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342 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Times, September 17, 1950, as saying, "All the contact I have
had with it [politics] has left me feeling as though I had been
drinking out of a spittoon."
The Papini Committee in Italy had become the focus of an
impressive movement to free Pound. In 1955, Papini sent a note to
the American Embassy in Rome, asking that Clare Boothe Luce,
the American Ambassadress, intercede on behalf of Pound. He
said, in part, "In the very moment when the chiefs of the Kremlin
are sending back pardoned German war criminals, we can not believe
that the descendants of Penn and of Lincoln, of Emerson and
Walt Whitman, wish to be less generous than the successors of
Lenin and Stalin."
Mrs. Luce apparently claimed no kinship with Penn or Lincoln,
for she ignored the note, if indeed she ever saw it. Some weeks
later, I was with the Pounds when they received a communication
from Papini, expressing his regret that Pound no longer wished to
regain his freedom and was willing to remain in custody. Pound
notified him at once that he had made no such statement. We later
learned that a minor official on Mrs. Luce's staff had finally replied
to Papini's request by saying that Mr. Pound had been contacted
and that he had no desire to leave St. Elizabeths! Neither
Ezra nor his wife had ever discussed this matter with anyone in
the State Department, and certainly not with anyone in the Rome
Embassy.
Our officials in Italy continued to be plagued by the Pound
question for several years. Our government was then deporting to
Italy a number of gangsters who had done very well in America.
The Italian press set up a great clamor about this. The editors
wrote bitterly to the effect that these lads would never have become
gangsters if they had grown up in the civilized atmosphere of
their native Italy, but since they had come to maturity in the
jungle cities of America, of course they had had to become gangsters
in order to survive. Now that they had been overcome by
their evil environment, the United States government wished to
send them back to plague their native land. "If you must send
people back to Italy," wrote one editor, in a statement that delighted
Pound, "send us back Ezra Pound, whom you despise, but