POUND ON FASCISM

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21732, 14 March 1936, Page 19

POUND ON FASCISM

—__♦_—-.._. Jefferson and/or MnssoHnf. By Ear* PoimtL Stanley Noti. 128 pp. (6/net.) Mr Nott decided to publish "Jefferson and/or Mussolini" in April, 1935. The manuscript left its author's hands in February, 1933, arid in its two years' wanderings was read and rejected by 40 publishers. Their unwillingness to publish is comprehensible. The book has as much thread of develppment as a dictionary, and some of its language is abracadabric. But it is worth attacking. No one will read it. It contains dogmatic snippets of political theory, many historical references (some so recondite as to seem dubious), generous condemnation of most practising statesmen, oracular comments on modern literature, and, from time to time, eulogies of the humane perspicacity of Jefferson and Mussolini. Mr Pound's convictions are founded on intuition or on a coincidence of some episode with his own literary fancy. But the pudding has many plums easy to pull out, easy to swallow, and likely to cause mental indigestion. All which, doubtless, is Mr Pound's arch purpose. Maybe these comments are all wrong; maybe some philosophical profundity lies beneath the rambling structure of words and verdicts. Only deep study and unlimited goodwill will disprove one case or the other, and the reviewer's goodwill and power of study have been exhausted. Mr Pound calls his work journalism, but "Journalism as I see it is history of to-day, and literature is journalism that stays news." Two laudatory sentences about Mussolini may be quoted; they seem to be true. "By taking more responsibility than any other man (save possibly Lenin) has dared to assume in bur time Mussolini has succeeded in imparting here and there a little of this sense to some others." Again: "Power is necessary to some acts, ' but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power. The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward order." Italy became the heir to Jeffersonian principles—thinking first of the cultural inheritance and its effect on men—because as Mr Pound observed during the war, "Italy was—full of bounce .... London is dead, Paris is tired, but here the place is alive." "Italy' for the very "simple reason that after the great infamy there was no other clot of energy in Europe capable of opposing ANY FORCE WHATEVER to the infinite evil of the profiteers and the sellers of men's blood for money." It is hard, with ordinary knowledge, to join in this panegyric, and it is easy to dismiss Mr Pound's affirmations as infatuated moonshine. It is more easy to observe him kicking the great in the pants. (The language is inevitable.) "I see," says Mr Pound, "a member of the Seldes family giving half an underdone damn whether their yawps do harm or have any other effect than that of getting themselves advertised." The research student who goes over "Jefferson and/or Mussolini" with a fine toothcomb (the phrase is inevitable), and extracts reference by reference the matter for a biographical memoir of Mr Pound which it certainly contains, will not have to send his MSS. to 40 publishers.