EZRA POUND: A Victim Of The Deep State ?
POUND
THE YOUNG AMERICAN
PEERED through the viewfinder at the naked poet. James Angleton
squeezed the shutter once and then again. Ezra Pound went right on
talking, as if he didn’t care. 1 Jim, as Pound called him, had just
come down from Milan. Upon arrival, the Yale man with black hair and
high brown cheekbones had spotted the abode of the expatriate poet
from the waterfront below. It took some ingenuity to locate the
entrance to number 12 via Marsala in the narrow cobblestone street
around back. He hiked up the darkened stairs to the fifth floor and
emerged into the bright light of the terraced apartment, where Pound
and his wife, Dorothy, welcomed him like an old friend.
In fact, that summer
day in 1938 was the first time Jim Angleton and Ezra Pound had met.
Pound was fifty-two years old, Angleton a rising college sophomore
and expatriate resident of Italy. He knew of Pound through the
crystalline poetry of his books Personae and the Cantos (“Songs”
in English).
He felt something of
a personal connection, too. During his freshman year, he had come
across a sketch of Pound in a campus magazine, above the caption
“From Idaho to Rapallo.” 2 Jim had made that same
intercontinental journey.
Born in Boise, he
had lived there and in Dayton, Ohio, until he was sixteen years old,
when his family moved to Milan. In the poet’s odyssey from Idaho to
Italy, Angleton might have seen the arc of possibility in his own
life.
Angleton was taller
than his host. He had a Latin complexion and the lithe build of a
soccer player. His English accent announced old-world courtesy and
quiet good manners. His piercing dark eyes and the perpetual hint of
a smile suggested an ironic approach to life.
The couple welcomed
Angleton into their neat apartment. Pound, ever alert for potential
patrons, knew of Jim’s father, a parvenu who ran the
Italian-American Chamber of Commerce in Milan. Hugh Angleton was one
of the best-known Americans in northern Italy. 3 He mixed easily
among the businessmen and officials associated with the government of
Benito Mussolini.
For Pound, who
admired Mussolini, this was recommendation enough. He also supposed
that the young Angleton could derive from his teaching a necessary
education in the complexities of debt, trade, and paper money. And
eventually (the poet may well have calculated), Jim’s father might
be of some service.
For five days in
August 1938, Angleton made himself at home with the Pounds. He had
come in search of greatness and found it. He had read the dense
poetry of The Fifth Decade of Cantos, published in 1937. He
especially admired an early poem of Pound’s, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,
about the universal beauty of poetry. Angleton knew, too, of Pound’s
interest in economics, articulated in a series of publications with
pedantic titles such as ABC of Economics, Social Credit, and
Jefferson and/or Mussolini—the latter a frankly laudatory portrait
of the Italian fascist leader. Poetry could not be insulated from
revolution and money, Pound insisted. So Jim gave close attention to
his political writings as well as to his poetry. 4
* * *
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON
WAS born on December 9, 1917, the first of four children of James
Hugh Angleton and his wife, Carmen Moreno Angleton.
Hugh, as he was
known, had grown up in central Illinois, working as a schoolteacher
until he moved to Idaho, where he started out as a candy salesman. He
was serving in the Idaho National Guard at a U.S. military post in
Nogales, Arizona, when he met Carmen Moreno, born in Mexico but
naturalized as a U.S. citizen. It was, according to one account, “a
case of love at first sight.” The bride was “one of the Spanish
beauties of Nogales and exceedingly popular.” 5 They were married
in December 1916 and returned to Boise, where their first child was
born, a son. They named him James, and Carmen gave him a Spanish
middle name, “Jesus,” which later he would shun.
The Angletons lived
in a two-story, two-bedroom bungalow on Washington Avenue in Boise. 6
Hugh took a job as a sales agent for the National Cash Register
Company. 7 Sociable and engaging, he was soon promoted.
In 1927, Hugh and
Carmen Angleton moved their family to Dayton, Ohio, where Hugh became
a vice president of National Cash Register. Jim attended Oakwood
Junior High, a public school. 8 In 1933, Hugh bought out NCR’s
Italian subsidiary and moved the family to Milan, where he opened his
own company, selling cash registers and business machines. Suddenly,
the candy salesman was a wealthy man.
In raising their
children, Hugh and Carmen emphasized the importance of education and
travel. They sent Jim to Malvern College, an exclusive redbrick
boarding school in Worcestershire, England. 9 It was there, he said
years later, that he learned the importance of duty. 10 His younger
brother, Hugh, was sent to Harrow, an even more exclusive English
prep school. Carmen, the elder daughter, went to a convent school in
Milan and then a girls’ school in Switzerland. Delores, the
youngest, would also go to school in England. In the summers, the
family reunited in Milan.
Angleton’s
upwardly mobile childhood was formative. By the time he arrived at
Yale in September 1937, he had resided in three countries, attended
public and private schools, spoke three languages, and had lived in
circumstances both modest and luxurious. He was an outdoorsman with
advanced tastes in poetry, an athlete with an original mind. He
displayed a distinctive social style, and—perceptible under the
surface—an ambition fueled by the rapid success of his father.
After his freshman
year at Yale, he returned to Milan for the summer. He called up the
American embassy, asking for the address of the expatriate writer
Ezra Pound, and he didn’t relent until he was given it. Then he
wrote straightaway. Jim explained he was the photography editor of
The Yale Literary Magazine, not mentioning that said journal did not
actually publish photographs. 11 Receiving no answer, Jim wrote
another letter in longhand ten days later.
“I want only to
get a few spirited ideas from you together with a photo....” 12
This plea extracted
the desired invitation from the Pounds. And so Angleton drove down
from Milan to Genoa and then traced the coastal road to Rapallo.
In their summer idyll, the esoteric master and the voracious schoolboy
talked and smoked. 13
Pound doted on the
company of disciples, and Angleton was looking for wisdom. Angleton
wanted to find coherence in the world, and Pound’s mythic poetry
offered a place where he could speak a higher language of art.
Angleton felt free to wield his camera around the apartment. When
they went out onto the apartment’s rooftop terrace overlooking the
Gulf of Tigullio one overcast day, Pound stood up and stared into the
distance. Jim snapped another photo and later gave it to the poet.
Pound thought it the best picture of himself that he had ever seen. 14
* * *
BY THE TIME ANGLETON
got back to New Haven in September, his five days with the
world-famous Ezra Pound had become, in the retelling, close to five
weeks. In one gulp, Angleton had taken in the surface effects of a
worldly education. Pound’s reckless ambition, his will to cultural
power, his elitism, his conspiratorial convictions, his self-taught
craftsmanship, and his omnivorous powers of observation—all these
would have influence on the maturing mind of James Angleton.
Angleton took a room
at 312 Temple Street with his best friend from freshman year, another
aspiring poet, Reed Whittemore. Reed had led a more prosaic childhood
as a doctor’s son in New Haven. Whittemore recommended T. S.
Eliot’s poem “Gerontion” to his roommate, and Angleton loved
it. With its apparent insight into history and its obscure
intimations of danger, Eliot’s poem foreshadowed the life of
adventure to which Angleton would aspire.
After such
knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many
cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives
with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by
vanities. Think now
She gives when our
attention is distracted
And what she gives,
gives with such supple confusions
That the giving
famishes the craving …
“He was quite
British in his ways,” Whittemore said of his friend. “He was a
mixture of pixiness and earnestness, very much at home in Italian
literature, especially Dante, as well as the fine points of
handicapping horses.” 15
Angleton’s
solitary style was already evident. A student of fly-fishing, he
liked to borrow Whittemore’s car and drive off to streams in
northwestern Connecticut, where he would spend long hours casting for
trout. Yet Whittemore said he never saw a single catch. Angleton
spoke of visiting a female friend whom he knew from some other life,
but Whittemore never saw her, either. With his English accent,
Italian suits, and lofty manner, he was, in Whittemore’s words, “a
mystery man.” 16
* * *
YALE COLLEGE
OCCUPIED a high position in American intellectual life. Not as
patrician as Harvard, nor as provincial as Princeton, Yale served
students from a wider range of backgrounds, and it served them
differently. 17
The classrooms
scattered around the campus in New Haven contained intense islands of
scholars, students, and aspiring poets who spoke of a new way of
thinking about literature. Angleton, it turned out, had entered one
of the more powerful intellectual milieus of mid century America.
Yale was the place where the enduring influence of New Criticism
began to be felt.
The New Critics were
a cohort of literature professors who converged on Yale in the 1930s.
They favored a canon of English poetry centered on Shakespeare; the
metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, led by John Donne; and
select moderns, such as William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot.
Angleton took
English 10, an introductory course on poetry, fiction, and drama,
with Maynard Mack, a young professor who admired Pound’s poetry.
Mack encouraged Angleton’s interest. 18 Mack’s undergraduate
seminars were presented as laboratories for young literary
scientists, the model for research being drawn from two
original-minded English critics, I. A. Richards and William Empson.
Richards had been an influential lecturer in English and moral
sciences at Cambridge University. In 1939, he became a professor at
Harvard. Bill Empson was his most gifted student, a mathematician and
poet whose undergraduate thesis became a famous work of literary
criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity.
In the book, Empson
offers an argument, supported by interpretations of poems, for the
relationship between verbal ambiguity and imaginative value.
From its first
publication in 1930, Seven Types of Ambiguity has never gone out of
print. Yet at the time, it had not been published in the United
States—a neglect that surprised Angleton. When Empson visited Yale,
Angleton introduced himself and took the critic out for a long
evening of wine and literary talk. He said he would find Empson an
American publisher. 19
The New Criticism
that Angleton treasured was a powerful method, not merely for its
insights into poetry but for its implicitly conservative worldview.
It was not
value-free. On the contrary, its proponents would argue vigorously
that it was a method deeply rooted in a particular set of values, a
method, in the final analysis, for promulgating those values. The
elevated strictures of the New Criticism that exalted his favorite
poets would prove formative for Angleton. He would come to value
coded language, textual analysis, ambiguity, and close control as the
means to illuminate the amoral arts of spying that became his job.
Literary criticism led him to the profession of secret intelligence.
Poetry gave birth to a spy.
SALESMAN
ANGLETON EXTRACTED A
FISTFUL of letters from his mailbox in the cramped confines of Yale
Station. One of the letters was postmarked “Rapallo.”
When he sliced open
the envelope, he had to decipher Ezra Pound’s inimitable
orthography.
Dear Jim,
All this is vurry
fine and active. How the hell am I to do my own work and take two
months off to collect my own bibliography I don’t see. Does the
Yale lib/[rary] expect to BUY...? 20
The poet was steamed
that Angleton had not fulfilled his promise of compiling a complete
bibliography of Pound’s work. Ezra wanted to sell some manuscripts
and pay some debts. He was always short of money.
By return mail,
Angleton responded with flattering familiarity: “Dear Ezra.”
He reported he was
rereading Confucius’s Ta Hio and Pound’s opera Cavalcanti. He
saved his biggest news for the last page: He and Reed Whittemore were
launching a new magazine called Furioso. “Would you be the
Godfather of this?” 21
Angleton was pleased
to get Pound’s response ten days later.
“Yes, I’ll back
up any and all the proposals in yrs. 19 th instant,” Pound wrote.
“But we had better think out WHAT will do the job best. The ‘text
book’ ought to be ready soon/you can quote from advance copy of
that.” 22
The idea that the
great Ezra Pound was sending them a “text book”— whatever that
was—sounded more than promising. Angleton described himself as “a
very excited piece of protoplasm.” 23
Nonetheless, he was
disappointed—no, dismayed—when Pound sent him the long-awaited
“text book.” It was not a canto. It was not even poetry. It was a
list of Pound’s favorite quotes about coinage, paper money, and
debt from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers.
Angleton wasn’t pleased.
He wrote to Pound,
deflecting the gift and asking for something more literary.
“Right at this
moment Ezra, we are awaiting a canto or something,” Angleton said.
“We have to have some verse from you.” 24
Pound did not
answer. With Whittemore’s help, Angleton improvised a solution.
They dressed up the “text book” quotes with some Roman numerals
and stashed it at the back of the issue before they went to press.
The red-trimmed first issue of Furioso, adorned by an impish devil
wielding a switch, was mailed out in May 1939. Costing just thirty
cents, the publication was a literary bargain. In its twenty-eight
pages, there was Pound’s odd contribution,and a letter from the
poet Archibald MacLeish arguing that the new communications medium of
broadcast radio would be the salvation of poetry.
Angleton’s friend
E. E. Cummings, also a known poet, contributed a poem. The soon to be
renowned Dr. William Carlos Williams added three more. 25
One canny Yale
graduate student named Norman Holmes Pearson was especially impressed
with this collection of fresh, arresting literary work.
Pearson was a gimpy
young man, almost a hunchback. He smoked a pipe and read Sherlock
Holmes detective stories for pleasure, which proved to be good cover
for the unlikeliest of spies. Pearson made a point of introducing
himself to Angleton. 26
* * *
WHEN YALE CLASSES
ENDED in May 1939 Angleton returned to Milan by boat. The ten-day
voyage took him from New York to Genoa. A train took him to Milan and
a reunion with his parents and siblings. Angleton wrote a letter to
Pound, asking if he might visit him in Rapallo again. He wanted Pound
to meet his father.
Hugh Angleton, then
fifty years old, was not a poet or a writer. He was a man of
business. Like Ezra Pound, he admired the ambitions and spirit of
Italian fascism. “Hugh Angleton was a very tough character,”
recalled William Gowen, a young army captain, who would meet both
father and son in Rome a few years later. “Jim worshipped his
father. Hugh was very aggressive and masculine. Jim was not.” 27
Hugh was an outgoing
man, solidly built at five foot eleven, with serious gray eyes. 28 He
had installed his family in the Palazzo Castiglioni, an art nouveau
palace in the center of Milan. An extrovert and a fine horseman, he
betrayed few traces of the raw western frontier from which he came.
In the Italian-American Chamber of Commerce, he cultivated friends,
dinner companions, and business partners.
In his office on via
Dante, Hugh Angleton received visitors from all over Europe. From
friends in manufacturing, he learned about the German arms industry.
At the Rotary Club, he talked to financiers and industrialists. 29 As
a member of the Knights of Malta, he knew influential Catholics. 30
As a Mason, he drew on his friends in the secretive order to keep
himself informed about Italian politics. As a man with connections,
Hugh wanted to get to know his son’s friend, the great poet, who
dared to say fascism and Americanism were two sides of the same coin.
Angleton gravitated toward Pound’s view that Italy and America were
not enemies. 31 Hugh didn’t disagree.
The newspapers
brought more foreboding news every day. Armies were mobilizing across
Europe. In August 1914, a global war had erupted, seemingly out of
nowhere. In the summer of 1939, the older generation could sense
another cataclysm coming.
A few weeks later,
on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the war in Europe
had begun. Two days later, England and France mobilized to fight
Germany. Mussolini rallied to Hitler’s defense, passing a series of
anti-Semitic decrees in November 1939. The United States then
sanctioned Italy. Angleton’s adopted country was now an enemy of
the United States of America.
* * *
IN THE FALL OF 1939,
Angleton and Whittemore moved into room 1456 of Pierson College, a
pleasant enclosed quadrangle in the heart of the Yale campus. 32 They
went to work on the second issue of Furioso, which proved even better
than the first, flush with poems from the famous and the promising.
Pound’s contribution, alas, was again disappointing. Generously
titled “Five Poems,” it consisted of five fragments, alternately
whimsical, vulgar, and slight. 33
In his own writing,
Angleton had adopted Pound’s resentment of Jews and verbal abuse of
President Roosevelt. In February 1940, he wrote to Pound:
“There is hell of
a lot of Rooseveltian shillyshally here in America.” He complained
the American press favored London over Berlin. “Everything is
definitely British and the jews [sic] cause a devil of a lot of
stink. Here in New York will be the next great pogrom, and they do
need about a thousand ghettos in America. Jew, Jew and Jew, even the
Irish are losing out. 34 But Angleton did not write to debate
politics. He knew Pound was squeezed by wartime financial measures.
He wanted to offer money.
“I talked to Dad
on the telephone the day before the war and mentioned the little
shekel you might need, say a couple of thousand, and he said o.k.,”
Angleton wrote. “So I hope you will oblige by writing him and
accept it as a favor.” 35
Pound responded by
return mail, acknowledging Angleton’s offer, if not his own
acceptance of money.
“Dear JIM, Thanks
fr/ yr/ air mail. I am not yet starved to the wall yet but thanks for
the practical intentions in yr/ epistle. Neither, of course do I have
any intention of relapsing into reminiscence of the Celtic Twilight
during a period when twilight sleep is NOT, by hell, being used, for
the birth of a new Euroope [sic].”
Pound had something
more important in mind than money: a cause.
“A NEW god damn it
NEW EUROPE,” he wrote. “All midwives to hand and ready.” 36
As the poet
championed the “new Europe” of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler,
he sought out Hugh Angleton and his generosity. Pound wrote him in
June 1940:
Dear Mr. Angleton,
Jim is all het up
for fear that I with poetic imprudence might have failed to putt
[sic] by a few biglietti di mille [meaning he had failed to save a
few thousand dollars]. I shall still eat/ even if Morgenthau, Hull,
and that ass F.D. Roosevelt have succeeded in having the mails
blocked and payment on U.S cheques suspended.
In the same letter,
he signaled that he was short of funds, at the same time saying that
he wished to talk about something “more important than my personal
affairs.” He wanted Hugh Angleton’s help in spreading his
political views.
“Time has come
when I might be a business asset (wild as the idea wd/appear),” he
wrote. “I don’t mean in an office but sitting at the seat of
news.” 37
Pound wanted to be a
practical asset to a businessman like Angleton. Within six months, he
began to broadcast his commentaries for Radio Rome, the Italian news
outlet heard from Sicily to the Pyrenees.
“What will remain
from this struggle is an idea,” Pound declared in early 1941. “What
spreads and will spread from the determination to have a New Europe
is an idea: the idea of a home for every family in the country. The
idea that every family in the country shall have a sane house, and
that means a house well built, with no breeding space for
tuberculosis bugs....”
Pound likened
twentieth-century European fascism to nineteenth-century American
democracy in its rejection of collectivism. The new Europe, he said,
was merely following in the path of the United States. 38 Over the
next four years, Pound would deliver more than 120 speeches over
Radio Rome, most of them rife with folksy language, images of
infestation, historical references, and anti-Semitism, all wrapped in
a belligerent spirit of racial chauvinism.
Angleton had not
been uncomfortable with fascism or fascists at Yale, sometimes to the
consternation of his more liberal classmates. Anti-Semitism didn’t
seem to bother him. But Pound’s overwrought vehemence did. As his
bright college years came to a close in the spring of 1941, Angleton
was ready to graduate from Yale College and the school of Ezra Pound.
Apparently, they never corresponded again. 39
WIFE
ONE RAINY DAY IN
September 1941, Cicely d’Autremont, Vassar class of 1944, walked
down Brattle Street in Cambridge. An impish sophomore from Arizona,
she was out on a date with a Yale boy who wanted her to meet a friend
who had just started at Harvard Law School. Cicely and the boy
climbed up three flights of narrow stairs in an old apartment
building. They walked into a bare living room that was unfurnished
save for a reproduction of El Greco’s painting View of Toledo. A
tall man stood next to the picture of an unearthly green
landscape.“How do?” he said.
This first encounter
so impressed Cicely d’Autremont Angleton that decades later she
recalled the moment.
“If anything went
together it was him and the picture,” she told a reporter. “I
fell madly in love at first sight. I’d never meet anyone like him
in my life. He was so charismatic. It was as if the lightning in the
picture had suddenly struck me. He had an El Greco face. It was
extraordinary.” 40
Another decade after
that disclosure, when Cicely Angleton was a grandmother, she again
relived that chance encounter, writing a poem tinged with rueful
hindsight.
Beware, she warned,
of hollow cheeks,
and auras sketched
in lightning. 41
Cicely d’Autremont
didn’t know to beware of hollow cheeks. She was barely more than a
schoolgirl, born into comfort and privilege. The marriage of her
mother and father in 1919 joined two of the wealthiest families in
Duluth, Minnesota. Her father, Hubert, was a scion of the
d’Autremonts, who had vast holdings in mining and lumber. 42 Her
mother, Helen, was a Congdon, who had more of the same, in addition
to a fabulous mansion. Helen and Hubert moved to Tucson, Arizona,
where he became a banker, while she was active in charitable work.
During the Depression years, the d’Autremonts were known as the
largest contributors to Tucson charities. 43 Cicely was born in 1922,
their second child and first daughter. 44
Cicely was drawn to
Angleton’s exotic intensity. “Jim was a Chicano and I loved him
for it,” she said. “I never saw anyone as Mexican as he was. He
was Latino, an Apache, he was a gut fighter.” 45
* * *
ANGLETON DID NOT
RETURN Cicely’s passion, at least not immediately.
In his last year at
Yale, Angleton’s charmed life had suffered unsettling setbacks. At
a time when the U.S. Army was welcoming hundreds of thousands of
young men, he was rejected by the Selective Service, probably because
of his recurring tuberculosis. 46 Optimistically, he applied to
Harvard Law School, despite the fact that his poor grades pulled him
down to the bottom quarter of the Yale class of 1941. 47 He was
rejected.
Angleton’s friend
Norman Holmes Pearson wrote a letter to Harvard, asking them to
reconsider. 48 Pearson, then thirty-two years old, surely qualifies
as the most improbable spymaster in American history. 49 An assistant
literature professor from a prosperous New England family, Pearson
had few obvious qualifications for a life of deception and intrigue.
He was a genteel man of unobtrusive appearance who walked with a
limp, left over from a spinal injury in childhood. He was also a
founding spirit of the global enterprise of espionage, propaganda,
and violence known as the Central Intelligence Agency.
Pearson’s letter
to Harvard proved convincing, and Angleton was admitted. 50 Reprieved
from unemployment, Angleton intended to make good by studying
international law and contracts and then going into the family
business. 51 He was headed for a career of selling cash registers or
perhaps publishing poets, but Norman Pearson wasn’t done with him.
Pearson, like many
other young Ivy League professors, went to war by joining the newly
created Office of Strategic Services. The OSS, as it was known,
resembled an elite university in its mission to collect and
disseminate information. The OSS was the brainchild of William
Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer known as “Wild Bill” for his aerial
heroics in World War I. For years, Donovan had been telling his
friend Franklin Roosevelt that the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi
Germany meant there would be another war in Europe, one that the
United States would have to join. America needed a foreign
intelligence service, and probably sooner rather than later, he told
FDR. After Pearl Harbor, Donovan had won the argument.
The British already
had a foreign intelligence agency, the Secret Intelligence Service
(SIS), established in 1909, sometimes known as MI6. So the officers
of the new American OSS were sent to school at the British
intelligence facility in Bletchley Park, north of London. There,
Pearson joined the SIS men in teaching the novice Americans the arts
of espionage and special operations as perfected by the world’s
greatest colonial power.
* * *
IN LAW SCHOOL,
ANGLETON learned the consequences of his friendship with Ezra Pound.
The poet’s speeches on Radio Rome did not attract a big audience in
Italy, nor were they broadcast in the United States. But the Federal
Communications Commission in Washington was recording them, 52 and J.
Edgar Hoover was listening. In his midfifties, the FBI director was a
heavyset man who favored shiny suits. He had built the Bureau of
Investigation, a small office within the Justice Department, into a
national police force. In April 1942, Hoover ordered his men to
investigate Pound on suspicion of aiding America’s enemies. 53
An FBI agent visited
Angleton at his Brattle Street flat. Angleton explained he admired
Pound’s poetry and found his political theories convincing, though
distorted by his prejudices against Jews and bankers. Angleton agreed
that Pound’s radio speeches were incoherent and indefensible. He
said he would testify to that effect and provide the names of others
who knew Pound. 54 In spring 1943, Angleton was drafted into the army
and passed his physical exam. He identified himself as James Hugh
Angleton, Jr., proof that he did not care for his given middle name,
Jesus. 55 Though he could have used his father’s contacts and
become an officer, he chose to begin army life as an enlisted man. 56
He also proposed to
Cicely, although Hugh and Carmen disapproved. 57 They didn’t know
Cicely d’Autremont or her family. Jim didn’t have a job or
professional degree. The couple endured a painful meeting with his
parents, but the young lovers did not relent. They set a date for a
wedding in July near the army base where Angleton was training. On
one of Jim’s few days off, he and Cicely got married at a church
outside Fort Custer, Michigan, an unromantic beginning to a troubled
lifelong commitment. 58
..........
EZRA POUND WAS NOW
confined to St. Elizabeths Hospital in southeast Washington. His
radio speeches had resulted in an indictment for treason. In the last
days of the war, he was arrested by U.S. military police in Rapallo
and taken back to the United States for trial. His literary friends
persuaded him to plead insanity, and he was committed to the hospital
instead of prison.
Angleton still
appreciated Pound as an artist but thought he was mad. “Pound
probably had the finest ear as far as the English language is
concerned,” Angleton told a journalist many years later, “but he
never stayed with one style and developed it. He was an innovator,
but he had a philosophy
which didn’t
really hang together. The fact he called one book Personae, or
‘masks,’ is reflective of his poetry and the different façades
that he had. I don’t think anyone ever took Pound’s politics
seriously.” 102
Of course, Angleton
had taken Pound’s politics seriously, at least as an undergraduate,
and he still thought fondly of the man. In drawing up a will in 1948,
he would bequeath a “bottle of spirits” to his friend, the
incarcerated poet. 103
.......
EZRA POUND WAS
RELEASED from St. Elizabeths Hospital in April 1958. He was now
seventy-two years old—still a favorite of conservatives but no
longer enchanted with fascism. He had finished another book of cantos
while incarcerated. Pound’s psychiatrist found him a fascinating
thinker and no danger to society.
Although Angleton
gave former CIA officer Peter Sichel the impression that he had been
in touch with Pound while the poet was at St. Elizabeths, there’s
no evidence Angleton ever visited or wrote. 60 After his release,
Pound returned to Italy and connected with many old friends, but not
with Angleton. 61
Notes:
1. Angleton’s
friend John Pauker showed photographs of the naked Pound to
classmates, according to Angleton’s
biographer Robin Winks. Winks interviewed classmates who had seen the
photos.Pauker was friends
with Angleton, who had photographed Pound and was the most likely
source of the photos. See
Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown; Scholars in the Secret War, 1934–1961
(New York: William
Morrow, 1988), 334.
2. The sketch
appears in Andrews Wanning, “Poetry in an Ivory Tower,” Harkness
Hoot, April 1933, 33–39. Wanning was a close friend of Angleton’s.
3. Winks, Cloak and
Gown, 329.
4. “Ezra Pound
Papers,” at
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/ezra-pound-papers.
5. “2 Idaho Boys
Married at Border Camp/H. L. Potter Weds Miss Barbara Clyne of Boise
and J. H. Angleton is Joined,” Idaho Daily Statesman, December 19,
1916. The story, repeated by Angleton biographers Tom Mangold, David
Martin, and Michael Holzman, that James Hugh Angleton participated in
“the punitive expedition” of Gen. “Black Jack” Pershing
against Mexican revolutionary Pancho
Villa is erroneous, according to historians Charles H. Harris and
Louis R. Sadler, authors of
The Great Call-Up: The Guard, the Border, and the Mexican Revolution (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 478 n.104.
6. Ada County
Assessor Land Records, “2016 Property Details for Parcel
R5538912210”; available at
7. Boise City and
Ada County Directory, 1927 (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk, 1926), p. 49.
8. “James Hugh
Angleton Jr, U.S Army Cpl.,” Personnel Files, 1942–1945, box 18,
RG 226, National Archives,
Washington, D.C.
9. Winks, Cloak and
Gown, 330.
10. Bert Macintyre,
Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (New York:
Crown, 2014), 69.
11. Letter from
James Angleton (JA) to Ezra Pound (EP), August 13, 1938, Ezra Pound
Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Series I: Correspondence, box 2, folder 63,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Hereafter, EPP.
12. Letter from JA
to EP, August 23, 1938, EPP.
13. Letter from JA
to EP, January 19, 1939, EPP.
14. That’s what
Pound told his friend Mary Barnard. See Mary Barnard, Assault on
Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), 161.
15. “The Making of
a Master Spy,” Time, February 24, 1975, 2.
16. Reed Whittemore,
Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet (Washington, D.C.:
Dryad Press, 2007), 38.
17. Michael Holzman,
James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 12–13.
18. Letter from JA
to EP, December 28, 1939, EPP. “He is really going places here at
Yale,” Angleton wrote of Mack. He went on to become the chairman of
the Yale English Department and a famous critic.
19. Furioso Papers,
YCAL MSS 75, Series I: Contributor Correspondence, 1938–1951, box
1, folder 30, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University.
20. Letter from EP
to JA, January 10, 1939, EPP.
21. Letter from JA
to EP, January 19, 1939, EPP.
22. Letter from EP
to JA, March 1939, EPP.
23. Letter from JA
to EP, March 23, 1939, EPP.
24. Letter from JA
to EP, May 3, 1939, EPP. Angleton and Whittemore proved to be
demanding editors. Pound sent
them another verse, which read as follows:
THE DEATH OF THE
PROFESSOR
Is the death of his
curiousity. The Professor died the
moment he ceases
hunting for truth, the moment he thinks
he knows something
and starts telling it to the student
instead of trying to
find out what it is.
This doggerel
evidently didn’t meet Angleton and Whittemore’s standards,
because they did not publish it. Letter
from EP to JA, May 1939, EPP.
25. Furioso Papers,
YCAL MSS 75 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University.
26. Holzman, James
Jesus Angleton, 25.
27. Author’s
interview with William Gowen, September 20, 2015.
28. Draft
registration card for James Hugh Angleton, June 5, 1917; available at
30.Winks, Cloak and
Gown, 329.
31. Author’s
interview with Tom Hughes, August 20, 2015.
32. Letter from JA
to E. E. Cummings, August 1939, EPP.
33. E-mail from
Nancy Lyon, Yale University archivist, to the author, June 10, 2015.
34. Furioso 1, no. 2
(New Year’s Issue, 1940). Pound’s “Five Poems,” appears on
page 5.
35. Letter from JA
to EP, December 28, 1939, EPP.
36. Letter from JA
to EP, February 1, 1940, EPP.
37. Letter from EP
to JA, June 7, 1940, EPP.
38. Letter from EP
to James Hugh Angleton, June 19, 1940, EPP.
39. Doob, Leonard,
ed., Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of WWII, Part II,
Miscellaneous Scripts #111,
“Homestead”; available at
http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres10/PoundRadiospeeches.pdf.
Their last written
communication was a postcard from EP to JA, April 11, 1941, EPP.
(note: the link above was
removed, a transcript is available down below)
40. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 37.
41. Cicely d’Autremont Angleton, A Cave of Overwhelming: A Collection of Poems (Cabin John, MD: Britain Books, 1995), 25.
42. Walter Van Brunt, Duluth and St. Louis County, Minnesota: Their Story and People, vol. 2, (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1921), 856.
43. “Helen Clara Congdon d’Autremont,”
44. Birth records, for Cecily Harriet d’Autremont,
Cicely did not use the spelling of her name that is found on her birth certificate.
45. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 32.
46. Letter from JA to E. E. Cummings, August 16, 1941, bMS AM 1892, Houghton Library, Harvard University. “Reed has gotten into the army and I have been rejected as a weakling but with few regrets,” he wrote.
47. Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, 28.
48. Ibid., 28.
49. Pearson’s story was told first and best in Winks, Cloak and Gown, 247–321.
50. Norman Holmes Pearson Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Letters, box II, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
51. Winks, Cloak and Gown, 340.
52. Doob, “Ezra Pound Speaking,” 6.
53. Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, 29.
54. Ibid., 30.
55. Records of the Office of Strategic Services, Personnel Files, 1942–1945, box 18.
56. Winks, Cloak and Gown, 340.
57. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 37.
58. Ancestry.com. Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867–1952. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015. Original data: Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867–1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics.
102. Aaron Latham,
“Politics and the C.I.A.—Was Angleton Spooked by State?” New
York, March 10, 1975, 34.
103. Mangold, Cold
Warrior, 45.
60. Author’s
interview with Peter Sichel, December 3, 2015.
61. John Tytell,
Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Anchor Press, 1987),
325–26.
Part
II 10 Miscellaneous Scripts #111 (early 1941)
HOMESTEADS
What
will remain from this struggle is an idea. What spreads
and will spread from the determination to have a New Europe is an
idea: the idea of a home for every family in the country. The idea
that every family in the country shall have a sane house, and that
means a house well built, with
no breeding space for tuberculosis bugs. I have seen the details of
some of these houses. It means that every family’s house will have
land enough, fields enough to support the family. It means that these
houses will not be burdened with mortgages. They will be inalienable,
and indivisible. The eldest son if he likes, or at any rate one son
or daughter will keep the farm, but above all the farmer will be
guaranteed a sale for his crop AT A PRICE that will cover his needs.
You may have heard that Andy Jackson OPENED the American lands to the
settlers. As against John Quincy Adams who had what might be called a
more communist idea, not that he was read, but he wanted at least
some land reserved to the nation and its proceeds used for schools,
and more highfalutin’ branches of education. He was “out of
time.” Jackson beat him. Jackson’s policy was a bit sketchy.
American homesteads in great part passed into great estates very
quickly grazing in place of farms etc , etc. My grandmother and great
grandmother lived on claims, land claims. The boys of 20 in New York
now know very little of such affairs. My father still has 80 year-old
cousins living I take it on claims in Montana They do not represent
the majority life of America. But Jackson’s land policy was called
DEMocratic. The New Europe is in that sense DEMociatic, and if you
folks rush out to SMASH this New Europe history will NOT give you ANY
medals whatever for saving DEMocracy. Italy does NOT confiscate the
farmers’ crop. I have seen that lie along with 200 others. Italy
has not set up Utopia in XIX years, but the farmer here knows he will
be paid for what he grows. He knows what he will be paid for it.
Nobody will get an option on it and grab excess profits. Get it quite
firmly in mind that war mongers are asking you to prevent and smash
this idea of a solid and clean well built house with land for each
family. Look into it before you decide to go out and die for
something or other, without quite knowing what. Let me remind you
that Brooks Adams was seen shortly before his death, an old man of 80
in running shorts and sweater, pulling the weights in the gym of the
Boston Athletic Club and prophesying a 30 years’ war, an IDEO
LOGICAL war. And let me remind you that the notion of ideological
wars is FORWARD, not backward. Our American forebears, given an empty
continent, sketched in a civilization. Rough draft without very great
attention to detail. Settlers rushed onto the land, they had hunger,
land hunger, each man to be free: Free of RENT, free of mortgage.
Reflection came later. A new idea rises in Europe, it is not confined
to the continent. You can not confine it. No amount of postal
thieves, censors, examiners, can smash it or swush it. There arises
the idea that a man may own all he can use. But that he may not own
what he can’t use. And especially he may not use this surplus to
starve his neighbor, he may not prevent farmer Jones selling his
corn. The millionaire may NOT rush in and undersell Jones till he has
ruin’d him, taken a mortgage on Jones’ farm, turned out Jones’
children the day the interest isn’t paid to the full. I will get
round in time to the flimflam of a past kind of pacifist, the
suppression of news, the gyrations committed by the Carnegie
so-called Peace Foundation, their
failure to get thought into America. Wars are made to make DEBT. Our
Civil War had a relation to DEBT. Christopher Hollis knows this. Readhis book, the TWO NATIONS, debts of the South to the City of NewYork. Greece spends 54% of her income paying the interest on DEBT.
Until you know who
has lent what TO WHOM, you know nothing whatever of
politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of
international wrangles. I wish Hollis hadn’t taken to silence and
solitude just when he did. But on the other hand has ANY man in
England now the power to speak out or communicate with his fellows?
Little Red Riding Hood, better look out for Wilikie’s false teeth!
Is Wendell saving DEMocracy? Is Wendell selling the New Deal to
Winston? Or is Wendell trying to shovel a few million farm boys into
the trenches? And SO soon after headlines “It’s War OR Willkie”?
Is Wendell now for it at all costs; just to prove not having elected
him, war is the consequence? Is Mr. ’Opkins selling the New Deal to
London? My venerable friend Doctor William C. Williams roars with
laughter when I suggest that people might THINK. “Ever see a
communist THINK?” writes ole Bill. I been told the process ain’t
nacheral. Waal, the Doc. is their white-haired boy. Will even he
notice that one group of people has steadily tried to EXtend this
conflict and to SUPPRESS all kind of intercommunication between
Europe and the U.S.? The other side (my side) has asked [for an]
investigation. Now what CAUSES that? Did this war start for Danzig?
Did this war start for POland, and if so why such silence re the half
of Poland that has been et [eaten] up by Rhooshy? You people don’t
believe those sad tales? Or do you? Some people want to make money.
Some people want to keep on with a racket that has paid ’em and
their papas large dividends. There may be six or eight rackets. Debt
interest, gun selling. Is American youth expected to run out and die
for debt interest and gun selling? If that is what the war-wanters
WANT, let ’em
say so. In England for years it has been KNOWN that the English war
plant could NOT produce the goods. Is it to be supposed that a lover
of England pushed his country into war, KNOWING that country could
NOT produce the goods? It has been declared in England for years that
there was a plot on to bash out the WHOLE of Europe for the profit of
Russia and the moneyed in America. It now appears that England has
been caught in the tweezers of the attempt but that continent largely
has NOT French bon sens showed
itself at the last minute They declined to have Paris completely
coventried in order
to hold off the German advance for six days or whatever. The English
are not so quick on the uptake. My Hollis has ceased to talk about
“the debts of the South to the City of New York being 200 million.”
I have been 20 years on this job, but you will not read. The new
generation will not read AFTER it has been bombed to blazes or buried
by high explosive. It may be your last chance. I suggest that you try
to read Hollis’ Two Nations and
read pages 206, 207 to learn what the Civil War was ABOUT, who and
what caused it. Then you may see who and what is trying to get you
yet again into the trenches, and to KEEP British men UNDER fire
despite the fact that they did NOT vote for this war. The gombeen
men’s
idea is that the MORE of England gets smashed, the higher the rate of
interest, and the MORE of it, they can change the survivors. What
[does] the farmer in West Africa get out of this war? Who now owns
THEIR government, for example? If Mr. Hull means to say:
I hate the
English, I hope there will be in England not one stone left on
another. I hope the Stone of Scone will be smashed into powder and
made into portland cement. I don’t want ANY life left in Britain.
All right, let him express himself. If he means: let’s grab all,
positively all the British assets, let him say so, but in that case
why dress up as a friend of Britain?
And in the meantime let me remind Messrs. Roosevelt and WALLACE of
the Report of the National Survey of Potential Product Capacity,published by Hodson, Chairman of the Emergency Relief Bureau and Post, idem, New York Housing Authority in 1935, one of the greatest
glories of Mr. Roosevelt’s administration which has also been
somewhat neglected both by administration and its opponents. As to
the Academy of Social and Political Science, I keep wondering when
they will start a serious study of ANYthing whatsoever that is
vital to
American welfare. A bunch of playboys.
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