THE POUND
AWARD
517
To give Pound a literary prize is, willy-nilly, a moral act within the
frame of our social world. To honor him is to regard him as a man with
whom one can have decent, normal, even affectionately respectful human
and intellectual relations; it means to extend a hand of public fraternity
to Ezra Pound. Now a hand to help him when he is down, yes. A hand
to defend him from censors, fools and blood-seekers, yes. But a hand
of honor and congratulations, no. For Pound, by virtue of his public
record and utterances, is beyond the bounds of our intellectual life.
If
the judges felt that he had written the best poetry of 1948, I think they
should have publicly said so-but not awarded any prize for the year.
That might, by the way, have been an appropriate symbol of our cultural
situation.
My position has, I know, grave difficulties and can easily lead to
abuse. Once you consider extra-literary matters in a literary judgment,
where do you stop? You stop at the point where intelligence and sensi–
bility tell you to-that is what they are for. But it would be absurd to
deny that there are occasions when aesthetic standards and our central
human values clash, and when the latter must seem more important. On
such painful occasions one can only say: not that I love literature less,
but that I love life more. Is there any other way of taking literature
seriously?
GEORGE ORWELL:
I
think
the Bollingen Foundation were quite right to award
Pound the prize, if they believed his poems to be the best of the year,
but I think also that one ought to keep Pound's career in memory and
not feel that his ideas are made respectable by the mere fact of winning
a literary prize.
Because of the general revulsion against Allied war propaganda,
there has been-indeed, there was, even before the war was over-a
tendency to claim that Pound was "not really" a fascist and an anti–
semite, that he opposed the war on pacifist grounds and that in any
case his political activities only belonged to the war years. Some time
ago I saw it stated in an American periodical that Pound only broad–
cast on the Rome radio when "the balance of his mind was upset,"
and later (I think in the same periodical) that the Italian government
had blackmailed him into broadcasting by threats to relatives. All
this
is plain falsehood. Pound was an ardent follower of Mussolini as far
back as the nineteen-twenties, and never concealed it. He was a con–
tributor to Mosley's review, the
British Union Quarterly,
and accepted
a professorship from the Rome government before the war started. I
