THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL, EZRA POUND This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound By EUSTACE MULLINS ". drop in some day at your convenience . to discuss this difficult individual, Ezra Pound . ." —Christian Herter, Under Secre­ tary of State, in a letter to Dr. Winfred Overholser, Superin­ tendent of St. Elizabeths Hos­ pital, January 2, 1958. FLEET PUBLISHING CORPORATION 230 PARK AVENUE • NEW YORK 17, N.Y. COPYRIGHT © 1961 by FLEET PUBLISHING CORPORATION ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Protected under the International Copyright Convention and the Pan-American Union Convention The opinions herein expressed do not necessarily represent those of the publishers. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-7628 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to acknowledge the following for permission to quote excerpts in this biography: Abelard-Schuman Limited, for excerpts from Intimations by Oliver St. John Gogarty, copyright 1950; Richard Aldington, for excerpts from Life for Life's Sake; Margaret Anderson, for excerpts from The Little Review and My Thirty Years' War; Janice Ford Biala, for ex­ cerpts from Thus to Revisit, No Enemy, Return to Yesterday, and New York Essays by Ford Madox Ford; Cassell & Co., for excerpts from The Crowning Privilege by Robert Graves; Christy & Moore, Ltd., for excerpts from J. B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats; Commentary, for excerpts from "Pure Poetry, Impure Politics, and Ezra Pound" by Peter Viereck (copyright American Jewish Committee); Constable and Company Limited, for excerpts from South Lodge by Douglas Gol­ dring; Caresse Crosby, for excerpts from Ezra Pound's Imaginary Let­ ters published by the Black Sun Press; Esquire, Inc., for excerpts from "Aftermath: The Question of Ezra Pound", February, 1958 issue; Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc., for excerpts from On Poetry and Poets by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1943, 1945, 1951, 1954, 1956, 1957 by T. S. Eliot, and The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway by Charles A. Fenton, copyright 1954 by Charles A. Fenton; Mrs. M. A. Goldring, for excerpts from People and Places by Douglas Goldring; Victor Gollancz, Ltd., for excerpts from W. B. Yeats by Joseph Hone; Har­ court, Brace & World, Inc., for excerpts from The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 edited by D. D. Paige, copyright, 1950; Gerald W. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Henderson, for excerpts from I Have This To Say by Violet Hunt; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., for excerpts from Life Is My Song by John Gould Fletcher; Houghton Mifflin Company, for excerpts from Amy Lowell: A Chronicle by S. Foster Damon, and A Critical Fable by Amy Lowell; Mrs. G. A. Wyndham Lewis, for excerpts from Blasting and Bombardiering by Wyndham Lewis; J. B. Lippincott Company, for excerpts from It Was The Nightingale by Ford Madox Ford; The Mac­ millan Company, for excerpts from King of the Great Clock Tower by William Butler Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats edited by Allen Wade, and Yeats: The Man and the Mask by Richard Ellman; Frederick Mor­ gan, for excerpts from his essay on the Pisan Cantos, in The Hudson Review, Spring 1951; The Nation, for excerpts from their editorial on Ezra Pound, April 1958; New Directions, for excerpts from the works of Ezra Pound; The New Yorker, for excerpts from "Talk of the Town", August 14, 1943 issue; Oxford University Press, Inc., for ex­ cerpts from The Identity of Yeats by Richard Ellman, copyright 1954; G. P. Putnam's Sons, for excerpts from Let There Be Sculpture by Jacob Epstein, copyright 1940 by Jacob Epstein; Random House Inc., for excerpts from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, copyright 1933 and renewed 1960 by Alice B. Toklas, and Auto­ biography of William Carlos Williams; Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., for excerpts from W. B. Yeats, Man and Poet by Norman Jeffares; Saturday Review; The New Republic, for excerpts from "The Ezra Pound Controversy" by Malcolm Cowley; The Viking Press, Inc., for excerpts from The Portable Nietzsche translated by Walter Kaufman, Exile's Return by Malcolm Cowley, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence edited by Aldous Huxley, and The Letters of James Joyce edited by Stuart Gilbert; and The Yale Literary Magazine for excerpts from Babette Deutsch's article on Pound in the December, 1958 issue. Special thanks go to Dorothy Pound, for permission to quote from the Rome Broadcasts; to Omar Pound, for his reading and correction of the manuscript, and to Ezra Pound, for his encouragement in the planning of this book. In addition, the author would like to thank E. E. Cummings, Frederick Morgan and Arnold Gingrich for their comments on the galleys, and James Laughlin, for his kind cooperation. for D. P. THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL, EZRA POUND I THE LOFTIEST rise of land in that territorial oddity known as the District of Columbia is occupied by an insane asylum. I have not been able to ascertain what humorist in the victorious Federal Government, immediately following the Civil War, selected this dominant ground for the site of St. Elizabeths Hospital, so that the employees of the various departments could look up, as they emerged from their offices at the close of the day, and see in the distance the solemn brick buildings of that Valhalla of the govern­ ment clerk, the madhouse. In 1949, I was introduced to the poet Ezra Pound, who was at that time an inmate of St. Elizabeths Hospital. There had been conflicting reports as to his mental condition; that is to say, the reports of the government psychiatrists, and the reports of everyone else who knew him. The hospital officials avoided the issue by describing him to prospective visitors quite honestly as a "political prisoner". In the interests of national security, Pound was being kept under guard by the Federal Bureau of Health, Education and Welfare. I also was a ward of the government. My status as a veteran of the Second World War had won me paid subsistence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington. In those days, the Institute housed the sad remnants of the "avant-garde" in America. It was inevitable that the name of Ezra Pound, who for nearly half a century had personified all that was 13 14 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL new and daring in the fine arts, should be mentioned there, al­ though its directors preferred the work of one of Pound's earliest discoveries, T. S. Eliot. In 1948, a reception had been held at the Institute in honor of Eliot, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize (as have several of Pound's students, although he himself has been passed by repeatedly). At this reception, I had first seen Ezra Pound's wife, Dorothy Shakespear Pound, who appeared briefly, squired by Eliot in his most high Episcopal manner. True to his calling, Pound had not allowed a treason indictment or a cell in a madhouse to interfere drastically with his work. He was translating the Confucian Odes. One of the students at the Institute was also a nurse at St. Elizabeths. Like many other mem­ bers of the staff, she had peeked at Pound's confidential file, al­ though this was nominally forbidden. My fellow student informed me that Ezra was a source of considerable annoyance to his "cap­ tors", as his doctors were sometimes called. Not only had he re­ fused "treatment", as the doctors termed their excursions into bar­ barism, but he would not take part in the activities of the hospital. In reality, persons under observation for mental illness are im­ mediately deprived of all their civil rights, a dilemma that the writers of the Constitution unfortunately overlooked. It has been very simple for bureaucrats to designate their critics as being "mentally ill", and to shut them away from the eyes of the world in the various Bastilles that have been built for that purpose. No one dares to intervene on behalf of a person who is "mentally ill". It is much safer to be a Communist or a hoodlum. The sculptor John B. Flannagan, who was a patient at Bloomingdale Hospital in New York (reputedly one of the best in the country), wrote of his experiences, "There are actually more legal safeguards for a felon than checks on the psychiatrist to whom civil liberty is a joke."1 The superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Dr. Winfred Overholser, was a genial type who wished the patients to help him create the atmosphere of a YMCA summer camp, but the assorted rapists, dope addicts, and political prisoners refused to cooperate. The staff employed the latest methods of "therapy" (which were con­ stantly changing), such as acting out one's repressions, without weapons of course. For those who wished to write—a category that includes everyone suspected of mental illness—a mimeo- EZRA POUND 15 graphed journal, called St. Elizabeths Sunshine, was circulated among the patients. The doctors were peeved because Ezra would not contribute to this journal, and the nurse informed me that they had marked him down as "uncooperative". This is the most serious charge that can be lodged against an inmate of a mental institution. Despite the fact that it is a federal institution, and much more amply budgeted than comparable state hospitals, St. Elizabeths is a heart-breaking and appalling Bedlam. Visiting doctors from other countries are seldom asked to tour it, for they would doubtless be horrified. The dank, dark buildings reek of the foul stench of a century's urine. I once dined in the employees' cafeteria, and was ill for two days. It seemed impossible for me to get the smell of the place out of my system. The medical techniques used at St. Elizabeths are regarded as incredibly backward and inhumane by more advanced European physicians.