ne afternoon in November 1977, in the Londra, where I was staying courtesy of the Biennale on Dissent, I received a phone call from Susan Sontag, \vho \vas staying in the Gritti under the same dispensation. "Joseph," she said, "what are you doing this evening?" "Nothing," I said. "Why?" "Well, I bumped into Olga Rudge today in the piazza. Do you know her?" "No. You mean the Pound woman?" "Yes," said
Susan, "and she invited me over tonight. I dread going there alone. Would you go with me, ifyou haven't got other plans?" I had none, and I said, Sure, I will, having understood her apprehension only too well. Mine, I thought, could be even greater. Well, to begin with, in my line of work Ezra Pound is a big deal, practically an industry. Many an American graphomaniac has found in Ezra Pound both a master and a martyr. As a young man, I had translated quite a bit of him into Russian. The translations were trash, but came very close to being published, courtesy ofsome crypto-Nazi on the board ofa solid literary magazine (now, ofcourse, the man is an avid nationalist). I liked the original for its sophomoric freshness and taut verse, for its thematic and stylistic diversity, for its voluminous cultural references, then out of my reach. I also liked his "make it new" dictum—liked it, that is, until I grasped that the true reason for making it new was that "it" was fairly old; that we were, after all, in a body shop. As for his plight in St. Elizabeths, in Russian eyes, that was nothing to rave about and, anyhow, better than the nine grams of lead that his wartime radio spiels might have earned him elsewhere. The Cantos, too, left me cold; the main error was an old one: questing after beauty. For someone with such a long record of residence in Italy, it was odd that he hadn't realized that beauty can't be targeted, that it is always a by-product of other, often very ordinary pursuits. A fair thing to do, I thought, would be to publish both his poems and his speeches in one volume, without any learned introduction, and see what happens. Of all people, a poet should have known that time knows no distance between Rapallo and Lithuania. I also thought that admitting that you've screwed up your life is more manly than persevering in the posture of a persecuted genius, with all the throwing up of the arm in a Fascist salute upon his return to Italy, subsequent disclaimers of the gesture's significance, reticent interviews, and cape and staff cultivating the appearance of a sage with the net result of resembling Haile Selassie. He was still big with some of my friends, and now I was to see his old woman.
The address given was in the Salute sestiere, the part of town with the greatest, to my knowledge, percentage of foreigners in it, Anglos especially. After some meandering, we found the place—not too far, in fact, from the house in which Regnier dwelt in the teens of the century. We rang the bell, and the first thing I saw after the little woman with the beady eyes took shape on the threshold was the poet's bust by Gaudier-Brzeska sitting on the floor of the drawing room. The grip of boredom was sudden but sure.
Tea was served, but no sooner had we taken the first sip than the hostess—a gray-haired, diminutive, shipshape lady with many years in her to go—lifted her sharp finger, which slid into an invisible mental groove, and out of her pursed lips canie an aria the score of which has been in the public domain at least since 1945. That Ezra wasn't a Fascist; that they were afraid the Americans (which sounded pretty strange coming from an American) would put him in the chair; that he knew nothing about what was going on; that there were no Germans in Rapallo; that he'd travel from Rapallo to Rome only twice a month for the broadcast; that the Americans, again, were wrong to think that Ezra meant it to ... At some point I stopped registering what she was saying—which is easy for me, as English is not my mother tongue —and just nodded in the pauses, or whenever she'd punctuate her monologue with a tic-like "Capito?" A record, I thought; her master's voice. Be polite and don't interrupt the lady; it's garbage, but she believes it. There is something in me, I suppose, that always respects the physical side of human utterance, regardless of the content; the very movement of someone's lips is more essential than what moves them. I sank deeper into my armchair and tried to concentrate on the cookies, as there was no dinner.
What woke me from my reverie was the sound of Susan's voice, which meant that the record had come to a stop. There was something odd in her timbre and I cocked my ear. Susan was saying, "But surely, Olga, you don't think that the Americans got cross with Ezra over his broadcasts. Because if it were only his broadcasts, then Ezra would be just another Tokyo Rose." Now, that was one of the greatest returns I had ever heard. I looked at Olga. It must be said that she took it like a mensch. Or, better yet, a pro. Or else she didn't grasp what Susan had said, though I doubt it. "What was it, then?" she inquired. "It was Ezra's anti-Semitism," replied Susan, and I saw the corundum needle of the old lady's finger once again hitting the groove. On this side of the record was: "One should realize that Ezra was not an anti-Semite; that after all his name was Ezra; that some of his friends were Jewish, including one Venetian admiral; that ..." The tune was equally familiar and equally long—about three-quarters of an hour; but this time we had to go. We thanked the old lady for the evening and bade her farewell. I, for one, did not feel the sadness one usually feels leaving the house ofa widow—or for that matter anybody alone in an empty place. The old lady was in good shape, reasonably well off; on top of that, she had the comfort of her convictions—a comfort, I felt, she'd go to any length to defend. I think I'd never met a Fascist—young or old; however, I'd dealt with a considerable number of old CP members, and that's why tea at Olga Rudge's place, with that bust of Ezra sitting on the floor, rang, so to speak, a bell. We turned to the left of the house and two minutes later found ourselves on the Fondamenta degli Incurabili .
h, the good old suggestive power of language! Ah, this legendary ability of words to imply more than reality can provide! Ah, the lock, stock, and barrel of the metier. Of course, the "Embankment of the Incurables" harks back to the plague, to the epidemics that used to sweep this city halfclean century after century with a census taker's regularity. The name conjures the hopeless cases, not so much strolling along as scattered about on the flagstones, literally expiring, shrouded, waiting to be carted—or, rather, shipped away. Torches, fumes, gauze masks preventing inhalation, rustling of monks' frocks and habits, soaring black capes, candles. Gradually the funereal procession turns into a carnival, or indeed a promenade, where a mask would have to be worn, since in this city everybody knows everybody. Add to this, tubercular poets and composers; add to this, men of moronic convictions or aesthetes hopelessly enamored of this place—and the embankment might earn its name, reality might catch up with language. And add to this that the interplay between plague and literature (poetry in particular, and Italian poetry especially) was quite intricate from the threshold. That Dante's descent into the netherworld owes as much to Homer's and Virgil's—episodic scenes, after all, in the Iliad and the Aeneid—as to Byzantine medieval literature about cholera, with its traditional conceit of premature burial and subsequent peregrination of the soul. Overzealous agents of the netherworld bustling around the cholera-stricken city would often zero in on a badly dehydrated body, put their lips to his nostrils, and suck away his life spirit, thereby proclaiming him dead and fit to be buried. Once underneath, the individual would pass through infinite halls and chambers, pleading that he has been consigned to the realm of the dead unjustly and seeking redress. Upon obtaining it—usually by facing a tribunal presided over by Hippocrates—he would returnfull of stories about those he had bumped into in the halls and chambers below: kings, queens, heroes, famous or infamous mortals of his time, repentant, resigned, defiant. Sounds familiar? Well, so much for the suggestive powers of the metier. One never knows what engenders what: an experience a language, or a language an experience. Both are capable of generating quite a lot. When one is badly sick, one imagines all sorts of consequences and developments which, for all we know, won't ever take place. Is this metaphoric thinking? The answer, I believe, is yes. Except that when one is sick, one hopes, even against hope, to get cured, the illness to stop. The end of an illness thus is the end of its metaphors. A metaphor—or, to put it more broadly, language itself—is by and large open-ended, it craves continuum: an afterlife, if you will. In other words (no pun intended), metaphor is incurable. Add then to all of this yourself, a carrier of this metier, or of this virus—in fact, of a couple of them, sharpening your teeth fora third—shuffling on a windy night along the Fondamenta, whose name proclaims your diagnosis regardless of the nature of your malady.