rected at the "free-thinking Jew" for
whom Mr. Eliot has little or no place
in his Christian Society? Why have
most of our best poets and critics been
engaged, from time to time, in a coy
flirtation with fascism? It is a question
that some future literary critic will
have to answer. Mann's
Doctor Faustus
seems to give us a partial explanation,
but even he has not covered all the
aspects of the twentieth century artist.
Perhaps we are still too close to our
contemporaries to make the fin al act of
evaluation, but we can help to clear
the air a bit for the future critic and
his readers. Providing, of course, that
literature will still exist
in
the future
world.
In the meantime, one hopes that Mr.
Tate has not as yet challenged the edi–
tors to a fine Southern duel.
Henry
A.
Woodfin, Jr.
Buffalo, N. Y.
Sirs :
About Pound and the Bollingen
Prize. Not one of the judges who
awarded the prize is an anti-Semite
in
any sense, and I think we all know it.
If
Mr. Barrett felt himself accused of
anti-Semitism, he would resent it as
much as Mr. Tate did, and I imagine
he could clear the thing up with Mr.
Tate by assuring
him
that he intended
no such insinuation. There is nothing
ugly or vicious
in
Mr. Eliot's social
ideas, or in his poetry except as it re–
flects the world of his experience. Mr.
Davis cannot really believe that there
is,
though he seems to credit Eliot with
a metaphor of his own invention: the
Jews as "carriers of disintegrative ra–
tionalism"--carriers being indeed an
ugly word here.
As a Roman Catholic, I consider my–
self Semitic rather than anti-Semitic.
Any mania on the subject has always
seemed to me not only deplorable but
low and meaningless, like swearing; I
thought it got into Pound's work like
765
all the other passions and special vo–
cabularies that are there, partly at least
because he was a collector and included
low life
in his
collection. It made me
angry when the Fascist fantasy, and
the old, artist's grievance against the
United States and Great Britain, put
him at the service of Italians who
never took
him
seriously as a Fascist
or anything else, in the propaganda
war.
If
he was not sane, he was not
responsible, and the doctors think he
was not sane. But how could anyone
fail to understand Mr. Greenberg's
feeling, or Mr. Shapiro's? I share them.
Anti-Semitism, mad or sane, must pre–
judice any artist
in
all our minds.
Prejudices, good or ill, may be dis–
concerted by works of art. However
unlikely it
might
seem that the most
beautiful poetry of 1948 should have
appeared in Pound's
Pisan Cantos,
that
is
nevertheless the case. And anti-Sem–
itism is not quite invisible in them, but
it
is almost. Mr. Barrett quoted three
fragments, a total of seven lines, as if
they were representative, but the fact
is that there are no others in 118 pages
devoted to other material. The cantos
do not so much "transform" objection–
able stuff as keep away from
it;
after
a note or two of Fascist bravado, and
the flings quoted by Mr. Barrett, they
are occupied with personal memories
and some fine images and affirmations.
The Bollingen judges were awarding a
prize for
poetry,
and there it is.
It is a little hard to say just what
they could be said to have done for
Pound in conferring the prize on his
work. Were they honoring him? There
were no ceremonies in the prison yard.
I doubt that you can honor someone
unless he is
in
a position to be hon–
ored, and that is scarcely Pound's posi–
tion;
it
is incongruous to think, in Mr.
Howe's phrase, of extending a hand in
congratulation. Perhaps the judges for–
gave him, or forgave him enough to
permit recognition of his work.
