User:SlimVirgin/Pound
The poet Ezra Pound was arraigned in Washington, D.C., on 25 November 1945 on charges of treason as a result of his radio broadcasts on behalf of the Italian government during the Second World War. The charges included broadcasting for the enemy, attempting to persuade American citizens to undermine government support of the war, and strengthening morale in Italy against the United States.[1]
St Elizabeths
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On 15 November, 1945, Pound was transferred to the United States. An escorting officer's impression was that "he is an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives."[2] On 25 November he was arraigned in Washington D.C. on charges of treason. The charges included broadcasting for the enemy, attempting to persuade American citizens to undermine government support of the war, and strengthening morale in Italy against the United States.[1]
He was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital – where in June 1946 Dorothy was declared his legal guardian – and held for a time in the hospital's prison ward, Howard's Hall, known as the "hell-hole," a building without windows in a room with a thick steel door and nine peepholes, which allowed the psychiatrists to observe him while they tried to agree on a diagnosis. Visitors were allowed only for 15 minutes at a time, while other patients wandered around outside the room screaming and frothing at the mouth, according to T. S. Eliot.[1] A panel of psychiatrists eventually settled on a diagnosis of schizophrenia.[3]
Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell, whose efforts to have him declared insane are credited with having saved him from life imprisonment, requested his release at a bail hearing in January 1947.[4] The hospital's superintendent, Winfred Overholser, agreed instead to move him to the more pleasant surroundings of Chestnut Ward, close to Overholser's private quarters, which is where he spent the next 12 years.[1] The historian Stanley Kutler was given access in the 1980s to military intelligence and other government documents about Pound, including his hospital records, and wrote that the psychiatrists believed Pound had a narcissistic personality, but they considered him sane. Kutler said that Overholser protected Pound from the criminal justice system because he was fascinated by him.[5]
Tytell argues that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last provided for, and was allowed to read, write, and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day. He took over a small alcove with wicker chairs just outside his room, and turned it into his private living room, where he entertained his friends and important literary figures. He began work on his translation of Sophocles's Women of Trachis and Electra, and continued work on The Cantos. It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released. Olga Rudge visited him twice, once in 1952 and again in 1955, and was unable to convince him to be more assertive about his release. She wrote to a friend: "E.P. has ... bats in the belfry but it strikes me that he has fewer not more than before his incarceration."[1]
The Pisan Cantos, Bollingen Prize
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James Laughlin had Cantos 74–84 ready for publication in 1946 under the title The Pisan Cantos, and even gave Pound an advance copy, but he had held it back, waiting for an appropriate time to publish. Tytell writes that in June 1948 a group of Pound's friends – Eliot, Cummings, W. H. Auden, Allen Tate, and Julien Cornell – met Laughlin to discuss how to get him released. According to the poet Archibald MacLeish, the men conceived a plan to have Pound awarded the first Bollingen Prize, a new national poetry award just announced by the Library of Congress, with $1,000 prize money donated by the Mellon family. The awards committee consisted of 15 fellows of the Library of Congress, including several of Pound's supporters, such as Eliot, Tate, Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, and Theodore Spencer. The idea was that the Justice Department would be placed in an untenable position if Pound won a major award and was not released.[6]
Laughlin published The Pisan Cantos on 30 July 1948, and the following year the prize went to Pound. There were two dissenting voices, Katherine Garrison Chapin, the wife of Francis Biddle, the Attorney General who had indicted Pound for treason, and Karl Shapiro, who said that he could not vote for an antisemite because he was Jewish himself. Pound's response to the news of the award was, "No comment from the bughouse."[6]
There was uproar. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry." Robert Hillyer, a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature, telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line."[7] Congressman Jacob K. Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee, and as a result it was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of Congress.[6]
Controversial friendships, release
[edit]Although Pound repudiated his antisemitism in public, Tytell writes that in private it continued. He often refused to talk to psychiatrists with Jewish-sounding names, would refer to people he disliked as Jews, and urged his visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), a fabrication claiming to represent a Jewish plan for world domination.[1] He struck up a friendship during the 1950s with the writer Eustace Mullins, believed to be associated with the Aryan League of America, who wrote a biography of Pound, This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound (1961).[8]
Even more damaging was his friendship with a far-right activist and member of the Ku Klux Klan, John Kasper. Kasper had come to admire Pound during some literature classes at university, and after he wrote to Pound in 1950 the two became friends. Kasper opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in 1953 called "Make it New," reflecting his commitment to Pound's ideas; it specialized in far-right material, including Nazi literature, and Pound's poetry and translations were displayed in the window.[9] Kasper and another follower of Pound's, David Horton, set up a publishing imprint, Square Dollar Series, which Pound used as a vehicle for his tracts about economic reform.[10] Wilhelm writes that there were a lot of perfectly respectable people visiting Pound too, such as the classicist J.P. Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport, but it was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out.[8] The relationships delayed his release from St Elizabeths.[10] In an interview for the Paris Review in 1954, when asked by interviewer George Plimpton about Pound's relationship with Kaspar, Hemingway replied that Pound should be released and Kaspar jailed.[11] Kasper was eventually jailed for the 1957 bombing of the Hattie Cotton School in Nashville, targeted because a black girl had registered as a student.[10]
Pound's friends continued to try to get him out. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he told Time magazine that "this would be a good year to release poets." MacLeish asked him in June 1957 to write a letter on Pound's behalf; Hemingway believed Pound was unable to abstain from awkward political statements or from friendships with people like Kasper, but he signed a letter of support anyway, and pledged $1,500 to be given to Pound when he was released.[12] In 1957 several publications began campaigning for his release. Le Figaro published an appeal entitled "The Lunatic at St Elizabeths." The New Republic, Esquire and The Nation followed suit; The Nation argued that Pound was a sick and vicious old man, but that he had rights too. In 1958 MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold, a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the 1945 indictment. Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit saying Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose.[13] The motion was heard on 18 April that year by the same judge who had committed him to St Elizabeths. The Department of Justice did not oppose the motion, and Pound was free.[14]
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ^ a b c d e f Tytell (1987), 289–297, 304–305
- ^ Kimpel (1981), 470–474
- ^ Ludwig, Arnold M. (1995). The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy. Guilford Press. p. 141. ISBN 9780898628395.
- ^ For Cornell's efforts, see "Julien Cornell, 83, The Defense Lawyer In Ezra Pound Case", The New York Times, 7 December 1994, accessed 3 September 2012.
- ^ Mitgang, Herbert. "Researchers dispute Ezra Pound's 'insanity'," The New York Times, 31 October 1981, accessed 3 September 2012.
- ^ a b c Tytell (1987), 293, 302–303
- For more details of who supported and opposed, see McGuire (1988)
- For MacLeish's position, Tytell cites MacLeish, Archibald. Riders on the Earth, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, 120; Winnick, R.H. (ed.) Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 to 1982. Houghton Mifflin, 1983; and in particular a letter from MacLeish to Milton Eisenhower, which is in the Library of Congress.
- Also see Sieburth (2003), xxxviii–xxxix. Sieburth writes: "At their [the committee's first] meeting [in November 1948], and to no one's great surprise, given [Allen] Tate's behind-the-scenes maneuverings and the intimidating presence of recent Nobel Laureate T. S. Eliot, The Pisan Cantos emerged as the major contender ..."
- See Sieburth (above) for Pound's response.
- The Associated Press reported the list of judges as Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Katherine Garrison Chapin, T. S. Eliot, Paul Green, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, Willard Thorp, and Robert Penn Warren. Also on the list of judges were Leonie Adams, the Library of Congress's poetry consultant, and Theodore Spencer, who died on 18 January 1949, just before the award was announced. See "Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell", The New York Times, 19 February 1949, accessed 12 April 2012.
- ^ "Canto Controversy" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 22 August 1949, accessed 12 April 2012.
- Hillyer, Robert. "Treason's Strange Fruit" and "Poetry's New Priesthood," in The Saturday Review of Literature, 11 and 18 June 1949.
- For a discussion, see McGuire, William. Poetry's Catbird Seat, Library of Congress, 1998; this excerpt courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania.
- ^ a b Wilhelm (1994), 286, 306
- ^ Hickman (2005), 127
- ^ a b c Tytell (1987), 306–308
- Also see "Police Firmness in Nashville", Life magazine, 23 September 1957, 34, accessed 12 April 2012.
- ^ Hemingway, Ernest. "The Art of Fiction", Paris Review, No. 21.
- ^ For the money from Hemingway, see Reynolds (2000), 303
- For the Hemingway quote, see Goacher, Dennis. Foreword in Ezra Pound. Women of Trachis. New Directions Publishing, 1985, p. ix.
- ^ Lewis, Anthony. U.S. asked to end Pound indictment", The New York Times, 14 April 1958, accessed 3 September 2012.
- ^ Tytell (1987), 325–326