Final Volume of Ezra Pound Biography Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff writes about the final volume of A. David Moody’s biography of Ezra Pound for the Times Literary Supplement: "Here, in vivid detail, Moody tells the painful story of Pound’s wartime activities in Fascist Italy, including his notorious anti-Semitic broadcasts for Rome Radio, his arrest by the US military in 1945 and detention at the Disciplinary Training Center at Pisa, his removal to Washington, DC to stand trial for treason (only to be declared unfit to do so on grounds of insanity), and his resultant confinement in St Elizabeths Hospital where he was to spend twelve years."

Volume Three also brings Pound’s personal story to its climax. The forced wartime ménage-à-trois with his wife Dorothy and mistress Olga Rudge (the mother of his daughter Mary) ended abruptly with Pound’s arrest. For the moment, Dorothy had won: she moved to Washington, visited her husband every day and was given control of his financial affairs. Documents make clear that after the first year or two, she was quite satisfied to have her husband remain at St Elizabeths, where he was safe from Olga and had none of his usual financial worries. Pound himself was resigned: at St Elizabeths he developed new friendships as well as love affairs – first with the bohemian, drug-addicted Sheri Martinelli and then with a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher, Marcella Spann, who accompanied the Pounds on their return to Italy, only to have Dorothy and Mary conspire to ship her back to her native Texas. Pound, who was deeply in love with Marcella, railed against his loss and was miserable both at Brunnenburg, a castle above Merano in the South Tyrol where his daughter Mary lived with her husband Prince Boris de Rachewiltz and their children, and then at home in Rapallo with Dorothy. In 1962, Olga – who had broken with Pound when, on her single visit to St Elizabeths in 1955 she found him in the arms of “La Martinelli” – came to the rescue: Pound was to spend the rest of his life in her loving care.

In its broad outlines, the story has been told many times – by the early biographers Charles Norman (1968) and Noel Stock (1970), by the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, by Hugh Kenner in his incomparable The Pound Era (1971), and by the poet’s later biographers John Tytell (1987) and Humphrey Carpenter (1988). But Moody has had access to much new or previously unknown archival material, and he provides explicatory chapters on each of the major volumes of the ongoing Cantos. His is thus the most authoritative biography to date.

Read it all at TLS.