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RAPALLO
VIA MARSALA, 12 INT. 5

John Buchan Esq

Dear Sir

One of yr/ novels occasionally drifts into this
seaside village, years late but still full of activity.
The big game. If you mean it all, what about the
game that has been going on SINCE 1919 with, heaven knows,
very thin line skirmishing against the Bank of France,
and the hook up Creusot, Skoda, Mitsui, and the big
press owners suppressing news all over the place?

Things one didn't write in 1920 because they
sounded too fantastic, and for which the evidence now
seems to be pretty clear.

Certainly material for the novelist, and
only the novelist who goes into ten editions CAN break
through the press gag. Carnegie's Peace Endowment eating
half a million dollars a year and doing NO work on
the economic causes of war. That is Nic Butler, despite the
fact that the existence of economic causes is known, and
that at least one head of a foreign section has tried to
draw it to the attention of the central office...

There it is, if you dislike deliberate plotting of
murder, the black or gray or whatever tint you like, HAND
didn't stop twitching with the treaty of Versailles. The
French press is bought and rotten to the hilt. Your english
press .... I leave to yr/ own inspection. Find me a
paper in england that will print economic fact, and I shall
be grateful.

cordially yours

Ezra Pound

[in margin:] I don't quite see how you wrote Standfast
unless you believe something or other.