Ezra Pound’s ‘Insanity’ & The Muncie Papers
by A. David Moody
In February 1946 a Washington D. C. court decided that Ezra Pound, who was under indictment for treason, was of ‘unsound mind’ and would therefore not be put on trial. An experienced and respected journalist who was present, Albert Deutsch, wrote in P.M., ‘I have no desire to persecute a mentally sick person . . . Yet I must frankly state my opinion that the case of Ezra Pound, involving the gravest crime possible, has been handled incompletely and inadequately by the Justice Department, and by the four psychiatrists who examined the defendant.’[1] The lawyers representing the government, he wrote, had ‘acted throughout as if they were going through the motions’. Most notably, they had failed to submit as evidence the reports of three psychiatrists who had examined Pound for the Justice Department when he was being held under arrest in Italy and had found him perfectly sane.
The finding of insanity has remained suspect to this day, but the suspicion has been directed against the psychiatrists rather than the Justice Department. A widely held view is that Dr Overholser, the leading psychiatrist in the case, had been concerned to protect Pound from a possible sentence of death and had persuaded the other psychiatrists to follow his lead.[2] But now some new evidence has come to light that throws suspicion back onto the Justice Department and calls for a revision of the story of Pound’s non-trial.
The new material comes from the files of Dr Wendell Muncie, the psychiatrist appointed by Julian Cornell, Pound’s attorney. Dr Muncie’s Pound files, scorched by a house fire which they survived, were recently given to me by his son, Peter Muncie. They contain his correspondence with Cornell and with the other psychiatrists, his notes of their examinations of Pound—these revealing for the first time what was actually said in those examinations—and also cuttings of Deutsch’s reports on the court proceedings. What now comes clear is that the several parties involved, the prosecution, the defence, the psychiatrists, and the judge, while nominally opposed or impartial, were effectively all working for the same outcome.
The FBI had begun investigating Pound in October 1942 in response to President Roosevelt’s naming him as one of a number of Americans in Europe ‘aiding Hitler et al on the radio’. ‘Why should we not indict them for Treason’, he asked the Attorney General, ‘even though we might not be able to try them until after the war?’ Pound had been broadcasting over Rome Radio since January 1941, and had not desisted when the United States entered the war in December of that year. He kept on until the fall of Mussolini’s regime in July 1943. In that month a Grand Jury brought in an Indictment charging Pound and others with treason. ‘These people have freely elected, at a time when their country is at war, to devote their services to the enemies of the United States’, the Attorney General declared, ‘They have betrayed the first and foremost sacred obligation of American citizenship.’
Pound heard about the indictment while listening to the BBC. He at once sent a letter via the Swiss legation in Rome to the Attorney General, setting out at some length his defence. The key point was the claim that he had been responsibly exercising his constitutional right to freedom of speech. ‘I do not believe that the simple fact of speaking over the radio, wherever placed, can in itself constitute treason’, he wrote, ‘I think that must depend on what is said, and on the motives for speaking’.[3] He was touching there on the requirement in U. S. law that for treason to be proved there must be evidence of a deliberate intent to do harm to the United States. Pound’s claim would be that he was attempting to inform Americans of facts they needed to know about Europe and about their own history, and that in doing so he was fulfilling his duty as an American citizen. His letter was filed unanswered, and was not mentioned in the later court proceedings.
An order for his arrest was sent to the U. S. forces in Italy, and an FBI agent set about gathering evidence there. When the war in Europe finally came to its end in early May 1945 Pound was picked up by a pair of bounty-hunting partisans, and would have been let go by their leader, but asked to be taken to a nearby U. S. command. From there he was transferred to the U. S. Counter Intelligence Center in Genoa and became a prisoner of the U. S. government. He was formally interrogated over three days, without the assistance of an attorney, and signed a sworn statement in which he declared himself ‘willing to return to the United States to stand trial on the charge of treason against the United States’.[4] He supplemented his sworn statement with two further statements. All three documents, like his 1943 letter to the Attorney General, were perfectly clear and coherent, if from a sometimes egregious point of view. And like that letter, these statements would not be mentioned in the court proceedings. Nor would it be mentioned that the two agents who had interrogated him over three days reported no signs of insanity.
On May 24 Pound was transferred to a U. S. Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa – a prison camp for the U. S. Army’s own criminals. He was to be held there while the FBI continued its search for evidence, and for witnesses. The law stipulated that there should be two witnesses to each alleged act of treason, and it was proving difficult to find Rome Radio technicians with a sufficient command of English to testify that they had been in the studio when Pound had recorded a specified talk that might be held to have been treasonous.
At the D. T. C. Pound was placed in a specially reinforced cage, with a concrete floor, a flat wood and tar-paper roof, but otherwise open to the elements. A bright light shone on the cage through the night. There was a general order that he was not to be spoken to. After three weeks there an army psychiatrist was assigned to examine him in order to assess his mental condition, and another army psychiatrist provided a second opinion. They reported that Pound told them that he had had a ‘recent spell of confusion’ lasting some moments while exposed to the sun, and they advised that ‘prolonged exposure in present environment may precipitate a mental breakdown’. One observed ‘No paranoia, delusions nor hallucinations’, and the other ‘no evidence of psychosis, neurosis or psychopathy’. The second psychiatrist recorded without comment that the prisoner complained of ‘claustrophobia’.[5]
In the light of these reports the camp commander had Pound moved from the cage to a tent in the medical compound. The Department of Justice, concerned about his mental competence to stand trial, asked for a further examination from another psychiatrist, and this took place on July 17. Major Weisdorf reported that his previous symptoms of anxiety and confusion had now cleared up. He noted a ‘prodigious flow of thought’ which sounded ‘on the whole relevant and coherent’; that Pound maintained that ‘he had done his utmost to prevent war and uphold the American Constitution’; and that he defended ‘his radio broadcasts on the Italian radio as the right of free speech and contends that he was not treasonable’. Weisdorf concluded that there was ‘no evidence of psychosis, or neurosis at the present time’.[6] As Deutsch noted, the three psychiatrists’ reports were never submitted in evidence.
Through July to September Pound was composing in his prison tent by day, and by night on the Medical Center dispensary’s typewriter, the long sequence of cantos which would be published in 1948 as The Pisan Cantos. In October he completed his translation of two works of Confucius. In that month he was also engaged in correspondence with his wife, with his English lawyer, with his American publisher James Laughlin, and with others, about his defence when his case came to court. He wanted to defend himself, and was being strongly advised, by T. S. Eliot along with the rest, that he should rather have a competent counsel.
On November 17 he was flown back to the United States. There was a strict instruction that ‘Legal Jurisdiction requires that plane returning prisoner land at Bolling Field in the district of COLUMBIA and NOT at National Airport or other airports in the UNITED STATES.’[7] Evidently the Justice Department wanted to ensure their direct control of the case. It arranged at about the same time for their Italian witnesses to be flown to America.
The day after his arrival Pound was brought from the District of Columbia jail for the preliminary arraignment before Chief Justice Bolitha J. Laws. He asked, in what the Washington Post called ‘a scholarly 10 minute debate’, to act in his own defence, but was told the case was too serious for that, and then agreed to have the court appoint an attorney to defend him. The formal arraignment was set down for November 27 and Pound was taken back to the jail. He was unaware that James Laughlin had already engaged Julian Cornell to undertake his defence. Cornell was a New York attorney and a special counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union. He had been briefed by Laughlin, and they had listened together to recordings of several of Pound’s broadcasts and agreed they did not sound treasonable. Nonetheless they had decided that their strategy should be to avoid a trial by entering a plea of insanity.[8]
Cornell had informed the Justice Department in early November that ‘he had been retained to confer with Pound about his defense’, and had asked to be notified of his arrival. He was notified by telegram on the day of the preliminary arraignment and at once traveled down to Washington. He presented himself to Judge Laws as Pound’s counsel, but explained to him that he was appearing only ‘for the purpose of arraignment, which includes entering of a plea to the indictment and application for bail’. He could not say whether he would undertake the defence. He also met with the Chief of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, Mr. McInerny, and with his assistant, Mr. Matlack, who would be in charge of the prosecution. He gathered from them, by his own account, that they regarded Pound’s case ‘as rather a mild one of its kind’, and concluded that on that account their opposition to the application for bail which he intended to make would not be too strenuous. Presumably he informed them, as he had intimated to Judge Laws, that he would be applying for bail on the grounds of mental illness. He was told that ‘three army psychiatrists who examined [Pound] found that he was suffering from claustrophobia’. It is not clear from Cornell’s account whether he was told at this meeting that those psychiatrists’ main finding had been that Pound was sane and fit to stand trial, but in any event he was aware of that finding shortly after.
Cornell first saw Pound the next morning, and ‘discussed with him the possibility of pleading insanity as a defense’. If the court accepted the plea, he told him, then he could expect to be back in Italy in six months a free man. And Pound, Cornell was able to tell Laughlin, had no objection to pleading insanity. However, according to Dr Muncie’s notes, Pound would tell him that it had been a ‘tremendous shock’ when Cornell brought in ‘this method of handling the case’. What he had wanted all along was to establish his innocence.
At the formal arraignment on November 27 the government filed its indictment which specified seven overt acts of treason and named five witnesses. Pound was being called upon to answer for opinions expressed in just seven broadcasts. Beneath its legal rhetoric there was surprisingly little substance to the indictment, and perhaps not much conviction. In 1950 Mr McInerny would be advised, following an internal Justice Department assessment of its case, that ‘extreme difficulty would be encountered in meeting our burden of proof if Pound were declared sane and the Government forced to trial’. There was insufficient evidence, he was told, ‘to meet the constitutional requirement of two witnesses to the same overt act or . . . the acts alleged could not properly be construed as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.’[9] It would be surprising if there was not already some awareness of that in 1945. And of course the Justice Department knew perfectly well what would be the consequence of the court’s accepting that Pound was unfit to plead.
Cornell had persuaded Pound ‘to remain mute rather than enter a plea of not guilty’, and he told the court that Pound was in no condition to answer the charge, and asked that a plea of not guilty be entered for him. He then made no attempt to address the indictment. Instead he presented a lengthy ‘Affidavit in Support of Application for Bail’ in which he declared, ‘I do not defend his actions, nor do I approve his sentiments’. His sole intent was to establish that Pound was suffering from mental illness, had long been suffering from mental illness, and that he was now in urgent need of medical care and should be released on bail to receive it. The gist of his argument was that the harsh conditions under which Pound had initially been held in the D. T. C. had preyed upon an already weakened mind and brought on a ‘complete mental collapse and loss of memory’. Pound had been ‘stricken with violent and hysterical terror’, and a ‘period of violent insanity apparently began about mid-June, to endure for three months or more’. That would have been the period in which he was examined by the three army psychiatrists, and composed his Pisan Cantos. At the end of his affidavit Cornell declared his confidence that ‘a disinterested psychiatric investigation’ of Pound’s condition would show that he was urgently in need of medical treatment, and this not in a penal institution but ‘in a civilian hospital or sanatorium operated by the United States or by the District of Columbia’.
Mr Matlack, after a brief recess to allow him to look through Cornell’s submissions and consult the Justice Department, told the court that the government had no objection to a medical examination. Judge Laws then ordered that Pound ‘be transferred to Gallinger Hospital or such other hospital as may be designated by authorized officials of the United States for examination and observation and for treatment if found necessary’. He appointed three psychiatrists to examine Pound on behalf of the government. These were Dr Winfred Overholser, Superintendent of St Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane, a Federal institution; Dr Joseph L. Gilbert, in charge of the psychiatric ward at Gallinger Municipal Hospital; and Dr Marion King, Medical Director of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Prisons.
Cornell engaged Dr Wendell Muncie, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins and a psychiatrist in private practice, to provide an ‘independent examination by a private physician’ (M/P)[10]. That was arranged in an exchange of telegrams on December 5. On December 6 Dr King wrote to Dr Muncie saying he had just learnt of his engagement to examine Pound, and extending, on behalf of all three government doctors, ‘a cordial invitation . . . to collaborate with us in this task’ (M/P). Dr Muncie accepted the cordial invitation, apparently not seeing this collaboration as incompatible with his independence. To assist them Cornell provided all four doctors with (as they put it) ‘considerable material in the line of his writings and biographical data’, all of it tending to show that Pound had long been of unsound mind, had become insane in the D. T. C., and was now altogether unfit to plead or to face a trial. There is no definite indication that they were briefed on the evidence to the contrary held by the Justice Department, though Dr King at least did know that the reports of the Army psychiatrists had not suggested a complete physical or mental collapse (Torrey 192). What is clear is that the psychiatrists for the government were effectively directed by the defence, and that all four psychiatrists would be consulting together.
In his briefing letter to Muncie on December 6 Cornell stated, ‘it is conceded by the government that [Pound] became definitely insane during his imprisonment in Italy last summer’ (Cornell 30). There is nothing to that effect in the Court record; and indeed later in the month the prosecuting attorneys would say, outside the court but for the public record, that the Army psychiatrists had declared Pound sane and able to stand trial for treason. However, in the court proceedings they did not present those reports and in effect did concede Pound’s insanity. Whether Cornell had had any encouragement from the Justice Department to believe what he told Muncie is an open question. But he did write in his account that he ‘expected that the government’s doctors would find Pound fit for trial in view of the fact that Army doctors at the military detention center in Pisa had found him sane enough and had sent him to the United States for trial’ (Cornell 35).
Dr King was the first to examine Pound and drafted a report on December 11. He found him astute, intelligent and cooperative, with no regrets for his acts, steadfast in his convictions, grandiose – as in his claim to have information of atom bomb capacity – and ‘querulous, egocentric, arrogant, critical and eccentric’. He concluded in that draft that Pound could not be considered mentally ill and thus absolved from responsibility.[11] Dr Muncie reached the same conclusion when he first examined Pound on December 13, the day on which all four doctors met together at Gallinger Hospital. He thought Pound was ‘a plain psychopath’, meaning that he was someone who disregarded social rules and laws, was immature, unable to accept responsibility, and who rationalized his behaviour to make it seem reasonable. Since psychopaths were almost invariably held responsible for their actions, the implication was that Pound was fit to be tried. (Torrey 193)
When the four doctors conferred Overholser, who was at the time Secretary-Treasurer of the American Psychiatric Association, put it to them that when psychiatrists disagreed in court it looked bad and tended to undermine the authority of the profession. He expressed the hope that they would all be able to agree on a diagnosis and present to the court a joint report, and that is what they did. Dr King would alter his draft report. And Dr Muncie would later tell the FBI that after talking with Overholser and the others he went back and found that in the meantime Pound had become ‘completely incoherent’. (Torrey 194)
The notes he made at the time have now surfaced, and they give direct evidence of what Pound actually said to Muncie, and some indication of what Muncie made of it. There are two sets of notes, one hastily written in pencil, apparently in the course of an interview; the other and longer set in ink and apparently written up after the interviews were concluded. Some details in the first set are incorporated into the fuller account, but not all. Not included was this, apparently a verbatim note: ‘“Tremendous shock when he [Cornell] brot in this method of handling the case . . . .wasn’t [ ? ] my going to know I’m chucked in a crazyhouse”’; and later this, ‘I don’t think C wants me to sham crazy.’ What follows is Dr Muncie’s fuller and more considered account in its entirety. (For the sake of clarity some abbreviations and contractions have been spelt out in full.)
Mr Ezra Pound
Dec 13/45
The pt. was examined at Gallinger Hosp. whither he had been sent by Judge Laws of the D. C. Court for observation , at the behest of his attorney, Mr Julian Cornell.
He was lying in bed, and appeared glad to see Drs. Overholser, King, Gilbert & myself. Dr. O. had told him I was coming .
He was pleasant, friendly, talkative, & circumstantial. He wandered off the topic at hand and had to be brought back to the issues. He was expansive, declared he was the tops in his literary field, & only in the case of T. S. Eliot had a pupil <perhaps> outdone the master. He described his <early> work as fragments, but necessary ones in the writing of an epic poem (the Cantos) which will do for the modern world what Homer did for the Ancient, & Dante for the Medieval worlds. In order to do justice to this concept, which he declares he has had in his mind since before graduating from Hamilton College, he had to delve into Economics, history, comparative poetry etc. Actually then his work is a continuum, not unrelated fragments (or enthusiasms).
He says critics, from the 2nd volume of his works on, have pronounced him on the decline, & the last work is always the worst.
He relates his experiences in the Army – & says he was insane from May – Sept /45, that there are memory gaps in that time he can’t account for, & that for 3 – 4 years preceding things are a bit hazy in that he couldn’t <(now)> put dates on events.
He feels he regained his mental equilibrium when he was given more humane care, & espec. when he was allowed to read & write & have his family as visitors – altho these latter events came more tardily <[ ? ]> did care of his body needs.
He knew he was indicted for Treason by contacting the Swiss Embassy, in 1943, just as the Germans took over Rome – he escaped, dodged German concentration camp & returned to Rapallo, via 50 mile hike towards Rieti from Rome. Yet he gave himself up voluntarily to the Americans because he felt he had information of the greatest value to the Intelligence. He denies that he was afraid of the Partisans & says he could go back to Rapallo now to live in peace with everyone (& would like to do just that).
He says he thought he was being brought to the U S to give information. & <understood> that he had to come as a prisoner because it was the only legal method of accomplishing that, So he understood since his passport had expired he was not legally holdable by the State Dept.
These incongruities are not solved (cleared).
He thinks he shld be allowed freedom & be sent to Japan to aid in the rehabilitation of the Japanese people, because of his standing with a certain group of [ ? ] poets in Japan (thru his Fenollosa executorship)
He doesn’t know what his standing in China is.
He denies AntiSemitism he says he has [belaboured?] the Jews, but also has done the same to the British, Americans & others. Yet just 2 mins. before he had referred to some jew as a dirty Kike.
The inconsistencies are marked & he offers no reasonable explanations for them.
He has always been an asocial person at least unconcerned with popular opinion re him.
Kicked out of Wabash for a love affair with his President’s girl friend, he was glad to go, for he felt before then very [ ? ] to Europe. he lived a life with little regard for the conventions :
Married a woman <(English)> he didn’t love as her mother wanted a son – a fraternal relationship exists between them – she has a boy now 19 probably by another man at his implied suggestion. This boy in the Amer Army at Bremen now. Mother is fond of him & he of patient.
He has had a long affair with Olga (American) & has a daughter by her – both devoted to him – he didn’t plan on this being so permanent an affair. but afraid to break it up as feared ‘madness or suicide’ of Olga – saw an Amer actual suicide & saw wife of T S Eliot go insane & feared both.
They all live nearby.
Patient with Olga to being taken captive– with wife no sex relation since the son’s birth.
Drinks little – wine
[ ? ]
Health generally good - fistula – operated 2-3x. Never used toilet paper a/c this / wet cotton instead.
Lost 40# during war – regained 20# since on Army food.
Says has alienated only some second raters but has kept all his real top notch friends – except Hemingway who is an out with him for personal reasons (not divulged, except that he needled him unmercifully)
Names only 3-4 intimates Eliot, Cummings, Ford Madox Ford. [Declares?] knew G. Stein well.
Says might have lived more wisely had he translated Confucius 20 yrs before he did.
Has played about him at will & enjoyed it.
Deliberately kept Amer. citizenship despite o’seas 37 yrs as felt it his obligation to fight for citizens rights under Constitution.
Gets back to early unpleasant experience at hands of bureaucrats.
Broke with mother at 17 a/c mother invaded his mail. Never close to her. Regarded father with great affectn – he died 2 yrs ago. Mother & father lived nearby.
Wife came into £200,000 in 1938 – son in boarding school in England
He knows something of gravity of his situation, but feels he was not a traitor – that he was working for the real rights of Americans, and that he has a good defence provided the jurors can understand.
He feels he is mentally not able to assist his counsel in defense of his case.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Olga a good violinist. Mother felt she as with all Amer. girls (contrast to continental or Europeans) too all out for romance, not practical, & wanted a child by his body – felt it ought to be -- disappointed that it a girl – though he not.
Psychotic
1) Circumstantial
2) Grandiose —
3) Memory difficulty / from May-Sept / <(can’t check this)>
[ ? ] vagueness before for 3-4 yrs / (retrograde?)
4) Inconsistencies in attitudes not perceived.
5) Vague argument – I can’t follow well & neither can the other Drs.
How could a jury or a counsel.
That was the basis on which Dr Muncie, along with the psychiatrists for the government, certified that Pound was insane.
The first paragraph of the four psychiatrists’ joint report to the court gave a brief history of the defendant’s life and career, this drawn from Cornell’s Affidavit and his other briefing papers, and stating that ‘He has long been recognized as eccentric, querulous, and egocentric’. That was followed by their own finding:
At the present time he exhibits extremely poor judgment as to his situation, its seriousness and the manner in which the charges are to be met. He insists that his broadcasts were not treasonable, but that all of his radio activities have stemmed from his self-appointed mission to ‘save the Constitution’. He is abnormally grandiose, is expansive and exuberant in manner, exhibiting pressure of speech, discursiveness, and distractibility. In our opinion, with advancing years his personality, for many years abnormal, has undergone a further distortion to the extent that he is now suffering from a paranoid state which renders him unfit to advise properly with counsel or to participate intelligently and reasonably in his own defense. He is, in other words, insane and mentally unfit for trial, and is in need of care in a mental hospital. (Cornell 36-7)
In the light of this brief report Judge Laws ruled on December 21 that ‘in accordance with the recommendation of the examining physicians, the defendant, Ezra Pound, be sent to St Elizabeths Hospital for treatment and examination.’ Late that afternoon Pound was transferred to St Elizabeths and assigned, as ‘Criminal No. 76028’, to Howard Hall, the maximum security ward for the most dangerous and violent of the criminally insane.
Immediately after the hearing the prosecuting attorneys told the press that they would be calling for a formal hearing before a jury. They mentioned the Army psychiatrists’ reports, and said that it was possible Pound was now feigning insanity to avoid a trial and possible death sentence. They gave every appearance of being determined to bring Pound to trial. However, when Cornell wrote to Dr Muncie on January 11, to inform him that the government would be making its ‘application to the court next Friday, January 18th, for an order directing a formal hearing, presumably before a jury, on the question of sanity’, he added this startling revelation:
I understand that the government’s lawyers have no question regarding the correctness of the medical report, but in view of the necessity of returning witnesses to Italy, they want to have his commitment to St Elizabeths Hospital made more definite and final. I presume, therefore, that the hearing will be rather perfunctory .....(M/P)
Evidently the government’s lawyers had let him know that they did not intend to seek to bring Pound to trial, but were content to have him committed definitely and finally to St Elizabeths Hospital for the insane. What that meant was made very plain by Dr Overholser when questioned by Albert Deutsch before the formal hearing took place: ‘I’d like to make it clear that St Elizabeths is no sanctuary for criminal suspects. No legal device can be used to set Pound free so long as the indictment stands against him. I think the public is pretty well protected’[12]. Evidently he too knew that Pound’s indefinite commitment to St Elizabeths was a foregone outcome.
On admission to St Elizabeths Pound was put through a thorough medical and mental examination. The report noted that he had given a very full account of everything that had happened to him since his arrest, a defence of his broadcasts, and an outline of his social, economic, and political philosophy together with a voluminous bibliography of authors and their writings. ‘At no time does he falter for lack of memory on any subject’, the doctor noted, ‘and tells his own story in a chronologically systematic fashion’.[13] He was kept under observation and interviewed a number of times in January, and near the end of the month a team of six St Elizabeths doctors conducted a formal examination. They did not find him insane or incompetent. Apart from some rather dramatic pauses, they noted, ‘his stream of talk is clear, coherent and relevant’. Bearing directly upon what the four psychiatrists had told the court there was this:
His ideas and concepts about his economic plan were discussed in some detail. While he still believes that his ideas are good and he still believes in them explicitly and thinks that various countries would be benefited by adopting them, he readily admits that his may not be the only successful economic plan. Nothing in the way of grandiosity or expansiveness beyond this was uncovered and he denied any idea that he was a world saviour.[14]
One of the doctors would later recall that he had tried ‘to elicit some symptoms of insanity’ but had found none, ‘no delusions, no thought disorder’. In his opinion Pound ‘definitely did not seem to be insane’. Dr Overholser, when these findings were reported to him, ‘suggested a longer period of observation before a final decision is reached’. (Torrey 203-4) He would warn Cornell that many of the doctors on his staff thought Pound was fit to stand trial, but that he would not mention this unless the prosecution questioned him about their views.
In the morning of February 7 Dr Muncie and the other three psychiatrists met at St Elizabeths to examine Pound once again in preparation for the court hearing scheduled for the 13th. That afternoon Pound would tell Charles Olson, ‘Four medicos at me this morning’. He was ‘in bad condition’, according to Olson, ‘his eyes worried and muddy, his flesh puffy and old’, and ‘He kept rubbing his head upward with his hands. Wrought up until it would squeeze your heart of blood.’[15] These are Dr Muncie’s notes, apparently written during the examination, except for the last page:
Stupor today blurred - after 3 days of working.
(ref. to my bro – he had been abroad, hadn’t he?)
When see you / as group? - . . . .
(Head in hands) I thot I was [coming?] up , but this AM again is all blurred –
Why doesn’t he bring that Confucius?
We can’t go outside to talk can we ? (head in hands)
Didn’t I ask for 15’ sane conversation?
When came here? Don’t know / I was here Xmas
Date today Feb. – 5 or 6 (reads papers – but not today)
<no push of talk> My mind, goes up & down –
Sometimes head clear at 4AM & afternoon
Today is buzzy or [--- ing] / completely muddled
(Expresses concern re publication of his Confucius.
I told them they would bust the main spring – if I’m not put out to grass –
(Refers to Rorschach – 2nd time – says 1st time / then later, “I’d seen the damnd things before)
Where seen before? Somebody at Gallinger-
My head is so damnd funny – it goes – takes so long
Deadly fatigue – exhaustion – began about 4yrs ago – can’t get flat enough on bed
Head [ ] – pressure – not the hollow (vertex)
Sometimes pressure here (occiput & neck)
Has heard from family – I forget them – goes blank
(I ask re constit. -)
(His answer ends in vagueness & blankness)
I suggest he’d have difficulty with juries comprehension
||“It’s the loss of faith in my capacity to communicate anything to anybody—”
(Talk re going to see Stalin & prevent war –
(How? - what arguments to Stalin)
Gets off on talk of Gesellite theory –
Never got back to question
*You [think?] I’m afraid of being shot isn’t it
The attempt to get hold of my mental coherence . . . . .”
Claims his broadcasts were designed to prevent war by the adoption of an economic system.
[Sidelined on both sides]
Churchill & Eden in front of those who made the war
World order plan rests on Confucius therefore the need to get out his translation <in English> of Confucius !
Recalls the N. Angell letter – feels the laugh was on N. Angell.
(As the interview proceeds, he appears more vehement, voluble, but not much more coherent or understandable)
He feels he was double crossed in coming to U.S. Felt sure [constr. ?] use was to be made of him by bringing him here. ?Communists in Brit. Intellig. Service
Fact he was allowed to do the Confucius in Concentration camp means to him he was to be made use of.
(Re trial) / “I’m not of sound mind but not a maniac – it’s neurasthenia & exhaustion”
(& not able to confer with counsel)
[The notes in pencil end there. What follows is in ink, and probably written after the examination.]
Confabulation re my brother.
Said he his best pupil!
Had been abroad !
Came from family of highest culture in Indiana!
(I had only said previous visit that Fred in Wabash same time he was.
____________________________________________________
Diag: 1) PsPs
2) Paranoid state.
Summary:
1) Grandiosity
2) Paranoid fixed ideas
a) Save Constit.
b) Confucius as basis of world order
c) Groups of intellectuals in various nations devoted to him Japan esp.
d) Hatred of bureaucrats / Roosevelt etc. bureaucrat
e) Feeling double-crossed – Brit. Intellig. or communists
3) Vagueness of ideas
a) Can’t make logical presentation - compl. difficulty with thinking process.
4) Poor grasp of present situation:
a) That being brot here to “keep” a/c special information at his disposal
5) Alternating push of ideas & “stupor” & feeling of futility.
6) Complete exhaustion as cause of breakdown – [feeling?] pressure
complete emptiness in head – pressure in head alternately
7) Memory not keen - things come back slowly & fragmentarily & with confabulation
After the interview Dr Overholser entered this note of their unanimous opinion into Pound’s case notes:
Patient was somewhat restless, agitated, stating that he is in a fog. He added that his condition goes up and down but at the present time he feels muddled. He gave vent to numerous delusions of grandeur and persecution. He states, for example, ‘If they had let my news through there would have been no Axis.’ . . . . . He is convinced that he was double-crossed in being brought to this country as a prisoner. He says ‘I have connections in half a dozen countries and nerve centers of intellect.’ He thinks he should have been brought to this country not as a prisoner, but as an advisor to the state department in dealing with Japan and, indeed, the rest of the world. The whole prosecution, he says, is inspired by the British Secret Service or else Communist groups. The greatest gift he could make to the United States is his translation of ‘Confusius’. The examiners were unanimous in their opinion that fundamentally the patient is suffering from a paranoid condition with a considerable psychotic coloring.[16]
That in essence is the finding they would present to the court hearing on February 13.
It was now up to the court to play its part. Judge Laws first addressed the jury:
Certain representations have been made to the Court that Mr. Pound is not in mental condition such as that he is able to participate with counsel in the trial of a criminal case, and not in position to understand the full nature of the charges against him.
Based upon that showing which has been made to me by psychiatrists, I am going to impanel a jury to pass upon that question. In the event the jury finds that his mental state is as has been represented to me, then Mr. Pound will not be brought to trial because, under the law, it would not be proper to prosecute him if his mental condition is as has been stated to me. (Cornell 154)
All four psychiatrists were called in turn as witnesses, all four, according to the transcript of the hearing, ‘on behalf of the Defendant’, this in spite of the fact that three were government officials who had been appointed by Judge Laws to act on behalf of the government. There were no witnesses on behalf of the prosecution, none of the Army psychiatrists and none of the St Elizabeths doctors. Under examination by Cornell, and cross-examination by Isaiah Matlack Esq. and Donald Anderson Esq. ‘appearing on behalf of the Department of Justice’, the four testified that Pound’s mental state was indeed as they had previously stated. At the conclusion of their testimony, which had occupied morning and afternoon sessions, Mr Matlack asked Cornell, was he not going to call Pound? When Cornell replied ‘I don’t think so’, Matlack proposed that he be called as ‘the Court’s witness’, but Judge Laws said, ‘I don’t think so. If we call him he will take two or three hours. I do not think it is necessary. The Court of Appeals says very plainly that you cannot disregard an opinion of the psychiatrists’ (Cornell 212).
The judge then charged the jury to return their verdict, telling them on the one hand that they were not necessarily bound to accept what they had heard, but on the other that ‘in a case of this type where the Government and the defense representatives have united in a clear and unequivocal view with regard to the situation’, he presumed they would have no difficulty making up their minds (Cornell 215). The jury took just three minutes to agree their verdict that Pound was of unsound mind.
But what warrant did the judge have for his statement that ‘the Government and the defense representatives have united in a clear and unequivocal view’? There is nothing to that effect in the official transcript of the hearing. But then the government had presented no witnesses and offered no evidence to make the case that Pound was in fact competent to stand trial, and that effectively conceded the defence case by default. And possibly the Justice Department had let the judge know, as it had let Cornell know, that they simply wanted Pound to be definitely and finally committed to St Elizabeths.
The fact was that, as Albert Deutsch observed, Matlack and Anderson had merely gone through the motions of testing the psychiatrists’ opinions. The nearest approach to a moment of truth came towards the end of Matlack’s cross-examination of Dr Overholser. Overholser admitted that he had read the reports of the psychiatrists who had examined Pound in the D. T. C., but said that their finding was that he was ‘suffering from an anxiety neurosis state’. One of those psychiatrists, Major Weisdorf, had reported a ‘transitory anxiety state’, but he had added that this had cleared up rapidly once Pound was removed from the cage. More to the point, he had found, as had the other two psychiatrists, ‘no evidence of psychosis or neurosis at the present time’. Matlack did not directly challenge Overholser with what was actually in the reports, but he did do it indirectly. Could the opinion of the army psychiatrists, he asked, ‘have anything to do with the present opinion of the doctors around here?’ Cornell immediately objected to the question – Overholser had warned him that in the opinion of the St Elizabeth doctors Pound was neither insane nor incompetent. Matlack then rephrased his question, ‘I asked you did those doctors find him insane?’ In fact he had not asked that, unless he meant it to be understood that the St Elizabeths doctors had agreed with the army psychiatrists, and the expected answer was, no, they had not found him insane. Overholser replied, ‘They said he was not psychotic’, and Matlack then said, ‘That means he was not insane?’ Overholser was evasive,
W.O.: They were I think interested in prison facts.
I.M.: When they said he was not psychotic, that means he was not insane?
W.O.: That he was not suffering from a major mental disease. That was their impression. How long they saw him, I don’t know, or what their experience was. (Cornell 199)
And Matlack allowed the evasion and did not put to him the main finding of all the psychiatrists who had examined Pound apart from these four. The members of the jury would not have known that highly pertinent information was being kept from them; but Judge Laws must have known at least that the army psychiatrists’ reports had declared Pound sane.
In his speculations about the hearing Conrad L. Rushing questioned why Judge Laws so readily went along with the psychiatric evidence, and observed that the hearing was ‘perfunctory and unusual for a serious case’. He supposed that Laws would have known that the government was in difficulties over its witnesses to the alleged treasonous broadcasts, and that he would certainly have seen that its prosecutors were making no real effort to contest the psychiatrists’ testimonies. If the prosecution were content to have Pound committed to St Elizabeths, he might well have concluded, then why not let him go there? That way justice would be served.[17]
Judge Laws had explained to the jury that according to the Laws of the District of Columbia, ‘if the jury shall find the accused to be insane the Court may then bring about a commitment of the defendant to hospitalization, to remain in hospitalization until or unless there comes a time when it is found that he has recovered from his mental difficulties, and in that event he is certified back into the court for trial.’ So Pound was remanded to St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane. And, as Dr Overholser had observed, no legal device could be used to set him free so long as the indictment stood against him.
Later in the day of the hearing Dr Overholser wrote to Dr Muncie to say how much he had enjoyed working with him, and how satisfied he was with the way they had all handled the case—if all such cases ‘were handled so, the reputation of expert testimony would be better than it is!’ As to the jury’s having agreed with them, well, ‘there was no opposition!’ (M/P).
Cornell had talked of getting Pound freed on bail, but now he advised that the time was not right, there would be such an outcry against it. But when he did file an application for bail in January 1947 he found the Justice Department no longer in a complaisant mood. Having allowed Pound to be committed to St Elizabeths it was now determined to keep him there. Mr Matlack was provided with a brief of twelve closely typed pages of ‘authorities and comments which may be cited in opposition to the Motion for Bail’, and these were condensed into the Government’s submission to the Court. The application was summarily dismissed by Judge Laws. The Justice Department’s long suspected complicity in Cornell’s strategy, a suspicion now confirmed by the Muncie/Pound Papers, had saved it from having to prove its case against Pound in court, and had produced the result which it appears to have seen all along as the best it could hope for. Given the difficulty of securing a conviction, the indefinite incarceration of the accused in an insane asylum could be regarded as a positive outcome.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Albert Deutsch, ‘Pound Gets “Unsound Mind” Verdict, Escapes Trial’, P.M. (Feb. 1, 1946) 7.
[2] For example see E. Fuller Torrey, ‘The Non-Trial’, in The Roots of Treason. Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St Elizabeths (London, 1984), 177-218. Conrad L. Rushing, a Superior Court Judge in California—in ‘“Mere Words”: The Trial of Ezra Pound’, Critical Inquiry 14 (Autumn 1987) 121-2—observed in response to Torrey’s view, that Dr Overholser would be highly unlikely to engage in such improper professional conduct, primarily because he was ‘an important government employee and director of a mental hospital that had close and direct relationships with the Federal District Court.’ Rushing own inference was that Overholser’s commitment to finding Pound insane ‘had more to do with the attitudes of the judge and the prosecutors’.
[3] Ezra Pound to the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, 4 August 1943, as in Charles Norman, The Case of Ezra Pound (New York, 1968) 64.
[4] Ezra Pound, ‘Statement’, 7 May 1945, as in Omar Pound and Robert Spoo (eds.), Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945-1946 (New York, 1999) 67.
[5] For the reports of the psychiatrists see Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘More on Pound’s Prison Experience’, American Literature 53.3 (1981) 469-76.
[6] Report of Major William Weisdorf, 17 July 1945, as in Kimpel and Eaves 470.
[7] Adjutant General War Department to Commanding General Mediterranean, 5 November 1945, copy in UK National Archives, Kew, WO 204/12602, item 45.
[8] For Julien Cornell’s own account of the trial, which I am drawing on here, see his The Trial of Ezra Pound. A Documented Acount of the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer (London: Faber & Faber, 1967). For a more detailed account based on a wider range of sources, also drawn on here, see A. David Moody, ‘American Justice’, in Ezra Pound: Poet. III: The Tragic Years 1939-1972 (Oxford, 2015), 167-227.
[9] US National Archives, Justice Department Files, Justice Department Office Memorandum, Mr Whearty to Mr McInerney, 6 June 1950.
[10] Material drawn from the Muncie/Pound Papers will be indicated thus by (M/P) where it is not otherwise made clear in the text.
[11] As reported by Stanley I. Kutler, ‘This Notorious Patient’, Helix (Melbourne) 13-14 (1983) 135-6.
[12] Albert Deutsch, ‘Ezra Pound Case Postponed To Permit Fuller Inquiry’, P.M. (January 31, 1946)—from cutting with Pound/Muncie Papers.
[13] US National Archives, St Elizabeths Files, 1397a-d, Case No. 68102 / Notes #1-4, 21 December 1945: Dr M. M. Parker.
[14] US National Archives, St Elizabeths Files, 1396, Case #58102 | Notes | January 28, 1946.
[15] Charles Olson, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound. An Encounter at St Elizabeths (New York, 1975) 68.
[16] US National Archives, St Elizabeths Files, 1397e, Ezra Pound | Case No.58102 | Notes #5 | 7 Feb., 1946: Dr Overholser.
[17] See Conrad L. Rushing, ‘“Mere Words”’, Critical Inquiry 14 (Autumn 1987) 122, 124-5.
[Reprinted from Agenda 53.4 (Spring/Summer 2020): 79-97.]