268
PARTISAN REVIEW
Pound undercuts the importance of individual exceptions to this
rule by referring to that possibility with a double subjunctive. Such an
exception
"might seem
to
contradict the general indefinite wobble. "
The "wobble" remains "general," characteristic of the Jews as a whole
despite individual exceptions. The exception that Pound shows us in
Canto XXXV is ironic. Pound felt that emotion was essential to
producing good art. He said in a letter
to
Iris Barry: "Also one must
have emotion or one's cadence and rhythms will be vapid and without
interest. " Pound does not accuse the Jews of being unemotional. The
drift of the passage from Canto XXXV is
to
accuse them of sentimental–
ity. But by not wiring "about papa's death for fear of disturbing the
concert," the Jews are keeping the emotion " in the family," exactly in
accordance with Pound's complaints about them.
Creativity and masculinity were closely associated in Pound's
mind. In a postscript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont's
Physique de i'Amour,
he claims:
The brain itself, is, in origin and development only a sort of great
clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve... . This hypothesis
would perhaps explain a certain number of as yet uncorrelated
phenomena both psychological and physiological.
It
would explain
the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.
As a "maker ... of images," the artist would seem to be in close contact
with the origin of his brain as semen. The feminine Jew, whose
affections are "intravaginal" and whose religion forbids the making of
images of the godhead, would seem to be excluded from artistic
creativity in Pound's view. In the letter to Iris Barry cited earlier,
Pound compares writing poetry to the working of a sculptor:
"It
is as
simple as the sculptor's direction : 'Take a chisel and cut away all the
stone you don 't want. '" Here again is the artist as the
phallic,
aggressive male. The state ofmind in which one must "cut away " is the
opposite of the Jews' feminine "warmth" and "sensitivity."
Sentimentality, the opposite of the sculptor's ruthlessness, is
characteristic of the Jewish artist:
The tale of the perfect schnorrer: a peautiful chewish poy
wit a vo-ice dot woult
meldt dh heart oHa schtone
and wit a likeing for to make arht-voiks
and ven dh oldt lady wasn't dhere any more
and dey didn't know why, tdhere ee woss in the
oldt antique schop and nobodty knew how he got dhere. (35/ 174)
