The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths

by E. Fuller Torrey

One of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound was also an active fascist and anti-Semite. Indicted on nineteen counts of treason for his anti-American broadcasts over Mussolini's Radio Rome during World War II, Pound escaped trial by pleading insanity. He spent the next twelve years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., until his literary friends--Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, and William Carlos Williams among them--mounted a campaign to secure his release. In this stunning biography, E. Fuller Torrey, who was himself a psychiatrist at St. Elizabeths, assesses the sanity of Ezra Pound. Using Pound's psychiatric hospital records, which Torrey obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and which had never previously been released, Torrey concludes that Pound did not go mad during World War II. Torrey also reveals the story of the salon Pound ran at St. Elizabeths and describes the collaboration of psychiatrists and poets in maintaining the charade of Pound's insanity. He also discloses, for the first time, Pound's support of Hitler as well as of Mussolini and explicates some of Pound's stranger mystical and sexual beliefs. Torrey integrates Pound's chaotic personal life with his poetry, illuminating both. The Roots of Treason is as entrancing as the moveable feast of literary Paris in the 1920s, and as chilling as the most recent acquittal of a murder who claimed to be insane.

Genres: Biography, Literature, Poetry

339 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Davy Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been years since I read it.
It was good, also interesting.
He did not get executed, it was lucky for him he had powerful friends.
I think they kept him outdoors in a cage for a time when he was first captured.

I have been more interested in him as a character. I zone out pretty easily on poetry. He wrote some crazy short papers like 'Jefferson or Mussolini'?

Interesting stuff on economics too, and that was my major. He liked Martin Van Buren I remember. Seemed he was mixed up with some shaky Social Credit stuff. He comes across as pretty stuffy to me.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I don't know if Ezra pound was insane but I do know he lived in a different world than the rest of us".---U.S. Vice-President Henry Wallace

Ah, but the good Dr. Fuller, a specialist on schizophrenia and an expert on the insanity defense, does know, and presumably wanted Pound, the greatest American poet of the twentieth century, not locked up at St. Elizabeth Mental Hospital, where Fuller later came to work, but put on trial and perhaps executed for treason. In fact, if Fuller had his way, and he's still alive and practicing at age 85, most of us would be institutionalized. (His own sister got taken away by the men in white coats for shouting "The British are coming!" on the front lawn of the Fuller house.) I good-naturedly picked up this book while I attended UCLA assuming I would find a rational account of the question of Uncle Ezra's sanity. What I got instead was a conspiracy theory. Reading Pound's mental evaluation made after his capture by U.S. troops in Italy in 1945, when he was charged with treason for speaking over Rome Radio during the war, and subsequent medical records at St. Liz., Fuller came to the conclusion that Pound was perfectly sane and that a group of his closest friends, poets Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams and Pound's publisher at New Directions (or "Nude Erections" as Ezra called it) James "Jazz" MacLaughlin conspired with the chief medical doctor at St. Elizabeth to have Ezra declared insane to spare him the firing squad. That's the secret! Except that it is also insane. The medical chief of St. Elizabeth would have to commit perjury for such a certification, facing life imprisonment for the sake of someone he had never met before. The three conspirators would have to meet and coordinate strategy for over a year. The doctors and nurses at St. Liz. would have to be fools or fooled into going along. Pound's own reaction to being placed for examination was to turn to MacLaughlin and plead "I don't know what I'm doing here Jazz. I thought they were going to send me to Tokyo to help MacArthur convert the Japanese from Shintoism to Confucianism". Typical for Ezra Pound, atypical for the rest of us who are not poetic geniuses. Pound was committed and spent twelve years "in the bughouse", writing more of THE CANTOS, courted by everyone from the queen of American poetry Elizabeth Bishop to the queen of American classicists, Edith Hamilton, and making astute observations on modern life, "You cannot eat in a Sputnik and you cannot get your life back in a Sputnik". Fuller has been a life-long advocate of locking up people who are "different than the rest of us" (yes, even his own sister) and still insists in 2023 that the United States, and New York City in particular, have TOO FEW mental patients behind bars. Incidentally, Fuller is a regular participant of the National Conference on Schizophrenia (!). I'd like a chance to attend some day and lecture the doctors on the case of "that difficult character", Ezra Pound.

[Mills College Library]

Biog P876t 1984