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The happy days were soon gone. At eleven, Mary left her gentle Tyrolean guardians to live with Pound in Rapallo. As World War II approached, he became more and more infatuated with Mussolini. In 1939, alarmed by Franklin Roosevelt's opposition to the Axis powers, he went to Washington to "talk some sense into the President." Roosevelt refused to see him. When the U.S. entered the war, Pound delivered a series of rambling and vaguely anti-American diatribes on Radio Roma. According to Mary, he did not really intend to betray his country but to persuade it with right reason. He saw himself as a Confucian scholar-statesman, and plastered the town of Rapallo with moralistic slogans: HONESTY IS THE TREASURE OF STATES. His daughter sees him as a lone wolf howling in a world gone mad.
Losing Grip. But was Pound's howling entirely sane? Mary deals with that matter as cryptically as possible. "He was . . . losing grip. His tongue was tricking him into . . . violent expressions." But her description of what happened to Pound when the war ended is detailed and grim. He was arrested by two small-time crooks who had learned that there was a 500,000-lira reward for his capture. Handcuffed to an accused murderer, he was taken by Jeep to a military jail near Pisa. There, at the age of 60, he was kept like an animal in an outdoor cage, exposed to all weathers, for more than six months. He was sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital, an insane asylum in Washington, D.C. During his ordeal, Pound fought off madness and suicide by writing some of his greatest verse.
Of her own life—now married and the mother of two, she lives in a castle in the Italian Tyrol—Mary writes gracefully but modestly. Pound is the major figure in her book, and she willingly plays Cordelia to his Lear. Perhaps at times she adds too soft a shading to the fierce old face—who could begrudge him that? Who would not be glad to hear that he and Olga are still together in old age, "taking care of each other"? Who could not envy him the vision he rescued out of horror:
Hast'ou seen the rose in the steel dust
(or swansdown ever?")
so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron
we who have passed over Lethe.