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the confines of the wall , was a small exercise ya rd . Like the oth er
inma tes, Pound was permitted a brief dail y exercise period in the yard.
At all other times he was locked into hi s cell. The thi ck black steel
door, which separated him (perhaps mercifully) from the madmen and
lunatics in slippers and straitj ackets, was pierced by nine peepholes cut
into it in three horizontal rows. Medi cs so inclined, could observe the
poet inside hi s cubicl e by peering in a t him. Moreover, the corridors
steamed with hea t and reeked of bile and sweat. Pound 's earlies t
visitors-Theodo re Spencer, Caresse Crosby, and H .
L.
Mencken ,
among o thers- came away appa ll ed and shocked by what they had just
seen. They could not understand how anyone could maintain even the
sembl an ce o f sanity under conditions such as these. Perhaps they
ass umed too much . Pound purportedl y suffered from cla ustrophobia
and loneliness and the feeling that h e was graduall y going insane. On
one occasion hi s " clear con science" p rovided him (Noel Stock has
written in hi s 1970 Pound biography) " with a moment of happiness,
despite hi s surroundings." " I remember," the poet later told a fri end,
"a moment of quite irra tional happiness in the hell-hole."
A sense of Pound's struggle to keep hi s head above wa ter pervades
the whole o f Olson 's chronicl e. H e survived by keeping his mind alive.
The running monologue was a useful aid. As in days of old his voice
piped and droned; his conversation ran the gamut. He talked about a
younger Yea ts, warning him to keep hi s own nose cl ean of politics;
about the Ameri can Indian o n the wa rd, who ran around talking about
killing people; about the J ews, usury, C.
H.
Doug las, and social credit.
He talked about Gaudi er-Brzeska, Katyn ,
N ewsweek,
Congressman
George Holden Tinkham, the indi ctment for treason , Wes tbrook
Pegler, Silvio Gesell, stamp scrip, Bennet Cerf, and Fo rd Madox Fo rd.
He recommended books for reading (Ronald Duncan 's
Journal of a
Husbandman
and the short stori es of Ma ry Butts) and di scussed the
ramifica ti ons o f the wa r ("Radar won the war, production was second,
and military strategy third "). One day Ol son brought him a copy of
The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand. Someone else bro ught him a Geor–
g ian primer; he wanted to learn the language, he claimed, so that he
could correspond with Sta lin. And Harry S. Truman : Who was he, he
wanted to know. Was he the one behind his own current troubl es?
" Does hi s name happen
to
be Warren Gamaliel?" he asked,. the
ques ti on a thrust a t The H a rding Administra tion . " Yo u will have to
take hi s name as it sounds," replied Ol son.
Then , too, the prisoner compl ained bitterl y about the never–
ending psychi a tric examina tions, the mind probes performed on him
