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The Knight and the Troubadour Dag Hammarskjöld and Ezra Pound The Knight and the Troubadour | Troubadour the and Knight The Fifty years ago, on 18 September 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld died in the plane crash near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia). The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation commemorates the event in many different ways, one of which is the publication of this remarkable story of a poet and a diplomat that will interest and intrigue many readers. Little Marie-Noëlle Pound Ezra and Hammarskjöld Dag The Knight and the Troubadour, which reveals a previously unexplored facet of Hammarskjöld’s life and documents the extent of Ezra Pound’s influence among Swedish poets and writers, marks a breakthrough in literary history and even re-writes history to some extent. For Dag Hammarskjöld, the diplomat, there were no boundaries between poetry and politics, and, with tragic consequences, the same was true for Ezra Pound, the poet. isbn: 978-91-85214-60-0 Marie-Noëlle Little Marie-Noëlle Little is a Professor of French at Utica College, Utica, N.Y. This publication has been produced by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. It is also available online at www.dhf.uu.se Designed by Mattias Lasson. Printed by X-O Graf Tryckeri AB, Uppsala 2011. Distributed by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation Övre Slottsgatan 2, SE-753 10 Uppsala, Sweden Phone: +46-18-410 10 00, Fax: +46-18-122072 Web: www.dhf.uu.se isbn: 978-91-85214-60-0 Th e Knight and the Troubadour Dag Hammarskjöld and Ezra Pound Marie-Noëlle Little In Memoriam Bengt Nirje (1924-2006) Contents Foreword ........................................................................................................5 Preface ........................................................................................................... 7 Prologue – College Hill and Castle Hill .....................................................11 Chapter I – Th e Troubadour (1905-40) .....................................................23 Chapter II – ‘Th e Devil’s Box’ (1940-49) ...................................................41 Chapter III – Northern Lights (1953) ..........................................................52 Chapter IV – ‘Noble Dag’ (1954) ...............................................................65 Chapter V – Ezra’s Choice (1955) .............................................................. 79 Chapter VI – ‘In the Dark Shade of Courage’ (1956) ................................91 Chapter VII – ‘In Praise of Dissent’ (1956-57) ..........................................101 Chapter VIII – To the White House (1957) .............................................116 Chapter IX – ‘A Sensible Plan’ (1957-58) ................................................. 128 Chapter X – ‘Th is is the End!’ (1958-61) ..................................................142 Epilogue – Into Great Silence ...................................................................161 Bengt Nirje ................................................................................................167 Acknowledgments ....................................................................................169 Illustrations ...............................................................................................171 Bibliography .............................................................................................. 173 Index ........................................................................................................... 177 Foreword In September of 2001, the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation commemo- rated the Secretary-General’s life, forty years after his death in an air- plane crash at Ndola. Th e event, held at his alma mater in Uppsala, had as its theme, ‘Dag Hammarskjöld: A Leader in the Field of Culture.’ One of the main speakers was Marie-Noëlle Little, who had just pub- lished Th e Poet and the Diplomat, a beautiful tale about the friend- ship between two remarkable intellectual giants, Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Leger; and about the relationship between diplomacy and poetry, ‘an important, not to say essential, complement to diplomacy,’ to use Dag’s description. In the audience was Bengt Nirje whom I fi rst met in December 1955 at United Nations Headquarters in New York, where I served as Personal Assistant to the Secretary-General. On holiday from literary studies at Yale University, Bengt had quite unexpectedly become a substitute for the U.N. correspondent for Radio Sweden. I was then unaware that Dag had just assigned Bengt to assist in the eff orts to liberate Ezra Pound from St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Long after- wards, in the late 1990s, Bengt described to me the chain of amazing coincidences by which he had become involved in the Ezra Pound case and, of course, I encouraged him to write about this fascinating story. After the 2001 commemorative program, I introduced Marie-Noëlle and Bengt, who had never met. In the course of a long luncheon conver- sation centered on Dag, I asked Bengt to tell his story, which sounded even more captivating. Th e three of us quickly agreed that it would be a great idea if Marie-Noëlle could cooperate with Bengt on his far- from-fi nished project to make a book out of his story. 8 | Marie-Noëlle Little has now written another important work of biog- raphy and literature, Th e Knight and the Troubadour, which reveals a previously unexplored facet of Hammarskjöld’s life and the extent of Ezra Pound’s infl uence among Swedish poets and writers. Once again, Marie-Noëlle has told a remarkable story of a poet and a diplomat that will interest and intrigue many readers. When my time at the United Nations was over in 1956, I received a fi rst edition of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, one of Dag Hammarskjöld’s favorite authors, and a note from Dag with these words: ‘An American adventure as a token of Th e Great Adventure – our years together in America.’ I did not know at the time that Ezra Pound would be part of the adventure, but I am not surprised he was. I am glad that in Th e Knight and the Troubadour, the story has fi nally been written and brought back to life. Per Lind Stockholm, December 2010 Per Lind Preface Th is is a story that has never been told or, at least, in the way it should have been told. Th is is a story about truth and treason, hope and despair, about generosity and selfi shness. A story about famous men, their si- lences, and their secrets. Or is it just about life? As real stories sometimes remind us of legends, with elements of mys- tery and even some danger, this one starts over a hundred years ago at a small college in New York State on a hill overlooking a peaceful valley, and ends more than half a century and two World Wars later in north- ern Italy at an old castle, perhaps once visited by minstrels and trouba- dours. Th e pivotal year is 1945 when the American poet Ezra Pound, who has been giving speeches over Rome radio, is fi rst arrested in Italy by a group of partisans, and later by the F.B.I. Pound is then brought back to the United States and confi ned at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hos- pital in Washington D.C. for almost thirteen years, before he is allowed to return to Italy in 1958. Th ese are the harsh facts of the offi cial version; but to my surprise, I discovered other versions. It seemed that everybody arrested Pound, and everybody liberated him, as well. Th e talents of a troubadour are necessary to tell this version of the story, dormant for half a century, which I discovered in the fall of 2001 in Uppsala, Sweden, where I presented my book Th e Poet and the Diplomat1 at the International Conference on ‘Dag Hammarskjöld and the 21st Century,’ commemorating the death of the second Secretary- General of the United Nations and his legacy. At the end of the confer- ence, as I was about to visit the garden of a dear ‘friend’ of mine, Carl von Linné, I met two Swedish gentlemen: Per Lind, who had been Dag Hammarskjöld’s Personal Assistant, and Bengt Nirje, who had known both Hammarskjöld and Ezra Pound. Bengt Nirje could not wait to tell me his own version of the Ezra Pound story, and the mysteries he 1 Th e Poet and the Diplomat: Th e Correspondence of Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Leger (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001). 10 | was still trying to solve. Later that day, after seeing all the documents he had gathered, I understood how signifi cant a story this was, and how my many years of work in Hammarskjöld studies would be an excellent excuse to help him write a book. How could I refuse? I never met Dag Hammarskjöld, but I went to the same French school as his niece Marlene, in Stockholm, where I was born (of French parents). In the mid-1970s, while pursuing my doctoral studies in the United States, I returned to Sweden to do some research on the Swedish poet and writer Harry Martinson, who had just re- ceived the Nobel Prize, and the French poet and diplomat Alexis Leger (also known as Saint-John Perse), who had received the Nobel in 1960. In the Royal Li- Alexis Leger and Marlene Hammarskjöld brary archives in Stockholm, I discovered the letters between Dag Hammarskjöld and Alexis Leger that led to my return, years later, to work on the French edition of their correspondence. I had a chance then to read most of the letters in the Hammarskjöld Collection, and I remember quite well reading a few unusual ones Ezra Pound had written to the Secretary-General. Of course, I knew nothing of Hammarskjöld’s involvement in the Pound case. In fact, I thought that he could not have intervened (because of his position at the United Nations) and that he mentioned Pound in his correspondence only because of a possible Nobel Prize. Little did I know that some twenty years later I would be working on a book about Pound and Hammarskjöld, and in Clinton, New York, not far from the college Pound had attended. When I fi rst compared my own discovery of the Pound/Hammarskjöld documents with the discovery of the Lascaux caves by those young boys in France in 1940, I did not realize how appropriate the comparison was. If I needed the talents of a speleologist to bring to light a story that otherwise would have remained buried in library archives, I also needed the same discretion that at fi rst surrounded the Lascaux discov- | 11 ery.

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