Ezra by Bernard Kops

First published: 1980, in Adam

First produced: 1981, at the New Half Moon Theatre, London

Type of plot: Expressionist

Time of work: 1945, with flashbacks to 1943 and 1898 and intimations of the late 1950’s

Locale: Italy and Washington, D.C.

Principal Characters:

• Ezra Pound, the twentieth century poet
• Antonio Vivaldi, the eighteenth century composer
• Benito Mussolini “Il Duce,”, the fascist dictator of Italy, 1922-1943
• Clara, Mussolini’s mistress
• Olga, Pound’s mistress
• Dorothy, Pound’s wife

The Play

As the ninety-minute, one-act Ezra opens, Ezra Pound paces the six-by-six-foot gorilla cage in which American troops have imprisoned him. It is May, 1945, somewhere between Pisa and Viareggio. Under arrest for treason, narrating his own situation, the poet moves from self-pity to a joke about Walt Disney; Ezra then sings a song from the Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) just as his pants fall down. He soon stops mourning the confiscation of his belt and shoelaces as he conjures up visions of two men he admires, composer Antonio Vivaldi and dictator Benito Mussolini. The former dances with Ezra to “Primavera,” the spring section of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (1725). The latter enters belting “Funiculi Funicula.”

Both try to cheer him with amusing badinage. “I’m the dead one, remember?” quips Il Duce, who then introduces himself to Vivaldi, joining him in singing a bit of “Me and My Shadow.” Mussolini’s mistress, Clara, appears long enough to scold these leaders—“Men will be boys”—but shifts in the demented Ezra’s mind to his own mistress, Olga. Before she is displaced among Ezra’s apparitions by his wife, Dorothy, Mussolini and Vivaldi exchange such barbed remarks as the dictator’s thrust, “Never trust a composer. A decomposer now, eh!” and the musician’s parry, “Italy had a future in the past.”

Ezra’s free association prompts his connection of his wife Dorothy’s entrance to “the yellow brick road.” Moments later, a voice-over of one of his pro-fascist radio broadcasts segues into a prison guard ordering the women to leave and then Ezra’s fantasy of the two women living together, united by their desire to protect his books and reputation.

As the action jumps backward and forward across 1945, Ezra faces down his interrogator by singing snatches of “Pennies from Heaven” and “Ten Cents a Dance” to explain his anti-Semitic economic theories; he confesses to having personally bombed Pearl Harbor. At his home, American authorities—represented onstage by a Guard—confiscate his typewriter and seven thousand manuscript pages, including his latest Cantos and his translations of Confucius. When asked specifically about his radio broadcasts, Ezra praises Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. Ezra excuses his views by proclaiming that he is above the law, because “a poet listens to his own voice.”

Ezra’s digressions grow increasingly bizarre. Rather than discuss events of 1943, he invokes Vergil, rambles into World War I, quotes one of his broadcasts calling upon American troops to desert, and focuses upon the question only when permitted, in the longest coherent stretch of text, a long reenactment of his walk from Rome north into the Tyrol to see his daughter. Then Clara complains that she and Benito are being kept awake, apparently by Ezra’s having willed them into his brain. Ezra broadcasts another anti-Semitic tirade, then recounts the occupation of his town, Rapallo, by American soldiers, and his arrest.

Although the caged Ezra increasingly appears more genuinely mad than self-mocking, doctors pronounce him sane, and he is shipped off to Washington, D.C., for trial. There, after reminiscences of his youth, he hears the indictment against him, his attorney’s halfhearted plea for his release, and a psychiatrist’s testimony regarding his paranoia. Alone in his cell at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the criminally insane after he has been pronounced of unsound mind, Ezra, seeming more rational than at any other time in the play, reflects upon the other geniuses who have been imprisoned or accused of treason or declared insane.

During this soliloquy, eleven years pass. Ezra hears quoted thereafter the pleas of famous men for his release, interrupting the litany to protest that he is “the patsy, the fall guy” for them because he has said what they only thought and to insist that he had known nothing about the gas chambers; had he known, he would have rescued the Jews. Thirteen years after his incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s, a voice dismisses the charges of treason against him.

For a few moments Ezra and Dorothy are upon a ship’s deck, bound for his beloved Italy. Then they stroll through the Ghetto Vecchio in Venice, as he calls the names of his Jewish friends. Only the wind replies. Confused at first by the empty houses, he then, too late, acknowledges the error of his anti-Semitism. Now the cage that contains him is the shame of his guilt.

Dramatic Devices

Despite its numerous—though momentary—geographical settings, Ezra is located more in the limbo of Ezra Pound’s mind than anywhere on this planet. Employing a chronology as fluid as Ezra’s startling mental lapses, Bernard Kops conveys expressionistically the workings of the Imagist poet’s fractured mind, which free-associates. As one fragmentary thought shoots off into another, a character related to that new notion may obligingly pop onstage. Since these people are merely figments of Ezra’s crazed brain, they are likely to appear just as whimsical and as short in their attention spans as he.

Adopting a presentational style, Kops has Ezra provide his own narrative of these hallucinatory experiences, as the poet conjures up characters who are the products of memory and wishful thinking. Ezra converses with ghosts (Vivaldi and Mussolini), delusions (Olga and Dorothy), and an assortment of others—who are doubled by the four performers other than the lead actor—either recalled from his past or attended to only fleetingly in lucid moments if they appear in some “present” time. Through this nonlinear structure, however, Kops does lead spectators to a conclusion that is both chronologically later than any other portion of the play and clear in its import. Although extremely episodic in its cinematic juxtaposition of disparate times and climes, Ezra does not confuse its spectators.

As Ezra chats with the audience and torments his mental phantasms, he jokes, often employing wordplay that seems appropriate for a poet (both Pound himself and author Kops). Marshaling his wit to mock his accusers (and occasionally himself), Ezra evades the questions put to him about his complicity with the enemy and perhaps finds, as well, some solace in his humor. Some of his joshing reflects more serious issues—“God is dead, as Sartre said, and I don’t feel so good myself”—while other humor, like that in William Shakespeare’s King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606, pb. 1608), achieves poignance. In this vein, Ezra assesses his situation at St. Elizabeth’s, concluding that he will be imprisoned there forever: “Please do not disturb. He is disturbed enough already. If only I could be alone. If only I could speak to someone. I am here for the rest of time. Time wounds all heels.”

Like Ezra’s humor, his continued bursting into renditions of phrases from popular songs expresses his great mind mired in illness or susceptible to the trivialities that masked from him the evil he embraced and its consequences. When Ezra and his imagined cohorts sing “A Tisket, a Tasket,” “Sisters,” “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” or “The Hokey Pokey,” they entertain their audiences, but they contribute also to the pain the viewer experiences at the spectacle of a shattered genius. Music serves another purpose as well. The sections of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons frame and underscore the action, leading inexorably to the chilling conclusion of “Winter.”

Critical Context

Ezra contributes to the growing body of work analyzing what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil.” Because Bernard Kops’s Ezra Pound is a man of charm who combines with his erudition and poetic gifts the products of popular culture—Walt Disney’s films, hit songs, The Wizard of Oz (1939)—his anti-Semitism takes on a run-of-the-mill or commonplace character seductively acceptable in this grandfatherly man-next-door. That he is clever gives the evil he spouts and espouses a disarming claim to respectability, exactly the sort of attractiveness that can lead to such revolting historical aberrations as the Holocaust.

Since Pound is an actual figure from American history, Kops can, and does, employ the facts of the poet’s life as they appear in his biographies. The playwright sets Ezra’s peregrinations (or his memories and fancies about them) in the appropriate Italian settings—such locations as Genoa, Bologna, Rapallo, Verona, and Naples. Moreover, culling many of Ezra’s lines from the historical record, Kops employs portions of Pound’s actual radio broadcasts to American troops as well as remarks made by attorneys and psychiatrists during his trial and the pleas for his release made by other famous men, many of them fellow poets.

Ezra resembles other historical plays or docudramas only in such grounding in fact. Its protagonist brings to mind such classical titans as Ahab or Lear—obsessive, crack-brained old men who unwittingly destroy themselves—far more than he does some dry rendering from a historical tome.

Ezra’s imaginative construction, leaping about in time and across geography without so much as a scene break while combining characters from different centuries, is recognizably the product of the author of such futuristic fantasies as The Dream of Peter Mann (pr., pb. 1960), Home Sweet Honeycomb (1962), and The Lemmings (1964). Like the latter two an indictment of fascism, Ezra resembles the teleplays Moss (1975) and Rocky Marciano Is Dead (1976) as well as several of Kops’s stage plays and novels in its choice of an aging man as its protagonist. Although Ezra’s outlook is bleaker than that of Kops’s more joyous, life-affirming work, the zany, colorful central character is vintage Kops, as is the madcap comic extravaganza that eventually shifts to an anguish that may move audiences to tears.

Sources for Further Study

Dace, Tish. “Bernard Kops.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 5th ed. Chicago: St. James, 1993.

Kops, Bernard. “Ezra.” Half Moon Newspaper, April/May, 1981, p. 2.

Kops, Bernard. Shalom Bomb: Scenes from My Life. London: Oberon, 2000.

Walker, Robert. “Pound: In Other Words.” Half Moon Newspaper, April/May, 1981, p. 2.