Pound and MacDiarmid: Fascism, Communism and Modernity

Peter Crisp

"La bourgeoisie est 1'autre nom de la societe moderne ." Fran~ois Furet Hugh MacDiarmid met Pound just once in his life, in 1970.' They got on very well. The measure of just how well is given by Pound's talking freely with MacDiarmid at a time of his life when he had virtually retreated into silence, and by MacDiarmid's saying, on the strength of this one meeting, that "Of all the men I have known, I loved Ezra Pound" (Bold 486-87) . It is not surprising that a current should have passed between them; they shared many old, long dead friends, such as A .R . Orage, and they had long admired each other, having corresponded in the early thirties. The basis of this reciprocal admiration almost certainly lay in a series of uncanny artistic and biographical parallels that subsisted between them. Pound and MacDiarmid were both Modernist poets, though at this very general level the younger MacDiarmid undoubtedly followed in Pound's wake.' They both produced both very short and amazingly long poems . The short poems, MacDiarmid's lyrics in Synthetic Scots and Pound 's Images, came first, while neither of their long poems, Pound's Cantos and MacDiarmid's "Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn," were ever finally completed . The work of both men is incredibly uneven, with at one extreme great poetry and at the other prosaic vituperation and prolixity. They were both capable of the most delicate lyricism and the most savage satire . They both practised creative translation, inserting many such translations into their long, non-narrative poems; they also stuffed these poems with quoted and original utterances in many languages . For both of them, their multilingualism and creative translation was part of a wider cultural internationalism that aspired above all to unite East and West. For Pound the main Eastern point of focus was Confucian China, for MacDiarmid it was

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Vedantic India. For both men, the women in their lives were emotionally and spiritually central . This centrality of the feminine is expressed by both of them poetically as a Gnostic vision of a divine, feminine principle.' They both assented to a Neo-Platonically inspired metaphysic with a strong emphasis, at the very least, upon the immanent nature of spiritual reality . Finally, they were both in their maturity committed to an anti-liberal politics, Pound from the fascist right and MacDiarmid from the communist left.' Some of the above parallels are no doubt due to chance . Yet it would be fantastic to think that all of them were rooted in nothing but coincidence . Most of them undoubtedly have their origin in a shared, Modernist, cultural formation . This formation was rooted in the group that clustered about the magazine the New Age, and its editor A.R. Orage, before, during and after the First War. The eighteen year old MacDiarmid actually made it into the pages of the New Age, with an article entitled "The Young Astrology," almost five months before Pound himself, who published in it constantly between late 1911 and his departure from England in the early twenties (Bold 76) .5 (MacDiarmid came to play a dominating role in the magazine after that departure) . The role of the New Age circle, with members such as T.E. Hulme and Ford Madox Ford, in the genesis of English language, literary Modernism is very well known . Evidently, a great deal of what Pound and MacDiarmid shared as poets has its origin here. Their common, basic metaphysic, with its Gnostic and Neoplatonic inspirations, also stems from the New Age circle, which sheltered individuals such as Allen Upward and G.R.S . Mead.' The title of MacDiarmid's first, New Age article, "The Young Astrology," is redolent of the kind of "up-to-date" esotericism that Orage encouraged . It was, however, not only Pound and MacDiarmid's poetic forms and metaphysics which were moulded to a large degree by the New Age, but also their politics, or at least economics . The economics of Social Credit, an underconsumptionist doctrine which saw economic salvation as lying in the abolition of private banking, were introduced to Orage by its inventor Major Douglas in 1918. Social Credit was quickly taken up by both Pound and MacDiarmid. It was the basis of their correspondence in the early thirties, when Pound, in a letter of 1934, cited MacDiarmid to show that you could be both "Douglasite and communist" (Nicholls 80) . By 1934 Pound was already an unqualified admirer of Mussolini and Italian fascism . Looking back from after the politics of the Popular Front in the middle and late thirties, and of the Second War in the forties, we may at first find it surprising that an admirer of fascism should find nothing to

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object to in MacDiarmid's communism. One might at first think simply that enthusiasm for Social Credit economics enabled Pound to "overlook" MacDiarmid's communist politics . Things were however far more complex than this . Pound and MacDiarmid are in fact instances of a phenomenon which was widespread in the Europe of the inter-War years, that of intellectuals who displayed an attraction to both communism and fascism . Pound's primary attraction was to Mussolini and fascism, and MacDiarmid's to Lenin and communism . They both however were, at various periods, enthusiastic about what many would now think of as the "other side ." MacDiarmid, who came from a working class though not big city background, was a committed socialist from the beginning . In 1908, at the age of sixteen, he joined both the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society (Bold 54-57) . During the nineteen twenties he moved steadily leftwards. This process culminated in his writing his three Hymns to Lenin between 1930 and 1934, in which last year he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, having been expelled from the National Party of Scotland for commmunist deviation . From the middle nineteen thirties he defined his politics in strongly anti-fascist terms, writing in 1939 for instance of "the naked confrontation of Communism and Fascism" (MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet -A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas 234). His anti-fascism was undoubtedly sincere, but was in the first instance a consequence of a change in the politics of the Comintern . This change involved the rejection of the doctrine of the so-called Third Period, which saw all political movements to the right of communism as being fascist . This meant in reality that the Social Democrats, termed "social fascists," were selected as the communists' priveleged target of attack. By making any form of left unity impossible, the "Third Period" had facilitated Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. Faced with the reality of Hitler, the Comintern adopted the politics of the Popular Front, calling for all left and democratic forces to unite against fascism . (This change of "line" was clearly underway by late 1934 and was consummated at the VII Comintern Congress of August 1935 (Furet 26163)) . It was the communist move to the Popular Front line of broad left unity against fascism proper that was the initial source of MacDiarmid's anti-fascism . Prior to this period, he had often been enthusiastic about fascism . In 1923, a year after Mussolini's March on Rome, MacDiarmid declared that Mussolini represented "an experiment in patriotic Socialism" and that "We want a Scottish Fascism which shall be . . . a lawless believer in law - a rebel believer in authority" (Bold 169-70) . MacDiarmid was

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not alone in conceiving of fascism as a form of socialism . That old socialist Shaw was happy in 1927 to describe Mussolini as "a Socialist" (Shaw 383). Neither was MacDiarmid's declaration of 1923 a flash in the pan. In 1929 he declared himself sympathetic to "a species of Scottish Fascism" and in 1930 said of a secret Scottish nationalist society, Clann Albain, to which he belonged, that "The whole organisation is on a militaristic basis, and in this resembles the Fascist movement" (Bold 274 & 278). In 1931 MacDiarmid published his first Hymn to Lenin, entitled at this stage simply "To Lenin," in an anthology edited by Lascelles Abercrombie . "To Lenin" was footnoted as coming from a work in progress entitled Clann Albain (Bold 299) . Clann Albain was of course the name of the "militaristic" organisation that MacDiarmid had said "resembled the Fascist movement ." Here Leninist and fascist impulses are clearly mingling . Pound's attraction to Mussolini was preceded and accompanied by his attraction to Lenin. Intensely excited by a 1924 lecture of Lincoln Steffens on Soviet Russia, Pound gave in Canto XVI, first published in 1925, a picture of the Russian revolution : There was a man there talking, To a thousand, just a short speech, and Then move `em on. And he said: Yes; these people, they are all right, they Can do everything, everything except act; And go an' hear `em, but when they are through, Come to the bolsheviki . . . Steffens' Autobiography makes it clear that the man talking was Lenin ;' Pound by this time totally shared the commitment to action that he attributed to the Bolsheviks . He had moved to Italy in 1924. (This was two years after Mussolini's seizure of power, but the move does not seem to have been politically motivated) . In 1926 he discovered the New York based communist magazine New Masses, to which he contributed occasionally up to 1930. Peter Nicholls attributes the quickening of his political interests to this discovery : 1926 was the first year that Pound mentioned Mussolini, admiringly (Nicholls 47-48) . His references to Lenin throughout the twenties and thirties are unfailingly positive . Thus in "Jefferson and/or Mussolini," written in early 1933, while making it clear that he considers Lenin's revolution to be specific to Russia and not ultimately as interesting as Italy's, Pound says that Mussolini "in our time" has dared to assume more responsibility than any other man (save possibly Lenin) ;" he also

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talks of "the bourgeois demo-liberal anti-marxian anti-fascist anti-Leninist system" (Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini 39 & 72) . As late as 1939, when he had developed a general exasperation with leftists, Pound was still happy to juxtapose quotations from Mussolini and Lenin (Pound, Selected Prose 1909-1965 270) . Pound's interest in leftist and Leninist ideas is well known, but his combination of it with fascism is generally dismissed as confused by writers such as Nicholls and Robert Casillo . Bold likewise asserts that MacDiarmid "was in a world of his own" when he saw Fascism and Socialism as interchangeable terms (Bold 170) . This he was certainly not, and neither was Pound . Francois Furet has shown just how widespread was a simultaneous attraction to both communism and fascism amongst European intellectuals in the inter-War years . Thus in Germany, after the retreat of the post-War, Bolshevik, revolutionary wave, and Stalin's institution of "Socialism in One Country" in 1924, an extreme right wing current of thought emerged termed "national Bolshevism ." This contained figures such as Moeller Van den Bruck, author of "The Third Reich," and Ernst Niekisch, who, like Mussolini himself, had started out as an extreme, revolutionary socialist (Furet 230-31 & 237-40) . National Bolshevism, or "Prussian Socialism," saw in Stalin's corporatist, hierarchical and anti-individualist, Russian society a valuable, though partial, model for a revived, nationalist

Germany intent on overcoming the common enemy of the liberal, capitalist West . After Hitler's seizure of power, German National Bolshevism faded away and by the mid-thirties the rise of the Popular Front ruled out for many, such as MacDiarmid, any perception of a link between fascism and communism . Pound however was not eccentric in continuing to exhibit enthusiasm for both extreme right and extreme left forms of anti-liberalism . Furet states that those who did so in fact outnumbered those who did not (Furet 352) . Thus Drieu La Rochelle, a pro-Nazi collaborator during the

Second War, published a book entitled "Socialisme fasciste" at the time of the Popular Front's emergence, and declared that "I have come to believe that fascism is a necessary stage in the destruction of capitalism" (Furet 353-54) . 1 In 1937 Shaw, expressing a very similar view to Drieu's from the left, characterised fascism as a form of retarded socialism held back by being associated with capitalist interests . For him the problem with Hitler and Mussolini, whom he greatly admired, was that they did not go far enough, while Stalin did (Shaw 480-92) . There was nothing eccentric in Pound and MacDiarmid's exhibiting enthusiasm for both fascism and communism . The crucial question of course is what was it that made both fascism

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and communism simultaneously attractive to many intellectuals in the twenties and thirties? One must start with that common figure of hate for both, what Pound terms "the bourgeois demo-liberal . . . system" (Jefferson and/or Mussolini 7) . Both fascist and communist hated and despised "the bourgeois ." As Furet notes, the notion of the bourgeoisie as a class was inherently vague, being defined economically rather than with the juridical precision of the estates of the ancien regime (Furet 17-48) .' Such an illdefined entity was tailor made to receive the projection of hostile fantasies from both fascist and communist . These fantasies were bound up with hostility to the one thing with which, via its identification with capitalism, the bourgeoisie was clearly associated, social and economic modernity . Peter Berger (1979) provides a powerful explanation for the attraction of many intellectuals to extreme forms of, primarily Marxist, socialism . This explanation can, as he briefly indicates, also explain their, often simul taneous, attraction to fascism . The essential context of modernity is that of a split between private and public spheres . The public sphere is dominated by the impersonality of, usually capitalist, economic mechanisms and by government bureaucracy, and tends to define itself as a set of technical means, ends being determined privately by individuals . These individuals, since they can find little in the way of ready made social meaning, have increasingly to create meaning out of their own slender resources . This, always potentially anomic, situation can lead to great unhappiness, but not all social groups are equally exposed to it. It presses particularly upon intellectuals because their particular role is to question tradition. Thus, while the economic and professional elites of 19th century, liberal capitalism used the, traditional but transformed, structures of Church and family to counter anomie, intellectuals, under the banner of Ibsenism and the like, came increasingly to violently attack these institutions . They thereby exposed themselves, more than any other social group, to the anomie of extreme individualism . Socialism, in its extreme Marxist versions, seemed to offer them a way out of the individualistic dilemma of both wanting to rebel against social tradition and of suffering from the anomic consequences of this rebellion . The intellectual could rebel against all established, social tradition and yet still fantasize about his future, total, reintegration into society . His very "modernistic" orientation towards the future allowed him to be both modern now and implicitly anti-modern for the still non-extant future. In the world of social fantasy, as opposed to that of social reality, he could have it both ways. Fascism offered intellectuals very much the same kinds of thing as

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Marxist socialism . Its offer of social reintegration is obvious, being bound up with extreme nationalism and a general, anti-liberal, cult of State authority . Rebellion and an orientation to the future were also crucial to it; the cultural and artistic avant gardism of Marinetti and Italian Futurism played a major role in its genesis (Tisdall & Bozzola 200-09) . In scorning the "bourgeois" fascism appealed to the spirit of youth and restless innovation; the Italian fascist hymn was "Giovinezza! Giovinezza!" - "Youth! Youth!" Mussolini, while naturally describing his fascisti as "rebels," "revolutionary spirits," and "a group of daring youth," called for "complete rebellion against the decrepit old state that did not know itself how to die" (Mussolini 40-43 & 74) . MacDiarmid catches fascist ideology brilliantly when he characterises it as "a rebel believer in authority" (Lucky Poet -A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas 234) . Fascism, just like communism, presented itself as a squaring of the circle of modernity . While surrounding itself with images of modernity, such as Mussolini the aviator, it claimed to offer a cure for the ills of modernity, that is, the ills of anomic individualism . (German Nazi ideology was less overtly rebellious and modernistic than Italian fascist ideology .) There can be no mystery about the mingling of fascist and communist impulses in a number of inter-War intellectuals .'() Social scientific generalisations are only ever approximate (MacIntyre 84-102) . Berger's analysis can account for much of the mingling of fascist and communist impulses in certain intellectuals, yet it does not really apply to Pound and MaDiarmid directly . It presents the communist or fascist intellectual as a covert individualist who believes that their antitraditional rebellion is a means to social reintegration . There is however nothing covert about the individualism of either Pound or MacDiarmid. Both writers stridently assert individual uniqueness and freedom . MacDiarmid (The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Vol . 1 222) cries : O the Devil is naething strange . His face is the crood'sain or oor When we cease to be oorsel's And become "like abody" again ." MacDiarmid also manifests a strong urge to social reintegration, but this is expressed far more by his Scottish nationalism than, as we shall see, by his communism, and he recognizes that it conflicts with his extreme individualism . In accepting this conflict, he makes a virtue of being "aye . . .

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whaur/Extremes meet" and is happy to "damn consistency" (MacDiarmid, The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Vol. 1 87 & 255) . This embracing of paradox owed much to Kierkegaard, whom MacDiarmid frequently cites, and who was an extreme, oppositional, individualist. With Pound there seems to have been originally no urge to social reintegration at all, but rather a somewhat contradictory individualism . Pound's commitment to individual libery above everything else, including the majority will, ironically shared much with classic liberals such as de Tocqueville and Mill . (Prior to his interest in Lenin Pound was violently hostile to all forms of socialism on individualistic grounds .) Yet he never referred to liberalism positively . Nineteenth century liberalism, like the Enlightenment, believed that the pre-socially defined interests of individuals naturally entailed a social ethic . Much in early Pound indicates a belief in such an ultimate compatibility of individual and society, and this probably accounts for his lack of any felt need for social reintegration. 12 Yet he was also drawn to a more extreme, oppositional form of individualism which was rooted in a Romantic vision of an irreducible conflict between individual and society. This oppositional, and so non-liberal, individualism is centered on the figure of the artist and is strikingly expressed by the young Pound's own Bohemian style of dress . During the thirties Pound was influenced by the collectivist ideals of fascist corporatism, but however much these may have modified his individualism they cannot explain his adherence to fascism, being a consequence, and so not a cause, of this. MacDiarmid's individualism was totally oppositional and Kierkegaardian, and it is in his sharing of this oppositional individualism with Pound that the relation between his communism and Pound's fascism is to be found. Pound's and MacDiarmid's visions of those "exceptional individuals" Lenin and Mussolini are virtually interchangeable . It is commonplace to observe that for Pound Mussolini was an artist : "Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled in contradictions" (Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini 34) . The concept of Mussolini as artist was common in Italian fascism, but Pound emits here no mere propagandistic echo . He rather expresses the central idea that led him to fascism . For Pound Mussolini, like Lenin, is someone who gets things done, but what he gets done is no fixed programme but an unpredictably unfolding project . This again is a common fascist concept and again it is rooted deep in Pound's own cultural formation. Mussolini is the intuitive artist who molds the dumb stupid mass of humanity to do something . The essential concept was expressed by Pound

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in 1922, when he was already committed to Social Credit economics but still lacked a clear political orientation, "All values ultimately come from our (the poets) [Pound's clarification] judicial sentences . (This arrogance is not mine but Shelley's and it is absolutely true. Humanity is malleable mud, and the arts set the moulds it is later cast into" (Pound, Selected Letters 181).) The reference to Shelley is acute, the Romantic concept of isolated, creative and inspirational, genius being fundamental . (Pound repeatedly refers to Mussolini as a "genius .")" The concept has however undergone an evolution that would have horrified Shelley . The rise of aestheticism, from the late eighteen sixties on in the English speaking world, led to a depoliticized concept of art that regarded the "philistine" majority of humankind as contemptible. Pound, like Wyndham Lewis, politicized this artistic elitism and, naturally, found fascism . To be fair, one must recognize that his attitude to the mass of humanity was not Nietzschean . He did not think they were there only to be exploited and dominated by a quasi-artistic elite ; he thought of himself as concerned with common justice for everyone . The thoughtless mass did however, for their own good, have to be artistically moulded ; Mussolini was indispensable . MacDiarmid displays exactly the same post-aestheticist contempt for the mass of humanity as Pound . In 1939 he wrote, "all my . . . wide experience has not modified, but only extended and emphasized, my sense of the worthlessness of the `too many' . . . I have understood clearly that only those few who are to some extent creative artists are really alive . . . while all others are consciously or unconsciously . . . traitors to the human process" (MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet -A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas 77) . This kind of thing recurs repeatedly in his prose and poetry . Like Pound he too thought of himself as concerned with common justice but, also like Pound, his artistic elitism entailed looking to a political genius for action, Lenin . In "The Seamless Garment," from the same volume as the First Hymn to Lenin, he exhorts a cotton mill worker to raise his sights above the everyday world . The two men proposed as the worker's inspirers are Lenin and Rilke, vanguard politician and artist. At the end of the First Hymn, the "secret" of Lenin is declared to be "the real will that bides its time and kens/ The benmaist [innermost] resolve." It is opposed to "the majority will" and, that ultimate horror for the Kierkegaardian artist, "the crowd" [the crowd] . It is not surprising that in the autobiographical "Lucky Poet" MacDiarmid declared that he would be happy to substitute for Lenin's name in these lines that of an artist, his own . There is however a certain asymmetry between MacDiarmid's

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conception of Lenin and Pound's conception of Mussolini, yet this asymmetry only emphasizes what the two poets share and what accounts for their attraction to each other's ideal dictator. At the height of his fascism Pound never criticized or relativized Mussolini, whom he saw as the ultimate artist . In the Second Hymn to Lenin, however, MacDiarmid differentiates Lenin's political task from that of the artist, and gives the artist an ultimately higher priority. Lenin is placed on the same continuum of active genius as the artist, but still finally relativized . Whereas Pound's artistic conception of politics fitted perfectly with actual fascist ideology, MacDiarmid seems to have sensed that his artistic elitism, despite its natural sympathy for Leninist vanguardism, contained elements in tension with Bolshevism . For MacDiarmid Lenin was a genius of action, as was Mussolini for Pound. At first glance this simply expresses the Bolshevik cult of Lenin as the uniter of theory and action . MacDiarmid's conception of action was not, however, that of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which was determinist and scientistic, but was more akin to Pound's, being voluntarist . For MacDiarmid, as "The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" and "To Circumjack Cencrastus" make clear, human action exists in the context of an evolutionary process which, like Bergson and Shaw, he saw as creatively unpredictable. (He no doubt imbibed much of this conception from the articles on Bergson in the New Age by T.E. Hulme, a man of the radical right.) Despite his relative, post-First War isolation in Scotland, MacDiarmid's approach to change and action can be seen as part of a general trend in Western Marxism in the twenties, when Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci all rejected determinism and emphasized willed initiative and the importance of ideological struggle . Western Marxism was, like fascism, greatly influenced by the trend of anti-scientistic voluntarism in late nineteenth century European culture. (See "From Bergson to Lukacs" in Colletti 157-98) . Despite being in reality radically voluntaristic, orthodox Bolshevism, however, remained in theory determinist and scientistic . It is probably MacDiarmid's sense that his voluntarism did not quite fit orthodox Bolshevism that made him relativize Lenin in the Second Hymn. Whatever its tensions however, his Leninism was still the projection of an arrogant, artistic, individualist elitism that allowed him, in the First Hymn to Lenin, to actively endorse the real massacres of Bolshevism, terming them "insignificant" : As necessary, and insignificant, as death Wi' a' its agonies in the cosmos still

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The Cheka's horrors are in their degree; And'll end suner! What maitters't wha we kill To lessen that foulest murder that deprives Maist men o' real lives?" As George Watson notes, the First Hymn to Lenin is an important piece of evidence showing that communist intellectuals of the thirties knew the kind of thing that was going on in the Soviet Union (Watson 53-54) . Powerful motivations have to be invoked to account for such a willed ruthlessness . Berger seems to have grasped the general nature of these motivations but, as we have seen, his analysis does not apply directly to MacDiarmid and Pound . It still however holds the ultimate key to understanding Pound's fascism and MacDiarmid's communism . The covert individualist who thinks of their rebellion as a means to social reintegration has, according to Berger, an unconsciously contradictory attitude to modernity . They want to expand its private sphere by rebellion, while desiring to destroy that private sphere by re-absorbing it into a public sphere of total socialization . Pound and MacDiarmid were not covert but overt individualists, but their attitude to modernity too was fatally ambiguous . Their common commitment to Social Credit is very significant here . Social Credit was an underconsumptionist economics which thought that, with modern technology, the only block to universal prosperity was the banking system . Both Pound and MacDiarmid frequently invoke the productivity of modern technology . Yet Social Credit also displayed a deep hostility to modernity . Douglas emphasized the distinction between real value and market price and saw the modern, bank dominated, economy as driving people to work ever harder for money rather than reaping the real benefits of leisure . Both Pound and MacDiarmid reveal a deep, underlying hostility to urban modernity . MacDiarmid, in "Island Funeral," with its powerful evocation of a pre-industrial world, talks of "the chaos" and "the din of the modern world," and, in "The Kind of Poetry That I Want," of wanting "to put the skids under the whole of modern consciousness" (MacDiarmid, The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Vol . 2 581-82 & 1009) . He also said that he liked no city overmuch, always remembering that "Cain, the murderer, was also the first city builder" (MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet -A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas 105) . Pound from the mid thirties came increasingly to place his economics in the context of a mystical union with nature via traditional agriculture, powerfully expressed in Canto 47.

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The artistic elitism of the late nineteenth century aestheticism inherited by Pound and MacDiarmid was an attempt to construct cultural meaning in the face of a modernity felt to be meaningless . Extended, hopeless boredom, a key symptom of anomie, stretches like a thread through aestheticism from Baudelaire, through Des Esseintes, to Laforgue . The root of this boredom was that hatred of progress, of the modern world, that Baudelaire preached so powerfully. It was this that made Wilde declare that "the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put Tragedy into the raiment of Comedy, so that the great realities seemed commonplace or grotesque or lacking style" (Wilde 936) . (No-one will be surprised at this stage to recall that both Baudelaire and Wilde were paradoxically great champions of modernity .) Nineteenth century aestheticism, from Gautier onwards, rejected the claims of society and politics. Its individualism was oppositional; it did not identify with the economic individual of the impersonal, capitalist market, nor with the citizen of an impersonal, representative democracy, but attempted to create a purely personal meaning via artistic creation and aesthetic experience in the private sphere. In politicizing this aestheticism Pound and MacDiarmid attempted to reimbue the impersonal public world directly with personal meaning . If the typical communist or fascist intellectual believed that they could escape from anomie by re-absorbing the private sphere into the public sphere, Pound and MacDiarmid took the other route of projecting privately generated, ultimately aesthetic, significance directly onto the public sphere ." The case of Pound and MacDiarmid presents a very significant variation upon the general case or theme of the fascist or communist intellectual . It is however a case rooted in exactly the same contradictory feelings about modernity as the more general case, and it resulted in exactly the same murderous politics of fantasy . These politics, those of fascism and communism, are no longer, at least for the time being, living options for Western intellectuals . There is however plenty of indication that oppositionalist fantasy still drives the politics of many contemporary intellectuals . A crucial symptom of this is the drive to radically politicize all culture . One way to express dissent from this, and so to begin to attempt to develop a social ethics that can somehow create a working, coherent compromise between the claims of individual autonomy on the one hand and those of social identity and public decision making on the other, is to refuse all such total politicization of culture . In the case of Pound and MacDiarmid, this means admitting, despite their politics, that they were both very great poets, though incredibly uneven ones.

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Notes
1 . "Hugh MacDiarmid" was the pen name of Christopher Grieve, just as "George Orwell" was of Eric Blair. To avoid confusion, I shall use only "MacDiarmid" or "Hugh McDiarmid" to refer to Grieve/MacDiarmid in this paper. 2. Pound was born in 1884 and MacDiarmid in 1892 . 3. For Pound's quasi-Gnostic conception of the divine as feminine, see Crisp 17393 . For the influence on MacDiarmid of the Russian Vladimir Solovyov's vision and conception of the Gnostic Sophia, see Bold 236-38 . 4. There are of the course divergences as well as parallels between the two poets. The two most striking are that MacDiarmid wrote his greatest, Scots, poetry not in free verse but in traditional metres, and that MacDiarmid completed two long poems, "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" and "To Circumjack Cencrastus ." (The exact nature of the completion of the second of these poems is however fairly problematic) . 5 . MacDiarmid's article appeared in late July 1911 (Bold 76), while the first article in Pound's series "I gather the Limbs of Osiris" appeared in early December, 1911 . 6. For the role of Mead and Upward in promoting Gnostic and Neoplatonic ideas in the New Age circle, see Crisp 173-77 . 7 . See Norman 272; Pound, The Cantos 74 ; Teirell 72, note 39 . There is an inconsistency in Pound's account in that the revolution he is picturing is that of February, not October, 1917 when Lenin was not in Russia . He probably does not actually name Lenin in order to conceal this anachronism. Pound first met Steffens in Paris in 1922, two years before the 1924 lecture (Nicholls 48). His interest in Lenin was thus probably well developed before his intense excitement at the 1924 lecture. 8. Drieu's original French reads, "J'ai acquis la conviction que le fascisme est une etape necessaire de la destruction du capitalisme ." The English translation is my own. 9. For an excellent discussion of the sociological effects of this uncertainty as to the boundaries of the bourgeosie in late 19th and early 20th century liberal capitalism, see the chapter "Who's Who or the Uncertainties of the Bourgeoisie" in Hobsbawm 165-91 . 10 . I must emphasize here that I am talking about the attraction of intellectuals in particular to both fascism and communism. Other social groups, such as businessmen, the lower anti-liberalism, tended to be attracted exclusively to either fascism or communism. This was because their economic interests seemed to indicate clearly either one or the other alternative, though this does not mean that their opposed choices may not in other ways have shared a great deal . The economic interests of intellectuals by contrast did not obviously indicate one or the other alternative, and so they were free to play with both. (We

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11 .

12 . 13 . 14 .

15 .

can of course dismiss the idea of any social group being in general influenced by predominantly disinterested motives.) MacDiarmid's greatest poetry was all written in lowland Scot, or Lallans. The following is a literal, and so, in the last line, unmetrical, translation by myself of the quoted lines: O the Devil is nothing strange His face is the crowd's or our own When we cease to be ourselves And become `like everybody' again . See for example "The Serious Artist," an essay of 1913, in Pound, Literary Essays 41-57. See Pound Jefferson and/or Mussolini 19 & 21 for examples . Watson, 53-54 translates this as follows: As necessary and insignificant as death With all its cruelties in the cosmos still The Cheka's horrors are in their degree, And will end sooner! What matters it whom we kill To lessen that foulest murder that deprives Most folk of real lives? The Cheka of course was the forerunner of the KGB. The case of MacDiarmid gives the lie to Walter Benjamin's often quoted and absurd assertion that while communism politicized art fascism aestheticized politics . Fascism politicized art every bit as much as communism. The music of Mendelsshon and Mahler, and the conducting of Bruno Walter, were banned by the Nazis not for aesthetic reasons but because Mendelsshon, Mahler and Walter were Jewish, antisemitic racism being of course at the heart of Nazi ideology and politics . The merest glance at National Socialist visual art, with its pedestrian realism and heroic gestures, will confirm that it is exactly the same kind of thing as socialist realism. In both cases, simplistic realism gives this art a mass appeal which allows the propagandistic point of the heroic gesture to be got across . Art has been totally subordinated to politics in both cases. Of course, there was an aesthetic path to fascism, as Marinetti showed (Benjamin 243-44). But then there was also an aesthetic path to communism, as MacDiarmid shows.

Works Cited
Benjamin, W. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ." Illuminations. London : Fontana, 1973 . Berger, P. "The Socialist Myth' in Facing Up to Modernity." Excursions in Society, Politics and Religion . London : Penguin, 1979 . 86-100.

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Bold, A. MacDiarmid - Christopher Murray Grieve, A Critical Biography. London : Paladin. 1990 . Casillo, R. The Genealogy of Demons -Anti-Semitism, Fascism (and the Myths of Ezra Pound. Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern UP, 1988 . Colletti, L. Marxism and Hegal. London : New Left Books, 1973 . Crisp, P. "Pound as Gnostic? Creative Mythology and the Goddess." Paideuma 23 .2/3 (Fall/Winter 1994): 173-93 . Furet, F. Le Passi D'Une Illusion -Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound. Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern UP, 1988 . Hobsbawm, E. The Age of Empire 1875-1914. London : Cardinal, 1987 . MacDiarmid, H. Lucky Poet - A Self-Study in Literature and Political Ideas . London : Methuen, 1943 . --. The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid. Vols . 1 & 2. Ed . M. Grieve and W. R. Aitken. London : Penguin, 1985 . MacIntyre, A. After Virtue . Chicago, Illinois : U Notre Dame P, 1981 . Mussolini, B . My Autobiography . Trans. R. Child. London : Hutchinson, n.d . Nicholls, P . Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing. London : MacMillan, 1984 . Norman, C. Ezra Pound . New York : MacMillan, 1960 . Pound, E . Jefferson and/or Mussolini. London : Stanley Nott, 1935 . . The Serious Artist." Literary Essays. Ed . T. S. Eliot. London : Faber & Faber, 1954 .41-57 . . Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. W. Cookson. London : Faber & Faber, 1973 . . Selected Letters. Ed . D. D. Paige. London : Faber & Faber, 1982 . . The Cantos, London : Faber & Faber, 1987 . Shaw, B. The Intelligent Woman's Guide To Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. London : Penguin, 1982 . Terrell, C. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, Vol. 1 . Berkeley, California : U of California P, 1980 . Tisdall, C. and A. Bozzola. Futurism . London : Thames & Hudson, 1977 . Watson, G. "Did Stalin Dupe the Intellectuals?" Politics and Literature in Modern Britain. London : MacMillan, 1977 . 46-70. Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London : Collins, 1966 .