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Assassins deserve worse, but don’t shoot him. Assassination only

makes more murderers … Don’t shoot him, diagnose him,

diagnose him.

ezra pound

in a radio broadcast from Rome,

February 18, 1943

It is difficult to speak directly of Ezra Pound’s economic ideas. He was a man who rarely uttered a simple “2 + 2 = 4.” He would say, instead, “2 + 2 = 4, as anyone can see who isn’t a ninny completely ballywhoed by the gombeen-men and hyper-kikes who CHOKE UP the maze of Jew-governed radio transmissions.” The specifics of his argument emerge with a tag line, a challenge or a baiting remark, and we must speak of both—both the substance and the style—if we are to speak at all.

Here we inevitably approach the question of Pound’s sanity. Pound stayed in Italy when the Second World War broke out. He worked for several years at the Ministry of Popular Culture in Rome, making radio broadcasts to America and to the Allied troops in Europe and North Africa. His broadcasts were a mixture of economic theory, insults to the Allied leaders, and exhortations on the wisdom of Fascism. When Italy fell, the Allies captured the fifty-nine-year-old poet and put him in a prison camp. They treated him poorly, as I have mentioned, confining him to an outdoor isolation cage until he collapsed. After his breakdown, Pound was given a room of his own indoors and allowed to write. After a long delay the army flew him to Washington to be tried for treason for the radio broadcasts. His publisher, New Directions, hired an attorney who suggested to Pound that he plead insanity. Pound agreed, and after government and private psychiatrists had examined him, the plea was accepted. He was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. Declared too crazy to be tried and treated as too crazy to be set free, he spent the next twelve years in a sort of legal limbo. The government finally released him in 1958. He returned almost immediately to Italy.

It was not just the government or Pound’s lawyer who thought he was a little crazy. People close to him had had the same reaction for some time. When Joyce saw him in Paris in 1935, he thought Pound was “mad” and felt “genuinely frightened of him.” Afraid to be alone with him, Joyce invited Hemingway to go with them to dinner; Hemingway found him “erratic,” “distracted.” Later, T. S. Eliot also concluded that his friend had become unbalanced (“megalomania”), as did Pound’s daughter, Mary (“his own tongue was tricking him, running away with him, leading him into excess, away from his pivot, into blind spots”). For the flavor of a man “away from his pivot,” one need only read a few of the radio broadcasts. Rambling, erratic, frustrated, full of an anger uncut by humor, humility, or compassion, they fatigue the reader and leave a bitter taste.

There are two pitfalls to avoid in speaking of a crazy side to Pound’s economics. First, we must be wary of reducing the ideas to psychological categories. As Thomas Szasz points out in his essay on the Pound case, it is an easy power play to take a man’s ideas and, instead of saying “You’re right” or “You’re wrong,” say “You’re crazy.” It impugns the status of the thinker and cuts off the dialogue. On the other hand, once we’ve restrained ourselves from taking the ideas as “merely psychological,” we cannot turn and take them flatly as ideas, either. Listen to thirty seconds of Pound at the microphone:

This war is proof of such vast incomprehension, such tangled ignorance, so many strains of unknowing—I am held up, enraged by the delay needed to change the typing ribbon, so much is there that ought to be put down, be put into young America’s head. I don’t know what to put down, can’t write two scripts at once. The necessary facts, ideas come in pell-mell, I try to get too much into ten minutes… Maybe if I had more sense of form, legal training, God knows what, I could get the matter across the Atlantic…

Pound’s ideas emerged so helter-skelter, so full of obsession and so stained with their maker’s breath that to make of them a