Time: 1945

Place:       An outdoor metal cage in Italy

                   A porch with a seafront view in a hotel on Virginia Beach

                   A room in St. Elizabeth’s Insane Asylum

Characters: Ezra Pound

                   Julien Cornell

                   Halsey Osgood

                                                            Act One

            (In the shadows a metallic cage in which Ezra Pound sits with a table, chair, phone and a roll of toilet paper.)

Ezra- This metal cage  is the Auschwitz where the Jews put me for my sins.

            I am locked in an outdoor metal cage in this goddamned Italian town for all the gawkers to see. I am the current spectacle for the gawkers after they take in Pisa’s leaning tower and the local cemetery. I’m lucky they didn’t hang me and habituate me upside down like the defunct and mostly lamented Benito.

            God knows I’ve always been a pariah and yet I’ve had to wait decades before I was arrested, caged and incarcerated like a captured wild wolf or a freak in a side show, possibly because most Italians think in America that poets are less formidable than Texas gunslingers. I am one more export like a hot dog. Well, we are. We poets sometimes write as if we are equals to minor deities and politicians. We might be superior to both and munitions manufacturers as well in an angelic assessment but no one votes for us or gives us a chance to steal. They trust us with the money more than they do a bibulous Irishman. They might think we are more lecherous than our former indolent colored servants.

            I am only valued by people like me, all I must say haply intrepid spirits with a signature impudent swagger, rebels and eccentrics with boozy notions one might hear in a bar now and then on the way to kiss the sawdust and the taste of one’s own vomit. It’s no wonder we poets are well known for our bellicose and slightly blue tavern recitations.

            I should have never spent any time in Italy, I think; it’s a scurvy country filled with barefoot wops. In America they never arrest poets; they’re too unimportant. No cockroach ever goes to trial or jail in the United States. They are too deeply and even biologically inconsequential. Besides all they are doing in the way of felony is being a classical and reliable cockroach. They let poets and assorted insects starve to death mostly.

            As a young man I left America as quickly as I could after trying to eke a living as a college teacher in Ohio. That state is not a citadel of aristos or hermetic learning. Then they paid me a beggar’s pittance. I departed my homeland I must admit with some deep felicity. After all I could be poor and bankrupt anywhere. In England they don’t think quite as badly as my gumba currently do of their eccentrics.

            Of course I knew and edited Yeats, Hemingway, Joyce, Eliot and all manner of geniuses in that improbable rainy country; mysteriously it’s always been a hermitage for the paras of the world, a kind of outdoor monastery where people go to escape the the familiar hells of other environments. I lived in Russell Square there for awhile then found cheaper quarters in Islington, all of course lodgings on the cheap. It was commodious enough if none of us were courtiers or had noble patrons. In France they had had a nobility once, men of measure who had when in power valued people like me. Now anyone with journey only wants to make more money. It’s a Jewish infection. All the rich in America and London want to be businessmen, then bankers. Even my pal Eliot pretended to be a banker. He was a bank teller. There is a difference.

            . It was a period in which the English had a deep obsession with tendentious imperial patriotism and he postures of morality that I thought lacked both honesty and vigor. Well, if I had had any sense I would have realized that there are worse company one can mingle with than stuffy bores. I really detest the Italians. They’re always one step from a cemetery, one that waits for them patiently enough. It comes from having too much known history in one’s local culture. Everything one does including benefaction turns to arid ritual.

            When I was arrested I wanted to write a letter to Roosevelt asking for mercy for Japan and Germany. They wouldn’t even give me the paper to write it. Other people writ letter to Roosevelt and aren’t told that Roosevelt has better things to do than to listen to my advise. We poets a are long way from being the counsel to kings because we have a private access to the divine. Well, that is the burden of democracy, isn’t it?

            They say that all men are created equal. It’s clear enough that ideas like that lead to thinking one is roughly no different than the worst of us,lunatics, morons, felons. They saw I’m bonkers but even if I am, what are they, fashionable lunatics? That’s all they are.

            The worst of it was getting those bizarre calls from Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. They knew absolutely nothing about poetry. They saw me as a guy they could use for other reasons. Big Al wanted to get me into show business if I ever got out of this damned prison. He’s in Florida now but he can’t help thinking of business. He thought I could become an m.c. on a Chicago television show. People told him I could talk well. I told him I couldn’t  even referee Professional Wrestling I couldn’t sing either. I wasn’t a candidate to be an act in Les Vegas for Bugsy . He must think I’m Noel Coward.  Charley Lucky called me from Naples saying I might want to front for an escort service. He wanted to run  one out of New York, Havana and Naples. Only  fancy stuff. he even wanted to run a college for tarts. He taught if there were a lot of poor poet around in America they could walk in Italy as Mafia-certified gigolos. He said women like to have men around who turn out a few love poems causally now and then. Maybe I could write them.  It would up the cost of paying for them in the bedroom but it would be a fancy niche market. And they say I’m crazy!       

            Maybe I am at least a little daft. Being  smart makes one vulnerable; being even mildly insane is much worse. They say I’m an Anti-Semite. I am all of that but the truth is the only Jews I’ve ever known are other poets like myself. I never met the Rothschilds, the Hirsches or the Montefiores; I couldn’t even be absolute sure that any of them exist. I really have no evidence at all in my observation of a Jewish conspiracy any more than a lot of people have of God..

             All right, let’s say it isn’t the Jews who run the world; who does? Somebody does. Somebody who’s secretive about their leucine or we’d all know about it.

            Frankly, I was always secretly opposed to Fascism. It’s at bottom a quackish cult in which one person  is nuts and murderous rather than a democracy in which everybody is no less corrupt and violent. Isn’t it better to limit vanity and a taste for murder to one man? 

            Or is it? Maybe we ameliorate the personal sting of vice when we are all  commonly  evil and corrupt.

                                    (Lights out).

                                                            Act One

            (Full Lights up. A wooden porch on a beachfront hotel with a view of the sea. Julien Cornell enters and sits in one of the rocking chairs on the porch. After a few moments Halsey Osgood enters and sits in a rocking chair next to Julien.

Halsey- This is a good choice for a meeting place, Julien. I like the placid view of the sea.

Julien- It is a calming vista. It does give anyone who looks at it a sense of peace and measure. It smut be mentally nurturing for fish.

Halsey- I wouldn’t like to live in the sea, Julien. We only see the surface of the water. If we inhabited it we might find it was more stormy and perilous than we think.

Julien- That might be the virtue of being elsewhere when one looks from afar at anything at all, Halsey.

Halsey- Yes. Maybe we need that terrifying proximity to desperation to be as conscious as we are.

Julien- We don’t have to think about our own troubles all that much, Halsey. We’re lawyers. We specialize in finding legal remedies for another man’s difficulties he can’t solve without us. We’re like doctors. The people who come to us are desperate in a way we never are.

Halsey- Well, we have a intrepid client if we’re on opposite sides of the battle who never was one to take up a peaceful life.

Julien- I never wanted to take this case. The man is a paranoid schizophrenic. He hates people he’s never met and doesn’t know. He can’t stand America, a place I value, and he hates democracy, something I’ve been defending my whole life.

            I think the court assigned me to defend him because I’m a Yalie like you, not any ability I have to keep him out of the hot seat. I certainly defended a lot of conscientious objectors of course but they were never treasonous. Still the money is good. Then as we say everybody in America is entitled to be represented by a lawyer.

Halsey- Well Ezra didn’t too all that well representing himself, Julien. He wanted to. He said only people who were expert on John Adams and Confucius could represent him. That’s not me, not you. I dolt know how you’re going to defend him in a courtroom, frankly. He rather undeniably committed treason, wanted to destroy America if he could, hates freedom, wants all of us to pretend we are living in the tenth century in the south of France.

            He even called Hitler a saint. I wouldn’t like to have your side of this coming legal imbroglio. Luckily it’s between two Yalies like us who can have a gentleman’s understanding with each other. To say the obvious, it’s easier in this case to be the prosecutor, I think. Luckily I am one.

Julien- You have got a lock in this case, no question. Maybe I should have been a prosecutor myself, Halsey. At least half of the people I defend are guilty. Many of the other half have done what the prosecutors say but I think the action they take up isn’t and shouldn’t be a crime.

Halsey- I admire your skill at getting them off to walk smiling into the sunset. .

Julien- You have to devise some ingenious ways to get them off when they are obviously culpable, Halsey. It’s made me a better lawyer.

Halsey- I can imagine. you aren’t afraid if some of these more idealistic felons walk the Earth they might come your way with their disposition to take up mayhem?

Julien- Most of the time they are cunning enough to do something else with their lives. I rarely ever have to defend the same perp for the same crime twice.

Halsey- Watt do you want to do about Ezra Pound, Julien? You can’t deny that he committed treason. He broadcast many radio programs for the Nazis. He was happy that Hitler killed six million Jews and knocked off a bunch of homosexuals and Gypsies as an encore.

            He is currently very sympathetic to the Klu Klux Klan and wants to bring back slavery in America. He hasn’t learned anything from his recent rather calamitous harvests either. He is likely to be someone whom one might have to defend a lot more than twice.

Julien- Our government has taken some severe revenge on him, I think. They locked him in a cage like a wild animal. They kept him there on bread and water for a few months. Anyway the sufficient system is not about rehabilitation but punishment. I’m surprised they didn’t just shoot him.

Halsey- That would have been not all that much to our interest, Julien. The American government likes spectacular trials like the one we have just concluded in Nuremberg. We don’t execute people capriciously without a chance for them to defend themselves.

            If one is more cynical about our practice of taking up such tawdry legal theatre we want to feel more pious about dispatching our criminals than the Nazis because we are under the illusion we are more virtuous than an efficient slaughtering machine like the Third Reich.

            That’s why we ran that Nuremberg extravaganza recently, as well why we want to do as much for your client, the inimitable Ezra. We need more reasons than Hitler ever did to eliminate our betrayers and enemies.

Julien- I understand that. In fact that’ why I want to avoid any trial at all. I know what he’ll say if we have one. He still thinks Hitler should have won the war, the world would be better off with, Jews, Irish folk and colored people and that if he can figure out how to do it, once he gets out of the slammer he’d like to join the Klu Klu Klan to help White Anglo-Saxons keep down people whom he regards as not truly human or natural slaves.

Halsey- That’s what he would say? Well, you don’t have to put him on the stand. We can still hold the trial while he sits in the room but says nothing. I’m sure you’ve thought of that, of course.

Julien- Ezra unfortunately is not the sort of person who will be silent anywhere. I couldn’t bring it off, Halsey. He’d insist on doing a whole lot of talking, indicting himself. In fact I need to keep him from the public altogether. He will sink himself as soon as he opens his mouth more quickly than any lawyer can save him. You are talking about the electric chair, am I right? You want to turn him into a fried egg.

Halsey- If we can prove he committed treason, not hard to do, he probably will be sentenced to death, Julien. George Washington sued to hang people for less. Benedict Arnold had to escape to England to escape a hanging. Nobody offered him clemency. We let off Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee because Abraham Lincoln was a compassionate man, perhaps in retrospect to a fault. We normally execute our traitors.

            Ezra I’m afraid wasn’t just a spy though he was  that too; he actively promoted the Nazis who wanted to kill us all with his radio broadcasts. If he could he probably would have brought down the United States. Should we free him and give him another chance to do so?

            I don’t think that would be a popular verdict, Julien. I have to say I don’t enjoy you wriggling on the hook trying to come up with any sort of defense for somebody as evil as Ezra You deserve better in our choice of clients. If I were you I’d guess you’re thinking you could have him declared insane and locked up in an asylum. That’s of course hah I would petition for, Julien, if I were you.

Julien- Your arguments, Halsey,  have a Ciceronian inevitability. I don’t have much choice, do I? I can’t say he didn’t do it. I can’t even claim that he didn’t work as hard as he did to destroy America or that he still doesn’t want to do it and I have to admit he would try to do it if he weren’t locked up. I haven’t got any other defense but insanity.

Halsey- I should tell you that I have been getting a lot of telephone calls from people you might call American intellectuals asking me not to try him because he is a great poet and critic. They never argue that he should be free to do what he can to do in America but I suspect they don’t like America all that much themselves and aren’t entirely unhappy with his craziest opinions. I could be wrong.

Julien- That’s interesting. They are putting some muscle on you, I suppose?

Halsey- Quite a bit of muscle, I’m afraid. Some of it is coming from Robert Lowell, a poet who regrettably also insane. He was also a conscientious objector if never quite a traitor. He’s afflicted with manic-depression, narcissism and a pugnacious swagger like Ezra but he is also a Lowell, connected as we say in the Mafia, and will probably never be arrested and thrown into a cage in a public zoo.

Julien- No. as we Yalies know that is a palpable indignity that never happens to the Lowells. Still I don’t envy him his life. It must feel terrifying to be as nuts as he is.

Halsey- I wouldn’t know. I’m only haunted by the dreads of the relatively sane, wealthy and well connected like you . We have no idea of what it is like to be a lunatic if we can guess what it might be like to suffer from relative sanity and a lack of obvious material desperation..

Julien- I know he almost killed his wife. He needs all the presumptive privilege he can get.

Halsey- I don’t think Ezra is quite as psychotic as Robert Lowell, but Robert Lowell is connected of course in a way normal people are not. Then there is the whole of the American college system that has taken a focused interest in Ezra’s difficulties.

            I am also hearing from T.S Eliot W.H Auden, Allen Tate, James Laughlin and rather surprisingly, Robert Frost, that I should free Ezra. presumably to do more of the same.

            They’re all friends, sort of like the conspiracy Ezra of Jews is always talking about. I don’t se it as a conspiracy. Laughlin is a guy from Pittsburgh like Paul Mellon who inherited a lot of money and decided to be a patron of culture. He wrote a little verse himself but maybe more importantly he founded New Directions and published a lot of his friends including Ezra.

            I’ve got to admire Ezra’s capacity to make friends, Julien. They all stick up for him. They go out of their way to try to break him out a loony bin. They might even throw him a buck or an award or two. God, they make up more awards than the Boy Scouts! It’s the American version of being knighted by the Queen.

            Laughlin lived with Ezra and hi wife fr several months in France. They move secretly but they are mostly pretty nice people, they don’t all have the same opinions and maybe most importantly they’re honest about them. Some of them have more courage than their antagonists give them credit for. Do you think it was easy for a Southerner like Allen Tate to praise a lot of Black poets and say anything good about colored people given the Jim Crow society he came from? Robert Penn Warren was all for Black people.

            He must have been snubbed by a lot of fancy folks at Vanderbilt. Can you imagine the punishment he took from other Southerners he hung with to make that stand? We may look at Robert Lowell as something of a privileged lunatic, which he is, but he suffered as much or more as anybody suffers who’s an accountant and not crazy.

Julien- That’s why I’m defending Ezra. I sure as hell know he suffers. He isn’t in the end a mortal all that different from me.

Halsey-Yeah, that’s why you took the case, isn’t it?

Julien- Yes. I think it must be very frightening to go crazy. Ezra knows he’s nuts, Halsey. He’s defensive about it but he guesses the worst about himself. It must fill him with dread. It has to terrify him. I know that sanity is pretty fearful too. Lunacy is much worse.

Halsey- We don’t know that though, do we, Julien? Being really bonkers probably comes upon us if at all as a relief.

Julien- Maybe. Sometimes what we know and are wise about is too painful to bear. I do know from my practice that anybody who is arrested and spends couple of days in a holding pen asks himself inevitably how he got there. It’s some nugget of tardy sagacity everybody in a prison shares. Then he wonders how he can get out out of the slammer and what he has to take up never to come back. Mostly it’s discretion and silence. Character is usually harder to change than accent and manners.

Halsey- Yet people we both know do go in and out of jails all the time. I ought to know; I put them there.

Julien- They do. They don’t know how to do otherwise.

Halsey- You think Ezra understands what got him in a lock up or how to avoid staying there”

Julien- He does sometimes, Ezra is not stupid, and he can be very charitable to people he likes. He has a lot of good qualities. None of them kept him out of being locked up in a loony bin. but mostly he doesn’t want to change himself. He’s full of grandeur, Halsey. He thinks he should be the sage counsel to the world’s kings.

            It might be one of the burdens of being a genius; I don’t know. One is born with a modicum of intelligence and yet isn’t a noble or half a god. If one isn’t connected like Robert Lowell one is a beggar or some kind of rogue.

             Ezra had the sense to marry well. He’s lived off women. Most inhabitants of psychotic wards are written off by everyone who might have loved them and stood for them, not Ezra. His friends and lovers take a beating from their own colleagues to stick up for them even though they know he’s guilt of treason and worse. His dark sides and rages against conspirators nobody has ever met seems to have bewildered his intimates as well as Ezra. I would speculate he seems like most paranoiacs to need an invisible enemy. Instead he got some visible ones with guns who put him in the slammer.

Halsey- I suspect it might be more his lack of connections. If T.S. Eliot had done the same things he would have walked into the sunset. Ezra was never a Harvard graduate or a Yalie. He only knew people like himself, mavericks with a lot of talent who weren’t anymore connected than he was.

            If he had gone to Harvard like Eliot and acted a little more genteel he would have been taken up by the British as kind of poetic Ronald Coleman preaching the gospel to the barefoot Hottentots. Instead he had a rural Pennsylvania accent and acted as if he would never could pick the proper gooseberry scone to nibble on at a high tea.

Julien- still Paul Mellon is taking him up as much as he can. He thinks he can position him to the rabble as a patriot.

Halsey- Paul has that opinion but unlike Ezra he hasn’t got any delusion that he is something or somebody more or other than he is. In a Bughouse sometimes three people claim to be Napoleon or Jesus. Maybe at most one of them might be whom they way they are, maybe none of them are, but the other two are lying. You might ask why considering that both Napoleon and Jesus had very difficult lives and were locked up one might be a fool to try to emulate them. Still they both even in a crazy house have managed to escape oblivion. That is the hidden fear of even a fake Jesus or Napoleon.

            Paul is powerful enough to do that, at least with the toady Academic crowd directly or indirectly on his payroll. He is the real Jesus and Napoleon; he is the authentic one and he’s not caged in an insane asylum either. Paul unlike Ezra and us is a guy who can back up his grandeur and assorted caprices. His father was after all the de facto emperor of America. He wouldn’t know what to do if he were flirting with oblivion. Who knows, maybe all character is just a set of bad habits.

            If he says Ezra is a patriot and a savant, a lot of people paying their bills on his pad will agree with him.

Julien- He can’t find anybody else to be a savant? we smut be one bunch of morons in America.

Halsey- There are many of them but unfortunately these days we suspect them of having secret populist sympathies. After all the real enemy of any empire is its subjects that’s why we try to bribe them all when we can’t seduce them with cushy college jobs, kill or incarcerate them. We may end up with a totally corrupt country but we are a wealthy one if classically immersed in our vices. Ezra has none.

            I would suspect Paul has heard from T.S. Eliot and some of his more artificially English friends that Ezra should be part of the American intellectual cadre that Harvard present James Conant thinks is going to run much of the world in the next decade or so.

            You remember Conant of course. He invented a kind of mustard gas nobody could ever recover from. Don’t forget, Paul’s father was the de facto king of the United States for about twelve years; ruling countries and empires isn’t an unfamiliar ambition to him.

            It might even be one of Paul’s virtues. It’s a big world. Somebody’s got to do it. Propel set up committees, Congresses and popular votes to hide their own discreet taste for despotism. Andrew Mellon, Paul’s father, was never elected to anything. Nobody outside Washington even knows about him.

Julian- Some people are good at that. I wish I were.

Halsey- Me too. Otherwise I’d been whopping with my own pad, no? Paul did it from England. He can’t get enough of English racehorses and boiled beef. Still he is a kind of American patriot without being any kind of democrat.

            I think Paul must have asked himself; why can’t my own country run a cultural empire as well as an army fill of Irishmen like my wonderful and urbane English friends? Then he talking in a cordial but sheathed way to some of his pals at the track about how he could do it and whom he could do it with. I’m sure that’s what we’re looking at.

Julien- I think it’s an enormous mistake. This country is mostly people who are not Yalies or graduates of Harvard. they don’t want to be either. They fought a war once against an elite like that, didn’t they? They’ll start a revolution of some sort, maybe cultural and not military, again against a bunch who are trying to make them a half defrocked British colony. It won’t stick beyond a few college campuses, filled with gaggles of educated chumps.

Halsey- Maybe you ought to talk to Paul and tell him his stratagems are mistaken. You’re both Yalies. You can do that.

Julien- It’s too late for that, I’m afraid. You say the machine is more or less in place. I think it might be too late for that.

Halsey- I agree. Paul as we know isn’t stupid. He might be misinformed. He doesn’t know anyone all that much outside of his class. He might think that’s all there is out there. In any case he’s lined up some very talented people, none of whom are happy with populism for various reasons.

            Of course there all one step from the gutter themselves, children of ramblers and scramblers; they don’t want to know or remembrance that. they’re all like Oscar Wilde, looking to be lord of something or other, any barony will do. Allan Tate and Robert Penn Warren are the authentic intellectual Southerners. the Fugitives, they call themselves. So is John Crowe Ransom. He’s got all the Anglophiles of an imaginary England and the grandsons of the Confederacy in place.

Julien- I don’t see a country of rednecks and assorted crackers not to mention religious dissenters out in Utah and cowboy populists responding too sympathetically to either Ezra or T.S. Eliot. Maybe I’m an innocent.

Halsey- I don’t think you are. In fact I sue pct you’re right. I think this whole memento is going to produce a love of blue down home vulgarity we are never going to recover from. Then Paul’s grandsons will hire impostors try to learn to imitate it. We’re going to have a plethora of fake etudes in filth. Well. why not? It’s better than Hitler. No question, Still, what if anyone is Pauls opposition? 

 Julien- None. Blue collar people in America don’t expect anything else from their government.

,

Halsey- true, but Paul Mellon isn’t leading a bunch of spas and apostles of treason. Of course they have their military bases over the whole of the Ivy League like us, Vanderbilt, Kenyon College and even the University of Iowa, believe it or not. They’re intellectual base is Princeton. That’s Dulles brothers territory. Still they’re idealistic people who have some common opinions.

            In a way they think like Ezra. Unfortunate they see humanity as a bunch of militarily organized groups under autocratic discipline for their common interests, not a loosely connected gaggle of folks most of the time squabbling with each other. Of course most of the time they have the same enemies. Tate isn’t an Anti-Semite; he taught at Brandies, he championed Karl Shapiro and is more of a genteel type like Eliot. Tate snubbed plankton Hughes socially yet he wrote very sympathetically about Black poets; he’s a guy straddling a live wire, you might say.

Julien- They all want to be Athenian aristos in a slave republic, don’t they? Still Tate is a very talented man. Mable he thinks he’s part of some secret Rosicrucian nobility.

Halsey- Well if you want to have a society with people in it who are arbiters of aesthetics and taste they are sadly the best we’ve come up with. Maybe it’s paltry. Maybe they’re excessive or wrong about a lot of things. Maybe we don’t do it s well as England does. Still it’s better to have somebody try to be makers of a world they themselves can live in better with all their limitations, bigotry and vanity if they aren’t Lorenzo di Medici than to be run by Jim Fisk and Jay Gould. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with making money but it is monkishly narrow to confine one[s mortality to acquire it endlessly, don’t you think?They are are the resident poets of an oligarchy if they can’t join any court.

Julien- Tate and Warren are pretty good people. They both stood up for the vulgar and poor in their way. If Tate was a racist he never quite got out from under a racism he never invented, They’re of course the more liberal bunch in that crowd. They give each other prizes and get each other jobs.

            It’s Pauls’ way of doling out money to foundations tax free. The cash all comes from him. Tate taught at Princeton. Warren’s of course a Yalie like us. They all made a living on Kenyon College in Ohio. That’s one of their Midwest bases. You hung out with Warren a few times at Yale. He’s a Yalie like us.

Julien- I did. I didn’t think he was all that liberal. Maybe he was. I could be i was listening to his accent, I don’t know.

Halsey- Well, maybe he isn’t; nothing is for sure; they all get published and they are the only poets who get into print in America.

Julien- I’ve wondered about that.

Halsey- He and Robert Penn Warren travel in the same company. Still they’re all very good. They should be published and publicly available. They are Southern poets who may have come personally from poor White trash and failed businessmen themselves but they think they’re think they’re an

Halsey- Sure. They teach at the same places Allen Tate thinks like Ezra that the Back people are inferior. He’s an open genteel racist. Ezra was a man with similar opinions to many of them but he had no connections. He didn’t go to Yale. We did, Julien. We’re more powerful than Ezra. We might be crazy and a traitor as he is but nobody is gong to lock us up for it. In fact we’re sitting here debating whether Ezra should live or die. Isn’t that power enough? All Ezra could come up with for champions was Mussolini and Hitler. we can count on Paul Mellon.

Julien- Yet now Ezra can look to our friend Paul. He’s been elevated.

Halsey- As long as Ezra can be of use in standing for the American empire in spite of himself he’ll do okay even though he needs to sequestered somewhere . James Conant wants the Academic curriculum to be mostly all of Ezra’s friends. Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, the whole crew.

Julien- Not anybody American and democratic, any of them. I get the picture.

Halsey- Yeah,  It’s a sorry bunch, I must say. Eliot is given all sort of prizes and awards by our discreet elite though he hates this country and democracy as much as Pound does in his genteel way ; he’s a snob and racist who couldn’t bare Irishman in particular. Allan Tate was never happy with the loss of the Civil War by the Confederacy and possibly to his credit, said so.

            I can’t make out Auden at all. Hitler would have killed him for being gay and having a Jewish lover. I guess Auden thinks because he’s English and has a great talent he can do anything, Even when he lives in America in New York, he can play the English card.

            He hates lesbians for some reason and flaunt his own recondite sexual tastes but he get jobs nobody else can touch. He’s written two produced opera libretti. Can you imagine anyone else thinking he could get an opera on anywhere in America? In a way he’s very snobbish for an old Communist. Of course Americans like Paul Mellon fawn all over him. Paul would like to be a fake Englishman like Eliot just as Auden is an ideal fake American.

            Ezra would never aspire to be either one. He was always a cracker barrel rural crank at heart; he always will be..

Julien- Auden is talented. He might be a great poet.

 Halsey- He’s very politically fashionable, Julien. In the 30s he was also a Communist, then he was some kind of 10th century Catholic. Hes got an obsession with Provencal France like Ezra.

            Believe me, if Ezra had more connections than he ever did he’d be getting prizes from Congress or Yale and Harvard like these guys instead of being locked up like a rabid wolf in a loony bin.

Julien- What about Robert Frost? Doesn’t he pose as a guy who just came off the farm with a rusty hoe and wants to be left alone by his neighbors?

Halsey- Yeah. It’s all a posture. I know him. He’s as politician in a cut throat world with a mind like Al Capone. Well, let him pose. Frost is a good poet. So is Eliot. Too bad he has a particular hatred for Irishmen. It’s no so good in American colleges the day thank to him to be Irish and have the name Sweeney. A lot of Irishmen have changed their name from Sweeney to McTeague.

            Eliot is actually not a bad guy if his life is a mess. A lot of them have talent. They are a kind of relic of the Tories that our founders tried but never were able to get rid of, a cadre of post medieval autocrats who despise democracy as much as Pound does, can’t stand people of color and or any White ethnics including Italians, Greeks or Jews, can’t stand Irishmen or Catholics much either, and would have liked to have stayed tied not to the real England which is now a socials democracy run more or less on our own Hamiltonian principles, but an imaginary empire of endless provinces if only in their fecund mind that nearly all our country was happy to get rid of.

Julien- I’m aware of that crew. After all I’m an American college graduate.

Halsey- You’re more than that, Julien. You’re a Yalie. People from Harvard, Yale and Princeton have been running this country since the Civil War, at least as much as anyone can run it. I think there’s a clandestine contract between hinterlands Americans and Ivy Leaguers to let the stuffy New England bunch run the government and steal what they can, otherwise leave them alone. The Paul Mellons n the other hand look to invent a world of elitists like the late George Third had think they’re patriots.

Julien- You might be right. Every government is a limited government.

Halsey- Yes, they are all of that whether we like I or not,no? The Mellons ran America under Paul Mellon’s father Andrew under the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations; why shouldn’t they run it now? He was after all the shadow emperor once. Andrew Mellon was effectively the king of America until Roosevelt get rid of him. They are of course very conservative people.

Julien- I heard they were sometimes bankers. I thought Ezra didn’t like bankers.

Halsey- Ezra doesn’t know who Mellon is. Mellon wouldn’t want him to know. Ezra couldn’t guess that the Mellons run everything including Old Overhill, a whiskey distillery. He;s a rural quack; he can’t even find the right conspiracies.

             Mellons made very good booze going way back. No harm in that, of course; George Washington was a big whiskey manufacturer. He specialized in fruit brandies. It’s almost patriotic to sell some kind of moonshine here. I would see Paul Mellon has noticed that Ezra didn’t like Roosevelt much. Roosevelt put Paul Mellon’s father out of power and returned him to the narrow business of only making money. I suspect Paul Mellon has picked up on at least some of Ezra’s politics.

Julien- Well, maybe it wasn’t so bad to be living in an oligarchy run by the Mellons and their friends as long as one was investing and making a bit of money oneself. There were and still are certainly worse places in the world to live.

Halsey- Your family is from Brooklyn, isn’t it?

Julien- I grew up in Brooklyn and I’m glad of it, believe me; I met everybody. You couldn’t be a hater of anybody too much and live in Brooklyn. It’s filled with all the people Ezra finds despicable and sub-human. We were all afraid of each other but we all had friends who weren’t like us tribally. Nobody could think of purging Brooklyn of people from the bottom and even way below the bottom. We all were so far down in the social world we had to look up to see the bottom.

Halsey- Interesting. I went to private schools and never met anyone who wasn’t a moderately desperate social climber. No matter where or from whom one was from our ambition to be imaginary aristos even as children utterly defined us.

Julian- Sometimes it’s a very crass common vice that bonds people to each other. I would say, sully the more seemingly odious the taste, the stronger the adhesion.

Halsey- Well, that was true about our collegiate elevations. I think there’s a difference between wanting to sleep with pigs and hoping to got to Yale.

Julien- Maybe they’re both odious to God. None of these places we came from formed Ezra.

Halsey- I guess you must feel Ezra is one very alien sort of being with your populist background. I can appreciate why you of all people didn’t look forward to defending him.           

Julien- Well, Ezra and Hitler had notions of purity that would have been unthinkable in Brooklyn. These attitudes really aren’t too different than Hitler’s idea of Teutonic racial purity but as Allen Tate admitted once they were enforced in the South if at all by a lot of lynching and violence, not by laws. In Brooklyn we had a chance to observe everybody close up.

            We liked all kinds of folks whether we were happy with their tribe or not. It was different. We had plenty of Protestant and Irish bigots but they were a minority helpless to do anything but complain about everybody else.

Halsey- They do that.

Julien- I’m never surprised that a lot of people who think they’re aristos, only some of whom are poets, are Anti-Semites though they’ve never met any Jews. They do read the Bible. They know Judaism is not for an elite of men of measure.

            It’s for everybody. It’s against slavery. It preaches charity and compassion for the poor and the orphan. It excoriates haughtiness and violence. If you’re an aristo you really can’t have those attitudes. If you think you’re some sort of toff you need slaves to keep you alive. You have to have contempt for people you’re treating like cattle. It alters your character.

Halsey- You make a fine lawyer’s argument for Brooklyn rough equality as a teacher of elevated Platonic morals, Julien. Maybe the whole derisiveness should be like Brooklyn.

Julien- Maybe it is. This is a cosmos of assorted life forms from insects to clams. Halsey, my Brooklyn had everybody. We had Irish, Italians, Jews and Black people who came up to work in the Navy Yard during the war, we also had a sprinkling of old Protestants from the 19th century who ran the libraries. And some shabby genteel Academics who never quite climbed out of the twelfth century.

            They think they’re fossilized provincial Europeans. They’re unhappy most of all that the twelve century lasted only a hundred years.

Halsey- That’s the bunch I’m talking about. Well, you managed to survive them.

Julien- Barely.

Halsey- You did better than me. I went to Choate like Paul. We spend our lives afraid of the mob.

Julien- So did I till I found out I was one of the mob. .

Halsey- They want to give Ezra the Bollingen Prize for commuting treason. Do you know what the Bollingen Prize is? Paul Mellon made it up last year. He named it. He also got Congress to take a hand in administering it.

            That means he has a plan. He wants to give it to Ezra. He thinks if Congress give Ezra an award they won’t fry your client.

Julien- That won’t last long if Mellon gives it to Ezra. Congress is filled with patriots. They’ll drop it.

Halsey- I gurus they will. I can’t make out Paul’s stratagems at at ll,frankly. What the hell anyway is this goddamned Bollingen Prize he invented? Paul’s an Anglophile. He’ll give after Ezra to anybody in the college system to cover his tracks to anyone in the system who promotes England and doesn’t like America outside of a few islands of imaginary cemetery culture. Walt Whitman if he were alive would never get it.

            I would imagine Paul’s invented Bollingen Prize is something like the other tatters of a long gone Tory immortality machine they heap on each other as the Immortals do in France. In any case they are telling me I might be dealing with some indemnity from their prestigious ranks were I to put the unrepentant Ezra in the electric chair for his wickedness.

            Tell me, do you think Ezra really believes everything he says he does? You’ve interviewed him; you ought to know.

Julien- I suspect he’s more ambivalent about his opinions than he lets on. You only read his manic phases. He’s depressed and silent a lot of the time. Of course being in jail can inspire one to some deep ontological despair but I think we only get to see half of Ezra: the least appetizing half.

            He swaggers; he’s full of himself. He has when flush with pugnacious afflatus an air of certainty one would expect to find in a classical mad monk.

            You remember when the arrested him he said he wanted to send a letter to Roosevelt telling him what to do. He things he’s the emperor of some modern Ruritania. We all are like him or want to be like him to a degree. Ezra’s delusional. He’s never met a rich Jew in his life.

            He doesn’t know a single banker. He’s always talking about numinous enemies that don’t exist the way novitiates used to babble about the devil. He thinks poets are unobtrusive mahatmas issuing divine testimony from the upper clouds.

            It’s at bottom trivial madness. Look, Halsey, a man is tried in court for what he does, not his inner life. I can’t defend any of it in a courtroom. I want to make some kind of settlement with you that will keep him alive because that’s the best I can do for him. I can’t mount a defense that will let him walk.

Halsey- we both know that. You’re not offended all that much by his hatred of Jews, I presume. Otherwise you would have turned down the case.

Julien- I certainly don’t like his Anti-Semitism. Since I come from Brooklyn I know what Jews have done and are doing I find a lot of his opinions not so much evil as insane. If Jews ever were running any kind of conspiracy we would have had had the misfortunes we have had. No Jew ever did run one. It’s all phantasmagoria.

            Still he does represent a kind of tribal and rural fear of any organization including the American government that might interfere with their lives. That dread pf a secret autocracy is not going to go away, Halsey. Ezra is a rural Pennsylvania inheritor of those unfortunate prejudices. I accept that.

Halsey- You don’t think much of the argument that he may be a great poet and therefore shouldn’t be tried for treason.

Julien- Frankly I don’t think he is one. He is close to impenetrable as a writer generally. He gives bad a name to obscurity. If Academics want to try to decipher his opacities as if they were garbled wisdom from an oracle that’s their private business; I sure as hell wouldn’t want to do it.

            How wise can a man be who can’t make the fair case for his own freedom? Maybe he wants to be locked up. I accept that liberty is the franchise to commit treason, suicide, do anything at all because these actions frankly are irrefutably built into Nature. Still your job is to set limits on freedom, not to push it to its frontiers as the Marquis de Sade did.

            My work is to oppose you but I can’t say I want to live in a world where many of our laws against murder and theft are absent. Des that make me an advocate of local despotism?I don’t think so.

Halsey- Interesting. I guess at bottom Robert Lowell, , Alan Tate and Hugh Kenner are calling me to claim otherwise. 

Julien- What do they say?

Halsey- They say that Ezra’s a very nice man who is a little demented. They claim he’s only trivially and accidentally fill of spite and malice.

Julien- Well, he does have some good qualities. He has charm ad he is very intelligent. He’s not as smart a he say he is but nobody is that smart. He doesn’t really read or speak Chinese at all, only knows enough Italian to get along in the street, knows nothing about economics and politics, lets on that he is a composer when he can’t read music, and for an encore has all the classical quietism of a racist and paranoid schizophrenic.

            He’s had at least one nervous breakdown where he couldn’t functions at all or make any sense of anything. He’s even written about it.

Halsey- Those are unquestionably heavy and crushing debits.

Julien- Even his perceptual notions of what poetry should be is a bit n the meretricious side. He claimed to be the founder of modern free verse but he really isn’t; Stephan Crane and Walt Whitman were. He did however push those ideas to a lot of people who had never heard them before. Every one of this ideas has numinous enemies he has to denounce much as most paranoiac schizophrenics feel they are being persecuted by somebody or something.

            All of his theories including the poetical ones are based on a war zone model of a little band of battling and always contentious literary warriors clearing out the infestations of the Philistines.

Halsey- Well, being excessively pugnacious either in or out of literature isn’t always the trait of a lunatic; it just shows some suicidal defect in character.

Julien- That’s true. To pick up your prior Ciceronian reference, Halsey, let us say that Ezra is in fact a great poet and critic, that he knows all the languages he claims to have mastered and is an expert on the virtues of tenth century Provencal life. Do we give him privileges for those reasons including the right to take up treason?

            That would create a two tiered society run by an elite whose claim to be above the law would be that they can turn out a fair run of anapestic verse or they are incurably bonkers. W we will never have an amendment to the Constitution gives poets and schizophrenics that privileged franchise, Julien.

            I don’t see ever having a license from God to be a baron in a ruling elite in our society.

Halsey- No, we might one day be ruled by generals but never by poets. Privilege comes only with the means of pure force, not the talent for spinning out a competent audaciousness haiku.

Julien- Yet you are getting telephone calls from a lot of people who maybe at bottom think otherwise.

Halsey- Well, plainly our friends in the nether purple clouds didn’t see anything wrong with promoting Eliot and Pound as their twin popes in our colleges. As I remember there was a rather chilling absence of democratic writers of any kind pushed by those shabby genteel professors when we went to Yale . We never mentioned Whitman or Stephan Crane.

Julien- You can see where all this is leading, can’t you? Nobody is going to produce an elite of English Tories in this free popular republic. When they try to do it they are going to inspire a lot of enemies among people who previously were shrugging bystanders.

Halsey- You think so? Interesting.

Julien- Look what ‘s happened in Germany after the Nuremberg Trials. Ohne mich is their credo. Without me. One can’t be more anti-fascist than that.

Halsey- Well, perhaps we can bear a more inclusive and moderate fascism better than you might think.

Julien- Maybe. It’s a chilling thought, isn’t it?

Halsey- Do you know where most of these telephone calls are coming from, Julien? From Yalies, particularly Paul Mellon. Do you know who he is?

Julien- Of course. He’s Andrew Mellon’s son and Thomas Mellon’s grandson, , one of the richest and most powerful guys in America, and a very active Yalie alumna.

Halsey- That’s right. Paul Mellon has a focused interest in not turning Ezra into a fried egg.

Julien- Why?

Halsey- I can only guess. Of course I’ve talked with Paul. His father was the most powerful man in America under Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Presidents came and went but Andrew Mellon stayed on his throne. He told them all what to do. They were empty folk; they wanted to know.

            Paul Mellon is I would assume a very conservative Republican who hated Roosevelt like his father. He’s more deft and invisible. He’s set up an organizational called the Bollingen Foundation, ostensibly a group that wants to promote Carl Jung’s ideas and sell his books.

            Bollingen by the way is a medieval castle in Jung’s home town in Switzerland. .

 Julien- I’m getting confused. Why would Paul Mellon be interested in Jung? He’ s sort of a mystic dualist psychologist and philosopher. A pretty hermetic guy too. I can’t imagine Jung and Paul Mellon having a casual conversation over a beer much less getting into an alliance.

Halsey- That’s right. Neither can I. I think Paul set up Jung as a front for what he really wanted to do with this phony Bollingen Foundation. He’s also offering prizes to assorted American poets. I’s a sort of deceptive moderately right wing operation that is cozy with Allen Tate and Robert Lowell but I can tell you that Paul Mellon isn’t a guy anymore than his father was who listens to the counsel of other people about what to do.

            I think Paul set up this foundation to give a prize to Ezra. In other words, to spring for some tax free money to put in Ezra’s empty pocket. He wants to legitimatize him, get Ezra freed. He thinks Ezra can be of use to him. That’s my take on the whole caper.

Julien- I’m starting to see why I got appointed as Ezra’s lawyer and you as his prosecutor. We’re both Yalies like Paul. That means we might owe a favor or two to Paul Mellon. I’m still bewildered, Halsey. What possible utility could a traitorous paranoid quack like Ezra have for a fancy guy like Paul Mellon?

Halsey- Paul thinks he can do anything. Money does often produce that psychosis. Mellon wants to make Ezra legit along with T. S Eliot. The twin orthodox popes of a new shamanism in the coming American empire.

Julien- He thinks he can do that? Ezra committed treason. He’s in a loony bin.

Halsey- Paul Mellon was born rich; he probably thinks he can conjure demons, Julien. It’s the cure of wealth.

            We should thank God we’re spared some kinds of lunacy, Julien. It’s not our skill to t look into the inner life of somebody like that.

            All we have to know is that he did set up a foundation, got Carl Jung to front for it, not a bad guy if a little iffy on Hitler, certainly not any kind of anti-Semite, and set the whole thing up to give Ezra some legitimacy if only as a poet, not as a politician.

Julian- Well, Paul is a heavy hitter, Halsey. His caprices show up in a lot of quiet Congressional laws. He can do much more to us if we don’t ls tine to him than kick us out of the Yale Alumni Association.

Halsey- That’s true. He did manage to get both of us in place to protect and defend Ezra. That’s a sign of invisible but real power.

Julien- I’m impressed. I never suspected all the manipulations you’re talking about, Halsey. I guess I’m an innocent.

Halsey- You don’t have enough information. Paul is an expert on whom he can bribe to do what he wants. One learns that skill when one has servants. He is the principle donor not only to Yale but many colleges all over America, one of them Vanderbilt, another Kenyon College where he established the Kenyon Review for poetry with his lackey John Crowe Ransom pushing that direction at that spa. Colleges all operate on patronage.

            That’s Paul’s game. He’s like the old nobles that way. They get it a scad of ducats from people like Paul or if they’re state colleges from the government. Paul had the sine to realize that if he were such a generous donor he could make the colleges the bases for creating a whole American middle class that would respond amicably to his dictates.

            He’s also thinking of putting the army on the same campuses too. Even if you’re doing nothing it never hurts to have the army on your side.

Julien- What’s the deal with the army? We’ve got a big one with no enemy. He doesn’t want them in the  the common labor market. We might have another Depression.

Halsey- Paul’s thought of all that, believe me. He’s talked it over with the Dulles brothers. John Foster wants them to take over the old military basis of the British, French, Dutch and so on. Allen Dulles is a specialist on Hispanic countries; he and John both worked for the United Fruit Company and Anaconda Copper going back to the First World War. They’re both Princeton loyalists like Woodrow Wilson. A lot of heavy thinkers like Albert Einstein live there. 

            Allen was our OSS chief of course. Both of them worked for Sullivan and Cromwell, the international bankers with offices in Berlin once. Allen is always talking about the “good Germans”. Maybe he’s right. I do know he wants to run Latin America through Catholic colonels. He has plans to take over the opium trade in Vietnam and Cambodia, maybe Afghanistan.

            They’re both epicureans who like their expensive wines and never overlook the stray women in the vicinity but they do have a Protestant piety that can be at first a little bewildering. Foster has a more subtle Bismarck approach to his politics. He likes invisible economic domination with no standing army.

            The army itself wants to run a bunch of colonial wars in Asia., the kind nobody wins or quite loses. Then the corrupt managerial class the army sets up comes here and opens some excellent restaurants.

            Most of them are Christian converts, Catholics, Presbyterians. Chiang Kai Chek and Syngman Rhee are both Presbyterians or at least they bow the knee to the cross while they’re killing people ; that’s how you know in Asia what their politics might be. Paul doesn’t have any quarrel with any of these ideas. He wants an inclusive cadre of people to run this new empire. He can be very accommodating to his friends. 

Julien- Well, I have to admit he has more of range than I thought when I met him in New Haven. He collects Art the way he acquires smart people. these aren’t all Paul’s ideas. He listens to some pals he has with brains, Julien.

            So does the estimable James Conant at Harvard.  For some reason he has a peculiar respect for poetry and poets I wouldn’t have all that quickly attributed to him. I thought he was more a lover of fast horses.

Halsey- He may think of us all as stallions. I dolt think Paul is a poetry fancier. He thinks poets are intelligent. They influence people as the late and perpetualy young Shelley once said. We do get at Yale a respect for intellectuals generally the rest of the country doesn’t have. We think they can be useful.

Julien- I think he overestimates the effect of any fancy American thinkers and European-type intellectuals at all here. They’re suave folk but, Halsey, nobody listens to them.

Halsey- Let Paul find that out for himself. He is taking some remarkable steps to conceal his muscle I must say. Most of his contribution to the exchequer of all these American colleges are anonymous or through holding companies he set up to conceal his activities.

Julien- I would too. He’s different than his father though. He’s secretive. He’s never held a position in the government. Nobody really knows much about him. H’s made sure of that by running advertisements for his companies in their newspapers. They wouldn’t want to lose his revenue. He’s also not a racist at all. He values Jews and Black folks if only ass well paid servants. He thinks they can be his liveried retinue as well as any of us.

            He’s expanded the role of Ivy Leaguers like the two of us to everybody. We can work for him. He pays very good wages too. I didn’t think Andrew Mellon was eve interested in creating an American intellectual class. Maybe Paul wants to outdo his father in the art of clever management. Paul Mellon is evidently a man who likes to operate more indirectly than his father.

Halsey- He might be imitating God and the angels. They are notably unobtrusive.

Julien- I don’t begrudge him his elevations, Halsey. We have to look up to somebody or something as a model.

Halsey- You’re going to see things like miracles nobody ever did in millennia from Paul The Jews are going to found Israel and have a country again after twit thousand years of humiliation; the Army is going to desegregate itself and pay no attention anymore to color. He is going to take the Old Boys of the OSS and make them into an American Intelligence service: the CIA. He is taking it over with the Dulles Brothers

            The only movement Paul dislikes really is Communism. He doesn’t begrudge them any franchise they claim in the Communist Manifesto. He merely thinks they want to take some wealth and power away from him. He is willing to talk it over with them.

            You might even call him a moderate socialist. His father hated the New Deal; Paul loves it. He says it’s a bunch of excellent reasons for a lot of people to work for him. If they don’t they have a lot to lose.

Julien- Well, if we’re going to be ruled by despotic I guess we couldn’t easily pick a better one.

Halsey- Paul i’s Sarasota invisible as Ezra’s favorite actors taking up worldwide conspiracies. Paul is a forgiving man. A little treason in anybody on a dry day apparently doesn’t faze him. You don’t think English lords weren’t as much betrayers of their country. their king loved Hitler. He gave him the Nazi salute.   

            They wanted to dissolve parliament like the Fuhrer. There were a lot of lords who were complicit in England and would have been put back in autocratic power if Hitler had successfully invaded that country. Still it’s deeper than that, Paul like a lot of rich people who have servants on all levels tries to make use of everybody.

Julien- He might be right about Ezra. I wonder whether Ezra’s radio broadcasts convinced anybody to be a fascist or hate Jews. Who listened to them? Maybe Ezra’s treason was earnest and honest enough but completely trivial.

Halsey- Well, he didn’t’ kill anybody.

Julien- That also gives both of us a reason to get Ezra out of a courtroom and into an insane asylum for a long while. Did you get to hear from Paul Mellon directly?

Halsey- Sometimes. I was contacted mostly by his assistants. Paul Mellon doesn’t do too many things directly, Julien. He’s somebody you notice only as a faint shadow if you know he is in the room at all.

Julien- He didn’t call me. He must think he only needs you to be on his side.

Halsey- He doesn’t have to worry about you much, Julien. He knows you’re an advocate of freedom. For him the less obvious muscle out there the better.

Julien- I know a bit about Paul Mellon from the Yale review. He’s a big fan of horses. He’s lived in England is an Anglophile; he has a vast and idiosyncratic art collection like his father. That of course tells me nothing about him.

Halsey- You don’t have to know more than that about Paul, Julien. It’s enough to savor in a superficial way that he got a famous Swiss psychologist to front for a foundation whose real aim is to put some American poet friends on the pad. I really can’t blame Jung for buying into the operation.

            War isn’t optimal for psychologists. It kills off most of their patients. He might be eating only macaroni with a bit of local Swiss cheese. Whom else would he go to if Paul couldn’t find some utility for his hermetic volumes? It’s hard to get an honest publisher anywhere.

Julien- I don’t want to knock Jung either. I rather like his books. I’ve read some of them. I also think Allen Tate is a very good poet. I like his Ode to the Confederate Dead.

            I don’t even have anything unpleasant to say about T.S Eliot as a poet if otherwise he seems to have been a terrible and miserable human being. I don’t think talent and intelligence have anything to to do with this covert genteel movement to get Ezra our of the bug house.

Halsey- I think we can assume Paul Mellon told his operatives to put Allen Tate and Robert Frost on their pad quietly. Some poets are for sale. Tate and Frost are honorable enough but others will take anybody’s farthing, as the Irish say. Besides that, this whole country is on the take. How many people do you think in America would stay at their jobs if they were paid nothing to be there? They’d all go out fishing.

            How the hell do these poets make a living? They have to have a patron. Then one day the patron asks them for a favor. They can’t say no. Nobody says no to Paul Mellon.

Julien- I feel I’ve been left out of the payoff. Paul Mellon never gave me a dime. He must figure I will do what he wants anyway for nothing.

Halsey- Ask him for a suitable stipend. You’re a Yalie. He’ll come through for you . Paul Mellon is a generous man. He’s never parsimonious with what he has; what he has got is a whole lot of money and power.

Julien- I did meet him at Yale Alumna events, Halsey. I liked him. He had no airs, seemed modest enough, was out to make Yale a better college than it was. I can’t say I blame him for wanting influence and using his cash and natural largesse to get it. Most people who make money only want more money. Paul Mellon is much more ambitious than that. Besides that, he’s likable.

Halsey- I agree. You know, since the Civil War the Mellons have been part of a business elite along with the Fricks,Rockefellers and Morgans that have run this country, at least the eastern half of it. Of course they’re going to want to have a dominant in what this country is and what it does. They won’t do it by force; they prefer bribery.

Julien- I can’t trash them for that. I might even admire them for it. Of course they aren’t exactly fancy folk like the Di Medicis. Maybe they’re moneyed louts doing the best they can.

Halsey- I do know that the Yalies and the Harvard folk have gotten together with the intellectual Princeton crowd to make plan for America that will probably include us.

Julien- Really. What’s the plan?

 Halsey- Whether we like or not we’re building an empire these days, Julien. We don’t know how to do that out of America. We’re experts at getting rid of an empire. Still we have to look to the very people you might find a but on the stuff, elitists and snobbish side to do it.

            That’s why Harvard is giving all those made up awards to T.S. Eliot. That’s why Paul wants to get Ezra a job as a hierophant gris in an intellectual cadre of people opposing Communism.

Julien- This country has no chance of even becoming Communist. Americans are even suspicious of the Boy Scouts.

Halsey- It’s true. Communism is maybe good at best enough for Russia. That’s not the point. They want to fill the middle range of their staff in an empire; they don’t know how to do it. That’s why they look to right wing Englishmen to help them to do it like Paul Mellon’s horse racing friends in London.

Julien- I’m beginning to understand your drift, Halsey. What do they think they can use Ezra for? He’s obviously crazy.

Halsey- Sadly, he’s all of that. I would suspect Paul wants him to be a kind of an exiled high priest of obscure verse. He’s already talked to James Laughlin about putting put a volume of his latest rather obscure verse.

            It’s got Chinese characters like a menu in an authentic noodle emporium. At least I think they’re Chinese. For all I know they’re Asiatic-looking gibberish.

Julien- Interesting. Frankly, I don’t think this country is going to buy into Ezra. they certainly hate the Chinese; I don’t know why. People never love their victims. Maybe they hate noodles too. It’s not his racism or his various other opinions that are fluff and quackery to them.

            They’ve had a lot of quack and drank poets in their time. To them all poets say a lot of a crazy things. It’s that he committed treason. Even T.S. Eliot didn’t quite do that.

Halsey- You don’t much like Eliot, do you? .

Julien- He’s much more dangerous than Pound, He doesn’t seem like a cracker-barrel crank. Besides, he really he really is a very talented poet. He’s great at nihilism.

Halsey- It’s amazing whom God or the devil gives talent to, isn’t it?

Julien- God wouldn’t want to deprive the wicked of inspiration. The devil himself never suffers from lack of it. He’s a long way from St. Louis.

Halsey- What is it you want me to do about Ezra, Julien?

Julien- I want him declared incurably insane. If he is bonkers he is legally unable to be tried for anything. I have four psychiatrists ready to testify that he’s totally a quack, daft, irreparably nuts.

            Of course they’re masters of piling on pious malarkey; nobody knows about the inner life of anybody. I can bring them to a hearing that with your help can bypass any trial and frying machine waiting for him at the end of a prison corridor.

Halsey- I think I can live with some of that. You know, it might be better in this country to be declared bonkers than otherwise. you could take up every crime from arson to murder with impunity. I’m not so happy about what you tell me these American college people one day might be up to.

Julien- One can live with that too. You know I made my early reputation defending conscientious objectors in World War Two. I learned a lot from them, I have to say . They weren’t cowards. They didn’t want to take part in a mass killing that ultimately knocked off a hundred and twenty five million people.

            I got a lot of social snubs and and general notoriety like Allan Tate and Robert Penn Warren for sticking up for Black folk for defending them but along the way I thought maybe they knew something. At the end of the war we have to find the immense cemeteries that would bury all those people.

Halsey- Yeah, a few years later nobody can remember what the war was about any more than they could explain World War One.

Julien- They personally didn’t want to be involved in dressing up in a uniform, getting a gun from their superiors and shooting at strangers. We can all understand that.

Halsey- I felt the opposite; I guess I can. I was in the war like you because I felt I needed to defend my country against fascism. Now you tell me I was fighting for Paul’s country, not my own. Well, at least it isn’t Hitler’s colony. The trouble is that fascism ultimately doesn’t have a military base or a territory.   It’s a hope at bottom for a simple life. We Americans can be fascists as much as the Germans and Japanese. It might even be a relief to be one, Julien. One never has to think too much independently and critically about anything.

Julien- One can’t help being reflective if one is a human being even if one is a philosopher in secret, Halsey. Then one can’t avoid acting on one’s character or one dies of cancer. That’s why fascism is probably not a good idea.

Halsey- We don’t have to worry about that , do we? You realize that Ezra has an ally in Paul Mellon, assuming-he wants to live and be out of the wrong chair or a loony bin. Paul Mellon is your pal too. He wants what you want.

Julien- If Ezra finds out about Paul Mellon he’s going to transfer is conspiracy theories from the Jews to the Mellons, Fricks, Rockefeller and and a whole bunch of our colleagues from Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

            You know, maybe Ezra was right about mysterious organized mass murder. . He just picked the wrong conspiracy.

Halsey- This American movement isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a bunch of people who have money and are more interested in other things more than making more money.

Julien- You’re right. I should praise them for being more like Lorenzo di Medici than Jim Fisk. You’re got a point in saying they have a right like anybody else to be wrong in some of their opinions.

            They have the franchise to be narrow, bigoted, mean spirited and fascist slavers though as you imply Allan Tate isn’t really quite that; he just spirits the logical directions of his opinions and c;aims hes a Roman Catholic.

            I’d even argue that it isn’t so bad to be a second or third class citizen in America run by these people compared to living at all in most places in the world Maybe it’s a good idea that they are keeping their control over a lot of America secret. It might be a step down for them to admit their existence at all much less run for office in the middle of our politics.

Halsey- Well, they aren’t killing anybody.

Julien- I guess they’re smarter than Hitler and Mussolini. They don’t seem to exist so they don’t make any enemies. They don’t need an army. Life is cheaper without one.

Halsey- It might be the stratagem of a lot of shadowy entities including God.

Julien- Ezra might have wrong invisible dragon in the shadows .

Halsey- He still wouldn’t be right. The best any of them can do is put people in jail or try to fry them as some patriots in Congress are thinking of doing to Ezra. Anyone who wants to do anything can do it on this planet if they’re willing to embrace the peril that comes from others who would like them to be silent and humble. There’s no better proof of that than Ezra.

Julien- Well, I think we have a deal. We merely have to convert the news to Ezra and he’ll be spared a lethal moment sitting in the wrong chair. If I were you, I wouldn’t mention who or what is looking out for his extension of life, Halsey. Ezra has a lot of grandeur. He may want to face and insult his Inquisitors. Of course he might be happy that somebody rich and powerful has taken him seriously. That almost never happens to any poet. He is, after all, a poet.

Halsey- Who cares what footstep say or think? Let him suspect the worst.

Julien- Excellent. You’ll find it  on one day if not another. Have we got a deal?

Halsey- Probably. I will have to check with Paul. I think we have an understanding he will be happy with. It won’t be quiche what you want but it will orbit it closely enough, I’d venture.

Julien- What does Paul really want?

Haley- Actually it’s close to what you’re aiming for, Julien. He intended to make General Eisenhower President of Columbia, the university not the country, and then President of the United States.

            Once he does that he will make user Eisenhower has an Attorney General that will not oppose your petition one day to free Ezra, not now but let us say, twelve years from into the pastel future when everybody has forgotten the war and and couldn’t care less whether one insane poet or other was quietly let out of the bug house and dumped elsewhere from a boat docking in faraway Naples.

            Of course if Ezra dies in the loony bin, sad to say, all the better.

Julien- I get you. General Eisenhower though is not an Ivy Leaguer. He’s from Kansas. He graduated from West Point.

Halsey- Paul will make him an Ivy Leaguer. He’s be an Ivy League convert. After several years presiding numinously over an Ivy League school he will seem like one. Reality never has to prove itself. Persuasion is only the genius of illusion.

Julien- Amazing. Paul has more magical powers than any sorcerer.

Halsey- Power may be a form of sorcery. Rousseau implied as much. Shall we have lunch the main dining room in this capacious place and sample the excellent crab cakes they make as cunningly as they do, Julien? This place is not only restful; it has an unobtrusive talent for some moderately delightful epicurean episodes of simple pleasure.

Julien- I like the chowders here as well. They have a gift for such mortal consolations in this place I think one can’t find too often elsewhere near Washington.

Halsey- (standing.). What do you think Ezra is eating now in the loony bin?

Julien- (standing) Some cheap gruel laced generously with magical and prodigal powders of sedation. Its’ the common lunch for the daft they serve in such places.

Halsey- Roosevelt was always known for his compassion for the impoverished and fallen but it hasn’t extended itself to ample and well made cuisine for lunatics.

                        Exit Halsey and Julien.

                                                   Act Two

            A cell in St. Elizabeth’s Insane Asylum. There is a table, a chair in which Ezra sits writing, a sheathe of paper, a few pens and a telephone. As Ezra talks one occasionally hears screams of the insane in the background. A phone rings. Ezra picks it up.

Ezra- Yeah, Ezra here. Who? John Kasper.

            Yeah, I read your letter all right. I can’t get out of here all that easily but if I could i’d be right with you, John, in promoting the Klu Klux Klan. Somebody like you has got to stand for White folks but maybe too many of them like me are in insane asylums.

            It’s not bad here unless you want to take a walk. I get to write at a desk, I’ve got two pens that work, and I can get my mail pretty regularly. I’m not really singled out in being incarcerated in this shabby loony bin; the whole of America is a goddamn insane asylum.

            Yeah, I do get depressed sometimes. Not much happens in thes walls I need to pay much attention to. Still the minutes go by reliably, I have a longing for something to intrigue me here but given the numskulls and lunatics in the place, nothing ever does. I was once a man who had a kind of informal career as an editor of many people of genius. I had a tent too. It was very exciting living in London and Paris, having such friend as I had through of course at that time both they and myself were nobody.

            When you’re in your twenties everybody is nobody. It makes for a lot of rough equality in one’s social company.

            None of us were democrats and loved the common people at all. We were very plainly not one of them, John. There was nothing common about us. We can’t help a mild pique at the vulgar. We certainly lived on nothing . What could we do, sell apples?Hemingway was the only one who had some kind of a job. He was a correspondent for the Toronto Star, whatever that might be. I’ve never been a thousand miles from Toronto; maybe he made it up. Some of us lived off women.

            Hemingway did it. They always picked up the check when he and his girl friends went into a bar. Still it’s not a bad contract. Nobody forces anybody to do anything. They like to have poets around.      A woman thinks when she’s young she can sell her body to some rich fellow and often she does. She gets bored with that or she lossless her looks and decides to pawn the jewels and fur coat, rifle the joint bank account, and get so to speak independent.

            They hire some polite gigolos. There’s nothing more demanding in the bedroom that a middle aged woman with a bit of money, I can tell you.

            The poets get old too. The novelists they discover they can’t make a living from their books even if they get them published though every else in the business seems to be living plushly enough, and maybe they look to the financial world to get a job.

            Eliot became a bank teller to  pay his bills. I suppose he figure as long as people want to deposit and take out money from some place he had a job. Some of them were Commies; more of them were Fascists. They all had a funny notion of what their ideal country should be. I’ve veneer heard of even a country latrine run by poets. They aren’t good managers of anything. They know nothing about plumbing. When the cans can’t flush they shake their heads and move on to the next damned outhouse.

            We all know that the old lords weren’t any good anymore at running anything. They were hiring Irishmen for their army, selling their feudal lands, turning over any detail of their plantations to the locals, eating too much well done boiled roast beef. Their legs were swollen and distorted from the gout, they were choleric; they all had scarlet noses. They did a lot of serious friendly boozing and got hooked on the fancy vino.

            What was left after they passed out and were mumbling shibboleths to themselves as they barfed all over the floor? Hemingway thought it was going to be what he called professionals. It’s all very Commie. Hem was more of a Commie than a lot of people. Maybe whatever it was, a bunch of Jews or commissars, we couldn’t do anything about it.

            While the war was going on, whatever the battles were with real people dying , we might go on lecture tours to the survivors if we get famous enough. Poe, Emerson, Robert Ingersoll did it. It’s a tough life. Strange towns,. stray women, bad booze and a lot of loneliness. Mark Twain made a damn carer of it. I could never do it. I’m not funny like Mark Twain. Some people are born funny. I was created to be earnest about everything,

            England makes sure their poets don’t die in the gutter like Poe or take up eternal sleep in a shabby room in Camden liking like a beggar off his brother like Whitman. Somebody paid to send Keats to Rome. Somebody else springs for the moolah to take care of Swinburne when he was in some extremity from too much laudanum or absinthe. The French government gave a a wad of francs to Stendhal and threw in a maid who’d sleep with him when Stendhal was old, fat and sclerotic. It’s a soft fall there. Maybe that’s French socialism.

            I never figured out what the First World War was about. Somebody with a gun kills some minor Austrian baron and the whole of Europe gets dressed up and attacks each other. You know, three million Frenchman died in that war. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t pique or revenge or some battle of fanatic ideologies.

            I figured it was banks and bankers. Maybe it wasn’t. Who knows? The deaths were real enough, millions of them. I thought it was the Rothschilds. I never met a goddamn Rothschild in my life. I hadn’t a clue about how a banker could start any war. What would he do to get strangers to dress up and kill each other? I couldn’t imagine it. Maybe I was wrong. It was just an opinion like a lot of stuff you hear in bar late at night.

            It’s dammed hard to be a poet in a democracy, John. Maybe I’m lucky to be locked up. I don’t have to look a lot of pity and indifference in the face You never tell anybody in America you’re a poet. They probably think you ‘re about to ask them for some stray change if you ‘ve got it.

            I’ve been plenty poor but I don’t care. The rich just take a different kind of beating, believe me. I’ve know a few of them: Merrill, Laughlin. They don’t walk down Memory Lane an more than anybody else with a smile.

            Having servants or slaves makes you dependent on their skills in a way that can fill you with stark panic. Lack of them means you can’t get a hell of a lot done. Go figure.

            How the hell did I get into politics? Well, I ‘ve got a lot of opinions about a hellova lot of things, I can tell you. We’re all in politics if we’re alive, John. We can’t help it. It started long ago when the king of Og attacked the king of Magog. They both needed an army.

            Some of them thought they could use an ineluctable cadre who couldn’t get enough of Og or Magog and we’ve all been politicians or warriors ever since. How did Richard Wagner who wrote operas become a politician? He realized he couldn’t influence the world much by writing operas. Whether you can do it or not with an army and priesthood is another story, but at least in those bloody and metaphysical fields some intrepid people are giving it a try.

             I wish I were genteel and Harvard-connected like Tom Eliot; I’m not. Eliot’s really from St. Louis but he learned after years of practice the right way to drink tea. I only was schooled in the art of guzzle down rotgut moonshine. It’s a general American prejudice that if I don’t do an imitation of some British thespian himself doing an actor’s impressing of some porcine toff who snubbed him at a cast party you’re a goddamned poltroon and a bum.

            Well, frankly I might be all of that and more, John. It’s just lack of connections and not bowing the knee to the right lieges. That’s what landed me in the slammer. We barefoot bums from P.A. are always at home doing a long stint in the hoosegow. The prisons would go out of business if if weren’t for us.

            Yeah, I’m cooped up in a crazy house, not quite a jail. Nobody wants to try me for treason though. Why is it a crime to be for the best and most honorable people in in humanity Is it a felony to look to do in a country of sub-humans, tramps, headless horsemen, sloths and degenerates? Most people west of the Hudson want poets to write about daffodils.         

            I’ve got nothing to say about daffodils, John. They’re nice flowers, John, but I can take them or leave them. I’m not really in any political game. If I were I wouldn’t be in this damn place. I wanted to be close to Mussolini but I intuited, maybe wrongly, that he didn’t like me. He was always polite to me of course. Way back when I thought a lot of Lenin. I’m not a Commie. He had something decisive about him, didn’t he?

            Yeah, Hitler was a kind of saint, John. Saints don’t need my advice.

            We poets in America are socially something a bit lower than insects. Let me ask you, how many poets do you see Roosevelt ever listening to?Maybe he reads Joyce Kilmer or verses on greeting cards. I like your idea of a White Citizen’s Council that protects our superiority. This damned country needs poets and hasn’t got them.

            When they have any sense they trundle off to England , France or Italy. At least they can take an impersonal beating from somebody else’s problems. I certainly feel I’m smarter than a whole lot of homo imbeciles. I’m sure you do too.

            Still, frankly, I’ve had a stupid life, John. My patrons were very parsimonious rich English fascists who were lucky they weren’t hung upside down themselves like my not so friendly friend Benito. They were all traitors to England. They were working for Hitler. That’s why England finally dumped them and went Jewish-Socialist. My patrons are all out power now. they sit in Jamaica and drink good gin. All they have between them and dropping dead in the street is a ton of feudal money.

            (There is a loud knock on the door.”

            I am apparently going to be graced with a few formal guests, john. Talk to you later. If I ever get out of here I will join you in a lynching or two if I can find an easy to ride white horse.

            ( A sound a key turning in a lock. Enter Halsey and Julien, looking wary and guarded.)

            My lawyer and my prosecutor. I’m honoree. I thought you two never talk to each other.

Julien- Hardly. We do nothing else but settle most cases among ourselves, Ezra. that’s why it’s important in America to pay for good representations. Otherwise you get betrayed by a sleepy and corrupt lawyer on the pad  paid on time. Ninety seven percent of the cases in America never go to trial. Nobody knows that. it’s a bigger secret than the way to make an atomic bomb. The other three percent may never  be tried either because all the litigants are dead or broke and the prosecutor wants to leave them alone.

            If it weren’t for our cordiality the whole justice system would collapse. the judges all come from clubhouses fixing traffic tickets. the clerks are all cousins of the politicians, looking for a commodious snooze. Everything is run in America by a few people who have assistants with a telephone.

Ezra- I’m not surprised. It beats shooting people doesn’t it? At least you think so. I’d offer you a chair but there’s only once chair here. Sorry, genteelness.

Halsey- We don’t mind standing.

Ezra- I’m surprised you two are on as cordial as you re. One of you puts people in jail; the other gets you out of the pokey.

Julien- We’re like God and the devil, Ezra. We always hang out together in the same place.

Ezra- Well, what can I do for you two? You can’t get me locked up. I’m already in a cage . Of course I wouldn’t mind leaving it.

Julien- I’m your lawyer, Era and I think Halsey and I have come up with a deal that’s the best I can do for you. We can’t deny you did what you did.

Ezra- I would never deny it. I’m proud of it. You know, in the end of Hitler and Mussolini had won the war I’d be a high officer in the administration that hired both of you two. The only thing that stands between me and freedom is a lost war.

Halsey- You don’t have any rue about anything, do you, Ezra?

Ezra- I don’t like being here. I suppose you might call that regret.

Halsey- Would you like to be elsewhere? We might be able to arrange that if you go along with our negotiated agreement, Ezra,

 Ezra- Watt do you have in mind.?Would you like to stage a bug house breakout t? Give me a ladder to climb over the walls, elude the machine guns and make my way to freedom?

Halsey- You dot understand politics as we practice it very much, do you, Ezra? You did commit treason. You’re lucky you’re not strutting as the fature act in a gallows dance on a gibbet  built specially for you near the Washington Monument.

Ezra- He was something of a traitor too, wasn’t he? He was the right side of a war.

Julien- Don’t antagonize Halsey. You”ll find out in the end he’s on your side. He’s a compassionate man.  He is going to get you on a slow boat to Naples one day, Ezra.

Ezra- That’s what you two Jews think is ever worse for me than a bug house. Hanging with dagos and wops.

Halsey- I don’t think the Italians will cotton to you much if you talk like that when you get there, Ezra.

Ezra- Suppose they don’t? Do you think I care? I’m not a whore or a john. I don’t he to be loved by strangers, By the way, I didn’t catch your names. Did you mention them at all??You might be phantasms. Like many a madman I sometimes do see things and people that aren’t there.

Halsey- I’m Halsey Osgood, your prosecutor. My friend here is Julien Cornell , your defense attorney.

 .

Ezra- Yes, I recall your names very well from affidavits if not your faces. We madmen do have our lucid episodes, Halsey. Since you’re my executioner, you won’t mind if I call you by your first name?

Halsey- We all do in the chummy world of lawyers and clients, Ezra. It keeps the adversarial aspect of our craft as quiet as we can without quite lulling it to sleep.

Ezra- You must feel very uncomfortable trying to pretend to live by the various American laws. Sometimes its illegal in our country to have a sip of beer.

Halsey- We never even try to go to trial if we can help it, Ezra. We settle everything. We get a snitch, we plea bargain, we have a few informal conference and we hack out a direction for every case we can. You’re your own snitch; we don’t need one to put a bit of muscle on you.

Julien- Halsey’s telling you the bare if somewhat brutal truth, Ezra. You are looking at frying like a fresh egg if you’re deemed sane. If you’re nuts you never have to stand trial.

            Then maybe ten or twelve years later I quietly run a petition to get you out of the loony bin and Halsey’s side under Eisenhower as unobtrusively never opposes the motion. Then you even more clandestinely take a slow boat to Naples. That’s the deal.

Halsey- It was good enough for Charley Lucky. Of course we let Lucky go right away. Al Capone walked and lived the rest of his life in Florida. He had to do some time but he did it in a hotel suite we build specially for him.

Ezra- I could use more room for myself here I must say.

Julien- We have architects setting up that suite in this place right now. You’ll l do better than Big Al. More toilets. 

Ezra- Still, you mean I have to send a silent decade or more in a outhouse or you’ll kill me? That is some damned choice.

Halsey- You pretty much caged yourself, Ezra. Nobody asked you to take up treason. Look, here’s  big Al’s private  phone number in Florida. I wrote out his address for you too along with Charley Lucky’s villa and phone in Naples, Both of them will be glad to hear from you.  (He hands Ezra a piece of paper.)

            They’re for good reason always sympathetic to  jailbirds. Don’t tell them you don’t like Italians and Jews though. They  aren’t racists. Charly Lucky studied under Arnold Rothstein. Big Al ran a tailor business with some feisty Jewish sartorial experts in Chicago. Don’t tell them you don’t like too many Black people either.

Ezra-You think I’m equal with Wops?  Did I kill anyone? Did they lose a fingernail? Did I give them a headache? Where are my torture chambers? Am I goddamn Bluebeard? Did I reveal any diplomatic secrets? I always had a lot of juicy fecund opinions. People say things worse than I do in a bar and as he settle down in the sawdust and pukes into on the way to a restless sleep nobody thinks of arguing with his bellicosity much less trying him for his excessive freedom of speech.

Halsey- It’s all true enough, You made the wrong enemies, Ezra.

Ezra- Well, I guess, Charley Lucky and Big Al made the wrong ones too. Didn’t you get Al for income tax evasion. He might have killed a hundred oleo and you put him in  slammer form tax fraud. What a joke!

Halsey- The jail was real. He did a little time in Alcatraz before we decided to show him some mercy. He was after all one of our genuine rivals for power. 

Ezra- Al didn’t bribe you?

Halsey-  Maybe he casually threw us all a few bucks afterwards. He likes to send people flowers too. He’s great for florists.  The money was generous but nothing you’d want to talk about.  You’d get along with Al and Charley Lucky.

            Charley Lucky showed more sense than you, Ezra. He had one regret. He said, “If I had it to do all over again, I’d  do the same things legit.”

Ezra- You got Charley Lucky on a prostitution charge. That was a set up. In this country even the married women are tarts. They operate on time and a steady income, not  doing  the same racket free lance.  

Halsey- We do that to people when they irritate us, Ezra, Charley Lucky annoyed us no end.  Al  irritated us even more. He did more time.

Ezra- For not paying taxes. Not for murder.

Julien- Yeah, Al  couldn’t explain to anyone on th jury who was sane how he was living like a millionaire and got the salary of a janitor. Still, we got him. We wouldn’t have tried him in Illinois; that’s hi barony. We had to file federal indictments to collar him.

Ezra- Well, maybe I’ll call him. It can’t hurt. you say Al had a whole suite  in jail?

Julien- Women too. Fancy women. They were happy to get a piece of him. Al has always been generous with anyone he liked, even dogs. A lot of people would have gone to jail to live like Big Al. Only one did, Al himself. You’ll be happy to hear he was prosecuted by a Jew.

Ezra- It sounds better than what mischievous fortune turned my way. Maybe I’d  be happier in Big Al’s lock up  but I’m already in stir; I don’t have to have that ambition.

            By the way do you think I am the only Anti-Semite in my crowd? Did you have ask Ernest Hemingway what he thought of Jews? Didn’t James Joyce write a whole novel with a Jewish hero that represented a parody of Hellenic heroism and virtue?

             Hemingway did the same thing. Do you think they love Jews? T.S. Eliot was mostly dismissive of the Irish, maybe he was spanked a s kid by some maid named Sweeney, but he never neglected Jews as poltroons and louts either. What I had to say about Jews wasn’t all that unfamiliar to any of them because among them  was a shibboleth, a banality. Do you think your rural Americans are crazy about Jews? I never met one cracker who was.

Julien- Ezra, that’s not what your case is about. You’re an American who wanted America to lose a war. .

Ezra- Maybe I did. Wasn’t I humiliated here enough to take up some labial but harmless revenge on my own country. who listened to my broadcasts? Dogs, cats?  They preferred P/G. Woodhouse if they were Nazis. He had more class.  You have no idea what it was for me as a very young man to live here. This is a country of poltroons, fools, morons, convicts and barefoot loutish degenerates.

Julien- No damn place on Earth lacks for any of those kind of people, Ezra. Even 10th century Provencal France was nearly all a territory filled with imbeciles. China is a country mostly of noodle-eating bums. You just noticed them because you’re an American.

Halsey- In any case all this elusive justice is changing for you thanks to a patron or two you have no idea exists. We are about to become the Republican lords of the earth whether you or anybody else like it or not. England and France are too tired and bled white even to sneeze properly. Losers like Germany and Japan take orders from us; they are under our  rule.

            We can either succeed at it or fail from stupidity and ineptitude. We don’t have any rivals. We penitent Russia is ur enemy these days but we haven’t got any, Ezra. Joe Stalin is about as Communist as Genghis Khan. The rest of the world he hasn’t take over by force is ours if we want it and can hold it.

Ezra- I suppose that’s true. You’re suggesting I’ve been focusing on the wrong conspiracy. That does have a Hellenic irony to it, I think. Well, let us say you are going to be the next British or Roman

empire. How are you going to do it?

Halsey- It’s complicated. We have to control the army, bribe them to go along with our agendas, give them bases in colleges and all over the world. We have to have a cadre of intellectual soldiers like the British had created rather effectively in Oxford and Cambridge over many centuries. We also have to corral and silence many people within America who are descendants of huge influx of criminals and worse from the Old World.

            We put people like Al Capone and the Charley Lucky along with the Purple Gang g in jail because they are our rivals, not any Reds or Fascists. They want to do the same thing we do. Sometimes we work together. They are experts on pleasure; we are masters of sobriety.  They movie in on areas Wehrmacht we’re weakest: amusements e, obsessions, a thirst or a crass continual inebriation. We want to be to the world what Big Al was once to the state of Illinois. We don’t say so of course.

Ezra- You don’t call that a conspiracy? You don’t think you’re a gang of criminals? You and Big All just have different visions of America, that’s all. If Al weren’t so violent a lot of people would vote for him to give us his very different version of the New Deal.

            Of course Al doesn’t have a formal justice system as we do. That’s why he does what he des to keep the peace. 

Julien- Many Americans did just that. They just didn’t put Big Al at the head of it. He didn’t look or seem like a patriot.  They preferred Roosevelt.

Halsey- The people that want to keep you from frying like a human hamburger aren’t bad guys, Ezra. They are as you might hear from my more pessimistic colleague Julien, limited and imperfect. Yet if they can’t do it, who else is doing it? Hitler has one thing right: there is a lot of organization going on right now on Earth and somebody is going to do it well or badly in a welter of rivals that want to do the same thing too.

            We want to do with with a good deal mor compassion and charity than Hitler or Uncle Joe but we are in the same game. If we can do it a lot fewer people will die or go to jail than if your champions had won the war.

            That may seem like a trivial ambition but something is often better than nothing.

Ezra- Who are these wonderful conspirators? All Jews, I presume. Are the Rothschilds involved?.

Julien- Please don’t be any more naive than you have to be, Ezra. I don’t think any of our cohorts here are Jewish. None of them are racists either. They don’t quite believe in rough equality, they may off some injurious contracts  but they aren’t out to enslave anybody.

Ezra- No, but they want to make use of me. I don’t see how they can do that, Halsey. I’m not exactly a patriot.

Halsey- People will forget what you did. Until then of course our champion are not looking for trouble. they want to keep you quiet and locked up.

Ezra- When you say people, you mean the common mob. Well they do have famously short memories. When you get to be a old as I am your own memory isn[t all that good either. Maybe it’s possible. Who are my champions in this clandestine oligarchy? J. P. Morgan? John D. Rappaport Franklyn D. Rosenberg?

Julien- Principally James Conant, Paul Mellon, Clark Clifford, and other people you’re lucky you’ve never heard of.  You might know too much to avoid the ire of some otherwise almost  invisible people.  In fact these folks are unknown because its as close as they can get to being unknowable, but it’s not a fascistic movement led by one man, Ezra.

            May of your friends are in it too. They talks about you as a very generous and charitable man; that’s their own experience of you. Maybe you are all of that. 

            We are gong to do this imperial enterprise anyway but they don’t want to leave you behind in an abandoned Jurassic loony bin. It’s as much Paul Mellon listening to Allen Tate and James Conant having tea with T.S. Eliot  as anybody else.

Ezra- It sound like a drunken collegium of self-inebriated aristos mingling with the polloi in an elephantine democracy. That’s a very volatile combo.

Julien- It’s still a very loose collection of souls, believe me. It’s not quite the ideal of the common people of course. We leave estates delegating power like that to the makers of the Constitution. I think they’re all dead now. 

Ezra- You two work together very well . You might start a law partnership.

Halsey- If we don’t live by any law we have to be deft at cordial diplomatic negotiation, Ezra. It’s the burden of ontological free fall, I suppose. l

Julien- I’ve cut the best deal I could muster given the circumstances, Ezra. Lawyers are schooled to tell their clients to say nothing to anybody, ever. I wouldn’t read a train schedule on the radio.

Ezra- I thank you for your charity.

Julien- As you say, you haven’t killed anybody. You aren’t likely to do so either. I don’t see the point of locking you up forever.

\

 Ezra- I’ve done a lot of traveling, Halsey. Belie me, one is always in prison somewhere.

Halsey- then if you prefer an outdoor slammer to something more snug you can’t complain we are locking you up at all.

Ezra- I’d like to choose the walled maze I live in. That’s a kind of freedom, isn’t it, Halsey. When you are my landlord and I don’t like the accommodations I can’t like for something that  suits me better, maybe in Paris or Islington. Nobody tells you what slammer to reside in. That might be the difference between us.

Julien- I don’t think you read politics very well, Ezra. You talk will but you’re a dilettante. Halsey is showing you mercy and you want to patronize him as a relative innocent. Right now you know more about American politics than most Americans ever do. We have a capacity for corruption that dwarfs the taste for it for any of your champions.

            I think Mussolini said so. He was right. Mussolini didn’t realize that between force and bribery there is more mercy in vice than in virtue.

            Your favorite politicians were always preaching the value of virtue. Hitler, Mussolini always talked of honor, character, sterling heroism and glory. What did it get them, Italy or Germany? Hitler killed more people than anyone in the whole of the First World War. Can you say you  worried about it? Ezra? To you it was a cleansing operation, right. Then when they lock you up you want mercy. You plead to others of your ilk that you have talent.

            You have lots of connected friends, Ezra. They write letters speaking up for you. It’s not merely the dispatch of Mussolini and Hitler either. Anybody on the ground level who bought into this malarkey were murderous or complicit in exterminations of innocents, babies. They have to live with their injuries to others for the rest of their lives. That’s why Hitler and Mussolini bought into you and used you.

Ezra- Maybe.

Julien- You can see as Mussolini did very aptly that democracy is like a carcass of a dead dinosaur. If it is all of that, but it feeds a lot of carrion creatures like us that feast on its sometimes very succulent dead flesh. Beyond that, unlike some expired gigantic reptile of the psst, there is always more to eat from the shrinking and odorous flesh on its bones.        

\           The rot is foul and putrescent enough, the smell is overpowering to some of us, but at least none of the scrambling feasters starve to death. They might do a lot worse if the dragon were alive. States never are. They’re eyeless, brainless and  maybe they don’t quite exist. Still some of them consumed a lot of smaller animals before they were destroyed themselves and went hurtling into oblivion.

Halsey- Don’t defend me, Julien, defend Ezra. I’m happy with being called corrupt. Corruption is one of the most successful  adaptions a human beings can make if he’s interested in survival.

Julien- If it gives you any consolation, Ezra, I don’t think Paul’s plan for America is going to work. I can even in detail see why it will founder and collapse one day. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Halsey is more optimistic than I am about this whole enterprise of course.

Ezra- Really. What do you think? And who’s Paul. Melvin?

Julien- Paul is one of the people who are going to give you a chance to live. You don’t  have to know anymore than that. He isn’t Jewish and he’s much more than a banker. He didn’t start any of the World Wars either. Business doesn’t really thrive on war at all though Karl Marx of course said otherwise. A war kills off a lot of customers for honest and dishonest commerce. It coarsens life to the point where only a few profits and products are available at all.

            The last thing Paul or his father ever wanted was either war. The Dulles brothers only worked for peace even if it was the tranquility at night  of a slave pen.

Ezra- This Paul Melvin must be magical like the late Jesus.

Halsey- I don’t think so. Jesus wasn’t political; he was for personal virtue. Also he was killed because to some brainless Romans he seemed to threaten their military version of peace. I know the Roman empire except for its Senators and warriors had the enforced passion for order of an utdoor  jail.

            Still that is better than the slaughterhouses outside the slammers for most of us.

Ezra- So you float in the emptiness, whistling Dixie.  At least you two don’t seem to have any kind of resident  ideology. That’s refreshing. I’m tired of ideas. They’re modern metaphysics.

Julien- We have it more than you might think. We are for humanity. Whatever that means, whatever it takes, we Americans want to nurture our human potentialities. That’ not true about your late champions, Ezra. They posed as redeemers of our weary and bloody species but they killed a lot of people before they were killed themselves.

             You have to be able to learn from evidence, not the phantoms of demagogic hope. I argued in my long career as a lawyer for conscientious objectors partially because freedom has to be if it’s any liberty at all, the franchise among other things to take up another way to respond to an enemy, even a real nemesis that is ready like Hitler to kill real people.

Ezra- Your crocodile piety about defending corruption moves me, Julien. Maybe if I had you as my counsel for a lifetime, I could have been more corrupt than I am and made the same specious arguments you do.

Julien- Possibly. Maybe after I did it you would have been the lawyer who defended me.

Ezra-Why don’t you think the plan of this grey eminence you call Paul Melvin  won’t work?

Julien- I’m looking at the evidence. This country has not been notable for avoiding imperialism,., fascism and massive extermination, Ezra. We dispatched the Indians. We’re chained African slaves and worked them like donkeys.

            We’ve denied equality to women,  which of course  they take anyway., sometimes in revenge. Beyond that Paul is basically running an enterprise that sad to say isn’t going to get too far in its aegis  and means of power beyond the Ivy League and its collegiate satellites. .

            I don’t see a lot of people in the future accepting anything less than full equality for themselves, Ezra. Nature gives equality to insects.  It’ll come from the white ethnics and rural populists first, then from everything and everybody.

            The history of the human race, Ezra, is a grisly tale of people traveling elsewhere to get that rough equality. I think we have some very inept and limited people trying to do something that probably couldn’t be done by anybody.

Ezra- Still you’re doing it.  You probably think it’s your best shot, I guess.

Julien- You think I want to be a gull or a slave?  Some people  think I’m tragic. I might be. 

Halsey- Considered this, Ezra, not one of your old friends are exactly patriots. Earnest Hemingway never wrote a novel about America. Yet America give him all sorts of prizes. Tommy Eliot hated America, said so and became a British citizen. If that weren’t enough he hated every White ethnic from Irishmen to Jews and that Black people were not quite human. America give both of them a truckload of prizes and  I suppose paid for their beer and groceries but none of your friends could ever occupy the place of a genuine American icon.

            Beyond that the United States has the only humanities programs in its colleges that teaches the values of monarchy and all its enemies it departed from. America has no American studies. It’s no wonder that the American provincials we’ve lined up for this enterprise are sometimes daft like Robert Lowell , sometimes idealistic veterans of the Confederacy, sometimes merely cynical and empty libertines.

            They certainly have no model of personal virtue to orbit if they’re satellites of you and Tommy Eliot ; they’re in ultimate free fall.  We won’t run American studies in those places because if we did we’d find we’re a country of escapees, criminals, fanatics and a mumbling army of  violent lushes.

Ezra- Much worse that that.

Halsey- Let’s say we’re a nation of criminals.  We don’t want to bring down our country even if we’re devil-worshipers. The deal we made with Big Al is that he would sit in the sun and stay out of his usual commerce. That’s the contract we want to make with  you, Ezra.  

Julien- Even in the hoosegow you’ll have a kind of life as a collegiate icon, believe me. They are no spineless chumps like Academic toadies. You’ll influence more people  in a jail than you ever did out of it.

Ezra- That’s very grimly amusing. You plan like the French to make me one of their phony immortals, or like the English you want to give me a nearly posthumous knighthood with  an virtual feudal estate of nincompoops and chumps. All right, Ill take it. –

Julien- Good. Sometimes  some of us are more successful  as martyrs than as politicians or lovers. Some people even want to be. After a lot of erotic affairs and a short season in power they  prefer a more phantom numinous and  ghostly life.

Ezra-  Maybe I’m  naive and bonkers. Julien,  but that seems like a hellova good reason to avoid such a curriculum.

Halsey- I don’t think so. We really are a country with the unarticulated and unproven belief that if we have the opportunity we don’t have to be bums.

             It’s a faith system that never has a conclusion, has never been demonstrated scientifically. It animates the entire world. We all feel only external demons with metaphysical connections keep us from being local barons.

            Yet we and they never quite get rid of the shadowy estates that diminish us, do we? However, I’m afraid  it isn’t the only source of our own ignorance about ourselves. A lot of people who will do anything for a shekel or two want to keep their jobs. I suspect emptiness sustains many more people than substance.

Ezra- Some folks are made out of rubber. Well, I will take your deal, gentlemen. I certainly can’t get any authentic pasta in St. Elisabeth’s loony bin; I have a taste for macaroni. You will give me better quarters, I hope.

Julien- I’m your defender, Ezra. I guarantee you will be living better than Al Capone. As you say, a lot of people are locked up one way or another.

Halsey- Don’t lose that piece of paper, Ezra. And don’t do any radio broadcasts for Big Al or  Communism.

Ezra- You think you’re locking up somebody who was treacherous to your country, a quack or psychotic who out of nothing but pure spite aimed at destroying democracy. You want to make sue of me as a resident icon of democracy in your colleges for a resettlement in a soft part of the slammer like Big Al. Well, maybe you are doing all of that, Halsey.

            Still  you don’t know what will be coming your way one day when you  try to mount me like an elk’s head as a martyr or misunderstood icon. You don’t know, any of you, the depth of the toxic vulgarity in your own country. Bell vie me, I’ve livid here long enough to savor it like a poison and have the sense to escape from it.

            You can’t elevate your citizens  to be philosophers because they don’t want to be anything like aristos . They want to sleep with bovines, swine and chickens if they can figure out how to get into them.

            They have all the measure and philosophy of a porcine community of obese imbeciles. Once you see how much you can sway any of them with a bunch of Ivy League flag wavers  you will  meet them on a day they’ll choose, not you, soon enough. I hope I’m alive to watch you squirm  when you meet them on a darkling night on a level plain.

            It’s all comes from Jews,  Wops, Black sub-humans, maybe the shanty Irish. They will envelop you like a tidal wave of sewage from an invisible cloaca.  You will swim in the odorous oceans of feces, vomit and pig swill and wish you’d been sent to Hell by God instead. l.  Before you die you’ll  drown in the offal of midgets.

Julien- Let’s say you’re right, Ezra. Well then, it’s sure as hell coming this way anyway, isn’t it? Ezra? I say: let it come.

Halsey- Besides that, some of us are better long distance swimmers in crap  than others.  

                                    (Exit Halsey and Julien.)

            What a bunch! If I’m smart but classically bonkers they’re just a lot more fashionably crazy. Whew! I’m glad I’m a poet. The money is terrible but the social company if you’re out of jail beats anything  I could find in colleges, business or politics.  Once we poets were dreaded by kings for our lauds and curses. 

            We seemed even to tyrants and hierophants  powerful in obscure divine ways that might curb their itches and hungers. We seemingly supped with angels; we could command the gilt soldiers of both Heaven and Hell casually at a whim. 

            The voice of even a minor bard prophesying doom was enough to cow these despots and the usual mendacious gaggles of goutish and lisping bogus priests. Our  blessings were valued like vessels of gold.  Now under the aegis of these clowns from Yale who visited me we once daunting harpers and witnesses to paradise are whisked away to bedlams or gen marginal jobs in  their colleges at scant wages and no medical  coverage.

            Even beggars  laugh at us as a crew of poltroons drowning in swill, louts lower than they are. Tarts on their ay to the local gardens to sell their passions to strangers  drop us a stray shekel  or two as they saunter on their silvery high heeled shoes into the carnal viscosities of the night.

            Of course I  have reddened my talents in these seasons of extremity and thirst to the commerce of criminals. I have a different version of my hopes for America or whatever country of  hospice graduates, invalids and imbeciles has had the inchoate and accidental hap to honor my gifts in a momentary mutual nurturing if  somewhat nether symbiosis. 

            I certainly have more in common with Big Al than I do with many a man I meet in the fumigated halls of respectable Ivy League shills and their ubiquitous usury. Big Al always sold an honest gallon of whiskey to his delighted customers.

            Charley Lucky never left any of his clientele  in a state of carnal infelicity for lack of a convenient vessel of very affordable amour if they might have  maundered in a divan comatosely in a stupor. He could only be accused of exhausting his customers with pleasure.  One divisors   only after a dark lustrum who is one’s peer in this hermetic guild of nocturnal favors.      

            ( Ezra looks at the piece of paper and dials a number.)

            Al? Ezra Pound here. No , I don’t need flowers or money. I’m not one more collegeiate poet on the take.  The saints and the daft are never hungry either for  provender or profit. We are the only innocents in town, you might say. 

            Halsey Osgood dropped by and said I should give you a call.

            No, I was never for Prohibition. I never voted but if I did I would have been against it. I believe it’s only not lawful but an insult to Nature to stop a man from taking an occasional reflective sip of wine. I even admire your ad hoc decisive judicial system. It saves the taxpayers a bundle and  keeps the Labradors in cemeteries  in pocket when all else fails.

            I think electric chairs and gas chambers are  teleport  mechanisms  I don’t  value at all; they are a clever commercial move of  inventors of rococo  decisive to destroy others than otherwise would be merely abstract theories of destruction scribbled on a piece of filthy paper. 

            We have the same enemies, believe me. Neither of us are ever going to quite legitimate in this country, Al. We have to be satisfied with being  nocturnal legends.  

            I suppose I could write articles for you under other names if you want. I do it for John Kasper. Yeah. the guy who runs the northern outreach of the Klu Klux Klan n New York  What the hell do you want me to say? You were always for the right of any of us to take a sip of beer. That’s a kind of freedom, isn’t it?

            You weren’t  the only one to lie a little  about your income tax? I can say that too. Somebody had to run Chicago politics. It’s a sewer. Nobody could have done it better than you did?  I could say that. I suppose it’s true. You were the only one who did it if you did it your way.

            Sure I’ve heard from Charley Lucky;  he says he shows up occasionally to visit you. He’s quiet about it. He doesn’t like Naples much. There’s too much poverty. There are too many people in  Naples who have nothing to lose by robbing him.

            They should all come here?  Yeah, here they could do whatever they do in Naples, white collar.

                                                (Lights out)

                                                The End  

                                                Addenda

            The central lie all writers offer is to assert to strangers that life might be more amusing than it is. I’ve certainly offered that con over a mendacious lifetime . This play first had its germ in a conversation I had with Sol Yurick. He felt that after World war Two some American  honchos had looked to produce a large estate of middle range  folks to run the new empire that American was taking over from England. Sol remarked that he thought James Conant when he was President of Harvard in the late 40s had created the whole of the phalanx of moderately or less right wing writers and artists that dominated the elite artistic circles of the 50s.

            Sol was always looking for and finding such covert organizations . He certainly  was always in his genial way offering a trove of such intelligent speculations on who had power and what they did with it.

            Along the way I learned a lot from Sol, both in politics and literature ; I’d like to say I’m grateful to him for his reading of  patterns and his many insights. 

            I didn’t pick up on the idea and maybe Sol didn’t either because James Conant wasn’t an optimal protagonist for a play or a novel. He was too complicated and enigmatic.

            Decades after this conversation with Sol it occurred to me while reading a article in a magazine quoting Pound and Eliot I thought I would combine Sol’s idea with a play about Pound, not Conant. Pound was colorful, predictable, full of idiosyncratic rhetoric, simple and transparent in person if not in  his poetic craft  in a way Conant never was, at least  publicly. Pound was also flamboyantly nuts, always a great part for an actor.  

            Unlike Conant Pound had been arrested and was almost tried for treason. Actually if Sol was right about Conant’s leadership in a creation of an artificial intellectual elite in America that was elitist, on the Right and outdid the common populace tis racism was much more treasonous than anything clamorous but ineffectual such as Pound ever did. Nobody ever  thought of accusing them of such large acts of perfidy much less trying them. 

            The honors Harvard heaped upon Eliot and the general toadyism of the entre American Academy in  promoting Pound and Eliot as great intellects  who wrote supposed masterpieces one had to admire and interpret or to lose one’s job in these colleges was much more damaging to American life  than Pound’s rather trivial acts of treachery.

            If one wanted to talk about perfidy the real betrayal occurred in the massive attempt of the universities in America of the time,still lingering like Covid among the educated gulls among us the present many decades later,  to impose a set of intellectual presumptions that went beyond politics  n their general toffish disdain for the common people. Pound made such a case for willful obscurity he inspired a lot of collegiate poetry  after him to be impenetrable. 

            He implied simplicity was probably superficial and vulgar. It effectively marginalized not merely poetry but influenced all the adjacent Arts to be more like coded  and garbled implosions, tangled knots heading toward  a leaden density than anything graceful and attractive.  It did in the utility of intellectuals  for America as it would for any regime.  

            Such notions  were common about the nobility and other autocrats in Europe but were hardly the less than hermetic fare that could have effectively hoped to  control or govern the country. 

            Then when the inevitable populisti revolts came their way like tardy dragons to give a reckoning to these aesthetics, the respectable conservative element of American  life lacked the power  of the populace to do anything at all but wallow in swinish excess much as the European nobles and hierophants on their way to a heap of landfill  had lacked it. Anyone with a  sense of history could have seen it coming. 

            Plays have an inherent  concentration of means that Aristotle said Sophocles  had suggested was optimal in their structure.  I switched the focus from Harvard to Yale because Pound’s lawyer, Julien Cornell, was a Yalie. I centered the  covert action on Paul Mellon because he too among the honchos of America  was an ardent  Yalie and active alumna of that school as well as one who for the reasons I gave probably did all the things I attribute to him.

            I left out Conant and the Harvard honchos nearly entirely because they might have distracted  an audience from the main action. I also wanted to stress that none of the actors, on stage otherwise, inf the play were  villainous, out to hurt others  or otherwise wonting in many virtues. This is a story of the limitations of people, not  their evils.  

            I have always had the same opinions about Eliot and Pound  as i did when I first came across them in college. Both of them though smart and talented were characterologically about the last candidates to be twin popes of any intellectual class  in America promoted from the top; I said so civilly at the University Of Michigan , somewhat putting myself at peril in getting the requisite green card at the time to get a subsequent white collar job.

            I found their racism offensive, their self severing and  meretricious  polemics  about people who had different ideas than they did  narrow and dishonest. Poetry is not and never should be a world of  good guys and bad guys. Poetry is written alone in a room. Any poet with a genuine voice of his own has no rivals. I thought Eliot was a great poet  malgre lui but a lousy thinker, Pound not so talented but much more crazy and psychotic, but I had nothing against either one of them personally. In fact I thought Eliot was to be commended for writing about  inner dread and  despair about nothing in a very original way. 

            Those  talents don’t make for good criticism. Huneker for example wrote about many French poets who felt a disgust at being human  but he himself was a hedonist who never had such feelings. A good critic has to have appreciation of some very diverse people. Freedom is not freedom if it isn’t the freedom to be evil or crazy. I think  that as Shakespeare says often, we can all earn from apparently daft people. I think the Marquis d Sade wasn’t crazy at all though he was locked up at Charenton as if he were  bonkers. Maybe some of them are capable more than  the more banal among us of thinking the unthinkable.   Still most people  pole in an insane asylum are nuts.

            Since Pound was at least half bonkers and Eliot  heavily depressed I don’t  judge them as I would somebody who functioned in the world with some affable vigor and deft craft. I do wonder why one would look for depth or even substance in people who were either insane or heavily  afflicted by pulverizing personal malaise.

            One of the signs of wisdom  in humans is one’s ability to stay out of loony bins and be relatively affable, be cordial and positive about their mortal actions. I admire Eliot because he wrote about feeling lousy abut nothing better than nearly anyone. That was his genius. Even Hamlet had a reason for feeling lousy. I would never repair to a bug hosue to look for savants who were masters of  morals,  politics or economics. 

            My central complaint was that the honchos of this country  had ignored American  culture altogether, were particularly ignorant of Whitman, Sandberg, Edward Arlington Robinson, William Carlos Williams, Stephan Crane. Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay,  and Kenneth Fearing, all of whom  were much  much likely candidates for the same  American cultural estate. If that weren’t national perfidy enough  they were trying to objectify as if it were a science a field and Art itself whose product  was created only by very varied, improbable  and unpredictable  craftsmen.

            Such they hadn’t been as cut-throat as well as absurdly orthodox in their unsupportable ideas as they were  they might have given America’s honest Tories a better shot at stable rule than promoting the psychotics and miserable people they picked as their resident stallions in their version of American cultural history. Two of them were culled from insane asylums. several of them were depressive suicides. 

            During this auto da fe of other styles than Pound’s and Eliot’s own imagistic rhetoric Pound was positioned by these mahatmas as the great  definer of proper rhetoric for “modern” poetry, one pruned of  stuffy crafts like rhyme, meter, strophic forms and  jingly verse that seemed to value its musically more than its substance. I think this Academic elevation was totally imaginary. There is a lot of great imagistic poetry that dispenses with such craft but would we want to give up all the great poetry that had these disciplines in it?

            One can’t objectify what craft any poet brings to a blank piece of paper.  All these stratagems Pound thought little of can help frame a poem with a subtle irony and counterpoint it wouldn’t have otherwise.

            Of course one has to be careful not to use forced rhymes, stuff  empty words in a line to fill a meter, use strophic form unobtrusively to extended  discourse like prose yet to give it an underlying formal structure,  vary the meter and hide the rhymes sometimes with enjambment, but the best of poets can do all of that.

            One of the best examples of this sardonic and subtle counterpoint  comes to us not in English but in French. Baudelaire’s effects are impossible to translate easily into English because we don’t have a culture that identifies these devices with a style that offers outrageous and unthinkable discourse  filling a vessel of pellucid formality like an anthem. Maybe we might be enriched in English if we could figure out how to do it.  

            In Pound’s world of allies and sinister Mnemesis there was no room for such distinctions. One was either a moron, a rat and a bum or one of the faithful. One has to wonder how many nascent poets who might have found some use for these means of writing verse were deterred from doing so by Pound’s  claims that such devices were to be purged from English verse forever.

            During Pound’s lifetime many poets continued to write with the means he thought were fossilized offal and turned out some wonderful verse. May of them weren’t obscure and had no reason to be so. There are a lot of effects one can produce  if one is not writing imagistic free verse. Why shouldn’t they have done it? 

            The central flaw in Pound’s critics is that it claims to have some science or objectivity. The best poets can write in any style with grace and felicity; the worst of them can’t produce anything in any style but dross.  

            One could not say when I went to college that Pound’s Cantos weren’t masterpieces without getting into big trouble. One was marginalized like a pariah. Sometimes one was even humiliated.  One couldn’t even question that Eliot’s The Wasteland or the Pound’s Cantos were anything other than a masterpieces and great hermetic intellectual  pieces of virtuosity.

            I don’t think they are. The cult of masterpieces is in itself a kind of cul de sac of idolatry that is itself questionable, but i would think of other large poems written at the same time that could have  been called American icons  much more than the willfully obscure poems with only European roots as if America hadn’t existed that Pound and Eliot wrote.

            Anyone with some notion of who was living in America would know from mere common sense even if they knew nothing about poetry that a free popular republic largely of emigrant escapees from nobility, monarchy, elites and racism  was going to produce a legendary culture when it could do that at all that would  develop along the populist lines  one finds in Whitman and Mark Twain. It was never going to be a nation resonating to the glories of being a province of  slave pen colony  of  England or anyone else.  These bottom folk were either going to do it legitimately or illegitimately.

            The  culture and its resident nurturing legends  were either going to come from directives from the top among republican aristo founders such as Freneau or it was going to come from people who were at the bottom, the very folks Pound and Eliot hated, who had nothing to lose by taking up the same labors.

            As I imply in my play, the honchos who  promoted the Pound and Eliot cult didn’t lack for intelligence; they clearly on the evidence were utterly lacking in physical observation of the American populace long before they evolved these suicidal directions.  They couldn’t and didn’t see  the stallions they picked to  create the aesthetic of their middle classes as a marginal claque of professors, converts to European  faiths and assorted improbable  madmen and toffs. They really didn’t know anything about their own country.

            Dare I suggest in a whisper that Edward Arlington Robinson’s Tristram And Iseult, also with a European base and a Tory vision, is better poetry than anything Pound wrote? than . The epitaphs of Edgar Lee Masters, the long poems of Carl Sandberg Ran Stallion and ambitious Hellenic verses of Robinson Jeffers, William Carlos Williams’ later  Patterson, the latter certainly pretty nihilistic stuff, would have been  better candidates for masterpieces in the promotion of creating the aesthetics for an American intellectual class that represented the whole of the country.

            It seems as if the one qualification for  joining the immortals they picked was that they hated America and preferred to live in Europe. There’s nothing wrong with those tastes but they don’t  resonate much with the massive  army of Americans who as clearly would rather be Americans and live in America.  

            I’m not saying some jingoistic national program should have  buried  or marginalized Pound and Eliot the way they tried to inter the value altogether of any of these other poets.  It’s even  fine that both Pound and Eliot thought hermetic obscurity is a virtue all by itself. It might be all of that and more for some people but it isn’t going to fly as a benison no matter who champions such aesthetics if one is attempting to as my characters in the play and their friends did to create an imaginary  Mount Rushmore for American poetry or for that matter anybody’s notion besides a few monks  of the value of verse at any time. Ancient poetry was not obscure. Even when it was profound and  enjoyed cognoscenti it always had  transparency on some level.  

            Pound did more to promote the value of obscurity than any poet in history. It effectively denied  any chance of verse and poets to be a central  element  in any national culture, especially one of a popular republic. .

            There are as many ways to write poetry or to live at all as there are and have been people on Earth. The history of poetry isn’t at bottom a tale of dissent from a fashionable  set of received ideas with pious revolutionaries purging the world of their time of its follies. It’s a constant production of varied voices.  It’s about innumerable individuals  expressing themselves idiosyncratically initially alone in a room.

            Both Eliot and Pound were in their criticism  not humanists but literary as well as political fascists, parlor autocrats who had  principles that governed their own work they also tried to apply to a general analysis of the work of others. It takes a kind of stupidity as well as parochial narrowness to want other people, poets or otherwise, to be like oneself. One is impoverished oneself by living this way on an imaginary asteroid.

            It’s at bottom a kind of incarceration in which the prisoner is also the guard and warden of the penitentiary holding a single convict in solitary.  That is what happens to anyone  embraces any kind of fascism.

            There is an inherent deep cleavage between those who want to organize people to be simpler and more homogeneous than they are, and Nature, a  force that is constantly producing the complex and varied from the simple and paradigmal .  That abyss was haply bridged  in English and American philosophy by writers like Hobbes, Locke, and  the founders of the United States, all of whom were aiming for, not war, but a viable covenant between Nature and the state.

            Our Constitutions if flawed is rooted more in what the limits of rule are, not  what  the rights of rulers to govern or judge might be. Obviously Pound and Eliot never were part of this  direction in life. Both of them  left America, did not like living in the Untied States, detested democracy, and had very poor opinions of  the churls who fell otherwise.

            I don’t begrudge them their natural right to hold any of these notions. I certainly admire Eliot’s talent  if not his politics. I think Pound was right in saying later that he had been unnecessarily and indulgently obscure  and hermetic in a lethal way to his poetry that damaged his own ambitions. I think  Byron and Whitman were right to see that populism led one to write verse more like prose.  They and Stephen Crane are the poets who founded  free verse, not Pound.

            Sometimes talent and politics push a writer simultaneously in different directions. None of us  feel Shakespeare  was diminished because politically he was a monarchist and hardly a populist. It doesn’t make anyone a bad poet to have opinions which seem a bit mean-spirited. Otherwise we wouldn’t value Dante. I do think that it was always intellectual suicide to try to  promote them as American poets who had some insights into what would nurture our own country.

            .In fact some of the  more brainless aspects of the 60s in my view were indirect harvests of a cadre of  these covert autocrat who had tried to push Ivy League snobbism, Anglo-Catholic cults and other such inapplicable  notions if one hoped to  attract a population of young people who were products of a country in which nearly all their ancestors had radically and actively departed from any European notions embedded in  the past.

            Since the  autocrats had taken over the niche of intellectuals and men of reflection, the 60s culture was almost of necessity dionysiac and closer to the midnight reflections of Elvis more  than it had to be.   Elvis was never obscure.       

            Associating vulgarity  and the tastes of the supposed servile classes with transparency is only of the central injuries promoting Pound  did to American  poetry. By the time the honchos decided to elevate a seemingly swinish legions of imitation vulgarians  and dump the intellectuals in the mid-70s  most Americans didn’t trust  the government or it institution  to do anything honest and honorable. Trying to push on the common people who were in the United States  because it was a country founded on principles of self-rule such hierophants did more damage to anyone who was respectably conservative than had they done if they had been open autocrats. 

            Those opposed to these provincial Pecksniff conservatives of the Ivy League hegemony were trashed as Communists in the first step  in a general rupture of the American rulers from limited government. It led to more dramatic confrontations a decade later inevitably like the legitimacy of the American interests in Asia, the Vietnam War or other colonial fracases and internal government corrupt nightmares that followed it. 

            One can tell a neighbor they are honestly wrong and still soft voiced and be civil. When one calls them traitors or heretics one has left the arena where one  one  aims to live on the same planet as  those whom one thinks they are wonting. It leads inevitably to wanting if their dissenters are vulnerable and lack power to enslave or kill them. Then who has absolute power and who does not  produces another kind of world other than self rule.  When this cortege  to a communal hari-kari of the spirit occurs the initial reason to recognize people at all to accommodate themselves to the brute mechanisms of rule, once that as Hobbes says at its best is  for the common good, collapses and nothing good at all happens to anybody. 

            Privately it’s also kept any honest criticism of Eliot or Pound and their value to America discreet to silent. Pound in my view was always a very troubled paranoid schizophrenic  who had at least one major nervous breakdown; maybe should be given some mercy and forgiveness in our judgment of his character given his vulnerabilities. It can’t feel good to be nuts. Pound as I say in this play didn’t kill anybody.  I would also guess nobody but a few American monitors listened to his radio broadcasts. His treason in the end was  both real and trivial. 

            Still  in war time any reason at all to take up championing an enemy who hopes to destroy one’s country does put one if one is on the losing side in the hands of enemies who in this extremity are rarely  prone to distinguish between one form or degree of betrayal and another one.

            Both Pound and Eliot really had it  pretty good  as human history goes in their personal lives. They ever missed a meal, veneer lived in a war zone, had a lot of loyal friends and even a few supportive women paying some of the bills for their existence. The elites  of the very country they hated  honored them with assorted invented prizes. Neither of them were at all grateful to America for what it had given them n even the external means of survival. That isn’t  criminal, merely morally odious.

            Their racism is a commonly held insanity but sadly life is fueled by enough real antagonists  to make some of us less respectful of others looking like them than we should be.  Maybe very smart people are flattered by such internal snobbish notions as and hungers for revenge on  the rabble as mediocre folks never are.

            Eliot wasn’t privately insane or half-insane  like Pound but he did lead a miserable life filled with ill luck domestically and severe depression. Luckily it fueled his poetry. There is a qualitative and large difference between feeling lousy and being  daft. Eliot was a fascist but nobody locked him up.           Most people are at least somewhat  trapped in a hard and stale existence; life is different in details but it is always difficult. If his woes prompted Eliot to pretend he was an Englishman when he was from st. Louis one imagines they must have been pretty severe.              

            A play can’t be about the absence of something. It can only orbit around what is not there.  My play is not merely about Pound is as much  focused on the lack of both common sense not to mention honor in  the republican aristocrats in it  who are free and adult, able to live out their callings, much as our founders had hoped would be the general condition of American citizens.

            We have to hold them all responsible for their failures. Yet first of all we have to understand  who they were and what if anything they had failed to do. Obviously we don’t have  the kind of country that honchos in 1945 were hoping to produce out of the ashes.

            My play I hope doesn’t ask the viewer to condemn  Pound as an isolated  quack. The two lawyers I have in this  drama aren’t any less culpable than Pound. Unlike Pound, they’re aren’t crazy. They are both in different ways  too close to the mechanisms of power to act to give  their lieges the measure they hoped for or at least give these mahatmas the simple cunning to protect themselves.

            Nobody wants to rule over a country whom one can’t govern with an honest covenants and rules over a populace  who merely fears and despises oneself. When one observes such a surface situation one can infer from it that some crushing despotism, overt or covert,  some autocratic run of policy from the top of a monarchical nature, is rampantly afoot.  Whether the directives come from force or seduction, from kings or more modern hooded tyrants wafting out notions of all sorts through the media, is merely a detail.

            To the degree that criticism is a science, in the Arts it is probably confined as Henry James says to whether or not an  Artist has executed some given idea. We should come to its harvests as scientists without received ideas. One of the shibboleths I’ve been listening to during a long life time is that Pound and Eliot  set modern poetry in a new direction from stuffy old formalism and that we are still living  in a world intensely and centrally a product of their influence. Though it was a revolution of more than a century ago and all the revolutionaries are long dead it is still called “modern”. Time has apparently stopped for these advocates of the “modern”.  We’ve all been told this by many an Academic. 

            Is any of it true?         

            I don’t think so.

            On observation, there was a religious war going on in Europe and America  during Pound’s and Eliot’s time between various Socialism and anarchisms and some form of anti-republican monarchism  that lasted  from the 1780s or so through 1960. although the 1950s in America featured control of the American colleges by the monarchists and moderate fascists it was simultaneously  the decade when most of the world rejected colonialism, racism and autocratic rule from the old empires.         

            The United States government was part of the contingent that lost many colonies of this old sort over decades from local revolutions.  The politics on both sides had a central effect on the Arts.

            In the 50s in American colleges if one didn’t write  dense, obscure and hermetic Horatian or Alexandrian poetry  filled with some autumnal reflections on mortality in a depressed mood such as Eliot and Pound produced and the Americana college system promoted, one was in the view of these pedants writing a vulgarian not poetry but doggerel.

            This all changed in that same decade because many poets, some Beatniks, many of whom were collected in Donald Allen’s New American Poets Anthology of 1960  were producing viable accessible verse at the same time whose transparency and egalitarian humanism spoke to a lot of  readers.

            When Allen Ginsberg wrote “I saw the best minds of my generation” destroyed by Moloch his analysis was accurate but his very language of “minds”was gnostic, the very victims he wrote about like Carl Solomon all college graduates.  His poem wasn’t really a laud of populism or egalitarian life. Still it set off some sixty years ago a turn to dionysiac populism in  American and Europe that left any of the opacity  and obscurity of Pound and Eliot way behind it

            The only poet after 1960 I can think of that s still  embracing some of those aesthetics was Jackson MacLow. Jackson was sort of a Jewish anarchist with a lot of formal education and was one of Pound’s last correspondents. As Jackson told me, he didn’t reveal to the end of their letter writing that he was Jewish. Pound said:”I thought so.” Jackson’s other influence was the Gematria of Abraham Abolafia in Gershom Scholem’s’ Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism. That was a long way from Ezra Pound’s thought.

            Even the 50s students were listening  not to dense autumnal Academic poetry but to Muddy Waters, Ray Charles and Buddy Holly. Anti-racism was a popular movement in every college in the 1950s; it was a reliable source of marchers in Martin Luther King’s  huge demonstrations. After 1963 or so the whole of the edifice created by the Academy, CIA and who knows what else collapsed beyond the island college scene. If any poetry was quoted beyond 1963 it was lines of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.  The aesthetics of Pound and Eliot were dead.

            The prose writers who were seminal  weren’t  college professors but pulp fiction writers. Rock music, created by refugees from Mississippi  in Chicago oddly a few blocks from the University of Chicago, was the signature art form of the late 20th century. It was everything  Pound and Eliot hated, produced by the very people they despised and probably would have wanted discreetly exterminated.          

            Eliot’s dismal and reactionary Wasteland was a beatoful elegie for the death of European empire, hardly mourned by the populace of  most of the world, yet the same bankruptcy of the colonial spirit was also the April of a better life for nearly everybody else once locked into the slave pens these honchos Eliot mourned who  ran a good deal of commerce on the planet.

            Who in history were the first to revolt from such a servile life? It was the very country Eliot and Pound were born into and rather dramatically rejected as their enemy.  One can be sure that since both of them were born in,America, on another day their ancestors had found local tyranny and arrogance even in their homeland personally insufferable. What does it say about anyone who honors either of these turncoat poets as savants, Americans or patriots? 

             England seems to have learned more from the American revolution than Americans who inherited it garnered from it  Alexander Hamilton were he to attend the House of Lords nowadays would say: “I knew I could be one day among an assembly of honorable republican men of measure, but I thought it was going to be the United States Senate.”

            Sixty years after this artificial set of radical Tory values perished though they were still funded after death by the slow thinking  ippissimi of such policies the problems people are facing in another century aren’t how they are going to react to living as punks or rogues in defunct European empires.  It’s how to avoid the reductive excesses of egalitarian thinking as they ponder about what if anything might sustain a life and make people less miserable beyond the real if limited blessings of material comfort. 

            Holding various dead honchos in power once responsible for their failures can be a dismal etude in intellectual safaris. The 50s and 60s were always in a state of collapse for such honchos because superficially long after Woodrow Wilson they were advocates of  an arid horny sobriety, colonial wars, racism and Ivy League snobbery.

            If all these peculiar advocacies worthy of only a few monks in their dry days did them in , the disasters they endured had a deeper source than a distaste for these surface priggish and arrogant tastes. Organization of any  kind, government, corporate factory towns, slavery or any other system operates at its best when it straddles the ultimate stasis hungered for by the  state and the  equally natural  explosive rebellions from it of its dissidents.

            If these two admittedly cloven but optimally civil  directions aren’t respected on all sides one gets either the Third Reich or diverse and bellicose slanderous anarchy. Then either one fuhrer does in the whole country or it is destroyed by everybody. 

            If and when we lack the ability to honor the other side of these polarities we are going to get Hitler or Uncle Joe on one end, a chaotic and fundamentally  dissatisfied and usually fuzzily inebriate set of dissidents on the other side. Both when they are observed are usually at bottom marks of  the lack of dialogue as well as an imbalance between two cosmic forces in the universe: implosion and explosion.

            If this play is about all kinds of insanity, being bonkers at least offers one a departure from one’s real antagonists or possibly bonded civil allies.

            Yet madness even when fashionable leads to ashes. Nature and reality are not enemies anybody needs.