Word: mauberley
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...odor of death hangs heavy over Ezra Pound's garden in Rapallo, Italy, during the fateful March of 1945. As he awaits the advance of the U.S. Army and his arrest for making treasonous broadcasts, the mad poet bids a venomous farewell to "poor old Hugh Selwyn Mauberley-arse-eyed traitor to the whole world!" Indeed, the fleeing Mauberley presents a threat to both Axis and Allies: he has seen atrocities on both sides and he is ready to bear witness...
...hero himself is a double fiction: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was the most famous of Pound's poetic creations, a British reactionary born in a savage half-century, "out of date with his time." Findley's Mauberley rushes to catch up with his century. Cowering in a crumbling Alpine hotel that has seen grander times and better people, he writes a graffiti testament in rooms once occupied by the likes of Isadora Duncan and Somerset Maugham. He has barely finished when someone stabs him. The body and the writing are found by American soldiers, liberators of the death camps...
...There Mauberley has detailed his strange relationship with Wallis Simpson, the American woman he loved "in the way dogs have of loving the feet at which they lie," from their first meeting in the lobby of the Imperial Shanghai Hotel in 1924. Both were infatuated with the same male. Their two-decade odyssey ends in the Bahamas, where the Duke of Windsor, glazed with alcohol, dressing a model of his mother each morning in fresh clothes, lives out the last degraded years of exile...
...also mixes the actual with the fantastic when he concocts a cabal called "Penelope." Its conspirators are a strange admixture of the notorious and celebrated, including Perfumer François Côty, Sir Alan Paisley, Field Marshal Von Ribbentrop, third in the Nazi hierarchy, and Hugh Selwyn himself. Mauberley's assignment: to persuade Wallis to prop up the Duke as a figurehead who will "rule" a United Europe controlled by fascists from England and Germany. Ribbentrop dangles a glittering prize before the duchess: "Your Royal Highness perhaps does not understand that there are crowns that have never...
...considered revelatory. Almost four decades after the events, it is no secret that during World War II neither side had an exclusive on betrayal and duplicity. But Findley's purpose is artistic as well as moral, and his characters talk and behave with appalling plausibility. As for Mauberley, the choice could not be more apposite. Ezra Pound's bloodless hero did not merely suffer from the disease of his age; he was the disease of his age, mute until it was too late, sensitive only for No. 1, fatally solipsistic to the end. As catastrophe beckons, the Duchess...