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Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45

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Ezra Pound's Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 Also by Matthew Feldman Fascism: Critical Concepts, 5 Vols., eds. Roger Griffin with Matthew Feldman (2004) Beckett’s Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’ (2006; revised paperback edition 2008) Beckett’s Literary Legacies, eds. Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon (2007) A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman (2008) ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe, eds. Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda, with Tudor Georgescu (2008) The International Reception of Samuel Beckett, eds. Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman (2009) Beckett and Death, eds. Steve Barfield, Matthew Feldman and Philip Tew (2009) Beckett and Phenomenology, eds. Ulrika Maude and Matthew Feldman (2009) Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, eds. Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman, Matthijs Engelberts and Dirk van Hulle (2010) Beckett/Philosophy, eds. Matthew Feldman and Karim Mamdani (2012) Modernism, Christianity and the Apocalypse, eds., Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman, with David Addyman (in press) Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, 1922–1962, eds. Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, with Henry Mead (in press) Doublespeak: The Rhetoric and Framing of the Far-Right since 1945, eds. Matthew Feldman and Paul Jackson (in press) DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 Matthew Feldman Reader in Contemporary History and Co-Director of the Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and Post-fascist Studies, Teesside University DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 © Matthew Feldman 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-34550-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–137–34551–6 PDF ISBN: 978–1–349–46653–5 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. www.palgrave.com/pivot doi: 10.1057/9781137345516 For Claire lovingly there, at each turn DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 Contents List of Illustrations vii Preface viii Acknowledgements xvii Part I Pound’s Fascist Conversion 1 Introduction 2 2 Approaching Pound’s Fascism: Development of an Ideologue 9 3 Unpaid Propaganda ‘for a Decent Europe’, 1935–40 34 Part II Pound at War 4 Reappraising the ‘Pound Case’, 1940–45 65 5 Pound’s Radio Propaganda: Revisiting the Critical Literature, 1940–43 80 5.1 The content of Pound’s broadcast scripts 82 5.2 The extent of Pound’s broadcasting 90 5.3 Dating of Pound’s broadcasts 100 6 Pound’s Propaganda Themes and Strategies, 1940–43 114 7 Conclusion: The Salò Republic, 1943–45 143 Bibliographical Note 166 Abbreviations 169 Index 171 vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 List of Illustrations 1 Color map of Abyssinia, cited in Pound’s mid-1930s correspondence. Reproduced from the British-Italian Bulletin Christmas Special insert for the London-based Italian newspaper L’ It a l i a No s t r a , 20 December 1935 38 2 ‘The Ten Points of the British Union’, reproduced from page 15 of the BUF’s 19 August 1939 edition of Action, referred to in Pound’s subsequent writings and broadcasts 57 3 and 4 Two-page briefing document drafted by the Anglophone division of Radio Rome for the purposes of propaganda strategy, c. mid-1941 124–125 5 Letter from Georg von Lillienfeld of Der Bevollmächtigte Des Grossdeutschen Reiches Bei Italienischen Regierung on 2 January 1944, inviting Pound to collaborate on radio propaganda in Nazi Germany 149 DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 vii Preface It is high time to start taking Ezra Pound’s fascism seri- ously. In doing so, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 is driven by dual, mutually reinforcing, contentions. In turn, these are intended to appeal to two distinct scholarly constituencies, while also raising some considerations for a third. Prior to acknowledging this book’s substantial intellectual debts – followed by two parts of three and four chapters, covering the periods 1935–40 and 1940–45, respectively – a foretaste of the themes and approach to follow is provided here. Most importantly, in challenging received opinion in several academic subjects, this preface briefly introduces a number of more general miscon- ceptions addressed in this study: the fallacy of reading modernism as antithetical to fascism; of refusing to treat fascist ideology as a genuinely seductive attempt to estab- lish a revolutionary ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism in modern Europe; and derivatively, of failing to account for the commitment of intellectuals from very dif- ferent backgrounds to this new ‘political religion’. Many of these assumptions are projected onto the remarkable case study personified by Pound – whose ‘case’ remains often discussed, yet still largely misunderstood. Coloring in Pound’s turn to fascist activism, accordingly, is empirically undertaken via an interpretative lens memorably charac- terized as “thick description” by the sociologist Clifford Geertz: “the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them.”1 viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 Preface ix Given this close focus upon Pound and his often-neglected ideological context, the methodological heavy lifting is taken up presently, rather than consistently invoked across a text much more concerned with, at last, setting the historical record straight. Given the wealth of previously neglected materials under review, this book’s natural constituency is ‘Pound studies’, a now sizeable sub-discipline of ‘modernist studies’. For too long, Pound’s fascist activism has simply been dismissed as either mad or bad, the product of political naiveté or misplaced economic ide- alism. Some or all of these factors may apply but, in short, this misses the wood for the trees. All too often lacking in supporting evidence, this tra- dition will be directly countered by the archivally driven view advanced here: Pound was a committed and significant English-language strategist and producer of fascist propaganda before, and during, Europe’s most destructive war. Methodologically speaking, part of the ‘new historicist’ turn in modernist studies, this assertion derives from an insistence upon, above all, theorizing from a position of empirical accuracy. Returning to the archives in order to narrow the horizon of literary interpretation, this approach also places heavy stress upon authorial presence and historical contextualization. As a consequence, ‘new historicist’ findings are often at odds with overly “presentist” readings of modernism.2 Would that all canonical modernists were multicultural, or gay-friendly and politically (if there must be a politics) moderate; but that was not how it was back then. Correspondingly, the self-serving conceit that modernism was somehow inured from ideological extremism leaves too many pivotal figures out of the account – from the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun on the revolutionary right to the Russian painter Alexander Rodchenko on the revolutionary left, amongst countless others – to justifiably conceive modernism in purely esthetic terms. Far closer to the mark, Pound’s most recent biographer, Alec Marsh, has aptly intuited that, in and of itself, “Fascism is a modernist politics.”3 Constructing canons is one thing, understandably titling toward contemporary concerns, but care toward the shifting values of the time – even the ugly ones – remains vital as well. Moving from apoliticism in the 1920s to revolutionary politics in 1930s, Pound’s trajectory was shared by literally millions in interwar Europe. Nor were artists exempted from this ideological draft. Insofar as this reflects back on Pound’s contemporaneous and subsequent poetry, there is merit in Lauber’s charge, to some extent surely, that Pound’s ongoing sequence, The Cantos, turned into a “Fascist epic” during these DOI: 10.1057/9781137345516 x Preface years. While close reading of Pound’s poetry is admittedly secondary over ensuing pages, it bears noting that these neglected insights were also raised, now more than three decades ago, by a leading Poundian scholar named Massimo Bacigalupo, who described The Cantos as “among other things, the sacred poem of the Nazi-Fascist millennium, which merci- fully never
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