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EZRA POUND 115
This information reached Westbrook Pegler in somewhat garbled
form, and he supposed that Ezra too had had something to do
with Wallace's "guru" period, and that he had been locked up to
keep from telling what he knew about the lunatic government
officials in Washington. But Ezra had no connection with the
"guru", nor with Orage during his Gurdjieff days. He did lunch
with Wallace in 1939, when he came over to try to prevent the
Second World War, but the "peace luncheon" failed in its purpose.
From 1917-20, Pound contributed a column, "Art Notes", under
the pseudonym "B. H. Dias", to The New Age; from 1917-21,
as "William Atheling", he wrote "Music", a review of events in
the musical world. Those who sneer at his knowledge of music
do not know that he was a respected music critic in England for
four years.
Orage had come a cropper by printing a strong editorial on the
Friday before England went into the war, in which he said that
there positively would be no war. The threat of hostilities was
simply a capitalist romp to play with the stock market. He later
realized that a genuine war provides the speculators with even
more opportunities to play with the stock market than the threat
of one.
Pound also published an article in The New Masses, June 28,
1915. He has been called a Fascist because some of his writings
appeared in pro-Fascist journals. Perhaps we should now call him
a Communist because of The New Masses effort. This article,
entitled "The damn fool bureaukrats", was the first public expression
of his discovery that government officials are every whit
as dangerous villains as are other stock types, such as bankers
and munitions-makers.
As Wyndham Lewis had foreseen, Pound's luck was running
out with the English. He had begun to look across the channel
to Paris, where world attention had focused. The Great War was
over, and the manipulators had gathered to commit a worse crime,
which Ezra defines as "ending one war so as to make another
one inevitable." 26
Sisley Huddleston, later a member of Pound's Paris coterie, and
Paris correspondent for the Times, soon dismissed Versailles as
"panem et circenses." The victors paraded down the Champs