Daniel Swift's "The Bughouse"

Daniel Swift teaches at the New College of the Humanities in London. His first book, Bomber County, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Guardian First Book award, and his essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman, and Harper’s.

Swift applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the heart of my book The Bughouse, for this is the page on which I describe Pound’s room on Chestnut Ward of St Elizabeths federal hospital for the insane. Pound spent a decade in this room, as a patient at the hospital between 1945 and 1958, and here he met with the many poets, artists, political activists, and students who came to visit him. He was, in his years at St Elizabeths, a most provocative figure: a great poetic genius and a patient in a mental hospital; a traitor and a madman; a fascist, a teacher, and a fool. This ward, and this room, were his setting, and here he played so many roles.

What is the room like? It is not big but nor is it a prison cell. It is perhaps ten feet by twenty, with two windows which look out upon the trees and lawns which surround St Elizabeths. It has heavy blue wallpaper which is peeling now, and it is no different, really, from the ten other rooms on the ward. No different except this one is the scene of what is perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum, with chocolate brownies and mayonnaise sandwiches served for tea.

Learn more about The Bughouse at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Bomber County.

The Page 99 Test: Shakespeare's Common Prayers.

--Marshal Zeringue