The art and the artist, can we love one and not the other? It’s a difficult question to answer. Sometimes my heroes can be embarrassing and pathetic like Li Bai trying to kiss the moon’s reflection on the lake falling out of the boat and drowning himself (I had a friend who did pretty much the same thing, so it can happen), or Stephen Foster cutting his throat while shaving, a down and out Bowery drunk who had the shakes, or Janis Joplin falling down dead from a heroin overdose breaking her nose. These artists you might say were all too human, having maybe too much fun, but hurting no one really but themselves and the collateral damage of loved ones. I have no trouble loving them.

But sometimes I find out my heroes have had unlikable ideas that caused harm. Like Walter Brennan, one of my favorite actors since I was a kid, feeling so much affection for him, and he turns out to have been a right wing antisemitic (not really Pappy Amos) racist. I come from Pennsylvania, the state of Joe Paterno, who turned a blind eye as we all know to young men buggered in the shower for the sake of football and the almighty dollar. Should we leave the statue up or tear the statue down? Should I never watch Red River again?

And then there’s Ezra Pound. Perhaps if he had only done silly things like sign his letters with a Heil Hitler! and call Mussolini the boss, I wouldn’t care so much, but he wrote articles for Italian newspapers with titles like, “Jews, Disease Incarnate,” during the time of the concentration camps, which leaves me feeling an involuntary, “Yuck,” when it comes to thoughts of Ezra Pound.

I have pretty much avoided Ezra Pound my whole life because of that yuck. Have I been cutting off my nose to spite my face? There always has been plenty to read, more than I ever will be able to (I think it’s soon time to read Winesburg, Ohio and Les Fleurs du Mal again), but I am planning to start the Cantos soon, some written on toilet paper when he was left to go mad in the solitary cage with the blinding lights on. I bought Pound’s Collected Work a few weeks ago. The first poem, Child of the Grass, is young with lovely sounds and full of promise. The good and the bad are all of a piece bound in a book some 1400 pages long.

Child of the grass
The years pass Above us
Shadows of air All these shall Love us
Winds for our fellows
The browns and the yellows
Of autumn our colors
Now at our life’s morn. Be we well sworn
Ne’er to grow older
Our spirits be bolder At meeting
Than e’er before All the old lore
Of the forests & woodways
Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal
Ne’er shall we feel
Aught of sorrow

Let light flow about thee
As a cloak of air

Give a listen to Moeurs Contemporaines, a kind of nasty gossip People Magazine 1919, a cantankerous poem (perhaps with premonitions of the evil to come). Pound’s voice reminds me of the sound a frustrated wasp makes flying against a windowpane. Just leave him alone and he won’t sting or say anything bad about you. He changes a few words from the original text while he reads. I’ve noticed he says, “She will neither come in, nor stay out,” instead of “She will neither stay in, nor come out.” Instead of “Stele” for the title of part VI, he says, “Column.” “There was once a man called Voltaire,” becomes, “There once was a man called Voltaire,” which has a bit of a limerick quality to it. I like that he says, “And the guards couldn’t stop ‘em,” as opposed to “And the guards couldn’t stop them.” And he shortens “And I said: ‘That was before I arrived,’” to, “I said: ‘That was before I arrived.’”

Child of the Grass, I would love to hear how Pound would read that.

I read an account of T.S. Eliot visiting Pound at Saint Elizabeths Mental Hospital. As they sat talking on a couch one of the patients came vacuuming the floor with an imaginary vacuum cleaner. Both poets lifted their feet when he got to them, so as not to get entangled in the invisible hose, and so the man could continue cleaning. I’ve always liked the story. Maybe it was in a letter of Robert Frost. Eliot finally did get Pound out of Saint Elizabeths. It took him and other friends over a decade to do it. Someone in the U. S. Justice Department finally decided it was time to let the vicious old man out.

I believe Pound recorded Moeurs Contemporaines in 1958 shortly before he was released from Saint Elizabeths. If he hadn’t been committed as insane to begin with, he would have been sentenced to life in a federal pen for his pro-fascist work during WWII. His book is on the table. Should I take a look?