Exploring what Ezra Pound called his daughter’s ‘Hogswill’

68 October-November 2024

Exploring what Ezra

Pound called his

daughter’s ‘Hogswill’

Kevin Kiely reviews ‘Let the Wind

Speak: Mary de Rachewiltz and

Ezra Pound’ by Carol Loeb Shloss

University of Pennsylvania Press. 376 pp. $39.95

daho-born, Imagist poet, Ezra Pound,

founder of literary modernism,

arranged the 1914 serialisation of

James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Man’ and from 1918 of

‘Ulysses’, as well as for the 1915 publication

of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock’. Ernest Hemingway, whose talents

he also largely discovered, wrote in 1932

that, for poets born in the late 19th or early

20th centur y, not to be inﬂuenced by Pound

would be “like passing through a great

blizzard and not feeling its cold”. Eliot’s

dedication in ‘The Waste Land’ was “For

Ezra Pound/il miglior fabbro” (“the better

craftsman”).

Pound married Dorothy Shakespear

whose mother had been a lover of WB Yeats.

The critic Iris Barry described the younger

Shakespear as “carrying herself delicately

with the air, always, of a young Victorian

lady out skating, and a proﬁle as clear and

lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin”.

Pound had a complex and often tumultuous

relationship with his daughter, Mary de

Rachewiltz. Born Maria del Carmelo Pound

in 1925, Mary was the product of Pound’s

long-term extramarital aﬀair with Olga

Rudge, a talented violinist.

Carol Loeb Shloss’s formidable

Not to be inﬂuenced by

Pound would be “like

passing through a great

blizzard and not feeling

its cold”

CULTURE

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October-November 2024 69

was spent with Hanna and Jacob Marcher,

farmers living on “the steep terrain of the

Alps [...] planting, sowing, cutting wood,

and breeding animals”. She then attended

convent school at the Religio Istituto at La

Quiete, Florence, and brieﬂy stayed with her

mother in Rapallo, Italy. Pound, an absentee

parent, claimed Mary had a ‘Jeanne d’Arc’

complex at age 15. Olga provides the useful

gloss that in the ﬁrst thirteen years of her

life, Mary had enjoyed “the beneﬁt of his

company for three weeks in total”.

Pound eventually ‘announced’ his

daughter to her American grandparents,

Homer and Isabel. But Shloss notes, “after

fourteen years of mystiﬁcation, the truth

could not abridge aﬀections already given

nor restore relationships never established”.

The grandparents’ letters of response are

riveting and, in a subplot, Olga writes to

Pound, “You were right in not wanting a

child. I was wrong. I have been wrong from

the start, and no way to clean up the mess”.

However, Mary’s relationship with her father

deepened through strong ﬁlial loyalty,

though her feelings towards Olga were

negative: “Perhaps I disliked her [...] a dark

resentment as though I were permanently

doing her wrong”, Mary reﬂected in her

forties.

Mary married Boris de Rachewiltz and

they enjoyed what seemed like a fairytale

romance, marriage, and residence in

Brunnenburg Castle in the Italian Tyrol,

where they became parents to Walter and

Patrizia. The couple shared high hopes and

mutual dreams “of living in Brunnenburg,

since it was in the territory once owned by

his ancestors”. They certainly had a vision.

1958 and only, and conveniently, released

when the Department of Justice dismissed

the indictment, deeming the defendant

“incompetent to stand trial” due to

“insanity”.

Mary fought for his release during his

thirteen-year detention, claiming he was

“an American patriot” who had broadcast

“within the protective circle of the First

Amendment’s freedom of speech”. She has

asserted that he “loved America more than

anything” and “didn’t reject America —

America rejected him”. In ‘Discretions’, she

protested that he was “not Italian, not a spy,

not a Fascist”.

As the biography unfolds, Mary’s life is

intertwined with her father’s, though often

at a distance from him and her mother. The

family secrets surrounding Pound’s

paternity of his daughter and ‘son’ were

cautiously approached in earlier

biographies. All agree that Olga Rudge bore

Pound’s daughter, Mary, in 1925. John

Tytell, in ‘Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano’

(1987) claims that “ﬁve months after the

birth of Olga’s illegitimate daughter,

Dorothy (Pound’s wife) conceived a child

(Omar). Like Olga, she had been completely

uninterested in children”.

Rudge and Pound fostered Mary to a

German-speaking peasant woman in Gais,

South Tyrol, after the woman’s own child

died. She agreed to raise Mary for 200 lire

a month. Pound believed that artists ought

not to have children, because motherhood

ruined women.

Shloss’s biography maps the lives of the

two families that derived from this

philosophy. Mary’s childhood in the Tyrol

Pound had a complex and often

tumultuous relationship with his daughter,

Mary — the product of Pound’s long-term

affair with Olga Rudge, a talented violinist

Ezr Pound

biographical portrait of Mary Pound will

embellish a reputation based on an earlier

biography of Lucia Joyce, ‘To Dance in the

Wake’ (2005). Mary herself had been her

father’s Italian translator for his 800-page

epic poem ‘The Cantos’ (1985) and other

works. In ‘Discretions’ (1971), she

positioned herself as both a family

memoirist and curator of the Ezra Pound

archive. She is now a fellow of the Radcliﬀe

Institute and her own poetry is well

regarded.

Schloss’s biography, accompanied by 30

images of family, literary associates, and

various residences, features Ezra Pound’s

numerous crises though it is clear Mary has

not been overwhelmed by them or her

‘colossus’ of a father. The relationship

between Pound and Mary is a blend of

emotional affection – and neglect,

intellectual connection, and the heavy

shadow of Pound’s political and personal

choices.

In 1942 US Assistant Attorney General,

Wendell Berge, labelled Pound’s broadcasts

(1942-43) from Mussolini’s Fascist Italy as

“enemy propaganda” for the Rome-Berlin

Axis. Pound’s legal counsel, Julien Cornell

in his book, ‘The Trial of Ezra Pound’ (1967),

voiced his hopes that missing transcripts

from broadcasts from 1942 and 1943 would

counter the treason indictment. But Pound

adored Mussolini and was a long-standing

Anti-Semite. Still, he has his apologists.

Duarte de Montalegre states the case that

Pound “inveighed against usury. This is why

many people believed him to be an anti-

Semite, erroneously identifying a vicious

practice with a whole race”. Pound himself

‘explained’, four months before his death,

that “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” .

Pound had, it is true, been declared of

unsound mind by four psychiatrists and was

detained in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the

Insane in Washington, DC from 1945 until

Schloss Brunnenburg

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70 October-November 2024

They “would ﬁght for [Pound’s] extradition

from the USA, and he [her father] could rule

over a domain populated with artists”. Boris

emerges as a clandestine figure, an

archaeologist, gunrunner, and author of ‘An

Introduction to Egyptian Art’ and other

books of Egyptology. In retrospect, Boris

was “ill-prepared for the real requirements

of the castle [...] He was gone most of the

time”. They divorced in the late 1960s.

Behind the scenes, Mary was in a

relationship with Leonard Doob, travelling

throughout Africa, where she drafted the

memoir, ‘Discretions’. This aﬀair rekindled

her poetic voice: in ‘Birch’, she wrote: “We

are two slender white birch trees/Kissing

and bowing down on the mountain/Under

green conifers and dilapidated golden

oaks”.

As to her father, she promised him that,

upon his release from detention,

Brunnenburg would oﬀer him “all the beauty

and space and comfort” denied to him. He

replied, “I am all for a solid base in Tyrolo/

sacred enclosure. Temnus (a temple)”.

Brunnenburg was both a residence and a

dream vision that drew Pound and other

visitors into its medieval plume. Shloss

writes of Pound’s time there in 1958: “He

spent his time alternating between long

silences and ﬁts of anger, dictating that

Mary and Olga ‘stay out of the room when

he was talking to visitors, making them wait

at the top of the stairs.”’ Pound’s temper as

a poet resonates with Mary’s poetry in ‘For

the Wrong Reason’ (1987), inspired by

Yeats’ ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’ (1919). The

collection concludes with: “What would it

be to meet, father, one’s father, mine; /

Would he have no answer, old rags over the

body, / the pain, the body itself, / or would

he have asked for a hug, or accepted mine?”.

Writing to Sister Mary Bernetta Quinn, Mary

revealed that ‘Discretions’ (1971) gave her

back the father of her earlier years, before

“international history made its harsh claims

[...] he had secrets, mistresses, aﬀairs of the

heart”. Hemingway’s memoir ‘A Moveable

Feast’ related [that] “Pound was kinder and

more Christian about people than I was […]

so kind that I always thought of him as a

sort of a saint — albeit an irascible saint”.

Pound’s ﬁnalé, ‘Canto CXX’, has these lines

bearing witness to his conscience: “Let the

Gods forgive what I/have made/Let those I

love try to forgive/what I have made”.

The memoir was reviewed by major

publications such as the New York Times,

the TLS and the Economist. Mary conﬁded

to Christine Brooke-Rose that she “wished

reviewers would quit criticizing her parents

for giving her foster care”. Mary’s

equanimity, and lack of bitterness are

evident in her reaction when she ﬁrst learnt

about her parentage: “I felt no resentment,

only a vague sense of pity”. Pound, however,

derided the memoir as “hogswill”, despite

Mary’s intent to remember Pound as she

knew him, rather than as he had been

defined by military prisons, mental

institutions, and public labels. She had

sought to reclaim through memor y what had

been sealed away in oﬃcial cabinets by the

law but he wanted none of it.

Pound’s release from St Elizabeth’s had

brought him to Brunnenberg, but he left

within months, returning to Olga. The

sojourn had not restored a family unit. Mary

lamented, “I would have liked nothing

better than to “play” the daughter with

house and grandchildren and all — but as

that has been my one great failure in life so

far, I don’t want to go on ‘pretending’ in

front of friends and strangers”.

She further revealed that Olga “would

never have asked Pound for a child had she

been the ﬁrst woman to come between him

and his wife: and that “it was Iseult [Gonne]

who broke up the marriage” — Iseult of

course being the daughter of WB Yeats’s

beloved, Maud Gonne, his lifelong muse.

Maud conceived Iseult next to the coﬃn of

her dead infant son. Yeats, also ever the

great romantic, artfully and serially

proposed to mother and once to daughter.

Iseult also features in her husband Francis

Stuart’s ‘fictional memoir’ ‘Black List,

Section H’ (1971) as “a less-than-stellar

lover and mother”.

Ezra Pound’s last years were spent in

Italy. In 1958, Pound and Dorothy arrived in

Naples where Pound was photographed

giving a fascist salute to the waiting press.

Shloss portrays Mary as living in the shadow

of her father’s exile, awaiting his return

while he recuperated at Olga’s apartment in

Rapallo.

Mary, Olga, and Dorothy devoted

themselves to managing Ezra’s moods, until

his death in 1972, after which “it seemed to

Mary that they had all been waiting for it to

happen, each of them braced against the

impending doom”. Mary then took on the

responsibility of her father’s literary estate,

writing that her motivation was to preserve

his memory, “because all we have are the

records of the past and the good memories

of those who shared them”.

‘Let the Wind Speak’ echoes the

paradoxical opening of Anna Karenina:

“happy families are all alike; every unhappy

family is unhappy in its own way”. Shloss’s

biography is neither hagiography nor

exposé but an objective narrative. Shloss

aﬀords Pound his proﬁle but makes his

daughter the centrepiece along his life’s

arc. Mary, nearly 100 now, continues to

navigate the complexities of her family’s

history, asserting herself not only as Ezra

Pound’s daughter and interpreter.

Kevin Kiely’s PhD in the Patronage of

Modernist Poetry at the Woodberry Poetry

Room, Harvard University is adapted as

Harvard’s Patron: Jack of all Poets (2022);

both listed in the World Catalogue.

Shloss affords Pound

his proﬁle but makes his

daughter the centrepiece

along his life’s arc

Mry de Rchewiltz (dughter of Ezr Pound) nd Kevin Kiely, Venice

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