Shrinking Pound

Jeffrey Meyers

The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St Elizabeths E. Fuller Torrey

(Sidgwick & Jackson £12.95, £8.95) During the Second World War, before and after Pearl Harbor, Pound wrote and delivered 300 seven-minute propaganda broadcasts from Rome. Arthur Miller stated that 'in his wildest moments of human vilification Hitler never approached °ur Ezra for sheer obscenity'. As millions of Jews were being gassed in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Pound urged a pogrom at the top, a new style of killing important Jews, and called Hitler 'a saint and a martyr. He was charged with treason in July 1943 and gave a reasoned, if unconvincing defence o f

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his actions. Arrested by Italian partisans in May 1945, he was handed over to the American Army and confined for 25 days in a 6x6x10-foot cage in Pisa. In July, he was examined by three army doctors who found him 'psychiatrically normal'. This fact disproves the rumour that the army and government conspired to induce Pound's Mental breakdown in Pisa so that he would not have to stand trial and they would not have to kill him. Shortly after the war, li,t!Isling in Norway, Pierre Laval in France, w"Illiam Joyce and John Amery in England were all executed for treason.

Pound, 'often brilliant but an ass', was

'Tie most paradoxical poet of our time. His greatest achievement was the discovery and encouragement of genius in artists like Joyce, Lewis and Hemingway. Eliot gratefully

kinder recalled: 'No one could have been

to writers who seemed to him worthy and unrecognised. He liked to be the im- presario for younger men as well as the animator of artistic activity in any milieu in

hick he found himself.' Gertrude Stein

_wearily said he was 'a village explainer, ex- 'el[ent if you were a village, but if you were tillot, not'. The split between the good and had Pound took place in about 1920 when . e met Major C. H. Douglas, became in- terested in politics and economics, and left _London for Paris. He was the only major .mOdernist who tried — and failed — to write

an epic poem. His best work —

b "b f erieY and Cathay — was written h`'ore the Cantos. After a lifetime of :.`°t.onous eccentricity and megalomania, ;lieu an unregenerate adherence to anti- atillitlsrn and Fascism, he humbly recanted Oil see? There was something rotten (Iii und it all!') and was purged into purity. American universities claiming that Pound Because hated Jews or supported Mussolini.) petulant Pound's cantankerous character, Pedantry and fraudulent expertise are so familiar in academic life, and his obscurity, difficulty and controversy appeal to scholars who prefer technique to content and avoid moral judgments, his reputation is now wildly inflated.

Pound's insanity plea was invented by Hemingway who had read transcripts of the wartime broadcasts, decided they could be used to prove Ezra was 'obviously crazy' and urged Pound's supporters — MacLeish, Eliot, Frost, W. C. Williams and Hilda Doolittle — to implement this strategy. Pound agreed to plead insane and simulated manic symptoms that were recognised as bogus. But Torrey, himself a psychiatrist, proves that 'Pound's treason trial never took place because four psychiatrists claimed he was insane and un- fit to stand trial.'

Dr Winfred Overholser, Superintendent of St Elizabeths Hospital, has long been considered a villain who kept the sane Pound locked up with loonies and con- demned to indeterminate imprisonment without trial that lasted for 121/2 years. But Torrey, who published the essence of his findings a few years ago in Psychology To- day, shows that Overholser knew Pound was sane, used his reputation and authority to persuade his three colleagues to declare Pound insane, and protected the accused traitor from punishment or death.

St Elizabeths was a refuge and showcase for Pound. He became a symbol of conser- vative chic and was visited by the leading poets of the age: Eliot, Williams, Cum- mings, MacLeish, Aiken, Tate, Lowell, Spender, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and James Dickey. Pound enjoyed intellectual stimulation, constant attention, good food, tennis with the staff and un- disturbed sexual relations in his private room with two mistresses: Sheri Martinelli and Marcella Spann.

In the asylum, Pound wrote the Rock Drill and Thrones sections of the Cantos, translated two books of Chinese poetry and Sophocles' The Women of Trachis, published at least 130 articles and won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949. Five years later, when the government attorney inquired how Pound was capable of writing and translating poetry but incapable of fac- ing justice, Overholser maintained that there was no improvement in Pound's men- tal state and that he was still unfit to stand trial.

Though Freud confidently told Hilda Doolittle, who had discussed Pound's symptoms during her own analysis: 'If I had known Ezra, I would have made him all right', no clinical diagnosis was made of his condition, no insanity was noted by the numerous psychiatrists who examined him, no treatment was ever recommended or im- plemented. In 1958, when sufficient time had passed and the political climate had changed, Pound's indictment was dismissed by the judge who had originally sent him to the asylum, and he was allowed to return to Italy. On arrival in Naples, he gave the Fascist salute.

Torrey's work is as uneven as Pound's. His biography of the poet up to 1945 is derivative and superficial, little more than a string of quotations linked by a flat, documentary style: Pound and Hilda Doolittle 'explored the perimeters of young passion'. He has a limited knowledge of the period (Lawrence never had an affair with Doolittle) and of Pound's poetry which he quotes in great slabs as if the meaning were obvious. He retrospectively reads the roots of treason into the early life and presents a case history instead of an objective revela- tion of Pound's quirky and querulous development, Torrey forgets that virtually all the innovative writers of this century (Conrad, Ford, Lewis, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence) were rejected by the reading public. And Torrey confuses the way Pound was treated by conventional society — 'stigmatised and socially isolated' with the enormous respect he received as a vortex of avant-garde activity in America, England, France and Italy.

But Torrey has completed the first literary biography based on psychiatric records (others will have to be written on Lowell, Berryman, Roethke, Jarrell and Plath) and becomes fascinating when he deals with material that he has mastered and presents his convincing discoveries. In the 80 pages at the heart of the book, which concern 1945 to 1958, Torrey does not discuss who heard Pound's broadcasts and what effect they had. But the book is not

merely 'a tale told by an Eliot, full of Pound and fury, signifying nothing'. For he does raise significant questions about the

surprising influence of the writers who helped Pound, the psychiatrist who con- travened medical ethics to save him and the Justice Department that deliberately failed to press the case against him.

MacLeish observed that 'nations are judged in the perspective of history by the way they treat their artists' and agreed with Hemingway that 'great poets are very rare and they should be extended a measure of understanding and mercy'. But Torrey im- plicitly agrees with another psychiatrist who said that 'a man of Pound's stature, learn- ing and influence has an even greater responsibility to uphold ethical principles and serve as an exemplary model.' Because psychiatry is more a placebo than a science, frequently presents vague and conflicting diagnoses in court and is subject (like the army) to the authority of its commanders, Overholser was able to prevail. It would have been more honest and just if Pound had been declared sane, made to stand trial, convicted of treason, sentenced to life im- prisonment, allowed no special treatment and pardoned at an auspicious moment.