The following review was published in today's Washington Post.... so I
thought I would send it along to all of those in the group who do not
receive the paper.
Poet, Madman, Lover
By Guy Davenport
Sunday, March 14, 1999; Page X01
EZRA AND DOROTHY POUND
Letters in Captivity 1945-1946
Edited by Omar Pound and Robert Spoo
Oxford University Press. 389 pp. $35
Reviewed by Guy Davenport
On May 3, 1945 -- five days before the surrender of
Nazi Germany to the Allies and the Soviet Union -- the
60-year-old American poet Ezra Pound was arrested in
Rapallo, Italy (where he and his wife Dorothy had lived
since 1924) by the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps and
taken to their headquarters in Genoa. He was charged
with treason for broadcasting a series of lectures on
economics, politics, philosophy, literature, and other
Poundian concerns by shortwave transmission to
England and the United States. If, 54 years ago, you
owned a shortwave radio set and were up at 3 a.m., you
could have heard newly discovered concerti grossi by
Antonio Vivaldi, followed by Pound talking about
money, credit, and banking systems that thrive on one
war after another.
In a long deposition to the CIC in Genoa Pound tried to
make his ideas intelligible. His agile brain had also
thought up other plans, now that he had the ear of the
military, as well as that (so he imagined) of Harry
Truman. Truman, he explained, could send him to the
Emperor of Japan, who would end the war when Pound
showed him how grievously Japan had departed from the
ethics of Confucius. Furthermore, after a crash course in
Stalin's native Georgian, he would then go to Moscow to
prevent a protracted and economically ruinous cold war
between Russia and the western democracies.
An honest colonel reported to J. Edgar Hoover, "Pound,
as is known, is an extremely well educated man with a
wide divergence of knowledge and interest. His hobbies
are the translating of ancient documents such as Pluto
and Confucius." The colonel had a better ear than the
FBI, who repeatedly heard Confucius as "confusion"
(and Celine as Staline, and "suburban garden" as "Sir
Bourbon Garden") in their transcripts of the broadcasts.
It would be interesting to know if Hoover assigned an
agent to check out the writings of Pluto.
Pound was not sent to Tokyo or Moscow. He was turned
over to the FBI, who placed him in the U.S. Army
Disciplinary Center outside Pisa (an army jail for
deserters, rapists, and murderers) where he wrote The
Pisan Cantos (the 74th through 84th sections of the epic
poem that he'd been writing since around 1916). Here,
after some terrible weeks in a maximum-security cage
made of metal landing strips, Pound was eventually
given an officer's tent. His wife, Dorothy, heroically
managed to visit him briefly. So did Pound's mistress,
Olga Rudge, and Pound's daughter by her, Mary. His son
Omar, the editor of this book, at the time a private in
the
U.S. Army, missed him by a day.
Flown to Washington (November 1945), Pound was
arraigned before a federal district court, where he
showed the judge the $23 he had to his name and asked
for defense counsel who had written a life of John
Adams and could read Confucius in Chinese. The judge
ordered a psychological evaluation (three, in fact). Thus
began Pound's 12 and a half years at St. Elizabeth's
Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Anacostia Heights.
Here he wrote two more sections of his Cantos,
translated the Chinese Odes and several Greek tragedies,
and talked with visitors every afternoon from 2 to 4. He
was an institutionalized scandal all these years. The
Pisan Cantos, published by New Directions in 1948,
won The Congressional Prize for Poetry (the only time it
has been awarded -- after the uproar over Pound's
getting it, its name was changed to the Bollingen Prize).
Pound's first visitor was a family friend from
Philadelphia bringing him a Bible. The second was the
poet Charles Olson. The third was H.L. Mencken. Over
the years one could see E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot,
William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and other
luminaries making their way among the catatonics.
The personal letter had always been one of Pound's
ways of communicating his ideas. These letters to
Dorothy, and hers to him, began at Pisa and continued,
maddeningly delayed by the exigencies of the times, until
Dorothy made her way on a refugee ship to Washington,
where she did not miss a single day's visit. Her last
letter is a shipboard diary, mailed upon landing in New
York.
They are some of the best love letters ever written, these
150 exchanges between an English wife (maiden name,
Shakespeare) of character, wit and indomitable
affection, and an American husband whose hubris and
sanity had clearly overreached boundaries of several
sorts: moral, political and commonsensical. He was
idiotically anti-Semitic; his economic theories sounded
dotty to all but a coven of utopian Social Credit
enthusiasts. His world had been swept away by four
armies, his hero Mussolini hung by his heels in Milan,
Hitler had shot himself, and the Japanese would soon see
a weapon of mass destruction made possible by the
theory of a Jewish physicist named Einstein.
In these letters (from "Mao" -- kitten -- to "Mao") there
is neither economics nor anti-Semitism. Anxiety as to the
other's wellbeing (or whereabouts) is the dominant note.
There are domestic dramas: Dorothy could not stand her
mother-in-law (Pound brought both his parents to
Rapallo) nor his mistress Olga. She was seeing Omar
(raised in England) for the first time in years, and
cautiously meeting Mary, Ezra's daughter by Olga.
Were it not for the most meticulous and useful notes to
any edition of letters that I am aware of, much would be
incomprehensible (as with any family letters). Robert
Spoo's fair and comprehensive introduction rivals the
thoroughly helpful notes in making this a very
reader-friendly book. The notes face the letters on
left-hand pages. Foreign phrases are translated in
brackets. The editing is as conscientious as editing can
be.
These letters exist in an uncanny way outside the
enormous debate about Pound's poetry, his instigation of
Modernism, his influence, or his guilt. They can stand
instead as a poignant exchange between two of the
millions of displaced persons, anguished and frantic, of
World War II, all the more valuable in the record for
being written by two of the century's most literate tragic
figures.
Guy Davenport's most recent book is "Objects on a
Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art & Literature."
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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