Carol Shloss - Let the Wind Speak: Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra Pound

CAROL LOEB SHLOSS

LET THE WIND SPEAK

Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra Pound

PENN PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2023 Carol Loeb Shloss

All rights reserved.
Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Hardcover ISBN 9781512823257

Ebook ISBN 9781512823264

Library of Congress Control Number:
2022011664

The imagination is transnational.

Orhan Pamuk

To live in the world but outside of existing conceptions of it.

Ezra Pound

I demand the honesty of forests.

Mary de Rachewiltz

_________

_________

Who knows what loyalty is in the underworld?

Antigone to Creon

One world stood by you, one stood by me.

Antigone to Ismene

Different worlds, both equally offended.

Ismene to Antigone

If you were Mary de Rachewiltz, on whose side of history would you fall? In an alpine tower, there is time to reflect. She observes something small: a piece of straw on the floor; a cracked cup on the table; through the window she sees immensity: a gorge, a line of mountains, a summit, a path to the heights. She considers a discordant inheritance. There was her father, Ezra Pound; there, facing him, was the United States. Between them, a charge of treason. As the daughter of a gifted poet whose life ended in turmoil, she recognizes that her life has grown from epic talent even as it has chafed against lies, betrayal, and shifting fictions. Beauty and danger roil together on the steep slopes and in the mind.

I met her in 1992. When we sat down, the first thing she asked was, What am I doing here? We were drinking tea together in the high Italian Alps in a castle named Brunnenburg. I saw her choice of dwelling place as an immense act of courage and originality. You chose it, I said, looking at turrets and winding staircases and terraces that hovered over steep chasms. But, as I was to learn, it was not a simple choice. She aligned character as well as fate with this dwelling place. What I considered home was, for her, also a place of exile, as if a familiar habitation could contain treacherous and isolated caverns within itself.

On one side, there was beauty: everything that made Brunnenburg familiar and beloved. She had lived in the Tyrol for most of her life; her children had been born here; her son, his wife and their family still inhabited another part of the castle; outside, vineyards were flourishing. The stone walls that sheltered us were filled with memory and manuscripts, artwork and archives, most of these things a testament to her father, the poet Ezra Pound. He had left her not only memory but vision. The Cantos, his poem containing history, had taught her, shaped her, preoccupied her from childhood, informing her choices and understanding in the same way that a Bible might guide another person. It was a spiritual endowment. Respect. Transcendental. I did not go as far as sewing fragments of cantos into my clothes, but I certainly wrapped them tightly around my mind. Its mastery meant that one could somehow imbibe the father through his words and then enact the words in daily life.

In this poetic sense, Brunnenburg was not just an unusual house, but was founded as an ideal city, a terrestrial paradise, a place apart, above, imbued with principle. A shelter such as this was first conceived in imagination by her father against the ruin of Europe in the Great War (As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill / from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor) an elevation from a broken Western civilization. And it actually tried to be a location without national ties. I was sitting in a remarkable place with a quiet but fiercely principled woman. In a certain sense, I was sitting in the aftermath of a poem.

In the way that Pounds cantos can be thought of as a construct of the mindPound building his paradiso/terrestre word by wordBrunnenburg was the construct of a listening, receptive child building stone by stone an idea that had been implanted since understanding was first possible: poetry can heal the world. If poems are a no place and occupy no time, their significance can still be reconfigured in the stones of houses, the limbs of children, and the roots of vines. They can become placed in the civic world; they can announce themselves in material form. They can assert moral and, in this case, even legal importance.

Brunnenburg was bought in 1948. By this time, World War II was over for most civilians, but Ezra Pound remained incarcerated in a mental hospital in the United States. He, too, had become an emblem: not only a person, but also the embodiment of values supposedly antithetical to the country of his birth. Languishing in a bughouse called St. Elizabeths, his name was, for most people, synonymous with treason. He had spoken against the American war effort on Rome Radio in the 1940san act construed as aid and comfort to the enemy by J. Edgar Hoover and later by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Few things that Mary did from Pounds capture in 1945 until his death in 1972 were, or could be, done apart from this filiation. Others might finesse the issue of Pounds politics by separating his personal views from his poetic genius. They might think him a great poet with an aberrant allegiance to Italian Fascism, but Mary could not. She grew up in the discordant neighborhood of this accusation. It was her heritage as much as The Cantos; and to a large extent, it explains the extraordinary step of buying a ruined castle and seeking territorial independence for it in the mid-twentieth century. Behind its acquisition lay an extraordinary conflict. Within its walls were answers to historical problems.

In thinking about this extraordinary human experiment, one can see that the castle was notable for what it excluded as much as for what it aspired to become: Italy, Marys birthplace, was aligned with the Axis powers; the U.S., her fathers country, took sides with the Allies. If Pounds downfall had been the result of unwanted national antagonisms, one could, at the least, imagine a place where differences were free to play out without devastating consequences. Before it was anything else, Brunnenburg was imagined as a haven for Ezra Pound, who had been captured and punished by the allies of World War II. As Mary put it in her autobiography, Our dreams soared high: we would achieve extraterritoriality, we would fight for his extradition from the USA, and he could rule over a domain populated with artists. She imagined that a stone building on a European mountainside could keep America imaginatively at bay.

Despite this idealism, Brunnenburg skirted danger. The castle was the measure of a serious prior exclusion. It was indeed an edifice that redefined political space, but the very need to extend imagination in this way was the mark of historical duress. Mary faced this squarely when she visited her father in the 1950s. Far from being the land of the free, America positioned itself in her mind as captor, judge, and scourge. Pounds incarceration meant that heand by extension shewas subject to laws far different from the rules that governed his poetic vision. Brunnenburg, in her eyes, stood as the embodiment of a deeply moral view of historys possibilities; the United States was governed by far different values. Thus, in Marys journey to St. Elizabeths, two cities were enjoined. Two sets of laws were placed in opposition.