Poetry and Poison

EZRA POUND: THE LAST ROWER

by C. DAVID HEYMANN

372 pages. Viking. $10.

Ezra Pound was a contradictory civilization of one. He was the most original American poet since Walt Whitman, a magically imaginative translator, and a literary promoter nonpareil. He also produced more verbal trash than any other great writer of modern times, wasted decades advancing crackpot schemes for monetary reform, railed disgracefully at "kikes, sheenies and the oily people," called Hitler "a saint" and democracy a "swindle," betrayed his country during World War II, and in old age spiraled down through hells of paranoia.

Biographers tend to get lost in the labyrinth of Pound's poetry, politics and character. But in Ezra Pound: The Last Rower, Biographer C. David Heymann has attacked the problems with a special advantage. Under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, he was the first scholar to study the massive FBI files on the Ezra Pound treason case. The result is the most harshly realistic portrait of the poet so far produced, a sickening, touching study of a man of great gifts gone wrong.

Born in Hailey, Idaho, Oct. 30, 1885, Pound was a prodigy who at 15 entered the University of Pennsylvania "resolved that at 30 I would know more about poetry than any man living." After he was fired from an instructor's job at Wabash College when a prostitute was found in his rooms, Pound showed up in London at 23 wearing a piratical red beard, green felt trousers, pink jacket, hand-painted Japanese tie, huge sombrero, one turquoise earring, and pince-nez.

A dazzling volume of verse called Personae (Masks) abruptly forced serious consideration of the upstart's mission: to drag poetry out of the 19th century and into the 20th. Poetry, Pound insisted, must have the virtues of good prose. "No book words, no straddled adjectives ('addled mosses dank'), no Tennysonianness . . . nothing you couldn't. in the stress of some emotion, actually say."

Hired as William Butler Yeats' secretary, he helped persuade the poet to adopt the direct, plain manner of his last and greatest period. Ezra raised money to support T.S. Eliot and, in the most celebrated editing feat of the century, transformed The Waste Land from a fascinating mess into a masterpiece. James Joyce admitted that without Pound's wheeling and dealing to put bread on his table, he could never have written Ulysses.

Floating Euphoria. Pound, meanwhile, brought out a volume of his own verse every year, worked steadily at his massive intercultural epic The Cantos, and cranked out three or four critical articles a week. His cash return was painfully small--often less than -L- 50 (about $250) a year. By 1916, Pound had begun to question the values of a "botched civilization" that starved its artists and trampled the flower of its youth in a war he considered meaningless. In a blinding revelation it came to him that usury, the practice of charging money for the use of money, was the cause of all man's miseries. Who had imposed usury on mankind? With lunatic intensity, Pound began to mumble about the sinister plutocratic Jews who controlled the world of banking and finance.

From a cottage in Rapallo, Italy, Pound promoted his monetary and racist ideas as energetically as he had promoted poetry. When Mussolini granted him an audience, he was utterly taken in. "There is too much future," he wrote in a floating euphoria, "and only me and Muss to attend to it."

In April 1939, Pound set off on a "mercy mission" to the U.S. to bring "Franklin Finkelstein Roosevelt" to his senses. When the President refused to see him, he returned to Italy in disgust and began to air his half-baked ideas and bigotry over Radio Rome. Between January 1941 and September 1943, he made 125 broadcasts.

On May 1, 1945, gun butts struck the door of the apartment near Rapallo where Pound lived `a trois with his wife Dorothy and his mistress of many years, a violinist named Olga Rudge. He was taken to a military stockade near Pisa and installed on death row in a steel cage 6 ft. square and open to all weathers. After three weeks of treatment designed to break the spirits of the most hardened criminals, Pound suffered a severe emotional breakdown.

Amnesty Movement. Poetry saved him. Recuperating slowly in a medical tent, he sat at the orderly's typewriter and pecked out his most personal and moving poems, the great Pisan Cantos. With eyes unsealed by shock, Pound finally saw himself as he was seen--a vain "beaten dog beneath the hail/ A swollen magpie in a fitful sun." He was flown back to the States to face trial for treason, but the case never came to judgment. Declared hopelessly insane. Pound was committed to a federal bedlam in the District of Columbia.

It was an eerie purgatory. The patients in the ward, says Heymann, sat "sunk in listless dejection" or "crawled about on their knees or stood on chairs and howled." Eventually transferred to a section for the less disturbed, Pound was allowed to see visitors for two hours a day. They came by the score: Thornton Wilder, Robert Lowell, Katherine Ann Porter, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot. During the last eleven years of Pound's commitment, America's most illustrious literary salon was conducted in a madhouse.

The visits restored Pound's spirits--and his obnoxiousness. He flaunted a succession of new female acquaintances in the face of his devoted wife, wrote contemptuous letters to eminent friends and spewed more antiSemitism. But he also completed two large new regions of his epic Section: Rock-Drill de los Cantares (1955) and Thrones de los Cantares (1959).

An amnesty movement was organized, and Robert Frost was invited to the Eisenhower White House to discuss "this difficult individual." On April 18, 1958, advised by psychiatrists that Pound was too crazy to stand trial but not crazy enough to need confinement, a federal judge dismissed the treason indictment and ordered the 72-year-old poet's release.

Pound's last 15 years were in some ways the strangest of his strange life. At 75, after Dorothy refused to divorce him so he could marry a 23-year-old girl, Pound slid into an abyss of depression. He told an interviewer bitterly: "I have lived all my life believing that I knew something. And then a strange day came and I realized that I knew nothing, nothing at all. And so words have become empty of meaning. Everything that I touch, I spoil. I have blundered always."

He stopped writing. For days on end, he did not even speak. The fire in his sapphire eyes went out. Just before his death in Venice on Nov. 1, 1972, at the age of 87, he looked like what Jean Cocteau had once called him: "A rower on the river of the dead." In the Greek myth, such spirits row forever and never attain the other shore .

Brad Darrach

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.