CHARLES BEREZIN
267
unimpressed by either fascism or communism, although he was given
to occasional Jew-baiting.
Pound's anti-Semitism bears the outline of much of the anti–
Semitic propaganda that preceded World War II. In
The Cantos
and
throughout his prose works we find the familiar anti-Semite's picture
of the Jew as unproductive, parasitic and conspiratorial. In Canto
XXXV we find:
this is Mitleleuropa
and Tsievitz
has explained
to
me the warmth of affections,
the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of
hebrew affections, in the family, and nearly everything else....
poinling out that Mr. Lewinesholme has suffered by deprivation
of same and exposure to American snobbery ... "1 am a product,"
said the young lady, "of Mitleleuropa, "
but she seemed to have been able to mobilize
and the fine thing was that the family did not
wire about papa's death for fear of disturbing the concert
which might seem
to
contradict the general indefinite wobble.
It
must be rather like some inlernal organ,
some communal life of the pancreas ... . sensitivity
without direction ... this is ... (35/ 172-3)
For Pound, creativity was masculine, phallic and individualistic. He
depicts the Jews as feminine and communal. Pound considered a
"direction of the will"
to
be an important component of culture. The
Jews ' "sensitivity without direction" suggests that they are incapable
of producing or sustaining a culture. Because "sensitivity" seems to
emanate from "some internal organ," the Jews do not have to strive for
it. This passive receptivity is the opposite of the will. The flabby,
indecisive language with which Pound describes the Jews, such
phrases as: "it must be rather like some internal organ," can also be
taken as an indication of Pound's feelings that the Jews were incapable
of the kind of precision and hardness necessary to be artistic, produc–
tive people.
Pound's type of the productive man was Sigismundo Malatesta
who asserted his will against all the obstacles Renaissance Italy could
put before him and built the Tempio. Pound said of his Malatesta
Cantos: "No one has claimed that the Malatesta cantos are obscure.
They are openly volitionist, establishing, I think clearly, the effect of
the factive personality, Sigismundo, an entire man." Lacking Sigis–
mundo 's type of individual will, a Jew could not have a "factive"
personality, could not be a creative, "entire man."
