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mentality. Attacking theJews , Roosevelt, or Churchill, he sounds like a street–
corner Fascist. The desire for order, for the known stamp of things, can be
seen in almost all of his work. Other writers have insisted that history conform
to
their demands , but it is difficult to think of another modern poet with such
a personal relationship to history. History may be a nightmare in
The Cantos,
but it is a nightmare manipulated by the man who possesses the secret, Pound
himself.
And despite efforts to portray him as a martyr, Pound was granted
respectability , even a kind of perverse heroism, while confined to St. Eliza–
beth's . George P. Elliott might have bitterly reminded us that "the Ausch–
witz ovens were scarcely cool" when the
Pisan Cantos
were written, but most
critics were happier to dismiss Pound's hatred of Jews as his self-confessed
" worst mistake ," a "suburban prejudice" better left alone. In our own time,
the " demo-liberal ideology" against which Pound fulminated is even less
fashionable than it was in the late Forties . Given the present cultural climate,
it is far easier to attack a democratic socialist, Orwell , than a fascist, Pound .
Eliot's is a more complex and less fashionable case, even for Mr. Chace.
For the past decade , it has pretty much been open season on Eliot. What was
once necessary , challenging that middle-aged orthodoxy that stifled us all,
now begins to parody itself. We have been so tendentiously liberated from
"Mr. Eliot " that the aggressive spontaneity grows equally middle-aged .
Poetic attitudes mock themselves sooner or later. The didacticism of middle–
aged clerics has been replaced by the spontaneity of self-conscious liberators.
Perhaps this kind of thing simply testifies to the limitations of poetry's public
voice. And yet, one is still left more uncomfortable by Eliot's politics than by
those of Pound .
It is not merely his greater intelligence which makes Eliot more disturb–
ing. There is something essentially slippery in Eliot; he remains an actor even
in his political beliefs , but an actor who cannot get beyond the pose. Pound
practiced what he preached : he did broadcast for Mussolinni , he did call for
the destruction of" richJews ," etc. Eliot was not a man ofaction. And there is
little even literary critics admire more than the man willing to take action.
Pound 's anci-Semitism-true to his essential blindness to historical reality–
reverses the roles of Jew and non-Jew .
the yid is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle in gt/proportion and go to
saleab le slaughter with the maxim um of doci lity.
Eliot's is more honestly rooted in the very marrow of that tradition for which
he hungers. This does not make it any more acceptable , but it does make it less
hysterical. Anti-Semitism is simply absorbed into the anti-democratic roOts of
