facist cryptogram in twl

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A Fascist Cryptogram in "The Waste Land?"Author(s): J. Mitchell MorseSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 9, No. 2 (May, 1982), pp. 315-316Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831266.

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JOURNAL OF MODERN LITERATURE 315

Pound's effort here and elsewhere in Rock-Drill to shed new light on the motives forWindsor's abdication is typical of his interest in other than standard explanations ofhistorical events. And this is certainly a startling explanation of Edward's motives.It seems though that Pound valued Windsor as more than merely a peacemaker;apparently he also considered Edward, in his abdication, as a notable Western instanceof the Confucian man of responsibility who is capable of momentous action when it iscalled for. Just prior to the mention of Windsor in Canto LXXXVI, Pound quotes fourideograms. These ideograms are part of a passage from the Chou King. In Couvreur'sFrench translation the passage reads: "Parfois I'Etat est ebranle et ruine a cause d'un seulhomme. Parfois aussi il est prospere et tranquille parce qu'un homme s'estheureusement rancontre."5 Two ofthe ideograms that Pound extracted from the originalChinese for inclusion in Canto LXXXVIare z1-5(Mathews 3016) and jen2 (3097). To?gether these ideograms convey the Chinese concept of the "one man," the Confucianman of responsibility upon whom the welfare of the state may depend. When Poundsays "it may depend on one man /... as in the case of Edwardus" he is placing Windsorin the tradition of the i1-5 en2. These two ideograms reoccur throughout the later Cantos.On one occasion, in Canto XCV/644-645, they are followed again by mention ofWindsor's act for peace. So Edward's place in paradise seems doubly secure. He is apeacemaker and also a man of responsibility who was capable of momentous actionwhen events called for it. Pound's vision of Windsor's abdication, then, as it is presentedin The Cantos, is as flattering in its way as the conventional romantic vision is in its. In anunpublished letter to Thomas Carter, editor of Shenandoah magazine in the early fifties,he even went so far as to recommend Windsor as a worthy candidate for the NobelPeace Prize and added the playful insinuation that, if such an unlikely event were everto occur, we"would all be well on our way to, as Pound spelled it, eutopia.6

ANDREW J. KAPPELVirginia Polytechnic Institute

A FASCIST CRYPTOGRAM IN THE WASTE LAND?

An additional implication of Wagner's Rhine-Daughters' chant in The Waste Land, lines277-78 and 290-91 ?

Weialala leiaWallala leialala

?may be found in one of Valery Larbaud's travel pieces, "Lettre d'ltalie." He arrives ina Tuscan town with a group of Italian and French friends, one of whom is celebrating his

5Thispassagecomes from BookFour,ChapterThree,paragraphightof theChouKingand is reprintednThomasGrieve,"Annotationso the Chinese nSection:RockDrill,"Paideuma, V #2/3 1975),333.6Pound'setterso Carter,whichI amediting orBlackSwanBooks,are housed nthelibraryf PatrickHenryCommunityCollege,Martinsville, irginia.

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316

birthday. They order a celebrative lunch or dinner?"le repas"?at a restaurant. Havingtraveled some distance in the open air, they are hungry and impatient, and Larbaud goesto see what is holding things up in the kitchen?"where I find chef, scullions andwaiters excited to frenzy by the preparation of the unforeseen feast and urging eachother on with d'Annunzian and fascist cries of 'Eja, eja, eja, alala "' (Valery Larbaud,Oeuvres [Paris: Gallimard, Ple'iade, 1958], p. 804.)

Eliot called the royalist-fascist Charles Maurras, whose views he promoted, a royalist.Only once, as far as I can discover, did he explicitly say he preferred fascism to democ?racy: "I confess to a preference for fascism in practice" (The Criterion, VIII[July 1929],682-83). But his works, until the bombs began to fall, were full of expressions ofsympathetic interest in it, modified by occasional expressions of praise with faint damns.As he said in the Preface to Homage to John Dryden, he often preferred to express hisideas "in cryptogram." Perhaps we can read these lines from The Waste Landaccord ingly.

J. MITCHELL MORSE

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facist cryptogram in twl

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