The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [145]
As I have said, Pound was attracted to any economic system that seemed hospitable to the artist and, in his estimation, Mussolini was a leader who knew his people needed poetry. Moreover, he was a man of action. He built people houses. He turned swamps into croplands. “From the time of Tiberius the Italian intelligentzia has been talking of draining the swamps,” says Pound, but only Mussolini got it done. He was “the De-bunker par excellence.” He took no guff from financiers:
They were to have a consortium
and one of the potbellies says:
will come in for 12 million”
And another: three millyum for my cut;
And another: we will take eight;
And the Boss said: but what will you
DO with that money?”
“But! but! signore, you do not ask a man
what he will do with his money.
That is a personal matter.
And the Boss said: but what will you do?
Mussolini understood that a money system, particularly after the Industrial Revolution, should be directed toward the distribution of abundance, not the management of scarcity. Pound reports that Mussolini gave a speech in 1934 in which, “speaking very clearly four or five words at a time … to let it sink in,” he declared that the problem of production was solved and that people could now turn their attention to distribution. Pound was delighted; he sent an obituary to the Criterion in London: “at 4:14 in the Piazza del Duomo, Milano …, Scarcity Economics died.”
Finally, Mussolini was a man “filled with … the will toward order.” In a 1932 letter, Pound advised a friend, “Don’t knock Mussolini … He will end with Sigismondo and the men of order, not with the pus-sacks and destroyers. I believe that anything human will and understanding of contemporary Italy cd. accomplish, he has done and will continue to do.”
Which brings us to our last anecdote in which Ezra Pound gives a gift.
In the early 1930s Pound requested and was granted an interview with Mussolini in Rome. He had petitioned Mussolini’s secretary for the meeting some ten months before, explaining that he wanted to talk about the accomplishments of Fascism, the cork industry, and conditions in the sulfur mines. Late in the day on January 30, 1933, Pound was admitted to see the Boss. He gave Mussolini a typewritten summary of his economic ideas and a vellum edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos, published a few years earlier in Paris. A later canto reports Mussolini’s reaction:
“Ma questo,”
said the Boss, “è divertente.”*
catching the point before the aesthetes had got there …
Pound accepted the remark as his laurel; his admiration of Mussolini took an exponential leap. Within a month he wrote his tract Jefferson and / or Mussolini (sending a copy to the Boss “with devoted homage”).
Isn’t this account a little strange? Did Pound really believe that Mussolini had read the Cantos before they met (or even afterward)? Had he never heard of polite conversation? And what could Il Duce have thought of the poet? Pound was firmly set in the habit of delivering his opinions without benefit of elaboration. We know for a fact that more than one Italian Fascist close to Mussolini found the poet “unbalanced” and his written Italian “incomprehensible.” In any event, it seems doubtful that Mussolini was as ripe to see the State Poet in Pound as Pound was to see the Poet’s State in Mussolini’s Italy. The meeting’s real significance, then, lies in Pound’s own cosmology, for Mussolini is the incarnation of Pound’s Confucian side. Stated in this fashion, Pound’s gift of the Cantos to the Boss concretizes and marks the moment when the imagination is given over to the will. In 1933 Pound literally handed Song over to Authority, a gift that cannot but break its own spirit, for neither the gift nor the imagination can survive as servants of the will toward order.
III • The Jew in the Hedge
Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot