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The Evil That Men Do
17 October 2012
Having quoted him on Twitter I found myself in a debate about Ezra Pound’s fascism, my opponent seemed to be of the view that his political beliefs, in some way, negated his poetry. Thinking about this, I realised my distaste for Pound’s politics was as nothing next to my loathing of the mind of the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, never, renounced his support for Stalin in the face of overwhelming evidence that he turned the Soviet Union into an abbatoir. I have heard of times when, in private conversation, Hobsbawm, in later life, persisted with the defence. Well, okay, Pound was a pretty vicious anti-semite and much else besides. So is my greater anti-Hobsbawm feeling justified? I don’t know, but here’s an attempt to explain it.
Pound was probably – these things cannot be precisely calculated – the most influential poet of the twentieth century after Eliot. In fact, he might be said to be the most influential by proxy because it was Pound who knocked Eliot’s The Waste Land into shape. So he should be, he is magnificent. I used to get chills as a teenager from poems like Exile’s Letter, E.P. Ode Pour L’election De Son Sepulchre. Near Perigord and, later, from even some of the most incomprehensible Cantos. I still get those chills. As a musician of language, he was greater than Eliot, but, in most other respects, he came in number two.
Pound was probably – these things cannot be precisely calculated – the most influential poet of the twentieth century after Eliot
So I am biased, but this, I think, is a bias with a rational basis. Hobsbawm was a historian who adhered to a profoundly wicked, irrational and inhumane view of history – the idea that history was a story that could justify the murder of millions – in spite of the crushing evidence of the failure of that view. I can understand taking that view in the fraught conditions of the thirties – many good people did – I cannot imagine clinging to it in the light of what later became evident – many bad people did.
Pound was a poet. He did not carefully weigh evidence and, in any case, his evidence came from the imagination and from mythology, not from the reality-based world of the historian. That this led him astray is not surprising – poetry is powerful stuff – many poets have been led astray and great art has often been produced by people we would now find very nasty. I’m not sure I would accept a dinner invitation from Carvaggio, I’d be scared. The questions are: does the wickedness affect the art? And, therefore, can there be no separation of the aesthetic and the autobiographical?
The answers are obviously yes and yes there can. Pound’s anti-semitic rants in the Cantos are both morally and aesthetically bad. But, read as a whole – a very difficult task – what we see is an autobiography in poetry, a broken, modernist reponse to Wordsworth’s Prelude (a mad comparison, I know, but that is the point). What we are getting in these poems in the mind in the raw, great bleeding warts and all, filtered through the musical genius of his language. The Cantos, I suppose I am saying, can be read against Pound. Consider the pale colours and regretful beauty of CXV. Or consider the lines in EP: Ode about World War I that started the Twitter debate.
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
You cannot read a historian against himself. His meaning is explicit and his own. A poet – any artist – is a different creature, responsible as a human for what he is, but not always entirely responsible, for good or evil, for what he does.
12 Responses to “The Evil That Men Do”
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17 October 2012 at 9:40 am
Once again: Hobsbawm said several times the Soviet Union had been a failure. He was not ‘unrepentant’ as you (and others keep claiming) keep claiming. And you can’t name an immoral action he did to another person. I note your paper was happy to use the services of the anti-Semitic Hugh Trevor-Roper when it suited them.
Also what about a genre in between poetry and history – novels. Evelyn Waugh was actually a reactionary Catholic racist and so are (some) of his books.
17 October 2012 at 10:04 am
Failed! Are you serious? The Soviet Union didn’t fail, its leaders succeeded in everything they intended and, as a result, proved the underlying justification wicked and wrong. Failed is a disgusting word under the circumstances because it exculpates.
17 October 2012 at 10:31 am
I think Pound was essentially an aesthete who deluded himself into thinking he was a great prophet and Mussolini was the Saviour. I recently found this comment H.L. Mencken made about Pound in 1936:
“You made your great mistake when you abandoned the poetry business, and set up shop as a wizard in general practice. You wrote, in your day, some very good verse, and I had the pleasure, along with other literary buzzards, of calling attention to it at the time. But when you fell into the hands of those London logrollers, and began to
wander through pink fogs with them, all your native common sense oozed out of you, and you set up a caterwauling for all sorts of brummagem Utopias, at first in the aesthetic region only but later in the regions of political and aesthetic baloney. Thus a competent poet was spoiled to make a tinhorn politician.
— H. L. Mencken, letter to Ezra Pound, Nov. 28, 1936″
Pound at least paid for his disgusting anti-Semitic rants by spending years after the war in prison or in mental asylums. I can’t think of any Western Stalinists who suffered a similar fate (after all, it’s Communists who tend to imprison or murder other Communists).
Hobsbawm voted with his feet (to use Lenin’s phrase) and chose to live in the West rather than the USSR. Actions speak louder than words.
17 October 2012 at 11:18 am
William, I find repellant his unrepenting of the view that mass murder in the service of the communist ideal could be justified.
As an aside, apart from being immoral it’s a bizarrely impractical view – as if heaven might be built on a foundation of smashed-in skulls.
17 October 2012 at 12:12 pm
The Soviet Union didn’t fail, its leaders succeeded in everything they intended and, as a result, proved the underlying justification wicked and wrong. Failed is a disgusting word under the circumstances because it exculpates.
That’s very well said. The persistent left-wing notion that the Soviets had good intentions but by ill fortune and circumstances beyond their control it all went wrong. The gulags sort of happened by accident.
I don’t buy the excuses for Hobsbawn in terms of his childhood experiences with the Nazis. Plenty of people with similar experiences didn’t become apologists for mass murder; and others with no such experiences have, so it’s down to the person. Seamus Milne’s traumatic life story, for example, includes being educated at Winchester, Balliol and Birkbeck (where despite the expense he apparently learnt nothing of any use).
17 October 2012 at 12:57 pm
I’ve been asking myself these questions about Pound for decades without coming to any sensible conclusions. From one point of view, you could say that his is a fairly straightforward case because the antisemitic rantings are worthless as literature — as wretched in their expression as they are vile in content. One one level, then, there is no problem in separating the dross in Pound’s work from the stuff we value, which remains uncontaminated. A more disturbing question arises when we ask whether the things that thrill us in Pound — the fierce rhetoric of the usury cantos, for example, or the inhuman beauty of the very last poems — spring from the same sort of imaginative extremism as his politics, so these things cannot be so simply separated out.
As I say, I just don’t know.
For anyone who is interested, I’m currently posting a series of pieces on the Dabbler exploring very similar issues in the work of that other literary fascist, the otter fancier Henry Williamson.
http://thedabbler.co.uk/2012/10/tarka-the-rotter/
http://thedabbler.co.uk/2012/10/tarka-the-rotter-springwatch-for-hitler/
17 October 2012 at 1:35 pm
Is it possible to isolate art from the artist and say, well, their behaviour is immoral but just look at, read or listen to their work. By refusing the offer of stolen goods we aid the war on crime, by reading Hobsbawm are we guilty of receiving, if so, what? Will hypocrisy prevail, not listening to Wagner will be problematical whereas not listening to Billy Bragg would be easy.
Is it over simplistic to make that judgement, drawing a line in the sand, we are after all only human and will sway this way and that, depriving ourselves of those sublime moments then, once again, breaking the pledge. Incidentally, I refuse point blank to stop reading Capt WE Johns.
17 October 2012 at 1:59 pm
Yes I don’t think there’s a right answer to this one – it depends on the art and the reader/listener. One I do find problematic is Pinter. His art treads the ‘fine line between clever and stupid’ (copyright Spinal Tap’) anyway. Knowing how OTT and silly his politics were make it that bit harder to believe his art is on the clever side of that line.
17 October 2012 at 9:44 pm
If Pound’s political views negated his poetry in some way, wouldn’t it follow that a second-rate poet could be bumped up to the pantheon of first-raters because of his outspoken support for the Allies?
17 October 2012 at 10:25 pm
My prejudicial perspective is rather different. A historian, aware of the enormous volume of human lives throughout the centuries, can, I’d think, find it tempting to succumb to the Stalinist view of millions of deaths as statistics. A poet, I’m innocent enough to expect, should have a more sensitive understanding of the consequence of lives.
Can’t help wondering if “malty” is named after Biggles. The scene where he and Ginger stride into an American bar and order a bovril, a malted milk and a packet of biccies to munch them with ranks among the finest in literature.
28 October 2012 at 9:09 am
I have to agree with Bryan about Pound – and the Cantos. I would have to say that the experience of reading the repellent Usury Cantos as well as Pound’s Italian radio broadcasts is – morally challenging. In stark contrast to Wagner for example the virulent hatred of Jews is integral to the work – by which I mean Pound’s poetry after 1925. It is striking surely that Italian Fascism was not significantly anti-Semtic until after 1938. To judge by the language of Pound’s anti-Semitic work, he may well have been deranged – as his lawyers argued after the war. But then anti-Semitism is an irrational ‘belief’. Jonathan Law is right – Pound is a tough case, morally. You have to quarantine the nasty stuff don’t you? But Bryan – I simply don’t understand the link you are making to the Hobsbawm issue. In order to make that connection, you would have to go beyond Hobsbawm’s alleged support for the Soviet Union – the equivalent would be a major series of statements, not one or two apocryphal comments about Stalin that, say, demanded that all kulaks or whoever deserved to be liquidated. There is NO equivalent in Hobsbawm’s published work that is in any sense comparable to the Usury Cantos.
28 November 2012 at 9:05 am
Pound should have used the toilet paper, that he scrawled his Pisan Cantos on, to wipe his ass.