Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935-45

M. Feldman

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137345516
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Ezra Pound was an influential propagandist for British, Italian and ultimately German fascist movements. Using long-neglected manuscripts and cutting-edge approaches to fascism as a 'political religion', Feldman argues that Pound's case offers a revealing case study of a modernist author turned propagator of the 'fascist faith'.

Part I

Pound’s Fascist Conversion

1

Introduction

Abstract: This chapter sets out the main themes, archival materials and socio-political context bearing upon Ezra Pound’s embrace of fascist ideology in the mid-1930s. It also identifies some of the historical context underpinning Pound’s propaganda for fascism in Britain, Italy and, ultimately, Nazi Germany, while also providing an overview of the ‘new historicist’ methodology to be pursued across Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45.

Feldman, Matthew. Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516.

Any judgment of MUSSOLINI will be in a measure an act of faith, it will depend on what you believe the man means, what you believe that he wants to accomplish.

I don’t believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for construction. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place.

–Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935)

That is what the jew is THERE to produce, war and more war between goyim/

UNTIL

UNTIL oh UNTIL all the goyim simultaneously wake up to the cause of the trouble and determine to wipe out the root cause of war, namely YIDDERY [....] Why not have the OPEN war against the war-causers before annihilating all other races; or reducing ALL other races to slaves, and the jew’s slaves Roosevelt and Churchill are so obligingly reducing the British and Americans to compulsory slaughter, or compulsory labour; or compulsorily having their houses destroyed in reprisals ...

Pound, “Corpses of Course”, 26 January 1945¹

This short study examines the changing character of Ezra Pound’s Anglophone fascist propaganda between 1935 and 1945. The expression of Pound’s political faith during these years, bookended by the introductory epigraphs above, witnessed a slide in emphasis from the expression of fascism as “construction” and spiritual regeneration in the 1930s to conspiratorial anti-Semitism and pro-Axis fanaticism by the end of World War II. As this suggests, the violent march of fascist movements in these years provides a crucial trajectory for Pound’s extensive propaganda efforts. Yet that said, even before embracing fascist ideology, like so many millions of others in the wake of World War I, Pound’s views were radicalized by momentous international events in Europe. Accordingly, this introduction sets out an all-too-often neglected contextualization of Pound’s voluminous propaganda over this decade. Bringing a range of primary and secondary sources into dialogue with his turn toward fascism (used here with a small ‘f’ to denote the generic ideology), implied throughout is that, given the seductions of interwar fascist ‘belief’, even the most idiosyncratic poet could become a mainstream propagandist for the revolutionary political faith of fascism.

Long recognized as a quintessential modernist and composer of some of the twentieth century’s most admired verse, during these years Pound nonetheless turned his literary talents to composing propaganda for, in particular, the British Union of Fascists; the Partito Nazionale Fascista; and ultimately, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei(hereafter BUF, PNF and NSDAP, respectively). Since then, the very unlikelihood of such a turn of events may be one explanation why scholars and critics have but scratched the surface of Pound’s activism for European fascist movements. In short, the time has come to empirically drill down into Pound’s archives and historical environment deeper than heretofore. In revealing a range of previously overlooked materials, this book proposes a new view of Pound – new both to general readers and to specialists in ‘Pound studies’ alike – as a significant propaganda producer and strategist for fascist movements between summer 1935 and his arrest for treason in spring 1945. Put another way, the arc of Pound’s propaganda descended from free and self-subsidized publicism in the mid-1930s, endorsing fascism in broadly aesthetic and economic terms, to earning his living by broadcasting pro-Nazi anti-Semitism by the final war years – exemplified by the rhetoric from 26 January 1945 above, written only a day before the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Simply put: what happened?

For something seismic did indeed take place in Pound’s worldview. This is indicated by recently released British government papers on Pound’s propaganda: two files compiled by MI-5 released to The National Archives in November 2002, covering fully 54 years and concluding only with obituaries clipped in the wake of Pound’s 1972 death. At the beginning of the file in December 1918, MI-5 stated that “there is no ground to regard the above with suspicion, and his sentiments are pro-ally.” Yet by the mid-1930s, the British secret service were systematically opening Pound’s mail to Britain; most notably, to Carlo Camagna, editor of the London-based British-Italian Bulletin. His intelligence file reported that, following the outbreak of World War II and the interning of Britain’s leading fascists from 22 May 1940 following the interrogation of another ideologue to be encountered below, Alexander Raven Thomson, he was named a principal supplier of information to the BUF from abroad.² By the next year, wartime British listening stations were transcribing scores of Pound’s broadcasts on behalf of Fascist Italy, recording titles like “Independence Day for Europe” and “The Fascist State.”³ A separate War Office file then commences with Pound’s US indictment for treason in 1943, “based on his vicious Anti-American broadcasts from ROME which began in 1940 [....] This headquarters will be notified at once should POUND be taken into custody.” As the ensuing flurry of military communiqués make clear, Pound was interned near Pisa, in the British controlled zone, between early May and late November 1945 – before being sent to Washington D.C. for trial, a successful insanity hearing and, subsequently, more than a dozen years’ institutionalization at St. Elizabeth’s asylum.⁴

These sizeable British deposits regarding what military authorities were already describing as the ‘Pound Case’ in 1945 all merit closer scrutiny. In the interests of concision – heavily bearing upon this study throughout – however, only a two-page document from the British archives demands further quotation at the outset. Shortly following his arrest and extensive interrogation by hot-on-the-trail FBI agent Frank Lawrence Amprim, Pound made the following declaration on V-E Day, 8 May 1945:

I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day’s work for a living.

Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a Saint, and wanted nothing for himself. I think that he was fooled into anti-Semitism and it ruined him. That was his mistake. When you see the “mess” that Italy gets into by “bumping off” Mussolini, you will see why someone could believe in some of his efforts.⁵

Similarly revealed in a surprising newspaper interview given on the same day, Pound compared Hitler with Joan of Arc, declaring: “Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.”⁶ This sacralized view of the Axis leaders, so in keeping with approaches to fascism as a political religion, had been a staple of Pound’s propaganda since his only meeting with Mussolini a dozen years earlier. More to the point, as international relations plummeted in the later 1930s and into the war-torn 1940s in Europe, Pound’s commitment to the Axis cause only continued to instensify – with his undeviating defense of the ‘infallible’ Mussolini, and later Hitler, as will be shown, best explicable in terms of fascism’s deliberately cultivated ‘secular faith’. Generally speaking, of course, things can always turn out differently then they actually did; historical actors have an agency, and events a contingency, which belies some of the more assured retrospective accounts of history. Thus when drilling down deeply into Pound’s motives and circumstances, it is important to remember that his scope for action was limited by the outbreak of World War II, insofar as he was wholly sutured to Mussolini and the Fascist regime by then. In short, Pound’s devotion to what he understood to be the political faith of fascism meant that his personal fate was inextricably bound up with the Axis.

Considering his V-E day statements and countless other examples from the preceding decade, the guiding explanation of Pound’s commitment pursued here – reinforced by propaganda texts, broadcasts, payments, correspondence and position papers – offers an overlooked motivation for his remarkably extensive collaboration with fascism: belief. He took fascist ideology seriously, and in return was taken seriously by leading activists in several far-right movements. Providing a key historical backdrop, moreover, Pound demonstrably marched in lockstep with key points of Italian Fascist policy – from Benito Mussolini’s 1932 decennial celebrations to the final defeat of the Axis. In revisiting this misjudged case of a leading modernist propagating the ‘political faith’ of fascist ideology, it will be argued here that, although eccentric (as was always his wont), Pound’s belief in fascist ideology was no mere aberration or fall into madness. Pound’s proselytizing was both sincere and freely undertaken; it was, equally, historically consequential and explicable theoretically. With respect to the latter, in adopting the lens of ‘political religion’ theory, furthermore, Pound’s ideological devotion to fascism will be shown to be in close keeping with self-understandings of fascist pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Pounds Fascist Conversion
• Part II  Pound at War
• Bibliographical Note
• Index