A SPECTACULAR LACK OF CHARACTER

The 18^th April has brought up a rather difficult subject. On this day in 1958, the United States federal court ruled that the poet Ezra Pound be released from his detention at St Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric hospital run by the District of Columbia Department of Health. It was originally termed the Government Hospital for the Insane. He had been admitted to the hospital in 1945. He resided in Chestnut Ward from 1946 until the 18^th April 1958.

Ezra Pound photographed on 22 October 1913

in Kensington, London, by A.L. Coburn

He was and is regarded by many as one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century; however, his politics and behaviour during the Second World War are despicable. It is surprising that so many serious writers and intellectuals supported him with such vigour. Is it so easy to separate his poetic writing from his political writing? Are their performances so different that one can be distinguished from the other? Does the one forgive the other?

Whilst he was at Chestnut Ward, he completed and published The Pisan Cantos for which he was awarded the first Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1949. The prize was established in 1948 by Paul Mellon, and was funded by a US$10,000 grant from the Bollingen Foundation to the Library of Congress. Ezra Pound was awarded the inaugural prize, chosen by a jury of Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress. This choice of a work by a committed fascist sympathizer infuriated many people in cold war America, and political pressure led the Congress to end the Library of Congress involvement in the program and return the unused portion of the grant to the Bollingen Foundation in 1949.

The prize is now awarded by the Beinecke Library of Yale University and is bestowed on an American poet in recognition of the best book of new verse within the last two years, or for lifetime achievement. Recipients include Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden (who became an American Citizen), E.E. Cummings and Robert Frost.

The award may have been hatched as a scheme to get Pound released from hospital. His publisher, James Laughlin, had Cantos 74–84 ready for publication in 1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and even gave Pound an advance copy, but he had held it back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish. John Tytell writes that in June 1948 a group of Pound's friends – Eliot, Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Julien Cornell – met Laughlin to discuss how to get him released. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish, the men conceived a plan to have Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award just announced by the Library of Congress, with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family. The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aitken, Amy Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be placed in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released.

Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin, the wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney General who had indicted Pound for treason, and Karl Shapiro, who said that he could not vote for an anti-Semite because he was Jewish himself. Pound's response to the news of the award was, "No comment from the bughouse."

There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry." Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line." Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee, and as a result it was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of Congress.

Pound had turned to fascism in the 1920’s and was an avid supporter of Hitler and Mussolini. In 1939 he began writing anti-Semitic material for Italian newspapers, including one entitled "The Jews, Disease Incarnate." He wrote to James Laughlin that Roosevelt represented Jewry, and signed the letter "Heil Hitler." He started writing for Action, a newspaper owned by the British fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, arguing that the Third Reich was the "natural civilizer of Russia." After war broke out in September that year, he began a furious letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned six months earlier, arguing that the war was the result of an international banking conspiracy, and that the United States should keep out of it. John Tytell writes that by the 1940s no American or English poet had been so active politically since William Blake. Pound had written over a thousand letters a year during the previous decade, and had presented his ideas in hundreds of articles, as well as in The Cantos. According to Tytell, Pound's fear was an economic structure that depended on the armaments industry, where the profit motive alone would govern war and peace. He started reading George Santayana, and The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks Adams, finding confirmation of the danger of the capitalist and usurer becoming dominant. He wrote in The Japan Times that "Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a 'country run by Jews,'" and told Oswald Mosley's newspaper the English were a slave race governed by the Rothschilds since Waterloo.

He broadcast over Rome Radio, though the Italian government was at first reluctant, concerned he might be a double agent. He told a friend: "It took me, I think it was, TWO years, insistence and wrangling etc., to GET HOLD of their microphone." He recorded just over a hundred broadcasts, and travelled to Rome one week a month to pre-record the 10-minute broadcasts, for which he was paid around $17. In a radio broadcast on the 15^th March 1942, Pound said “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew ... And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into.” The broadcasts required the Italian government's approval in advance, though he often changed the text in the studio. The politics apart, he needed the money. Tytell writes that his voice had assumed a "rasping, buzzing quality like the sound of a hornet stuck in a jar." He continued to occasionally broadcast, and writing under pseudonyms until about April 1945, shortly before his arrest.

I rather think that the critics who remarked that, "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry", are closer to the mark than those who chose to overlook his fanaticism.

There is a BBC documentary, entitled Human, All Too Human, on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who suffered from a similar bigotry as Ezra Pound. He too was a committed Nazi. The film begins with a quote from Heidegger himself:

“He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors”

Is that a reason to forgive? Do great thoughts outweigh great wrong?

The film ends with a comment from the philosopher Richard Rorty, which could be applied to Ezra Pound as well.

“There are a lot of cases of bad men writing interesting books and Heidegger is just a spectacular case of that sort. He stumbled into a situation that he didn’t have the character to get himself out of and for the rest of history he’s always going to be stuck in the trap in which he mired himself.”