After 38 years I recently re-read Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. It is not the great book I read when I was 28 but then I was in awe of Kenner’s encyclopedic knowledge of Pound’s poetry. Kenner still knows more about Pound than any writer on the poet I have read, but perhaps when the book was published he knew too much. He must have known more than his editor at the University of California Press, and that editor had to have been intimidated by Kenner. I think this explains the many gnomic, opaque and knotty sentences in the book, sentences that you have to read two or three times. That Kenner asks as much attention as he believes reading Pound requires is fair enough, but he sacrificed clarity. But this is merely an annoyance, and I want to concentrate on other matters here.
On this reading I was struck hard by Kenner’s refusal to make plain Pound’s anti-Semitism. The reader who begins to learn about Pound in The Pound Era will be flabbergasted when he discovers the virulence of Pound’s racism and its importance to one thread that runs through his life’s work The Cantos.
The record is clear and had to be available to a reader of Kenner’s wide range and depth of knowledge about Pound. From at least the early 1930s until the late 1960s Pound was an anti-Semite in private and in his published work. This was not a casually held belief explainable by the anti-Semitism of his literary generation or his times nor was it, as he explained to Allen Ginsberg in Venice “a stupid suburban prejudice.” Pound’s hatred of Jews was ingrained in the man and in his poetry.
In his chapter “The Cage”—this refers to the detention center outside Pisa where Pound was held under arrest before being taken to Washington and tried for treason*—Kenner writes:
“Hitler jailed no Rothschilds, and Pound thought that the poor Jews whom German resentment drove into concentration camps were suffering for the sins of their inaccessible coreligionists.
Stinkschuld sin drawing vengeance, poor yitts paying for
Stinkschuld
paying for a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim
he wrote on the first page of Canto 52, and went on to excoriate 'the international racket, specialité of the Stinkschuld,' with further remarks on their infuriating conduct. The ideograms for calling things by their right names appear on the last page of the preceding Canto, and fury at not being able to print ‘Rothschild’ betrayed his style. Even pseudonymized the words were held libelous. Though the thick black lines that replace them are more eloquent, it is a pity that Pound’s distinction between the financiers and the rest of Jewry was not allowed to be emphasized while he was still in the habit of making it. Correctly or not, it attempted a diagnosis, and one tending rather to decrease than to encourage anti-Semitism. ‘Race prejudice,’ he wrote in 1937, ‘is a red herring.’”
There is no way “poor yitts” or “a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim” will tend to decrease anti-Semitism. What Pound wrote in 1937 is itself a red herring and does not address the moral crudity of either his words or his thinking.
The asterisk after “concentration camps” sends one to this Kenner footnote: “Places not yet (1938) committed to a policy of extermination. News of that policy, when it was instituted, no more reached Rapallo than it did most of Germany.” A writer who thinks German “resentment”—“Indignation or ill will felt as a result of a real or imagined grievance”—explains Auschwitz is incapable of understanding the truth about Hitler, Germany, Pound or anti-Semitism. If this is calling things by their right name…Kenner obviously believed this defense of Pound and no weasel phrase like “correctly or not” will redeem him.
The Kenner phase that devastates is “distinction between the financiers and the rest of Jewry.” Kenner sees “poor yitts” as a distinction!
It is shocking to realize that a mind as fine as Kenner’s, as discriminating in so many matters cannot see Pound for who he was. I have no idea if Kenner struggled with Pound’s anti-Semitism—the above passage argues that he did not—or if he so much as glimpsed that he could not face the facts. Anti-Semitism is in The Pound Era only in Pound’s quoted remark to Ginsberg. It does not appear in the book’s index.
Did Kenner find it impossible to square Pound the Jew hating Mussolini lover with the great man he believed him to be? To ignore this aspect of Pound’s character and thought is, at the very least, intellectual cowardice.
One more example. Kenner ends his book with a sentimental anecdote relayed to him by Guy Davenport who had been told it by an old Wyncote, Pennsylvania friend of Pound’s. After his release from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Pound spent one night in his childhood home in the Philadelphia suburbs. He woke in the middle of that night and walked, in his pajamas, through the sleeping streets to sit on the steps of the Presbyterian Church, “to sit on its steps looking over the moonlit lawns of great estates: sitting where a boy had sat 60 years before, his eye on trees before dawn, his mind on a poet’s destiny…” Cue the strings, move in for a close-up then pull back for a slow fade. Even if Pound did sit on those steps that night (How can Kenner know third hand what was on his mind?) the right name for Kenner’s soft-focus ending is bullshit.
What Kenner leaves out is that when Pound returned to Italy not long after his night on the church steps he disembarked at Genoa. On the ship’s gangplank he posed for photographers his arm raised, hand outstretched giving the Fascist salute. A mad old poet’s folly? Whatever he thought on those church steps that salute is Pound’s destiny, a master poet and unregenerate Fascist.
It is sad and infuriating that Kenner’s intelligent and informative book refuses to take the full measure of his hero. This is The Pound Era's near fatal flaw.
Near because it is impossible not to be enlightened by Kenner’s book. Two points, one minor and the other major, I noted on this reading.
James Laughlin, Pound’s publisher, champion and friend for 60 years is named in the acknowledgments but is otherwise absent from this book.
The major point is that from the time the Cantos began to appear in book form in 1925 until after World War II the editions were miniscule, under 200 copies. Pound had no general readership and because of this his work had next to no critical response. Kenner shows this to be the opposite of Eliot and Joyce, of The Wasteland and Ulysses. They had readers who wrote about their work starting a dialogue that continues today. No such dialogue existed for Pound so that by the time his work became generally available his readers were years behind the times. His “piths and gists” style could be grasped but his “luminous details”, what mattered most to him could rarely be simultaneous with his reader’s experience. An odd antique quality clings to The Cantos. By the time we catch up to Pound and his world it has disappeared. These details can be learned by study and Kenner is an excellent teacher, but it remains a daunting task to get more than glimpses of what Pound is about in The Cantos.
Pound too must have suffered from this isolation. Kenner implies as much, but he does not have much to say about Pound’s egoism. He knew that he was right and in the Thirties some who knew him thought he had become a megalomaniac. This might have been his fate in any case, but what his powerful ego meant for his poetry was that he could credit his not being read or being mis-read to his genius. Partly because of this Pound’s come-uppance, the years of silence and depression before his death, is tragic—that a man with such gifts could go so wrong and not, until much to late, know it is a fate that no other great American Modern suffered.
Kenner cared enough to pursue “mermaids, that carving” to Venice’s Santa Maria dei Miracoli. We are in his debt for this, and his endorsement of “the accuracy of perception that set in array the words that drew me on” is inspiring. But reading his book now I see that the Pound era took place out of public sight. That too was Pound’s destiny and a tragic one.
*The trial never took place. Pound was declared mentally incompetent and sent to Washington’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital where he spent over fifteen years or a quarter of his writing life.
