VARIETY
It is the beauty of demons they
rush in to struggle with a cry of
hate you must hear if you will
answer them.
I have advanced far enough out
of the prison of my generation to
understand it is civil war in which
you are locked.
What day you ask when date
is dead
of May, when month is lost.
I can be precise though it is
no answer:
this is the day of great year
the day of fear.
Man is moon.
You will know better than I how
it is to be fought. I wrote to my
wife one time from Rapallo when
I had listened to Pound for an
afternoon damn usury, expound
credit and Major Douglas, talk the
totalitarian way, it was as though
I were in the presence of one of
Wyndham Lewis' revolutionary
simpletons.
I had never read Hegel, but my
mind had been full of Blake from
boyhood up, I saw the world as a
conflict, and could distinguish be–
tween a contrary and a negation.
Yet it was not easy for me to listen
when one of your young men who
had come to Rapallo to see Pound
came away and said to me: "He
has mingled with ferret and cha–
meleon, vulture and kite, every anti–
semite after his kind. He has
touched abomination and is un–
clean."
In my first hard spring-time I
had a friend I thought half a lu-
141
natic, half knave.
And I told him so, but friend–
ship never ends;
And what if mind seem
changed,
And it seemed changed with
the mind,
When thought rise up unbid
On generous things that he
did
And I grow half contented to
be blind!
Now in your country I hear a
department called Justice speak of
scripts for wireless and Ezra, as I
would expect, talk back sharp.
(Words cause no man fear except
in the making of them.) I pay
little heed, though there is pity in
me, for I know Pound, he is a
gambler and can measure conse–
quence.
The soul is stunned in me, 0
writers, readers, fighters, fearers,
for another reason, that you have
allowed this to happen without a
trial of your own. It is the pas–
sivity of you young men before
Pound's work as a whole, not
scripts alone, you who have taken
from him, Joyce, Eliot and myself
the advances we made for you.
There is a court you leave silent–
history present, the issue the larger
concerns of authority than a state,
Heraclitus and Marx called, per–
haps some consideration of descents
and metamorphoses, form and the
elimination of intellect.
We were the forerunners-Pound
only the more extreme-but our
time was out of phase and made
us enders. Lawrence among us
