Another dynamic we have from the days when humanity was worth something
Pound, the former fencer, and Hemingway, the amateur boxer, jabbed at one another with words
You’re lucky that my understanding of humanity is mostly an image trapped in my head that can scarcely be put into words, you’re lucky that only I have to carry that ineffable burden.
So, Hemingway has a collection of letters, and they’re only TO Pound. The letters to HIM are less easy to locate. Do I give a rat’s ass what Hemingway says? Not really. He’s one of those “puff-pieces” they glamorized because he’s relatively kosher, an ape in a lion costume case. Still, he was pals with Ez so that says something in his favor. They were frenemies later in life. In the beginning Ez thought of himself as “Hem’s” unkle. Hemingway was one of the main “voices of prestige” that prevented Ez from being executed, and eventually freed from St. Elizabeth’s.
It’s because they’re -drumroll- individualists
The mortality rate among literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends
It’s so funny to me how Dugin is always railing against western individualism when he himself is a classic case of the western individual.
The “neocortices” that survived the drowning of Atlantis. Instead of Vorticism, we have Neocorticism.
Angels are another way of talking about that ineffable image of humanity I have. It’s just always flapping its wings there on the edge of my perception.
The tables have turned since Pound’s time
Pound described “the Russian” as “the western European with his conning-tower, or his top-layer, or his upper-story, or his control-board removed.”
How to put this.. the Russian has remained like that, but the Euro has sunk to a level lower, so two levels lower than Pound’s day.
Let’s stay on the subject of Hemingway though. Keep in mind Lewis’s critique that, similar to Joyce, he adopted Gertrude Stein’s style. This is one thing that explains the division between him and Pound. A style is also a worldview.
Here is how Hemingway describes himself to Pound in a letter- rather an orc confession
a man who likes to drink and fuck and eat and talk and read the papers and write something
Not much different from a woman he seems in this portrait. Animal-urges and gossip, and gossip about gossip and animal-urges. How’d Pound put it- the “upper-story” removed?
This is a step above what you can usually expect in today’s US though
Hemingway’s mocking shit list included everything from literary and artsy types to writers and the entire city of New York. “Shit on them all,” he concluded.”
Will do! Thanks for the advice, ol Hem.
There are so many I’ve left out. Who else to shit on? No, no, we’ll continue with this “literary friendship” of the past.
“Magazines” today are closer to shitlib journo sites like Buzzfeed and the 100 other near-identical niggernonsense-hubs
Pound had long ascribed America’s lack of letters to “dry-rot, magazitis,” which produced “mental sewage” for the masses. Vanity Fair Pound referred to as “Vanity Puke,” and The Ladies Home Journal, “The Ladies Home Urinal.”
Hemingway was originally a journalist, and Pound is one of the reasons you know about him today as a novelist. Pound was like an antenna that could detect talent in his time. I think Kenner’s study titled The Pound Era has a lot of truth to it that many deny today.
The last time Pound and Hemingway met in person they had lunch with Joyce, and apparently this is what Pound ranted about
Pound feared the “Huns” living east of Germany—Bolsheviks, who were working with the Jews to undermine Western Europe.
Now we have a civilization of slant-eyed niggers, are you happy!
Of course you are, because you’re probably one of them, NIGGER!
Some of us, very few of us, happened to have grabbed hold of a raft of driftwood as Atlantis went under.
Chingchong bingbong, is that a language you are more fluent in? Then you are probably similar to Hemingway, in being trapped in matter, and confined to animal-impulse and gossip. Congrats, you seem like a real human being to me, spiritual chink.
The boxer has his jabs though
Since when are you an economist, pal? The last I knew you you were a fuckin’ bassoon player.
This is a response to Ez urging him to remove his money from the US and put it in Mussolini’s liberated banks. Well I’d tell people to do that with Iran but the color revolution is occurring there like clockwork.
See, this is another one like Eliot or Joyce or Lewis, who Pound is “responsible” for
Hemingway reiterated in this letter that he “learned more about how to write and how not to write from Pound than from any other son of a bitch alive.”
The top-floor was removed in Hem so he couldn’t grasp political philosophy- my theory.
Pound wrote this to Eliot’s journal
economics are about as complicated as a gasoline engine and ignorance of them is not excusable even in prime ministers and other irresponsible relics of a disreputable era.
These were the days when cars were something new. It’s more like as complicated as a “hadron collider” today.
Even our billionaires who believe they’re masters of the economy are slaves, so what does that tell you? They might as well be pouring canola oil in a gasoline engine.
It’s hard to hate Hemingway, even if he ended up being a system-clown from the perspective of history
As Europe headed closer to war, Hemingway’s letters to Pound remained friendly. Hemingway once sent Pound the jawbones of a shark that his poet friend dubbed “The Grave of the Unknown Sailor.” Impressed by this object’s “power and tenacity,” “Pound hung them on his living room wall,”
Only a real friend mails you the jaws of a shark AND prevents your execution.
This post probably falls on deaf ears though, because even Hemingway is gone today. It’s only “multicultural” niggery that people are steeped in.
“I’m a proud HUN!”
Ah, a further subtlety
Brought up in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway had been accustomed to mocking Jews and referred to himself as “Hemenstein,” or added the suffix “stein” to the nicknames of friends. This prejudice appeared in letters to Pound, as Hemingway labeled certain individuals “Celto-Kike” or “Bloomsbury kike intellectual.”
Similar awareness to Lewis then. Just a 20th century American, so less of a Steinkike by nature.
“Moi ois are slanted, I don’t know Freedom or Reason, please send help.”
You can study the interaction of these two writers here. I don’t find much in the way of Pound’s letters to Hemingway in it though, and these are probably buried for obvious reasons.