[As we had previously done with a previous work, we share the following as an example what’s possible when we allow an LDS perspective to seep into our scholarship, whether consciously or not. This paper-draft’s thesis, after all, is that an excessive and inordinate preoccupation with wealth and gain can lead to oppressive and authoritarian mindsets. Such, of course, is also the thesis of the Book of Mormon, which argues all the exact same about the Pride Cycle and the rise of the Kingmen in the Alma. Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.]
“Can’t move ‘em with a cold thing like economics”
This paper attempts what Donald Davies once advocated for as a “pedestrian reading”[i] of Ezra Pound’s poetry, one that privileges a perusing, cursory, surface-level reading of his work—like a tourist taking in only the scenery, the exteriors, the larger landscape and the rough lay of the geography—one that focuses not upon the obscure or encoded or elusive, but upon the most obvious, clear, and explicit. Such, according to Louis Menand, was how Pound himself desired to be read: “[Pound] desperately did not want to be misunderstood. Opacity and ambiguity can be deliberate effects in modernist writing…In Pound’s case, though, any obscurity is unintentional. Clarity is the essence of his aesthetic. He sometimes had to struggle against his own technique to achieve it”[ii]. In particular, this paper wishes to perform just such a pedestrian reading of Pound’s sprawling, multi-decade long-poem The Cantos, in order to note both its peculiar preoccupation with finance, as well as how the sheer number of references to finance skyrocket during his fascist turn in the 1930s. That is, this paper wishes to take a step back to remind ourselves that it not the specific contours of Pound’s various economic theories that mark his fascism—whether he was a Populist, or a Jeffersonian, or a Social Credit proponent—but rather the sheer fact that Pound sincerely believed economics to be the root of all human advancement in the first place, that placed him on the path towards Mussolini. This observation was considered self-evident by critics like Victor C. Ferkiss in the immediate post-War period after the collapse of the then-recent American fascist movement, and bears re-emphasis today amidst the resurgence of fascist proclivities amidst the ongoing aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This emphasis is also necessary, because critical attempts to rehabilitate or explain away Ezra Pound’s fascism over the past 30 years have typically cited his life-long preoccupations with finance as a mitigating factor in his favor, as opposed to being constitutive of the same[iii]. Paul Morrison for example, in 1996’s The Poetics of Fascism, goes for the his-heart-was-in-the-right-place defense, arguing that Pound’s “political commitments […] are inseparable from their poetic accomplishments, the utopian impulses that inform them”[iv], claiming that he “was only reluctantly a fascist”[v], and that “Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism have their origins in a profound and potentially revolutionary dissatisfaction with the liberal settlement; the anticapitalist, antibourgeois fervor that motivates them need not have assumed the reactionary form it did”[vi]. For Morrison, Pound’s fascism was a sort of economic utopianism gone bad, a reluctant and avoidable fascism that was otherwise rooted in the best of intentions. Likewise Alec Marsh, in 1998’s Money and Modernity, contextualizes Pound’s part of a larger generation of early-20th century poets, including his friends William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost, who were all concerned with economic reform, and jointly advocating for a return to some Jeffersonian ideal of a pre-industrial agrarian economy, a movement which predated Pound’s own fascist turn; as Marsh claims: “Pound became interested in the money question before Fascism existed, and his radical anti-Semitism did not fully manifest itself until the early 1940s”[vii]. In Marsh’s reading, the fact that Pound’s long-standing obsession with economics predated his turn towards fascism is evidence that the two have little to do with each other, rather than reading his economic obsessions as portending his turn towards fascism, once that ideology became available.
Other critics in turn have attempted to disassociate economics from his fascism entirely; as Pound himself wrote ruefully in the Pisan Cantos, “Can’t move ‘em/with a cold thing like economics”[viii], and numerous critics have apparently taken him at his word, preferring to seek something more fundamental or fascinating than mere economics by which to explain his fascism. Catherin E. Paul for example, in 2016’s Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism, argues for “the importance of the cultural projects of Mussolini’s fascism to Pound’s evolving Modernism”, rather than “his political and economic interests”[ix], treating the “political and economic” as red herrings that distracted from what was actually most relevant to his fascism: his larger desires for cultural renovation. Matthew Feldman for his part, in 2013’s Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-45, also largely downplays the role of economics in his poetry, arguing that “for too long, Pound’s fascist activism has simply been dismissed as either mad or bad, the product of political naiveite or misplaced economic idealism”[x], choosing instead to focus on the religiosity of Italian fascism. Speaking of naivety, Tim Redman in 2009’s Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism argues that Pound was indeed a “political naif”[xi], as though a touch more sophistication on the part of that Europhile polyglot would have steered him away from the same fascism that had also seduced so many other intellectuals of the era. Hugh Kenner meanwhile, in his landmark 1973 study The Pound Era, moves in the opposite direction, framing Pound’s slide into fascism as the result not of some intellectual naivety, but of an expansive, encyclopedic mind that at last collapsed under its own overbearing weight: “Thought is a labyrinth”[xii], his brooding study concludes. Correspondingly, David Barnes posits Pound’s fascism as but another example of his avant-garde poetics: “In Pound’s mind Fascism, like his own poetry, was avant-garde; and it is Fascism as avant-garde experiment that he is keen to recommend to ‘dilettantes’ and ‘tourists’”[xiii], framing Pound’s fascism as a strictly aesthetic consideration, subordinating his economic obsessions to his avant-garde aesthetics, not the other way around. Meanwhile Nick Selby, in 2005’s Poetics of Loss, goes so far as to make of Pound a tragic figure, bypassing economics entirely to argue that he was a sort of visionary trying to re-establish a lost sense of civilizational unity and integrity: “Pound’s text […] enacts a tragic sort of tenacity, and enforces a faith in the very idea of civilization itself, faith in the desire that something might be saved from loss”[xiv]. For Selby, Pound’s goals of civilizational salvage were laudable, even if his methods in the end became monstrous.
Yet though these numerous critics are all absolutely correct to argue that there is far more than strict economic idealism to Pound’s fascism, it is nonetheless still important to emphasize that economics was not a secondary or subordinate consideration—not a post hoc rationalization for his fascist mindset—but an integral part of the same; and, as Pound’s immensely economic vocabulary throughout so much of The Cantos indicates, there was nothing reluctant about his commitment to fascism, nor of his attendant preoccupation with economic theory, which was as central to his fascism as cultural projects of rejuvenation, avant-garde poetics, and state-sponsored religiosity.[xv] The problem is not that Pound considered financiers to be evil (a relatively uncontroversial position across the political spectrum, even today), but specifically that Pound, unlike many of his other poetic peers, privileged economic concerns above all other human considerations. As Redman also argues, Pound became convinced that “the progress of culture depends on health or sickness of the economy, which is in turn dependent upon monetary system”[xvi], and hence that the economic health of the public body is prior to, and therefore implicitly takes precedence over, any concern for individual human lives. Such an approach, even if begun under the most humane of intentions, inevitably tends towards authoritarianism, whether in Pound’s era or our own. Robert Casillo has argued in The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound that “[T]he role of Anti-Semitism and fascism within the verbal economy and structure of The Cantos, shows above all else that the fascist ideology is indispensable to the poem’s linguistic strategies and formal development”[xvii], and this same fascist ideology is in turn indispensable towards understanding Pound’s preoccupations with finance. If, as Pound himself once stated with deceptive blandness, “Literature is news that remains news”, then the fascist poetry of Pound—particularly that found in The Cantos—is likewise news that has remained news for us today.
Finance and Fascism in the Pandemic Era
The connection between Pound’s fascism and financial preoccupations was treated as far more self-evident during the immediate post-war period. For example, in 1955 (while Ezra Pound was still a patient at St. Elizabeth’s), Pound scholar Victor C. Ferkiss wrote the following summary to categorize the then-recent American fascist movement:
“American fascism had its roots in American populism; it pursued the same ends and even used many of the same slogans. Both despaired of achieving a just society under the joined banners of liberalism and capitalism. The attacks on finance capitalism, the hatred of social democracy and socialism, the belief that representative democracy is a mask for rule by a predatory economic plutocracy, and that a strong executive is essential for the creation and preservation of a middle-class society composed of small independent landowners, suspicion of freedom of the press and civil liberties generally as the shields and instrumentalities of the plutocracy, ultra-nationalism, anti-Semitism (both latent and active), and, finally, a peculiar interpretation of history which sees in events a working-out of a dialectic which opposes the financier and the producer—these populist beliefs and attitudes form the core of Pound’s philosophy, just as they provide the basis of American fascism generally. In developing these beliefs Pound followed a path from populist nostalgia to support of world fascism parallel to that followed by a number of other American fascist ideologues.”[xviii]
According to Ferkiss, what both American populism and fascism shared in common were deep-rooted distrusts of both financier capitalism and socialism more generally. These distrusts in turn resulted in a wide-spread hostility against a free press, civil liberties, and of representative democracy, accusing these all of serving as mere covers for the plutocratic class—which tendencies in turn became tainted with racism, nationalism, and a preference for a strong executive.
Now, Ferkiss’s conclusions were considered controversial even back in his mid-century milieu, particularly among those who understandably wished to disassociate the various and heterogeneous American Populist movements of the early-20th century from mid-century European fascism. However, his half-century-old conclusions appear to have been borne out during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in how many Right-wing elements in American society swiftly rallied around the clarion call to “reopen the economy” in the face of the initial March 2020 lockdowns, wherein they also flagrantly privileged economic productivity above all other human costs as well. Notably (despite the quick proliferation of conspiracy theories claiming otherwise), those most bullish for a quick return to economic “normalcy” did not, for the most part, deny the coronavirus’s rates of infection or lethality per se, but only argued that a certain percentage of mortality in the general population—the oft-repeated “2 or 3 percent,” or literally 6-9 million American deaths suddenly thrown at once upon an already-overburdened healthcare system—was an acceptable trade-off for sustained economic growth. As Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick blandly quipped in April of that year, “There are more important things than living”[xix]. The obvious rejoinder—that there is not—had apparently never occurred to him; for him and others, the demands of economic productivity clearly answered all sins. A proportion of all human lives had been deemed to be that Dickensian “surplus population”, extraneous and expendable, a floating population of the walking dead whose erasure could easily be justified in the all-important interests of maximizing economic production at all costs. Hence, for example, Midwestern meat packing factories suffering COVID-19 outbreaks early in the pandemic were quickly declared “essential infrastructure”, all without any corresponding assurance that the infected low-wage workers therein would be provided with adequate protections or sufficient hazard wages; and when the infections and deaths inevitably occurred at those facilities, Trump’s White House notably responded by simply ceasing all reportage of the same altogether. Less than two decades earlier, Cameroonian philosopher Achilles Mbembe had proposed the idea of the Necropolis, in order to describe those war-torn border regions in sub-Saharan Africa that had produced “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead”[xx]; yet in the early-2020s, it was the purportedly developed and industrialized United States that operated openly like a Necropolis, consigning similarly vast populations to a living death.
As if to further illustrate the connection between this particular breed of economic populism and fascism, these calls to “reopen the economy” were swiftly accompanied by Right-wing paramilitary groups—complete with Nazi swastikas, Confederate flags, and assault rifles—who forcefully and dramatically occupied the Michigan and Oregon state capitols, in protest of those left-wing governors who still sought to privilege public health over market profits. When, later that Summer, it was not these paramilitaries but the George Floyd protestors who were tear-gassed and assaulted by federal officers, the message was unmistakable: these Right-wing militias had the tacit approval of the White House. Moreover, these early attacks on state legislatures were in turn but the prelude to the January 6th attack on the U.S. capitol, as many similar paramilitary members engaged in a violent coup attempt to overthrow the electoral vote certification of then-President-elect Biden. None of these actions were out of character, of course: over the preceding four years, Trump had hit the standard fascist checklists so flagrantly—e.g. fostering hatred against immigrants and religious minorities; open hostility against a free press; the cultish worship of a central charismatic leader; a promised elimination of decadence (expressed as “draining the swamp”), and etc.—that when literal neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, VA to “Unite the Right” and attack counter-protestors less than a year into his term, it was merely shocking, not surprising. As it was nearly a century earlier with Pound, a fanatical obsession with economic demands above all other human considerations had been central, not adjacent, to the far-right ideologies that eventually morphed into a flagrantly fascist ethos.
As with Pound, many left-wing commentators would cite the oft-repeated “economic anxiety” as the prime motivator and mitigating factor for Trump’s voters, as though, again, Ferkiss had not already connected such concerns to the fascist mindset over 60 years earlier. For that matter, Trump’s particular brand of economic populism—one that obviously exasperates, rather than ameliorates, the present gross inequalities between rich and poor—was likewise a standard feature of Pound’s fascism as well, according to Ferkiss:
Pound believes that the economic problem is one not of production but of distribution. […] Once the state controls credit, something can be done about distribution. And this, for Pound, is a problem merely of getting the goods which have been produced distributed, not of equalizing distribution. Hitler and Mussolini, Pound felt, were successful in getting goods distributed; that this distribution was not on a “democratic” or egalitarian basis was for him an irrelevant objection.[xxi]
This obscene misdistribution of wealth, the undermining of democratic institutions, and the violation of egalitarian ideals were ultimately all irrelevant objections to both Pound in the 20th century, and to Trump supporters in the 21st, who continued to uphold him as a champion of the Working Class despite his wealthy parentage and numerous casino and country club holdings. An excellent illustrative example of this lack of concern for equality can be found in the The Cantos via the word “Grain”, which appears at least 17 times throughout the epic, and does so almost always in connection to grain prices, sales, imports, and dividends—that is, in terms of ensuring the proper distribution of staple food products throughout the broader body politic, as Ferkiss earlier described. Yet though Pound certainly pays lip service to the ideals of equitable distribution, it is never as more than an abstract ideal; notably throughout the 800+ pages of the Cantos, the phrase “working class” only appears once, while “slave”—and that always in connection with the U.S.-African transatlantic middle passage—appears only 4 times, and never in explicitly condemnatory terms. Pound, ever the self-proclaimed aristocratic elitist, apparently could never quite muster more than token concern for the disenfranchised, the exploited, or the enslaved. Hence, though the word “Public”—specifically, in conjunction with terms like “public lands”, “public debt”, and “public money”—appears 28 times throughout The Cantos, it is almost always as a generalized and vague abstract, rarely as individuals or any particular persons. For Pound, as it still is for many of our 21st-century autocrats, resources are equitably distributed among the “public” only in the most abstract of senses. Again, as Ferkiss noted, that “this distribution was not on a democratic’ or egalitarian basis was for [Pound] an irrelevant objection”[xxii]. Hence by way of further example, numerous U.S. conservatives have argued and continue to argue quite sincerely that all Americans have equal access to, say, healthcare, or housing, or college education in theory, even if vast swaths of America can no longer afford it in practice. As ever, the fact that the current distribution of resources is grotesquely non-egalitarian is treated as an irrelevant objection, the same as it once was for Pound and the other mid-century American Fascists.
But then, none of these authoritarian tendencies are recent or novel in U.S. foreign and domestic policy, either: the United States’ long-standing and violent exploitations of the Third World in the production of our clothing and consumer kitsch, of undocumented migrant farm labor for the harvesting of our produce, of our governments’ full-throated support of death-squad enabled dictators in overthrowing democratically elected governments throughout Latin America and the Middle-east all across the late 20th century–not to mention the centuries-long practice of African slavery and Native American genocide–all long predate Trump’s ascension, or even his birth. Trumpism, like fascism a century earlier, only made explicit a vicious undercurrent that had been lurking there all along.
Some Financial Inventories
Apropos of the topic, some financial inventories might here help to belabor the point of Pound’s over-weening economic obsessions. Throughout the 109 completed Cantos, the word “million” (including the dialectical variant “millyum”) appears 81 times, each of which appear in connection with a specific monetary amount, whether expressed in American dollars, British pounds, Italian florins and lire, or French lous. Similarly, the word “thousand” (either spelled out or in Arabic numerals) appears 67 times, and likewise always expresses a fiscal value. The word “money” itself appears 55 times. The word “bank” and/or “banker” appears no less than 50 times. “Tax” (including “taxes” and “taxation”) appears 47 times. His obsessive keyword “usury” or “usura” appears 31 times. Interest-rate percentages—whether expressed as the word “percent” or the % symbol—appears 29 times. “Pay” and/or “payment” appears 30 times. “Debt”—especially in conjunction with public debt, national debt, and civil debts—appears 28 times. “Interest”—as in, interest-bearing or interest-payments—appears no less than 21 times. “Credit” appears no less than 19 times.[xxiii] Overall, of the 109 completed Cantos, finance and other economic considerations appear in no less than 58 Cantos—or 53% of the total.
These financial references are not uniformly spread across The Cantos, but see their highest concentration in the ones published throughout the 1930s, during the years of his initial pivot towards fascism. By contrast, in the earliest A Draft of XXX Cantos published in 1930[xxiv], some variant allusion to finance, money, and economics make explicit appearance in only 8 Cantos total—namely, Cantos IX, XII, XIX, XXI, XXV, XXVI, XXVIII, and XXIX (and those last two only reference finance lightly, in single lines: “I never saw the twenty I lent him” (136) and “running up the most awful bills” (142), respectively). Yet though the financial references are sparser, the first XXX Cantos do contain sentence constructions that would go on to repeat themselves with a sort of monomania throughout the entire rest of his epic: these include expense-account listings like “Rising from 15 dollars a week […] Saved his people 11,000 in four months/On that Cuba job/But they busted,/Also ran up to 40,000 bones on his own,/Once, but wanted to ‘ eat up the whole’r Wall St ’ ”[xxv]; the year/price/inventory constructions of lines like “Intestate, 1429, leaving 178,221 florins di sugello”[xxvi], or “1335 3 lire 15 groats to stone for making a lion”[xxvii]; and the interest-rate citations of lines like “2% on what’s actually sold/No tax above that”[xxviii]. Ironically for a man so deeply suspicious of money’s capacity to reproduce itself via “usury,” these exact same sentence constructions would go on to continually reproduce themselves with only minor variation over the entire remaining 30+ years of the Cantos’ composition; they are the earliest red flags for how susceptible Pound would become towards fascist ideology.
Nevertheless, a casual reader who never makes it past the earliest Cantos could be forgiven for assuming that finance was, at best, a secondary or tertiary priority for Pound when he first began this project. However (as previously noted), beginning with the 1930s-era Cantos, his long-gestating obsessions with finance that had been simmering subtly beneath the surface came bubbling forth to colonize the entire epic. The timing of the same is crucial; as Redman argues, Pound had become convinced by 1934 that “the progress of culture depends on health or sickness of the economy, which is in turn dependent upon monetary system”[xxix]. Money ceased to be a means to an end, but rather becomes an end unto itself. Not-coincidentally, 1934 is also when Pound first met Mussolini—and when The Cantos suddenly become overwhelmed with economic concerns. Hence in Eleven New Cantos XXXI–XLI, itself published in 1934, prices, inventories, taxes, and interest rates are heavily and repeatedly cited by Pound. These predominate the bulk of Cantos XXXI, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV, XXXVII, XXXVIII, XL, and XLI. That is, 8 of these 11 new Cantos produced shortly after his definite fascist conversion are verifiably obsessed with finance—or 72% of the total. Likewise, in both the Fifth Decad (published in 1937), and the China Cantos and the Adams Cantos (both published in 1940), explicit references to finance appear in Cantos XLII, XLIII, XLIV, XLV, XLVI, XLVIII, L, LII, LIII, LIV, LV, LVI, LVII, LXI, LXII, LXIV, LXV, LXVI, LXVII, LXVIII, LXIX, LXX, and LXXI. That is, out of the next 33 Cantos produced throughout the 1930s, finance predominates 23 of them, or 69% of the total. This section is also noteworthy for containing Canto XLV—the notorious “Usura” Canto—wherein the evil of usury is famously and explicitly laid forth as the entire didactic theme of the poem. Indeed, 22 of the 31 appearances of “usura” or “usury” in the Cantos entire appear in XLV alone, or 70% of the total—which are also in turn 88% of the total appearances of “usura” in just the 1930s-era Cantos. As Alireza Farahbaksh argues, Canto XLV is “the summarizing and unifying canto of the whole book”[xxx], the one that is, “as Pound admits himself, the centerpiece of his Cantos because it incorporates the highlights of his political and economic theories”[xxxi]. Even as numerous scholars have traced and examined Canto XLV’s “inherent ambiguity” and “confusion”[xxxii], the sheer fact that he is so preoccupied with “usura” in the first place still betrays how for Pound, finance took a priori precedence over all other considerations. Again, to emphasize: it is the sheer fact of his obsession with money, as opposed to any of his specific pet theories that he tried out throughout the early decades of the 20th century, that is constitutive of his growing fascism.
Overall, across the 43 Cantos produced between 1930-1940, 31 of them dwell primarily upon finance: 72% of the total. As Farahbakhsh also argues:
Although it is not possible to make a complete and satisfactory statement about all of the themes of Pound’s The Fifth Decad of Cantos, it can be confidently claimed that economics and politics are among the central themes of these cantos. Pound’s anti-Semitism and his support for Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s Fascism, which caused deep resentment against him as well as his poetry, are literally ubiquitous motifs not only in The Fifth Decad of Cantos, but throughout The Cantos.[xxxiii]
Even when Pound still integrates in other topics, it is clear upon which he now overwhelmingly places his highest priority argues Farahbakhsh, and to which he subordinates all the others. Indeed, of the aforementioned 81 appearances of “million” throughout the Cantos, 62 appear in the 1930s-era Cantos alone—or, 76% of the total. Of the 67 appearances of thousand (both print and numerical), 54 appear in this section—or 79% of the total. Of the 55 appearances of “money”, 37 are in this section—or 67% of the total. Of the 47 appearances of “Bank,” 33 are from this decade—70% of the total. 36 of the 47 appearances of “tax” are from this decade—76% of the total. 23 of the 29 references to “percent” or “%” are here—79% of the total. 14 of 19 instances of “credit” appear here—73% of the total. As are 20 of the 28 instances of “debt”—71% of the total. “Pay” appears here 22 out of 25 times—88% of the total. “Interest” 20 of 21 times—95% of the total. “Profit” 12 of 18—66% of the total. “Buy” 12 of 16—75% of the total. Not to mention: 3 of the 4 references to “Rothschild” and all 9 appearances of “jew” are from this period—92% of his most explicitly anti-Semitic remarks. Again, and not incidentally, this decade corresponds with the period of Pound’s most fervent fascist activity, which he continued to evangelize with all the zeal of the convert throughout the 1940s, even when the Allies were marching up the Italian Peninsula.
Nor is Pound able to leave finance alone in the infamous Pisan cantos, written while he was being held a U.S. prisoner of war in Pisa on charges of High Treason, and expecting summary execution at any moment. Here he eulogizes fascism but does not forsake it. As Louis Menand somberly notes, “Pound laments, but he does not regret. ‘The Pisan Cantos’ is a Fascist poem without apologies”[xxxiv]. Even while still within the first Pisan Canto—the gargantuan, 25-page Canto LXXIV—he still ends up spending two full pages total obsessing over money, dollars, rackets, lending, usury, money, and state borrowing, all accompanied with further anti-Semitic dog-whistles via his citations of the Book of Leviticus and Hitler’s own favorite The Life of Henry Ford. One would think that by the end of the first Pisan Canto, he would have at last exhausted the poetical possibilities of interest rates, but then he continues to hammer upon such topics as taxes, money, and socialism in Cantos LXXVIII (where his confession of failure—“Can’t move ‘em/with a cold thing like economics”—nevertheless still gives way to further extended meditations on the same), as well as in Cantos LXXIX, LXXX, and LXXIV. There are only 10 Cantos in the Pisan Cantos, yet half of them still inevitably circle back compulsively to the topic of finance.
Nor does he finally move on from economics while serving his 12 year-stint at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. In the Rock-Drill Cantos [LXXXV–XCV], published in 1956 (a year after Ferkiss’s article on Pound first appeared), he initially touches only lightly upon markets and finance in Canto LXXXV (“Keep ‘em off the market for four years/and leave ‘em without understanding”[xxxv], he writes cryptically), before returning full-throated again to his well-worn obsession for the majority of Canto LXXXVIII. Nevertheless, that is only one solid Canto out of 10, and so one might here assume that, as his formal fascist associations increasingly receded into the past, this was a signal that Pound was at last moving on from this theme. One would be mistaken: in the final completed section Thrones de los Cantares [XCVI–CIX], published in 1959 (that is, a solid decade and a half after the formal military defeat of European fascism), he continues to touch upon finance and markets to one degree or another in Cantos XCVI, XCVIII, XCIX, C, CI, CIII, CIV, and CVIII.
I have belabored Pound’s excessive economic vocabulary of The Cantos not only to emphasize his financial obsessions, but also to illustrate how his monomania repeatedly blinded him to the human cost of his various economic theories. Notably, though Pound typically only speaks of the members of the public in abstract terms, he does get quite particular about commodities. For example, Pound rails against how “The tariff of 1816 murdered indigo”[xxxvi] in Canto LXXXVIII, even as he never breathes a word about any actually murdered human bodies: not those aforementioned African slaves, not the indigenous, and certainly not the Jews under European anti-Semitism. It becomes painfully obvious throughout The Cantos that the health of commodities matters more to Pound than concrete human lives. (One cannot help but recall, too, the number of Americans more offended by the destruction of property than by the police murder of civilians or deaths during COVID). Moreover, much like the many paramilitaries of our own era, Pound even implicitly condones the use of deadly force to enforce economic policy: “Burr did his job 20 years too late”[xxxvii], he writes in Canto LXXXIX, tacitly approving of the extra-judicial execution of Alexander Hamilton as a manner by which to avoid a central banking system in the U.S. In classic fascist fashion, Pound seems to endorse the idea that if the economic system cannot be radically reformed legislatively, then it must be so forcefully and violently. But then again, if one believes economic health is prior to all other considerations, then inevitably one will come to believe that economics also takes precedence over any concerns for physical life or safety—as true in The Cantos as during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I cannot make it cohere”—nor should it
Pound’s fascism is especially thorny for those who have sought to reconcile Pound the fearless champion of free-speech—the iconoclast who helped midwife Joyce’s Ulysses into existence against the combined might of the British and American obscenity censors—with the Pound who came to bed himself so enthusiastically with those fascists who much more openly burned both books and human beings alike. But as numerous other critics have argued, Pound himself appears to have seen no contradiction between his earlier poetic and later political stances at all. As Barnes contends,
That Pound could apparently accommodate both these ravings and a “sophisticated” modernism in this period might seem surprising; but the writer would have seen no conflict here. Pound could easily switch from his Hitlerian fantasies to a recommendation of the kind of artists (Joyce, Marinetti) that the Führer would have classed as “degenerate.” In his mind, the sharp lines of modernism seem to have been equated or even interchangeable with the totalitarian politics of Nazi Fascism.[xxxviii]
This claim, that Pound considered his “modernism” to be equivalent or “even interchangeable” with “totalitarian politics”, is worth further interrogation: for what he, like so many of his generation, seemed to be responding to was a feeling that the larger “culture” or “civilization” (however one cared to define such broad concepts) was no longer total—that it had fractured, fragmented, Yeats’s “things fall apart”—and thus needed to be re-totalized. Naturally then, totalitarianism seemed to him a valid, even vital, strategy for accomplishing this re-totalization. As rehearsed by such diverse critics as Jed Esty, Frederick Jameson, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey, England’s self-identity in particular by the end of the Victorian period had become increasingly de-centered, fractured, fragmented, and hazily defined. This culture-wide fragmentation had occurred in response to the increasing sprawl of Great Britain’s global empire, the rapid rise of automation and mechanization, and the ascendancy of a laissez-faire capitalistic order that rendered the English generally—and the Working Classes especially—feeling radically individualistic and therefore radically alone, without firm anchor in any sort of common culture, and therefore all the more subject to the ruthless and alienating powers of market forces. In short, English society and culture no longer felt like it “cohered”, to use Pound’s word. The promise that totalitarianism offered, and which Pound ultimately embraced with fervor, was that of a re-unified society, a unified culture: not just T.S. Eliot’s “fragments shored against my ruin”, but one re-formulated into a cohesive and coherent whole.
Fascism we will recall has its roots in the fascio, the Italian word for a bundle of rods, and the attendant idea that though individual sticks may be broken easily, a united whole can serve as an unbreakable weapon of blunt force. Such is the fascist ethos at its most basic: weakness in individuality, brute strength through unity. Naturally, this ethos also meant the purging out of all elements that did not conform to this new unity, which of course had its inevitable conclusion in the ethnic purges and the death camps. This same logic likewise coursed through MAGA; no one, neither supporter nor opponent, was ever fooled by the term “Make America Great Again”, which all parties full well understood meant “by erasing the Other”, including religious, sexual, and ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, and etc. The slogan promised a vision of a racially, culturally, and politically unified America, the logic of which predictably resulted in travel bans, border walls, child prisons, and a revitalized white-supremacy movement. As the openly white-supremacist congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) was fond of declaring, America’s strength was “not in its diversity”. The controversy surrounding him was that he was stating explicitly what had only been implied before, that the logical end of all fascist thought is the elimination (violently, if necessary) of a “degenerate” ethno-cultural diversity, in favor of an enforced nationalistic/racial unity and coherence.
I use the word “coherence” due to its prominence in one of Pound’s final Canto drafts—specifically 1962’s unfinished Canto CXVI—wherein he famously exclaims, “my errors and wrecks lie about me./I cannot make it cohere”[xxxix]. This oft-quoted line is frequently read as a sort of confession of poetic failure, as though the broader societal coherence he had sought to achieve via both his poetry and his politics had eluded him to the bitter end. However, in retrospect, Pound’s futile desire to “make it cohere” was exactly the problem in the first place: for to force coherence upon the immense sprawl of history and humanity was only possible through fascism, and as such could only result in fascism’s attendant horrors and crimes. Pound’s original sin, then, was to fail to recognize and embrace the liberational possibilities of incoherence, to allow history and humanity alike to remain inscrutable, inaccessible, irreconcilable, unresolvable, and hence un-colonizable.
Pound did not have to end up this way; Morrison is correct to state that “the anticapitalist, antibourgeois fervor that motivates [Pound] need not have assumed the reactionary form it did”[xl]. Even among his most celebrated proteges, Pound’s fascism did not hold deep sway: T.S. Eliot, despite being a banker in finance obsessed with cultural unity and tainted by anti-Semitism (and hence a far stronger candidate for a full-on fascist tilt), nevertheless turned instead towards Anglican Christianity and British citizenship in the 1930s; Ernest Hemingway, for all his other macho posturing, remained very matter-of-factly anti-fascist up through and including his 1940 Spanish Civil War romance For Whom the Bell Tolls; Pound’s college friend William Carlos Williams railed against finance quite as polemically in Paterson as Pound did in The Cantos,yet never turned fascist, either—and the possible reasons why in the latter case are potentially instructive. As Alec Marsh writes in his own comparison of The Cantos with Paterson: “Temperamentally, Pound is for unity, Williams for multiplicity”[xli]. That temperament may be the key towards understanding why Williams never arrived at fascism, while Pound did: Williams’ priority was never to “make it cohere” at all; to not bundle into a narrow fasci of sticks, but to expand and spread out the number of sticks out in all directions till they became uncountable.
Another example of this multiplicity vs. unity can be found in James Joyce himself for that matter, who openly embraced the literary and liberational possibilities of incoherence in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. This last example is also potentially useful to highlight, both because Pound was one of Joyce’s earliest and most earnest supporters, but also because Joyce’s two longest works appear prima facie to also be engaged in the same massive project of cataloguing and accounting for all human history as The Cantos. There is, however, this key difference: for Joyce, the inevitable incoherence resulting from such an ambitious project—the sprawling multiplicity, the lack of any cohering unity—is a feature to be celebrated, not a challenge to be resolved. For example, arguably the most famous formalistic features of the Wake is the fact that the book’s closing sentence, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” is finished by the first line, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”[xlii], which indicates that the book can potentially be read in a continuous circle. That is, there is a sense of infinity about the Wake: a circle after all is calculated according to the never-ending decimals of pi, which theoretically signifies that every possibility of existence is potentialized within its infinite numerical code. Joyce multiplies the number of potential meanings into infinity, not forced a singular, didactic coherence upon them. It is an infinity that transcends and exceeds the comparatively meager sums of even the most modern totalizing systems, no matter how large and globally encompassing they may be. Such had been the trend in all of Joyce’s novels; as numerous Postcolonial scholars have argued, Joyce’s project was anti-colonial and anti-imperial in nature, an attempt to exceed the limits of even the globe-spanning British Empire by multiplying potential readings until they surpassed even England’s own mighty accounting: “Subversion is part of the Joycean enterprise,” writes Seamus Deane, “There is nothing of political or social significance which Joyce does not undermine and restructure”[xliii]. Radical incoherence for Joyce was a way of escaping the impulse towards totalitarianism, to transcend, resist, and undermine the repressive hegemonic pretentions of empire itself.
That is, Joyce as an anti-colonial subject does not worry that he “cannot make it cohere”, only Pound the fascist totalitarian laments that. Somehow Pound, for all his enthusiastic advocacy and admiration for Ulysses, missed perhaps its entire point: Joyce through his encyclopedic allusions was never actually trying to forcefully re-unify our massively complex and fragmented modern culture through sheer force of will at all, but rather to embrace and explore the full measure of its irreconcilable complexity. For that matter, it is perhaps not just the fact that Pound was such an apologetic fascist that inhibits the Cantos’ wider circulation (at least compared to Ulysses) among a wider audience, but that his fascism caused him to write his magnum opus in such a cramped and monomaniacal style—one that, for all its sprawl, nevertheless still tries to narrow the world down into a single, didactic accounting, not multiply and expand it. As catalogued earlier in this paper, the tendency of Pound’s Cantos (particularly from the 1930s onwards) became an attempt to reduce all human history down to accounting, inventories and financial reports, rather than unfold and expand the world beyond the accounting of even the most totalizing and totalitarian regimes.
Not coincidentally, the fascist sympathizers of the 21st century have also sought not to expand their world view, but rather to shrink it down: all those aforementioned border walls, travel bans, child cages, and a toxic nostalgia for a mythical unified American past that never existed have all been the hallmarks of the Trump era. Even worse, they work to shrink both the definition and the physical size of the United States of America, rather than embrace, encourage, and celebrate its staggering diversity and complexity in the first place. I have repeatedly emphasized these points, because as the U.S.’s pandemic responses have yet again forcefully reminded us, the concerns of a century past have not abated today; far too many U.S. citizens are still attempting to “make it cohere”, to force a racial-cultural-political unity upon a society that feels ever more fragmented and adrift with each passing year, under those same advancing forces of globalized capitalism and neo-colonialism, the continued rise of automation, and of America’s own collapsing international empire. They have sought to subordinate all other human considerations to economics; perhaps because if everything can be inventoried, quantified, and accounted for, then perhaps at last they can control it, and “make it cohere”, which they insist upon at as desperately as Pound did. Consequently, we must learn from Pound’s failures for they are also our own: we must remember to recognize that an excessive obsession with economics and unity above all other concerns is a nascently fascist and autocratic tendency, and that a failure to recognize it as such will allow fascist tendencies to recur and wreck their inevitable destructions upon us as well. As Pound himself famously said, “Literature is news that remains news”—and so too does The Cantos remain news for us.
[i] Davie, Donald. The Cantos: Towards a Pedestrian Reading. Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics , SPRING and SUMMER 1972, Vol. 1, No. 1 (SPRING and SUMMER 1972), pp. 55-62
[ii] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/09/the-pound-error
[iii] Although to be fair, these critics have at least acknowledged his fascism. As Daniel Swift complains of a Pound conference he attended in 2013, “I hear ‘versifier’ used as a term of abuse, and an hour-long elucidation of three lines of a fragment. I hear an awful lot of gossip about long-dead literary editors. I hear no mention of fascism or anti-Semitism”. Daniel Swift, in The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 230.
[iv] Paul Morrison, in The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3-4.
[v] Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 147.
[vi] Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 4.
[vii] Alec Marsh, in Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 68.
[viii] Ezra Pound, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Faber and Faber, 1975), 481.
[ix] Catherin E. Paul, in Fascist Directive: Ezra Pound and Italian Cultural Nationalism, (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2016), 1.
[x] Matthew Feldman, in Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935-45 (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2013), viii.
[xi] Tim Redman, in Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambrdidge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9.
[xii] Hugh Kenner, in The Pound Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 561.
[xiii] David Barnes, in “Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy”, Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Fall 2010), 27.
[xiv] Nick Selby, in Poetics of Loss in the Cantos of Ezra Pound: From Modernism to Fascism. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 54.
[xv] It is worth briefly noting that Adolph Hitler in 1933 Munich railed just as fervently against “the economics of profiteers and fools” and of “bringing the state into dependence upon international loans”, and all that not as side-bar, but a central message of his election campaign.
[xvi] Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, 88.
[xvii] Robert Casillo, in The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 216.
[xviii] Victor C. Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism”. The Journal of Politics. V17, No. 2, May, 1955, 174.
[xix] Matt Stieb, in “Dan Patrick of Texas on State Reopening: ‘There Are More Important Things Than Living’”, Apr. 21, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/dan-patrick-there-are-more-important-things-than-living.html.
[xx] Achilles Mbembe, in “Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15.1 (2003), 40.
[xxi] Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism”, 185.
[xxii] Ferkiss, “Ezra Pound and American Fascism”, 185.
[xxiii] As for currencies: “dollar” (both the word and the $ symbol) appears 22 times; the British “Pound” (including its dialect-variant “pund”) appears 18 times; lira and lire 5 times; florins 4 times; and lous twice. “Profit” appears 18 times; “buy” 16 times; “Price” 15 times; “Commerce” and “borrow” 12 times each; “treasury”, “capital”, and “loan” 11 times each; “export” 10 times; “import” 9 times; “revenue”, “cost”, and “bills” 8 times each; “cash” 7 times; “stock” and “dividend” 6 times; “union” and “collect” 5 times; “wage”, “bond”, and “property” 4 times; “customs” thrice; and “consumer” and “default” twice a piece. Closely related to these preoccupations with financial concepts are of course his anti-Semitic dog-whistles against the “Rothschilds”, who are named 4 times, as well as the usual anti-Semitic slurs of “big jews”, “damned jews”, and “colonizing jews”, with the diminutive lower-case “jew” appearing at least 9 times.
[xxiv] Itself a compendium of First XVI Cantos, published in 1924-25, and A Draft of the Cantos 17-27, published in 1928.
[xxv] Pound, The Cantos, 54.
[xxvi] Pound, The Cantos, 96.
[xxvii] Pound, The Cantos, 117.
[xxviii] Pound, The Cantos, 125.
[xxix] Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, 88)
[xxx] Alireza Farahbakhsh, in “The Anti-Modernist Quality of Ezra Pound’s The Fifth Decad of Cantos (Cantos XLII—LI)”, War, Literature and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities. (24, 2012), pg. 2.
[xxxi] Farahbakhsh “Anti-Modernist”, 7.
[xxxii] Miklós Péti,. “Usura Alone Not Understood? A Rhetorical Consideration of ‘Usury’ In ‘The Cantos’”. Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Winter 2001, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Winter 2001), pg. 4.
[xxxiii]Farahbakhsh “Anti-Modernist”, 13.
[xxxiv] Louis Menand, in “The Pound Error”, The New Yorker, June 2, 2009.
[xxxv] Pound, The Cantos, 549.
[xxxvi] Pound, The Cantos, 583.
[xxxvii] Pound, The Cantos, 593.
[xxxviii] Barnes, “Fascist Aesthetics”, 32.
[xxxix] Pound, The Cantos, 796.
[xl] Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 4.
[xli] Marsh, Money and Modernity, 218.
[xlii] James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 628, 1.
[xliii] Vincent Cheng, in “Of Canons, Colonies, and Critics: The Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Joyce Studies”. Re: Joyce: Text. Culture. Politics. Ed. John Brannigan, Julian Wolfreys, Geoff Ward. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 226.