Timothy Findley was probably the best canadian writer ever. His books always take a different path to reality as we have come to know it and they bring historical persons to the attention of the reader that we all have heard about but never minded to view as human beings. In Famous last words, one of those persons that come alive is Ezra Pound, a well-known american poet who lived in Europa between the wars and got involved with fascist and nationalsocialist regime that there was at the time, writing a great deal in favour of them and also braodcasting his views over the radio. In the book, Pounds alter Ego Hugh Selwyn Mauberley has this to say about Ezra Pounds role in alluring europes people into the greatest tragedy of the human race:
Ezra Pound has one mad eye: his left. And there were times I thought he saw the world through it alone, as if the other were blind. But now, as I write this here, I think about the world outside these windows and I see it as being the world that Ezra saw: the world of chaos, fire and rage. I never heard him once remark upon the beauty of the world, the stuff of other poet´s dreams - of splendour in the grass; but only of the human world, whose beauty all was lost or passed.chiefpedro in Literatur | TrackBack(0)Ezra will be condemned, I know, for what he´s said and done: his broadcasts and his writings. But he will only be condemned because the world cannot acknowledge that he had made visions of the truth. Ezra will be destroyed for no better reason than that no one wants to be seen by a madman - lest the madman call him "brother". It will be somebody´s job to pull him down and say he was the cause of madness; thus disposing of the madness in themselves, blaming it all on him. "We should never have done these things", they will say, "were it not that men like Pound and Mussolini, Doctor Goebbels and Hitler drove us to them. Otherwise, we should have stayed at home by our quiet hearths and dandled our children on our knees and lived out lives of usefulness and peace..." Missing the fact entirely that what they were responding to were the whispers of chaos, fire and anger in themselves. All of which Ezra could see from the very first with his one mad eye.