4pQonT

366 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
professors, psychiatrists, and millionaires. This idea is also touched
upon by Nietzsche, when he says, "Whereas modern man fears
nothing in an artist more than the emotion of any personal fight,
the Greek knows the artist only as engaged in a personal fight." 2
Because Ezra engaged in a personal fight, he found every
group up in arms against him. He too found another genius, Confucius,
as a sparring partner and comrade-in-arms. One day he
showed me a battered book whose binding was in shreds and
heavily patched with Band-aids and pieces of Scotch tape. This
was James Legge's version of Confucius' The Four Books. Ezra
said that this book had carried him through the Pisa experience.
"Without it," he wryly remarked, "I really would have gone nuts."
As Ezra had warned his people in one of his broadcasts, "Some
day you will need to know, need to know more than you do at
present." This statement, made against the background of a war,
was ignored, because the only thing one needs to know in wartime
is how to survive.
But now the moment has arrived when Americans "need to
know," need to know more than the pap that is fed them by the
professors and the journalists. This need can be filled by the work
of Ezra Pound, even though he has returned to Italy. The only
thing that prevents the American people from reading Pound is the
fear that knowledge may be more challenging than slavery.
When the governments of the United States and Italy finally
agreed that it was safe to let Pound go abroad, T. D. Horton and
his wife accompanied the "exiles" to New York. They stopped
on the way to visit the old home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, and
on the following day drove to Rutherford, New Jersey, where they
spent several days with William Carlos Williams before sailing.
In Italy, Pound has continued to work on his Cantos. Since his
return, he has published Impact, a volume of essays, and Thrones,
a new section of the Cantos. Giacomo Oreglia interviewed him for
one of Europe's most important newspapers, Stockholm's Dagens
Nyheter, November 5, 1958, and I quote, in part:
". . . Showing old-fashioned chivalry Ezra Pound, together
with his wife Dorothy Shakespear, a finely-built, reserved lady,
and his amiable, well-educated daughter Mary de Rachewiltz met
me at some distance from Castel de Fontana.