Retirement

Those best qualified to judge thought him the master versemaker in English of his generation. He lived in a decaying palazzo in Rapallo, on the Mediterranean shore near Genoa. Of his own greatness Ezra Pound had no doubt; he named his son Homer Shakespear Pound, so the story went, "for the crescendo effect." Writers whom he had befriended included a grateful exile, James Joyce, and a sportsman, Ernest Hemingway. His letters, jaggedly typed, jumpy with execrations and wit, walloped out in enormous numbers, were avant-garde currency for 20 years.

Money, of which he had not much, obsessed him in the '30s. For Social Credit he became a fiery if incoherent apostle. "Usury" he attacked in sumptuous and contemptuous cantos. He fell for the Fasces that seemed to mean Order. In his crotchety isolation he desired an audience; his own country ignored him; Fascismo flattered him. His half-bantering egomania became huge. When World War II began, chafing at new difficulties of communication, he wrote: "Am inconvenienced by shutdown of London."

In February 1940, Ezra Pound was heard for the first time on the Rome radio, beamed to America. He became a regular broadcaster on Rome's weekday noon quarter-hour. In his dry, rambling way he extolled "Brother Benito," lashed at Jews, English, the Gold Standard, gunmakers, Roosevelt. U.S. students of short wave bracketed him with barefaced Lord Haw-Haw as another, but more harmless, renegade. Up to December 1941 he was still telling the U.S.--disconnectedl--what Pound wanted: "I want Roosevelt out of post-war matters. Let him stick to North America even if it means diminished gun sales for his pals. ... I do not see the U.S.A. having Fascism without years of training. . . ."

But Pound was no Haw-Haw. After Dec. 7 he was no longer heard.

Last week the Rome radio announced: "On Dec. 9, the day the U.S. declared war on Italy,* Dr. Ezra Pound, the well-known writer, retired to Rapallo to continue his study of Chinese philosophy."

*The U.S. declared war on Italy on Dec. 11

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