What new can be said about Ezra Pound? That he was, in a manner of speaking, a Fortean.
Certainly, there is little reason to rehearse his biography, for my purposes, beyond drawing out those Fortean affinities. Acres of forest have fallen to print not only his voluminous work but the equally voluminous commentary—literary criticism and biographies, one of the latter three books, long, in the neighborhood of 2,000 pages.
So, thumbnailed: He was born 20 October 1885 in Hailey, Idaho but relocated to Pennsylvania before he had turned five. Whipsmart, he matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania when he was 15, but finished at Hamilton College, graduating in 1905. (Fortean Society Founder Alexander Woollcott graduated from the same school in 1909). Pound was deeply interested in literature and music. During these years, he traveled back and forth to Europe, soaking up its culture and preferring its arts to what he saw as America’s juvenile outpourings.
Certainly, there is little reason to rehearse his biography, for my purposes, beyond drawing out those Fortean affinities. Acres of forest have fallen to print not only his voluminous work but the equally voluminous commentary—literary criticism and biographies, one of the latter three books, long, in the neighborhood of 2,000 pages.
So, thumbnailed: He was born 20 October 1885 in Hailey, Idaho but relocated to Pennsylvania before he had turned five. Whipsmart, he matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania when he was 15, but finished at Hamilton College, graduating in 1905. (Fortean Society Founder Alexander Woollcott graduated from the same school in 1909). Pound was deeply interested in literature and music. During these years, he traveled back and forth to Europe, soaking up its culture and preferring its arts to what he saw as America’s juvenile outpourings.
It was the poet Ford Maddox Ford who helped to hone his inchoate ideas and got him to prefer poetry to music. Pound had, in the words of one biographer, a demanding sense of aesthetics, with beauty leading to transcendence—though in his later years he would moderate this view some. Ford pointed Pound toward the poetic movement of imagism, with which he was affiliated for a few years, paying special attention to concise word choice. Pound was, for all of his modernism, deeply influenced by classical forms—especially Dante. He had a messianic view of himself: Pound knew that there was an objective truth, revealed through tradition, though it was probably only perceivable by geniuses like himself. His poetry, in one way, he thought, was a form of scientific endeavor: by precisely defining the nature of individuals and their desires in his poetry, he was setting the groundwork for ethics and civics.
Pound was also affiliated with metaphysical and occult movements. He knew and approved of W. B. Yeats, for example, and published in Osage’s “The New Age” (where modernism and metaphysics combined). After passing through Imagism came to vorticism, influenced by the old notion of the atom as a vortex of energy. What counted in vorticism, more than the precise word, was their arrangement—a focus borrowed from Cubism. The vortex was formed by the energy of the universe concentrated through the individual—for Pound remained, despite his affection for tradition, deeply committed to individualism, against the determinsms of science, religion, and, particularly, the state.
For him, though, the individual was particularly masculine, and he complained about a gynocracy that emasculated the modern man. Despite his chauvinism, Pound was connected to a couple of publications that were feminist as well as modernist, “Egoist” and, especially, Margaret Anderson’s “Little Review,” which was at the center of the Chicago Renaissance and published the likes of Ben Hecht. He helped to funnel the best European works to its offices on America’s third coast. He helped T.S. Eliot, for example, with his modernist classic “The Waste Land,” and was at the center of several other modernist networks. Pound’s modernism, though, did not seem to extend to sexual politics, and unlike many other modernists who enjoyed flouting Victorian mores, Pound maintained a very conservative view of domesticity. A solid private sphere was to allow manly geniuses, like him, to spread enlightenment and counteract the stupidity of the masses. He wrote with these ideas in mind, putting out his own poetry, tracts on politics, economics, and culture, as well as a number of translations, including some from the Chinese.
While writing for “The New Age,” Pound discovered the ideas of social credit, and these would become important to his economic thought, even as he broke with the magazine’s coterie and then rejoined it. Social credit was one response to the crisis of capitalism that the nineteenth century had bequeathed to the twentieth, and was commonly taken up by both modernists—William Carlos Williams was also a fan—as well as Forteans. It was a way of the individual triumphing against the system, which remained important to Pound—that was why he had supported the Allies during World War I, because he found Germany totalitarian.
It was his social credit views—in economic and political form—that would get Pound into trouble. Although ins writing he emphasized the importance of quotidian, the particular, in his politics he was bound up with the abstract. Fascists, particularly Mussolini, became an object onto which he could project his ideals. As he saw it—again in the words of a biographer—Pound was thinking in grand terms, about the “epic of capitalist era, in which the will to social justice, as embodied in some few heroic individuals, must contend against the greed of the wealthy and powerful and the abulia of the many. It is a story based on real persons and real practices, and its credibility does depend in some degree on its truth to what is commonly known of these persons and practices. Beyond that believability, though, there is another order of reality, that of meanings and values; it is with these that the epic poet is most engaged, and in creating images of what is to be admired or hated he will bend history to his ends.” He summarized, “The real war, for Pound, was between usury and a good society.”
Reified like this, though, the ideas lost touch with reality, and behaved in their own ways. Pound was always more partial to Italian forms of Fascism, which he saw as more rooted in economics, than German forms, which were more rooted in racism, but in both cases let abstractions get in the way of reality: “But then his war on usury became mixed up in an attack on the League of Nations for imposing sanctions on Italy. And his defence [sic] of Italy became contaminated with justifications of its aggression against Abyssinia.”
During the 1930s, and continuing through the outbreak of War, Pound worked on behalf of the Italian fascists, justifying their political programs and attacking the Allied forces as reactionary. Inevitably, his talks and writing were run through with anti-Semitism that continued to shape—and therefore mar—his thought well into the post-War period, sometimes to the surprise of his fans. And it required unusual mental gymnastics from those who would hope to defend Pound. His biographer David Moody, for example, justifies Pound’s anti-Semitism since it had—in the end—the best interest of the Jews at heart, a way for them to escape from other forms of anti-Semitism. It’s a weird and convoluted theory: “The fact is that pound was using racial anti-Semitism to enforce his own economic agenda. That made his a rather special variant, and all the more extraordinary insofar as it was deployed not to incite race hatred but to motivate Jews to save themselves from persecution.”
As a result of his actions during the war, Pound was captured by Allied Forces and, an American, set tone tried for treason, but was instead declared insane an locked up at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in late June 1945, where he remained incarcerated—though with a fair degree of freedom—until 1958. He carried on correspondence, had visitors, and continued to write, publishing his Pisan Cantos from the Hospital. These were a continuation of a work he had been writing for decades. The Pisan Cantos, published by New Directions, won the Bollinger Prize in 1948. Pound’s lawyer at this time was Julien Cornell, who had also defended a number of Conscientious Objectors and was connected to the Fortean Society, having briefly served as its legal counsel.
After his release, Pound returned to Italy, where he was depressed and possibly mentally compromised. He was unhappy with his Cantos, which had been his life’s work, and did not produce much of note.
Ezra Pound died 1 November 1972, two days after he had turned 87, in Venice.
*****************************
Given the prominence of Ezra Pound in American letters during the 1910s and 1920s, it is of course only to be expected that his name would, in some way, be conjoined with Fort’s. It is only coincidence—but coincidence is Fortean, no?—that Pound and Fort should be in the same advertisement, run in “Publisher’s Weekly.” Boni & Liveright published both Ezra Pound’s “Instigations” and Charles Fort’s “Book of the Damned,” and both were advertised together on in the 27 September 1919 announcement of the fall list.
Beyond that small bit of happenstance, I don’t know that Pound ever gave any thought to Charles Fort. Omnivorous reader that he was, he very well may have read through one or all of Fort’s books. But there is no evidence, that I have found, he cared much for Fort. He was, however, part of the broader Fortean nexus, and seemingly intrigued by the Society that Thayer helped to found and keep in the public consciousness with pamphlets and a magazine.
Pound was a hero to Thayer, and he thought that the poet should be part of the Society from its beginning. At the first—and only—meeting of the Society, in January 1931, Thayer announced to the press and those in attendance that he planned to ask Pound to join. Probably he even did, but Pound must not have agreed, because Thayer never crowed about him being a member—which he would have. But once Pound was incarcerated, Thayer took up his cause with vehemence, though mostly behind the scenes, as Cornell wanted him that too much publicity could be a bad thing. Still, Pound was mentioned in the magazine here and there.
Thayer wrote to Pound in December 1945, telling him that, though he may have thought the Society dead, “on the contrary, we flourish now more than ever, and we have not compromised with the flag-wavers for a single instant throughout the late World Fraud.” He offered to send him copies of “Doubt,” the Fortean Society magazine, and Fortean visitors, both of which he seemed to follow through on. He had trouble getting Forteans to go, so instead his wife, Kathleen went, as did he, a few times, as well as an associate of Scott Nearing. The collection of newsletters and magazines he received while at St. Elizabeth’s included Doubts 14-18 and 24 and 26, as well as a leaflet “that You May Know,” which was apparently included with Doubt on eight occasions. I do no know who wrote the pamphlet, but it was modeled on Pound’s writing style and themes, announcing the the world’s monetary supply was controlled by a small cadre, particularly the Jewish Rothschilds. The cover of Doubt 16 was an Chinese ideogram drawn by Pound, with the caption pointing to Pound’s book on culture, from 1938.
These newsletters did not go unread. The copies preserved at Hamilton College, which Pound had owned, include underlinings and marginalia, noting stories on economics and the perfidy of Catholics. Some time around April 1946, Pound even suggested some item for “Doubt,” though the surviving correspondence does not say what it was; Thayer thought it was a good idea, and suggested Pound write it up himself. He may have even sent in a Fortean clipping around January 1947, but, again, the extant correspondence is unclear. And in 1948, Pound seems to have offered Thayer some aphorisms—whether this was the fulfillment of the idea Pound suggested or something else, I don’t know—but Thayer passed because they were not in line with Fortean interests. Adding to the confusion, it is not clear whether Thayer passed because they were genuinely un-Fortean, which seems unlikely given his capacious definition of Forteanism, because he could not pay Pound what he thought he deserved—this crept up in Thayer reprinting a work by Pound in his anthology “33 Sardonics,” the publisher offering what Thayer bought was an insultingly low price, though with “Doubt” Thayer could have offered any amount—or, most likely, because Thayer was trying to follow Cornell’s advice and not bring undue attention to Pound.
It was a strain on Thayer, keeping his mouth closed, as he admitted. For a long time, he had used Pound’s term for the newspapers, “wypers,” borrowed from his 1938 book “Culture,” and sometimes even had the coinage attributed to him—but he wanted to acknowledge its source. He just didn’t think that would help Pound, which was his main goal, even though it hurt. Thayer told Russell, in 1947, “‘Wypers’ is Ezra Pound’s word, not mine, dammit. But I can’t give him credit until we get him out of the nut-house, The necessity for silence is driving me nuts—but he and his family our legally advised so I am not to turn over any apple-carts.” And that same year, wrote to Pound, “Incidentally, you may have noticed that I swiped your word ‘wypers’ for the dailies, and now use it consistently. I should have given you proper credit for this, but for the fact that the best legal advice is not to mention your name in print for the time-being. It has been so damned difficult for me to remain silent so long. Pussy-footing is not my forte. But I had rather compromise with my conscience than work you an injury.”
For Thayer was committed to Pound and his ideals, and turned to him for advice on economics as well as poetry. He asked for Pound’s opinion of Duke of Bedford, who was an Accepted Fellow of the Fortean Society, because “his politics are a bit foggy to me.” A similar lack of understanding had Thayer asking Pound about George Sylvester Vierick, a poet who had been a supporter of fascist Germany: “His principles are imperceptible (to me, at least), but—anyway—he is back in town, with a novel which leans heavily on his observations in prison.”
And Thayer tried to use the Fortean Society to help Pound in more indirect ways. (He did so personally, too, meeting with Laughlin and Pound’s family; petitioning Cornell; sending Pound magazines and offers of other goods or money; visiting.) He tried to coordinate a “stunt” with his wife Dorothy and the Society, for example, the nature of which is unknown, and it didn’t work out anyway. He promoted Pound’s friends, such as Hugo Fack, a renegade of economic thought (who, in turn, mentioned Fort in one of his pamphlets) and George Toms Olarenshaw, who would become associated with the publisher (monarchist, fascist sympathizer, Fortean, and New Age enthusiast) N. V. Dagg. Thayer wrote that both Olarenshaw and Fack “appear to be on the ascendant. I am doing what I can to help.” He used his Fortean connections to seek out people with whom Pound was trying to get in touch, and bring forward Forteans to Pound.
At one point, about a year after his incarceration, Pound suggested that Thayer do a census of “tentative” or “potential” adults. The exact meaning of this phrase is obscure, but it seems to suggest people who thought for themselves, which in practice meant were not taken in by government propaganda and understood some of the virtues of the various European fascist movements as checks on unbridled capitalism. Nothing came of the census, at least not obviously—the idea may have survived in some reduced form. Initially, though, Thayer was very excited, even as he knew there was a very large caveat to the proceedings: “It has a depressing side—for—I should like to be able to say that the entire roster of the Society would do for a start, and, alas, that isn’t true. However, I shall see what I can do with the notion editorially, simply for the sport of goading the semi-conscious.”
Nonetheless, there were a number of Forteans who supported Pound—however much Thayer might have wished more would do so. In early 1949, Miles D. S. Kirk, wrote a couple of letters to Eric Frank Russell in which he mentioned being infuriated by Pound’s mis-treatment—though Kirk seems to have left the Fortean Society fairly quickly, since he thought it was hypocritical, pleading for freedom of thought but then mindlessly disparaging fascism. Pound’s attorney, Julien Cornell, allowed his name to be used in association with the Fortean Society. The poet Charles Olson also used Fortean ideas in works that were profoundly influenced by Pound—though he was shocked by the baldness of his anti-Semitism. Prince Boris de Rachewiltz, Pound’s son-in-law, became associated with the Fortean Society, its representative, for a time, in Italy.
James Blish, the science fiction writer, was a great admirer of Ezra Pound, had written an academic work on him, and defended his poetry against charges of anti-Semitism vehemently in his self-published ‘zines and letters: Pound was using Jews in his works as a symbol, Blish said, a literary device that metonymically summarized capitalist fat cats. His work needed to be judged as literature, not in social or political terms. (It should be noted that Blish’s friends at the times noted he had significant sympathies for the Nazi movement.) Thayer also kept Eric Frank Russell, science fiction writer and British representative of the Fortean Society, up to date on Pound’s case and there personal situations of Pound and his family. Russell was sympathetic to Pound and opposed to those who besmirched the name.
That matter came to a head 1949; that was when Pound’s Pisan Cantos, published by James Laughlin in 1948, was awarded the Bollingen Prize by the library of Congress. Some on the left were bothered by the seeking approval of his anti-Semitism, while others followed James Blish’s line of reasoning—though not influenced by Blish—separating the quality of the literature from its political meanings. Others, on the right, were upset that a traitor had been rewarded—and this was part of a more general attack on Pound’s style of modernist literature. As Alan Filreis has shown, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a contest over the meaning of modernism, and Forteans, as well as their associates were right in the middle of it.
Significant attacks on Pound came from the Saturday Review of Literature, which had done so much to promote Fort in the 1940s, and also from the Fortean poet Lilith Lorraine and her associate Stanton Coblentz, a science fiction writer, and Peter Viereck, son of Thayer associate and poet George Sylvester Viereck. Speaking generally, they saw Pound and others practicing a fragmented modernist style of poetry as anti-American, contributing to disorder, sowing the seeds of communism. The name of Coblentz’s and Lilith’s organization—“The League for Sanity in Poetry”—was clearly a jab at Pound, installed in an insane asylum. Of course, Fort himself had a modernist, fragmentary aesthetic, in line with Pound or Joyce or Stein, which may account for the overlap in those who appreciated Fort as a writer and Forteans willing defend Pound’s poetry. It’s also true that Lilith Lorraine—particularly—and others who waved the flag in the name of anti-communism, irritated Forteans for their conventionality. (Lilith Lorraine’s being a woman did not help her with the likes of Thayer and Russell.)
In the second half of 1949, Russell penned an angry response to something Coblentz had written in Lorraine’s small magazine “Different.” Coblentz had attacked Pound—and Russell came to his defense, even though he admitted he had not read the work in questions, “The Pisan Cantos.” The arguments against Pound, he said, were ideological, not aesthetic, and should be dismissed as demagoguery. His stance won plaudits from another Fortean who was irritated at Lorraine’s conservatism, Francoise Delisle, and in November Thayer told him he would run the piece, though “It is not half strong enough. His case is very sad.” Thayer himself had broken down and spoke out publicly, writing a letter about the Saturday review of Literature’s attack on Pound; however, it never appeared. Russell’s short essay did run in “Doubt.”
I don’t know that all the hubbub in the Fortean Society meant much to Pound; he did read those issues of Doubt, and Thayer helped his family some, but otherwise there was a distance. Cornell kept the Society and Thayer at arm’s length; Laughlin breezed through; and Eliot never met with Thayer, despite a number of overtures. But something got through. In 1962, giving an interview to “The Paris Review,” Pound’s thoughts drifted to his differences with Thayer—Pound thought transcendence through art was possible, but difficult, while Thayer dismissed the very notion as nothing more than the workings of psychology and culture.
This difference between the two men seems to have wormed its way into the Pisan Cantos, though subtly. Line 688 of Cantos 74 runs “Beauty is difficult”—the very idea that separated Thayer and Pound—and there followed a run down of various people and their confrontations with the possibility of beauty. From here, he muses on the passing of beautiful things, the mind’s ability to remember them and with them all the associated imagery—it’s Proust’s Madeleine—at the same time wondering where those things actually go. Is there a kind of reincarnation, what he calls metempsychosis, or something else—something occult, something bizarre—an afterlife that would appeal to the Fortean imagination: “eh, to arrive by metempsychosis at….?/and there are also the conjectures of the Fortean Society.”
But this reference to the Fortean Society is more than tossed off, a glib pointing-to all of its hypothesizing. There’s something of the difference between Pound and Thayer in these lines, too. He is no referring to the Fortean Society because it supports ideas such as reincarnation. He is pointing to it for its thematic resonance, too. The very next words after the invocation of the Fortean Society, line 738, repeats line 688: “Beauty is difficult.” Pound was seeking it—he knew beauty existed. The Fortean Society—Thayer—they speculated that there was no such thing, no objectively, not as part of the universe. Perhaps that was why, as much as anything else, Pound himself stayed distant from the Fortean Society—despite all it did to support him.
Pound was also affiliated with metaphysical and occult movements. He knew and approved of W. B. Yeats, for example, and published in Osage’s “The New Age” (where modernism and metaphysics combined). After passing through Imagism came to vorticism, influenced by the old notion of the atom as a vortex of energy. What counted in vorticism, more than the precise word, was their arrangement—a focus borrowed from Cubism. The vortex was formed by the energy of the universe concentrated through the individual—for Pound remained, despite his affection for tradition, deeply committed to individualism, against the determinsms of science, religion, and, particularly, the state.
For him, though, the individual was particularly masculine, and he complained about a gynocracy that emasculated the modern man. Despite his chauvinism, Pound was connected to a couple of publications that were feminist as well as modernist, “Egoist” and, especially, Margaret Anderson’s “Little Review,” which was at the center of the Chicago Renaissance and published the likes of Ben Hecht. He helped to funnel the best European works to its offices on America’s third coast. He helped T.S. Eliot, for example, with his modernist classic “The Waste Land,” and was at the center of several other modernist networks. Pound’s modernism, though, did not seem to extend to sexual politics, and unlike many other modernists who enjoyed flouting Victorian mores, Pound maintained a very conservative view of domesticity. A solid private sphere was to allow manly geniuses, like him, to spread enlightenment and counteract the stupidity of the masses. He wrote with these ideas in mind, putting out his own poetry, tracts on politics, economics, and culture, as well as a number of translations, including some from the Chinese.
While writing for “The New Age,” Pound discovered the ideas of social credit, and these would become important to his economic thought, even as he broke with the magazine’s coterie and then rejoined it. Social credit was one response to the crisis of capitalism that the nineteenth century had bequeathed to the twentieth, and was commonly taken up by both modernists—William Carlos Williams was also a fan—as well as Forteans. It was a way of the individual triumphing against the system, which remained important to Pound—that was why he had supported the Allies during World War I, because he found Germany totalitarian.
It was his social credit views—in economic and political form—that would get Pound into trouble. Although ins writing he emphasized the importance of quotidian, the particular, in his politics he was bound up with the abstract. Fascists, particularly Mussolini, became an object onto which he could project his ideals. As he saw it—again in the words of a biographer—Pound was thinking in grand terms, about the “epic of capitalist era, in which the will to social justice, as embodied in some few heroic individuals, must contend against the greed of the wealthy and powerful and the abulia of the many. It is a story based on real persons and real practices, and its credibility does depend in some degree on its truth to what is commonly known of these persons and practices. Beyond that believability, though, there is another order of reality, that of meanings and values; it is with these that the epic poet is most engaged, and in creating images of what is to be admired or hated he will bend history to his ends.” He summarized, “The real war, for Pound, was between usury and a good society.”
Reified like this, though, the ideas lost touch with reality, and behaved in their own ways. Pound was always more partial to Italian forms of Fascism, which he saw as more rooted in economics, than German forms, which were more rooted in racism, but in both cases let abstractions get in the way of reality: “But then his war on usury became mixed up in an attack on the League of Nations for imposing sanctions on Italy. And his defence [sic] of Italy became contaminated with justifications of its aggression against Abyssinia.”
During the 1930s, and continuing through the outbreak of War, Pound worked on behalf of the Italian fascists, justifying their political programs and attacking the Allied forces as reactionary. Inevitably, his talks and writing were run through with anti-Semitism that continued to shape—and therefore mar—his thought well into the post-War period, sometimes to the surprise of his fans. And it required unusual mental gymnastics from those who would hope to defend Pound. His biographer David Moody, for example, justifies Pound’s anti-Semitism since it had—in the end—the best interest of the Jews at heart, a way for them to escape from other forms of anti-Semitism. It’s a weird and convoluted theory: “The fact is that pound was using racial anti-Semitism to enforce his own economic agenda. That made his a rather special variant, and all the more extraordinary insofar as it was deployed not to incite race hatred but to motivate Jews to save themselves from persecution.”
As a result of his actions during the war, Pound was captured by Allied Forces and, an American, set tone tried for treason, but was instead declared insane an locked up at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in late June 1945, where he remained incarcerated—though with a fair degree of freedom—until 1958. He carried on correspondence, had visitors, and continued to write, publishing his Pisan Cantos from the Hospital. These were a continuation of a work he had been writing for decades. The Pisan Cantos, published by New Directions, won the Bollinger Prize in 1948. Pound’s lawyer at this time was Julien Cornell, who had also defended a number of Conscientious Objectors and was connected to the Fortean Society, having briefly served as its legal counsel.
After his release, Pound returned to Italy, where he was depressed and possibly mentally compromised. He was unhappy with his Cantos, which had been his life’s work, and did not produce much of note.
Ezra Pound died 1 November 1972, two days after he had turned 87, in Venice.
*****************************
Given the prominence of Ezra Pound in American letters during the 1910s and 1920s, it is of course only to be expected that his name would, in some way, be conjoined with Fort’s. It is only coincidence—but coincidence is Fortean, no?—that Pound and Fort should be in the same advertisement, run in “Publisher’s Weekly.” Boni & Liveright published both Ezra Pound’s “Instigations” and Charles Fort’s “Book of the Damned,” and both were advertised together on in the 27 September 1919 announcement of the fall list.
Beyond that small bit of happenstance, I don’t know that Pound ever gave any thought to Charles Fort. Omnivorous reader that he was, he very well may have read through one or all of Fort’s books. But there is no evidence, that I have found, he cared much for Fort. He was, however, part of the broader Fortean nexus, and seemingly intrigued by the Society that Thayer helped to found and keep in the public consciousness with pamphlets and a magazine.
Pound was a hero to Thayer, and he thought that the poet should be part of the Society from its beginning. At the first—and only—meeting of the Society, in January 1931, Thayer announced to the press and those in attendance that he planned to ask Pound to join. Probably he even did, but Pound must not have agreed, because Thayer never crowed about him being a member—which he would have. But once Pound was incarcerated, Thayer took up his cause with vehemence, though mostly behind the scenes, as Cornell wanted him that too much publicity could be a bad thing. Still, Pound was mentioned in the magazine here and there.
Thayer wrote to Pound in December 1945, telling him that, though he may have thought the Society dead, “on the contrary, we flourish now more than ever, and we have not compromised with the flag-wavers for a single instant throughout the late World Fraud.” He offered to send him copies of “Doubt,” the Fortean Society magazine, and Fortean visitors, both of which he seemed to follow through on. He had trouble getting Forteans to go, so instead his wife, Kathleen went, as did he, a few times, as well as an associate of Scott Nearing. The collection of newsletters and magazines he received while at St. Elizabeth’s included Doubts 14-18 and 24 and 26, as well as a leaflet “that You May Know,” which was apparently included with Doubt on eight occasions. I do no know who wrote the pamphlet, but it was modeled on Pound’s writing style and themes, announcing the the world’s monetary supply was controlled by a small cadre, particularly the Jewish Rothschilds. The cover of Doubt 16 was an Chinese ideogram drawn by Pound, with the caption pointing to Pound’s book on culture, from 1938.
These newsletters did not go unread. The copies preserved at Hamilton College, which Pound had owned, include underlinings and marginalia, noting stories on economics and the perfidy of Catholics. Some time around April 1946, Pound even suggested some item for “Doubt,” though the surviving correspondence does not say what it was; Thayer thought it was a good idea, and suggested Pound write it up himself. He may have even sent in a Fortean clipping around January 1947, but, again, the extant correspondence is unclear. And in 1948, Pound seems to have offered Thayer some aphorisms—whether this was the fulfillment of the idea Pound suggested or something else, I don’t know—but Thayer passed because they were not in line with Fortean interests. Adding to the confusion, it is not clear whether Thayer passed because they were genuinely un-Fortean, which seems unlikely given his capacious definition of Forteanism, because he could not pay Pound what he thought he deserved—this crept up in Thayer reprinting a work by Pound in his anthology “33 Sardonics,” the publisher offering what Thayer bought was an insultingly low price, though with “Doubt” Thayer could have offered any amount—or, most likely, because Thayer was trying to follow Cornell’s advice and not bring undue attention to Pound.
It was a strain on Thayer, keeping his mouth closed, as he admitted. For a long time, he had used Pound’s term for the newspapers, “wypers,” borrowed from his 1938 book “Culture,” and sometimes even had the coinage attributed to him—but he wanted to acknowledge its source. He just didn’t think that would help Pound, which was his main goal, even though it hurt. Thayer told Russell, in 1947, “‘Wypers’ is Ezra Pound’s word, not mine, dammit. But I can’t give him credit until we get him out of the nut-house, The necessity for silence is driving me nuts—but he and his family our legally advised so I am not to turn over any apple-carts.” And that same year, wrote to Pound, “Incidentally, you may have noticed that I swiped your word ‘wypers’ for the dailies, and now use it consistently. I should have given you proper credit for this, but for the fact that the best legal advice is not to mention your name in print for the time-being. It has been so damned difficult for me to remain silent so long. Pussy-footing is not my forte. But I had rather compromise with my conscience than work you an injury.”
For Thayer was committed to Pound and his ideals, and turned to him for advice on economics as well as poetry. He asked for Pound’s opinion of Duke of Bedford, who was an Accepted Fellow of the Fortean Society, because “his politics are a bit foggy to me.” A similar lack of understanding had Thayer asking Pound about George Sylvester Vierick, a poet who had been a supporter of fascist Germany: “His principles are imperceptible (to me, at least), but—anyway—he is back in town, with a novel which leans heavily on his observations in prison.”
And Thayer tried to use the Fortean Society to help Pound in more indirect ways. (He did so personally, too, meeting with Laughlin and Pound’s family; petitioning Cornell; sending Pound magazines and offers of other goods or money; visiting.) He tried to coordinate a “stunt” with his wife Dorothy and the Society, for example, the nature of which is unknown, and it didn’t work out anyway. He promoted Pound’s friends, such as Hugo Fack, a renegade of economic thought (who, in turn, mentioned Fort in one of his pamphlets) and George Toms Olarenshaw, who would become associated with the publisher (monarchist, fascist sympathizer, Fortean, and New Age enthusiast) N. V. Dagg. Thayer wrote that both Olarenshaw and Fack “appear to be on the ascendant. I am doing what I can to help.” He used his Fortean connections to seek out people with whom Pound was trying to get in touch, and bring forward Forteans to Pound.
At one point, about a year after his incarceration, Pound suggested that Thayer do a census of “tentative” or “potential” adults. The exact meaning of this phrase is obscure, but it seems to suggest people who thought for themselves, which in practice meant were not taken in by government propaganda and understood some of the virtues of the various European fascist movements as checks on unbridled capitalism. Nothing came of the census, at least not obviously—the idea may have survived in some reduced form. Initially, though, Thayer was very excited, even as he knew there was a very large caveat to the proceedings: “It has a depressing side—for—I should like to be able to say that the entire roster of the Society would do for a start, and, alas, that isn’t true. However, I shall see what I can do with the notion editorially, simply for the sport of goading the semi-conscious.”
Nonetheless, there were a number of Forteans who supported Pound—however much Thayer might have wished more would do so. In early 1949, Miles D. S. Kirk, wrote a couple of letters to Eric Frank Russell in which he mentioned being infuriated by Pound’s mis-treatment—though Kirk seems to have left the Fortean Society fairly quickly, since he thought it was hypocritical, pleading for freedom of thought but then mindlessly disparaging fascism. Pound’s attorney, Julien Cornell, allowed his name to be used in association with the Fortean Society. The poet Charles Olson also used Fortean ideas in works that were profoundly influenced by Pound—though he was shocked by the baldness of his anti-Semitism. Prince Boris de Rachewiltz, Pound’s son-in-law, became associated with the Fortean Society, its representative, for a time, in Italy.
James Blish, the science fiction writer, was a great admirer of Ezra Pound, had written an academic work on him, and defended his poetry against charges of anti-Semitism vehemently in his self-published ‘zines and letters: Pound was using Jews in his works as a symbol, Blish said, a literary device that metonymically summarized capitalist fat cats. His work needed to be judged as literature, not in social or political terms. (It should be noted that Blish’s friends at the times noted he had significant sympathies for the Nazi movement.) Thayer also kept Eric Frank Russell, science fiction writer and British representative of the Fortean Society, up to date on Pound’s case and there personal situations of Pound and his family. Russell was sympathetic to Pound and opposed to those who besmirched the name.
That matter came to a head 1949; that was when Pound’s Pisan Cantos, published by James Laughlin in 1948, was awarded the Bollingen Prize by the library of Congress. Some on the left were bothered by the seeking approval of his anti-Semitism, while others followed James Blish’s line of reasoning—though not influenced by Blish—separating the quality of the literature from its political meanings. Others, on the right, were upset that a traitor had been rewarded—and this was part of a more general attack on Pound’s style of modernist literature. As Alan Filreis has shown, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was a contest over the meaning of modernism, and Forteans, as well as their associates were right in the middle of it.
Significant attacks on Pound came from the Saturday Review of Literature, which had done so much to promote Fort in the 1940s, and also from the Fortean poet Lilith Lorraine and her associate Stanton Coblentz, a science fiction writer, and Peter Viereck, son of Thayer associate and poet George Sylvester Viereck. Speaking generally, they saw Pound and others practicing a fragmented modernist style of poetry as anti-American, contributing to disorder, sowing the seeds of communism. The name of Coblentz’s and Lilith’s organization—“The League for Sanity in Poetry”—was clearly a jab at Pound, installed in an insane asylum. Of course, Fort himself had a modernist, fragmentary aesthetic, in line with Pound or Joyce or Stein, which may account for the overlap in those who appreciated Fort as a writer and Forteans willing defend Pound’s poetry. It’s also true that Lilith Lorraine—particularly—and others who waved the flag in the name of anti-communism, irritated Forteans for their conventionality. (Lilith Lorraine’s being a woman did not help her with the likes of Thayer and Russell.)
In the second half of 1949, Russell penned an angry response to something Coblentz had written in Lorraine’s small magazine “Different.” Coblentz had attacked Pound—and Russell came to his defense, even though he admitted he had not read the work in questions, “The Pisan Cantos.” The arguments against Pound, he said, were ideological, not aesthetic, and should be dismissed as demagoguery. His stance won plaudits from another Fortean who was irritated at Lorraine’s conservatism, Francoise Delisle, and in November Thayer told him he would run the piece, though “It is not half strong enough. His case is very sad.” Thayer himself had broken down and spoke out publicly, writing a letter about the Saturday review of Literature’s attack on Pound; however, it never appeared. Russell’s short essay did run in “Doubt.”
I don’t know that all the hubbub in the Fortean Society meant much to Pound; he did read those issues of Doubt, and Thayer helped his family some, but otherwise there was a distance. Cornell kept the Society and Thayer at arm’s length; Laughlin breezed through; and Eliot never met with Thayer, despite a number of overtures. But something got through. In 1962, giving an interview to “The Paris Review,” Pound’s thoughts drifted to his differences with Thayer—Pound thought transcendence through art was possible, but difficult, while Thayer dismissed the very notion as nothing more than the workings of psychology and culture.
This difference between the two men seems to have wormed its way into the Pisan Cantos, though subtly. Line 688 of Cantos 74 runs “Beauty is difficult”—the very idea that separated Thayer and Pound—and there followed a run down of various people and their confrontations with the possibility of beauty. From here, he muses on the passing of beautiful things, the mind’s ability to remember them and with them all the associated imagery—it’s Proust’s Madeleine—at the same time wondering where those things actually go. Is there a kind of reincarnation, what he calls metempsychosis, or something else—something occult, something bizarre—an afterlife that would appeal to the Fortean imagination: “eh, to arrive by metempsychosis at….?/and there are also the conjectures of the Fortean Society.”
But this reference to the Fortean Society is more than tossed off, a glib pointing-to all of its hypothesizing. There’s something of the difference between Pound and Thayer in these lines, too. He is no referring to the Fortean Society because it supports ideas such as reincarnation. He is pointing to it for its thematic resonance, too. The very next words after the invocation of the Fortean Society, line 738, repeats line 688: “Beauty is difficult.” Pound was seeking it—he knew beauty existed. The Fortean Society—Thayer—they speculated that there was no such thing, no objectively, not as part of the universe. Perhaps that was why, as much as anything else, Pound himself stayed distant from the Fortean Society—despite all it did to support him.
