We stayed in the house where Ezra Pound was born. It was a bit of a surprise. Nobody had told us anything about it. We found the address they sent us to and drove around back through the alley to carry our stuff in so it was a while before Tracy opened the front door and stepped out to look at the front yard. She was coming back in when she stopped and said “you should take a look at this”. And there it was, a brass plaque:
birthplace
Of
Ezra Pound
the poet
October 30, 1885
“I have beaten out my exile”
The house is a display space and while we were there it was empty in front except for unused display podiums. In the back there was period furniture and a bookshelf filled with biographies and Pound criticism with a bronze on top that I thought of as a death mask. Tracy was almost certainly right, though, Ezra was old when he died – he wouldn’t have looked that good. It was a face casting but of a younger Pound, still alive, maybe before he went off the deep end.
He was one of those slavishly Eurocentric types of turn of the century provincial American culture. Someone asked me why he was thought of as an American poet (not an American himself) and I had to agree. Pound was trying not to be. Where he went wrong was he made a little money, got some famous friends and decided with no justification that he could be an economist. Even then, you couldn’t be taken seriously if you unthinkingly held several mutually exclusive ideas within one or two short paragraphs. Might work for a poet but economists were trying to be consistent with their ideas. So the more serious types stopped returning his letters and Ezra fell in with the crackpots and conspiracy mongers.
Still, his racism wasn’t totally out of band for the time. We need to acknowledge that. Benito Mussolini was a columnist for the Hearst syndicate until 1936 and he ended the relationship. He was probably busy invading Abyssinia. Pound was living in Rapallo, a nice seaside place on the northwest coast of Italy. He liked Benito. Benito was down on the gays and busied himself shipping them off to an isolated group of islands in the Adriatic. It wasn’t until he signed up with Hitler that Mussolini became seriously dangerous for Jewish people. Ezra was already there.
In a beautiful example of the critical analysis he brought to economics, he declared,
“When speaking of the Protocols alleged to be of the Elders of Zion, one is frequently met with the reply: ‘Oh, but they are a forgery.’
Certainly they are a forgery, and that is the one proof we have of their authenticity. The Jews have worked with forged documents for the past twenty four hundred years…”
When the United States went to war with Italy, Ezra put on his black shirt and sat at his shortwave and broadcast to the American soldiers words that were meant to weaken their resolve, to turn them to the Axis cause.
After the war he said “I consider genocide impractical and admit, in theory, that every man should be judged after his own merits. But…”
It’s odd staying in a museum. Like camping in a wilderness but of intangible history embodied in objects or like artifacts of a dream. I started feeling the tremors of the war around me. I don’t worry about ghosts and wasn’t thinking that maybe I’d see old Ezra come down the banister. He was only three or four when they moved to Pennsylvania so it would be a really small ghost anyway. But he was a big fucker and bad and deeply involved in the war and I could feel that.
I thought about setting up a tent in the front room and camping like we were in Yellowstone but then we’d have to make a fire. Smoke damage, burn marks on the floor. I’m really not into tagging anything so huge.