“Toss a Coin in the Arno for Me”: Recollections of Ezra Pound in Italy

Michael Wren Steele

 

During the 1960s, many books formerly banned were being released due to first amendment-based court decrees. I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn; Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves; Fanny Hill; the bawdy poems of Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; DeSade’s Bedroom Philosophers and Pierre Louys’s Aphrodite. I’d dabbled with writing since age eight and moved from jungle stories to historical stories to Gothic tales strongly influenced by Poe and Hawthorne. I became known at family reunions as a teller of “ghost stories,” most of which I improvised on the spot. I had been schooled by Quakers and Jesuits and was well-versed in the likes of Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire and Joyce--all Jesuit schoolboys themselves. I was in Venice wanting to write a scandalous novel. One so shocking it made Miller look cautious.

 

It was 1965 and underneath my introverted persona burned a bonfire of angers against just about everything as well as a libido on overdrive. So, I figured in Venice--a city where painters and prostitutes defied the Inquisition--I could let loose. Let my “true self” emerge free from parents, teachers, and guardians of the Superego.

 

Seaside cities usually have milder winters in terms of snow or ice; but the winds have cold teeth. It was Carnivale, Ash Wednesday following like mourners after a raucous funeral, when I got a call from one of the Venetian Jesuit priests I had studied under.

 

         “There is an American poet,” explained Father Stefano, “who wishes to meet you.” He went on to explain further that the poet lived in Venice part of the year and was looking for an assistant to help him with his work.

 

         A bit baffled by the request of a famous American poet coming out of the blue like this, I responded to Father Stefano’s proposal with “Si. Vorrei parlare a poet dagli a Stati Uniti.” (My Italian was getting better.)

 

         An hour later I was looking at a very tall man in a wide-brimmed wool hat, wearing a large shawl that resembled a serape. He had a beard, unusual for those days. A white beard flecked with a few reddish streaks. His gaze was intense, cat-like. His movements, though a bit awkward, seemed to flow without thought or effort. An old man. Already crusty with years, but not stooping, and no cane. He looked more like a pirate, I thought. Ready to round up a crew and take to the white-capped sea which asserted itself in the tides of day-to-day life.

 

         “Buon giorno,” he said in a sonorous voice, as we were formally introduced. The Italian ringing like that of a native. “Come va?”

 

         I put out my hand and gave my name.

          “Ezra Pound,” he said, nearly crushing my extended hand. I was tall and large. Well over six feet. He was taller and larger. The eyes sparkled in a mass of splotchy skin and errant hair.

 

         “My business is poetry and mischief,” he offered, grinning.

 

          We walked to a coffee bar where he ordered cafe corretto, and I espresso.

 

         “I’m tired of sitting,” he said. “As you know by now, it’s cheaper this way. Save the lira for that beribboned girl who caught your eye. I do.”

 

         A week later, and with some difficulty, I found Pound’s residence. He occupied the third floor of a building on a secluded canal. As with most waterfront domiciles, the front door was on the canal and was rarely used since the water levels often fluctuated. As true of many buildings, currently, in Italy, this was “multi-use.” From the street entrance, one entered a small lobby and faced the choice between proceeding up a narrow, dark, winding staircase, or taking a small, creaking elevator which held, at best, two large persons, or, when lucky, one large person and two small persons. Or two of any size with modest luggage. A pensione occupied the top floors.

 

         Ezra worked in a small room away from the tiny portholes that served as windows. “I don’t need any distractions,” he said, when he saw me gazing at the oval windows. Yet he occasionally moved his typewriter next to portholes with antique handles which opened, with difficulty. He rarely delegated typing to anyone since he typed much faster than I, or any others who came to assist him in his work.

 

         Most of Pound’s “assistants,” I came to find out, stayed with him only a short time. Two of us, however, were constant: myself and a woman of indeterminate age he had nick-named the duenna, even though she was not a duenna. (Her name was actually Laura.) In the beginning days of my internship, I did odds and ends work--typing in my one-finger fashion, while the duenna knew “the touch system.” Ezra, on the other hand, used his own system-- “Which I recommend to no one,” he would often say--and which he called “pianoforte.” With his massive fingers, the touch system, designed for nimble fingers, would have been annoying and inefficient to a man with such large hands.

 

         After a few days on the job, Ezra began grilling me, checking me out. He peppered me with questions on word definitions. He wanted precise Oxford Dictionary definitions. Etymologies. Quotes when relevant. As concise as possible:

 

         “Glossolalia?” he threw at me.

 

         “I responded with hesitation: “Speaking in tongues. Possessed by the Holy Spirit. First instance, First Century Anno Domini Jerusalem. The disciples speak to various nationalities. Tongues of fire are visible.”

 

         “Dionysian?” was his second word, thrust at me like a lance.

 

         “A state of ecstasy. Aspect of a mystery religion imported from Thrace thriving in Greece circa 300 to 200 BC. In Euripides, The Bacchae...” I returned.

 

         “Plautus?”

 

         “God of wealth. See also the Canaanite Mammon.”

 

         “Pecuniary?”

 

          “Relating to money. From the Latin pecunia.”

 

         “Hemophilia?”

 

         “Congenital disease. The blood does not clot and bleeding continues. Potentially fatal. From the Greek heme for blood, and philia for love approximating love of one’s kin.”

 

         Seemingly impressed at my quick volley to his fast serve, he continued:

 

          “Alexander Borgia?”

 

          “Spanish born Pope. Served 1492 through 1503. Followed Innocent VIII. Preceded the brief papacy of Pius III, succeeded by Julius II, also in 1503. Father of Cesar, Lucrezia, and others.”

 

         “Benevenuto Cellini?”

 

         “Florentine silversmith. Also wrote an Autobiography. Lived from .....”

 

         “That’s enough,” said Pound putting an end to the definition drill. “They said you were a walking encyclopedia. I believe it now. I suppose you’ve the twenty-third psalm in there, too, along with the Sermon on the Mount and the Lamentations.”

 

         “Yes sir, would you like....”

 

         “No. I got it. As long as you know the square root of the naught.”

 

         “Yes. Zero,” I responded.

 

         “And where does the naught come from?” he shot back, with a look in his eye that said he thought he had stumped me.

 

         “India,” I parried.

 

         “Very good. Most would have said the Arabs. Now, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.”

 

         In the beginning Ezra had me working with his correspondence, which was delivered twice a week in a bulging sack. Since the Italian postal service, then as now, is notoriously laggard, many of the postmarks were as old as two months.

 

         He had a system. Two lists--neither of which was written down but which we were expected to know. The short list correspondence, he wanted to read immediately, meaning during the noon to mid-afternoon siesta break. The long-list correspondence he meant to read “eventually,” though I doubt he ever read it at all. Then there was “the shit list.” Mail I or the duenna read. Most of which ended up on the garbage barge which floated by our windows a couple times a week in the canal below.

 

         Laura was what, a decade later, would be called “a groupie.” She dressed like many older Italian women of the day: modestly. Long, loose fitting dresses sashed or belted at the waist. Backless, elegant sandals she slipped out of while working. But the modesty was deceptive, as there was often a slit in the skirt or else the skirt slipped up as she sat, or opened-up, as high as mid-thigh, revealing one or two shapely legs. When she bent over to go in a file drawer to retrieve something (I learned not to pick up what she dropped), the seemingly high neckline, when loosed, would reveal two girlish breasts. She always acted as if these poses were unwitting. But Ezra, if in the room, without missing a beat (he seemed for an old man to see very well, indeed) would wink at me and say, regardless of time of day: “A touch of Pernod Fils,” or “Sambuca Romana, don’t you think?”

 

         The first time he said this, I dropped everything in my lap onto the floor, got up, and went for a bottle and three glasses. When I returned, he and the duenna were laughing. I soon learned all the Latin was code for “take a long walk,” which I did (usually with another “list” never written down, which included pencils, pens, carbon paper, liqueurs and wine, flowers, pipe tobacco, and chocolates. Rarely did I shop for food, as that was usually delivered by other “groupies.”

 

         I also learned in those early days that if one of the cats who roamed the building (two were Ezra’s) got on his typewriter or desk, he’d stop what he was working on. He wouldn’t shoo the cat off or allow anyone else to. So I’d go for the bottle. Or he would....

 

         “These hillbillies!” he would often joke, referring to my American heritage and place of birth. I learned, over time, that his taunts were not to be taken seriously, even if said with a straight face. He found it hilarious, for instance, that I had trouble carrying a small tray with three glasses on it and showed me how to balance it in one hand like a waiter. He also showed me how to pour, by raising the bottle, so the pernod, sambuca, or ouzo poured into the glasses without spilling. Then we’d sit, the three of us (or more if there were guests--who usually brought gifts, most of which he would later give away), one or more cats (gatta) purring as they sat on the typewriters or in our laps.

 

         At some point, Ezra would sigh and say, “O Tempera. O Mores.” Usually, but not necessarily, code for “Any interesting mail?” And each of us two would offer what we thought were the highlights in the mail delivered that day. “I’d answer them all, if I could,” he’d say. But generally it was I who answered all letters, if written in English, German or French. Laura answered in Italian and German. If, that is, they were “answerable.” Requests to review or write book prefaces went unanswered, with few exceptions. Ezra would say “file it” referring to these kinds of requests. But after a while they were inevitably tossed out.

        In those days in Venice, I thought doors were waiting open for me. As it turned out, they were not. What I learned at Pound’s elbow was that you “keep on” just the same. Already, by 1945, he had found himself ostracized from mainstream anthologies.

 

         While biographers have painted him to have lapsed into silence during his last years (and with many, it’s true, he did stay mute) I found no Lear-like qualities to his persona, even if, for three seasons, I was a good enough Fool. And while I never actually heard him utter the words, I felt him say “I might have ended up happy had I not once been such a towering influence.” The muteness others encountered was melancholia. The ruminant hunted down and given a silver bullet. No longer able to renew under the procession of moons.

 

         Perhaps he felt, rightly, a post-war generation, like ours, would unshoulder the disillusionment following the Great War. Or perhaps he saw a kindred spirit in me, an athletic-looking youth already touched with moonglow.

 

         Conversations, after time went on, were not daily. They flowed out of a need to “let go” the muse’s demands. Not to “talk shop” but to, simply, talk. The pace of his banter could be quick-witted. Or punctuated with frowns and long lapses. During our more lively conversations, he reminded me that Dante had reserved an icy embrace for “the violation of the Medieval code: one does not betray one’s friend.” Hence Lucifer is a parody of the crucifixion--with Jesus flanked by Judas on the one side and Brutus on the other.

 

         At one point, I remember him looking at me, sighing, and saying: “You know history, but you don’t know America. America must have a devil... You’ll find out. The Red Menace, now, and when that’s done, another will fill the void. Peace, as Gibbon said, is for small, pastoral republics.”

 

         He loved to talk about music, but when we steered out of the Baroque and Classical (or Renaissance) masters, he changed the subject. “I’ll play possum when you get off in possum’s haunts,” he would say. “Like Yeats and his pantheon of spooks.”

 

         He didn’t suffer fools lightly. Once, when I attempted to champion Edna St. Vincent Millay, he shot back: “She should’ve stayed in that casket. With one good candle.” On Aiken, he replied: “Good name for him! A perpetual ulcer.” On Ginsberg: “Nice boy. Some good stuff. Too much dross.” When I brought up Faulkner, his reply was: “I’m told I ought to read him. But I don’t. Novels.... I don’t keep up with. As you can see, I don’t keep up with contemporary poets, either. I’d never get any work done.” On the other hand, he spoke highly of Robert Frost, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Conrad, Hardy, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Cocteau, Mina Loy, and Robert Lowell.

 

         One day he picked up a couple envelopes from his desk, and announced: “Now, these scholars are for real! The letters were from Hugh Kenner and D.S. Carne-Ross. Names that went, immediately, on his Short List.

 

         Pound loved my tales of field hands on my grandfather Steele’s farm--how they rescued me from a bear, for example, or taught me voodoo or how to “shop cotton” or how to sing with do-re-mi readings above the notes or about fishing and catching the massive “spoonbill catfish” (which he identified from descriptions as “paddlefish”).He loved hearing about huge carp washed up after floods or the damkeeper’s telling of two-hundred pound catfish or the ruminations on “Blue Gum Niggers,” who were vulnerable, like Achilles or Krishna, “only in the foot.” And he loved to hear me talk of Miz Copeland, who was dug up by grave robbers due to rumors she was buried in jewelry. Or of the Pentecostals who headquartered in my hometown, meeting from dusk to midnight.(“Did they handle snakes?” he wondered.)

 

        Also, he relished my own “scary stories.” He thought some “too Poe-esque,” but listened to most without comment, calling some “hair-raising.”

 

         “The South is haunted,” he said to me one day after one such tale. “Like Southern Italy. Did you see voodoo symbols pinned to altars?” he wanted to know.

 

         While on the subject of the South, he happened to mention a tour of the U.S. that had been organized by his American publisher James Laughlin (another literary figure who was on his Short List). “We passed through the South on my reading tour. Very colorful. There and New England. The rest of the country looked monotonous, save the Rockies. Gas stations look different in the South or New England. People look you in the eye there. But this, too, will change. Enjoy local color while you can. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean I’m endorsing meanness....”

 

         Oddly, Pound spoke of Mencken and Fitzgerald as Southerners. When I protested: “Their wives, I think. Not them. Baltimore is not Southern,” he muttered something like “Well, in my day....” not conceding anything.

 

         I remember he could get quite worked up over “crypto-aesthetes” and “apologists for Plautus”--ripping Stevens apart, for example, by conceding that “he started well,” and then praising MacLeish, Olson and Sara Teasdale--saying of the latter: “a minor poet but there’s a niche for them.”

 

         “Find your own voice,” he said to me one day, feeling generous. “It takes a while. I started off writing greeting-card poetry. Wish I could hide it now. I’ll take Sandburg--not one of my favorites--over those other jackanapes any day!”

 

         During this first visit, I seem to remember Pound working on one of the Cantos that he referred to as “Thrones.” He read little of his own work to us, but when he did it was a riveting performance, as he was a superior reader of his own work. When he would read the same passages to us, again, later, they had all been changed. Also, I remember his referring to a “rose garden,” which could have been a reference to Empyrean. Since the work he shared with us was unfinished, he never invited scrutiny or comment.

 

* * *

I made my second trip to Italy five years after the first. In 1970. During the first stay, my time with Pound was about experiencing the serendipity of our meeting and association. During the second trip, old Ez was a priority!

 

         Again, as in 1965, I flew into Rome. I spent two days at Vatican City and in the area near Stazione Termini. Eventually, I took the night train, again, to Venice. This time I noted many more Americans on the train than before. And this was the off-season! I rode 2nd class in a compartment with a doctoral candidate going back to school. Her specialty: Byzantine art history. From Venice, she was going to Ravenna. When she asked me if I would join her, I replied; “Yes. I love Ravenna. That’s where Dante died. The only problem is the railroad station. It’s a long walk from there to the town. And San Vitale is a bit far from town.”

 

         “So, you’ve seen San Vitale?” she asked.

 

         “One of my favorite places,” I shot back, enthusiastically. “The mosaics are incredible. I’d love to see it all again!”

 

In Venice, I found Pound’s new address. Before I had left Venice in 1965, he had said: “Keep up. Write to me. I’ll put you on the short list.” So in the interim five years I heard from him, not an assistant, when response came to my letters. Most of his notes were one-pagers or on postcards in his usual telegraphic style with cryptic comments. For example, when I told him I was currently attending college in a graduate department in the South dominated by “The Fugitives,” he replied: “What were they running from?” or “Never could make heads nor tails of ’em.”

 

         By 1970, two women were looking after the old man. One a nurse, and the other his daughter Marie de Rachewiltz. I often sat with them for a while when Ezra was napping. They would update me on the condition of his health. There was usually nothing major to talk about except the symptoms of old age. Phlebitis. Rheumatism. Occasional labored breathing. Flagging energy....

 

         “He remembers you well,” they told me early on in the second visit. “Just don’t wear him out.”

 

         After a while he would awake, and receive me sitting up in an old recliner swaddled in blankets. I remember my first impression being that he’d shrunk a bit. And had also been to the barber. But he still had that familiar Poundian sparkle in his eyes. While his handshake was no longer the bone-crusher that had greeted me in 1965, it was firm and friendly.

 

         “The hillbilly!” he said, grinning, on the day of our reunion. “He knows the 1952 edition of the Britannica by heart,” he said, turning to the two women. “Good at languages, too. Probably here to do a thesis on me. Shall we warn him?”

 

         I told him of my disappointments in graduate school, saying I didn’t fit in and that I’d chosen the wrong time for the wrong place, despite the fact that football was good those years and the co-eds, limited by gender quota, were likely chosen for looks and good hair, if not acumen.

 

         “Of course not! You’re too quick and subtle for that bunch,” he responded, followed by a long, whistling sigh. “You were so young when you were here before. One should never disillusion the young. I should have warned you--not to expect any kind of community amongst scholars. You know, I took my M.A. in philology. Eliot in philosophy. Williams became a physician. Yeats studied art. You love literature too much and have a real feel for it. One should never dissect one’s Beloved.”

 

         And he went on... “Despite my dislike for that bunch, well....Lytle publishes me, so I guess I can’t complain. Ransom? Good fellow, no doubt, but too many geese. I figure it takes ten years to become a peasant. You know that with all the farmers in your family. You ever see him and Warren clean out the stables?!” And when I tried to defend Cleanth Brooks’ Well-Wrought Urn, Pound bristled, then made a pun on “what Cleanth wrought, I earned.” Continuing with: “There’s nothing to TB but death. I, too, was once smitten with Keats. Whitman and Browning ate that oyster.”

 

         The two women brought tea which only made Ezra more animated. During our conversation, I remembered my promise to the beautiful girl studying Byzantine art history. I told him I was going to Ravenna. “Wonderful! Piss on Dante’s remains for me,” was his unhesitating response.

 

         He also asked if I would be going to Florence. “Yes,” I said.

 

         “Then toss a coin in the Arno for me. A cento lira will do.”

 

         I said I would and agreed to come back before I left.

 

         In 1972, back in Huntsville, Alabama, I was thumbing through a Time magazine in a bus station. Near the back of the magazine I saw the headline: DEATH IN VENICE. Ezra Pound had died. This was near his birthday, and very close to mine--in November. He would’ve been eighty-seven. I was almost 24. My eyes teared, as I couldn’t finish the ambivalent Time tribute.

 

         When I had read the Time article on Pound’s death, I was finishing my last quarter of graduate school. Already hospitalized three times in a year, I wasn’t up to it any more. With the assistance of my advisor, I withdrew within a week of deadlines for two final papers due. I was very depressed and a physician at the infirmary had put me on Ritalin hoping it would get me out of the depression more quickly than the tricyclides, which were supposed to take a month or more. I packed up and left school at Auburn.

* * *

I went back only once to visit Mary, in Italy, who was still there. The “Canadian Pound aficionado,” (Andrew Jordan) I was told, had died in a car wreck the year before. In September of 2000--the Jubilee Year--I went for the third time with my closest friend, Valeria. Before leaving, I spent months relearning Italian. Since I’d not used it in years, I’d forgotten much.

 

         Since Atlanta began offering international flights in the mid-seventies, there was no need to fly to New York, then New York to Rome. We left on a Saturday afternoon and arrived in Rome early Sunday morning, and for the first time ever, I actually slept on a plane.

 

         Our hotel was in the northern section of Rome and away from the hubbub. It was quiet there and the oleanders were in bloom on the hillside where the gated hotel stood. A far cry from the pensiones and hostels of previous visits. Our hotel, fortunately, had a limo service to Vatican City, and Rome’s subway, like Paris’s, was fairly easy once we got our bearings. We went, first, to Santa Maria Maggiore and I was stunned, yet again. [explain what it was that stunned you] The next day we went to the Vatican and attended a mass there, entering through Sacra Porta and passing the Pieta. After, we explored the Vatican catacombs, where I paid tribute to the tomb of Pope John XXIII, who initiated Vatican II. (A true hero, who has since been moved from the musty underground, to upstairs, and is said to be well-preserved.)

 

         On a Tuesday we rode the subway to Piazza Di Spagna. While Valeria sought a toiletta, I studied maps with a certain destination in mind. While I was studying the maps, a tall woman in a short skirt with long white legs walked up the steps, sat beside me, and began eating a banana. After a while, she spoke. I could tell from her good English that she was German. Twenty-something, very tall and pretty. Her name was Castine. It turned out she had been an exchange student in Cleveland years before. Valeria returned, and I introduced her to Castine. We talked for a while and then went our separate ways, exchanging addresses, and Valeria and I went to eat lunch at Piazza Barberini, where we found a good minestrone, enjoying a tasty gelato to end the meal.

 

         After asking several people in the streets, we found the Cornaro Chapel, at Santa Maria Della Vittoria, which was not far from Piazza Spagna or the Triton Fountain, but was hard to find because it was small and there were so many churches. And, of course, which is typical of Italy, the church was closed (chiuso) for the noon to mid-afternoon siesta. Finally, at the three o’clock bell, a Carmelite priest came out and unlocked the doors. Plain on the outside, Santa Maria Della Vittoria is absolutely extravagant once inside: frescoes by the Orazzi Brothers and a series of small chapels--one dedicated to Therese di Lisieux, another to Francis of Assisi. The Cornaro Chapel, which is at the front of the church, houses the sculpture “Saint Teresa in Ecstasy” by Bernini--my favorite piece of art in all the world.

 

         “Someone special took me here, a long time ago,” I told Valeria, “and I want to pass that gift on to you--who are special to me--thirty-five years later.”

 

         I’d not hyped the Bernini Teresa to Valeria, but had just taken her there on the promise that there was something special that I wanted to show her, and she had gone along with my little intrigue. My hope was, of course, that she would share my sentiments about “Saint Teresa in Ecstasy.” She did.

 

         We saw more of Rome in the days that followed. The Vatican Museum with a renovated Capella Sistina and Michelangelo’s self-portrait. The Stanza Rafaello with Raphael’s “Disputation,” “School of Athens” and “The Freeing of Peter.” On the fifth day, we managed to get to the Coliseum, stopping along the way to get train tickets for Florence.

 

         In Florence, we stayed at Hotel Bretagna on Lungarno Corsini within view of the Ponte Vecchio. That night we went to eat in Oltrarno near Santa Trinita. After dinner, on the way back to the hotel, as we crossed over the River Arno, I stopped on the bridge. Plunged my hand into the pocket of my pants. Pulled out a lire in change. And tossed it into the water, below.