“Ezra Pound Speaking” RADIO SPEECHES OF WORLD WAR II Edited by Leonard W. Doob CONTRIBUTIONS IN AMERICAN STUDIES, NUMBER 37 GREENWOOD PRESS WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT – LONDON, ENGLAND Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pound, Ezra Loomis, 1885-1972. Copyright © 1978 by the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-91288 ISBN: 0-313-20057-2 ISSN: 0084-9227 First published in 1978 Greenwood Press, Inc. 51 Riverside Avenue, Westport, Connecticut 06880 Printed in the United States of America Contents: Series Foreword Introduction Part I: 110 FCC Recorded Scripts: 1. Last Ditch of Democracy 2. Books and Music 3. The Golden Wedding 4. This War on Youth—On a Generation 5. Those Parentheses 6. On Resuming 7. 30 Years or a Hundred 8. The Stage in America 9. Canto 46 10. Sale and Manufacture of War 11. Power 12. America Was Intentions 13. Napoleon, Etc. 14. Why Pick on the Jew? 15. Gold: England 16. England 17. And the Time Lag 18. But How? 19. But How? Second Item 20. McArthur 21. The Pattern 22. Destruction 23. Indecision 24. Comic Relief 25. Question of Motive 26. Clarification 27. To Social Creditors 28. Aberration 29. MacLeish 30. Blast 31. Opportunity Recognized 32. Non-Jew 33. Universality 34. The Duration 35. The Precarious 36. A French Accent 37. To Be Late (Essere in ritardo) 38. Free Speech in Albion (Alias England) 39. With Phantoms 40. E.E. Cummings Examined 41. Brain Trust 42. As a Beginning 43. Brain Trust: Second Spasm 44. As to Pathology and Psychoses 45. The Keys of Heaven 46. The British Imperium 47. Violence 48. The Fallen Gentleman (II signor decaduto) 49. That Interval of Time 50. The Giftie 51. Disbursement of Wisdom 52. Continuity 53. How Come 54. Freedumb Forum 55. Darkness 56. Perfect Phrasing 57. July 16th, an Anniversary 58. Superstition 59. Axis Propaganda 60. More Homely 61. That Illusion 62. Serviti 63. Complexity 64. Toward Veracity 65. Pots to Fracture 66. Anglophilia 67. To Explain 68. More Names 69. Pogrom 70. To Recapitulate 71. Financial Defeat: U.S. 72. Usurocracy 73. Lyric Tenors 74. Fetish 75. Valentine 76. J.G. Blaine 77. Canute 78. Zion 79. Conscience 80. On Retiring 81. On the Nature of Treachery 82. Romance 83. Philosemite 84. Lord Bleeder 85. Sumner Welles 86. Economic Aggression 87. Administration 88. Economic Oppression 89. In the Woodshed 90. Soberly 91. [Title Unknown] 92. And Back of the Woodshed 93. Suprise 94. Big Jew 95. Debt 96. [Therapy] 97. To the Memory 98. [Obsequies] 99. War Aims 100. [On Brains or Medulla] 101. Stalin 102. Materialism 103. Communist Millionaires 104. Coloring 105. [Title Unknown] 106. Credit: Legality 107. Audacia/Audacity 108. Objection (Protesta) 109. Civilization 110. Lost or Stolen (Perduto orubato) Part II: 10 Miscellaneous Scripts: 111. Homesteads 112. March Arrivals 113. America Was Promises 114. Aristotle and Adams 115. To Consolidate 116. To Albion 117. Two Pictures 118. Quisling 119. Philology 120. Church Peril Appendix 1. The Content Analysis: Methodology Appendix 2. Quantitative Analysis Appendix 3. Pound’s Critics Appendix 4. Style and Techniques Bibliography Glossary and Index to Names Series Foreword The best reason for publishing Ezra Pound’s Italian broadcasts may be the simplest. Thousands of people have heard about them, scores have been affected by them, yet but a handful has ever heard or read them. Here they are. There are other compelling reasons, the first having to do with the magnitude of their author. No other American—and only a few individuals throughout the world—has left such a strong mark on so many aspects of the twentieth century: from poetry to economics, from theater to philosophy, from politics to pedagogy, from Provençal to Chinese. If Pound was not always totally accepted, at least he was unavoidably there. Those traits of mind and character that made Pound so inescapable are not only evident in the broadcasts but also present in ways that make them more fully understandable. Here is that same fearless plunge toward the heart of the matter—often heedless of consistencies—that marked his study of ancient and exotic languages and cultures. Here is that same urge to simplify and instruct that marked his unorthodox textbooks: ABC of Economics, ABC of Reading and the rest. Here is that flair for dramatic hyperbole which peppered the Cantos and produced such deliberately shocking titles as Jefferson and/or Mussolini. The broadcasts do not always show these traits at their best, but their blatant presence makes them useful clues in putting together the puzzle of that powerful enigma at their center. Even if the shadow of Ezra Pound did not so broadly color this century, these broadcasts might still command a clinical respect for the way in which they interrelate so vitally with the rise of fascism in Europe and the accompanying extremes of feelings, with the cause and conduct of World War II as viewed from this special place by this very special commentator. To the historians who have counted this an almost anti-ideological war, the broad casts offer considerable counterpoint. Furthermore, they are the starting point for understanding two major cultural events of the postwar years: the trial of Ezra Pound and the literary prize controversies. The Bollingen Prize debate—by itself the politico-literary cause célèbre of the generation—while once totally preoccupying has to this day refused to lie at rest. Even this young Greenwood Press series, begun twenty-five years after the fact, offers two fresh and extensive treatments of the issue. Such insistent unrest shows clearly the need for this essential evidence now at hand. The broadcasts do not show Pound at his best. War, bigotry, and totalitarianism are not sunny subjects. Yet giant figures need their full dimensions, and unpleasant subjects can and should be studied for the best of reasons. How indeed are we to lessen our chances for future encounters with shrinking horizons if we do not learn from episodes so recent, so strongly cast, and so richly charted? We applaud, then, the respect for a complete historic record which has allowed the Pound Literary Trustees to overcome an understandable reluctance toward seeing these scripts in print. We applaud this same impulse which has motivated the patience and stamina of Leonard Doob. There are, and there will always be, more motives behind an act like this than one can chronicle. From our point of view, however, this work provides a singular and extensive collection of data for the pursuit of that most bewildering of cultural equations: the balance between the creative force, the individual personality, and the social context. Seen in this light, Ezra Pound’s texts become a “Contribution in American Studies” at a profound and essential level. ROBERT H. WALKER February 1975 INTRODUCTION The title of this book is the signature Ezra Pound almost always used at the start and sometimes at the end of each broadcast from Radio Rome in World War II. Pound himself had proposed to publish “300 Radio Speeches,” containing also the texts of his “Money Pamphlets,” newspaper articles published in Italian, and his translations from the Chinese: Ta Hio (The Great Digest) and Chung Yung (The Unwobbling Pivot). Pound started to write for radio toward the end of 1940. The first scripts to be accepted were read in English by regular speakers of Radio Rome. In January 1941 he was able to record his own speeches, which were broadcast, on an average, twice a week. He wrote the texts at his home in Rapallo and on occasion in Rome where he traveled to record on discs a batch of 10 to 20 speeches. He wanted the discs to be transmitted in a particular order, but it is apparent from the discrepancies between his numbering system and the dates on which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recorded the speeches that the Italian officials did not always follow his plan, although in general the deviation was not great. He gathered news and information from Italian newspapers and whatever foreign papers he managed to obtain; from Italian broadcasts and any foreign station (especially the BBC) he could hear on his own radio; from conversations with friends, officials, and travelers; from letters of friends in America and other countries; and from his own library, which included back numbers of periodicals. He envied the BBC’s supply of news and feature materials, since he himself had “not one disc” (July 25, 1943). After the Fascist government fell in July 1943, Pound left Rome and eventually submitted scripts and ideas to Mussolini’s Republic of Saló. No evidence exists to indicate that any of this material was ever broadcast to America in Pound’s name from Radio Milan while that station remained under the regime’s control. The present collection consists of original manuscripts Pound prepared to read on Rome radio, divided into two parts: Part 1 includes all of the available manuscripts (105) for the broadcasts recorded by the FCC: October 2, 1941, to December 7, 1941; January 29, 1942, to July 26, 1942; February 18, 1943, to July 25, 1943. These are the speeches that have been quoted by Pound’s critics, and they include those selected by American authorities who sought to press the charge of treason against him. The monitoring unit of the FCC, called the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, recorded every broadcast from Radio Rome, included among which were Pound’s speeches. There are egregious errors and omissions in these FCC transcripts because recording equipment in those days was crude, because atmospheric conditions interfered with the monitoring, and because, I assume, the transcribers sometimes did not recognize Pound’s references.