Haunted by Kindnesses 

Michael Wood

‘It is, and is not,’ Ezra Pound wrote in a short poem called ‘Sub Mare’, ‘I am sane enough.’ What ‘is, and is not’ is the eerie landscape of the piece, a shifting underwater place; ‘sane enough’ is designed to allay but not entirely disperse our suspicions. It means the speaker is sane enough for the job in hand, which is the declaration of a set of uncertain feelings: just about sane enough, but not solidly, reliably sane; and probably not sane enough to pass any objective or official test. The chief character in Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno goes out and gets himself a certificate of sanity, hoping thereby to trump his father’s worries about his soundness of mind. The father weeps, and says: ‘Now I know you really are mad.’ Pound himself, later in life, was judged insane enough not to have to stand trial for treason (and not sane enough to be released from his hospital in Washington). For D.W. Winnicott and people who share his views, Adam Phillips writes in his new book, ‘the distinction between sanity and madness always has a question-mark over it.’

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