Madness, Paranoia, and Ezra Pound’s FBI File Karen Leick Either there is and was a plot to ruin all goyim, all nations of Europe, or some people are stark raving crazy. – Ezra Pound, in a broadcast over Rome Radio Although many of us are startled to learn that the FBI maintained files on writers including E.B. White and Robert Frost, it comes as no surprise that the FBI collected 1,512 pages on Ezra Pound. For discussion of the E.B. White and Robert Frost files, see Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1988). His large file includes correspondence between Hoover and his agents regarding Pound, transcripts of some of his pro-Mussolini broadcasts over Rome Radio, the entire text of his Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935), clippings of newspaper articles about Pound and his arrest for treason in 1943, and dozens of interviews with people: some knew Pound well, some had encountered him on few occasions, and some had never met him at all. The FBI was most interested to see if any of these individuals would be able to identify Pound’s voice in recordings of his radio broadcasts for his trial. The Department of Justice was concerned that Pound could not be convicted of treason because of the way it is defined by the U.S. Constitution: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. (U.S. Constitution, Art. 3, Sec. 3) The government was pressed to find two individuals who could testify that they had witnessed “the same overt Act.” Usually there was only one Italian working at the radio station in Rome when Pound spoke, and none of the radio technicians spoke English. Five Italian witnesses were flown over to the United States to testify, and the government sought American witnesses who would, after listening to records that had been made of the broadcasts, state under oath that the voice they had heard was definitely Pound’s. See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 689-91. Evaluating the information given to the FBI by interviewees is a challenge for any scholar. The interviews recorded in Pound’s FBI file are censored, with the names of the interviewees blacked out, along with their addresses and much information that might be used to identify them. George Antheil is the only subject who was interviewed about Pound whose name was not censored. The identities of some of the blacked out names, however, can still be deduced from certain details divulged in the interviews, such as William Carlos Williams, James Laughlin, Richard Aldington, e. e. cummings, Kay Boyle, and Theodore Spencer. C. David Heymann has connected some names to interviews in Ezra Pound: The Last Rower (New York: The Viking Press, 1976) that I was unable to recognize on my own, such as e.e. cummings, Louis Zukofsky, Ronald Duncan, Tibor Serly, John Dummond, John Slocum, Reynolds Packard, and James Angleton. Heymann also asserts that there is no FBI interview in Pound’s file with Hemingway or Eliot, a fact I would have been unable to determine, since many interviews are simply too vague to suggest the source. But the credibility of all witness testimony is suspect for a variety of reasons: some of Pound’s friends, such as Williams, minimized his sins, while others, such as cummings, emphasized his errors, possibly to create distance between his views and their own. Interviewees rightly feared that they could easily be targets of FBI investigations themselves, and their responses reflect this concern. Many of those interviewed had only met Pound once or twice in Italy or in the United States when he visited in 1939; their comments are frequently based on rumor or speculation. And, the timing of an interview may have affected it. Those interrogated before Pound’s well publicized indictment for treason on July 26, 1943, may not have understood what was at stake, while those who were interviewed by the FBI after this date would have been well aware that their responses might provide information for the upcoming trial. In addition, many FBI agents conducting the interviews did not know the details of Pound’s case themselves. Kay Boyle reports that when an FBI agent appeared at her door asking questions about Pound on February, 20, 1943, The agent stayed about an hour. Well, at the end of the hour he said to me, “By the way, um, who is Ezra Pound?” I said, “You don’t know who he is?” “No,” he said. “I have no idea.” I said, “Well, he’s a poet and he’s a great admirer of Mussolini and Hitler, and he’s broadcasting for the Axis.” Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992), 201. Although the FBI interviewed a wide range of persons over the course of several years and the purpose of each interview was to find out the interviewee’s relationship to Pound and his or her ability to recognize his voice, there is striking observation that recurs, regardless of the timing of the interview, or whether the person being interviewed identified him or herself as a friend or enemy of Pound. The FBI did not know that a plea of insanity would be used by Pound’s attorney, Julien Cornell, but they might have guessed that this would be an effective defense since so many of those interviewed told the FBI that they believed Pound was mentally unstable. [Blacked out] advised that, in his opinion, DR. POUND had gone completely insane as far as any sense of reason and judgment was concerned. Although his name is blacked out, this interview is clearly with William Carlos Williams. [Blacked out] still considers himself a close friend of POUND’s and is sorry for POUND, believing that POUND has turned traitor to the United States because of a mental condition. Although his name is blacked out, this interview is clearly with James Laughlin. [Blacked out] states that his attempts at conversation with Pound were successful in producing only 4 topics of conversation on the part of Pound, namely, that Martin Van Buren was the greatest president the United States ever had, that John Adams was one of the greatest men that ever lived, a strong tirade against the Jews, an equally strong tirade against international bankers… [Blacked out] stated that despite Dr. Pound’s ability as a literary figure, he believes the man is mentally unbalanced… Although his name is blacked out, this interview is clearly with Theodore Spencer. [Blacked out] stated that he has never met Dr. Ezra Pound but has heard that POUND is mentally unbalanced. He also suggested that [Blacked out] might be able to furnish further information relative to POUND. [Blacked out] was in Italy until April 1, 1941, recalled meeting Dr. EZRA POUND in Italy on one or two occasions between February 12, 1941 and April 1, 1941. [Blacked out] believes that Pound is a ‘crack-pot’ and recalled that Pound told him that he was really fighting for America inasmuch as he was favoring the Fascist cause, which is the only reasonable form of government. Pound also told [Blacked out] that the Jews were trying to get the United States into the war. [Blacked out] stated that he knew Pound since 1935. … [Blacked out] described Pound as a ‘madman’ and stated that he is very antagonistic toward the British because of the alleged British treatment of the Fascist government… It was [Blacked out]’s opinion that Pound is a ‘crack-pot’ and turned against the United States because he believed the Americans never appreciated his genius. Originally [Blacked out] was very fond of Pound, but stated when he last saw Pound the latter was definitely fanatical. [Blacked out] had met POUND in Rome on one or two occasions in 1935 or 1936. It is [Blacked out]’s opinion that POUND is completely ‘crazy’. He was already, at the time she saw him, a rabid Fascist. [Blacked out] could furnish no specific information concerning Pound, inasmuch as he considered the American poet a strange person and a bit insane, and he avoided Pound as much as possible. [Blacked out] considered Pound somewhat mentally unbalanced and said that Pound rambled incoherently at times … Like many other people interviewed, [Blacked out] claims that she considered Pound ‘a bit insane.’ [Blacked out] stated that he would be willing to testify against Ezra Pound, although he stated that he, as well as any acquaintance of Pound, should they be called, probably all would state that they believed he had become mentally unbalanced. Critics have always greatly resisted the suggestion that Pound was unbalanced or fanatical. Those who admire Pound’s work may feel that the quality or significance of his writing is diminished if a consensus is reached among scholars that Pound was mentally unstable. As Louis Sass points out in Madness and Modernism: [some believe] that whereas the artist chooses, controls, and uses certain states or forms of consciousness, the madman simply suffers them. This latter idea is one that has been with us since ancient times, and, with little doubt, it remains the most widely held assumption about the difference between insanity and “true” creativity. Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 70. In 1946, the editors of the The Nation expressed a slightly different reason for their discomfort with the charge that Pound was insane: “It seems to us an unwarranted slur on the poet to maintain that he is less responsible for his actions than other men – and we can’t help begrudging to various and sundry philistines the satisfaction of having one of the most famous of modern poets declared insane.” Editorial, The Nation (5 January 1946): 3. The Nation was aware that some Americans had always felt alienated by modernist poetry and found the idea that Pound was mad to be evidence that modern poetry was unintelligible for a reason: modernist writers, they were amused to report, were crazy. This theme was repeated by many editors and columnists during the controversy that erupted when Pound received the Bollingen Award for poetry in 1949. An editorial in the Richmond Times Dispatch on February 24, 1949, explained that: “Entirely apart from art and treason, we are afraid the award has confirmed what a good many plain, God-fearing, hard-working, salt o’ the earth Americans have suspected – that poets are nuts, and especially modern ones.” “America’s Poet Pound,” Richmond Times Dispatch (24 February 1949): editorial page. Likewise, an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer Public Ledge observed: “The [Bollingen] award says, in effect, we must understand a mind like Pound’s if we’re going to cope with modern poetry. That makes it easy for most of us to reach a decision to get along without such specialized literary fare.” “Poets and Ezra Pound,” Philadelphia Inquirer Public Ledger (21 February 1949): 18. A letter to the editors of the Washington Post predicted the consequences of giving the award to a possibly insane traitor: “The ‘prize poet’ is either a man suspected of treason, or one who is of unsound mind! The public’s reaction to this dilemma cannot help but be a further estrangement between modern poets and a potentially attentive reading audience.” “Ezra Pound’s Prize,” Washington Post (24 February 1949): 10. See also Ollie Crawford, “Ezra Pound gets Pretty Penny By Going From Bad to Verse”: “This proves that you don’t have to be crazy to write poetry, but it helps. You can write about spring and be just as balmy.” Philadelphia Inquirer Public Ledger (22 February 1949): 21. Like Pound’s loyal admirers, most serious enemies of Pound have never believed his insanity plea. The idea that there was a “conspiracy” among the doctors at St. Elizabeths to find Pound mentally unfit for trial only in order to save him from possible execution has been suggested by numerous critics, including E. Fuller Torrey, Kay Boyle, Robert Casillo and others. E. Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984); See Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992), 198; Robert Casillo, A Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Alfred Kazin argued in 1986, “Whether or not he always knew what he was saying – clearly impossible in such a lifetime’s flood of words – Pound was dishonest, and so were his defenders, when he finally claimed insanity as a reason for his actions. He got away with it.” Alfred Kazin, “The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound,” New York Review of Books (13 March 1986): 23. This mistaken interpretation of events is shared by many detractors, although Pound’s actions during World War II were never judged; instead, he was found unfit to stand trial. That is, his present mental condition was the only concern of the doctors (Winifred Overholser, Marion King, Joseph Gilbert, and Wendell Muncie) who reported on Pound’s condition at the trial. Pound’s treatment at the Disciplinary Training Centre (DTC) north of Pisa, where he had been locked in a small open cage, exposed to rainstorms and hot sun, and blinded by floodlights around the clock from May 24 to June 15, 1945 (when he began to exhibit signs of a mental breakdown), was seen as one likely cause of Pound’s unstable mental condition in the fall of 1945; his wartime behavior was irrelevant. But the consensus reached by these doctors was never believed by much of the public. Like Kazin, Kay Boyle also thought that the insanity plea was a deliberate manipulation: [T]he whole business of being in the hospital was a trick. He either pretended to be insane or got people to tell people he was. If it was pacifism, that would have been something else, but it wasn’t that. He was telling the American troops to desert. He wanted American troops to lose the war. Robins, 198. My reading of the FBI interviews is quite different; many people were spontaneously telling officials that Pound was unbalanced without being coerced either by Pound or FBI agents, who clearly were not interested in encouraging this line of defense for the poet. Boyle’s belief that Pound encouraged American troops to desert during World War II in his radio broadcasts is also not accurate, although many Americans at the time who had not heard or read transcripts of the broadcasts also believed this to be true; instead, Pound was considered treasonous for giving “comfort to the enemy” because he frequently complimented Mussolini, harshly criticized Roosevelt, and suggested that Churchill and Roosevelt were pressured by a network of Jewish international bankers and munitions dealers to bring about the Second World War. During the years that numerous citizens were telling the FBI that Pound was insane, many of his friends and acquaintances also discussed this possibility among themselves. Hemingway wrote to Archibald MacLeish in 1943: “He is obviously crazy. I think you might prove he was crazy as far back as the latter [sic] Cantos. He deserves punishment and disgrace but what he really deserves most is ridicule. He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of.” Hemingway also wrote to Allen Tate that Pound “ought to go to the loony bin.” MacLeish wrote to Hemingway: “it is pretty clear that poor old Ezra is quite, quite balmy.” Carpenter, 699. And, as early as 1934, Joyce suggested that Pound had lost his mind after he had a disturbing dinner with Hemingway and Pound in Paris; Hemingway reported in a letter: “Joyce … asked me to come around when Pound was present because he was afraid he might do something mad.” Carpenter, 503. E. Fuller Torrey dismisses the significance of all of these comments, claiming that Hemingway was exaggerating Pound’s mental instability in a deliberate attempt to orchestrate an effective insanity plea for him, and that these comments as well as all of the references to Pound’s insanity in his FBI file evince this effort. But Torrey is forced to quote certain comments in the file out of context, such as the individual who said that “he as well as any acquaintances of Pound’s, should they be called to testify, probably would all state that they believed he has become mentally unbalanced.” Torrey fails to mention that this person explicitly said that he would be willing to testify against Pound. Torrey, 183. Humphrey Carpenter speculates that because Hemingway’s report of the meeting with Joyce “was written after Hemingway had seen a transcript of one of Ezra’s wartime broadcasts, when the question of his sanity had begun to be raised. … Hemingway’s recollections were probably influenced by this.” Carpenter, 503. That Pound’s friends wondered about his stability in private might counter claims that the insanity defense was without substance and simply invented by a clever attorney, but critics have not regarded this discourse as significant. According to Carpenter, MacLeish’s or Hemingway’s comments in their correspondence should not be taken seriously because “there was a considerable difference between calling him ‘cracked’ in private letters and publicly claiming, as a legal defense, that he was clinically insane.” Carpenter, 703. William M. Chace contends that “no one had thought him seriously ill in a clinical sense, although Hemingway was fond of offering the opinion, that of an amateur in such matters, that Pound was ‘wacky’ or ‘balmy’ or ‘goofy.’” William M. Chace, “‘Insanity,’ ‘Treason,’ and Care,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1987): 134-41. To prove that Pound was not really unbalanced, Chace uses as evidence the letter that Julien Cornell, Pound’s attorney, wrote to Dorothy Pound before the trial which stated that Pound’s “mental aberrations” were “not anything new or unusual, but are chronic and would pass entirely unnoticed by one like yourself who has lived close to him for a number of years.” Cornell concluded the letter: “I am sorry that you may have been startled and alarmed by reports of your husband’s condition and I hope that you can understand that he may appear to a stranger in quite a different way from the way in which he appears to you.” Julien Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer (New York: The John Day Company, 1966), 41-42. Chace does not mention that important closing, although it clearly indicates that Cornell was giving Dorothy a rosy assessment of Pound’s condition to mollify her fears. Many other anecdotes suggest that those who met Pound did not find his behavior normal. For example, in1941 in Italy, Luigi Villari of the Institute of Overseas Cultural Relations tried to warn Radio Rome about the advisability of letting Pound broadcast: “There is no doubt in my mind that Ezra Pound is insane! He is a pleasant enough madman and he is certainly a friend of Italy, but in the course of two interviews I recently had with him, I heard criticism, circumspection, accusations, etc. that have rather alarmed me.” Carpenter, 585. Pound’s eagerness to share his paranoid conspiracy theories with politicians and other influential figures only served to alienate him from the few individuals whom he managed to see. He specifically traveled to the United States in 1939 to convince officials in Washington that the United States should stay out of the war and managed to arrange a meeting with William Borah, Republican Senator from Idaho; Charles E. Corker, Borah’s office clerk, reports that after the Senator spent about 20 minutes with Pound he made two memorable remarks: “Do you know how that poet makes a living?” and “I think he’s crazy.” The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah, Ed. Sarah C. Holmes. Foreword Daniel Pearlman (Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 2001), 81. And it was not just Pound’s warped political perspective that caused concern among those who encountered him. Romano Bilenchi recalls that during the war Pound told him that “the only thing that might cause us to lose the war in the long run is the scarcity of butter. But I’ve found the answer: sow peanuts in the Alps … One of these days after I’ve talked it over with Pea at Viareggio, I’ll go to Rome to explain the problem to Mussolini.” Pound did discuss this plan with Pea, who concluded: “The fellow is crazy, crazy, completely crazy.” Wendy Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 129. These reports and many others suggest that Pound’s eccentric ideas in the late 1930s and early 1940s alarmed many of his friends and acquaintances. Pound’s singular obsession with select political topics of conversation, his maniacal attempts to convince others of an international Jewish conspiracy, and his confidence in his own wisdom with regard to the tragic events unfolding in Europe all fostered speculation about his mental stability. Once Pound was incarcerated at St. Elizabeths in December 1945, visitors had concerns as well. James Laughlin was disturbed that Pound told him that he hadn’t realized he was being arrested for treason and had thought that the government, recognizing his expertise on Eastern philosophy, was planning to send him to Tokyo as a political ambassador of some kind. Laughlin also was troubled by Pound’s insistence that another patient taste his food to be sure that it was not poisoned by “Berny Baruch [and] the Jews.” Flory, 143-44. Carpenter claims that Pound’s comments to Laughlin were “a bluff” because Pound had already written a letter to Arthur Moore, his attorney in London, to discuss the charge against him. Carpenter, 697. But the contradictory behavior and inconsistent comments Carpenter cites may not have been so calculated. Pound’s rational communication with Moore is privileged by Carpenter as evidence of his sanity, although individuals who recalled Pound’s strange and disturbing pronouncements never believed that his passionate exhortations were a pose. In fact, Pound’s sudden shifts in conversation from rational to irrational topics were seen by some doctors as indicators of his mental deterioration. Williams also was concerned about Pound’s delusional thinking; he wrote in his Autobiography that “Ezra is convinced that after twenty minutes’ instruction in the Georgian dialect, if at the beginning of our difficulties with Russia, Stalin would have given him a five-minute interview, he could have shown the man the error in his thinking, made him see, comprehend and act on it, and all the subsequent confusion and disaster could have been avoided.” Qtd. Flory, 144. Charles Olson, who thought Pound seemed normal when he first visited him, changed his mind after Pound asked him: “Does anyone know Westbrook Pegler?” Olson says that he “must have froze” (sic) when Pound brought up this name; Pound said that Pegler was “the best man they’ve got.” Olson explains: “Pound’s praise of him reveals his utter incomprehension of what is going on, and what has happened to himself. … What a collapse. I wondered then how long more I can hold out my hand to him as a poet and a man.” See Carpenter, 736-37. Pound also insulted Olson directly: “I have as much or more of a quarrel with the Swedes and the Irish as with the Yids so you better watch out.” Carpenter, 737. Torrey only quotes Olson’s initial reaction to Pound: ‘his jumps in conversation are no more than I or any active mind would make,” see 206. Westbrook Pegler was a popular right-wing columnist for the New York World Telegram who had a reputation for harshly criticizing writers and politicians. As Frank Luther Mott explains, “[Pegler] gained a reputation as a devastating crusader, and to be ‘peglerized’ was to be annihilated by exposure.” Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, A History: 1690-1960 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963), 693. Pound was unaware that Pegler had a close but unstable relationship with the FBI and frequently received information from them for his attacks. In 1953, Quentin Reynolds, a friend of the FBI who had published a children’s book approved by Hoover titled The FBI, won a libel suit against Pegler, who had written in a typical smear that when he was a war correspondent, Reynolds was “pro-Communist, immoral, and a coward.” Robins, 135-36. As Bennett Cerf recalls: “Here was Pegler smearing Quentin Reynolds, who had lived through the London Blitz, gone with the expedition to Dieppe, and was shelled by Nazi batteries while on a boat one hundred yards from shore!” Bennett Cerf, At Random (NY: Random House, 1977): 168. During the trial, Reynolds’ lawyer read a passage to Pegler and asked if he thought it sounded like something that a Communist would write. Pegler said, “It certainly is. That’s typical Communist propaganda.” When the lawyer revealed that the paragraph was written by Pegler himself and had appeared in one of his columns, Reynolds’s victory was assured. Pegler fell out of favor briefly with the FBI when he called FBI agents “trigger men” in an article. Hoover wrote him a letter explaining that “They have never been instructed to ‘shoot to kill,’” but apart from this incident Pegler’s point of view was respected by Hoover. His negative commentaries about writers were often clipped and saved in FBI files; the one article about Hemingway’s death in his FBI file was a representative example of Pegler’s style. “It has been my stubborn opinion,” Pegler wrote, “that Ernest Hemingway was actually one of the worst writers in the English language during his time.” Mitgang, 70. The FBI also saved an attack on Carl Sandburg by Pegler in his file. Even more damaging, Archibald MacLeish reports that Malcolm Cowley resigned from the Office of Facts and Figures as a result of articles written by Pegler that accused him of Communist leanings. MacLeish was Librarian of Congress from 1939-1944, director of the wartime Office of Facts of Figures, assistant director of the Office of War Information, and assistant secretary of state from 1944-45. Pegler probably had gotten his information about Cowley indirectly from the FBI through the notorious Congressman Martin Dies, organizer of a special committee to investigate un-American activities in 1938. Mitgang, 91; Robins, 78, 220-25 Pound’s high opinion of Pegler seems to have changed when Pound found himself the subject of Pegler’s column. In 1947 Douglas Larsen interviewed Pound for a sardonic article that appeared in the Washington News: “Ezra Pound, Accused Traitor, makes St. Elizabeth’s [sic] Here a Mecca for the Literati.” Douglas Larsen, “Ezra Pound, Accused Traitor, Makes St. Elizabeth’s [sic] Here a Mecca for the Literati,” Washington News (24 Oct. 1947): 3. Under the subtitle “He’s Libeled!” Larsen quotes Pound: “You know, you reporters are always putting my name in the newspapers. I see Westbrook Pegler mentioned me the other day. And I think I have a libel suit against him because he linked my name with Henry Wallace. Wallace is just a soft-shelled dummy from the Mid West, who always believes the last man he talked to.” Pegler discussed Pound again in one of his columns on September 16, 1955; the article was clipped and saved in Pound’s FBI file. Clearly making an argument that had not been fed to him by Hoover, Pegler claimed that there was a government conspiracy to save Pound’s life and that, as a result of pressure from the Department of Justice, the chief of Italian radio propaganda had been prepared to “say he thought Pound was crazy.” Pegler also declared that Pound’s radio broadcasts were “gibberish.” Hoover wrote on the margin of the clipped article: “What about this?” Hoover received a response on September 20 from an agent: Recordings and transcripts of Pound’s broadcasts were obtained during the course of our investigation, and furnished to the Criminal Division of the Department. These were used as the basis of Pound’s indictment and the department, therefore, apparently did not consider them ‘gibberish.’ … the question of Pound’s sanity was never an issue in our investigation. Robins, 198. The FBI interviewed Dr. Overholser, Pound’s psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths, on February 23, 1956, to check out Pegler’s suggestions, but Overholser apparently did not suggest to them that Pound’s diagnosis had been manipulated and the inquiry was not pursued further. See Torrey, 217. Anyone reading through Pound’s FBI file would immediately notice that the majority of his friends and acquaintances told agents that he was mentally unbalanced; but the FBI never considered these comments important, even when the issue was raised explicitly 10 years after his trial. Similarly, Pound scholars, whether defending or condemning him, have uniformly dismissed the significance of any comments or observations that suggest he might have been insane. In fact, some critics are forced into creative and surprising analyses to avoid the suggestion that Pound was mentally unstable. For example, in The American Ezra Pound Wendy Flory persuasively analyzes Pound’s delusional thinking during World War II and shows that his misunderstanding of every country’s motivation in the conflict begins with the false premise that Britain and the United States were initiating the war. Instead of arguing that this warped thinking is evidence of Pound’s insanity, Flory claims that this “self-delusion and evasion [was] of such an extreme kind and of so prolonged an extent that his sanity could not help but be threatened.” Flory, 103. This, of course, is a counter-intuitive cause and effect relationship; Flory argues that Pound’s sanity was threatened by his self-delusions, not that he was self-deluded because he was insane. But in the end, Flory excuses Pound altogether, arguing that there is a “separation between his basic personality (the ‘real’ Pound) and the psychotic state of mind into which he falls when the subject is his support of Mussolini.” Flory, 166. Some argue that Pound’s thought processes after the war appeared consistent with the ideas he expressed in the late 1930s; therefore, he was not crazy. Before T. S. Eliot saw Pound at St. Elizabeths, he had heard reports from Julien Cornell and Dorothy Pound of his condition, and wrote to Arthur Moore on 3 December 1945 that: There is a curious similarity between Mrs. Pound’s and Mr. Cornell’s account of him in some respects and a complete difference of interpretation. One would suspect that Pound seems to his wife much more normal than he is, and to Mr. Cornell, meeting him for the first time, he seems much more unbalanced than he is. A good deal of what Cornell says about Pound’s way of talking seems to me very much what I would expect of him at any time. Carpenter, 705-06. Or, to put it another way, Pound was not any more irrational than usual. Eliot does suggest that Pound was not quite “normal” if he believes that Dorothy Pound might have thought him “more normal than he is.” As Eliot points out, a person who knew him well may have normalized and thus excused Pound, unable to recognize the symptoms of his mental disintegration. It is not clear, however, why a person who was unfamiliar with Pound’s erratic behavior would offer a similarly inaccurate mental diagnosis. Pound seemed perfectly reasonable some of the time. Critics who admire Pound’s work but dislike his political or economic positions often characterize his irrational, conspiratorial views as mistakes, but not fundamental lapses from sanity. His passion to change the world was certainly appealing, they suggest, even if his fervor was misdirected. In 1939, Pound did travel to the United States to meet with politicians, believing that he could alter governmental policy and prevent war. Was it crazy for Pound to believe he could change minds so quickly, and with such dramatic results? Or was his attempt both admirable and thrilling? Those who had seen or heard about the coexistence of the clear thinking Pound and the raving madman had the feeling that were “two Pounds,” as Flory argues, including the psychiatrists who examined him at St. Elizabeths; some felt that this inconsistency proved that he was faking or playing up his craziness at times to save himself. In fact, as critics have repeatedly pointed out, some of the doctors at St. Elizabeths did not believe Pound was legally insane. Pound’s confidence in his ability to convince world leaders of his ideas was considered by the psychiatrists who testified during his trial to be delusional. It was not just that Pound thought his ideas were correct; he also believed that any world leader would immediately see the wisdom of his propositions. As Dr. Wendell Muncie pointed out during his testimony, Pound felt that he had “the key to the peace of the world through the writings of Confucius, which he translated into Italian and into English, and that if this book had been given proper circulation the Axis would not have been formed, we would be at peace now, and a great deal of trouble could have been avoided in the past … [and] that with himself as leader, a group of intellectuals could have gotten together in different countries, like Japan, for instance, where he is well thought of, to work for world order.” Cornell, 157-59. Following this line of argument, Overholser stated that he thought that Pound suffered from “both delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution, both of which are characteristic of what we call the paranoid condition,” while King explained that, in his opinion, his mental condition would “fall in the category of paranoid states, sometimes called paranoid conditions … part way between so-called paranoid schizophrenia or dementia praecox, paranoid type, and true paranoia.” Cornell, 181. This testimony is rejected by Carpenter, who argues that “This was little more than a display of jargon to impress the jury, and not even very accurate psychiatric jargon (it is not at all clear what King meant to convey by these distinctions, which are not found in psychiatric textbooks).” Carpenter, 748. Carpenter should have been able to find these terms, which were widely used in the United States in the 1940s. After Zelda Fitzgerald was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized, she wrote to Scott that if she were released, “We will have all the children we can, and call them Dementia Praecox Fitzgerald – Dear, how gruesome!” Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 218. And a doctor in Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) observes that “We’ve noticed that now that we no longer speak of dementia praecox, we get fewer dementia praecox patients.” Mary McCarthy, The Group (New York: Signet Books, 1963), 296. Of course, The Group takes place in the 1930s; McCarthy was mistaken about how early the term fell out of use. In fact, a useful series on “Insanity” was published in Scientific American in 1941; the first article was titled “Just What is Insanity?: Essentially it is Simply a Lack of Proper Adjustment to Environment and Society”; the next installment was “Paranoia; Dementia Praecox, or Schizophrenia; Paresis; Senile Dementia; Toxic Insanity.” L. J. Pankow, “Just What is Insanity? Essentially it is Simply a Lack of Proper Adjustment to Environment and Society,” Scientific American (December 1941): 330-32; L.J. Pankow, “Insanity: Paranoia; Dementia Praecox, or Schizophrenia; Paresis; Senile Dementia; Toxic Insanity,” Scientific American (January 1942): 9-11. According to Scientific American, in childhood the paranoid individual was “said to have been queer, taciturn, morose, avoiding other children and associating with older persons.” In the second stage, he or she suffers from “delusions of persecution and corresponding hallucinations.” Finally, in the last stage, “the subject [who] has suspected that people were cold and aloof to him … knows it. … [He may believe that] people are poisoning his food, are trying to gas him or to injure him with electricity.” The description of a person who suffers from Dementia Praecox, or schizophrenia, exhibits other symptoms; he or she may be “unusually bright” and has “two or more trains of thought traveling together simultaneously. … A question may bring a totally unrelated answer, a command may bring an opposite action, or no action at all. All this is due to his twin or double train of thought. This also accounts for the incoherence of speech found so regularly in these cases, and to the emotional deterioration. … It is from this class that hoboes, prostitutes, cranks, eccentrics, and criminals develop.” Pankow, 9. Some of Pound’s behavior certainly does correspond with aspects of these descriptions. In addition to symptoms already mentioned such as Pound’s belief that he was being poisoned, Pound’s difficulty fitting in with his peers in childhood and especially while in college, where he was the victim of numerous practical jokes, failed to join a fraternity, and was known as a social outcast, has been detailed with care by E. Fuller Torrey. See chapter 2 of The Roots of Treason, 18-41. If Scientific American’s descriptions of paranoia and schizophrenia were accepted definitions at this historical moment, it is not surprising that a psychiatrist might categorize Pound’s behavior as paranoid and delusional. Furthermore, Wendy Flory points out that his mental state also corresponds with current definitions of paranoid psychosis, or “Delusional Disorder,” “Grandoise Type” and “Persecutory Type.” See Wendy Flory, “Pound and antisemitism,” The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 287. Flory’s representation of Pound’s mental condition in this article corresponds more closely to my conclusions than her earlier study, The American Ezra Pound. Here, she argues that “his medical records, letters, and the testimony of many visitors to St. Elizabeths show clear evidence of psychosis” (287). Scientific American defined insanity as “simply a lack of proper adjustment to environment and society,” and it is easy show that Pound was ill adjusted to his surroundings, as he maintained a deluded idea that Jewish bankers, with the help of Roosevelt and Churchill, successfully orchestrated World War II. But Pound was certainly not the only person in the 1940s who believed this conspiracy theory. During the trial, Dr. Muncie was asked, “Do you think [Pound’s] delusion [is] any different than some of these other European leaders had?” Muncie replied: “I haven’t had a chance to examine them.” He was asked again: “But what I am getting at is whether you think it might be similar?” Muncie answered: “It might be, but I have never examined them.” Cornell, 168. This brief exchange was a serious moment in the trial. If Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini exhibited thinking or behavior similar to Pound’s, couldn’t they all have avoided punishment by using an insanity defense (if they had all survived the war, of course)? In this especially patriotic moment, to connect Pound with such figures was in itself damaging to him; but to insinuate that his plea of insanity was some kind of trick that could be used by any brutal dictator would have made his case offensive to Americans who were badly shaken by the destruction and violence perpetrated during the war. In fact, Nancy Cunard wrote a furious letter to Pound soon after he was confined to St. Elizabeths in which she said that if he was crazy, “Goering, Goebbels, Hitler, Streicher, the whole gang of criminals were just ‘merely’ insane. … Fascism is not insanity, unless evil itself, all evil, be insanity.” Torrey, 221. The idea that Hitler might be insane, of course, was not new. Margaret Mead explicitly contrasted the values of German Nazism with American ideals in order to highlight the human deficiency in Germany’s ideological views. Susan Hegeman observes that, according to Mead, “German culture, the newly anointed other to Western ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ and so on, was not comparable to the west; like its leader, it was insane.” Susan Hegeman, Patterns of Culture: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999): 164. See Margaret Mean, “The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values,” Science, Philosophy, and Religion: Second Symposium (1942): 57-58. But as the horrors of World War II became known, any willingness to forgive or excuse the architects of the war evaporated. Any American citizen who had supported the views of Hitler or Mussolini deserved punishment; there was no defense. The day before Pound’s trial, some of the “young doctors” on staff at St. Elizabeths told Overholser that they did not agree with the diagnosis that Pound was mentally unfit to stand trial. Cornell reports that “[t]hey thought Pound was merely eccentric, and wanted to see him tried and convicted. Overholser felt they were in error, perhaps their judgment was distorted by patriotism.” Cornell, 43. I have come across no critic that has taken Overholser’s concerns about his colleagues’ possible bias seriously. But, familiar as we are with the ways patriotic attitudes can warp the judgment of some Americans, it may be useful to rethink the pervasive idea that the only special treatment Pound experienced during his arrest, examination, and trial was favorable. The paranoia that Pound and others suffered in the 1940s was disturbing to psychiatrists and psychologists who struggled to explain the increase in the number of individuals suffering from the disorder. In 1937, Ernst Harms argued in an article titled “Paranoid Tendencies in Social Behavior” in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology that certain factors in a person’s environment may lead to a paranoid condition in individuals who “are already abnormal in their neurobiological structure”; according to Harms, there are three aspects of “modern social life” that significantly contribute to a paranoid person’s understanding of the world. Ernst Harms, “Paranoid Tendencies in Social Behavior,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 32 (Oct. 1937): 431-38. First, modern society is dominated by secret bureaucratic organizations; second, our social structures accept and encourage racial or ‘social’ prejudice; and third, our society is filled with private groups who adhere to specific symbolic structures unknown to individuals outside of these groups. Harms, 434-34. These are “all disorientating and paranoiac factors.” Harms adds: “The seriousness of this problem must not pass without emphasis.” Harms, 437. The paranoid, not to mention racist, impulses of many Americans in this period were certainly encouraged by one powerful, secret bureaucratic organization in the United States; the ubiquitous FBI made it clear to citizens that they might be watched at any time. The massive publicity campaign that Hoover orchestrated consistently emphasized his power and omnipotence. In addition to the numerous “G-Men” movies, such as “G-Men” (1935), “Border G-Men” (1938), “Dick Tracy’s G-Men” (1939), “Junior G-Men” (1940), the documentary-style short “You Can’t Get Away with It” (1936), comic strips like “Dick Tracy,” “Secret Agent X-9” and “War on Crime,” and radio shows like “The FBI in Peace and War,” numerous articles appeared, some by Hoover himself, such as a 1937 article in The Rotarian titled: “Fingerprint Everybody? Yes – Says John Edgar Hoover.” J. Edgar Hoover, “Fingerprint Everybody? Yes – Says John Edgar Hoover,” The Rotarian (January 1937): 16-17, 64, 66. Hoover appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice, on August 5, 1935 and August 8, 1949. The New Yorker published a glowing three-part profile on Hoover in 1937 that explained that any individual who toured the FBI headquarters could be fingerprinted and receive a souvenir copy of his or her own prints, suitable for framing – for free! As a guide explains to tourists, it is useful to have your fingerprints on file in case you suffer from amnesia, are mutilated in an accident so severely that you are unrecognizable, or need to prove your identity in a dispute over a relative’s will. Jack Alexander, “Profiles: the Director – I,” New Yorker (September 25, 1937): 20-25; “Profiles: The Director – II,” New Yorker (October 2, 1937): 21-26; “Profiles: The Director – III,” New Yorker (October 9, 1937): 22-27. The 1949 Time magazine story also describes the FBI tour, but there is at least a suggestion that Hoover’s surveillance of everyday American citizens was disturbing to some people. “But what no tourist will see is the bureau’s investigative file covering thousands of ordinary U.S. citizens. … It was the existence of those files – important strands in the nation’s gigantic net to catch a few disloyal citizens – which gave even the most ardent admirer of the FBI a slightly uneasy feeling. It was not that very many people objected to flushing out Communists and potential saboteurs. But it was a suspicion that any such collection was bound to damn the innocent as well as the guilty.” “Boards & Bureaus: The Watchful Eye,” Time (8 August 1949): 12. The article concludes that since the trustworthy Hoover runs the organization, there is no danger: “Certainly, in other hands, the FBI was a potential danger to every free citizen. It had not proved to be so in the hands of John Edgar Hoover.” Time, 13. When the New Yorker asked Hoover about allegations that FBI agents followed reporters who researched stories about the FBI, Hoover claimed he “has never had any writer shadowed. When the subject is brought up, he makes a point of recalling that the morbid fear that one is being followed is a classic instance of pathological behavior.” “The Director – II,” 23. Living in this “panoptic” world that Foucault has described surely played a major part in exacerbating the fears of the unstable. But do we want to concede that Pound was “crazy,” “a madman,” a “crackpot,” “mentally unbalanced,” or “completely insane” (to repeat the words of those interviewed by the FBI in the 1940s)? If we classify Pound as mentally unstable, can we maintain that his poetry is still significant, even brilliant? Louis Sass points out that: The truly insane, it is nearly always assumed, are those who have failed to attain, or else have lapsed or retreated from, the higher levels of mental life. … Another possibility does suggest itself, however: …What if madness, in at least some of its forms, were to derive from a heightening rather than a dimming of conscious awareness, and an alienation not from reason but from the emotions, instincts, and the body? Sass, 4. Indeed, Pound’s poetry illuminates, rather than obscures, a culture of corruption, avarice, deceit and secrecy. Certainly Pound’s worldview was not rational; but it is also true that this isolated, distorted man was watched, arrested, nearly executed, and locked up for almost 13 years. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault suggests: Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world’s time, masters it, and leads it; … through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes culpable (for the first time in the Western world) in relation to the world of art. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), 288. Pound’s inability to adjust to his environment and society allowed him to see that organizations might conspire together against the better interests of citizens as a whole; to believe that most people did not listen to warning signals around them; to suspect the motives of patriots; and to see that it was difficult to know who to trust. As early as 1920 Pound began to explore in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly the dangers of dishonest governments whose lies devastate the lives of everyday citizens. He attempted to expose an economic conspiracy that he believed brought about modern war, lamenting soldiers who went to war believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. (IV ll. 74-79) This theme is further elaborated throughout the Cantos, as in, for example, Pound’s “Hell Cantos,” which are inhabited by corrupt politicians who enabled war profiteering. As a correction to this amoral, insidious economic norm in the world around him, Pound instead looked to the Confucian ideal of order that begins with a sincere heart and is directly opposed to traits that lead to corruption and greed, such as the desire for fame and power. The important balance in Confucian thought that Pound saw as essential for the maintenance of justice is the direct result of laws, not the whims of corrupt individuals. Pound also promoted John Adams as a principled role model and alternative to the destructive politicians he distrusted. In the “Adams Cantos” Pound teaches readers that Adams declared, even as he defended an unpopular position, that “bad law is the worst sort of tyranny” (62 / 343), that he honestly negotiated “with bankers in Amsterdam/ … a treaty of commerce, by no arts or disguises/ no flatteries, no corruptions” (62 / 346) and that Adams was shocked by “men of no character” who for “a guinea a day write pro or con anything” (62 / 347). Although Pound is not directly concerned with the kind of surveillance conducted by Hoover’s FBI in his poetry, the ideals of Confucius and Adams certainly clash with the invasive, illegal, and destructive policies that Hoover instituted while in power. Furthermore, Pound repeatedly demonstrates his fervent belief in the central importance of art and literature for the health of any nation in the Cantos by celebrating in the “Malatesta Cantos” Sigismundo Maltesta (1417-1468), Lord of Rimini, whose financial support of artists including Piero della Francesca is directly at odds with Hoover’s aggressive attempt to intimidate artists in the modernist period. Hoover’s paranoid cynicism about the corruptibility of human nature contributed to his power; Pound’s Confucian belief in the inherent good nature of the human spirit instead led him to trust the most unlikely leaders, such as Mussolini, and fail to see corruption when it mattered most. His paranoia was focused on a select few who were irrationally blamed for all of the world’s problems, whereas Hoover, of course, trusted no one. The secret organization that controlled the United States was unlike that which Pound imagined and it had different aims. But he was right that a powerful organization was threatened by him; Hoover’s FBI had no patience for his political meddling, and exercised its will to silence his dissident views. In recent years, scientists have uncovered evidence that schizophrenia is linked to a disturbance in dopamine levels in the brain and deficiencies in the neurotransmitter glutamate. Instead of suggesting that the label “mentally ill” must be a negative and arbitrary label attached to the deviant, it is important to see that the real and consequential symptoms of the disease should not be minimized or ignored. In controversial works like The Myth of Mental Illness, Ideology and Insanity; The Manufacture of Madness (1961) and Schizophrenia: The Scared Symbol of Psychiatry (1976) Thomas Szasz has argued that “the phenomenon psychiatrists call ‘schizophrenia’ is not a demonstrable medical disease but the name of certain kinds of social deviance” (Schizophrenia, 67). Furthermore, Ronald Laing explained in 1964 that “I do not myself believe that there is any such ‘condition’ as ‘schizophrenia.’ Yet the label is a social fact. Indeed, this label as a social fact is a political event” (quoted in Torrey and Miller, The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001) p. 305. The critical discussion about Pound’s instability opens up when we acknowledge that certain individuals may be predisposed to react in paranoid and irrational ways. It is certainly true that, as Ronald Laing has suggested, to classify Ezra Pound as insane is a political act, but the decision by Pound critics not to discuss the possibility that Pound was mentally unstable is also a political decision. R. W. Flint argued in a letter to Commentary in 1951 that “[Pound’s] anti-Semitism seems to be a link with outright madness and paranoia and is hence a powerful object-lesson and witness against itself.” R. W. Flint, “Pound, Poetry and Politics,” Commentary (July 1951): 86. Pound would not be released from responsibility for his racist and Fascistic views if we consider the possibility that he was mentally unbalanced and that the culture of the 1930s and 40s contributed to Pound’s delusions. Instead, Pound’s views can be examined and understood as symptomatic of his historical moment: a paranoid mind living in a paranoid age. Hoover’s bureau exacerbated the anxieties of citizens, creating a culture of secrecy, fear, and suspicion. Pound’s FBI file reminds us of this terrifying, oppressive environment, even if Pound’s own misdirected paranoia prevented him from recognizing the actual threat to his freedom. 27