The poet's release finally enabled him to join his daughter and her husband--the prince and heir to a long-crumbled kingdom--in their castle in the Tyrol.
Mary de Rachewiltz limits what she tells in Discretions to the events in which she herself was a participant.
The book stands apart from all that has been written about Pound, valuable as an inside story of much of Pound's personal life, but also valuable independently as an autobiography of deep self-perception and sensitive writing, a remarkable accomplishment of literature.
Like much of Pound's poetry, Discretions can be annoyingly obscure, especially for those not in the know about Pound and pre-war Italy. But extensive quotation from Pound's Cantos--along with an index citing the location of the verses--makes much of Pound's difficult poetry come clear.
As all good autobiographers should, de Rachewiltz points out early in her book that several realities are "playing in counterpoint." It's this acceptance of counterpoint that makes Discretions a valuable work of literature as well as of memory: the acceptance that the different realities of different stages of maturity can play in the same story consecutively or all at once, in harmony or in discord. The counterpoint plays clearly as the teenaged, peasant-raised girl describes an uncomfortable visit with her father's friend, T.S. Eliot, as she is waiting for her father's release from America. "The room and his words felt chilly. After a while he went to fetch some tea....And stooping, he returned carrying a small tray with two cups and a tiny plate of very thin, very dry Saiva biscuits. And I inwardly: I wish I could give him some bread and butter....I had met a great man, and Loneliness.
It's hard to say, in fact, how many realities are playing in Discretions. It's a work that has, in a way, been in the making since the author first tried autobiography at age 8; and all through it are tantalizing intimations that her life is part of the acting out of a myth seized upon by the madness, or the vision, of her father. Her story starts with the local creation-story of her childhood village of Gais, a story of an old woman and a goat, the only survivors of a great flood. But the myth she emphasizes most, the myth of the god with two wives, of Zeus with Hera and Dione, is perhaps the one she wonders most about--partially because her father spent two years "pent up" with two women who loved him only a little more than they hated each other.
For the daughter of Ezra Pound, for the woman who lived the life of a peasant foundling before discovering a larger world of harsher realities, it is not pretentious but compelling and revelatory to write of age-old plots being played out in the 20th century but "Somewhere between Mamme and Tatte's world on earth and God in Heaven there was an island of demigods not ruled by human laws. Here the range of imagination was wider, feelings more passionate and ruthless....Every myth I came to know, I believed in, and lived through, giving it new twists."