The Gift (38 page)

Hermes is not greedy, however. He likes the clink of coin but he has no hidden pile. Pictures of Hermes usually show him with a little bag of change, just enough to get the trading started. He’s no miser asleep on heaps of gold. He loves the fluidity of money, not the weight. When he’s a thief he’s usually a generous thief. In the
Homeric Hymn to Hermes
, the newborn god steals some of Apollo’s cattle but immediately sacrifices them to the other gods. Later he invents the lyre and makes it a gift to Apollo, who, though he’s still angry about the cattle, gives Hermes a staff in return. Hermes is hardly a god of gift exchange, but as the gift is marked by motion, he is not its antagonist, either.

Unlike the other gods, Hermes is never identified with a place. He can stay “on the road” because he has no territory to defend. Other Greek gods have, as it were, an ego position to
uphold; they can always be pinned down, therefore, caught in a streak of vanity. Hermes is untrappable. It’s not that he’s humble, he’s shameless. After he steals Apollo’s cattle, Apollo (who’s very serious about right and wrong) takes the thief before Zeus. But Hermes just invents a fantastic lie, until Zeus, who knows very well what has happened, begins to laugh at his brassy denials. In that laugh Hermes remains free; he can’t be hooked on Apollo’s moral tone.

Hermes is sexually shameless as well. In the
Odyssey
Hephaestus makes a magic net and catches his wife in bed with Ares. The gods gather around, laughing at the trapped adulterers, and when someone says, “Can you imagine yourself in Ares’ position?” only Hermes pipes up: “Yes!” He can climb into bed when the chance arises, but never gets stuck there. He has none of the virtues of the hearth. He’s a god of what we call “cheap sex,” sex on the highway. People who go through a series of casual affairs after a divorce have put themselves in the care of Hermes. Their other gods, those who call for more durable affection, may speak up (“Will he be with you on Christmas?”), but the first sparks of erotic fantasy cannot be struck from such serious tones.

Hermes can’t be trusted, of course. They say “he either guides the way or leads astray.” If you are stuck, Hermes will get you into bed or sell you something or push you down the path, but after that there’s no guarantee. In this way he is identified with intellect and invention. In a Hermetic mood we will make a hundred intellectual connections only to find, when we check them with a less restless god, that ninety-nine of them are useless.

Homer tells us that Zeus gave Hermes “an office … to establish deeds of barter amongst men throughout the fruitful earth,” and he has done his job well. He may be the twentieth century’s healthiest Greek god. He is present wherever things move quickly without regard to specific moral content, in all
electronic communication, for example, or in the mails, in computers and in the stock exchange (especially in international money markets).

Hermes will exchange gifts, but he is quite different from any god of the gift because his connections are made without concern for lasting affection. He isn’t opposed to durable bonds, he just doesn’t care. In
a
strict
gift-consciousness, then, or in any consciousness with a high moral tone, Hermes will be forced into the background. If your god says, “Thou shalt not steal,” Hermes will not leave (he’s too tricky), but he will have to disguise himself. He’ll turn his collar around and sell Bibles over the radio.

There are obvious connections between the mythology of Hermes and the European myth of the Jew. When the double law of Moses fell into disrepute, Christians identified themselves with the first half of the law, the call to brotherhood, and remembered the Jews primarily for the second half, the permission to usure. When a “limit to generosity” was dropped from the collective attitude, it reappeared in the collective shadow as a tricky Jew, skilled in trade and not part of the group. Furthermore, ever since the Diaspora the Jew has been seen as the uprooted one, the wanderer and the stranger. Jews in Europe were taken to be alocal, able to live in a place without becoming identified with it. Jews have always been attacked, therefore, in times of local nationalism.
*

Ezra Pound’s image of the Jew is basically an elaboration of
this mythology. First of all, for Pound the Jew was an international force, bearing allegiance to no particular country and therefore destructive to all. Pound tells the English, for example, that they used to have a fine empire, “but you let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your Empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew. Your allies in your victimized holdings are the
bunya
, that is, the money lender.”

Second, as this quote already makes clear, for Pound the Jew is the usurer, not simply skilled in finance but a sneak thief who bleeds the nation. The “kike god” is monopoly, and “the first great HOAX” of these evil people “was substitution of kike god … for universal god.” The main trick of Jewish bankers is to secretly steal the banking powers away from local governments. “After Lincoln’s death the real power in the United States passed from the hands of the official government into those of the Rothschilds and others of their evil combine.”

Third, for Pound the Jew is in charge of communication. Not only are the newspapers actually “Jewspapers,” but “the Morgenthau-Lehman gang control 99% of all means of communication inside the United States and … they can drown out and buy out nearly all opposition …” Jews fill the press and the radio waves with lies for their own selfish gain: “An artificial ignorance is diffused, artificially created by the usurocratic press …,” and so on.

Finally, as you can see, Pound’s Jew has remarkable powers. He secretly controls huge nations, he controls ideas and intellectual life, he controls the money and he controls “99% of all
means of communication.” Surely we are in the presence of a god! And though Hermes himself is not marked by the greed that Pound finds in this character, all the rest is pure Hermes—the Protector of Thieves and God of Commerce, the Messenger of the Gods and the Lord of the Roads.

The character Pound seeks to describe has one final trait: he is diseased (or disease-transmitting). Pound once wrote a newspaper article with the simple title “The Jew: Disease Incarnate.” The sickness is sexual: “Jewish control is the syphilis of any gentile nation”; Jews are the “gonorrhoeal elements” of international finance. “Usury and sodomy the Church condemned as a pair, to one hell, the same for one reason, namely that they are both against natural increase.” The image here is an extension of the natural metaphor out of which Pound works (as natural increase is sexual, so its enemy is a sexual disease), but I don’t think we will get very far trying to connect this part of Pound’s Jew to Pound’s ideas. Nor does it have much to do with Hermes. It has to do with psychological repression. An aspect of the self forced to remain in the shadow invariably takes on a negative cast not at all inherent in it. It becomes dirty or violent, trivial or huge, diseased or evil. To integrate the shadow with the ego involves holding a sort of dialogue with it in which these negative aspects fall away and the repressed element comes forward in a simplified form, accepted as “no big thing” into the daylight self. So long as the ego refuses commerce with the shadow, however, the shadow will always seem repulsive.

There is a strange fairy tale in the brothers Grimm collection which pulls together all the threads of our story so far— Pound’s generosity toward his fellow artists, his turn toward money and political economy, his devotion to Mussolini, his willfulness, his Jew, and the consequences of repression. The tale is at once a drama of the Jew in the shadow of the European Christian and a parable of Ezra Pound’s life.

The Jew in the Hawthorn Hedge

Once upon a time there was an honest and hardworking servant who worked for a rich miser. The servant was always the first one out of bed in the morning and the last one in bed at night. Whenever there was a hard task no one else wanted to tackle, the servant would take it in hand. He never complained; he was always jolly.

The miser kept the servant around by never paying him his wages. After three years, however, the servant announced that he wanted to see a bit of the world and he asked for his pay. The miser gave him three farthings, one for each year, saying, “That’s a bigger and handsomer wage than you would have received from many a master.” The good servant, who understood little about money, pocketed his capital and went on his way, up hill and down dale, singing and skipping to his heart’s content.

Soon the servant met a little dwarf who asked him for help, saying that he was poor and needy and too old to work. The kindhearted servant took pity on the dwarf and he handed over his three farthings. Then the dwarf said, “Because you’ve been so good to me, I shall grant you three wishes.” “All right,” said the servant, “I’ll wish myself first a blowgun that will hit everything I aim at; secondly, a fiddle which, when I play it, will make everybody dance who hears the sound; and thirdly, if I make a request of anybody, that he may not refuse it.”

The wishes granted, the servant went merrily on his way. Soon he met a Jew who was standing by the road, listening to a bird singing in the top of a tall tree. “Miracle of God!” the Jew cried, “to think that such a small creature should have such an awfully powerful voice! If only it were mine!” Whereupon the servant shot the bird with his newly acquired blowgun. It fell dead into a hawthorn hedge.

“You dirty dog,” said the servant to the Jew, “go and fetch your bird!” “Oh my!” said the Jew. “If the gentleman will drop the ‘dirty,’ the ‘dog’ will come on the run! I’m willing to pick up the bird, for after all, you hit it.” He lay on the ground and began to work his way into the bushes. When he was in the middle of the hawthorns, a spirit of mischief got the better of the good servant: he took up his fiddle and started to play. The Jew began to dance wildly; the thorns tore his coat, combed his goatee, and pricked him all over. The Jew begged the servant to stop but he wouldn’t, thinking, “You’ve skinned plenty of people; now the hawthorn hedge won’t be any kinder to you.” Finally the Jew offered to give the servant a whole purse of gold if he’d stop his fiddling. The servant took the gold and went on his way.

When the servant was quite out of sight the Jew began to curse him. “You wretched musician, you tavern fiddler! You rogue, put a penny in your mouth so that you may be worth four farthings!” When he had thus given vent to his feelings he went into town to find a judge. The judge sent his people after the servant, who was brought back to town, tried, and condemned to the gallows for highway robbery. As he mounted the ladder with the hangman, however, the servant asked the judge to grant him one last wish. “I beg you let me play my fiddle one last time.” Of course as soon as he started to play, everyone began to dance, even the town dogs, until all were so tired the judge offered to free him and give him anything if he would only stop playing. The good servant put down his fiddle and climbed down from the gallows. He stepped up to the Jew, who was lying on the ground and gasping for breath. “You dirty dog, now confess where you got your money or I’ll begin to play again.” “I stole it, I stole it!” screamed the Jew, “but you
earned it honestly.” The judge had the Jew led to the gallows and hanged as a thief.

This repulsive little story belongs to a group of tales in the Grimms’ collection in which the imaginative growth of the plot is cut off by some unquestionable collective attitude. It comes from a culture (early nineteenth-century Germany) that had not learned to live with the Jew in the hedge any more than Pound ever did.

The servant in the story is “softhearted,” a character at home with gift exchange but not with money. The first thing we should note is that his softheartedness,
by itself
, is not a weakness or failing: his gift exchange works. It has its own power. He gets his wishes. In a different tale—if, for example, the problem of the story were to find the servant a bride— things would have proceeded with no further ado after the gift exchange with the dwarf. But the problems in this story are power, greed, and social relations mediated by money. This seems to be a land where people sell their labor in the marketplace. The servant’s soft heart is not enough. He’s a naïf, somebody who just got off the boat. He’s Walt Whitman lifted from a Civil War hospital, 1862, and set down in London, 1914.

At the start of the tale the miser cheats the servant and the servant doesn’t feel the insult. On a conscious level, he has no idea what three years’ labor is worth. He goes singing and skipping down the road, and we are left waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then on his first wish our happy worker calls for a weapon! Clunk. Now we know the insult
was
felt. It is not yet conscious, but the servant
does
have a money side to him, one that felt both hurt and unarmed when he was cheated.

The Jew appears. I take the Jew to be the servant’s shadow, a personification of that part of him that felt the blow. The Jew is exactly the man the servant needs to meet, too. Here is someone who knows about money, who could tell him the market value of a year’s work. The Jew makes this clear with his parting insult: “Put a penny in your mouth so that you may be worth four farthings.” The image sums up the problem: our simpleton with his three farthings is a three-quarter wit, so to speak, and needs a Jew to provide him the fourth coin.