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EZRA POUND 269
There was a flurry of interest over the fact that Pound, indicted
for treason and incarcerated in a madhouse, had won a prize for
his work, but the New York Times soon went on to other things.
During that spring, several well-known writers received proofs of
two articles by Robert Hillyer, an academic poetaster much loved
at The Saturday Review of Literature, whose work had been
ignored by the "new school".
In the issue of June 11, 1949, the first of these articles,
"Treason's Strange Fruit", appeared. The second, "Poetry's New
Priesthood", came out in the June 18 issue. The gist of these
virulent outpourings was that Paul Mellon, the sponsor of the
Bollingen prize, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung of Switzerland, and a mob
of poets led by T. S. Eliot, had combined in a worldwide "fascist"
conspiracy, involving, among other persons, the proprietors of
an outfit called Pantheon Books. The purpose of this "fascist"
conspiracy was to give Pound an award for his poetry, and Hillyer
was now warning the democracies that this objective had been
achieved. It was obvious that he considered himself to be a Paul
Revere of modern literature, sounding the tocsin against the forces
of Pound and Eliot.
In addition to the numerous distortions, inaccuracies and misstatements
that marred these two items of prose, we must consider
the background in which they appeared. The Saturday Review of
Literature had long since given up any pretensions of serious
literary criticism. It was simply a trade publication, which announced
new books, with brief reviews contributed by the hewers
of wood and drawers of water in the literary world, the university
professors, newspaper copyreaders, and retired high school teachers
who could write for the magazine's high school and small town
library audience.
The Saturday Review also conducted a highly profitable "Personals"
column, which accounted for a considerable portion of its
revenues. There had been a growing demand for entertainment
after the war, and almost any peccadillo found a ready audience.
The editors of The Saturday Review found that the more unusual
advertisements they printed, the more they received, and the
"Personals" column steadily grew.