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252 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL out and executed, and he supposed that his own turn might come any day. For a while, he had as a neighbor a Private Till, who is referred to in The Pisan Cantos as "St. Louis Till". Pound wrote, and Till was hung yesterday for murder and rape with trimmings 15 [.] Till, a Negro soldier, had raped two Italian women during a drunken orgy. He finished the party by slashing them to death with a bayonet knife. All about Pound was the stuff of tragedy during that terrible summer of 1945. He writes in The Pisan Cantos, As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor. 16 His old friend Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, had died of shock after seeing his home and the cultural city of Dresden levelled by Allied bombers, an attack in which forty thousand women and children, fleeing the onrushing Communist hordes, lost their lives. Pound's wife had not been informed where he was, and did not know if he was alive or dead. To this day, she has never received any official notification of her husband's whereabouts from the government. It seems probable that Pound suffered a sunstroke, or a mild stroke, as a result of prolonged exposure. The poet Alan Neame, writing in Blackfriars, the English Dominican Review, in May, 1951, notes that Pound was "exposed to the variations of the Italian climate and to the ill treatment of . . . guards who used to while away their time tormenting him with their bayonets." By autumn, his physical condition had deteriorated alarmingly, and the camp commandant informed Washington that he would have to have medical care. He received no answer to this message. A guard made Pound a wooden platform, so that he no longer had to sleep on the ground. This kind deed is referred to in The Pisan Cantos,
EZRA POUND 253 "doan yu tell no one I made it" from a mask fine as any in Frankfurt "It'll get you offn th' ground" 17 [.] One afternoon, eight of the prisoners, driven almost mad by the harsh treatment, tried to make a break for it. As they dashed past Pound's death cage, they were mowed down by automatic rifle fire. The guards continued to rain bullets into them as they lay helpless on the ground, only a few feet from Pound. The horror of this scene had a lasting effect upon him. "After that," he said, "I needed a five-year rest cure. But I didn't bargain for a life sentence." On the evening of November 17, 1945, two lieutenants took Pound away. He supposed that, at last, he was being led out to be executed. Instead, they put him in a jeep and drove him to a landing strip, where he was put aboard a C-54 Army transport. The next morning, under heavy guard, he was taken from the plane and lodged in the District Jail in Washington, D.C. Two days later, Omar Pound, who was serving in the U.S. Army in Germany, arrived in Pisa to see his father. He had heard from a fellow soldier, a former inmate of Pisa, about the old man in the cage ("he had the same name as yourn"), and obtained an emergency furlough. The District Jail held many critics of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the two years previous to Pound's incarceration there. Two other poets, George Sylvester Viereck and Ellis O. Jones, accused of sedition, were still locked up there when Pound arrived. Viereck asked permission to visit with him, but he was refused. During his months of captivity in Pisa, a blackout had been placed on news of Pound. Not only his family, but his friends as well, were unable to find out what had happened to him. T. S. Eliot finally discovered that he was imprisoned in the D.T.C., and wrote some indignant letters to the authorities. He also contacted some of his fellow writers, and asked them to protest. Robert Graves wrote a sneering answer which was typical of the responses. He said, "I never interfere with the domestic affairs of another nation." Yet many of these same writers who refused to help Pound leaped to the defense of the Communist poet Boris
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252 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL<br />
out and executed, and he supposed that his own turn might come<br />
any day. For a while, he had as a neighbor a Private Till, who<br />
is referred to in The Pisan Cantos as "St. Louis Till". Pound<br />
wrote,<br />
and Till was hung yesterday<br />
for murder and rape with trimmings 15 [.]<br />
Till, a Negro soldier, had raped two Italian women during a<br />
drunken orgy. He finished the party by slashing them to death<br />
with a bayonet knife.<br />
All about Pound was the stuff of tragedy during that terrible<br />
summer of 1945. He writes in The Pisan Cantos,<br />
As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill<br />
from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor. 16<br />
His old friend Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel Prize-winning<br />
playwright, had died of shock after seeing his home and the cultural<br />
city of Dresden levelled by Allied bombers, an attack in<br />
which forty thousand women and children, fleeing the onrushing<br />
Communist hordes, lost their lives.<br />
Pound's wife had not been informed where he was, and did<br />
not know if he was alive or dead. To this day, she has never received<br />
any official notification of her husband's whereabouts<br />
from the government.<br />
It seems probable that Pound suffered a sunstroke, or a mild<br />
stroke, as a result of prolonged exposure. The poet Alan Neame,<br />
writing in Blackfriars, the English Dominican Review, in May,<br />
1951, notes that Pound was "exposed to the variations of the<br />
Italian climate and to the ill treatment of . . . guards who used<br />
to while away their time tormenting him with their bayonets."<br />
By autumn, his physical condition had deteriorated alarmingly,<br />
and the camp commandant informed Washington that he would<br />
have to have medical care. He received no answer to this message.<br />
A guard made Pound a wooden platform, so that he no longer had<br />
to sleep on the ground. This kind deed is referred to in The Pisan<br />
Cantos,