About “King Ezra”: interview with Michael G. Stephens

Michael G. Stephens is the author of the novel King Ezra

How did the idea of writing a novel about Ezra Pound come about?

Molti anni fa – many years ago, while a grad student at Yale, I had the idea of writing a play about Ezra Pound. His papers were in the rare book and manuscript library at that university. I made an appointment with the head librarian to get permission to use Pound’s archive. I was informed that the poet’s daughter Mary had to approve it. This scene is revisited at the end of my novel.

For years – we are talking decades – I had a stack of index cards, my notes on Ezra Pound. I had been living in London for 15 years, teaching, working in fringe theatres, and doing a doctorate on the St Mark’s in-the-Bowery Poetry Project. Pound and William Carlos Williams were the spiritual poetic specters at the Poetry Project, along with Frank O’Hara and other alternative poets such as Robert Creeley and John Ashbery and Charles Olson. So researching and writing the thesis also brought me back to 1966 when I attended writing workshops at the Poetry Project, and then in the 1970s, attending the Drama School, including a one-on-one graduate class I had with Derek Walcott, the future Nobel laureate in poetry. We often discussed things like Pound’s poetry.

I lived in England as an EU national (Irish) and became worried that I would be asked to leave when the UK left the EU. So pre-emptively I moved to the US where I began to work those Poundian index cards into a play, which in the novel is the play about Pound at St Elizabeths where he was incarcerated for 11 years. It was then around 2016 that I began to write the novel around the play, finishing it several years later.

What sources did you use to write the novel?

It was from researching my PhD (2003 to 2006) at the University of Essex that provided me with the facts of Pound’s life. Those index cards grew exponentially from 2003 onwards. I read all the biographies doing the Fud, then re-read them when I returned to the USA. Also I received the PhD when I was 60 years old, so there was this feeling that it was now or never for the Pound project.

Can you explain the reason for the title since Pound is only defined much later in the novel King Ezra?

I see Ezra Pound as a tragic figure, his sin of pride manifested in his antisemitism. AsPound told Allen Ginsberg in Venice towards the end of his life, it was a suburban prejudice. I call the novel King Ezra (Re Ezra in Italian) because Pound was the king of Modernism, its salesman and regal presence, the person whom everyone knew, including Joyce, Hemingway, Frost, Eliot and HD.

One of the protagonists of your novel is Dermot Froidveaux: is he your alter ego?

Dermot Froidveaux is a mash-up of several sources. My father was Romany Irish and my mother was Irish, English, Swiss, French, and I would learn many years later – Italian. The Froidveaux were my Swiss Italian ancestors. So I am having fun naming the narrator that. Dermot is not my alter ego, though I once did teach at NYU, again – molti anni fa. He is mainly there to recount that incident at Russell Banks’ apartment in Brooklyn at which Paul Auster was in attendance. I may use Dermot again, though. He can drink and carry on without repercussions, whereas I can not.