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.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
When will you folks start thinking?
Then ten years later a
? bill slid thru, knocking out silver. And there waren't never again enough honest force in our Congress to get thru an HONEST bill about money. Some flyers, some attempted amendments trying to save what was saveable. Trying to keep "IN CIRC. as currency" some of NON- INTEREST payin' part of the debt. Calhoun would have understood it, would have understood that phrase about NON-INTEREST payin' part of the debt. Of course no need for it to be issued as DEBT whatsoever. Calhoun would have understood the bearin' of that phrase about, AT LEAST PART of, the debt that did NOT bear interest. Did not TAX the plain man, every man in America, wakin' or sleeping. John Adams would have understood it, Lincoln would have understood it. AND HOW.
Page Mr. Sandburg, I say, Carl, do TELL Archie, ask Archie about that NON-INTEREST bearin' part of the debt. What does the eminent Congressional Librarian have to say about that word NON-interest bearin'? And if not, why not? After all Archie waren't in on that fly-by- night company of the President's, floated to take it off the people of Europe, during the German inflation. Archie is fairly late comer to the kike's table. I hope you ain't eatin' shoe-bread.
But you would do better to innoculate your children with typhus and syphillis than to let in the Sassoons, Rothschilds, and Warburgs.
Then of course there's this silver business. Silver never quite OPEN. Wanted to break gold MONOPOLY but not by real honesty. Wanted to prevent the gold racket from being exclusive, but by means of another RACKET. Good men feeling they needed backin', like Sir Montagu Webb, gettin' the silver boys back of 'em, but not tellin' ALL of the story. Very hard case of conscience. A man gets into Congress BY silver, has silver backing. Has a RIGHT to want as much rights for SILVER as the gold lice have for their gold. BUT: wants his rights to be raised into a racket. Don't give a cuss for the rights of the sheep men and wheat men.
? Waaal, that has been silver's weakness. No commodity has a JUST right over any other commodity and you can't eat these METALS.
Commodity dollar, old pop Warren was right on that line. BUT who is to ISSUE the dollar? Back to the old Constitution, old betrayed Constitution. What has the gol darn Baltimore Sun, or New York Sun to say about the U. S. Constitution? What has Col. McCormick got to say about the U. S. Constitution? Put me out, or his weak-kneed half masted editors put me out of his Paris paper too soon. Don't matter a hoot. But what has he got NOW to say about the U. S. Constitution? Mebbe he has waited about 20 years, mebbe longer, that are JUST 20 years too much.
I'll be seem' you. What have the silver Johnnies got to say about national money? No, I am not a social creditor. I passed by that alley away. I am a national money man.
And there ought to be more AMERICANS WITH ME.
#35 (May 10, 1942) U. K. (B40) THE PRECARIOUS
Mr. Vernon Bartlett, whom I shall define later this evening if my time holds out, and I haven't used it all up on more important items, Mr. Vernon Bartlett has nearly crowned his long and not wholly ambiguous life by writing an intelligent sentence.
He says that England's position at the peace conference will be PRE CARIOUS. I'll say it will be precarious. I haven't an etymological dictionary handy in my hotel bedroom so I don't know whether "precarious" really springs from a couple of Latin words meaning the state a thing gits into before it goes rotten. The English word is usually used to mean in peril, uncertain. I'll leave it at that, not go battin' round for a word like POST CARIUS.
? Precarious, in the common sense, I'll say it will be risky. Just as RISKY as Germany's was at Versailles. With this difference--that the next peace won't be made by a pair of kikes, one at each side of the table, or standing behind the stuffed shirts who represent 'em in front of the public.
And the basic aim of the peace will not be Versailles' basic aim. Namely, to prepare the next war. That's what Versailles was aimed at, with its daggers and cross lines, its Skodas, its synthetic states. Its gun factories run with Jew money, run on loans, based on money sweated out of the Aryan peoples, sweated out of the farm laborers and industrial workin' men. Stuck in positions of danger. The next peace will not be based on international lending. Get that for one. And England will certainly have nothing what bloody ever to say about what its terms are. Neither I think will simple hearted Joe Stalin, NOT wholly trusted by the kikery which is his master.
WHY have you got where you are, and where are you? YOU are down under the filth and dung of humanity. You are down under Maisky and Litvinoff, and if human degradation can show anything lower, go fetch it.
LOOK at your masters' faces! How did you get there, and why is Bartlett in a position to say so? Bartlett is one of the noises, as you will say, not a bad fellow, has many pleasant intentions.
CAN HE AFFECT 'em? He can not. He is a journalist, under the rump of the usury system. Under the rump of the usury system, certain pimps rise into prominence. I noted it first in the economic brothel. Pigou, every time Asquith government wanted a swindle put over, Pigou was expected to fix up the SCIENCE of economics to suit it. A few figures, a few statistical tables. He waren't quite lively enough, so a confidence man named Keynes was invented.
? One of my grave diggers of England, one of the boys that got paid for puttin' brass knobs on your coffin. Let me stick to three diseases of the Anglo-French-American system. The syphilis, typhus, and tuberculosis of the mercantilist? No, not even mercantilist, the USURY system, with trimmings, not even the medieval, or metal money usury system, now dying out even in India, and giving way to the galloping CARIES of the Anglo-English bank system, that stakes out the old fashioned usurers, and devours even the parasites. Fake economists are one form of the journalist bacillus. Put out in front to lie, and rising on the wings or tin toes of ambition, permitted (on the leash and chain system) to get out in front and holler.
Quoted from one press to another, NOT because they ever print anything useful, or tell the truth, or approach it. They are either men who KNOW NOT, or men who say not, and who put up a word screen, or esCHEW certain issues; who do NOT make revelations. And whose interest even when quoted internationally is NOT due to the INTRINSIC meaning of what they actually say. Their blather IS symptomatic, and is studied and quoted as a symptom of the diseases. And what the Times says indicates one of two things. The Times says what its controllers want said that is basic. Either what its controllers WANT fools to believe, or what a given group of knaves feel they have to admit to keep up credibility. The poor bastids who write it never enjoy what de Gourmont called writer's sole pleasure. They most of 'em never even get to a mental world in which Gourmont's concept exists or can enter.
Remy de Gourmont wrote to me in a letter "frankly to write what one thinks, that is the writer's pleasure. " These duds or prominent journalists,
some infamous, some well intentioned, are of two sorts. The absolute simpletons who believe what they are told by their masters and the absolute
? knaves, who are usually part simpleton.
In Keynes' case, we can take it, I suppose, that he is mostly knave and part simpleton. At any rate he is now at your rudder or near it. Bright spirit, etc. The second microbe of the disease is the son-in-law who is sometimes made by the third sort of pest. Such let us say as M/G A/Q. Shall I name her? Probably not even a whore. In days past William Watson protested, he came very near naming her. Watson protested against the infamies of the Boer war, now forgotten. Already an antique when I got to London. The old boy once taken out of mothballs and roared a few sonnets at us, uncomprehended, what was it all about? Decimation of England was part of it. Three decimations of England. The aristos, the English of English stock, who were killed in the Boer war.
B. Adams, noting England's decline, AT THAT TIME and her proximate and probably further enfeeblement. Decimation of 1914, the KIND of Englishman, 100% of ENGLAND, that was mowed off in the first three months. Kill 'em off at the top, pogroms start at the bottom and are NEVER so very effective.
Third shot at Dunkirk, with a few nuts and raisins for Maisky. The second disease works on the Queen Esther or Salome method. SONS and nephews rebel. Baldwin's son stands up to his father. Winston's nephew gets Winston's number, and shows himself to be at least a different sort of an ass. Men of the same RACE rebel at a certain moment. Some dirt they refuse to eat. Some kind of dirt they won't eat even if their own fathers tell 'em to eat it.
Hence son-in-laws are required. And females are needed to get 'em. Marry a little below 'em when a RISING man appears on the horizon, over the tea table. All right take the bitch in question, probably not even a whore. Marries a RISER, and runs him, but does NOT help him. Absolute failure to cooperate, or to MAINTAIN a governing class, to
? function as one of it. De? vergondage de la guerre, etc. , may not even go to bed with the Jews, but plays round, in serious moments. Oh well, let us lay OFF the ladies.
Now for the sons-in-law. That pink haired snot Alex Hamilton was the perfect example. Study his story, half Jew, spritely, a whole box of tricks and a great man with the ladies.
Now how do these sonnie boys RISE? They most certainly are SE LECTED for lack of principle and for pliability and ambition, often for their credulity. But always because they have a certain pliable mechanism, their boosters know HOW they work, know how to work 'em. After a point they can be turned loose, as adjusted wreckers, their own passions will run 'em and run the nation to ruin.
Yes, yes, Mr. Bartlett, the position of England at the Peace, did you say CONFERENCE? The position of England at peace time will be PREcarious if it ain't rotted already. England has chosen birth control INSTEAD of Eugenics.
You could see that 30 years ago, and then they went to breeding fool- blooded grey hounds and whiffets, not even farm edible farm stock, IN STEAD of trying to make human thoroughbreds.
The so-called example of the race course, horsebreedin' would have served the English race as a paradigm, but they didn't use it.
Contraception, killin' the native stock before it was hatched, instead of BREEDING a population.
Good evening.
#36 (May 11, 1942) U. S. (B41) A FRENCH ACCENT
? One of the jobs I took on way back before half my listerners were off milk diet or out of their diapers was the education of the rising American literature generation as to the contemporary (and anterior) production of French high class writin'. I held, even in my young days, that a nation's literature has a certain importance.
I also had patriotic motives. I also felt for the stranded young inside America. I clomb out, by fingernails. I only had half a toe hold, but I at least clomb up to whaar one could see what was what on at least the writer's horizon. American boys wantin' to write started with 20 or more years as a handicap.
Most of 'em have it still, Gauss down at Princeton for example, doing quite a serious book, careful study, thoughtful but 20 years late in startin'. When I got along to be 40 or 45, I thought I could hand over the job to someone younger.
I think Sam Putnam was ready to take it over, but pore Sam hit an unlikely moment, 1924-25, French writing was pindlin'.
I had already said that after de Gourmont's death there was no froggie whom I could trust to send in a monthly letter about French contemporary authors: for the Little Review or the DIAL. The French were biologically fixed and they were losin' the sense of RESPONSIBILITY, intellectual responsibility, only a few elderly blokes like A. Mockel and Valette still it. I mean they didn't have to think. For them a good book was a good book; and you didn't argue, you didn't even have to think that it was your duty to the state to boost a REAL book, and leave the fakes in the discard. And Valette was tired, so tired. Offered me the American rubric, at a time when I had not time to read 40 American dud books and make little notes on 'em. Printed the first criticism of Ulysses (mine) in the Mercure that was published in France. Remy de Gourmont lived in a world in which it was inconceivable that a
? man would CHANGE his thought or withdraw a line of his writing for ulterior motives.
That was the vanishing world, that was old France. One of Gourmont's friends, La Marquise de Pierre, had never before seen an American. She looked on me as the representative of Benjamin Franklin. The United States was still the land that Lafayette went to. 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.
? bill slid thru, knocking out silver. And there waren't never again enough honest force in our Congress to get thru an HONEST bill about money. Some flyers, some attempted amendments trying to save what was saveable. Trying to keep "IN CIRC. as currency" some of NON- INTEREST payin' part of the debt. Calhoun would have understood it, would have understood that phrase about NON-INTEREST payin' part of the debt. Of course no need for it to be issued as DEBT whatsoever. Calhoun would have understood the bearin' of that phrase about, AT LEAST PART of, the debt that did NOT bear interest. Did not TAX the plain man, every man in America, wakin' or sleeping. John Adams would have understood it, Lincoln would have understood it. AND HOW.
Page Mr. Sandburg, I say, Carl, do TELL Archie, ask Archie about that NON-INTEREST bearin' part of the debt. What does the eminent Congressional Librarian have to say about that word NON-interest bearin'? And if not, why not? After all Archie waren't in on that fly-by- night company of the President's, floated to take it off the people of Europe, during the German inflation. Archie is fairly late comer to the kike's table. I hope you ain't eatin' shoe-bread.
But you would do better to innoculate your children with typhus and syphillis than to let in the Sassoons, Rothschilds, and Warburgs.
Then of course there's this silver business. Silver never quite OPEN. Wanted to break gold MONOPOLY but not by real honesty. Wanted to prevent the gold racket from being exclusive, but by means of another RACKET. Good men feeling they needed backin', like Sir Montagu Webb, gettin' the silver boys back of 'em, but not tellin' ALL of the story. Very hard case of conscience. A man gets into Congress BY silver, has silver backing. Has a RIGHT to want as much rights for SILVER as the gold lice have for their gold. BUT: wants his rights to be raised into a racket. Don't give a cuss for the rights of the sheep men and wheat men.
? Waaal, that has been silver's weakness. No commodity has a JUST right over any other commodity and you can't eat these METALS.
Commodity dollar, old pop Warren was right on that line. BUT who is to ISSUE the dollar? Back to the old Constitution, old betrayed Constitution. What has the gol darn Baltimore Sun, or New York Sun to say about the U. S. Constitution? What has Col. McCormick got to say about the U. S. Constitution? Put me out, or his weak-kneed half masted editors put me out of his Paris paper too soon. Don't matter a hoot. But what has he got NOW to say about the U. S. Constitution? Mebbe he has waited about 20 years, mebbe longer, that are JUST 20 years too much.
I'll be seem' you. What have the silver Johnnies got to say about national money? No, I am not a social creditor. I passed by that alley away. I am a national money man.
And there ought to be more AMERICANS WITH ME.
#35 (May 10, 1942) U. K. (B40) THE PRECARIOUS
Mr. Vernon Bartlett, whom I shall define later this evening if my time holds out, and I haven't used it all up on more important items, Mr. Vernon Bartlett has nearly crowned his long and not wholly ambiguous life by writing an intelligent sentence.
He says that England's position at the peace conference will be PRE CARIOUS. I'll say it will be precarious. I haven't an etymological dictionary handy in my hotel bedroom so I don't know whether "precarious" really springs from a couple of Latin words meaning the state a thing gits into before it goes rotten. The English word is usually used to mean in peril, uncertain. I'll leave it at that, not go battin' round for a word like POST CARIUS.
? Precarious, in the common sense, I'll say it will be risky. Just as RISKY as Germany's was at Versailles. With this difference--that the next peace won't be made by a pair of kikes, one at each side of the table, or standing behind the stuffed shirts who represent 'em in front of the public.
And the basic aim of the peace will not be Versailles' basic aim. Namely, to prepare the next war. That's what Versailles was aimed at, with its daggers and cross lines, its Skodas, its synthetic states. Its gun factories run with Jew money, run on loans, based on money sweated out of the Aryan peoples, sweated out of the farm laborers and industrial workin' men. Stuck in positions of danger. The next peace will not be based on international lending. Get that for one. And England will certainly have nothing what bloody ever to say about what its terms are. Neither I think will simple hearted Joe Stalin, NOT wholly trusted by the kikery which is his master.
WHY have you got where you are, and where are you? YOU are down under the filth and dung of humanity. You are down under Maisky and Litvinoff, and if human degradation can show anything lower, go fetch it.
LOOK at your masters' faces! How did you get there, and why is Bartlett in a position to say so? Bartlett is one of the noises, as you will say, not a bad fellow, has many pleasant intentions.
CAN HE AFFECT 'em? He can not. He is a journalist, under the rump of the usury system. Under the rump of the usury system, certain pimps rise into prominence. I noted it first in the economic brothel. Pigou, every time Asquith government wanted a swindle put over, Pigou was expected to fix up the SCIENCE of economics to suit it. A few figures, a few statistical tables. He waren't quite lively enough, so a confidence man named Keynes was invented.
? One of my grave diggers of England, one of the boys that got paid for puttin' brass knobs on your coffin. Let me stick to three diseases of the Anglo-French-American system. The syphilis, typhus, and tuberculosis of the mercantilist? No, not even mercantilist, the USURY system, with trimmings, not even the medieval, or metal money usury system, now dying out even in India, and giving way to the galloping CARIES of the Anglo-English bank system, that stakes out the old fashioned usurers, and devours even the parasites. Fake economists are one form of the journalist bacillus. Put out in front to lie, and rising on the wings or tin toes of ambition, permitted (on the leash and chain system) to get out in front and holler.
Quoted from one press to another, NOT because they ever print anything useful, or tell the truth, or approach it. They are either men who KNOW NOT, or men who say not, and who put up a word screen, or esCHEW certain issues; who do NOT make revelations. And whose interest even when quoted internationally is NOT due to the INTRINSIC meaning of what they actually say. Their blather IS symptomatic, and is studied and quoted as a symptom of the diseases. And what the Times says indicates one of two things. The Times says what its controllers want said that is basic. Either what its controllers WANT fools to believe, or what a given group of knaves feel they have to admit to keep up credibility. The poor bastids who write it never enjoy what de Gourmont called writer's sole pleasure. They most of 'em never even get to a mental world in which Gourmont's concept exists or can enter.
Remy de Gourmont wrote to me in a letter "frankly to write what one thinks, that is the writer's pleasure. " These duds or prominent journalists,
some infamous, some well intentioned, are of two sorts. The absolute simpletons who believe what they are told by their masters and the absolute
? knaves, who are usually part simpleton.
In Keynes' case, we can take it, I suppose, that he is mostly knave and part simpleton. At any rate he is now at your rudder or near it. Bright spirit, etc. The second microbe of the disease is the son-in-law who is sometimes made by the third sort of pest. Such let us say as M/G A/Q. Shall I name her? Probably not even a whore. In days past William Watson protested, he came very near naming her. Watson protested against the infamies of the Boer war, now forgotten. Already an antique when I got to London. The old boy once taken out of mothballs and roared a few sonnets at us, uncomprehended, what was it all about? Decimation of England was part of it. Three decimations of England. The aristos, the English of English stock, who were killed in the Boer war.
B. Adams, noting England's decline, AT THAT TIME and her proximate and probably further enfeeblement. Decimation of 1914, the KIND of Englishman, 100% of ENGLAND, that was mowed off in the first three months. Kill 'em off at the top, pogroms start at the bottom and are NEVER so very effective.
Third shot at Dunkirk, with a few nuts and raisins for Maisky. The second disease works on the Queen Esther or Salome method. SONS and nephews rebel. Baldwin's son stands up to his father. Winston's nephew gets Winston's number, and shows himself to be at least a different sort of an ass. Men of the same RACE rebel at a certain moment. Some dirt they refuse to eat. Some kind of dirt they won't eat even if their own fathers tell 'em to eat it.
Hence son-in-laws are required. And females are needed to get 'em. Marry a little below 'em when a RISING man appears on the horizon, over the tea table. All right take the bitch in question, probably not even a whore. Marries a RISER, and runs him, but does NOT help him. Absolute failure to cooperate, or to MAINTAIN a governing class, to
? function as one of it. De? vergondage de la guerre, etc. , may not even go to bed with the Jews, but plays round, in serious moments. Oh well, let us lay OFF the ladies.
Now for the sons-in-law. That pink haired snot Alex Hamilton was the perfect example. Study his story, half Jew, spritely, a whole box of tricks and a great man with the ladies.
Now how do these sonnie boys RISE? They most certainly are SE LECTED for lack of principle and for pliability and ambition, often for their credulity. But always because they have a certain pliable mechanism, their boosters know HOW they work, know how to work 'em. After a point they can be turned loose, as adjusted wreckers, their own passions will run 'em and run the nation to ruin.
Yes, yes, Mr. Bartlett, the position of England at the Peace, did you say CONFERENCE? The position of England at peace time will be PREcarious if it ain't rotted already. England has chosen birth control INSTEAD of Eugenics.
You could see that 30 years ago, and then they went to breeding fool- blooded grey hounds and whiffets, not even farm edible farm stock, IN STEAD of trying to make human thoroughbreds.
The so-called example of the race course, horsebreedin' would have served the English race as a paradigm, but they didn't use it.
Contraception, killin' the native stock before it was hatched, instead of BREEDING a population.
Good evening.
#36 (May 11, 1942) U. S. (B41) A FRENCH ACCENT
? One of the jobs I took on way back before half my listerners were off milk diet or out of their diapers was the education of the rising American literature generation as to the contemporary (and anterior) production of French high class writin'. I held, even in my young days, that a nation's literature has a certain importance.
I also had patriotic motives. I also felt for the stranded young inside America. I clomb out, by fingernails. I only had half a toe hold, but I at least clomb up to whaar one could see what was what on at least the writer's horizon. American boys wantin' to write started with 20 or more years as a handicap.
Most of 'em have it still, Gauss down at Princeton for example, doing quite a serious book, careful study, thoughtful but 20 years late in startin'. When I got along to be 40 or 45, I thought I could hand over the job to someone younger.
I think Sam Putnam was ready to take it over, but pore Sam hit an unlikely moment, 1924-25, French writing was pindlin'.
I had already said that after de Gourmont's death there was no froggie whom I could trust to send in a monthly letter about French contemporary authors: for the Little Review or the DIAL. The French were biologically fixed and they were losin' the sense of RESPONSIBILITY, intellectual responsibility, only a few elderly blokes like A. Mockel and Valette still it. I mean they didn't have to think. For them a good book was a good book; and you didn't argue, you didn't even have to think that it was your duty to the state to boost a REAL book, and leave the fakes in the discard. And Valette was tired, so tired. Offered me the American rubric, at a time when I had not time to read 40 American dud books and make little notes on 'em. Printed the first criticism of Ulysses (mine) in the Mercure that was published in France. Remy de Gourmont lived in a world in which it was inconceivable that a
? man would CHANGE his thought or withdraw a line of his writing for ulterior motives.
That was the vanishing world, that was old France. One of Gourmont's friends, La Marquise de Pierre, had never before seen an American. She looked on me as the representative of Benjamin Franklin. The United States was still the land that Lafayette went to. 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.
