Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
of bourgeois society, on the other hand,
Odyssean many-mindedness may seem
dangerously demented. Let's put it another
way, the negatively incapable are fixed in
their single tracks. And Pound thought that
they (along with the U.S. Constitution
which they wrecked) needed fixing.
In The Trials of Ezra Pound, Timothy
Findley returns to the particular cultural
history of modern times into which his
Famous Last Words inquired with penetration
and power. In that novel, he explored
the culture of the modernist imagination in
the person of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, aesthete,
ironist, rootless intellectual, fascist.
Mauberley was adapted, of course, from
Ezra Pound's neurasthenic 'character' in
the 1920 poem ofthat name. Hardly surprising
then that Findley, fearless historian
of injured minds, has now turned to the
story of Ezra Pound himself.
The dramatic possibilities of the
American government's hearings into
Pound's state of mind have been vividly
exploited for their own sake, and also for
the light they cast on the desolate aftermath
of the modernist experiment. The presence
of William Carlos Williams and Dorothy
Pound conveys effectively the ruined personal
relations of Ezra, the inveterate loudmouth,
now forced into a lawyerly silence
as the system conspires to avoid having to
hang him. But of course the silence is not
only strategic; there are moments when
Pound is stammered into silence by the
incorrigible idiocy of a world that cannot
get the wisdom he proffers. The play, now
and then, also catches some of the moods
and eloquence of the late Cantos, as Pound
struggles against an encompassing incoherence
to make legible his experiences.
Pound's madness is the issue before the
court and Findley exploits the ambiguities
of Pound's position. We see him in a number
of guises: misunderstood sage, holy sap,
рее-stained derelict. The play forcefully
conveys the view that Pound dodged
responsibility for his actions and words in
Italy by the collusion of one or two sympathetic
psychiatrists who swore to the
unsoundness of his mind, thus, sparing the
poet the ordeal of a trial. But again the word
'unsound' brings back the whole quandary
of the word 'fixed.' When lifted clear of its
narrow legal confines, being of'unsound
mind' activates several other senses, all of
which resound in the play. Being a modernist
means not being able to stop your
ears to the Sirens perched on every morpheme
in the revolutions of a word.
First presented as a play for voices by
C.B.C. radio (with Douglas Rain in the title
role), Findley has now made the text available
in a version for the stage. Having never
seen it in production, I'm not sure how the
play might work in the flesh. It certainly
works well in the theatre of this reader's
head. One other sticking point. I'm not
sure what someone who doesn't know the
documentary background would make of
the play as a play. The more you know of
the personalities and events on which the
play is based, the richer you will find
Findley's superb enactment.
Madness and modernism is also the topic
of a new book by the clinical psychologist
Louis A. Sass and although Pound only gets
passing mention, Sass's very interesting
thesis goes some way in illuminating the
issue of Pound's so-called unsoundness of
mind. Like the work of R.D. Laing and
David Cooper in the 1960s, Sass contests
some of the givens of clinical psychology.
For example, he inquires whether the identification
of madness and irrationality is
entirely warranted in all cases of dementia.
He questions the commonplace notion that
insanity necessarily means a lessening or
diminishing of consciousness, 'a deprivation
of thought that, at the limit, amounts
to an emptying out or a dying of the
human essence—the mind reduced to its
zero degree.'
Following on a rich literary tradition that
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