This Difficult Individual: Ezra Pound by Eusatace Mullins

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"This Difficult Individual: Ezra Pound" by Eusatace Mullins.

Although this book was published in 1961, it has a 1940s style: tart, arcane, well-researched, gossipy but high-brow all the same, coupled with a strong impulse toward ethical puritanism.

The first third of the book is what you might expect from any study of great literary figures of the glorious past, particularly that Bohemian period of the Twenties and Thirties in Paris. There is an abundant crowd of literary luminaries that Ezra Pound meets and helps. There are literary quotations as well as quoted passages by other writers either about Ezra Pound or the time-period in which he and his friends lived. There is no literary analysis or explanation for any of Pound's poems or other works here or elsewhere in the book. The main names here, however, are William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot as well as Ford Maddox Ford and Wyndham Lewis.

The middle-third of the book is largely political, involving the story of how Ezra Pound felt compelled to speak out on the radio about the evils of war and how Americans ought to resist entering into World War II as well as critical remarks about President Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thus causing the U.S. government suddenly to take the totalitarian decision to label Ezra Pound's talks as acts of treason. Ezra Pound spent six months in a concentration camp in Pisa, Italy and then -- illegally and unconstitutionally -- thirteen (13!) years in confinement at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Washington, D.C.

The last third of the book is a political and spiritual validation, vindication and defense of Ezra Pound's ideas about constitutional government, communication, and writing, although it is clear that after Ezra and Dorothy Pound leave St. Elizabeth's Hospital and leave the country to return to Italy, Pound never again communicates with the author (or anyone else in America, for that matter) and so has no knowledge of the last two decades of his life (with and without Dorothy Pound and Olga Rudge).

The author does a fine if unnecessary job of explaining just who Ezra Pound's (few) true friends were and who his (many) enemies were, naming names on both sides, without fully explaining why Eza Pound, who helped so many become good and famous poets, writers, artists, was not reciprocated with favor and help in return by them in his dire moment of need except to say that these saw this genius, this creator, as "this difficult man." Never once did the author think or even suggest that with each successive world war, civilization was growing more and more anti-intellectual, little capable of tolerating let alone understanding a man who loved learning, who could think, a man who kept growing intellectually even as he reached into his seventies, seeking the new intellectually in order to try to make the new stay new.

There are references in this work about Ezra Pound that I can't wait to read because they help me understand the world as well as Ezra Pound: the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin; the lawyer Sir Edward Coke; Louis Agassiz; Charles Callan, author of "Back Door to War" (1952) - about Roosevelt's knowing decision to get the U.S. into World War II; Brooks Adams' works; and "The Four Books" by James Legge, a Confucian work that helped Ezra Pound get through his 6-month experience in the concentration camp at Pisa.

As a single source to glean as much information as possible about Ezra Pound, I highly recommend this difficult book. It's a bit funny today to learn that the author went quite out of his way to prove and show that Ezra Pound was not a sexual decadent in any way -- only to admit, sheepishly and quietly, in the last pages of the book that, yes, Ezra Pound did have a mistress at one time, and, yes, the mistress gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock. This was a big part of the "ethical puritianism" I was referring to at the opening of this review. Nonetheless, this book shows magnanimously what a powerhouse of culture, taste, and intelligence was -- and is -- this incredibly gifted difficult man. I love listening to Vivaldi's music, and until now I had no idea that I had Ezra Pound to thank for the survival of such beautiful works in sound (although Olga Rudge may have been even more responsible for Vivaldi's survival if you trust Pound and Rudge's daughter's account in her memoir, "Discretions").

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