Volume 35, Number 9 · June 2, 1988
Pound's Book of Beasts
By Denis Donoghue
Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound
by James Laughlin
Graywolf Press, 203 pp., $9.50 (paper)
The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound
by Robert Casillo
Northwestern University Press, 463 pp., $34.95
Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism
by James Longenbach
Oxford University Press, 329 pp., $21.95
Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
by John Tytell
Doubleday/Anchor Press, 368 pp., $19.95
'Pound's anti-Semitism is a distressing topic,' as James Laughlin says in Pound as Wuz, a collection of his formal and informal reports on EP, mostly from 1934–1935, when he studied in the poet's 'Ezuversity' at Rapallo. A fan to begin with, Laughlin became Pound's publisher, impresario, friend. He has never doubted that Pound was a major poet, an indelible presence, a man for the most part of great force and charm. The quality of Laughlin's affection for the poet has withstood every challenge to its continuance. He regrets having to bring up the matter of his friend's anti-Semitism, but it is already up; there is no point in being dainty about it. He remarks that the citizens of Rapallo, even after the war, didn't resent Pound's fascist activities: 'Noi siamo tutti stati fascisti: We were all fascists,' a newspaper editor acknowledged. Still, after a few embarrassed pages Laughlin settles for the verdict he received from Dr. Overholser, chief psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, where Pound spent eleven years under constraint: 'You mustn't judge Pound morally, you must judge him medically.' Pound suffered from paranoia; as Laughlin says, he 'could not control himself.' Besides, and for what the evidence is worth, some of Pound's friends—Louis Zukofsky, Allen Ginsberg, Heinz Klussmann—were Jews. At the first decent moment, Laughlin puts the topic aside and proceeds to happier themes, Pound's translations, his 'Canto 74,' the 'lighter side,' his hoaxes and doggerel.
Review, 3701 words
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