The Violin Player, Notes on Footnote 6, Chapter 1 (page 26)

In my last couple of posts I briefly talked about the Lost Generation. Hemingway was in that circle, as was John Dos Passos and many others. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are often included in discussions of Lost Generation poets.

Ezra Pound was one of the premier poets of the period until he lost himself in a stew of racism and insanity. World War II had come around and Pound by this time had made over one hundred radio broadcasts in support of Hitler and Mussolini. Hemingway had made it clear in a letter to Archibald MacLeish that Pound deserved punishment, disgrace and mostly ridicule. Pound was fortunate, he was tried for treason, but sent to a mental institution. Although he repudiated his support of Fascism, he never lost his racist streak.

But I need to back up a bit. Although Pound was married to Dorothy Shakespear, he did have several affairs; his longest running affair was with Olga Rudge, which lasted 50 years.

Rudge was a world class violinist. She had spent World War I playing in concerts to raise money for the British and French war efforts. Eventually Rudge had made her way to Italy and met Pound in the early 1920's. This was still at Pound's peak, he was one of the luminaries of the Lost Generation and mentor to Hemingway. Around this same time, Rudge became acquainted with George Antheil, a young American composer.

Around this time, Pound was still promoting Vorticism as a style of poety. To Pound, Vorticism is described as "The image is a radiant node or cluster; it is ... a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing." Pound worked with Antheil to develop Vorticism in musical compositions for the violin. Pound wrote Antheiland the Treatise on Harmony to help promote Antheil.

As an interesting aside, Antheil wrote the murder mystery Death in the Dark under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop. It was actually a collaborative effort including Antheil, T. S. Eliot, Franz Werfel, W. B. Yeats, and Pound.

Eventually, Antheil was forced to disavow Pound, probably in part due to Pound's increasing collaboration with the Fascists.

In later years Antheil made his way to Hollywood and scored several films, including The Pride and the Passion, starring Cary Grant and Sofia Loren.

On a side note, it was Antheil's pseudo-expertise in endocrinology that brought him in touch with the screen actress Hedy Lamar. Antheil and Lamar worked together on a way to encrypt radio signals to torpedoes to prevent them from being jammed. The idea used frequency hopping and the idea was based on the mechanics of a player piano. The idea was patented, but initially the Navy dismissed the idea. Eventually the technique was used by the U.S. military after the patent expired and frequency hopping is now widely used. 


(edited for grammar 7/31/14 and tags added)