In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ELT 44 : 4 2001 Pound & Anti-Semitism Leon Surette. Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to AntiSemitism . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xii + 314 pp. $39.95 IN RECENT YEARS, Leon Surette has produced two books that alter our sense of Ezra Pound's relation to fascism and anti-semitism. The first, "/ Cease Not to Yowl: Ezra Pound's Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti (University of Illinois Press, 1998), co-edited by Demetres Tryphonopoulos , could be read as the second of a two-volume study of the poet's views between 1947 to 1959, when Pound was in St. Elizabeths. The first part of this work is Pound in Purgatory, which scrutinizes Pound's evolving economic and racial politics in the crucial 1930s, when he changed from a money radical to an anti-semite. The book discusses Pound's views on banking and the mythos of economics, Social Credit, Fascism, "the Keynesian Revolution," Sylvio Gesell, Irving Fisher, Arthur Kitson, and concludes with the "Jewish Conspiracy" to end where "I Cease Not to Yowl" begins, with Pound's correspondence with O. R. Agresti. This long argument prepares us for the defiant Pound we meet in the Agresti correspondence. The precise etiology of Pound's ideological disease has been long debated for Poundians, as has the extent to which his beliefs compromise his art. Surette's book is the most comprehensive study of these questions that we have had and brings up much that is new. Specifically, Surette dwells on three figures who have been relatively ignored: John Maynard Keynes, Father Charles Coughlin, and Arthur Kitson. Surette believes that Pound's behavior was the result of a "muddle" caused by his economic radicalism and his unshakable faith in Mussolini . "For whatever reason," he writes, "Pound persisted to the bitter end in the belief that fascism was the political instrument that would bring about those economic reforms which would ensure the peace and prosperity of the world." Pound knew, yet refused to concede, that the economic theory he most believed in, a form of Social Credit, was deeply flawed and that Mussolini was little interested in economic reforms; ". ..emotionally incapable of surrendering either his economic radicalism or his hero-worship of Mussolini," Pound became increasingly frustrated , "irrational and irascible." His resort to conspiracy theory and anti-semitism was the consequence. If the readers of his hectoring letters and articles could not understand him it was because they would not, because they had been duped by the forces of evil: the Jews. Surette 514 BOOK REVIEWS even locates the precise moment of infection; it is a terrible irony that its proximate cause was Louis Zukofsky, who had sent Pound an American Christian Party and Silvershirt paper called Liberation in the spirit of mockery. In it was an article by its editor William Dudley Pelley, "The Mystery of the Civil War and Lincoln's Death," which caught Pound's imagination. Surette argues it is from this source that Pound caught the bug that would come to obsess him in the decades to come. Hitherto he had resisted the Jewish conspiracy arguments of his correspondents like Kitson, who had sent Pound the highly toxic forgery Protocols of the Elders ofZion, which Pound had ignored. Soon after reading the Pelley article, however, Pound began expressing more radically bigoted views. It was convenient for Pound that the German/Italian rapprochement of 1936 caused Mussolini to introduce anti-semitism as fascist policy in Italy , thereby bringing Pound's new beliefs into the party line. Surette shows that Pound read and rejected Keynes's General Theory, a book that many of Pound's economic correspondents—including Social Creditors—hailed as a breakthrough and partial justification of Douglasite economic insights. Had Pound been able to listen better, he might have realized that Roosevelt, not Mussolini, was more likely to promote economic reform. A second source of infection were the virulent radio speeches of Father Coughlin, whose broadcasts were probably the model for Pound's own radio career. Surette reports that Pound read Coughlin's Money! Questions and Answers (1935) with enthusiasm; there can be no doubt that the radio priest, who has been recently exposed as a paid Nazi agent, had...

pdf

Share