8 - The Many Lives of Ezra Pound: Biographies and Memoirs, 1960–2015

Summary

If we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to solve it.

—Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography”

[The facts of history] do not speak for themselves, alone, exclusively, “objectively.” Without the narrator to make them speak, they would be dumb. It is not objectivity that is the historian's best glory. His justness consists in seeking to understand.

—J. G. Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History

THE BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE that has accumulated around Ezra Pound for more than half a century is vast and diverse. Retrospectively speaking, it could not have been otherwise. Pound was a bohemian and a rebel; he insisted on his individual point of view in the face of governments and war; was deprived of liberty for thirteen years without trial; locked up in a mental hospital, he was denied personhood: he was deemed incurably insane, in spite of the steady stream of original poetry and translations from Greek and Chinese that poured from his typewriter in the asylum years. Pound had chosen to fight the world—the world fought back and conquered. From 1945 onwards, his life was turned into a cause célèbre and opinions among academics and non-professionals alike have been sharply divided. There were those whose interest was born of compassion, who witnessed or read accounts of his tribulations as an old man, and looked upon him as a poet of genius whom America had treated unconstitutionally and unjustly. There were others who saw him as a monster guilty of betraying his country in time of war and deserving execution— shooting or hanging, whichever was most practical. In this view, the mental hospital was not only inadequate punishment; it was no punishment at all. Pound had privileges, he received visitors and held court; he even continued his outrageous anti-Semitic rants and placed himself as an éminence grise behind right-wing radicalism in the US. The telling of Pound's life has always hinged on his biographers’ political and moral commitments, and the writing of a Pound biography cannot but be a political act, inscribing a certain moral position that the biographer makes clear in his text.