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PARTISAN REVIEW
by one staff psychiatrist after another:
"If
they want to examine me why
don't they give me some scientist, I wouldn 't mind.... But this
intolerable questioning. Good god, what the hell difference does it
make what I was reading in 19021 " The only subject Pound consis–
tently shied away from in these talks with Olson was the question of
his Italian radio broadcasts during the war. When forced to confront
the issue his response was always the same. His aim had not been
to
defend Mussolini or Italian Fascism but
to
save the American c:onstitu–
tion and keep America out of the war. Confucius, he told Olson, was
the basis of his defense; in Kung could be found the key.
Glib explanations of this sort helped alienate him further from
friends and acquaintances. " In everyone's relations with Mr. Pound
there come...coolnesses," E.E. Cummings was to write. The chill set in
between Pound and Olson toward the middle of 1948. Pound 's ethno–
logical antagonisms proved too much for Olson to bear. "I have as
much or more of a quarrel with the Swedes and the Irish as with the
Yids, " Pound had said. This was followed by an even more offensive
vociferation: "I was a Zionist in Italy, but now I'm for pogroms, after
what I've experienced in here. " Olson's visits
to
St. Elizabeths ceased.
The two poets did not meet again until 1965, when their paths crossed
at the eighth annual Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto. But by then the
aged craftsman had taken his mysterious oath of silence and was as
mu te as the Sphinx.
This book, then, is the best record we shall probably ever have of
the relationship which existed between these two men. It is well served
by Mrs. Seelye's astute editing and the addition of a detailed set of
footnotes. A number of Olson's .poems, written about Pound or with
Pound in mind, have also been included and are central to the text.
My only regret is that too little has been said in the volume about
Pound's role as a literary model for Olson and through Olson for poets
like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Gregory Corso. A compar–
ison, even a short one, of Pound's revolutionary ideogrammatic
method vis-a-vis Olson 's projectivist or Open Field verse technique
would have been most welcome here, although without it the book still
manages to stand very erect on its own two feet.
c.
DAVID HEYMANN
