A Lesson Half‐Learned

Extract

“Yeats said to me that if they knew what we thought, they’d do away with us. They want their poets dead.” Ezra Pound took no pains to conceal what he thought and, sure enough, found himself at the age of sixty in the death-cells at Pisa—open-air cages, exposed to the elements, with only a pup-tent for shelter—facing the possibility of execution for treason as a result of his war-time broadcasts on Italian radio in support of Mussolini, Hitler and fascism. Heymann’s study’attempts to chart the precise evolution which led him there, and thence to thirteen years in St Elizabeth’s Mental Asylum, medically diagnosed at his trial as a man “afflicted with a paranoid state of psychotic proportions,” and judged “of unsound mind” by a jury which took three minutes to reach its verdict.

Perhaps this is the significant phrase. Yeat’s remark was romantic braggadocio: for “do away” we should substitute “put away”. Pound’s treatment, after the initial atrocities of the Pisan cage, which induced an arguably long-imminent nervous breakdown, was “lenient” enough, in conventional terms—as if the authorities had almost conspired to avoid the embarrassment of a political trial for a man with such an international reputation and such influential friends. And to see Pound’s beliefs as a logical development from his starting-point was too risky an option in the war-ravaged Europe of 1945, where already former fascists were being rehabilitated to prop up the administration of the occupied zones, and fend off the risk of communist takeovers.