Pound Letters

ELT 43 : 1 2000 James's personal correspondence, Stevens hearkens to questions of tonality , through which the master styles himself the adorer of some beautiful young man. If psychoanalytic approaches to the correspondence yield the knowledge that "love will fail, identification with the fantasmatic ideal will fail, the object of desire is impossible," as Stevens says, James's 'campy' self-production in his letters allows him to generate "compensatory fantasies." Crisply summarizing the tension between lost love and active fantasy, Stevens remarks: "This flamboyance might be seen as the flipside of melancholia." Ending on a high note, Stevens stresses the positive basis James enjoys in his belated fashioning of a queer identity. Henry James and Sexuality is a welcome addition to the scholarship on James and homosexuality, a book which will be read as much for its innovative readings of familiar texts as for its theorization of a homoerotic thematics in James. Wendy Graham Vasser College Pound Letters "I Cease Not to Yowl": Ezra Pound's Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette, eds. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xxiii + 327 pp. $34.95 FROM LATE 1945 to 1958, Ezra Pound was confined in St. Elizabeths Hospital, situated on a green hilltop from which the United States Capitol is clearly visible. Today the hospital grounds resemble a small college campus rather than a federal institution for the insane. When the poet was first transported there, however, it was severely overcrowded , and he was confined in Howard Hall, a building reserved for violent offenders and the least hospitable area in the hospital. After Pound was transferred to the less austere and dangerous Center Building , he was, over time, granted a moderate degree of freedom and an increasing number of privileges. Unlike other inmates, he was given his own small room, and he was permitted to walk about the grounds, to play tennis on the nearby court, and to entertain an impressive roster of visitors, including T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, and Längsten Hughes. And by the late 1940s, he was once again firing off volleys of missives to a significant number of individuals in America and abroad. One of those with whom he corresponded frequently was Olivia Rossetti Agresti (1875-1960). "ORA" (or "O. R. A."), as Pound addresses her most of the time, was the niece of Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, 120 BOOK REVIEWS the daughter of Michael Rossetti, and the cousin of Ford Madox Ford. Born in London, she was an Anarchist sympathizer during her youth and with her sister began printing the Anarchist journal The Torch in the family basement until they were expelled by their father and forced to relocate on Goodge Street. The girls also published Shaw's Why IAm an Anarchist, and Ford apparently "first heard" about the notorious "Greenwich Observatory incident at the offices of" their journal. As the editors of this volume tell us, his recounting to his friend Joseph Conrad of both the botched bombing and "the Anarchist ambience oÃ- The Torch" itself "provided the inspiration for The Secret Agent" In 1897, "ORA" married Florentine Antonio Agresti, the pro-Anarchist, anti-communist son of a Tuscan industrialist and moved with him to Italy. She functioned for a number of years as secretary and translator to the Utopian theorist, David Lubin, and from 1919-1921 served as a translator for the Italian delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva. In 1921 she returned to Rome, where she continued to reside until her death. As far as can be ascertained from the surviving correspondence, Pound began writing to her in the summer of 1937, asking for her assistance with the editing and placing of a short piece on "paper money" he had written in his "damn bad Italian," and the two continued to communicate until approximately a year before her death. According to the count of the editors, the extant correspondence between Pound and Agresti consists of 328 letters and cards held in collections at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the New York Public Library. (The Lilly Library at Indiana University possesses some duplicates.) Tryphonopoulos and Surette have selected...