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