Famous Last Words

The lines from W.H. Auden on p. 157 are from “In Memory of W.B.

Yeats”, in Collected Shorter Poems. Copyright 1966 by W.H. Auden.

Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

The lines from T.S. Eliot on p. 44 are from The Cocktail Party. Copyright 1950 by Faber & Faber Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

The lines from Ezra Pound on pp. 3, 59, 66, 293 and 323 are from Hugh Seiwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts). The first four quotations are from E.P. Ode pour 1’election deson sepulcre. sections II, III, Envoi (1919) and X; the final one from Mauberiey: “The Age Demanded”. The line from Ezra Pound on p. 218 is from Poems from Lustra: “Near Perigord”. II. All these quotations reprinted from Personae, copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound, by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, and from Collected Shorter Poems, copyright 1952 by Ezra Pound, by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

The line from Ezra Pound on p. 37 is from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI, copyright 1948 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd.

The sentences on p.265 are from “Story of My Death” by Lauro de Bosis.

de Bosis, Italian poet, scholar and the founder of the Alleanza Nozionale, died on October 3rd, 1931 after a flight over the city of Rome during which he dropped antiFascist pamphlets. “Story of My Death” was published posthumously on October 14th, 1931.

The sentence from Thornton Wilder on p. v is from The Ides of March. Copyright 1948, 1950 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc. and Brandt & Brandt, Literary Agents, Inc.

Acknowledgement is also made for lines quoted from the following songs; On p.13 from “Wien, Wien”. Lyric and music: Dr. Rudolf Sieczynski. 8 1914 (Renewed) Adolf Robitschek. e 1940 (Renewed) Warner Bros. Inc.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

On p.95 from “A Fine Romance”. By Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern.

Copyrightc 1936 T.B. Harms Company (c/o The Welk Music Group, Santa Monica, CA 90401). Copyright renewed. International copyright secured.

All rights reserved. Used by permission.

On p.188 and 217 from “I’ll See You Again”. Words and music: Noel Coward. ° 1929 (Renewed) Warner Bros. Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

On p.277 from “It’s Only A Paper Moon”. Lyric: Billy Rose & E.Y.

Harburg. Music: Harold Arlen. 1933 (Renewed) Warner Bros. Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

On p.281 from “Jeepers Creepers”. Lyric: Johnny Mercer. Music: Harry Warren. s 1938 (Renewed) Warner Bros. Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

On pp.299 and 300 from “You Stepped Out Of A Dream”. By Gus Kahn and Nacio Herb Brown. Copyright e 1940, renewed 1968 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Inc. All rights administered by Leo Feist, Inc. All rights reserved.

Used by permission.

1910

When Mauberley was twelve years old, his father took him onto the roof of the Arlington Hotel in Boston and said to him; “I’ve always loved the view from here. Cambridge

across the river. The red bricks of Harvard… .The Swan Boats in the public garden. The gilded dome on Beacon Hill and all the people walking on the grass… .” And it was so.

His father had spent much time up there alone on the roof of that hotel where Mauberley was born. Mauberley, too, had come to love these things. “I love the tops of the trees,”

his father said. “And the smell and the sound of the horses passing by… .When you were born, it snowed. And I came up here that night and threw a snowball all the way across the avenue and hit George Washington square in the face!

I meant no disrespect. I only wanted him to know. It was late, you see, and there was no one else to tell… .” His father smiled. There was a pause in which the two of them looked out on all these things and then his father said; “but the world is too much with us. That’s a quote and you can look it up some day.” There was another pause and then; “I love you, Hugh. You can’t look that up anywhere. But I ask you to memorize it, just the same. The thing is—I’m afraid I haven’t been able to love your mother as I should have since she was ill. You’ll understand that failure later on, when some of what you love has turned to stone. You’ll leave your mother too in the course of time. As children do and should. But every husband doesn’t leave his wife and I want to be sure you understand I do not blame your mother, and I beg you not to blame her either, for the failure of our marriage. Your mother is herself—that’s all. And 1 am me.

Do you understand? You might as well blame a person for surviving birth, and blame their heart for keeping them alive, as blame them for the fact they are themselves… .” Mauberiey’s father stood up very tall and sighed. “But the fact

remains, your mother is the most unhappy woman I have

ever known. And some of that has been my fault—and even, sadly, yours.” He smiled at his son. “Because we’re here…and

have intruded in her life. And because—” the smile began to fade and his father turned away “—not all the caring in the world will mend her mind or the bitterness that’s come with her failure to be whole. And I wish…” He stopped.

“But no. I’ve spent my whole life wishing. Don’t ever wish for anything. Want everything, Hugh—but wish for nothing.”

Now his father looked across the Charles to Cambridge,

shading his eyes against the sun. “Tomorrow,” he said, “you will read in the papers I have been let go from Harvard. This, again, is something you will understand when you are older.

The simple explanation is: I had too much to say they didn’t want to hear. My students have been very kind and there is talk of protest. But I won’t go back. I can’t go back. There’s nothing left to teach that’s mine: unique. And so.” he smiled, “it’s over. And a whole new life awaits us.” Mauberley’s father laid his hand upon his shoulder and took him on a guided tour of all the views. He smoked a cigarette and reminded his son of secret cigarettes they had watched the servants smoking down below in the side yard of the Sears’

Mansion. “They thought they were getting away with it—

and all the time, we saw!” They had a good laugh together over that, and the time the Fishmonger came and kissed the Cook and she slapped his face in the same side yard. And the day when President Tail fell down in front of the Ritz Hotel and it took eight men to lift him up. Mauberley’s father took off his jacket, then, and laid it neatly folded on the parapet, “All these years, eh, Hugh?” he said. “of staring down at the world. Now; look at all the people staring up.”

And then he clambered onto the ledge and—waving at the sky—he leapt down fifteen stories to his death.

In the pocket of his father’s jacket—hung for many weeks like a wreath on the back of Mauberley’s door—there was a soft, flat leather bill-fold with a clasp. Inside, there was a pencil made of silver and a message addressed to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: my son.

“He who jumps to his dealh has cause,” it said. “He ivho leaps has purpose. Always remember: I leap!.”

ONE

March. 1945

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace…

Ezra Pound

About ten weeks before the end of the war, Mauberley went up out of Italy to hide at UnterBalkonberg. This was in March of 1945.

His journey began at Rapallo.

All he took with him was his notebooks: some of them

packed in his attache case, others jammed and crammed into a cardboard valise whose corners and handles were riveted with brass. Time and panic had already taken their toll of his possessions and most of what he wore was scrounged:

an oversized greatcoat; a pair of army boots; a peasant’s cap and a blue suit tailored in Verona. His underwear had rotted at the armpits and his socks, by journey’s end, would peel away with the skin from between his toes. His shirt was the only vaguely decent thing he wore—a nondescript and overmended plaid, his parting gift from Ezra Pound.

Mauberley wore no tie and, although he had begged for

one, Ezra had refused to give up the only one he owned, having already planned to wear it himself on the day of his arrest.

“But you never wear a tie,” said Mauberley.

“That’s right,” said Pound. “Ergo: to wear one is to say I have surrendered.”

Mauberley, all his adult life, had been a fastidious dresser, famous for his suits of Venetian white and his muted English ties. The open collar nearly drove him mad, and his hand kept going up as if a pressure point had given way and he needed a tourniquet. In the end, he accepted the bootlace offered by Ezra’s wife, Dorothy, and tied it firmly around his neck. This made him feel complete. It also made him look like Dorothy’s Scarecrow.

“Suits you,” said Pound. “It goes with the straw in your head.”

“And you can go to hell,” said Mauberley.

All they did, to the last, was argue.

Dorothy watched and listened from the sidelines; fingering her worry .beads, worn in a loop at her waist. She felt she was cut adrift and lost in a very small boat with no one else to row but two sick men. And she was tired. Her only consolation was her memory of the shore. Otherwise, she fed on fear for Ezra; sadness for Mauberley; apprehension for herself.

This was the end of the exile they had chosen.

Twenty-six years before, in 1919, when the other war was over, Mauberley had come to Europe from America—just

like Ezra before him—a boy with a sheaf of poems in his hand. And Ezra had become his mentor. (“Ezra! Ezra! Every

one’s mentor! “Dorothy had said. “The world is full of Ezra’s proteges.”) This had been in England. Then the exile moved by stages down from London into Paris then to Rapallo in Italy—everyone’s ultimate choice for exile—where they settled by the sea. And Ezra had predicted Hugh Selwyn Mauberiey would become the greatest writer of his time.

And was wrong.

(Dorothy put a quarter cut of cheese, a stick of bread, a jar of soup and a string of onions into an old cloth bag and handed it to Mauberley.)

Not that it mattered now that Ezra had been wrong. Infinitely more important things had come to govern their lives

in Italy. Ezra had said: “I am giving up poetry for politics… .”

Poetry maybe: writing never. And Dorothy could count the events that had ensued with the brevity of telling her beads.

Click: Mussolini. Click: the Fascists. Click: first Ezra, later Mauberley, had joined. Clack: their writing had followed.

(Dorothy took a bottle of wine and bumped its cork with the palm of her hand and shoved it down inside the bag

beside the stick of bread.)

Still, looking back, it was sad about the writing; sad when she thought of all the proteges and promise and success.

And the failures. So many wars had come and gone through the 1920s and ’30s, each interlocking with the next—Mauberiey’s “boxed set of wars”—and with them down went all

the old necessities for literature; all the old prescriptions for use of the written word; all the old traditions of order and articulation fading under the roar of bombast and rhetoric.

And Ezra, somehow adoring it, had said: “You see? There’s no place left for a man who writes like Mauberley. Mauberiey’s whole and only ambition is to describe the beautiful.

And who the hell has time for that, any more? No one.

Beauty will have to describe itself from now on. Words have more important work to do. …” And he set about doing it—

Ezra: pouring through a dozen languages, phrase books and dictionaries piled up around him. Buried at his desk. “Somewhere in here,” he had said; “is what we know already;

forgotten and ignored. And I mean to find it.” Digging like an archaeologist.

Sometimes with dynamite.

But Mauberley would not take part in this dismantling of the past. The past was where he lived; or wanted to. He wore his whites and wrote his careful books; he invested his mother’s fortune and took up residence in all the best hotels of Europe: the Savoy in London; the Meurice in Paris; the Grande Bretagne in Venice; the Bristol in Vienna. He began to cultivate a taste for people Pound could not abide. He came back, from time to time, and Pound went on receiving him. Fondness prevented a total schism. Fondness or admiration; loneliness; fear of what was coming; or something.

Dorothy called it love—and Ezra spat on the floor.

(Dorothy, rummaging, found an old cotton pair of gloves and put them into the bag.)

Now, in the face of capture, both men having been denounced as traitors to their country, they were in hiding on

the hill above Rapallo: guests at Sant’ Ambrogio in the house of Ezra’s mistress (click) Olga Rudge. Miss Rudge had retired from the present scene and was standing out in her olive grove watching through binoculars for planes. The Allies were dropping bombs on Genoa across the bay and only a

fool could not foretell the end of this. But Exra was determined he would brave the ending out.

“I may be hiding from their bombs,” he said; “but when

their soldiers come, 1 won’t be hiding then. No sir! I shall bid them welcome. ‘Welcome, Fellow Americans!’ Eh? And