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346 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
with the state, no organization offered him assistance. But all monoliths
are really inverted pyramids, a massive superstructure of myth
built upon a minuscule bit of truth or reality, and this tiny base is
susceptible to attack by mavericks, or those who refuse to fall into
line. Such are few indeed, because almost everyone is persuaded to
attack the massive superstructure, rather than the base, and their
attacks fail. Rather than answer Pound's attack on its base, the
monolithic liberal state imprisoned him. Now he needed another
maverick to maneuver from the outside, and Rex found him in
Congressman Usher L. Burdick of North Dakota.
Burdick caught fire when Rex explained Pound's dilemma. It
is interesting to note that most admirers of Pound's poetry were
content to see him remain in prison, about ninety per cent of the
purchasers of his works being liberals who admired his genius and
slept more soundly because he was in jail. Many of his partisans,
on the other hand, had little interest in his poetry. Burdick, who
caused his release, was among this number.
On August 21, 1957, Burdick introduced House Resolution 403,
demanding a full-scale investigation of the Pound case. His fellow-
Congressmen could not ignore the resolution, although none of
them spoke in favor of it. As was customary with a "maverick
resolution", they put it in limbo, as the various committees and
other means of pigeonholing legislation are known. In this case,
the resolution was turned over to the Legislative Reference Service
of the Library of Congress, the only department of that institution
that has any direct connection with Congressional work. The
LRS was asked to prepare a report on the background of the
case, it being tacitly understood that the report could be completed
in 1958 or 1968, or whenever the LRS got around to it, as no
date of completion was set.
As luck would have it, the research assistant who was assigned
to the report, H. A. Sieber, became greatly interested in the subject.
He made an intensive study of the considerable Pound
material at the Library of Congress, and on March 31, 1958, only
seven months later, the report was submitted. The Medical, Legal,
Literary and Political Status of Ezra Pound contained much of
interest, including a photograph of the death cage in which Pound
had been kept at Pisa.