Preamble to Ezra Pound\'s Economic Correspondence 1933-1940

Introductory chapter to Roxana Preda. Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence 1933-1940. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. 1-5.

Introduction Preamble: The correspondence of a poet economist It is generally agreed that Ezra Pound was a genius in poetry and a crank in economics. Literary friends and critics, monetary reformers and general well-wishers alike, pointed out to him the incomprehensibility of his opinions, the incongruity of his pet theories, and the hopelessness of his claim to understand and change modern society by a poetry backed by economics. This volume does not aim to completely dislodge these assumptions but instead attempts to further reveal Pound as an intellectual integrated in a movement for the reform of capitalism—a movement beginning to take shape after World War I, reaching its greatest impetus around 1935–36, before being buried beneath the decisive events leading to World War II. In the critical tradition, the first claim for Pound’s crankiness has been based on his fundamental commitment to Clifford H. Douglas’s Social Credit, an economic theory that offered an alternative not only to orthodox economics but also to the wellestablished conflict between the political Left and the Right. Social Credit did not fare well in specialist circles, and to this day it has remained a little known, controversial theory offering apparently unfounded, impractical solutions to the problems of poverty and economic crisis. This, however, was not clear to Pound, who had had no previous economic education and whose political views and impulses were developed in conversations with friends. The poet met Douglas in the offices of the New Age at a time when the virtually unknown monetary reformer was trying to persuade the editor, Alfred R. Orage, to publish his first articles. It becomes clear from Pound’s later correspondence that this situation was a decisive factor in his lifelong allegiance to Social Credit. This was a theory that had taken shape in the discussions between Douglas, Orage, and himself in the office of the New Age at 38 Cursitor Street in 1918–19. As Pound documented in Canto 22, Douglas was aiming to renew economics in the same way he had been trying to renew poetry. If Douglas’s theories seemed obscure and complicated—if what he offered had still an inchoate form and an unsatisfactory style—Social Credit was an experiment in thought, a form of intellectual avant-garde, which was exciting to be part of. Moreover, in order to 1

understand what Douglas was saying, one had to have previous knowledge of economics, be aware of how societies work, and understand their monetary cycles. Mutatis mutandis, Douglas was appealing to a reader informed in politics and economics, just like the modernist poet was writing for a reader familiar with the literary tradition. Pound may have realized that if he was to write the long poem he had been turning over in his mind and experimenting with since 1915, history and poetry alone did not give all the answers. Douglas’s theory seemed to offer a key to understanding why societies stumbled from one economic crisis to another, why poverty and war existed. It opened for Pound a perspective from which to base his inquiry into the study of civilizations, a field in which he would be employed for the rest of his poetic career. Though Pound published one of the earliest reviews of Douglas’s first book, Economic Democracy,1 there is very little Social Credit in the first thirty cantos, which Pound wrote and refined from 1915 to 1930. Social Credit theory seemed to be buried under Pound’s other pursuits and interests, mainly in art, music, and history. The poet moved from London to Paris in 1920 and from Paris to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924, thus breaking the immediacy of his contacts to the offices of the New Age. Orage also left London in 1922, to live and work with the mystic philosopher, George Gurdjieff, first at Fontainebleau and then in New York. During his absence, Social Credit grew to a political and monetary movement in Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations. Moreover, Pound’s old connections seemed to recede over a period when Social Credit was developing, but when Pound was not politically involved at all. This break lasted until 1932 when the poet renewed his old ties, mainly as a reaction to Orage’s return to London to start a new journal, the New English Weekly (NEW). Pound initiated letter exchanges with his former mentors and wrote the ABC of Economics. He offered it to Orage, who rejected it, and then to Douglas, who mediated its publication with Faber (Douglas to Pound, January 9, 1933). While Pound and Orage were negotiating the terms of the poet’s involvement with the NEW, a new situation emerged that would result in a permanent bone of contention between Pound and faithful Social Creditors. In 1932, a small Austrian town named Wörgl made an experiment with a devaluing kind of currency called Schwundgeld (vanishing money), based on the recent theory of a German reformer, Silvio Gesell. Pound was enthusiastic about the beneficial effects of this reform and began writing to Orage and Douglas about the possibility of combining Social Credit with the Wörgl money, which he called stamp scrip. Neither Orage nor Douglas thought that Social Credit needed to be adulterated with other theories. In spite of their rebuffs, Pound was not discouraged. His belief in stamp scrip was grafted onto

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his earlier Social Credit allegiances and became a permanent element of his economic tool kit. Nevertheless, stamp scrip caused a major rift between Pound and his mentors. It also continued to create difficulties with other Social Creditors with whom he would come into contact later, causing them to distrust his judgment and to view him as rather amateurish and naïve. Pound had even less success in persuading reformers from the Gesellite camp, such as Hugo Fack, E. S. Woodward, and John Büchi to accept the Social Credit analysis. Pound’s hybrid views earned him a negative reputation for crankiness even in monetary reform circles. And if this situation was not bad enough, a third element was grafted onto Pound’s economics in 1933–his growing admiration for the reforms in Fascist2 Italy and for Benito Mussolini personally. On January 30, 1933, he managed to get an interview with the dictator, to whom Pound had sent his volume of poetry, A Draft of XXX Cantos. However, he had not solicited the interview to discuss poetry, but rather economics. With the help of a list of twenty questions, Pound tried to interest the Duce in Social Credit. Mussolini showed a sufficiently positive attitude to persuade Pound that he was open to ideas of reform along this line. The poet began to follow Fascist economic policy with an eye for possible harmonies between it and Social Credit. This change is reflected in his letters to Douglas and Orage, where he began praising Mussolini and pointing out possible analogies. This caused astonishment, protest, and ridicule among his correspondents. Pound’s reawakened interest in Social Credit, his enthusiasm over stamp scrip, and his conviction that Mussolini was the best hope for implementing Social Credit policy ignited a feverish propagandistic activity. The little flame of Pound’s economic interests that had flickered during 1932, burst into an all-consuming fire the next year. Beginning in 1933, besides delivering lectures and writing articles and pamphlets, he began sending letters to a number of reformers in England and the United States. Some of them, like William E. Woodward or Paul DeKruif were not attached to any camp. Others, like Douglas, Orage, John Hargrave, Gorham Munson, and James Crate Larkin were prominent Social Creditors; still others, like the distinguished North American economist, Irving Fisher, his assistant, Hans Cohrssen, and the publisher Hugo Fack were fighting in the Gesellite camp. Pound included fascists in his network of correspondents: in 1934 he wrote about the benefits of Social Credit and stamp scrip to members of the British Union, like Alexander Raven Thomson and Henry Vaughn, as well as to John Summerville, a North-American fascist. This correspondence, as well as his letters to Mussolini and other Italian Fascists, shows that Pound’s main interest was to get Social Credit and stamp scrip implemented, if not in a democratic economy, then in a fascist state. Over the years, Pound’s admiration for Fascist Italy, tolerated at first within the circle of economic radicals, became a true bone of contention. Social Creditors had not been completely closed to fascist propaganda, but viewed it with interest as a 3

“sociological fact” (Philip Mairet, letter to Pound, January 13, 1935). After Orage’s death in November 1934, the NEW had been open to articles about Mussolini and Hitler. However, Social Creditors came to reject fascism of all colors as the decade wore on. From the start, Douglas had ridiculed every attempt on Pound’s part to win him over to Fascist economic policy; Hargrave, the leader of the militant wing of Social Credit, called the Green Shirts, also energetically rejected a rapprochement and finally broke with Pound in 1939 because of his fascism. The 1930s was a difficult decade for Social Creditors since their propaganda was not making any significant headway, either in Great Britain or in the United States. The only electoral victory (in the Canadian province of Alberta in August 1935) had been followed by severe disappointment, since Social Creditors, once in power, had not been able to implement any of its desired reforms. In the United States, Social Credit propagandists had been allied with the anti-New Deal forces and lost the elections of 1936; in the United Kingdom, the Prosperity campaign, in which the entire activist force had been channeled, took a nosedive when Edward VIII abdicated the throne at the end of the same year. On Pound’s side of the exchange, the relationship with the Social Creditors was not satisfactory at all. They did not take up any of his proposals, rejected his Gesellite innovations, and generally ignored his ideas and injunctions. Pound was also dissatisfied with the Social Credit journals: their propaganda was weak, their interest in foreign affairs minimal, and their literary section mediocre. Gesellite propaganda, by comparison, was even more closed to the outside world. Hugo Fack, Pound’s main Gesellite correspondent, was not willing to allow any grain of truth to Social Credit. Moreover, after the publication of The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, in which Gesell was praised, Fack began to advertise John Maynard Keynes in his paper, The Way Out, something that Pound could not forgive. Their correspondence foundered in 1937, a year that marked a radical departure in Pound’s propagandistic strategy. Since 1933, Pound had begun advocating Mussolini’s economic policies, an activity that met with stiff resistance from virtually all his non-fascist correspondents, except Fack. Pound continued this campaign in his journalism, and in 1936 he agreed to contribute to the British Italian Bulletin (BIB), a propaganda organ of the Italian government in England. All through the year, Pound contributed almost equally to the NEW and to the BIB. Starting in January 1937, his contributions to Social Credit publications dropped dramatically, whereas his articles in the British fascist press were maintained and further developed by regular contributions to the organs of the British Union, Action and British Union Quarterly (BUQ). The cordial relationship with their editor, Raven Thomson, made Pound fundamentally change his attitude towards British fascism. If in 1933 he had despised Oswald Mosley and distrusted his organization, towards the end of the decade Pound would come to consider him the best solution for England (letter to John Penrose Angold, January 13, 1939). 4

The economic correspondence shows a similar move, which highlights a sudden turn from intense Social Credit propaganda at the end of 1936. The edifice of correspondence that Pound had been building since 1933 collapsed like a house of cards. The opinions he expressed in his occasional communications, starting in 1937, seem to be a result of the political defeats in the preceding year. They were not aimed at persuading his correspondent to take immediate political action, but expressed more general cultural concerns in which he tried to explore a possible archeology of Fascism as political and economic practice. Anti-Semitism, which hitherto had been seen in occasional flashes, now became virulent and constant. Pound was now more interested in books and education than in goading reformers and discussing points of theory. He had turned from active politics to more general interests in cultural history. The cantos that Pound wrote between 1933 and 1940 reflect the changes that the economic correspondence indicates. 11 New Cantos (written between 1930 and 1933) and The Fifth Decad (written between 1934 and 1936) were permeated by Social Credit thought. However, 1937 was a year of retrenchment. Pound took a break from poetic activity, rediscovering his interest in Chinese philosophy and history. It was only in 1938 that he felt ready to work on a new section, Cantos LII– LXXI. The new poetry would clearly have a political rather than economic orientation. In juxtaposing two systems of government—monarchy, as exemplified in the Chinese history, and republicanism, as epitomized by John Adams’s career—Pound put forth his response to a question that had become overwhelming at the end of the 1930s: What makes a government stable? And, equally important: How can war be avoided? Social Credit had receded into the background. It would not be forgotten, however, and would come back into the cantos Pound would write during the 1950s. But that is another story.

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