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14 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
new and daring in the fine arts, should be mentioned there, although
its directors preferred the work of one of Pound's earliest
discoveries, T. S. Eliot. In 1948, a reception had been held at the
Institute in honor of Eliot, who had just been awarded the Nobel
Prize (as have several of Pound's students, although he himself has
been passed by repeatedly). At this reception, I had first seen Ezra
Pound's wife, Dorothy Shakespear Pound, who appeared briefly,
squired by Eliot in his most high Episcopal manner.
True to his calling, Pound had not allowed a treason indictment
or a cell in a madhouse to interfere drastically with his work. He
was translating the Confucian Odes. One of the students at the
Institute was also a nurse at St. Elizabeths. Like many other members
of the staff, she had peeked at Pound's confidential file, although
this was nominally forbidden. My fellow student informed
me that Ezra was a source of considerable annoyance to his "captors",
as his doctors were sometimes called. Not only had he refused
"treatment", as the doctors termed their excursions into barbarism,
but he would not take part in the activities of the hospital.
In reality, persons under observation for mental illness are immediately
deprived of all their civil rights, a dilemma that the
writers of the Constitution unfortunately overlooked. It has been
very simple for bureaucrats to designate their critics as being
"mentally ill", and to shut them away from the eyes of the world
in the various Bastilles that have been built for that purpose. No
one dares to intervene on behalf of a person who is "mentally ill".
It is much safer to be a Communist or a hoodlum. The sculptor
John B. Flannagan, who was a patient at Bloomingdale Hospital in
New York (reputedly one of the best in the country), wrote of his
experiences, "There are actually more legal safeguards for a felon
than checks on the psychiatrist to whom civil liberty is a joke." 1
The superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Dr. Winfred Overholser,
was a genial type who wished the patients to help him create the
atmosphere of a YMCA summer camp, but the assorted rapists,
dope addicts, and political prisoners refused to cooperate. The
staff employed the latest methods of "therapy" (which were constantly
changing), such as acting out one's repressions, without
weapons of course. For those who wished to write—a category
that includes everyone suspected of mental illness—a mimeo-