Matthew Feldman - Politics, Intellectuals, and Faith: Essays

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

1My thanks to Matthew Feldman for the opportunity to edit his stimulating and thoughtful collection of essays and for his timely responses to my numerous queries. I am most grateful to Valerie Lange, Jana Dvers, and Christian Schn of ibidem-Verlag for their patience, dedication, and professionalism.

For Luisa

Archie Henderson

1Matthew Feldman is a noted scholar of twentieth century literature and history. His publications include three monographs and numerous volumes edited or co-edited by him. His first collection of essays was Falsifying Beckett: Essays on Archives, Philosophy and Methodology in Beckett Studies (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2015), containing pieces published over a dozen years. This collection, his second, covers a wider chronology and range of subject matter, but finds in its title, Politics, Intellectuals, and Faith, a unifying theme. What is of overriding concern to Feldman in these essays, written for academic and general audiences between 2002 and 2020, is how, and why, intellectuals of the twentieth-century were drawn to extremism; how the kind of fervent devotionakin to religious devotionthat they expressed was in fact essential in the construction of totalitarian rule; and how some legacies have influenced, above all, fascist and radical right movements to this day.

Part 1, Ezra Pound, Modernist and Fascist, consists of a series of interrelated essays devoted to the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who was the subject of Feldmans compact monograph Ezra Pounds Fascist Propaganda, 1935-45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Modernist and fascist, the two roles for which Pound is probably best known, are frequently considered to be the two sides of the poet, which are conveniently separated and compartmentalized in many discussions of his life and works. In this bifurcated formulation, the modernist half of the famous poets life is the triumph, the fascist half is the tragedy. Feldman does not see it this way. For him, the two sides cannot be so neatly divided, at least during World War II. Just like a coin, one side cannot stand alone without the other. Feldman wants to understand how Pounds lifeone of the most fascinating of the twentieth centurycould have turned out the way it did. For this, he needs to ask and answer the question, Just how deeply involved was Ezra Pound with fascism? The question has been evaded by most (but not all) Pound scholarspresumably for fear of what would turn up by way of an answer.

Calling it high time to start taking Ezra Pounds fascism seriously, Feldman frames his monographs approach to Pounds last decade in Fascist Italy by arguing that fascisms political faith, typically mapping onto traditional Christian practices, can be usefully understood as a defining feature of fascist ideology. In the words of historian Emilio Gentile, the construction of a fascist religion, centred around the sacralization of the state, appears to be an attempt to evokein order to legitimize the fascist regimethe sacred nature of the Roman archetype as an expression of an ethical-religious concept, in which the essential reasons behind the states existence and power are projected as symbols of faith. It was necessary, said Mussolini (My Autobiography, p. 69), to lay the foundation of a new civilization. As Gentile explains this notion, in the move away from many centuries of decadence, the Italian people had the chance to create a new civilization; but only total subservience to the duces leadership, and belief in the fascist religion, would have given Italians the moral force necessary to rise to the challenge. Feldman sees Mussolinis foundation-layingwhat Gentile terms, in an article of that title, the Fascist anthropological revolutionas part of a socio-political, revolutionary attempt to overcome perceived decadence by seeking to create literally new men of action and faith: warrior-priests with the will to turn myth into reality and establish a secular utopia; or in Pounds words, a paradiso terrestre. As applied to Poundwho also advocated for a new civilization in 1928and in many instances before and sincethis means that Pounds veneration for Mussolini only starts to make sense, then, against the unmistakable backdrop of Fascisms political faith [] Even as an expatriate in Fascist Italy, Pounds commitment to the Fascist faith was far from idiosyncratic; it was representative. Extending far beyond his delivery of antisemitic speeches over Rome Radio, Pounds transnational fascist commitments show a dimension of the poet that is not encapsulated in the standard picture of him as a hopeless idealist in wartime Italy: For too long, Pounds fascist activism has simply been dismissed as either mad or bad, the product of political naivet or misplaced economic idealism. Some or all of these factors may apply but, in short, this misses the wood for the trees. All too often lacking in supporting evidence, this tradition will be directly countered by the archivally driven view advanced here: Pound was a committed and significant English-language strategist and producer of fascist propaganda before, and during, Europes most destructive war. Feldmans book stirred considerable controversy among Pound scholars, with its unflinching portrait of Pound as the committed fascist overshadowing his role as the quintessential modernist and composer of some of the twentieth centurys most admired verse.

In the eight essays that comprise Part 1, Feldman goes beyond the date range and topics covered in Ezra Pounds Fascist Propaganda, 1935-1945 (while including one chapter from the latter). He identifies some key moments in the timeline leading to the poets being all in with activism on behalf of Italian Fascism. These include, of course, his famous meeting with Mussolini in 1933, but also include his reading of a book by Kantorowicz; his print propaganda for the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in the mid-1930s and for the British Union of Fascists between 1936 and 1940, both of which coincided with and reflected his growing antisemitism; and his encounter with Hitlers Mein Kampf in 1942. During his postwar years of confinement at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., Pound attracted numerous neo-fascist visitorswith Eustace Mullins, John Kasper, and Matthias Koehl counted among the most notorious of themand influenced like-minded devotees in the United Kingdom and Australia. Feldman concludes Part 1 with a look at Pounds influence on the Italian neo-Fascist group named after him.

Feldman starts off the first chapter in this volume with a striking quotation from Lawrence Rainey, who asserted in 1999 that it was the allure, the thrill, the prospect of terror [] that attracted Ezra Pound to Fascism, and not the multiplicity of motives that, as scholars have tried to argue, led Poundand numerous other European intellectualstowards the totalitarian temptation. Feldman, however, rejects Raineys notion of intellectuals as, in essence, bystanders standing agape before the spectacle of totalitarianism, seeing them instead as potentially key cultural influencers who were in a unique position to lead the leaders on matters of culture. In this connection, Pounds cultural influence has been a particular long-lasting one, extending beyond his work in Fascist Italy to the younger generation of fascists and radical right extremists who gathered around him on the grass at St Elizabeths, as well as contemporary neo-fascist groups such as CasaPound, explicitly named after the poet. In fact, Feldman focuses not on the spectacle of Fascist terror as a motivator for Pound, but on his hero worship of