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  For Jessie

  Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’

  Let us go and make our visit.

  T. S. Eliot,

  ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

  Prologue

  Liz Bish

  The Roman road runs north past Livorno, past fields of sunflowers dazed by the sun and mountains in the haze. This is the old Via Aurelia. Above it snakes a new motorway on stilts. Just after Pisa, the old road meets a sullen river and a forgotten train station. METATO, says the rusting sign, and here is the field that was the prison: bound to the north by river and to the west by road, while all around to the south and east are low hills.

  Across the landscape there are lines: of cypresses, lines where the plough passed, lines from a tractor. There are lines of umbrella pines each one like a Y, while in the hills are marble mines, red squares boxed from brown hillside. The field that was the prison is now a nursery garden. At the north end is the Fiorista Gloria, and here are greenhouses filled with ferns for the stiff bouquets Italians give at funerals. At the south end is Ristorante La Rota, and behind the restaurant are nine more pale greenhouses. Some are empty and in some are tomatoes in rows, zucchini on the ground, white butterflies, blue beehives. The soil is rocks in the heat.

  The woman at the fern garden tells me to go and see the old men at Circolo Acli, where they take their coffee each afternoon at two. The café is at the end of a road, with white gravel and brown plastic furniture, and they sit in the shade smoking slowly, not much talk. I ask, but they do not know about the field at Metato, for this is Vecchiano and Metato is a mile away. Then they remember Signor Bertelli. He lives in a green house by the old train station, overlooking the field and the river, and as I walk up he is sitting on his terrace. When I say I am writing a book about a story that began here seventy years ago, he tells me he is a writer too. He holds out a handful of pages. He has been writing a poem about his ninety-seventh birthday, last week.

  Signor Bertelli remembers the camp on the other side of the river. It was all tents, he says, and first it was for Italian airmen, and when the Americans came they built a fence two metres high. Nobody local went inside. He laughs when I say there was a famous American poet in there. At the end of the war Signor Bertelli worked for the Americans. They sent him to Naples to direct the traffic, and he remembers the terrible traffic and how everybody thought he spoke English because he wore an American uniform, but he never understood a word.

  * * *

  Ezra Pound was the most difficult man of the twentieth century. He was an ardent fascist who wrote ‘Never consider anything as dogma’ and a rambling anti-Semite who believed that ‘Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.’ He was the densely allusive high modernist who wrote some of the tenderest poetry of his time and a boy from suburban Philadelphia who lived most of his life in Europe: London, Paris, Italy. His great work, which he wrote for fifty years, is the unfinished, 800-page Cantos. This is a poem of legendary complexity, as hard and rich as any art produced in that century, but Pound’s difficulty lies not only in the challenge of how to read his poetry, but also how to reconcile it with his life’s contradictions. He loved the American Constitution and spent the Second World War broadcasting anti-American propaganda from Mussolini’s Italy; he was a racist who held that the summit of human truth was to be found in African myth, Chinese philosophy and Japanese plays. He is difficult because he is a man who may accurately be described by the most cartoonish names: fascist, madman, genius, traitor. He was the best and the worst, and just as his strengths seem to cancel his failings, so too do those failings falsify the strengths.

  You cannot write the history of twentieth-century literature without giving Pound a starring role in the story, but you can call him the hero or the villain; both parts are his. Writing in Poetry magazine in 1916, the celebrated American poet Carl Sandburg claimed: ‘All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned.’ In 1916 Pound was thirty years old and already the contradiction is set. For those who care about poetry, Pound is either the sign of all that is wrong or the best thing going, but he cannot be ignored.

  Sandburg continues: ‘One must know how to spell his name, and have heard rumors of where he hangs his hat when he eats, and one must have at least passing acquaintance with his solemn denunciados and his blurted quiddities, in order to debate on modern poetry, and in such debate zigzag a course of progress.’ It is not enough to read his poems alone, for it is in his life that he becomes an emblem of what a poet is and should be. Sandburg mentions Keats, for Keats is the kind of poet who is easy to love: a boy of extravagant talent who lived a poet’s life and usefully died young. He knew his niche and filled it beautifully. But Pound is not Keats; his place is not so certain; where he hangs his hat one day may not be the same tomorrow; and this is not all. Pound’s contradictions remain with us. They are the uncertainties of our time, and if we wish, in Sandburg’s phrase, to zigzag a course of progress, we must consider Pound and his place in our world.

  A mile from where I work in central London is the National Portrait Gallery: an ornate Victorian temple which houses the faces of Britain’s history. On the second floor is the Statesmen’s Gallery. It is an avenue of important men – and a couple of women – of the nineteenth century, and the statesmen have monocles, watch fobs and splendid names such as Lord George Cavendish Bentinck. The portraits have black backgrounds and the only person in this gallery not wearing a black suit is the cricketer W. G. Grace and he is the most stately of the lot, a mountain of a man in cricket whites and wide, square beard. Here, decorum matters.

  To the side of the gallery is Room 24, where the writers are, and they too wear black. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning are looking at one another, muted, ready for a funeral. Dickens is in very dark green trousers and frock coat; a tiepin holds a spray of black cravat. The Reverend Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, looks like your headmaster’s headmaster. Thomas Hardy wears a black suit and a white shirt. This was an age which considered writers lesser statesmen, and they dress the part.

  Continue a little further now, to the end of the gallery, and left, and as you turn you leap into a new century. The portraits shrink and here at last is colour, and here at last the writers look alive. In the painting by Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey is lying reading. He wears a fuzzy dressing gown with a red paisley blanket on top and he holds a book tenderly with long amazing hands. Dylan Thomas, painted by Augustus John, is wearing what looks like a woolly jumper made from a leopard’s fur, and Laurie Lee is in a rich brown suit and blue shirt.

  When you step from the Statesmen’s Gallery you move from the Victorian age to the modern, and as much
as Freud or Einstein, Ezra Pound invented the modern age. He edited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into what is routinely described as the most important poem of the twentieth century and he told Ernest Hemingway to use fewer adjectives. He encouraged E. E. Cummings to experiment with the layout of typewritten words on the page and he was responsible for the first publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Wyndham Lewis called him the Trotsky of literature and the difference he made lies not only in anecdotes such as these. On the broadest possible scale, Pound’s life was committed to the principle that writers are not lesser statesmen.

  * * *

  By May of 1945, when the soldiers came for him with guns, Ezra Pound had been living in Italy for twenty years. His was a generation of American writers who went abroad, but his entanglement in Europe was a little more extreme. In January 1941 – the year America entered the war – he began a series of radio broadcasts from Rome. He discussed monetary reform, his poetry and, most of all, the folly of this fight against the Axis powers; and he broadcast perhaps 200 times – rambling, passionate, in accents and impersonations – before 26 July 1943, when the US Department of Justice indicted him for treason. This charge carries the death penalty. Pound continued to broadcast. By the spring of 1945 the war was coming to an end and Italy was collapsing, and on the morning of Thursday 3 May he was at home in the village of Sant’Ambrogio, just above the northern seaside town of Rapallo, when two Italian Communists from a local anti-Fascist brigade rapped on his door. Pound had long believed in culture, that scholarship might save us, so he picked up a Chinese dictionary and a copy of Confucius and put them in his pocket. Then he went with the soldiers.

  There are two ways to tell what happened next.

  1.

  The Communist partisans who captured Pound did not want to keep him, so at lunchtime they let him go. He went to the American military post in the next village and handed himself in. The American troops were uncertain what to do with this sixty-year-old poet with a pointy beard. The next day he was taken in handcuffs to Genoa, where he was questioned by the FBI. On 22 May the order came from Washington. ‘Transfer without delay under guard to MTOUSA Disciplinary Training Center,’ it ran: ‘Exercise utmost security measures to prevent escape or suicide.’

  The DTC at Pisa was a punishment and rehabilitation camp for military offenders: rapists, murderers, deserters, 3,500 men. Pound was put in a cage at the edge of the field, six feet by six, reinforced with strips of jagged steel of the sort used to construct emergency runways. He called it ‘the gorilla cage’.

  All other members of the camp, both prisoners and guards, were ordered to keep away from him.

  Next to him were the cells where prisoners on their way to execution waited. Pound was permitted to keep his Confucius and the Chinese dictionary, and was given an army issue Bible.

  The sun at Pisa is hot in May and June. Pound had no shelter. The dust and glare inflamed his eyes.

  By the middle of June Pound has suffered a nervous breakdown. He is given a tent of his own in the military compound. He finds a poetry anthology in the communal latrine. He is allowed to use the typewriter in the dispensary at night. He starts to write.

  He writes:

  No one who has passed a month in the death cells

     believes in capital punishment

  No man who has passed a month in the death cells

     believes in cages for beasts.

  One of the guards makes a desk for him from a packing case. This is against the rules. In return, Pound includes the guard’s name – ‘Mr Edwards’ – in his new poem.

  He writes: ‘the greatest is charity / to be found among those who have not observed regulations.’

  Few stories in the history of poetic creation are more touching than this one: Ezra Pound in prison wrote himself into a state of grace.

  He starts to notice the natural world around him: the insects and the birds, that which is growing, that which renews. He writes: ‘Learn of the green world what can be thy place / In scaled invention or true artistry, / Pull down thy vanity.’

  Sometimes, the other prisoners and guards took advantage of the poet in their midst. The guard Robert Allen later recalled: ‘It was not unusual to see him typing a letter to some trainee’s girl or mother with the trainee dictating at his shoulder and Pound interpreting for him.’

  His nickname in the camp was ‘Uncle Ezra’.

  The commanding officer of the DTC was Lieutenant Colonel John L. Steele. He said: ‘We weren’t able to provide him with a library, but obviously he didn’t need that; he carried that in his head.’

  Pound’s wife Dorothy was not told where he was until August, and once she heard she went to him. His son Omar – who was serving in the US army – also went to visit him at the DTC.

  He writes: ‘What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross.’

  In Washington, the Department of Justice began to assemble the treason case. Despite the existence of recordings of Pound’s broadcasts, the prosecution, in order to prove treason, were required to provide witnesses to the act. The government lawyers found five Italian radio technicians to testify that Pound had made treasonous speeches over the radio in Rome, and flew them to Washington. In the United States, awaiting the trial, these five radio men demanded their regular monthly salaries, but soon revealed that since none of them knew English they could not account for what Pound may or may not have said during the broadcasts. Later, the government paid for them to take a vacation at Hot Springs, Virginia.

  Pound’s defence lawyer, who willingly took on the case, was Julien Cornell. He was a Quaker and a pacifist and most experienced in defending conscientious objectors.

  On 18 November 1945 Pound’s plane landed at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, DC. This journey – his rendition – was the first time he had flown. Upon disembarking, he was greeted at the runway by a crowd of reporters, and he asked them: ‘Does anyone have the faintest idea of what I actually said in Rome?’

  Pound was examined by army medical experts and civilian psychiatrists under the direction of Dr Winfred Overholser, who was a widely respected authority on the role of psychiatry in legal proceedings and the superintendent of St Elizabeths Hospital, the government hospital for the insane just outside Washington. On 21 December 1945 their joint report was presented to the court. ‘He is now suffering from a paranoid state which renders him mentally unfit to advise properly with counsel or to participate intelligently and reasonably in his own defense,’ the doctors conclude: ‘He is, in other words, insane and mentally unfit for trial.’

  He writes: ‘Oh let an old man rest.’

  Pound was taken directly from the courtroom to St Elizabeths Hospital. He was kept there for the following twelve and a half years.

  2.

  In early May 1945, when Pound was being held at Genoa, he gave an interview to an American journalist. In it he described Hitler as ‘a martyr’, Mussolini as ‘a very human, imperfect character who lost his head,’ and Stalin as ‘the best brain in the business’.

  On 15 June 1945 an army psychiatrist examined Pound and reported: ‘There is no evidence of psychosis, neurosis or psychopathy. He is of superior intelligence, is friendly, affable and cooperative.’

  The opening of Canto 74 – the first of The Pisan Cantos, written at the DTC – presents the fall of Mussolini as a tragedy.

  He writes: ‘poor old Benito’.

  One of the most troubling of the Cantos is 73, which celebrates the death of a company of Canadian soldiers tricked on to an Italian minefield. Along with Canto 72, Canto 73 was written in Italian during the summer and autumn of 1944. Pound’s publishers, New Directions and Faber, excluded these two cantos from the printed versions of the poems until 1987. Since then, editions include the two cantos in the original Italian along with an English translation of 72, but not of 73, meaning that the most extreme statement of Pound’s political sympathy remains unknown to those who cannot read Italian.

 
It is hard to convey bad poetry in quotation. This is why Pound has tended to fare well in the hands of his critics. Anyone can find a good line or two, but the grand bad faith of the Cantos – its pomposity, its anger – is a constant, running line after line.

  On 17 November 1945 Pound was flown from Rome to the United States via Prague, England and Newfoundland. He was escorted by Lieutenant Colonel P. V. Holder, and on the long journey they talked. Later, Holder wrote: ‘Pound […] is an extremely educated man with a wide divergence of knowledge and interests. His hobbies are the translating of ancient documents such as Pluto [sic] and Confucius. The bulk of our conversation was carried on concerning these matters. He explained in detail the source of his knowledge and the means by which his translations were accomplished.’

  On 27 November 1945 Julien Cornell told the New York Times: ‘Mr Pound is not sufficiently in possession of judgement and perhaps mentality to plead.’ This was the first time anyone publicly declared that Pound was insane.

  In a letter written after their first meeting, Cornell noted that Pound ‘had no objection to the possibility of pleading insane as a defense […] In fact he told me that the idea had already occurred to him.’

  On 10 December 1945 Dr Marion King – the head of the prison medical service – reported his findings from three examinations of Pound. He concluded that Pound was not ‘a psychotic or insane person’, and therefore ‘should not be absolved from the necessity of standing trial’. His opinion was not included in the documents presented to the court.

  At the end of December 1945 Dr Addison Duval – one of the psychiatrists who had told the court that Pound was unfit to stand trial – noted: ‘I had assumed that he was psychotic because our boss had already made a diagnosis […] But I couldn’t elicit any symptoms of psychosis at all. There were no delusions, no thought disorder and no disturbance or disorientation. He definitely did not seem to be insane.’