DISCRETIONS by Mary de Rachewiltz. 312 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $8.95.
The hand of Ezra Pound, more strongly than any other, shaped the dominant style of 20th century poetry in English. Born in 1885 in an Idaho mining town, he flourished from 1907 in London and Paris as the friend of Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, the discoverer of Frost, the teacher of Eliot (who dedicated The Waste Land to him) and even of Yeats. But sometime in the 1930s something went tragically askew. The man Eliot called "the greatest poet alive" lapsed into an aging crank, teasing out nutty monetary theories, making Fascist noises about "international Jewry" as "the true enemy," stuffing junk and glories into a multilingual magpie epic called The Cantos. During World War II he made pro-Axis broadcasts from Rome. Accused of treason and brought back to the U.S., he escaped trial when he was certified insane, but for the next twelve years was shut up in a madhouse. Now 85, he passes his time in Venice and Rapallo, an old bone singing in the sun.
How to understand such a life? Pound has been little help to his often obtuse biographers. The best hope has been that friends and family would talk, a hope partly realized in this discreet but perceptive memoir by his illegitimate daughter, who is a poet in her own right and who has translated The Cantos into Italian. Though she makes no more sense than anyone else of that vast and buzzing head, she found in the little happenings of family life a language that helps explain his crusty heart. Looking up from knee height, she saw an Ezra Pound nobody else has seen: a busy, bossy, funny, touchy, loving and at times absurdly conventional American daddy.
Entity with a Grudge. The author's mother was the mistress of Pound's middle and later years, a gifted violinist named Olga Rudge. Since little Mary was a by-blow and an inconvenience —Olga, Pound and Mrs. Pound all moved in the same European artistic circles—she was boarded from birth with a farm family in the Italian Tyrol. Mary's first memory of her Tattile, as her foster parents called Pound, is of a pair of shiny shoes she was not allowed to touch. On another visit, alarmed at her farm-girl fingernails and unbrushed teeth, Tattile bought her a toothbrush and personally gave her a manicure. Mamile was more distant, "an incomprehensible entity with a grudge . . . as though I were permanently doing her wrong."
On periodic visits to Tattile and Mamile in Venice, Mary watched Pound making poetry: "His silence was suspense, a joyous sense of expectation, until he broke into a kind of chant that sometimes went on for hours." Pound was often severe with Mary. When she was still quite small, he drafted an elaborate table of "Laws for Maria." Item: "If she suffers, it is her own fault for not understanding the universe." But on the whole, he was a really nice if distant dad. He bought the child a small flock of sheep, and became her silent partner in a tiny bee-raising business; many of these episodes, mentioned obscurely in The Cantos, are here explained in full. In Venice he walked her all over town and fed her gooey Italian goodies. And one night, after taking Mary and Mamile to a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie, he got so excited that all the way home he tap-danced like a damn fool on the cobblestones of Venice.