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The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths

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The biographical facts and materials presented in this book are marred by the author's injudicious hostility toward his subject. Pound cannot win with Torrey; the pre-sexual youth is depicted as a tepid and resentful celibate, while the mature Pound is an over-zealous worshiper at the altar of eroticism.

When Pound leaves the academy behind him and good riddance, his "pretensions toward a professorship were stillborn". Why "pretensions"? Why not "ambitions"? And is Pound's savage indictment of the academy really so off-the-wall, that it can be read as nothing more than ressentiment?

It is not going too far to say that this book makes a freak of Pound. Perhaps this is to be expected from a clinical psychiatrist who views the troublesome colossus as a personification of the institutional problems of his profession. But there is more to the man than a collection of neuroses, and Torrey fails to come to terms with his genius as well as his failings.

I do not deny that Pound's biography is problematic, to put it mildly. But it circumvents the problem his legacy poses to paint his caricature without a counterbalancing appreciation for how Pound changed the course of the world-famous Yeats in mid-career, why Eliot dedicated a masterwork to this "better craftsman", and why Hemingway claimed lifelong to remain in his debt.

Torrey is the most original and definitive chronicler of mental illness and this previously out-of-print book is a stunning example of why. In Roots of Treason, Dr. Torrey takes on St. Elizabeth's Hospital which conspired to label the poet Ezra Pound, 'mentally ill' in order to help him avoid a prison sentence for treason. It is a delicious commentary on the intersection of cold war politics, liberalism, and the abuse of mental institutions. In previous books, Dr. Torrey has taken on the American Psyciatric Association (Freudian Fraud), politicians who kicked the mentally ill out of hospitals (Nowhere to Go), misguided mental health advocates (Out of the Shadows) and others. He has also expanded our knowledge of Schizophrenia (Schizophrenia and Manic Depressive Disorders) and provided invaluable assistance to those who have schizophrenia or have someone in the family who has it (Surviving Schizophrenia). This book differs from other Torrey works in that it should be of immense interest to those who have no interest in mental illness, per se, but are interested in the life Ezra Pound and the literati who surrounded him. The book details Pound's escapades in Italy, atraditional lifestyle, and return to America that ultimately ended in him being charged with treason. It's a fun, fast, informative read, ridden with blunt Torreyisms. SO glad it is back in print

Dr. Torrey does a good job of demonstrating that Ezra Pound was in no way mentally ill, and that St. Elizabeth's Hospital should not have been used as a convenient means of dealing with a troubling dissidenter after World War II.
But the author seems to have been afraid that his book would be seen as advocacy for Pound, and thus, for the type of Jew-baiting utterances included in Pound's wartime radio programs. (Pound, like many populists, blamed big banks in part for inciting and promoting wars; he blamed Jews for running these institutions for the super-rich masters of war.)
Thus the book is at pains to denigrate Pound in all sorts of ways that have no bearing on its central thesis. (Was Pound a poseur and literary provocateur? Of course; noone doubts this. But it does not detract from his literary genius or his major role in shaping the literature of high Modernism.)
And this one-sided treatment of Pound causes the author to ignore a line of investigation that challenges his central thesis: the author seems to claim that Pound was a coward who chose a fake mental illness as a way out of being punished for his opposition to the Allied war effort. (Pound had no say in how he was treated; the US government had no basis for putting him on trial, and no desire to.) Also, the months of rigors and deprivations that the elderly Pound underwent at the Pisa Detention Facility after his capture quite plausibly impacted him physically and mentally. The author is blinded to this aspect of the story. Did Pound's rough treatment render him insane? No way - but it might explain a good part of Pound's responses during the psychiatric exam at St. E's.
In short, the author weakens the treatment of his central thesis by an attack on Pound that is simply not supported by the facts.

I was lucky to be able to read a library copy of this book, lucky because, if I'd have paid for such a biased, sketchy and un-thorough biography I'd have asked for my money back. HOWEVER it DID grease the wheels of thought for an article I was writing at the time.

The central problem of a decent biography on Pound is very simple, how to extract the brilliant pioneering critique on the international banks of Europe and America from the petty prejudices Pound furthered to 'bring out' this economic thesis. Very few writers are even remotely well-versed in Pound's prose to even attempt a well-balanced biography (and their publishers unfortunately don't nudge them too far in that direction either)... but, for the record, we might say the most established biogs might be:

'This Difficult Individual' by Eustace Mullins (I haven't read this but suspect it to be eminently more sympathetic to Pound than Torrey, in fact it's sympathies, I am sure, are probably part of the reason is it out of print and no U.S publisher will touch it)... another problem being that Mullins, for all his apparent gusto, I've been given to understand, does not cover the post-war years whatsoever (partially he couldn't since the book came out a decade before Pound's death)

...then we have Noel Stock's mildly more thorough standard biog, again; the problem being that its author was too young and unfamiliar with the entire output of Ezra Pound to make well-balanced decisions during the process of putting the biog together. Stock IS familiar with Pound post-WWII but can he piece together his understanding of Pound's early years well enough to have some knowledge of how the pre-war relates to the post-war Pound (fundamentally the 'economic theis' directly relates to this).

Lastly we have Kenner's already mentioned 'The Pound Era', a conventional biog in only the barest of senses, well written though it may be to some (for this reader its strengths are, to a certain degree, its weaknesses... it is a touch too flowery/word-drenched, and often full of the worst cliches of the modernist approach Pound more efficiently put into practice). If Kenner is the decisive word on Pound then I would honestly beg to differ.

Torrey fits in among this bunch only via the title and vague subject of his book. It seems the main selling point might be: an artist under "psychiatric treatment" stands in need of a biographer well versed in psychiatric treatment, which, at the end of the day, stands in a muddle given that Pound, it's furthered by Torrey, didn't ultimately need psychiatric treatment (how to assess this societally, given that he was imprisoned for more than just a few years? Perhaps a good biographer would need to figure that in too?)

Unfortunately the only solution for future biographers to assess Pound in his entirety is to take the time to read ALL that he wrote (am I cynical enough to believe that the writers mentioned may not have done this??)

Meaning: the 'uncomfortable' prose, amongst others:

1/Jefferson and/or Mussolini
2/Ezra Pound Speaking; The Speeches of World War II, to be looked at in depth
3/Guide to Kulchur (much more rigorously)
4/The Economic Correspondence, particularly (just released this/last year)
5/...in fact, ALL correspondence available (a lot has been amassed as of 2010), Pound, here, thru his vast correspondence, is begging to be represented wholly and properly
6/Late Cantos/Late Prose

A budding biographer MUST balance Pound's fascism and anti-semitism within the context of the growing thesis of the history of The Federal Reserve and the lack of acknowledgement this thesis received in his day, a thesis which he could be said to be the originator of, in the mid 20th Century at least, and also this must be (as Stock points out) one of the major reasons for his famous 'late silence'.

Given that the first two books are virtually unobtainable at the present time, and 'Kulch...'; long out of print, one can only hope that a future biographer will not fall into the holes Torrey and others dug for themselves via their own close-mindedness, inattention to the vast output of their subject, and lack of respect for someone who, in spite of all his many faults, was attempted to free western society from the shackles of the economic system which conditioned and enslaved them, and wrote some world-changing poetry along with it...