Lies and threats against Italy, after the
Versailles
cheatin'.
Ezra-Pound-Speaking
Zangwill invented the term; he was gauche, he was pathetic.
But the word had a career.
The idea was tempting.
So was the old Yankee idea of trying a woman of every nation, or of as many as possible.
What's wrong with halfbreeds7 Do you know one of 'em who don't suffer sometimes from cleverness, that don't quite come solid, sometimes from a peculiar sort of stoppage INSIDE the head, leadin' to a kind of sense of frustration?
For 60 years mankind has been experimentin' on guinea pigs. All sorts of experiments. Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding. The wisdom of China long ago ruled out inbreedin'. The hundred names, no man to marry a woman of his own name, that was a barrier on the one side.
Ce? line has got down to the other. The next move, the next world movement is a move toward the production of thoroughbreds. Think it over. That idea is a risin'. Means no hardship to anyone. It is eugenic. No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and
? horses. One would think the human race was worth as much attention as the British fanciers give to whiffets.
Albert Londres had a hunch that the French ought to try it on blacks in their Africa. He hated to see the Africans going rotten, covered with scabs in French colonies. Ce? line thinks it would be useful to use that much sense on Frenchmen. So I suppose Admiral Leahy, or whatever Layafettist [? ], is over there at Vichy trying to blackmail Pe? tain, will be trying to git ALL Ce? line's books forbidden or pinched in the UNOCCUPIED parts of French territory.
Oh, it's a lovely world, as Candide has told us, all that is, is the best possible.
Mebbe in time the American college boys will gil 'round to reading me or Ce? line or some of the Livin' authors. BUT don't git to thinking that, just because the Clipper ships carry so little NEWS, that there is NOTHING being written in Europe. Ole Europe is still here on the continent. Josh Twostep, Josher Dos Passos hasn't succeeded in persuadin' Europe that times like these are times in which the writer should lay off writin'.
Times like these are times when a writer should git down to bedrock and talk without fuzz on his tongue. Ce? line does that all right enough. Time to read Ce? line for the simple truths that stand there in his writing, expressed with perfect lucidity--and simplicity. You may be a bit late in startin'.
A great writer is one whose straight simple phrases stick in the memory.
L'ame n'est pas venue sur la terre pour se faire e^merger.
#38 (May 17, 1942) U. K. (B45)
FREE SPEECH IN ALBION (ALIAS ENGLAND)
The propaganda for free speech in Britain (listlessly elegiac, retrospective) r sounds as follows: "The murderer stole my watch but his wife told him not to. We have free speech in this family. " That is how it sounds HERE. No one denies that free speech is a fine old British
? tradition. One complains that it is a moth-eaten tradition: a shadow with small present substance. The series of outrages committed by British governments in the past. Chesapeaken Leopard, etc. are in history. That Bright protested, etc. during the United States Civil War, is in history.
What the B. B. C. does NOT care to admit is the profound resemblance between England's divide et impera during our United States Civil War, and her policy on the continent of Europe.
All of which is most keenly analyzed in Mein Kampf, a book as slandered in England and as much obscured by press mud as any other.
It is the points to WHICH British free speech does not APPLY that we want to hear about. Free speech has been cornered. We complain that the British press was rotten, and had been for over a century. My memory goes back considerably further than Mr. Bridson's, whatever Winnie said in 1936: I can match it. I remember the pavements of London "WE WANT EIGHT" back before the other war started.
Winston was allus shoutin' for gun sales, high pressure salesmanship of blood, cannon, and slaughter. BUT at the same time upholdin' a usury system which made it impossible to deliver the cannon. Hence bringing slaughter on Europe.
It is not the question of British chauvinism, but the mixture of chauvinism and absolute utter dishonesty, and a refusal to look at the economic causes of war that disgusts the foreign observer. That some Englishmen dislike being betrayed needs no argument. That the English people did NOT desire the war needs no argument. The point is they kept on having governments that insisted on having a war. The British people are NOT represent ed. The B. B. C. may run a very good (up to a point) retrospect about Free Speech in England. BUT to couple that with the unholy alliance with Russia does not convince the opponent of England's bona fide, rather of idiocy and dishonesty.
? Kumrad Maisky's FACE, like the hindend of a pig, for example. WHY does England suppose that Kumrad Maisky will hesitate any longer about bumping off George VI and Elizabeth, than his pals did about killin' the Czar, with Temple of Canterbury sayin' the blessin'? No, Temple is a prize comic, possibly Lang WOULD have pronounced an Episcopal benediction? Temple don't, I think, mean any harm, just fat headed.
Rhetoric about "our representatives in Parliament" is NOT the point. The point is your Parliament does NOT represent you. That is the syndicalist complaint against Parliaments in the old rotten borough or disguised rotten bank-borough form.
Every CONstructive measure proposed to camouflage the iniquity of your usuries is a slavish copy of the corporate state.
BUT without the corporate structure, just patchin', and NOT hitting for the main evil. Money is admitted by at least one B. B. C. yapper to be a financial label. But interest? When does that occur properly? And WHO fixes the label, and in whose interests? And IS there a Jewish problem?
Perhaps, along with Carlyle's love for his wife, and the fine old husky sailor voices telling of the Chesapeake and the Leopard, there might be a historic sketch of the Jews and Noll Crummwell, and a FEW probes into the WHY of the present struggle, and the REFUSALS to cooperate with the civilized world, and the hook-up with Russia.
Does the Bolshevic government stand for the best English traditions: free speech, and no taxation without representation?
Fat lot of representation your tax payers have had in this budget. Though I dare say they have been by now so hog swoggled by propaganda, appeals to their finest feeling, that they are ready to murder their children and grandmas in the cause of 60% on real deposits. And a perfect fury of abuse and hysteria when some Frenchman opens a book of geography
? and discovers what was long since known to Theophile Gautier, namely that France is a part of Europe. ON THE MAP, geographically, France is a PART of Europe, and her sanity and welfare would consist IN functioning as PART of Europe.
Preferably a Frenchman, not a half nigger, half Jew bridged head of Anglo-Judaea. Some idea, that is the GEOGRAPHIC idea, may someday enter England. But no signs of British desire to collaborate in a new order have yet emerged from the British Bleat Corps halls of transmission.
Divide et impera. I dunno who translated Mein Kampf into English. Here Bompiani or someone had an idea, and stroke of genius, and printed the second half first, so Italian readers, some of 'em, came straight on the program, constructive program, health, responsibility, personal, and a study of history. Elsewhere in the book, you can see Hitler (if you have
YET begun to develop an interest in that opponent of your infamies: you can see Hitler thinking about the evils of having Innthal, valley of the Inn, cut off from the rest of the German Volk. You can see him, figgerin' out for Germany, what a few Americans figured out for the United States of America. Divide et impera.
Of course, you are gittin' divided for the same old Sassoon [who is] wantin' U. S. farm boys to squeeze interest out of the Hindoos, now that T. Atkins is getting scarcer.
The rest of the world is tired, bloody well TIRED of having Chesapeakes and RESULTS: accompanied by Mrs. Burglar Bill tellin' Bill not to do it. Yes, some British protested against chattel slavery. The wheeze, the BANK wheeze, now KNOWN, and recorded in history, being that wage slavery was CHEAPER, that LESS responsibility devolved on the OWNERS (alias employers) of wage slaves than on the
? owners of black slaves, who had to feed 'em to keep up their workin' potential. ALL that is HISTORY.
The world, especially Europe, is tired, tired, and the English stock, the part of the English RACE in the colonies was tired from 1750 onward of being sanctioned, of having their OWN money censored. Sanctioned, forbidden--their AUTARCHY, such as it was, sabotaged, their prosperity sabotaged by a kike gang or a sub-kike or super-gang of grafters and monopolists, headquarters in London.
And YOU will, I 'spose, get your karma, your contrapasso when the head office shifts from Last Cheape, and Thredbobbin Alley over to Wall , Street with Wailing included. Shama Yssrael, the one true fatherland is the pawn shop.
Why take that INTO your so very [valued] tradition. Beatin' your breasts. Give us a nut to crack and God can crack it. As for the people, one of your own living poets has beaten his hairy breast as follows:
We can think as we are told to think We are the echo of the loudest bark We are the arses kicked by better men
There is this very uncurious mixture in British propaganda. The wailing wall, AND the reminiscence, the old lavender, the Spanish Armada, etc. The TRADITIONS, the better of which 20 years of British politics have done so little to maintain.
You can't expect me to stenograph all your noises. [I'd] go out of my head when I wake up the next morning in a country that asks RESULTS and about which YOU apparently know very little.
Why, for example, should Hitler and Mussolini who have been through a great deal more than I have, who have been thru a great deal I have not,
? endured hardships I have not, why should they be scared by Mr. Hull, Mr. C. Hull or Eden, when these stiffed effigies can't even scare ME?
Why all this talk of the German Staff regardin' with fear and trembling the arrival of a few motor boats at Le Portel, or wherever, the 33 or what ever out of the 50 or whatever remained with their ammunition; pore devils? TO take England's MIND OFF England's business, the business she OUGHT to have been minding and HOW, since 1919, since Versailles defrauded Italy.
#39 (May 18, 1942) U. S. (B43) WITH PHANTOMS
Two topics that I have rarely touched in these conversations--Germany and Lord Tennyson.
And of Tennyson I now quote but a verse and a fragment.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall" (maybe it was fail). I haven't been readin' Tennyson lately, but that much sticks in my head from the Idyls.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall. " I guess it was fall. Take it as prophecy. And the phantom that the Anglo-Jew world is fighting, or that the Anglo-American is fighting, a Jew usurer instigation, is the German PHANTOM, NOT the reality. And that phantom has been built out of lies, till the pious and kindly American, and simple hearted British boob BY the million believe it, see it, hear it. And FAIL to grasp or to face the reality.
Now I almost never talk of Germany because I have seen very little of Germany. Ole Ford toted me 'round about Hessen Darmstadt in 1911, tellin' me what a fine country was Germany. Then he wrote When Blood is their Argument. Since then I have been to Vienna and to Frankfurt for
? Antheil's opry, and passed thru Munich and from Wien I went up to Wo? rgl. And as the young can't be expected to know my past history I 'spose I got to preface it.
That I was interested in CIVILIZATION from the age of 12 when I first saw Venice. Venice looked good to me. Anyhow, I came to Europe to git kulchur all right, and to a great extent got it. Started in U. Penn. at 15 to FIND out what had been written, and what was the BEST of it, in as many languages as I could gil under my occiput; to KNOW what the real thing was. And thence to HISTORY and economics. To SEE what was going on in the world TODAY, as I needed it in my business, my business being WRITIN', and an Epic being a container of HISTORY.
Of course you need music to understand real versification. But comin' from a duck-board country, I was interested in LATIN order. Order in stone work, in paintin', Adamo me fecit. S. Zeno Verona, architect had cut that column by HAND, by his own hand, want INTEGRAL, totalitarian interest in the job of buildin' S. Zeno. Church of S. Zeno. I liked Quattro cento paintin'. P. Uccello. First freshman theme, I wrote was on Paulo Uccello, picture in Louvre I reckon.
Anyhow, apart from Von der Vogelweide, old Schnitz Brandt lettin' me jump the prose and come to the osses, the poetry, medieval German poetry, in 1904 or 5. I didn't much cotton to German literature, in cf. with the Mediterranean. Dante, Villon, provenc? al Canzoni writers; anyhow, I didn't cotton to German literature. And then philology, ERROR of old German university system got my goat. And I laid off readin' German till I hit Leo Frobenius.
Also being in England 12 years, I certainly saw the last war from the Lon don angle. Lump in my throat when I heard even in this one, that Vimy Ridge had been taken. I could take all the rest of it but, when I heard Vimy was taken, that was a tough one. BUT JUSTICE IS JUSTICE. And lies are a poor Ersatz for justice. And as to LYING I
? reckon Hitler has been lied about more than any man livin' except Mussolini.
Now re Mussolini. I KNOW they are lyin'. I['v] been here 17 years and I have known for 17 years they were lyin'.
Lies and threats against Italy, after the Versailles cheatin'. That offense to humanity, Robert Mond, threatenin' Mussolini. Waal, it used to be said in London that Alfred looked like one end of a pig, and that Robert Mond looked like the other. And the FORM certainly did show the spirit inside 'em. I believe the younger generation felt it, and has had a lurch over toward honesty. But he sure has heredity workin' against him. And a Jew who wants to run honest certainly ain't chosen a bed of roses. Sure, some Jews aspire to honesty, kindly impulses, gestures of opulence. But gawd help 'em. And God save humanity FROM them.
Well, very few real reports about Germany have got into English or American circulation. I doubt if many of 'em have got into second editions. So when I contradict lies about Germany, my ground is limited. I have one or two fragmentary first hand reports. I have PRINTED data.
Now when I was doing my job on Sig. Malatesta I came to the conclusion that DOCUMENTS, personal letters and what not, PROVED ONE THING:
A letter PROVES what the bloke who wrote it wanted the receiver to believe ON the day he wrote it. The rest of history has to be derived from computation. IF documents DISAPPEAR with remarkable coincidence, say reports of an event in February in 1424, there was something someone was trying to KEEP from the public. 'Specially if the despatches for a particular day disappear from six archives simultaneous, and so weiter.
Well I know the Times, Telegraph, N. Y. Post and all the damn kikery also kiker Archibishopery of England, LIED about Italy. And I know f
? rpm first hand that facts about Germany did NOT git much anglo-yanko publicity. And I keep off guess work when writin' my history. That is, I separate guess work from SOLIDS. And a solid is, for example, that a certain idea was PRINTED on a given day. And I do NOT assert things to be so from readin' translations till I have seen the originals. That is, I treat translations as translations. And not having read the English version of Mein Kampf I will not discuss it. That book was translated into Italian and printed in 1933 (yaas, a delay, not an immediate publication) and Bompiani had [a] coup de genie, published the second half first, so the Italian public had chance to GET the program clear and at the start. And I affirm that there has for years been the most God damned ignorance and misapprehension of that program in England and America.
I myself had only a vague idea. I wasn't intent on Germany. I had my job with my writin', and my recordin' of ITALY. Trying to git things straight. I could see it was GOOD here in Italy. I said it was the ONE inch of solid ground. That's why I came here. ONE inch of solid earth where a man could see straight and write it; could buck the international money swine and NOT disappear altogether. And I reckoned in a general way that Germany etc. etc. NOT till the time of Sanctions did I begin to consider Germany from a new angle. Up till then I had drifted on, pretty much in the old 1914 view that Germany ought to be etc. , etc.
APART, that is, from my view of Drang nach Osten. Germany, natural civilizer of Russia, ought to keep western edge of Europe at level of civilization and amenity already reached, at least that. And let Germany go East leaving the old balance of power. Not till I was settin' by the bandstand, or standin' and I heard "forse con mciggiorgiustizia," voice on the radio, givin' a survey of Europe, did I begin to wonder: Well, maybe. I was behindhand in readin' Mein Kampf, but do you YET know what is IN it? Have you a clear idea of the PROGRAM? Hitler in 1924 saying that Germany ought to lay off the Tyrol, ought to SEE Italy. See Italy Fascist as the ONE ray of light in a world that was going to sunset, sinking. Just as I saw it as the ONE inch of SOLID basis. Well, Brother
? Adolf did do something about it, while I was lookin' and listenin'. An' I hand it to him that he is more efficient than lam.
Now what were, and are the THREE planks of the Hitler program as set forth in the opening of La Mia Battaglia, Italian translation of second half of Mein Kampf?
First, HEALTH, health of the race. Now every American (or Englander of my generation or of that before or after my generation) knew and knows that we were up against the problem of "be a SLAVE or not breeding. " Any man not born rich in our time KNEW he had to mate late. Breed LATE, and breed few, or else go into slavery. Mr. Curtis Moffit said to me that he saw what would happen if he was a good boy, so he decided on badness. Said he would be a BAD boy, and float on the TOP of the current. Waal, I landed in Europe, as my incipient biographers have stated, with justice, with 80 bucks, American dollars (pre-Morgenthau) in my clothin' and that led me to a practical view of some problems. As to the Hitler program, it was (what we ALL knew, and did nothing about, namely) that the breedin' of human beings deserves MORE care and attention than the breedin' of horses and wiffetts, or even the breedin' of sheep, goat, and the larger livestock. That is point ONE of the NAZI program. Breed GOOD, and preserve the race. Breed thorough, that is for thoroughbreds, conserve the BEST of the race. Conserve the best elements. That means EUGENICS: as opposed to race suicide. And it did not and does NOT please the Talmudic Jews who want to kill off ALL the other races whom they can not subjugate; and drive down what he thinks [ is doin', his USF to his race or nation consists in seeing the OBJECT and writin' down what he sees, and not falsifying his record.
SECONDLY, what is the second point of the Hitler program? Personal responsibility. A political system in which you can't pass the buck. Very unpleasant for hired M. P. 's DEBTORS (Jews, butter-and-egg-men fakers like Wendell Willkie, and M. P. congressmen, etc. ). Financed by Jews
? and put in the legislatures to defraud the people in usurer's interests and kept there by bank money who can be on committees, and always, always avoid ALL responsibility for swindling laws. Such as was the demonetization of silver [in] 1873, the sale of the country in 1863. The Federal Reserve System, and its infamous workings, making the people pay two dollars for every one dollar spent by the government. Hitler, having seen the Jew puke in the German democracy, was out for responsibility, government officials etc. to be RESPONSIBLE for their acts. MOST unpleasant for Monds, War burgs, invisible de facto Jew governments.
And the THIRD point was a STUDY of history. To look at the history. Waaal, now WHAT program does this CONTRADICT? I ask you, if you are such low down and gol darn suckers, or such British blockheads, or such unfathomable and irredeemable IGNORAMI, as NOT to know what program this contradicts, there is not a great deal of hope for your posterity. I may tell you someday where the opposing program is found, if you are too weak-kneed and puny to trace it. And when you, or if you do trace it, you may see why the stick screen was erected, and why people began to speak evil of Hitler. As to who spake and speaks evil of Hitler, we will someday go into that also.
#40 (May 21, 1942) U. S. (B49)
E. E. CUMMINGS EXAMINED
I have to go on tryin' to tell you. And I now tell you that your Mr. Cummings is a very great writer, I tell you he follows H. James, and Thoreau, and Whitman. I tell you he is the most intelligent man in America.
If that is an earful, TAKE it. I don't know what is to become of our educated intelligentsia, or whatever. An American, fullblooded American, writes a book in every way as BIG as the Apes of God or Ulysses. It gets some attention, it does not get nearly enough. You make
? a contribution to the world literature of tomorrow, and you pay very little attention to what happens right thaar under your noses.
I told you once before that this book [ Cummings' inspection of Russia makes a trilogy of big books, along with those of Joyce and of Wyndham Lewis, with Ulysses and Lewis's APES, Apes of God by ole Wyndham Lewis, also like Mr. Cummings a painter. That fact has its bearin'.
Both of 'em used to USING their eyes. Use of the eye assists human beings in making direct observations. I am not up to comparin' their painting, I know very little of Mr. Cumming's painting, save I saw one bit that had UGH! I am talkin' now of his writing. And in comparin' EIMI, or AMI or however your different Greek professors tell you to pronounce it, with the other two volumes, I say, or mebbe repeat that Joyce was writin' in retrospect. Ulysses dishes up the capitalist situation, the HELL made in great cities by the usury system. That is a limit. Not a very new point of view about anything.
Well I dunno as Ole Wyndham's Apes had a very new point of view either. Rowlandson, Fielding, Hogarth, all might have seen that boil on old England's neck from similar standpoint. Irish, English, and America, Joyce had no philosophy. Gasps from his chapel parishioners, Joyce had some ruck end of theology and a VERY conventional outlook. Lewis had philosophic views.
I nacherly never agreed with either of' 'em about much of anything. I agree with my compatriot or ex-compatriot, Mr. Cummings, a very great deal. But not wholly. I back up damn near anything Mr. Cummings has said or will say. I have to think back after having reread him, I have to think back and wonder, now just what was it that I wanted to ask him, where was it I wanted him to go on a bit further.
? Lewis' limit in that particular hefty volume, inhered in his subject, he was doing the carbuncle on Johnnie Bull's neck. Cummings, followin' ole Hen. James, was doing all Russia, and doing it in the Jamesian sense, that he was constantly comparing that nation, or state of existence with the American state of existence, with a peripheric view of countries adjacent.
Oh, yes, e. estlin was a carryin' on from his forebears, both James and Thoreau, and I repeat it, [from] Whitman. That just unfinish, on certain pages, that weak spot, or what seems a weak spot to the European. Mebbe three or four paragraphs that I as professor would probably cross out of his manuscript, or would have crossed out, and said, here bo', you rewrite this, 432 or 431 pages. I should have been much more severe on Flaubert. How is the book greater than Joyce's volume, or than Lewis's Apes? If we must use this terminology or why do I like it better, if I do like it better. Or say why does it come easier to me, I am hoistin' up over questions of technique, Cummings' neologism, his punctuation. Well I am American. I perceive his technique, which Jefferson, Tom Jefferson, would have justified; which is justified by the measure Jefferson applied to neologism. Namely, new words justified when NECESSARY to express a new meaning. A great deal of Joyce was NOT new, and a great deal was needless, was in the do main of experiment, colors being mixed on a palette. Lewis needed his emphasis, often as EMPHASIS, not merely as meaning save insofar as emphasis is part of meaning, which is not always.
Cummings I believe needed EVERY single split word to say what he was saying. In no other way could he have registered Russia, 1931, and it was a very great registration. Also you might now take it as psychic and warnin'. Ulysses was not a warning. It was a certificate of demise. The Apes of God, was, and HOW a warning, unheeded. There is still time for the U. S. A. to read Mr. Cummings before worse things happen, I mean happen TO YOU.
? Now in part Mr. Cummings teaches a doctrine which is very ably condensed (dichten, condensare; to write poetry is to CONDENSE), Mr. Cummings teaches a truth which a contemporary German author has stated quite clearly, as follows:
What we are used to call public opinion is based only in very small part on per sonal experience or indeed on the experience of particular persons or indeed on the knowledge of individual voters, but for the most part on a collective representation (collective picture) which brings about in a strangely obstinate and insistent way a so called process of clarification of the problems.
Now the USE of a great writer to his RACE is due precisely to his having PERSONAL direct perception, and puttin' in down on paper. Don't matter what he thinks [he] is doin', his USE to race or nation consists in seeing the OBJECT and writin' down what he sees, and not falsifying his record.
Mebbe by an' by afterwards that word photo, that diagram, that TRUE diagram can serve to enlighten his people. Don't forget they are HIS people as they will never be the people of any member of Congress.
And Mr. Cummings went, unbelievably, he might now say, went down into hell, alias Soviet Russia. And you are now allied to Soviet Russia.
A thing estlin cummings certainly never thought of when he was writin' his ami or eimi which, as byproduct, the American people, you American folks MIGHT now use for your OWN gettin' enlightened. I'm tellin' you. Apart from the joy of readin' a great American book, IF you read it slowly, it might be of practical use.
I once had a kike friend who had a theory about poetry, namely, that no one ever read ALL the words on a page. It didn't, that theory didn't lead him to making his poetry quite satisfactory, but as theory it may also serve to enlighten you.
? Now Mr. Cummings writes PROSE, whereof every word tells its story. And I myself made an error first time I tried to read him. Tried to read him too fast, got impatient. No use approachin' him that way. Got to read slow. More on one page than on two pages of most other authors, so you get as much in three minutes readin' him slow, as you do to readin' Josh Passos faster, or readin' Wilder at ten pages a minute. You CAN skip in some authors, you cannot in Cummings skip one word on page ten without maybe losin' the bearin' of what he is saying elsewhere. Go at him slowly.
Second point is his parenthesis, are his parentheses. Well old Henry James worried his European readers to death by his parentheses. They are an American habit, they mean something to us and for us as Americans. They mean something more than the one track mind. But they do NOT imply deviation or lack of direction. They are a desperate attempt, no not an attempt, a DEVICE, to avoid leaving out something NEEDED, some part of the statement needed to set down, to register the direction, and meaning.
Well, Cummings said a whole mouthful; he said a bookful. Was out above the glooms of Ulysses, and the factor of Lewis top hole in London. There is in Cummings what the Chinese say with an ideogram. Ideogram that I have translated as candid. I don't much hold with Mr.
What's wrong with halfbreeds7 Do you know one of 'em who don't suffer sometimes from cleverness, that don't quite come solid, sometimes from a peculiar sort of stoppage INSIDE the head, leadin' to a kind of sense of frustration?
For 60 years mankind has been experimentin' on guinea pigs. All sorts of experiments. Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding. The wisdom of China long ago ruled out inbreedin'. The hundred names, no man to marry a woman of his own name, that was a barrier on the one side.
Ce? line has got down to the other. The next move, the next world movement is a move toward the production of thoroughbreds. Think it over. That idea is a risin'. Means no hardship to anyone. It is eugenic. No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and
? horses. One would think the human race was worth as much attention as the British fanciers give to whiffets.
Albert Londres had a hunch that the French ought to try it on blacks in their Africa. He hated to see the Africans going rotten, covered with scabs in French colonies. Ce? line thinks it would be useful to use that much sense on Frenchmen. So I suppose Admiral Leahy, or whatever Layafettist [? ], is over there at Vichy trying to blackmail Pe? tain, will be trying to git ALL Ce? line's books forbidden or pinched in the UNOCCUPIED parts of French territory.
Oh, it's a lovely world, as Candide has told us, all that is, is the best possible.
Mebbe in time the American college boys will gil 'round to reading me or Ce? line or some of the Livin' authors. BUT don't git to thinking that, just because the Clipper ships carry so little NEWS, that there is NOTHING being written in Europe. Ole Europe is still here on the continent. Josh Twostep, Josher Dos Passos hasn't succeeded in persuadin' Europe that times like these are times in which the writer should lay off writin'.
Times like these are times when a writer should git down to bedrock and talk without fuzz on his tongue. Ce? line does that all right enough. Time to read Ce? line for the simple truths that stand there in his writing, expressed with perfect lucidity--and simplicity. You may be a bit late in startin'.
A great writer is one whose straight simple phrases stick in the memory.
L'ame n'est pas venue sur la terre pour se faire e^merger.
#38 (May 17, 1942) U. K. (B45)
FREE SPEECH IN ALBION (ALIAS ENGLAND)
The propaganda for free speech in Britain (listlessly elegiac, retrospective) r sounds as follows: "The murderer stole my watch but his wife told him not to. We have free speech in this family. " That is how it sounds HERE. No one denies that free speech is a fine old British
? tradition. One complains that it is a moth-eaten tradition: a shadow with small present substance. The series of outrages committed by British governments in the past. Chesapeaken Leopard, etc. are in history. That Bright protested, etc. during the United States Civil War, is in history.
What the B. B. C. does NOT care to admit is the profound resemblance between England's divide et impera during our United States Civil War, and her policy on the continent of Europe.
All of which is most keenly analyzed in Mein Kampf, a book as slandered in England and as much obscured by press mud as any other.
It is the points to WHICH British free speech does not APPLY that we want to hear about. Free speech has been cornered. We complain that the British press was rotten, and had been for over a century. My memory goes back considerably further than Mr. Bridson's, whatever Winnie said in 1936: I can match it. I remember the pavements of London "WE WANT EIGHT" back before the other war started.
Winston was allus shoutin' for gun sales, high pressure salesmanship of blood, cannon, and slaughter. BUT at the same time upholdin' a usury system which made it impossible to deliver the cannon. Hence bringing slaughter on Europe.
It is not the question of British chauvinism, but the mixture of chauvinism and absolute utter dishonesty, and a refusal to look at the economic causes of war that disgusts the foreign observer. That some Englishmen dislike being betrayed needs no argument. That the English people did NOT desire the war needs no argument. The point is they kept on having governments that insisted on having a war. The British people are NOT represent ed. The B. B. C. may run a very good (up to a point) retrospect about Free Speech in England. BUT to couple that with the unholy alliance with Russia does not convince the opponent of England's bona fide, rather of idiocy and dishonesty.
? Kumrad Maisky's FACE, like the hindend of a pig, for example. WHY does England suppose that Kumrad Maisky will hesitate any longer about bumping off George VI and Elizabeth, than his pals did about killin' the Czar, with Temple of Canterbury sayin' the blessin'? No, Temple is a prize comic, possibly Lang WOULD have pronounced an Episcopal benediction? Temple don't, I think, mean any harm, just fat headed.
Rhetoric about "our representatives in Parliament" is NOT the point. The point is your Parliament does NOT represent you. That is the syndicalist complaint against Parliaments in the old rotten borough or disguised rotten bank-borough form.
Every CONstructive measure proposed to camouflage the iniquity of your usuries is a slavish copy of the corporate state.
BUT without the corporate structure, just patchin', and NOT hitting for the main evil. Money is admitted by at least one B. B. C. yapper to be a financial label. But interest? When does that occur properly? And WHO fixes the label, and in whose interests? And IS there a Jewish problem?
Perhaps, along with Carlyle's love for his wife, and the fine old husky sailor voices telling of the Chesapeake and the Leopard, there might be a historic sketch of the Jews and Noll Crummwell, and a FEW probes into the WHY of the present struggle, and the REFUSALS to cooperate with the civilized world, and the hook-up with Russia.
Does the Bolshevic government stand for the best English traditions: free speech, and no taxation without representation?
Fat lot of representation your tax payers have had in this budget. Though I dare say they have been by now so hog swoggled by propaganda, appeals to their finest feeling, that they are ready to murder their children and grandmas in the cause of 60% on real deposits. And a perfect fury of abuse and hysteria when some Frenchman opens a book of geography
? and discovers what was long since known to Theophile Gautier, namely that France is a part of Europe. ON THE MAP, geographically, France is a PART of Europe, and her sanity and welfare would consist IN functioning as PART of Europe.
Preferably a Frenchman, not a half nigger, half Jew bridged head of Anglo-Judaea. Some idea, that is the GEOGRAPHIC idea, may someday enter England. But no signs of British desire to collaborate in a new order have yet emerged from the British Bleat Corps halls of transmission.
Divide et impera. I dunno who translated Mein Kampf into English. Here Bompiani or someone had an idea, and stroke of genius, and printed the second half first, so Italian readers, some of 'em, came straight on the program, constructive program, health, responsibility, personal, and a study of history. Elsewhere in the book, you can see Hitler (if you have
YET begun to develop an interest in that opponent of your infamies: you can see Hitler thinking about the evils of having Innthal, valley of the Inn, cut off from the rest of the German Volk. You can see him, figgerin' out for Germany, what a few Americans figured out for the United States of America. Divide et impera.
Of course, you are gittin' divided for the same old Sassoon [who is] wantin' U. S. farm boys to squeeze interest out of the Hindoos, now that T. Atkins is getting scarcer.
The rest of the world is tired, bloody well TIRED of having Chesapeakes and RESULTS: accompanied by Mrs. Burglar Bill tellin' Bill not to do it. Yes, some British protested against chattel slavery. The wheeze, the BANK wheeze, now KNOWN, and recorded in history, being that wage slavery was CHEAPER, that LESS responsibility devolved on the OWNERS (alias employers) of wage slaves than on the
? owners of black slaves, who had to feed 'em to keep up their workin' potential. ALL that is HISTORY.
The world, especially Europe, is tired, tired, and the English stock, the part of the English RACE in the colonies was tired from 1750 onward of being sanctioned, of having their OWN money censored. Sanctioned, forbidden--their AUTARCHY, such as it was, sabotaged, their prosperity sabotaged by a kike gang or a sub-kike or super-gang of grafters and monopolists, headquarters in London.
And YOU will, I 'spose, get your karma, your contrapasso when the head office shifts from Last Cheape, and Thredbobbin Alley over to Wall , Street with Wailing included. Shama Yssrael, the one true fatherland is the pawn shop.
Why take that INTO your so very [valued] tradition. Beatin' your breasts. Give us a nut to crack and God can crack it. As for the people, one of your own living poets has beaten his hairy breast as follows:
We can think as we are told to think We are the echo of the loudest bark We are the arses kicked by better men
There is this very uncurious mixture in British propaganda. The wailing wall, AND the reminiscence, the old lavender, the Spanish Armada, etc. The TRADITIONS, the better of which 20 years of British politics have done so little to maintain.
You can't expect me to stenograph all your noises. [I'd] go out of my head when I wake up the next morning in a country that asks RESULTS and about which YOU apparently know very little.
Why, for example, should Hitler and Mussolini who have been through a great deal more than I have, who have been thru a great deal I have not,
? endured hardships I have not, why should they be scared by Mr. Hull, Mr. C. Hull or Eden, when these stiffed effigies can't even scare ME?
Why all this talk of the German Staff regardin' with fear and trembling the arrival of a few motor boats at Le Portel, or wherever, the 33 or what ever out of the 50 or whatever remained with their ammunition; pore devils? TO take England's MIND OFF England's business, the business she OUGHT to have been minding and HOW, since 1919, since Versailles defrauded Italy.
#39 (May 18, 1942) U. S. (B43) WITH PHANTOMS
Two topics that I have rarely touched in these conversations--Germany and Lord Tennyson.
And of Tennyson I now quote but a verse and a fragment.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall" (maybe it was fail). I haven't been readin' Tennyson lately, but that much sticks in my head from the Idyls.
"Shall come to fight with phantoms and to fall. " I guess it was fall. Take it as prophecy. And the phantom that the Anglo-Jew world is fighting, or that the Anglo-American is fighting, a Jew usurer instigation, is the German PHANTOM, NOT the reality. And that phantom has been built out of lies, till the pious and kindly American, and simple hearted British boob BY the million believe it, see it, hear it. And FAIL to grasp or to face the reality.
Now I almost never talk of Germany because I have seen very little of Germany. Ole Ford toted me 'round about Hessen Darmstadt in 1911, tellin' me what a fine country was Germany. Then he wrote When Blood is their Argument. Since then I have been to Vienna and to Frankfurt for
? Antheil's opry, and passed thru Munich and from Wien I went up to Wo? rgl. And as the young can't be expected to know my past history I 'spose I got to preface it.
That I was interested in CIVILIZATION from the age of 12 when I first saw Venice. Venice looked good to me. Anyhow, I came to Europe to git kulchur all right, and to a great extent got it. Started in U. Penn. at 15 to FIND out what had been written, and what was the BEST of it, in as many languages as I could gil under my occiput; to KNOW what the real thing was. And thence to HISTORY and economics. To SEE what was going on in the world TODAY, as I needed it in my business, my business being WRITIN', and an Epic being a container of HISTORY.
Of course you need music to understand real versification. But comin' from a duck-board country, I was interested in LATIN order. Order in stone work, in paintin', Adamo me fecit. S. Zeno Verona, architect had cut that column by HAND, by his own hand, want INTEGRAL, totalitarian interest in the job of buildin' S. Zeno. Church of S. Zeno. I liked Quattro cento paintin'. P. Uccello. First freshman theme, I wrote was on Paulo Uccello, picture in Louvre I reckon.
Anyhow, apart from Von der Vogelweide, old Schnitz Brandt lettin' me jump the prose and come to the osses, the poetry, medieval German poetry, in 1904 or 5. I didn't much cotton to German literature, in cf. with the Mediterranean. Dante, Villon, provenc? al Canzoni writers; anyhow, I didn't cotton to German literature. And then philology, ERROR of old German university system got my goat. And I laid off readin' German till I hit Leo Frobenius.
Also being in England 12 years, I certainly saw the last war from the Lon don angle. Lump in my throat when I heard even in this one, that Vimy Ridge had been taken. I could take all the rest of it but, when I heard Vimy was taken, that was a tough one. BUT JUSTICE IS JUSTICE. And lies are a poor Ersatz for justice. And as to LYING I
? reckon Hitler has been lied about more than any man livin' except Mussolini.
Now re Mussolini. I KNOW they are lyin'. I['v] been here 17 years and I have known for 17 years they were lyin'.
Lies and threats against Italy, after the Versailles cheatin'. That offense to humanity, Robert Mond, threatenin' Mussolini. Waal, it used to be said in London that Alfred looked like one end of a pig, and that Robert Mond looked like the other. And the FORM certainly did show the spirit inside 'em. I believe the younger generation felt it, and has had a lurch over toward honesty. But he sure has heredity workin' against him. And a Jew who wants to run honest certainly ain't chosen a bed of roses. Sure, some Jews aspire to honesty, kindly impulses, gestures of opulence. But gawd help 'em. And God save humanity FROM them.
Well, very few real reports about Germany have got into English or American circulation. I doubt if many of 'em have got into second editions. So when I contradict lies about Germany, my ground is limited. I have one or two fragmentary first hand reports. I have PRINTED data.
Now when I was doing my job on Sig. Malatesta I came to the conclusion that DOCUMENTS, personal letters and what not, PROVED ONE THING:
A letter PROVES what the bloke who wrote it wanted the receiver to believe ON the day he wrote it. The rest of history has to be derived from computation. IF documents DISAPPEAR with remarkable coincidence, say reports of an event in February in 1424, there was something someone was trying to KEEP from the public. 'Specially if the despatches for a particular day disappear from six archives simultaneous, and so weiter.
Well I know the Times, Telegraph, N. Y. Post and all the damn kikery also kiker Archibishopery of England, LIED about Italy. And I know f
? rpm first hand that facts about Germany did NOT git much anglo-yanko publicity. And I keep off guess work when writin' my history. That is, I separate guess work from SOLIDS. And a solid is, for example, that a certain idea was PRINTED on a given day. And I do NOT assert things to be so from readin' translations till I have seen the originals. That is, I treat translations as translations. And not having read the English version of Mein Kampf I will not discuss it. That book was translated into Italian and printed in 1933 (yaas, a delay, not an immediate publication) and Bompiani had [a] coup de genie, published the second half first, so the Italian public had chance to GET the program clear and at the start. And I affirm that there has for years been the most God damned ignorance and misapprehension of that program in England and America.
I myself had only a vague idea. I wasn't intent on Germany. I had my job with my writin', and my recordin' of ITALY. Trying to git things straight. I could see it was GOOD here in Italy. I said it was the ONE inch of solid ground. That's why I came here. ONE inch of solid earth where a man could see straight and write it; could buck the international money swine and NOT disappear altogether. And I reckoned in a general way that Germany etc. etc. NOT till the time of Sanctions did I begin to consider Germany from a new angle. Up till then I had drifted on, pretty much in the old 1914 view that Germany ought to be etc. , etc.
APART, that is, from my view of Drang nach Osten. Germany, natural civilizer of Russia, ought to keep western edge of Europe at level of civilization and amenity already reached, at least that. And let Germany go East leaving the old balance of power. Not till I was settin' by the bandstand, or standin' and I heard "forse con mciggiorgiustizia," voice on the radio, givin' a survey of Europe, did I begin to wonder: Well, maybe. I was behindhand in readin' Mein Kampf, but do you YET know what is IN it? Have you a clear idea of the PROGRAM? Hitler in 1924 saying that Germany ought to lay off the Tyrol, ought to SEE Italy. See Italy Fascist as the ONE ray of light in a world that was going to sunset, sinking. Just as I saw it as the ONE inch of SOLID basis. Well, Brother
? Adolf did do something about it, while I was lookin' and listenin'. An' I hand it to him that he is more efficient than lam.
Now what were, and are the THREE planks of the Hitler program as set forth in the opening of La Mia Battaglia, Italian translation of second half of Mein Kampf?
First, HEALTH, health of the race. Now every American (or Englander of my generation or of that before or after my generation) knew and knows that we were up against the problem of "be a SLAVE or not breeding. " Any man not born rich in our time KNEW he had to mate late. Breed LATE, and breed few, or else go into slavery. Mr. Curtis Moffit said to me that he saw what would happen if he was a good boy, so he decided on badness. Said he would be a BAD boy, and float on the TOP of the current. Waal, I landed in Europe, as my incipient biographers have stated, with justice, with 80 bucks, American dollars (pre-Morgenthau) in my clothin' and that led me to a practical view of some problems. As to the Hitler program, it was (what we ALL knew, and did nothing about, namely) that the breedin' of human beings deserves MORE care and attention than the breedin' of horses and wiffetts, or even the breedin' of sheep, goat, and the larger livestock. That is point ONE of the NAZI program. Breed GOOD, and preserve the race. Breed thorough, that is for thoroughbreds, conserve the BEST of the race. Conserve the best elements. That means EUGENICS: as opposed to race suicide. And it did not and does NOT please the Talmudic Jews who want to kill off ALL the other races whom they can not subjugate; and drive down what he thinks [ is doin', his USF to his race or nation consists in seeing the OBJECT and writin' down what he sees, and not falsifying his record.
SECONDLY, what is the second point of the Hitler program? Personal responsibility. A political system in which you can't pass the buck. Very unpleasant for hired M. P. 's DEBTORS (Jews, butter-and-egg-men fakers like Wendell Willkie, and M. P. congressmen, etc. ). Financed by Jews
? and put in the legislatures to defraud the people in usurer's interests and kept there by bank money who can be on committees, and always, always avoid ALL responsibility for swindling laws. Such as was the demonetization of silver [in] 1873, the sale of the country in 1863. The Federal Reserve System, and its infamous workings, making the people pay two dollars for every one dollar spent by the government. Hitler, having seen the Jew puke in the German democracy, was out for responsibility, government officials etc. to be RESPONSIBLE for their acts. MOST unpleasant for Monds, War burgs, invisible de facto Jew governments.
And the THIRD point was a STUDY of history. To look at the history. Waaal, now WHAT program does this CONTRADICT? I ask you, if you are such low down and gol darn suckers, or such British blockheads, or such unfathomable and irredeemable IGNORAMI, as NOT to know what program this contradicts, there is not a great deal of hope for your posterity. I may tell you someday where the opposing program is found, if you are too weak-kneed and puny to trace it. And when you, or if you do trace it, you may see why the stick screen was erected, and why people began to speak evil of Hitler. As to who spake and speaks evil of Hitler, we will someday go into that also.
#40 (May 21, 1942) U. S. (B49)
E. E. CUMMINGS EXAMINED
I have to go on tryin' to tell you. And I now tell you that your Mr. Cummings is a very great writer, I tell you he follows H. James, and Thoreau, and Whitman. I tell you he is the most intelligent man in America.
If that is an earful, TAKE it. I don't know what is to become of our educated intelligentsia, or whatever. An American, fullblooded American, writes a book in every way as BIG as the Apes of God or Ulysses. It gets some attention, it does not get nearly enough. You make
? a contribution to the world literature of tomorrow, and you pay very little attention to what happens right thaar under your noses.
I told you once before that this book [ Cummings' inspection of Russia makes a trilogy of big books, along with those of Joyce and of Wyndham Lewis, with Ulysses and Lewis's APES, Apes of God by ole Wyndham Lewis, also like Mr. Cummings a painter. That fact has its bearin'.
Both of 'em used to USING their eyes. Use of the eye assists human beings in making direct observations. I am not up to comparin' their painting, I know very little of Mr. Cumming's painting, save I saw one bit that had UGH! I am talkin' now of his writing. And in comparin' EIMI, or AMI or however your different Greek professors tell you to pronounce it, with the other two volumes, I say, or mebbe repeat that Joyce was writin' in retrospect. Ulysses dishes up the capitalist situation, the HELL made in great cities by the usury system. That is a limit. Not a very new point of view about anything.
Well I dunno as Ole Wyndham's Apes had a very new point of view either. Rowlandson, Fielding, Hogarth, all might have seen that boil on old England's neck from similar standpoint. Irish, English, and America, Joyce had no philosophy. Gasps from his chapel parishioners, Joyce had some ruck end of theology and a VERY conventional outlook. Lewis had philosophic views.
I nacherly never agreed with either of' 'em about much of anything. I agree with my compatriot or ex-compatriot, Mr. Cummings, a very great deal. But not wholly. I back up damn near anything Mr. Cummings has said or will say. I have to think back after having reread him, I have to think back and wonder, now just what was it that I wanted to ask him, where was it I wanted him to go on a bit further.
? Lewis' limit in that particular hefty volume, inhered in his subject, he was doing the carbuncle on Johnnie Bull's neck. Cummings, followin' ole Hen. James, was doing all Russia, and doing it in the Jamesian sense, that he was constantly comparing that nation, or state of existence with the American state of existence, with a peripheric view of countries adjacent.
Oh, yes, e. estlin was a carryin' on from his forebears, both James and Thoreau, and I repeat it, [from] Whitman. That just unfinish, on certain pages, that weak spot, or what seems a weak spot to the European. Mebbe three or four paragraphs that I as professor would probably cross out of his manuscript, or would have crossed out, and said, here bo', you rewrite this, 432 or 431 pages. I should have been much more severe on Flaubert. How is the book greater than Joyce's volume, or than Lewis's Apes? If we must use this terminology or why do I like it better, if I do like it better. Or say why does it come easier to me, I am hoistin' up over questions of technique, Cummings' neologism, his punctuation. Well I am American. I perceive his technique, which Jefferson, Tom Jefferson, would have justified; which is justified by the measure Jefferson applied to neologism. Namely, new words justified when NECESSARY to express a new meaning. A great deal of Joyce was NOT new, and a great deal was needless, was in the do main of experiment, colors being mixed on a palette. Lewis needed his emphasis, often as EMPHASIS, not merely as meaning save insofar as emphasis is part of meaning, which is not always.
Cummings I believe needed EVERY single split word to say what he was saying. In no other way could he have registered Russia, 1931, and it was a very great registration. Also you might now take it as psychic and warnin'. Ulysses was not a warning. It was a certificate of demise. The Apes of God, was, and HOW a warning, unheeded. There is still time for the U. S. A. to read Mr. Cummings before worse things happen, I mean happen TO YOU.
? Now in part Mr. Cummings teaches a doctrine which is very ably condensed (dichten, condensare; to write poetry is to CONDENSE), Mr. Cummings teaches a truth which a contemporary German author has stated quite clearly, as follows:
What we are used to call public opinion is based only in very small part on per sonal experience or indeed on the experience of particular persons or indeed on the knowledge of individual voters, but for the most part on a collective representation (collective picture) which brings about in a strangely obstinate and insistent way a so called process of clarification of the problems.
Now the USE of a great writer to his RACE is due precisely to his having PERSONAL direct perception, and puttin' in down on paper. Don't matter what he thinks [he] is doin', his USE to race or nation consists in seeing the OBJECT and writin' down what he sees, and not falsifying his record.
Mebbe by an' by afterwards that word photo, that diagram, that TRUE diagram can serve to enlighten his people. Don't forget they are HIS people as they will never be the people of any member of Congress.
And Mr. Cummings went, unbelievably, he might now say, went down into hell, alias Soviet Russia. And you are now allied to Soviet Russia.
A thing estlin cummings certainly never thought of when he was writin' his ami or eimi which, as byproduct, the American people, you American folks MIGHT now use for your OWN gettin' enlightened. I'm tellin' you. Apart from the joy of readin' a great American book, IF you read it slowly, it might be of practical use.
I once had a kike friend who had a theory about poetry, namely, that no one ever read ALL the words on a page. It didn't, that theory didn't lead him to making his poetry quite satisfactory, but as theory it may also serve to enlighten you.
? Now Mr. Cummings writes PROSE, whereof every word tells its story. And I myself made an error first time I tried to read him. Tried to read him too fast, got impatient. No use approachin' him that way. Got to read slow. More on one page than on two pages of most other authors, so you get as much in three minutes readin' him slow, as you do to readin' Josh Passos faster, or readin' Wilder at ten pages a minute. You CAN skip in some authors, you cannot in Cummings skip one word on page ten without maybe losin' the bearin' of what he is saying elsewhere. Go at him slowly.
Second point is his parenthesis, are his parentheses. Well old Henry James worried his European readers to death by his parentheses. They are an American habit, they mean something to us and for us as Americans. They mean something more than the one track mind. But they do NOT imply deviation or lack of direction. They are a desperate attempt, no not an attempt, a DEVICE, to avoid leaving out something NEEDED, some part of the statement needed to set down, to register the direction, and meaning.
Well, Cummings said a whole mouthful; he said a bookful. Was out above the glooms of Ulysses, and the factor of Lewis top hole in London. There is in Cummings what the Chinese say with an ideogram. Ideogram that I have translated as candid. I don't much hold with Mr.
