Books: Atrocities

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FAMOUS LAST WORDS by Timothy Findley Delacorte; 396 pages; $14.95

The odor of death hangs heavy over Ezra Pound's garden in Rapallo, Italy, during the fateful March of 1945. As he awaits the advance of the U.S. Army and his arrest for making treasonous broadcasts, the mad poet bids a venomous farewell to "poor old Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—arse-eyed traitor to the whole world!" Indeed, the fleeing Mauberley presents a threat to both Axis and Allies: he has seen atrocities on both sides and he is ready to bear witness.

So begins Canadian Timothy Findley's fourth and most peculiar novel. In Ragtime style. Famous Last Words assembles a vivid cast of historical personages, among them the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Lana Turner, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Lindbergh. But here the famous names do not move to syncopated jazz; instead the work resounds with tainted anthems.

The hero himself is a double fiction: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was the most famous of Pound's poetic creations, a British reactionary born in a savage half-century, "out of date with his time." Findley's Mauberley rushes to catch up with his century. Cowering in a crumbling Alpine hotel that has seen grander times and better people, he writes a graffiti testament in rooms once occupied by the likes of Isadora Duncan and Somerset Maugham. He has barely finished when someone stabs him. The body and the writing are found by American soldiers, liberators of the death camps. Captain Freyberg, a fanatical Nazi-hunter who ironically places the Dachau gate sign, ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Work shall set you free), over his desk, checks off Mauberley as one more fascist corpse. Lieut. Quinn is not so sure. He begins to examine the handwriting on the wall.

There Mauberley has detailed his strange relationship with Wallis Simpson, the American woman he loved "in the way dogs have of loving the feet at which they lie," from their first meeting in the lobby of the Imperial Shanghai Hotel in 1924. Both were infatuated with the same male. Their two-decade odyssey ends in the Bahamas, where the Duke of Windsor, glazed with alcohol, dressing a model of his mother each morning in fresh clothes, lives out the last degraded years of exile.

Findley's reweaving of history is so canny that it is sometimes difficult to tell where the tear ends and the mend begins. The duke, for instance, did visit Germany in 1937, where he took tea with Field Marshal Goring and was photographed with Hitler. And he did lounge in neutral Portugal, as if to wait out the hostilities, until Winston Churchill learned of a Nazi kidnap plot and ordered British troops to provide an escort to the Bahamas. But the additional malice is pure Findley: British commandos raid the duke's quarters, only to find the royal presence crashing through a mirror, trying to hide inside his own image.