ENPages
page_0001
[1934]
EZRA POUND via Marsala 12-5 Rapallo Anno XII
23 Feb
John Buchan M/P
Dear Mr Buchan
I didn't know you were in Parliament, but that of course gives you a second leverage. It seems to me the REAL issue is very simple, and that black ignorance is the real EVIL.
People do not know that means of distribution exist (are known) just as potent to get goods distributed, are are electric centrals and correlated machinery for production.
That neees [needs] to be Howled from the house tops.
Unless you are a very assiduous reader you probably don't know that I have done an ABC of Economics (which shd/reach you before long). That was written over a year ago, and I was permitted to lecture at the Bocconi, though I don't think they are in any way responsible for what I said.
Pardon detail/ but I can put the matter more clearly NOW.
MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION EXIST.
Most of alledged economists are scoundrels (probably more scoundrel than fool..), trained seals. (I am trying to be brief. and I omit nuances.
Can you ask in the House three questions or can you PRINT 'em?
1. What is an auxilliary currency?
2. When money is rented, who ought to pay the rent, the man who HAS the money when the rent falls due, or some fellow who HASN'T IT?
3. What is the result of every factory, every industry under the present system, creating prices faster than it emits the power to buy?
page_0002
2.
EZRA POUND Via Marsala 12-5 RAPALLO
If you can break the boycot on those three enquiries, you will have done more in five minutes than I can in a year.
PLUS the initial statement. MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION exist (are known).
I don't know whether you are plauged [plagued] as I am by requests to go BACK to what you were doing 15 or 20 years ago.
What I wrote this Jan/ on literature is already in press.
What I wrote last Feb/ (second vol. of volitionist economies) I can NOT get into print by any means whatsoever. "Jefferson and/or Mussolini". British fascists hate it worse than the communists.
And it OUGHT to be printed, or at least part of the matter in it, discussed.
Questions (asked in public) as to WHY the Carnegie Peace Foundation refuses (or has at any rate signally FAILED) to investigate the ECONOMIC causes of war, would be of greatest possible utility.
A consumate (god provides but one brief word) "anagram of this", Nic Butler might be drawn by an M/P/
Being the paid tout of corruption and having official status as a college president he ignores "la Bohême". If you cd. lance that poison gland it wd/ be a glorious days job.
Old Mensdorf (As head of Austrian committee) wrote their central office years ago, indicating some of the economic causes. So far as I know no result, save the secretary's acknowledgement of receipt of the letter.
I don't know whether my leisure is any use? I mean I read a certain amount of current history, and resumés are at yr/ disposal IF they can be used. I mean definite references not what must often seem like wild statements, that I make for sake of brevity in personal matters.
page_0003
3.
Ezra Pound Via Marsala 12-5 Rapallo Anno XII
My curiousity was aroused by the british boycot of economic discussion in 1918 or thereabout, and I have been at least LOOKING about me, ever since.
I will ask Orage if he still has a spare copy of one of my more recent Cantos.... probably containing nothing you don't know.
Concealment of knowledge of the means of distribution is criminal sabotage on the GRAND scale / mere mechanical sabotage and street riots are NOTHING in comparison.
The disease of language itself is our affair as writers. Even that is taboo ...
(a few weeks ago) The migit X. tried to put on man's clothes and offered to answer 12 questions in the English Review.
I sent him six and he died on it. These were questions mostly re/ the betrayal of the language itself.
Degenerated into a collection of indefinite middles, newspaper blah incapable of registering or transmitting ANY idea with sufficient definiteness to be useful.
If any of this is obscure, or seems too lunatic I will try to elucidate. No use, if one has a dead wire, and no use telling men what they know already.
France is a more perfect portrait of capitalist state with implications as usual, day by day, little by little.
Until last spring I found NO evidence that anyone there was awake to what was going on/ I mean among the people I meet in Paris. Last spring it HAD begun to leak.
It is, I think, very important to treat Comité des Forges not as cause by at [but as] symptom.
cordially yours
Ezra Pound
