Ezra Pound: Fascist Modernism as Committed Literature?
p. 69-80
Résumé
This article analyses the question of committed literature from an unfamiliar angle, that of the generation of modernist writers who explicitly or implicitly appeared to subscribe to the politics not of the Left, as we commonly understand committed literature to do, but of the Right and of Fascism. Taking Ezra Pound as representative of that generation, the paper analyses some little-known essays Pound wrote between 1938 and 1943 while living in Italy. Published in one of the most prominent literary magazines of the Fascist era, Meridiano di Roma, these articles ranged over a series of well-established Poundian motifs, from the question of the Jewish dominance of financial world-markets, to the theory of money proposed by Gesell, to, less often, Pound’s literary judgements on his contemporaries. The article sets these essays in the context of Fascist cultural policy, but then proceeds to ask whether Pound’s own use of Italian does not in fact tell us more about his political commitments and allegiances than the explicit theories of money and state organisation he propounds in the essays written for Meridiano. The essay concludes by suggesting that Pound’s instrumental use of Italian is part of a larger history, on which Pound was silent, but to which he made what is perhaps one of the most ambitious contributions. This history maps the shift in cultural dominance from British to American English, and the corresponding move towards the age of US imperialism. Drawing on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s different notion of committed literature as outlined in their book on Kafka, the article concludes that while Pound’s work can easily be seen as ‘committed’ in those terms, the direction and shape of this commitment is not towards the Fascist regimes of Western Europe, but towards the USA.
Texte intégral
1Perhaps because of the influence of Adorno’s essay on commitment, and of Sartre’s What is Literature? to which Adorno’s piece at least in part addressed itself, when we speak of committed literature it seems to me that what we normally mean is a literature that thematises its own relationship to the ideology of the Left, of socialism and Marxism. The opposite of this conception of literature is then a literature that insists on its autonomy from the social context, both at the level of content and at that of form. But as Adorno rightly points out, these two conceptions of literature are far from being antithetical—they are in fact complementary: ‘Each of the two alternatives negates itself with the other: committed art, which as art is necessarily detached from reality, because it negates its difference from reality; l’art pour l’art because through its absolutization it denies even the indissoluble connection to reality that is contained in art’s autonomy as its polemical a priori. The tension in which art has had its life up to the most recent period vanishes between these two poles.’1 This antithesis is itself the product of a specific historical situation, which Adorno identifies with the Cold War, but which at least within the British (and American) context goes back to the 1930s, to the emergence of the New Signatures poets and the context of the Spanish Civil War.2 Adorno in fact refers to Sartre’s well-known dismissal of the political power of Guernica, but at least Picasso’s painting does help us to date the origin of this opposition between a literature that is clearly committed to and aligned with the politics of the Left, and a literature that, on the other hand, claims to be autonomous from social and political ideology and yet is, according to its critics, firmly located on the side of the bourgeoisie in its role as hegemonic class.
2But what happens to the binary opposition autonomy/commitment when we add to the equation the extremely unstable variable provided by those writers who subscribed, either explicitly or implicitly, to the opposite end of the political spectrum, to the far Right of Fascist ideology? In the last twenty years or so, a growing body of work has insisted that we widen our sense of what constitutes the relationship between literature and politics to include writers like W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, F.T. Marinetti or indeed Ezra Pound, who all expressed to a different degree a certain support and commitment to the ideology of Fascism both in the interwar period and during World War II. These writers are not the ones we normally think of when we engage in a debate around committed literature; yet, at least in Pound’s case, their support for Fascism was not just explicit, but an integral part of his artistic production, as well as of the theories which Pound articulated to explain the aims of his art.
3Pound’s commitment to Fascist ideology has been extensively examined, both in relation to his poetic production and to his prose writings of the 1930s. Mussolini famously first appears in Canto XLI as ‘the Boss’ who finds Pound’s poem ‘divertente’ [amusing], ‘catching the point before the aesthetes had got there,’3 in an account of the only real-life meeting between the American poet and the Italian dictator. By the time of that meeting in 1933 Pound had been living in Italy for eight years, in exile from London since 1920 and, before then, from the US since 1908. In his own view, his support for Mussolini, and for the ideology of Fascism more in general, clearly stemmed from his sense of an exhaustion and corruption of the original project of Western civilisation. The Cantos invoke the model of Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy in their attempt to offer a diagnosis of the malaise and a recipe for renewal of that project. But Italian Fascism and, to a lesser extent, Nazi Germany did not just represent for Pound the rightful heirs of European civilisation; they also presented a model of renewal for the US, whose own founding fathers, as Pound will argue in Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), espoused a view of the State and of political and economic organisation that Pound argued was essentially compatible with that of Italian Fascism.4
4Pound’s position on the connections between his poetic vision and his political and economic theories is very clearly illustrated in a group of little-known essays and articles which he wrote between 1938 and 1943 for one of the most prominent literary and cultural magazines of the Fascist era, Meridiano di Roma. Apart from the first few, these essays were all written in Italian by Pound himself and have so far never been published in English.5 Pound’s own selection of fourty-four of these essays was printed in book form under the title of Orientamenti in 1944, in the dying days of the Salò Republic, the last remnant of Mussolini’s regime still clinging to the shores of Lake Garda. But Orientamenti was pulped by its publishers, Casa Editrice delle Edizioni Popolari, based in Venice, as soon as it was printed, and only a few copies remained, one of which was sent to the author.6 We know from the FBI file on Pound that at least one of these copies was retrieved from Pound’s house in Rapallo by the officer assigned to his case. We also know that the FBI at some point produced the only extant English translation of these essays as part of the evidence to be brought to bear at Pound’s treason trial. But that translation is no longer in Pound’s FBI file and doesn’t seem to have survived elsewhere in their archives.7
5By 1938, the year he finally managed to get himself published in Meridiano, Pound had been living in Rapallo, a small coastal community in the Liguria region of North-West Italy, for more than a decade, but in a state of relative isolation from the main currents of political and cultural affairs in Italy. As Tim Redman points out in his study of Pound’s relation to Italian Fascism, the American poet had been trying to communicate to Fascist officials since the early 1930s ‘that AMERICAN opinion MIGHT become dangerous’,8 by which Pound meant that it could turn anti-Fascist and, therefore, prepared to join Britain into a possible future war against the Axis powers. Pound’s frustration at not having the ear of the Fascist regime abated when he was offered a regular slot in Meridiano di Roma through his friend Uberto degli Uberti, who knew Cornelio di Marzio, editor of Meridiano and the President of the Confederation of Professionals and Artists, of which the Journalists’ Guild was part, both Confederation and Guild being part of the system that had taken the place of trade unions in Mussolini’s Italy.
6Meridiano di Roma replaced a prestigious literary magazine, Italia Letteraria, which ceased publication in December 1936. During the following two years Meridiano was edited by a committee which included Cornelio Di Marzio, but also other writers and intellectuals, not all of whom followed a strict Fascist line in cultural and artistic matters. While the journal was under the editorship of this committee it opened its doors to a wide variety of opinions, including those of a group of young intellectuals ‘who would later go on to constitute the first seed of the Italian Communist Party, and who contributed a regular column to Meridiano in which they often carried out a lively polemical debate not just around cultural issues but also in terms of politics’.9 The relative openness of the magazine to non-Fascist positions was somewhat curtailed in 1938, when Di Marzio became its sole editor and when Pound himself started contributing to the journal on a regular basis.
7Like Mussolini, Di Marzio was a journalist who had joined the Fascist movement in the early 1920s, when it was still a para-military organisation. As president of the Federation which brought intellectuals within the ranks of the Fascist State, Di Marzio cultivated a fairly pragmatic attitude towards intellectuals and artists, offering space on the pages of Meridiano also to those who were not completely aligned to the regime, in the belief that Fascism should make room for all cultural tendencies, and especially encourage avant-garde ideas and styles.10 This tactical openness was informed by a ‘functional’ conception of the role of intellectuals and artists within the Fascist State, a functionalism which fits in with Phillip Cannistraro’s analysis of Fascist mass media as manufacturers of consensus. As Cannistraro puts it, ‘by 1926 Mussolini had already abandoned the idea that cultural policy was useful only as an instrument for the subjugation of the anti-Fascist opposition. The Fascists started to take up a much more sophisticated position which saw in cultural policy a means for moulding the moral and social consciousness of millions of citizens, of every class and from every part of the country. Implicitly Mussolini will come to accept Cornelio Di Marzio’s conception of the totalitarian State as a state that is capable of integrating the masses into a uniform national experience’ (Cannistraro 69-69). In Di Marzio’s conception, culture becomes a means towards shaping a national consciousness which can integrate every class and every region under the aegis of the State, that is, culture becomes the instrument for suppressing or erasing interclass and inter-regional conflicts.
8I have dwelt on Di Marzio’s conception of the role of culture in the Fascist State for two different reasons. The first one is that it provides a model for committed art which chimes in with Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum that while Fascism renders ‘aesthetic’ the contemporary political situation in which mankind ‘can experience its own destruction’, Communism ‘responds by politicizing art’.11 Di Marzio’s sense of a national culture whose aim is to amalgamate class and regional differences (which in Italy carry the traces of historical conflicts) into a uniform national experience certainly fits Benjamin’s definition of Fascism. But my reason for invoking Benjamin here is also by way of contrast with Adorno’s later essay on commitment. Whereas the latter cites almost exclusively literary examples (with the exception of Picasso’s Guernica, and Schoenberg’s music), Benjamin’s conclusion was reached at the end of an essay dedicated to thinking about the impact of new technologies of vision— film and, before it, photography—on traditional conceptions of art. We know Adorno did not like Benjamin’s essay, or indeed his conclusions, but we may want to bear in mind at least the premises of Benjamin’s analysis, that the question of art’s commitment—political or otherwise—is always raised in the context of the emergence of a new culture of the mass media, to which Fascism represents perhaps one of the earliest political responses.
9My second reason for dwelling on Di Marzio’s conception of Fascist cultural policy is because it offers a concise and yet well-defined term of comparison for Pound’s own views on the relationship between art and politics. This relationship was for Pound inevitably mediated by economic theory, and more specifically, by the theory of money Pound had been developing throughout the 1930s, and which will become in the course of the years more and more central to the writing of the Cantos. Alongside this theory of money, Pound also began to articulate a theory of the State which was partly based on the Fascist totalitarian State but also took some of its models from early American history (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are the protagonists of Cantos XXXI-XLI) and from Confucius’s writings. By the end of the 1930s, then, Pound had moved from the late aestheticist pose that had characterised his early production (and to which Hugh Selwyn Mauberley provided his ‘long goodbye’) into a conception of literature which was unequivocal about the centrality of economic and political matters to any attempt at ‘making it new’, as Pound himself had summed up the modernist enterprise.
10In the articles for Meridiano Pound declares from the outset that his relationship to the Italian reader could only be established on the basis of a reciprocal understanding about the importance of the right conception of money and of the right ideal of the State. In an article entitled ‘The Jews and this War’, published on 29 March 1940, Pound addressed the question head on: ‘Few among the young realise that meditating upon the ideal of good government is the highest form of thinking that can bear fruit in this world. Thirty years ago, I was myself far from inclined to these reflections. I understand perfectly well the poetasters and young aesthetes who grumble when I talk of the idea of the state or of any monetary problem’.12 And yet for Pound there can be no thinking about poetry which is not inflected and informed by a sustained process of thinking about the state and its relation to the circulation of money. Indeed Poundian critics have pointed out that what Pound himself called ‘a toxicology of money’ was not just an external adjunct to Pound’s manifold intellectual interests, but was in fact fundamental to his conception of language.13 Increasingly, Pound came to articulate an understanding of language that relied on precise definition of meaning. As Peter Nicholls has pointed out, the question of the definition of words for Pound is closely connected with an ‘understanding of just price and just measure’ (Nicholls 80); more and more language becomes for Pound a currency that must be strictly contained in its meanings so as to prevent it from spreading the corruption of wrong ideas, chiefly about what is money and what is the role of the State. It is striking that Pound’s insistence on the need for clear definitions of words also matched the directives issued by the Fascist government about the use of written language in newspapers and which exhorted journalists to avoid the ‘pompous and wordy rhetoric’ of the ‘old style’.14
11But as well as being directly linked to economic theories, the emphasis on the need for definitions is also suggestive of Pound’s experience of living in a foreign country, of existing in a state of exile from America and American English. The pieces Pound wrote for Meridiano clearly show the limitations of his command of Italian. They display Pound’s usual conflation of literary and spoken registers, but given that in Italian the distance between these registers is greater than in English, the effect is jarring and made more so by his, again typical, use of paratactic constructions and sentences that do not often include any subordination of clauses. Connections between ideas, sentences and paragraphs are often left implicit, a choice that contrasts sharply with written Italian, which tends to unfold over different layers of conjunction and subordination. Pound shows awareness of the difficulties of communicating with his readers, offering sometimes apologetic comments—‘I should have explained myself more clearly’.15 At the same time, he also tends to turn his bad Italian into a programmatic stance: ‘I don’t achieve Latin clarity [...] I offer you the defects of my own mental processes, the long parenthesis, compare it to that of Henry James’.16 There is in fact nothing Jamesian in Pound’s Italian, as Pound himself recognises when he describes his method as consisting of ‘putting together two Italian words which aren’t usually found together’.17 The method clearly produced accusations of incoherence, against which Pound defended himself with an analogy that does nothing to dispel the charge: ‘If I’m accused of jumping from one point to another without coherence, I respond: the elevator is not incoherent’.18
12Pound’s tone in these articles is often flat, declarative and didactic. At times a note of colour is added by a flurry of adjectives (‘a thick, pestilential and stinking ignorance’,19 which has something of a Dantesque flavour to it). Pound admits in ‘Opinions To Be Revised’ that his Italian is idio-synchratic, or rather, idiogrammatic: ‘when I want to put together two Italian words that are not usually found together, in the attempt to coin an idea, I’m told “but we say [...]”, or, “but we don’t say like this, we prefer [...]”, pulling out instead a clichè, a worn out and faded commonplace’.20 The claim is that Pound is trying to forge a different kind of language which is word-based rather than syntax- or use-driven. If this is compatible with the emphasis on definition and with Pound’s use of Chinese ideograms in the Cantos, it does not sit well with the practice in Italian, where meaning tends to accrue to the sentence rather than the individual word. Pound’s Italian shows in fact a certain deafness to register, so that one can find in the same sentence a flat declaration of facts mixed in or followed up by a colloquialism or idiom: ‘Our ancestors fought against the sanctions, our American history is glorious from 1750 until 1863; but then it stinks’.21
13Pound’s deafness to register partly reflects the complex history of the establishment of a national language in Italy. At the time Pound was living in Rapallo, Italian would still have been deeply divided between a spoken language (often a so-called dialect, so-called because it is simply one of the many different varieties on offer) and a written one, derived primarily from Tuscan (itself of course the local dialect of Tuscany). Pound doesn’t seem to have been aware of this history. The essay on Cavalcanti he published in 1934 claimed there was no prose in medieval Italy: ‘It was 1280, Italy was still in the state that Germany is to-day. How can you have “PROSE” in a country where the chambermaid comes into your rooms and exclaims: “Schön ist das Hemd!”’.22 Pound’s mixing and chopping of the literary and spoken registers in Italian certainly reflects his practice in English and has something of a collagist flavour to it, as Pound appears to be building up his sentences from phrases and expressions he has heard or read (there are quite a few mentions in these pieces of other Italian newspapers and magazines, such as La Nazione, or Rivista Fascista). But because he is lacking a point of reference, a baseline for written and literary Italian, he ends up with a strangely abstract idiom, which is forged exclusively by the desire obsessively to communicate certain fixed ideas, with little consideration for tone or style. What tone there is comes across from the choice of a certain vocabulary of excess and disgust, perhaps influenced by Dante and by that of the Hell Cantos. Beyond these touches, the rhetorical posture is undoubtedly that of manifestos and political speeches, with a tendency to the use of repetition even of entire sentences to convey emphasis.23
14This rhetorical choice also raises the question of whom Pound understood to be the addressees of his Italian pieces. The essays often directly interpellate a ‘you’ that clearly designates an Italian audience, contrasted to the ‘us’ of the American republic. The common feature of these pieces is a constant effort to explain the nature of the American politico-economic problems to an Italian readership that Pound appears to envisage as being composed of the Fascist hierarchy rather than a more generally conceived public (‘your revolution is our revolution’24). At the same time, though, in quite a few of the pieces this ‘you/us’ schema is reversed to reveal the real addressee of Pound’s World War II writings—the American public to whom the nature of the Fascist revolution must be explained as being essentially compatible with the early Republican ideals.25 Repeatedly, Pound comes back to the question of translation of fundamental Fascist ideas and concepts into their English equivalents: ‘If I had to translate the words “sindacato”, “confederazione”, “corporazione” where would I start from? Should we say “union”, “confederation”, “body”? [...] Somebody should draw up a linguistic agreement between Fascist Italian and American English to explain the most common words’.26 Most of these articles are concerned with the question of how to translate abstract ideas across from the Italian Fascist State to the English language, or conversely, how to make Italians understand American systems of State and Government. Pound is unequivocal: language is the direct expression of economic realities: ‘the true definition of even just one word always draws us towards a greater understanding of life and of economics’; ‘the right definition of one single word, I’d almost say, the true definition of any concept leads to concrete knowledge’.27 The struggle over economics is intimately connected to the clear expression of certain simple concepts.28 Fundamental, then, for Pound is the fact that ‘the notion of “FASCIO” has not been properly understood by more than 10 people in the whole of the US or England’.29 The consequences of what is essentially a linguistic misunderstanding are dire. World War II is a war produced by the false definition of words, from which ‘the enemy dervives the majority of its propagandistic power, which deludes even them’.30
15Pound’s somewhat instrumental attitude towards this foreign language in which he is forcing himself to communicate calls up to my mind an irresistible comparison with another Anglo-phone writer who adopted a foreign language as a programmatic stance. Although Beckett’s political position and involvement in World War II lies at the exact opposite pole from Pound’s, a comparison between his and Pound’s practice of writing in a foreign language may nevertheless be suggestive in this context precisely because Beckett has often been invoked as an instance of a very different model of what constitutes a ‘political’ or, in our terms, ‘committed’ kind of literature. I am referring here to Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s brief suggestion, in their study of Kafka, that Beckett may be seen to operate within English the same process of ‘deterritorialisation’ that Kafka performed for German. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that Beckett shared with Kafka his political position as the inhabitant of a country (Ireland, Czechoslovakia) that had been subjected to imperial domination by Britain and Germany and by English and German respectively. Faced with this impossible position where the only language available for expression is that of the dominant power, both Kafka and Beckett could choose between two roads. One way would have been ‘to artificially enrich this German [or English]’, as Max Brod and James Joyce did. The other was to impoverish it, to proceed ‘by dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty’. It is this last way, the way of Kafka and Beckett, which Deleuze and Guattari hail as the resource of those who ‘live in a language that is not their own, or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve’.31
16Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the kind of literature that emerges and is forged through this impoverished use of a major language is that of a ‘minor’ literature where everything is political, where there is no space of individuality or interiority that is not marked by the political and historical situation in which that literature is produced. We may take this ‘immigrant’ writing as a model to oppose to the conception of art propounded by Adorno, for whom literature remains art in so far as it is capable of negating the world and, with it, a specific political engagement or commitment: ‘Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world’ (Adorno 80). But while the conception of art, and of its relationship to politics, might differ dramatically for Adorno on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari on the other, the models they invoke are surprisingly the same: ‘Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays and his genuinely colossal novel The Unnameable have an effect in comparison to which official works of committed art look like children’s games—they arouse the anxiety that existentialism only talks about’ (Adorno 90).
17But if Beckett effected a de-territorialisation of English via French, we could say that Pound in fact performed the exact opposite gesture in his use of Italian, by trying to force that language into the mould of his very idiomatic American English. The indifference to linguistic specificity that is evident in Pound’s Italian essays—and which led the Italian Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale to lament that Pound never really bothered to learn Italian32—seems to me to fit in with Pound’s theory and practice of translation. There is nothing for Pound that is untranslatable, or rather, nothing that cannot be used as a pretext in his campaign for making poetry in English ‘new’. While the ways in which Pound appropriated both Chinese (in Cathay) and Latin texts (in Homage to Sextus Propertius)33 to force the English idiom of late-Romantic poems into a modernist renewal may superficially remind us of Beckett’s practice of self-translation from the French, it in fact lies at the other end of the political and of the poetic spectrum. Paul Morrison has argued that despite Pound’s extensive practice of translation, the American poet was in fact ‘opposed to the fetishization of tropological displacement, the compulsive mobility [of meaning] that defines the ideology of translatio’ because this ran against ‘his aesthetic project, which is to reestablish the lost connection between the order of words and the world, to repair the chasm between signifier and signified’. For Morrison, Pound’s aesthetic project is in fact indistinguishable from his ‘economic project, which is to return the signs of wealth to their material basis in human productivity, in work done and goods produced’ (Morrison 18). This is to say that there is no conflict between Pound’s poetic commitments and his political ones, that the latter are in fact born of the former. And if Pound is to be taken as the foremost representative of Anglo-American modernism, as Hugh Kenner suggested in The Pound Era,34 then we could also suggest that on the measure provided by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature, the products of Anglo-American modernism have turned out to be the heralds of the era of American imperialism in which we still live. Their allegiance to Fascism is then not, as Morrison claims, in tension with their poetic radicalism; rather their poetic radicalism is itself part of a dramatic shift in the historical and political situation, a shift which marked the demise of the old English of the British Empire, and the emergence of the new English of the American century.35 This is a story which Pound’s tongue cannot help but tell, even if it is a story that Pound himself may have fundamentally misread.
Notes de bas de page
1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992) 77.
2 For an account of the British context see Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988); for the American one, see David Madden. ed., Proletarian Writers of the Thirties (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1968).
3 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber, 1987) 41/2-4.
4 Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (London: Stanley, 1935).
5 An English translation and critical edition of a selection of these essays by Peter Nicholls and Elena Gualtieri is currently in preparation; it will appear with Michigan UP in 2009 with the title of Orientations: the Essays from Meridiano di Roma.
6 Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1983) 72.
7 The FBI file relates how a Bureau Agent visited Pound’s home in Rapallo on 7 May 1945 to obtain documents which Pound had given written permission to Dorothy Pound, his wife, to hand over (26 May 1945; 6/5). Among the items Pound lists ‘a copy of Orientamenti’, though he warns Dorothy not to surrender ‘the ONLY one left until you can get another’ (6/10). A few months later, a letter to the Assistant Attorney General T. L. Caudle encloses ‘an English translation of the first eighteen chapters of the book Orientamenti (Orientations), which is a collection of Pound’s political and financial articles’ (26 November 1945; 12/74); a ‘translation of the entire book’ was then sent to Caudle on 13 December 1945 (13/78).
8 Pound quoted in Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 87.
9 ‘Cornelio Di Marzio’, Dizionario Bibliografico degli Italiani, vol. 40 (Roma: Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 1991) 87-88; all translations from Italian are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
10 Phillip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: fascismo e mass media (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1975) 126.
11 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992) 235.
12 Ezra Pound, Orientamenti (Vibo Valentia: Grafica Meridionale, 1978) 36; quotes from Orientamenti are all from this later, unauthorised edition of the book, the only one available in Italian libraries.
13 Peter Nicholls’s Ezra Pound: Economics, Politics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984) has a whole chapter entitled ‘The Toxicology of Money’, in which he follows in detail the intricacies of Pound’s economic thinking and ideas, p. 138-60; see also Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Paul de Man (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996) 16-59.
14 Anna Laura Lepschy and Giulio Lepschy, The Italian Language Today, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1988) 28-9; see also Erasmo Leso, ‘Aspetti della lingua del fascismo. Prime linee di una ricerca’, in Storia linguistica dell’Italia del Novecento, a cura di Maurizio Gnerre, Mario Medici, Raffaele Simone (Roma: Bulzoni, 1973) 139-58, which provides an analysis of Mussolini’s own use of Italian, which tended to work as a ‘model for linguistic behaviour’ (141), and was characterised by a ‘dislike for technical language’ and a preference for religious and military terms (142).
15 Ezra Pound, ‘Sul discorso di Hitler’ [On Hitler’s Speech], in Idee Fondamentali: Meridiano di Roma 1939-1943, ed. Caterina Ricciardi (Roma: Lucarini, 1991) 106; this Italian volume, now out of print, complements the essays originally published by Pound in Orientamenti. Of the forty essays selected by Ricciardi, only eleven had already been published in book-form in Orientamenti. Pound’s own selection is more biased towards issues of an economic and political nature (it is classified under ‘Economy’ in Italian libraries). Ricciardi’s integrates those economic writings with some more culturally-oriented pieces.
16 Pound, ‘Gli ebrei e questa guerra’ [The Jews and this War] (Orientamenti 40).
17 Pound, ‘Opinioni da rivedere’ Opinions to Be Revised] (Orientamenti 60).
18 Pound, ‘I classici dell’avvenire’ [Classics of the Future] (Idee Fondamentali 63).
19 Pound, ‘Ancora pericolo’ [Danger Still] (Orientamenti 31).
20 Pound, ‘Opinioni da rivedere’ [Opinions to Be Revised] (Orientamenti 60).
21 Pound, ‘Un modo di comunicare’ [One Way to Communicate] (Orientamenti 25).
22 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. and with an introduction by T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968) 198.
23 Pound, ‘Gli ebrei e questa guerra’ [The Jews and this War], and ‘Il sistema dei vampiri’ [The Vampires’ System] (Orientamenti 37, 52).
24 Pound, ‘Un modo di comunicare’ [One way To Communicate] (Orientamenti 25).
25 Pound, ‘Da far capire agli americani’ [To Make the Americans Understand] (Orientamenti 45-48).
26 Pound, ‘Di una nuova economia’ [Of a New Economy] (Orientamenti 64-5).
27 Pound, ‘L’ebreo, patologia incarnata’ [The Jew, Incarnate Pathology] (Orientamenti 95, 96). Note how the stress on definition is an integral part of Pound’s anti-Semitic discourse. The connections between Pound’s economic theories, his anti-Semitism and his theory of language have been well analysed by Morrison in his Poetics of Fascism, passim; for an extensive study of Pound’s anti-Semitism see Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988).
28 Pound, ‘Il problema delle tasse’ [The Problem of Taxes] (Orientamenti 91).
29 Pound, ‘Verso l’ortologia’ [Towards Orthology] (Orientamenti 84).
30 Pound, ‘L’ebreo, patologia incarnata’ [The Jew, Incarnate Pathology] (Orientamenti 96).
31 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1986) 19.
32 Eugenio Montale, ‘Fronde d’alloro in manicomio’, Corriere della Sera, 3 marzo 1945, reproduced in Ezra Pound. Un Poeta a Rapallo, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Genoa: San Marco dei Giustiniani, 1985). On the reception of Pound’s Italian writings among Italian writers, see Luca Cesari’s introduction to Ezra Pound, Carte Italiane 1930-1944: letteratura e arte (Milan: Archinto, 2005) 17-20
33 Both early collections can be found in Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber, 1984).
34 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972).
35 For a compelling study of the transfer of economic and social power from Imperial Britiain to the US in the interwar years, see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).
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À la rencontre de la différence
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