Atrocities

By J.D. Reed

FAMOUS LAST WORDS by Timothy Findley Delacorte; 396 pages; $14.95

The odor of death hangs heavy over Ezra Pound's garden in Rapallo, Italy, during the fateful March of 1945. As he awaits the advance of the U.S. Army and his arrest for making treasonous broadcasts, the mad poet bids a venomous farewell to "poor old Hugh Selwyn Mauberley--arse-eyed traitor to the whole world!" Indeed, the fleeing Mauberley presents a threat to both Axis and Allies: he has seen atrocities on both sides and he is ready to bear witness.

So begins Canadian Timothy Findley's fourth and most peculiar novel. In Ragtime style. Famous Last Words assembles a vivid cast of historical personages, among them the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lana Turner, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Lindbergh. But here the famous names do not move to syncopated jazz; instead the work resounds with tainted anthems.

The hero himself is a double fiction: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was the most famous of Pound's poetic creations, a British reactionary born in a savage half-century, "out of date with his time." Findley's Mauberley rushes to catch up with his century. Cowering in a crumbling Alpine hotel that has seen grander times and better people, he writes a graffiti testament in rooms once occupied by the likes of Isadora Duncan and Somerset Maugham. He has barely finished when someone stabs him. The body and the writing are found by American soldiers, liberators of the death camps. Captain Freyberg, a fanatical Nazi-hunter who ironically places the Dachau gate sign, ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Work shall set you free), over his desk, checks off Mauberley as one more fascist corpse. Lieut. Quinn is not so sure. He begins to examine the handwriting on the wall.

There Mauberley has detailed his strange relationship with Wallis Simpson, the American woman he loved "in the way dogs have of loving the feet at which they lie," from their first meeting in the lobby of the Imperial Shanghai Hotel in 1924. Both were infatuated with the same male. Their two-decade odyssey ends in the Bahamas, where the Duke of Windsor, glazed with alcohol, dressing a model of his mother each morning in fresh clothes, lives out the last degraded years of exile.

Findley's reweaving of history is so canny that it is sometimes difficult to tell where the tear ends and the mend begins. The duke, for instance, did visit Germany in 1937, where he took tea with Field Marshal Goring and was photographed with Hitler. And he did lounge in neutral Portugal, as if to wait out the hostilities, until Winston Churchill learned of a Nazi kidnap plot and ordered British troops to provide an escort to the Bahamas. But the additional malice is pure Findley: British commandos raid the duke's quarters, only to find the royal presence crashing through a mirror, trying to hide inside his own image.

The author also mixes the actual with the fantastic when he concocts a cabal called "Penelope." Its conspirators are a strange admixture of the notorious and celebrated, including Perfumer Franc,ois Coty, Sir Alan Paisley, Field Marshal Von Ribbentrop, third in the Nazi hierarchy, and Hugh Selwyn himself. Mauberley's assignment: to persuade Wallis to prop up the Duke as a figurehead who will "rule" a United Europe controlled by fascists from England and Germany. Ribbentrop dangles a glittering prize before the duchess: "Your Royal Highness perhaps does not understand that there are crowns that have never yet been worn by anyone." She replies without hesitation: "How long do you think we might have to wait?"

In a revisionist age, this sort of indictment can hardly be considered revelatory. Almost four decades after the events, it is no secret that during World War II neither side had an exclusive on betrayal and duplicity. But Findley's purpose is artistic as well as moral, and his characters talk and behave with appalling plausibility. As for Mauberley, the choice could not be more apposite. Ezra Pound's bloodless hero did not merely suffer from the disease of his age; he was the disease of his age, mute until it was too late, sensitive only for No. 1, fatally solipsistic to the end. As catastrophe beckons, the Duchess of Windsor is heard to complain: "We are led into the light and shown such marvels as one cannot tell . . . and then they turn out all the lights and hit you with a baseball bat." Findley does not relinquish the bat, but in this ambitious, disturbing book, the lights never go off for an instant. --By J.D. Reed

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