Pound, Pasolini, and some Racist Killings in Modern-Day Italy

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I don�t have a particular movie in mind for this post, but instead I want to meander through a few checkpoints in Italy�s postwar artistic and political history.  While browsing at a bookstore recently, I came across an anthology of short works by Pier Paolo Pasolini entitled In Danger.  The title of the anthology comes from the title that Pasolini chose for his last interview, �We�re All in Danger.� Several hours after the interview, Pasolini was murdered, run over several times by his own car.  An apt title.

Before proceeding further with this essay, I must confess that I don�t actually know that much about Pasolini or his work.  In fact, the only film of his that I�ve seen is probably among his least famous, 1964�s Comizi d�Amore (Love Meetings), a documentary in which Pasolini asks random Italians (the proverbial �man on the street,� I suppose) for their opinions on sexuality and gender issues.  Alberto Moravia was interviewed, I recall, although he�s hardly just a �man on the street.�

But I know the key points about Pasolini.  I know that he was a man of many hats, that he was an accomplished writer of poetry and prose before he turned to cinema, which he balanced with his literary work up until his death.  I know that he was an enthusiastic supporter of communism.  I know that he was gay and known to be gay in a time and a country when that can�t have been easy, to say the least.  I know that he is the director of Teorema (1968), the inspiration of for Takashi Miike�s 2005 atrocity/masterpiece (depending on how you approach it), Visitor Q.  I know that he was the director of Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which I have not seen, even though I�m told I should (I remember a (Slate?) article in which a movie reviewer talks about how he really doesn�t want to see Salo, and he consults with a bunch of fellow critics, and they all tell him, sorry, but you have to see Salo if you want to be a critic, and so he does, and it�s upsetting; this is not the place to talk about Salo.  Maybe I�ll bring myself to see it at some point, and then I�ll talk about it at length).  I know that Pasolini thought that consumerism was another form of fascism, and that he thought it was worse than the overt political fascism of Mussolini, because, whereas Mussolini�s fascism may have destroyed bodies, consumerist fascism destroys souls.  I think he should have consulted with Primo Levi, who had experience of both kinds of fascism, and asked him which he thought was worse.  And then I know that Pasolini was murdered in 1975, almost immediately after the completion of Salo. 

An iconic picture of Pier Paolo Pasolini

He was murdered by the seventeen-year-old Giuseppe Pelosi, who confessed at the time but in 2005 recanted his testimony, saying that he had only confessed because his family had been threatened.  In the Italy of the 1970�s (or �60�s, or �80�s, or any of the Italys one finds in the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia), this is certainly not impossible.  Pelosi claimed that Pasolini was murdered by three men with southern accents who called Pasolini a �dirty communist.� Italy�s 1970�s are known as the Years of Lead; you had the Italian Red Brigades shooting people through the knee cap and kidnapping and murdering former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro; you had far right-wing neo-fascist organization carrying out terrorist attacks, culminating in the 1980 Bologna train massacre, which killed 85 people; anarchist playwright Dario Fo�s wife was kidnapped and raped in 1973; God, just an awful situation all around.

And in 1972, the elderly American poet Ezra Pound died in Rapallo, Italy, and was buried there.  One does not immediately associate Pound�who was born in the Idaho territory in 1885�with the cultural and political turmoil of post-war Italy.  His presence there seems anachronistic.  Pound came to Europe from America in 1908, was a personal assistant to W. B. Yeats for a while, and ended up becoming a pivotal (or perhaps the pivotal) figure in Anglophone modernism (Hispanophone literature had its own modernism, circa-1900 or thereabouts, so it seems only fair to make the distinction).  Pound wasn�t just a poet; he also held strong opinions about economics and politics, almost all of them appalling.  He moved to Rapallo�the English humorist and aesthete Max Beerbohm also lived in Rapallo at the time; I�ve never heard of a meeting between him and Pound, but I�m sure it would have been worth seeing�in Mussolini�s Italy, which he found quite congenial.  He embraced the Social Credit theory of economics, which his nowadays known, if it�s known at all, because of its association with Pound.  Social Credit seeks to eliminate debt and sees the lending of money at interest�usury!�as being an atrocious evil.  And who were the worst usurers?  Sigh.  The Jews, Pound would tell you.  The Rothschilds and their chief enabler in Washington, President Rosenstein.

A wonderful picture of Pound in his youth.

When World War II broke out, Pound elected to remain in Italy, and he arranged with Mussolini�s government to make radio broadcasts, in which he would express his anti-war (as in, anti-American-involvement in the war) viewpoints, denigrate the Jews, and praise the glories of Confucianism (the man was a crank, and while a crank like Frank E. Dec would hold forth on the Gangster Computer God, Pound liked to talk about Confucius).  In 1944, with the advance of the American army up the Italian peninsula (and this is presumably just around the time that the criminals in Salo were perpetrating their atrocities), Pound decided to �present� himself to the Americans.  When faced with charges of treason for his wartime radio broadcasts, Pound successfully got off with an insanity defense.  Many people thought that this was bullshit, or that his mental health problems were at least exaggerated, but his conduct here would seem to indicate otherwise.  When he entered the American camp, Pound instructed them to immediately send a telegram directly to President Roosevelt (I suspect he did not refer to him as Rosenstein during this conversation) offering his services in negotiating the surrender of the Japanese; as an expert on Japanese culture (which I suppose he kind of was, in his autodidactic� unrelentingly crankish�way), he was sure that he could be of assistance.  The Americans arrested him instead and kept him in an outdoor cage for several weeks; if he was not insane before this, he certainly was afterward.  When he was repatriated to the US, he expressed to his lawyer his confusion about the whole ordeal, saying, �I thought they were going to send me to convert the Japs from Shintoism to Confucianism.� When his lawyer asked him if he needed anything, he requested a Georgian grammar, so as to write �a letter to Stalin about Confucius.�  Always with the Confucius.

He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent to the St. Elizabeth�s mental hospital, where he remained until 1958, writing more cantos and translating Confucian texts.  Upon his release, he immediately returned to Italy and his beloved Rapallo.  When a journalist asked him why he was leaving the US, he famously quipped, �It�s a mad house.�

And so he lived out his life in Rapallo.  He later repented of his anti-Semitism, dismissing it as an �immature� prejudice.  Whether or not he ever grasped the true repulsiveness of this prejudice is subject to debate.  He was known to claim that a man named Ezra couldn�t be an anti-Semite.  He pointed out that he�d dedicated his 1936 book Guide to Kulchur to Louis Zukofsky, a Jew, which is sort of like saying, �I�m not a racist! Here, look at my black friend!�

Pound's mugshot

What does Pound have to do with Pasolini? In 1969, Pasolini, a respected poet in his own right, interviewed the aging American.  I�m a big fan of the literary interview, and I was especially curious to know what these two would make of each other.  How would Pasolini, a passionate, politically committed Italian communist, interact with Pound, the quasi-reformed American fascist and anti-Semite, at the time elderly and not always there mentally?

Well, the interview turned out to be downright sweet, if not particularly informative.  Pasolini begins the interview by quoting Pound�s famous poem about Walt Whitman, �A Pact,� in which Pound essentially says, �I feel really uncomfortable with you, Walt, and I don�t like a lot of what you do, and I don�t like your approach to poetry, but you�re here, your presence is enormous, I cannot escape you, you seep into my poetry despite my best efforts to suppress you, so let�s reach an understanding.�  Pasolini says that he feels the same way about Pound; despite Pound�s repellent politics, he�s a still a great poet, one of the greatest of his time, and most of the rest of the interview passes with Pasolini quoting various Pound poems admiringly and Pound responding with something to the effect of, �Why yes, yes, I did write that.�

The interview represents a poignant brush between two different eras and two very different personalities and worldviews.  Pound dies in 1972 and Pasolini in �75.� By that point, surely any influence that Pound�s politics wielded on the Italian political scene, if he�d ever had any to begin with, must have seemed negligible in the extreme.

Imagine my surprise, then, when on December 13 of 2011, I found Ezra Pound had snuck his way into a news story out of Italy.  In the city of Florence, five Senegalese street vendors had been shot, two of them fatally.  The perpetrator was a far right-wing Italian nationalist and xenophobe, and he committed suicide after the attacks.  In the BBC article that I read about the event, they mentioned almost in passing that the shooter had been associated with a neo-fascist organization called Casa Pound.  The article did not elaborate on the name.

I went to Wikipedia and looked up Casa Pound.  No article.  I went to Italian Wikipedia and looked up Casa Pound, and there was an article, albeit one of the �stub� variety.  I do not speak Italian, but I used the wonders of the internet to translate the article into crude, word-for-word literal English.  I found that Casa Pound was a far-right organization that found inspiration in the political positions staked out by Ezra Pound, as well as by the more �usual suspects� of Italian fascism (rather ironic for an Italian nationalist group to be named after an American).

So Pound�s politics live on, despite his later efforts to downplay them, and despite his undeniable greatness in the literary realm.  One wonders what Pasolini would have made of the Casa Pound killings, had he lived to them.  Would he still have made his �pact� with Pound?