PhilPaine.com

This was Tim­o­thy Findley’s fourth nov­el, and it attempts to get into the mor­bid world of the celebri­ties and intel­lec­tu­als who cosied up to the Nazis and the Ital­ian Fas­cists. This was iden­ti­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cally, to the coterie of celebri­ties who cosied up to the Com­mu­nists. It was a loath­some time, in which there were very few voic­es who spoke for any­thing good. Every­one was some kind of sleazy creep. Ezra Pound, the Duke and Duchess of Wind­sor, Har­ry Oakes, Rudolf Hess, and von Ribben­trop appear as char­ac­ters, among oth­ers, all seen through the eyes of a fic­tional Hugh Sel­wyn Mauber­ley (the per­sona of some of Pound’s poems), whose frozen corpse is found in an Alpine hotel, with a tes­ta­ment scrawled in pen­cil on the walls of three rooms. It’s a good and intrigu­ing read, but the absence of any char­ac­ter that one can feel any sym­pa­thy for left me feel­ing worn out by the end. But that has always been my response to the intel­lec­tual world between the two World Wars. Frankly, I don’t care about the fact that peo­ple like Ezra Pound of Bertolt Brecht were tal­ented writ­ers — they were dis­gust­ing lit­tle pieces of shit, and no amount of clev­er­ness or artistry makes them admirable. The Nazi-Com­mu­nist-Fas­cist men­tal­ity was the low­est ebb of the human mind, when genius­es degrad­ed them­selves into moron­ic sav­ages. There is prob­a­bly no way to write about it, or read about it, with­out feel­ing ill. We are still suf­fer­ing the after­ef­fects of that intel­lec­tual holocaust.