Beauty is MORE
interesting
than distortion.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
That last phrase is not serious.
England will NOT build tomorrow on the work system of the Stalin canal, but that will be thru no fault of Sieff, Goldsmid,-- --You will have to lay off your trappings, you will have to study new hygiene, you will have to give back their naturalization papers to the sweepings of Europe.
Let the Jews BUY a national home somewhere in your ruins. They have sold a good deal of Africa into serfdom; and NOT been nice to the
? ENGLISH who ventured on WORKING there, who went there to raise crops of food stuff. The usury system is unpleasant. The world is almightily ONTO that system. The Bu? rgermaster of Worgl, or in other words, common honesty, is of more use to Tomorrow's England than all the gold of the Indies or all the opium of the Sassoon, and the consequent revenues, concerning which Bobble Cecil can or should by now be able to supply ample details.
The effect of the B. B. C. transmissions is that, in the whole pack of their transmitters, there is no one who dares mention the Jewish problem, Brain Trust included. Probably lose their jobs if they tried, and what can be expected from a profession with Shaw and Wells at the top who think 24 hours a day of their incomes and of the truth at spare moments? Only England dare not mention the expulsion of Jews by Maria Theresa, nor England's blackmail of Maria Theresa, nor the Jews' relations with Cromwell. American radio is silent, partly from ignorance, the poor hicks just don't know any history, though a gang of foolish youngmen had the exuberance to get jailed for plotting to bump off all the Jew members of Congress. Had they succeeded, such is the American gangster and anarchist psychology that the only comment inside the United States would have been "and a damn good thing too. " (With echos in unspeaking England. ) The only place where anyone would have been shocked is in Italy, where there is a millennial conservatism and a prejudice against-- --.
#51 (July 2, 1942) U. S. (B65) DISBURSEMENT OF WISDOM
My friend F. Whiteside never tired of a very well known story of Chase and Whistler. For those of you to whom Chase's name is unfamiliar one may as well say that Whistler was a painter of very great talent. He had limitations, his drawing bothered him, some of his paint has now sunk into the canvas and the nuances he so labored may not last forever, but he was certainly one of the ornaments of his time, and with Henry James
? the two Americans who lit up the horizon of American youth at the turn of the century, and certainly some of his work will give joy to the elite as long as the canvas or paper remains.
Whereas Chase was, in painting, the equivalent of Harper's monthly magazine, Chase returned to the American like Howells, but on one occasion he disagreed with Jimmy, and on being kidded, he broke off: "I won't argue with you any longer. " To which Mr. Whistler with weary patience: "But, Chase, I am NOT arguing with you. I am just telling you. "
The Chinese have a more monumental exposition of the same theme: In evil time the sage can enjoy his own wisdom; when the land is well governed, the people benefit from his instructions.
Now apart from any national talents that I may or may not possess I have, first in poesy, and then in economics, which is one of the components of history, spent considerable more time and thought, and I do enjoy or suffer a thirst for knowledge which is, to put it mildly, above the common.
You are in a bloody mess. Bloody in more senses than that word has in British jargon. You are in a bloody MESS. Who got you there? Why did he do it? Does he know why he did it? Does he know HOW he dit it?
You have all of you been chicken-headed, frivolous, etc. You don't even know whether your various races of European origin will or CAN survive on a continent that has seen the fade-out of Mayas and Aztecs. And you have an ORGANIZED minority of a different race amongst you. A race that never tires, a race possessed of subcrocodilian vitality. And the lively lizard is "on this earth very antient" as huddy (W. H. Hudson) remarks of the condor and other predatory foul of the Andes.
AXIOM. Against an organized force of four or more, probably EIGHT million, a hundred individuals can NOT prevail until ORGANIZED. The
? sporadic efforts of a few excited young men are no use. The dilettante velleities of a few theorists are NO use. And the rest of the inhabitants of the United States can organize on ONE basis only, namely, that on which Europe has finally been constrained to organize its rebellion against the pervasive the ubiquitous Yidd. Pacts may be signed between the Pennsylvania Deitsch and the scrawny New Englander of British or Anglo-Scotch origin, but on no basis save that of race, and of allied more or less consanguineous races can you cohere.
You have, as opposed to any such projected order not merely the 4 or 8 million kikes in New York and points penetrated already. [From] New York to San Diego or wherever the pan hebe, the world Jewry, has set up a radio. Which is bloody well more than the rebellious British reformers were able to do in England during the four years before the betrayal of the British race by Churchill and Eden.
That being the vital point in the German program and the press being in the hands of kikery (high kike) and the subjugated servants of Jewry, some possibly only 1/2 or 1/3 conscious of what they were up to.
Religious base, no use; has been exploited. History of massacres re theology points [to the] downfall of Byzantium, as LONG as it was possible to stir up war on religious basis; that label was used to stir up strife.
Tacitus: Jews back, of persecution of early Christians. Fights in church between iconoclasts and the religious part of the church, down to the Germanic wars of religion. With the quite simple advice of the opponents, i. e. Jews, to THEIR component members; to GET into the church; get into the church, get into the prebends; to take holy orders and corrupt the church from inside (documented). Till you get the almost perfect instrument, Luther, both religious fanatic (on the question of the trinity, etc. ) and a very good politician, rebelling against being taxed by
? an ecciesiast central; already corrupted, and fallen into the hands of a banking family.
Religious base, no USE, that is written and proved over and over in European history which you do ill to ignore. Church split into fragments on one hand; and then any diplomatic representative of a foreign race can SO easily go thru the motions of getting converted. Nothing new about that and the thin veil of observance, torn off in a jiffy whenever it seemed opportune even after centuries of pretending. No, no great hoax, that of combatting on religious base. Simple-minded European tribesmen fell for it, were weakened during about 1600 years, continual attrition. Wonder we're here at all. Must be something tough in European and Mediterranean fibre.
As to effects on, let us take a test tube specimen, France. According to some reckoning France had 38% of the population of the great powers in Louis XIV's time, 27% in 1789 and has 13% at present. I don't know just what powers are included in those figures, but on whatever calculation it has been made, it indicates a DECLINE.
Anyhow, religious basis NO use. What CAN you organize on?
Can't move 'em with a cold thing like economics. Marx advised fighting on economic basis. I still meet people who fall for that bit of eminently semitic strategy. For ONE HUNDRED years, simpletons and inexperienced young men have tried AS, damn it, my friends, of a dozen sects, economic sects; I tried ever since my kitten of mind got its eyes half open. And what came of it? Five thousand in prison, Wo? rgl, Alberta.
Yes, yes, we lily-livered humanitarians fussed 'round wantin' to cure the evil by honest accountancy; and we did NOT prevent this war.
I think my most obtuse opponent, or my most enthusiastic opponent, or Frankies' most faithful UNhappy warrior Archie MacLeish will admit that the reformers, the monetary reformers, the men who wanted honest
? functioning of the treasuries and of finance in England and America, did NOT prevent this war. (And damn lucky if they stave off the next one. ) Oh yes, the kahal makes 'em in series. SERIES technocracy, why waste the plant on ONE world calamity? The last one was nearly a world war.
The Talmud announced destruction of 75% of the goy. Yes, brother you have an OPPONENT. And what CAN you rely on? Dan Boone out shootin' squirrels. Hit 'em in the eye every time, but the Boone era, Daniel Boone era, has gone forever. The Boone era seems to have got mislaid for the moment. Prosperity has went, it has vamoosed. We wipp, nichishin, chippewa language has vanished with the pure injun dialects. Even the mixed idiom such as "que voulex you buju, nicichin" is no longer current on the Canadian frontier. And Henry James already noticed a change in New York phonetics.
On the seventh day gawd rested. I noted THAT even in [the] days of the Little Review. Either the European stock now resident in North America ORGANIZES or it sinks still deeper into the morass of high kikery. Its ideals and ideas have WENT. The structure of the Anglo-American landwidg is kufuzzled.
About 20 lost men in the United States DID notice the race problem, if not in time, at least in time to be read by Europeans who were really thinking about the WAY OUT. Undoubtedly it is pleasant to think that IF you get rid of capital system the Jew becomes harmless. That was oily Marx's bait, and what happens is the Stalin canal.
A FAKE elimination of capitalism, an attack of ALL civilization, even as much as had leaked into Russia. An attack on property, that is on private ownership of LAND, plows and bathtubs, but the USURER left in command. Not only have the nice and polite amongst us who TRIED to reform the hell of the stinking capitalist, i. e. , usury world, by honest accountancy, monetary and economic reform been shown up as ABSolootly incapable of gathering a mass of adherents powerful enough
? to DO anything, let alone resist a barbarian avalanche. BUT when capitalism has been dethroned etc. Slobody, Slobody for the fishes, open the fish breedin' tanks, in Slavic enthusiasm. That elimination of so called "capitalism" is merely used as a flail, a steamroller to crush out the rest of the non-chewish world, that is as much of it as it could ever run, in collusion with the decrepit, syphilitic, Sassonic, beCecil's sewage and mould of the British plutocracy.
The rot eating in since Cromwell, since the Constantinopolitan kikes were so INTerested in that damn hypocrite that they sent over an embassy to see if Cromwell was their Messiah. Much more in their line than the young fellow from Nazareth. I am not arguing, I am just telling you. One of these days you will have to start thinking about the problem of race, BREED, preservation.
I do NOT like to think of my race as going toward total extinction, NOR into absolute bondage.
The Cincinnati etc. erred from snobbery. They did not in George Washington's time organize on racial basis. No one thought of it, no one could have then thought of it. There WAS a racially homogeneous population in the newly freed colonies. Certain privileges were dear to the privileged. Snobbism is NOT conservative. Fashion is not conservative. La Mode, etc. is a ramp. Cf. with Hungarian and Roumanian peasant linen, one shirt or blouse lasts a life time, indestructable as real Chinese silk, "no can tear. "
That is what the advertising trade diddles you out of and you will have to think about Race.
#52 (July 6, 1942) U. S. (B66) CONTINUITY
? Had I the tongue of men and angels I should be unable to make sure that even the most faithful listeners would be able to hear and grasp the whole of a series of my talks.
That is the disadvantage of the radio form, and heaven knows when I shall be able to print these texts in book or books available to the American and English public. Book implying that [the] reader CAN, when he wishes, look back, take up the statement of the preface, see where Chapter X hitches onto Chapter I. Nevertheless you may as well make the effort to grasp at least the fact that there IS a sequence in what I am saying, and that the conversation of February coheres with that of April. And if you, you in Iowa, Wyoming, Connecticut, DON'T make that effort, if you don't listen and TRY to get [the] main threads and cables of what I am telling you, you will lose time.
Just as the writers who did NOT read the Little Review lost time. Many never made it up. There is no one of any literary size, or even pretenions among you who hasn't by now read the Little Review authors, or authors formed by the Little Review authors. Authors indebted to the Little Review and to its authors for their force, their take off, the initial jab that set 'em off.
Pity is that many got only a fragmentary view. Joyce and not Eliot, Eliot not W. Lewis. I hear a million Americans have taken advantage of Mr. Hemmingway's last production, and so they ought to. TWO million ought to read it (probably . . . I haven't yet seen a copy but that is due to conditions of Atlantic transport).
PITY is that there is so much else, so much essential else that they are unblissfully UNaware of. And I honestly do not know where they can get essential parts of that else, except from my broadcasts. And out of them, out of these talks, the young men in England and America will have to build their souls, or at least their minds for tomorrow, or LOSE time, never get into life at all.
? They will not be tomorrow's Hemingways, or even today's Clark Gables. They will be just shelved, left on the cupboard floor, this way inglorious and ungloried, back numbers before they are dated. Like neo- Georgians who read Mr. Eliot 15 or 26 years late, and tried to cut little nitches in his umbrageous cathedral, mouse holes in his choir stall.
And after a hundred broadcasts it is STILL hard to know where to begin. There is so MUCH that the United States does not know. This war is [the] fruit of such vast incomprehensions, such tangled ignorance, so many strains of unknowing.
I am held up, enraged, by the delay needed to change a typing ribbon, so much is there that OUGHT to be put into the young American head. Don't know which, what to put down, can't write two scripts at once. NECESSARY facts, ideas, come in pell-mell. I try to get too much into ten minutes. Condensed form O. K. in book, saves eyesight, reader can turn back, can look at a summary. Mebbe if I had more sense of form, legal training, God knows what, could get the matter across the Atlantic, or the bally old channel. Art, economics, pathology. You need to know MORE about all of 'em. Need to GIT out of this war, need to stay out of, or prevent the next one, need to change the stinkin' old system.
ROT in art, art as pathology, university delays. How come class war? What is it the professors don't know? Got to choose between two or four subjects or I will git nothing over in any one talk. Very well. I will start on: How come. Two bits of ignorance that have recently been rubbed into me by a mob or congress of professorial persons. NO . . . let's start on something that HAS been discussed IN America for twenty years, 30 years, Doctor looks at literature. All this quite silly talk about the diseased mind back of modern painting.
It bored me like hell. It was mostly poor stuff. BUT the fault lay in its limitation AS criticism, not in the main worry that caused half educated
? medicos to go into it. What was wrong with the criticism was lack of proportion.
HEALTH is MORE interesting than disease. Health is TOTAL.
Beauty is MORE interesting than distortion.
We have most of us been buffaloed, or at any rate the intelligentsia is mostly an ass. NOT from having no brains, but simply from partialism in the original sense of that word. Intelligentsia is mostly a nuisance because it runs on snobisms and fragments.
At [the] age of 15 a consumptive gave me a copy of Salome? with Beardsley's illustrations. I cut 'em out, they were so ugly. But for more than ten years of my life I considered this an act of genuine fanaticism. I came to see the . . . damn it all, call 'em merits of Beardsley's distortions.
GROANS from the effete, elite and superior sophomores.
Later a distorted but amiable female presented me coyly with an inferior Beardsley, that is, a volume of distortions by a pink nailed esthete. The significance of THAT act was apparent even to me. I don't think it was conscious on her part. The book probably gave her relief or comfort that she could not have derived from Praxiteles or Botticelli. At any rate I was older, and the drawings weren't even good Beardsley. AND I wasn't interested in pathology. So I have never mentioned the incident before.
The medicos who started worrying about the disease behind modern art were right. That is, they were RIGHT to worry. They were mostly silly in their statements of detail, and this was due to ignorance, lack of cultural heritage. But they were on the right line.
I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did not prevail when a given picture was painted. Sense of design, precision of LINE, will give way to interest in detail. Suggestion of luxury will
? augment as people lose an ethical basis of life, as they lose passion for justice, love of real distinction between one idea and another. Diagnosis will replace love, analysis will give way to squalor. There are steps and slopes downward toward Avernus, falsification will enter. Honest men, when a dogma or style has been falsified, will turn analytic. They will be partial, the first ones emphatic and vigorous. They will aim, that is, the best ones will aim at health.
For example, Manet, fed up with falsification of color in painting, Manet reduced to analysis of light and color. Both making distinct contributions to world art. Manet one of the world's greatest.
But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by excess, disease in a weak man. Unbalance, hard to divide at certain point, and if one drifts with the current, one grows tolerant first of weakness, and then accustomed to weakness, and then plops into squalor.
Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order. TO KALON, the world was saner when the cult of ugliness did NOT engage the attentions of anyone.
I know all about chocolate box, pseudo beauty, etc. BUT a deflection of the AIM is a decadence. It is a false ripening, it is green fruit going rotten. Beardsley was a sick man, knew he had to make a name quick if he wanted to make it. Personal wish, NOT belief in what art is or ought to be. Knew he hadn't time to learn to PAINT. HIS sane youthful impulse was to pre-Raphealite beauty. Early drawings, Burne-Jones, that's what he WANTED.
Yeats asked him why he hadn't stuck to it. Beardsley was no slouch, he was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself nor to his friends in private. He answered:
Beauty is so DIFFICULT.
? We have all seen the cult of beauty turn to slop. Esthete: an artist who won't take pains, who will NOT face the work needed to paint a good picture, or write a good novel or poem. All fragmentary, nothing total. And the GREAT perversion, the great decadence, when the painting is made to sell, when the artist stops wanting to live. Worth his hire, MUST eat, but EAT secondary AS desire, to will to paint, or to make. Then to git rich, that is the END, the absoloot end of a painter. Few men can resist the lure, we all like comfort. That is my weakness and I have seen men who can do without it. I know no American will much believe that, and some of the men who can do without it are lunatics and fanatics. And snobbism doth make coneys of them all. So far as I know, nobody else had the courage to point out that the German pavilions at the Binennale di Venezia four years ago was the best. All the little daubers in the shops, doing Monet and Renoir 60 years late were shocked by the hardness of outline. It was almost the only pavilion not rotted with slobber, some more, some less.
The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct. An adjunct that proves the idea has other dimensions than the merely ideologic. It is a good idea, it is NOT a WHOLE idea. But it needs plastic expression: it has imperfect plastic expression, which is a sign of its force. But it does NOT arise from a plastic need.
Health is CRUEL, or rather health is often accompanied by what seems cruelty to the baccillus. The man who is totally healthy don't worry about baccillae. He isn't perpetually surrounded by patent medicines, bottles of disinfectant.
For God's sake LOOK at your art. When art is subordinate to the picture dealer, the museum in the United States gets what is LEFT after the European connoisseur has taken the pick of the billing.
? Ezra Pound speaking.
I know I haven't got very far in this talk, so wait for the next one. HEALTH, damn it, think about HEALTH in the interim.
#53 (July 10, 1942) U. S. (B67) HOW COME
HEALTH! I said health, last time. Don't you let anyone kid you out of it. Don't let 'em kid you out of looking for health in art. I am now goin' on to: How come.
CAPITAL does NOT come exclusively from labor. Not one man in a hundred EVEN in Europe has digested that truth and its implications. But what happens when a man who is living on the part of capital that does NOT come from labor first finds out what he is doin'? He gets scared as hell. He starts trying to conceal the cause of his privilege. HE starts the class war; class war does NOT come from the bottom. The man who is doing an honest day's work feels his strength. He feels the justice of drawin' his pay. And until he's nearly starved, until he is worried to death by fear of losin' his job, you cannot get him to DO anything at all about what is taken off him. Nothing is rarer than a peasant revolt. Save in the most atrocious circles. The peasant never does more than grumble a bit, he never bothered about his overlord gettin' something. So long as he ate he was happy. And LONG after he ceased to get a just portion of the returns from his own labor, he was certainly wholly innocuous.
What happens on the other side? MAN finds he hasn't justice on his side, and gets a panic. He sets up university chairs in economics to bamboozle the public. And this he does from sheer lack of culture. The concept of the cultural heritage took a long time to crystallize. The phrase is fairly new. I don't recall a CLEAR formulation of it in pre- Douglasite writing. It is latent in medieval terminology, but that
? terminology was invalidated when the so-called aristocracy came to include such a vast mess of what was anything but the best. Aristocracies ROT, they fall under usurocracy. That is their pathology, their slop- down, their decadence. Now in spite of lean years, and how, I have always enjoyed a large share of privilege. Got stocked up with University advantages. [Great? ] deal of mental pleasure. Always could bask in the best of what had been written and thought. That was nice for me, and it delayed my public utility for a decade. I had a nice time, but I contributed singularly little to curin' the world's diseases. I don't 'spose I worsened 'em any. Let me keep to the rich man's panic, the bourgeois panic. This panic starts when he begins not to KNOW. Lord it don't start as a clear perception. He begins to smell that CAPITAL comes from something that isn't an honest day's work. And he is scared out of his pantelettes at the idea of what it would mean to him if he had ONLY what he could earn doing a workman's work. Knowing he couldn't do it anyhow.
It takes a Whistler to reply to old Eden's lawyers, "NO, not for an half hour's work, for the knowledge of a lifetime. " But the cultural heritage is NOT merely the piled up skill of a master craftsman. You can't think clearly or see clearly till you get WORK into THREE brackets. The work a man does today. The anterior work that piles up into SKILL (material skill, handcraft, hand sleight, knowledge, discrimination. ) And the WORK done by men, now dead. Work done by the family, by the race, before you started workin' or loafin'. An instinct for the justice of the claims of ANTERIOR work leads to the craftsman's pride. It leads to family pride, and that ROTS when the man or family loses the passion for justice.
Man with passion for justice, or even a sense of justice, or an uneasiness about the existence of justice, starts rootin' round, starts trying to delimit the claims of the three orders of WORK: 1) work today, 2) work yesterday by the folk who are still livin', 3) work by the departed. And ONLY on that basis can you have sane law and society. But I have sat in
? on a professorial conference of several hundred persons, and not three of 'em had any glimmer of this simple tripartite division.
ALL purchasing power does NOT come from labor. All real wealth comes from natural resources PLUS labor. The shyster wants to hog natural resources, and sweat the hide of labor. That is the cause of unpleasantness. There is no wangle or dirty wheeze that the shyster won't think up and use to get a monopoly, to violate the just price, to keep labor sweatin'. And the shyster is pizin'. He is the sworn blasphemer, false swearin' and cheatin' FOE to all labor, past, present, and labor to come. And you better discover this. You better kick him out of your hemisphere. You better invent some bug poison that will eliminate him from your system.
That's what non-shyster Europe is drivin' at. The shyster got hold of Russia. He sweat the hide off of labor, he built the Stalin canal, and I advise all readers of the N. Y. Herald to GET the official reports of the treatment of human MATERIAL, carloads of "human material" dumped into the making of the Stalin canal.
One kind of shyster succeeds another: shyster penetrates ANY organization, church or state for the sake of livin' on the Purchasing Power that DON't come from labor. Shyster joins EVERY new movement so as to be there when it gets big and to be at the exploitin' position. Gangster shysters, medieval orders of chivalry rose to combat the gangster, to combat universal brutality and injustice in range of the individual knight. Or the body of chivalry rose to an idea. With these two forces, i. e. , gangsterism AND chivalry, the feudal system developed. As law it was a RESPONSIBLE system. The DUTIES of the overlord were enormous. They required DISTRIBUTION of wealth. Naturally this annoyed greedy overlords, and weak overlords, and the shyster entered the system. Ready to sweat out taxes, to sweat the hide off of labor, and to collect money interest. In fact the shyster is always a rent collector. And the worm ate into the fruit. Reniou, provenc? al word
? meanin' interest on lent money. Gangster barons kept and lent all right whenever they could so wangle it. Greed, violence, nothing new about vices. When the two had rotted the world long enough, there came an explosion. The difference between OUR American Revolution and the French was enormous. OURS rose with the perception that dead men do not EAT. That is, with a perception that there is a just limit to the rights of work done by men [who] have ceased to breath. Jefferson said it: the earth belongs to the living. As He did not say: the earth belongs to idiots. But on the other hand, he did not clearly assert that the management of the earth requires the intelligence of men who are prepared, and FITTED to govern. An assault on mortal man, an assault on the exaggerated privileges accorded to the whims and greeds of the dead was NEEDED. It came.
Naturally the Revolution was betrayed. BUT it lasted sixty years. Or rather the government set up on that basis lasted 60 years. Count it longer dependin' on when you count the start of our revolution as from 1776 or 1750? Or 60? The French revolution flopped in a hurry. The Napoleonic dream was not merely a dream of conquest. To witness the CODE, code Napoleon, Napoleon's law code. Desire for justice, Mediterranean sense of justice. But a lot of good sense got lost. The guilds, the anti-trade or ganizations, with their grades of apprenticage, got chucked into the discard. They were NOT 100% innocent. Against the feudal greed, trade greed developed. Nevertheless the guilds left a dream. Left THEIR code of sanity, code of sense, necessity of order and preparation.
There is now a new code in Italy.
Let the Jews BUY a national home somewhere in your ruins. They have sold a good deal of Africa into serfdom; and NOT been nice to the
? ENGLISH who ventured on WORKING there, who went there to raise crops of food stuff. The usury system is unpleasant. The world is almightily ONTO that system. The Bu? rgermaster of Worgl, or in other words, common honesty, is of more use to Tomorrow's England than all the gold of the Indies or all the opium of the Sassoon, and the consequent revenues, concerning which Bobble Cecil can or should by now be able to supply ample details.
The effect of the B. B. C. transmissions is that, in the whole pack of their transmitters, there is no one who dares mention the Jewish problem, Brain Trust included. Probably lose their jobs if they tried, and what can be expected from a profession with Shaw and Wells at the top who think 24 hours a day of their incomes and of the truth at spare moments? Only England dare not mention the expulsion of Jews by Maria Theresa, nor England's blackmail of Maria Theresa, nor the Jews' relations with Cromwell. American radio is silent, partly from ignorance, the poor hicks just don't know any history, though a gang of foolish youngmen had the exuberance to get jailed for plotting to bump off all the Jew members of Congress. Had they succeeded, such is the American gangster and anarchist psychology that the only comment inside the United States would have been "and a damn good thing too. " (With echos in unspeaking England. ) The only place where anyone would have been shocked is in Italy, where there is a millennial conservatism and a prejudice against-- --.
#51 (July 2, 1942) U. S. (B65) DISBURSEMENT OF WISDOM
My friend F. Whiteside never tired of a very well known story of Chase and Whistler. For those of you to whom Chase's name is unfamiliar one may as well say that Whistler was a painter of very great talent. He had limitations, his drawing bothered him, some of his paint has now sunk into the canvas and the nuances he so labored may not last forever, but he was certainly one of the ornaments of his time, and with Henry James
? the two Americans who lit up the horizon of American youth at the turn of the century, and certainly some of his work will give joy to the elite as long as the canvas or paper remains.
Whereas Chase was, in painting, the equivalent of Harper's monthly magazine, Chase returned to the American like Howells, but on one occasion he disagreed with Jimmy, and on being kidded, he broke off: "I won't argue with you any longer. " To which Mr. Whistler with weary patience: "But, Chase, I am NOT arguing with you. I am just telling you. "
The Chinese have a more monumental exposition of the same theme: In evil time the sage can enjoy his own wisdom; when the land is well governed, the people benefit from his instructions.
Now apart from any national talents that I may or may not possess I have, first in poesy, and then in economics, which is one of the components of history, spent considerable more time and thought, and I do enjoy or suffer a thirst for knowledge which is, to put it mildly, above the common.
You are in a bloody mess. Bloody in more senses than that word has in British jargon. You are in a bloody MESS. Who got you there? Why did he do it? Does he know why he did it? Does he know HOW he dit it?
You have all of you been chicken-headed, frivolous, etc. You don't even know whether your various races of European origin will or CAN survive on a continent that has seen the fade-out of Mayas and Aztecs. And you have an ORGANIZED minority of a different race amongst you. A race that never tires, a race possessed of subcrocodilian vitality. And the lively lizard is "on this earth very antient" as huddy (W. H. Hudson) remarks of the condor and other predatory foul of the Andes.
AXIOM. Against an organized force of four or more, probably EIGHT million, a hundred individuals can NOT prevail until ORGANIZED. The
? sporadic efforts of a few excited young men are no use. The dilettante velleities of a few theorists are NO use. And the rest of the inhabitants of the United States can organize on ONE basis only, namely, that on which Europe has finally been constrained to organize its rebellion against the pervasive the ubiquitous Yidd. Pacts may be signed between the Pennsylvania Deitsch and the scrawny New Englander of British or Anglo-Scotch origin, but on no basis save that of race, and of allied more or less consanguineous races can you cohere.
You have, as opposed to any such projected order not merely the 4 or 8 million kikes in New York and points penetrated already. [From] New York to San Diego or wherever the pan hebe, the world Jewry, has set up a radio. Which is bloody well more than the rebellious British reformers were able to do in England during the four years before the betrayal of the British race by Churchill and Eden.
That being the vital point in the German program and the press being in the hands of kikery (high kike) and the subjugated servants of Jewry, some possibly only 1/2 or 1/3 conscious of what they were up to.
Religious base, no use; has been exploited. History of massacres re theology points [to the] downfall of Byzantium, as LONG as it was possible to stir up war on religious basis; that label was used to stir up strife.
Tacitus: Jews back, of persecution of early Christians. Fights in church between iconoclasts and the religious part of the church, down to the Germanic wars of religion. With the quite simple advice of the opponents, i. e. Jews, to THEIR component members; to GET into the church; get into the church, get into the prebends; to take holy orders and corrupt the church from inside (documented). Till you get the almost perfect instrument, Luther, both religious fanatic (on the question of the trinity, etc. ) and a very good politician, rebelling against being taxed by
? an ecciesiast central; already corrupted, and fallen into the hands of a banking family.
Religious base, no USE, that is written and proved over and over in European history which you do ill to ignore. Church split into fragments on one hand; and then any diplomatic representative of a foreign race can SO easily go thru the motions of getting converted. Nothing new about that and the thin veil of observance, torn off in a jiffy whenever it seemed opportune even after centuries of pretending. No, no great hoax, that of combatting on religious base. Simple-minded European tribesmen fell for it, were weakened during about 1600 years, continual attrition. Wonder we're here at all. Must be something tough in European and Mediterranean fibre.
As to effects on, let us take a test tube specimen, France. According to some reckoning France had 38% of the population of the great powers in Louis XIV's time, 27% in 1789 and has 13% at present. I don't know just what powers are included in those figures, but on whatever calculation it has been made, it indicates a DECLINE.
Anyhow, religious basis NO use. What CAN you organize on?
Can't move 'em with a cold thing like economics. Marx advised fighting on economic basis. I still meet people who fall for that bit of eminently semitic strategy. For ONE HUNDRED years, simpletons and inexperienced young men have tried AS, damn it, my friends, of a dozen sects, economic sects; I tried ever since my kitten of mind got its eyes half open. And what came of it? Five thousand in prison, Wo? rgl, Alberta.
Yes, yes, we lily-livered humanitarians fussed 'round wantin' to cure the evil by honest accountancy; and we did NOT prevent this war.
I think my most obtuse opponent, or my most enthusiastic opponent, or Frankies' most faithful UNhappy warrior Archie MacLeish will admit that the reformers, the monetary reformers, the men who wanted honest
? functioning of the treasuries and of finance in England and America, did NOT prevent this war. (And damn lucky if they stave off the next one. ) Oh yes, the kahal makes 'em in series. SERIES technocracy, why waste the plant on ONE world calamity? The last one was nearly a world war.
The Talmud announced destruction of 75% of the goy. Yes, brother you have an OPPONENT. And what CAN you rely on? Dan Boone out shootin' squirrels. Hit 'em in the eye every time, but the Boone era, Daniel Boone era, has gone forever. The Boone era seems to have got mislaid for the moment. Prosperity has went, it has vamoosed. We wipp, nichishin, chippewa language has vanished with the pure injun dialects. Even the mixed idiom such as "que voulex you buju, nicichin" is no longer current on the Canadian frontier. And Henry James already noticed a change in New York phonetics.
On the seventh day gawd rested. I noted THAT even in [the] days of the Little Review. Either the European stock now resident in North America ORGANIZES or it sinks still deeper into the morass of high kikery. Its ideals and ideas have WENT. The structure of the Anglo-American landwidg is kufuzzled.
About 20 lost men in the United States DID notice the race problem, if not in time, at least in time to be read by Europeans who were really thinking about the WAY OUT. Undoubtedly it is pleasant to think that IF you get rid of capital system the Jew becomes harmless. That was oily Marx's bait, and what happens is the Stalin canal.
A FAKE elimination of capitalism, an attack of ALL civilization, even as much as had leaked into Russia. An attack on property, that is on private ownership of LAND, plows and bathtubs, but the USURER left in command. Not only have the nice and polite amongst us who TRIED to reform the hell of the stinking capitalist, i. e. , usury world, by honest accountancy, monetary and economic reform been shown up as ABSolootly incapable of gathering a mass of adherents powerful enough
? to DO anything, let alone resist a barbarian avalanche. BUT when capitalism has been dethroned etc. Slobody, Slobody for the fishes, open the fish breedin' tanks, in Slavic enthusiasm. That elimination of so called "capitalism" is merely used as a flail, a steamroller to crush out the rest of the non-chewish world, that is as much of it as it could ever run, in collusion with the decrepit, syphilitic, Sassonic, beCecil's sewage and mould of the British plutocracy.
The rot eating in since Cromwell, since the Constantinopolitan kikes were so INTerested in that damn hypocrite that they sent over an embassy to see if Cromwell was their Messiah. Much more in their line than the young fellow from Nazareth. I am not arguing, I am just telling you. One of these days you will have to start thinking about the problem of race, BREED, preservation.
I do NOT like to think of my race as going toward total extinction, NOR into absolute bondage.
The Cincinnati etc. erred from snobbery. They did not in George Washington's time organize on racial basis. No one thought of it, no one could have then thought of it. There WAS a racially homogeneous population in the newly freed colonies. Certain privileges were dear to the privileged. Snobbism is NOT conservative. Fashion is not conservative. La Mode, etc. is a ramp. Cf. with Hungarian and Roumanian peasant linen, one shirt or blouse lasts a life time, indestructable as real Chinese silk, "no can tear. "
That is what the advertising trade diddles you out of and you will have to think about Race.
#52 (July 6, 1942) U. S. (B66) CONTINUITY
? Had I the tongue of men and angels I should be unable to make sure that even the most faithful listeners would be able to hear and grasp the whole of a series of my talks.
That is the disadvantage of the radio form, and heaven knows when I shall be able to print these texts in book or books available to the American and English public. Book implying that [the] reader CAN, when he wishes, look back, take up the statement of the preface, see where Chapter X hitches onto Chapter I. Nevertheless you may as well make the effort to grasp at least the fact that there IS a sequence in what I am saying, and that the conversation of February coheres with that of April. And if you, you in Iowa, Wyoming, Connecticut, DON'T make that effort, if you don't listen and TRY to get [the] main threads and cables of what I am telling you, you will lose time.
Just as the writers who did NOT read the Little Review lost time. Many never made it up. There is no one of any literary size, or even pretenions among you who hasn't by now read the Little Review authors, or authors formed by the Little Review authors. Authors indebted to the Little Review and to its authors for their force, their take off, the initial jab that set 'em off.
Pity is that many got only a fragmentary view. Joyce and not Eliot, Eliot not W. Lewis. I hear a million Americans have taken advantage of Mr. Hemmingway's last production, and so they ought to. TWO million ought to read it (probably . . . I haven't yet seen a copy but that is due to conditions of Atlantic transport).
PITY is that there is so much else, so much essential else that they are unblissfully UNaware of. And I honestly do not know where they can get essential parts of that else, except from my broadcasts. And out of them, out of these talks, the young men in England and America will have to build their souls, or at least their minds for tomorrow, or LOSE time, never get into life at all.
? They will not be tomorrow's Hemingways, or even today's Clark Gables. They will be just shelved, left on the cupboard floor, this way inglorious and ungloried, back numbers before they are dated. Like neo- Georgians who read Mr. Eliot 15 or 26 years late, and tried to cut little nitches in his umbrageous cathedral, mouse holes in his choir stall.
And after a hundred broadcasts it is STILL hard to know where to begin. There is so MUCH that the United States does not know. This war is [the] fruit of such vast incomprehensions, such tangled ignorance, so many strains of unknowing.
I am held up, enraged, by the delay needed to change a typing ribbon, so much is there that OUGHT to be put into the young American head. Don't know which, what to put down, can't write two scripts at once. NECESSARY facts, ideas, come in pell-mell. I try to get too much into ten minutes. Condensed form O. K. in book, saves eyesight, reader can turn back, can look at a summary. Mebbe if I had more sense of form, legal training, God knows what, could get the matter across the Atlantic, or the bally old channel. Art, economics, pathology. You need to know MORE about all of 'em. Need to GIT out of this war, need to stay out of, or prevent the next one, need to change the stinkin' old system.
ROT in art, art as pathology, university delays. How come class war? What is it the professors don't know? Got to choose between two or four subjects or I will git nothing over in any one talk. Very well. I will start on: How come. Two bits of ignorance that have recently been rubbed into me by a mob or congress of professorial persons. NO . . . let's start on something that HAS been discussed IN America for twenty years, 30 years, Doctor looks at literature. All this quite silly talk about the diseased mind back of modern painting.
It bored me like hell. It was mostly poor stuff. BUT the fault lay in its limitation AS criticism, not in the main worry that caused half educated
? medicos to go into it. What was wrong with the criticism was lack of proportion.
HEALTH is MORE interesting than disease. Health is TOTAL.
Beauty is MORE interesting than distortion.
We have most of us been buffaloed, or at any rate the intelligentsia is mostly an ass. NOT from having no brains, but simply from partialism in the original sense of that word. Intelligentsia is mostly a nuisance because it runs on snobisms and fragments.
At [the] age of 15 a consumptive gave me a copy of Salome? with Beardsley's illustrations. I cut 'em out, they were so ugly. But for more than ten years of my life I considered this an act of genuine fanaticism. I came to see the . . . damn it all, call 'em merits of Beardsley's distortions.
GROANS from the effete, elite and superior sophomores.
Later a distorted but amiable female presented me coyly with an inferior Beardsley, that is, a volume of distortions by a pink nailed esthete. The significance of THAT act was apparent even to me. I don't think it was conscious on her part. The book probably gave her relief or comfort that she could not have derived from Praxiteles or Botticelli. At any rate I was older, and the drawings weren't even good Beardsley. AND I wasn't interested in pathology. So I have never mentioned the incident before.
The medicos who started worrying about the disease behind modern art were right. That is, they were RIGHT to worry. They were mostly silly in their statements of detail, and this was due to ignorance, lack of cultural heritage. But they were on the right line.
I affirm that future art criticism will be able to tell the component of usury tolerance. How far the TOLERANCE of usury prevailed, or did not prevail when a given picture was painted. Sense of design, precision of LINE, will give way to interest in detail. Suggestion of luxury will
? augment as people lose an ethical basis of life, as they lose passion for justice, love of real distinction between one idea and another. Diagnosis will replace love, analysis will give way to squalor. There are steps and slopes downward toward Avernus, falsification will enter. Honest men, when a dogma or style has been falsified, will turn analytic. They will be partial, the first ones emphatic and vigorous. They will aim, that is, the best ones will aim at health.
For example, Manet, fed up with falsification of color in painting, Manet reduced to analysis of light and color. Both making distinct contributions to world art. Manet one of the world's greatest.
But what is temperament in a sound man becomes by excess, disease in a weak man. Unbalance, hard to divide at certain point, and if one drifts with the current, one grows tolerant first of weakness, and then accustomed to weakness, and then plops into squalor.
Mediterranean sanity and beauty, order. TO KALON, the world was saner when the cult of ugliness did NOT engage the attentions of anyone.
I know all about chocolate box, pseudo beauty, etc. BUT a deflection of the AIM is a decadence. It is a false ripening, it is green fruit going rotten. Beardsley was a sick man, knew he had to make a name quick if he wanted to make it. Personal wish, NOT belief in what art is or ought to be. Knew he hadn't time to learn to PAINT. HIS sane youthful impulse was to pre-Raphealite beauty. Early drawings, Burne-Jones, that's what he WANTED.
Yeats asked him why he hadn't stuck to it. Beardsley was no slouch, he was a courageous invalid. He was a heroic invalid, up to the point of his force. He didn't lie to himself nor to his friends in private. He answered:
Beauty is so DIFFICULT.
? We have all seen the cult of beauty turn to slop. Esthete: an artist who won't take pains, who will NOT face the work needed to paint a good picture, or write a good novel or poem. All fragmentary, nothing total. And the GREAT perversion, the great decadence, when the painting is made to sell, when the artist stops wanting to live. Worth his hire, MUST eat, but EAT secondary AS desire, to will to paint, or to make. Then to git rich, that is the END, the absoloot end of a painter. Few men can resist the lure, we all like comfort. That is my weakness and I have seen men who can do without it. I know no American will much believe that, and some of the men who can do without it are lunatics and fanatics. And snobbism doth make coneys of them all. So far as I know, nobody else had the courage to point out that the German pavilions at the Binennale di Venezia four years ago was the best. All the little daubers in the shops, doing Monet and Renoir 60 years late were shocked by the hardness of outline. It was almost the only pavilion not rotted with slobber, some more, some less.
The futurist rooms are always an affirmation of propaganda that could get along by itself without any painting whatever. I mean the main line of futurist propaganda is an idea, the painting an adjunct. An adjunct that proves the idea has other dimensions than the merely ideologic. It is a good idea, it is NOT a WHOLE idea. But it needs plastic expression: it has imperfect plastic expression, which is a sign of its force. But it does NOT arise from a plastic need.
Health is CRUEL, or rather health is often accompanied by what seems cruelty to the baccillus. The man who is totally healthy don't worry about baccillae. He isn't perpetually surrounded by patent medicines, bottles of disinfectant.
For God's sake LOOK at your art. When art is subordinate to the picture dealer, the museum in the United States gets what is LEFT after the European connoisseur has taken the pick of the billing.
? Ezra Pound speaking.
I know I haven't got very far in this talk, so wait for the next one. HEALTH, damn it, think about HEALTH in the interim.
#53 (July 10, 1942) U. S. (B67) HOW COME
HEALTH! I said health, last time. Don't you let anyone kid you out of it. Don't let 'em kid you out of looking for health in art. I am now goin' on to: How come.
CAPITAL does NOT come exclusively from labor. Not one man in a hundred EVEN in Europe has digested that truth and its implications. But what happens when a man who is living on the part of capital that does NOT come from labor first finds out what he is doin'? He gets scared as hell. He starts trying to conceal the cause of his privilege. HE starts the class war; class war does NOT come from the bottom. The man who is doing an honest day's work feels his strength. He feels the justice of drawin' his pay. And until he's nearly starved, until he is worried to death by fear of losin' his job, you cannot get him to DO anything at all about what is taken off him. Nothing is rarer than a peasant revolt. Save in the most atrocious circles. The peasant never does more than grumble a bit, he never bothered about his overlord gettin' something. So long as he ate he was happy. And LONG after he ceased to get a just portion of the returns from his own labor, he was certainly wholly innocuous.
What happens on the other side? MAN finds he hasn't justice on his side, and gets a panic. He sets up university chairs in economics to bamboozle the public. And this he does from sheer lack of culture. The concept of the cultural heritage took a long time to crystallize. The phrase is fairly new. I don't recall a CLEAR formulation of it in pre- Douglasite writing. It is latent in medieval terminology, but that
? terminology was invalidated when the so-called aristocracy came to include such a vast mess of what was anything but the best. Aristocracies ROT, they fall under usurocracy. That is their pathology, their slop- down, their decadence. Now in spite of lean years, and how, I have always enjoyed a large share of privilege. Got stocked up with University advantages. [Great? ] deal of mental pleasure. Always could bask in the best of what had been written and thought. That was nice for me, and it delayed my public utility for a decade. I had a nice time, but I contributed singularly little to curin' the world's diseases. I don't 'spose I worsened 'em any. Let me keep to the rich man's panic, the bourgeois panic. This panic starts when he begins not to KNOW. Lord it don't start as a clear perception. He begins to smell that CAPITAL comes from something that isn't an honest day's work. And he is scared out of his pantelettes at the idea of what it would mean to him if he had ONLY what he could earn doing a workman's work. Knowing he couldn't do it anyhow.
It takes a Whistler to reply to old Eden's lawyers, "NO, not for an half hour's work, for the knowledge of a lifetime. " But the cultural heritage is NOT merely the piled up skill of a master craftsman. You can't think clearly or see clearly till you get WORK into THREE brackets. The work a man does today. The anterior work that piles up into SKILL (material skill, handcraft, hand sleight, knowledge, discrimination. ) And the WORK done by men, now dead. Work done by the family, by the race, before you started workin' or loafin'. An instinct for the justice of the claims of ANTERIOR work leads to the craftsman's pride. It leads to family pride, and that ROTS when the man or family loses the passion for justice.
Man with passion for justice, or even a sense of justice, or an uneasiness about the existence of justice, starts rootin' round, starts trying to delimit the claims of the three orders of WORK: 1) work today, 2) work yesterday by the folk who are still livin', 3) work by the departed. And ONLY on that basis can you have sane law and society. But I have sat in
? on a professorial conference of several hundred persons, and not three of 'em had any glimmer of this simple tripartite division.
ALL purchasing power does NOT come from labor. All real wealth comes from natural resources PLUS labor. The shyster wants to hog natural resources, and sweat the hide of labor. That is the cause of unpleasantness. There is no wangle or dirty wheeze that the shyster won't think up and use to get a monopoly, to violate the just price, to keep labor sweatin'. And the shyster is pizin'. He is the sworn blasphemer, false swearin' and cheatin' FOE to all labor, past, present, and labor to come. And you better discover this. You better kick him out of your hemisphere. You better invent some bug poison that will eliminate him from your system.
That's what non-shyster Europe is drivin' at. The shyster got hold of Russia. He sweat the hide off of labor, he built the Stalin canal, and I advise all readers of the N. Y. Herald to GET the official reports of the treatment of human MATERIAL, carloads of "human material" dumped into the making of the Stalin canal.
One kind of shyster succeeds another: shyster penetrates ANY organization, church or state for the sake of livin' on the Purchasing Power that DON't come from labor. Shyster joins EVERY new movement so as to be there when it gets big and to be at the exploitin' position. Gangster shysters, medieval orders of chivalry rose to combat the gangster, to combat universal brutality and injustice in range of the individual knight. Or the body of chivalry rose to an idea. With these two forces, i. e. , gangsterism AND chivalry, the feudal system developed. As law it was a RESPONSIBLE system. The DUTIES of the overlord were enormous. They required DISTRIBUTION of wealth. Naturally this annoyed greedy overlords, and weak overlords, and the shyster entered the system. Ready to sweat out taxes, to sweat the hide off of labor, and to collect money interest. In fact the shyster is always a rent collector. And the worm ate into the fruit. Reniou, provenc? al word
? meanin' interest on lent money. Gangster barons kept and lent all right whenever they could so wangle it. Greed, violence, nothing new about vices. When the two had rotted the world long enough, there came an explosion. The difference between OUR American Revolution and the French was enormous. OURS rose with the perception that dead men do not EAT. That is, with a perception that there is a just limit to the rights of work done by men [who] have ceased to breath. Jefferson said it: the earth belongs to the living. As He did not say: the earth belongs to idiots. But on the other hand, he did not clearly assert that the management of the earth requires the intelligence of men who are prepared, and FITTED to govern. An assault on mortal man, an assault on the exaggerated privileges accorded to the whims and greeds of the dead was NEEDED. It came.
Naturally the Revolution was betrayed. BUT it lasted sixty years. Or rather the government set up on that basis lasted 60 years. Count it longer dependin' on when you count the start of our revolution as from 1776 or 1750? Or 60? The French revolution flopped in a hurry. The Napoleonic dream was not merely a dream of conquest. To witness the CODE, code Napoleon, Napoleon's law code. Desire for justice, Mediterranean sense of justice. But a lot of good sense got lost. The guilds, the anti-trade or ganizations, with their grades of apprenticage, got chucked into the discard. They were NOT 100% innocent. Against the feudal greed, trade greed developed. Nevertheless the guilds left a dream. Left THEIR code of sanity, code of sense, necessity of order and preparation.
There is now a new code in Italy.
