We need a treatment for an Ezra Pound biopic

Okay, I’m par­tial. But Pound’s life, writ­ings, and char­ac­ter were so out­sized, so dra­matic, it’s amaz­ing we haven’t seen a movie ver­sion of his life already. (Tom and Viv must not have grossed well.) Check out Lawrence LaR­iv­iere White’s spare allu­sions to just a few of the events sur­round­ing the Pisan Can­tos:

For exam­ple, I’ve always been par­tial to one part of the story, some­thing not in Sieburth’s intro, some­thing that hap­pens long after all the Pisan stuff: after he gets out of St. Elizabeth’s, and after his great photo op, giv­ing the fas­cist salute on the boat, throw­ing out some red meat for the boys in the press, his first stop is Schloss Brun­nen­burg, home to his long-suffering daugh­ter & her aristo hus­band. The way Ken­ner tells the story, it’s a mis­er­able spell, dur­ing which Mary for about the first time in her life has a chance to spend some qual­ity time with her dad, but then all these wackos show up, her dad’s friends—poetic syco­phants, escaped fas­cists, fel­low for­mer men­tal patients. It could make a great play, kind of like a real­ist, big cast ver­sion of End Game, & a dark dank bro­ken down medieval cas­tle for a set. All of Pound’s pre­ten­sions come home to roost & the nest gets stinky. There’s an arc to that story.

There’s an arc to Sieburth’s ver­sion of the Pisa story, one that doesn’t get played up in the Ken­ner. Both ver­sions give us the cap­ture in Rapallo by the par­ti­sans, with Pound pick­ing up the euca­lyp­tus pip on the way out (& I’m fond of that pip. I too col­lect fetish objects, if too many. I’ve got this box of rocks. I used to know where each came from). & both gives us good details on his time at the DTC, the weeks in the cage & the weeks in the infir­mary. Sieburth empha­sizes the racial dimen­sion, some­thing that has a sharp pres­ence in the poems. The Deten­tion Train­ing Cen­ter was the only seg­re­gated [sic; I think White means deseg­re­gated, TC] unit in that the­ater of oper­a­tions, and Sieburth believes that the con­tact with the black voices, their inclu­sion in the poem, is the cru­cial ele­ment in the Pisan Cantos.

But it’s the time between the two events that fas­ci­nates me. Pound isn’t taken directly to Pisa. His first stop is at a mil­i­tary intel­li­gence facil­ity in Genoa, where some sym­pa­thetic offi­cers give him the good cop treat­ment & Pound sings like a bird, for the ben­e­fit of J. Edgar Hoover’s files. It’s a glo­ri­ous manic phase for Ezra, lift­ing him up to make for a bet­ter depres­sive crash in the cage. Pound is at his delu­sional best (& whether or not he was insane, he was grandiosely delu­sional), fir­ing off let­ters left & right, telling every­one how all he had to do was have a quick chat with Tru­man (& even Stalin) & he’d get every­thing fixed, & by every­thing he didn’t mean his case, he meant the world.

A. David Moody has already banged out a solid biog­ra­phy of the young Pound (1885–1920) and is work­ing on a sec­ond vol­ume; I won­der if anyone’s optioned it yet. (Among other Amer­i­can mod­ernists, Gertrude Stein would also make a great movie subject.)