Preparing for Death: The Final Days of Death Row Inmate

 

 Jaturun “Jay” Siripongs

An Interview with Ajahn Pasanno

Jaturun "Jay" Siripongs, a native of Thailand, was convicted in 1983 for the murders of Garden Grove market owner Pakawan “Pat” Wattanaporn and store clerk Quach Nguyen. While Siripongs admitted to involvement in the robbery, he denied having committed the murders. Yet he refused to name his accomplice and was convicted and sentenced to death.

Six days before Jay Siripongs was to be executed, his friend, attorney Kendall Goh, contacted Abhayagiri Monastery seeking a Buddhist spiritual advisor. Two days later, Abhayagiri co-abbot Ajahn Pasanno expeditiously received security clearance to enter San Quentin Prison and spent three extraordinary days with Jay Siripongs, the last three days of Siripongs’ life. Jay Siripongs died by lethal injection on February 9, 1999.

There were many reports that Siripongs went through a remarkable spiritual transformation while in prison. As a youth, Siripongs had taken temporary Buddhist monastic ordination in Thailand — a common Thai cultural practice. While in prison, he drew upon the meditation training he had received during his ordination and practiced consistently. Guards and inmates alike recognized that he lived his life at San Quentin peacefully. Several guards supported the clemency appeal for Siripongs, some openly. Even former San Quentin Warden Daniel B. Vasquez supported a plea for commutation of Siripongs’ sentence to life imprisonment.

Kathryn Guta and Dennis Crean spoke with Ajahn Pasanno in May 1999.

Fearless Mountain: How did you come to be called in as Jay Siripongs’ spiritual counselor?

Ajahn Pasanno: The first time Jay expected to be executed was November 17, 1998. At that time, he was accompanied by a Christian minister, a woman who had attended several other executions at San Quentin. Although Jay liked the minister very much and had known her for years, there was a dynamic between them that increased his anxiety. In November, in the final hours before his scheduled death, the two talked incessantly, and Jay was distracted from composing his mind. Jay had had a clear sense of what he needed to do in order to prepare for death, but he did not do it in November. Then, at the last moment, a federal court granted a stay, and Jay was not executed for another three months. He was very fortunate that this first execution had been stayed. His situation and reactions became clear to him. He wanted to make his death as peaceful as possible, and he knew he had to do the inner work to make it so.

For the second execution date, Jay was determined to go to his execution alone so that he could try to be calm and collected in his last hours. His friend Kendall Goh was concerned about his lack of spiritual support and offered to find a Buddhist advisor. It was apparently not easy for Jay to ask for a different spiritual advisor; he encountered difficulties both from San Quentin and others, and he was cautious. I thought that his caution was reasonable as clearly the last thing he needed at that stage was some pious lecture from a monk. However, immediately after we met we connected, and he was happy to have me there.

FM: How did it feel to serve as a spiritual counselor to a condemned man?

AP: At first, I felt happy to help. Then I thought, I’m going into a hell realm, and there was a certain amount of trepidation. There were gates, chains, a metal detector and guards. Then there was a second metal detector, guards to stamp my hand after I’d cleared it, then more gates and guards. Yet there were also many conflicting images. I heard a guard call children visitors by their names as if he knew them.

When I saw Jay, he was not like others I have been with who are approaching their deaths. Jay was young and healthy, in control of his faculties. He was sharp, intelligent and talented. It was clear he had lived the last years of his life skilfully. Although he was waist-chained, he remained dignified. He was gracious and hugged his visitors. The whole situation took on a surreal quality. Everything appeared normal, but at midnight on Monday this human being would die, he would be executed.

FM: Was there any tension in the air considering that Jay would soon be put to death?

AP: Not really. The atmosphere was relaxed and not gloomy. Sometimes we got down to the nitty gritty of the mind. Other times we joked and laughed. On the first day especially, Jay was a very gracious host. Prior to my arrival he had set up a chair for me on one side of a table and for his friends on the other side. He had instructed them very strictly on how to behave in the presence of a monk, and he had planned to offer a meal. He said it was the first time he had been able to feed a monk in twenty years. In response to questions from his friends, I talked about the Buddhist theory of awakening using the lotus flower metaphor. I also talked quite a bit about the meaning of Taking Refuge — seeing the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha as enlightened knowing, truth and the embodiment of goodness. Jay was so happy that his friends could hear Dhamma and that he could share this with them.

Yet I felt very concerned that Jay look after the quality of his own mind and not let people distract him due to their own traumas about his imminent death. Jay recognized the dynamic that was going on around him; he was certainly not trying to maintain social contact because of agitation or restlessness. Still, he realized that he had to take responsibility for his own stability. Although he gave himself completely to his friends during the visiting hours, he meditated many of the other hours of the day beginning when he awoke at two or three o’clock in the morning.

During the days before his death, I pushed Jay into not becoming distracted. He had a lot of visitors. I told him it’s best not to get too caught up with all these people. Kendall had told me when I first came that Jay was doing fine, that it was the rest of them who were falling apart. It was very obvious that Jay had touched the lives of many people, and they gathered around him before his death. His sister, Triya, was there. Some of his friends considered him their spiritual teacher. Many of his friends were lawyers, other friends were born-again Christians. So there were many different needs, and Jay, being kind-hearted and generous, tried to fulfil them all.

FM: Is it true that Jay was also an accomplished artist?

AP: Yes. Jay showed me his portfolio. He had become skilled in many different media and was obviously talented. He also gave away most of his art — over 600 pieces — to acquaintances and friends over the years. Jay used art to express his process of growing and changing. He often used butterflies as a symbol of his metamorphosis. At some time during his incarceration, he had realized that his life would end in prison. He thought, I can’t continue hating myself or others.

During the last eight years, Jay underwent a deep transformation and came to a real understanding of himself. He told me that he had been in prison for a long time and couldn’t say it was a bad thing. He felt he had been able to grow in prison in a way that would not have been possible had he not been in such difficult and extreme circumstances. He learned to reflect deeply on what would create well-being and clarity in his mind. The closer he got to the execution, the more he learned about what would obstruct the mind from growth and peace. He turned himself to the process of applying the mind to truth.

FM: And this included taking up Buddhist meditation?

AP: That’s right. Jay had learned how to meditate when he was a monk in Thailand many years earlier. While in the monastery, he had had a very clear vision of light while meditating, but when he had tried to replicate the experience, it didn’t come back.

FM: That sounds like the common meditation experience of grasping after what is pleasant.

AP: Yes. I teased him about that. Jay then reported that three weeks earlier the light had come back. This was very encouraging to me. Since Jay was a visual artist, I realized that he could use the vision of light as an anchor at the moment of his death. I led him in guided meditations centering on the breath and light. Since his breath would only be there until the injection took effect, I told Jay that there would come a time to let the breath go and focus instead on the image of light.

FM: How else were you able to help Jay with his inner work? Was he afraid of death?

AP: The first night we talked on the phone, I had asked Jay, “What’s your mental state.”

“I’m at peace,” he said. “I’ve accepted what will happen. But I still have things I want to know.”

Growing up in Thailand, Jay believed in rebirth. He joked that he wanted his ashes scattered in the sea so that they might be eaten by fish and then the fish by humans. In this way, he could quickly return to the human realm to continue his work. He knew that human birth was the place where learning was possible — a place to understand pain and joy, good and evil, right and wrong. Growth and understanding were the results of choices one made. Jay had made some very bad choices over the years, but he had also made some good ones. He felt he had learned some real lessons in this lifetime and was determined to stay on the path of Dhamma in the next life.

FM: Did you ever to talk to Jay about those bad choices, about his crimes?

AP: No, I never talked to Jay specifically about the past. There was not enough time. I focused instead on his spiritual wellbeing, on his ability to face death with as composed a mind as possible. I was not relating to him as a person convicted of a crime. I was relating to him as a person facing death.

FM: What were the last few hours with Jay like?

AP: Six hours before an execution, the prisoner leaves his family and friends behind and goes to a very cramped cell right next to the execution chamber. Only his spiritual advisor can accompany him. There are six guards, called the execution squad, in a very confined space, and people like the prison psychiatrist and the warden also come in from time to time. There can be a lot of intimidation from the guards right before the execution. They might be carrying on loud conversations or be obnoxious in other ways. They may be watching TV very loudly just three feet away from the condemned man. On Jay’s November execution date he had been allowed recitation beads in his cell, but before giving them to him, one of the guards had put them on the floor and stepped on them.

After I was strip searched, I was taken to one of these death row holding cells. There, Jay and I were separated into two different cells connected only by a small corner. Right away I did protective chanting as a way of cleaning out negative energy. “We’ll take the game away from them,” I told Jay. We had planned for Jay to ask for the Refuges and Precepts in Pali, but he mistakenly did the chant to request a Dhamma talk instead. So I gave a short Dhamma talk to him and the guards.

FM: What did you talk about?

AP: I told the story of the Buddha, just after his enlightenment, not wanting to teach, as he thought nobody would understand. I talked about the nature of delusion of the human world and the liberation of the Dhamma. I talked about the Four Noble Truths, about how letting go was not a rejection of anything. I instructed Jay to pay attention to the arising of consciousness. Rather than inclining the mind towards that which will result in suffering and rebirth, I told Jay to move instead towards relinquishment and focusing the mind.

In terms of letting go or relinquishment, we talked about forgiveness in the context of “not self.” If we haven’t forgiven, we keep creating an identity around our pain, and that is what is reborn. That is what suffers. I asked Jay, “Is there anybody you have not forgiven yet?” I meant the system, his parents, others.

Jay thought about it. “I haven’t forgiven myself completely,” he said softly at last. It was touching. He had a memory of being a person who had been involved in something wrong in the past, yet now in the present he was a different person. It was helpful for him to see that he was not this memory of himself, to let go of the person in the past who was involved in the crimes.

It was also interesting to see that the guards seemed intent on what I was saying, and throughout the evening they were actually very solicitous and respectful of both of us.

FM: Was Jay preoccupied with the numerous appeals to save his life that continued during this time?

AP: Jay did not seem concerned or worried about justice. He did not hold out great hope for the appeals to go through. When the final appeals were turned down, it was not a big deal. “I’m accepting the fact that I’ll be executed,” he said.

FM: What was Jay’s state of mind as he got closer to the execution?

AP: At one point, Jay asked, “If I am not the body, not the feelings, not the mind, then what is it that is liberated?” I told him that such a question appearing then in his mind was simply doubt arising. When you let go of everything and experience the peace and clarity inherent in that, you don’t have to put a name or identity on it.

At another point Jay said, “I have two people on my mind, . . . me and you.”

I said, “You’ve got to get rid of me. I’m not going in there with you. And then you have to let go of yourself.” We really laughed about that.

Basically, I helped prepare Jay for the many distractions that might take place during the execution. “People will be strapping you down; things will be happening around you,”

I warned. “You need to establish the mind without going to externals. Keep your attention within.” We spent the whole evening meditating, chanting and talking Dhamma. So in the last hour Jay was very peaceful and able to establish his mind firmly on his meditation object. Toward the end, we took the time to do a ceremony of sharing merit and offering blessings, even to the guards. After his final appeal had been turned down, Jay also asked me to do some chanting for the lawyers involved in his case. He had a quality of thoughtfulness right up until the end.

FM: Were you present at the execution?

AP: No. That had been decided before I first visited Jay at San Quentin. I believe that not having yet met me, Jay elected not to have me there with him. When I read the papers the next day, though, they reported that he lay very still during the execution and kept his eyes closed. I found this heartening because I felt he was composing his mind.

FM: How did you feel after the execution?

AP: I was very grateful to have been there. It was very humbling. One can’t help but consider what any one of us would have done in a similar circumstance — relating to our death not as something abstract, sometime off in the future, but knowing that at precisely 12:01 A.M. we will definitely die.

FM: Was there a funeral for Jay?

AP: There was a private cremation the day after Jay died. I met with his sister, Triya, at the crematorium. Jay’s body lay in a cardboard box. Earlier, when Triya had asked to view his body, she had been told by the funeral director that this was not possible. I wasn’t aware of this, so I asked the funeral director to lift the lid to the box. With some hesitation, she lifted it. Jay was in a body bag. “There must be a zipper,” I said. The woman searched around and said the zipper was by his feet. She hesitated again. She said that Jay would not be wearing any clothes. “There must be some scissors around. It’s just a plastic bag,” I said. The woman brought some scissors over and cut the bag open at the shoulders and head.

It was very powerful to view his body. He had the most serene expression on his face. There was a brightness to his skin. He wasn’t dull or waxy. He had the tiniest bit of a smile. It was very good to see he had died a peaceful death. After all that had happened, it was a reassuring ending.

To prevent people from becoming stuck in the gaining, the achieving or the comparing mind

 Now, with all this talking about stream-entry and realization, some of you who are familiar with Luang Por Sumedho’s teachings may also be aware that he would very, very rarely talk about or use the language of aiming for attainment. Just as we can become competitive about who has the biggest house or published the most papers, we can also become competitive or acquisitive about realization. So Luang Por Sumedho would very often point to the absurdity of ‘trying to become’ a stream-enterer or ‘trying to get’ enlightened. That very way of phrasing the issue displays an acquisitive or becoming tendency; we have let bhava-tanhā, the desire to become, take hold of our spiritual efforts.

So, in talking about all of this I’m very conscious of the fact that there’s a danger in creating a substantial desire to ‘become’ something special. It’s therefore important to notice how, when you set yourself a goal, you start to think: ‘I’m not a stream-enterer yet but I want to become one, so what can I do now to become that in the future?’ In Luang Por Sumedho’s teachings, over and over and over again he would say that one of the root delusions about meditation practice is to think, ‘I’m an unenlightened person who’s got to do something now to become enlightened in the future.’ He saw that he had been setting that up as a paradigm in himself, and he realized that he was creating a false framework. 

If we do this, even though we might feel its a good intention, we are unwittingly building our practice on a basis of bhava-tanhā. We can be unconsciously strengthening the sense of self, strengthening self-view: ‘I am an unenlightened person and I’ve got to do something to become an enlightened person in the future.’ 

What he would always encourage instead is to let go of that whole structure; to let go of conceiving ourselves as a person and simply be awake now, be enlightened now, be awake to this moment. So it’s not a matter of starting a stream-entry programme, but rather of being awake in this moment to the feelings of the body, to perceptions, the sounds that you hear, the things that you see. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch; knowing this is all arising and passing away here and now. If we see that, if we recognize that, then we are being awake right now. Right now there is the quality of wisdom. It’s being actualized.

A number of years ago, the last time Luang Por Sumedho gave a retreat in California at Spirit Rock Meditation Centre, I was helping out with the event and I noticed that every single Dhamma talk was about self-view, about attachment to conventions and about getting beyond doubt – every single talk for the whole ten days. But he never mentioned stream-entry once. He never talked about the idea of a realization or an attainment or getting something. It was really striking how he was giving everybody the tools, but not creating a framework that was liable to cause people to be caught up in the gaining mind, or that self-creating habit of, ‘I’ve got to get something that I haven’t got yet.’ His approach was rather to say, ‘This is how you work with self-view. This is how you work with attachment to conventions. This is how you work with doubt. This is how it all operates. This is what you do. This is the set of tools. This is how they work. This is what you do with them. This is what you don’t do with them. I was really struck by the wisdom of that. He was giving a full-on teaching to help people acquire the tools needed to support that quality of realization. But he was also working hard to prevent people from becoming stuck in the gaining, the achieving or the comparing mind. 

That said, I also feel that it can be helpful to speak about the spiritual framework – not to go against Luang Por Sumedho’s way of doing things, but simply in order to have the roadmap that’s there in the Buddha’s teachings. In this way we can be clearer about the nature of the task at hand – then it’s up to us, having that framework, to be careful not to get entangled and end up grasping at attainment. Be aware if the mind is conceiving, ‘I am a person who is not enlightened yet and I’ve got to do something now to get enlightened in the future’; and as soon as you see your mind doing that, just say, ‘Whoah, hold it!’ Then, rather than buying into and solidifying that view, take Luang Por Sumedho’s advice and step back from it, saying, ‘Here is the wisdom mind seeing the way things are, here and now. Here’s the Buddha seeing the Dhamma, here and now.’ See that we can be enlightened right now, we can be awake in this moment. There can be wisdom, there can be wakefulness; and, in that moment of clear seeing, the Dhamma is recognized, is known, actualized.

I feel these are important themes, and it’s good to return to them throughout our practice, to familiarize ourselves with the framework of the spiritual landscape. We look at these areas of identification, where we get caught up, and hopefully we learn how to use these tools and understand this framework of awakening, without turning the framework into another obstacle. Instead of feeding the habits of self-view and the gaining and comparing mind, we learn to be able to see how it all works, to see what the potential is and what the obstacles are, and guide our lives towards what is really beneficial and truly liberating.

The Breakthrough

Buddhist Meditation as a Means of Liberation

Ajahn Amaro

On Hemingway, Jews, and Masculinity

“Why not make the Jew a bounder in literature as well as in life? Do Jews always have to be so splendid in writing?”
Ernest Hemingway to Max Perkins, Dec. 21, 1926.

Having previously written about the early twentieth-century writers T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robinson Jeffers, I felt it was high time that I addressed the work and thought of an altogether more controversial and ambiguous literary figure of the same period — the inimitable Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway may seem an odd choice to profile for a White advocacy site and, moreover, in his last and only appearance at The Occidental Observer, now some three years ago, he proved very controversial and divisive indeed. He was a supporter of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the novel based on his experiences in Spain, one senses that Hemingway is ventriloquizing when one of his characters responds to the question “Are you a Communist?” with the reply “No, I am an anti-fascist.” Most sensationally however, at least one 2017 text written by a former CIA officer has made the claim that Hemingway was recruited as a Soviet agent in 1940 by two of the top NKVD agents then operational in the United States — the Jew Jacob Golos and the Soviet Jewish spy king Abram Osipovich Einhorn. Both men had in turn provided leadership and support to the notorious spying cell run by Julius Rosenberg. Returning to the title of the last TOO article on the man, we have to once more ask who is the “real” Ernest Hemingway? Was he, as one critic responded to the last piece, “not a great White man”? Or is he, as Robert S. Griffin insists, “an exemplary white historical figure”?

The ambiguity, and even hostility, surrounding Hemingway is not without reason. Even setting aside the “enemy agent” accusations, Hemingway was, in several respects, intellectually of what might be termed ‘the Old Left,’ in the sense that he tended towards support for economic socialism, pursued ideological comradeship with blue collar workers and veterans, and had many friends with similar political tastes. His alcoholism, confrontational character, philandering, and final descent into mental illness and suicide could lead some to perceive the author as little more than a debauched degenerate. This behavior was in all likelihood rooted in genetic causes — and almost certainly reverberated flamboyantly in his son Gregory, an alcoholic transvestite who occasionally called himself Gloria, had surgery to create one “breast,” and finally died in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center a day after being arrested for indecent exposure.

In other respects, however, before his final decline, Hemingway was perhaps the quintessential, unreformed White rogue, a kind of throwback to the ancient, uncivilised Indo-European who defies strictly moralistic explanations. He was a rank individualist, antagonistic to all forms of authority and authoritarian government, Stalin’s included. Of course, his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was Jewish, and yet he publicly explained his decision not to have children with her as being due to his aversion to having children with Jewish genes.1 He embraced the lifestyle of the masculine bon vivant, had a strong distaste for what he called “queers” “fairies” and “faggots,” enjoyed his experience observing colonialism in Africa, and loved nature and outdoor pursuits. On a more personal level, he wrote one of my favourite short novels, The Old Man and the Sea, a literary masterpiece on the themes of masculine endurance and stoicism, and influenced two of my favourite twentieth-century modernist writers, William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. Hemingway remains, if nothing else, as enigmatic as ever. As we are now just couple of years away from the 60th anniversary of his death, is there anything in Hemingway’s life and work that retains value for the White man of today?

I. Hemingway on Jews

Hemingway’s thoughts and writings on Jews, despite being rare and sometimes inconsistent, are extremely telling both in terms of his own attitudes and about the real nature of anti-Semitism; they are ultimately difficult to square with Nicholas Reynolds’s allegations of participation in Jewish-led Soviet activism in the early 1940s. Some enlightenment might be gleaned from his posthumous legacy on the Left, where he is either claimed with great unease or, in a rapidly growing trend, totally rejected.2 It’s now common knowledge, both from depictions of Jews in his fiction, and his discussions of Jews in letters and private papers,3 that Ernest Hemingway was highly suspicious of Jews, and frequently hostile to them. Most of this antagonism appears to have been based not on irrational or inherited prejudice, but on a series of exploitative relationships in which Hemingway’s work was pirated by Jewish publishers, situations where Hemingway was not adequately renumerated for his work by Jewish employers, or simply the fact that almost every Jew Hemingway met was in possession of an insufferable personality. In a letter written in Paris in November 1926 to Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway describes how his work and that of James Joyce was being systematically pirated by Jewish publisher and pornographer Samuel Roth:

Everything I publish over here is stolen by Samuel Roth who has never had my permission to publish one word and pirates everything that appears here as fast as it comes out and has never paid me a cent. … Joyce is all broken up about it. Roth has stolen his Ulysses without permission, never paid Joyce a cent, is publishing Ulysses in monthly installments and expurgating it. … Joyce is in absolute despair. … It is a horrible and discouraging business, and does not make one love the Jews any better. … Isn’t there some national organization that can blacklist the advertising of crooks? Life seems quite complicated today.4

Hemingway was also rather astute regarding the manner in which Jews protect themselves from criticism by using accusations of anti-Semitism against critics. Writing to one friend on the Bronx-born Jewish playwright Irwin Shaw, Hemingway explained that he felt Shaw was “a jerk and a good short-story writer. But if I’d say he was a bad playwright (which he is), he would say I was anti-Semitic.”

The majority of allegations of anti-Semitism against Hemingway concern his depiction of the character Robert Cohn in his Roman à clef The Sun Also Rises, with Cohn now widely acknowledged to have been based on the American Jewish writer Harold Loeb, with whom Hemingway spent some time in Paris in the 1920s. In a previous discussion of Jewish criticism of English literature I remarked that Jewish intellectual activists frequently direct “their antagonism towards anything but positive reflections of Jews in literature. … Their efforts have the dual function of staining the legacy of the English literary past, and shackling authors in the present, who would feel constrained to avoid having a negatively portrayed Jewish character in their works.” I argue that Hemingway, much like T. S. Eliot in Gerontion and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, provides an important late example of a top-level writer who not only continued to depict Jews in his work, but was bold enough to include negative Jewish characters. In fact, Hemingway’s 1926 retort to criticism of his depiction of Cohn/Loeb should be regarded as a classic: “Why not make the Jew a bounder in literature as well as in life? Do Jews always have to be so splendid in writing?”5 Loeb, whom Hemingway observed having a number of affairs with European women, appears to have left such an impression on Hemingway that the former became the benchmark for intolerable Jewishness. Writing to Perkins in 1932 from Key West on a new mutual associate named “Klein,” Hemingway remarks: “Only thing about Klein is that name — Does Clark say if he’s one of those Kleins — Germans are swell — kikes not so good — We don’t want him to turn out to be Harold Loeb.”6



Harold Loeb

Whether or not Hemingway’s depiction of Cohn/Loeb was meant to refer to Jews as a group, the narrative is damning enough. Cohn, who is one of a group of several Americans in Spain for the running of the bulls, is described as a talentless failed novelist who nevertheless acquires considerable influence in literary circles due to inherited Jewish wealth. According to the introductory pages of the text, Cohn became race-conscious for the first time when he arrived to study at Princeton: “No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton.” While Princeton gives Cohn a chip on his shoulder (“it made him bitter”), it also provides him with his first method of crypsis when a bout at the college boxing club flattens his nose — an event described by Hemingway as an “improvement” on its earlier state. Thereafter, Cohn awkwardly embraces an identity as a kind of crypto-Jewish almost-WASP, a highly aggressive ethnic outsider who pursues his own ends under an altered face that acts, we surmise, as a mask.

It’s very interesting that Jews seized on Cohn very early on as a metaphor for the Jewish people as a whole, something that may of course reveal more about Jewish psychologies and sensitivities than Hemingway’s actual intentions. Jewish literary scholars Phyllis Lassner and Lara Trubowitz have described The Sun Also Rises quite sensationally as a “nasal study in exile and alienation” in which Hemingway warns that “Cohn — and other outsiders — will seduce, impregnate, and therefore pollute the Anglo-Saxon stream, while the pure-bred Anglo-Saxon protagonist, Jake Barnes, is wounded, impotent, and incapable of reproducing his stock.”7

While such an observation could be linked to Hemingway’s strong distaste for the sexual dalliances of the real-life Harold Loeb among English and American women in Spain, Lassner and Trubowitz ultimately perceive a much grander, even political, indictment of the Jews. They conclude that: “The Sun Also Rises suggests then, that letting Jews go to college is indeed a dangerous business. Once Robert Cohn [and other Jews] gain entry to the Ivy institution, they pose a collective threat not only to the character of the American university, but to the very purity of the American family.”8 If such an allegory was indeed intentional, it represents an important contribution from Hemingway to one of the more simmering political debates current at the time of the book’s publication (1926). Between the 1910s and the mid-1930s, Jewish representation at Ivy League colleges tumbled as successive elite colleges imposed a numerus clausus, and a large number of subtle tests designed to weed out Jews from the admissions process, limiting the vast majority of places to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Allegations of bigotry and anti-Semitism have played a prominent role in attempts to have Hemingway censored, the earliest example being the efforts of Bantam Press in 1949 to remove all uses of the terms “kike,” “Jewish,” “Jew,” and “Jews,” from The Sun Also Rises, effectively deleting all references to the ethnic background of Robert Cohn and the role played by this background in forming the personality of that character. Moreover, the edition was shamelessly advertised as “the complete text of the original edition — not one word has been changed or omitted.”9 And yet, this being a production of the ambiguous and enigmatic Hemingway, the book was also banned by reactionary and traditional elements for its cruder and more sensual aspects. It was banned in Boston by conservative elements in 1930; burned by the German National Socialists in 1933; and outlawed in Ireland in 1953. In 1960 it was banned from schools in San Jose and Riverside, California. With its wide capacity to offend, it remains today at number 18 on the American Library Association’s banned classics list.

II. Hemingway on Masculinity.

Aside from accusations of anti-Semitism, Hemingway’s most enduring legacy on the Left has been as an exemplar of “toxic masculinity.” I was first drawn into material on this aspect of Hemingway criticism, while conducting research on Jewish activism in postwar literature, especially the Jewish promotion of pluralism in fiction. A major text for anyone interested in this subject is Leah Garrett’s Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (2015). Garrett’s thesis is that prior to the 1940s, American heroes in fiction were “Hemingwayesque” in that they were “stoic, tough, laconic,” with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) providing a classic example. To use Garrett’s own terminology, Hemingway’s depiction of the ideal American male was “subverted” by a series of Jewish writers who presented new heroes with weaknesses and self-doubts, and introduced a slew of new themes. Garrett, an academic at Monash University, explains:

Racism and anti-Semitism were also major themes of the Jewish war novels. … What most of these authors tried to do was assert the idea that a basic American value was pluralism, and that all communities, including blacks, Jews, homosexuals and Mexicans, needed to be valued in postwar life. Jewish war novels shaped the understanding of postwar America about the events that had just happened in the conflict, along with suggesting how the country should treat Jews and others in the coming era. [emphasis added]

In summary, depictions of warfare in literature became less about masculine qualities that had been the focus of the Western canon since The Iliad, and more about how sensitive troops should be to the diversity in their platoon. The Jewish novelists included Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions), Ira Wolfert (An Act of Love), Merle Miller (That Winter) and Stefan Heym (The Crusaders). It’s particularly interesting that while all of these books received middling to poor reviews from serious critics, they all sold extremely well due to advertising and promotion, with the result that all five of these Jewish war novels, and thus their ideas, “dominated the New York Times bestseller list of 1948.” A sixth book about a Jewish soldier that also sold very well that year was, ironically, Point of No Return, written by Hemingway’s wife Martha Gellhorn. A further feature of these works was their unanimous effort as Holocaust propaganda. Garrett writes that these “Jewish writers argued in their novels that the Holocaust was the central, rather than an ancillary aspect of the war experience.”10

Reading about the Jewish subversion of the ‘Hemingwayesque’ hero, now some several months ago, I was led to ponder what exactly the substance of this term might mean on a deep level, beyond the caricature that was Hemingway’s own lifestyle. Perhaps the most valuable and lasting legacy of Hemingway’s contribution to masculinity was not his personal bravado but in fact one of his most sensitive texts, The Old Man and the Sea. This remarkable short fable (less than 100 pages) tells the story of Santiago, an old fisherman of unstated but very advanced age, who has gone 84 days without taking a fish. Santiago depends on his catch for his existence, and the novel opens with him half-starved and living, bare-footed, in squalor. He has gone so long without taking a fish that others in the village have declared him salao, “which is the worst form of unlucky.” No-one will help him or accompany him while fishing. His only occasional companion is a young man he trained many years ago, who visits sporadically with old newspapers and a little food.

The Old Man and the Sea is ultimately, a strongly anti-socialist and fiercely masculine novel, and Santiago, despite his decrepitude, is a true hero. Despite his circumstances, the old man never engages in self-pity. He never asks for charity. Having failed on 84 successive attempts, the story begins on the day he starts his 85th. He is resilient, and he is relentless, operating on will and instinct alone. On this day, with meagre resources, Santiago sets sail, going further from shore than any other vessels in search of prey. And he finds it in the form of the largest Marlin he has ever seen. The novel comes into its own when Santiago finds and then battles against the fish and his own failing body. As he battles the gigantic marlin, his chest hurts, he sees spots in his vision, his hands bleed, and one of them seizes. He succeeds in catching the Marlin, using every last gasp of his body, collapsing finally in victory. The victory, however, is short-lived, as successive waves of sharks attack the great dead fish tied to the side of Santiago’s boat, stripping away more of the precious, valuable, and hard-won flesh in each ferocious raid. The old man’s war with the sharks as he makes his return to shore is both moving and inspiring. Despite the overwhelming personal tragedy of the situation, the old man is neither self-pitying nor bitter. He acknowledges that he is, in the end, not all that different from the sharks, and that there is nothing moral or unjust in the struggle for survival. I won’t spoil the ending of the book for those who haven’t read it, but it should suffice to state that we are left with the impression that Santiago remains unbroken, and perhaps unbreakable.

Art and the artist are intimately linked but never identical. Hemingway was himself unable to become a Santiago, ending his own life with a shotgun at the age of 61. And yet his ideal remains, the age-old concept that masculinity is achieved, heightened and perfected through trial and tribulation. It is this concept that is nowadays declared “toxic,” and discussions of “toxic masculinity” invariably invoke the “Hemingwayesque” while lauding new types of “heroes” such as that offered by the Jewish novelists mentioned above. None of this is surprising, of course, since the current downward trajectory of Western civilisation can only continue in the absence of White men who persist, who endure, and who are unbreakable. One Leftist essay on Hemingway and masculinity ends with deadly sincerity on the note that “the most destructive words someone can say to a young boy are ‘be a man’,” presumably because it is more empowering to a young boy to tell him to “be a girl,” “be a homosexual,” or “be a unicorn.”

III. Discussion.

So where does all this leave us in relation to the questions asked at the outset of the essay? I turn first to the issue of Hemingway and the Jews. Much as I am an admirer of Hemingway’s fiction, I do not perceive the author as possessing unusual prescience on Jewish matters. Hemingway’s antipathy for Jews was instinctive and natural, even jocular (he had occasionally gone by the nickname “Hemingstein” since youth), and quite common during the period. I am inclined to view some of the hysterical Jewish interpretations of his work as just that — hysterical products of highly ethnocentric minds. I do believe that the character of Robert Cohn was driven by Hemingway’s particular distaste for a particular Jew, and that the character probably came to embody some of the generally Jewish traits that Hemingway found most appalling. But there is simply not enough evidence within, or outside, the text of The Sun Also Rises to conclude that the novel is a riff on Jewish penetration of White society, or on the dangers of Jewish entry to elite colleges. These subjects appear nowhere in Hemingway’s papers, letters, or reported conversations. Moreover, if Hemingway truly believed, as he wrote of Cohn, that Jews possess no sense of ethnocentrism until White rejection provides them with racial consciousness, then this is a woefully naive and ultimately useless understanding of Jewish identity. I can only conclude in this respect that if Hemingway has any relevance or value to White identity today, it bears no relation to specific issues of race and ethnicity.

It is perhaps only in the area of what it means to be a White man that Hemingway has something to offer — both as embodied warning and as promoter of an ideal. Hemingway places us in a quandary because he portrayed measured, stoic heroes while living the life of a bar-room brawler. He showed us dignity in the suffering of age, and then shot himself to escape suffering at the age of 61. He wrote female characters debauched and degraded by feminism, while bedding successive real life examples of the same. His best work is essentially based on themes of self-reliance and perseverance, and yet he dallied with Communists in Cuba. One almost hears him screaming: “Do as I say, not as I do!”

In Under Kilimanjaro, published posthumously for the first time in 2005, Hemingway wrote that his ideal afterlife was the “Happy Hunting Grounds,” a Paradise in Africa where there would be “no white men … no … missionaries nor settlers.” His comment, as one academic has pointed out, suggests Hemingway’s “discomfort with white imperialism, in general, and the white man in Africa, in particular. After all, it is difficult, to say the least, not to acknowledge the politically subversive potential of Hemingway’s half-serious indictment that “it always seemed stupid to be white in Africa.”11 The comments certainly speak of a lack of ethnic feeling, even if I doubt that they were subversive in intent.

My conclusion is that I must respectfully disagree with Robert S. Griffin’s assertion that Ernest Hemingway was an “exemplary White historical figure,” and that I tend to agree with the contention that he was “not a great White man.” This does not, I feel, detract from the respect I have for him as a novelist, or the great love I have for The Old Man and the Sea. But this writer of heroes was no hero.

1 M. Reynolds, Hemingway: The Final Years, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 208.

2 See, for example, C. Sigal “The Nasty Stuff,” in Hemingway Lives!: Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today (New York: OR Books, 2013), pp. 179-184.

3 See C. Baker, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961 (New York: Scribner, 2003).

4 Ibid, p. 225.

5 Ibid, p. 240.

6 Ibid, p.353.

7 P. Lassner & L. Trubowitz Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Representing Jews, Jewishness, and Modern Culture (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008), p. 142.

8 Ibid.

9 A. Waldhorn, A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway (Syracuse University Press, 2002), p.239.

10 L. Garrett, ‘Young Lions: Jewish American War Fiction of 1948,’ Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, (Winter 2012), pp.70-99, (p.70).

11 J. M. Armengol-Carrera, (2011). ‘Race-ing Hemingway: Revisions of Masculinity and/as Whiteness in Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa and Under Kilimanjaro.’ The Hemingway Review, 31(1), 43–61, p.61.

Andrew Joyce
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/

My congratulations go to Andrew Joyce for this impressively researched and argued article. It superbly responds to my assertion in a 2016 TOO article that Hemingway merits being a respected figure in whites’ racial heritage. I learned so much from reading Andrew’s article. I’m better for having read it. I respect it greatly. Robert S. Griffin

The Real Ernest Hemingway?

 

by Robert S. Griffin, Ph.D.

On June 20th, 2016, in an post entitled “The Real Ernest Hemingway,” The Occidental Observer reprinted the first few paragraphs of a writing that had appeared in the February, 1979 issue of Instauration, a white interests magazine, along with a link to the complete source.1   In introductory remarks, the TOO post characterized the Instauration material as “a fascinating portrait of an elite American [Hemingway] shortly before the Fall [which I took to mean the demise of white hegemony in this country]—extreme cowardice on race and Jewish issues combined with a veneer of hyper-masculinity.”  The post attracted 33 reader comments.

The prefatory remarks in TOO and the opening paragraphs from the Instauration writing, along with the TOO reader comments, piqued my curiosity, and I followed the link to National Vanguard, a white advocacy web site, where the reprint had first appeared a few days before and read the 1979 Hemingway writing in its entirety.

I found the Instauration material from 37 years ago to be as the TOO post described it, fascinating, and the contemporary response to it in TOO intriguing; and more than that, I found all of it important.  You’re invited to read the full Instauration writing as it appears in National Vanguard for yourself.   However, I’ll try to write this in a way that it makes sense even if you haven’t read what was in Instauration. 

Some background on Instauration:

Instauration was a monthly print magazine—no webzines like this one in those days—with a publishing history lasting from 1975 to 2000.  It was the brainchild of an American, Wilmot Robertson (1915-2000)—Instauration died when he did.

It wasn’t until Robertson was in his mid-fifties that he became active in racial matters with a book he authored in 1972, The Dispossessed Majority.2   The majority referred to in the book’s title are American whites of northern European heritage, who were, according to Robertson, being, well, dispossessed in their own country.  They were being pushed down, shoved aside, and replaced by a coalition of liberals, racial minorities, and, most powerfully, Jews.  While Robertson had no time for these three groups, he had particular contempt for the white American power elite of his day, who, as he saw them, contributed mightily to the demise of their racial brethren by sucking up and caving in and selling out to whites’ adversaries in the process of pursuing their own narrow and selfish personal agendas.  Robertson continued and expanded upon these themes as the editor of Instauration.

Both the TOO and National Vanguard posts were titled “The Real Ernest Hemingway.”  Indeed, there was an indisputably real Ernest Hemingway.  He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois and he did what he did (most prominently, he wrote both fiction and non-fiction) in places like Paris, Havana, New York City, World War II battlefronts, and Idaho, and he died by a self-inflicted shotgun blast in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2nd, 1961.

Since Hemingway is no longer around to speak for himself, and we can’t check him out first-hand, we’re left with what we can discern about the real Ernest Hemingway, that mortal human being and his merits as a man and as a writer, from what we’re told and shown about him—such as in this 1979 Instauration writing.

And that’s not a simple task.  In a recent article for TOO,3 I referred to people’s tendency to believe whatever someone who is articulate and comes off credible sends their way that aligns with their preconceptions and perceived wants and needs.  Too often, we—and I’m including myself in this characterization—buy what is alleged about someone or something when we shouldn’t.

In my TOO article, I used the term “mediator” to refer to people who in effect stand between us and reality and tell us what’s going on and what it means and what we should think and do about it.   The mediator I used as an example was The New York Times and its coverage of mass killings at an Orlando, Florida gay nightclub in mid-June of 2016.   Here, I’ll be doing pretty much the same thing, only this time the mediator is the Instauration author in 1979 saying (writing) “This is what Ernest Hemingway was like.”

But was he really like that?   That is what we have to decide.  And whatever we decide, what is the significance or implication of that perception of Hemingway for things we care about, such as the wellbeing of white people?

I think it is fair to say that the TOO post, including the reader responses, is favorable to the Instauration take on Hemingway:  yes, this gets at the true Ernest Hemingway, good job; and this portrayal of Hemingway makes a positive contribution to the cause of whites.  I disagree on both counts: this is not the real Hemingway; and it is not good for white people to depict Hemingway in this way.   This writing sets out how I came to that conclusion.

*    *   *

The February, 1979 Instauration issue with the Hemingway writing contained just two names, Robertson’s as the editor and Howard Allen’s as the publisher.4   Only one of the eleven articles in the issue had an author attached, the one with the Hemingway writing: “Inside Out with Cholly Bilderberger.”  “The Real Ernest Hemingway” wasn’t part of the Instauration material; that was the title used in the web site that first reprinted the Instauration Hemingway writing, National Vanguard, and then TOO used this same title for its post.

A review of other issues of Instauration around that time revealed this same pattern—no identified authors except “Inside Out with Cholly Bilderberger.”5 Given the absent of authors’ names except Bilderberger’s, which seemed clearly to be a pen name, I was left with the impression that Instauration was likely a one-man operation, that Robertson wrote and edited everything in the magazine, including the Cholly Bilderberger “Inside Out” feature.  If indeed Robertson wrote everything, that was a lot, around thirty large size pages with small type per issue, month after month after month.  Sampling the articles, Robertson and whoever else might have contributed writings came off to me as bright, informed, and dedicated, and the writing was at a pro level.

So what was this Cholly Bilderberger business?  I decided that it was likely Robertson as a fictionalized character.  I am reminded of a fictional contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine, Ed Coaster.6  From time to time in Vanity Fair, we learn of the escapades of Mr. Coaster, an aging journalistic anachronism with his old-style typewriter.  We are never told directly that Coaster is a send-up, and we don’t know who writes the Coaster material, and the Coaster episodes involve real people doing ostensibly real things with Mister Coaster.  As readers, we know to take it all with a grain of salt—none of it really happened.  But at the same time, Ed Coaster’s exploits—as do good fiction and satire—reveal truths about the world.

It seems to me Cholly Bilderberger was Wilmot Robertson’s Ed Coaster.   Right off the bat, in the first paragraph in the Hemingway feature, Cholly notes in passing that he was there with Hemingway and Winston Guest hunting in East Africa, and with Hemingway and Leland Hayward at the Ritz in Paris, and with Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich at 21 in New York City, and with Hemingway “playing king to the whole world” in Havana.   This would have been in the 1930s and ‘40s.  All that?  Cholly was at the table with Ernie and Marlene?  Come on.  This was exaggeration for effect.   We’re having fun here.

I had the strong impression that Cholly, whether it was Robertson or someone else, made up all of this February, 1979 “Inside Out” feature, including the remarks attributed to Hemingway, to get across a point he really believed, that while Hemingway was down on liberals and Jews he knuckled under to them in order to look out for himself, and that he was a despicable character personally and a sell-out to what he really believed, including in his writing, and a plague on him and other big shots like him.  Robertson’s Cholly dispatches weren’t to be taken literally (as Ed Coaster’s aren’t now).  I assume he thought everyone knew what he was up to, just playing around, but with a serious intent behind it.

It appeared, however, from reader correspondence in the old Instauration issues that the irony, the joke, got by people; they took Cholly and what he said at face value.  And I have the sense that the readers of TOO and National Vanguard did too.  To the extent that is true, it raises the question, is this evidence that people aren’t processing the factual claims and ideas coming at them well enough?   I hypothesize the answer to that is yes.

In the 1979 Cholly feature, Robertson—I’m assuming it was Robertson—I’m sure meant well, but in getting his message across he trivialized and attributed a low, sarcastic, and crude persona to a major white icon, Hemingway.  Among other things, Cholly has Hemingway saying “Kikes smell different and feel different.”   Ouch.  I don’t think that portrayal of Hemingway serves the cause of white people.  In fact, it serves our adversaries more than it does us.

The Cholly material reinforces the stereotype of Hemingway (and, the put-down, the shallow and disreputable aspirations of a lot of white men): “boozing and womanizing and generally living out the American dreams.”   But that’s Hemingway’s public persona, the one that sold the books and magazine articles.   I’ve read a good deal about Hemingway, and from that, plus what I’ve picked up in his writings, in reality Hemingway was soft, not hard, or better, soft as well as hard, nuanced, complex.  To illustrate, consider the posthumously published The Garden of Eden, which is clearly autobiographical.    Although but a high school graduate, Hemingway was very informed, thoughtful, and perceptive — an intellectual, really.   I remember being taken by a recording of his voice—surprisingly genteel.   He knew literature well and could have been on a college English faculty somewhere.   Boxing, yes; a man’s man, communing with nature, big on courage, yes; possessing the coarseness and immature vulgarity depicted in this Cholly writing, no.   Hemingway was a capon, was he? (Cholly refers to him as that.)  This Cholly writing insults Hemingway.  And frankly, I’m taken by the fact that none of the TOO commenters picked up on this.

Cholly has Hemingway offhandedly dismissing his novel “The Old Man and the Sea,” which more than any other won him the Nobel Prize in Literature as being about “some spic who caught a fish.”   He also has Hemingway flippantly saying about the Jewish character Robert Cohn in his first big book, The Sun Also Rises, “I was actually pretty nice to him.”  That’s not the Hemingway I’ve read about or discerned from his writings.  That’s not the way a serious writer talks about his work.  I can’t believe Hemingway ever said anything like what Cholly put in his mouth.

Hemingway was an artist (he drew inspiration from artists outside the realm of writing, including from the French Impressionists), and he was deadly serious about his art.   He sincerely respected the creative act of writing.  He crafted the words he wrote with every ounce of his being.   I think of his ten or more drafts of a paragraph from his memoir “A Moveable Feast,” all of which found their way into print so readers could see Hemingway’s process.  This was very near the end of his life and he was badly damaged and not a one of the drafts was any good.  But it was obvious he had never stopped trying to produce great writing.   The “some spic who caught a fish” slur goes too far for my money.

Even though Hemingway famously professed writing what you know about, Bilderberger (Robertson?) declares he hypocritically stopped doing it himself, that he “retreated from reality.”   That’s poppycock.  I recently read Across the River and Into the Trees, a later, and critically disparaged, novel (I thought it was superb).  It was about a man aging, about mortality, about life now being for all practical purposes in the past tense, about action having been replaced by immobility and inertia, and losing it sexually.  Not what Hemingway knew about?  Not getting at what’s really going on?  Are you kidding me?  Well, yes, you are kidding me, but as Queen Victoria once said, “We are not amused”—or at least I’m not, and I’m suggesting that none of the rest of us should be either.

Hemingway, declares this Instauration writing, didn’t support the famous poet and critic Ezra Pound when Pound was hospitalized/locked up as a fascist nut case for anti-American and anti-Jewish broadcasts he made from Italy during WWII.  Hemingway most certainly did support Pound, and he did it at significant professional risk to himself.   A few years ago, I researched an article that got me into the Pound case.7   Hemingway said things like Pound “couldn’t have been in his right mind” and that he “uttered absolutely idiotic drivel,” but that was clearly to lighten things up and get the authorities to go easy on Pound after he was arrested, and he said it in the context of effusive praise for Pound.   This Bilderberger feature says Hemingway called Pound a traitor.  I never came across that in my investigations.  It would have been out of character for Hemingway flat-out to have called Pound a traitor.

As the Instauration writing asserts, I’m sure Hemingway had negative feelings toward Jews.  From what I’ve read, just about everybody did in those days.  But Hemingway bowed down to them as the writing describes?   Hemingway was a phony and an opportunist and a coward who said one thing out of their presence and another thing to their face?  Hemingway had to go through Jewish-dominated publishing and motion picture industries to get his work to an audience and earn a living.   My conclusion from what I know about Hemingway is that he was a man of personal and professional integrity and that he laid low and kowtowed the very least he had to in order to make his way in the world.  It’s so easy to hold someone to lofty standards when you aren’t the one who has to pay the utilities bill.  In my view, the Instauration depiction of Hemingway crosses the line into the realm of character assassination.

The Instauration piece attributes sophomoric and vulgar banter to Hemingway about the Jewish film producer David Selznick, liberal doyenne Eleanor Roosevelt, and “Juice in New York City” that I can’t bring myself to repeat.  Hemingway?   No.  He was too evolved a person for that.   Putting this kind of mentality in another human being to get a rise out of readers and support your thesis about the “reality” (I’m putting it in quotes) of the American elite is base behavior.

The writer of this Hemingway writing does a hit job on Hemingway.   Hemingway and by association white people generally—Cholly says it: Hemingway came to “stand for all [white] Americans”—come off looking a lot worse than liberals and Jews do here.

Whites’ adversaries realize that ridicule and demonization of exemplary whites—the Founders, every dead white male artist that ever lived, get slave-owner Jackson off the twenty-dollar bill, etc, etc, etc.—is a good way to soften whites up and bring them down as a race   We should be extra cautious about doing that to ourselves.  Taking a sledgehammer to the pedestal of an iconic white American (and unfairly as far as I’m concerned) in order to make a point as was done in the Instauration material is the very thing we don’t need.

Postscript:

I submitted the above article to the editor of The Occidental Observer, Dr. Kevin MacDonald.  He sent it for review to two men who knew Robertson when he was alive and had familiarity with Instauration when it was in publication.  According to them, while I was on to something with my basic contention—Cholly’s writing was likely fictionalized—I was off on a number of my speculations:

Contrary to what I alleged in the article, Robertson had a long history of racial activism prior to writing The Dispossessed Majority in the early ’70s and his work with Instauration.  In the late 1930s, he was active in the America First Committee, most prominently associated with aviator Charles Lindbergh, which opposed U.S. entry in a European war and had a tacit white racial agenda.  Another example, in the mid-1960s he was a contributor under his own name to a white racial publication called “Western Destiny.”

Instauration did not cease operation upon Robertson’s death.  Rather, Robertson voluntarily closed it down because he was concerned about maintaining its quality.  He worried that it would become a parody of itself in the way he believed an earlier, similar magazine had—American Mercury, edited by the legendary journalist, H. L.  Mencken (1880–1956).

Robertson did not write everything in Instauration.  There were contributions from a host of others, I’m not sure of the exact number.  Robertson heavily edited submissions, however, so that stylistic differences among the writers were blurred.  In my review of Instauration issues, Robertson refrained from using author names other than Cholly’s—using one’s name writing for white interests publications is like sticking your head out of the foxhole.  The pattern for writings where author’s identities are protected with which I’m familiar, including with this webzine, is to use pseudonyms; writings aren’t left without any attribution at all.  The stylistic similarities among the writings and the absence of author names other than Cholly’s in the issues I reviewed led me to come to the conclusion that Robertson wrote everything in Instauration. The reviewers have helped me learn that that conclusion was based on a false premise: Cholly was far from alone as a credited Instauration author, including at least one besides Robertson who used his real name.

Robertson did not, as I had surmised, write the Cholly “Inside Out” features.  I still don’t know who Cholly was (the reviewers report he has died), but it wasn’t Robertson.  The reviewers describe Cholly as a socialite and a respected author of both fiction and nonfiction who had lived in Paris, Switzerland, and Palm Beach.  He participated in the European theater in World War II, in the intelligence service, one viewer believes.  The reviewers think it likely that Cholly did in fact know Hemingway.

One reviewer reported that his recollection is that Cholly held Hemingway in contempt, and that Cholly “wrote a good deal of fictional material.”   This reviewer referred to noting “elements of a Cholly ‘tall tale’” in the Hemingway writing.  However, he added that he “suspected Cholly had a basis in fact in some of the material he included in the article.”

Respectful as I am of the reviewers’ comments—they both have superb reputations—what’s my grade on this article?   I’d put myself in the B/B- range—not bad, but still leaving much to be desired.

In my favor, I believe I caught a fabrication in this Cholly writing.   And it does seem that readers, both back then and now, took it literally when they shouldn’t have.

And, something I didn’t go into explicitly in the article, I think this Hemingway writing example reflects a pattern in white racial discourse generally.   We make pronouncements to one another, and indeed they are often thoughtful and articulately expressed.   But except for brief “yes, right” and quick comments and extrapolations from their audience, they pretty much just sit there unattended, unexamined; they don’t receive hard analysis and criticism.  The thesis here, and it should have been articulated better in the article—is that the white racial movement would profit from more rigorous dialogue and debate, and yes, respectful disagreement, than has characterized it up until now.

An example that comes to mind, in this magazine I read the writings reflective of a “New Right” perspective, Alain de Benoist’s for example.  No question, these writings come across as erudite and unimpeachably valid.   But are they really?   Are they truly grounded in reality; are they more that high-sounding words put together well?   Hear me, I’m not saying they aren’t worthy; I’m but raising the issue of whether we put them to the test of hard scrutiny—as we should with all public expressions, including this one—and whether we work with these ideas, offer modifications and alternatives to them.  Do we essentially nod our heads yes and move on?   I have concern that that is basically what we do.  I certainly don’t think we have a corner on this predilection—in fact, we do less of it than our adversaries.    But our standards should be higher than theirs.

What exactly are we debating right now as a white racial movement?  What alternative visions, programs, strategies, tactics, are on our agenda at the present?   Does this Hemingway post and its response tell us something important about ourselves?   I think it does.

All that got my grade up to a soft, not solid, B.  But I’m not an A by a long shot.   The shortcomings in my article preclude that.

The big error in my piece was jumping to the conclusion after a cursory investigation that Robertson authored the Hemingway writing, which I still find highly objectionable.   Doing that, I detracted from the legacy of a true pioneer in the white racial movement.  We would all do well to read Robertson’s book, The Dispossessed Majority (see endnote 3).  Written nearly a half century ago, it contains a remarkably accurate and prescient diagnosis of the underpinnings of the crisis currently facing white people in America. I owed Wilmot Robertson to write about him carefully — full of care — and I didn’t.

Why were there so many places that I was off in my conclusions?

First, I had other things going on in my life that drew my attention and energies, and I was willing to devote just so much time and effort to this Hemingway matter and no more.   The truth of it is that I was re-binge-watching Breaking Bad when I took a break between episodes and checked the TOO site and saw the “Real Hemingway” post and went “What’s this?” and decided to look into it some.  Which I did, but Walter White never left my mind—along with my daughter’s golf game, and this suspicious lesion on the side of my face, it isn’t skin cancer, is it?   Plus I have a pronounced lazy streak—at this very moment, a nap is calling out my name.   That is an explanation, but it isn’t a valid excuse, especially when going public with claims about people as I did in this article.

As a reader, you need to be on the case sifting through what you are getting from someone—me in this writing—who is telling you what is going on in the world.  You and I both need to keep in mind that we are trying to make sense of reality amid all sorts of things going on in our lives, and within the context of personal limitations, and we have to stay humble, tentative, about what we know, or think we know.

I ended the article I originally submitted with the assertion that we should be careful about pulling the rug out from under prominent white personages from the past, Hemingway being one of them.  The two reviewers strongly contradicted my positive views of Hemingway.

“Professor Griffin is correct to some extent that the destruction of our heroes is a bad thing for our racial self-worth,” said one reviewer.  “But does Hemingway deserve to be a hero?”  Clearly, he was implying no, he doesn’t.

Said the other reviewer: “As for the quote [Cholly attributes to Hemingway] about The Old Man and the Sea being about some spic who caught a fish, Dr. Griffin is incorrect when he surmises that Hemingway would never say that.   In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway makes derogatory racial remarks about Cubans.  He has a character observe that when the hatch is open, he’s hit with ‘Chink stink.’  If he would say those kinds of things in his novels, it stands to reason that he would say such things privately.

“Hemingway was a truly repulsive person.  He was an Anglo-Saxon who liked Spanish bullfights in which the poor animals are essentially tortured to death.  They are bled to the point of collapse before the matador comes out and finishes them off.

“It is well known and documented that Hemingway gut-shot a bitch and relished watching her death agonies over the next several days.  The story was reported by the respected liberal writer Joy Williams, and it appeared in a guidebook put out by the Key West Chamber of Commerce.  There is every reason to believe the story is true.

“Hemingway commented that he was able to finagle the ‘honor’ of being allowed to torture and kill a German POW [during World War II].

“He went out of his way to humiliate and hurt his friend [the writer] John Dos Passos by springing on him in front of everybody at a dinner where Dos Passos was to give a talk that a very close friend of Dos Passos had been executed in the Spanish Civil War.   It was shocking and sadistic treatment.

“Hemingway’s style of writing was an inevitable and necessary corrective to the overly flowery and effeminate language novelists used in the 19th century and into the 1920s.

“Hemingway was not a great white man.”

My response is that writers can attribute things to characters in their books that do not mirror their own views or behavior.

Also, there are positive ways to look at bullfights and those who take to them.

As for the bitch dog story, maybe so, maybe not so—I lean toward disbelieving it.  The Joy Williams account is evidence to be sure, but because she wrote it and the Key West Chamber of Commerce printed it does not prima facie make it a fact; credibility has to be assessed from the get-go.   Another piece of evidence to consider is that Hemingway doted on a slew of cats.  Cats aren’t dogs, but they are domestic animals.  I’m having major trouble imagining Hemingway shooting a dog in the stomach and relishing in watching her death agonies over a period of a several days.

More, as my recent Orlando article pointed out, a lot of claims by respected liberal writers, as Joy Williams was, aren’t true (I’d say the same thing about respected conservative writers), and it is not because they make things up. Rather, their life experience, outlook, and work and social contexts lead them to write things they assume are so that aren’t.   Hemingway’s politics, which I have written about elsewhere,8 leaned in a libertarian/conservative direction, and he had a gun-toting alpha male image.9  Williams, liberal and a woman, could have been writing about the “other” in the same way liberal writers at The New York Times are when they deal with Donald Trump.

Whether or not Hemingway ever told the story, seriously or in jest, about maiming and then killing a German POW—I’ve never read it—that it actually happened is incredible to me, not the least bit credible.   For the military to have granted the most famous writer/journalist at that time, who was sending back reports on the war to publications in the U.S., the privilege of killing a German POW and to have run the risk of a monumental public relations disaster if the news of it had gotten out is beyond my imagination.  Imagine the uproar if it had been revealed that top military brass were allowing a civilian to, as the reviewer relayed the tale, knee cap and then execute a German soldier, who, before he died, cried out, “What about the Geneva convention?”  Supposedly, Hemingway snarled in reply as he started shooting, “Here’s your Geneva Convention.”  I simply don’t buy it.  Which is certainly not to say that I dismiss all stories of atrocities against German soldiers (one reviewer concluded that I do).  To the contrary, I have documented them in a book I wrote on the late William Pierce.10   My article was about what Ernest Hemingway likely did and didn’t do, only that.

There are other possible, less condemning, motivations to Hemingway’s sharing with an audience that Dos Passos’ friend had been executed than it was Hemingway’s intention to hurt and humiliate Dos Passos.   Shocking and sadistic treatment of close friends does not fit with what I have read about Hemingway.  Insensitive at times, yes; shocking and sadistic, no.

And last, I deem Hemingway a truly great writer; far, far more that an inevitable and necessary corrective.

The issue has been drawn: the two reviewers say Hemingway does not merit being a respected figure in whites’ racial heritage and I say he does.

I contend our adversaries are tearing down our white heroes enough as it is without us piling on ourselves and helping them in their campaign to destroy us.   Especially, we shouldn’t be debunking white heroes unfairly, and that’s what I see happening here to Hemingway.   I don’t pick up that the two reviewers have as big a concern about this phenomenon as I do.

It needs to be underscored that neither the two reviewers nor I are the last word on this matter.  We are but three voices at the table.  Add your voice to this issue of Hemingway’s merits as an exemplary white historical figure, as well as anything else in this article.

Robert S. Griffin is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont.

Endnotes

1.http://www.instaurationonline.com/pdf-files/Instauration-1979-02-February.pdf


The Dispossessed Majority is available online as a PDF. https://ia800500.us.archive.org/23/items/TheDispossessedMajority/WilmotRobertson-DispossessedMajority-Dm.pdf

“The Orlando Shootings: Talk, Reality, and The New York Times,” The Occidental Observer, June 27th, 2016. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/06/the-orlando-shootings-talk-reality-and-the-new-york-times/#more-37606

The February, 1979 issue of Instauration is online. http://instaurationonline.com/?cat=26

The December, 1978 and all of the 1979 issues of Instauration are online.
http://instaurationonline.com/?cat=26


For examples of the Ed Coaster spoofs, see http://connection.ebscohost.com/tag/COASTER%252C%2BEdwin%2BJohn

A book I recall contributing to that investigation into the Pound case that involved Hemingway is E. Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St. Elizabeths (McGraw-Hill, 1984).
See the November, 2007 thought “On Hemingway’s Politics” in my web site, www.robertsgriffin.com.
See the March, 2014 thought “On Ernest Hemingway and Manhood” in my web site, www.robertsgriffin.com.
Robert S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds (Authorhouse, 2001), see pp. 285-290.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/
 

Ezra Pound, Jewish Activism, and the Struggle for Cultural Memory

 

“The terror of Pound for Kazin and the rest of us, if we are honest, is Pound’s racism”
Theodore Weiss, The New York Review of Books, 1986. 

I often take great pleasure from looking into the past and finding, among persons and works of great genius, ideas that we very closely share. It’s not terribly difficult. Times have changed so dramatically, and the window of ‘acceptable’ ideas has so radically narrowed, that almost every great creative thinker of substance prior to the 1950s held socio-political views regarded as quasi-Fascistic by the current dispensation. Most of us will be aware, of course, that these broader cultural shifts have had extremely negative repercussions for the socio-historical legacy of such figures. In short, within a society all too keen to abolish the ‘old White men’ from the history books, such figures will be the first to go.

Against this ominous backdrop, a colleague and literary scholar recently felt the inclination to inform me that the great genius of literature Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who possessed a genuine and open sympathy for Fascism, is being slowly and insidiously exiled from college reading lists and school curricula. It should come as no great surprise to readers of the Occidental Observer that having been caged in a ‘death cell’ for his war-time affiliations, and driven first into a mental health hospital and then out of his country, Pound’s punishment would continue posthumously with his relegation to anonymity. Where my friend erred, however, was in attributing the slow vanishing of Pound to an amorphous ‘neoliberal’ zeitgeist. As an ‘armchair’ fan of Modernist poetry for almost a decade, and an ethno-nationalist even longer, I’ve been more acutely aware of the specificities behind the degradation of the much-maligned poet. Far from being a recent phenomenon, I was also aware that the most important steps in Pound’s marginalization had been put in place decades earlier. Having shared these specificities with my colleague, I now present them here for the consideration of our readership.

The process of annihilating a genius and his worldview from the cultural memory of his people is both straightforward and relatively commonplace. During the course of several research projects over the last decade, it became apparent to me that even where ideologically suspect cultural figures are permitted to remain under study, the socio-political ideas of these ‘tainted’ individuals, no matter how central to their character or intellectual worldview, are sequestered within their social and professional biographies, and often presented as unpleasant ‘moral stains’ upon an otherwise acceptable and productive life. An excellent example in this regard is W.J. McCormack’s 2005 Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics, which endeavored to ‘expose’ and quarantine the Anglo-Irish poet’s alleged “intense relationship” with Fascism and anti-Semitism. In this way, ‘offending’ but ‘milder’ figures like Yeats are made ‘safe’ for the young and impressionable White minds passing through our college systems. In the more ‘extreme’ cases, however, like that of the explicitly Fascist-affiliated Pound, these ‘moral stains,’ and the indignation they provoke, are deemed unmanageable and unforgiveable. They are amplified, and utilized in attempts to defame and degrade the cultural figure. The process of defamation and degradation eventually forces that figure out of acceptable public discussion and recognition, and thus into obscurity.

The method of defamation and degradation is subtle and slow, like the drip-feeding of poison. It is also in large part facilitated by the now-familiar practise of academic and cultural gatekeeping. Retaining our focus on the example of Pound, it is instructive to study the work of Jewish academic Louis Menand, who has occupied highly influential chairs in English Literature at Princeton and Harvard, and is a prominent critic for both The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. In a 2008 article titled ‘The Pound Error,’ Menand unleashed precisely the kind of withering indictment of Pound that continues to pave the way for his banishment from cultural memory. In Menand’s summation of the poet’s personality, Pound was “vain and idiosyncratic,” but by far the greatest problem was “that he was a Fascist.” Pound is said by Menand to have been possessed of an “obsession with the Jews,” which is true only to the extent that Pound had a preoccupation with usury and financial abuse that inevitably drew him into ideological opposition to some of the key innovators in that area of economic life. Pound, the titan of letters and the enabler of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and T.S. Eliot (among many others), is ultimately dismissed by Menand as “a failure,” notable only for “the shambles of his political beliefs and the limitations of his poetics.”

Emanating from such lofty academic heights, Menand’s invective would be influential enough in demeaning the work and cultural memory of Ezra Pound. But the effort is more widespread and thus even more effective. Although one may instinctively expect the ‘anti-Semitic’ work of poets like Pound and T.S. Eliot to deter the attentions of Jewish literary scholars, the reality is quite different. Indeed, in the mirror image of Menand’s claim, it actually appears that it is Jews who have the obsession with Pound. Pound, perhaps more than any other poet, has exerted an attractive influence over a large swathe of Jewish scholars, all of whom have been pulled magnetically towards him by a burning zeal to deconstruct his work, life, and legacy. This juxtaposition of hatred with attraction is subtly expressed in Anthony Julius’s T.S. Eliot, anti-Semitism and Literary Form, in the course of which Julius writes that Jews reading Eliot’s poetry are both “appalled and impressed.”[1] These academic activists are appalled because they perceive an unjustified critique upon their ethnic group, and they perceive this critique all the more keenly because of their ethnocentrism. They are impressed because they appreciate, and are threatened by, the talent of their target, often despite themselves. The ‘attraction’ arises from the desire to deconstruct and demean that talent, and thus avenge or assuage the critique.

Posthumously, Pound possessed no shortage of Jewish ‘admirers.’ The death of a notable figure often gives rise to renewed interest in that individual’s work and its significance. One might argue, particularly in the modern era, that the first ten to twenty years following that death may set the tone for how or if that figure will be remembered over a much greater length of time. After Pound died in Venice in November 1972, the remainder of the 70s was taken up by a widespread fascination and rediscovery of his poetry, but this enthusiasm was not shared by Jewish intellectuals. Following Pound’s death one of the most ardent and vocal was the New York Intellectual, and prominent literary critic, Alfred Kazin. Alfred Kazin would remark bitterly in 1986 that “in the museum of modern literature no figure commands more space than Ezra Pound. … The literature on Pound is enormous and swells every month.” What set apart the coming attentions of Kazin, and later Theodore Weiss, Macha Rosenthal, Charles Bernstein, Nancy Harrowitz and, most recently, Noel Stock, Tim Redman, Louis Menand and David Biespiel, from the early enthusiasm of the 70s, was the deconstructive and antagonistic slant of the Jewish academics. In words that almost perfectly mirror Julius’s claim to be “appalled and impressed” by the work of T.S. Eliot, Kazin’s scathing 1986 rebuke was titled “The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound [emphasis added].” The objective of these Jewish attentions was not to partake in celebration and the cementing of a cultural icon in the literary canon, but rather to break down the target’s reputation and weaken his place in cultural memory. In attacking the posthumous enthusiasm for Pound’s work, these intellectuals were in effect condemning Pound to a second, cultural, death.

In this deconstructive effort, no arguments were too tenuous, and no line of attack was too abstract or extreme. Assaults on Pound’s legacy and work by these Jewish intellectuals in the decade immediately following his death were astonishing in their bitterness. When, in 1973, the English literary scholar Michael Wood wrote a positive review of two (gentile-authored) works on the poet, he was met with remarkable ferocity by the Jewish New York writer Max Geltman. Wood had committed the sin of writing that he perceived great tenderness in the work of Pound, to which Geltman responded by asking whether “the word ‘tenderness’ is meant to imply the kind of tender care lavished on the gas chambers.” In the protracted invective that followed, Geltman would deride Pound, with sneering condescension toward his rural origins, as that “sputtering comet out of Hailey, Idaho.” At its conclusion, Geltman would round off the piece with an obscure reference to a forlorn note allegedly written by a child at a “Nazi Death Camp.” Wood’s response was both brave and damning, describing Geltman’s attack as both “stupid and incoherent.” And Wood’s conclusion was a perfect indictment of Geltman’s tactical use of Jewish schmaltz: “There is, however, nothing in Pound which is quite as ugly as the closing paragraph of Mr. Geltman’s letter. If fidelity to the holocaust means exploiting the memory of that child for the sake of a cheap, polemical pathos, then I’m all for forgetting.”

Unfortunately, strong-willed non-Jews like Wood had by the 1970s been disprivileged numerically at the higher levels of academia and popular criticism. As a result, and in marked contrast to the enthusiasm and celebration of the early 1970s, by the 1980s the balance of opinion on Pound began to tip heavily against him. Alfred Kazin’s 1986 attack on Pound was even more significant than the Geltman affair, and would be described by an acquaintance of the poet as reaching “some heights of virulence,” with the “more than strong” suggestion that Pound “was to blame for the 7,740 Italian Jews who died at Auschwitz.” For Kazin the New York Intellectual, Pound was the epitome of the ‘White Imperialist,’ a “genius not least in his American gift for appropriating land not his own.” Above all though, Kazin’s scathing rebuke represented an attempt to push the popular Pound, and other Modernist poets associated with the reconstruction of Homeric myth, if not volkisch thought, back out of the spotlight:

Modernism…has threatened to take over the curriculum. Eliot’s prescription, that past literature should constantly be assimilated to the taste of the present, had led to a steady omission and distortion of actual history. Modernism must not become the only writer of its history…. Modernism is not our only tradition.

In this respect, Kazin found ready agreement from Princeton academic Theodore Weiss, who assented that “Whatever their fascination, Pound and modernism are overdue for relegating to the dead past,” and suggested that “Pound and modernism be ignored or, if dealt with, done so negatively, and that poetry itself be considered peripheral, inconsequential as it is in a modern industrial society.” More recently, David Biespiel states that if Pound’s “violent fascism and anti-Semitism” weren’t bad enough, his poetry should be dropped because it is “getting less and less contemporary and more and more lost to time.” Thus, through Jewish domination of the key ‘valves’ of culture, we have witnessed the steady shift from a situation in which “the literature on Pound is enormous and swells every month” to one in which Pound is a “peripheral” nothing; a “failure;” or worse.

The strong presence within elite Western English faculties of a Jewish bloc advancing Jewish interests (marginalizing an ‘anti-Semite’ and a literary movement ‘tainted’ with ‘anti-Semitism’) is somewhat ironic given that Jewish literary critics like Anthony Julius issued maudlin complaints that “it is well known that English faculties in America were once especially hostile to Jewish applicants.”[2] What Julius is referring to is the subtle conflict that played out across Western universities between the 1920s and 1950s; a conflict that would ultimately end with Jewish intellectuals like Weiss and Menand flooding the leading positions at Ivy League colleges, and other Jewish intellectuals like Kazin taking command of the leading avenues of criticism. If the WASP ‘old guard’ ever really exerted the privileges of academic and cultural gate-keeping, this had been conclusively wrenched from their grasp by Jews by the early 1960s.

The conflict cannot be seen as benign in either its progression or its results. In English departments, and presumably in many other disciplines, both WASPs and Jews perceived group interests as being at stake. At Yale, WASP professors expressed doubts and concerns that “Jews lacked the cultural and religious background for teaching English literature,”[3] which was presumably the subtle articulation of the belief that Jews would be implicitly hostile to much of the English literary canon. On the other hand, one need only survey a handful of memoirs by Jewish literary scholars to learn that such hostility was clearly in evidence. For example, when asked about his experience of 1950s Yale, Harold Bloom replied sardonically that it was “an Anglo-Catholic nightmare. Everyone was on their knees to Mr T. S. Eliot.”[4]

Given such evidence, any argument that Jews and gentiles shared the same cultural interests should be treated with a healthy scepticism. Indeed, it is concerning to say the least that a group evincing demonstrable hostility to the cultural figures, interests, and heritage of White Europeans now dominates the upper echelons of that same culture. Jewish academics have become an important segment of our hostile elite.

While we may be encouraged by our current culture-shapers to believe that the entry of Jews into our arts helped us to become more ‘worldly’ and ‘objective’ in our creative life, sober reflection on contemporary Jewish activity in English literature reveals quite the opposite. Even if we accept Bloom’s perspective, it may be said that we have merely replaced the ‘Anglo-Catholic nightmare’ with a Jewish one. And rather than being on our knees to ‘Mr T. S. Eliot,’ everyone is now on their knees to Jewish victimhood. The apparent Jewish inability to appreciate English literature beyond the narrow purview of ethnic interest is demonstrated with even the briefest of bibliographies from the field’s leading scholars:

Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller’s Jewish Presences in English Literature
Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of ‘the Jew in English Literature and Society and his Between Race and Culture: Representations of ‘the Jew’ in English and American Literature
Harry Levi’s Jewish Characters in Fiction: English Literature
James Shapiro’s Shakespeare and the Jews
Edgar Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction
Gary Levine’s The Merchant of Modernism: The Economic Jew in Anglo-American Literature
Heidi Kaufman’s English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Esther Panitz’s The Alien in the Midst: images of Jews in English Literature
Edward Calisch’s The Jew in English Literature: As Author and as Subject
Matthew Biberman’s Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature
Eva Holmberg’s Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination
Phillip Aronstein’s The Jews in English Poetry and Fiction
Nadia Valman’s The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture
Frank Felsenstein’s Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture
Jonathan Freedman’s The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America
Sheila Spector’s British Romanticism and the Jews: History Culture and Literature
Anna Rubin’s Images in Transition: the English Jew in English Literature, 1660-1830

These works represent only the tip of a very large and growing iceberg. They are in addition to hundreds of articles appearing in influential journals and magazines. Writers like Julius would have us believe that the position of the Yale academics of the 1950s was based on irrational bigotry — the ignorant anxieties of dusty old White men. And yet the trajectory of literature in the English language, both in respect of its past and present, has moved in a radically different direction since the end of the WASP dominance.

This new departure has not been for the better. The likes of Pound, Yeats, and Eliot have now given much ground to ethnically myopic works like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), about a neurotic and compulsively masturbating Jew, and Howard Jacobson’s similar, if more periphrastic, The Finkler Question (2010). I am only half-joking when I suggest that our grandchildren will learn their Chaim before their Homer.

While I have labored on the importance of academic gate-keeping, it is important to note that the deconstruction of a cultural figure may take forms other than the assault of elite journalism and co-ordinated academic critique. It also takes the form of exclusion and socio-cultural taboo. In 1999 a panel of thirteen writers and poets, including John Updike, voted to honor Pound with a carved stone that would have put him beside such figures as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe in a part of the nave of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, inspired by Poets’ Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey. The effort was ultimately thwarted by a concerted campaign of pressure on the Cathedral to block Pound’s inclusion. One of the few public representatives of the campaign was the academic and Pound ‘scholar’ Tim Redman, author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Redman, a Jewish academic who has made a career out of combining hate with attraction, explained his opposition to Pound’s inclusion with the remarkably curt, blunt, and unsophisticated retort that: “He contributed to a climate of opinion that enabled the Holocaust to happen.”

T.S. Eliot is often excoriated for his now infamous line that “The rats are underneath the piles / The Jew is underneath the lot.” Eliot and Pound may have both smiled wryly on learning that this august Cathedral apparently boasted a Jewish warden, Marsha Ra, who would earnestly explain to reporters that Pound “was giving anti-Semitic radio broadcasts while my people were being gassed.” Ra, a convert to Christianity, further insisted that Pound was “not representative of Christian values.” The New York Times later reported that it was Ms. Ra who organized, and was thus ‘underneath,’ the petition to block Pound’s inclusion. A panel of thirteen leading figures of contemporary literature was thus rendered obsolete by the activism and absurd moralizing of a middle-aged Jewish librarian.

To conclude, it is fairly evident that the struggle for cultural memory can involve more specific players, trends, and actions than the amorphous ‘neoliberal’ zeitgeist imagined by my colleague. Civilization, for all its greatness, is ultimately a fragile entity. It requires care, conservation, and occasional pruning. If our culture loses sight of its geniuses, we will be all the poorer for it — ideologically, spiritually, tactically, and culturally. We all have a duty to keep these figures and their work alive. Our ability to do so will ultimately determine whether there is life in our civilization yet, or whether, as Pound feared, there is nothing left but “an old bitch gone in the teeth.”

[1] A. Julius, T.S. Eliot, anti-Semitism and Literary Form (Thames & Hudson, 2003), 40.

[2] Ibid, 52.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/