There is a certain type of book frequently seen these days, which I believe has yet to acquire a single word or short phrase to describe it like, for example, “chick-lit” or “microhistory”. This book is a member of this as-yet-unnamed genre, individual examples of which often have elements of history, biography, autobiography/memoir, and comedy, to greater or lesser extents.

The shortest description I can give is “What-I-Learned-Writing-a-Book-about-X” (or, less specifically, “X and me”) where X here is, obviously, Ezra Pound. I have recently read entries in this genre wherein X equals sommeliers and literature written by tyrants, and I have another one teed up for reading soon where X = time.

Although of course my enjoyment of individual entries in this field varies, I generally like them. They frequently provide a way to acquire a little knowledge about one of the many topics of which I am lamentably ignorant. The human factor, the author's personal voice, prevents the subject from becoming too dry and abstract, I believe. But I certain understand those who find this genre irritating, perhaps thinking, in this case, “When I pick up a book that purports to be about Ezra Pound, I want virtually all of it to be about Ezra himself, and the author could, for example, best confine to his personal journal a description of the route he (the author) took in a taxi to get from Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to the grounds of St. Elizabeth's Hospital while researching this book”.

Generally, I find Pound impenetrable when he is not being reprehensible. However, I try, in this and other matters, to remember that I may be wrong – tens of thousands of people, including many people of proven accomplishment and taste, have said that Pound's writings are beautiful and profound. They cannot all be idiots and dupes, contrary to what the younger me might have told myself. The author convinced me that maybe I could take another run at Pound if I ever find myself with plenty of spare time and unfettered access to a good-quality university library.

It is perhaps too granular to be quibbling with individual words in a 300+ page book, but I would like to mention a word that made me get up on my hind legs. The word is “cowardly”. It occurs at Kindle location 1566 and is a characterization of the behavior of the poet and medical doctor William Carlos Williams, with whom Pound had the type of relation which the kids today are called “frenemy”. The circumstances are: Williams, in a letter, related that Mrs. Pound, perhaps grasping at straws once it became apparent her husband might be an insane asylum inmate for a long time, suggested a preposterous plan wherein Pound will “be released from the hospital under my custody as a physician.” Williams fulfilled a promise to mention this plan to the authorities but, when doing so, made clear that he, Williams, understood that it is completely impractical. This, the author notes, is “cowardly”. This characterization is just wrong, and it is the sort of thing perhaps written by a man who feels that he has never said anything for the sole purpose of sparing someone's feelings. So I ask: How was Williams supposed to act? Tell Mrs. Pound that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell of such an action being approved and she is clearly a moron for even suggesting it? Is that more honest and less cowardly? Or perhaps Williams should have bravely and irresponsibly suggested taking on legal responsibility for a man who, while perhaps not certifiably insane, has certainly had prolonged periods of insane behavior. Let him sleep in the spare bedroom? Sure! Probably the suggestion would have been laughed out of the meetings and courtrooms where it was mentioned, at least in part because Williams was a pediatrician, not a psychiatrist. I guess the point that really fries my biscuit is that, while Pound was broadcasting paranoid rants about the world Jewish banking conspiracy in the service of a country with whom the US was at war and living in luxury as a result, Williams was treating the sick children of suburban New Jersey, including (it is reported) many who could not afford to pay him. Who, I ask you, is the coward?

New topic: At Kindle location 1673, the author reports that, in June 1947, Pound writes the following “short rhyme” in the back of his notebook: “Nobody think but grandpa/ He sits round all day/ Whistling in the bughouse/ Just to pass the time away.” The author fails to make the connection that Pound's ill-tempered and self-pitying doggerel derives from a charming and cheerful 1905 Tin Pan Alley tune named “Everybody Works But Father”. See and enjoy Groucho Marx singing this song here – off-topic, but worth the click.

I received a free egalley of this book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux via Netgalley. Thanks to both.

The Bughouse provides a new and valuable perspective on the Pound problem: the question of how to deal with the great art of a terrible person. To what extent, and in what ways, can we admire, or even love, the masterworks of the slaveowner or racist, the murderer or fascist. The problem is not as bad when the art has little or no direct relation to the artist’s reprehensible actions and/or ideas, but, in Pound’s case, the fascism and anti-Semitism is right there in the poetry.

Furthermore, the issue is complicated in Pound’s case by the vexed question of his sanity. The numerous mental-health professionals who examined him dramatically disagreed about this, and Swift acknowledges that “Pound’s madness—or not—will always remain an open question.” I was most intrigued to learn here that Pound’s defense attorney tried to use his poetry as evidence of his insanity!

Many books on Pound have, of course, grappled with this issue of the man and his work, and no single study can possibly settle this intractable problem, but this book’s approach—looking at the postwar Pound primarily through the writings of the fellow poets who visited him in St. Elizabeths Hospital—makes a real contribution. In this respect, it is like M. Owen Lee’s useful book Wagner: Terrible Man & His Truthful Art.

Interesting story of Ezra. It was all new to me so I found it fascinating.