Ezra Pound: Poems Ezra Pound

Letter-writing campaign

When war broke out in September 1939, Pound began a letter-writing campaign to the politicians he had petitioned months earlier.[295] On 18 June 1940, after the fall of France, he wrote to Senator Burton K. Wheeler: "I have read a regulation that only those foreigners are to be admitted to the U.S. who are deemed to be useful etc/. The dirtiest jews from Paris, Blum??" He explained that they were all a pox.[296] To his publisher, James Laughlin, he wrote that "Roosevelt represents Jewry" and signed off with "Heil Hitler".[286] He began calling Roosevelt "Jewsfeldt" or "Stinky Rooosenstein".[293] In Meridiano di Roma he compared Hitler and Mussolini to Confucius.[294] In Oswald Mosley's newspaper, Action, he wrote that the English were "a slave race governed by the House of Rothschild since Waterloo".[293] By May 1940, according to the historian Matthew Feldman, the British government regarded Pound as "a principal supplier of information to the BUF [British Union of Fascists] from abroad".[297] His literary agent in New York, John J. Slocum, urged him to return to writing poetry and literary criticism; instead, Pound sent Slocum political manifestos, which he declined to attempt to publish in the United States.[298]

Radio broadcasts

You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your Empire, and you yourselves are (doomed) by the Jew.

— Ezra Pound, Radio Rome, 15 March 1942[299]

Between 23 January 1941[300] and 28 March 1945, including during the Holocaust in Italy, Pound recorded or composed hundreds of broadcasts for Italian radio, mostly for EIAR (Radio Rome) and later for a radio station in the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state of Nazi Germany in northern and central Italy.[301] Broadcast in English, and sometimes in Italian, German, and French,[302] the EIAR program was transmitted to England, central Europe, and the United States.[303]

Styling himself "Dr Ezra Pound" (his only doctorate was the honorary one from Hamilton College),[304] he attacked the United States, Roosevelt, Roosevelt's family, Churchill, and the Jews. He praised Hitler, recommended eugenics to "conserve the best of the race",[305] and referred to Jews as "filth".[306] The broadcasts were monitored by the United States Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, and on 26 July 1943 the United States District Court for the District of Columbia indicted Pound in absentia for treason.[307] According to Feldman, the Pound archives at Yale contain receipts for 195 payments from the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture from 22 April 1941 to 26 January 1944. Over 33 months, Pound received 250,000 lire (then equivalent to $12,500; $185,000 as of 2013).[308]

On 9–10 September 1943, the German Wehrmacht occupied northern and central Italy. Hitler appointed Mussolini head of a fascist puppet state, the Italian Social Republic or Salò Republic.[309] Pound called it the "Republic of Utopia".[310] SS officers began concentrating Jews in transit camps before deporting them to Auschwitz-Birkenau.[311] In Rome when the German occupation began, Pound headed north to Gais, on foot and by train, to visit his daughter, a journey of about 450 miles (720 km).[312][ab] On or around 23 November 1943, he met Fernando Mezzasoma, the new Minister of Popular Culture, in Salò. Pound wrote to Dorothy from Salò asking if she could obtain a radio confiscated from the Jews to give to Rudge, so that Rudge could help with his work.[314]

From 1 December 1943 Pound began writing scripts for the state's new radio station.[315] The following day he suggested to Alessandro Pavolini, secretary of the Republican Fascist Party, that book stores be legally obliged to showcase certain books, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a Okhrana hoax document purporting to be a Jewish plan to dominate the world. "The arrest of Jews will create a wave of useless mercy," Pound wrote, "thus the need to disseminate the Protocols. The intellectuals are capable of a passion more durable than emotional, but they need to understand the reasons for a conflict."[316] On 26 January 1945, in a script called "Corpses of Course" for the program Jerry's Front Calling, Pound wrote: "Why shouldn't there be one grand beano; wiping out Sieff and Kuhn and Loeb and Guggenheim and Stinkenfinger and the rest of the nazal bleaters?"[317]

Arrest for treason

In May 1944 the German military, trying to secure the coast against the Allies, forced the Pounds to evacuate their seafront apartment in Rapallo. From then until the end of the war, the couple lived with Rudge in her home above Rapallo at Sant' Ambrogio.[318] There were food shortages, no coffee, and no newspapers, telephones, or letters.[319] According to Rudge, Ezra and Dorothy would spend their nights listening to the BBC.[320] In addition to the radio scripts, Pound was writing for the newspaper Il Popolo di Alessandria. He wanted to write for the more reputable Corriere della Sera in Milan, but the editor regarded his Italian as "incomprehensible".[321]

Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot by Italian partisans on 28 April 1945. Their bodies were displayed in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, abused by the crowd, then left hanging upside down.[323] "Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano / by the heels at Milano".[324] On 3 May armed partisans arrived at Rudge's home to find Pound alone. He picked up the Confucian text Four Books and a Chinese–English dictionary and was taken to their headquarters in Zoagli,[325] then at his request to the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by FBI agent Frank L. Amprin.[326]

Pound asked to send a cable to Harry S. Truman to help negotiate a "just peace" with Japan. He wanted to make a final broadcast called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he would recommend not only peace with Japan, but American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script was forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover.[327] A few days later Amprin removed over 7,000 letters, articles and other documents from Rudge's home as evidence.[328] On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, Pound gave the Americans a further statement:

I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day's work for a living.

Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a Saint, and wanted nothing for himself. I think that he was fooled into anti-Semitism and it ruined him. That was his mistake. When you see the "mess" that Italy gets into by bumping off Mussolini, you will see why someone could believe in some of his efforts.[330]

Later that day he told an American reporter, Edd Johnson, that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc ... Like many martyrs, he held extreme views". Mussolini was "a very human, imperfect character who lost his head".[331] On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, where he was placed in one of the camp's 6-by-6-foot (1.8 by 1.8 m) outdoor steel cages, with tar paper covers, lit up at night by floodlights. Engineers reinforced his cage the night before he arrived in fear that fascist sympathizers might try to break him out.[332]

Pound lived in isolation in the heat, sleeping on the concrete, denied exercise and communication, apart from daily access to the chaplain.[333] After three weeks, he stopped eating.[332] He recorded what seemed to be a breakdown in "Canto LXXX", where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters went over me".[334] Medical staff moved him out of the cage the following week. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by psychiatrists, after which he was transferred to his own tent.[335] He began to write, drafting what became known as The Pisan Cantos.[336] The existence of two sheets of toilet paper showing the first ten lines of "Canto LXXIV" in pencil suggests he started it while in the cage.[337]