In 1949, I was introduced to the poet Ezra Pound, who was at that time an inmate of St. Elizabeths Hospital. There had been conflicting reports as to his mental condition; that is to say, the reports of the government psychiatrists, and the reports of everyone else who knew him. The hospital officials avoided the issue by describing him to prospective visitors quite honestly as a "political prisoner". In the interests of national security, Pound was being kept under guard by the Federal Bureau of Health, Education and Welfare. I also was a ward of the government. My status as a veteran of the Second World War had won me paid subsistence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington.
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In reality, persons under observation for mental illness are immediately deprived of all their civil rights, a dilemma that the writers of the Constitution unfortunately overlooked. It has been very simple for bureaucrats to designate their critics as being "mentally ill", and to shut them away from the eyes of the world in the various Bastilles that have been built for that purpose. No one dares to intervene on behalf of a person who is "mentally ill". It is much safer to be a Communist or a hoodlum. The sculptor John B. Flannagan, who was a patient at Bloomingdale Hospital in New York (reputedly one of the best in the country), wrote of his experiences, "There are actually more legal safeguards for a felon than checks on the psychiatrist to whom civil liberty is a joke."
The superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Dr. Winfred Overholser, was a genial type who wished the patients to help him create the atmosphere of a Y M C A summer camp, but the assorted rapists, dope addicts, and political prisoners refused to cooperate. The staff employed the latest methods of "therapy" (which were constantly changing), such as acting out one's repressions, without weapons of course.
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The medical techniques used at St. Elizabeths are regarded as incredibly backward and inhumane by more advanced European physicians. Although the members of the staff no longer cure "mental illness" by removing the entire large intestine, this was a popular remedy there until the Second World War. The superstitious doctors of several decades ago believed that mental disorder was caused by bacteria in the gut, the bacteria that in reality are responsible for the osmotive digestive process. The operation had no visible effect on the patients' mental capacities, but more than eighty per cent of them died from its aftereffects.
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Psychiatrists comprise a fascinating group for future study in the field of mental disorder. Dr. Overholser's predecessor at St. Eliza-beths had been shot dead by his wife while he was sitting in an automobile with his mistress in front of a fashionable dress shop on Washington's F Street. A few months later, a series of brutal muggings and rapes, committed by employees of St. Elizabeths, had moved a Washington editor to complain that the attendants should be locked up at night with the patients, and that they should not be allowed to come into the city.
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In the preface to one of Robert Harborough Sherard's books, Lord Alfred Douglas writes, "I always had an instinctive feeling that once Oscar Wilde had been sent to prison, prison became the obvious goal for any self-respecting poet, and I never rested until I got there. It took me about twenty-five years to do it, but I succeeded in the end, and I did six months' imprisonment in the Second Division for libelling Mr. Winston Churchill about the battle of Jutland. The result is that I am one of the very few Englishmen of letters now living, or who has been living since 1895, who can go to bed every night without feeling more or less ashamed of being an Englishman."
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The use of the term "mental illness" as a weapon to dispose of political opponents is by no means rare in American history. A recent book, The Trial of Mary Todd Lincoln, by James A. Rhodes and Dean Jauchius (Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, exposes the rigged insanity trial of President Lincoln's widow to invalidate the possible influence of her son, Robert Todd Lincoln, in the elections of 1876. As soon as they were over, and only two hours after the results were known, Mrs. Lincoln was given a new sanity hearing and released. As Rex Lampman said of the inmates of St. Elizabeths, "Most of these people are here because somebody wants them to be here."
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Many people who would have liked to visit him were fearful of doing so because they had to apply by letter. Since Ezra had been accused of treason against the present office-holders, those who visited him incurred considerable risk. A visitor might be promptly investigated by government agents, and some of them lost their jobs.
Later on, journalists began to carp about the fact that some of Pound's visitors were anarchists or other types of extremists, the forerunners of the beatniks. But people who had something to lose could not afford to visit Pound and incur the inevitable penalties. Despite the fact that many literate persons who occupied subordinate positions in the government read and admired Pound's work, none of them dared to visit him. Even Huntingdon Cairns, who holds a fairly lofty post at the National Gallery, would only risk seeing Pound a few times during the twelve and a half years of his imprisonment in Washington.
Consequently, Pound's visitors could be divided into two groups, the youthful and reckless art students, or beatniks, and those admirers of his work who came from other countries and were therefore immune to reprisals by the federal government. This group included scholars and diplomats from almost every country in the world except Russia.
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The tragedy of the First World War, which signified the down-fall of an orderly Western civilization, spurred Pound to seek justice. It is impossible for the artist to complete himself, or do significant work, without committing himself to this struggle. Sooner or later, he will be asked to become a lackey to the existing order, regardless of that order's merits. His life then becomes a precarious existence, if he chooses to carry on without submitting, or an empty one, if he surrenders.
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Archibald MacLeish described the scene in a review that ap-peared in the New York Times, December 16, 1956:
". . . Not everyone has seen Pound in the long dim corridor inhabited by the ghosts of men who cannot be still, or who can be still too long. . . . When a conscious mind capable of the most complete human awareness is incarcerated among minds which are not conscious and cannot be aware, the enforced association produces a horror which is not relieved either by the intelligence of doctors or by the tact of administrators or even by the patience and kindliness of the man who suffers for it. You carry the horror away with you like the smell of the ward in your clothes, and whenever afterward you think of Pound or read his lines, a stale sorrow afflicts you."
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He informed us that it would be impossible for Reck to see Pound without going through the requisite preliminaries, as Pound was "a political prisoner".
Ezra was delighted to learn that the officials were being so frank about his status, and it gave me new insight into the opposition of the state that held him in bondage. As I plunged deeper into the study of his work, I was forced to take into account the entire circumstances that had led him to make the broadcasts from Italy, resulting in his indictment on a charge of treason. I learned that he could have avoided the indictment by renouncing his American citizenship, but he had purposely refused to make this sacrifice, for behind his every act was his loyalty to his country.
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The basis of Ezra's struggle against bureaucracy—his "treason" if you will—is based on two fundamental concepts: "the state as convenience" and the tax system as "legalized robbery". It is no wonder that his captors put him in a madhouse for thirteen years.
No doubt, he would have been shot had they not feared that this would only accelerate the circulation of his ideas. For they are his ideas. I fail to discover in Plato or Pascal anything so obvious, even though these abuses already existed, in a lesser degree, during their lifetimes.
Ezra once said to me, "I did not understand, until I read Confucius, the impact of one man upon another." He suggests that Confucius is the philosophical base for many of his ideas, as explained in the editorial in The Exile of Autumn, 1927:
"The dreary horror of American life can be traced to two damnable roots, or perhaps it is only one root: 1. the loss of all distinction between public and private affairs. 2. the tendency to mess into other people's affairs before establishing order in one's own affairs, and in one's thought. To which one might perhaps add the lack in America of any habit of connecting or correlating any act or thought to any main principle whatever, the ineffable rudder-lessness of that people. The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius, it consists of establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without special effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other people's affairs. Against this principle of evil no adequate precaution is taken by Christianity, Moslemism, Judaism, nor, as far as I know, by any monotheistic religion. Many 'mystics' do not even aim at the principle of good; they seek merely establishment of a parasitic relationship with the unknown. The original Quakers may have had some adumbration of the good principle. (But no early Quaker texts are available in this village.)" Ezra's preference for Confucian principles is based upon his statement that "It is the only system which shows a concern with social order." This explains why he has devoted so many years to giving us the thought of Confucius in digestible language. In his translation entitled The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest of Confucius, he says, "Finding the precise word for the inarticulate heart's tone means not lying to oneself, as in the case of hating a bad smell or loving a beautiful person, also called respecting one's own nose. On this account the real man has to look his heart in the eye even when he is alone.
"You improve the old homestead by material riches and irrigation; you enrich and irrigate the character by the process of looking straight into the heart and then acting on the results. Thus the mind becomes your palace and the body can be at ease; it is for this reason that the great gentleman must find the precise verbal expression for his inarticulate thoughts.
"That is the meaning of the saying: If a man does not discipline himself he cannot bring order into the home.
"One humane family can humanize a whole state; one courteous family can lift a whole state into courtesy; one grasping and perverse man can drive a nation into chaos. Such are the seeds of movement . . . (semina motuum, the inner impulses of the tree). That is what we mean by: one word will ruin the business, one man can bring the state to an orderly course."
These pithy excerpts, chosen at random from many such thoughts presented in Ezra's Chinese translations, explain what he wants to give to us. The greatest human problem, and the one most fraught with difficulties, is the problem of communicating with others, and here civilization is always put to the ultimate test. "The inarticulate heart's tone," that beautiful phrase for the melody of the being, depends upon not lying to oneself, a much more demanding precept than the conventional admonition that one should not lie to others.
We have seen in recent years the terrible truth in the Confucian saying "One humane family can humanize a whole state." Russell Kirk has written graphically of the decay of the great houses in England and Scotland, those manifestations of a culture that now lie roofless to the weather, symbolizing the vanished glories of their builders as well as the present apathy of the village inhabitants. The strength of the shire, and its ability to produce people who emigrated to various parts of the world and distinguished themselves, notably in America, was centered in the "humane family" occupying the great house, and their humane influence pervaded the entire community. Now that good manners have been equated with tyranny, the villagers have returned to the graces of their cattle.
The American South also has benefited by the influence of the "great house" and its humane influence. Now that most of its mansions are in decay, or restored and in the hands of "Yankees", the influence is hardly discernible, although traces of it linger in speech and minor courtesies.
Ezra's translations of Confucius were not widely reviewed in the United States because the first mention of the word "order" in contemporary intellectual circles is equivalent to the cry of "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Everyone dashes for the exits. Confucius states (and this is out of context) that "One man can bring the state to an orderly course." By this he means one "humane" man, not a Fascist dictator. Confucius treats of the "gentleman in government", not the egomaniac.
The history of modern Europe might have been quite different had Mr. Hitler been able to bring order into his thought, but he is seldom criticized on that ground, perhaps because many self-styled liberals think in the same irregular fashion that he did. Their minds proceed in a sort of Cinerama, at one moment whirling down the roller-coaster of psychoanalysis, and the next moment drifting in a balloon over Paris.
Fighting this trend, Ezra Pound was driven further and further from his homeland, geographically speaking, but at the same time, he was drifting closer to his roots. At least he came to an under-standing of those Confucian gentlemen of the early Republic, Mr. Washington and Mr. Adams, whose virtu stemmed from the humane families of Great Britain.
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Pound appended a long list of editorial suggestions, containing such pointed items as the following:
"1. All bureaucrats should be drowned. All interference in human affairs by people paid to interfere ought to be stopped."
"2. Le style c'est homme. Knowledge of this simple fact would have saved us from Woodie Wilson."
"3. All officials in the State dept. ought to be vacuum-cleaned." Pound antedated Joe McCarthy's assault on the State Department by more than two decades. Despite this warning, no improvements were made until the lad from Wisconsin came onto the scene. As for Woodie Wilson, his style did not alert the American public against him, perhaps because no one ever read his dry historical writings.
In October, 1951, Ezra wrote me a note on Wilson: "From perusal of House's and Wilson's own writing it is difficult to form an estimate of their ethics, that is to say, they may have thought themselves honest. They did not believe in democracy or in representative of government. Like all men who have respected Alex. Hamilton they believed in financial oligarchy and dictatorship. They played into the hands of international usury and control of that most vital 'instrument of policy' the issue of purchasing power.
This they imposed on an unconscious public. There is not the slightest shadow of doubt that they knew their acts to be serious, vide House Memoirs, where the Reserve Board is considered (as) important as the Supreme Court of the nation. As an historian Woodrow is second only to Parson Weems, and shows no curiosity regarding the colonial period."
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Ezra founded a short-lived magazine in Italian, L'Indice, and advertised in the Genoese press for Italian writers, with little success. His efforts to rouse his countrymen from their seemingly hopeless state of mental torpor were not confined to the young. He wrote to his old English professor, Dr. Felix E. Schelling, at the University of Pennsylvania:
"Dear Doc Schelling, As one of the most completely intolerant men I have ever met, the joke is on you if you expected to teach anyone liberality. As for my being embittered, it won't wash; everybody who comes near me marvels at my good nature. Besides, what does it matter to me personally? I don't get scratched by it, but the howls of pain that reach me from the pore bastids that are screwed down under it and who have no outlet, save in final desperation writing to some-one in Europe . . . I have never objected to any man's mediocrity, it is the idiotic fear that a certain type of mediocrity has in the presence of any form of the real. And the terror of newspaper owners, professors, editors, etc. in the presence of idea. I have documents stacked high, from men in most walks of life. Proved over and over again. No intellectual life in the univs. No truth in the press. Refusal to look at fact. It is nonsense to talk about my being embittered. I've got so much plus work going on that I have difficulty in remembering what particular infamy I wrote you about. . . . What little life has been kept in American letters has been largely due to a few men getting out of the muck and keeping the poor devils who couldn't at least informed. . . . You ain't so old but what you wouldn't wake up. And you are too respected and respectable for it to be any real risk. They can't fire you now. Why the hell don't you have a bit of real fun before you get tucked under? Damn it all, I never did dislike you."
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He spent some time with an old friend, Congressman George Holden Tinkham, who is referred to as "Uncle George" in the Cantos. He had met Tinkham years ago in Europe, for Tinkham, the only bearded member of Congress, usually went abroad at campaign time and let his opponent talk himself into defeat. As a visiting Congressman, he had been allowed to fire the first American shot against the Austrians when the United States went to war against the Central Powers in 1917. Pound mentions in the Cantos that he and Uncle George tried to find the exact spot, years later, but the road had been blown off the mountainside.
A descendant of a Mayflower family, Tinkham represented the 11th Massachusetts District—including Newton and the fashionable Back Bay—from 1915 to 1943, when he retired. He was a colorful figure in Washington, and his office was filled with mementoes of his travels, including stuffed heads of game animals, African shields, and a picture of himself from a London news-paper. This last was an item listing the ten most prominent Negroes in America. Tinkham's name was among them, because one of his constituents had put him down as an honorary member of a Negro group in Boston. Tinkham found amusement in his visitors' reaction to this item.
Despite the fact that he enjoyed being a member of the ruling class, Tinkham accomplished some noteworthy acts during his terms of service. It was he who noticed the clause in the League of Nations bill that would have caused us to abnegate our sovereignty. He immediately rushed to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's office, and told him about it. As Ezra describes the occasion in the Cantos, "and he knew there'd be one hell of a fight in the Senate." Lodge was subsequently memorialized as the man who led the fight against the bill and defeated it, winning for himself the title of the "founder of isolationism", or some such term.
Tinkham also made an amazing prediction in 1934, which was noted by the press, and quickly forgotten. He declared that Roosevelt's recovery program would be a complete failure, and that the President would have to take us into war in order to cover up his failure. As Herbert Hoover pointed out, after the event, in the third volume of his Memoirs, this is exactly what happened.
Tinkham did approve of one Roosevelt deed—repeal. He was one of the most steadfast fighters against prohibition.
Family investments in South African gold mines gave Tinkham a comfortable fortune. Ezra says that when "Tink" showed his letter of credit to the manager of an Italian bank, the man salaamed to the floor. And, to fix the situation in my mind, Ezra repeated the man's gesture of obeisance to money.
At Ezra's suggestion, I went to the Harvard Club in 1952 to see "Tink". With his typical enthusiasm for a campaign, Ezra had drafted no less than three letters to "Tink", the last of which had been signed by me, in order to set up the appointment. It had been decided that I was to write Tinkham's biography, which would be one of considerable interest, and that the wealthy old bachelor should finance the enterprise. "Tink" was easily the most interesting personality at the Club, openly contemptuous of the young Harvard men who were paralyzed at the sight of him. His beard was as raffish and his eyes as bright as they must have been when Ezra first set eyes on him.
We spent some pleasant hours together, but nothing came of the proposed book. Tinkham was not much interested in whether anyone knew what he had done for his country or not. He was then in his eighties, he had twenty million dollars, and he intended to live out his life as he had always lived it, enjoying it to the full.
Shortly after I talked with him, he went to Europe again. In 1956, he died, leaving only one survivor, a sister who was wealthier than himself, and who lived on top of a mountain in North Carolina. His money went to a children's home in Boston.
From
This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound By E U S T A C E M U L L I N S
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