ID 1108952
Los 153 | Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Schätzwert
£ 3 000 – 5 000
Typed letter signed (‘Ezra Pound’) to T.E. Lawrence (‘My dear Colonel’), Via Marsala, Rapallo, 12 December [1934]
3 pages, 270 x 225mm, on his letter-paper illustrated with the Gaudier-Brzeska head, date and a few corrections added in autograph. Provenance: Sotheby's, 20 & 21 July 1981, lot 264.
Unpublished: an extraordinarily abusive letter to T.E. Lawrence, attacking his lack of intellectual courage, his Oxford education, his career in the Middle East and the British financial system, in thrall to the banks. ‘My dear Colonel’, Pound addresses his letter, for ‘if I have real contempt for man, and when there is profound need to insult him, [I] use the perlite language which has carried England into slavery’, before launching into a tirade of impressive vitriol and scope: ‘If you hadn't had the money of England back of you, your buying and ordering of grain in Arabia (or whatever dump it was) wdn't have got you the world's front page (wrapped up in miracles etc.) Either you are infinitely insincere, or you have a lacuna in yr/mental processes almost beyond my capacity for measuring. A slave gvt/ govrned [sic] by irresponsible tyrants/ who permit almost no truth to be printed / may have produced you, and so have warped you from man's nature that you just can't see anything, or indulge that li'l exercise which Arry Stotl so admired, i.e.; "the perception of relations". As for fashionable themes. Econ/ wasn’t where I started. People blah about production/ but distribution has only reached the Bloomsbury scum, after 15 years as a suppressed topic/ and the monetary system is still almost taboo/ and banks are adored by Britain, grovelling on its belly button/ “mustn’t attack the bankers”’. Without pausing for breath he continues: ‘You may have had some physical courage at some stage of yr/ career but moral and intellectual courage you just HAVE NOT’, going on to pronounce splenetically on Oxford (‘an incubator of slaves and buro-crats’) and the ‘opium’ of steady work (‘For a man running away from his duty nothing could be more soothing than some nice tidy manual work/ huntin', painting or machine tending. Look at Mr Hemingway chasing pussy cats’); and to recommend Cummings and Cocteau (‘you aren't fit even to read about 'em’). Accusing the English of being ‘accomplices in crime they are too ignorant to understand and too comfortable to look into. Sincere supporters of murder, unsuspecting bunnies’, Pound states his support for Mussolini (‘Mussolini or Freud /I am for the Duce. But not for liberalist slosh’) and urges Lawrence to read his work (‘it is better than a lot that gets printed’).
Lawrence and Pound were first introduced in 1920, when Lawrence solicited advice on publishing whilst in the process of writing The Seven Pillars: on 20 April 1920, Pound wrote to Lawrence with characteristic forcefulness: ‘I don't care […] whether you use your own name or not; only if you don't you will be under the shameful and ignominious necessity of writing something which will interest the editor. Can you “write”?’ (sold Christie’s New York, 20 February 2004, lot 72). The present letter was written some years later: Pound's reference at the end of the letter to cantos 31 to 41 must relate to Eleven New Cantos, first published in America in 1934. Not published in Letters to T. E. Lawrence. [With:] printed questionnaire titled ‘Volitionist economics’, typed annotation by Pound at the head of the sheet ‘fink abaht it a LITTLE’.
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| Losnummer | 153 |
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| Auktionsdatum | 15.12.2023 |
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| Auktionshaus | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auktionsdatum | 15.12.2023 |
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| Auktionshaus | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auktionsdatum | 15.12.2023 |
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| Auktionsdatum | 15.12.2023 |
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| Losnummer | 153 |
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| Auktionshaus | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auktionsdatum | 15.12.2023 |
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| Losnummer | 153 |
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| Auktionshaus | CHRISTIE'S |
| Auktionsdatum | 15.12.2023 |
