Das Schone Papier Vergeudet

EZRA POUND

Before you issue another number of your magazine half blank, I must again ask you seriously to consider the iniquity of the present “protective” tariff on books.

This tariff has contributed more than any other one cause, and perhaps more than all other causes, to the intellectual isolation of America, to her general ignorance, to her sodden parochialism.

I have expressed myself on this subject many times. Mr. George Haven Putnam has been fighting against the evil for years. It is one ground on which all intelligent Americans, whatever their disagreements as to literary canon may be, can come together.

I am too much buried in work to write you an article at present. There are hundreds of young men with more time than I have, to whom this is a matter not of mere general interest, but of vital and personal importance.

The simple fact is that it is very, very difficult to get foreign books in the United States. There is no facilitation of their sale. The 25% tariff serves as an excuse for an exorbitant elevation of the price of all foreign books, whether imported in sheets, or bound.

Result: Editors of sodden and moribund “better” magazines talking about De Regnier and De Gourmont as “these young men”, in 1914.

Result: provincialism, isolation, lack of standards of comparison, and consequent inability to recognize good work when it appears. When it gets praise it is praised in company with rubbish.

American writers handicapped in competition with men living in civilized countries. Export of best, and even of moderately good, artists instead of export of art.

I can’t go into the whole question of free trade. It has worked in England. It has, more than anything else, made the “Empire.” I do not see why it should ruin the Republic.

But that is not my business. I mean, Free Trade in the widest sense is not my present affair. The prohibitive tariff on books is very much everybody’s affair if they care a hang for the intellectual state of the country.

The state of the copyright laws is barbarous, but it is perhaps more the affair of the maltreated authors than of the country at large. It is evil only as other obstructory measures are evil. But this matter of excluding foreign books in the interest of a few artizans (who are better paid than authors and who seek nothing above immediate gain, and whose loss in the event of reform would be negligible) is immediate and vital.

The whole question of censorship, as to Dreiser, as to Hokusai prints destroyed by customs officials, etc., are all really minor issues, largely dependent on this matter of the exclusion of the words thought and knowledge.

If among the young writers gathered about The Little Review you can not find two or three to take up this question, to study it, to marshal the data (vide Putnam’s “Books and Their Makers” to start with, re. the causes of the rise of Paris as the world’s intellectual capital),—if you can not find such young authors, then your young literati are a set of rotters and the Great West is more of a mud-hole than I should have thought it.

Form, in the narrow sense, is nothing but the separating line between surfaces of color. That is its outer meaning. But it has also an inner meaning, of varying intensity, and, properly speaking, form is the outward expression of this inner meaning.... The artist is the hand which, by playing on this or that key, i.e., form, affects the human soul in this or that way. So it is evident that form-harmony must rest only on a corresponding vibration of the human soul. The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct is its appeal.—Kandinsky.