Ezra Pound—the expatriate poet, unhinged fascist, and obstinate dreamer—was in the productive phase of a mental breakdown at the time of his 1945 arrest for treason and his subsequent detention at an American internment camp just north of Pisa, Italy. While confined in a cage for much of the day—six feet square, the grass hot and matted from his fretful pacing—it was after a transfer to an officer’s tent (following a psychiatric evaluation) that Pound began to write the Pisan chapter of his Cantos, an epic poem of bohemian life and loss, of political misadventures and Odyssean searching. The canto included a vast catalog of the people he’d known and admired in his youth in New York City, artists like himself who had lost the better part of their minds to war, but who had somehow survived to see their art die before them. He called these men “the lost legion,” and its patron saint was a writer he’d lost touch with years before. He wrote in Canto 80:

as for the vagaries of our friend Mr. Hartmann,
Sadakichi a few more of him,
were that conceivable, would have enriched
the life of Manhattan
or any other town or metropolis
the texts of his early stuff are probably lost
with the loss of the fly-by night periodicals…

Pound was obsessive about his great work, discarding draft after draft. In the same canto that contained the remembrance of Sadakichi, Pound would make the admission that haunts all artists: “Beauty is difficult.”

*

Around the same time as Pound’s imprisonment, housed in his own unofficial interment on the Morongo Indian reservation in Banning, California, critic and poet Sadakichi Hartmann waited out the last years of the Second World War deeply impoverished and depressed. His small shingled house was located at the dusty halfway point between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, where movie stars would motor past on the freeway for a quick weekend under an umbrella, returning to the set smelling of chlorine. Sadakichi was sixty, and it was hard to imagine the handsome young man he had once been, the critical darling of Greenwich Village, the fellow Ezra Pound delighted in when they’d begun their correspondence in the early part of the century. Now in his twilight years, alcoholic and sickly, Sadakichi was living in self-imposed exile, first from his friends in New York, then Los Angeles. He had run hard aground with nearly everyone he had ever met. His drinking partner, the actor John Barrymore, had called him “a living freak… sired by Mephistopheles out of Madame Butterfly.”

At the far edge of his adopted country, Sadakichi had been within an ocean’s reach of the completed circle of...