Charles Berezin
POETRY AND POLITICS IN EZRA POUND
Ezra Pound's anti-Semitism poses a problem that literary
critics, by and large, have not handled with distinction. Such concerns
are considered un-literary and· beyond the immediate scope of the text.
Sometimes a critic will include in his account of Pound a minute
description of Major Douglas's economics, but only
to
demonstrate
how Pound made use of that theory in
The Cantos.
But having seen
that use, what then should the reader make of it? Until literary critics
are willing to face anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and fascism as issues,
as problems of the literary texts that make use of them, we shall be
unable to come to a realistic appraisal of the work of Ezra Pound or of
modernism as. a cultural phenomenon.
Most critics, when confronted by Pound's anti-Semitism attempt
to sweep it under the nearest apology, leaving conspicuous bulges in
their arguments. Christine Brooke-Rose, in a remark characteristic of
one type of apology, asserts: "His anti-Semitism is (or was) nasty, an
aberration, even if in intention focused on the financial question. "
Calling his anti-Semitism an "aberration" is a disservice to Pound.
Brooke-Rose counsels readers not to take him seriously. As Hyam
Maccoby recently pointed out: "Pound himself would not have wanted
to be judged as a moral incompetent who happened to have a knack for
poetry."
If
we learn nothing else from Pound we learn that ideas do not
exist in a historical vacuum. Denying this truth is perhaps the greatest
harm Pound's "friends" can do when they treat his anti-Semitism as
though the Holocaust never happened.
Another method of apology focuses on Pound's big-Jew-little-Jew
distinction.
In
Canto LII, Pound says: "... sin drawing vengeance,
poor yitts paying for ... paying for a few big jew's vendetta on
goyim." Some feel that in statements such as this Pound absolves the
"poor yitts" from responsibility in the "big jew's" crimes. But this
argument falls down if we consider that the only difference between the
two is the "poor yitts'" lack of power.
In
Guide to Kulchur
Pound
remarked: "Meyer Anselm had, let us say, a purpose, a race (his own
race) to 'avenge.'" Here, the "big jew's vendetta" is carried on in the
