Moody finally jumps the shark here: the book is, as another reviewer puts it, sustained by rage at the injustice done to Pound. The problem is that Moody's sense of this injustice is so absurd as to make the book itself ridiculous. Was Pound guilty of treason? Well, if you'd like to use the legal definition, it's arguable. Moody puts a lot of weight on a few clauses in a few cases, without considering that literally being in the pay of a fascist government in order to produce arguments about why America is run by Jews and should not be in the war probably counts as 'comforting' the enemy, even if the actual content of that propaganda is not aimed specifically at telling American soldiers not to fight. I just think splitting hairs isn't a good idea when your client is Ezra Pound. Moody, on the other hand, would claim that Alan Shapiro is a worse person than Pound because Shapiro didn't think Pound should be awarded prizes for his poetry all because he was literally a Nazi sympathizer.

I mean, come on, A. David. You can disagree with Shapiro in general, but you can't assault him as an immoral monster.

Leaving that aside, Moody also fails in more scholastic ways. His picture of Mussolini and fascist Italy in general is taken entirely from the apologist/revisionist biography by Nicholas Farrell. If you want to reference it, fine, but perhaps look at some alternatives as well, Bosworth or someone. It's hardly surprising that Moody can be sympathetic to Pound's sympathy for the Fascists when he's going on Farrell's unbalanced picture.

Smaller, but indicative of the lack of care shown in this final volume, is Moody's unwillingness to actually read about the things that Pound was reading in anything other than Pound's way. It's one thing to say 'Pound thought that the Kuan Tzu [Guanzi, as the orthography has it now] was an influence on the much earlier thought of Confucius and Mencius, but this is impossible,' another entirely to report Pound's factual errors as truths (see p. 347 for this particular error).

Given the moralistic turn of the humanities, it's unlikely that anyone will do anything to supplement Moody's work for a generation; it would be career suicide. This is a terrible shame. But Moody's readings of the poetry are second to none, and the biography as a whole is a monument of scholarship; Pound's life, no matter what you think of him, is one of the most remarkable of the twentieth century. ( )

this is the only volume where Moody's tangents unfurled enough to truly bog me down: the coooonstant sustained outrage over every injustice done by family, acquaintances, and institutions. even in the last 5 pages he's still getting worked up about pound being blackballed from some award. ( )

You can read my full review at the New York Journal of Books:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/ezra-pound-poet-volume-iii ( )