Should we cancel the books of writers who behave badly?

We get upset about writers who behave badly. Can we even go on reading the work of a beloved someone who turns out to be a child abuser? Or on a lesser scale, someone who says the wrong thing at the wrong time? Should we cancel them and their books?

Let’s look back at a famous modernist poet, a celebrity in his day, who after Hitler is possibly the most reviled author of the 20th century. If they’d had social media in those interwar years, Ezra Pound would have had a huge following, and he’d also have been cancelled dozens of times. And yet somehow he’d have clawed his way back into many influencers’ good books.

I knew that Pound was an antisemite and a fascist, but I hadn’t realised how far he went. A new book by Stephen Harding, G.I. G-Men, billed as “The Untold Story of the FBI’s Search for American Traitors, Collaborators, and Spies in World War II Europe”, reminds us that the US government accused Pound of treason and built up a strong case against him, but he avoided prosecution by being declared mentally ill and was put into a hospital.
His crime? Starting in 1941, he made hundreds of radio programs from Italy, broadcast in English, praising the fascist dictator Mussolini and railing against the threats from an economic world order run by “international Jewry”. The regime paid him well.

Pound died in 1972 but remains a controversial figure. As Tim Redman points out in his 1991 book Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, critics argued for decades that Pound was not really a poet or not really a fascist, or that he was a fascist, but his poetry is not fascistic, or that there was an evil Pound and a good Pound. He was always a colourful character. In his early years, his only sins appeared to be arrogance, obnoxiousness and a relentless drive for self–promotion that led him to write and anonymously publish glowing reviews of his own work.

Born in the US, he spent much of his life in London, Paris and Italy. As a poet, critic and literary journalist, he made many friends and more enemies. The grateful writers whose work he published and promoted included T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, who praised his poetry and his advocacy for friends, “and in the end few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity”. Pound’s magnum opus The Cantos (twice as long as Paradise Lost) was hailed as a stupendous religious poem about the human journey from hell to paradise, but was also attacked for its “piles of boring scree”. There was uproar when he received a new US poetry award, the Bollingen Prize.

At one stage while the Americans were investigating him for treason, they kept him isolated in a steel cage, sleeping on concrete in the heat. He stopped eating. Late in life he suffered from depression and was convinced his entire life’s work was worthless.

Yet, he never renounced his antisemitism, just hedged around it. “I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day’s work for a living,” he wrote when Germany surrendered in 1945. “Hitler was a saint … he was fooled into anti-Semitism.” And after the war he went on writing many unsigned antisemitic articles, which were duly published.

Is Pound’s case a warning to us? It certainly shows how even the most blatantly poisonous doctrines in a writer’s work can keep bouncing back.

Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com

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