Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound's Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy

David Barnes University of London

Although the nature of Ezra Pound's Fascism has generated substantial critical study, the mechanics of his actual engagement in the cultural projects of the Mussolini regime has received less attention. Using as its starting point lines from Pound's controversial "Italian Canto" 72explicitin its praise of the Fascist regime the essay examines Pound's correspondence with Italian cultural figures in the 1930s. Focusing on his relationship with the academic librarian Manlio Torquato Dazzi and the celebrated Futurist F. T. Marinetti, the essay demonstrates the blurred distinctions between aesthetic and political spheres in Pound's engagements with Italian culture in the 1930s. The essay further argues that Pound's avant-garde aesthetics and neo-platonicphilosophy colored the way he engaged with the cultural projects of the regime, making his Fascism a mixture of spirituality, modernism and totalitarianism. Keywords: Ezra Pound / The Cantos I fascism / futurisnn / modernism / nationalism

INTRODUCTION: UNKLE GEORGE'S POSTCARDS

n 20 June 1936, Congressman George Tinkham of Massachusetts ("Unkle George") wrote Ezra Pound advising him that he was planning to visit Italy. The letter contained some political discussion, including Tinkham's opinion that "the United States should not be a 'puppet'" state of Great Britain and that, referring to Italy's invasion of Abyssinia: Mussolini certainly has had a great triumph and in his age and generation is a great man. Any man who can successfully defy England and the League of Nations, representing fifty-two nations, is a man of strength and he has my admiration. f^Dear
Uncle George'IS)

After the visit. Pound sent Tinkham two postcards: one was of a view of Rapallo, the other a picture of the Venetian church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, which was to feature much in Pound's poetry as the "jewel box" (see, for example. Canto 75). In themselves, these details might not be of much interest. But here they occur

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in a quite obviously political context; Pound is trying to court Tinkham in Italy as an American political figure sympathetic to Fascism. The exchange of postcards, which is a means of reminiscing upon and preserving the touristic encounter, becomes in this context a further comment on Fascism's role in Pound's mind as guardian of culture. These photographic fragments of Italian beauty are also, perhaps, a plea: look at what we might lose if we choose the wrong (for Pound, the anti-Fascist) path. The postcard exchange also aptly demonstrates the difficulty of separating political and esthetic questions within the Poundian universe. The peaceful beauty of fifteenth-century Italian art acts not, as we might expect, as a counter-argument to the violence of Fascism, but as its perfect accompaniment. Early polarized accounts of Pound tended to either marginalize his political engagement or explain it in over-simplified terms, in both cases keeping it away from his cultural/esthetic activities.' In the popular account of Pound, a split emerged between the early radical modernist Pound and his reactionary. Fascist successor. In this account, the progress of Pound's career is narrated as a kind of going to the "dark side," whereby Pound gradually moves towards the tragic mistakes of Fascism and anti-Semitism. However, a range of recent accounts has complicated this notion, blurring the lines between Pound-as-artist/poet and Pound-as-Fascist enthusiast.^ A related problem has persisted in critical approaches to "Pound's Italy." How could the poetic, paradisal country of the Cantos be integrated with the Fascist state praised for its cultural and economic projects? Of course, as a number of critics have noted, these two Italys are bound closely together; or indeed they may be different facets of Pound's one ideal, multifaceted Italy, a country at once Mussolini's, Sigismondo's, Dante's and Cavalcanti's.' In the example of "Unkle George's postcard," we see how an image of Italy may be read through both esthetic and political lenses. In examining the changing meanings of Italy for Pound, this essay attempts to contribute to this discussion by seeing Pound's "writing Italy" and his "writing in Italy" as crucially connected. DAZZI AND MARINETTI IN THE AFTERLIFE Two lines from Pound's "Italian" Canto 72 focus on the poet's correspondence with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Futurist artist and writer, and Manlio Torquato Dazzi, the librarian first of the Malatestiana library at Cesena and later of the Querini Stampalia in Venice. In examining these lines, this essay hopes to illuminate the complex negotiations of politics and culture that Pound was involved with under the two Italian Fascist regimes (the regime of 1922-43 and Mussolini's Salo Republic of 1943-45). Rather than providing an in-depth analysis of Canto 72 (this has been performed by Massimo Bacigalupo, Robert Casillo and others), my concern in this essay is to work outwards from some of the details of the poetry to the wider socio-political context.** For the purposes of this article, it suffices to say that there is some critical debate as to whether or

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not the two "Italian Cantos," 72 and 73, represent an attempt at Fascist propagandizing by Pound. Patricia Cockram takes this view, seeing the Italian Cantos as esthetic failures on Pound's part, driven by political and economic desperation (535). Bacigalupo, however, views these Cantos as both a return "to the 'visionary' structure attempted . . . in the 'Three Cantos' of 1917, and an anticipation of the autobiographical Pisan Cantos" ("The Poet at War" 71). Bacigalupo argues that the poems should not be seen as aberrations, but as crucial staging posts in the development of Pound's writing. They were published in the Fascist newspaper Marina Repubblicana in January and February 1945. The second of the two Cantos is particularly explicit in its approval of Fascist violence, glorifying a terroristic Fascist attack on a group of Canadian soldiers and ending with a hymn to the Fascist "ragazzi" who "portan il ero" ("boys [who] wear the black"). Cockram, Bacigalupo and Casillo have detailed the suppression and censorship of these Cantos in the development of the Poundian oeuvre. Cockram notes that Pound omitted a racial slur (a reference to "marocchini ed altra immondizia," "Moroccans and other garbage"seemingly a reference to mixed-race Allied troops) in his rendering of Canto 72 into English (540). Furthermore, the two poems were omitted from the collected Cantos until 1986, a situation which Robert Casillo considers a scandal, an attempt on the part of the critical establishment to suppress a "smoking gun" which would overwhelmingly convict Pound's poetry of Fascism ("Fascists of the Final Hour" 121). While the "Italian Cantos" clearly represent a propagandistic drive on the part of Pound, they must also be studied, I maintain, in relationship to the development of Pound's larger poetic project. Indeed, such a reading leaves a rather more disturbing taste; instead of being written off as belonging to Pound's crass Fascist period, the lack of clear boundaries between esthetic and political drives in those Cantos must be addressed. Both F.T. Marinetti and Manlio Torquato Dazzi feature in Canto 72 as Dantesque "shades" or ghosts that appear to the narrator, a figure (ostensibly Pound) fioating in a kind of literary afterlife. Dazzi and Marinetti are interesting ghosts for a number of reasons. Dazzi was alive when the Canto was written (in 1944, during the Sal period); he spent the war in Switzerland and returned to Venice in 1948, dying in Padua in 1968. By contrast, F.T Marinetti had died shortly before the writing of Canto 72; Pound had received the news of Marinetti's death just before he began composing the Canto. This news certainly informs the poem, specifically in Pound's pugilistic representation of Marinetti. Yet it also seems that the two Italians feature as central, almost archetypal figures, figures upon whom rests a crucial dilemma:
Tu con Marinetti fai il paio Ambi in eccesso amaste, lui l'awenire E tu il passato. (Cantos 426)

Massimo Bacigalupo has translated these lines as: "You [Dazzi] and Marinetti are two of a pair / Both loving too much, he the future, / You the past' ("Ezra

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Pound's Cantos" 11). This phrase articulates not only a crucial internal problem in Pound's career and practicethe arch-modernist as also a slightly archaic figure, "make it new" meaning searching through reams and reams of the past for the fresh phrasebut it also describes an obvious dilemma for Fascism. With its Janus-faced nationalism. Fascism trod a path between futuristic modernity and imperialistic nostalgia. Marinetti's presence here is interesting; as Futurist, he represents a facet of Fascist culture that is aggressive, vitalistic and modernistic. Yet Marinetti was positioned uneasily within Fascism at times precisely because his modernistic futurism suggested an implicit criticism of Fascism's archaizing, nostalgic tendencies. Those tendencies were to look backwards to the glories of the past, for instance in the upholding of the ideal oiromanit ("Roman-ness") and in appeals to mythic medieval and renaissance pasts.' At the start of his career, Marinetti had scorned such versions of nationalism, ridiculing the proto-Fascist hero Gabriele D'Annunzio's decadent writing for being "the sickly, nostalgic poetry o f . . . memory" (68). Nostalgia, it appears, is Futurism's "other." Yet Andrew Hewitt's work on Marinetti in his book Fascist Modernism is relevant here. Hewitt sees Futurism (and to some extent Fascism) as emerging out of nineteenth-century decadent estheticism. Marinetti, with his Symbolist past, develops "out of and against a decadent estheticism" and it is this decadent estheticism that then returns as the Futurist repressed (103). The Futurist attack on luxury, languidness, sickness, Venice and crucially the past seems to be Futurism's revenge on the decadent esthetic. Indeed, in writers particularly associated with decadence there exists the apotheosis of what is "unhealthy" for Marinetti. Wilde's Ihe Picture of Dorian Gray, Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," and similar works (works that influenced the Symbolist poets with whom Marinetti was initially associated) are preoccupied by a languid obsession with the past, the image of the lone aristocrat in his decaying room. Hewitt is suggesting that Futurism is in some way locked into relationship with estheticism, complicating the idea of Futurism as simple negation or denial of the past. This strange, symbiotic relationship resurfaces in Fascism as a kind of genetically modified nostalgia, injected with maculinistic vitalism and modernistic technophilia. This paradigm may help to approach those lines of Pound's afresh. For what Pound seems to be facing is the difficulty of negotiating between the demands of past and future. Pound places himself, as loyal Fascist, between the bookworm antiquarianism of Dazzi ("il passato") and the destructive futurity of Marinetti ("l'awenire"). A close examination of Pound's correspondence with Dazzi, Marinetti and others shows us what that "negotiation" looked like in practice as Pound involved himself in Fascist cultural projects.

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THE CULTURAL MILIEU OF VENICE Pound first knew Manlio Dazzi as the librarian of the Maletestiana library at Cesena, and admired him for his "proper Dantescan education" (qtd. in Carpenter 429). Dazzi continued his correspondence with Pound once Dazzi became established in Venice as director ofthe Querini Statnpalia Library in 1925.* In 1928, Pound had given an edition often new Cantos to the Querini, and Dazzi writes to Pound describing himself as "proud" of being the occasion ofthe gift. Dazzi describes the Cantos resting on his desk and transporting him into a memory of Pound's last visit to Venice where Pound had read from his work at Florian's, the famous caf in St Mark's Square: "dopo la silenziosa gira in gondolail suono del 'water green clear, and blue clear' 'in the suavity ofthe rock' nel canto che meglio conviene alla mia sensibilita" ("after the oh-so quiet gondola ridethe sound of 'water green clear, and blue clear' 'in the suavity ofthe rock' in the Canto which best agrees with my sensibility" [Olga Rudge Papers; my translation]). This gift was obviously a version of the limited edition Draft of Cantos 17-27perfect for a Venetian library due to the high count of references to Venice and its history in the poems. Dazzi here seems to be conflating his and Pound's experience of Venice with the images of Canto 17, "water green clear, and blue clear," which, as Tony Tanner, Caterina Ricciardi and others have described, evokes a sacred, lyrical Venice encrusted with nineteenth-century esthetic language borrowed from Ruskin, Pater and others (Tanner 316-17; Ricciardi 232-43). This lyrical perspective seems to inform the appearance of Dazzi in Canto 72; Dazzi appears to "make a lullaby" ("ninna-nannare/arsi") of the lines of Mussato that Dazzi translated in his Ecerinis of 1914 (Dazzi was a noted classicist and had particular interests in the early Renaissance). Given that the lines Pound has Dazzi quoting are a rape scene and site ofthe conception ofthe monstrous protagonist, it seems odd, to say the least, that they should be described as a lullaby. What Pound seems to highlight is a rapturous, lyrical, nostalgic quality in Dazzi, clearly demonstrated in his November 1928 letter. After complaining about the hard work he has to do, Dazzi says that it is "Venezia dolcissima" ("sweetest Venice"), and his picturesque local square with its plane tree, flint well and "qualche famiglie di uccelli" ("several families of birds"), that keeps him sane. In other words, Dazzi displays a susceptibility to reverie and lyricism; qualities linked, I suggest, with what Pound describes as Dazzi's "excessive love of the past." This is an impression bolstered by Mary De Rachewiltz's description of "dreamy" Dazzi in the 1930s ensconced behind his desk in the library (99). By all accounts, Dazzi was resistant to Fascist culture. He joined the Resistance during World War II, later becoming a Communist, and avoids political discourse in his correspondence with Pound. The Querini Library under Dazzi in the 1920s and 1930s was, according to NuUa Dazzi, by no means dominated by the Fascist regime, and resisted the race laws of 1938 by openly stocking the works of Jewish authors on the shelves (Dazzi 38-39). However, Manlio Dazzi

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did edit the review Ateneo Vneto from 1931 to 1935, at a time when much of its rhetoric was pro-Fascist. A copy of this magazine in the period contains an article by Duillio Torres praising a reborn "nationalistic" Fascist architecture, and talk about a Fascist "renewal" of Venice (Torres 171). Whether Dazzi's inclusion of such rhetoric indicates his unqualified approval of Fascism is unclear. Dazzi seems to have avoided conflict with the regime until the 1940s by remaining largely buried in a gentle, scholastic world, writing his meditative lyrical poems about the changing seasons of Venice. His status as a veteran (he was wounded and imprisoned by the Austrians in the First World War) may also have raised Dazzi's standing in the militaristic culture of Fascist Italy (Dazzi 37-38). In Pound's correspondence with other Venetian figures in the 1930s, including the academic Carlo Izzo and the editor oII Gazzettino, Aldo Camerino, it is the American poet who is the overtly political figure spouting Fascist propaganda, while the Venetians display less enthusiasm. In 1935, Pound writes to Izzo in Venice trying to get the Venetian to use his publishing contacts to distribute an Italian version o Jefferson and/or Mussolini (this was not to happen until 1943). Pound wrote in August 1935 that the book was "intended to break down absurd and bestial false representation of Italy. Ten years idiotic calumny in Eng. and U.S." (Ezra Pound Papers). Izzo is not entirely convinced about the political emphasis of the book: he replies that he finds the book "chiefly a study in personality: yours. It may very well be that YOU interest me." On 25 August 1935, Izzo complains that he can't meet Pound in Venice because "unfortunately tomorrow night I have got to go to a Fascist 'adunata' [mass-meeting]" (Ezra Pound Papers), again demonstrating a certain resistance to the political machinery. However, both Izzo and Camerino longed for a revival of literary experimentation in Venice, and thus seemed to have seen Pound as a kind of prophet of the avant-garde. Both were regularly present, as Mary De Rachewiltz records, at readings from the Cantos held at Olga Rudge's "hidden nest" in Calle Querini (100). Between Pound's visits to the city in the mid-thirties, both men were urging the American poet to return and kick-start an artistic renaissance. In 1936, Izzo writes: "When is it you are coming back to Venice? May? June? Camerino 6c I long for your bracing conversation" (Ezra Pound Papers). Likewise, Camerino writes: "we need yr awakening force and your bracing strength" (Ezra Pound Papers). For Pound, force and strength were found in Mussolini's Fascism and he found it difficult to understand why the Duce's revolution was not renewing and transforming the whole country. Discussing the possibility with Izzo and Camerino of beginning a new avant-garde literary journal in Italy, he writes: "I cant do ALL the bloody propaganda" and, referring to the invasion of Abyssinia: "Now you blokes have got an IMPERO what about trying to wake up Italian letteraria." Any new Italian literary journal should contain, continues Pound "no pre fascist points of view and buggar the league of or leak of nations mentality" (Ezra Pound Papers), a sentiment to which there appears to be no reply from Izzo. These frustrations with what Pound saw as Italian political apathy are perhaps most clearly expressed in a 1934 letter to Margherita Sarfatti, the prominent

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Fascist intellectual and sometime mistress of Mussolini.' Pound's letter to Sarfatti describes Italy as having three epochs, the present, "inhabited by DUX [Mussolini] . . . and almost no one else" (although presumably EP himself), the "letterati, living about 1890" and the academics, or "scholastic Italy," "inhabiting 1850/60" (Ezra Pound Papers). In other words. Pound here puts himself and Mussolini at the forefront of avant-garde revolutionary Fascism and sees much of the rest of Italy as somewhat lagging behind. The sentiments concur with the tone of much of Pound's manic Mussolinian propaganda in the mid-thirties. In December of the same year, he wrote to James Joyce complaining that there is "too much future, and nobody but me and Muss/ [Mussolini] and half a dozen others to attend to
it" {Pound/Joyce 234).

MARINETTI, ROME AND RADICAL-MODERNIST FASCISM It is, as we might expect, in his correspondence with F.T. Marinetti that Pound's most obvious engagement with the modernistic side of Fascism can be seen. In the disturbing imagery of Canto 72, Marinetti appears as the voice of aggressive Fascism, urging Pound to lend him his body so that he can fight on and avenge the Axis defeat at the battle of El Alamein, in Egypt. This battle is often thought of as one ofthe turning points ofthe war. In October 1942, the German general Rommel had been forced into a humiliating retreat by General Montgomery's British forces; from El Alamein onwards. Axis troops struggled to gain the upper hand in North Africa. By promisingthrough the "voice" of Marinettithat "we will return" (Bacigalupo "Ezra Pound's Cantos'" 11), Pound is articulating the Fascist propaganda line, that the tide would be turned again and that the Allies would be forced onto the defensive. In Pound's correspondence with the Futurist writer, this aggressive Fascism is combined with a sharp modernistic esthetic sensean almost perfect example ofthe "rendering politics aesthetic" that Walter Benjamin associated with Fascism and Marinetti (Benjamin 234-35). The Pound-Marinetti correspondence constantly engages the question of what the most appropriate cultural expressions of Fascism should be. I pick up the correspondence in 1932, when Pound's meeting with Marinetti in Rome in the summer of that year is recorded. Pound apparently returned from that trip "loaded with futurist and fascist licherchoor" (qtd. in Carpenter 489). However, these visits obviously occurred throughout the 1930s. Mary De Rachewiltz remembers meeting Marinetti in Rome in 1936, where he discussed with typical eccentricity a treatise on turning milk into synthetic wool (113). It is likely that that Pound is thinking about those visits when he writes in Canto 72 of hearing the voice of Marinetti "come sentita Lungotevere, in Piazza Adriana" ("as heard on the Lungotevere, in Piazza Adriana," 427, Bacigalupo, "Ezra Pound's Cantos" 11). The initial hostility towards Futurism on the part of Pound and Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist movement was replaced by a renewed interest in Marinetti on Pound's part in the 1930s.* While the Vorticist manifesto of 1914 (devised by

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Pound and Lewis in London) wrote off Marinetti's esthetic as "automobilism," a "huUo-buloo about motor cars" (Koloctroni, Goldman and Taxidou 292), Pound became increasingly conscious of the Futurist writer's central position within radical nationalism. Along with D'Annunzio, Sigismondo and of course Mussolini, Marinetti fit the type of the "poet-hero" or fighting-artist that was so important to Pound. The change in Pound's attitude might have been as much pragmatic as ideological; Vorticism was in fact heavily indebted to the Futurists, and the Vorticist Manifesto is at times awkward in its protestations of distinctiveness. Despite the international background of its protagonists (Pound the American, Lewis the half-American British subject born in Canada), London-centered Vorticist politics seem to recommend a kind of creative English nationalism. Anxious to be distinguished from what it describes as the "picturesquely patriotic" themes of Futurism, the Vorticist manifesto of 1914 nevertheless claims the "Modern World" as "due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius" (293). In other wordsdespite Pound and Lewis's desire to stress the differences between Vorticism and its Italian cousinthe Vorticist manifesto seems directly inspired by Marinetti's cocktail of nationalism and hyper-modernity. Thus, I suggest. Pound's identification with Marinetti in the Fascist context comes not as a volte-face, but as the culmination of his long interest in a political, nationalistic avant-garde. If the somnolent world of Dazzi, Izzo and Camerino in Venice was a little too slow for Pound, Marinetti's direct, active revolutionary style was its immediate counterpart. In contrast to the long, discursive letters written by the Venetians, Marinetti's are direct and pointed, clearly mindful of the Fascist injunction for the "new Italians" to avoid wordiness and obfuscation. In August 1932, Marinetti writes that he hoped to come to Rapallo: "speravo venire a Rapallo ma invece dopo pochi bagni alia marina di Pietrasanta sono tornato a Roma dove aspetto una terza marinettino o un terzo marinettina" ("hoped to come to Rapallo but unfortunately after a little bathing in the marina of Pietrasanta I have returned to Rome where I await a third marinettino or marinettina"; my translation). His reference to a "marinettino/marinettina" ("baby boy/baby girl Marinetti") suggests he was wryly aware of the cult of personality that had developed around him. In the event, it was to be a "baby girl"his third daughter, born to him on the twentieth of September. Marinetti signs his letter with "una forte stretta di mano"("a firm handshake"), here consciously embracing a strong physicality, even in his written correspondence (Ezra Pound Papers). Marinetti's willingness to discuss art and politics with Pound might reflect the Futurist's anxiety about his position within the Fascist regime. The Duce himself was often ambiguous over aesthetic questions, and avoided propagating a particular "Fascist style." Multiple modernist alternatives to Futurism existed within the Italy of the 1920s and 1930s, all vying for official funding and patronage. At the same time, influential Fascists like Roberto Farinacciunder the influence of Nazi policieshad from the early 1930s been advocating hostility towards "degenerate" art, a category he clearly identified Futurism with (Adamson

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229-30). Marinetti's desire to align Futurism with the Fascist regime would have increased his desire to seek out other like-minded avant-garde artists; hence, perhaps, his willingness to engage with Pound. An interesting series of letters between Marinetti and Pound centers on their collaboration over plans to realize the architectural ideas of Antonio Sant'Elia. Sant'Elia had been closely associated with the Futurist and proto-Fascist groups and was killed in World War One. Death in the First World War was a fast track to Fascist canonization and Sant'Elia soon became a key martyr of the regime. Sant'Elia's futuristic, experimental style was highly praised by modernists within the regime who wanted Italian buildings to emphasize Fascism's radicalism and revolutionary strength. Mario Rispoli, for example, wrote in the early years of Mussolini's government that "If we want to create a fascist architecture there is but one path to be followed: the one outlined by Sant'Elia" (qtd. in Da Costa Meyer 195). Sant'Elia's emphasis on novelty and the clear line would have recommended him to Pound and Marinetti. In his Manifesto of 1914, a creed that set out his plans for a new national and modernistic architecture, Sant'Elia had written: "this architecture cannot naturally be subject to any law of historic continuity. It must be new, as our state of mind and the contingencies of our historic moment are new" (qtd. in Letts 87). Pound became attracted to the idea of using plans based on designs of Sant'Elia for a Casa Littoriale at Rapallo, where he had maintained his main residence since 1925. This Casa Littoriale (lictor's house) was to be a showcase for the arts and Fascist culture, and seems to have been suggested in response to the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, which commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome. The dynamic architecture, he reasoned, would attract foreign interest, and the building could be used to articulate Fascism to the outside world. In 1932 he wrote in the Rapallo newspaper IIMare:
A Casa Littoriale in Rapallo could easily contain at least one library accessible to foreigners, either dilettantes or tourists, to help them understand the new Italy. This building, if inspired by a project of Sant'Elia, would open the eyes and probably the mind to the contemporaneous situation of the nation. (Qtd. in Da Costa Meyer 202)

As ever in this period. Pound's concern is to convince world opinion (specifically Anglo-American opinion) of the merits of the Mussolini regime. In Pound's mind Fascism, like his own poetry, was avant-garde; and it is Fascism as avant-garde experiment that he is keen to recommend to "dilettantes" and "tourists." Pound's discussions with Marinetti over the "Sant' Elia plan" continued well into the middle and late 1930s. In 1936, Marinetti wrote to Pound to say that he was:
. . . frvidamente solidale con te per la realizzazione del piano Sant'Elia. Oggi piCi che mai dopo la grande nostra vittoria impriale le architetture devono avere l'ormai indispensabile splendore geomtrico ideato da Antonio Sant'Elia morto con una palla in fronte a Monfalcone per una piu grande Italia.

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Joumal of Modem Literature Volume 34, Number 1 . . . fervently, solidly behind you for the realization of the Sant'Elia plan. Today more than ever after our great imperial victory our buildings must have the now indispensible geometric splendor devised by Antonio Sant'Elia, killed with a bullet in the head at Monfalcone for a greater Italy. (Ezra Pound Papers; my translation)

Here martyrdom, imperialism and architecture are conflated in the soaring Fascist heights of Marinetti's rhetoric. He ends the letter: "Gloria ad Antonio Sant'Elia Gloria all'Italia fascista bene architettata da Benito Mussolini" ("Glory to Antonio Sant'Elia, glory to the Fascist Italy well designed by Benito Mussolini"; my translation). Marinetti's use of the trope of Mussolini as architect ("bene architettata" is "well designed" or "concocted") is interesting. As in Pound's writing, Marinetti represents the Duce here as the great modernist, defining the lines ofthe nation. Modernist architecture was not the only cultural project the two men discussed. There is a letter from Pound discussing the radio and the possibilities for electro-acoustic music, and there is a note, dated for the second of May 1941, where EP discusses "aeropittura." Marinetti first floated aeropittura as a concept in 1928; it is an art form associated with the glorification of aerial war from the time of Abyssinia, through the Spanish Civil War, and into World War II. By 1941, the Fascist line had severely hardened; the Axis with Nazi Germany was five years old and Italy was an international pariah. The outbreak of World War II would have brought the aggressive militarism characteristic of areopittura to the fore. Violent anti-British demonstrations in Italian cities, including Genoa, also took on a marked anti-Semitic flavor (Michaelis 292). At the same time, the Fascist press became increasingly belligerent, pugilistic and "menacing" to both its external and internal "enemies" (Michaelis 291). By 1941, Pound himself was advocating a complete repudiation of "angloisrael" and what he calls the "infezione giudaica" ("Jewish infection," "AngloIsraele", Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose. Vol. VIII 99). By October of that year. Pound was writing articles for the Meridiano di Roma with titles like "L'Ebreo, Patologia Incarnata" ("The Jew, Pathology Incarnated"), and arguing that Europe would not be properly united and "Roman," "dal momento che si liminera l'usura internazionale ed ebraica" ("until the moment it frees itself from international, Jewish usury," "II Grano," Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose Vol. VIII140; my translation). The chill of those words needs no glossing. Whatever else was going on in Pound's mind, his correspondence with Marinetti over the hard lines oiaeropittura occurred against the backdrop of an increasingly virulent, anti-Semitic, Nazi-Fascism. In his letter to Marinetti, Pound postulates his own theory of what aeropittura should be. Pound writes: "io non vedo 'UN motto' che servirebbe, vedo LO SPAZIO fra DUE motti" ("I don't see 'ONE motto' which would serve [work], I see T H E SPACE between T W O mottos"; my translation). His example of this is the imagined "space" between the writings of Giacomo Leopardi and those of Gabriele D'Annunzio, "con tutto cio che s'implice nella distanza, distanza

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d'epoca, distanza fra elegia di Leopardi ed il superbo intuito profetico di G D Annunzio" ("with all that is implied in the distance, a distance of epoch, a distance between the elegy of Leopardi and the superb, prophetic intuition of G D Annunzio," Ezra Pound Papers; my translation). He then goes on to ask Marinetti whether he remembered the first staging of D'Annunzio's play La Nave in Venice in 1908; Pound perhaps attended the play when he moved to Venice from the United States in that year. What might Pound's description of this "space between two mottos" mean? What appears to be implied is an area or distance between the pessimistic nationalism of Leopardian elegiac nationalism that is unrealizable and doomedand D'Annunzio's sacralized, renewed nationalism. Yet this "space" is also a link, a chain that binds the two Italian poets together. The specific phrase of Leopardi's that Pound cites is "ma la gloria non vedo" ("but I do not see the glory"). These lines are taken from Leopardi's great nationalist poem, "All' Italia." The poem articulates a crumbling. Romantic space marked out by decaying walls and columns, and by the "towers of our ancestors" ("torri degli avi nostri," Canti 5). Leopardi's voice proclaims that he "sees" the remnants of buildings but not the "glory." In other words, what is missingor appealed tois a vital energy and living power. In the context of 1941, this vitalism and energy take on disturbingly violent and racialized overtones. Inasmuch as Leopardi's poem is a paean to a lost Italy, it shares features with Northern European views of the country in the Romantic period, when visitors like Shelley and Byron tended to focus on Italy's tombs, sepulchers and cemeteries.' As such, foreign images of Italy returned to tropes of death, mourning and ruin, articulating what James Buzard has called a "rather satisfying savoring" of Italian decay (40). Italian nationalist readings of Leopardi's work, however, saw this appeal to a lost Italy as a call to national awakening, the coming-toconsciousness of national identity. Pound's neoplatonic philosophical leanings, mingled with Fascist-nationalist sentiments, transform this Leopardian past of death and glory into a live potentiality. This was a project Pound had embarked upon much earlier, I suggest. For instance. Canto III with its gods floating in the "azure air / Bright gods and Tuscan" (11) sees a potentially decaying Italy (centered around Venice and the Lakes) renewed by spiritual, organic and political "life." Fascist martyrology and appeals to a dynamic history fit neatly into Pound's pre-existent neoplatonic schema, where floating "gods" are not so much disembodied spirits as appeals to a present political ideology. By the time Pound was writing Cantos 72 and 73 in the early 1940s, this schema is even more explicit. The recurrence of the words "presenza" ("presence") and "presente" ("present") in Canto 72 (425-26) refer, it may be assumed, to Fascist martyr rituals, which used the words in the readings of roll calls of the dead (noted by Casillo, "Fascists" 102; Cockram 538). The Italian historian Emilio Gentile, who details how the reading of the roll call was the "culminating moment" of Fascist rituals that borrowed from and politicized prexistent Catholic rites, describes this practice:

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Journal of Modern Literature Volume 34, Number 1 . . . One ofthe leaders ofthe squad would call out the dead man's name, and the crowd, on its knees, bellowed "Present!" Raised as saints and heroes in the symbolic universe ofthe Fascists, the dead charismatically watched over the communion of Fascists, living on in their memory. (27)

Yet these Fascist ritesa political "communion of saints"also add another layer to Pound's already well-developed sense of neoplatonic mysticism, where "shades," or "daemons" mediate spiritual truth to humanity (see Liebregts 116-31).'" Peter Liebregts also sees Pound's commitment to Fascism in terms of the neoplatonic directio voluntatis, or the "direction of the will." This "will" is harnessed by the neoplatonic subject to steer him or herself away from base passions towards a higher beauty (226-27). In the political sphere, as Liebregts has shown, this translates into a concern with order, structure and discipline. When this ordered rationalitywhat Pound calls Mussolini's "right reason" {Jefferson and/ or Mussolini 110)is combined with a nationalistic appeal to Roman, medieval and Renaissance Italian pasts, we are approaching something like the unique jumble that Pound's thinking consisted of in the late 1930s and the 1940s. To Pound, Fascist nationalism synthesized a contemporary order and discipline with a quasi-spiritual appeal to unbroken chains of past civilizations (Rome, Venice, the Tuscan city states). Pound "saw Mussolini as being able to provide Italy with a new Renaissance, because he seemed to have the will and intelligence to translate thought into the active creation of social-economic order" (Liebregts 226-27). Yet this idea of renaissance also co-exists, in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, with a strange attraction to Fascist violence, both rhetorical and actual. Pound quotes approvingly, it seemsa letter from a correspondent advocating "bombe, bombe, bombe per svegliare questi dormiglioni di 'pensatori' italiani" ("bombs, bombs, bombs, to wake up these slumbering Italian 'th'mkeis,'" Jefferson and/or Mussolini 32; my translation). While Pound claims the bombs as "purely verbal," the force of the violence remains. This is one of a number of occasions within the text where Pound seems to both approve of and distance himself from Fascist aggression. Another passage in the book sees him apparently moved by the "excitement" of a Fascist confrontation in Venice, while at pains to tell the reader that nobody "hit me with a club and I didn't see any oil bottles" (forcing their victims to drink castor oil was a notorious Fascist punishment) {Jefferson and/or Mussolini 50-51). Writing in 1931 in the Italian newspaper // Belvedere, Pound justified his move to Italy by comparing an Italy of "new virility and continual growth" with a "tired" France and the "stupidity" of England:
The thing that most interests me in the world . . . is civilization, the high peaks of culture. Italy has twice civilized Europe. . . . Each time a strong, live energy is unleashed in Italy, a new renaissance comes forth. (CJtd. in Redman 76)

This idea of Pound's of an Italian "live energy" was already making itself evident in the world of the floating gods of Canto III, completed in the early 1920s.

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Borrowing from Gabriele D'Annunzio's Notturno, Canto I I I is a hymn, among other things, to Venice." However, I suggest that Pound's reception of Italy is influenced here not only by D'Annunzio's romantic and lyrical emphases, but also by his political ideology. In the 1920s, D'Annunzio was gaining Pound's approval with his proto-Fascist combination of esthetic experiment and political intervention (see Beasley 154-55, 197-98). In Paris he had become acquainted with D'Annunzio's mistress Luisa Casati, who probably introduced him to Fascist ideology (Rainey, Institutions 138-39). By 1928, in his essay "Cavalcanti," Pound was referring to D'Annunzio as "Nostro Gabriele . . . solitary, superficially eccentric, but with a surprisingly sound standard of values." D'Annunzio, as the "only living author who has ever taken a city or held up the diplomatic crapule at the point of machine-guns" was "in a position to speak with more authority than a batch of neuraurasthenic incompetents or of writers who . . . are . . . incapable of action" {Literary Essays 192). Essential to Pound in this violent paean to D'Annunzio was the Italian writer's claim not to be a "mere poet," but a political artist. D'Annunzio had written that "all manifestations of life and all manifestations of intelligence are equally attractive" ("tutte le manifestazioni della vita e tutte le manifestazioni deir intelligenza mi attraggono egualmente"; qtd. in Pemble 47). D'Annunzio's esthetic nationalism would lead to an increasing military consciousness and an emphasis on the idea of the fighting artist, a position to which Pound would also at times attach Sigismondo Malatesta, Mussolini and Marinetti. Thus Pound's mention of D'Annunzio's play La Nave in his 1941 letter to Marinetti implies a nod to D'Annunzio's interventionist and irridentist politics, evident in the work as the ideology of a sacralized, imperialistic Adriatic expansion under the banner of ancient Venice. It is in this "space," then, that the live, mystical energy required for aeropittura is to be found. Pound further mentions Wyndham Lewis's 1910 picture Plan of War, with its abstract geometric shapes and revolutionary radicalism. The reference to Plan of War suggests that Pound was attempting to shape Fascist culture in his own avant-garde image, where the dynamic modernist energy characteristic of Blast is channeled through neoplatonic spirituality and molded into a propagandistic, bellicose and violent Fascist nationalism. The last file in the Marinetti folder in Pound's papers is a card from the Futurist Association of Savona in 1944, inviting Pound to a special poetry reading to mark the Futurist's recent death. The text on the card places Marinetti alongside Giotto, Dante and Virgil as an artist who reached the "vrtice di guida" ("heights of leadership") and praises him for his attack on profit-driven mediocrity and "para-liberal" art (Ezra Pound Papers). On the other side of the card, a Futuriststyle montage depicts a series of intersecting words and jagged shapes. The words themselves"Futurism," "Rebirth," "Roman-ness" and "Christianity"incorporate splintered cross symbols, an attempt at a Futurist memorial that retains elements of Christian symbolism. As a summation of Marinetti's career, it reflects the Futurist's own compromises with the regime and the diverse ideals of Fascism:

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poised in equilibrium between modernist radicalism and traditional Catholicism, between aggressive Futurism and nostalgic monumentalism. By 1944, the deportation camp of Borgo San Dalmazzo, in striking distance of Pound's home at Rapallo, had been running for several months; hundreds of foreign Jews were deported in the closing months of 1943 to Auschwitz via France (Sarfatti 183). Yet Pound continued with his quasi-biological, paranoiac fantasies of degeneration: "Quando una nazione muore, gli ebrei si moltiplicano in essa come i bacilli nella carogna" ("When a nation dies, the Jews multiply within her like bacilli in a test-tube," "Razza o Malattia," Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose Vol. VIII 223; my translation). In the same month. Pound raged against the "sedicenti intellettuali" ("sedentary intellectuals") and the "feccia giudaica o la zavorra giudaizzata" ("Jewish dregs or Judaised dead wood"; my translation) of French literature (" Peccato Ma ..." Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose Vol. VIII 223). That Pound could apparently accommodate both these ravings and a "sophisticated" modernism in this period might seem surprising; but the writer would have seen no conflict here. Pound could easily switch from his Hitlerian fantasies to a recommendation of the kind of artists (Joyce, Marinetti) that the Fhrer would have classed as "degenerate." In his mind, the sharp lines of modernism seem to have been equated or even interchangeable with the totalitarian politics of Nazi Fascism. This balancing of diverse political and esthetic drives was a project with which both Marinetti and Pound were involved. The fragile negotiation of past and future deployed in Italian cultural projects of the 1920s and 1930s reflected back to Pound the concerns of his artistic practice. His engagement with the cultural projects of the regime as a displaced avant-garde poet provide a fascinating and disturbing view of the intersections of art and totalitarian politics in Mussolini's Italy.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Ezra Pound Literary Trust for permission to quote from Pound's unpublished correspondence. Unpublished material 2010 by Mary De Rachewiltz and the estate of Omar S. Pound. Used by permission of New Directions, agents.

Notes
1. E. E. Cummings writes in 1948 that the important thing is Pound's authenticity: "a human being who's true to himself... is immortal." William Carlos Williams is critical of Pound but asserts that he "just isn't dangerous" and that "as a poet Ezra had some sort of right to speak his mind." Conrad Aiken separates justice done to the "traitor" from justice done to the "poet," "one of the great creative influences of our time." Saxe Commins of Random House rejects Pound, writing that he "refuses to publish any fascist" (Norman 47, 53-54, 60-61, 61). Margaret Schlauch in 1949 denies him a place in the pantheon of great poets and describes his work as "anti-humanistic" (San Juan 49). Pearlman avoids mention of Mussolini and Fascism except as a poetic trope in Pound's work (40, 140-41).

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2. Examples include Lawrence Rainey's subtle, miincc Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture, Robert Casillo's more belligerent The Genealogy ofDemons: Fascism, Anti-Semitism and the Myths of Ezra Pound ind Peter Nicholls's Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing. 3. See Peter Nicholls's "Lost Object(s). Ezra Pound and the Idea of Italy." Catherine E. Paul's work on Pound and Italian Fascismfor example her essay "Italian Fascist Exhibitions and Ezra Pound's Move to the Imperial"is also worth mentioning here. 4. Massimo Bacigalupo's translation, "Ezra Pound's Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation" also contains a useful commentary on the poem. See also Cockram and Casillo, "Fascists of the Final Hour." 5. D. Medina Lasansky's recent work has stressed the importance ofthe Renaissance and Middle Ages in the iconography of Italian Fascism. See The Renaissance Perfected. 6. Dazzi was instrumental in Pound's discovery and deepening understanding of many facets of Renaissance Italian culture. In particular, Piero Lucchi credits him with the development of Pound's historical, "fragmentary" poetic, a poetic inspired as much by the material research conducted in Italian libraries as hy Eliot's method in The Waste Land. See Lucchi 236. 7. Sarfatti, of Venetian Jewish origin, was forced to emigrate following the regime's introduction ofthe anti-Semitic Race Laws in 1938. See Bosworth 363, Ben-Ghiat 150-51, 8. For Pound's early reactions to Futurism, see Beasley 77-79. 9. For more on this theme, see Luzzi. 10. Peter Liebregts makes it clear that such "shades"or in the language o(Canto III, "gods"are not "ghosts" in the occultist sense favored by W.B. Yeats. Instead, Pound developed the Greek neoplatonic idea ofthe daimon into a sense of a spiritual intelligence running as a thread of "genius" through the great civilizations. 11. The line "and peacocks in Kore's house, or there may have been" (11) is a direct reference to a phrase from D'Annunzio's work. In Notturno, D'Annunzio writes of the house of Kore being inhahited ("abitata") by white peacocks (D'Annunzio 443).

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Casillo, Rohert. The Genealogy ofDemons: Fascism, Anti-Semitism and the Myths of Ezra Pound. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print. . "Fascists of the Fmal Hour." Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture. Ed. R.J. Golsan. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1992.98-127. Print. Cockram, Patricia. "Collapse and Recall: Ezra Pound's Italian Cantos." Joumal of Modem Literature Summer 2000): 535-44. Print. Da Costa Meyer, Esther. The Work of Antonio Sant'Elia. New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1995. Print. D'Annunzio, Gabriele. Notturno. Milan: Trves, 1921. Print. Dazzi, Nulla Romandini. "Manlio Torquato Dazzi." Profili Veneziani del Novecento. Ed. Giovanni Di Stefano 6c Leopoldo Pietragnoli. Venice: Supernova, 2003. Print. De Rachewiltz, Mary. Discretions. London: Faber, 1971. Print. Gentile, Emilio. The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. Print. Hewitt, Andrew. Fascist Modemism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. Print. Koloctroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, eds. Modemism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998. Print. Lasansky, D. Medina, The Renaissance Perfected. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2004. Print. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Eds. Domenico De Robertis and Giuseppe De Robertis. Florence: Mondadori, 1978. Print. Letts, Rosa Maria, ed. Futurism and the Architecture of Sant'Elia. Milan: Mazzotta, 1990. Print. Liebregts, Peter. Ezra Pound andNeoplatonism. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2004. Print. Lucchi, Piero. "II Poeta e il Bibliotecario: Ezra Pound e Manlio Torquato Dazzi dalla Romagna dei Malatesti a Venezia." Humanistica Marciana. Saggi offerti a Marino Zorzi. ExI. Simonetta Pelusi and Alessandro Scarsella. Venice: Biblion, 2008. Print. Luzzi, Joseph. Romantic Europe and the Ghost ofItaly. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2008. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Selected Writings. Ed. R.W. Flint. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Print. Michaelis, Meir. Mussolini and the Jews. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Print. Nicholls, Peter. Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984. Print. . "Lost Object(s). Ezra Pound and the Idea of Italy, "fera Pound and Europe. Eds. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.166-74. Print. Norman, Charles. The Case ofEzra Pound. New York: Bodley Press, 1948. Print. Paul, Catherine E. "Italian Fascist Exliibitions and Ezra Pound's Move to the Imperial." Twentieth Century Literature 51.1 (Spring 2005): 63-96. Print. Pearlman, Daniel. The Barb of Time. New York: Oxford UP, 1969. Print. Pemble, John. "Tlie Resident Strangers of Nineteenth-Century Venice: Myth and Reality." Ravidon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian Relationship. Ed. Ralph A. Griffiths and John E. Law. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005. Print. Pound, Ezra. "Anglo-Israele." zra Pound's Poetry and Prose. Vol VIIL 99-100. . The Cantos ofEzra Pound. London: Faber, 1987. Print. ." Literary Essays. 149-200.

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. Literary Essays. Ed.T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1954. Print. . Pound/Joyce. London: Faber, 1967. Print. . "Razza o Malattia." Ezra Pound's Poetry and Prose. Vol. Vlll. 223. Rainey, Lawrence. Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Print. . Institutions ofModernism. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1998. Print. Redman,Tim. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. Ricciardi, Caterina. Eikones: Ezra Pound e II Rinascimento. Naples: Liguori, 1991. Print. Rudge, Olga. Olga Rudge Papers. Ms. 54. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Library, YaleU. San Juan, E., ed. Critics on Ezra Pound, Coral Gables, FL: U of Miami P, 1972. Print. Sarfatti, Michle. The Jews in Mussolini's Italy. Trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006. Print. Tanner, Tony Venice Desired. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Print. Torres, Duillio. "La Nuova Architettura a Venezia."y/no Vneto 1933: 161-181. Print.

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