A Letter from London
Reading edition
EZRA POUND
I should be very glad if someone in America could be made to realize the sinister bearing of the import duty on books. I have tried in vain to get some of my other correspondents to understand the effect of this iniquity ... but apparently without success. It means insularity, stupidity, backing the printer against literature, commerce and obstruction against intelligence. I have spent myself on the topic so many times that I am not minded to write an elaborate denunciation until I know I am writing to someone capable of understanding and willing to take up the battle. Incidentally the life of a critical review depends a good deal on controversy and on having some issue worth fighting. Henry IV. did away with the black mediaevalism of an octroi on books, and the position of Paris is not without its debt to that intelligent act. No country that needs artificial aid in its competition with external intelligence is fit for any creature above the status of pig.
The tariff should be abolished not only for itself but because dishonest booksellers shelter themselves behind it and treble the price of foreign books, and because it keeps up the price of printing.
If there is one thing that we are all agreed upon: It is that the canned goods of Curtis and Company and Harper and Company and all the business firms should be set apart from the art of letters, and the artist helped against the tradesman.
As a matter of fact a removal of the tariff wouldn’t much hurt even publishers, as the foreign books we really want in America are the sort which the greed of American business publishers forbids their publishing ... but that is no matter.
It affects every young writer in America, and every reader whether he wish merely to train his perceptions or whether he train them with a purpose, of, say, learning what has been done, what need not be repeated, what is worthy of repetition. There is now the hideous difficulty of getting a foreign book, and the prohibitive price of both foreign and domestic publications. I don’t know that I need to go on with it.
Again and yet again it is preposterous that our generation of writers shouldn’t have the facility in getting at contemporary work, which one would have in Paris or Moscow. It’s bad enough for the American to struggle against the dead-hand of the past generation composed of clerks and parasites and against our appalling decentralization, i. e., lack of metropoles and centers, having full publishing facilities and communication with the outer world—(which last is being slowly repaired)—also our scarcity of people who know.
When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.—Bernard Shaw, 1916.