Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

St. Elizabeths Hospital

Pound arrived back in Washington, D.C., on 18 November 1945, two days before the start of the Nuremberg trials.[338] Lt. Col. P. V. Holder, one of the escorting officers, wrote in an affidavit that Pound was "an intellectual 'crackpot'" who intended to conduct his own defense.[339] Dorothy would not allow it; Pound wrote in a letter: "Tell Omar I favour a defender who has written a life of J. Adams and translated Confucius. Otherwise how CAN he know what it is about?"[340]

He was arraigned on 27 November on charges of treason,[ac] and on 4 December he was placed in a locked room in the psychiatric ward of Gallinger Hospital.[342] Three court-appointed psychiatrists, including Winfred Overholser, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, decided that he was mentally unfit to stand trial. They found him "abnormally grandiose ... expansive and exuberant in manner, exhibiting pressure of speech, discursiveness and distractibility."[343] A fourth psychiatrist appointed by Pound's lawyer initially thought he was a psychopath, which would have made him fit to stand trial.[344]

On 21 December 1945, as case no. 58,102, he was transferred to Howard Hall, St. Elizabeths' maximum security ward, where he was held in a single cell with peepholes.[345] Visitors were admitted to the waiting room for 15 minutes at a time, while patients wandered around screaming.[346] A hearing on 13 February 1946 concluded that he was of "unsound mind"; he shouted in court: "I never did believe in Fascism, God damn it; I am opposed to Fascism."[347] Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell, requested his release at a hearing in January 1947.[348] As a compromise, Overholser moved him to the more comfortable Cedar Ward on the third floor of the east wing of St. Elizabeths' Center Building.[349] In early 1948 he was moved again, this time to a larger room in Chestnut Ward.[350]

Tytell writes that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward.[351] At last provided for, he was allowed to read, write, and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day.[352] (In October 1946 Dorothy had been placed in charge of his "person and property".)[353] His room had a typewriter, floor-to-ceiling book shelves, and bits of paper hanging on string from the ceiling with ideas for The Cantos.[351] He had turned a small alcove on the ward into his living room, where he entertained friends and literary figures.[352][ad] It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released.[355]

The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize

and the Serpentine will look just the same and the gulls be as neat on the pond and the sunken garden unchanged and God knows what else is left of our London

— The Pisan Cantos (1948)[356]

James Laughlin of New Directions had Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV, known as The Pisan Cantos, ready for publication in 1946 and gave Pound an advance copy,[357] but Laughlin held back, waiting for the right time to publish. A group of Pound's friends—T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Joseph Cornell—met Laughlin in June 1948 to discuss how to get Pound released. They planned to have him awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family.[351]

The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer.[ae] The idea was that the Justice Department would be in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released.[351] Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 20 July 1948,[359] and the following February the prize went to Pound.[360][af] There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin and Karl Shapiro; the latter said he could not vote for an antisemite because he was Jewish himself.[362] Pound had apparently prepared a statement—"No comment from the Bug House"—but decided instead to stay silent.[363]

There was uproar.[364] The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said that poetry cannot "convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry".[365] Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature,[366] telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire, not one line, in Pound".[367] Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee. It was the last time the Library of Congress administered the prize.[362]

Diagnosis

During a case conference at St. Elizabeths on 28 January 1946, six psychiatrists had concluded that Pound had psychopathic personality disorder but was not psychotic. Present during the meeting, he decided to lie on the floor while the psychiatrists interviewed him.[368] In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association published its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-1), and St. Elizabeths began diagnosing patients according to its definitions. In July 1953 a psychiatrist added to Pound's notes that he probably had narcissistic personality disorder. The main feature of Pound's personality, he wrote, was his "profound, incredible, over-weaning (sic) narcissism". A personality disorder, unlike conditions that give rise to psychosis, is not regarded as a mental illness, and the diagnosis would have made Pound fit to stand trial. On 31 May 1955, at the request of the hospital's superintendent Winfred Overholser, the diagnosis was changed to "psychotic disorder, undifferentiated", which is classified as mental illness.[369] In 1966, after his release from St. Elizabeths, Pound was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[370]

Mullins and Kasper

While in St. Elizabeths, Pound would often decline to talk to psychiatrists with names he deemed Jewish (he called psychiatrists "kikiatrists"),[371] and he apparently told Charles Olson: "I was a Zionist in Italy, but now I'm for pogroms, after what I've experienced in here (SLiz)."[372] He advised visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he referred to any visitor he happened not to like as Jewish.[373] In November 1953 he wrote to Olivia Rossetti Agresti that Hitler was "bit by dirty Jew mania for World Domination, as yu used to point out/ this WORST of German diseases was got from yr/ idiolized and filthy biblical bastards. Adolf clear on the baccilus of kikism/ that is on nearly all the other poisons.[sic] but failed to get a vaccine against that."[374]

Pound struck up a friendship with Eustace Mullins, apparently associated with the Aryan League of America and author of the 1961 biography This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound.[375] Even more damaging was his friendship with John Kasper, a Ku Klux Klan member who, after Brown v. Board of Education (a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision mandating racial desegregation in public schools), set up a Citizens' Council chapter, the Seaboard White Citizens' Council in Washington.[376] Members had to be white, supportive of racial segregation, and believers in the divinity of Jesus.[377] Kasper wrote to Pound after admiring him at university, and the two became friends.[378] In 1953 Kasper opened a far-right bookstore, "Make it New", at 169 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village,[379] that displayed Pound's work in the window.[380] With Pound's cooperation, he and another Pound admirer, T. David Horton, set up Square Dollar Series, a publishing imprint that reprinted Pound's books and others he approved of.[381]

It became increasingly clear that Pound was schooling Kasper in the latter's pro-segregation activism.[382] In January and February 1957 the New York Herald Tribune ran a series of articles on their relationship, after which the FBI began photographing Pound's visitors.[383] One article alleged that some of Kasper's pamphlets had, as John Tytell put it, "a distinctly Poundian ring" to them.[384][ag] Kasper was jailed in 1956 over a speech he made in Clinton, Tennessee,[385] and he was questioned about the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville.[386] After Pound left hospital in 1958, the men kept in touch; he wrote to Kasper on 17 April 1959: "Antisemitism is a card in the enemy program, don't play it. ... They RELY ON YOUR PLAYING IT."[387]

New Times articles

Between late 1955 and early 1957,[388] Pound wrote at least 80 unsigned or pseudonymous articles—"often ugly", Swift notes—for the New Times of Melbourne, a newspaper connected to the social-credit movement. Noel Stock, one of Pound's correspondents and early biographers, worked for the paper and published Pound's articles there.[389] A 24-year-old radio reporter at the time, Stock first wrote to Pound in hospital after reading The Pisan Cantos.[390]

In the New Times in April 1956, Pound wrote: "Our Victorian forebears would have been greatly scandalized at the idea that one might not be free to study inherited racial characteristics," and "Some races are retentive, mainly of the least desirable bits of their barbaric past." There was a "Jewish-Communist plot", which he compared to syphilis. Equality was dismissed as "anti-biological nonsense".[391] "There were no gas ovens in Italy", he wrote in April 1956; a month later he referred to the "fuss about Hitler".[392] On 10 August 1956: "It is perfectly well known that the fuss about 'de-segregation' in the United States has been started by Jews." Instead, America needed "race pride".[391] Using pseudonyms, he sent his articles directly to Stock, so that the newspaper's editor may not have realized they had all been written by Pound. Stock sent Pound copies of the published articles, which he would distribute to his followers.[393] He contributed similar material to other publications, including Edge,[394] which Stock founded in October 1956.[395] Stock called Edge the magazine of the "international Poundian underground".[390]

Release

Pound's friends continued to try to get him out of St. Elizabeths. In 1948, in an effort to present his radio broadcasts as harmless, Olga Rudge self-published six of them (on cultural topics only) as If This Be Treason.[396] She visited him twice, in 1952 and 1955, but could not convince him to be more assertive about his release.[397] In 1950 she had written to Hemingway to complain that Pound's friends had not done enough. Hemingway and Rudge did not like each other.[398] He told Dorothy in 1951 that "the person who makes least sense ...in all this is Olga Rudge".[399] In what John Cohassey called a "controlled, teeth-gritting response", Hemingway replied to Rudge that he would pardon Pound if he could, but that Pound had "made the rather serious mistake of being a traitor to his country, and temporarily he must lie in the bed he made". He ended by saying "To be even more blunt, I have always loved Dorothy, and still do."[398]

Four years later, shortly after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, Hemingway told Time magazine ..."I believe this would be a good year to release poets."[400] The poet Archibald MacLeish asked him in June 1957 to write a letter on Pound's behalf. Hemingway believed Pound would not stop making inappropriate statements and friendships, but he signed MacLeish's letter anyway and pledged $1,500 to be handed to Pound upon his release.[401] In an interview for the Paris Review in early 1958, Hemingway said that Pound should be released and Kasper jailed.[402]

Several publications began campaigning in 1957. Le Figaro published an appeal titled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths". The New Republic, Esquire, and The Nation followed suit. The Nation argued that Pound was a "sick and vicious old man", but that he had rights.[403] In 1958 MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit stating Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose.[404] The motion was heard on 18 April 1958 by Chief Judge Bolitha Laws, who had committed Pound to St. Elizabeths in 1945. The Justice Department did not oppose the motion,[405] and Pound was discharged on 7 May.[406]