I have never objected to any man's mediocrity ...

 

In 1949, I was introduced to the poet Ezra Pound, who was at that time an inmate of St. Elizabeths Hospital. There had been conflicting reports as to his mental condition; that is to say, the reports of the government psychiatrists, and the reports of everyone else who knew him. The hospital officials avoided the issue by describing him to prospective visitors quite honestly as a "political prisoner". In the interests of national security, Pound was being kept under guard by the Federal Bureau of Health, Education and Welfare. I also was a ward of the government. My status as a veteran of the Second World War had won me paid subsistence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington.
*
In reality, persons under observation for mental illness are immediately deprived of all their civil rights, a dilemma that the writers of the Constitution unfortunately overlooked. It has been very simple for bureaucrats to designate their critics as being "mentally ill", and to shut them away from the eyes of the world in the various Bastilles that have been built for that purpose. No one dares to intervene on behalf of a person who is "mentally ill". It is much safer to be a Communist or a hoodlum. The sculptor John B. Flannagan, who was a patient at Bloomingdale Hospital in New York (reputedly one of the best in the country), wrote of his experiences, "There are actually more legal safeguards for a felon than checks on the psychiatrist to whom civil liberty is a joke."

The superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Dr. Winfred Overholser, was a genial type who wished the patients to help him create the atmosphere of a Y M C A summer camp, but the assorted rapists, dope addicts, and political prisoners refused to cooperate. The staff employed the latest methods of "therapy" (which were constantly changing), such as acting out one's repressions, without weapons of course.
*
The medical techniques used at St. Elizabeths are regarded as incredibly backward and inhumane by more advanced European physicians. Although the members of the staff no longer cure "mental illness" by removing the entire large intestine, this was a popular remedy there until the Second World War. The superstitious doctors of several decades ago believed that mental disorder was caused by bacteria in the gut, the bacteria that in reality are responsible for the osmotive digestive process. The operation had no visible effect on the patients' mental capacities, but more than eighty per cent of them died from its aftereffects.
*
Psychiatrists comprise a fascinating group for future study in the field of mental disorder. Dr. Overholser's predecessor at St. Eliza-beths had been shot dead by his wife while he was sitting in an automobile with his mistress in front of a fashionable dress shop on Washington's F Street. A few months later, a series of brutal muggings and rapes, committed by employees of St. Elizabeths, had moved a Washington editor to complain that the attendants should be locked up at night with the patients, and that they should not be allowed to come into the city.
*
In the preface to one of Robert Harborough Sherard's books, Lord Alfred Douglas writes, "I always had an instinctive feeling that once Oscar Wilde had been sent to prison, prison became the obvious goal for any self-respecting poet, and I never rested until I got there. It took me about twenty-five years to do it, but I succeeded in the end, and I did six months' imprisonment in the Second Division for libelling Mr. Winston Churchill about the battle of Jutland. The result is that I am one of the very few Englishmen of letters now living, or who has been living since 1895, who can go to bed every night without feeling more or less ashamed of being an Englishman."
*
The use of the term "mental illness" as a weapon to dispose of political opponents is by no means rare in American history. A recent book, The Trial of Mary Todd Lincoln, by James A. Rhodes and Dean Jauchius (Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, exposes the rigged insanity trial of President Lincoln's widow to invalidate the possible influence of her son, Robert Todd Lincoln, in the elections of 1876. As soon as they were over, and only two hours after the results were known, Mrs. Lincoln was given a new sanity hearing and released. As Rex Lampman said of the inmates of St. Elizabeths, "Most of these people are here because somebody wants them to be here."
*
Many people who would have liked to visit him were fearful of doing so because they had to apply by letter. Since Ezra had been accused of treason against the present office-holders, those who visited him incurred considerable risk. A visitor might be promptly investigated by government agents, and some of them lost their jobs.

Later on, journalists began to carp about the fact that some of Pound's visitors were anarchists or other types of extremists, the forerunners of the beatniks. But people who had something to lose could not afford to visit Pound and incur the inevitable penalties. Despite the fact that many literate persons who occupied subordinate positions in the government read and admired Pound's work, none of them dared to visit him. Even Huntingdon Cairns, who holds a fairly lofty post at the National Gallery, would only risk seeing Pound a few times during the twelve and a half years of his imprisonment in Washington.

Consequently, Pound's visitors could be divided into two groups, the youthful and reckless art students, or beatniks, and those admirers of his work who came from other countries and were therefore immune to reprisals by the federal government. This group included scholars and diplomats from almost every country in the world except Russia.
*
The tragedy of the First World War, which signified the down-fall of an orderly Western civilization, spurred Pound to seek justice. It is impossible for the artist to complete himself, or do significant work, without committing himself to this struggle. Sooner or later, he will be asked to become a lackey to the existing order, regardless of that order's merits. His life then becomes a precarious existence, if he chooses to carry on without submitting, or an empty one, if he surrenders.
*
Archibald MacLeish described the scene in a review that ap-peared in the New York Times, December 16, 1956:

". . . Not everyone has seen Pound in the long dim corridor inhabited by the ghosts of men who cannot be still, or who can be still too long. . . . When a conscious mind capable of the most complete human awareness is incarcerated among minds which are not conscious and cannot be aware, the enforced association produces a horror which is not relieved either by the intelligence of doctors or by the tact of administrators or even by the patience and kindliness of the man who suffers for it. You carry the horror away with you like the smell of the ward in your clothes, and whenever afterward you think of Pound or read his lines, a stale sorrow afflicts you."
*
He informed us that it would be impossible for Reck to see Pound without going through the requisite preliminaries, as Pound was "a political prisoner".

Ezra was delighted to learn that the officials were being so frank about his status, and it gave me new insight into the opposition of the state that held him in bondage. As I plunged deeper into the  study of his work, I was forced to take into account the entire circumstances that had led him to make the broadcasts from Italy, resulting in his indictment on a charge of treason. I learned that he could have avoided the indictment by renouncing his American citizenship, but he had purposely refused to make this sacrifice, for behind his every act was his loyalty to his country.
*

The basis of Ezra's struggle against bureaucracy—his "treason" if you will—is based on two fundamental concepts: "the state as convenience" and the tax system as "legalized robbery". It is no wonder that his captors put him in a madhouse for thirteen years.

No doubt, he would have been shot had they not feared that this would only accelerate the circulation of his ideas. For they are his ideas. I fail to discover in Plato or Pascal anything so obvious, even though these abuses already existed, in a lesser degree, during their lifetimes.
Ezra once said to me, "I did not understand, until I read Confucius, the impact of one man upon another." He suggests that Confucius is the philosophical base for many of his ideas, as explained in the editorial in The Exile of Autumn, 1927:

"The dreary horror of American life can be traced to two damnable roots, or perhaps it is only one root: 1. the loss of all distinction between public and private affairs. 2. the tendency to mess into other people's affairs before establishing order in one's own affairs, and in one's thought. To which one might perhaps add the lack in America of any habit of connecting or correlating any act or thought to any main principle whatever, the ineffable rudder-lessness of that people. The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius, it consists of establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without special effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other people's affairs. Against this principle of evil no adequate precaution is taken by Christianity, Moslemism, Judaism, nor, as far as I know, by any monotheistic religion. Many 'mystics' do not even aim at the principle of good; they seek merely establishment of a parasitic relationship with the unknown. The original Quakers may have had  some adumbration of the good principle. (But no early Quaker texts are available in this village.)" Ezra's preference for Confucian principles is based upon his statement that "It is the only system which shows a concern with social order." This explains why he has devoted so many years to giving us the thought of Confucius in digestible language. In his translation entitled The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest of Confucius, he says, "Finding the precise word for the inarticulate heart's tone means not lying to oneself, as in the case of hating a bad smell or loving a beautiful person, also called respecting one's own nose. On this account the real man has to look his heart in the eye even when he is alone.

"You improve the old homestead by material riches and irrigation; you enrich and irrigate the character by the process of looking straight into the heart and then acting on the results. Thus the mind becomes your palace and the body can be at ease; it is for this reason that the great gentleman must find the precise verbal expression for his inarticulate thoughts.

"That is the meaning of the saying: If a man does not discipline himself he cannot bring order into the home.

"One humane family can humanize a whole state; one courteous family can lift a whole state into courtesy; one grasping and perverse man can drive a nation into chaos. Such are the seeds of movement . . . (semina motuum, the inner impulses of the tree). That is what we mean by: one word will ruin the business, one man can bring the state to an orderly course."

These pithy excerpts, chosen at random from many such thoughts presented in Ezra's Chinese translations, explain what he wants to give to us. The greatest human problem, and the one most fraught with difficulties, is the problem of communicating with others, and here civilization is always put to the ultimate test. "The inarticulate heart's tone," that beautiful phrase for the melody of the being, depends upon not lying to oneself, a much more demanding precept than the conventional admonition that one should not lie to others.

We have seen in recent years the terrible truth in the Confucian saying "One humane family can humanize a whole state." Russell Kirk has written graphically of the decay of the great houses in  England and Scotland, those manifestations of a culture that now lie roofless to the weather, symbolizing the vanished glories of their builders as well as the present apathy of the village inhabitants. The strength of the shire, and its ability to produce people who emigrated to various parts of the world and distinguished themselves, notably in America, was centered in the "humane family" occupying the great house, and their humane influence pervaded the entire community. Now that good manners have been equated with tyranny, the villagers have returned to the graces of their cattle.

The American South also has benefited by the influence of the "great house" and its humane influence. Now that most of its mansions are in decay, or restored and in the hands of "Yankees", the influence is hardly discernible, although traces of it linger in speech and minor courtesies.
Ezra's translations of Confucius were not widely reviewed in the United States because the first mention of the word "order" in contemporary intellectual circles is equivalent to the cry of "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Everyone dashes for the exits. Confucius states (and this is out of context) that "One man can bring the state to an orderly course." By this he means one "humane" man, not a Fascist dictator. Confucius treats of the "gentleman in government", not the egomaniac.

The history of modern Europe might have been quite different had Mr. Hitler been able to bring order into his thought, but he is seldom criticized on that ground, perhaps because many self-styled liberals think in the same irregular fashion that he did. Their minds proceed in a sort of Cinerama, at one moment whirling down the roller-coaster of psychoanalysis, and the next moment drifting in a balloon over Paris.

Fighting this trend, Ezra Pound was driven further and further from his homeland, geographically speaking, but at the same time, he was drifting closer to his roots. At least he came to an under-standing of those Confucian gentlemen of the early Republic, Mr. Washington and Mr. Adams, whose virtu stemmed from the humane families of Great Britain.
*
Pound appended a long list of editorial suggestions, containing such pointed items as the following:

"1. All bureaucrats should be drowned. All interference in human affairs by people paid to interfere ought to be stopped."

"2. Le style c'est homme. Knowledge of this simple fact would have saved us from Woodie Wilson."

"3. All officials in the State dept. ought to be vacuum-cleaned." Pound antedated Joe McCarthy's assault on the State Department by more than two decades. Despite this warning, no improvements were made until the lad from Wisconsin came onto the  scene. As for Woodie Wilson, his style did not alert the American public against him, perhaps because no one ever read his dry historical writings.

In October, 1951, Ezra wrote me a note on Wilson: "From perusal of House's and Wilson's own writing it is difficult to form an estimate of their ethics, that is to say, they may have thought themselves honest. They did not believe in democracy or in representative of government. Like all men who have respected Alex. Hamilton they believed in financial oligarchy and dictatorship. They played into the hands of international usury and control of that most vital 'instrument of policy' the issue of purchasing power.

This they imposed on an unconscious public. There is not the slightest shadow of doubt that they knew their acts to be serious, vide House Memoirs, where the Reserve Board is considered (as) important as the Supreme Court of the nation. As an historian Woodrow is second only to Parson Weems, and shows no curiosity regarding the colonial period."
*

Ezra founded a short-lived magazine in Italian, L'Indice, and advertised in the Genoese press for Italian writers, with little success. His efforts to rouse his countrymen from their seemingly hopeless state of mental torpor were not confined to the young. He wrote to his old English professor, Dr. Felix E. Schelling, at the University of Pennsylvania:

"Dear Doc Schelling, As one of the most completely intolerant men I have ever met, the joke is on you if you expected to teach anyone liberality. As for my being embittered, it won't wash; everybody who comes near me marvels at my good nature. Besides, what does it matter to me personally? I don't get scratched by it, but the howls of pain that reach me from the pore bastids that are screwed down under it and who have no outlet, save in final desperation writing to some-one in Europe . . . I have never objected to any man's mediocrity, it is the idiotic fear that a certain type of mediocrity has in the presence of any form of the real. And the terror of newspaper owners, professors, editors, etc. in the presence of idea. I have documents stacked high, from men in most walks of life. Proved over and over again. No intellectual life in the univs. No truth in the press. Refusal to look at fact. It is nonsense to talk about my being embittered. I've got so much plus work going on that I have difficulty in remembering what particular infamy I wrote you about. . . . What little life has been kept in American letters has been largely due to a few men getting out of the muck and keeping the poor devils who couldn't at least informed. . . . You ain't so old but what you wouldn't wake up. And you are too respected and respectable for it to be any real risk. They can't  fire you now. Why the hell don't you have a bit of real fun before you get tucked under? Damn it all, I never did dislike you."
*
He spent some time with an old friend, Congressman George Holden Tinkham, who is referred to as "Uncle George" in the Cantos. He had met Tinkham years ago in Europe, for Tinkham, the only bearded member of Congress, usually went abroad at campaign time and let his opponent talk himself into defeat. As a visiting Congressman, he had been allowed to fire the first American shot against the Austrians when the United States went to war against the Central Powers in 1917. Pound mentions in the Cantos that he and Uncle George tried to find the exact spot, years later, but the road had been blown off the mountainside.

A descendant of a Mayflower family, Tinkham represented the 11th Massachusetts District—including Newton and the fashionable Back Bay—from 1915 to 1943, when he retired. He was a colorful figure in Washington, and his office was filled with mementoes of his travels, including stuffed heads of game animals, African shields, and a picture of himself from a London news-paper. This last was an item listing the ten most prominent Negroes in America. Tinkham's name was among them, because one of his constituents had put him down as an honorary member of a Negro group in Boston. Tinkham found amusement in his visitors' reaction to this item.

Despite the fact that he enjoyed being a member of the ruling class, Tinkham accomplished some noteworthy acts during his terms of service. It was he who noticed the clause in the League of Nations bill that would have caused us to abnegate our sovereignty. He immediately rushed to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's office, and told him about it. As Ezra describes the occasion in the Cantos, "and he knew there'd be one hell of a fight in the Senate." Lodge was subsequently memorialized as the man who led the fight against the bill and defeated it, winning for himself the title of the "founder of isolationism", or some such term.

Tinkham also made an amazing prediction in 1934, which was noted by the press, and quickly forgotten. He declared that Roosevelt's recovery program would be a complete failure, and that the President would have to take us into war in order to cover up his failure. As Herbert Hoover pointed out, after the event, in the third volume of his Memoirs, this is exactly what happened.
Tinkham did approve of one Roosevelt deed—repeal. He was one of the most steadfast fighters against prohibition. 

Family investments in South African gold mines gave Tinkham a comfortable fortune. Ezra says that when "Tink" showed his letter of credit to the manager of an Italian bank, the man salaamed to the floor. And, to fix the situation in my mind, Ezra repeated the man's gesture of obeisance to money.

At Ezra's suggestion, I went to the Harvard Club in 1952 to see "Tink". With his typical enthusiasm for a campaign, Ezra had drafted no less than three letters to "Tink", the last of which had been signed by me, in order to set up the appointment. It had been decided that I was to write Tinkham's biography, which would be one of considerable interest, and that the wealthy old bachelor should finance the enterprise. "Tink" was easily the most interesting personality at the Club, openly contemptuous of the young Harvard men who were paralyzed at the sight of him. His beard was as raffish and his eyes as bright as they must have been when Ezra first set eyes on him.

We spent some pleasant hours together, but nothing came of the proposed book. Tinkham was not much interested in whether anyone knew what he had done for his country or not. He was then in his eighties, he had twenty million dollars, and he intended to live out his life as he had always lived it, enjoying it to the full.

Shortly after I talked with him, he went to Europe again. In 1956, he died, leaving only one survivor, a sister who was wealthier than himself, and who lived on top of a mountain in North Carolina. His money went to a children's home in Boston.

From
This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound By  E U S T A C E   M U L L I N S

Out of This Century, is "must" reading for many reasons, none of them literary

Yeats had recently come through a harrowing experience with the self-professed master of black magic, Alistair Crowley. The two men, both interested in psychic phenomena, had founded a Society for Psychical Research. They set up a "temple" in order to perform their works, but Yeats soon discovered that he, a practitioner of beneficial "white magic", had been lured into an association with a practitioner of evil, or "black magic".

To counteract Crowley's baneful activities, Yeats moved into "the Temple". A titanic struggle for the soul of one of the members ended in a draw between the master of white magic and the lord of black magic. Tiring of the contest, Crowley decided to move to the Continent. He insisted on selling all of the furnishings of "the Temple" before he left, with the proceeds to be divided between the two founders. Yeats refused to let him enter "the Temple", and Crowley, finding his black magic insufficient for the purpose, re-sorted to the courts. The lawsuit was grist for Crowley's mill, but Yeats found the court battle very upsetting.
*
Although Maud Gonne was willing to smoke hashish with Yeats, she was not willing to marry him. Each time that he was rebuffed, he went back to his verses with renewed determination. Perhaps poets should not consummate their love affairs.
*
Fletcher, a shy, neurotic youth who was determined to become a poet, had taken rooms near George Bernard Shaw in Adelphi Terrace, but he could never muster the courage to call upon him.
He led a solitary life during his first year in London. He had met a few would-be writers at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, but they could not afford to dine with him at the expensive French restaurant where he usually took his meals. He ate alone, reading at table.

In 1910, Fletcher brought out five small volumes of his poetry, engaging four separate London publishers for the work. He paid the entire costs of publication himself, and hopefully sent the books to critics. There was no enthusiastic reception, such as had greeted Pound, for the poems, although well-written, offered nothing new.

Most of the recipients did review them, and the unsold copies were kept in storage until the outbreak of the First World War, when Fletcher contributed them to the British war effort as paper pulp.

In addition to his duties as foreign editor of Poetry, Pound had also created for himself the post of literary editor of a suffragette newspaper, The New Freewoman, which had formerly been known as The Freewoman. Pound's position on suffragism is not clear; he once remarked in a letter to me that each new dilution of the suf-frage weakened the entire system on which voting was based. His alliance with the staff of The New Freewoman may have been occasioned by the fact that the journal was militantly opposed to the excessive virility of the Pankhurst wing.

These suffragettes chained themselves to fences, in a poor imitation of the Andromeda myth, and also re-enacted other folk-tales which this writer does not care to discuss. In order to re-emphasize the intellectual facets of the suffragette movement, such as they were, a wealthy lady named Miss Harriet Weaver had financed this newspaper. It was written and edited by her friend Dora Marsden. Miss Weaver felt that the paper was not attracting a sufficiently wide audience, and when Ezra Pound chanced upon her at one of Hulme's evenings, he persuaded her that she could get more readership by incorporating a literary review with the suffragette editorials. He agreed to furnish this department without salary, and thus he obtained an English outlet for the promotion of his various disciples and enthusiasms.

Pound praised one of Fletcher's volumes in The New Free-woman, and soon afterwards, he called upon the Arkansas bard at his French restaurant in London. Fletcher has recorded the occasion in his autobiography:

"I must confess that I eyed Pound with considerable interest, having already heard about him while in London, and having read with attraction and repulsion about equally balanced, his own early volumes. What I saw was a man of about my own age and height, dressed in a brown velvet coat, a shirt open at the neck and no necktie, and pearly-gray trousers. His fine-chiseled, for-ward-jutting features were set off by a rounded mass of fiery, curly red hair and beard and mustache similarly red and curly, trimmed to a point. Gray-blue penetrating eyes, shielded by a pince-nez, peered at the world behind his projecting cheekbones; and a high-pitched, shrill, almost feminine voice provided strange contrast to the pugnacious virility of the poet's general aspect. He had, I soon saw, slender feminine hands, which, as he talked, he fluttered to and fro. His body was almost equally mobile, jumping and twitching in his chair, with a backward jerk of the head, as he emphasized each point."

Ezra was quite the innovator in dress, for it took considerable courage to wear an open-necked sport shirt in London at that time. He has told me of an occasion in Rapallo, on a scorching afternoon, when a little Frenchman approached him in the town square. The Frenchman was choking in a high starched collar, as he passed by the comfortable Ezra, who was sauntering along in his customary sport shirt, open wide at the neck. The Frenchman's eyes protruded, first in hate, and then in envy. He reached up and with a single violent gesture ripped open his tie and shirt. It may be said that Ezra found the world writhing in stiff collars and left it in sport shirts.

"I discovered him to be as baffling a bundle of contradictions as any man I have ever known," says Fletcher, continuing his description of Pound. "Internationally Bohemian in aspect, he yet preserved marked farwestern ways of speech and a frank, open democracy of manners. Hating the academicians of England, he yet laid claim to be a great scholar in early Provençal, Italian and Latin. Keen follower of the dernier cri in arts and letters, his own poetry was often deliberately archaic to a degree that repelled me. In short, he was a walking paradox."

Fletcher was unable to understand how a man could dislike academicians and yet devote himself to the study of the classics. Apparently he was unfamiliar with the type of scholar who had grown up in the universities of England like a particularly difficult type of clinging ivy, and is epitomized by T. S. Eliot's pronouncement on Professor Gilbert Murray's translations of the Greek: "He has erected a barrier between the student and the plays greater than that represented by the original Greek."

At first, Pound and Fletcher got along, to such an extent that Fletcher contributed some money to The New Freewoman. Having pumped this masculine source, Pound proposed to Miss Weaver that the journal's title be altered to a noun of more neutral gender. He suggested The Egoist, and she agreed to it.
*
There is no misanthropy in a thorough contempt for the mob. There is no respect for mankind save in detached individuals.
*
Stupidity is a pest, a bacillus, an infection; a raging lion that does not stay in one place but perambulates. When two fools meet, a third springs up instanter between them, a composite worse than either begetter.
*
A more intimate view of Joyce has been given us by Oliver St. John Gogarty:

"Joyce was an unloveable and lonely man; but he willed his life. He was an artist deliberately and naturally, and for this he sacrificed everything, even his humanity. . . . He had the wrong idea of an artist when he dressed himself as a Rembrandt and sent postcards with his portrait to his friends—or rather to his acquaintances, for he would not acknowledge that anyone could be his friend."
*

The character Dick Diver, in Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, is based upon McAlmon, although the critics seem to have missed it. Diver is portrayed as a handsome and intelligent minis-ter's son who meets a neurotic girl from a very wealthy family. He marries her, and abandons his career in order to traipse around with her. Because of the emptiness of his life, he eventually be-comes an alcoholic, gets a divorce, and returns to America as a drunkard and a failure, having dissipated his life in a few short years.

While living with Bryher, McAlmon failed to do any significant work, although everyone expected great things from him. He be-came more of a dilettante, began to drink heavily, and asked her for a divorce in 1926. More than anyone else, his life typifies what has been described as "the lost generation". As such, he is one of the important figures of the Jazz Age. He wandered about Europe for the next few years, returned to America, and lived in Mexico for a while. In 1940, he found that he had contracted tuberculosis.

His last years were spent as a traveling salesman for a surgical supply house, owned by one of his brothers, that was located in El Paso, Texas. He died in 1956.

*
A less happy occasion when the quarter turned out was the funeral of R. Cheever Dunning. A poet in the classical tradition of the starving artist, or rather, the western tradition, Dunning lived in a tiny garret room, slowly dying of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Pound and other expatriates helped him as much as they could, but at last he died in his garret.

McAlmon tells the story of another casualty of the Left Bank, a lively and brilliant young Japanese of samurai stock. For some months, Toda had been seen daily at the Café Dôme, the Rotonde, and other haunts of the expatriates. Then he disappeared, and none of his friends could find out what had happened to him. Finally they located him in a tiny room, dying of starvation. His money had run out, and either he could get no more from his family, or he had exhausted his inheritance. At any rate, he was too proud to let anyone know of his dilemma, and he went to his room to await death. When he was discovered, it was too late to save him.
*
It would be a mistake to suppose that all of the expatriates were engaged in the production of serious works of art. Most of them frequented salons or cafés where no work was done or even con-templated. Such were the establishments of Harry and Caresse Crosby, and of Peggy Guggenheim.

Harry Crosby was a nephew of J. P. Morgan, and he maintained an elaborate place in Paris. The Crosbys often entertained forty or fifty people. He ended this regime by shooting himself in the temple, in order to get nearer to the sun.

Peggy Guggenheim, being a woman, did not shoot herself when she became bored. She simply changed husbands, a recipe which the envious Caresse was not slow to follow. The Guggenheim auto-biography, Out of This Century, is "must" reading for many reasons, none of them literary. In describing the aftermath of her parties at the Boulevard St. Germain flat, which were distinguished by the guests' lack of concern for their hostess, she says, "After the guests would leave, I went around, like my aunt, with a bottle of lysol. I was so afraid of getting a venereal disease."

It wasn't safe to lie down in the Guggenheim apartment. Her book also offers a delightful description of a sexual experience atop a Portuguese manure pile. The tome really has something for everybody, and we should be grateful to all purchasers of copper for having made Miss Guggenheim's charming autobiography possible.
*
With the demise of the transatlantic review, the expatriates had to read imported copies of Samuel Roth's quarterly, Two Worlds, for they no longer had a magazine of their own. This too was short-lived, for Roth was sent to prison for selling through the mails a four-hundred-year-old work on love by an Arab physician —or was it four-year-old work on a hundred ways of making love? At any rate, poor Roth, victim of innumerable prejudices, went to jail.
*
Miller's columns attracted some attention, and he began to expand them into a book. He developed a peculiar, foaming, self-propelled prose to describe his adventures in the prone, and soon had sufficient pages for two books. They eventually appeared as The Tropic of Cancer (1931) and The Tropic of Capricorn (1939).

The publisher was one Jack Kahane, formerly of Dublin. His out-fit was called the Obelisk Press, and its chief claim to fame was the publication of Frank Harris' Autobiography, four or five vol-umes in which Harris monotonously recounts in detail his seduction of innumerable Amys and Lillies. These works were sold to tourists who had advanced beyond the "feelthy postcard" stage.
Despite the success of the Harris work, Kahane was very cau-tious, and he did not publish anything else as daring. The rest of the Obelisk list was composed of innocuous volumes by "Cecil Barr" or by "Basil Carr", which were Mr. Kahane's pen-names.

Unlike bootleggers, dope peddlers, or pimps, publishers of pornog-raphy are usually shy, nervous fellows, and are as reluctant to publish books as their more respectable colleagues. Kahane vir-tually swooned from fear when he read the purple pages of Miller's books, but he could not refuse them. They made a fortune for both himself and the writer, mostly because of the Second World War.

When the Americans liberated Paris, a vast stock of the "Tropic" books was discovered, and Kahane's nephew sold them for fifty dollars apiece to the victors. Soon Miller had a nest egg of forty thousand dollars in a French bank, enabling him to retire in California like any professor emeritus of biology, which, perhaps, he is.
*
In August, 1932, Olga Rudge was present when Ford Madox Ford came to Rapallo. She recorded the following conversation, which subsequently appeared in Il Mare, Western Review, and Mood:

"POUND: What authors should a young Italian writer read if he wants to learn how to write novels? 

FORD: (Spitting vigorously) Better to think about finding himself a subject.

POUND: (Suavely, ignoring Ford's irritation) Well, suppose he has already had the intelligence to read Stendhal and Flaubert? 

FORD: A different curriculum is needed for each talent. One can learn from Flaubert and from Miss Braddon. In a certain way one can learn as much from a rotten writer as from a great one. 

POUND: Which of your books would you like to see translated into Italian and in what order? 

FORD: I don't trust translations; they would leave nothing of my best qualities. Some writers are translatable. 

POUND: What are the most important qualities in a prose writer? 

FORD: What does 'prose writer' mean? The Napoleonic Code or the Canticle of Canticles?
POUND: Let us say a novelist. 

FORD: (In agony) Oh Hell! Say philosophical grounding, a knowledge of words' roots, of the meaning of words. 

POUND: What should a young prose writer do first? 

FORD: (More and more annoyed at the inquisition) Brush his teeth. 

POUND: (Ironically calm, with serene magniloquence) In the vast critical output of the illustrious critic now being interviewed (changing tone) . . . , you have praised writer after writer with no apparent distinction (stressing the word 'apparent' nearly with rage). Is there any? 

FORD: There are authentic writers and imitation writers; there is no difference among the authentic ones. 

POUND: Stick to literary examples. 

FORD: Hudson, and Flaubert in Trois Contes. Not all of Flaubert, let us say the Trois Contes. 

POUND: You have often spoken to me of 'fine talents.' Are some finer than others? 

FORD: (Tries to evade comparison.)

POUND: Are there new writers on a level with Henry James and Hudson? 

FORD: (After qualifying Henry James' talent at some length) Yes. Hemingway, Elizabeth Roberts, Caroline Gordon, George Davis. Read 'The Opening of a Door' and 'Penhelly.'

POUND: But as artists? If James is a consummate artist, is Hudson something else? He may be called a pure prose writer, not a novelist.

FORD: The difference between weaving and drawing. 

POUND: Now for the term 'promising.' What makes you think a new writer 'promises'? 

FORD: The first sentence I read. When two words are put together they produce an overtone. The overtone is the writer's soul. When Stephen Crane wrote, 'The waves are barbarous and abrupt,' he presented simultaneously the sea and the small boat. Waves are not abrupt for a ship. 'Barbarous and abrupt'—onomatopoeic, like 'Poluphloisboion' in Homer (when the Cyclops throws the rock).  

POUND: (concluding) How many have kept their promises since the English Review was founded twenty-five years ago? 

FORD: Stephen Reynolds is dead. Ezra has become hangman's assistant to interviewers. . . . I don't know what Wyndham Lewis is doing. Norman Douglas. D. H. Lawrence is dead, but kept on 'till the end. Rebecca West. Among the successors: Virginia Woolf; Joyce in 'The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'; the Hughes who wrote 'High Wind in Jamaica,' a dramatist's novel, not a novel writer's."

From:

T H I S  D I F F I C U L T  I N D I V I D U A L , E Z R A  P O U N D

B y E U S T A C E  M U L L I N S

The 5 Trillion Cold War Hoax

 Introduction

PT Barnum said it for all time, "There's a sucker born every minute." For more than four decades, the American people have been terrorized, not by a foreign threat, but by their own government. In order for the Federal Reserve System central bankers to continue to loot the nation after the successful conclusion of the I Second World War, they had to invent a new threat. The only candidate was our erstwhile gallant ally, the Soviet Union. The central bank conspirators faced the task of continuing to mobilize the people against a terrible threat, taxing them heavily in order to save them from destruction.

Today, we are burdened by a $5 trillion national debt.

Coincidentally, that is the sum we have spent on "national defense" since 1945. The World Order billionaires launched a complex, long-term plan to demonize Soviet Russia. Overnight, they would undergo a sea change, from the darlings of the American political Establishment to a dangerous and possibly overwhelming enemy. la my researches of more than fifty years, I finally located the smoking gun which exposed this conspiracy, a little known article in the August 1977 issue of American Heritage magazine, "Who Started the Cold War?" by historian Charles L. Mee Jr., editor of Horizon magazine, and author of one of the first cold war books, Meeting at Potsdam.

I. "SCARE THE HELL OUT QF THE COUNTRY" In this article, Mee writes that on Feb. 27, 1947, "President Truman met with Congressional leaders in the White House.

Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson was present at the meeting, and Truman had him tell the Congressmen what was at stake. Acheson spoke for ten minutes, informing the legislators that nothing less than the survival of the whole of Western civilization was in the balance at that moment; he worked in references to ancient Athens, Rome, and the course of  Western civilization and freedom since those times. The Congressmen were silent for a few moments, and then, at last.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a prominent Republican who had come to support an active foreign policy, spoke up. All this might be true, Vandenberg said, but, if the President wishes to sell his program to the American people, he would have to 'scare hell out of the country'. It was at that moment that the Cold War began in earnest for the United States." This is one of the most revealing statements in American history. This is the smoking gun which proves that the federal government used a terror campaign to frighten the American people into supporting four decades of Cold War spending on armaments. The initial campaign was the "atom bomb scare", which raged for some years; it finally lost its effectiveness, and was replaced by the ogre, based solely on falsified and invented CIA statistics, that Soviet Russia was the most terrifying military power, with the fastest growing economy, in the world.

These two CIA claims were mutually exclusive; no nation could have the world's greatest military machine and at the same time support the world's fastest growing economy, but the statisticians successfully sold this scare story for years.

II. CHURCHILL LAUNCHES COLD WAR

The Cold War, the Hegelian invention of Soviet Russia and the United States at each other's throats, the "free world" vs. the "slave empire", Capitalism vs. Communism, was the final triumph of dialectical materialism, also invented by the German philosopher, Hegel. He laid down the dictum that to rule the world, you create a problem; you find an antidote to that problem; and you throw the two conflicting theses against each other, to result in a consensus or resolution. This diabolical and cynical formula reached its apogee in the Cold War. Hopefully, we will not see another such travesty of history.

Hard on the conclusion of the Second World War, the Colossus of the United States stood astride the entire world. With the world's largest economy, never touched by a single bomb or artillery shell throughout the war, the largest army, and a proud and victorious people, it was incredible that the United States could for a moment seriously regard the war-devastated Soviet Union as a threat. Stalin lost forty million people during the war; his nation was in rains. He desperately needed a breathing space in which to recover. Miraculously, the World Order invention of the Cold War came to his rescue. None other than Stalin's co-conspirator, Winston Churchill, was chosen to launch this new "problem".. Now unemployed, Churchill was desperate to get back into the limelight. At the invitation of President Truman, Churchill was brought to the United States to deliver a speech at little Fulton College, in Truman's home state of Missouri.

On March 5, 1946, at Fulton, Churchill made his famous "Iron Curtain" speech. He warned that an "Iron Curtain" had descended upon Europe, the Communist enslavement of the Eastern European countries. He failed to mention that he and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had joined at Yalta to deliver Eastern Europe to Stalin, with Alger Hiss, the originator of the plan, beaming in the background. Not a single journalist, anywhere in the world, mentioned Churchill's overwhelming personal complicity in creating and maintaining the dire situation which he now publicly deplored.

During the four decades of the Cold War, Hollywood, which never failed to bolster the goals of the Cold War architects, reserved its bitter scorn for "red-blooded Americans" who stood for flag and country. While forbearing from ever presenting lifelong Communists in a deprecating way, Hollywood made films deriding "anti-Communists" as flag-waving American Legion boobs, a stance which it continues to this day. If any one of the eggheads and their Hollywood lackeys were to be called a "patriot", they would be overcome with shame.

VIII. A PHONY WAR

During most of its history, the Cold War was a propaganda war, in which the opponents hurled invectives at each other.

However, the military-industrial complex cannot make billions of dollars from propaganda; there had to be occasions of real shooting. We endured the Korean War and the Vietnam War, with hundreds of thousands of casualties, while Soviet Russia did not lose a man in either war. Both Russia and the United States were careful to have the scenes of battle take place thousands of miles from their own lands, in poverty-stricken countries such as Korea and Vietnam. We had the Cuban missile crisis, a soap opera in which the media convinced Americans that they had been on the brink of atomic destruction, being saved just before the bombs were launched by the "incredible diplomatic skills" of John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev, neither of whom before or after this crisis had ever shown the slightest skill at diplomacy. The Berlin Wall was built, to prevent all of its population from fleeing the desolation of Communist East Germany. The eggheads greeted the Berlin Wall with praise. President John F. Kennedy made a special trip to Germany to put his seal of approval on the Berlin Wall, and to reassure the Communists that the United States would not remove it. And we never did. It was the Germans themselves, driven beyond endurance, who ripped it down, much to the consternation of our eggheads in Washington.

(...)

XIII. TECHNIQUES OF THE COLD WAR

The government propaganda techniques by which the American people were terrorized for some forty years began with the dire threat of nuclear annihilation. School children went through daily drills of falling to the floor in terror of the atomic bomb which would destroy their school. Their parents built backyard "bomb shelters" stocked with food and water.

Because "scientific studies" showed that the radiation peril would last for at least five hundred years, the survivors apparently expected to spend that much time in their shelters.

Nationwide philosophical debates ensued as to whether the survivors, huddled in their shelters after the blast, should open the door to neighbors or to "minorities" who had neglected to build bomb shelters, or whether they should shoot those who battered down the doors to get food. Hollywood loyally produced many movies about the coming atomic debacle, such as Dr. Strangelove, in which insane fascists were determined to use the bomb to destroy the civilized world; War Games, in which a mad computer tried to trick the United States and Russia into destroying each other; and a steady stream of films depicting "Bette Davises" as little old librarians who were determined that students should be allowed to read the works of Karl Marx.

XIV. THE CIA RIDES TO THE RESCUE

After years of exposure to the imminent threat of being vaporized in an atomic blast, Americans began to ignore the threat; many of them bulldozed their bomb shelters into swimming pools. It was obvious to our masters that new techniques of terror had to be developed. The Central Intelligence Agency now became the vehicle of mass terrorism.

It became known as "the Company" under the leadership of stock promoter Bill Casey. He became highly skilled at peddling alarming statistics about the threat of Communism to Congress, who hastily voted vast increases in the "defense" budget. The oligarchs abandoned the now worn out doctrine of nuclear annihilation. There would be no need to spend two-hundred-and-fifty-billion dollars a year on tanks, guns and airplanes if they were all to be vaporized by a single bomb. The defense budget had been brought from a low of $13 billion in 1947 to a continuous budget in the hundreds of billions. With its top secret budget of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, never to be examined by anyone, the CIA sent its own James Bonds all over the world usually to attack and overthrow "anti-Communist" governments and "dictators" such as Ferdinand Marcos, who had been indiscreet in their denunciations of Communism. The CIA hired hundreds of journalists to write books and articles promoting its version of the Cold War, always at the highest prevailing rates.

XV. EFFECTS OF THE COLD WAR

The effect on both Russia and the United States of the Cold War conspirators has been devastating. Russia's economy is in a state of collapse, with no improvement in sight. The United States has been looted; its infrastructure, its roads, bridges and other assets need many billions in immediate repair. We have the $5 trillion Cold War debt; but the most destructive effect on our nation is the Cold War's effect on our morality.

The years of being terrorized by the atomic threat had a very destructive effect on morality. If we were to be vaporized at any time, it seemed worthwhile to seize the moment, to take pleasure, money and any other rewards while they were available, without (bought for the consequences, since there would be no consequences. We have now endured the effects of this poisonous doctrine for several generations.

The effect of the CIA propaganda lies about the "great Soviet Union" which might take over the world at any moment has been equally destructive. When conservative economist Paul Craig Roberts landed in Moscow during the height of the CIA propaganda campaign, he was stunned to find that Soviet Russia had "a Third World economy". I had proved in my writings that the United States taxpayer had been subsidizing the Soviet Union since 1917. In fact, Americans have been living a lie for four decades, the lie that we were in dire peril from "the Communist threat". This lie has been demoralizing; it has placed us on the brink of bankruptcy; and it poses the challenge to us: When are we going to get rid of our Cold War conspirators? They must pay the price for the destruction they have wrought on our nation. We must drive them out of every office; bring them to trial for their high treason; and restore the Republic which our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us. It is this task not sad jokes about "balancing the budget" which will determine whether this nation will survive to the twenty-first century.

Eustace Mullins