The Gift (39 page)

Arthur Rackham’s illustration for “The Jew in the Hawthorn Hedge.”

Although the Jew shows a touch of greed (“If only it were mine!”), he first appears as a man who responds spiritually to beauty: he is moved by the song of the bird and he praises the Lord. Also, he appears immediately after the gift exchange, as if he were drawn into the circle of consciousness not only by the servant’s need for him but by his own longing for something—something to do with song and gift.

So we have two men drawn to each other by mutual need. The servant might teach the Jew about the gift, and the Jew could teach him about money. The singing bird is the promise
of their possible harmony, something beautiful and higher. For a moment we see the three of them together.

But the servant kills the bird. The touch of anger in him and the touch of greed in the Jew dominate and prevent the union. Then a “spirit of mischief” comes over the servant and he tortures the Jew. What might have been a simple anger at the start of the story has turned into a bitterness that possesses the servant and sours him for the rest of the tale.

When the robbed Jew goes to find the judge, the imaginative tension of the tale collapses. The judge carries a solidified collective attitude. He seems to know only one law—“Thou shalt not steal”—and applies it first to the servant and then to the Jew, never looking into the particulars of the case. At the end the Jew is simply murdered, and the problems of the story are left unsolved. The miser is never dealt with (a miser who is
not
a Jew, by the way); the servant’s meanness and greed (it is
he
who steals the gold) are not addressed; his naïveté is left intact. Nor does the Jew’s wonder and spiritual longing lead him anywhere. The bird is killed. There is no dialogue, no change. The death at the end of the tale redeems nobody, it is simply brutal.

There are three or four ways of dealing with shadow figures. The Christian way has been to say that everything on the dark side is “not-God” and must be avoided or attacked. Another way is to face the shadow, address it and see what it wants. Such a dialogue requires that the ego position be suspended for a moment so that the shadow may actually speak. There is a similar mystic or Buddhist approach in which one disidentifies with both the ego and the shadow. Finally, one could switch allegiance and identify with the shadow itself. In a Black Mass, for example, the priest approaches the dark side not to fight it or debate it but to worship. Many cultures have annual festivals— like the Mardi Gras—during which everyone may put on a mask and act out what is hidden during the rest of the year.

The servant in our story never gets close to the shadow, of course. He doesn’t take the Jew seriously enough to either talk with him or be wary of him. As a result, his own shadow side takes control without his conscious self becoming aware of it. At the end of the story the servant himself has become what one expects will be a sanctimonious miser, bad-mouthing the Jews as he invests his stolen gold. In short, he leaves the tale a possessed simpleton, skipping and singing and killing birds!

Ezra Pound, from the time he left college until sometime in the 1920s, was the hardworking servant—the first out of bed in the morning and the last to sleep at night. Like our hero, he had an authentic sense of the gift and its power; not only was he personally gifted, but his relationship to the outer world was successfully mediated by generosity. At the same time, however, he seems to have suffered some insult that became buried in the unconscious. William Carlos Williams says that he and Pound had an ongoing argument about which was the correct food for a poet, bread or caviar. Pound favored caviar. Some part of Pound felt he was a king—and yet he had no castle and no kingly powers. Out of some disappointment— an unreciprocated gift, a lost kingdom—the poet turned to the money question and began looking for a thief. As if in answer to his own invocation a figure came toward him, a Hermes/Jew who might have been carrying the missing farthing. If he were an Old Testament Jew, he might have been able to teach Pound how to protect his gift, how to deal in cash at the edges of the self so that life might go on within.

But Pound, like the servant, went haywire when he met the Jew.

For a man given to invoking deities, Pound was strangely scornful of psychological phenomena. He once wrote to Joyce that “Preserving public morality is more important than exploring psychological hinterlands.” As for modern psychotherapy:

The general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb on his weskit.

I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited periods. So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.

In short, the best physic for a man with bad dreams is a hitch in the army.

With Pound’s own righteousness coupled to such an attitude toward the psyche—no wonder Hermes never got out of the shadow. As with the servant, the insult Pound felt to his own worth turned into an unending bitterness; what had been singing fell dead. An obsession with money and political thinking began to cut off the poetry, as Yeats had feared. Then everything escalated. Pound took the growing dead-ness as
caused
by the Jews—Jews were cutting him off from the news, Jews were stealing the gold, Jews were destroying the crops, Jews were fouling the nest. Like the servant, Pound never turned to face the Jew as a part of himself. He called for the judge, for men with a will toward order who could enforce “public morality.” By the 1930s he could write a whole treatise on sharing the wealth with not a drop of compassion in it. And by the 1940s his hobbled imagination could only produce the old solution to the old story—kill the Jew:

IV • Imagist Money

In Federico Fellini’s movie
Amarcord
, one of the workmen building a house pauses to say a little poem:

In London before the First World War, Pound became involved in an economic reform movement called Social Credit. Organized around the ideas of a Scottish engineer, Major C. H. Douglas, the Social Creditors sought to answer the bricklayer’s question. Credit refers to our trust in the ability and intention of a purchaser to make payment at some future time of a debt incurred in the present. With credit, earning power over time can be concentrated in the present so that a third-generation worker might own outright a house his grandfather once bought “on credit.” “Credit is the future tense of money,” says Pound.

To explain why the bricklayer doesn’t in fact own a house, Social Creditors distinguished between “real credit” and “financial credit.” Real credit is the purchasing power of a group over time—all that comes of labor, technology, and the gifts of nature. Financial credit is the same thing expressed with money. Social Creditors did not oppose the monetary expression of credit—large industries and nations cannot operate without that abstraction—but, they said, financial credit should equal real credit. What happens instead
is that self-interested bureaucrats take over the management of financial credit and it begins to become detached from the real. If money managers with houses begin to appear alongside bricklayers who can’t get a mortgage, then something is the matter with credit.

Pound, in his elaboration of these ideas, rests financial credit not only on real wealth but quite specifically on natural increase. “What constitutes a sound basis of credit … was and is, the abundance, or productive capacity, of nature taken together with the responsibility of the whole people.” In the comparison of two banks which I mentioned some time ago, for example, the bank of Siena was a good bank because it based credit on natural abundance. As Pound describes it:

Pound’s stock example of an evil bank was the Bank of England. In a book by Christopher Hollis called
The Two Nations
Pound came across a quote attributed to that bank’s founder, William Paterson. A prospectus written in 1694 for
potential investors included this sentence: “The bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.” Pound repeats the sentence over and over in the
Cantos
and in his prose. Here value is detached from its root in the natural world; here lies the seed of the dissociation between real and financial credit. Money “created out of nothing” cannot have real value or real increase, but the “hell banks,” through abstraction and mystification, make it appear to have both. Once such false money is at large, it secretly gnaws away at the true value that rests on the growing grass and the living sheep.

Pound divided all goods into three classes:

• 1 transient goods (“fresh vegetables, luxuries, jerry-built houses, fake art, pseudo books, battleships”),
  

• 2 durable goods (“well constructed buildings, roads, public works, canals, intelligent afforestation”), and
  

• 3 permanent goods (“scientific discoveries, works of art, classics”).
  

In phrases reminiscent of our description of a gift, Pound adds that the goods in his third group “can be put in a class by themselves, as they are always in use and never consumed, or they are … not destroyed by consumption.” The only change I would suggest in these groups would be to move vegetables—or any life that is cyclically reborn—into the last category, in the spirit of Pound’s own lines from a late canto: “The clover enduring, / basalt crumbled with time.” Clover endures the way art endures. The verb is the same as in the
usura
canto, “no picture made to endure nor to live with / but to sell and sell quickly.”

Pound felt that as long as we are going to use money as a symbol of value, there should be different kinds of money to stand for different kinds of value: clover money for clover
and basalt money for basalt. “For every bit of DURABLE goods there ought certainly to be a ticket [i.e., a piece of money] … But what about perishable goods, stuff that rots and is eaten …?” he asks. “It would be better … if money perished at the same rate as goods perish, instead of being of lasting durability while goods get consumed and food gets eaten.” He sought, therefore, a currency “no more durable than … potatoes, crops or fabrics.” Until the symbols of value accurately reflect the various kinds of wealth, we will always have the unfair situation of some folks having “money wealth” that increases in their bank accounts while others have “potato wealth” that decays in their larder. So Pound proposed a vegetable currency which, like the bread the fairies leave at night, would perish in the hands of those who did not use it.

He was particularly keen on stamp scrip, a form of currency proposed by the German economist Silvio Gesell. As Pound tells it, Gesell “saw the danger of money being hoarded and proposed to deal with it by the issue of ‘stamp scrip.’ This should be a government note requiring the bearer to affix a stamp worth up to 1 percent of its face value on the first day of every month. Unless the note carries its proper complement of monthly stamps it is not valid.” With stamp scrip, you lose money by having money. Whoever has something in his pocket on the first of the month will see it shrink by 1 percent, rather than grow. If you keep it a hundred months it will perish completely. (Stamp scrip is
Schwund geld
in German, “shrinking money.” Pound sometimes calls it “counter-usury,” and in letters to Mussolini refers to it as “transient currency” and as money that bears “negative interest.” It’s money that decays.)

Both Pound and Gesell thought that stamp scrip would prevent hoarding and increase the velocity of the money in circulation. Nobody would want to hold on to it. I’m not sure
that it does this any better than conventional interest—when all money bears interest, uninvested money shrinks, too. But there is one obvious difference between stamp scrip and conventional interest: the
direction
of the increase is reversed. A conventional interest payment goes to the owner of the money; with stamp scrip (as with gifts) the increase goes
away
from the owner of the wealth (it goes to the state, about which more later). Moreover, again as with a commerce of gifts, the increase of stamp scrip goes to the group as a whole, not to individuals. “Anyone who thinks to keep it put by in a stocking will find it slowly melting away. Anyone who needs it to live by, or who uses it to stimulate and increase the well-being of the nation, will profit by it.”

The imagery of Pound’s argument ties stamp scrip to the fertility of nature, just as he tied credit to “the growing grass.” Metallic money should not stand for perishable goods, he declares, because its durability “gives it certain advantages not possessed by potatoes or tomatoes.” Nor should it represent the value of goods that increase by nature (“Gold … does not reproduce itself …”). But with stamp scrip—as long as the state prints the money and also sells the stamps—a sort of natural cycle is established: money dies in the state and the state gives it life again. It perishes but, like “the clover enduring,” is reborn (increased if the group’s wealth has increased). With the state playing the part of the topsoil, as it were, stamp scrip imitates animal and vegetable goods that decay into a fertile compost.