1My primary purpose in undertaking to write this paper was to try to explain to myself, at least, why Pound, like so many other European intellectuals, embraced an extreme anti-liberal and totalitarian political philosophy. The French historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, has put my question for me very well:
What makes disinterested and courageous young men, Russians in the 1920s, Germans in the 1930s, Frenchmen from 1948-1954 (and we were, it appears to me, I and my comrades, in effect disinterested and relatively courageous) what makes then these young men, and women, become… the agents or the supporters of a certain totalitarian and cruel regime, which necessarily perverts, to a greater or lesser extent, the persons thus implicated? (126, my translation)
2It is worth, perhaps, remarking that Italy and the Italians are ignored in this brief summary, although in historical fact numerous Italian intellectuals, and at one time the most internationally famous of them all, Bendetto Croce, supported the Fascist movement for national and social regeneration, and rallied to Mussolini’s cause to the extent even of approving of the murder of the socialist leader Matteotti. Nor should we overlook the place of the leader, if not indeed the founder, of Futurism, Marinetti, that avant-garde artistic movement par excellence. One might also just note in passing that the fascination of French intellectuals for totalitarian régimes, particularly of a Marxist persuasion, neither began in 1948 nor ended in 1954: Le Roy Ladurie is limiting his attention here to just his small band of brothers of the immediate post-war period. Both Aragon and Paul Éluard wrote sickening sycophantic poems in praise of Stalin,2 poems of such a grossness in their flattery that the most obsequious servitor of an ancien régime monarch would have been ashamed to append his name thereto.3
- 1 For an interesting discussion of this hypothesis as it relates to the working-class see Lipset 115 (...)
3The intellectuals’ betrayal of their trust (la trahison des clercs) is a century long phenomenon: in that Ezra Pound simply takes his place amongst the luminaries of European culture. It is a fascinating, disturbing, perplexing question: why did so many European intellectuals embrace with such passion and conviction anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic, and anti-bourgeois doctrines? Liberalism, in all its guises, is bourgeois in its origins, therein Marx was right and on that count most historians and sociologists agree with him. Representative government, which we term also democratic, is an invention of the bourgeoisie. We will find more defenders of bourgeois liberal values amongst sociologists such as Max Weber or Raymond Aron or political thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin than amongst the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” For teachers of “humanistic” subjects, lovers of poetry and literature, who persist in believing that our commitment to, our passion for literature, is something of great and eternal importance in the education of mankind and in the making of a more tolerable humane world, these are surely embarrassing and disturbing facts. Of course, the supporters of these illiberal and totalitarian régimes would precisely argue that these so-called liberal values are far from either universal or necessary for a proper humane civilisation: they are but a lure, are class-dominated, and do not make for a world where human beings are most properly themselves. There was a strong appeal, to many an intellectual, writer or artist, of anti-democratic, anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois régimes in the immediate period after the end of the First World War, although the origins of their discontents and the formulation of their critiques of the bourgeois liberal order reach well back into the 19th‑century. After 1914 there is a great loss of confidence in Western liberal values; indeed, perhaps we should acknowledge that these values were, in fact, never widely shared nor deeply felt by many but merely accepted as imposed by the dominant class.41 And there is, at that time, a widely accepted view, amongst the intelligentsia, that the West is in decline, that the days of Western liberal democracy are numbered, that Western civilisation is about to be replaced by others, foreign but more vigorous. And above all there is a hatred of bourgeois capitalism.
4There are varying accounts and critiques of this inevitable and, in the view of many, justified Decline of the West. One was given by Wyndham Lewis in 1926 in his book The Art of Being Ruled. There we learn that “The ‘democratic’ European idea is undoubtedly being strangled off the stage. One day a messenger may appear and announce in solemn tones its pathos” (67). And he goes on to present an ironic assessment of what he terms the “superficial idea of ‘freedom,’” the “insistence on the individual (any individual, that is),” each individual thus, in his own eyes, becoming “a little universe to himself.” This over-insistence on our individual “independence” is the cause of our weakness and decline, for it leaves us unable to organise ourselves collectively in face of others. Furthermore, for him—and he is hardly unique in this view at this time—“The parliamentary system is a great characteristic European institution that today has on all hands lost its meaning… All the liberal tricks are seen through and known now by heart. So, for better or for worse, parliamentary rule is finished” (67-69).
5The Decline of the West is due then to a superficial idea of freedom, to an exaggerated “individualism” which is but a form of egoism and egocentricity, a parliamentary system that is but a sham and no longer commands the allegiance of the ruled, liberalism and liberals in all their guises are the true popular villains: there we have a neat summary of a very prevalent system of beliefs.
6Pound’s vision of England and its bourgeois liberal democracy is given, as we all well know, in “Canto XV,” first published in the original edition of A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925, a year before Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled.It is too long to quote here in full but let me remind you a little of this vision of putrescence which is England with its political parties and social reformers of the day, represented by the Fabians “crying for the petrification of the putrefaction” (64), its mass circulation newspapers, and its system of finance capitalism: “the beast with a hundred legs, USURA” (64). The culmination and ultimate achievement of Western civilisation is the First World War with its slaughter of millions and the collapse of the old liberal order, one of whose major outcomes is the Russian Revolution. This forms part of the subject matter of “Canto XVI.”
7So one of my starting points in trying to understand Pound’s fascination with and commitment to Italian Fascism lies in a cursory, and of course unsatisfactory, examination of the general and pervasive intellectual atmosphere of the time. My second, and admittedly more idiosyncratic approach, is via his attraction to archaic social and economic structures as represented not only by American society at the time of Jefferson and Adams but even more so by the civilisation of ancient China. For Pound not only promotes the wisdom of Kung-fu-tseu (Confucius), the sacred books, and the poems of the Classical Anthology, but also supplies us with highly abbreviated, condensed, and vigorously selected passages of Chinese history. And the purpose of history, Pound tells us, is moral instruction. Furthermore, we have intercalated within both the Chinese Cantos and the Adams Cantos passages in praise of the Leopoldine reforms at Siena. For good reasons, as I hope I’ll be able to show.
8The great enemy for Pound was financial, not industrial capitalism: the typical bourgeois capitalist enemy was the usurer, the banker, not the factory owner, not the producer or the maker, and hence his heroes were not the industrial proletariat but the artisan, the crafstman, the peasant. In this he was at one with the Italian Fascists, but Pound had come to his conclusions about the evils of bankers and the modern monetary systems before Mussolini’s rise to power. It was the First World War and the meetings with Orage and C.H. Douglas that formed his political outlook. So he can embrace Fascism as simply a chance to reform the world according to policies he had already come to by other means and through other influences.
9For Pound the great social, political, moral, and economic question—they are all tied up together—is not who owns the factories but who owns and controls the money. Coining is sovereignty, as he never ceases to insist, and if the directors or regents of a bank have control of the issuing of money and the power to levy interest on money, which in fact they do not actually have, for their deposits do not have to cover the full extent of their loans, then effective economic power is theirs not that of the state or the community at large. And that economic power allows them to control much else in the state.
Hath benefit of interest on all
the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing. (XLVI 233)
[the] CRIME
Ov two CENturies (XLVI 231).
10So the Usury Cantos, however insistently didactic they may be, are absolutely central to any understanding of Pound. It is worth remarking, I think, that all the examples of the maleficient effects of Usury in “Canto XLV” are taken from pre-industrial societies where the population is in great majority peasant, and it is the craftsman, the artist and the small peasant farmer who are the great losers under the reign of Usura, and the poets and painters he cites who are no longer possible under Usura are all from the 15th and 16th centuries.
11When Pound writes:
“And thou shalt not, Firenze 1766, and thou shalt not
sequestrate for debt any farm implement
nor any yoke ox nor
any peasant while he works with the same. (XLIV 223)
12he is voicing a fear that has haunted peasant communities throughout history and around the world. And he is echoing a demand that runs throughout their existence in all continents: that credit should be easy, that interest rates on their loans should be low. Notoriously interest rates on small loans to peasant-farmers have been exorbitant almost everywhere and at all times, far higher than to merchants or rulers: they have been properly usurious. The result has frequently been either the dispossesion of the peasants or their eternal dependence on the usurers. Above all that bad years, crop failures (over which the peasant has no control: neither he nor even the most bureaucratic and centralised govern-ment controls the weather, pests, or epidemics) or temporary low prices in the market for his goods (over which equally he has no control)‑5—that none of these should lead to his eviction, seizure of his property, or imprisonment for debt.
13Seizure of his yoke ox or his horses and his plough means destitution of himself and his family. Sequestration for debt was not a problem confined to the peasants of the area round Sienna in the 18th‑century: it was something experienced by small and medium sized French peasants during the Great Depression of the 1930s.6 And in America too: The Grapes of Wrath is based on the mass eviction of “Okies” during the time of the Dust Bowl. As so often Pound is using history to talk about contemporary problems. This quotation from the decree of Pietro Leopoldo is a thematic echo, as we all know, of what is said in “Canto XXXVII”: “‘Thou shalt not’, said Martin Van Buren, ‘jail ‘em for debt’” (181). Van Buren and Pietro Leopoldo make an ideogram of a compound hero of the little man, and above all the peasant farmer, or the American equivalent, the settler on unclaimed land. The whole of “Canto XXXVII” takes up the case against banks, speculators, large landowners and capitalists, and praises those who speak out and defend the interests of the poor, the workers and the small farmer—or peasant in European terms.
…if a man in primeval forest
set up his cabin, shall rich patroon take it from him?” (181)
14In this canto he has a “Mr Somebody Tomkins” echo the complaints of many Italians, not all Fascists by any means, about the conduct of “speculators” while it was the peasants, mainly, who
“Filled your armies
“while the priests preaching sedition
“and men of wealth decrying government credit.”
“…in order to feed on the spoils.” (181)
15Later Pound adds, in his own voice but what I take to be a summary of the thoughts of Van Buren, remarks that carry on this line of argument:
working classes
who mostly
have no control over paper, and
derive no profit from bank stock…
merchants will not confess to over-trading
nor speculators the disposition to speculate…(182)
16That this debate took place in America and not in Italy, and a hundred years ago, only shows, for Pound, the continuing relevance of the moral lessons of American history to contemporary problems for the evils, and the evil doers, remain the same.
17The Cantos are, in many respects, a long political poem: history is put into the service of a very definite political ideal. Perhaps one could even venture the suggestion that The Cantos are the great Fascist epic, the major artistic achievement of Fascism? There are those who would deny that Fascism ever could, by its very nature, produce a major literary work, but such an argument would lead us far astray from our present concerns. Nevertheless, Pound’s critique of the place of banks, debt, interest, loans, financial power influencing politics if not in fact controlling it, financial speculation and speculators is intimately connected to his adherence to that political ideal, is absolutely essential to Pound’s political vision. Economics serve—or ought to serve—definite political and social objectives, and those are the defense and promotion of the small man, the producer, the peasant, the craftsman, the artisan and the artist. So The Cantos are full of wise rulers—and their opposites. The enemies of the Republic and the res publica are the bankers who use money to create money rather than for the production of goods.
18Opposed to this sort of bank and bankers we have the example of Siena where the Magistrate of the Mount, that is the bank, is instructed to
give his chief care that the specie
be lent to whomso can best use it USE IT
(id est, piú utilmente) (XLII 217-218)
19The basis of the Sienese bank’s credit is the productiveness of the city-state’s agriculture. The richness of a nation lies in its land and the sweat of its peasants: this is a thoroughly agrarian view of the nature of a country’s wealth. I see nowhere in The Cantos an attempt by Pound to grapple with the nature of modern industrialism, of how the wealth of nations is no longer primarily a matter of the productiveness of the land. Pound totally rejects, as far as I can tell, modern industrial and financial economies, and the following description of one of the most prevalent uses of money in such economies is precisely what fills him with horror: “The pace at which a circle of financiers, speculators and investors hand round one to another particular pieces of wealth, or titles to such, which they are neither producing nor consuming but merely exchanging, bears no definite relation to the rate of current production” (Keynes 47, my emphasis). That was written over seventy years ago7 by an economist for whom Pound expressed disdain—quite erroneously in my humble opinion. But this economist wasn’t moralising, merely describing, and Pound never ceased to be a moral dogmatic about money and a well-constituted state.
And I have told you of how things were under Duke
Leopold in Siena
And of the true base of credit, that is
the abundance of nature.8 (LII 257)
20That abundance is the basis of a properly constituted polity is forcibly reaffirmed in the very next canto, the first of the Chinese Cantos. But equally Pietro Leopoldo is praised for practising autarchy:
that trade inside the Grand Duchy be free of impediments
shut down on grain imports
[…]
Pietro Leopoldo
Ferdinando EVVIVA!!
declared against exportation
thought grain was to eat.9 (XLIV 223)
21Economic self-sufficiency was a policy attempted by Italy under the Fascists: Leopoldo is thus a precursor of Mussolini and joins him with those other heroes of proper economic management such as Van Buren, Adams and the early Chinese emperors.10 Italian farmers had suffered mightily in the decades before the 1914-18 war from the cheaper grain that could be imported from America, Canada and Russia. And the sight of food being exported when it is needed at home, particularly in times of shortages and local famines, extremely frequent in Europe until the coming of the railways, has always infuriated peasants.
- 2 “Records of prices of staple grain have a double significance. For in every age exceptour own, by (...)
- 3 Cambaire 184, cited by Berger23 n39. I don't have the comparable figures for Italy but they may be (...)
- 4 This concept of economic self-sufficiency is not just confined to the poor or middling peasants: i (...)
22But more importantly autarchy or economic self-sufficiency is the fundamental principle of a peasant economy. Why did men develop farming in the first place? To feed themselves and their families.211 Most farming for most peasants throughout history, and still in large parts of the world, is what we’d term “subsistence farming.” Peasants aim at being entirely self-sufficient as much as possible. Grain is to be eaten, and it has been estimated that as late as 1938 for France as a whole two-thirds of all agricultural production was consumed on the farm itself. In some areas it was much higher, approaching in more “backward areas” as much as 80%.3 In a truly peasant economy they make their own furniture, their own clothes, their own tools. They do not primarily produce for a market: they sell their surplus, if they have one. Commercial farming is a late development. Money is for taxes and the few items they cannot make for themselves. Even well into the 19th‑century—or in some places in Europe even into the 20th‑century—a good ploughman was expected to be able to make his own plough and keep it in order. Only if he had an iron plough—and not every one did by far—did he need the services of a blacksmith. If it was what in English is called a “scratch plough” he didn’t even need that: the plough was made entirely of wood. And such “ploughs”—they aren’t really ploughs in the proper sense—were still in use in parts of France and Italy until after the Second World War! Furthermore Pound is emphasising one of his fundamental economic principles: goods are primarily for use, not exchange—in that he is in perfect accord with a peasant economy.4
23Furthermore:
Where ambition is every man’s trade is no ploughing
How shall the plow be kept in hands of owners not hirelings? (395)
24asks Pound-Adams in “Canto LXVIII.” These two lines sum up the perennial worries of those statesmen who see in agriculture and a strong, independent peasantry the very basis for a strong and healthy state, and a happy and vigourous population. If too many people flock to the cities with their false lures of streets paved with gold and a chance to escape the secular miseries of rural life, if to be a teacher, a notary or a functionaire is to be preferred to a life behind the plough what will become of our power and prosperity? The depopulation of the countryside haunts the political and social thinking of many a continental writer throughout the 19th‑century and well on into the 20th. It is therefore worth remarking here that Italy in 1918 was the most predominantly peasant country in Western Europe, even more so than France which is usually thought by French historians, and even more so by the apologists for a traditional rural order, to be primarily a land of peasants. Italy in 1918 is an essentially rural country where agriculture employs 55% of the active population whereas in France the figure is 43% and Germany 35% (Milza 20). (The figure for Great Britain is so relatively low that it is not thought worth mentioning!)
25The second obsessive fear is how to insure that the land stays in the hands of those who actually till it rather than falling into the hands of large capitalistic absentee farmers. Or the banks or other “loan lice” who then hire the former peasant owners at starvation wages and turn the former free independent small holder into a hired wage earner who can be replaced more or less at will.
26Furthermore it was the peasantry who above all furnished the manpower for the Italian army in the First World War: according to Milza and Berstein it is estimated that in 1918 of the 4, 800,000 male agricultural workers 2,600,000 are at the front, that is 60% of the working population in a country that is primarily agricultural and where the work is still overwhelmingly manual, even more so than in France. And the Italian peasantry also paid its disproportionate price in blood: at Caporetto, the Italian Verdun, the Italians lost 400,000 troops.
27With these facts in mind the lines in “Canto XXXVII,” already cited: “if a man have in primeval forest/set up his cabin shall rich patroon take it from him?” and “Filled your armies/while the priests were preaching sedition/and men of wealth decrying government credit./…in order to feed on the spoils” become truly luminous details. Furthermore, what must seem to many merely marginal or nearly insignificant, at best a bit of misguided enthusiasm on the part of Pound, now gains in importance:
Having drained off the muck by Vada
From the marshes, by Circeo, where no one else wd. have
drained it.
Waited 2000 years, ate grain from the marshes (XLI 202)
- 5 Pound could have also cited Turgot—and even Adam Smith! There are four references to Turgot in The (...)
28By this act Mussolini shows himself to be a great statesman worthy to join the ranks of Van Buren, Adams and the exemplar Chinese emperors.5
29This interest in farming, the farmer or peasant, and agriculture has its place, not surprisingly, in the Jefferson Cantos. Thus what otherwise might well seem an obscure, and again far from important reference—what some might dismiss as merely a particular quirk of Jefferson’s universal mind, as confirmation of his wide-ranging intellectual interests, is of much more central importance if we hold on to the idea that, for Pound, the proper treatment of the peasant is at the heart of a solid, rational, equitable and just polity.
Oryzia mutica, the upland or mountain rice…
- 6 Succory is an American name for chiccory.
seed of perennial succory… very famous turnip of Sweden (XXXII 157)‑6
- 7 On further reflection, no. Jefferson trusted the people to get it right in the long run, Pound did (...)
30I am far from certain that another poet, or compiler of Jeffersonian dicta on the proper management of a state would have selected such passages for such prominence, for after all this canto only runs to four pages and therefore each item, however appparently trivial or marginal to our “normal” way of thinking is “foregrounded” and calls attention to itself in an unprecedented way. These detailed, concrete, practical concerns for crops that can be grown in a particular country at a particular time prove for Pound that Jefferson is amongst the great statesmen of the world along with Mussolini, Adams, and Pietro Leopoldo. And is it not astonishing, when you reflect on it, that not a single word of Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia or the Declaration of Independence, including the original version, to which Adams refers to in “his” cantos, nor from any other of his political writings, is cited in The Cantos?7 What is remarkable, indeed, about the Jefferson Cantos is how much they emphasize Jefferson’s practical concerns: a canal linking Lake Erie and the Ohio River, the excessive and wasteful taxation in France under the ancien régime, (it’s hardly changed!), a water screw for propelling boats,‑etc. And of course money and the banking system. The promotion of agriculture and the defense of the small owner-operator, practical public works and control of the country’s finances and banking system: a practical political programme for a good, well-ordered state.
31Jefferson understands very well how an aristocracy maintains its sumptuous and extravagant “grandeur,” how monarchs can build their Versailles palaces, at the expense of the well-being of the overwhelming mass of the people who, at that time, are peasants, by extracting from them all the surplus they possibly can and leave to them just enough for them to stay alive. The Marxian analysis of primitive capital accumulation applies above all to the treatment of the peasantry. Pound, via Jefferson, expresses his moral indignation at this exploitation: and we must remember that Fascism, for its advocates, is based above all on a moral revolution.17
32Thus have I tried to explain, to myself at least, why Pound when he came to write the elegy of Fascism in “Canto LXXIV” can begin with the line: “The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders.” (439)
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