The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [147]
To approach the crazy side of Pound’s economics, we may begin by looking for those places in his presentation where the tone suddenly slips, where his voice becomes unaccountably shrill. Pound constantly addresses himself to money, for example, but it is the Jew as moneylender who comes in for the strange twists of phrase and affect. Pound could write an entire Money Pamphlet with sufficient cogent ideas to make his argument discussable, but then on the last page suddenly say that “the Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers” have been hiding the facts from the public.
If we list the topics that come to us with this fishy smell we find the following: stupid and ignorant people, lazy people, the Americans and the English, the Allied leaders (Roosevelt and Churchill in particular, American presidents in general), usurers, monetary criminals, the Jews, and, to a lesser extent, the Protestants. The elements in this list are all connected to one another in Pound’s cosmology: the lazy are ignorant; the ignorant are usually Americans; the Americans elect “their sewage” (the best example being Roosevelt, whom Pound thought of as a Jew, calling him “Jewsfeldt,” “stinkie Roosenstein,” etc.);England hasn’t been the same since they let in the Jew, who, of course, is the best example of the usurer and the monetary criminal. We are not dealing with discrete elements here, we’re dealing with a lump. If we speak of any part of the lump, we will be well on our way to describing the whole. The part I shall focus on is the Jew as he appears in Pound’s writing.
“Pound’s Jew,” as I would call this image, seems to me to be a version of the classical god Hermes. One of Pound’s early poems invokes Mercury, the Roman counterpart to Hermes:
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-
shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the whores dropping in for a word or two in
passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.
Hermes is a god of trade—of money and merchandise and the open road. I shall say more about him in a moment; for now we need only note that the poem says this deity could free the poet from some confinement. If Hermes were to answer the call—with a little shop, some dirty money, and cheap sex— Pound might be released from the troublesome burden of his profession. My position here is that Hermes did in fact respond to Pound’s invocation, but that Pound backed off, refused his approach, and consigned the god to his own shadow.
In psychoanalytic terms, the “shadow” is the personification of those parts of the self that could be integrated into the ego but for one reason or another are not. Many people leave their feelings about death in the shadow, for example. They could be carried in the daylight self but are left unspoken. Random sexual desire remains in the shadow for most people. It could be acted upon openly or it could be acknowledged and dismissed (which still removes it from the shadow), but it isn’t. What the ego needs but cannot accept the psyche will personify and either present in dreams or project onto someone in the outer world. These shadow figures then become objects of simultaneous fascination and disgust—a recurrent and troubling figure in dreams or someone in the neighborhood we don’t like but can’t stop talking about.
Pound began to become obsessed with the money question around 1915, so I take that to be the approximate date when Hermes answered his invocation. But, as I say, Pound backed off. Then, like any spurned deity, Hermes began