Ezra and Bill

On April 18, 1958, the indictment of treason against Ezra Pound was dismissed. After a dozen years at St. Elizabeth's, he was released to the custody of his wife, Dorothy.

Pound's plans were crystal clear. First, he made a sentimental journey back to the romantic scenes of his youth, his childhood home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania; to the apple tree where he once frolicked with Hilda Doolittle. Late one night, he awoke, slipped out of his house in his pajamas, and walked down to the Presbyterian Church, where he sat in silence on the steps and gazed out over the quiet, sleepy town.

His last stop before returning to Italy at the end of June was, of course, Nine Ridge Road. The final meeting between Ezra Pound William Carlos Williams was a less than joyful one. They both knew this was the end. A true conversation was impossible. Pound was preoccupied with thought of his voyage to Genoa the next day. He took off his shirt and lay down on the couch in the front room expecting to be waited on. Flossie was deeply offended. She had never cared for Ezra very much. As far as she was concerned, it was good riddance.

"If I were a dog," Williams wrote, in his poem, "To My Friend Ezra Pound,"

I'd sit down on a cold pavement

in the rain

to wait for a friend (and so would you)

Over the half-century since graduation from Penn, Williams and Pound had spent no more than a handful of days together, here and there in Rutherford, London, Paris, and Washington. They inhabited different sides of the world. At the root of their friendship there was always mutual, if grudging respect--from a distance. They were ready and willing to praise each other's work, even if they did not eye to eye on matters other than literary ones. They both relished a good fight and had plenty of them.

Their personalities, too, were at opposite ends of the scale. Ezra was the proud and self-centered teacher, convinced he was right about everything, never willing to open up his deepest feelings. Williams, in turn, was a humble, if at times bitter, follower of his friend's instructions about what to read, whom to publish; and much less certain there was in fact one and only one answer to any given problem. Williams was a purely emotional being, who took a personal point of view on every experience.

Ezra might have said, over and over, that only emotion endures," and when it came to his own poetry, he certainly wrote by that rule; but he did not, like his doctor friend Bill Williams, live by it.