In message <[log in to unmask]>, Alex Davis
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>Just to muddy the waters further. Alan writes
> His lack of attention to the contemporary US empire-building
>>can hardly be explained in his case by political naivety.
>
>EP's political naivety, I assume; and right you are. But he wasn't "in his
>lunacy" at this date. All the evidence suggests that EP was sane and thus
>fit to stand trial, and, ironically enough, would have probably not been
>hanged, but received a shorter period of detention that he actually did at
>St Elizabeths. (See Tim Redman, _Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism_,
>Cambridge UP, 1991).
>--Alex
>
Pronouns a bit tricky here: I meant that Olson, who had already had a
political career of sorts in the Roosevelt administration, cannot be
assumed to be politically naive, but yes implying by comparison that
Pound certainly can. Re Pound's 'lunacy' I know there's a clinical &
legal case against - maybe I was being unjustifiably & unkindly
rhetorical - but also hoping to conflate some of the impression of the
man as he appears in Olson's (& others') accounts at that time. Olson's
struggle with meeting a man he's admired deeply but finds fixated on
certain violently non-humanitarian ideas loosely connected in a system
of his own devising. Olson swings round & round, warming to the man &
being disgusted by him alternately. 'A hypochondriac-paranoid w/
delusions of grandeur' - not a professional opinion, obviously, but a
direct one - a man so identified with his own persona ('the ultimate
image of the end of the West', Olson's words) that he cannot see beyond.
'Fit to stand trial', maybe, but ...
Best, A
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