Ezra Pound & The Bughouse
The Guardian takes a look at Daniel Swift's new book about Ezra Pound and his years spent unraveling during and after the Second World War. In The Bughouse, Swift examines the United States's treatment of Pound, "the most difficult man of the 20th century." Kept at St. Elizabeth's, a "government hospital for the insane," Pound's room in the hospital became a destination for poets, some with a few complications of their own. At the Guardian, Robert McCrum writes:
Pound on fascist radio was a disaster waiting to happen. Ever since 1913, when he'd read poetry into a phonoscope (an obsolete recording device), he was fascinated by a medium whose disembodied polyphony, he claimed, echoed his own techniques. "I anticipated the damn thing in the first third of the Cantos," he wrote. In December 1941, just before Pearl Harbor tipped America into war, Pound began a series of broadcasts from Rome, partly about poetry but, more fatally, also about the folly of fighting against the Axis powers. By the time he was indicted for treason, which carried the death penalty, he had broadcast more than 200 times.
Pound's radio prose was like the man: chaotic, confusing, sometimes comic, but always – says Swift – "a little sad" with references to "kikes", "yids", and Tennyson, and rants against "chief war pimp, Frankie Finkelstein Roosevelt", who had "chucked away our national, cultural heritage". Far away in Maryland, federal eavesdroppers wrote it all down.
Like PG Wodehouse who, in utterly different circumstances, fell foul of Nazi radio, Ezra Pound turned himself over to US forces who, in May 1945, slammed him into a brutal punishment camp with 3,500 rapists, murderers and deserters. His "gorilla cage" was 6ft by 6ft of steel bars with no shelter from the sun or rain. By the middle of June, Pound had suffered a nervous collapse. But then, like Oscar Wilde in Reading jail, he began to write himself into a state of grace. In November 1945, he was flown back to Washington DC to face trial. On landing, he asked: "Does anyone have the faintest idea of what I actually said in Rome?"