Law

In 1956, BBC producer D.G. Bridson visited St. Elizabeths Hospital to record Ezra Pound reading from his poems. Pound began one of the taping sessions with a monologue in which he described the “four steps” that had led to his incarceration. The first step had been his quarrel with an American passport official in Paris who had tried to interfere with his return to London in 1919. The second was being told that an American judge had declared: “In this country there ain't nobody has got any goddamned rights whatsoever.” The third was the boast of a prosecuting attorney: “All that I’m interested in is…seeing what you can put over.” The fourth and final step was learning from Senator Burton Wheeler in 1939 of President Roosevelt's effort to “pack” the Supreme Court. That was where Pound “took off from.” “When the Senator is unable to prevent breaches of the Constitution…the duty, as I see it, falls back onto the individual citizen. And that is why…when I got hold of a microphone in Rome, I used it” (<italic>ASC</italic>, 823-5). The “four steps,” with their fairy-tale causality, are a distilled chronicle of Pound's disenchantment with America and liberal democracies. Like his encapsulation of economic wisdom in the slim broadside he called Introductory Textbook (in Four Chapters), Pound's “four steps” seek to elucidate a world of complexity with the simplicity of a village explainer. Each of the “steps” purports to document a perversion of law by a tainted official: a desk jockey in the passport office for whom red tape was a religion; a judge whose sense of legal realism had declined into cynicism; a district attorney who flaunted prosecutorial indiscretion; a ruthlessly pragmatic chief executive keen to abuse his power of judicial appointment.