To listen to more of Donald Hall’s stories, go to the playlist: • Donald Hall (Poet)
US Poet Laureate Donald Hall (1928-2018) published essays and anthologies of both poetry and prose including "String too Short to be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm", and "Ox-Cart Man", a children's book which won the Caldecott Medal. [Listener: Kendel Currier; date recorded: 2005]
TRANSCRIPT: Ezra Pound… I think it was 1958 when he was released from the custody in the mental hospital in Washington, because, rather than try him as a traitor, the government had judged him insane, incapable of standing trial, because he had broadcast for Mussolini to the American troops during the Second World War. And this was a difficult idea to… to… I loved Pound's poetry - the early stuff mostly - early 'Cantos' too, and I learned a lot from him… I admired him very much. But the words I'd heard out of Washington were that he was arrogant and fascistic and… 'The Paris Review' had earlier tried to do an interview with him, and he'd said yes at first, and then he said he'd discovered that the magazine was part of the pinko usary fringe. And that may be because the name of the publisher at that time was Jean Stein… I don't know that. So now he was back in Italy and 'The Paris Review' wanted me to interview him, and they wanted it like crazy, and I loved much of the work, so I decided to do it. I rented a Morris Minor station wagon, so that the baby could be on the top of her baby carriage, behind the seats, and… and we… could sit behind us, and we drove from Thaxted over to France, and through the Simplon Pass railroad train - wonderful - turn around and look at the baby as we were going through the tunnel sitting up, looking around - and my wife took the kids through the streets of Rome. These two little red-headed babies, and they were constantly remarked upon - ‘Rosso!’ But I went to see Pound the day we got there to arrange when we'd start the interview the next day. And he came to the door and opened it, and he was 74 then. His face was heavily wrinkled, almost like Auden's and kind of beautiful… that great hair swooping back, leonine, but he looked… he looked very old, and he carried a cane, and he said, ‘Mr Hall, you have come all the way from England, and you find me in fragments’. And it was an extraordinary time. I spent a good deal of four days with him, and I came to feel for him enormously. He was very guilty, but he didn't get it - what he had done wrong. He insisted he was not a traitor, because you could not be a traitor without treacherous intent. He said nothing… he was defending the real American republic against the usurpers. He said nothing anti-semitic to me. But one time he told a joke that had references to Judaism - it wasn't anti-semitic - and then his face fell, he was afraid he had been anti-semitic, he didn't know. Well, he went in and out of speech. There were times when he was eloquent and witty and building a story nicely, but then maybe in the middle of a sentence he would collapse, and close his eyes, and lie back on a little bed, and say that he was a failure. Succeeding in the interview was really important to him… that's one thing I thought of him as being so arrogant. He was desperate to do a good interview - to come off well, and so on. He was a very broken man. Shortly thereafter, he stopped talking, almost entirely, he went into the silence, and for the last 10 years of his life, he spoke very few words. He could speak - it wasn't a physical thing - but, he was sort of entering the silence at that time, and there was a lot of silence. But eventually over four days, there was a lot of talk, and when we saw him… I took a tape recorder on a very primitive machine… and the thing you can hear clearest on it was, ‘Turn that damn thing off! Turn that damn thing off!’ But I managed to get the interview off it, and out of memory, and so on.
11 сен 2024
