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320 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
and one another's property; instead of psychiatry, he suggested love;
and instead of money, he suggested art.
His years of exile were due to the flight of intellect from money,
for the two are incompatible, as witness the operation of any great
American corporation. Money reduces everything to quantity; intellect,
performing a selective function that is necessary to life itself,
sternly insists upon quality. The very existence of an Ezra
Pound negates the theory of quantity. How many Ezra Pounds are
there? Such men compel us to deal in unities of one, instead of
escaping into the never-never land of socialist numbers, which deal
only in billions and trillions.
In a letter from Italy dated March 18, 1959, Ezra suggests that I
append this comment on contemporary literary criticism: "The
freudian approach to literature: not which the author has managed
to get onto the page; but: did he wet the bed as a child."
It was no accident that the rich adopted Freud, for he was as
vain and useless as the idlest millionaire. Who could foresee that
justice would be wreaked by the gods, and that this foul-mouthed
creature would spend the last eighteen years of his life suffering the
Dantean punishment of the lower half of his face slowly rotting
away?
With the gods of Marx and Freud being raised over the United
States like funnyfaces painted on giant balloons for a college football
rally, it is no wonder that Ezra remarked to me, "the only
place I could stand to live in this country is the madhouse." He
often said that the company of the eight thousand in St. Elizabeths
might not be so unbearable as that of the "160,000,000 crazier ones
outside."
Ezra Pound helped others without thought for himself; he wrote
poems without worrying about who would pay him for his work.
This set him off too jarringly against the mainstream of American
life. Consequently, he was able to look at his countrymen with an
objective eye, nor was he insensitive to their appearance.
During the 1956 elections, he called to my attention the commissar
or foetus type of public official that seems to have been
produced by the modern state. It is characterized by a round head,
usually bald, a petulant mouth, and the formless features of a
newly-born baby. In July, 1959, he wrote to me,