Psychiatrists, Paranoia, and the Mind of Ezra Pound

Andrew J. Kappel

Literature and Medicine, Volume 4, 1985, pp. 70-85 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2011.0023

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/376514/summary

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^Psychiatrists, Paranoia,
and the Mind of Ezra
Pound
Andrew J. Kappel

Ezra Pound is probably the only major modern poet whose work
has not been subjected to psychoanalytic interpretation. Indeed, only
recently have critics begun to identify the most obvious autobiograph-
ical dimensions of his work.1 This critical tendency to consider the
poetry aside from the poet is due less to any fastidiousness about the
poet's right to privacy than to the sense that his work is peculiarly
resistant to biographical and psychoanalytical approaches. Pound
himself put up the resistance, and did so deliberately. By about 1920
he had decided sharply against a self-expressive poetic for his work.
The decision was made between 1915 and 1920 while he was engaged
in his vexed effort to begin The Cantos. It took him so long to get started
because he had first conceived of the epic self-expressively, as an
explicit record of his struggles. In provisional drafts of the earliest
cantos he addressed his readers directly and discussed the difficulties
that the epic project, the modern world, the cluttered past, and many
lesser things posed for him. Ronald Bush's authoritative study The
Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos chronicles through revised drafts of early
cantos the progressive objectifying of the epic task and manner.2 Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920), the sequence of poems with which Pound
ended his London period, amounts to a formal announcement of the
decision to abandon subjective, self-expressive interests, and to replace
them with objective interests in the world outside the poet. The self-
involved aesthete Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a connoisseur of "selected
perceptions" who reveled in the "glow of porcelain" and "made no
immediate application / Of this to relation of the state / To the individ-
ual," but was content merely to feel that "the month was more tem-
perate / Because this beauty had been," is abandoned amid flamingoes
Andrew J. Kappel 71

on the deserted Pacific isle of his own "consciousness disjunct," while

Pound, freed of this aspect of himself, sets off toward the world.3
When the finalized versions of the early cantos appeared in book form
in 1925, the chatty, ever-present poet, so full of himself in the first
drafts, was no longer with us. He had disappeared behind his subjects,
which were newly presented for their own sakes, not as the occasions
of the poet's experiences.
With the exception of the anomalous Pisan Cantos (1948), from
1925 forward Pound largely excluded himself from his poem and
instead focused its attention directly upon a continuous series of for-
mal "subjects"—Renaissance condottieri, Byzantine numismatics, John
Adams's dealings with Talleyrand, Scotus Erigena's poetic allusions
to Greek literature, and so on—few of which could easily be made to
serve as episodes in a poet's psychobiography. He wanted his readers
to focus their attention directly upon the subjects about which he
wrote. The Thames bankers' collective effort to undermine French
currency during the later Napoleonic era, as far as he was concerned,
was a matter of far greater import than the question of whether or not
he himself suffered from dementia praecox, as his defensive interest
in the beleaguered, egomaniacal French emperor might suggest to
someone interested in his psychobiography. The straightforward interest
that critics have taken in Pound's "subjects" and their lack of attention
to any psychoanalytic interpretation of those subjects would have
pleased Pound as being consistent with his belief that his subjects
were far more important than he was.
The scrupulous reticence of his critics, however profitable it has
been to an understanding of Pound's "subjects," has otherwise had
unfortunate consequences. It has allowed his reputation as a madman
to flourish. Not to face doubts of Pound's sanity has confirmed sus-
picions of his insanity. In that way the reticence has jeopardized its
own ambitions, for the unmonitored idea of Pound's insanity under-
mines any confidence we might have in his ability to do his precious
"subjects" justice. Thus, it is not the case that a consideration of the
matter of his insanity can only harm his reputation. Just the opposite
is true. And it is surprising that the matter has not been taken up
already, for the opportunity has been beckoning critics for nearly thirty
years. Perhaps the most striking omission in Pound studies is any
serious consideration of the elaborate psychological diagnosis of the
poet presented in 1945 by the U.S. government doctors who had been
asked to examine Pound as part of the effort to ascertain whether or
not he was fit to stand trial for treason.4 Their testimony provides the
72 THE MIND OF EZRA POUND

basis of a much-needed assessment of his mental state and its mani-

festation in his work.
The testimony has recently received some attention, though not
from a literary critic. E. Fuller Torrey, a psychiatrist and popular writer
on psychiatric topics, published in the November 1981 issue of Psy-
chology Today an essay entitled "The Protection of Ezra Pound," which
he expanded to a book, the fullest study to date of Pound and his
psychiatrists.5 Unfortunately, both essay and book leave much to be
desired. Despite Torrey's medical qualifications and his familiarity
with files on Pound not previously accessible to the public, his analysis
offers no new insights into the case. It merely repeats, in fact, the
partial judgments of Pound's journalistic detractors of the late forties
and the fifties.6 As Torrey's title suggests, he believes that Pound's
doctors deliberately perjured themselves when they testified to the
poet's insanity—all in order to prevent him from standing up to trea-
son charges which, Torrey assumes, would most certainly have been
proven true. He reacts to this disregard of conventional professional
ethics and the subsequent subversion of conventional procedures of
justice with the avidity of a muckraker so committed to the enterprise
of exposing unethical behavior for public condemnation that he fails
to consider seriously the possibility that the diagnosis supposedly
fabricated to "protect" Pound might have been medically valid. In
fact, he has little real interest in Pound at all. The poet's case concerns
him only insofar as it is the occasion of psychiatric malpractice. The
abruptness of his judgments and the inadequacy of his analysis are
evident at every point, but they become almost ludicrous when he
pauses, very briefly, to consider some of Pound's psychiatric symp-
toms.

Since these symptoms had to be dismissed as quickly as possible,

Torrey asserts immediately that Pound faked them, and not even very
well. "[H]is efforts," Torrey writes, "were so primitive as to be almost
ludicrous." He offers the following instance. Pound complained in
1945 that he "experienced a queer sensation in the head as though the
upper third of the brain were missing and a fluid level existed at the
top of what remained." According to Torrey, "[t]his exotic symptom"
corresponds to no known psychiatric or neurological condition and
was the "standard Pound offering" to convince his doctors he was
mad. Torrey does not even credit Pound with having invented the
fake symptom himself, but suggests that he stole the idea from T. S.
Eliot. He ignores the physical evidence of the complaint—Pound's
inability to hold his head upright, a problem commemorated in numer-
Andrew J. Kappel 73

ous photographs and paintings of the poet—and concocts instead a

poetical origin. The otherwise unheard-of condition, Torrey notes, "is
most reminiscent of lines from T. S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men,' a poem
well known to Pound." He quotes what he feels are the relevant lines,
the famous ones about the hollow men's headpieces full of straw.7
Such naivete would almost be amusing, were it not part of a serious
defamation of character. There is something blithely impertinent about
Torrey's convenient assumption that mental states described by poets
but unlabeled by psychiatrists do not exist; his analysis here demon-
strates something like that muddleheadedness to which Pound admit-
ted and of which Torrey denied the existence.
Pound's own doctors were much more open-minded and were
willing to entertain the poet's own efforts to explain his condition. In
fact, their testimony in court was in part an attempt to translate the
poet's self-diagnosis into psychiatric and lay terms that would be
comprehensible and convincing to a judge and jury. They recognized
his symptoms immediately as very like those of someone suffering
from an advanced and complex paranoia, and presented them as such.
The idea of Pound's paranoia is by no means unfamiliar, but it is
usually conceived of narrowly—as his sense of modern history being
a secret conspiracy of financiers and arms merchants (a view that we
now know cannot be dismissed as pure paranoid fantasy). His doctors,
who knew little if anything of his interpretations of history, conceived
of his paranoia broadly as a characteristic habit of mind. They did not
know the specific details of the paranoid beliefs, but they recognized
the classic paranoid behaviors.
The foremost of these, noted by all the doctors who examined
him, was his tendency to systematize. Dr. Wendell Muncie, for instance,
testified to the presence of "a system of reasoning which is embedded
in his mentality so that it is impossible for him to think outside of that
system."8 The doctors recognized in this systematizing the solipsistic
mental activity of the paranoid, or what Thomas Pynchon, the cen-
tury's foremost writer about paranoia, has beautifully labeled "the
orbiting ecstasy"9 of the paranoid mind. When interviewing Pound,
doctors noticed that his fragmentary and disorderly conversations
returned again and again to the same fairly small set of facts and ideas.
His mind revolved and revolved around them: currency ratios, ideo-
grammic phrases from the Confucian Analects, professions of belief in
the greatness of the American Constitution—but the actual contents
of his mind were of less interest to his doctors than was the nature of
his mind's operations upon its contents, whatever they might be. The
74 THE MIND OF EZRA POUND

value of the psychiatric diagnosis of paranoia lies in its identification

of solipsistic systemization as the characteristic operation of Pound's
mind.
Nowhere is this systematization more in evidence than in the
cantos he was writing during these years—the Pisan (1948), Rock-Drill
(1955), and Thrones (1959) groups, which were planned as an extended
culmination of the poem that would bring the diverse materials of the
earlier sections into some sort of order. He had announced defensively
at the faltering start of the epic project that the poem would have an
order, though it would not be immediately apparent or architectonic
in nature—but cumulative and gradually emergent. The Pisan Cantos
begin his effort to make good on that promise. They do not get very
far. Within them the poetic consciousness brings into its ken a stag-
gering multiplicity of detail and idea—culled from preceding cantos,
from his earlier short poetry, from his personal past, from the imme-
diate present of the Pisan camp. Given the trying circumstances under
which the poems were composed, a surprisingly large portion of the
material is held together conceptually. But because the connections
are merely suggested by the means of juxtaposition of items, and so
are not explicitly elaborated, they seem rushed and tentative rather
than carefully considered and finalized. The Pisan Cantos give us not
the promised order but a record of the first persistent search for it,
which turns out to be the record of a mind feverishly unstill, burdened
with more than it can handle. Any moments of rest are only conces-
sions to exhaustion, not triumphs of the rage to order. "Down, Deny-
down" he wrote at the end of one of the cantos, "Oh let an old man
rest."10
This failure to establish order, a failure the record of which is an
extraordinary poetic success, is due in part to circumstances beyond
Pound's control. He had not planned to compose his paradiso in a
prisoner-of-war camp. Rock-Drill and Thrones continue the culminating
search for order more according to plan: they avail themselves of the
philological, legalistic, and philosophical works Pound wanted to use
in establishing his principles of order," works obviously not available
at Pisa but which could easily be secured at St. Elizabeths, from friends
or off the shelves of the nearby Library of Congress. Within the frame-
work established by these works, the connectives ordering previously
disparate elements are drawn in with greater authority and assurance.
What was swirling nearly adrift in the Pisan Cantos is tightening and
solidifying in later sections. But despite the progress, the promised
order is not achieved. The poem ends before the pattern emerges. We
Andrew J. Kappe! 75

may glimpse its contours, sense the materials approaching final align-
ment, but that is all. The poetic action of Pound's paradiso, even when
closest to its goal, is only a refined version of the conversational
behavior witnessed by the psychiatrists who listened to Pound talk in
circles, sometimes tightening, sometimes not, in 1945.
At the end of the first Pisan canto, the first sustained attempt in
the poem to bring things to some sort of order, Pound provided a
definitive image of his mind's insistent effort to urge elements into
unity. Near the end of the canto, set before and in contrast to the
definitive concluding image, there appears an image of the mind
moving "[sjerenely in the crystal jet" of the waterspout of history;
Pound envisions in his mind "as the bright ball that the fountain
tosses" (p. 449, Canto 74). But at the very end of the canto, he forsakes
this exhilarating conception of the mind's relationship with its mate-
rials, replacing it with an image that lessens the sense of the mind's
sprightliness and helplessness. He concludes with the famous ques-
tion: "Hast Ou seen the rose in the steel dust / (or swansdown ever?)
/ so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron" (p. 449,
Canto 74). He prefers to conceive of the mind as a magnetic force that
orders the items that come into its ken. It is not merely acted upon,
not merely along for the ride, but actively steering, however gently.
The image is an idealized conception of Pound's paranoid mind
engaged in its systematizing operations. In practice that mind is rarely
as patient and light-handed as the image suggests; more often it is
anxious and vehement. This persistent unease of the poetic conscious-
ness of The Cantos is the result of its awareness that the task it had set
itself was by nature an impossible one. The demand, easy enough to
formulate at the start, that the order of the poem be an emergent one,
eventually proved too great. By categorically refusing to accept as
valid, as adequate to the modern world, previous ages' explanations
of the Order of Things, Pound had posed for himself, he eventually
realized, some formidable epistemological problems. He came to com-
plain again and again that unlike Dante he did not have an "Aquinas-
map" to help him chart his way through experience. He entertained
as possible partial explanations a multitude of philosophies, tenta-
tively advancing at the end Confucius's system of ethics as the best of
the lot, but, unlike Dante, he had to work all along without settled
definitions of good, evil, human nature, time, history—all those things
well defined for Dante by Aquinas. For Pound, the definitions were
to emerge at the end, so that when he was done he would have written
not only a modern Commedia but a modern Summa as well. His com-
76 THE MIND OF EZRA POUND

plaints about the difficulty of his task are understandable.

Another impossible demand that he put upon himself, which
accounts for the anxiousness and vehemence of the mind at work in
The Cantos, was the requirement that the achieved order be compre-
hensive. The history that was to be included in his "poem including
history" was the history of the world, a complete account of what has
happened on the planet, with particular emphasis on what has hap-
pened since Dante. The global scope and post-medieval emphasis are
apparent in the broad outlines of the poetic materials. Three "events"
dominate the story the poem tells: the Italian Renaissance, the found-
ing of the United States, and Confucianism. Pound realized that until
his day such a comprehensive, planetary view of things was not
possible. People of his generation were the first to have a knowledge
of the earth in all its parts, a sense, one might call it, of the total
planetary picture. Pound's Americanism further qualified him for the
job of giving expression to this unprecedented global sense. In Pound's
youth, being American constituted a paradoxically welcome condition
of cultural impoverishment that afforded him an unburdened win-
dow-shopper's pluralistic and choosy perspective on the offerings of
different cultures. Those early decades of the century were the years
of the first modem American tourists, who had much the same use
for the world that Pound did. He was more serious than they, of
course—more committed to seeing the sights, all of them and each
one thoroughly, so much so that he never returned home. His self-
imposed exile was a deliberate effort to solidify the liberated condition
of cultural non-allegiance that made clear sight possible. It was not,
as William Carlos Williams always felt, a shirking of responsibility.
While Williams stayed at home to write an American epic, Pound went
abroad to assume the responsibility of writing a global one.
So, as Williams was recording what had happened in Paterson,
New Jersey, Pound was trying to compile a historical account of three
continents, with an occasional glimpse toward one of the other four.
Understandably, he had a harder time convincing himself that he was
doing his subject justice. He found it harder to be sure that he was
telling the whole story. It became increasingly difficult for him to
ascertain whether or not he had gotten down everything that mat-
tered. He revealed his anxiety about comprehensiveness very early
on when he defended the chaos of disparate facts and figures from
diverse cultures that filled the pages of the early sections of cantos by
saying that he was merely trying "to get all the colors on the palette."
Andrew J. Kappel 77

Beginning to recognize the onerousness of merely getting them together,

he could hardly have considered the further prospect of ordering them
with anything like nonchalance. And in a way the constant accumu-
lation was a delay tactic. The desire for comprehensiveness always
successfully competed against the desire to order, but complicated as
it delayed the second task. Eventually the desire to include everything
became a compulsion to exclude nothing. Enough was never enough.
New elements were added faster than old ones cohered. Ball after ball
was added to the juggling act. New matter appears even in the late
Rock-Drill and Thrones sections, where the task of ordering things was
to be given priority. In the opening cantos of Thrones, for instance, the
vast new territory of the Byzantine Empire, scrupulously cluttered
with numismatic and mercantile details, slides momentously into the
poem's endlessly expandable geography. The greatest American tour-
ist could not leave a single sight unseen.
This commitment to comprehensiveness, though in practice it
competed with the desire for order, was meant theoretically to be in
service of that desire. The order was conceived of as a pattern that
would emerge only when all the pieces that comprised it were present.
An order artificially established by an arbitrary limiting of experience
was of no interest because it did not necessarily have anything to do
with the true nature of things, might in fact actually distort them. The
desired order was revelatory, a manifestation of the nature of things.
However, there was a catch. Though comprehensive attention to detail
ultimately guaranteed order, it precluded, while it was going on, an
awareness of order. Pound's image for this epistemológica! predica-
ment was the voyage of the Carthaginian sailor Hanno. He concludes
Canto 40 with an excerpt from The Periplus of Hanno, a day-by-day
account of a voyage of discovery along the African coast. One of
Hanno's goals was to make a map of the coastline, which he does by
noting, as he sails along, the contours of each separate strip of beach,
jut of peninsula, recess of inlet as it passes by—but he is unable in the
closeness of his focus to see the shape of the whole. Like an avid
tourist Hanno saw all the sights in detail but could not, like a god
above them, see the pattern they made. He did not steer by the stars
but followed the land as it went. He experienced the world "not as
land looks on a map / but as sea bord seen by men sailing" (p. 324,
Canto 59). Hanno's dutiful record of his sightings promised eventually
to constitute—if he encountered everything—an accurate map of the
world. His comprehensiveness guaranteed the accuracy of the pattern
78 THE MIND OF EZRA POUND

but—here is the catch—it also necessitated a closeness of focus that

precluded him from ever seeing the pattern the map depicted.
This admission of ignorance is a sign of Pound's rigorous com-
mitment to distinguishing between what he could know and what he
could not, a commitment he professed when challenged publicly by
T. S. Eliot with the question "What does Mr. Pound believe?" He was
committed, he answered, to not jumping to conclusions on questions
of belief.12 But his desire for a perspective on things that might afford
a glimpse of their order, a desire for a little bit of transcendence, was
too strong to be denied for long, and he eventually entertained the
possibility that a sense of the whole was achievable even as one moved
horizontally amidst the parts. It was all a matter of one's relation to
the parts at hand. He found in the work of the Scottish monk Richard
of St. Victor a mystical philosopher's schema for the different phases
of that relationship which permitted him to think that premature
transcendence into a sense of the whole might be possible. Richard
defined three stages of intellection: cogitatio, "the aimless flitting of
the mind" about its objects; meditatio, "the systematic circling of the
attention around the object"; and contemplatio, "the identification of
the consciousness WITH the object."13 The Richardian schema allowed
Pound to conceive of the perception of the rose in the steel dust, his
beatific vision, as possible as an end of a circumscribable, repeatable
process. He did not have to keep moving through new material,
oblivious to its contribution to the map, but could refine his relation-
ship to the material at hand so that its embodiment of the total map's
contours became apparent. Of course, this was an awareness one
rarely, if ever, achieved. The swirling masses of information and
imagery in The Cantos are records of the poetic mind in states oÃ- cogitatio
and meditatio, necessary preludes to contemplatio, the desired episte-
mological condition of full knowledge. They are a deliberate priming
and revving of the engine of the mind, or a sort of calisthenic warm-
up. In many of the late cantos Pound enacts Richard's schema, record-
ing again and again an effort to sense the whole precociously, before
all its parts are transcribed. The great Canto 90 is the fullest and most
formal of these enactments.M
Pound's doctors, who knew little of The Cantos, late or early, nor
anything about Richard's schema of intellection, nevertheless recog-
nized in the poet's conversation in 1945 the record of a mental activity
much like the Richardian action of The Cantos. Dr. Marion R. King
noted the difficulty that Pound had sustaining a dialogue. "I found,"
Dr. King testified, "that I would have more information about the
Andrew J. Kappel 79

patient by permitting him to go ahead and talk. He chafes under cross-

examination and restrictions, but does pretty well when allowed to
proceed on his own accord; it is his own statement that he can explain
his feelings and his ideas very much better if he is allowed to let the
subject flow and not be interrupted too much."15 The Cantos are a
record of a lifetime spent letting "the subject now." Dr. King's account
testifies to Pound's anxious sense of having an impossibly unwieldy
subject, one beyond grasping fully; to his sense that the purpose of
his articulation was not self-expression but accurate presentation of
his subject; to his belief that the human mind, perhaps his in particular,
was over-eager to grasp and present, and therefore constituted a threat
to its subject, which it could easily distort; and to his sense that the
mind must be allowed a gradual approach to its subject if its goal of
accurate presentation were to be achieved. In his effort to explain and
diagnose Pound's condition as it was manifest in his conversation,
Dr. King spoke in court of paranoid schizophrenia, dementia praecox,
and accelerating obsessionalism. He might just as accurately have
invoked the three Richardian categories.
Dr. King's account of Pound's conversational style and the larger
diagnosis of paranoia of which it was a part also reveal that, in the
way of a paranoid, Pound's treatment of his subjects was not in
practice nearly as evenhanded and disinterested as it was meant in
theory to be. By insisting on no interruptions, no contributions from
others on the subject of a conversation, while allowing that subject to
flow, supposedly on its own, Pound was insisting on the private,
solipsistic relationship with his subject that is a hallmark of the para-
noid mind. What he was protecting through refusal to be interrupted
was not so much his subject as his relationship with it. Like the classic
paranoid's, his mind innocuously but unmistakably shifted its atten-
tion and allegiance from the world itself to his vision of it and soon
developed the paranoid's reluctance and inability to grant or recognize
any potential distinction between one's sense of things and things
themselves. What was an interpretation assumed the status of unme-
diated truth. At a point when the mind had most eccentrically per-
sonalized its operations, it claimed for itself the anonymity of an
everyman and for its perceptions the validity of objective observations.
Item after item entered into The Cantos as into a paranoid system,
ostensibly to provide a comprehensive account of the world but actually
to advance a thesis about the world. His data had much less freedom
to "mean" than he claimed they did when he invoked Hanno's periplus
as his poem's epistemological model. He was looking not for the truth,
80 THE MIND OF EZRA POUND

whatever it might be, but rather for confirmation. Dr. Wendell Muncie
noted Pound's "distiactibility" and emphasized that it was the result
"of internal things, not external things."16 His mind harkened more
and more exclusively to itself. The initial selflessness of his efforts to
know the world evolved into a vast egocentrism.
The paranoiac character of his mind, so clear to his doctors in
1945 and so manifest in his late work, is also recognizable in many of
his most famous ideas and statements made at the beginning of his
career. The famous ideogrammic method, for instance, first formu-
lated in 1919 when Pound published The Chinese Written Character as a
Medium for Poetry but being practiced as early as the poems of Cathay
(1915) and from the start the model of the semantics of The Cantos, is
designed to suit the inclinations of the paranoid. The ideogram rep-
licates in miniature the project and manner of the paranoiac mind.
Pound's clearest explanation of the method occurs in the ABC of Read-
ing (1934) where he cites the Chinese ideogram meaning "red," which
presents in conjunction pictures of a rose, a cherry, a flamingo, and
iron rust to express the idea of the color.17 The paranoiac mind's
manner of comprehending the world is replicated in the ideogram's
semantics, where information functions as clues and meaning takes
the form of a system of implications.
The ideogrammic generation of meaning exclusively through
implication was first successfully practiced by Pound in Cathay, where
it proved an appropriate semantic process for translating the fastidi-
ously reticent Oriental lyrics. Consider, for example, "The Jewel Stairs'
Grievance."
The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the dear autumn."1

Pound includes a note that treats the poem as if it were a single

ideogram, a little system of clues.
NOTE.—Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is some-
thing to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who
complains. Clear autumn, therefore he has no excuse on account of weather. Also
she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked
her stockings. ..."

The note is necessary because the poem adopts the purely presenta-
tional manner of imagist verse, eschewing explanation or comment,
implicitly meaning what it means without explicitly saying what it
Andrew J. Kappel 81

means, the way the Chinese rose-cherry-flamingo-rust ideogram means

"red." In his "A Few Don'ts" for imagists, Pound advised against
explaining within the poem the significance of the objects that appeared
in it: "Don't use such an expression as 'dim lands of peace'. It dulls the
image."20 Consequently, when he wants to indicate that the court lady
was crying he does not write that she let down "the crystal curtain of
tears." The poem's reticence, its refusal to advertise its meanings, a
quality for which—Pound's note goes on to explain—it was especially
prized, makes its subject a secret to which only those capable of
properly reading its coded clues can become privy. It is a poem of and
for a paranoiac mind, and divides its readership into the two halves
of the paranoid's world, those in on the secret, those out of the know.
Pound was interested in the ideogram because it holds and com-
municates significance the way the world does, and so decoding it can
be a valuable epistemological exercise. Like the world, the ideogram
neither explicitly formulates nor abstractly (and therefore comprehen-
sively) states its meaning. In The Cantos the African coast, Hanno's
ideogram, has an overall shapeliness, even though Hanno sees only
a disorder of topographical clues as he sails along. Pound, not content
with Hanno's brand of knowledge—that of the oblivious recorder of
meaning, was interested in the act of mind required to decode the
ideogram. He wanted to know the significant orderliness of the world,
not merely witness it unwittingly. In the late thirties he attempted to
explain the ideogrammic mode of thought to the philosopher George
Santayana. With the ideogram for "red" as one of his examples, he
defined an epistemológica] procedure composed of mental leaps con-
necting particulars, as opposed to the method Santayana—and most
philosophers—used: the Aristotelian method of logical abstract thought.
Pound's admission, even insistence, that there was no map provided
an occasion for a paranoiac mind to exercise its delight in systematiz-
ing. The limitations and dangers of the method were obvious to San-
tayana. "[Y]our tendency to jump," he pointed out to Pound, "is so
irresistible that the bond between the particulars jumped to is not
always apparent[.] It is a mental grab-bag. A latent classification or a
latent genetic connection would seem to be required, if utter miscel-
laneousness is to be avoided."21 Santayana was pointing out that there
might be an enormous difference between jumping from rose to cherry
to flamingo to rust to arrive at the idea of "red," and jumping from
peninsula to inlet to headland to sandy beach to arrive at the meaning
of "the world." Pound was banking on the hope that there was no
difference. The coherence of the world in all its parts was the given
82 THE MIND OF EZRA POUND

from which he proceeded; he believed in such systematic coherence

with the blind passion of a paranoid.
Pound's artistic enterprise, like the paranoid's, was to justify that
belief through the gathering and processing of information, but not
just information about every old cliff and shoal, cove and overhang.
As he stated, "Artists are the antennae of the race," not the cameras.22
This famous formulation implies that, like the paranoid "sensitive,"
the artist is privy to information to which everyone else is oblivious.
Hanno's periplus was too tedious and pedestrian an ideal. Pound's
fullest discussion of the idea of the artist as an "antenna" occurs in
his 1913 review of Allen Upward's religio-sociological study, The Divine
Mystery. In his review Pound quotes the following passage from
Upward's discussion of some African folklore about a primitive rain-
maker.

The secret of genius is sensitiveness. The Genius of the Thunder . . . could not call
the thunder, but he could be called by it. He was more quick than other men to feel
the changes of the atmosphere; .... |W]hen he felt the storm gathering round his
head, he . . . marched forth to be its Word, . . . .a

Like the paranoid, the artistic genius is attuned to an order of things

which the ordinary mind cannot perceive. Like the paranoid, he cannot
escape this awareness, he cannot tune out the insistent signals of the
new, but becomes increasingly sensitive to them, and obsessed by
them until he makes the enterprise of communicating them to others
his compulsive mission. He marches forth to be their Word. The
compulsion is heightened in the case of Upward's thunder-genius, in
the cases of many paranoids, and in the case of Ezra Pound, by the
urgent nature of the signalled information. The present condition of
things was threatened by the imminent yet unrecognized order. Fur-
thermore, while the predicted rain was a happy threat to the African
aridity, for Pound the strengthening "usocracy" of financiers posed a
greater and anything but happy threat to civilization as he knew it.
He shares with the classic paranoid this sense of a coming destructive
order, as well as the consequent feverish rush in which the alarming
vision is expressed, and the anxiety felt when the effort to express it
has failed.
The anxiety of that failure pervades the last cantos, Drafts and
Fragments (1969), where Pound formally and publicly abandons his
poem. He assumes full responsibility for the failure: "Tho' my errors
and wrecks lie about me. / And I am not a demigod, /1 cannot make
it cohere" (p. 796, Canto 116). He had been unable to see the world's
Andrew J. Kappel 83

absolute order and meaning, but he never denied their existence: "it
coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere" (p. 797, Canto 116).
He always defined the failure that he accused himself of as a failure
of his mental powers of synthesis. That human faculty was the one
specifically crucial to his art. Despite all his programs for activating it,
and thereby sensing the coherency and shape of the world—the repeated
attempts to climb Richard of St. Victor's ladder of intellection into full
knowledge or to charge with meaning the circuitry of the ideogram—
he remained to the end merely Hanno sailing along the ragged edge
of unassimilated data. He was tormented by a sense of beckoning
opportunity and personal impotence, by his belief in the significance
of the data and his collapsed mental apparatus for comprehending
them.
He spoke late in life of those days, increasing in number, on
which he simply could not make his mind work. The act of thinking,
specifically of synthetic thinking, had become intolerably demanding.
It had always been hard work, and a lifetime devoted to the job
eventually took its toll on him. Throughout his middle age he had
been troubled by a physical inability to hold his head up while seated.
Photo after photo discovers him supine in a chair, head leaning heavily
against the chair's back. Wyndham Lewis's famous portrait of Pound
portrays him in this position. The characteristic posture embodies the
fact that he possessed his own mind as a highly taxed, precious faculty.
His previously quoted complaint to his doctors that he sometimes
"experienced a queer sensation in the head as though the upper third
of the brain were missing and a fluid level existed at the top of what
remained" is comprehensible as an effort to describe the loss of those
highest powers of synthesis, or of contemplatio, that were so important
to him. Dr. Winfred Overholser, the head of St. Elizabeths Hospital,
who of all the poet's doctors was the one most familiar with his case,
described him as a man who had lost the feeling that "the whole world
. . . revolved around him" and become "less and less able to order
his life."24 It was a process of disintegration like a paranoid's loosening
grasp on his "system" of things. In the last cantos Pound gathers a
tradition of various road- and bridge-builders, such as the civil engi-
neers Dino Martinazzi and Riccardo Cozzaglio who built the spectac-
ular Gardesana highway along the rugged cliffs of the Lago di Garda
(p. 779, Canto 110), whose work is celebrated because they, in their
practical way, made connections between things, synthesized sepa-
rate parts of the world. Their work is the ideal against which Pound
measures his Cantos and finds them wanting. His connections remained
84 THE MIND OF EZRA POUND

tentative, partial. He had brought no synthesis to completion. He

quotes again and again in the late cantos a remark of the sculptor
Constantin Brancusi's: "je peux commencer / une chose tous les jours,
mais / fiiniiiir" (p. 560, Canto 86; p. 677, Canto 97).
When Donald Hall interviewed Pound in 1960 for the Paris Review,
the troubling issue they returned to every session was Pound's ability
to finish The Cantos. Pound wavered between confidence and despair.
In a moment of assurance and exhilaration one day, he suggested that
they go to the Circus Maximus—he was living in Rome that year—
for their next session. They could stroll about as they talked. The
following day Hall met Pound at his apartment, where the poet's
scarf, hat, and walking stick lay together on a chair near the door,
ready for the expedition.
He settled his hat back on his head, flung his scarf around his neck, and took up
his stick. Then he realized, with a short laugh, that he didn't know how to direct
me to the Circus Maximus. He sat at the edge of his sofa bed, hat and scarf still on,
and studied a map. Then suddenly it happened, horribly in front of my eyes: again
I saw vigor and energy drain out of him, like air from a pricked balloon. The strong
body visibly sagged into old age; he disintegrated in front of me, smashed into a
thousand unconnected and disorderly pieces. He took off his hat slowly and let it
drop, his scarf slid to the floor; his stick, which had rested in his lap, thudded to
the carpet. His long body slid boneless down, until he lay prone, eyes closed, ....

"The question," he said finally, was "whether to live or die."25 What

made life worth living for Pound was the ability of his mind to seek
order and meaning. He could, if with difficulty, accept the possible
futility of the search, but he could not live with the loss of the ability
to continue looking. His psychiatrists recognized this essential truth
about the poet in 1945 when they saw in his behavior the urgent
obsessive systematizing of the paranoid mind, a mind helpless to ease
the burden it placed upon itself. Their testimony saved that mind from
probable extinction, so that it might continue its demanding regimen
of synthesizing exercises.

NOTES

1. See Wendy Flory, Ezra Pound's -Cantos": A Record of Struggle (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981), which interprets Pound's epic poem as an account of his
personal experience of love and the reading to which the experience prompted him.
2. Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1976).
3. Ezra Pound, '"The Age Demanded,'" from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in Pcrsonae:
The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1971), 201-2. Ezra
Andrew J. Kappel 85

Pound: PERSONAE. Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New

Directions Publishing Corporation.
4. The full texts of the doctors' testimonies are contained in Charles Norman,
The Case of Ezra Pound (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968).
5. See E. Fuller Torrey, 'The Protection of Ezra Pound," Psychology Today 15 (11
November 1981):57-62, 64-66; and The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St.
Elizabeths (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984), which elaborates but does not significantly
alter his questionable argument. For the best full-scale assessment of the book, see
Carrol F. Terrell's review in the Washington Post, 9 October 1983.
6. The most infamous of these earlier sensationalized accounts are those of H.
S. Canby and Robert Hillyer that appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature 28 (15
December 1945):10; 31(11 June 1949):9-11; and 32 (18 June 1949):7-9, 38.
7. Torrey, "The Protection of Ezra Pound," 61.
8. Norman, 126.
9. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Bantam, 1967), 137.
10. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1973), 536,
Canto 82. All subsequent quotations from The Cantos are from this edition and are cited
parenthetically in the text by page and Canto number. Ezra Pound: THE CANTOS OF
EZRA POUND. Copyright © 1940, 1948, 1956, 1962 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
11. The fuDest single study of the sources for Pound's paradise is James J.
Wilhelm, The Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Walker and Company, 1977).
12. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New
Directions, 1968), 85.
13. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 328.
14. See Andrew J. Kappel, "Ezra Pound in Heaven," Hudson Review 35 (Spring
1982):80-83, for a reading of Canto 90 as a Richardian exercise in transcendence.
15. Norman, 139.
16. Norman, 121.
17. EZTa Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 22.
18. Ezra Pound, "The Jewel Stairs' Grievance," from Cathay, in Personae, 132.
Ezra Pound: PERSONAE. Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
19. Ezra Pound, "Note" to "The Jewel Stairs' Grievance," from Cathay, in Per-
sonae, 132. Ezra Pound: PERSONAE. Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
20. Pound, Literary Essays, 5.
21. Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Avon, 1970), 483.
22. Pound, Literary Essays, 58.
23. Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New
Directions, 1973), 403.
24. Norman, 152.
25. Donald Hall, "Fragments of Ezra Pound," in Remembering Poets: Reminiscences
and Opinions (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 156, 160.