1. Something not generally remembered is that Francis Biddle, the Attorney
General who indicted Pound for treason, was not the recipient of an
ordinary political education but a highly cultivated man, well acquainted
with Pound's work. In fact, his wife, the poet Katherine Garrison Chapin,
was on the jury that awarded Pound the Bollingen Prize. (She voted nay.)
 
Aside from that, Biddle was a writer himself, and a proud scion of the old
Philadelphia banking family that's mentioned in _The Cantos_. So it's
interesting to read his almost apologetic account of Pound's case in his
memoir _In Brief Authority_ (Doubleday, 1962), pp. 290-295. It begins with
a tribute to "President Roosevelt's exercise of the powers of pardon and
commutation of federal convicts [which] reflected his sense of pity for the
trespasses of human frailty," and continues with an account of the first
treason conviction of the war (in fact, the first since 1794): the case of
a Nazi sympathizer in Detroit who had sheltered an escaped German prisoner
of war. In that case, President Roosevelt commuted the death sentence to
life imprisonment. And that brings Biddle to the indictments of Pound and
the ten other Americans accused of treason for their pro-Axis broadcasts.
He concludes (pp. 294-95):
 
"When Pound moved to Rapallo many years before the war, my brother George
went to see him and made an excellent lithograph of the poet; and later
called on him at St. Elizabeth [sic], hoping to be allowed to draw him
again. But Pound would not agree. When George asked him to autograph a book
in August 1957 he wrote George one of his funny half-mad letters:
 
"'Dear Jarge'--it ran--
"'I will do anything in reason, but NOTHING that wd. force my infinitely
pateint wife to wrap up parcels and tote 'em to the post office. She got
'nuff to do luggin in stuff people send to her instead of direkt to me at
the orsptl . . . Ain't it time fer yr. bro. I mean ain't he young enuf to
turn over a new leaf and admit the country warn't invaded when they stopped
habeas corpus or other irregularities I mean the dems might even git some
kudos for going anti-Javitts kulchurl uplift an all that. If history don't
brand F.D.R. as one of the worst stinkers, it cant avoid seein that he was
a cad and a liar who perjured himself every time he tukk oath of office.
And the causes of war have been defined in Fuller's Military History
etCettyroar, merely certain lies and evasions putt out 12 years ago are
being revived, etc. He knows damn well I didn't betray anybody.
 
        "'He knows
 
                        "'Yorz
                                "'Ezra'"
 
On the other hand, Biddle is firm about one thing. "The broadcasts were
unquestionably treasonable," he says on 292, and explains the
aid-and-comfort provision in full legal detail. And the footnote to the
letter is that "Javitts" would be Senator Jacob Javits of New York, a
liberal Republican and (more to the point for Pound) a Jew.
 
2. Here's a reference I haven't found in the ordinary Pound literature:
Robert D. Gillman, "Ezra Pound's Rorschach Diagnosis," _Bulletin of the
Menninger Clinic_ 58 (1994): 307-22. The abstract reads:
 
"The 1946 Rorschach protocol of poet Ezra Pound was given blind to three
clinical psychologists to see whether interpretations of this historic
document would give perspective to the controversy that surrounded his
hospital commitment as unfit to stand trial for his treasonous radio
broadcasts during World War II. The psychologists found greater
psychopathology and defect in Pound's functioning than was generally
observed when he was originally tested, and they predicted the
psychotic-organic depression that occurred after the poet's discharge 12
years later."
 
Jonathan Morse
Department of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa