Poetic Injustice

A five-month stint earned Indiana a lifetime of scorn from poet Ezra Pound. But now, 100 years after he fled this "sixth circle of desolation," it's time the state had the last laugh—by taking some credit for his success.
by Evan West

As a language instructor at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ezra Pound may or may not have been a good teacher. He may or may not have been crazy. He may have resigned his post, or he may have been fired. He may or may not have spent the night with a woman who may have been a prostitute, a trollop, or a man.

What is certain, however, is that Pound left the position because of his perceived indiscretions, and Wabash—and, by extension, Indiana—has never come off looking very good in the whole affair. Of the stories that describe the poet’s rise in the literary pantheon, the most commonly told version casts the Hoosier state as the foil. But it’s time to set the record straight: Far from impeding Pound’s ascendancy, Indiana deserves credit for having propelled him on his way to becoming one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century and a founding father of literary modernism.

The mere suggestion probably has Pound tossing about in his grave on Venice’s Isle of the Dead. After all, he lived in Crawfordsville for only a few months in 1907 and 1908. He was, by birth, an Idahoan, was raised in Pennsylvania, and went on to soundly reject the United States in favor of the Continent. Throughout his life, he seems to have referenced Indiana—“the last or at least sixth circle of desolation”—only when he needed a convenient symbol of puritanical philistinism.

It is a shame, really, that Pound, were he alive, would certainly reject our claim to him. He was, after all, the first to accomplish the enormous feat of adapting the epic poem, an ancient genre that includes Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the modern English language; his Cantos, a massive compendium of verse that reflects the angst and fragmentation of Western civilization in the post–World War I era, sits atop the list of landmark 20th-century epic works such as T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land (which is dedicated to Pound and owes much to his editing) and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and helped set the cadence of the written words we read today. “Pound was the greatest 20th-century poet in all languages,” says biographer Tim Redman, a professor of literary studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. “It is not an exaggeration to say that Pound was the greatest poet since Dante.”

And Indiana, apparently, was no place for a writer with Dantean aspirations. “If any body ever shuts you in Indianna [sic] for four months & you dont [sic] at least write some unconstrained something or other,” he once wrote in a letter to poet William Carlos Williams, “I give up hope for your salvation.”

One can hardly blame Pound for recalling his Indiana layover—actually more like five months than four—with something less than fondness, though his origins were no more glamorous than the station he found in Crawfordsville. He was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho (an even remoter backwater, one imagines, than rural Indiana), though his father, a mid-level government bureaucrat, resettled the family in a Philadelphia suburb when Pound was very young, and the future poet enjoyed a comfortable upbringing amid the kind of convention and propriety he would later defy. His affinity for cultural sophistication likely stems from his days as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he dated poet Hilda Doolittle and earned a master’s degree. And his regard for high culture grew, no doubt, during his various European adventures, one of which he completed as a graduate student in 1907. He likely regarded the offer of an instructorship at a provincial Midwestern college as a cure for idleness and a means of replenishing his pockets and furthering his travels—not, certainly, as a chance to fulfill some dream of being a French teacher. The Wabash post—chairman of the Department of Romance Languages—was to be the 21-year-old’s first real job, and upon securing it he bragged in a letter to his mother that he had aced the interview without shining his shoes.

Wabash, for its part, imported Pound as part of a move to modernize the curriculum with expanded language offerings. And if it was something modern the college administration wanted from Pound, it got that in spades. He arrived full of big ideas about revolution in literature, politics, and culture, and a palate conditioned to Continental tastes. The town of Crawfordsville fancied itself as a cultural oasis—General Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur, had kept a home and study there, and townspeople boasted of living in the “Athens” of Indiana—and Wabash was on the rise, at least athletically, competing head-to-head in football and basketball with national powerhouses such as Notre Dame.

“The Crawfordsville of 100 years ago was an upcoming city of some potential,” says Redman. “It had several rail lines and an interurban line, it was electrified, and had been home to the author of Ben-Hur. It was a pretty lively place for the Midwest in those days.”

But Pound was clearly not impressed. Shortly after his arrival, he wrote to a friend that he longed for “mere degenerate decadent civilization, as represented by cocktails, chartreuse, and kissable girls.” (Indianapolis can take solace in the fact that, after taking a brief excursion to the capital city to watch the Wabash football team play Michigan, Pound wrote that he had enjoyed “a touch of civilization.”) He mostly eschewed the polite company of Crawfordsville society and the learned Wabash faculty—and considering that he was barely older than most of the students, he probably was not embraced by peers and colleagues anyway. Instead, he gravitated toward the colorful characters and forbidden pleasures of the theaters and bars that decent folks in the area referred to, disapprovingly, as “downtown.”

On campus, too, Pound stuck out sorely, for both his foppish appearance and outlandish antics. Viola Baylis Wildman, an acquaintance from that time, later described him as having “dressed in a cosmopolitan manner, wearing soft-collared shirts, wide flowing ties, velveteen jackets, patent-leather shoes, a wide-brimmed felt hat always atop his unruly hair.” He must have cut a shocking figure among the high starched collars and stiff woolen suits of his colleagues. Even his socks were a scandal. When only black was deemed befitting a man’s ankles, Pound was known to kick his feet onto his desk to expose—gasp!—a more provocative purple.

And if his clothing aroused discomfort in colleagues, his behavior demanded irritation: Very early in his tenure he suffered a severe reprimand from college president George Mackintosh for smoking his favorite Bonhommes Rougues (“Red Gentlemen”) cigarillos in Center Hall, an indulgence forbidden in the confines of the conservative Presbyterian institution. At a loss to fully explain this odd fellow in recorded accounts, acquaintances and observers from his Wabash period have tried a variety of descriptions: eccentric, disheveled, unconventional, aloof, brilliant, nuts, insane, carefree, indifferent, unorthodox, over-sophisticated, self-indulgent, unstable, liberal, and queer. At least one recollection refers to him as a “scamp”; most finally settled on “bohemian.”

Most of Pound’s impressionable students loved him, of course. They called him Ezra in an era when pupils addressed their masters with only a formal salutation. Pound jested and jibed in class, and peppered his French lessons with the kind of off-color wit that his late-adolescent students found irresistible. As one former charge wrote later, “I acquired little facility in that language of elegance and sophistication. I did, I recall, learn to say—with what was, I assume, an impeccable Parisian accent—“This is the cat of my aunt.’” The teacher’s easygoing manner and peculiar proclivities encouraged the student body to make sport of him in campus publications, and his frequent absences from chapel services—where student attendance was compulsory—were duly noted in the school newspaper. Still, the pokes suggest a touch of gratitude, too: When Pound, responsible for counting the attendance of students in his pew, missed chapel, students who did the same were off the disciplinary hook.

Further ingratiating himself to students, Pound invited the brightest and most inquisitive among them to “soirees” in his modest boarding-house quarters, which were furnished primarily with wooden crates draped with green burlap. He served them cheese sandwiches and Curacao liqueur or cheap wine in cracked teacups, and regaled them with mostly one-sided discourses on literature, religion, politics, and whatever other subjects might have merited a good rant at the moment. “My impression of Pound is that he was very much devoted to playing the part of the romantic poet and rebel,” says James Rader, a retired teacher and former Wabash student who has made a lifelong avocation of researching the Pound legend (and whose work has appeared in Paideuma, an academic journal of Pound scholarship). “I think that he rather enjoyed scandalizing his students and the good people of Crawfordsville.”

If Pound had limited his visitors to students and the handful of like-minded male followers he attracted from around town, he might have remained in the college’s good—or at least tolerant—graces. But even in the dreary winter months, a young man’s fancy can turn to love or, in this case, away from boredom, and thus Pound sowed the seeds of a scandal that ultimately proved unforgivable. Not surprisingly, Pound seems to have been a popular subject of gossip, and rumors about the young bachelor keeping company with unsavory women—many of them performers in traveling burlesque shows—began to fly.

Several competing and overlapping stories recount what happened one cold February night in 1908. Pound later maintained that while he was out on one of his late-night walks, he had encountered on the street a shivering woman whom he variously described as a “lady-gent impersonator” and a “female impersonator of male characters” who had been abandoned by a traveling show. (None of his biographers seems willing to explain what a “lady-gent impersonator” might have been, though it is hard to imagine the words had the same meaning we would ascribe today.) Moved by a spirit of charity (or so his own account of the evening maintains), Pound—whose generosity is frequently noted by biographers—escorted the desperate creature to the warmth of his private chamber, where he offered food and his bed. Pound insisted that he, in turn, had slept through the night, fully clothed, on the floor.

Whatever the case, one of the spinsters who presided over Pound’s boarding house discovered his guest the next morning and immediately complained to Mackintosh, the college president, insisting that a boarder of such low moral character was unfit to uphold the good name of Wabash.

Fairly or unfairly, history has painted Mackintosh as a humorless and overly pious man, and by itself Pound’s indiscretion might have been an excusable, albeit serious, offense. But the community’s standards of decorum, and Pound’s inclination to flout them, probably forced Mackintosh’s hand. Soon after receiving notice of the incident, he rid himself of the headache by relieving Pound of his professorial duties. Pound soon fled town under threat, some say, of criminal prosecution on charges of immoral conduct. (On February 15, 1908, The Crawfordsville Journal reported that “Prof. Ezra Pound, instructor in Romance Languages in Wabash College, has resigned his position and left yesterday for his home in Philadelphia. Prof. Hains will take his classes in French and John Wilson, a student with five years knowledge of Spanish, will take the classes in that language, temporarily.”) In later correspondence and interviews, Pound was always cavalier about his ignominious departure from Crawfordsville, but evidence suggests it upset the sensitive young poet more than he would admit. “One day,” former Pound student Lexemuel Hesler wrote in response to a query from Rader, “I started to Center Hall to register for the Winter Quarter. I met Ezra coming out the building, tears running down his face. One of the boys who had been in the class said: ‘Haven’t you heard? Old Doc Mac just fired Ezra.’”

“There are two ways to see Pound,” says William Placher, a religion and philosophy professor at Wabash who is well-versed in college lore. “One is as the great poet stuck in this backwoods college. The other is to think of him as a fairly annoying eccentric who didn’t do a very good job of teaching his students.”

Either way, no matter how badly Pound might have wished to forget Wabash and Crawfordsville, they would always be the setting for his first real failure. In the spring of 1908, Pound—convinced that America was a lost cause—set sail for Italy.

Near the end of Pound’s life, in spite of all his achievements and notoriety, the poet still harbored strong feelings about the little Indiana town he had left behind.

Rader, who gathered many of the firsthand accounts cited in this article, mailed an inquiry to Pound in Italy in 1959. And, to his surprise, Pound replied—twice, in a kind of unrhymed verse sprinkled with odd punctuation and idiosyncratic spellings. “Events at Wabash much, yes MUCH funnier than any printed version I have yet seen,” he wrote in one of the notes. “Specially my having spent the evening when / supposed to have been in flagrante, with the widdy ole Mac / was supposed to have wanted to espouse, / and what she wrut to the / President, I have never known in detail.” (In its cryptic fashion, the letter suggests that Mackintosh, or “ole Mac,” a widower, was at odds with Pound because the poet had called on an available widow the president himself desired.)

Understandably, officials at Wabash have never trumpeted the school’s role in Pound’s development—but perhaps it is high time someone did. “To say that we’ve always been proud of him might be a little much,” says Placher. “But he’s never been forgotten.”

More importantly, Pound never forgot Wabash. Blessings don’t always come in pretty packages, and it was undoubtedly those few months of feeling like a caged bird that gave Pound the resolve to fly off to where he really belonged—the ancient splendor and cultural dynamism of continental Europe. (As he said in a 1954 magazine interview, “If I’d been a good boy, I might today be the head of a department at Wabash.”) The stint in Indiana also may have given him some material. “If there was some key literary factor coming out of Pound’s time in Crawfordsville,” says Redman, “it would have been a reaction against moralizing Christianity, the kind of poetry of piety that was prevalent at the time.” Scholars date the writing of many of the poems in Pound’s first collection, A Lume Spento, published shortly after his arrival in Venice, to his days of languish. “Bah! I have sung women in three cities,” he writes in the poem “Cino,” which is believed to have been composed in Crawfordsville. “But it is all the same; / And I will sing of the sun.”

Less frequently noted, however, is the more practical reward Pound received for his suffering. “Good Presbyterians have standards of rectitude in financial matters as well as sexual ones,” says Placher. “Wabash had signed a contract with Mr. Pound to pay him a year’s salary, and so they did.” It was the Indiana college’s generous—and probably unnecessary—payout that financed Pound’s subsequent exploits in Italy’s greener pastures. Redman further notes that Mackintosh, typically painted as the villain in the Pound Affair, soon regretted his rash decision to dismiss Pound (and probably sensed the young teacher’s immense talent) and tried to make things right. In a private archive, Redman found a letter Mackintosh had sent to Pound in Europe, asking the poet to return. “Mackintosh was a fair man and reconsidered his decision, either for monetary matters or because he doubted the veracity of the allegations,” Redman says. “In that sense Wabash comes off looking much better in this whole thing.” It was Pound’s decision, finally, not to remain at Wabash, though being at the college, says Redman, “was a good experience for him. It helped him crystallize what he wanted—and what he wanted was to go back to Europe, to the world capitals of culture.” Which he did, slightly chastened, but with the promise of a full purse—an excellent beginning for any poet.