User:DeRossitt/A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound

A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound is a 1988 book by Humphrey Carpenter.

Overview
Carpenter has a number of specific theories on Pound's life and art:

- That Pound was at all times an actor, a collector of personae, a dramatic presence; that Pound's personality was therefore in some situations superficial, such as when he had to deal with serious problems. On this superficiality Carpenter quotes Charles Olson, who visited Pound in St. Elizabeths: "He strikes you as brittle-and ter- ribly American, insecure. .... He does not seem ... to have inhabited his own experience. It is almost as though he converted it too fast."

-that the Cantos are autobiographical. Carpenter does not an- nounce this theory explicitly until the final pages, but it is implicit in the way in which he quotes from the Cantos throughout his biography to illustrate the continuity of Pound's experience.

-that Pound's legal defense was insufficient. Attorney Julien Cor- nell gets consistently low marks for having Pound plead insanity when most psychiatrists and friends found him eccentric but sane. Other broadcasters for fascism had been executed, but Carpenter argues that Pound could not easily have been convicted. Many readers will agree with Cornell (whom Carpenter quotes) that "It is easy to say by hind- sight that the situation should have been more accurately predicted, but at the time this was impossible."

-that Pound's keepers at St. Elizabeths kept him longer than was necessary in part because he was famous. Dr. Overholser feared that another hospital would "get" Pound. Other psychiatrists at St. Elizabeths felt that Pound was sane, but Overholser never changed the official diagnosis of insanity.

-that the Pisan Cantos are not, as some have felt, recantatory. Many readers feel that Pound confessed his errors in these Cantos, but Carpenter shows that many of his old attitudes (admiration for ol' Muss) continue.

-that the Cantos are "a botch" (as Pound put it to a friend late in life). Carpenter does not apportion enough space to a treatment of the Cantos as a whole to demonstrate this argument. He shows that they are autobiographical and so they form, he argues, a "coherent botch."

Reception
John Whalen-Bridge in American Literature

Massimo Bacigalupa in Paideuma

Doris L. Eder in The Virginia Quarterly Review

G. Singh in World Literature Today