>From:  pcockram <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Re: Animal House at the Ezuversity
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Date:  Thu, 13 Jan 2000 18:59:54 -1000
>
>Everett Lee Lady wrote:
>
>> What does seem to be true is that many of the academics who have devoted
>> a significant portion of their careers to studying Pound seem to despise
>> him as a person.  Maybe this tells us something about Pound.  Or maybe
>> it tells us something else.
>
>I have to say that I don't think this is true (yes, there are a few, but not
>many).  A so-called poet named Tom Dish, who reads his "criticism" on NPR,
>recently came down in favor of the St John's banishment and claimed, in fact,
>the very opposite: that academics who write about Pound completely ignore his
>politics.  What I do think is that those of us who care about Pound as a poet
>and person (and no one can claim he wasn't an amazingly interesting and
>many-sided person whose opinions were based on ideas that were incontestably
>moral, however misguided we may find them to be from our vantage point today)
>cannot afford to tiptoe around the issue of his politics.  It is something with
>which we are all forced to contend, however uncomfortable it may make us, if we
>hope for anything we say about Pound to be taken seriously.  Of course there
>are many annoying, outrageous, and just plain silly comments, but the
>contention is worth it.
 
As to the attitudes of academics, I'm judging only by the messages that
get posted to this mailing list.
 
A lot of the academics who post here and who have made a profession out
of studying Pound don't seem to have any understanding at all of who he
was.  This is very strange, because the man comes through very clearly
in the descriptions in the usual reference works, especially the
biographies by Charles Norman and Humphrey Carpenter (which are the
ones I'm most familiar with).
 
I'm going to post here an article from my web page, although it's
partially incomplete; at the very least, it still needs some editing.
You wouldn't think there would be anything in this article that needs
to be told to experts on Pound, since the article mostly consists of
quotations from Charles Norman and Humphrey Carpenter.  And yet the
material here seems to be something that a lot of the academics just
don't understand.
 
I do think that if one wants to understand the Cantos, one needs to
understand as much as possible about Pound's life.  And if one wants to
understand Pound as a person, one has to learn about his politics.
 
Unfortunately, a lot of the most important part of Pound's politics
simply doesn't interest (or at least apparently doesn't) most of the
academics who study him.  Anti-semitism is a hot button for many of them
and Pound's anti-semitism is really the only thing they can notice.  But
although anti-semitism was pervasive in his conversations and his
correspondance, it was never one of the central issues for him.  But
reading Brooks Adams, or Thomas Hart Benton, or Martin Van Buren, or
John Adams is too boring for the academics.  They'd rather concentrate
on the issues that have a personal charge for them.
 
Likewise, for Pound's economics it's easy to concentrate on the proposed
panaceas like Social Credit or the Gesell currency tax which seem in
retrospect clearly crackpot.  It's much harder to address Pound's core
(and rather nebulous) ideas about the essential role that credit and
money (which is essentially just a form of credit) play in capitalism,
and the fact that there's something fundamentally wrong that financial
success in our system comes to those who manipulate money and manipulate
the means of distribution rather than to those who actually produce
things of value.  Money, as Pound says, is intended to be just a
convenient ticket that enables people to produce goods for others and
acquire goods produced by others without needing to engage in simplistic
bartering.  But somehow money has taken over the whole system with the
actual producers and consumers getting short changed.
 
The essential root of the evils of capitalism (not that I believe that
capitalism is totally evil) seems to be not ownership of the means of
production, as Marx believed, but control of money and credit.  Credit
seems to be the essential element in capitalism, because capitalism
involves a time reversal.  The means of production (factory, whatever)
has to be paid for by consumers buying the goods produced, but the
factory needs to be constructed before the goods can be sold.  So the
factory has to be paid for by something that can happen only after it is
built.  Hence the essential role of credit.  And those who control
credit, not the evil producers Marx talked about, are the real kings of
the capitalist system.  Or at least, as I understand it, this is Pound's
view.
 
--Lee Lady
 
====================
 
What Was Pound Like?
 
Lee Lady
 
<Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady/ramblings/pound3.html>
 
[ Still under construction ]
 
I am certainly no Pound scholar. And although I knew E.P. when he was in
St. Elizabeths in the late 50's, I have very little if any new information
to contribute.
 
But I have noticed through subscribing to the Ezra Pound mailing list that
many of those academics who have made a profession out of studying Pound
don't seem to have any concept of all of who the man actually was. (Judging
by the articles posted to the mailing list, many of these academics
seem to actually despise him.)
 
One problem is apparently that academics like to work from documents.
But when you read Pound's letters, and the transcripts of the radio
broadcasts he made from Italy during the war, and his various published
opinionated prose works, you see a very different person than the Pound
described by those who actually knew him.
 
Below, I simply want to quote from some of the standard reference materials
to give an impressionistic portrait of Ezra Pound as seen by those who knew
him.
 
In my opinion, if you look for the one salient detail that really brings
Pound to life, it is Gertrude Stein's comment that he was the ``village
explainer.'' (``Met Ezra Pound. Didn't like him. Found him to be the village
explainer. Very useful if you happen to be a village; if not, not.'') I
don't have much hope for any biography that doesn't highlight this comment.
 
Pound, in my opinion, was in his youth (and really, still in his fifties)
what in contemporary terms would be called a nerd. Extremely bright, quite
arrogant intellectually, generous, with a lively interest in other human
beings but a rather superficial one (see especially Lewis Hyde's book The
Gift in this respect), a good judge of literature but not a good judge of
people. (He was taken in by Mussolini's enormous personal charm just as much
as the ladies in Franco Zefferelli's recent film Tea With Mussolini.)
 
If Pound had been born a little later and the circumstances of his life had
been a little different, I think he would have been ideally suited to be a
science fiction writer of the Golden Age of Science Fiction --- someone like
Damon Knight or Frederick Pohl or, perhaps more to the point, A. E. van
Vogt.
 
He was someone who looked at the surface, and he developed a form of poetry
that looks at the surface, and developed an entire critical mystique to
justify his idea that the important part of literature is what's on the
surface; what's important, according to him, is the beauty of the language:
melopeia, phanopeia, and mythopeia. ``Literature is language that's highly
charged with meaning.'' You never see Pound saying, ``Literature is writing
that sees deeply into the human heart,'' or anything of that sort.
 
One notices in his poetry that he tended to be much more at home with
mythology and things that had happened at least fifty years previously than
with the world around him.
 
He was not a thinker; he was an enthusiast. In the realm of literature, he
did have some important ideas, but otherwise few of the non-literary ideas
he promoted were his own. One might almost refer to him as a popularizer,
except that the form in which he expressed his ideas made them quite
inaccessible to all but a small audience.
 
Most of the quotations below have been taken from Charles Norman's book EZRA
POUND (MacMillan, 1960).
 
Robert Graves on first meeting Pound (c. 1920): ``From his poems, I had
expected a brawny, loud-voiced, swashbuckling American; but he was plump,
hunched, soft-spoken and ill-at-ease, with the limpest of handshakes.''
(Quoted in Charles Norman's book EZRA POUND.)
 
Scofield Thayer, 1921 (quoted in Charles Norman's book): ``Ezra Pound, of
whom I have been seeing more rather than less, is a queer duck. He wears a
pointed yellow [?] beard and an elliptical pince-nez and open Byronic collar
and an omelette-yellow bathrobe. On entering a restaurant, one has observed
him so awkward as unintentionally to knock over a waiter and then so
self-conscious as to be unable to say he is sorry. But like most other
people he means well, and unlike most other people he has a fine
imagination. At close quarters, he is much more fair in his judgements than
hie correspondence and his books would warrent one to believe.
``When one arrives at his hotel on the street of the Holy Fathers, one
usually learns from the young lady that Mr. Pound is au bain. But the young
lady consents to go upstairs and inquire if Mr Pound will see guests.
Mr. Pound receives, beaming and incisive.''
 
Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast (p. 108): ``His own writing, when he would
hit it right, was so perfect, and he was sincere in his mistakes and so
enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I often thought of him as
a kind of saint.''
 
Hemingway in 1925: ``We have Pound, the major poet, devoting, say, one fifth
of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the
fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when
they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He lends
them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He
writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets
publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they
claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital
expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end, a few of them
refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.
``Personally, he is tall, has a patchy red beard, strange haircuts and is
very shy. But he has the temperament of a toro di lidia from the breeding
establishments of Don Eduardo Miura. No one ever presents a cape, or shakes
a muleta at him without getting a charge. Like Don Eduardo's product, too,
he sometimes ignores the picador's horse to pick off the man and no one goes
into the ring with him in safety. And though they can always be sure of
drawing his charge yet he gets his quota of bull-baiters each year.''
(Reprinted in An Examination of Ezra Pound, edited by Peter Russell.)
 
Of course one of the things that Pound is famous for is having been able to
recognize the talent of a large number of extremely notable writers and
having helped them get started on their careers and gain recognition. And
certainly Pound's judgement in this respect was very astute. But I believe
that even more than this is true: I believe that even some of the young
writers Pound helped developed into notable literary figures precisely
because of Pound's help. It seems clear to me that this was certainly true,
for instance, of H.D., who had been Pound's sweetheart back in Pennsylvania
before he, and eventually she, came to Europe. Certainly H.D. deserves
credit for her wonderful talent. But, in my opinion (based mostly on reading
her autobiographical book An End to Torment), she would never have developed
that talent and become a poet if it hadn't been for Pound's encouragement.
And T.S. Eliot, on numerous occasions over the years, expressed his opinion
that Pound's help was absolutely crucial in his own development as a poet.
 
In 1959, E.E. Cummings wrote about the Pound of the Twenties (quotation also
taken from Charles Norman), ``During our whole promenade, Ezra was more than
wonderfully entertaining: he was magically gentle, as only a great man can
be.''
 
Margaret Anderson (editor of the Little Review) in 1923 (again quoted from
Norman's book): ``He was dressed in the large velvet beret and flowing tie
of the Latin Quarter artist of the 1830's. He was totally unlike any picture
I had formed of him. Photographs could have given no idea of his height, his
robustness, his red blondness -- could have given no idea of his high Teddy
Roosevelt voice, his nervousness, his self-consciousness. After an hour in
his studio I felt that I had been sitting through a human experiment in a
behaviorist laboratory. Ezra's agitation was not of the type to which we
were accustomed in America -- excitement, pressure, life too high-geared. It
gave me somehow the sensation of watching a baby perform its repetoire of
physical antics gravely, diffidently, without human responsibility for the
performance.''
She commented on his tendancy to ``orientalize'' his attitude toward women,
who he kissed on the forehead or drew upon his knee. She concluded: ``It
will be more interesting to know him when he has grown up.''
 
In 1928 or 1929, Yeats wrote to Richard Aldington, ``In his work, Ezra can
be abrupt and barbarous; when he wants, he can be a pleasant companion and
the most generous of men. He is sensitive, highly strung, and irascible. All
this throwing down of fire-irons and spluttering of four-letter words is
merely Ezra's form of defense against a non too considerate world. I should
say Ezra has had to put up with far more annoyances from other people than
they have from him.''
 
Certainly his ``abrupt and barbarous'' manner has caused a number of people
who know his political views only through his letters and radio broadcasts
to completely misjudge the tone of his attitudes (although certainly the
content alone was often reprehensible enough!)
 
In 1929, in A PACKET FOR EZRA POUND, Yeats wrote his famous description of
Pound's kindness to the stray cats in Rapallo: ``Sometimes about ten o'clock
at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side,
upon the other palm trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket
bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats. He knows all their
histories -- the brindled cat looked like a skeleton until he began to feed
it; that fat gray cat is an hotel proprietor's favorite, it never begs from
the guests' tables and it turns cats that do not belong to the hotel out of
the garden; this black cat and that grey cat over there fought on the roof
of a four-storied house some weeks ago, fell off, a whirling ball of claws
and fur, and now avoid each other.''
 
But then Yeats felt compelled to add: ``Yet now that I recall the scene I
think that he has no affection for the cats -- `some of them so ungrateful,'
a friend says -- he never nurses the cafe's cat, I cannot imagine him with a
cat of his own.''
Yeats proposes an explanation as follows: ``Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify
them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with
contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a
studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed
and like good politicians sell our charity for power.''
 
And yet, somehow, five or ten years later, Pound was unable to see that the
Jews in Germany and the German-occupied countries, and eventually, toward
the end of the war, in Italy itself, were in a situation very comparable to
the cats in Rapallo. (According to Eustace Mullins's biography of Pound,
however, he did give assistance to some Jewish families that had escaped
from Germany. I think the only confirmation of this, though, is Pound's own
account.)
 
Reading Yeats's account of Pound's care for the stray cats in Rapallo makes
me think of Pound's care of John Chatell, one of the young regular visitors
to St. Elizabeths in the late 50's. I would eventually learn that Chatell's
family owned an extremely successful real estate company which handled a lot
of expensives houses in Georgetown. But Chatell himself lived the life of a
poor student (without actually being a student, except at the `Ezuversity').
Marcella Spann Booth, writing in Paideuma, has reminded me of the way Pound
used to mother him, scavenging hospital food for him to take home.
 
Writers, artists, musicians, and the like (even mathematicians!) who are
widely acclaimed as boy wonders in their twenties often find it difficult to
find a path to follow as they reach maturity, and this seems to have been
some of what happened to Pound after he moved to Italy and entered his
fifties.
 
Pound had now achieved a great triumph, which also seemed to have been his
downfall: namely, the world was now taking him seriously. And yet despite
having a couple dozen books to his name and being fairly universally
recognized as one of the world's great living poets, he was living in fairly
severe poverty, as was the case for his whole life.
 
Being taken seriously was, as I see it, an extremely pernicious thing for
Pound, because it encouraged him to take himself far more seriously than was
compatible with rationality. The brash egotism which had earlier been seen
as tolerable and somewhat natural in a bright young man seemed to be turning
into an irrational egomania. And it encouraged the world to look at his
stupidities, in particular his radio broadcasts, much more harshly than
would have been the case if the world had still seen him as the extremely
bright but eccentric writer that he had been in London and Paris during his
thirties and forties -- in some ways, not only the village explainer, but
also the village fool, albeit a highly intelligent fool; almost an idiot
savant.
 
Pound's fiftieth birthday was in 1935, and about that time one began to
learn the answer to Margaret Anderson's question of what Pound would be like
"when he grows up," and the answer was not a pretty one. His old friends now
often returned from visiting him to report that he was querrulous and
intolerant of any disagreement with his opinions, which many now found quite
bizarre. Some (Joyce, for instance) found him in fact quite insane.
 
In Humphrey Carpenter's biography A SERIOUS CHARACTER, Robert Fitzgerald is
quoted as saying that Pound's letters and articles written during the
Rapallo period ``had the tone of a man no longer in touch.... What had
seemed high-hearted and rather Olympian fun began to seem childish and
beside the point. Only a man working in isolation, without criticism or
ignoring it, could have failed to see the fretfulness and poverty of
argument.''
 
It's always important to remember, though, as Fitzgerald acknowledged, that
throughout his life Pound in person was very different and much pleasanter
than Pound on paper. However Carpenter also quotes Giuseppe Bacigalupo as
having noted an unpleasant change in manner at his occasional meetings with
Pound, saying, ``It was not possible to hold a normal conversation.... He
had come increasingly to adopt the attitude of someone who assumes that the
person he is talking to shares his own interests and knowledge, so that some
cryptic allusion seemed to him to be enough to explain what he was thinking
--- a hypothesis which was far from well founded.''
 
It's important to remember, though, that in the context of the 1930's
Pound's support for Mussolini and for eccentric economic theories (we would
now say "crackpot") were not as bizarre as they now seem to us in
retrospect, and were shared by many notable intellectuals of the time.
 
In any case, Pound in Rapallo seemed, as always, to be having a very good
time. In Humphrey Carpenter's book, James Laughlin is quoted on the subject
of Pound at the movies.
 
"The movies were simply awful, but Ezra loved them. He'd sit up in
the gallery with a cowboy hat on and his feet on the rail, eating
peanuts, roaring with laughter."
 
The fact is, it seems as though Pound in many ways never did ``grow up.''
Almost all the available photographs of Pound make him look like a very
``serious character'' (the phrase which Humphrey Carpenter used as the title
of his biography on Pound), and because of this they totally misrepresent
Pound. They certainly look nothing at all like the images in my own memory.
One characteristic that most people who knew Pound, from his twenties into
his seventies if not his eighties, seem to agree on was a joyous quality
along with a boyishness which at times seemed to verge on an insane
immaturity. In the PBS Voices and Visions program on Pound, one of the
former officials in the Fascist government reports that when they tried to
discourage Pound from his radio broadcasts during the war, and asked him
whether he realized how seriously such an action would be considered and how
serious the consequences for him might be, his response was to laugh.
 
In the Pisan detention camp, where he was at first barbarically prisoned in
an open iron cage (after all, the Army thought of him as a despicable
traitor, an American who had supposedly broadcast propaganda for the
Fascists), he became a camp character, and his self-devised bizarre exercise
ritual, including fencing and playing tennis with imaginary opponents using
an old broom handle, became a source of amusement for the guards. Many of
the guards developed an affection for the old man, and started showing him
various kindnesses in violation of their orders.
 
He told the medics in the camp that the United States government would never
try him for treason, because he ``had too much on several people in
Washington.'' (My source here, as for most of this, is Charles Norman's
biography.)
 
As he left the camp to be flown to the United States, he put his hand under
his chin to indicate a noose and made a pantomine gesture of being hanged.
And when the plane became airborne, he started laughing, because he'd never
been in the air before.
 
When he was first put into St. Elizabeths mental hospital, he was put into
Howard Hall, where the most dangerous patients were kept, because the staff
at St. Elizabeths had been told that he was a serious criminal. Although the
time in Howard Hall was a horrible ordeal as one can see from Humphrey
Carpenter's biography (aside from everything else, he was never allowed to
go outside during this period), when he talked about the experience several
times in my presence he expressed amusement that the authorities would
consider him dangerous enough to warrent this treatment and said that it
gave him the opportunity to meet a couple of murderers, which had been an
interesting new experience for him.
 
Humphrey Carpenter's biograph on Pound (A SERIOUS CHARACTER) in Chapter 13
quotes the following report by Louis Dudek on Pound at St. Elizabeths, when
he had been moved to the more benign environment of the Chestnut Ward and
was allowed to receive visitors out on the lawn in good weather:
 
"He continually kept doing little things to make us comfortable:
cutting the fruit ... and passing it around; pouring the tea out
of a thermos; offering newspapers to lay on the grass for sitting;
bringing out books, magazines, letters from a bag... He would also
feed the birds... Said Mrs Pound: `He would never do that in the
old days; he was always too busy, always doing something.'"
 
This description (and some of the other reports Carpenter quotes in the same
chapter) agree very much with my own memories of St Elizabeths. Although
Pound has often been called a narcissist, and was certainly an egomaniac, he
was always very attentive to the people around him (including the orderlies
and at least many of the patients at the hospital) and took a keen interest
in the lives of his regular visitors and was concerned for their well being.
As mentioned above, he regularly scavenged hospital food for John Chatel
(``young Chatel,'' as he called him in his letters), and possibly some of
the other starving artists and writers among his visitors as well. Humphrey
Carpenter quotes from a report that
 
"His room was a confusion of jars, bottles, boxes, make-shift
containers filled with dainties, exotics, and plain fare of bread,
cheese, ham, sweets... and all the left-over food he could `pouch'
three times a day at St. Liz. The main purpose of his bulging
larder was to feel the starving artist; jar after jar of food went
of the grounds `for the noble purpose of nourishing the arts.'"
 
Pound usually referred to himself as ``Grampa,'' and all the younger
visitors were encouraged to do likewise. Sheri Martinelli was in some sense
(it's probably impossible now to ever establish to exactly what extent) his
lover, but she was much more like a favored daughter. She usually referred
to him as Maestro and her affection toward him, mixed with deep respect (one
might almost say reverence), was like that one might have to a favorite
older relative.
 
She brought him cookies, fudge, and jasmine tea. In a short article in
Paideuma (volume 13), Marcella Spann gives an account of Pound jumping out
of his chair and running across the lawn to greet Sheri
 
"with his most affectionate and energetic bear hug. The cookies she
has brought scatter about them, and Sheri exclaims: ``Grampa is
the only man in the world you can bring cookies and before he can
eat one of them, he drops them all on the ground; and before you
can help him pick them up, he steps on every one.''"
 
Pound's old friends in the literary world were often bothered by the
indiscriminateness of his friendliness to visitors, and seemed to think that
there was something wrong with Pound's being friendly to people with so
little stature. But E.P. seemed to be equally interested in and friendly
toward just about everybody (and despite his well known anti-semitism, this
apparently included those Jews who managed to visit him). When Sheri's lover
Gilbert Lee was sent to the penitentiary for dealing heroin, E.P.'s attitude
was apparently that this was regretable, but typical of the trouble that
artists get themselves into when they're young. In a letter subsequent to
Gilbert's release, Pound wrote, ``Well, he's apparently devoting himself to
composing jazz now.'' (Gilbert was a jazz pianist, and earned his living as
an auto mechanic. Unfortunately, a few years later he had an accident while
working on a car that seriously damaged his fingers and consequently ended
his career as a musician. Years later, when I met him and Sheri again in San
Francisco, he was still an auto mechanic.)
 
I think that one can see here a strong continuity here between the Pound in
Paris in the 1920's, as described by passages quoted above from Charles
Norman's book, and the Pound in St. Elizabeths during the 1950's.
 
Some academics now take the fact that John Kasper was welcome at
St. Elizabeths as proof that Pound was a racist. But in fact, although
Pound's anti-semitism was quite conspicuous in almost all his conversations,
he was not notably racist. (Furthermore, although Kasper was later to become
infamous as a White supremacist, his personal attitudes toward Negroes
seemed to be rather confused.) Everyone was welcome at St. Elizabeths,
provided only that they were willing to listen to Pound respectfully and try
to learn from him.
 
When I started visiting Pound at St. Elizabeths, one of the first things I
wondered about was whether he was actually sane or not. At the time, I know
not the slightest thing about mental illness, so all I could do was to judge
whether he seemed basically rational or not.
 
Pound certainly had his own style of communicating. On my first visit, I
couldn't understand a word he said. Later, I started to catch on to his
style. The comments by Giuseppe Bacigalupo quoted above describe this fairly
well. To repeat,
 
"He had come increasingly to adopt the attitude of someone who
assumes that the person he is talking to shares his own interests
and knowledge, so that some cryptic allusion seemed to him to be
enough to explain what he was thinking --- a hypothesis which was
far from well founded."
 
One had to read the correct books and learn the right things in order to
make sense of what E.P. was saying. To my seventeen-year-old self at the
time, this did not seem completely unreasonable, and once I had learned the
background material, Pound's talk seemed fairly reasonable.
 
Reading the ABC of Reading and his other books was a big help, because I
realized that a lot of his discourse when there was a big crowd present
consisted of quotations from his books; slogans such as ``Artists are the
antennae of the race'' or ``Great literature is news that stays news.'' This
was perhaps an unusual form of communication, but it seemed quite rational
and deliberate; he believed that these slogans were very fundamental truths
which it was important to re-iterate over and over again in the hopes that
they would finally sink in for the listener.
 
Later on, when I experienced him in small groups of friends, I found his
conversation quite ordinary. He was quite capable of small talk.
 
One day Sheri, as I recall (or it may have been John Chatel), mentioned that
recently St. Elizabeths had been granting weekend furloughs to some of the
patients so that they could spend time with their families, and complained
that it was unfair that EP had not been granted a similar privilege. But he
responded quite calmly that after all, he was charged with a extremely
serious federal crime, and so naturally the hospital would be ultra-cautious
about relaxing their control.
 
Oddly enough, this is the one case where I think Pound's usual complaint of
oppression by his enemies could have been justified. A lot of influential
people, both in Congress and otherwise, hated Pound because of his
anti-semitism and in particular because of his radio broadcasts (very few
people in those days were familiar with the actual contents of the
broadcasts, which were then only available in the Library of Congress on
microfilm) and might have raised a big stink if St. Elizabeths had allowed
him any sort of freedom.
 
On many other occasions, though, he claimed that he was being kept
incarcerated, or that publishers were refusing to include his work in
anthologies, because the government or the banking interests wanted to
suppress some of the information he would reveal to the public. Even at the
time, I was considerably skeptical of this.
 
But one can't claim that someone is crazy just because some of his opinions
are irrational. The fact is that very few people are able and willing to
apply critical thinking to their own beliefs about politics, religion, and
the like, although most of us are quite capable of subjecting the beliefs of
those who disagree with us to rigorous critical analysis.
 
In retrospect, though, I do think that Pound had a megalomania that went
beyond the bounds of rationality.
 
As far as I can tell, throughout his life, everyone who ever had much
contact with him liked him, including those who despised his attitudes.
 
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