THE POUND AWARD
621
allegation whatever of antisemitism on the part of the judges. The
question was, and is, the public wisdom of an award to Pound, and not
the private psychology of the judges. It is Mr. Tate who has injected the
personal issues. Surely Mr. Tate must recognize that he has a public
responsibility to answer, not me personally, but all those people who
have not forgotten what happened in Germany during this last War
and who, like Mr. Greenberg, feel threatened by an award to Pound. Mr.
Tate still has the opportunity open to him to offer a reasoned justification
of the award, and we hope that he will do so. In the meantime, his
challenge to a personal duel is strictly extra-curricular sport-having
nothing to do with the public issue.
The comments explain themselves sufficiently so that it is unneces–
sary for me to linger in detailed examination of all of them. I should
like to confine the rest of my remarks to the statements by Mr. Davis and
Mr. Auden.
I agree with Mr. Davis that the context in which this question is
raised has to be extended to include the historical circumstances that now
condition literary judgment in the United States. What the present con–
troversy demonstrates is that the category of the aesthetic is not the
primary one for human life, and that the attitude which holds aesthetic
considerations to be primary is far from primary itself, but produced by
very many historical, social, and moral conditions. It would be hard to
define just what the reigning climate of opinion has become in literary
America since the collapse of the 'thirties; but perhaps it is high time
we sought to establish a new climate, beginning with a re-examination of
some of these "non-aesthetic" bases of literary judgment.
Mr. Auden's letter is the kind of rational, impersonal, and calm
justification of the prize that we had hoped to have from Mr. Tate. I
respect Mr. Auden's position, but I am not altogether convinced by his
arguments. I would agree with everything that he says if the question
had been one of censorship. But the question I raised was not one of
suppressing Pound's book but of publicly honoring it with a prize. Mr.
Auden's jump-"no prize; suppression"-is his own inference and not
mine.
This point must be stressed since, as Mr. Shapiro remarks in his
comment, some people are glad to celebrate the award for Pound just
be–
cause
it seems a triumph of liberalism. Such
is
the line taken by Mr.
Dwight Macdonald, who in an editorial in his magazine
Politics
finds
the award "the brightest political act in a dark period." One can be
in favor of the prize for Pound and still find Mr. Macdonald's enthusiasm
here just a little extreme. I am against censorship in principle even
