Next address - till 4th Oct. anyway: care of Dr Fellner,
75 Kenilworth Court,
London SW15

Received your letter at Clonfert, where I put in a most valuable week with the Mosleys, who asked me to send you their greetings. Both of them are in wonderful form, and I wish particularly you could meet Diana, who combines beauty with intelligence rarely.

Project: that the monthly, under the title THE ANALYST, an European Review, should begin on the first of March, yearly subscription two guineas, each number Horizon format roughly, 25 thousand words. OM will be anonymous - and please keep this secret - political editor for one third, the remaining two thirds to be general, literary, etc, under my control with Diana Mosley as working editor. Our address to be 302 Vauxhall Bridge Road, the same as Euphorion Books, where we have a staff of men: chief agent, actual producer of the mag. John Hampden.

Some special features: a 2000 word monthly digest of the serious Russian press; a 1000 word monthly devoted to finance and tradetrends etc.

Our chief first aim - to sell ourselves, so that we can educate: by ourselves, I mean, our pages.

Would you agree to AN's Neamelogue, or guide to the Cantos, being published bit by bit, monthly?

Will you write for us?

Will you help us with advice how to get American readers?

Shall follow yr advice in last letter, recontacts.

My plans: London till 4th October, then Paris briefly, then Rome till around the 20th when ¹ shall sail with my car from Naples to Beirut, motor direct to Baghdad: arrive 25 Alwiyah (inshallah) about first November. Address (late)

We want to get material for first two numbers by Xmas.

Yrs

DS

25 Alwiyah,
Baghdad. Iraq.

January 10th 1956

Dear Calipha - or I should say, **hidden Ixmam**:

I was delighted to get your letter, and apologetic about
my handwriting. Typing will be inaccurate but legible. First, a
poem which I dedicate to you for 1956:

PERSIA 1955

(written thinking of EP in a cheap expensive shoddy allamerican
tourist-trap of a hotel, cold spring 1955)

Beneath the white snowhills
in a brick pallisade

Zarathustra in dark cave
grows the carcerating embassy

Cold winds of Asia cold blasts of history
build build the cheap hotels

And the zigzag mountains and the arches
clutch the toumans the kingly riyals

Storks disdainful fly south from Teheran
but the planes fly in from Oklahoma

Stands in woolcoat the shepherd cruciform
over broad beans the broad-accented sergeants

0 Darius 0 Manes 0 Zarathustra
0 the digit added to the loan-notes.

As to activity: it is apity that Goacher ( whom I saw with Margaret
in London) is such a purist that he quarrelled with OM so much that
he would not consent at least to work on with the European; now spends
all energy on the BBC. Some pique, at least. I think the European -
I know the European - is very far from perfection, or even adequacy.
But AT LEAST it is a forum, where there was none. It will become more
so as it becomes more established. Latest news is that some expenditure
on ads is helping sales at last to climb. I am starting a new regular
feature in 1956, MEN AND BOOKS, a kind of running ( I hope not in the
sense that a nose runs) commentary on books I have been reading,
and their relation to life. First 3 numbers have done Runciman on
Crusades, OEdpius Rex and Greek religion, and Anthony Powell and
John Liemann's Autobiography - in this shit even the tomato pips
are prefabricated! I shall come onto economics, if you tell me
what. I'll read it and write about it. May I quote part of your
letter - the part about percentages - and then go on to what you
suggest IN WHATEVER YOU SEND ME WITHIN THE NEXT MONTH? I quite agree
your world-scattered lieutenants must do some of the work. But we
are working, if not at the same furrow. Alan has an article on modern
Iraqi painters in current Studio - big splash: not a bit profound,
as the art is not profound; but excellent as publicity for the Arabs,
whom the kikes as you so well call them try always to pretend that
except for them the mideast is a cultural vacuum! Alan's last
essay on the Pisan Cantos was the best: only last week I suggested
that the next should be a real attack on the economics of the Cantos,
to which he said, I hate economics. Don't we all? It is the shit

we're moving into aquarian age - man with jordan - hence the
recurrence of copric imagery in this letter! it is I say the
faeces Hercules has to wrestle with in the stables - I know I'm
mixing my labours. That's exactly what a poet has to do: he'll
come round to it, but needs stuffing with facts, ashe's weak on
economics. Still? Yes, still - but then, he is doing a dozen other
things, writing for the european, reviewing, teaching, learning
Arabic, frequenting paintersstudios and so on. Any books from
now on you want boosted please send me, or the titles, and I'll
get them at least into the European. Any major boosting, I can
do in extenso.

Second Activity: we are planning a series of DEMOILLITIONS, first as a series of articles in the magazine, then as a book, pirate book, paper cover, euphorion, won't get ONE review, you know the kind of thing. I've done an initial article on EUROPE (we demolish from a European stand point) which I pin down as quarrelsomeness and heirarchy. (Ghastly overcompression, here.) Alan has done Spender. Diana is doing la West. Francois Voituriez (College National Orthodox, Latakia, Syria) is doing Mauriac: he is a Rivarol boy, very active, translating my Alcibiades into French, etc. Unlike other Rivarol boys, is sensible about the Arabs though( perhaps under DS' influence?) i.e. not colonialist in presence francoise sense. Violently antiMendes. Can you help here? How? Of course you could not participate. But could you suggest targets: we want to demolish living people, where possible, of the 30s, particularly the type who like Mann or Lehmann or Spender put abstract ideas and Jewish gelt above loyalty to the soul of Europe. Could you also get us some sane young Americans (I mean, who write what may be called perhaps? the genteel prose of the European-style magazine in Eunuch's island) to undertake something along these lines? Anyone competent to do FDR: with wit? Living: at least he has a statute in the middle of London. Till that's down, he's a target. His still lives. Is she worth deflating?

Third Activity: I have been making a small collection of
poems, kept the Horatian 7 years most of them. I shall send them
to you (in bound typescript - the Baghdad binders still do a
good job in leather for a dollar and a half) to look at. If you
like them, you might know someone in America who'd be interested.
My agent for articles and novels, Bernice Baumgarten, has never
shown any interest in my poetry in the USA.

Collins are bringing out NEW BABYLON, a book with photographs
about every aspect of Iraq, including poetry, sex, economics. ('his
latter not very deep, I confess) at the end of February. I wrote
it in collaboration with John Haylock, who shares this house with
me.

Someone is going to try and demolish Hemingway, a friend of
the Mosleys: I pointed out what he said about you. (last year's TIME)
so he'll be a privileged demoilishee, for that. I don't like much
of his work, though I admire many of his sentences. His feeling
for the world is not mine. His courage is great. His generosity
seems to have survived success. His awareness of spiritual debt
has not been blunted by flattery. How few people one can say that
of - particularly those who pound typewriters!

3.

This year I have been writing a novel about London 1943, six characters all against the war for different motives. So far I haven't heard from Collins (who by contract have an option) but only from Patience Ross, my agent: she wrote, excellent descriptions, perfect realisation of the war atmosphere, but the book is totally unsatisfactory! My typist wrote: anyone with strong political man opinions will find your book infuriating. It is strange, because the book is not an anti kike tract or anything like that; the title the impossible shore and the whole vein of the work shows my realisation that to wish for a german victory was idle, and that the Germany we all hoped for - we only hoped for. It did not exist. But even to state on white paper the black truth, that some people did attack the war, still in 1956, sends readers into convulsions. Was there ever a war in history with quite so much money spent on persuading people that it was not only necessary, but unarguable?

What you say about teaching Mus I quite realise and always realised: it is the only hope. We had set about educating the bigger number if we had any chance of getting hold of the means for talking to 160 millions. Will Mr Baruch step forward and ask us to do that job, next time, in the name of democracy? Some likelihood. The million copy editions will be reissued for Messrs Wouk, Mailer and Mann. Even the later was only 'all right' by marriage!

I quite see that you didn't fall for the 'war is to man as matrimony to woman' sort of nonsense. My support of National Socialism is just the same - horrible though many of its mistakes were, at least it was a forward moving, positive movement that was making the mistakes - something with potentialities for goodness and even beauty; not a system bogged down in its own greed, incapable of producing more than what Chander calls "the slobbery kiss, and the pornographic dissolve."

I have written a longish cultural note on the Middle East or rather Arab world for E. Hood of Shenandoah. Have not heard yet his reactions to it. I've hardly mentioned the Zionist business, though of course to the whole Arab and Moslem world it is finance-colonialism personified - not the delicate artycrafty refugee settlement that most Yanks no doubt picture it as.

What is your opinion of the Penguin book on CONFUCIUS? I am reading it and Humphreys BUDDHISM at the same time. Also the Pelican history of Japanese art which is excellent value.

In my cultural note for Shen. I put that the first need for the Arabs is to have a cultural bureau established by their govt's on strictly poundian lines to supervise close translation from western literature - the key books. Not a chance? Perhaps, if someone sends them a copy - they feel 'shame' if they don't get down to doing what some westerners tells them needs doing.

But can a bureau be run on poundian lines - without a Pound?

Every good wish for 1956: your photograph sent

25 ALWIYAH

BAGHDAD,

IRAQ

26th January, 1956

Dear EP:

Alwiyah has no particular meaning, it is simply a quarter of Baghdad, where we live, and the number is enough. AN is in Kermanshah for a few days; when he gets back I'll give him your message. You are right, he gets carried away by pretty ideas, needs his nose keeping down to grindstone of fact.

I have sent to Diana M. Bunting's VESTIGES which I like, and think she will permit: I have also sent a letter to BB via EUROPEAN awfice, but if you have quicker means of contact, please ask him: can we print it in the EUROPEAN?

Good news just come from the awfice: all January issue sold out at once, so that 70 copies I had ordered for free delivery to some friends were unavailable. This is something fantastic for us. A year or so ago we were having to cut print order to bone, simply not to overclutter the office with unsold numbers. We sold well I think Nov, but this quick sale of Jan issue quite remarkable. They are increasing the print order from Feb.

R Graves: excellent target. Can you find someone to do it? If NOT, I'll do him myself. I hate that Goddess rubbish; his much lauded Penguin on Gk mythology almost contrives to make even that wonderland simpliste. He says on the backs of his books: lives in Majorca Spain except in time of war. the usual romantic rubbish, that war is something acceptable and quite normal for parfit gentil knights of the usury age.

Moslems - you are quite right - do not kowtow. Please restore. Moroccans heretical and abjectly corrupt thanks as much to French as any. Here the attitude to authority is deliciously contemptuous, also hypocritical. I.e. no reverence at all for house of hashim, but polite gestures if anyone thinks a job available. That's only natural. Islam is the best religion: it is rational, it is easy to believe, it is practical, it asserts the male priciple, it believes in real things and disbelieves in goblins, it attacks usury, it believes in order, discipline and degree. The opposition to art is going: 300 students here in baghdad, as I may have told you, studying to be art-teachers. How, of course, it as much as any culture, needs getting back to its sources and awau from the marshes into which the clear water has sometimes oozed. Weeds grow even in the clearest pools, at the periphery. Morocco is a periphery, and full of Jews.

‰ British Bank of the Middle East,
Beirut Lebanon

April 13th 1957

Dear EP: I think Alan N has written to you recently? And you will know of our enforced hegira. Am now working part-time for the Muqaddis Scoiety, the one healthy organisation in the Lebanon: it controls the Moslem schools in Beirut and throughout the country, and combats by so doing the filthiest educational grid (missionary, prot and cath) any-where. Everyone very rightminded. Islam at its best here, where in a near minority. Meanwhile am in closest touch with Egypt, and have just got back from an 11 day visit. The city of Dioce has touched down . . there is a wonderful new spirit there, and the people at the top are perhaps better than under BM, as he was unique, while Nasser has atleast five first rate colleagues: Abdul Hakim Amer, Min of Def., Abdul Latif Baghdadi, who reconstructs, Zaccaria Muheddin, who controls the interior, Kameleddin Hussein, who educates, to say nothing of Qaisonne, offinance, and Stino, Koptic, who is min of supply. There is a general overall willingness to reconstruct, to work, to fight. I think you r guidance is needed. I spoke of you in many quarters: some totally ignorant, others very well informed. I suggested to one man: Thebest gesture the new Egypt cd make in the face of world-Jewry we be to offer the vacant post of Pro Of Eng at Cairo Univ to the greatest living poet in Eng. The thought may fall on good ground. Meanwhile, Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, Prof. of Philosophy at Caixro University, is on the govt appointed committee " to further poetry". He and four others sift through hundreds of poems a month, which they intend to publish in yearly anthologies. About one in twenty is sincere, the rest rhtetoric. Zaki admires your work, and understands it well. I think he would like to be in touch with you. He is about 50, London Univ. Doctorate in Philosophy, a Log. Positivist, and very intelligent. Not many Islamically minded, though a Moslem. Quote. We need Pound for our poets, and Wittgenstein for our thinkers. Interested in Kung. His address: Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, 17 Sharia' Gamie, No.18, Cairo. The Govt is publishing a wonderfully produced and free, politically, monthly: Al Magallah. Zaki says that there is nothing but good will from on top, and that things have never been better from the intellectual point of view. With more contacts are needed. I hope to return to Egypt frequently during the next months. I was glad that you thought The European better: I have few hopes of it, but its existence is to the good. Goacher does not even reply to my letters any more. Perhaps as I sent them to the BBC they are interrupted? It may be so. Have you seen the April issue, with my article on NASSER and AN's on the Kafr Qassem massacres? The Egyptians have printed 20 thousand copies of my article as a pamphlet. Egypt is the spear-head of truth at the moment. The Eg press is excellent: I had a long meeting with Anwar as Sadat, ed. of Al Gahhouriyah( The Republic) which now sells more than 100 thousand a day. Have close contacts here with the biggest weekly As Sayyad, and one of the writers ( very superficial, but under our barakal control!) wants to do a long article on EP. Could he have a photograph? Could he? I shall write it for him. But Lab in a way

is important. With said young journalist met a 'brilliant young
economist' from the Am Univ Of Beirut, a graduate, not a sophomore:
he had never <u>heard</u> of Douglas, let alone Gesell. Yet the AUB produces
people like Malik, quisling foreign Minister and ally of the like
plan. There is much work to be done.

The wonderful thing about Egypt: they are all in Ernest, and
the hateful 'spirit of compromise' so dear to AngloSaxons is totally
not there!

And events of last November opened eyes that even till then might
have been closed.

Who can <u>still</u> say that worldjewry is a myth, when the Pres.of
Gods Own Country bows to the ugly Meir, as she crosses the Atlantic
on her sable broomstick?

By the way, we are with Kaster on one level; but no enthusiasm
for beating up negroes. Though I am against the educated Yankee
blacks (usually pansy) one sees playing pianos in the seedier bars
of the Mediterranean. Also see no point in carrying sexual amusement
to the point of inter-marriages, where the coalblackones are concerned.
But frankly, I don't have a high enough opinion of the average
white American to <u care </u> whether he's contaminated or not!

But maybe churchburning is the jam for Mullins on the Federal
Reservec?

May this year bring you greater mobility!

June 8th 57

Dear EP: Ya Azizi Muallim:

You will perhaps have heard that AN asked and received permission to dedicate his Leone to Mme Chamon, wife of the 100% Americanophile president? He was photographed doing same, and presenting his time-bomb, a long letter of dedication about EP. She is asked tointefvene immediately with Ike. As her own comments were, on receiving the poem: "It's very kind of you really I'm sure", we decided to ginger things up. So AN and I have been preparing a long and important ( for Web. ) article in As Sayyad ( the hunter) which is biggest circ. weekly ( political, opposition) in this country: circ. 15 or 16 thousand. Salim Nassar is a journalist on it, and we gave a complete indoctrination class to him, which he took down in detail: in particular about EP's economic theories, which I outlined, and about the structure of the Cantos, as the eternal war between the man who wants to do a good job and theman who wants to take his rakeoff: great sympathy to all this HERE. This article will have as ITS timebomb translation into Arabic of Alan's dedicace plus photograph: and I have suggested title to whole THE POET IN THE IRON MASK, taken from Punch. When this is in print, Salim will then ring up the presidency, and say: By the way, what are you doing about EP?

I have also given a long interview about the got tam juice Suez and money to Al Musawwar, which is Egypt's illustrated weekly (110 thousand), and said much the same thing, about the difference between capitalism and finance: a distinction never made here at such yankitsch-inspired missionary establishments as the A U B.

Egypt is the ' heart of arabism', and the only place where really important work can be achieved: but I am reproaching in fac-simile your lines about getting Avicenna into English and KUNG into Arabic, in the Sayyad article. Seed has a habit of falling on good ground very fast there, where lots of young men are looking for a job to do.

My play ( did I tell you about this?) on Algeria has now aroused interest in Moscow and London: the only comment from Brandt and Brandt in NY was that it would make an excellent TV vehicle if all political refs were cut out! But for England, there are some changes I shall have to make, and will therefore probably be going back there in July. Will spend some days with the Mosleys at Orsay on the way. Doubt if I shall see Goacher in London: he never replies to letters, and works in the BBC: which even to enter depresses DS.

Here elections: the Govt are paid by $$ and accuse the proEgyptian opposition of being paid by roubles.

About Arabic: the chief reason it has been ignored by scholars and others: it is at least five times more difficult than Persian. I think it is simply a cliche that Persian is much better. The PreIslamic Odes are as cogent as Sappho ( whose Page OUP edition is mastered. Do you know it? Sappho and Alcaeus in one volume.) and much more of them. Difficult not impossible to translate: but all

translators to date use biblical language - which is as wrong
as could be. Difficulty: world referred to so different from
CANTOS world. Much depends on wit, play on words, inner meanings,
music, inside-Arabic-culture references, all of which lost in
translation. For ex: Abu Nawas comes across as a minor cavalier
Falstaff in most versions: instead of an equal to Horace. There
are so many roadblocks to an appreciation of Arabic: besides the
language which needs at least a decade, there are the modern Arabic
critics who are pre-swinburnian, and geiger-counters for the third
rate: and the English arabists like Nicolson who think I imagine
that the summt of English verse is the golden road to Samarkand, or
perhaps Rupert Brooke. Slovenly scholarship in Arab world itself
COMPARED to alBaqillani of Tenth Century, who is empsonian. No
real texts; confusion between criticism and appreciation, or worse,
"search for noble portions in our Arab heritage." And you cut, cut,
cut, anything whichoffends your current complex.

But there is something there.

In any case Arabic gzve the concept words to Iranian and
Turkish.

And one credit: in Arabic song today ( as with Um Kalthum)
the words and the music still go together, siamese twins, not
runaway carthorses as with Roger Quilter.

The level of Arabic 'lyrics' on the radio a Mont Blanc higher
than BBC rubbish.

Don't know much about kikes aping Moslems: do know that the
Jukebox is number one battering instrument of american kulcher
in Arab world.

I distrust far more Kikes imitating John Bull viz Isaiah
Berlin. The Moslems are very shrewd.

There Was one odd Yank in Baghdad: pale innerlooking Jewish?
eyes, taught at our college: gave no convincing reasons for being Mos,
was explicitly not antiJ, and was distrusted by all the students,
except one of the prettiest girls, whom he at once married, to alarm
of parents: one of whom Palestinian Arab. No political link-up
THAT I KNOW OF.

Interim. More to follow.

DS

‰ British Bank of the Middle east,
Beirut.

17th Nov 57

DEAR EP:

You know I am writing a book on Egypt, Young Egypt? Part of which (about 100 pages) a short history of Et from Napoleon to modern times. I have never done so much research in my life before, nor had such clear evidence what an ariadne thread you've got hold of in USURA. The reignof Khedive Ismail - it all coheres. May I quote some lines from the Usura Canto at the head of my chapter on Ismail? The book is being published by Wingate, some time early next year.

Did I tell you that Spender commissioned me to write an interview with Nasser? I went to Cairo in September, wrote the piece, after 3 hours with Nasser, at this house, sent it to Kristol, who cabled back fulsome congratulations and promises of publication in December number. I was then paid, very meanly, and the proofs and pageproofs sent. At the pageproof stage they tried to include a 'box' at the beginning which would have given the impression that I thought Nasserwas not really sincere in what he said. They withdrew this, when I sent a stern cable. Then suddenly, ten days ago, I had a letter from the two editors saying that after a lot of thought, they had come to the following conclusion: it wdn't be fair to have a sympathetic article on Nasser without one on Ben Gurion: they had an article on BG, but it was flat, dull, unself-revealing, and THEREFORE they thought the fairest thing was to use neither of them: although - and they went off into streams of insincere compliments about my piece. Of course I could do another article, on a young Arab poet perhaps? They would certainly print an essay on Lebanon I sent them in January. And would I send them my expenses, so they could pay me them. When I told this to the Egyptian ambassador, his comment was simple: and came from a history of experience of usurers. "Someone came into their office and pushed athousand pounds onto their desks. That's all."

But I thought you would beinterested. And you can of course repeat the story. My agents are now trying to find another publisher. In the last resort, the European would take it. But I should like something with more readers, if possible.

Alan has justfinished an excellent pair of articles on EP: one for the European, reprints the US ambassador s letter to Madame Chamon, when she wrote protesting about a certain poet's continued incarceration.

Have you any inside dope on the interest rates in Egypt before Cromer took over? And were the Barings Jewish?

Desmond

Flat 12A,
8, Sharia Yusif el-Gindi,
Bab el-Louk,
Cairo. UAR.

4th December. 1959

Dear EP:

There is a project which might interest you; if it would, we
should be the happiest editors/translators in the world.

By 'we': I mean, myself and Zaki Naguib Mahmoud. Zaki, who
was in London and America for a long time, is Professor of Philosophy
at Cairo University; he is also a great lover of poetry, and has trans-
lated some of your criticism into Arabic. He is on the committee for
poetry which comes under the Higher Council for Literature. His committee
have made a selection of modern Egyptian poetry which they want to be
translated into English and published in London. The poets included go
from al-Baroudi, a contemporary of Arabi Pasha, up to the living Abbas
al-Akkad, whose best work was written around 1920. The selection ex-
cludes the younger generation: wisely, probably. The book will be around
100 pages? The authorities here will subsidise it, to the extent of
guaranteeing to buy a certain number of copies; so it will be easy to
find a London publisher. Alan Neame is helping there. It will also be
possible to pay translators fairly generously. The scheme we have
worked out: that Zaki will help me, Alan and anyone else, with the
literal meaning of the lines; the English-speaking poets will then take
over. By anyone else, we hope to mean you! When your name was mentioned
to the Committee, there was jubilation at the idea of your being
associated with this project.

Please let me know by registered post if this idea interests
you. If it does, we shall then get busy.

Yours ever,