Here's the review. It's from the Feb. 5 edition of WSJ
February 5, 1999
Bookshelf
What Prison Taught the Poet
By HUGH KENNER
The bare facts have been accessible for half a century.
The American poet Ezra Pound, since 1924 a resident
of Italy, was arrested in May 1945 by occupying
American troops on account of pro-Mussolini
broadcasts he had made over Rome Radio. A few weeks
later he was transferred to the U.S. Army Disciplinary
Training Center near Pisa, kept there in a cage and later
moved to a tent. There, aged 60, he wrote the "Pisan
Cantos," an unforeseeable segment of his magnum opus.
In mid-November he was flown to Washington for a trial
he was next judged unfit to stand. He would spend the
next 12 years in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the
Criminally Insane.
Whoever visited Pound at "St. Liz," as I first did in
mid-1948, would recall the calm presence of his wife,
Dorothy. They had been married since before World
War I, and her Edwardian-British manner remained
unmistakable. After decades of contagion, Ezra's
manner, likewise, was more British than one would have
expected. Despite what I'd have guessed from his
hyper-American epistolary style, he was the first man I'd
ever met who always spoke in complete sentences. What
I first heard from his lips was a subordinate clause:
"Since you are younger and more vigorous than
I...perhaps you will not mind if I sit here...." That alcove
with four chairs, at a juncture of madhouse corridors,
might have been a drawing room, so much did Dorothy's
presence transfigure it.
"Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters
in Captivity, 1945-46," a collection
of the couple's letters, moves in now
with a magnifier on the chaotic
two-year fulcrum of events you've just
heard tidily paraphrased. One thing
paraphrase sweeps under the rug is
that, from some time before Pound's
arrest until Dorothy got to Washington
-- a hectic 12 months -- no one
involved really knew what was going on. Hence the
frantic quality of all efforts at communication evident in
this book. Italy is just putting itself back together;
restoration of rail service from Genoa to Rome is one
1946 event. The trans-Atlantic mail is erratic: "Four of
yours by today's post!" writes Dorothy to Ezra on "Ap
17.46," what has just arrived having been written in
Washington in early March. And after endless efforts to
schedule something useful, the ship Dorothy finally
boards for America is two weeks getting there, with at
one point half the passengers seasick. Yes, that was then.
Nowadays, of course, we fly.
So, lacking an easy sequence wherein each letter
responds to the letter just above it, editors Omar Pound
and Robert Spoo have had to guide us through a morass
of cross-reference. Their book places letters on each
right-hand page, explanations and identifications on the
page facing it. Dorothy wrote frequently, Ezra when he
was allowed to; from the moment he was arrested, every
page to which he'd put pencil had to make its way past a
(usually permissive) censor. For her part, Dorothy
understood that the mere arrival of mail, whatever its
content, would give him cheer. Hence ("Jan 29.46"),
"We have a tin of peanut butter! From the sister of that
tall Pole. She is charming; more of her anon....Yes, I
have quite a lot of patience; & propose exercising it near
you, as soon as possible."
Messrs. Pound and Spoo have also supplied documents
that clarify the legal situation and the extent to which the
American authorities and the man they had in custody
were perpetually at cross-purposes. It was one of
Pound's delusions that he possessed political knowledge
of which the U.S. government would want to avail itself,
for instance by dispatching him to Moscow to clue Stalin
in. That clarifies a "Cantos" detail --
and but one point needed for Stalin
you need not, i.e. need not take over
the means of production;
money to signify work done, inside
a system
and measured and wanted.
He was a while realizing that all the Army wanted was
to lock him up for trial concerning the brief broadcasts
he'd aimed at America in the hope of persuading the
homefolks that Mussolini wasn't the demon they'd been
imagining. The investigations entailed delays, since a
case for treason required locating two witnesses to the
delivery of each broadcast, and the broadcasts had been
delivered months or years before, and how to find
Romans who had been in the studio on this occasion or
that one? It's easy to see why, during preparation of the
case, Pound had to be kept in Pisa for months: the
months to which we owe the "Pisan Cantos."
We learn, too, one more detail of great value,
considering the notorious, if intermittent, anti-Semitism
in the broadcasts. On being installed in the cage in Pisa
(where "a tin can served for a toilet"), Pound "was
allowed to keep his volume of Confucius and the small
Chinese dictionary, and was given a regular-issue
Bible." (That would be the Bible that, as he told me one
day, he'd read clear through; he imagined he was the
only person who had read through the Bible after
reading Confucius.)
Now, some two-thirds of the Bible is written in Hebrew,
and bespeaks centuries of Jewish responses to Jewish
plights. And possibly the most famous, and most
cherished, passage in the "Pisan Cantos" derives from
such responses:
The ant's a centaur in his
dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order,
or made grace.
Pull down thy vanity, I say
pull down....
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.
That ant derives from Proverbs 6:6: "Go to the ant, thou
sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which,
having no guide, overseer or ruler, Provideth her meat in
the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest."
And as for vanity, turn almost anywhere in Ecclesiastes,
for instance 2:11: "Then I looked on all the works that
my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had
laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation
of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."
The ant and vanity are just a few pages apart in the
Hebrew Bible, the one seeing to necessary things, the
other wasting its labor on vexation of spirit. What Pound
would one day regret as "that stupid, suburban,
anti-Semitic prejudice" may have begun to dissipate in
the Pisan cage. I know that I once brought a Jewish
friend to visit him at St. Elizabeth's, and they got on
well, and the friend went back on his own another time.
And one moral is, beware of generalizations.
Mr. Kenner is a professor of English at the University of
Georgia. "The Pound Era" is the best known of his
numerous books.
hugh witemeyer wrote:
>
> The eagerly anticipated edition of the correspondence of Pound and Dorothy
> during the Pisan period of 1945 is apparently just out from Oxford
> University Press in New York. Its editors are those veteran collaborators
> and superb annotators, Omar Pound and Bob Spoo. I am told that Hugh
> Kenner reviewed the edition this month in the WALL STREET JOURNAL. Can
> anyone tell us the issue in which that review appeared?
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