• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

No one failed to mention this part of Pound’s spirit. It is a cornerstone of his way of being. Each anecdote has a simple structure: from the “Bel Esprit” to the old brown shoes we have a man who responds with generosity when he is moved by art. True worth, for such a person, inheres in the creative spirit, and the objects of the world should move accordingly, not to some other, illusory value. Pound’s essay “What Is Money For?” begins with its own answer: money is “for getting the country’s food and goods justly distributed.” The title could as well have been “Why Have No Proper Shoes Been Distributed to James Joyce?” In approaching Pound’s economic theories, it seems to me that our work will be most fruitful if we use these anecdotes as a backdrop, if we see his work as an attempt to find a political economy that would embody the spirit they reveal. Pound sought a “money system” that might replicate, or at least support, the form of value that emanates from creative life. He cared for neither Marxism nor bourgeois materialism because, he felt, neither held a place for the artist. He was attracted to the theories of an Englishman—Major C. H. Douglas—because Douglas was one of the first, according to Pound, “to postulate a place for the arts, literature, and the amenities in a system of economics.” During the 1930s Pound printed his economic ideas in a series of “Money Pamphlets”; in one of them he describes two different kinds of bank—one in Siena and one in Genoa—the first built “for beneficence” and the second “to prey on the people.” The last line of his analysis reads: “The arts did not flourish in Genoa, she took almost no part in the intellectual activity of the renaissance. Cities a tenth her size have left more durable treasure.”

The point for the moment is not that Pound was either right or wrong about the Bank of Siena or about Major Douglas, but simply that Pound’s money theories, at least at the start, were addressed to the situation of the artist and the liveliness of culture. Something had happened after the Renaissance, he felt, that ate away at art and made it less likely that an artist would have a decent pair of shoes. In Canto 46 we find the date 1527—the time, roughly, of the Peasants’ War, Luther’s sermons on Deuteronomy, and Thomas Müntzer’s martyrdom—and with that date the line: “Thereafter art thickened, thereafter design went to hell.” The changes that the end of the Middle Ages brought to political economy (and to religion and philosophy) are for Pound the touchstone for an explanation of the shift in the sense of value. To explain the whole, Pound focused on the post-Reformation reemergence of usury.

Canto 45

With usura hath no man a house of good stone

each block cut smooth and well fitting

that design might cover their face,

with usura

hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall

harpes et luz

or where virgin receiveth message

and halo projects from incision,

with usura

seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines

no picture is made to endure nor to live with

but it is made to sell and sell quickly

with usura, sin against nature,

is thy bread ever more of stale rags

is thy bread dry as paper,

with no mountain wheat, no strong flour

with usura the line grows thick

with usura is no clear demarcation

and no man can find site for his dwelling.

Stonecutter is kept from his stone

weaver is kept from his loom

WITH USURA

wool comes not to market

sheep bringeth no gain with usura

Usura is a murrain, usura

blunteth the needle in the maid’s hand

and stoppeth the spinner’s cunning. Pietro Lombardo

came not by usura

Duccio came not by usura

nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin′ not by usura

nor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted.

Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio

Praedis, Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.

Not by usura St. Trophime

Not by usura Saint Hilaire,

Usura rusteth