There’s an old black-and-white photo from the 1965 poetry festival in Spoleto, Italy, in which we can see Ezra Pound surrounded by younger poets: Bill Berkson is there, along with John Wieners, Desmond O’Grady, Charles Olson—so large he looks like he’s been sloppily photoshopped into the scene—and a partially obscured John Ashbery. The scene is significant, I think, for how it projects two moments yet to come for Pound’s posterity: the Olson-led renaissance of his reputation in the late 1960s, and his eclipse as a model for younger poets after the rise, a decade later, of Ashbery’s star. Pound had already been in and out of vogue many times: in the 1910s, he was at the center of a creative vortex, and an influence on the shape of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. By the late 1930s, he was largely an outsider, and at the end of the Second World War he hit his nadir, politically disgraced and caged like an animal by the American Army occupying Italy.
Our own moment should be a propitious one for another look at Pound. He isn’t currently a model for many poets (Nathaniel Tarn and John Peck are the most significant talents carrying a torch for “Ole Ez”), but we do live in times that seem uncannily Poundian: times of public madness, resurgent fascism, and crackpot economic theories. Perhaps it’s not a great time for a young poet to take her cues from the author of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, but it’s certainly a good moment to examine Pound as a phenomenon, if not a model. The 1959 anthology A Casebook on Ezra Pound provided excellent fuel for the reevaluation of the poet after his release from St. Elizabeths Hospital, when, as Donald Davie put it, Pound’s politics had “made it impossible for any one any longer to exalt the poet into a seer.” We would welcome another book capable of opening up a new discussion of Pound’s meaning and significance. Daniel Swift’s study of Pound’s dozen years in St. Elizabeths Hospital, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), promises to be just such a book. The topic—and, especially, the subtitle—lead one to hope for a study packed with insight into the moral and aesthetic conundrum that is Pound. Is he to be held responsible for his fascism? Does his mental health exculpate him? How do madness and politics bear on the poetry itself? One opens the pages of Swift’s book eager to find out.
The Bughouse, alas, does not live up to its topic, or its moment, when the issues of Pound’s politics have an alarming currency. Not that there aren’t moments that come tantalizingly close. Swift’s sojourn among Italian neofascists who revere Pound is revealing: he catches the particular nature of their attachment to the poetry, as well as the appeal of their movement—with its ethos of brotherhood and its cool tattoos—to a certain kind of alienated young man. He’s even brave enough to admit that while spending time among them he came to want to be liked by the dubious fraternity. Swift can also be quite good on how Pound’s publishers colluded in hiding the worst of his political offenses, keeping, for example, the most overtly pro-fascist parts of Pound’s writing obscure. Canto 73, Swift tells us, is among the most disconcerting parts of Pound’s epic. The canto, he says,
celebrates the death of a company of Canadian soldiers tricked onto an Italian minefield. Cantos 72 and 73 were written in Italian during the summer and autumn of 1944. Pound’s publishers, New Directions and Faber, excluded these two cantos from the printed versions of the poems until 1987. Since then, editions include them in the original Italian along with an English translation of 72, but not of 73, meaning that the most extreme statement of Pound’s political sympathy remains unknown to those who cannot read Italian.
It is to be hoped that the current editorial staff at New Directions and Faber will remedy the situation, though one has doubts about them making the financial commitment to a project that might well undermine the appeal of one of their poets.
Swift has done his homework in digging up the various diagnoses of Pound’s mental health made during, and just prior to, his St. Elizabeths period—and he’s right about the conundrum Pound’s possible insanity poses: unless one is a fascist, “to sympathize with Pound one has to accept that he is insane, and yet to take his advice one must assume that he has real and sane things to say.” So how mad was he? One psychologist finds the grandiosity and vagueness of Pound’s poetry to be, in itself, a sign of mental distress. Another worries over how “a distinct remark is meaningful” to Pound, “but the complete meaning is lost to others.” Is the patient lost in solipsism, talking to himself alone? Later, attorneys will question whether Pound was being sheltered by his doctors, and wonder whether his ongoing publication of poetry and translations isn’t a sign of sufficient mental health to warrant a long-deferred trial for treason. Some psychiatrists were convinced Pound suffered paranoia, or manic depression, though a Rorschach test revealed no evidence of psychosis, and one analyst concluded that Pound’s evident hatred of women and other races needn’t be regarded as paranoid, as it was entirely “in line with Fascistic ideology.”
It is difficult to choose between these opinions, as Swift doesn’t give us enough by way of context to make a judgment—with the sole exception of an early psychological assessment that argued Pound’s mental health had been badly eroded during his captivity in an American military facility’s open-air cage at the end of the war. We see enough of that grim period in Swift’s account to find the analyst’s claims entirely plausible. Swift, though, equivocates regarding Pound’s mental health. He sees traces of paranoia in the Chinese cantos, but Pound, he concludes (if that is the word), was “neither quite mad nor sane.” We certainly do need more evenhandedness and disinterest in the world, but inconclusiveness is a poor substitute for objective insight.
Insight, in fact, is what The Bughouse is most lacking. So meandering, so digressive, so diffuse is Swift’s book that it’s not just a matter of wondering what thesis it might hold, but of wondering just what the book is about. “The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound”? No, it’s not really about any of these. Pound’s poetry never really takes center stage. As often as not, the poetry under discussion isn’t Pound’s, but that of his visitors at St. Elizabeths. This could, of course, have been interesting enough, had the analysis of poems given us some significant understanding of Pound—but instead we find ourselves being told that The Waste Land is T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, and that Life Studies was Robert Lowell’s breakthrough book. One wonders, at moments like these, just whom Swift imagines his likely reader really is, and what that reader needs to be told. Discussions of Pound’s poetry tend to be cursory: a quotation followed by a simple paraphrase, say, or an observation about Pound not really understanding how the Chinese written character worked. There are some good observations about the general nature of The Cantos. “The Cantos are an artwork which demands forty years of attention,” writes Swift, “and once a reader has expended such care, he or she is bound to assume that its object has been worthwhile…and this is how Pound converts literary critics into disciples. It is not possible to be a casual reader of the Cantos.” But such moments are few, and scattered sparsely in a narrative that takes us far from the poetry for long, sometimes barren stretches.
The Bughouse offers as little insight into Pound’s politics as it does into his poetry. We hear the familiar anecdotes about Pound’s radio broadcasts and his brief meeting with Mussolini, and we see him willingly appropriated by various American racists and European fascists. There is some intrinsic interest in these scenes, especially in our troubled times. Swift quotes, for instance, from a journalist’s account of the 1956 trial of John Kasper, an American white supremacist and disciple of Pound:
“We didn’t have no education, no way to let those city folks know how we felt,” one lean weather-bitten woman said outside the courtroom at Kasper’s trial in Knoxville last year, “but now John can speak up for us and tell them about the colored and all that. He’s been to college, but he’s for us. ”
The remarks could almost have been made this year, from the same sort of woman, about a different and more successful American populist demagogue. But if what we seek is any penetration into why Pound became and, by all appearances, remained a fascist, we seek in vain. Swift has some anecdotes, to be sure, but neither theories nor opinions are on offer. You will understand Pound’s politics no better for having read this book. Nor will you be any closer than you already were to an understanding of whether his broadcasts in Italy would have constituted treason had he come to trial.
Despite recording the observations of various psychiatrists, The Bughouse isn’ t really much concerned with madness. There are interesting anecdotes about the history of St. Elizabeths, how it evolved from what was hoped to be a pastoral retreat whose peacefulness would heal damaged minds into something more like a holding tank for patients gooned on tranquilizers. These anecdotes might have formed the core of a very different book, a kind of biography of an institution. But this, like so much else, never really emerges from Swift’s meanderings.
The digressive, episodic structure of The Bughouse is, in large measure, a result of Swift’s decision to tell his tale in the style of New Journalism—as a kind of “in search of” story, featuring Swift in propria persona as he delves into his subject matter. But it is precisely as New Journalism that The Bughouse fails most spectacularly. What works for Tom Wolfe as he treks cross-country with Ken Kesey and his drug-tripping Merry Pranksters in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is—unsurprisingly—far less effective for a story whose most key moments include the opening of institutional file boxes and interviews with mid-level civil servants.
In the end, The Bughouse must be classed as a missed opportunity: the topic offered a chance to reflect on how forces now (alas!) reemerging in society worked on, and through, one of the leading poets of an earlier generation. Despite some good vignettes and fragments, Swift’s book, like The Cantos, simply does not cohere. Unlike Pound’s troubled, troubling, and misguided epic, though, it does not have the redeeming quality of genius.
May 2018