An extravagant American is in Italy. Better said, a renegade American. His name is Ezra Loomis Pound; readers of poetry know him as Ezra Pound; his friends call him Ezra or Ez even Old Ez, not because he is old, but because already, he is a master. And this poet, this reader of outlandish economic tractates, has a hunch that Benito Mussolini may one day turn out useful, for Italy and for the rest of the world. And so he writes him: sends him an eccentric epistle in picturesque and disjointed Italian, his devotion padded out with recondite suggestions, like those of a Renaissance arbitrator addressing a despot or an Italian cardinal. And, so il Duce will know who he is dealing with, he includes a selection of poems – typical poems of Pound’s, strewn with ciphers, ideograms, fragments in Latin, Greek, Chinese.
The dictator pages through it brutishly: the letter doesn’t interest him, its language is strange to him, it’s nothing, the frivolities of a rube. But when he reaches the poems, he smiles: Ma questo è divertente. This he likes. Getting wind of these words, Pound places the episode in one of his poems: ‘Ma questo, said the Boss, è divertente’, and despite all evidence to the contrary, he sees here a sign of the tyrant’s portentous lucidity. Such is the fascination of totalitarian power, the temptation of the intellectual to delegate, to displace vicariously, the whole of his moral responsibility onto a leader or system of ideas that seems to subsume the external world beneath an all-embracing organisational system. This delegation, which relieves the burden of judgment, is never disadvantageous to power. Years later, Soviet grandstanders wished to ban the work of a deceased poet: Mayakovsky. The woman the poet loved, Lilya Brik, besought Stalin to protect it. As though dropping a coin into an automat, she achieved her purpose by spluttering a formula: ‘Mayakovsky is the greatest poet of the Soviet era.’ The protection extended took the standard form of an official cliché, salvaging Mayakovsky by transforming him into a puppet useful for the validation of despotism. In essence, the words ‘the greatest’, or the simple verdict ‘divertente’, display the same contempt, the same distrust, reserved by the politician for the poet.
14 October 1979