Knee-High to Ezra Pound

By Brad Darrach

DISCRETIONS by Mary de Rachewiltz. 312 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $8.95.

The hand of Ezra Pound, more strongly than any other, shaped the dominant style of 20th century poetry in English. Born in 1885 in an Idaho mining town, he flourished from 1907 in London and Paris as the friend of Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, the discoverer of Frost, the teacher of Eliot (who dedicated The Waste Land to him) and even of Yeats. But sometime in the 1930s something went tragically askew. The man Eliot called "the greatest poet alive" lapsed into an aging crank, teasing out nutty monetary theories, making Fascist noises about "international Jewry" as "the true enemy," stuffing junk and glories into a multilingual magpie epic called The Cantos. During World War II he made pro-Axis broadcasts from Rome. Accused of treason and brought back to the U.S., he escaped trial when he was certified insane, but for the next twelve years was shut up in a madhouse. Now 85, he passes his time in Venice and Rapallo, an old bone singing in the sun.

How to understand such a life? Pound has been little help to his often obtuse biographers. The best hope has been that friends and family would talk, a hope partly realized in this discreet but perceptive memoir by his illegitimate daughter, who is a poet in her own right and who has translated The Cantos into Italian. Though she makes no more sense than anyone else of that vast and buzzing head, she found in the little happenings of family life a language that helps explain his crusty heart. Looking up from knee height, she saw an Ezra Pound nobody else has seen: a busy, bossy, funny, touchy, loving and at times absurdly conventional American daddy.

Entity with a Grudge. The author's mother was the mistress of Pound's middle and later years, a gifted violinist named Olga Rudge. Since little Mary was a by-blow and an inconvenience --Olga, Pound and Mrs. Pound all moved in the same European artistic circles--she was boarded from birth with a farm family in the Italian Tyrol. Mary's first memory of her Tattile, as her foster parents called Pound, is of a pair of shiny shoes she was not allowed to touch. On another visit, alarmed at her farm-girl fingernails and unbrushed teeth, Tattile bought her a toothbrush and personally gave her a manicure. Mamile was more distant, "an incomprehensible entity with a grudge . . . as though I were permanently doing her wrong."

On periodic visits to Tattile and Mamile in Venice, Mary watched Pound making poetry: "His silence was suspense, a joyous sense of expectation, until he broke into a kind of chant that sometimes went on for hours." Pound was often severe with Mary. When she was still quite small, he drafted an elaborate table of "Laws for Maria." Item: "If she suffers, it is her own fault for not understanding the universe." But on the whole, he was a really nice if distant dad. He bought the child a small flock of sheep, and became her silent partner in a tiny bee-raising business; many of these episodes, mentioned obscurely in The Cantos, are here explained in full. In Venice he walked her all over town and fed her gooey Italian goodies. And one night, after taking Mary and Mamile to a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, he got so excited that all the way home he tap-danced like a damn fool on the cobblestones of Venice.

The happy days were soon gone. At eleven, Mary left her gentle Tyrolean guardians to live with Pound in Rapallo. As World War II approached, he became more and more infatuated with Mussolini. In 1939, alarmed by Franklin Roosevelt's opposition to the Axis powers, he went to Washington to "talk some sense into the President." Roosevelt refused to see him. When the U.S. entered the war, Pound delivered a series of rambling and vaguely anti-American diatribes on Radio Roma. According to Mary, he did not really intend to betray his country but to persuade it with right reason. He saw himself as a Confucian scholar-statesman, and plastered the town of Rapallo with moralistic slogans: HONESTY IS THE TREASURE OF STATES. His daughter sees him as a lone wolf howling in a world gone mad.

Losing Grip. But was Pound's howling entirely sane? Mary deals with that matter as cryptically as possible. "He was . . . losing grip. His tongue was tricking him into . . . violent expressions." But her description of what happened to Pound when the war ended is detailed and grim. He was arrested by two small-time crooks who had learned that there was a 500,000-lira reward for his capture. Handcuffed to an accused murderer, he was taken by Jeep to a military jail near Pisa. There, at the age of 60, he was kept like an animal in an outdoor cage, exposed to all weathers, for more than six months. He was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital, an insane asylum in Washington, D.C. During his ordeal, Pound fought off madness and suicide by writing some of his greatest verse.

Of her own life--now married and the mother of two, she lives in a castle in the Italian Tyrol--Mary writes gracefully but modestly. Pound is the major figure in her book, and she willingly plays Cordelia to his Lear. Perhaps at times she adds too soft a shading to the fierce old face--who could begrudge him that? Who would not be glad to hear that he and Olga are still together in old age, "taking care of each other"? Who could not envy him the vision he rescued out of horror:

Hast'ou seen the rose in the steel dust

(or swansdown ever?")

so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron

we who have passed over Lethe.

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