Pound's 12 years at St Elizabeth return of the gods and literary and poetic activity

THE CITY OF POUND'S INTERNMENT

http://washingtonart.com/beltway/pound.html

He seemed the powerful impresario and had Frost and Eliot published, and reinvigorated Yeats and taken Joyce "out of the gutter"and was now in tatters.

• He read piles of books and resumed on the Pisan Cantos,finishing what he started at the detention camp at Pisa.
• Literary Washington in one minor case entered the walls of this opportune seclusion ,translated some Confucius and some Sophocles and published Cantos 85-95 Rock Drill 1956 and Cantos 96-109 Thrones 1959.
• Hugh Kenner -The best talk was really the Monologue bringing home Pound's tremendous discipline considering his setting.
• Rudd Fleming appeared to converse on Greek drama. They collaborated on a translation of Sophocles Electra published as a play by Pound and Fleming (Princeton Univ Press 1989).
• He also wrote thousands of letters some scrawled in pencil.
• The work he produced in his 12 years of confinement was to attempt to finish what he had started in 1907. He stated his life's mission was to bring back the gods. His early poem The Return catches a tension marked by the ambiguity of their "possible return".
• Twelve years after his release,by the time of his death in Italy, the gods were still suspended.
  

When he arrived in Washington, aged 60, he must have seemed a mere wreck of the
man who, as powerful impresario, had first gotten Frost and Eliot published and
had, by their own accounts, given "new life" to Yeats and taken James Joyce "out
of the gutter." Commanding nothing now, he was reduced to requesting a vacuum
cleaner to battle the microbes he feared. He had to beg small changes in his
diet (he liked to slather bread with mayonnaise and serve it to his guests). But
Pound the writer was not slowed down. He read through chaotic piles of books,
finished the section of his Cantos he had begun in the U.S.Army's detention camp
in Pisa (The Pisan Cantos,1948), translated Confucius and some Sophocles, and
then wrote and published Cantos 85 - 95 (Rock-Drill, 1956) and Cantos 96-109
(Thrones, 1959). He also wrote thousands of letters, some of them hugely
scrawled in pencil, some of them dictated to and typed by his wife Dorothy. All
the reading and writing was done over the clatter of hospital routines and the
din of the voices of his mentally disturbed wardmates. "The best talk in St.
Liz," wrote Hugh Kenner, "was the monologue." The city of Washington cannot
claim to have nurtured these writings, at least not in the usual way. Washington
was outside the walls of where the work happened.
In at least one minor case,
literary Washington did get inside the walls. Rudd Fleming, then a young
professor at the University of Maryland, visited Pound often to converse about
Greek drama and eventually to collaborate with him on a translation of
Sophocles' Elektra. Finally published as a play by Pound and Fleming (Princeton
University Press, 1989), Pound's work on this project cleared the way for his
translation of The Women of Trachis (1954) and built up momentum for further
work on the cantos.
When I came to Washington Pound had three years to go.
Though I got to know Rudd Fleming, who could possibly have introduced me to
Pound, visiting him was the farthest thing from my mind. An intern on the ward
would give me occasional anecdotes, but the mere thought of a visit would have
struck fear into me. The fear would have been somewhat like the kind of fear
taught by the Hebrew Bible.
The work that Pound produced in his twelve years
of confinement was an attempt to round out and finish the work that he had begun
by 1907, when he had exiled himself. One of the ways he had stated his life's
mission was "to bring back the gods." The tentativeness and ambiguity of their
possible return is caught in the tension of his early poem, "The Return," where
the gods in present tense are in irregular, unstable meters while their past is
in metrically regular lines and the final image has no tense at all. By the time
of his death in Italy, twelve years after his release, the gods were still
suspended, the cantos unfinished. In their final fragments, he could calmly
outstare what he had failed to finish in Washington and since

..............................No man can see his own end.The gods have not returned. "They have never left us."..................................They have not returned.
(Canto 113)
I have brought the great ball of crystal;............................Who can lift it?Can you enter the great acorn of light?..............But the beauty is not the madnessTho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.And I am not a demigod,I cannot make it cohere.
(Canto 116)
The quiet flow of such lines came mostly after and seldom during St. Elizabeth's. The final third of the Pisan Cantos, written there, carry the truckloads of Pound's deep, wide, almost frantic reading. But the resulting fragments of quote and paraphrase and the footnote-like insertions are still under an astonishing mastery of formed speech, everything held together by tension. The mastery continued in the next two books of the cantos, Pound trying now for the precision of philology in one of them, and in the other for a balance between the terrible disorder perceivable within and outside of himself and the clean sanity of ancient Chinese ideograms. He got himself back to what he had started to catch 30 years earlier, sketching Confucius (the westernized name for Kung):
And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:................."If a man have not order within him"He cannot spread order about him;And if a man have not order within himHis family will not act with due order;..................And if the prince have not order within himHe can not put order in his dominions...And Kung said, "Without character you will.................."be unable to play on that instrument"Or to execute the music fit for the Odes."The blossoms of the apricot.................."blow from the east to the west,"And I have tried to keep them from falling."
(Canto 13)
I cannot pretend to make wise elucidation of the cantos in Rock-Drill and Thrones. Pound demands slow, careful readers, and why not? As a teacher I used to point to a few samples and hurry on, willing to concede that the failure was more mine than Pound's.

:

EZRA Pound at St Elizabeth's Hospital in curably insane? A genius

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound#Further_reading
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/pound.html
Pound's antisemitism was a phase of wrongly deducing cause and effect and he had the courage to admit this failing as a cause of his error of assessment. He was as translator not only adept in the classical languages and Provencal, but inculcated and passed along tradition as the soul of what he was writing of. In this case of his translation of the Electra of Sophocles he collaborated with Rudd Fleming while interned at St Elizabeth's. He was engulfed in the soul of what he wrote of, was transported back to that era and saw it linked into an eternity. Admittedly he made miscalculations and was a bit "out of focus. He was both classicist and romantic as he pictures himself ,and his sensitivity to the troubadours was as a byproduct of his general proclivities to stay in that era as medievalist, classicist and romantic. He was at the core of their soul. I detected this proclivity in his presenting Bertrand de Born as presented in Dante. His modernism and free verse experimentation were a translation of esoteric and other wise inexplicable visions to poetry or under its guise. All the great writers who knew him knew him and greatly respected and acknowledged his proclivities , the properties of any aspiring classicist and one embracing tradition as Eliot defines it, with a rich but ordered memory and mastered 7 different languages, and hoarded their light, boring only to those lacking in the desire for scholarship and in obtaining a fraction of what he had.

Rudd Fleming, a professor at the University
of Maryland, visited Pound often. They collaborated on a translation of Sophocles' Electra,
which was published by Princeton
University Press in 1989.[25]
Fleming stated, when asked about Pound's antisemitism, that Pound considered it
a mistake. A statement from Pound's foreword to a collection of his prose
writings (written on July 4, 1972) would seem to support Fleming's assertion:
"In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be used with great
care. re USURY: I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. The cause is
AVARICE."[26]
Pound also declared in 1967, "The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban
prejudice of anti-Semitism." [27]


Rod Jellema on EZRA
POUND(October 30, 1885 - November 1, 1972)
When Ezra Pound arrived in
Washington from Italy in 1945, a prisoner charged with treason, he landed in a
war's-end bureaucracy which could offer little in the way of a literary scene.
Briefly jailed and then transferred to St. Elizabeth's, to a secure ward for the
criminally insane, he would have had almost no contact with poets in Washington
anyway. Most of his visitors were from elsewhere, among them William Carlos
Williams, T. S. Eliot, Charles Olson, Robert Lowell. If he had been living in
Washington by choice (hard to imagine), his isolation and loneliness might have
been about the same. Often gruff and irascible, an incessant talker, "a
barbarian on the loose in a museum," in those twelve years he might have been
only a difficult neighbor.
Ezra Pound in 1945, taken 5 days after his
admission to St. Elizabeth's Hospital(National Archives)

I used to
think of him not as a neighbor but as an uncle. Uncle Ezra. He'd be a grand
embarrassment to most of my gentler family, a fire-brand uncle self-exiled to
London-Paris-Rapallo-Venice who had strolled the horsey streets of London with
Yeats in 1912 wearing pinned-up trousers of green pool-table felt and an
oversized hat, railing against the world's loss of decorum and order. Lots of
people might want an uncle like that to shock the neighbors ­ or the other
uncles ­ the kind of uncle you need when you sometimes have to wonder. This
"crank medievalist" with his "rich but disordered memory," who hoarded
intersecting planes of light in seven languages of broken glass the way Old Man
Hodge, our midwest neighbor, used to stash away foreign bottle caps in his shack
out back that no one ever entered. Uncle Ez. He would have startled and bored
your friends by tracking like comets the curves of ideographic Chinese verbs,
chanting, hands flying. But his talk would be, well, different. He could enter
into and speak from the mind of a medieval scientist who would get "a mind full
of forms" from looking at newly developed electric street lights, fascinated by
not just the light but by "the thought of the current hidden in air and in wire"
("Essay on Cavalcanti"). But then he'd leap to big pronouncements for saving
civilization, usually wrong, often horrid and disgraceful. You'd have to feel
confused and ashamed. But he'd be like no one else's uncle, and there's that
thing about the wonder. He might not sit on the front steps and tell the
neighbor kids about it, he might in fact shout to them just what's wrong with
international banking, but if he was your uncle he just might sometimes let you
in.

Roald Dahl career and WWII III

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_dahl

Dahls "bravery " is the stuff legends are made of and, gratifyingly so, his bravery was an established fact during his early career in the RAF . He wrote of the crash and the injuries he sustained.His flight experience was minimal yet he seized the adventure and enjoyed watching the wildlife. I can but imagine he viewed one of these magnificent creatures from on high.

Career
In July 1934, Dahl joined the Shell Petroleum
Company. Following two years of training in the UK, he was transferred to Dar-es-Salaam, Tanganyika
(now Tanzania). Along with the only
two other Shell employees in the entire territory, he lived in luxury in the
Shell House outside Dar-es-Salaam, with a cook and personal servants. While out
on assignments supplying oil to customers across Tanganyika, he encountered black
mambas and lions,
amongst other wildlife.[4]
[edit]
World War II
Roald Dahl
Allegiance
United
Kingdom
Service/branch
British Army
(August-November 1939) Royal Air Force
(November 1939 – 1945)
Years of service
1939–1945
Rank
Wing
Commander
Battles/wars
World War
II
Other work
Author
In August 1939, as World War II impended,
plans were made to round up the hundreds of Germans in Dar-es-Salaam. Dahl was
made an officer in the King's African
Rifles, commanding a platoon of Askaris, indigenous troops
serving in the colonial army.
In November 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force. After a
600-mile (970 km) car journey from Dar-es-Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for
flight training with 20 other men, and was one of only three who survived the
war, as the other 17 died in combat. With seven hours and 40 minutes experience
in a De Havilland Tiger
Moth, he flew solo; Dahl enjoyed watching the wildlife of Kenya during his flights. He
continued on to advanced flying training in Iraq, at RAF Habbaniya,
50 miles (80 km) west of Baghdad. Following six months'
training on Hawker Harts, Dahl was made
a Pilot Officer.
He was
assigned to No. 80 Squadron RAF,
flying obsolete Gloster Gladiators,
the last biplane fighter aircraft used
by the RAF. Dahl was surprised to find that he would not receive any specialised
training in aerial combat, or in
flying Gladiators. On 19 September 1940, Dahl was ordered to fly his Gladiator
from Abu Sueir in Egypt, on to Amiriya to refuel,
and again to Fouka in Libya for a second refuelling.
From there he would fly to 80 Squadron's forward airstrip
30 miles (48 km) south of Mersa Matruh. On the final
leg, he could not find the airstrip and, running low on fuel and with night approaching, he
was forced to attempt a landing
in the desert. The undercarriage hit a boulder and the aircraft crashed,
fracturing his skull, smashing his nose, and temporarily blinding him. He managed to
drag himself away from the blazing wreckage and passed out. Later, he wrote
about the crash for his first published work.

Roald Dahl's Early Life II

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_dahl

Dahl was virtually fatherless as he was born when his father was age 57 and that he died when Roald was age 3. Dahl's mother did not return to Norway,since it was her husband's wish to have their children educated in British schools which he valued as the best in the world.The great Mouse plot shows his predisposition to a mischief he never quite "shed" and kept this trait in his brahsness life long. It aserved him quite well as an "irregular" covert and flying ace.His attendance at British schools was unpleasant and often he wrote home to his mother concealing his unpleasantness,Note his work Boy...JT Christie was actually the headmaster who performed the caning as explained below.After schooling, he spent 3 weeks hiking, and was a lover of the outdoors and of nature and exerted himself in athletics prior to hiking with the PSES.

Early life
Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales in 1916, to Norwegian parents,
Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl (née Hesselberg). Dahl's father had moved
from Sarpsborg in Norway and
settled in Cardiff in the 1880s, and his mother came over to marry his father in
about 1910. Roald was named after the polar
explorer Roald Amundsen, a
national hero in Norway at the time. He spoke
Norwegian at home with his parents and sisters, Astri, Alfhild, and Else. Dahl
and his sisters were christened at the Norwegian Church,
Cardiff, where their parents worshipped.
In 1920, when Roald was still
only three years old, his seven-year-old sister, Astri, died from appendicitis. Weeks later,
his father died of pneumonia at the age of 57.
Dahl's mother, however, decided not to return to Norway to live with her
relatives, but to remain in Wales since it had been her husband's wish to have
their children educated in British schools, as he
felt they were the best in the world.
Dahl first attended The Cathedral
School, Llandaff. At the age of eight, he and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a
dead mouse in a jar of sweets at the local sweet shop, which was owned by a
"mean and loathsome" old woman called Mrs Pratchett (wife of blacksmith David
Pratchett). This was known amongst the five boys as the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924".
This was Roald's own idea.
Thereafter, he was sent to several boarding schools in England, including Saint Peter's in Weston-super-Mare. His
parents had wanted Roald to be educated at a British public school and, at the
time, because of a then regular ferry link across the Bristol Channel, this
proved to be the nearest. His time at Saint Peter's was an unpleasant experience
for him. He was very homesick and wrote to his mother almost every day, but
never revealed to her his unhappiness, being under the pressure of school
censorship. Only after her death in 1967 did he find out that she had saved
every single one of his letters, in small bundles held together with green tape.
He later attended Repton School in Derbyshire,
where, according to his autobiography Boy: Tales of
Childhood, a friend named Michael was viciously caned by headmaster Geoffrey Fisher, the man
who later became the Archbishop of
Canterbury and crowned the
Queen in 1953. (However, according to Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown,[3] the caning
took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher had left Repton. The headmaster
concerned was in fact J.T. Christie, Fisher's successor.) This caused Dahl to
"have doubts about religion and even about God".[4]
Dahl
was very tall, reaching 6 ft 6 in (1.98 m) in adult life;[5] he was good
at sports, being made captain of the school fives and squash teams, and also
playing for the football team. He
developed an interest in photography. During his
years there, Cadbury, the chocolate
company, would occasionally send boxes of new chocolates to the school to be
tested by the pupils. Dahl apparently used to dream of inventing a new chocolate
bar that would win the praise of Mr Cadbury himself, and this proved the
inspiration for him to write his third book for children, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory (1963) and include references to chocolate in
other books for children.[6]
Throughout
his childhood and adolescent years, Dahl spent his summer holidays with his
mother's family in their native Norway. His childhood and first job selling
kerosene in Midsomer Norton and
surrounding villages in Somerset are the subject of his autobiographical work, Boy: Tales of
Childhood.
After finishing his schooling, he spent three weeks hiking
through Newfoundland
with the Public Schools' Exploring Society (now known as BSES
Expeditions).

Roald Dahl's summary background and early life

Dahl's expanding career reminds me of the Renaissance career spanning many areas and types of experiences which afforded him quite the role as fabulist on a world scale, a role he relished and maintained for years.Novelist , short story writer and screen writer ,his works are enduring and fraught with dark humor and gauged for children simultaneously. His bio in the Irregulars Pt one offers a more comprehensive view of him especially as his role in the Charles Marsh household was pivotal to the war effort and his role as a "covert" in what came to be known as MI6 during the war. His RAF role as fighting ace and courage displayed afforded him the designation of war hero and intelligent agent. He was also inebriated in his Nordic heritage Note the list of some of his works below.

Roald Dahl (English pronunciation: /ˈroʊ.ɑːl
ˈdɑːl/,[2]
Norwegian: [ˈɾuːɑl
dɑl]; 13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.
Born in Llandaff, Wales, to Norwegian parents, Dahl
served in the Royal Air Force during
the Second World War, in
which he became a flying ace and intelligence
agent. He rose to prominence in the 1940s with works for both children and
adults, and became one of the world's bestselling authors. His short stories are
known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their
unsentimental, often very dark humour.
Some of his
more well-known works include James and the
Giant Peach, Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda, The Witches, and The BFG.