What Was Ezra Pound Like?

Lee Lady

"It would be too dangerous to allow authors to imagine themselves to be profound thinkers."

 ---   Balzac, in his critical article on Stendahl's The Charterhouse at Parma

I am certainly no Pound scholar. And although I knew E.P. when he was in St. Elizabeths in the late 50's, I have very little if any new information to contribute.

But I have noticed through subscribing to the Ezra Pound mailing list that many of those academics who have made a profession out of studying Pound don't seem to have any concept of all of who the man actually was. (Many of these academics seem to actually despise him.) One problem is apparently that academics like to work from documents. But when you read Pound's letters, and the transcripts of the radio broadcasts he made from Italy during the war, and his various published opinionated prose works, you see a very different person than the Pound seen by those who actually knew him.

Below, I simply want to quote from some of the standard reference materials to give an impressionistic portrait of Ezra Pound as seen by those who knew him.

In my opinion, if you look for the one salient detail that really brings Pound to life, it is Gertrude Stein's comment that he was the "village explainer." ("Met Ezra Pound. Didn't like him. Found him to be the village explainer. Very useful if you happen to be a village; if not, not.") I don't have much hope for any biography that doesn't highlight this comment.

Pound, in my opinion, was in his youth (and really, still in his fifties) what in contemporary terms would be called a nerd. Extremely bright, quite arrogant intellectually, generous, with a lively interest in other human beings but a rather superficial one (see especially Lewis Hyde's book The Gift in this respect), a good judge of literature but not a good judge of people. (He was taken in by Mussolini's enormous personal charm just as much as the ladies in Franco Zefferelli's recent film Tea With Mussolini.)

If Pound had been born a little later and the circumstances of his life had been a little different, I think he would have been ideally suited to be a science fiction writer of the Golden Age of Science Fiction --- someone like Damon Knight or Frederick Pohl or, perhaps more to the point, A. E. van Vogt.

He was someone who looked at the surface, and he developed a form of poetry that looks at the surface, and developed an entire critical mystique to justify his idea that the important part of literature is what's on the surface; what's important, according to him, is the beauty of the language: melopeia, phanopeia, and mythopeia. (The ABC of Reading for the definitions.) "Literature is language that's highly charged with meaning." You never see Pound saying, "Literature is writing that sees deeply into the human heart," or anything of that sort.

One notices in his poetry that he tended to be much more at home with mythology and things that had happened at least fifty years previously than with the world around him.

He was not a thinker; he was an enthusiast. In the realm of literature, he did have some important ideas, but otherwise few of the non-literary ideas he promoted were his own. One might almost refer to him as a popularizer, except that the form in which he expressed his ideas made them quite inaccessible to all but a small audience.

Robert Graves on first meeting Pound (c. 1920): "From his poems, I had expected a brawny, loud-voiced, swashbuckling American; but he was plump, hunched, soft-spoken and ill-at-ease, with the limpest of handshakes." (Quoted in Charles Norman.)

Scofield Thayer, 1921 (quoted in Charles Norman's book): "Ezra Pound, of whom I have been seeing more rather than less, is a queer duck. He wears a pointed yellow [?] beard and an elliptical pince-nez and open Byronic collar and an omelette-yellow bathrobe. On entering a restaurant, one has observed him so awkward as unintentionally to knock over a waiter and then so self-conscious as to be unable to say he is sorry. But like most other people he means well, and unlike most other people he has a fine imagination. At close quarters, he is much more fair in his judgements than his correspondence and his books would warrent one to believe.
 
"When one arrives at his hotel on the street of the Holy Fathers, one usually learns from the young lady that Mr. Pound is au bain. But the young lady consents to go upstairs and inquire if Mr Pound will see guests. Mr. Pound receives, beaming and incisive."

Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast (p. 108): "His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I often thought of him as a kind of saint."

Hemingway in 1925: "We have Pound, the major poet, devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He lends them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end, a few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity.
"Personally, he is tall, has a patchy red beard, strange haircuts and is very shy. But he has the temperament of a toro di lidia from the breeding establishments of Don Eduardo Miura. No one ever presents a cape, or shakes a muleta at him without getting a charge. Like Don Eduardo's product, too, he sometimes ignores the picador's horse to pick off the man and no one goes into the ring with him in safety. And though they can always be sure of drawing his charge yet he gets his quota of bull-baiters each year." (Reprinted in An Examination of Ezra Pound, edited by Peter Russell.)

Of course one of the things that Pound is famous for is having been able to recognize the talent of a large number of extremely notable writers and having helped them get started on their careers and gain recognition. And certainly Pound's judgement in this respect was very astute. But I believe that even more than this is true: I believe that even some of the young writers Pound helped developed into notable literary figures precisely because of Pound's help. It seems clear to me that this was certainly true, for instance, of H.D., who had been Pound's sweetheart back in Pennsylvania before he, and eventually she, came to Europe. Certainly H.D. deserves credit for her wonderful talent. But, in my opinion (based mostly on reading her autobiographical book An End to Torment), she would never have developed that talent and become a poet if it hadn't been for Pound's encouragement. And T.S. Eliot, on numerous occasions over the years, expressed his opinion that Pound's help was absolutely crucial in his own development as a poet.

In 1959, E.E. Cummings wrote about the Pound of the Twenties (quotation also taken from Charles Norman), "During our whole promenade, Ezra was more than wonderfully entertaining: he was magically gentle, as only a great man can be."

Margaret Anderson (editor of the Little Review) in 1923 (again quoted from Norman's book): "He was dressed in the large velvet beret and flowing tie of the Latin Quarter artist of the 1830's. He was totally unlike any picture I had formed of him. Photographs could have given no idea of his height, his robustness, his red blondness -- could have given no idea of his high Teddy Roosevelt voice, his nervousness, his self-consciousness. After an hour in his studio I felt that I had been sitting through a human experiment in a behaviorist laboratory. Ezra's agitation was not of the type to which we were accustomed in America -- excitement, pressure, life too high-geared. It gave me somehow the sensation of watching a baby perform its repetoire of physical antics gravely, diffidently, without human responsibility for the performance."
She commented on his tendancy to "orientalize" his attitude toward women, who he kissed on the forehead or drew upon his knee. She concluded: "It will be interesting to know him when he has grown up."

In 1929, in A Packet for Ezra Pound, Yeats wrote his famous description of Pound's kindness to the stray cats in Rapallo: "Sometimes about ten o'clock at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side, upon the other palm trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats. He knows all their histories -- the brindled cat looked like a skeleton until he began to feed it; that fat gray cat is an hotel proprietor's favorite, it never begs from the guests' tables and it turns cats that do not belong to the hotel out of the garden; this black cat and that grey cat over there fought on the roof of a four-storied house some weeks ago, fell off, a whirling ball of claws and fur, and now avoid each other."

But then Yeats felt compelled to add: "Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for the cats -- `some of them so ungrateful,' a friend says -- he never nurses the café's cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own."
 
Yeats proposes an explanation as follows: "Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power."

And yet, somehow, five or ten years later, Pound was unable to see that the Jews in Germany and the German-occupied countries, and eventually, toward the end of the war, in Italy itself, were in a situation very comparable to the cats in Rapallo. (According to Eustace Mullins's biography of Pound, however, he did give assistance to some Jewish families that had escaped from Germany. I think the only confirmation of this, though, is Pound's own account.)

Reading Yeats's account of Pound's care for the stray cats in Rapallo makes me think of Pound's care of John Chatell, one of the young regular visitors to St. Elizabeths in the late 50's. I would eventually learn that Chatell's family owned an extremely successful real estate company which handled a lot of expensives houses in Georgetown. But Chatell himself lived the life of a poor student (without actually being a student, except at the `Ezuversity'). Marcella Spann Booth's memoirs in Paideuma have reminded me of the way Pound used to mother him, scavenging hospital food for him to take home.

In 1928 or 1929, Yeats wrote to Richard Aldington, "In his work, Ezra can be abrupt and barbarous; when he wants, he can be a pleasant companion and the most generous of men. He is sensitive, highly strung, and irascible. All this throwing down of fire-irons and spluttering of four-letter words is merely Ezra's form of defense against a non too considerate world. I should say Ezra has had to put up with far more annoyances from other people than they have from him."

Certainly his "abrupt and barbarous" manner has caused a number of people who know his political views only through his letters and radio broadcasts to completely misjudge the tone of his attitudes (although certainly the content alone was at times reprehensible enough!)

Pound's fiftieth birthday was in 1935, and about that time one began to learn the answer to Margaret Anderson's question of what Pound would be like "when he grows up," and the answer was not a pretty one. His old friends now often returned from visiting him in Rapallo to report that he was querrulous and intolerant of any disagreement with his opinions, which many now found quite bizarre. Some (Joyce, for instance) found him in fact quite insane.

Pound had now achieved a great triumph, which also seemed to have been his downfall: namely, the world was now taking him seriously. And yet despite having a couple dozen books to his name and being fairly universally recognized as one of the world's great living poets, he was not well off financially, only surviving because of the income from his wife's inheritance. (When this money became inaccessible during the Second World War, his life became one of almost drastic poverty.)

Being taken seriously was, as I see it, an extremely pernicious thing for Pound, because it encouraged him to take himself far more seriously than was compatible with rationality. The brash egotism which had earlier been seen as tolerable and somewhat natural in a bright young man now seemed to be turning into an irrational egomania. And it encouraged the world to look at his stupidities, in particular his radio broadcasts, much more harshly than would have been the case if the world had still seen him as the extremely bright but eccentric writer that he had been in London and Paris during his thirties and forties -- in some ways, not only the village explainer, but also the village fool, albeit a highly intelligent fool; almost an idiot savant. (It's important to remember, though, that in the context of the 1930's, Pound's support for Mussolini and for eccentric (we would now say "crackpot") economic theories were not as bizarre as they now seem to us in retrospect, and were shared by many notable intellectuals of the time. Until Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, his support both in Europe and the U.S. was widespread, including the Luce publications: Time, Life, and Fortune.)

In Humphrey Carpenter's biography A Serious Character, Robert Fitzgerald is quoted as saying that Pound's letters and articles written during the Rapallo period "had the tone of a man no longer in touch.... What had seemed high-hearted and rather Olympian fun began to seem childish and beside the point. Only a man working in isolation, without criticism or ignoring it, could have failed to see the fretfulness and poverty of argument."

It's always important to remember, though, as Fitzgerald acknowledged, that throughout his life Pound in person was very different and much pleasanter than Pound on paper. However Carpenter also quotes Giuseppe Bacigalupo as having noted an unpleasant change in manner at his occasional meetings with Pound, saying, "It was not possible to hold a normal conversation.... He had come increasingly to adopt the attitude of someone who assumes that the person he is talking to shares his own interests and knowledge, so that some cryptic allusion seemed to him to be enough to explain what he was thinking --- a hypothesis which was far from well founded."

(This manner of speaking by means of references to totally obscure books or historical events as if of course this would totally clarify the matter for the listener was very much what I noticed of him at St. Elizabeths. Although I don't think that this is a valid sign of insanity, one can readily understand why psychiatrists who talked to him briefly would get the impression that he was totally insane.)

In any case, Pound in Rapallo seemed, as always, to be having a very good time. In Humphrey Carpenter's book, James Laughlin is quoted on the subject of Pound at the movies.

The movies were simply awful, but Ezra loved them. He'd sit up in the gallery with a cowboy hat on and his feet on the rail, eating peanuts, roaring with laughter.

In the Pisan detention camp, where he was at first barbarically prisoned in an open iron cage (after all, the Army thought of him as a despicable traitor, an American who had supposedly broadcast propaganda for the Fascists), he became a camp character, and his self-devised bizarre exercise ritual, including fencing and playing tennis with imaginary opponents using an old broom handle, became a source of amusement for the guards. Many of the guards developed an affection for the old man, and started showing him various kindnesses in violation of their orders.

He told the medics in the camp that the United States government would never try him for treason, because he "had too much on several people in Washington." (My source here, as for most of this, are the biographies by Charles Norman and Humphrey Carpenter.)

As he left the camp to be flown to the United States, he put his hand under his chin to indicate a noose and made a pantomine gesture of being hanged. And when the plane became airborne, he started laughing, because he'd never been in the air before. (This was reported by Olga Rudge in the PBS Voices and Visions program.)

Even after Pound was moved to the more benign Chestnut Ward, his conditions at St Elizabeths would be seen as intolerable to most people. He had a tiny little room which was mostly packed with books, notebooks, and the like, with a small cot to sleep on. Humphrey Carpenter quotes from a report that

His room was a confusion of jars, bottles, boxes, make-shift containers filled with dainties, exotics, and plain fare of bread, cheese, ham, sweets... and all the left-over food he could `pouch' three times a day at St. Liz. The main purpose of his bulging larder was to feel the starving artist; jar after jar of food went of the grounds `for the noble purpose of nourishing the arts.'

He was surrounded by mentally ill patients, with whom he seemed to stay on fairly good terms. Apparently the inmates in the asylum were in fact quite devoted to him, and he seemed to enjoy them. In either Charles Norman's biography or Humphrey Carpenter's, there is a report from someone who visited Pound at St Liz, that while Pound was commenting on his lawn chairs, which he found the ideal furniture, one of the inmates said, "Yes, and not only has he got a lawn chair, but he's got a heart bigger than all Washington."

Despite the appalling conditions he lived under, it is my personal belief (which many will certainly argue with) that the years at St Elizabeths, at least after the first few --- the later years when he was allowed to spend the afternoons outside on the lawn in good weather and allowed whatever visitors he chose --- were the best years of Pound's life since he left London and Paris. But of course it was only for a few hours each day that he could spend time with visitors.

Pound's old friends in the literary world were often bothered by the indiscriminateness of his friendliness to visitors, and seemed to think that there was something wrong with Pound's being friendly to people with so little stature. But E.P. seemed to be equally interested in and friendly toward just about everybody (and despite his well known anti-semitism, this apparently included those Jews who managed to visit him). When Sheri's lover Gilbert Lee was sent to the penitentiary for dealing heroin, E.P.'s attitude was apparently that this was regretable, but typical of the trouble that artists get themselves into when they're young. In a letter subsequent to Gilbert's release, Pound wrote, "Well, he's apparently devoting himself to composing jazz now." (Gilbert was a jazz pianist, and earned his living as an auto mechanic. Unfortunately, a few years later he had an accident while working on a car that seriously damaged his fingers and consequently ended his career as a musician. Years later, when I met him and Sheri again in San Francisco, he was still an auto mechanic.)

The regular visitors, mostly young, were interesting people. Pound was known as a traitor and someone with extremist political views, including anti-semitism, and he fact that someone would choose to visit E.P. regularly was a pretty good indication that this was someone who was willing to color outside the lines and had a desire to learn more about the world than what was taught in conventional educational institutions. (With a very few exceptions, academics did not visit Pound. Becoming familiar with Pound did not then seem a good way to advance an academic career.) Diane DiPrima was a regular visitor for a while, although unfortunately that was before the time I showed up. There were Reno Odlin, Hollis Frampton, and too many others who I no longer remember. And Pound thoroughly enjoyed some of the young disciples who never went on to become famous, especially John Chatel ("young Chatel," as E.P. so often called him in his letters), who Pound scrounged food for from the hospital cafeteria.

Sheri Martinelli was truly delightful and was in some ways, I believe, a woman as remarkable as Lou Andreas-Salomé (an intimate friend of Niezsche, Rilke, and Freud). (After reading H.D.'s memoir An End to Torment, I realized that Sheri was also in many ways a younger copy of H.D.) Most of Pound's biographers have not bothered to learn much about Sheri, but she had been a protege of Anais Nin before putting herself under Pound's wing. Both Anatole Broyard and William Gaddis were in love with Sheri in the Forties. Sheri was in some sense (it's probably impossible now to ever establish to exactly what extent) E.P.'s lover, but she was much more like a favored daughter. She usually referred to him as Maestro and her affection toward him, mixed with deep reverence, was like that one might have to a favorite older relative.

Sheri brought him cookies, fudge, and jasmine tea. In a short article in Paideuma (volume 13), Marcella Spann gives an account of Pound jumping out of his chair and running across the lawn to greet Sheri

with his most affectionate and energetic bear hug. The cookies she has brought scatter about them, and Sheri exclaims: "Grampa is the only man in the world you can bring cookies and before he can eat one of them, he drops them all on the ground; and before you can help him pick them up, he steps on every one."

In a lot of ways, I think the circle on the lawn at St Elizabeths was very much like the friends Pound had associated with in Paris and London, although unfortunately not endowed with comparable talent. (And I have to say that E.P. certainly did little to help bring out what talents we may have had. His prescriptions were much too dogmatic to be helpful.)

And of course we provided Pound with what he had always wanted: an appreciative audience. We were an uncritical audience, of course, but many of us did the required homework. We all read Pound's translations of Confucius, not to mention the Cantos and Pound's other books, as well as the monographs by Fenellosa and Louis Agassiz and Alexander Del Mar published by the Square Dollar Press. I, for one, also read Eimi amd The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings, several novels by Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis, and also the autobiography of Martin van Buren and Thomas Hart Benton's enormous memoir Thirty Years in the Senate. In the Library of Congress (which at that time was open to high school students) I was able to find copies of Blast, the Vorticist magazine edited by Pound and Wyndham Lewis in the Twenties. Later, because of E.P.'s recommendation, I would subscribe to the Congressional Record for at least a year, reading it fairly thoroughly although not cover to cover. (And yes, I also read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, although it was not E.P. himself who recommended them or gave them to me.)

E.P. usually referred to himself as "Grampa," and all the younger visitors were encouraged to do likewise.

But many people of stature, both old acquainances and writers who Pound had never met before, did in fact come and visit E.P. at St Liz --- more than would have ever visited him at Rapallo. One of the major disappointments for me was having missed meeting both E.E. Cummings (a long-time friend of Pound's, of course) and Tennessee Williams, because they came in the middle of the week when I was in school. (Sheri reported that Cummings wore a suit with a vest and pocket watch and looked like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. To her disgust, E.P. and Cummings spent most of their time together talking about the weather.) A son or grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright showed up one weekend. And there were a few bright young academics: Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Professor Giovannini from Catholic University.

Considering the harshness with which he often attacked both friend and foe in his correspondance and his published writings, one of the amazing things about E.P. was that just about everyone who ever knew him personally, including those who were vehemently opposed to his ideas, loved him. And many of his old colleagues who might otherwise have simply dropped him went out of their way to send friendly communications to him in St. Elizabeths simply because of the injustice with which they believed he was being treated. (They saw him as a fool, not a traitor or a criminal.) Eliot, Williams, and Hemingway were among those who continued to regularly correspond with him, despite drastic political differences. I suspect that even Joyce would have written him a letter from time to time if he'd still been alive, although certainly Joyce had every reason to feel agrieved by Pound's treatment of him.

He continually kept doing little things to make us comfortable: cutting the fruit ... and passing it around; pouring the tea out of a thermos; offering newspapers to lay on the grass for sitting; bringing out books, magazines, letters from a bag... He would also feed the birds... Said Mrs Pound: `He would never do that in the old days; he was always too busy, always doing something.'

This description (and some of the other reports Carpenter quotes in the same chapter) agree very much with my own memories of St Elizabeths. Although Pound has often been called a narcissist, and was certainly an egomaniac, he was always very attentive to the people around him (including the orderlies and at least many of the patients at the hospital) and took a keen interest in the lives of his regular visitors and was concerned for their well being. As mentioned above, he regularly scavenged hospital food for John Chatel ("young Chatel," as he called him in his letters), and possibly some of the other starving artists and writers among his visitors as well.

I think that one can see here a strong continuity here between the Pound in Paris in the 1920's, as described by passages quoted above from Charles Norman's book, and the Pound in St. Elizabeths during the 1950's.

Some academics now take the fact that John Kasper was welcome at St. Elizabeths as proof that Pound was a racist. But in fact, although Pound's anti-semitism was quite conspicuous in almost all his conversations, he was not notably racist. (Furthermore, although Kasper was later to become infamous as a White supremacist, his personal attitudes toward Negroes seemed to be rather confused.) For the most part, everyone was welcome at St. Elizabeths, provided only that they were willing to listen to Pound respectfully and try to learn from him. (Journalists were usually not welcome. Jews were usually not welcome, although they were usually treated courteously if they did show up.)

When I started visiting Pound at St. Elizabeths, one of the first things I wondered about was whether he was actually sane or not. At the time, I know not the slightest thing about mental illness, so all I could do was to judge whether he seemed basically rational or not.

Pound certainly had his own style of communicating. On my first visit, I couldn't understand a word he said. Later, I started to catch on to his style. The comments by Giuseppe Bacigalupo quoted above describe this fairly well. To repeat,

He had come increasingly to adopt the attitude of someone who assumes that the person he is talking to shares his own interests and knowledge, so that some cryptic allusion seemed to him to be enough to explain what he was thinking --- a hypothesis which was far from well founded.

Reading the ABC of Reading and his other books was a big help, because I realized that a lot of his discourse when there was a big crowd present consisted of quotations from his books; slogans such as "Artists are the antennae of the race" or "Great literature is news that stays news." This was perhaps an unusual form of communication, but it seemed quite rational and deliberate; he believed that these slogans were very fundamental truths which it was important to re-iterate over and over again in the hopes that they would finally sink in for the listener.

Later on, when I experienced him in small groups of friends, I found his conversation quite ordinary. He was quite capable of small talk.

One day Sheri, as I recall (or it may have been John Chatel), mentioned that recently St. Elizabeths had been granting weekend furloughs to some of the patients so that they could spend time with their families, and complained that it was unfair that EP had not been granted a similar privilege. But he responded quite calmly that after all, he was charged with a extremely serious federal crime, and so naturally the hospital would be ultra-cautious about relaxing their control.

Oddly enough, this is the one case where I think Pound's usual complaint of oppression by his enemies could have been justified. A lot of influential people, both in Congress and otherwise, hated Pound because of his anti-semitism and in particular because of his radio broadcasts (very few people in those days were familiar with the actual contents of the broadcasts, which were then only available in the Library of Congress on microfilm) and might have raised a big stink if St. Elizabeths had allowed him any sort of freedom.

On many other occasions, though, he claimed that he was being kept incarcerated, or that publishers were refusing to include his work in anthologies, because the government or the banking interests wanted to suppress some of the information he would reveal to the public. Even at the time, I was considerably skeptical of this.

But one can't claim that someone is crazy just because some of his opinions are irrational. The fact is that very few people are able and willing to apply critical thinking to their own beliefs about politics, religion, and the like, although most of us are quite capable of subjecting the beliefs of those who disagree with us to rigorous critical analysis.

In retrospect, though, I do think that Pound had a megalomania that went beyond the bounds of rationality.