The Writer as Political Crazy

When Stalin got through purging his fellow Communists in the Thirties, a Russian once said to me, it was noticed in Moscow that no one left in the Politburo was taller than the boss. Djilas, now a heretic but once an important Yugoslav Communist, reports in his memoirs of the Kremlin scene that at the all-night banquets that were a regular feature of the jolly life under Stalin, death warrants were gaily passed around the table and that members of the in-group could fill in any name they liked. By the time he died, in fact, Stalin had personally signed at least 50,000 death warrants. But Stalin was a madman who killed more Communists than Hitler ever did and helped bring on the 1939--1945 war by sicking Hitler on France and England. This, as another Russian once said to me in Russia, was "a piece of folly for which we paid" with 30,000,000 lives. Hitler, of course, was an even greater madman in public than he was in private, where it was his pleasure to have women urinate and defecate on him. He destroyed millions of lives, brought Europe down in flames--and by his utter lack of political restraint or foresight assured Communist control over almost half of Germany and all of eastern Europe. Politicians, statesmen, leaders of helpless masses of people can of course be notoriously cruel, outstanding nuts, vicious in the name of race or class beyond anything in the usual booby hatch. And you don't have to believe that this is the final conflict, as Communists do, or in the final solution, as Nazis did (and no doubt still do), to note that even in our noble democracy, President Kennedy, who was notoriously anxious about his machismo, was stung by that crude but not stupid psychologist Khrushchev, after their famous confrontation in Vienna in 1961, into more militancy than he had ever intended. Johnson hysterically described himself as "the chief of the free world" and went so mad on an unwinnable war in Vietnam that he destroyed his Presidency and his own passion for racial accommodation in this country. Nixon's closest aides have said that he became angry when negotiations with the North Vietnamese broke down at the end of 1972. That anger was amazingly costly to a great many B-52 crews and innocent residents of Hanoi.

Still, politicians are notoriously unbelieved and mistrusted--especially by those who disagree with them. And we live in an age of such political fanaticism, cruelty, unceasing violence, mass destruction and we are so helplessly bombarded by propaganda and extremism from every side that politics, classically the domain of the common good, the public realm, the general welfare, has become as frightening to many people as dictators, authoritarians and zealots themselves.

But we expect more, don't we, from writers and "intellectuals"?

• • •

One day in 1942--that was several wars ago--I wandered into a CBS studio to see a friend who monitored foreign broadcasts and found him staring open-mouthed at a transcript he had just made. "You've always praised Ezra Pound to me as a master of language," he said bitterly. "Will you kindly put your eyes on this?" The transcript was of Pound's twice-weekly broadcasts to America on the Italian Fascist radio, which my friend had started taking down the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

The first thing I saw was a reference to Mrs. Roosevelt's consorting with "niggers." More than 30 years later I remember that I felt amazement more than anything else as I read these pronouncements by one of the original poets and master critics of the 20th Century, the writer most responsible for making "modernism" in literature part of our lives:

Things often do look simple to me. Roosevelt is more in the hands of the Jews than Wilson was in 1919. (December 7, 1941)

Politically and economically the U. S. has had economic and political syphilis for the past 80 years, ever since 1862. And England has had economic syphilis for 240 years. . . . (February 3, 1942)

That any Jew in the White House should send American kids to die for the private interests of the scum of the English earth . . . and the still lower dregs of the Levantine. . . . (February 19, 1942)

What I'm getting at with all this. What am I getting at? Which? What? What? Which? (February 26, 1942)

My job, as I see it, is to save what's left of America and to help keep up some sort of civilization somewhere or other.

Ezra Pound speaking from Europe for the American heritage.

F. D. R. is below the biological level at which the concept of honor enters the mind. (March 26, 1942)

It becomes increasingly difficult to discuss American affairs except on a racial basis.

Don't start a pogrom--an old-style killing of small Jews. That system is no good whatever. Of course, if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom up at the top, there might be something to say for it. But on the whole, legal measures are preferable. The 60 kikes who started this war might be sent to St. Helena as a measure of world prophylaxis, and some hyperkikes or non-Jewish kikes along with them. (April 30, 1942)

Pound died in Italy at the end of 1972. The case of Ezra Pound, as English professors called it in collections of documents set up for freshmen to study, would seem to have been over for some time. And right now, the left-wing writer as political nut is certainly sitting more heavily on our minds than Ezra Pound. Just recently, for example, Jean Genet said in an interview: "What makes me feel so very close to [blacks] is the hatred they bear for the white world; a hatred comparable to my own for the world that scorned me because I was a bastard, with no father and no mother, a creature . . . rejected just as they are today because they are black. . . .

"My rebellion and my scorn took for their boundaries the boundaries of the French Empire. Now it extends to the entire white empire and to its mainstay, which is the U. S. A. . . . I rejoiced to see France attacked and invaded by the Germans. It pleased me to see the country that had oppressed me so oppressed in its turn. . . . Despised by Frenchmen, I felt and I still feel a bond to all that they regard as despicable. . . . All my life, all my work, is in fact a settling of scores with white society. I am always on the side of the strongest."

But the case of Ezra Pound will not disappear from the minds of those who know what a good poet and marvelous critic he was. It illustrates as no other writers' cases do in our time--not even those of the writers who shared his Fascist views, like the great French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, or the master writers who were equally reactionary, like T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats--what madness, obscenity and, above all, self-destruction total intemperance on the subject of politics can visit on an extraordinary writer.

Everybody knows that Pound was indicted for treason by the U. S. Government, was kept in a steel cage in an American military prison near Pisa and, after being flown back to the United States, was judged by Government psychiatrists mentally unfit to stand trial, and that he spent 12 years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane, in Washington, D. C. In 1958 (thanks mostly to Robert Frost's influence with the Eisenhower Administration), Pound's indictment for treason was dismissed. He returned to Italy, where (out of step with the mob, as usual) he gave the Fascist salute as he disembarked. In his last years, Pound subsided into what was, for him, the most amazing act. He refused to talk at all.

Pound is still an issue, as is shown by the recent controversy over the refusal by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to grant him the prize conferred by its own Emerson-Thoreau committee. That is because his poetry will always be important and yet was as damaged by his intellectual violence as his life was. No one has ever claimed that Pound's scurrilous, vituperative but more often incoherent broadcasts to his native country influenced, or could have influenced, to acts of treason any American citizen who was not already a money crank and obsessive hater of (continued on page 136)Writer as Political Crazy(continued from page 108) Jews like himself. Pound's most notable disciples in this country were the fifth-rate demagog John Kasper and--hilariously--David R. Wang, Dartmouth 1955, who described himself as "the only Chinese poet of record who devotes himself to the cause of white supremacy." Pound's broadcasts were (understandably) so unintelligible to the Fascists themselves that some Italian radio officials suspected he was an American agent relaying information in code!

No matter how much one regrets Pound the unsuccessful, hideous, loony political broadcaster, it is impossible to forget him entirely in favor of the Pound who wrote some of the most beautiful modern English poems, Pound the perfect friend and sponsor of other writers, who put Eliot's The Waste Land into shape, the Pound who was among the first to recognize Robert Frost, who influenced even an older poet like Yeats, who was a passionate defender of Joyce when that great man could not count on many friends and supporters for Ulysses. For Pound took his own political ideas and nostrums very seriously, put them into his most ambitious book, his lifework, the Cantos, and, above all, considered it his mission, as a poet, to lecture humanity at large on the subject of its political disorder. Pound believed that literature was the queen of the arts and that poets were its kings. Poetry was it; no scientist, no political leader (except those who were as wise as poets, which meant only Confucius and John Adams!) could rival a true and therefore supreme poet in the scope and power of his mind.

Modern times began with the French Revolution, modern literature with the romantic revolution in the arts. Words-worth wrote of his first enthusiasm for the French Revolution, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," and Shelley wrote in A Defense of Poetry that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Ever since the French Revolution made politics everybody's business and romanticism glorified literary imagination as the key to heaven on earth, all the really interesting writers "in our time" (the title of Hemingway's first and still most arresting book) have taken it for granted that life is unprecedentedly on the move, that for us there has been the most awesome shifting of people's minds, lives, the whole of human destiny, in recorded history. (American writers have felt themselves to be right in the middle of this ever-accelerating idea of human possibility.)

So it is nothing new for modern writers to think of themselves as prophets, priests, ministers to the human condition in general. Pound fondly called poets "the antennae of the race." And Pound, a writer with lightning intuitions about what was great in other writers, was equally cocksure on economics, Confucius, the history of finance in the ancient world, the political ideas of John Adams, the superiority of the Fascist system of "corporations" (which did not really exist) and, as he said in one of his broadcasts, the fact that "the Nazis have wiped out bad manners in Germany."

Writers are by nature confident people--about their own opinions. The greater they are, the more confidently they indulge themselves in theories and suppositions that might shame the average citizen. Tolstoy, the greatest novelist in Europe, tyrannically insisted, as a believer in "naturalness," that his wife breast-feed each of their children (they had 13). A boastfully virile man who had access to the many young girls on his estate, a wealthy novelist, aristocrat, land-owner, he at length proclaimed that the times were too serious for mere novels and, without seeing anything funny in this, lectured everyone in sight on the necessity of total chastity, poverty, pacifism and civil disobedience.

Dostoievsky, who as a young man was sentenced to death for studying subversive literature, became a violent reactionary and supporter of czarist oppression, wrote a political column in a rich man's newspaper to advance his views and was so intolerant that he attacked Anna Karénina for its implied criticisms of Russia's "Pan-Slav" policy. Victor Hugo's admirers called him a god to his face and he became so convinced of his undeviating rightness that someone memorably called him "a madman who thinks he is Victor Hugo." Flaubert, the aesthetic purist, the most famously apolitical of novelists, had such confidence that his books had the key to everything that on surveying the carnage after the Paris Commune was destroyed in 1871, he modestly said, "This wouldn't have happened if they had read my Education Sentimentale."

But it was only with the 20th Century, the two terrible world wars and their chain of wars, with the coming of communism and fascism, the breakup of the old order, the slaughter of helpless millions for being the wrong class or race, that writers, usually the most sensitive and concerned writers, demonstrated that in our time everything does turn into politics.

D. H. Lawrence, for example, was an amazingly evocative novelist, essayist and poet. But he became the most viciously authoritarian of political pseudo philosophers after he was rejected for medical reasons from serving in the 1914--1918 war. He was antiwar, but this was a blow to his shaky masculinity; he then found himself, because of his German wife, Frieda von Richthofen, accused of sympathizing with the enemy. All through the postwar period, his increasing despair of Western civilization was matched by his struggle against the tuberculosis that finally killed him, in 1930, at 45.

A close friend, David Garnett, said that Lawrence literally kept himself alive by sheer rage. Bertrand Russell admired Lawrence's literary gifts (all the first-rate men of his time in England recognized his genius from the first) but was soon frightened by his private myth about himself as a "leader." Russell saw before anyone else did that Lawrence's intense creative pride had in the disorder of the world after 1918 become political megalomania. He was to write in Portraits from Memory that Lawrence really saw himself as the supreme ruler when a dictatorship had been established. He charged that Lawrence had developed the whole philosophy of fascism before the politicians had thought of it. He called Lawrence "an exponent of the cult of insanity" in the between-wars period.

Lawrence's political views, when expressed in novels about Mexico (The Plumed Serpent) and about Australia (Kangaroo), were thoroughly brutal as well as feverishly exalted in their hatred of democracy. Lawrence was, of course, a miner's son, but his genteel husband-hating mother had taught him to despise the lower orders. The fierce attachment between himself and his mother also gave him an indestructible sense of his own rightness. He came to think of himself as a man born to re-educate humanity in the lessons of the primitive and what he insidiously liked to call "blood knowledge."

"One thing I can do," Lawrence boasted (and with reason), "I can juggle with words; get a white rabbit out of a silk hat, or a turtledove out of a black saucepan in which I had only rattled peas." There are few 20th Century writers, few in all English literature, who can make the immediate moment so real, give us the feel of life at the moment we most gladly do feel it. But when Lawrence laid down the law about women, society, peasants, the Etruscans and their art, he was alternately repulsive and ridiculous. He said, for example, that the lower classes should be relieved of all responsibility. They should not even learn how to read or write. "The secret is to commit into the hands of the sacred few the responsibility which now lies like torture on the mass. . . . Leaders--this is what mankind is craving for." As many of his admirers have noticed, there is a strain of personal cruelty in Lawrence's writing, a fantasy of unlimited domination over others; it allowed him to praise the most bestial "executions" among the Aztecs and to make some of his silly women characters talk (if not behave) in perfect accordance with the male fantasy of sex as assured domination.

But Lawrence's belief in blood knowledge, though so much like the windiest (continued on page 206)Writer as Political Crazy(continued from page 136) Nazi rhetoric about "blood and soil," is often funny in its unqualified pretentiousness. Lawrence once wrote in a letter:

If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman and is transferred to the fetus, probably without intervention either of nerve or brain consciousness. And this is the origin of totem: and for this reason some tribes no doubt really were kangaroos.

T. S. Eliot was not as obviously far out as Lawrence, Pound. Céline (who became Pétain's personal physician during the Vichy period) and other great presences in the 20th Century revolution of modernism. Unlike Céline, who always heard a buzzing in his head from wounds incurred in 1914 but wrote the most savagely powerful French prose of our time in his great novel Journey to the End of the Night. Eliot was an almost preposterously proper type. He was a deeply repressed man who wrote his great early poem. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, directly about sexual timidity and deprivation carried to the point of schizophrenic delusion.

Eliot was so ravaged and broken down by the mental illness of his first wife that in his most famous poem, The Waste Land, he identified his personal desolation with the disintegration of Europe. But as he said when paying tribute to Pound's inspired cutting and sharpening of the poem (Pound also raised a fund to send Eliot to recuperate in Switzerland), The Waste Land should not have been taken, so much as it was, for a picture of civilization in trouble. It was Tom Eliot who was in trouble.

Still, like so many great poets and novelists of the suspense-laden Twenties (civilization seemed to be hanging in the balance, and indeed it soon tell). Eliot did fancy himself something of a pundit about society, tradition, culture. He once made a ridiculous speech to the Conservative Association in London (at which two former prime ministers swelled the captive audience) that demonstrated his lack of any real ideas on the subject of politics. But in England he became such a VIP that he finally convinced himself that it was up to him to help save poor declining England. Alas, he remained such a make-believe, literary theorist of society that at a time when everybody in England knew that something had to be done about the monstrously inadequate educational system, Eliot publicly opposed raising the school-leaving age from 14 to 15. He advocated inequality of education on the grounds that it was nonsense to believe "that a great deal of first-class ability . . . is being wasted." A few years later, the classic Robbins report on higher education in England proved that "most of the intelligence of the nation was in fact being wasted."

William Butler Yeats, surely the greatest poet in English of the 20th Century, developed as a poet so amazingly that his later poetry was infinitely sharper, tarter, more magical and sensual than his early romantic poems. But the fierceness of his Irish mind led him to develop a foolish contempt for what he assumed to be the effeteness of modern times. He saw the present as a mere transition to a more legendary, traditionalist future. He was infatuated with Mussolini's Fascism, which he hilariously called individualist. He supported the Irish Fascist Blue Shirts, led by General Duffy. Yeats wrote, with misplaced confidence in his own words:

Politics are growing heroic. De Valera has forced political thought to face the most fundamental issues. A Fascist opposition is forming behind the scenes to be ready should some tragic situation develop. I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes. . . . I know half a dozen men, any one of whom may be Caesar--or Catiline. It is amusing to live in a country where men will always act. Where nobody is satisfied with thought. There is so little in our stocking that we are ready at any moment to turn it inside out, and how can we not feel emulous when we see Hitler juggling with his sausage of stocking. . . . The chance of being shot is raising everybody's spirits enormously.

• • •

In a sense, we have all been political nuts since the world-wide Depression of the Thirties: this led straight to the still-incredible destructiveness of 1939--1945 and the revolutions, wars, civil wars, mass insurrections that have followed World War Two. This war certainly made us all "very tough," as Kurt Vonnegut says in Slaughterhouse-Five. But the tougher we get the more we grow afraid of ourselves. There seems to be no escape from political anxiety. Yet for all this unrelenting pressure of political issues on every man, woman and child just now (especially in an age when instant mass communications single out and dramatize every act of violence, every rape and shoot-out as a political protest), our faith in our own political ideas and nostrums, in the use of reason and in the exercise of right language, has correspondingly declined.

This is why, in our time, the writer as political out is such a spectacle. Wordsworth and Shelley, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. Emerson and Thoreau still had perfect faith in the power of literature over the minds, souls, lives of everyone. Today even the best of writers cannot help doubting the rightness and relevance of literature to the whole human predicament. This decline of confidence comes at a time when any writer with imagination is likely to feel increasingly outraged by the political nuts everywhere who shape lives and send children to useless wars: who order the Cuban TV to cover the execution of political prisoners: who allot billions every year to pay for past wars, present wars, future wars: who unleash the killings in Northern Ireland, the killings in Colombia, the killings in America; who perpetuate the militarism of senile Southern politicians, the epidemic of drug taking on the part of the young, the fanaticism of political debate, the overbearingness of politicians, the poisoning of personal relationships in what French novelist Nathalie Sarraute calls "the age of suspicion."

Although I have never had an original political idea in my life, I, too, am a political nut. For without being able to do anything about it. I have been maddened by the slaughter of so many innocent people, the unspeakable cruelty in the very streets of American cities, the insane self-righteousness of people who excuse their blood lust as political virtue. Literature has been life itself to me, certainly the most creative part of life. Yet aware of myself as a writer peculiarly concerned with the minds of other writers. I am even more aware that the news, the alarms, the disturbances that fill our lives all day and every day have not brought the most gifted writers of my time any corresponding faith that they will be listened to and believed.

It was thus exactly his political insignificance that cemented Pound's craziness. For he was not used to having anything he said or believed on any subject dismissed as insignificant. Like D. H. Lawrence and so many other famous writers with a notable faith in all their own pronouncements. Pound was a spoiled child and sounded off for 70 years with the self-assurance of one. Freud said that the favorite of the mother is always a "conqueror." Pound was the favorite of both his parents, was peculiarly close to them (and always had them around in heathen Europe) up to an amazingly late age. He was used to being loved and fondly listened to evidently from babyhood. In his broadcasts, he sounded off about the "spirit of '76," which he thought his family represented--a grandfather had been a Congressman. It is important to note about this political nut that he was able to sustain good relationships with wife and mistress openly. He was a wonderful friend and always so good to people he admired that the poet Louis Zukofsky and other Jews have defended him against the charge of being personally anti-Semitic. On the other hand, it is a fact that when this spoiled child felt ignored, not made enough of for any reason, he turned petulant--this seems to have happened in England, and he came to hate the English just as publicly as he excoriated those financiers and other superpowerful bogeymen he called kikes.

Pound always took his own opinions most seriously. He could be humble and contrite, as befits a man of 60 held prisoner in a steel cage who discovered after the war that he had been extolling leaders who had put 1,000,000 Jewish children to death. But his earlier cockiness stemmed from his poet's sense of personal authority. One of the wonders of human creativity is the sureness with which poets come to trust their wayward moods, the electric instinct with which they can put unrelated and opposing things into exciting combination. The poet's gift is one of the most remarkable forms of mental organization known to nature. It involves the ability to bring together different levels of being, to unite into sound items drawn from both our deepest unconscious and our closest thinking. Yet even among modern poets, famous for emphasizing the "natural" qualities of the spoken voice, Pound is remarkable for turning the most amazing pile of ideas and reminiscences into beautiful sound.

His most ambitious and most famous poem, the 84 Cantos, is in many respects a weird junk shop and flea market of his random experiences (and favorite quotations). Yeats called the Cantos "nervous obsession, nightmare, stammering confusion." It is studded, in no discernible order, with Chinese ideograms and quotations from the Greek, Provençal, Italian; it is full of historical freight lifted bodily from the political papers of John Adams and the diaries of John Quincy Adams, and I mean lifted, not stolen. It is by turns also catty and tremulously "beyootiful" in a romantic style not seen since Pound was in high school, and it is characteristic of his mind that he repeats stories about mandarin figures in the arts he knew for over half a century without his noticing the repetitions.

Reading the Cantos is a kind of exercise in magic: You wait for the great man to deliver a rabbit out of so much drivel and, by God, sometimes he does! There are many stunning passages, much pretense and, above all, a lot of the static buzzing in Pound's curious mind. Finally, Pound is a maker of pastiches, clever imitations and impersonations of how any and all poets have sounded through the ages. Although the Cantos is really an old Saratoga trunk stuffed with personal memorabilia, fantastic reading, conscious and unconscious quotations, gossip, hatred and spite, it is, in the end, a work in honor of poetry as Pound's real life, his best life. As a poet, Pound was able to rise above the debris of his life, above the junk pile of his miscellaneous and sometimes phony learning. By his gift for making poetry sound, by sheer hypnotic incantation, he did make his unbelievable contraption move.

George Orwell was probably right when he called Pound a faker. Pound always pretended to more languages than he had, and certainly to more knowledge of history and economics. But Orwell was not a poet. His wonderful commonsensical mind made him the long-needed scourge of upper-class English leftists who cheerfully thought Marxist dictatorship good enough for the common people. But Orwell was incapable of understanding the peculiarly intuitive accomplishment at work in Wizard poets like Pound--which is a form of genuine divination, of occult knowledge. As Rilke said. "Poetry is the past that breaks out in our hearts."

Pound had this gift. And, like many poets, he had it to a degree that unbalanced him. Poets are different from prose writers: They are more the victims of words for words' sake; but they also have an inborn sense of what lies buried in words--the human traditions and human practices that have been congealed into the rhythm, force and color of words alone. Poets have a right to speak for that realm within our own minds that feels like another world. This other world lies in the undecipherable network of our unconscious thought, where we are under the spell of words and the combination of words without knowing what they "mean." Poets like Pound have this secret writing in their heads to such an extent that they are often literally cracked. They see life through this crack and often they become this crack.

The mad poets are legion, a legion of the damned. Since the 18the Century and the beginning of modern, romantic poetry, we have had such certified madmen and lunatic cases as Christopher Smart. John Clare, Dr. Johnson, William Cowper, William Blake, Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Verlaine--and, in our day, the German Nobel Prize winner Nelly Sachs, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Delmore Schwartz. And there are the suicide poets--Gérard de Nerval, Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman.

Pound's good friend Ernest Hemingway said of him when he was on trial for treason. "Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin. For history's sake, we shouldn't keep him there." But from Pound's own point of view, this craziness may have been the positive in his life, the force behind his unquenchable mental energy, his gift for whipping up other minds into an intellectual excitement like his own. Pound was an unstoppable talker, mover, prodder; his intellectual energy, his poet's sense that whatever he said was authoritative because a poet said it made him think of language as the divine gift embodied in him. He was a creature of words, bewitched by words, haunted by his own power to summon up the myths of human history from the amazing deep that is a poet's mind.

Pound was, from ecstatic youth on, the poet's poet, a man driven mad with excitement by his own gift, by poetry everywhere in the air of his life. He had a sure instinct for what was first-rate. It is a matter of record that he was also the most generous of critics to now-famous poets when they still needed a hearing. But the world-wide Depression of the Thirties brought out all his family's obsession with finance as an Eastern monopoly (his father. Homer Pound, once actually printed his own scrip to pay off his employees). Pound became obsessive on the subject of "usury," assumed on his own say-so that the banks and banks alone, "international financiers," held everyone else in thrall by forcing them to borrow all capital at high interest rates. By rapid stages Pound became a believer in Major Douglas' Social Credit, then in Mussolini's theory that the Fascist state could be made up of "corporations" from the different classes that would work together in the interest of the state, then in the Nazi claims that rich Jews alone held the purse strings in Europe and, by squeezing off credit, were responsible for the Depression.

Pound read a lot in history, but only to find things suitable to his growing paranoia that "they" were after the rest of "us" and to his megalomania that a few great men in history, like himself. Confucius and John Adams, knew all the answers. Have you ever seen marginal comments in library books--"Fool! Hasn't he read Blankety Blank, page 83?" Pound's economic pamphlets are like that.

What is most disturbing about Pound the political nut (as opposed to Pound the poet) is how cheap, nasty, downright stupid his style becomes in polemic. This is already clear in the excerpts from his "treason" broadcasts during the war. It appears in many cantos. In the original version of canto 52, for example, Pound propounded the lie that the poor Jews of Europe, just then being slaughtered by Hitler, were paying for the "guilt" (Schuld in German) of the Rothschilds (the name means red shield in German), whom Pound typically called the Stink-schulds. These names were replaced by blanks in the complete edition of the Cantos. But it is typical of right-wing mania on the subject of Jews that one of the most brilliant critics of Pound, Hugh Kenner, repeats this dangerous falsehood in his recent book. The Pound Era, when he says that "Hitler jailed no Rothschilds, and Pound thought that the poor Jews whom German resentment drove into concentration camps were suffering for the sins of their inaccessible coreligionists." Kenner quotes these beautiful lines from canto 52:

Stinkschuld sin drawing vengeance, poor yitts paying for Stinkschuld, paying for a few big jew's vendetta on goyim.

• • •

Kenner does not know how many "Rothschilds" died in Nazi camps. Still, right-wing literary critics are not the greatest danger to the republic just now. The most obvious political nuts among writers are on the left, whether New Left, Bomber Left or Would-Be Left. Norman Mailer, in a famous essay. "The White Negro," on the necessity of white middle-class writers like himself becoming "psychopaths" or "hipsters" so as to beat back the conformism poisoning American life, wrote that as opposed to the arch-square and obedient goody-goody male who "can conform to what he loathes because he no longer has the passion to feel loathing so intensely," two strong 18-year-old hoodlums beating in the brains of a candy-store keeper do have courage of a sort:

for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into new relations with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one's life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.

I once heard Mailer lament to a private discussion group that literature is "conservative." He is an always exciting writer who for years has also been playing every possible role in and out of his work because his desire for himself is, above all, to be a doer, risk taker, adventurer not content with mere writing. But, of course, writing is Mailer's life and his only real consistency. A good deal of his posturing consists in sticking his head over the trench, yelling Fuck you, squares! and then contentedly getting back to his typing.

Pound hated Jews because he had a child's version of history: Everything was just lovely in his Golden West until those corrupters from the East came in. Mailer is a Jew with a typical modern dislike of being a "good Jew." As he has often said, being a Nice Jewish Boy is the one role unacceptable to him. He, too, is a spoiled child, with a partiality to his own family that permits him, like Pound, to take off on the world at large whenever he likes.

Right-wing nuts are distinguished by their feeling for tradition, continuity and the paranoiac delusion that some evil person or force is trying to break up something that was never questioned by the delusion that activism at any price, symbolic activism it necessary, will redeem man (whether he likes it or not) from the suffering inflicted on him in the past and present. Mailer is actually a very cagey writer, is by no means taken in by his own propaganda and is certainly no "poet" in the cracked and suicidal tradition. But he does have the itch to get things moving, and he is so much one Jewish mother's favorite that he does have the delusion that anything he says about women, the infamy of birth control (and the necessity of abortions), the city of New York, high-rise apartments, the nature of movies. Marilyn Monroe. Nixon, McGovern, the moon shots, the short-sleeved WASP technicians in the Houston space center, etc., is true and important and vital because he feels these things and people must look up to hear him say these things. And saying is for Mailer a form of doing. He is essentially a novelist, of course. For some years now, he has been living his novels rather than writing them. Like many intellectual Jews, he is also a moralist, his head beating against the mythically perfect unlimited future that something must bring us to.

Robespierre, the very type of the absolutist radical who condemns masses of people to death in the name of revolution as the "final solution" to all human problems, actually described himself as a "pure and sensitive soul." His deepest belief was that the French Revolution could have been made only by pure and sensitive souls. That passion exists, he once said in a speech to his followers, "that sublime and sacred love of humanity, without which a great revolution is but a manifest crime that destroys another crime: it exists, that generous ambition to found on this earth the first republic of the world. . . . You feel it burning at this very moment in your souls; I feel it in my own."

To burn with one's won virtue and indignation is the great mark of high-principled radicals. But no one has ever burned quite so fiercely as far-out radicals, black and feminists have in our day. It was for the sake of humanity at large, of course, that The Realist published the report that on the plane taking Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy's body back to Washington after the assassination in Dallas. Johnson mounted the corpse and reached sexual climax in the throat wound of his predecessor. It was in the name of the highest principles that James Baldwin addressed Angela Davis in prison as "my sister in Dachau." Susan Sontag said in Partisan Review: "The white race is the cancer of history. It is the white race and it alone--its ideologies and inventions--which eradicates autonomous civilization wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

Sometimes it is not necessary to be a talented writer, just a literary feller, to contribute to what Benjamin DeMott called "The Age of Overkill." Louis Kampf, recently president of the Modern Language Association (the largest professional organization of literature teachers in the world), wrote in The Trouble with Literature that "the study of literature--the voyeurism implicit in this--must really come to an end it all of us are to be full participants in the making of our culture." Kampf wrote of Lincoln Center in a collection of essays called The New Left that "not a performance should go by without disruption. The fountains should be dried with calcium chloride, the statuary pissed on, the walls smeared with shit."

Just now the most vociferous expressers of outrage in this country are blacks, homosexuals and feminists. All three groups (though certainly not in equal proportions) have good reason to complain of legal disabilities against them, prejudice and malevolence at large. But no group ever protests until it is organized as a group, gets a growing sense of power and the assurance that its grievances are sympathized with by many forces in the community. But if one protests as a writer, with a writer's skill and a writer's sense of his or her own importance, one also exaggerates by dint of one's own natural and professional egotism. There is something peremptory, dogmatic, teacherlike about any kind of literary gift. As Serge Koussevitzky once said in his special brand of Russian-English to a young conductor who had lost control of the orchestra: Is tooking a tempo and kept it!

To write is to take a tempo, to lay down a line, to set up an argument and to keep it. Persuasion, indoctrination, influence are what writing does, and that is why writers with an eye on the audience are the last ones in creation to live up to the French saying "Truth is in the nuance." As the Mailer syndrome has shown, writing can be an exercise of power, of machismo, of keeping all directives in your keeping. It can be a form of absolute domination--especially over the truth, over the writer's own contradictory feelings. Many women writers these days are bursting out, understandably, Sylvia Plath, who is becoming a martyr symbol to many feminist writers, was a gifted but thoroughly morbid writer; indeed, a specialist in death, hypnotized by the Nazis' killing of millions. Violent against herself, she wrote in a famous poem, Daddy, that her German-born father, an innocent professor of biology in Boston who incurred he wrath by dying when she was very young, was a "Nazi" and a "bastard."

These lines were idiotic, shameful. But it is funny as well as sad to find an equally talented woman poet, Adrienne Rich, say in a recent book review: "I believe that the poem Daddy is more than Plath's exorcism of her own father; it is an attempt to exorcise the patriarchy internalized in every woman--the same patriarchy that committed Dachau and Hiroshima."

Anything goes in our time. Rage in epidemic, especially when it is would-be rage. Without strong feelings, man, you may be just another square! Rages makes us all revolutionaries. And artists at the same time? A talented black poet, who knows of course, that Malcolm X was murdered by blacks, turns on his own people in a poem called The Nigga Section and writes with mounting fury:

slimy obscene creatures, insane

creations of a beast, you

have murdered a man, you

have devoured me, you

have done it with precision

like the way you stand green

in the dark sucking pus

and slicing your penis

As they lurch toward the end of the 20the Century, writers have good reason to worry whether literature will survive. But meanwhile, rage as literature is a going game. "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," a great American writer wrote in the last century, "the century of hope." Things ride us more and more, and we are right to feel much of what we feel. But feeling can be a liar, a pretense, a piece of opportunism. In our time, just now our supposed innocence as private human beings combines all too nicely with our political fury at what is happening to mankind. Rage makes up a lively substitute for the balance and modesty and, above all, the personal honesty that will alone get us to do what we seem least capable of just now--to live with one another.