The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics and Madness of Ezra Pound – review

The psychodrama surrounding one of America’s greatest 20th century poets during, and immediately after, the second world war is so bizarre, it’s astonishing that this chapter in the life of the modernist, madman, fascist and traitor AKA Ezra Pound has remained largely neglected for so long.

In The Bughouse, Daniel Swift has reconnoitred a unique but hardly obscure literary target. The deranged figure of Pound behind bars has been hiding in plain sight for decades. Still, it is Swift’s considerable achievement sympathetically to examine an extraordinary, often troubling, tale in an idiosyncratic biographical analysis that marries lit crit and memoir in a sometimes awkward fusion.

Swift describes Pound as “the most difficult man of the 20th century”. Others called him “the Trotsky of literature”. He was certainly a rag-bag of contradictions: a racist who believed in African myth and Chinese philosophy, and an antisemite whose 800-page Cantos is an unfinished masterpiece of renowned beauty and complexity. “As much as Freud or Einstein,” writes Swift, he “invented the modern age. He edited The Waste Land.” He also played tennis “like an inebriated kangaroo”, revered the US constitution, but spent the second world war broadcasting anti-American propaganda from Mussolini’s Italy.

Pound on fascist radio was a disaster waiting to happen. Ever since 1913, when he’d read poetry into a phonoscope (an obsolete recording device), he was fascinated by a medium whose disembodied polyphony, he claimed, echoed his own techniques. “I anticipated the damn thing in the first third of the Cantos,” he wrote. In December 1941, just before Pearl Harbor tipped America into war, Pound began a series of broadcasts from Rome, partly about poetry but, more fatally, also about the folly of fighting against the Axis powers. By the time he was indicted for treason, which carried the death penalty, he had broadcast more than 200 times.

Pound’s radio prose was like the man: chaotic, confusing, sometimes comic, but always – says Swift – “a little sad” with references to “kikes”, “yids”, and Tennyson, and rants against “chief war pimp, Frankie Finkelstein Roosevelt”, who had “chucked away our national, cultural heritage”. Far away in Maryland, federal eavesdroppers wrote it all down.

Like PG Wodehouse who, in utterly different circumstances, fell foul of Nazi radio, Ezra Pound turned himself over to US forces who, in May 1945, slammed him into a brutal punishment camp with 3,500 rapists, murderers and deserters. His “gorilla cage” was 6ft by 6ft of steel bars with no shelter from the sun or rain. By the middle of June, Pound had suffered a nervous collapse. But then, like Oscar Wilde in Reading jail, he began to write himself into a state of grace. In November 1945, he was flown back to Washington DC to face trial. On landing, he asked: “Does anyone have the faintest idea of what I actually said in Rome?”

Pound was sent to St Elizabeths, a government hospital for the insane where, after examination, he was found to be “mentally unfit for trial”. He would be kept in “S Liz” for nearly 13 years, sequestered in the place he called “the bughouse”.

St Elizabeths, writes Swift, became “the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum”. Pound became a destination for cultural pilgrims, a mad poet visited by other poets: TS Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, ageing modernists and newer voices such as Frederick Seidel, some of whom were almost as “crazy” as Pound. The resident of St Elizabeths became a kind of creative godfather to several, more or less unstable, US writers of the 1950s, from Anne Sexton and John Berryman to Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell.

But how mad was he, who had always been a holy fool? Was he faking dementia to avoid the death penalty? To some visiting psychiatrists, the man who, in 1945, called Hitler “a martyr”, mourned “poor Benito” and declared Stalin “the best brain in the business” appeared to be simply a genius. Hadn’t Shakespeare, no less, found lunatics, lovers and poets to be “of imagination all compact”?

Swift, echoing this, says that Pound “encapsulates the central questions about art, politics and poetry, about the connection between experimental art and extreme political sentiment”. Struggling for answers, he undertakes a prolonged analysis of the meetings between patient 58,102 (Pound’s case-file number) and six major poets, led by Eliot. This makes for an enthralling narrative, but it does complicate an already cubist portrait of an impossible character. We might be better informed, but we are, in truth, not much the wiser about the enigma of “Uncle Ez”.

What’s not in doubt is Pound’s tragedy, or the cruelty meted out to him: the years spent among the criminally insane, the isolation and the terrible distress. At night, Pound would stop his ears with paper to block the mad cries of his fellows. “I want quiet,” he begged one doctor. “You must decide whether I am to be cured or punished.”

While the authorities struggled with this conundrum, some poets appealed to President Truman for clemency, while Pound himself withdrew into a distracted seclusion in which he could write and hold court. By 1952, we find him on the hospital tennis court, reminiscing with Eliot about Rupert Brooke. In 1953, Lowell reports him “much fatter and healthier”. Within another year, the publication of new work raised old questions about a poet who could adapt Confucian odes, but was not fit to stand trial.

Simultaneously, with the passage of time, he was morphing from traitor to throwback. In 1951, Salinger published Catcher in the Rye; Stalin died in 1953; in 1955, Ginsberg’s Howl signalled a new generation. While the 50s unspooled, Pound reached a kind of premature posterity in St Elizabeths.

Many young poets who came to “the bughouse” to practise “Ezrology”, returned to the world in a state of ecstatic reinvention. Some espoused Pound’s mad politics. Inevitably, a few young women fell in love with him. Conspiracy theorists debated his fate. Was he a traitor protected by the hospital from the punishment he deserved; or a truth-teller tormented for his candour ?

Swift struggles with this afterlife, unable to decide if this is “a heroic drama about poets rescuing a poet” or “a case study in psychiatry”. Pound seems to have understood himself better than the experts. “Officially, I am as crazy as a coot,” he told his daughter on his release in 1958, “but not a peril to society or myself.” He died in 1972, aged 87.