1949 The award caused a critical storm that spread to the popular press, raising once again (as had the trial of Oscar Wilde – see 25 May) that old question of whether aesthetics is a kind of morality. In other words, does art have a system of morality that can be kept separate from life?
Ezra Pound, the archetypal Anglo-American modernist, was the author of works ranging in size from the early imagist ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (a poem not much longer than its title), through the cultural critique of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920) to the monumental The Cantos (1922 onwards, unfinished at his death in 1972, at which point he had reached number 120). He was also a generous patron to many artistic contemporaries and midwife to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
From 1924 he lived in Italy. When the Fascists took power, he became an ardent admirer of Mussolini, writing to him from time to time, and even meeting him once in 1933 when he presented the Duce with a copy of his first 30 Cantos. Hugely delighted with the encounter, Pound would recall it in Canto 41:
‘Ma questo,’
Said the Boss, ‘è divertente.’1
Catching the point before the aesthetes had got there;
With so much goodwill about, it was natural that Pound would want to support the Italian side in the war against the Allies. Pound hated the war anyway, so he wrote articles for the Italian papers denouncing it as a Jewish bankers’ conspiracy. Between 1941 and 1943 he also made well over 100 broadcasts on Rome Radio attacking the war. They were in English, colloquial in tone, spoken in a kind of folksy accent and clearly aimed at Americans (including soldiers on active service) in an attempt to get them to question their nation’s war effort against the Axis.2
As the Allies completed their dangerous conquest of Italy, Pound was arrested by Italian partisans and handed over to the US authorities. On 24 May 1945 he was incarcerated in a US Army ‘Detention Training Camp’ (DTC) on the Via Aurelia just north of Pisa, where he was kept in an open cage for almost a month, before being allowed a tent.
It was here that Pound wrote most of Cantos 74 to 84, the so-called Pisan Cantos. They are indeed different from the other Cantos – more reflective, less declamatory; quoting from conversations in his personal past more than from the writings of philosophers and politicians; immensely attentive to nature near and far, from a green baby grasshopper swinging on a blade of grass to the snow on the marble of the Carrara mountains to the north-east of the DTC.
On his return to the States Pound was charged with treason, but was judged unfit to plead because of his mental condition, and committed to St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. There he was the centre of something of a salon, visited by poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and William Carlos Williams, and a cadre of younger men keen to learn more about his ideas about economic history. Meanwhile, publication of The Pisan Cantos in 1948 aroused a great deal of interest – so much so that the Fellows of American Letters at the Library of Congress decided to award the volume the first-ever Bollingen Foundation poetry award on this day in 1949.
Then all hell broke loose. ‘Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell’, thundered the Sunday New York Times. Scarcely less alarming was Robert Hillyer in The Saturday Review of Literature (‘Treason’s Strange Fruit’), for whom The Pisan Cantos were a vehicle for ‘Fascism, anti-Semitism’ and ‘contempt for America’. It was all down to a conspiracy made up of T.S. Eliot and other friends of Pound, together with the ‘New Critics’ whose doctrine disallowed the truth value of a work of art, focusing instead on its inherent worth as an aesthetic object – a ‘Well-Wrought Urn’, to borrow New Critic Cleanth Brooks’ title of 1947.
Eighty-four writers and critics, including e.e. cummings and Lionel Trilling, wrote to The Saturday Review to counter Hillyer’s attack. The magazine declined to print their letter.
Congressmen like Jacob K. Javits of New York and James T. Patterson of Connecticut addressed the House, and read Hillyer’s essay into the Congressional record. The Congressional Joint Committee on the Library of Congress resolved that no more literary prizes should be granted under the Library’s auspices.
There was some truth in Hillyer’s analysis, daft as it may sound at this distance. If not a conspiracy, then the Bollingen award was certainly the result of a remarkable likeness of critical orientation among the Fellows – most of whom, like T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Mark Van Doren and Conrad Aiken, were friends of Alan Tate, the Library’s consultant in poetry, who had appointed them.
It was left to a later historian to point out the irony that during the Cold War, ‘most Americans would have felt more at home with Soviet “Realist” premises, which demanded a subordination of art to politically defined mass needs, than with a seemingly incomprehensible aesthetic theory originating in T.S. Eliot’s obscure complaints about a “dissociation of sensibility”’.3
The British had a more direct approach to problems like these. When they finally got their hands on another expatriate American broadcasting treason from an enemy country, William Joyce (aka ‘Lord Haw-Haw’), they strung him up without delay or ceremony. As Private Eye would put it, ‘it’s the only language they understand’.
1 ‘But this … is amusing.’
2The full text of the broadcasts can be found in Leonard W. Doob (ed.), Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.
3Frank A. Ninko, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1951, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.