A cloud of documents also surrounds Pound's claim that he attempted to leave Rome via the last diplomatic train to Lisbon in 1942. A report in the Library of Congress refers to the "possibility of the development of a misunderstanding between Mr. Pound an a consular official which might have unintentionally aborted Mr. Pound's 'attempt' to leave Italy." Heymann has unearthed documents showing that the U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Rome had called Pound a "pseudo American" in late 1941; he also found anonymous testimony gathered by the FBI stating that Pound "made very undignified remarks" about the U.S. and gave the Fascist salute when he went to the Consulate Office and the American Embassy. These all tend to corroborate strong tensions between Pound and the Embassy, but they don't settle the question. Heymann simply adds another theory: Pound may have stayed because U.S. officials refused to grant a visa to Mary, his daughter by his mistress, Olga Rudge.

There is also the issue of Pound's insanity. While Heymann explores this in depth and uncovers a few new tidbits about the inquest into Pound's mental state--especially the conflicting reports by psychiatrists--the issue really isn't part of Pound's political life.

FINALLY THERE IS the uproar over the award of the first Bollingen Prize for poetry in the Pisan Cantos in 1949, a matter that hits at the very heart of the conjunction of poetry and politics in Pound's life. Heymann simply recounts the attacks, defenses and counterattacks on the committee for making the award, without ever proffering his own opinion. Karl Shapiro--who was on the Bollingen committee, and voted against the award--seems to have had the best idea--that a poet's moral and political philosophy could not be separated from his poetry. But then Shapiro, like the rest of the critics of that time and since, suggests that the infusion of Pound's politics into the Cantos, "lowers its standards as a literary work," and this betrays the real problem with that particular award and all other literary prizes. They are symbols of the desire to dictate culture to the masses. It is meaningless to say one poem is better than another in some type of hierarchical order. Some poems will simply be read more than others and critics should spend their time writing about the individual poems and poets they would like to see being read more, and not waste their time over prizes. The question then is, should the Cantos be read? During the Bollingen controversy Robert Gorham Davis wrote that the Cantos are "a test case for a whole set of values, and stand self-condemned." But he also added an important point to the debate, that the Cantos "are important documents; they should be available, they should be read."

If one can't make distinctions between Ezra Pound the poet and Ezra Pound the man, one can still distinguish between the poet/man and the poetry.

Heymann gives us a profile of the poet/man, and in many ways it is deficient. It doesn't try to clean up the mess that has surrounded Pounds life, the almost inscrutable clusters of prose that make up Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, the incomplete information in Charles Norman's biography, published in 1960, 12 years before Pound's death or Noel stock's The Life of Ezra Pound, completed two years before the poet died. But for all of its problems, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower provides us with one particularly important piece of information. That at least early in the 1960s Ezra Pound was still supporting Fascism. Heymann gives us this information where Kenner had said that "silence descended" on Pound in 1960, as a result of his sickness and ensuing surgery. Heymann tells us this where Stock had said that in 1961 Pound "returned to Rome; he went into a clinic there in May and in June was brought back to" his home and a relatively quiet life in the North of Italy. Heymann tells us a different, more complete story. Pound had been sick, all right, but he enjoyed a "brief revival" in 1961:

It was in the center of Rome in the middle of the day. He [Pound] was photographed at the head of a neo-Fascist, May Day parade, stepping their way up the Via del Corso from the Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina to the Piazza Venezia and the Vittoriana. They wore jack boots and black arm bands. They flaunted banners and shouted anti-Semitic slogans. They gave the Roman salute and displayed the swastika. They heaved rocks and bottles at the crowd, overturned cars, attacked bystanders....

Then silence "fell," as Heymann puts it, not quite as conveniently as it descended on Pound in Kenner's book, or as it seemed to pervade Pound's later life in Stock's biography.

Heymann's comment on Pound's conduct that May Day of 1961 is short, rhetorical, but necessary and correct: he simply lists the principles Pound had uttered all of his later life: "Sinceritas? Cheng Ming? [which means "precision" or "true definition"] Decency in his conduct? Persistent awareness?" None of these were at work that day in Rome, nor in much of Pound's life; and no defense can come to the support of Pound the man for his actions.