The Man in the Cage

Most of the prisoners in the US Army Disciplinary Training Camp in Pisa were rapists, murderers and looters who were subjected to military tribunals and then hung; others were collaborators with the Mussolini regime and they were turned over to the Italian communists who typically executed them without all the bother of a trial.

The man in the cage near the centre of the camp was an arch-collaborator but he was also a US citizen, so he would be granted a proper hearing back home in a US court room. The soldiers were warned not to speak with him and to ignore anything he might say: the CO was worried he would seduce other Americans to the fascist cause.

This did not seem likely – the caged man was obviously insane. He paced back and forth, bearded, wild eyed, raving in French, English, Italian, Chinese and other languages the intelligence agents attempting to debrief him could not even identify. There was little to do in the camp – the war was over, few of the other prisoners spoke English – so standing around listening to the madman became a popular past time.

The cage was open to the air, it contained only a bucket for a lavatory, and no bedding. The sixty year old man squatting over the bucket and wiping his ass with his hands was one of the most famous poets in the world; Ezra Loomis Pound.

Pound was one of the founders of modernism and a friend to people like W B Yeats and Ernest Hemmingway; he collaborated with T S Eliot on The Wasteland, and Eliot dedicated his masterpiece to Pound. If you have an anthology of English poetry in your house it probably contains two of Ezra Pound’s haiku – the short Japanese poetic style that he made popular in the west:

Alba

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

In a station of the metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

His post-WWI poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberly is also often quoted:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Pound’s decision to move to Italy in the mid 1920’s coincided with the transformation of the country from a democracy to a fascist dictatorship. The poet admired Mussolini – whom he met at least once – and by this stage in his life he had become obsessed with odd ideas about economics, central banks and ursury, and the sinister role the jewish people played in the banking system.

When war broke out he begged the Italians for the opportunity to propagandise for them; at first they refused, which was definitely the smart response. Pound documented his initial petition to culture Minister Allesandro Pavolini:

Well the Ministro looked at me careful and said in perlite words to
the effect that: ‘Ez … if you think you can use our air to
monkey in America’s internal politics, you got another
one comin

But after several years of nagging the Italian’s finally relented and gave ‘Ez’ a broadcast show. You can hear excerpts from it on Youtube. Pound used his addresses as a pulpit to rant about jews, central banks, interest charges and the negative reviews the US critics had given to his friend Ferdinand Celine. He claimed that the United Kingdom had become ‘a jew owned deer park with tea-rooms” and dismissed the US President as ‘Stinkie Rosenstein’ and ‘Franklin D Frankenfurter, Jewsfield’. The officials in the Italian Ministry of culture thought Pound was an insane buffoon and coming from members of Mussolini’s government that was saying something.

Italian radio did not transmit to the US so few if any of his fellow countrymen would have been able to hear Ez ranting, but he attracted the attention of US intelligence who had him indicted in absentia for treason.

After the fall of Mussolini’s regime and the collapse of the absurd Salo republic, Pound was captured by partisans. He demanded they turn him over to the US army and this is how the man who once went to London society parties with Henry James – clad in a suit made of bright green billiard fabric – and been taught to box in Paris by Ernest Hemmingway found himself caged like an animal in a make-shift camp near Pisa, with crowds of GI’s from Nebraska and Kentucky staring at him while he paced and raved in Sanskrit and koine Greek.

After a three weeks of this confinement medical inspectors concluded that Pound had suffered a complete nervous breakdown and he was moved indoors where he committed his thoughts to paper instead of keeping the other prisoners awake by screaming them aloud at night.

It transpired that Pound’s deranged gibberish was actually great poetry – many critics consider his Pisan Canto’s to be the greatest verse written about World War II. The poems composed in the cage won the inaugural Bollingen Prize from Yale and the Library of Congress.

The Canto’s begin:

The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent
shoulders
Manes! Manes was tanned and stuffed,
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
by the heels at Milano
That maggots shd / eat the dead bullock
DIGONOS, but the twice crucified
where in history will you find it?

yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper,
with a bang not with a whimper,
To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.
The suave eyes, quiet, not scornful,
rain also is of the process.
What you depart from is not the way
and olive tree blown white in the wind
washed in the Kiang and Han
what whiteness will you add to this whiteness,
what candor?

At first glance this is incomprehensible, a few minutes with Google and Wikipedia (how did people read modernist poetry before the internet?) reveals that Manes was a Zoroastrian prophet who died in a Persian prison; Ben and Clara are Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci, killed and hung upside down in the Piazelle Loreto; Digonos is Dionysus the twice born God, Dioce an utopian city mentioned in Herodotus.

And ‘the Possum’ is his nick-name for his old friend T S Eliot (hence ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’). Like Eliot’s Wasteland, the Canto’s are difficult to read, both are filled with quotations and arcance references, both say more than they seem to say, and both are filled with odd, perfectly formed phrases that haunt the mind: ‘rain also is of the process’, ‘ To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the color of stars’.

Once he arrived back in the US Pound was tried for treason. He had little difficulty convincing a federal jury to find him not guilty by reason of insanity and the court sentenced him to be confined in St Elizabeth’s, a psychiatric hospital in Washington DC. Many artists daydream about being institutionalised – a quiet place to work, regular meals, nobody to bother you, access to books and notepads – and Pound seemed to live out this fantasy in a comfortable room away from the other inmates where he enjoyed conjugal visits from his wife.

After twelve years Pound was set free; he returned to Italy where he declared ‘all America is a lunatic asylum’ and when asked for his views on the Holocaust he replied ‘The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism’. The great poet did not seem to regret the millions of people murdered so much as that his involvement with the crime of the century made him look a little gauche and middle-class.

It is (very) easy to condem Pound, but his actual contribution to the Fascist war effort was trivial. Unlike the broadcasts of British Fascists such as William Joyce (popularly known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’), to whom the British people actually tuned in to during the early stages of the war (German propaganda was the only way to find out the progress of the conflict in Churchil’s heavily censored, somewhat Orwellian wartime Britain) nobody listened to ‘old Ez’, who also paid for his crimes to some degree – unlike the many artists and poets who went on to apologise and propagandise for Stalin, Mao and the international communist movement. And at least Pound had the courage of his insane convictions – he went and lived under Mussolini. Left-wing intellectuals were considerably more reluctant to move to Soviet Russia.

I don’t know why I picked up Pound’s Selected Poems yesterday afternoon. It’s a book that’s been sitting on the shelf unread since I bought it from a second hand bookstore in Sydney a dozen years ago. It was strange to sit and read his verse in the peaceful sunshine of suburban Karori and think about poor mad Ezra in his cage surrounded by the criminal scum of post-war Tuscany:

a man on whom the sun has gone down

amid the slaves learning slavery