Pound In Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (review)

Leon Surette's most recent book on Ezra Pound is an important contribution to Pound studies, especially in the cautionary tale it so thoroughly documents that challenges those of us who have been long drawn to Pound's poetry. For he tells the story of Pound's descent into anti-Semitism, a fall from zealous economic reformer into a paranoid conspiracy theorist who sees the Jews as responsible for the decline of Western culture.

Surette not only wants to tell the story of Pound's anti-Semitism again--for other scholars have recently been attending to this aspect of Pound's thought and of modernist thought in general--but he wants to date it; that is, he wants to document, as precisely as possible, exactly when this shift occurred in Pound's attitude toward the problems of the modern world, "from economic radicalism to Anti-Semitism" as the book's subtitle puts it. I find this goal of Surette's original and worthwhile, and I find his scrupulous attention to Pound's letters and economic essays and pamphlets successful in providing relatively certain dates before and after which we can see this change. Surette is able to show that Pound expresses hardly any anti-Semitic thinking before 1934, and that by 1936 he is fully anti-Semitic in his thinking about an international Jewish conspiracy. This may seem a small goal that contributes little to our thinking about Pound's character and quality of thought, but Surette is careful to make this dating of Pound's fall crucial to explaining the nature of Pound's anti-Semitism--not the result of a long-held racial prejudice that leads him to see the Jews as the evil in the world to be exterminated, but the consequence of his deep and urgent desire for economic reform. In his arrogant and perhaps pathological presumption, he feels he has comprehended the nature of the world's economic ills and the solution to them, and only a conspiracy led by men of ill- will can explain how the relatively easy solutions (of Social Credit and Fascism especially) have not been implemented and have been discredited. It's but a small step, in Surette's logic, from a general conspiracy against the light of economic reform to a Jewish conspiracy. By dating Pound's shift, Surette makes this case not only plausible but convincing.

Surette's argument is intended to correct the speculations about Pound's character described so powerfully by Robert Casillo in his 1988 book, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound. Casillo's Pound is an anti-Semite from youth, a result of his suburban American antipathy to the Jews who were displacing his class and its claims to privilege and power in America at the turn of the century. Casillo's Pound is a racially motivated anti-Semite, Surette's Pound a man driven by his own arrogance and confusion to conspiracy paranoia. I can't help but believe that, despite some protestations to the contrary, Surette wants to rescue Pound from Casillo's powerful critique. Surette is careful on several occasions to clarify that this difference in no way exonerates or even mitigates Pound's sin; yet I find it hard to believe that Surette does not intend his argument to lessen our harsh judgments about Pound's anti-Semitic statements and attitudes. After all, his Pound is "in Purgatory," a place where sinners are sent whose sin is motivated by excess of desire and who will purge this excess and become redeemed. Surette uses the theological language of "fall" and "descent" throughout his book to describe Pound's emerging anti-Semitism, and such language implies that the poet was some place higher before so falling. Perhaps this is a way not to discredit his earlier scholarship, especially A Light...