Ezra Pound, Father & Teacher: Discretions

By Mary de Rachewiltz and Mary deRachewiltz

Book Overview

Mary de Rachewiltz's autobiographical account, Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher, which first appeared as a New Directions Paperbook in 1975, is now reissued with a new afterword by the author. Set against the background of Fascist Italy and the Tyrolean Alps where she spent the early years of her childhood, the story Ezra Pound's daughter movingly reveals is a side of the poet which is seldom touched upon, that of devoted father, and at the same time serves to illuminate many of the more difficult, personal passages of The Cantos. But the book is more than a mere memoir, for Mary de Rachewiltz is an accomplished poet and translator in her own right, guided in her craft under her father's tutelage: through her stylized, often oblique prose technique we are enabled to appreciate more deeply Pound's inner anguish during the war years and the strains put upon him by the circumstances of his life. Many of the scenes described are illustrated with photographs. while the narrative itself gleams with lines from The Cantos that light up the events of the author's life as her life lights up the poetry.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811216470
• ISBN13: 9780811216470
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Simple and Laborious, the Life and the Work

Mary's life was a simple one: she lived as a little Swiss shepherdess in Gais with foster parents, moved to Venice to stay with her real parents, the poet Ezra Pound and the violinist Olga Rudge; she worked as a secretary and part-time nurse during World War II, married a bright but poor young man with an ancient, aristocratic lineage who sheltered her in a castle in northern Italy where she gave birth to three children and adopted one other one; and once Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Washington, D.C., she sheltered him until he left her home to live in Rapallo with Olga Rudge to the end of his days. Mary, a Catholic, said her life was about "ora et labora" (prayer and work) and that all she wanted from her life was what Ezra Pound wanted for her: a simple life with labor. What is laborious about the work presented here is that her story is not written simply, but impressionistically and with many adages from Latin, Greek, German, Italian as well as quotations from Pound's Cantos such that the whole becomes a work of labor to decipher the deeper layers and references. Without self-pity, Mary de Rachewiltz attempts to write the story of her consciousness as it is forced to expand under Pound's tutelage (as well as that of Olga Rudge) from a simple sturdy peasant child speaking only the Tyrolean dialect to a cultured and civilzed woman aware of many cultures and languages (without really shedding or needing to shed that "girl along the road" of her Gais childhood). As a source of biography for the life of Ezra Pound, the work is disappointing. No effort is undertaken to explain that her father was married to Dorothy Pound or that she had a half-brother, Omar. They meet; they do not connect socially, and that is the end to these relationships. And, even while Mary spent more than 10 months in America trying to extricate her father from St. Elizabeth's Mental Asylum after his being unjustly incarcerated there simply for speaking out against the war on Mussolini's radio station -- without a trial -- her insights into what happened to have brought him into this catastrophe and what were his personal thoughts about his situation are simple after all her labor -- a daughter's respect for an unfairly accused, famous father who continued to write poetry as well as before, showing no impairment whatsoever on his sanity. Mary de Rachewiltz is a rare individual who has lived an unusual life. (She is 84 years old now.) I am glad to have enountered such a life (and Herr's presence in it).