Abstract
This chapter analyzes some of the longer-term drivers for Pound’s turn toward European fascism between the wars, especially with respect to his artistic experiences and interest in ‘social credit’ economics. Critical discussions of Pound’s work on the ‘Malatesta Cantos’ is presented for its influence upon his later politics, as is his Fascist ‘conversion’ during winter 1932–33 — culminating with his only meeting with Mussolini on 30 January 1933 — reflected in his 1935 (but written in February 1933) study, Jefferson and/or Mussolini.
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References
On Pound’s populist American background, see Wendy Flory, The American Ezra Pound (Yale University Press, London: 1989);
and on his revolutionary temperament more generally see, for example, Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1993), chs. 2 and 4.
Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (Jonathan Cape, London: 2009), 3.
See Sherry, Radical Modernism, ch. 1; Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries, 207ff; and on Pound’s correspondence, see the revised, 1950 collection edited by D.D. Paige, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound (Faber and Faber, London: 1971).
See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound; hereafter Carpenter/ASC. This phrase is also employed by John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (Bloomsbury, London: 1987).
Pound, cited in Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, Vol. 1: Origins and Development (University of Berkeley Press, London: 1976), 307 n.55.
Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound: Critical Lives (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 42, 46; hereafter Marsh/EPCL. See also Sean Francis, “Now for a large-mouthed product’: Ezra Pound and the Poetics of Promotion”, Paideuma 34/2–3 (Fall/Winter 2005).
Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (Vintage Books, London: 2009), 4.
Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (Yale University Press, London: 2010), 4–6.
George Bornstein, “Modernism”, Ezra Pound in Context, ed., Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2011), 374; hereafter Nadel/EPIC.
See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism (Palgrave, Basingstoke: 2007), 62fE
Tim Redman, “Pound’s Politics and Economics”, The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed., Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1999), 252.
Serenella Zanotti, “Fascism”, Nadel/EPIC, 376; for a similar view, see David Barnes, “Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy”, Journal of Modern Literature 34/1 (2010), 20.
On Fascism’s attempt “to regenerate the Italian people, to create a ‘new man’, a new race of Italian dominators and conquerors, builders of a civilization offered to the peoples of the white race as both the solution to the crisis in Western civilization and as the expression of a new civilization”, see Emilio Gentile, “The Fascist Anthropological Revolution”, Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth Century Italy, eds., Guido Bonsaver and Robert Gordon (Legenda, Oxford: 2005), 22.
Lawrence Rainey, The Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (Yale University Press, London: 1998), 120. For a dissenting view, see Chris Chapman, “‘Do You Want Any More of this Archaic Information on Folks, up to 1745?’: Rethinking Ezra Pound’s Italian Renaissance”, Textual Practice 25/3 (2010).
A. David Moody, Ezra Pound, Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, 1885–1924 (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2007), 367.
Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World (State University of New York Press, Albany: 1991), 70, 89.
Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (Stanley Nott, London: 1936 [1935]), 26 and 128.
Ivanoe Bonomi, From Socialism to Fascism: A Study of Contemporary Italy (M. Hopkinson and Company, London: 1924), 138–139.
Rainey, 126; see also Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos (University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1991), 74.
Lea Baechler et al., eds., Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, 11 volumes (Garland, London: 1991), V, 329; hereafter EPPP.
Humphry Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Faber, London: 1988), 489–490; hereafter Carpenter/ASC, 489–490.
Pound’s original letter of 28 April 1932 is partially reproduced in Niccolò Zapponi, “Ezra Pound e il fascismo”, Storia Contemporanea 4/1 (1973), 452.
Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London: 1970), 305;
hereafter Stock/LEP. For Pound’s letter to Langston Hughes using Italian Fascist dating, see David Roessel, “A Racial Act: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Langston Hughes”, Paideuma 29/1–2 (2000), 25.
Catherine Paul, “Italian Fascist Exhibits and Ezra Pound’s Move to the Imperial”, Twentieth Century Literature 51/1 (2005), 69.
See Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Mostre”, online at: www.jeffreyschnapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Mostre.pdf, 63, 65; and Schnapp, “Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution”, Fascism Aesthetics, Culture, ed., Richard Golsan (University Press of New England, Hanover, NJ: 1992).
Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (University of Toronto Press, London: 2003), 167, 163;
italics in original. See also Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, London: 1998), chs. 2 and 3;
Emily Braun, “Sironi in Context”; and Mark Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity”, both reprinted in Fascism: Critical Concepts, 5 volumes, Roger Griffin with Matthew Feldman, eds. (Routledge, London: 2004), vol. III.
Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman (Morrow, New York: 1993), 342.
For the abridged English edition of Dux, see Margherita Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, trans. Frederic Whyte (T. Butterworth, London: 1925).
Roxana Preda, “Social Credit in America: A View from Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940”, Paideuma 34/2–3 (2005) 204.
For a critique of Pound’s economics as “neither analytically sophisticated” nor “economically sound” — put bluntly, “the A+B Theorem is mistaken” due to “double counting” — see Alessandro Lanteri, “Douglas, Gesell and the Economic Ethics of Ezra Pound”, The History of Economic Ideas 19/1 (2011), 147–148, 151.
An incisive reading is offered by Alec Marsh’s Money and Modernity (University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa: 1998), ch. 3;
while a more superficial account has been recently provided by Meghnad Desai, Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound (Faber, London: 2006).
Pound, letters of 1 November 1927 and 3 August 1938 cited in, respectively, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929, eds., Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2010),638; and Roxana Preda, ed., Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940 (University of Florida Press, Gainesville: 2001), 215; hereafter Preda/EPEC.
Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (University of Illinois Press, Urbana: 1999), ch. 11;
see also David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (Continuum, London: 2012), chs. 1 and 5.
Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1992), 87; hereafter Redman/EPIF. Pound’s translated interview with Francesco Monotti is also in ibid., 76–77.
Bill Freind, “‘Why Do You Want to Put Your ldeas in Order?’: Rethinking the Politics of Ezra Pound”, Journal of Modern Literature 23/3–4 (2000), 545–546; see also Thomas Cody, “Adams, Mussolini and the Personality of Genius”, Paideuma 18/3–4 (Winter 1989).
John Whittam, Fascist Italy (Manchester University Press, Manchester: 1995), 89.
According to Heymann, Pound sent more than 50 items to the Duce alone; see the first appendix to David Heymann, Ezra Pound, The Last Rower: A Political Profile (Seaver Books, New York: 1976), 317; hereafter Heymann/LR.
Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 19205–19505 (University of North Carolina Press, London: 2003), 1–2.
Freind, “‘Why Do You Want to Put Your Ideas in Order?”, 547. On Francis Stuart, see Brendan Barrington, ed., The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 1942–1944 (Lilliput Press, Dublin: 2000).
Aline Lion, The Pedigree of Fascism: A Popular Essay on the Western Philosophy of Politics (Sheed and Ward, London: 1927), 234.
Ugo Spirito in Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1995), 69. This volume offers convincing demonstration of the regenerative — or in Pound’s terms, “constructive” — impulse at the heart of fascist ideology; for Mussolini’s Italy, see excerpts, 23–88.
Leon Surette, Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics (McGill-Queen’s University Press: London: 2011), 221.
Camillo Pellizzi, Il Corriere della Sera, 14 February 1936, cited in Luca Gallesi, “II Carteggio Pound-Pellizzi negli anni del fascism”, Nuova Storia Contemporanea 6/3 (May–June 2002), 70–71. According to Gallesi, Odor Por facilitated Pellizzi’s review of Jefferson and/or Mussolini. I am grateful to Andrea Rinaldi for his assistance with this passage. Pound swiftly thanked Pellizzi for his “valentine in the Corriere”, 15 February 1936, YBL 40/1688.
Giuseppe Prezzolini, Fascism, trans. Kathleen Macmillan (Methuen, London: 1926), 55–57.
Giorgio Pini, The Official Life of Benito Mussolini, trans. Luigi Villari (Hutchinson, London: 1939), 236–237.
Piero Melograni, “The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini’s Italy”, Journal of Contemporary History 11/4 (1976), 233.
Emil Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini (Little, Brown and Company, Boston: 1933), 126–127; and Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 13.
Burton Hatlen, “Ezra Pound and Fascism”, Ezra Pound and History, ed., Marianne Korn (National Poetry Foundation, Bangor: 1985), 155, 157.
See, for example, Alexander de Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development (University of Nebraska Press, London: 1989), ch. 10, arguing (156): “the Fascists never completely opted for a single style.”
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Feldman, M. (2013). Approaching Pound’s Fascism: Development of an Ideologue. In: Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345516_2
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