The fascinating madness of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was an ardent fascist who wrote much of his finest work while locked in an asylum for 12 years. So can a mad, bad man also be a great poet?
The renowned poet Ezra Pound once said: ‘If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good.’ This is, I suppose, a variant on Martin Luther King’s belief: ‘If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.’
At first, both of these quotes sound very true, and very heroic. But what if the opinions our hero holds – the opinions he’s prepared to die for – are disgusting?
Ezra Pound was prepared to risk his life for his opinions, but they were opinions he shared with Mussolini and Hitler. During the Second World War, in hundreds of broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini’s government, Pound said things such as ‘I think it might be a good thing to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred yids if you can do it by due legal process,’ and ‘Whoever died at Dunkirk died for gold.’ He stood in the vanguard of fascism. ‘For the US to be making war on Italy and Europe,’ he declared, ‘is just plain nonsense.’
After the war was over, he remained true to his deeply held opinions, and at considerable personal risk. Under lock and key, he continued to describe Hitler as ‘a martyr’, and his old chum Mussolini as ‘a very human, imperfect character who lost his head’.
The man his biographer describes as an ardent fascist and a rambling antisemite is still regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. This interesting book grapples with this apparent contradiction, and many more. Can a bad man be a great poet? Can a great poet also be mad? Can you divorce poetry from its creator? Does genius excuse wickedness? And what is the point of a great intellect if it ends up agreeing with thugs and half-wits?
How should you judge a poet? One of Pound’s readers argued that ‘A poem is a thing in itself. You judge it by itself, for itself and of itself – not by the politics of the man who wrote it.’
This sounds true and reasonable. But then you read the opposite point of view, expressed by a young poet who visited Pound in prison: ‘To read only his poetry and ignore his crimes would be the grand betrayal, for it would be to admit that poets are fools and bohemians, not men of the world.’ And this sounds true and reasonable, too.
Ezra Pound was brought up in suburban Philadelphia, a happy, all-American child in a happy, all-American family. Aged 39 in 1924, he and his wife moved to Italy, drawn by its relative cheapness. They lived there for the next 20 years, until he was arrested by the Allied Forces in May 1945. He had already been indicted for treason back in July 1943, so he faced a possible death sentence, just like our own Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce. Under arrest, he was taken to Genoa for questioning by the FBI, and then shipped back to America for examination, and possible trial. Various experts and psychiatrists gave him all sorts of tests and interviews. ‘What is wrong with you?’ asked one doctor. ‘All of Europe upon my shoulders,’ he replied.
To another, he said: ‘If this is a hospital, you have got to cure me.’ ‘Cure you of what?’ asked the doctor. ‘Whatever the hell is the matter with me,’ came the reply. ‘You must decide whether I am to be cured or punished.’
In the end, they decided on a bit of both. He was, said the report, ‘suffering from a paranoid state’ and this rendered him ‘insane and mentally unfit for trial’. So, for the time being, he would be incarcerated in a government hospital for the insane on the outskirts of Washington. This was where he was to live for the next 12 years.
St Elizabeth’s Hospital was a vast institution, with more than 7,000 inmates. Though it was surrounded by high walls, it was otherwise pretty liberal. Throughout his time there, Pound was allowed to go on writing and publishing his poems. He even won a top literary award for the best volume of poetry published in 1948, giving rise to a classic New York Times headline: ‘POUND, IN MENTAL CLINIC, WINS PRIZE FOR POETRY PENNED IN TREASON CELL’.
He was also allowed to receive any number of visitors, many of whom were fans and/or fellow poets. The author describes St Elizabeth’s, not without reason, as ‘the world’s least orthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum’. Pound’s list of visitors reads like a roster of the most distinguished American poets of that era: Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, John Berryman, T S Eliot.
Daniel Swift has had the bright idea of studying seven of these encounters in depth, six with poets and one with a doctor. Rather than writing a conventional cradle-to-grave biography of Pound, rather too many of which have already been written, he has confined himself to Pound’s 12 years in the mental hospital – or ‘The Bughouse’, as Pound called it – ‘trying to see him through the eyes of others’.
Swift has been energetic in his pursuit of Pound and his visitors, travelling here, there and everywhere or, as he puts it, in his fluffily poetic way: ‘Wherever people speak of Pound, there I tried to go.’ This means that he spends an awful lot of time describing slightly unnecessary journeys up hill and down dale, sometimes to speak to someone who once met someone who once met, etc, etc, the great, mad poet.
Often, he visits somewhere and tries to soak up the atmosphere, not quite knowing why. At one point, he climbs upstairs in the derelict mental hospital and enters a gymnasium set up for basketball. ‘We stand for a while in the pale green light, just beneath the roof, and not for the first time I wonder what I’m looking for here, in an abandoned gymnasium, in a ruined hospital, in a poet’s memory. I’m fairly sure, however, that Pound never played basketball here, for tennis was his game…’
Well, if the author doesn’t know why he’s there, I’m not sure even the most conscientious reader will be able to enlighten him. The Bughouse is full of fascinating information, but it all comes at the price of a great deal of waffle. There were times while reading it that I began to yearn for a sharper, less airy-fairy, more journalistic approach, free of gnomic utterances such as: ‘Noticing is humanity; sensitivity is grace, is salvation, is the blessed capacity to let one’s mind be changed by what one looks upon.’ Oh, get on with it!
Swift is also much given to hyperbole. ‘Ezra Pound was the most difficult man of the 20th Century,’ he confidently states on page two. Later he writes: ‘Few
‘Was Pound’s continued ability to write poetry proof of his sanity, or his insanity?’
stories in the history of poetic creation are more touching than this one: Ezra Pound in prison wrote himself into a state of grace.’ All he means by this is that Pound wrote some nature poems after first being captured. But if he achieved a state of grace, it didn’t last long: within days, he was back to his daft anti-semitic rants.
Yet, for all its faults, at the heart of this book lies a fascinating debate about poets and society. Some of the greatest American poets – Lowell and Berryman, and also Anne Sexton and Delmore Schwartz – were, at different times in their lives, out of their minds. Yet at the same time they were capable of writing poetry that resonated far more deeply with the rest of humanity than the vapid stuff offered by their more rational, more personable counterparts.
In 1954, the US Attorney General wrote to the head of St Elizabeth’s asking how it was that ‘this patient is mentally capable of translating and publishing poetry but not mentally capable of being brought to justice’.
It was a good question, and a hard one to answer. Was Ezra Pound’s continued ability to write poetry proof of his sanity, or of his insanity?
Swift doesn’t mention another 20th-century author and poet, Primo Levi, an Italian sent to Auschwitz by Pound’s hero Mussolini. Levi was in no doubt that poetry could not be divorced from morality. ‘As long as we live we have a responsibility: we must be answerable for what we write, word by word, and ensure that every word reaches its mark.’