The next move, the next world
movement
is a move toward the production of thoroughbreds.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
I went up her stairs and was received as if I had been a flamingo or sortie other rare exotic.
That old France is NO longer with us.
Now after my study of the real poets, from Gautier onward, I dropped into Paris in, I think, 1919 and I asked what was doing. And they told me a lot, some of it hooey, but nobody mentioned Cocteau. Only after six weeks did someone say, after I had refused a lot of dog biscuit writing, as NOT what I was lookin' for, oh, well, there is Cocteau. Just as some years before a Harvard man entered my hail bedroom, if you could call it HALL, and told me about American writing and, when I declined to eat it, he added, oh, well, there is Eliot. I thought the isolation of Jean Cocteau indicated some nastiness on the part of his colleagues, but didn't notice their stud book.
Jean had his own particular line. Not everyone could be expected to like it, but he was way and by far the BEST poet and best prose writer then livin' in Paris. Only real criticism of his limits came from Picabia, who had on his own part limits. Curiously enough (details extraneous to my present subject) ten years later the best new writer in Paris was Rene? Crevel. Les Pieds dans le Plat. Have you read it? When he died, I expected to see his contemporaries make a fuss, and lament him. They did NOT.
I had thought by then I could draw back and do my own stuff and leave funeral services and criticism of the young to the new generation. Not a bit of it. After hemmin' and hawing, and waitin' I had to lay a wreathe on Crevel. Nigh coincided with the demise of Possum's Criterion. Well
? now what was CAUSIN' this, what was causin' this state of affairs? YOU tell papa.
I am not, as you might think, indulgin' merely in retrospect. I am recallin' these things because I have been readin' YET AGAIN a French author. Way out above other French authors. Say Cocteau was 1919, and Crevel 1926, and the new man been now writing for just a decade. I hear he is a doctor, been working in Paris suburbs. Seen a bit of reality. Writes without fuzz on his tongue. Prose writer who bursts in[to] poetry, into verse writing. Next time, next time, be the last ONE. Gnrr, gnrr, gnrr, gnrra. Suicide of the Nation.
No fuzz on the blighter's tongue. Voice of France, as when France was young. Only Sam Putnam I think today will be able to find out a way to say in United States talk what the frog has been tellin' 'em.
This frog has been telling 'em back in '32 of the war to come. It is not only that the FRENCH of Rabelais has come to life again. It is not only that spoken French, the French of the mechanics is at last put down on the page. It is that it takes hold of the page; it is alive on the page.
The dirty old siren mermaid sticking up out of the mud of the Seine, blowsly, boosy, unappetizing, starts tellin' the author where to git off at, she tells him, he tells her, there is no wasted politeness. There is none of the heaviness that sometimes creeps into Ulysses. None of the aimless search for exaggeration that makes Finnigan's Wake unimportant. Joyce hit his high in Ulysses. There was still exuberance. In Finnigan he is hunting, he is experimenting with a technique, bourgeois diversion. I haven't patience to wade through it. Thank God I am not employed to estimate the exact percentage of real metal in low grade ores (no pun intended).
France HAS an author who in 1938 could write, FRANCE HAS NO ALLIES.
? That one sentence is enough to establish an author.
Oh yes, the rising American writers, the writers of 1940 to '50 will STILL have to read a FRENCH author. I mean ANOTHER French author; one not yet in the school books, one no Amy Lowell will bring home in a sachet case.
France stank, and the stink is recorded. It is recorded with a COPIA: whereof probably no frog since Rabelais has been capable. But the copia, the supply of words is an accessory. It is the clear view that makes CE? LINE important.
Yaaas, I am talkin' of CE? LINE. Last book suppressed I hear in Ole Brother
Pe? tain's France. Don't like the SUBJECT. Some folks don't like the SUB JECT. Now WHY don't they like the subject? Ce? line was all out to save France. I reckon he is still out to pick up the pieces.
Forty million population in France in 1938; 25 million Frenchmen, soon to be a minority. CELINE was tellin' 'em, and they did NOT listen to Ce? line. Nacherly Mr. Chamberlain's friends, and Mr. Eden's playmates did NOT encourage the publication of Ce? line. Naturally his work was not welcome in certain quarters. Nevertheless the E? cole des Cadavres had gone into 51 editions by the time the copy before me was printed. His best KNOWN works are Voyage au bout de la Nuit, Mort a` Credit, Bagatelles pour un Massacre.
Bonjour, Ferdinand. I don't hold it my duty any more to run a chronicle of French publications, but I still know a real book when I see one, what ever the contents.
Ferdinand has GOT down to reality, Ferdinand is a writer. Next one will be the last one. Gnrr, gnrrn, gnrrn, gnrr. Suicide of the Nation.
? La prochaine sera la derniere. Gnie? res! Gn, gn. c? a sera le suicide de la Nation.
Au pays n'en riviendra gue? re.
Not only for his copia, his abundance of language. Not only for the force of his prosody, but for the content. You will have to read Ce? line sometime. The active members of the community will have to BUY their own copies of L'Ecole des Cadavres, not enough to hear me 5 minutes over the air, or dip into a copy at a friend's house.
#37 (May 14, 1942) U. S. (B42)
TO BE LATE (ESSERE IN RITARDO)
I hear one of my ex-editors has been saying, oh, yes, Pound's talks are all right but they are, what was it, belated. No, he said something different, tardy, was it OUT OF DATE, OUT OF DATE, that was it.
Well damn it, two things. One, if you hadn't been such mutts you would have heard me (and Ce? line for that matter) long before now.
Some of you would have THOUGHT about what Ferdinand, L. F. Ce? line, and the present speaker started saying a long time ago.
I started long before Ce? line. So far as I can make out, I s'pose he is 15 or 20 years younger than I am. Unless of course he took up his young days doctorin' in the Paris suburbs and only got round to writin after he had got through with his patients.
He says in one place folks don't understand him. That is they understand him all wrong. Does this remind you of some of the best Jersey writin'? I translate it from the original,
One constructs little illusions, one thinks one is understood, and then, not a bit of it. . . . One writes out thousands of prescriptions . . . one will
? never know the good that they do. . . . You have been understood all WRONG, always. If you have written it out in your largest and clearest script and then sung it:
Half a teaspoon full in a cup of tilleul, WARM, at the moment of getting into bed. . . . The patient, the client, will do it his own way, he will take thirty teaspoons full in a cup of bouillon when he gets OUT of bed and that will cause a horrible scandal and he will come around and blame you . . . and there will be complications, no end of them.
In all humility, I am telling you these things, that is sure. But I do not pretend to TEACH you anything whatsoever.
About ten years after I left Paris, M. Ce? line discovered why he left France; being a Frenchman he doesn't put it that way. But he has, quite amply, noted the biological fixity of the French. He is quite eloquent about the ten years during which Pasteur was kept from reachin' maximum utility, logic, cartesianism, etc. The difference between boiling instruments 20 minutes and boiling 'em 3 [minutes]. He also notes that he has never found a poor Jew of no importance who speaks evil either of Rothschild OR of the Soviets. The United States may take 20 years more to get to where Ce? line was ten years ago.
Belated I am belated I am not an alarm clock expected to tell unhearing America, of every first book by a new European author. Especially when I have said things analogous before said author had broken into print. Ce? line writes with the clarity of R. de Gourmont: he is a great writer. The search for reality leads men of different races to similar quite private discoveries. In fact, that is the basis of science, which relativity tries to destroy. Ce? line denies that there is ANY fundamental and irremediable hate between the French and the Germans. It was my own conclusion after four years in Paris. Hence of course Mr. Roosevelt's determination to starve the French in unoccupied France Hence the opposition to Herbert Hoover sending Horlick's milk or whatever to babies in Europe. Ce? line noted that his compatriots are biologically fixed, or static and tend to disappear en masse. Well, Kokka, the ex-Russian General Staff officer agreed with me on that point years ago Biological fixes In 1938
? he was writing and printing: the DEMOCRATS want the WAR. The democ will finally get it.
I came back to America the spring after that date to say that there was a force INSIDE the United States that was not only trying to bust up the Monroe Doctrine, not only trying to betray our tradition of keeping out of the European mess, but trying to start a war IN ORDER to get America into it. Ferdinand, the Ce? line, not the Bull, yaas, you said a mouthful. And France did not hear you.
I am no prophet of doom. The democracies WANTED the war. That is, the satraps were hell bent on startin' it, and their slaves GOT it. Right on the old cervix, right on the cervical column, when the hen got it.
One by one; Czechoslovakia, born says M. Ce? line in Paris. M. Ce? line is quite good on Benes [? ]. Why laugh, you got Litvinov in Washington, and Maisky is over in London. Why think you have anything on the Frenchmen. Certain of your own writers have told you. Told you the melting pot theory is EXPLODED. Mr. Zangwill invented the term; he was gauche, he was pathetic. But the word had a career. The idea was tempting. So was the old Yankee idea of trying a woman of every nation, or of as many as possible.
What's wrong with halfbreeds7 Do you know one of 'em who don't suffer sometimes from cleverness, that don't quite come solid, sometimes from a peculiar sort of stoppage INSIDE the head, leadin' to a kind of sense of frustration?
For 60 years mankind has been experimentin' on guinea pigs. All sorts of experiments. Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding. The wisdom of China long ago ruled out inbreedin'. The hundred names, no man to marry a woman of his own name, that was a barrier on the one side.
Ce? line has got down to the other.
The next move, the next world movement is a move toward the production of thoroughbreds. Think it over. That idea is a risin'. Means no hardship to anyone. It is eugenic. No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and
? horses. One would think the human race was worth as much attention as the British fanciers give to whiffets.
Albert Londres had a hunch that the French ought to try it on blacks in their Africa. He hated to see the Africans going rotten, covered with scabs in French colonies. Ce? line thinks it would be useful to use that much sense on Frenchmen. So I suppose Admiral Leahy, or whatever Layafettist [? ], is over there at Vichy trying to blackmail Pe? tain, will be trying to git ALL Ce? line's books forbidden or pinched in the UNOCCUPIED parts of French territory.
Oh, it's a lovely world, as Candide has told us, all that is, is the best possible.
Mebbe in time the American college boys will gil 'round to reading me or Ce? line or some of the Livin' authors. BUT don't git to thinking that, just because the Clipper ships carry so little NEWS, that there is NOTHING being written in Europe. Ole Europe is still here on the continent. Josh Twostep, Josher Dos Passos hasn't succeeded in persuadin' Europe that times like these are times in which the writer should lay off writin'.
Times like these are times when a writer should git down to bedrock and talk without fuzz on his tongue. Ce? line does that all right enough. Time to read Ce? line for the simple truths that stand there in his writing, expressed with perfect lucidity--and simplicity. You may be a bit late in startin'.
A great writer is one whose straight simple phrases stick in the memory.
L'ame n'est pas venue sur la terre pour se faire e^merger.
#38 (May 17, 1942) U. K. (B45)
FREE SPEECH IN ALBION (ALIAS ENGLAND)
The propaganda for free speech in Britain (listlessly elegiac, retrospective) r sounds as follows: "The murderer stole my watch but his wife told him not to. We have free speech in this family. " That is how it sounds HERE. No one denies that free speech is a fine old British
? tradition. One complains that it is a moth-eaten tradition: a shadow with small present substance. The series of outrages committed by British governments in the past. Chesapeaken Leopard, etc. are in history. That Bright protested, etc. during the United States Civil War, is in history.
What the B. B. C. does NOT care to admit is the profound resemblance between England's divide et impera during our United States Civil War, and her policy on the continent of Europe.
All of which is most keenly analyzed in Mein Kampf, a book as slandered in England and as much obscured by press mud as any other.
It is the points to WHICH British free speech does not APPLY that we want to hear about. Free speech has been cornered. We complain that the British press was rotten, and had been for over a century. My memory goes back considerably further than Mr. Bridson's, whatever Winnie said in 1936: I can match it. I remember the pavements of London "WE WANT EIGHT" back before the other war started.
Winston was allus shoutin' for gun sales, high pressure salesmanship of blood, cannon, and slaughter. BUT at the same time upholdin' a usury system which made it impossible to deliver the cannon. Hence bringing slaughter on Europe.
It is not the question of British chauvinism, but the mixture of chauvinism and absolute utter dishonesty, and a refusal to look at the economic causes of war that disgusts the foreign observer. That some Englishmen dislike being betrayed needs no argument. That the English people did NOT desire the war needs no argument. The point is they kept on having governments that insisted on having a war. The British people are NOT represent ed. The B. B. C. may run a very good (up to a point) retrospect about Free Speech in England. BUT to couple that with the unholy alliance with Russia does not convince the opponent of England's bona fide, rather of idiocy and dishonesty.
? Kumrad Maisky's FACE, like the hindend of a pig, for example. WHY does England suppose that Kumrad Maisky will hesitate any longer about bumping off George VI and Elizabeth, than his pals did about killin' the Czar, with Temple of Canterbury sayin' the blessin'? No, Temple is a prize comic, possibly Lang WOULD have pronounced an Episcopal benediction? Temple don't, I think, mean any harm, just fat headed.
Rhetoric about "our representatives in Parliament" is NOT the point. The point is your Parliament does NOT represent you. That is the syndicalist complaint against Parliaments in the old rotten borough or disguised rotten bank-borough form.
Every CONstructive measure proposed to camouflage the iniquity of your usuries is a slavish copy of the corporate state.
BUT without the corporate structure, just patchin', and NOT hitting for the main evil. Money is admitted by at least one B. B. C. yapper to be a financial label. But interest? When does that occur properly? And WHO fixes the label, and in whose interests? And IS there a Jewish problem?
Perhaps, along with Carlyle's love for his wife, and the fine old husky sailor voices telling of the Chesapeake and the Leopard, there might be a historic sketch of the Jews and Noll Crummwell, and a FEW probes into the WHY of the present struggle, and the REFUSALS to cooperate with the civilized world, and the hook-up with Russia.
Does the Bolshevic government stand for the best English traditions: free speech, and no taxation without representation?
Fat lot of representation your tax payers have had in this budget. Though I dare say they have been by now so hog swoggled by propaganda, appeals to their finest feeling, that they are ready to murder their children and grandmas in the cause of 60% on real deposits. And a perfect fury of abuse and hysteria when some Frenchman opens a book of geography
? and discovers what was long since known to Theophile Gautier, namely that France is a part of Europe. ON THE MAP, geographically, France is a PART of Europe, and her sanity and welfare would consist IN functioning as PART of Europe.
Preferably a Frenchman, not a half nigger, half Jew bridged head of Anglo-Judaea. Some idea, that is the GEOGRAPHIC idea, may someday enter England. But no signs of British desire to collaborate in a new order have yet emerged from the British Bleat Corps halls of transmission.
Divide et impera. I dunno who translated Mein Kampf into English. Here Bompiani or someone had an idea, and stroke of genius, and printed the second half first, so Italian readers, some of 'em, came straight on the program, constructive program, health, responsibility, personal, and a study of history. Elsewhere in the book, you can see Hitler (if you have
YET begun to develop an interest in that opponent of your infamies: you can see Hitler thinking about the evils of having Innthal, valley of the Inn, cut off from the rest of the German Volk. You can see him, figgerin' out for Germany, what a few Americans figured out for the United States of America. Divide et impera.
Of course, you are gittin' divided for the same old Sassoon [who is] wantin' U. S. farm boys to squeeze interest out of the Hindoos, now that T. Atkins is getting scarcer.
The rest of the world is tired, bloody well TIRED of having Chesapeakes and RESULTS: accompanied by Mrs. Burglar Bill tellin' Bill not to do it. Yes, some British protested against chattel slavery. The wheeze, the BANK wheeze, now KNOWN, and recorded in history, being that wage slavery was CHEAPER, that LESS responsibility devolved on the OWNERS (alias employers) of wage slaves than on the
? owners of black slaves, who had to feed 'em to keep up their workin' potential. ALL that is HISTORY.
The world, especially Europe, is tired, tired, and the English stock, the part of the English RACE in the colonies was tired from 1750 onward of being sanctioned, of having their OWN money censored. Sanctioned, forbidden--their AUTARCHY, such as it was, sabotaged, their prosperity sabotaged by a kike gang or a sub-kike or super-gang of grafters and monopolists, headquarters in London.
And YOU will, I 'spose, get your karma, your contrapasso when the head office shifts from Last Cheape, and Thredbobbin Alley over to Wall , Street with Wailing included. Shama Yssrael, the one true fatherland is the pawn shop.
Why take that INTO your so very [valued] tradition. Beatin' your breasts. Give us a nut to crack and God can crack it. As for the people, one of your own living poets has beaten his hairy breast as follows:
We can think as we are told to think We are the echo of the loudest bark We are the arses kicked by better men
There is this very uncurious mixture in British propaganda. The wailing wall, AND the reminiscence, the old lavender, the Spanish Armada, etc. The TRADITIONS, the better of which 20 years of British politics have done so little to maintain.
You can't expect me to stenograph all your noises. [I'd] go out of my head when I wake up the next morning in a country that asks RESULTS and about which YOU apparently know very little.
Why, for example, should Hitler and Mussolini who have been through a great deal more than I have, who have been thru a great deal I have not,
? endured hardships I have not, why should they be scared by Mr. Hull, Mr. C. Hull or Eden, when these stiffed effigies can't even scare ME?
Why all this talk of the German Staff regardin' with fear and trembling the arrival of a few motor boats at Le Portel, or wherever, the 33 or what ever out of the 50 or whatever remained with their ammunition; pore devils? TO take England's MIND OFF England's business, the business she OUGHT to have been minding and HOW, since 1919, since Versailles defrauded Italy.
#39 (May 18, 1942) U. S. (B43) WITH PHANTOMS
Two topics that I have rarely touched in these conversations--Germany and Lord Tennyson.
And of Tennyson I now quote but a verse and a fragment.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall" (maybe it was fail). I haven't been readin' Tennyson lately, but that much sticks in my head from the Idyls.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall. " I guess it was fall. Take it as prophecy. And the phantom that the Anglo-Jew world is fighting, or that the Anglo-American is fighting, a Jew usurer instigation, is the German PHANTOM, NOT the reality. And that phantom has been built out of lies, till the pious and kindly American, and simple hearted British boob BY the million believe it, see it, hear it. And FAIL to grasp or to face the reality.
Now I almost never talk of Germany because I have seen very little of Germany. Ole Ford toted me 'round about Hessen Darmstadt in 1911, tellin' me what a fine country was Germany. Then he wrote When Blood is their Argument. Since then I have been to Vienna and to Frankfurt for
? Antheil's opry, and passed thru Munich and from Wien I went up to Wo? rgl. And as the young can't be expected to know my past history I 'spose I got to preface it.
That I was interested in CIVILIZATION from the age of 12 when I first saw Venice. Venice looked good to me. Anyhow, I came to Europe to git kulchur all right, and to a great extent got it. Started in U. Penn. at 15 to FIND out what had been written, and what was the BEST of it, in as many languages as I could gil under my occiput; to KNOW what the real thing was. And thence to HISTORY and economics. To SEE what was going on in the world TODAY, as I needed it in my business, my business being WRITIN', and an Epic being a container of HISTORY.
Of course you need music to understand real versification. But comin' from a duck-board country, I was interested in LATIN order. Order in stone work, in paintin', Adamo me fecit. S. Zeno Verona, architect had cut that column by HAND, by his own hand, want INTEGRAL, totalitarian interest in the job of buildin' S. Zeno. Church of S. Zeno. I liked Quattro cento paintin'. P. Uccello. First freshman theme, I wrote was on Paulo Uccello, picture in Louvre I reckon.
Anyhow, apart from Von der Vogelweide, old Schnitz Brandt lettin' me jump the prose and come to the osses, the poetry, medieval German poetry, in 1904 or 5. I didn't much cotton to German literature, in cf. with the Mediterranean. Dante, Villon, provenc? al Canzoni writers; anyhow, I didn't cotton to German literature. And then philology, ERROR of old German university system got my goat. And I laid off readin' German till I hit Leo Frobenius.
Also being in England 12 years, I certainly saw the last war from the Lon don angle. Lump in my throat when I heard even in this one, that Vimy Ridge had been taken. I could take all the rest of it but, when I heard Vimy was taken, that was a tough one. BUT JUSTICE IS JUSTICE. And lies are a poor Ersatz for justice. And as to LYING I
? reckon Hitler has been lied about more than any man livin' except Mussolini.
Now re Mussolini. I KNOW they are lyin'. I['v] been here 17 years and I have known for 17 years they were lyin'. Lies and threats against Italy, after the Versailles cheatin'. That offense to humanity, Robert Mond, threatenin' Mussolini. Waal, it used to be said in London that Alfred looked like one end of a pig, and that Robert Mond looked like the other. And the FORM certainly did show the spirit inside 'em. I believe the younger generation felt it, and has had a lurch over toward honesty. But he sure has heredity workin' against him. And a Jew who wants to run honest certainly ain't chosen a bed of roses. Sure, some Jews aspire to honesty, kindly impulses, gestures of opulence. But gawd help 'em. And God save humanity FROM them.
Well, very few real reports about Germany have got into English or American circulation. I doubt if many of 'em have got into second editions. So when I contradict lies about Germany, my ground is limited. I have one or two fragmentary first hand reports.
Now after my study of the real poets, from Gautier onward, I dropped into Paris in, I think, 1919 and I asked what was doing. And they told me a lot, some of it hooey, but nobody mentioned Cocteau. Only after six weeks did someone say, after I had refused a lot of dog biscuit writing, as NOT what I was lookin' for, oh, well, there is Cocteau. Just as some years before a Harvard man entered my hail bedroom, if you could call it HALL, and told me about American writing and, when I declined to eat it, he added, oh, well, there is Eliot. I thought the isolation of Jean Cocteau indicated some nastiness on the part of his colleagues, but didn't notice their stud book.
Jean had his own particular line. Not everyone could be expected to like it, but he was way and by far the BEST poet and best prose writer then livin' in Paris. Only real criticism of his limits came from Picabia, who had on his own part limits. Curiously enough (details extraneous to my present subject) ten years later the best new writer in Paris was Rene? Crevel. Les Pieds dans le Plat. Have you read it? When he died, I expected to see his contemporaries make a fuss, and lament him. They did NOT.
I had thought by then I could draw back and do my own stuff and leave funeral services and criticism of the young to the new generation. Not a bit of it. After hemmin' and hawing, and waitin' I had to lay a wreathe on Crevel. Nigh coincided with the demise of Possum's Criterion. Well
? now what was CAUSIN' this, what was causin' this state of affairs? YOU tell papa.
I am not, as you might think, indulgin' merely in retrospect. I am recallin' these things because I have been readin' YET AGAIN a French author. Way out above other French authors. Say Cocteau was 1919, and Crevel 1926, and the new man been now writing for just a decade. I hear he is a doctor, been working in Paris suburbs. Seen a bit of reality. Writes without fuzz on his tongue. Prose writer who bursts in[to] poetry, into verse writing. Next time, next time, be the last ONE. Gnrr, gnrr, gnrr, gnrra. Suicide of the Nation.
No fuzz on the blighter's tongue. Voice of France, as when France was young. Only Sam Putnam I think today will be able to find out a way to say in United States talk what the frog has been tellin' 'em.
This frog has been telling 'em back in '32 of the war to come. It is not only that the FRENCH of Rabelais has come to life again. It is not only that spoken French, the French of the mechanics is at last put down on the page. It is that it takes hold of the page; it is alive on the page.
The dirty old siren mermaid sticking up out of the mud of the Seine, blowsly, boosy, unappetizing, starts tellin' the author where to git off at, she tells him, he tells her, there is no wasted politeness. There is none of the heaviness that sometimes creeps into Ulysses. None of the aimless search for exaggeration that makes Finnigan's Wake unimportant. Joyce hit his high in Ulysses. There was still exuberance. In Finnigan he is hunting, he is experimenting with a technique, bourgeois diversion. I haven't patience to wade through it. Thank God I am not employed to estimate the exact percentage of real metal in low grade ores (no pun intended).
France HAS an author who in 1938 could write, FRANCE HAS NO ALLIES.
? That one sentence is enough to establish an author.
Oh yes, the rising American writers, the writers of 1940 to '50 will STILL have to read a FRENCH author. I mean ANOTHER French author; one not yet in the school books, one no Amy Lowell will bring home in a sachet case.
France stank, and the stink is recorded. It is recorded with a COPIA: whereof probably no frog since Rabelais has been capable. But the copia, the supply of words is an accessory. It is the clear view that makes CE? LINE important.
Yaaas, I am talkin' of CE? LINE. Last book suppressed I hear in Ole Brother
Pe? tain's France. Don't like the SUBJECT. Some folks don't like the SUB JECT. Now WHY don't they like the subject? Ce? line was all out to save France. I reckon he is still out to pick up the pieces.
Forty million population in France in 1938; 25 million Frenchmen, soon to be a minority. CELINE was tellin' 'em, and they did NOT listen to Ce? line. Nacherly Mr. Chamberlain's friends, and Mr. Eden's playmates did NOT encourage the publication of Ce? line. Naturally his work was not welcome in certain quarters. Nevertheless the E? cole des Cadavres had gone into 51 editions by the time the copy before me was printed. His best KNOWN works are Voyage au bout de la Nuit, Mort a` Credit, Bagatelles pour un Massacre.
Bonjour, Ferdinand. I don't hold it my duty any more to run a chronicle of French publications, but I still know a real book when I see one, what ever the contents.
Ferdinand has GOT down to reality, Ferdinand is a writer. Next one will be the last one. Gnrr, gnrrn, gnrrn, gnrr. Suicide of the Nation.
? La prochaine sera la derniere. Gnie? res! Gn, gn. c? a sera le suicide de la Nation.
Au pays n'en riviendra gue? re.
Not only for his copia, his abundance of language. Not only for the force of his prosody, but for the content. You will have to read Ce? line sometime. The active members of the community will have to BUY their own copies of L'Ecole des Cadavres, not enough to hear me 5 minutes over the air, or dip into a copy at a friend's house.
#37 (May 14, 1942) U. S. (B42)
TO BE LATE (ESSERE IN RITARDO)
I hear one of my ex-editors has been saying, oh, yes, Pound's talks are all right but they are, what was it, belated. No, he said something different, tardy, was it OUT OF DATE, OUT OF DATE, that was it.
Well damn it, two things. One, if you hadn't been such mutts you would have heard me (and Ce? line for that matter) long before now.
Some of you would have THOUGHT about what Ferdinand, L. F. Ce? line, and the present speaker started saying a long time ago.
I started long before Ce? line. So far as I can make out, I s'pose he is 15 or 20 years younger than I am. Unless of course he took up his young days doctorin' in the Paris suburbs and only got round to writin after he had got through with his patients.
He says in one place folks don't understand him. That is they understand him all wrong. Does this remind you of some of the best Jersey writin'? I translate it from the original,
One constructs little illusions, one thinks one is understood, and then, not a bit of it. . . . One writes out thousands of prescriptions . . . one will
? never know the good that they do. . . . You have been understood all WRONG, always. If you have written it out in your largest and clearest script and then sung it:
Half a teaspoon full in a cup of tilleul, WARM, at the moment of getting into bed. . . . The patient, the client, will do it his own way, he will take thirty teaspoons full in a cup of bouillon when he gets OUT of bed and that will cause a horrible scandal and he will come around and blame you . . . and there will be complications, no end of them.
In all humility, I am telling you these things, that is sure. But I do not pretend to TEACH you anything whatsoever.
About ten years after I left Paris, M. Ce? line discovered why he left France; being a Frenchman he doesn't put it that way. But he has, quite amply, noted the biological fixity of the French. He is quite eloquent about the ten years during which Pasteur was kept from reachin' maximum utility, logic, cartesianism, etc. The difference between boiling instruments 20 minutes and boiling 'em 3 [minutes]. He also notes that he has never found a poor Jew of no importance who speaks evil either of Rothschild OR of the Soviets. The United States may take 20 years more to get to where Ce? line was ten years ago.
Belated I am belated I am not an alarm clock expected to tell unhearing America, of every first book by a new European author. Especially when I have said things analogous before said author had broken into print. Ce? line writes with the clarity of R. de Gourmont: he is a great writer. The search for reality leads men of different races to similar quite private discoveries. In fact, that is the basis of science, which relativity tries to destroy. Ce? line denies that there is ANY fundamental and irremediable hate between the French and the Germans. It was my own conclusion after four years in Paris. Hence of course Mr. Roosevelt's determination to starve the French in unoccupied France Hence the opposition to Herbert Hoover sending Horlick's milk or whatever to babies in Europe. Ce? line noted that his compatriots are biologically fixed, or static and tend to disappear en masse. Well, Kokka, the ex-Russian General Staff officer agreed with me on that point years ago Biological fixes In 1938
? he was writing and printing: the DEMOCRATS want the WAR. The democ will finally get it.
I came back to America the spring after that date to say that there was a force INSIDE the United States that was not only trying to bust up the Monroe Doctrine, not only trying to betray our tradition of keeping out of the European mess, but trying to start a war IN ORDER to get America into it. Ferdinand, the Ce? line, not the Bull, yaas, you said a mouthful. And France did not hear you.
I am no prophet of doom. The democracies WANTED the war. That is, the satraps were hell bent on startin' it, and their slaves GOT it. Right on the old cervix, right on the cervical column, when the hen got it.
One by one; Czechoslovakia, born says M. Ce? line in Paris. M. Ce? line is quite good on Benes [? ]. Why laugh, you got Litvinov in Washington, and Maisky is over in London. Why think you have anything on the Frenchmen. Certain of your own writers have told you. Told you the melting pot theory is EXPLODED. Mr. Zangwill invented the term; he was gauche, he was pathetic. But the word had a career. The idea was tempting. So was the old Yankee idea of trying a woman of every nation, or of as many as possible.
What's wrong with halfbreeds7 Do you know one of 'em who don't suffer sometimes from cleverness, that don't quite come solid, sometimes from a peculiar sort of stoppage INSIDE the head, leadin' to a kind of sense of frustration?
For 60 years mankind has been experimentin' on guinea pigs. All sorts of experiments. Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding. The wisdom of China long ago ruled out inbreedin'. The hundred names, no man to marry a woman of his own name, that was a barrier on the one side.
Ce? line has got down to the other.
The next move, the next world movement is a move toward the production of thoroughbreds. Think it over. That idea is a risin'. Means no hardship to anyone. It is eugenic. No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and
? horses. One would think the human race was worth as much attention as the British fanciers give to whiffets.
Albert Londres had a hunch that the French ought to try it on blacks in their Africa. He hated to see the Africans going rotten, covered with scabs in French colonies. Ce? line thinks it would be useful to use that much sense on Frenchmen. So I suppose Admiral Leahy, or whatever Layafettist [? ], is over there at Vichy trying to blackmail Pe? tain, will be trying to git ALL Ce? line's books forbidden or pinched in the UNOCCUPIED parts of French territory.
Oh, it's a lovely world, as Candide has told us, all that is, is the best possible.
Mebbe in time the American college boys will gil 'round to reading me or Ce? line or some of the Livin' authors. BUT don't git to thinking that, just because the Clipper ships carry so little NEWS, that there is NOTHING being written in Europe. Ole Europe is still here on the continent. Josh Twostep, Josher Dos Passos hasn't succeeded in persuadin' Europe that times like these are times in which the writer should lay off writin'.
Times like these are times when a writer should git down to bedrock and talk without fuzz on his tongue. Ce? line does that all right enough. Time to read Ce? line for the simple truths that stand there in his writing, expressed with perfect lucidity--and simplicity. You may be a bit late in startin'.
A great writer is one whose straight simple phrases stick in the memory.
L'ame n'est pas venue sur la terre pour se faire e^merger.
#38 (May 17, 1942) U. K. (B45)
FREE SPEECH IN ALBION (ALIAS ENGLAND)
The propaganda for free speech in Britain (listlessly elegiac, retrospective) r sounds as follows: "The murderer stole my watch but his wife told him not to. We have free speech in this family. " That is how it sounds HERE. No one denies that free speech is a fine old British
? tradition. One complains that it is a moth-eaten tradition: a shadow with small present substance. The series of outrages committed by British governments in the past. Chesapeaken Leopard, etc. are in history. That Bright protested, etc. during the United States Civil War, is in history.
What the B. B. C. does NOT care to admit is the profound resemblance between England's divide et impera during our United States Civil War, and her policy on the continent of Europe.
All of which is most keenly analyzed in Mein Kampf, a book as slandered in England and as much obscured by press mud as any other.
It is the points to WHICH British free speech does not APPLY that we want to hear about. Free speech has been cornered. We complain that the British press was rotten, and had been for over a century. My memory goes back considerably further than Mr. Bridson's, whatever Winnie said in 1936: I can match it. I remember the pavements of London "WE WANT EIGHT" back before the other war started.
Winston was allus shoutin' for gun sales, high pressure salesmanship of blood, cannon, and slaughter. BUT at the same time upholdin' a usury system which made it impossible to deliver the cannon. Hence bringing slaughter on Europe.
It is not the question of British chauvinism, but the mixture of chauvinism and absolute utter dishonesty, and a refusal to look at the economic causes of war that disgusts the foreign observer. That some Englishmen dislike being betrayed needs no argument. That the English people did NOT desire the war needs no argument. The point is they kept on having governments that insisted on having a war. The British people are NOT represent ed. The B. B. C. may run a very good (up to a point) retrospect about Free Speech in England. BUT to couple that with the unholy alliance with Russia does not convince the opponent of England's bona fide, rather of idiocy and dishonesty.
? Kumrad Maisky's FACE, like the hindend of a pig, for example. WHY does England suppose that Kumrad Maisky will hesitate any longer about bumping off George VI and Elizabeth, than his pals did about killin' the Czar, with Temple of Canterbury sayin' the blessin'? No, Temple is a prize comic, possibly Lang WOULD have pronounced an Episcopal benediction? Temple don't, I think, mean any harm, just fat headed.
Rhetoric about "our representatives in Parliament" is NOT the point. The point is your Parliament does NOT represent you. That is the syndicalist complaint against Parliaments in the old rotten borough or disguised rotten bank-borough form.
Every CONstructive measure proposed to camouflage the iniquity of your usuries is a slavish copy of the corporate state.
BUT without the corporate structure, just patchin', and NOT hitting for the main evil. Money is admitted by at least one B. B. C. yapper to be a financial label. But interest? When does that occur properly? And WHO fixes the label, and in whose interests? And IS there a Jewish problem?
Perhaps, along with Carlyle's love for his wife, and the fine old husky sailor voices telling of the Chesapeake and the Leopard, there might be a historic sketch of the Jews and Noll Crummwell, and a FEW probes into the WHY of the present struggle, and the REFUSALS to cooperate with the civilized world, and the hook-up with Russia.
Does the Bolshevic government stand for the best English traditions: free speech, and no taxation without representation?
Fat lot of representation your tax payers have had in this budget. Though I dare say they have been by now so hog swoggled by propaganda, appeals to their finest feeling, that they are ready to murder their children and grandmas in the cause of 60% on real deposits. And a perfect fury of abuse and hysteria when some Frenchman opens a book of geography
? and discovers what was long since known to Theophile Gautier, namely that France is a part of Europe. ON THE MAP, geographically, France is a PART of Europe, and her sanity and welfare would consist IN functioning as PART of Europe.
Preferably a Frenchman, not a half nigger, half Jew bridged head of Anglo-Judaea. Some idea, that is the GEOGRAPHIC idea, may someday enter England. But no signs of British desire to collaborate in a new order have yet emerged from the British Bleat Corps halls of transmission.
Divide et impera. I dunno who translated Mein Kampf into English. Here Bompiani or someone had an idea, and stroke of genius, and printed the second half first, so Italian readers, some of 'em, came straight on the program, constructive program, health, responsibility, personal, and a study of history. Elsewhere in the book, you can see Hitler (if you have
YET begun to develop an interest in that opponent of your infamies: you can see Hitler thinking about the evils of having Innthal, valley of the Inn, cut off from the rest of the German Volk. You can see him, figgerin' out for Germany, what a few Americans figured out for the United States of America. Divide et impera.
Of course, you are gittin' divided for the same old Sassoon [who is] wantin' U. S. farm boys to squeeze interest out of the Hindoos, now that T. Atkins is getting scarcer.
The rest of the world is tired, bloody well TIRED of having Chesapeakes and RESULTS: accompanied by Mrs. Burglar Bill tellin' Bill not to do it. Yes, some British protested against chattel slavery. The wheeze, the BANK wheeze, now KNOWN, and recorded in history, being that wage slavery was CHEAPER, that LESS responsibility devolved on the OWNERS (alias employers) of wage slaves than on the
? owners of black slaves, who had to feed 'em to keep up their workin' potential. ALL that is HISTORY.
The world, especially Europe, is tired, tired, and the English stock, the part of the English RACE in the colonies was tired from 1750 onward of being sanctioned, of having their OWN money censored. Sanctioned, forbidden--their AUTARCHY, such as it was, sabotaged, their prosperity sabotaged by a kike gang or a sub-kike or super-gang of grafters and monopolists, headquarters in London.
And YOU will, I 'spose, get your karma, your contrapasso when the head office shifts from Last Cheape, and Thredbobbin Alley over to Wall , Street with Wailing included. Shama Yssrael, the one true fatherland is the pawn shop.
Why take that INTO your so very [valued] tradition. Beatin' your breasts. Give us a nut to crack and God can crack it. As for the people, one of your own living poets has beaten his hairy breast as follows:
We can think as we are told to think We are the echo of the loudest bark We are the arses kicked by better men
There is this very uncurious mixture in British propaganda. The wailing wall, AND the reminiscence, the old lavender, the Spanish Armada, etc. The TRADITIONS, the better of which 20 years of British politics have done so little to maintain.
You can't expect me to stenograph all your noises. [I'd] go out of my head when I wake up the next morning in a country that asks RESULTS and about which YOU apparently know very little.
Why, for example, should Hitler and Mussolini who have been through a great deal more than I have, who have been thru a great deal I have not,
? endured hardships I have not, why should they be scared by Mr. Hull, Mr. C. Hull or Eden, when these stiffed effigies can't even scare ME?
Why all this talk of the German Staff regardin' with fear and trembling the arrival of a few motor boats at Le Portel, or wherever, the 33 or what ever out of the 50 or whatever remained with their ammunition; pore devils? TO take England's MIND OFF England's business, the business she OUGHT to have been minding and HOW, since 1919, since Versailles defrauded Italy.
#39 (May 18, 1942) U. S. (B43) WITH PHANTOMS
Two topics that I have rarely touched in these conversations--Germany and Lord Tennyson.
And of Tennyson I now quote but a verse and a fragment.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall" (maybe it was fail). I haven't been readin' Tennyson lately, but that much sticks in my head from the Idyls.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall. " I guess it was fall. Take it as prophecy. And the phantom that the Anglo-Jew world is fighting, or that the Anglo-American is fighting, a Jew usurer instigation, is the German PHANTOM, NOT the reality. And that phantom has been built out of lies, till the pious and kindly American, and simple hearted British boob BY the million believe it, see it, hear it. And FAIL to grasp or to face the reality.
Now I almost never talk of Germany because I have seen very little of Germany. Ole Ford toted me 'round about Hessen Darmstadt in 1911, tellin' me what a fine country was Germany. Then he wrote When Blood is their Argument. Since then I have been to Vienna and to Frankfurt for
? Antheil's opry, and passed thru Munich and from Wien I went up to Wo? rgl. And as the young can't be expected to know my past history I 'spose I got to preface it.
That I was interested in CIVILIZATION from the age of 12 when I first saw Venice. Venice looked good to me. Anyhow, I came to Europe to git kulchur all right, and to a great extent got it. Started in U. Penn. at 15 to FIND out what had been written, and what was the BEST of it, in as many languages as I could gil under my occiput; to KNOW what the real thing was. And thence to HISTORY and economics. To SEE what was going on in the world TODAY, as I needed it in my business, my business being WRITIN', and an Epic being a container of HISTORY.
Of course you need music to understand real versification. But comin' from a duck-board country, I was interested in LATIN order. Order in stone work, in paintin', Adamo me fecit. S. Zeno Verona, architect had cut that column by HAND, by his own hand, want INTEGRAL, totalitarian interest in the job of buildin' S. Zeno. Church of S. Zeno. I liked Quattro cento paintin'. P. Uccello. First freshman theme, I wrote was on Paulo Uccello, picture in Louvre I reckon.
Anyhow, apart from Von der Vogelweide, old Schnitz Brandt lettin' me jump the prose and come to the osses, the poetry, medieval German poetry, in 1904 or 5. I didn't much cotton to German literature, in cf. with the Mediterranean. Dante, Villon, provenc? al Canzoni writers; anyhow, I didn't cotton to German literature. And then philology, ERROR of old German university system got my goat. And I laid off readin' German till I hit Leo Frobenius.
Also being in England 12 years, I certainly saw the last war from the Lon don angle. Lump in my throat when I heard even in this one, that Vimy Ridge had been taken. I could take all the rest of it but, when I heard Vimy was taken, that was a tough one. BUT JUSTICE IS JUSTICE. And lies are a poor Ersatz for justice. And as to LYING I
? reckon Hitler has been lied about more than any man livin' except Mussolini.
Now re Mussolini. I KNOW they are lyin'. I['v] been here 17 years and I have known for 17 years they were lyin'. Lies and threats against Italy, after the Versailles cheatin'. That offense to humanity, Robert Mond, threatenin' Mussolini. Waal, it used to be said in London that Alfred looked like one end of a pig, and that Robert Mond looked like the other. And the FORM certainly did show the spirit inside 'em. I believe the younger generation felt it, and has had a lurch over toward honesty. But he sure has heredity workin' against him. And a Jew who wants to run honest certainly ain't chosen a bed of roses. Sure, some Jews aspire to honesty, kindly impulses, gestures of opulence. But gawd help 'em. And God save humanity FROM them.
Well, very few real reports about Germany have got into English or American circulation. I doubt if many of 'em have got into second editions. So when I contradict lies about Germany, my ground is limited. I have one or two fragmentary first hand reports.
