Getting It Wrong

Everything I knew about the trial of Ezra Pound for treason and his incarceration in St Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane was wrong. Not that I knew a lot. But I thought I knew that Pound had definitely committed treason, had gone more than a bit crazy in the war years, and had been declared insane in very dubious fashion in order to protect him from execution by understandably sympathetic friends.

I'm now reading Moody's account of all that took place, a very detailed one indeed, and now I think I know the following: Pound had by no means definitely committed treason, and those who were tasked to prosecute him knew that and had reached the conclusion he would walk out as a free man from any real trial; he showed a number of very understandable signs of stress, but nothing close to what might generally be thought of as insanity, and the majority of the doctors who dealt with him knew that perfectly well; his defence may have thought they were helping him, but were complicit in an appalling injustice in locking him away for twelve years.

Having got it so badly wrong for years I'm loathe to accept Moody's conclusions without deep consideration but, my goodness, he's convincing in his thoroughness and general intelligence of analysis. And in his empathy for a difficult subject, an empathy that is by no means all-forgiving, by the way. He calls Pound out for his anti-Semitism in no uncertain terms and makes his readers well aware of the sometimes egregious extent of the poet's political naivety in regard to what Hitler and the Nazis were up to.

One thing, by the way, that I got wrong and that I can offer some defence for. I genuinely thought I'd heard tapes of Pound's broadcasts with EP raving in dreadful fascistic fashion - as bad as Lord Haw Haw, I always thought. But Moody is very convincing on the fact that the general content of the broadcasts was by no means so dreadful and the sense of Pound raving can be connected to the poor sound quality of the broadcasts and subsequent recordings and his ill-informed choice of a hectoring tone which he assumed would somehow cut through to his listeners (of whom there were very few.)