NOTES

PART ONE: 1921–1932

1. A YEAR IN PARIS, 1921–1924

Pound’s nine ‘Paris Letters’ contributed to the Dial between September 1921 and February 1923 have served as a guide to the background of the first section of this chapter. In the notes to this chapter ‘Paris Letter’ will be shortened to ‘P.L.’

3 too ‘northern’: EP to Ottoline Morrell, 7 July [1922] (HRC).

his senses open…‘moving energies’: see EP, ‘Cavalcanti’, LE 152 and 154.

‘solid year’: EP to WCW, 2 Feb. 1921, L (1951) 229.

in bed with flu: EP to Thayer, 10 Feb. 1921, EP/Dial 207.

‘for the first time’: EP to FMF, ‘6/4/1921’, EP/FMF 55.

His typewriter: EP’s letters from Saint-Raphaël, as to FMF and the Dial, were handwritten, while those from Paris or London were generally typewritten.

‘Palm leaf hut’: EP to ACH, 25 Jan. 1921, EP/ACH [223].

‘five hours’: EP to AB, Mar. 1921, cited Carpenter 383.

‘hand in sling’: EP to Thayer, ‘21/3/21’, EP/Dial 213.

silver ash tray…‘Paris next week’: EP to FMF, ‘6/4/1921’, EP/FMF 55.

‘not much space’: EP to FMF, 22 May [1921], EP/FMF 58.

4 ‘dismissal’: EP to Thayer, 19 Apr. [1921], EP/Dial 216.

‘no means’: EP to MCA, [22? Apr. 1921], EP/LR 265—see also EP/Dial 267.

‘special summer number’: EP to FMF, 11 May [1921], EP/FMF 56.

‘intelligent nucleus’: EP to FMF, 22 May [1921], EP/FMF 58.

‘in his atelier’: EP, ‘Parisian Literature’, Literary Review [of the New York Evening Post], I.49 (13 Aug. 1921) 7. Re no abstract ideas see also EP’s ‘Brancusi’ (details below).

‘doing what Gaudier’: EP to FMF, [Aug.? 1921], EP/FMF 61.

‘Where Gaudier’ and rest of paragraph: EP, ‘Brancusi’, LR VIII.1 (Autumn 1921) 3–7.

‘infinite beauty’: EP, ‘P.L. January 1922’, Dial LXXII.2 (Feb. 1922) 188.

‘who have cast off’: EP, ‘P.L. January 1922’, Dial LXXII.2 (Feb. 1922) 188.

‘sort of Socratic’: EP, ‘Parisian Literature’, Literary Review [of the New York Evening Post], I.49 (13 Aug. 1921) 7.

nettoyage: EP, ‘P.L. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 457.

‘contemporary average’: EP, ‘P.L. August 1922’, Dial LXXIII.3 (Sept. 1922) 333.

5 ‘civilization’: EP, ‘P.L. February 1923’, Dial LXXIV.3 (Mar. 1923) 279.

‘this new Brancusi’: EP to MCA, 4 May [1921], EP/LR 273.

The ‘average mind’: EP, ‘P.L. August 1922’, Dial LXXIII.3 (Sept. 1922) 333. Note: I have substituted ‘Creon’ for ‘Oedipus’—the reason will become apparent.

Sophocles’ Antigone, to end of paragraph: EP, ‘P.L. December 1922’, Dial LXXIV. 3 (Feb. 1923) 278–9.

‘power to do him evil’ et seq.: EP, ‘P.L. December 1922’, Dial LXXIV.3 (Feb. 1923) 279.

Upward’s suicide: see A. D. Moody, ‘Pound’s Allen Upward’, Pai 4.1 (1975) 62–5.

6 ‘function of poetry’: EP, [Answers to three questions], Chapbook 27 (July 1922) 17–18.

Brancusi’s ‘universe’: EP, ‘P.L. December 1921’, Dial LXXII.1 (Jan. 1922) 77.

‘cavern’: EP, ‘P.L. December 1921’, Dial LXXII.1 (Jan. 1922) 77.

‘junk-shops’: EP, ‘Brancusi’, LR VIII.1 (Autumn 1921) 7.

‘clap-trap’…‘galleries’: EP, ‘P.L. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 462.

saw Braque: EP to WL, 27 Apr. 1921, EP/WL 128; also to JQ, 21 May 1921, EP&VA 246.

‘met Picasso’: EP to IWP, 8 Jan. 1922, EP/Parents 493.

Léger: see EP, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’ (1937), in S Pr 427–8.

‘at Picabia’s’: EP, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’ (1937), in S Pr 427.

Parade: ‘a ballet extravaganza commissioned by Diaghilev for his Russian ballet and written by Jean Cocteau.…Cocteau persuaded Picasso to do the stage sets, great Cubist sculptures that looked like costumes. The music was by Erik Satie…[and] incorporated the sounds of a typewriter, a ship siren, machine guns, and the cries of a circus barker.…The programme note…by Apollinaire…introduced the word “surrealism”’ (John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (Bloomsbury, 1987), pp. 161–2).

7 ‘Satie’s Socrate’: EP to AB, [April? 1921], L (1951) 231.

Natalie Barney: details in this paragraph drawn from ‘Ezra Pound: Letters to Natalie Barney’, ed. with commentary by Richard Sieburth, Pai 5.2 (1976) [279]–95; also from Wilhelm: 1990, 261–2. EP recalled her salon in a 1933 note, ‘The Violinist Olga Rudge’, EP&M 342–3.

‘a good piss’: WCW, Autobiography (1951) (New York: New Directions, 1967), pp. 228–9.

‘got out of life’: from Barney’s own words, cited by EP in ‘P.L. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 458, and from EP’s paraphrase in 84/539.

‘velvet jacket’: Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company (Faber & Faber, 1960), pp. 38–9.

‘Rooseveltian voice’: MCA, My Thirty Years War, pp. 243–4, as cited EP/LR 300.

8 Gertrude Stein: see Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 217.

talked him down: see Norman: 1960, 246—citing Scofield Thayer.

‘mended a cigarette box’: Beach, Shakespeare and Company, pp. 38–9.

‘wonderfully entertaining’: E. E. Cummings to Charles Norman, 1959, in Norman: 1960, 247.

‘a good talker’: Sisley Huddleston, Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris: Salons, Cafés, Studios (Geo. G. Harrap & Co.,1928), p. 97.

Nancy Cox McCormack: this recollection is from an extract from her unpublished manuscript, ‘Ezra Pound in the Paris Years’, reproduced with permission from The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo, in Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano, p. 171.

did not enjoy…Paris: see, for example, WCW, Autobiography, p. 226.

the way he danced: Caresse Crosby’s account in her The Passionate Years (New York: Dial, 1953), p. 225 is taken from Wilhelm: 1990, 290–1.

9 ‘one of the spectacles’: Sisley Huddleston, Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris, p. 144.

Nature, genius, and the state of the world

9 Isis and Osiris: see EP: Poet I 169.

Imagisme: see EP: Poet I 225–9.

Vorticism: see EP: Poet I 255–6.

mind and…nature…one and the same: Whitman, of course, was there in his fashion in Song of Myself well before EP; and, before Whitman, Emerson, guided by Carlyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth, had been on the same track. But Pound had to find his own way in the terms of his own time to identify human genius with the organic energy of the universe.

‘biological basis’ etc.: EP, ‘Remy de Gourmont: A distinction’ (1920), LE 343–4.

10 ‘rush order’: EP to AB, 21 June 1921 (Lilly).

‘Speak not’: EP to DP, 23 July 1921 (Lilly).

‘supplementary chapter’: EP to HLP, 28 June 1921, EP/Parents 486.

‘There might be’: NPL (1926), p. 55.

he speculated: ‘Translator’s Postscript’, NPL (1926), pp. 169–80.

‘scientifically demonstrable’: EP, ‘The Wisdom of Poetry’ (1912), S Pr 332—see EP: Poet I 243.

one life in all: Spinoza, wrestling with that conception in the 1670s and coming at it from the perspectives of theology and logic, determined that all individual beings are ‘modes’ of the one universal being. The modern physicist has no problem conceiving of everything we know or can guess at from the boson and the quark to the whole cosmos of uncountable galaxies as made up of the one lot of moving energies—though when he comes to consider just how those stellar energies translate themselves into his calculations about them he is as much in the dark as Pound was.

‘various statements’: EP, ‘The New Therapy’, NA XXX.20 (16 Mar. 1922) 259–60—rest of paragraph is from this article.

11 subject to the limited knowledge…of his time: The science of genetics in 1921 was a long way from conceiving of DNA. The chromosome had been identified as the carrier of genetic characteristics; but the exact nature of the gene and how it functioned had yet to be discovered. Further, the rational hypothesis that both parents contributed to the genetic makeup of their offspring had yet to be proved and was still a matter of debate.

conventional prejudices: paragraph based on ‘Translator’s Postscript’, NPL (1926), pp. 170–1, and ‘The New Therapy’. Re Marianne Moore being not a female chaos see EP: Poet I 345.

Canto II: seeing the light

11 Dionysos: ref. C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976); Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn. (1996); J. Lemprière, A Classical Dictionary (George Routledge and Sons, 1904).

12 ‘You rely on force’: Euripides, The Bacchae [with other plays], trans. Philp Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 191.

Ovid’s version: in Metamorphoses—see Golding’s version Bk. III, ll. 642–921.

13 Homeric hymn: in Loeb Classical Library, Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, with an English translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 428–33.

Odysseus calling up Tiresias: on this see EP: Poet I 314–15.

‘it shouts aloud’: EP to W. H. D. Rouse, 23 May 1935, L (1951) 363.

14 ‘cord welter’: ‘cold-welter’ is an unfortunately persistent misprint.

old men of Troy: Homer, Iliad III, 139–60.

15 ‘Chinese mythological figure’: EP, as cited by Mary de Rachewiltz, Discretions (Faber & Faber, 1971), p. 156.

16 ‘Church tower’: see EP: Poet I 393.

monocular monotheism: in a letter to Richard Aldington, 4 Mar. 1926, EP wrote, ‘the root of evil is the monotheistic idea’ (HRC).

17 ‘a manuscript in the Ambrosian’: EP, ‘Troubadours —Their Sorts and Conditions’ (1913), LE 97.

‘Le Testament’ or Pound’s Villon: in the dark

This section (with the one following) is almost entirely dependent upon the published work and generous private communications of Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher. Responsibility for the use made of their work and guidance, and for the interpretation of Pound’s Le Testament, is of course mine alone. Testament I=Ezra Pound: Le Testament, ‘Paroles de Villon’—1926 ‘Salle Pleyel’ concert excerpts & 1933 Final Version complete opera, Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes editors, performance editions (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2008); Testament II=Ezra Pound: Le Testament: 1923 facsimile edition edited by George Antheil, with notes for the 1931 BBC radio broadcast, ed. Margaret Fisher and Robert Hughes (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2011); EPRO=Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); CPMEP=Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2003); Fisher: 2003=Margaret Fisher, ‘Great Bass: Undertones of Continuous Influence’, Performance Research 8.1 (Spring 2003) 23–40; ESC=Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound, Robert Hughes conductor and musical director, Margaret Fisher author, containing audio CD (Other Minds OM 1005–2) and 80-page booklet (San Francisco: Other Minds Inc., 2003). In addition to live performances in York, Cambridge, and Brantôme, I have listened to the 1971 Western Opera Theater production, conducted by Robert Hughes, recorded and issued in 1972 as Fantasy Records no. 12001; the 1980 Holland Festival production performed by the ASKO ensemble, Reinbert de Leeuw music director and conductor, recorded and released as Philips Harlekijn 9500 927; and a tape of the performance by the University of York Villon Music Theatre Ensemble directed and co-produced by Charles Mundye for the 1992 York Festival—Heaulmière’s aria sung by Anna Myatt in this production is included on ESC’s CD.

17 tones of vowels: ‘we will never recover the art of writing to be sung until we begin to pay attention to the sequence, or scale, of vowels in the line, and of the vowels terminating the group of lines in a series’ (EP, ‘The Treatise on Metre’, ABCR 206). On ‘weights and durations’ see EP, ‘The Treatise on Metre’, ABCR 198–9. Duration, the time (longer or shorter) of the sounds in verse is too often neglected by prosodists—on this essential aspect see the important essay by Margaret Fisher, ‘Towards a Theory of Duration Rhyme’, Testament II, 127–80. As for the vowel scale, the sceptical might try the experiment of producing the series of vowels and carefully noting their different positions within the mouth, with their different resonances. Consonants are relatively monotone, being produced by tongue, teeth, and lips.

17 ‘Will probably’: EP to AB, 5 May 1921 (Lilly)—cited Carpenter: 1988, 386.

18 ‘done 116’: EP to AB, 16 May 1921 (Lilly)—cited CPMEP 99 n. 261.

‘Cello is’: EP to AB, 5 May 1921 (Lilly)—cited Carpenter 386–7.

modes of Arab: When, in the summer of 1960, R. Murray Schafer asked Pound what he really wanted Le Testament to sound like, EP played him a tape of some Sudanese music—Schafer to Hugh Kenner, 25 Aug. 1962 (Hugh Kenner Archive, HRC); see also Schafer’s ‘Postscript 1942–1972’, EP&M 465.

‘My ignorance’: EP to AB, 16 May 1921 (Lilly). Cp. ‘improving a system by refraining from obedience to all its present “laws”’—EP to AB, [Apr.? 1921] (Lilly)—cited CPMEP 19.

nothing ‘that interferes’: EP to AB, 25 May 1921, L (1951) 233.

‘setting words’: EP to Elizabeth Winslow, [n.d., between 1951 and 1958], Pai 9.2 (1980) 355.

‘tough, open-air’: GK 368.

not so much on the notes: ‘The singer must grasp not only the purely musical proportions of his piece but the precise way vowels and consonants of language (phonemes) must be apportioned and arranged in hierarchies within the grosser, prescribed, purely musical notes of pitch and duration’—Michael Ingham (professional singer and Chair of Music Department at University of California at Santa Barbara), in Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 237.

‘emotive contents’: GK 366; ‘emotional correlations’: ABCR 63.

‘What the devil’: DP to EP, 10 July [1921] (Lilly).

‘a musical work’: EP to DP, 14 July [1921] (Lilly).

‘for a few days’: EP to DP, 23 July 1921 (Lilly).

‘tango on the sabath’: EP to DP, 26 July 1921 (Lilly).

‘Chewing into op.’: EP to DP, 30 July 1921 (Lilly).

19 ‘Ezra sang’: AB to Hugh Kenner, [1964], Hugh Kenner Archive (HRC)—cf. Kenner, The Pound Era (Faber & Faber, 1972), pp. 389–90. R. Murray Schafer, listening in 1960 to Pound singing portions of Le Testament, was ‘amazed at how faithful his singing was to the original [score], at least in terms of rhythm’ (Schafer to Kenner, 25 Aug. 1962, [Hugh Kenner Archive, HRC])—cf. Schafer, EP&M 465–6.

‘8 and 9 hrs’: EP to DP, 6 Aug. 1921 (Lilly).

‘through worst’: EP to Natalie Barney, 10 Aug. 1921, Pai 5.2 (1976) 286.

‘contrapuntal hurdy gurdy’: EP to DP, 10 Aug. 1921 (Lilly).

‘I naturally think’: EP to HLP, 8 July [1923], EP/Parents 516.

‘11 o’clock’: CPMEP 30.

‘highly fractional notation’: EP to AB, 21 Feb. 1924 (Lilly).

‘no attempt’: EP to AB, 30 June 1926, CPMEP 49 n. 129.

‘most salient feature’: Hughes, CPMEP 30.

20 All for the love etc.: my trans. An equivalent to ‘garson rusé’ would be ‘artful dodger’, if it were not that the phrase is forever Dickens’s.

‘generally at the interval’: Robert Hughes, ‘Ezra Pound’s Opera’—a reprint of the sleeve-note to Fantasy Records no. 12001—Pai 2.1 (1973) 14.

‘klangfarbenmelodie’: Hughes, ‘Ezra Pound’s Opera’, 13.

21 Pound’s Villon: see SR chap. 8, particularly pp. 169, 176–7; also EP: Poet I 119–20.

vibrations…of his virtù: see Fisher: 2003, 1; and EP: Poet I 155–6.

22 notes for a minimalist staging: I have conflated two TSS notes, one headed ‘Staging of the Villon’ and concerned with visual effects—i.e. not for radio (Beinecke YCAL MSS 53 box 32/736); the other, headed ‘Villon/ stage’, formerly in the possession of AB, apparently used in 1959 in connection with the 1962 BBC radio production (Beinecke YCAL MSS 43 box 4).

23 ‘the first voice’: ABCR 104.

A new theory of harmony

23 ‘will be twenty years’: GK 365.

performers in the 1920s: see ESC 19.

‘The violin accompaniment’: from Gallup: 1983, 438 [E3h(1)].

measures…greatly simplified: see CPMEP 31.

‘cutting up Villon’: EP to AB, 26 Nov. 1925 (Lilly).

24 ‘another fit’: EP to AB, 30 Dec. 1925 (Lilly).

⅝ bar: on this see EP to IWP, 2 Mar. 1926: ‘That 5/8 has taken about fourteen years to discover. i.e. neither Walter, nor Agnes, nor even young Jarge, had managed…to find out that most of my rhythms do not fit bars of two, three or four EVEN or equal notes; or rather they had ALL found out that, but none of em hit the simple division of two longs and a short (or the various equivalents)’—EP/Parents 588; see also CPMEP 30–3.

‘nacherl measure’: EP to AB, 7 Jan. 1926 (Lilly).

‘indubitably earnest’: EP to AB, 27 Dec. 1925 (Lilly).

‘the great light’: EP to AB, 1 Feb. 1926 (Lilly).

‘tentatively at least’: EP to IWP, 2 Mar. 1926, EP/Parents 588.

‘Paroles de Villon’: Stock: 1970, 263 gives the programme of the 1926 concert; further details and discussion in CPMEP 34–9.

‘At any rate’: EP to AB, 30 June 1926 (Lilly).

‘a curiosity’: EP to Peter Russell, n.d., [c.1951] (HRC).

25 ‘unduplicated little masterpiece’: Schafer, EP&M x.

‘musical immortality’: Richard Taruskin, in ‘Arts & Leisure’ section, p. 24, New York Times 27 July 2003 (communicated by Robert Hughes).

‘a grand liberation’: George Antheil, ‘Why a Poet Quit the Muses’ (1924), reprinted Pai 2.1 (1973) [3].

article in the Paris Times: a cutting of the article is with EP’s letter to AB of 8 July 1924 (Lilly).

The Treatise on Harmony: first published in 1924 as part of Antheil and The Treatise on Harmony (Paris: Three Mountains Press); reprinted 1927 (Chicago: Pascal Covici), and 1962 with Patria Mia (Peter Owen); included in S Pr and EP&M. Citations here from EP&M 296–306. Note: the chapter on Antheil (EP&M 253–65), an important addition to EP’s account of his theory, is not included in either PM (1962) or S Pr.

one of ‘the three’: EP&M 293–4. The English composer Edmund Rubbra was much influenced by The Treatise on Harmony (communicated by Richard Edwards).

horizontal progression: the Paris Times article stressed the ‘horizontal’ nature of the music in Le Testament, saying that it ‘is composed altogether of parallel and horizontal strands of music which have nothing vertical about them’.

‘like steam’: EP&M 297.

‘12-tone system’: Fisher: 2003, 26.

26 ‘pure rhythm’: ‘Introduction’ [to Cavalcanti poems], T 23–4. See also GK 233–4.

‘the difficulty’: EP to Mary Barnard, 2 Dec.1933, Mary Barnard, Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 55.

‘a logical idea’: CPMEP 131–2.

‘its simplest operation’: CPMEP 136.

‘natural divisions’: CPMEP 139; see also Fisher: 2003, 28.

‘employs a chord’: CPMEP 137; see also GK 73 and 233.

27 ‘Let us say’: EP&M 301.

all the noises…machine-shop: see EP, ‘Machine Art’ (1927–30), in Machine Art and Other Writings, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), especially pp. 72–6, ‘The Acoustic of Machinery’.

‘perhaps the bridge’: EP, ‘How to Read’ (1929), LE 26.

‘order-giving vibrations’: see EP: Poet I 228.

‘magic of music’: GK 283 (and 255).

Li Ki: EP owned the two volumes of Li Ki: ou Mémoires sur les bienséances et les cérémonies, Texte Chinois avec une double traduction en Français et en Latin par S. Couvreur S.J., 2^ième éd. (Ho Kien Fou: Mission Catholique, 1913). In chap. XVII, ‘Traité sur la musique’ (vol. II, 45–114), he marked the Chinese as well as the French text, and wrote on the front end paper ‘Harmonies & Dissociations’.

‘prescription for’: Michael Ingham, ‘Pound and Music’, in Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, p. 240

Cosmos: cf. ‘These concepts the human mind has attained. | To make Cosmos— | To achieve the possible’ (116/795).

28 ‘main form’: see EP: Poet I 368.

Year 1 of a new era: kaleidoscope

28 ‘Honoured Progenitor’: EP to HLP, [after 21 Mar. 1921], EP/Parents 480.

‘nobody seems’: EP, ‘Paris Letter. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 458.

‘can’t go on valeting’: EP to JQ, 21 May 1921, EP/JQ 207n.

Lewis: see EP/WL 127–35.

reported to Dorothy: EP to DP, 10 Aug. 1921 (Lilly).

29 ‘Joyce’s head X-rayed’: EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 216. See also EP/JJ 212.

‘Pried up the edge’: EP to DP, 10 Oct. 1921 (Lilly).

‘to build a dream’: see Stock: 1970, 83 and 243.

Yeats…‘somnolent’: EP to HLP, 22 Oct. [1921], EP/Parents 488.

Eliot…‘ordered away’: EP to DP, 14 Oct. 1921 (Lilly).

‘can’t move ’em’: see EP: Poet I 407.

30 ‘a nerve specialist’: TSE to Henry Eliot, 3 Oct. 1921, TSEL I 584.

‘Tom has had’: Vivien Eliot to Scofield Thayer, 13 Oct. 1921, TSEL I 592.

‘a rough draft’: TSE to Sidney Schiff, [4? Nov. 1921], TSEL I 601.

‘best mental specialist’: TSE to Richard Aldington, 6 Nov. 1921, TSEL I 603. See also TSE to Henry Eliot, TSEL I 614.

Dr Vittoz’s book: details from Valerie Eliot’s note, TSEL I 594n.

‘exquisite Studio’: Vivien Eliot to Mary Hutchinson, [20? Dec. 1921], TSEL I 618. Details of studio from EP to HLP, 3 Dec. [1921], EP/Parents 490–2.

‘mouldering plaster’: Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life (Maidstone: George Mann, 1974), p. 88. See photograph of courtyard with statue in Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and his World (Thames & Hudson, 1980), facing p. 66.

cooked even better: WL, ‘Ezra Pound’, in Ezra Pound: A Collection of Essays, ed. Peter Russell (Peter Nevill Ltd, 1950), p. 261.

‘in the midst of plumbers’: EP to Thayer, 5 Dec. 1921, EP/Dial 222.

‘cheminée’: EP to HLP, 3 Dec. 1921, EP/Parents 490.

31 ‘poêle Godin’: EP to JQ, 21 Feb. 1922, EP/JQ 207.

to construct tables and chairs: see Kenner, Pound Era 390, 392, and Stock: 1970, 238; see Ackroyd, Ezra Pound and his World, facing p. 58, for photo of EP in chair.

Ford…stranded: see Norman: 1960, 265.

a whitlow: DP to EP, Dec. 1921 (Lilly).

‘new poem in semi-existence’: EP to IWP, 8 Jan. 1922, EP/Parents 493.

Liveright…in Paris: Liveright to JQ, 24 Mar. 1922 (copy in Lilly)—cited Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 196–7 n. 13. For further details see Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, pp. 81–2.

In return for: Norman: 1960, 253 copies the contract or ‘memorandum of agreement’, which was dated ‘4 Jan. a.d.1922’ and ‘4 Saturnus An 1’.

‘a jumble’: TSE, ‘On a Recent Piece of Criticism’, Purpose X.2 (Apr.–June 1938) 92–3.

‘marvellous critic’: TSE, ‘The Art of Poetry’ [Interview], Paris Review 21 (1959) 52–3.

facsimile: TSE, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (Faber & Faber, 1971).

32 ‘the justification’: EP to Felix E. Schelling, 8 July 1922, L (1951) 245.

‘as good in its way’: EP to Thayer, 9–10 Mar. 1922, EP/Dial 236.

verse ‘squib’: EP, ‘E.P. hopeless and unhelped’, TSEL I 627.

‘About enough’: EP to JQ, 21 Feb. 1922, EP/JQ 206.

‘These fragments’: 8/28—cf. The Waste Land l. 430.

33 ‘as good as Keats’: EP to JQ, 4–5 July 1922, EP/JQ 209.

‘affable’: EP to JQ, 21 Feb. 1922, EP/JQ 207.

‘“out” triumphantly’: EP to ACH, 12 Mar. [1922], EP/ACH 224.

By mid-February: EP to AB, 17 Feb. 1922 (Lilly).

34 ‘732 double sized’…‘All men’: from EP, ‘Paris Letter. May 1922’, reprinted as ‘Ulysses’ in LE 403–9—see pp. 407, 403.

‘epoch-making’: EP, ‘Paris Letter. May 1922’, LE 408.

answer to the prayer: see GK 96, and ‘An Anachronism at Chinon’ in PD (1918), 13.

‘public utility’: LE 409—cf. LE 324n. (‘Most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negation…’).

‘le roman réaliste’: EP, ‘James Joyce et Pécuchet’, Mercure de France 156.575 (1 June 1922), as reprinted in EP/JJ 208.

new Inferno: EP to IWP and HLP, 20 Apr. 1921, EP/Parents 483. Cf. ‘Joyce has set out to do an inferno, and he has done an inferno’ (LE 407).

‘Katharsis’: EP, ‘Le Prix Nobel’, Der Querschnitt 4.1 (Spring 1924), as in EP/JJ 220.

‘the whole occident’: LE 407.

‘age of usury’: GK 96.

‘The katharsis’: GK 96.

‘midnight’: EP, ‘The Little Review Calendar’, LR VII.2 (Spring 1922) [2].

Zagreus: like Osiris, dismembered by his enemies, then reborn as deathless Dionysos of the realm of Hades, the self-renewing principle of life.

35 ‘I am afraid’: EP to Thayer, 9–10 Mar. 1922, EP/Dial 236.

‘Eliot works’: EP to ACH, 12 Mar. [1922], EP/ACH 225–6.

‘don’t want him’: EP to Aldington, 12 Mar. 1922 (HRC).

Natalie Barney: EP to Aldington, 16 Mar. and 22 May 1922 (HRC). See also ‘Ezra Pound: Letters to Natalie Barney’, ed. Sieburth, Pai 5.2 (1976) 286.

appeal slip: see Gallup: 1983, 429. HRC has a copy with annotations by Pound (filed with 3 letters by TSE to J. V. Healey).

‘saving civilization’: EP to AB, 18 Mar. 1922 (Lilly).

‘restarting’: EP to Aldington, 16 Mar. 1922 (HRC).

letter to Williams: EP to WCW, 18 Mar. 1922, EP/WCW 53–5.

36 The best economist: paragraph based on EP, ‘Credit and the Fine Arts. A Practical Application’, NA XXX.22 (30 Mar. 1922) 284–5, and ‘Paris Letter. October 1922’, Dial LXXIII.5 (Nov. 1922) [549]–554.

attic and…salt bread: EP, ‘P.L. Sep.1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 463.

‘when the individual city’: EP, ‘P.L. Jan. 1922’, Dial LXXII.2 (Feb. 1922) 192.

a long letter: EP to JQ, 4–5 July 1922, EP/JQ 209–14.

‘What the hell’: WCW to EP, 29 Mar. 1922, EP/WCW 56.

‘my £10’: EP to JQ, 4–5 July 1922, EP/JQ 213.

37 On 12 March: TSE to EP, 12 Mar. 1922, TSEL I 641–3.

‘raise the standard’: TSE to E. R. Curtius, 21 July 1922, TSEL I 710.

‘Willing’: EP to TSE, 14 Mar. [1922], TSEL I 647–51.

By his account: TSE to Aldington, 30 June 1922, TSEL I 686–8.

Pound’s account: see ‘Small Magazines’, English Journal (College Edition) XIX.9 (Nov. 1930) 703; 72/481; also EP to Stanley Nott, 24 May 1936, EP/SN 213–14. On the title see TSE to EP, 9 July 1922, TSEL I 692.

$200: TSE to EP, 19 July 1922, TSEL I 707–8; see also Stock: 1970, 247.

‘with two lump gifts’: EP to HM, L (1951) 250.

£300…not enough: TSE to EP, 19 July 1922, TSEL I 709.

38 ‘small and precarious’: TSE to Sydney Schiff, 2 Aug. 1922, TSEL I 715–16.

‘manifestoe’: TSE to EP, 19 July 1922, TSEL I, 708.

‘cannot jeopardise’: TSE to EP, 28 July 1922, TSEL I 712–13.

‘If you and I’: TSE to EP, [3 Nov. 1922], TSEL I 771. See also Vivien Eliot to EP, 2 Nov. [1922], TSEL I 770–1.

‘NO periodical’: EP to TSE, 4 Nov. [1922], TSEL I 773.

‘not thinking’: TSE to EP, [15 Nov. 1922], TSEL I 778–9.

10,000 francs: mentioned also in EP to DP, 21 July 1922 (Lilly); and EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 215.

a short article: copied in TSEL I 789–90n.

‘libellous falsehood’: TSE to Gilbert Seldes, 1 Dec. 1922, TSEL I 797.

letter denying: TSE to Editor, Liverpool Daily Post, [30 Nov. 1922], as in TSEL I 794–5.

39 did accept: TSE’s June 1923 stamped receipt for £20 received from EP/Bel Esprit is in the Beinecke Pound archive (with letters from TSE to EP). In this connection see TSE to EP, 14 and 20 May 1923, TSEL II 133–4, 139; further, on 21 July 1923 EP wrote to DP that he had ‘French cheque for 1000 francs for T.S.E.’ (Lilly).

‘entoiled’: EP, ‘P.L. October 1922’, Dial LXXIII.5 (Nov. 1922) 550.

A renaissance man

39 a postcard: see EP/LR 283 for both the p.c. and the LR’s response.

‘Dear Dad’: EP to HLP, 12 Apr. [1922], EP/Parents 497–8.

‘I shall be dead’: EP to JQ, 12 Apr. 1922, EP/JQ 208.

40 ‘no respect’: EP to [? MCA], [13 July 1922], EP/LR 287.

travelling in Italy: details of dates and places from EP’s letters to his parents, AB, WL, JQ, Thayer, and WCW.

[parents] retiring: EP to IWP, 8 Jan. 1922, EP/Parents 493.

‘busy spring’: EP to JQ, 20 June 1922, as extracted in Daniel D. Pearlman, The Barb of Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 302.

‘cuban pennies’: EP to DP, 14 July 1922 (Lilly). See also EP to HLP, [July 1922], EP/Parents 500; and 12/53.

‘4, probably 5’: EP to AB, 29 June 1922 (Lilly).

‘five cantos’: EP to JQ, 4, 5 July 1922, EP/JQ 213.

Morand’s…fictions: see EP, ‘Paris Letter. September 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 462; and Gallup: 1983, 448–9. EP’s translations were published as Fancy Goods and Open All Night: Stories by Paul Morand by New Directions in 1984.

‘Tami Koumé’: taken from printed invitation on verso of which are notes for Malatesta cantos, in folder of drafts of 1922–3 (Beinecke). Tami Koumé, a Japanese painter Pound had known in London, was killed in the 1924 Tokyo earthquake.

‘gt. gland sleuth’: EP to HLP, [July 1922], EP/Parents 500.

boxing lesson: see WL, ‘Ezra Pound’, in Ezra Pound: A Collection of Essays, ed. Peter Russell, p. 261; for Hemingway’s account see his A Moveable Feast (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 82–3.

41 ‘pretty unhealthy’…‘Obsequies’: Sibley Watson to Thayer, 29 July 1922, EP/Dial 245.

‘damn fit’: EP to JQ, 4, 5 July 1922, EP/JQ 213.

people…flooding: details from EP to DP, 17 July 1923 (Lilly); and Wilhelm: 1990, 316–17.

fifty-page booklets: for details see Gallup: 1983, 34–5; and PD (1958), 50–1. Six books were published in this ‘Inquest’, among them EP’s Indiscretions, WCW’s The Great American Novel, FMF’s Women & Men, and Hemingway’s In our Time (1924). See further EP to FMF, 1 Aug. [1922], EP/FMF 68–9; and EP to WCW, [? 1 Aug. 1922], EP/WCW 63–4.

some sort of affaire: Nancy Cunard’s letters to Pound in 1922 and 1923 are in the Lilly Pound collection. See James J. Wilhelm, ‘Nancy Cunard: A Sometime Flame, a Stalwart Friend’, Pai 19.1–2 (1990) 202–12.

‘don’t at present’: EP to DP, 21 July 1922 (Lilly).

‘swell out’: EP to HLP, [July 1922], EP/Parents 500.

The first draft: all the drafts referred to are in Beinecke.

Eliot’s Tiresias: see The Waste Land Part III, and note to line 218.

42 Malatesta managed: GK 159. The best account of Sigismondo’s Tempio, with illustrations, is Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini (1934). Hugh Kenner wrote a fine account of visiting it—see ‘The Hiddenmost Wonder’ in his Historical Fictions (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), pp. 3–11. For a near contemporary account of the state of Italy in Sigismondo’s time see Niccolo Machiavelli’s History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy, Bk. VI.

‘bhloomin historic character’: EP to IWP, 1 Nov. 1924, EP/Parents 546.

‘boisterousness’: EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 217.

‘some…vigour’: EP, ‘P.L. October 1922’, Dial LXXIII.5 (Nov. 1922) 554. Re D’Annunzio’s seizing Fiume etc., see Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2003), pp. 84–9.

‘openly volitionist’: GK 194.

43 at Excideuil: see EP: Poet I 382 and 322.

‘a wing’: this would be a grasshopper in flight. Cf. 17/79; also WCW in Paterson Bk. II.

44 ‘no other’: GK frontispiece.

‘immense panorama’: TSE, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 177.

‘cut his notch’: GK 159. In a review of Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini (Criterion XIII.52 (Apr. 1934) 496), EP wrote of Sigismondo’s Tempio, ‘As a human record, as a record of courage, nothing can touch it.’

‘shut in by battles’: EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 217.

‘Life was interesting’…‘fascio?’: J/M 49–51.

Steffens…talking: see ‘Ezra Pound’ [a letter], Morada 3 (1930) 90; 16/74–5; and Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), pp. 750–1 and 760–1.

‘ne veux: ‘Kongo Roux’, [391, 15 (10 July 1921):] Le Pilhaou-Thibaou [10].

‘measured moments’: EP to Felix Schelling, 8 July 1922, L (1951) 249.

45 ‘Christianisme’: ‘Kongo Roux’, [391, 15 (10 July 1921):] Le Pilhaou-Thibaou [10].

‘Damn remnants’: EP to HM, 16 July 1922, L (1951) 250–1.

‘reading up’: EP to JQ, 10 Aug. 1922, EP/JQ 217.

46 ‘got three’: EP to HLP, 25 Dec. [1922], EP/Parents 505. See also EP to Watson, 4 Jan. 1923, EP/Dial 255–6; and Watson to Thayer, 10 Mar. 1923, EP/Dial 260–1.

58^ter: call slip among drafts and notes for Malatesta cantos (Beinecke). Other details in this paragraph, including correspondence with book dealers, drawn from these notes; also from Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘Pound’s Research for the Malatesta Cantos’, Pai 11.3 (1982) 406–19.

‘“Te cavero”’: see 10/43.

passport: reproduced facing p. 54 of Il viaggio di Ezra Pound, a cura di Luca Gallesi ([Milano]: Biblioteca di via Senato Edizioni, 2002)—catalogue of a ‘bio- bibliographical’ exhibition in the Sala Serpota, Biblioteca di via Senato, 17 Sept.–14 Oct. 2002.

‘chewing along’: EP to IWP, 19 Jan. [1923], EP/Parents 506.

toured…battlefields: see Wilhelm: 1990, 322.

‘Geographical verification’: EP to JQ, 17 Feb. 1923, as extracted in Pearlman, The Barb of Time, p. 302.

‘documents preserved’: EP draft note to ‘your eminence’, 2 Feb. 1923, with drafts and notes for Malatesta cantos (Beinecke).

dance with postcards: the postcards and letters exchanged in Mar. 1923, now in Lilly, are the primary source of information about EP’s movements in the following paragraphs.

47 ‘Somewhat full day’: EP to DP, 8 Mar. 1923 (private collection).

‘highest quality’: EP, ‘Possibilities of Civilization: What the Small Town Can Do’, Delphian Quarterly, XIX.3 (July 1936) 16.

‘Hotel-keeper’: EP to DP, [21 Mar. 1923] (Lilly). On this incident see J/M 26–7.

‘descended’: EP to DP, [28 Mar. 1923] (Lilly). I am aware of the damaging construction put upon these two notes of 21 and 28 Mar. 1923 by Lawrence Rainey, who has asserted in a number of places that they prove that what drew Pound to Fascism was a love of violence. I find that an over-determined and false reading of those notes. There is no lack of evidence to establish that Pound’s interest in Fascism had quite other motivations—e.g. see his letter of 15 Aug. 1923 to Nancy Cox McCormack, cited here (from one of Rainey’s own articles) on pp. 54–5. For a less lurid light on Pound’s friendship with the hotel-keeper Averardo Marchetti, see Luca Cesari, ‘Pound e il “farsi scannar” del romagnolo Marchetti’, in Ezra Pound 1972/1992, a cura di Luca Gallesi (Milano: Greco & Greco editori, 1992), pp. 210–23. See Ezra Pound 1972/1992, 445–6 for a biographical note on Marchetti.

48 Nancy Cunard: see Wilhelm, ‘Nancy Cunard: A Sometime Flame’, Pai 19.1–2 (1990) 202–12; and Wilhelm: 1900, 324.

‘divorce news’: DP to EP, [Mar. 1923—misfiled as 1921] (Lilly).

‘wd. be some time’: EP to DP, [21 Mar. 1923] (Lilly).

sojourning foreigner: the authority is among papers of J. Atherton Parker, D’s solicitor (Pound MSS II, Box 12, Lilly).

sent off…24 April: EP’s typescript note from Paris to Watson, saying he had ‘sent off the Cantos, day before yesterday’, is dated ‘26/3/1923’, EP/Dial 264—but he must have mistaken the month since on 26 Mar. he was in Rimini without his typewriter. An April date is supported by Watson’s arranging to have the revised cantos copied for Thayer about 5 May—see EP/Dial 274.

‘on tactical grounds’: TSE to EP, [27 May? 1923], TSEL II 141.

49 the objective poetic self: see EP: Poet I 306–11, 363.

Gemistus Plethon: see GK 45 and 224–5.

50 historians now recognize: e.g. P. J. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 228–31.

Burckhardt: see Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) (Phaidon Press, 1944), p. 278.

51 ‘fighting the world’: Cantos 802, among the final fragments.

52 ‘paradiso terrestre’: Cantos 802 (emphasis added).

Life and times: 1923–1924

52 state visit: see Farrell, Mussolini, p. 135.

not visit…‘Confucius’: EP to HLP, 19 May [1923], EP/Parents 511—EP’s emphasis.

Persian soup: Stock: 1970, 253.

‘de looks edtn.’: EP to IWP, 11 May [1923], EP/Parents 511.

‘a dee looks edtn’: EP to Kate Buss, 12 May 1923, L (1951) 256.

53 ‘canto on Kung’: EP to HLP, ‘about the 21^st June 1923’, EP/Parents 514.

‘Kung said’: 13/59.

‘exact reverse’: EP to HLP, ‘about the 21^st June 1923’, EP/Parents 514.

‘portrait of contemporary’: EP to WL, 3 Dec. 1924, EP/WL 139.

‘state of’…‘decomposition’: EP to FMF, 16 Nov. [1933], EP/FMF 134. See also EP to Schelling, 8 July 1922, L (1951) 247–8.

‘vice-crusaders’: 14/63.

‘fearfully painful’: OS to EP, 12 July [1923] (Lilly).

‘to know for certain’: DP to EP, 9 July 1923 (Lilly).

‘had O. Rudge’: EP to DP, [27 June 1923] (Lilly).

‘The Rudge’: EP to DP, 17 July 1923 (Lilly).

‘Olga played over’: EP to DP, 7 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

54 ‘Mi rencusi’: OR to EP, 6 June 1923 (Beinecke/OR)—Conover, 6, dates this as 21 June.

‘Caro’: OR to EP, 6 July 1923 (Beinecke/OR).

‘25 kilometers’: OR note on snapshot, cited Conover, 7. OR’s 1923 album is in Beinecke.

‘not to panic’: DP to EP, 21 July 1923 (Lilly).

‘left everything’: DP to EP, 9 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

‘combined intake’: EP to IWP, 30 Aug. 1923, EP/Parents 518.

‘rewriting’: EP to DP, [13 July 1923] (Lilly).

‘de looks’…‘sense of form’: EP to DP, 23 July 1923 (Lilly).

by 1 August: EP to DP, 1 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

small booklet: EP to AB, 3 Aug. 1923 (Lilly); also EP to DP, [? 7 Aug. 1923] (Lilly).

‘on 16^th’: EP to AB, 23 Aug. 1923 (Lilly).

still working on that: EP to DP, 14 Oct. 1923 (Lilly).

‘a creative force’: Nancy Cox McCormack, ‘Gifted Sculptor Gives Vivid Pen Picture of Mussolini’, newspaper clipping from unidentified source dated ‘Oct. 1923’ among Cox-McCormack Papers in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo—as cited in Lawrence S. Rainey, ‘“All I Want You to Do Is to Follow the Orders”: History, Faith and Fascism in the Early Cantos’, in Lawrence S. Rainey, ed., A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 95.

‘To clear up’: EP to Nancy Cox McCormack, 15 Aug. 1923 (Buffalo)—as cited Rainey, ‘“All I Want”’, pp. 98–9.

55 ‘vortices of power’: see EP: Poet I 262–3.

‘uproars, fiascos’: EP, ‘“Inverno Musicale”: La violinista Olga Rudge’, Il Mare XXVI.1281 (30 Sept. 1933) [1], as translated in EP&M 344. Antheil said it was to hear Stravinsky’s Les Noces, first performed on 13 June, that he had gone to Paris.

hours of it: from Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (New York, 1945), p. 117, cited EP&M 245.

‘demoniac temperament’: EP, ‘La violinista Olga Rudge’, Il Mare XXVI.1286 (4 Nov. 1933) 2, as translated in EP&M 345.

‘Hitting the piano’: ‘George Antheil Plays…’, Paris Edition Chicago Tribune (13 Dec. 1923), as in EP&M 246.

‘a riot’:‘The Mailbag’, New York Herald (Paris), 22 Dec. 1923, cited Conover, 7.

According to Alex Ross, ‘it turned out that the brouhaha had been staged for the benefit of the film director Marcel L’Herbier, who needed a wild crowd scene for his thriller L’Inhumaine’ (Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 138).

three of his compositions: detail from Ellmann, James Joyce, 568.

‘turned into bedlam’…‘Cagney’: EP, ‘“Inverno Musicale”: La violinista Olga Rudge’, Il Mare XXVI.1281 (30 Sept. 1933) [1], as translated in EP&M 344.

56 ‘white winer’: James Charters, This Must Be the Place (Michael Joseph, 1934), p. 96—cited Wilhelm: 1990, 289. EP appears briefly, not drinking, in Robert McAlmon’s ‘Truer than Most Accounts’—a record of life in Paris c.1923–4—in The Exile no. 2 (Autumn 1927) 40–86.

‘swashbuckling…chess’: BB in Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting, ed. Jonathan Williams (Lexington, Ky.: Gnomon Press, 1968), [n.p.].

‘locked up’: BB to Lieppert, 30 Oct. 1932 (University of Chicago Library)—as cited in Victoria Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1991), p. 24.

‘petty thieves’: from BB’s more detailed account of the episode as recorded by Caroll F. Terrell in ‘Basil Bunting: An Eccentric Biography’, in Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrel (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), pp. 41–2.

note, from ‘Prison’: BB to EP, [6 Oct. 1923], (Lilly)—cited Peter Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 26.

57 11 December concert: programme reproduced in EP&M [249].

Schwerke: EP&M 247–8.

‘hell’s own’: EP to HLP, 8 Dec. 1923, EP/Parents 521.

‘He discussed’: EP to William Bird, [? Dec. 1923], L (1951) 256. Cf. EP to HLP, 8 Dec. 1923, EP/Parents 521.

58 20 October: EP to DP, 20 Oct. 1923 (Lilly).

‘vorticist film’: see EPRO 230 n. 66; and John Alexander, ‘Parenthetical Paris, 1920–1925: Pound, Picabia, Brancusi and Léger’, Pound’s Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy (The Tate Gallery, 1985), pp. 109ff.

specimen pages: see Philippe Mikriammos, ‘Ezra Pound in Paris (1921–1924)’, Pai 14.2–3 (1985) 391.

‘Eliot turned up’: EP to DP, 25 Nov. 1923 (Lilly).

‘My Dear Son’: HLP to EP, 10 Dec. 1923 (Beinecke).

aunt or an uncle: EP to IWP, 10 Feb. 1924, EP/Parents 524; also Conover, 53.

‘Must stay on diet’: EP to HLP, 6 Jan. [1924], EP/Parents 521.

‘6 Jan. 1924’: the setting copy is in Beinecke. The Malatesta cantos were probably set from the Criterion printing.

59 ‘Darling’: EP to OR, from Hotel Mignon, Rapallo, [Jan. 1924], (Beinecke/OR).

‘Caro’: OR to EP, 22 Jan. 1924 (Beinecke/OR).

‘vigliacco’: in the slang of a later era, that could be ‘I want you something rotten’.

‘a few days’: EP to OR, [Feb. 1924] (Beinecke/OR).

‘the miseries’: EP to OR, 25 Feb. 1924 (Beinecke/OR).

‘to interior’: EP to HLP, 12 Mar. [1924], EP/Parents 525.

‘in palazzo’: EP to parents, 25 Mar. [1924], EP/Parents 526.

‘Ezra’s things’: OS to DP, 11 May 1924—as cited in Conover, 53.

Fiddle Music: see CPMEP 143–4; and Conover, 52.

‘superfluous rubbish’: EP to William Bird, 17 Apr. 1924, L (1951) 259; other details from EP to Bird, 10 and 17 Apr. 1924, L (1951) 257–9.

61 copied…songs: see CPMEP 152ff.

‘doing sketches’: EP to HLP, 12 May 1924, EP/Parents 529.

‘a few more cantos’: EP to HLP, 16 May 1924, EP/Parents 530.

‘Jefferson’: EP to HLP, 28 May [1924], EP/Parents 531.

‘Marco Polo’s note’: EP to HLP, 21 June [1924], EP/Parents 534.

‘another large wad’: EP to AB, 30 Aug. 1924 (Lilly).

‘Pagany’: WCW, A Voyage to Pagany (New York: Macaulay, 1928).

‘renaissance music’: WCW, Autobiography, 225–6. See also Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 238–41.

tones…from the instrument: see CPMEP 142ff.

‘Musique Américaine’: details of the concert of 7 July from: the Invitation-Programme (HRC); CPMEP 152–8; Conover, 53–4; Wilhelm: 1990, 340; Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company 132; Mariani, WCW 240.

Fiddle Music: for an expert account and edition of EP’s dozen or so compositions for violin in the years 1923–32 see Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound, ed. with Commentary by Robert Hughes (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2004).

62 ‘intestinal waters’: EP to DP, [17 July 1924] (Lilly).

‘First day’: EP to DP, 31 July 1924 (Lilly).

‘not a bad sign’: EP to DP, 4 Aug. 1924 (Lilly).

‘general survey’: EP to DP, 15 Aug. 1924 (Lilly).

in the Vienne: EP to HLP, ‘end of Aug.’ [1924], EP/Parents 539.

Olga was with him: see Wilhelm: 1900, 341.

‘My health’: EP to HLP, 4 Sept. [1924], EP/Parents 540.

‘shall keep my plans’: DP to EP, [July 1924] (Lilly).

‘Mao’: EP to DP, 2 Sept. 1924 (Lilly).

‘special book case trunk’: EP to HLP, 13 July 1924, EP/Parents 536.

‘melancholy man’…‘not in the movement’: EP to DP, 17 July 1923 (Lilly). Details of this episode in Sept.–Oct. 1924 from: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, chap. 16; EP to HLP, 15 Oct. 1924, EP/Parents 543.

63 ‘fine book of poems’: EP to HLP, 15 Oct. 1924, EP/Parents 543. Referred to by EP as ‘The Four Winds’ (see EP to H. L. Mencken, Feb. 1925, L (1951) 270); due to his efforts twelve of the poems appeared in Poetry XXVI.1 (Apr. 1925); others were printed in the Dial and in transatlantic review; and EP printed a further nine in Exile. (For TSE’s—and JJ’s—amazement at EP’s enthusiasm for Dunning’s poems see TSEL II 557.) EP also published an article on ‘Mr Dunning’s Poetry’ in Poetry XXVI.6 (Sept. 1925), and another in Exile no. 3 (Spring 1928). The Poetry selection and EP’s Poetry article were reprinted in Pai 10.3 (1981) [605]–618. In 1929 Edward W. Titus published from his Black Manikin press in Paris Windfalls by R. C. Dunning containing 43 poems, but not including all that had appeared in periodicals. Titus had published Rococo: A Poem by Ralph Cheever Dunning in 1926.

‘thinking about civic order’: ‘An Interview with Ezra Pound’ by D. G. Bridson, New Directions 17, ed. J. Laughlin (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 170.

2. FROM RAPALLO, 1924–1932

Human complications

This section is based for the most part on three sets of correspondence: letters between EP and OR (Beinecke/OR); letters between EP and DP (Lilly); letters from EP to his parents (Beinecke). More of the EP/OR correspondence is given in Anne Conover’s Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Mary de Rachewiltz’s memoir, Discretions (Faber & Faber, 1971)—in USA Ezra Pound: Father and Teacher (New York: New Directions, 1975, 2005)—tells her own story superbly.

64 would record…‘piantato’: from OR Personal Papers (Beinecke/OR)—see Conover 56, 55.

‘complications’: EP to AB, 3 June 1926 (Lilly).

‘rejuvinated’: EP to WL, 3 Dec. 1924, EP/WL 138.

‘the north side’: EP to HLP, 15 Oct. 1924, EP/Parents 543–4—rest of paragraph EP/Parents 543–4.

18 and 19: from Stock: 1970, 257.

Sicily: details from EP letters to his parents reproduced in Lettere dalla Sicilia e due frammenti ritrovati, a cura di Mary de Rachewiltz (Valverde, Catania: Il Girasole Edizioni, 1997).

‘Greek theatre’: EP, in ‘Hell’ (1934), LE 205.

65 ‘ought to stick at’: EP to A. P. Saunders, 25/1/25 (Hamilton).

‘a phobia’: EP to OR, 13 Mar. 1921, as in Conover, 58.

advised against Monte Carlo: EP to OR, 4 Mar. 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

‘general reading’: EP to IWP, 11 Feb. [1925], EP/Parents 556

‘Baldwins’: EP to HLP, 15 Feb. [1925], EP/Parents 556–7.

‘taking apartment’: EP to OR, 4 Mar. 1925 (Beinecke/OR). James Laughlin described the apartment in ‘Pound le professeur’, his contribution to L’Herne: Ezra Pound I (Paris, Éditions de L’Herne, 1965,148): ‘Behind the broad terrace were four or five small rooms, furnished with the simplicity Pound loved. Most of the chairs and tables were of his own making, from pieces of wood picked up in the local carpenters’ workshops. There were the beautiful Gaudier sculptures, small but quite pure, and among the paintings a striking Max Ernst, an abstract of two white sea-shells. In Dorothy Pound’s small salon were coloured drawings by Wyndham Lewis, and several of her own skilful sketches. Along the walls were low bookcases made by Pound, with fewer books than one would expect —he was constantly sifting out those he considered not worth keeping’ (my translation).

‘about 8 or 9’: EP to HLP, [April 1925], EP/Parents 563.

‘permanent locale’: EP to HLP, [24 June 1925], EP/Parents 570.

66 ‘up to XXIII’: EP to HLP, 25 Mar. 1925, EP/Parents 561.

‘mostly borasco’: EP to AB, 13 Mar. 1925 (Lilly).

This Quarter: Norman: 1960, 274–8 gives the dedication and fills out the story.

‘two weeks chase’: EP to AB, 7 June 1925 (Lilly).

‘capolavoro’: EP to William Bird, 24 Aug. 1925, L (1951) 273.

‘so bored’: OR to EP, [June 1925], as in Conover, 58.

‘Where officially’: EP to OR, 18 Apr. 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

‘figlia di Arturo’: see MdR, Discretions 203.

‘[leon]cina’: OR to EP, 11 July 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

‘no talent’: OR to EP, 22 July [1925] (Beinecke/OR).

‘if you would like’: OR to EP, 20 July 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

67 ‘a contadina’: OR to EP, 22 July [1925] (Beinecke/OR).

humanity and wisdom: see Discretions, 7–15 in particular.

‘D’s birthday’: EP to HLP, 14 Sept. 1925, EP/Parents 576.

‘one from Egypt’: EP to DP, 17 Oct. 1925 (Lilly).

‘la mia leoncinina’: OR to EP, 22 Oct. [1925] (Beinecke/OR).

‘crowded and successful’: EP to OR, 7 Dec. 1925 (Beinecke/OR).

‘XXII to XXIII’: EP to IWP, 24 Oct. [1925], EP/Parents 579.

cutting up his ‘Villon’: EP to AB, 26 Nov. 1925 (Lilly).

‘throwing out’: EP to HLP, 28 Nov. and 2 Dec. 1925, EP/Parents 582.

68 met there by ‘R’: DP to EP, ‘15 Dec. 1925’ (Lilly). When DP removed all her possessions from the castle at Brunnenburg c.1966 she left behind one book, a copy of McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, in which there is a bookplate which she had designed for ‘E. Hassan Riffai’. Riffai was an Egyptian army officer. In Jan.1939 ‘Captain Rifai’ sent Dorothy stamps for Omar’s collection, and in Jan. 1940 she asked Omar if he had heard anything from him—see DP to Omar Pound, 18 Jan. 1939 and 7 Jan. 1940 (Omar S. Pound Archive, Hamilton).

‘at last escaped’…tea with Beerbohm: EP to HLP, 24 Dec. [1925], EP/Parents 584.

‘played him’: OR in unpublished transcript of interview, 1981 or 1982, by New York Center for Visual History for their film Ezra Pound: American Odyssey, as cited in Carpenter: 1988, 450.

‘At the heart’: DP to EP, 20 Dec. 1925 (Lilly).

‘at last thought out’: EP to OR, 17 Feb. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

‘enjoying pyramids’: EP to HLP, 11 and 17 Jan. [1926], EP/Parents 585, 586.

‘oriental drapery’: EP to HLP, 2 Feb. [1926], EP/Parents 587.

‘somewhat worn’: EP to HLP, 3 Mar. 1926, EP/Parents 589.

‘half ill’: EP to OR, 20 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

‘Troppo incommodo’: EP telegram to OR, 19 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

‘not pleased’: OR to EP, 29 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

‘a coup de désespoir’: OR to EP, 19 Mar. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

‘thoroughly understands’: OR to EP, [? 26 Mar. 1926] (Beinecke/OR). ‘The Rapallo Tennis Club was much frequented by the bel mondo of Rapallo, mainly foreign residents and artists and Italian nobility’ (Giuseppe Bacigalupo, Ieri a Rapallo, V edizione (Pasian de Prato: Campanotto Editore, 2006), p. 182).

‘24/3/1926’: EP, small notebook (YCAL MSS 43, box 34, folder 804, Beinecke).

‘crucial part’: EP to OR, May 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

‘don’t make a vollum’: EP to OR, Apr. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

69 ‘down to Rome’: EP to IWP, 13 May 1926, EP/Parents 699.

‘Homage Froissart’: see CPMEP 159.

‘Dear Dad’: EP to HLP, 11 Oct. [for Sept.? 1926], EP/Parents 602.

‘sur déclaration’: details from copy of birth certificate (Lilly). In British and US law a child born in wedlock is presumed to be the husband’s legitimate child, a presumption that can be set aside only by a judicial decision based upon clear evidence that the husband is not the father. In Some Do Not (1924), the first part of Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford had his hero Tietjens say about accepting his estranged wife Sylvia’s child as his own: ‘a child born in wedlock is by law the father’s, and if a gentleman suffer the begetting of his child he must, in decency, take the consequences; the woman and the child must come before the man, be he who he may.’

‘small operation’: EP to OR, 27 Sept. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

‘taps, tests, analyses’: EP to HLP, [Oct. 1926], EP/Parents 603.

by Raymonde Collignon: details from DP’s letters to EP in May and June 1927 (Lilly).

‘adopt’: WBY to OS, 24 Sept. 1926, cited Norman: 1960, 283.

‘Omar’s eyes’: DP to EP, 9 June 1927 (Lilly). In late September or October 1926 DP told HLP and IWP that Omar’s eyes were ‘dark blue’; however, when sending a ‘little photo of Omar’ in April 1927 she wrote that he had ‘brown eyes after mother’. DP’s own eyes, according to her passport, were blue.

70 ‘Do you favour’: EP to OR, 1 Nov. 1926 (Beinecke/OR).

didn’t ‘see much fun’: DP to EP, 13 Apr. 1931 (Lilly).

‘Cat and Water Carrier’: EP to ‘Dear Progenitors’ 22 Dec. [1926], EP/Parents 611. The clavichord was transported early in 1928; the ‘Hieratic Head’ in Nov. 1931.

‘somewhat functional’: EP to OR, 2 Apr. 1927 (Beinecke/OR).

‘I do not think’: EP to OR, [22 Jan. 1929] (Beinecke/OR).

‘wd. putt it’: EP to OR, 26 Jan. [1929] (Beinecke/OR).

‘a set of values’: EP to OR, [12 Dec. 1928] (Beinecke/OR).

71 ‘very American’: see Norman: 1960, 303–4.

‘the only reason’: EP to OR, [12 Dec. 1928] (Beinecke/OR).

cuckold: among EP’s ‘legal papers’ is this undated note: ‘I, Ezra Pound, declare that Omar is not my son save in the legal sense. I am cuckold.’ (Beinecke YCAL MSS 53, box 37, folder 859.) Another copy of the note, in EP’s hand, is preserved with OR’s Notebooks (Beinecke).

Greek tragedy: cf. Aeschylus’ Eumenides, and Sophocles’ Women of Trachis in EP’s version.

Saving the world by pure form

71 blocking in 28–30: EP to HLP, 7 Sept. [1927], EP/Parents 636.

‘new American version’: EP to AB, 22 Jan. 1928 (Lilly).

72 ‘how to rhythm’: EP to OR, [Nov. 1927] (Beinecke/OR). Much of the detail in this paragraph is from EP’s letters to OR in Oct. and Nov. 1927.

‘the summa’: EP to Glenn Hughes, 11 Apr. 1928 (HRC).

‘carry dissipation’: EP to OR, [Feb. 1928] (Beinecke/OR).

New Masses: for EP’s brief letter in New Masses, New York, II.2 (Dec. 1926) 3, see P&P IV, 373; for his article, ‘Workshop Orchestration’, New Masses II.5 (Mar. 1927) 21, see P&P IV, 381; and for his further letter and Gellert’s reply, New Masses II.5 (Mar. 1927) 25, see P&P IV, 382. See also EP&M 315.

73 ‘three perfectly placed’: NPL 156.

‘After the intellect’: EP, ‘How to Write’[1930], Machine Art 102.

‘mental formation’: EP, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’ (1937), S Pr 118.

‘active element’: EP, ‘For a New Paideuma’ (1938), S Pr 254.

‘All men’: EP’s instance in J/M 21.

‘the organizing thought’…‘We need’: EP, ‘Simplicities’, The Exile no. 4 (1928) 5.

‘18th century’: EP, ‘Simplicities’, The Exile no. 4 (1928) 4.

‘interesting phenomena’…‘The republic’: EP, [editorial notes], The Exile no. 1 (Spring 1927) 89–90.

74 ‘the present state’: EP to Glenn Hughes, 2 Sept. 1927 (HRC).

‘Starting at the bottom’: taken from EP’s later revised version of Ta Hio, ‘The Great Digest or Adult Study’, Confucius 19. [EP’s Ta Hio. The Great Learning of Confucius (1928) was translated from Guillaume Pauthier’s French version in Doctrine de Confucius ou Les Quatres Livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine (Paris, 1841). EP’s 1945 translation is based on his own study of the Chinese text.]

‘increases through’: Confucius 27.

75 ‘The men of old’: Confucius 29–33.

76 ‘abundance of nature’: 52/257.

Fenollosa: see CWC 12 and 22.

77 ‘When we see’: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), chap. IV, §7.

‘talk of science’…‘We continue’: EP, ‘Simplicities’, The Exile no. 4 (1928) 3–4.

‘Familiarity’: EP, ‘Addenda. II’ [c.1928], Machine Art 111.

‘We are as capable’: EP, ‘Epstein, Belgion, and Meaning’ (1930), EP&VA 166.

‘human consciousness’: EP, ‘How to Read’ (1929), LE 22.

78 ‘nutrition of impulse’: EP, ‘How to Read’ (1929), LE 20.

A sextant for ‘A Draft of XXX Cantos’

78 hell…into proportion: EP to William Bird. 26 Dec. 1924, L (1951) 263.

Rodker’s deadline: information from EP letters to HLP and DP, June–Sept. 1927.

the designs: see EP to William Bird, 10 and 17 Apr. 1924, L (1951)5257–9. Further information from Anthony Ozturk, in a paper to 12th International EP Conference, Oxford, 1987.

de luxe editions: in a draft letter dated 31 Jan. 1932 to the editor of the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune EP wrote: ‘A few years ago the de luxe edition was one of the few means of publishing anything not likely to have large commercial success’ (Beinecke). For a sampling of his published comments see: ‘The Renaissance. III’, Poetry VI.2 (May 1915) 91; ‘On a Book of Prefaces’, [Nov. 1917], EP/LR 157; ‘Historical Survey’, LR VIII.1 (Autumn 1921) 39–42; ‘Paris Letter. Sept. 1921’, Dial LXXI.4 (Oct. 1921) 463; ‘Paris Letter. Oct. 1922’, Dial LXXIII.5 (Nov. 1922) 550; ‘Paris Letter. Dec. 1922’, Dial LXXIV.1 (Jan. 1923) [85]; to R. P. Blackmur, 30 Nov. 1924, L 260–1; to John Drummond, 18 Feb. [1933], L (1951) 320; ABCE 110–11; ‘Past History’, English Journal (College Edition) XXII.5 (May 1933) 350–1.

‘Soncino and Bodoni’: EP, ‘Deflation Benefit’, Globe I.5 (Aug. 1937) 66. Jerome McGann’s suggestion in The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991) and elsewhere that these de luxe editions of the cantos showed Pound under the influence of William Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Kelmscott Press is contradicted by this statement, and by Pound’s determined ‘No Kelmscott mess of illegibility. Large clear type…’ (L(1951) 256). Soncino is given honourable mention at the close of XXX Cantos. McGann appears unaware that Pound had deliberately purged his work of Pre-Raphaelite influences before 1914.

79 money from the ventures: Lawrence Rainey’s argument—as in ‘The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F. T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound’, Modernism/Modernity I.3 (1994) 209–12—that the de luxe editions of the cantos turned the poem into a market commodity are not in accord with the known facts about the production (i.e. the writing) of the cantos, about the individuals involved in the material production of those editions, and about the conditions under which the cantos had to be published at that time. That some copies—it is not known how many—were bought as collector’s items and traded on the rare book market could not turn the poem into a commodity, but only those copies of it. The poem lives, after all, in the mind, not on paper.

‘sextant’: GK 352.

80 ‘The best lack’: WBY, ‘The Second Coming’.

82 ‘Mr Pound’s Hell’: TSE, After Strange Gods (Faber & Faber, 1934), p. 43.

taste for damnation: cf. TSE, ‘Baudelaire’ (1930), Selected Essays, 3rd edn. (Faber & Faber, 1951), pp. 427–9.

‘Io venni’: Dante, Inferno V, 28.

Plotinus’ idea: see Enneads I. 8.

‘mental rot’: EP to FMF, 16 Nov. [1933], EP/FMF 134. See also EP to John Lackay Brown, Apr. 1937, L (1951) 385–6.

84 Kublai: see EP, ‘Kublai Khan and his Currency’ (1920), S Pr 174–6. William McNaughton, for one, reads the episode very differently, as an instance of the head of state properly exercising his sovereign power and responsibility to issue money—see Pai 21.3 (1992) 20. It is also true that his currency served commerce. The problem is that he neglected to distribute his wealth for the common good.

Masaryk: see vol. i, 393–7.

‘the unit submerged’: from EP to OR, 20 Aug. 1927 (Beinecke/OR).

‘from the TOP’: EP to Ingrid Davies, 25 Mar. 1955, with reference to the Russian Revolution and ‘my Tovarisch Canto’ (HRC).

85 ‘light of the Renaissance’: EP, ‘Remy de Gourmont’ (1920), LE 355.

‘the finest force’: see EP: Poet I 313.

inventors of…loan capitalism: see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (Verso, 1994), chap. 2 ‘The Rise of Capital’, especially pp. 96–109 (‘The Genesis of High Finance’).

86 King Midas: see Ovid, Metamorphoses V. Lemprière notes that according to Plutarch Midas later suffered from bad dreams. (To remedy the omission of canto 23 from this account the exigent reader might look up Burton Hatlen’s essay ‘Pound and Nature: A Reading of Canto XXIII’, Pai 25.1 and 2 (1996) 161–88.)

Ruskin: see Stones of Venice, i: The Foundations, chap. 1, § 1–39; ii: The Sea Stories, chap. 8, ‘The Ducal Palace’, § 13–25; iii: The Fall, chap. 4, § 6.

87 Sulpicia: her poems can be found in David Roessel, ‘“Or perhaps Sulpicia”: Pound and a Roman Poetess’, Pai 19.1–2 (1990) 125–35.

88 ‘biological process’: 29/144–5. Cf. cantos 39 and 47.

Zagreus: see p. 34 above.

formal structure: cf. EP in letter to John Lackay Brown, Apr. 1937: ‘the cantos are in a way fugal’—‘theme, response, contrasujet. Not that I mean to make an exact analogy of structure’ (L (1951) 386).

89 natural energies: cf. SR 92–3.

action as against stasis: cf. EP, ‘The American or Christian morality is dastardly because it is a lie; it is false. | Greek mythology and science alike show us not a strife between a good and a bad but a conflict of forces and inertias, a conflict of different necessities and modalities; each good in a certain degree’ (‘How to Write’, Machine Art 112).

90 ‘the growing tree’: CWC (Stanley Nott, 1936), p. 52—not in CWC 1964—and see 53/265. [hsin¹ is character 2737 in Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary.]

‘uncut forest’: S Pr 97n.

‘Basis of renewal’: 20/91–2—see also 21/98–100.

‘something to think about’: EP, unpublished TS leaf (Y CAL MSS 43/Collected Prose [formerly Box 77, folder 2945], Beinecke).

Literary relations old and new

90 ‘one of the most’: ‘Announcement’, Dial LXXXIV.1 (Jan. 1928) 90.

‘Isolated Superiority’: ‘Announcement’, Dial LXXXIV.1 (Jan. 1928) 4–7.

‘read Confucius’: EP, ‘Credo’ (1930), S Pr 53.

declare him a heretic: see After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (Faber & Faber, 1934), pp. 41–3.

91 Pound would riposte: see ‘Credo’ (1930), S Pr 53.

‘best possible’: EP to John Price, 2 Apr. 1926, as in Barry S. Alpert, ‘Ezra Pound, John Price, and The Exile’, Pai 2.3 (1973) 432.

‘nice little note’: EP to WCW, 18 Dec. [1931], EP/WCW 114–15.

‘revolutionary simpleton’…‘intellectual eunuch’: WL, Time and Western Man (Chatto & Windus, 1927), pp. 55–7, 85–7.

Guggenheim: see EP to Henry Allen Moe [secretary to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation], 31 Mar. 1925, EP&VA 294–9.

‘Don’t worry’: EP to HLP, 1 June [1927], EP/Parents 631.

‘ole Wyndham’: EP to WCW, 5 Nov. [1929], EP/WCW 98.

‘large and vivid’: EP, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’ (1937), S Pr 429.

pirating of Ulysses: see EP/JJ 224–7.

92 ‘Nothing short’: EP to JJ, 15 Nov. 1926, EP/JJ 228.

‘network of french banks’: EP, ‘Past History’ (1933), EP/JJ 251–2.

‘never had any respect’: EP, ‘After Election’ (1931), EP/JJ 239.

‘not lack conversation’ et seq.: WBY, A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929), as in A Vision (Macmillan & Co., 1937), pp. 3–6.

93 ‘flux his theme’ et seq.: WBY, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. xxiii–xxvi.

‘a fugue from a frog’: EP to John Lackay Brown, Apr. [1937], L (1951) 385.

‘Melopoeia’: FMF, ‘Pound and How To Read’ (1932), EP/FMF 103.

‘a closed mind’…‘word as reality’: WCW, ‘Excerpts from a Critical Sketch: A Draft of XXX Cantos by Ezra Pound’ (1931), Selected Essays of WCW (New York: New Directions, 1969), 106–7.

94 ‘no ideas but in things’: see WCW, Paterson: Book One, I.

‘not ideas about the thing’: Wallace Stevens, ‘Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself’, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Faber & Faber, 1945), p. 534.

‘First cheering’: EP to LZ, 18 Aug. 1927, EP/LZ 3.

father in poetry: see Barry Ahearn, ‘Introduction’, EP/LZ xix–xx.

95 ‘all new subject matter’: LZ, ‘Ezra Pound’, Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays (Rapp & Carroll, 1967), p. 71.

‘hate, comprehension’: LZ, ‘Ezra Pound’, 69.

organizer of form: see LZ, ‘Preface’, An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (Le Beausset, Var.: TO, Publishers: 1932), p. 18.

‘greatest poem’: LZ, ‘Preface’, 24.

‘still for the poets’: LZ, ‘Preface’, [27].

‘Every generation’ et seq.: EP to LZ, 22 Dec. [1931], EP/LZ 123.

96 ‘Objectivists’ number: Poetry XXXVII.5 (Feb. 1931).

‘arrogance of youth’ et seq.: Harriet Monroe, ‘Comment’, Poetry XXXVII.6 (Mar. 1931) 328–33.

‘gave over’: [LZ], ‘Notes’, Poetry XXXVII.5 (Feb. 1931) 295.

‘my point of view’…‘produce something’: EP to LZ, 24 Oct. [1930], EP/LZ 45–7.

‘And the verse’: EP to LZ, 28 Oct. [1930], EP/LZ 55.

‘A group’ et seq.: EP toLZ, 12 Aug. 1928, EP/LZ 11–15.

‘most solid’: EP, ‘Small Magazines’, English Journal (College Edition) XIX.9 (Nov. 1930) 702.

‘Every generation’: EP to Charles Henri Ford, 1 Feb. 1929, L (1951) 301.

97 ‘My son’: EP to Lincoln Kirstein, [? May 1931], L (1951) 314.

‘stir up the animals’: EP to Samuel Putnam, 3 Feb. 1927, P&P IX, 477.

‘intellectual communication’: EP, ‘Small Magazines’, English Journal (College Edition) XIX.9 (Nov. 1930) 670.

‘The work of writers’: EP, ‘Small Magazines’, 702.

independent little magazine: see EP to HLP, 15 Nov. [1926], EP/Parents 606.

‘EXILE’: postcard, statement over ‘yours as circumstances permit/EZRA POUND, editor’, (copy in HRC).

‘mss.…which cdn’t’: EP to Richard Aldington, 25 Jan. 1927 (HRC).

‘new show’: EP to John Price, 12 Jan. 1927, ed. Barry S. Alpert, ‘Ezra Pound, John Price, and The Exile’, Pai 2.3 (1973) 437.

‘to go ahead’: EP to John Price, 20 Jan. 1927, Pai 2.3 (1973) 440. EP told Pascal Covici the second number was to have ‘three separate sorts of thing: Poetry, prose…that is the finished work, and rapportage, i.e. wholly unassuming but s’far as I know veracious accounts of things, and this last need not have any “literary” or artistic merit’ (EP to Covici, 9 Feb. 1927 [HRC]).

In the sphere of action

98 ‘mostly stop-gap’: EP to Sibley Watson, 20 Oct. 1927, EP/Dial 324.

‘Occasionally’: EP to John Price, 8 Jan. 1926, ed. Barry S. Alpert, ‘Ezra Pound, John Price, and The Exile’, Pai 2.3 (1973) 430.

‘critical prose’…‘social or political prose’…‘booted into thinking’: EP, unpublished TS leaf (Y CAL MSS 43/Collected Prose [formerly Box 77, folder 2945] (Beinecke).

Lenin’s short and effective: see EP, ‘Data’, Exile 4 (1928) 115–16, and Cantos 16/74.

99 ‘root’ idea: see EP, ‘Simplicities’, Exile 4 (1928) 1–5.

‘observe the nation’: EP, ‘Dr Williams’ Position’ (1928), LE 391–2.

‘Improvements’: EP, ‘Poundings, Continued’, Forum LXXX.1 (July 1928) 156–7.

‘Damnation’: EP to Judge Beals, 7 May 1930, reproduced with covering letter of 8 May 1930 in P&P X, 88–91; ‘lyric’ is from EP’s letter. For ‘article 211’ see EP: Poet I 354.

100 ‘A good state’…‘aristocracy’: EP, ‘Definitions etc.’, Der Querschnitt V.1 (Jan. 1925) 54. ‘White coal’=water-generated electricity.

‘sane method’: EP, ‘Newspapers, History, Etc.’, Hound & Horn III.4 (July/Sept. 1930) 578.

‘democratic idea’: EP, ‘Newspapers, History, Etc.’, Hound & Horn III.4 (July/Sept. 1930) 578.

‘The more one’…‘Fascio’: EP to John Price, 8 Jan.1926, ed. Alpert, Pai 2.3 (1973) 435.

101 private performance: see EP to William Bird, 4 Mar. 1927, L (1951) 282–3.

‘We are tired’…‘raison d’être’: see EP, ‘Simplicities’, Exile 4 (1928) 5.

Rimini Commandante: see p. 47 above.

‘passport imbecility’…‘comprehensive order’: EP to Bronson Cutting, 17 Feb. [1931], EP/BC 50.

‘effective program’: EP, interview with Francesco Monotti in Belvedere (Mar. 1931), as translated by Redman in his Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, p. 76.

‘an opportunist’: EP, ‘mike [gold] and other phenomena’, Morada 5 (1930) 44.

‘an opportunist’: EP, J/M 17–18.

‘sense of responsibility’etc.: whole paragraph based on EP, ‘Fungus, Twilight or Dry Rot’, New Review I.3 (1931) 112–16.

102 ‘Thought, dogblast you’: EP, ‘Our Contemporaries and Others’, New Review I.2 (1931) 150.

aristocracy of artistic genius: see EP: Poet I 262–3.

103 ‘amiable jaw’: EP to LZ, May 1932 (HRC).

‘glorious advent’: Benito Mussolini as cited by EP, ‘Appunti’, Il Mare XXV.1235 (12 Nov. 1932) 3—my paraphrase of EP’s Italian.

Pound recalled: in ‘Appunti’, Il Mare XXV.1237 (26 Nov. 1932) 4—my paraphrase.

D’Annunzio: concerning him EP wrote in 1928, ‘The only living author who has ever taken a city or held up the diplomatic crapule at the point of machine guns, he is in a position to speak with more authority than a bunch of neurasthenic incompetents or of writers who never having swerved from their jobs, might be, or are, supposed by the scientists and the populace to be incapable of action’ (‘Cavalcanti’, LE 192).

‘Appunti’…L’Indice: this paragraph is indebted to Redman.78–83.

104 interviewer in 1931: i.e. Francesco Monotti, as in Redman 76.

‘every reinvigoration’: EP, ‘Appunti. I. Lettera al traduttore’, L’Indice I.12 (Oct. 1930) [1].

had he been living in Italy: EP, ‘Appunti. XIII. Scultura’, L’Indice II.7 (10 Apr. 1931) [1]—my paraphrase.

‘went bust’: to be exact, ‘The Indice has gone bust’, EP to Langston Hughes, 8 May 1932, ed. David Roessel, ‘“A Racial Act”: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Ezra Pound’, Pai 29.1–2 (2000) 216.

‘Supplemento Letterario’: for a complete collection of all the contributions see Il Mare Supplemento Letterario 1932–1933, a cura della Società Letteraria Rapallo (Rapallo: Commune di Rapallo, 1999).

asserted that Futurism: EP, ‘Appunti’, Il Mare XXV.1235 (12 Nov. 1932) 3.

‘advocated’…‘reputation’: Walkiewicz and Witemeyer, ‘The Poet and the Senator’, EP/BC 15. I am much indebted to the commentary and notes of W & W.

‘tool of tyranny’: BC, as cited from the Congressional Record by W & W, EP/BC 18.

‘Article 211’: EP to BC, 8 Nov. 1930, EP/BC 38.

105 ‘the Baboon law’ etc.: BC to EP, 23 Jan. 1932, EP/BC 69.

‘amendment died’: W & W, EP/BC 27.

‘list of the literate’: EP to BC, 8 Nov. 1930, EP/BC 38.

‘& I suppose’: BC to EP, 9 Dec. 1930, EP/BC 40.

‘American govt.’: EP to Langston Hughes, 18 June 1932, L (1951)323.

‘Democracies’: 91/613.

‘theoretical perfection’: EP, ‘Bureaucracy the Flail of Jehovah’, Exile 4 (1928) 13.

‘went to Dionysius’: 8/31.

106 free passage of new invention: see EP, ‘Newspapers, History, Etc.’, Hound & Horn III.4 (July/Sept. 1930) 574–9.

forty-hour week…shortened working day: EP wrote to DP, 17 Sept. 1932: ‘Von Papen has come out for 40 hour week and no reduction in pay to workers. 15 hours wd. prob. be nearer the mark; but le principe and the possibility seems to be penetrating. N. Y. SUN printed my scorcher on short day; on Aug. 20. (I.e. before either the Muss. or the Von P. proclamations.)’ (Lilly). The London Times of 23 Sept. 1932 reported the Italian proposal at the ILO meeting and the British opposition to it. On EP’s support for a shorter working day see W. & W., EP/BC 89–90, and EP to BC, 20 Mar. 1931, 9 Oct. 1931,11 Feb. 1932, EP/BC 56, 58–9, 71–2.

‘a plutocratic era’: EP, ‘Left vs. Right’, Chicago Tribune, Paris (16 Mar. 1930), 5.

‘democratized’: EP to BC, 20 Mar. 1931, EP/BC 54–5.

‘to prevent’…‘two causes’: EP, ‘By All Means Be Patriotic’, New English Weekly I.25 (6 Oct. 1932) 589. See also ‘More Bolshevik Atrocities’, Exile 3 (1928) 97–101; ‘Peace’, Exile 4 (1928) 15–19; ‘A Possibly Impractical Suggestion’, Poetry XXXIV.3 (June 1929) 178; Impact 281–2 [the ‘Mensdorff letter’]; Cantos 18, 19, 31–51.

‘that stays news’: ABCR 29.

‘mental slop’…‘public enemy’: EP, ‘That Messianic Urge’, New York Sun (4 June 1932) 12. The title is on EP’s TS (Beinecke).

one…counter-attacked: ‘[Burton] Rascoe’s Riposte’, New York Sun (11 June 1932) 36.

‘strife and tumult’: OED s.v. ‘bear garden’.

107 ‘where you are talking’: EP to Mike Gold, 17 Aug. 1930 (HRC).

‘propagandist literature’: EP, ‘Open Letter to Tretyakow, kolchoznik’, Front I.2 (Feb. 1931) 126—repr. Impact 227.

‘the classic work’: ‘A Classic Art, by Boris de Schloezer, Translated from the French by Ezra Pound’, Dial LXXXVI.6 (June 1929) 464–5.

108 ‘rage for order’: Wallace Stevens, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’.

Krishna: see Bhagavad Gita chap. xi.

Cavalcanti: the intelligence of love

This section is indebted to David Anderson’s comprehensive Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), with a good ‘Editor’s Introduction’. Note that, of necessity, this does not reproduce Pound’s Guido Cavalcanti Rime (Genova: Edizioni Marsano SA, [1932]). For some further light on the preparation and publication of Rime see Stefano Maria Casella, ‘“To adjust the spelling of Guido”’, Ezra Pound 1972/1992, a cura di Luca Gallesi (Milano: Greco & Greco editori, 1992), pp. 155–98.

The philosophical dimension has been extensively discussed. See: Georg M. Gugelberger, ‘The Secularization of “Love” to a Poetic Metaphor: Cavalcanti, Center of Pound’s Medievalism’, Pai 2.2 (1973) 159–73; James J. Wilhelm, Dante and Pound: The Epic of Judgement (Orone, Me.: University of Maine Press, 1974); Kevin Oderman, ‘“Cavalcanti: That the Body is not Evil’, Pai 11.2 (1982) 258–79; Mohammad Shaheen, ‘Pound’s Transmission of Ittisal in Canto 76’, Pai 17.1 (1988) 133–45; Matthew Little and Robert Babcock, ‘“Amplius in coitu phantasia”: Pound’s “Cavalcanti” and Avicenna’s De Almahad’, Pai 20.1–2 (1991) 63–75; Maria Luisa Ardizzone, ‘The Genesis and Structure of Pound’s Paradise: Looking at the Vocabulary’, Pai 22.3 (1993) 13–37; Jacqueline Kaye, ‘Pound and Heresy’, Pai 28.1 (1999) 89–111; Peter Makin, ‘Pound’s “Provence” and the Duecento’, Ezra Pound and the Troubadours, ed. Philip Grover (24680 Gardonne, France: éditions fédérop, 1995), pp. 91–110; Line Henriksen, ‘Chiaroscuro: Canto 36 and Donna mi prega’, Pai 29.3 (2000) 33–57; Maria Luisa Ardizzone, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004).

On Pound’s opera Cavalcanti (1931–3) I am much indebted for both information and interpretation to (a) Margaret Fisher, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (EPRO)(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 146–95; (b) Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2003): CPMEP (1) contains their ‘Perspective and Analysis’ of all Pound’s musical compositions, with Cavalcanti covered on pp. 41–124; CPMEP (2), pages separately numbered, presents Robert Hughes’s edition of the full score of Pound’s opera or ‘sung dramedy’, Cavalcanti; (c) Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound (ESC), Robert Hughes conductor and musical director, Margaret Fisher author, containing audio CD (Other Minds OM 1005–2) and 80-page booklet (San Francisco: Other Minds Inc., 2003)—the Other Minds CD contains selections from Cavalcanti and from Pound’s unfinished third opera, Collis O Heliconii (1932). See also Margaret Fisher, ‘Great Bass: Undertones of Continuous Influence’, Performance Research 8.1 (Spring 2003) 23–40, particularly pp. 30 and 34–9. I am indebted to Mary de Rachewiltz for a recording of the performance of Cavalcanti: A Sung Dramedy in 3 Acts under the direction of Marcello Fera in the Nuovo Teatro Communale of Bolzano, 14 July 2000.

108 ‘Guido’: EP to DP, 14 Sept. 1927 (Lilly).

‘Guido’s philosophy’: EP to OR, [Oct. 1927] (Beinecke/OR).

‘proof’: EP, ‘Cavalcanti’, MIN 345, LE 149.

‘biological proof’:EP, Poetry Notebook 13 (Beinecke).

‘nature’s source’: EP, trans. of ‘Donna mi prega’ in ‘Cavalcanti’, MIN 353, LE 155.

‘by miracle’: EP to IWP, 11 Nov. 1927, EP/Parents 639. Other details from EP to OR, [early Nov. 1927] (Beinecke/OR).

‘full text’: EP to HLP, 16 Nov. [1927], EP/Parents 640.

109 title page: from Anderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Pound’s Cavalcanti, p. xxi.

‘Specimen pages’: Gallup: 1983, 153.

Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets: Pound’s marked copy is now in HRC.

110 David Anderson records: Anderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Pound’s Cavalcanti, pp. xxii–xxiii. The Gilson review is reprinted in Homberger: 1972, 273–9.

‘very complicated’: EP, ABCR 104; see p. 23 above.

‘psychologist of the emotions’: EP, ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), T 18, Anderson 12.

111 ‘Exhausted’: EP, ‘Introduction’, T 20, Anderson 14.

after Eliot: Eliot’s actual words, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), were of course ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.

‘It is only when the emotions’: EP, ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), T 24, Anderson 19.

re Canzoni, see EP: Poet I 135–49.

‘not as platonic’: EP, ‘Date Line’, MIN 15.

‘super-in-human refinement’: cf. ‘super-in-human refinemengts’, EP to AB, 24 Oct. 1933 (Lilly).

112 ‘Mediaevalism’: this paragraph and the first sentences of the next are based on this, the first part of ‘Cavalcanti’, as in MIN 345–52 and LE 149–55.

cites Gilson: in ‘Partial Explanation’, MIN 359–60, LE 160–1.

113 ‘intenzion’: see MIN 361, LE 162.

‘Voi che intendendo’: Paradiso VII, 37. See GK 315, 317.

‘much more “modern”’: EP, ‘Cavalcanti’, MIN 346, LE 149.

Renan’s Averroës et L’Averroïsme: Pound’s marked copy is in HRC. Cf. MIN 388–90, LE 184–6.

‘the eternal act’: S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), chap. XIII.

‘perfection of the rational soul’: ‘La perfection de l’âme rationelle est de devenir le miroir de l’univers’ (attributed to Avicenna), Ernest Renan, Averroës et L’Averroïsme (Paris, 1925), p. 96.

no question…of a paradise out of this world: on this aspect see Mohammad Shaheen, ‘Pound’s transmission of ittisal in Canto 76’, Pai 17.1 (1988) 133–45.

‘ever at the interpretation’: see EP: Poet I 225 and SR 92–3.

114 ‘the active and passive’: EP, ‘Terra Italica’ (1931), S Pr 59—the rest of this paragraph is based on this important essay, S Pr 54–60.

‘Coition, the sacrament’:EP TSS note (Beinecke), cited by Margaret Fisher, EPRO 153.

‘meaning can be explained’: EP, ‘Preface’, CPMEP (2) vi. Underlining as in EP’s TSS, ‘Pound/Cavalcanti —General directions’ (Beinecke).

‘visual libretto’: CPMEP (1) 42.

115 ‘full of radio’: EP to DP, [Aug./Sept.] 1931 (Lilly).

‘will be much clearer’: EP to DP, 29 Oct. 1931 (Lilly).

Sonate ‘Ghuidonis’: for a full description see CPMEP (1) 163–9.

116 forma mentis: in 1935 EP wrote, ‘Forma to the great minds of at least one epoch meant something more than dead pattern or fixed opinion. “The light of the doer, as it were a form cleaving to it” meant an active pattern, a pattern that set things in motion./(This sentence can be taken along with my comment on Guido and in particular the end of the chapter called “Mediævalism”[in “Cavalcanti”, LE 150–5]’ (PE 51).

‘Al poco giorno’: EP’s score is printed in Complete Violin Works of Ezra Pound, ed. with commentary by Robert Hughes (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2004), pp. 126–9—commentary on pp. 67–73. The recording of a performance by Nathan Rubin is track 13 on ESC.

‘Collis O Heliconii’: there is a ‘performance edition’ of Pound’s unfinished score, together with an extensive and illuminating critical analysis and discussion of the opera, in Margaret Fisher’s The Recovery of Ezra Pound’s Third Opera Collis O Heliconii: Settings of poems by Catullus and Sappho (Emeryville, Calif.: Second Evening Art, 2005). The recording of a selection is track 22 on ESC.

‘celebration of the sacrament’: Margaret Fisher, ESC (booklet) 29.

‘no small technical problem’: EP, GK 368.

‘I live in music’: reported by Robert Fitzgerald in Encounter (1956), as cited by Margaret Fisher, ESC (booklet) 24.

Threads, tesserae

117 Olga Rudge…Landowska: OR to EP, 30 Sept. 1929 (Beinecke/OR).

‘The little town’: WBY, ‘Rapallo’, A Vision (Macmillan, 1937, 1962), p. 3.

‘with large trunk’: EP to HLP, 8 Jan. 1927, EP/Parents 616.

‘As S. seems to mean’: EP to HLP, 11 Jan. 1927, EP/Parents 617.

Frobenius…paideuma: see p. 73 above; also WBY to Sturge Moore, Apr. 1929, cited Norman: 1960, 301.

118 ‘intellexshull centre’: EP to IWP, 22 Nov. [1927], EP/Parents 642.

‘Italy then was maddening’: Robert McAlmon, ‘Truer Than Most Accounts’, Exile 2 (Autumn 1927) 45.

Mary Oppen recalled: in her Meaning A Life: An Autobiography (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1978), p. 138.

‘Vinciguerra and Lauro’: EP to DP, 18 Oct. 1931 (Lilly). On Lauro de Bosis see Stock: 1970, 299; also Nancy Cox McCormack, ‘Ezra Pound in the Paris Years’, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey, Sewanee Review CII (1994) 103 n. 16. De Bosis (1900–31), a poet and translator, author of Icarus (a play), flew over Rome on 3 Oct. 1931 showering anti-Fascist leaflets upon the city, then flew on towards Corsica.

‘banged it hard’: MdR, Discretions, 52; see also Conover, 78.

‘Mensdorff letter’: printed in Impact 281–3.

119 lasting disillusionment: see Cantos 103/737.

‘so warmly of Olga’: DP to EP, 7 June 1928 (Lilly).

Morrison’s…Dictionary: Cf. EP: Poet I 287 and note. DP told Hugh Kenner in conversation in 1965 that she bought her copy of Morrison in 1914—Kenner, ‘D. P. Remembered’, Pai 2.3 (1973) 488.

a ‘very cheerful soul’: DP to EP, 2 May 1928 (Lilly).

‘Is Vienna’: DP to EP, 4 June 1928 (Lilly).

‘Longing to see you’: Nancy Cunard to EP, 27 [Sept. 1928] (Beinecke).

‘No but really’: Nancy Cunard to EP, [28 Sept. 1928] (Beinecke).

a small house in Venice: some details in this paragraph from Conover, 82–4.

‘Three matchboxes’: Desmond O’Grady, ‘Ezra Pound: A Personal Memoir’, Agenda 17.3–4 (1979/80) 293.

‘Five minutes’: EP to OR, [12 Dec. 1928] (Beinecke/OR).

‘perfection’: cf. WBY, ‘The Choice’ in The Winding Stair (1933).

120 ‘Caro, I beg you’: OR to EP, 21 Jan. 1929 (Beinecke/OR).

life would be impossible: EP to OR, [22 Jan. 1929] (Beinecke/OR).

‘hidden nest’: 76/462.

no longer in it: cf. OR to EP, 4 Mar. 1929 (Beinecke/OR).

doing the beams: EP to OR, [? 1 Apr. 1929] (Beinecke/OR).

‘calf on the brain’: EP to OR, 20 Mar. [1929] (Beinecke/OR).

‘Darling’: EP to Pamela Lovibond [PL], [28 Mar. 1929] (Beinecke).

‘Dearest Pam’: EP to PL, 2 Apr. [1929] (Beinecke).

‘can’t use telephone’: EP to PL, 5 Apr. [1929] (Beinecke).

‘Darling: Adrian’: EP to PL, 10 Apr. [1929] (Beinecke).

‘at Pagani’s’: EP to PL, 11 June [1929] (Beinecke).

‘the venerable William’: EP to PL, 2 May 1932 (Beinecke).

‘an evening of Mozart’: invitation in EP Scrapbook (Brunnenburg).

121 Obermer: prescription in Pound MSS II, Box 11 (Lilly).

Pituitrin: Louis Berman, author of The Glands Regulating Personality (1922), wrote in his The Personal Equation (1925), pp. 108–9, that the pituitary gland, or more specifically its pre-pituitary lobe, was ‘most important of all [in] its tonic effect upon the portions of the brain involved in the Olympian functions of reason and abstraction—in short, intellectuality’; also that it has to do with the maintenance of the sex-glands throughout life.

‘the anti-cold serum’: EP to DP, [May 1930] (Lilly).

‘poor circulation’: DP to EP, [May 1930] (Lilly).

any ‘Obermer medicine’: DP to EP, 11 July 1930 (Lilly).

‘Thyro-manganese’: EP to DP, 18 July 1930 (Lilly).

‘said “Pray Ezra”’: Richard Aldington to Brigit Patmore, May 1929, Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle: Their Lives in Letters 1918–61, ed. Caroline Zilboorg (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 207.

‘so terribly ridiculous’: HD to Bryher, May 1929, Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle, p. 209.

‘Ezra’s people’: FMF, The Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, ed. Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 356.

‘If you are investing’: EP to HLP, 1 Aug. [1928], EP/Parents 664.

‘Wyncote is very lovely’: IWP to Miss Heacock, as cited in Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, 6 Mar. 1930, extracted in Stock: 1976, 90. Other details in this paragraph from Stock: 1976, 89–90.

122 via Americhe: now Corso Cristofero Colombo.

Bankers, economists, and politicians: this sentence and the next take off from two sentences in Redman, ‘Pound’s Politics and Economics’, Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 255.

father hard up: on this see Conover, 90–1, 96–7.

Brescia…Lago d’Iseo: EP to DP, [Sept. 1929] (Lilly).

‘mos’ noble feeling’: EP to OR, 30 Sept. [1929] (Beinecke/OR).

‘a year and a half’: OR to EP, 19 Nov. 1929 (Beinecke/OR). In Discretions MdR remembered it differently: ‘And from now on whenever the scrupulous biographer will report a concert in Budapest, a performance in Vienna, a trip to Franfurt, Wörgl, Salzburg, it may be assumed that the journey was interrupted, for a few hours or for a few days, in Bruneck’ (14–15).

the child remembered: MdR, Discretions 23–5.

123 ‘duly and properly’: EP to OR, 26 Dec. [1929] (Beinecke/OR). In a note to HLP dated 26 July 1927 EP wrote, ‘Enclose another member of the family’. He had been photographed with Mary in Gais earlier in the month—see Discretions for the photo—so it would appear that Homer had a hint of Mary’s existence well before 1933. In July 1928 EP sent another photograph without saying who the child was, causing Homer to ask, ‘is it the same as the one you sent a year or so ago?’, and to report, ‘Mama wonders why she is the recipient of strange children without name, or habitation or connection’ (HLP to EP, 10 July 1928 [Beinecke]). Isabel herself, in a letter of 22 Sept. 1928, asked EP, ‘Why cannot the three or four of you spend the season with us?’ (Beinecke).

‘That she shd’: EP to OR, [18 Jan. 1930] (Beinecke/OR).

‘She dont seem to understand’: EP to OR, ‘second letter’, [18 Jan. 1930] (Beinecke/OR).

‘she get it into her head’: EP to OR, 24 Jan. [1930] (Beinecke/OR).

the god: OR to EP, [25 or 26 Jan. 1930] (Beinecke/OR).

the centre: EP to OR, 27 Jan. [1930] (Beinecke/OR).

relationship that could not speak its name: paragraph based on OR’s ‘Diary–1931’ (Beinecke/OR).

‘Uproarious evening’: EP to DP, 30 Apr. [1930] (Lilly).

‘Omar comes to tea’: DP to EP, 26 Apr. 1930 (Lilly).

124 Jenkintown Times-Chronicle: detail from Stock: 1976, 89.

photograph: reproduced in Discretions—but misdated ‘1929’ (for 1930). See also Stock: 1976, 20.

Can Grande’s grin: EP p.c. to DP, [1 June 1930] (Lilly). Cf. 78/481.

‘For Ezra’: the inscribed copy is in HRC.

‘than, say, the followers’: my account of the opera and its reception is drawn from the New York Herald’s Paris and Berlin critics’ reviews as cited by Conover, 95.

pampered parasites: EP to W. B. Johnson, 10 Aug. 1930, reproduced in facsimile in A Selected Catalogue of the Ezra Pound Collection at Hamilton College, compiled with notes by Cameron McWhirter and Randall L. Ericson (Clinton, NY: Hamilton College Library, 2005), pp. 18–20.

to recommend Zukofsky: cf. EP/LZ 37n.

casting about: e.g. see EP to DP, 30 July [1930] (Lilly), mentioning books for her to look out for in London; EP to LZ, 20 Feb. and 5 Oct. 1931 (HRC).

‘swatting at’ John Adams: EP to DP, 28 Apr. 1931 (Lilly).

125 ‘Read, study the languages’: Mary Oppen, Meaning A Life, p. 132.

seized a copy: detail from Hugh Ford, Published in Paris (Garnstone Press, 1975), p. 112.

‘abandonment of logic’: Winters’s words are cited by EP in a letter to the editor, ‘Mr Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”’, NEW III.4 (11 May 1933) 96.

‘fifty years hence’: Yvor Winters to EP, 12 June 1928 (Beinecke).

Ford…out of money: FMF to EP, 18 Aug. 1931; EP to FMF, 20 and 21 Aug. 1931; EP/FMF 92–3.

‘The Child’: DP to EP, 3 Sept. 1931 (Lilly).

her mother’s shares: DP to EP, [? 21 Sept. 1931] (Lilly).

leaving her estate: OS to EP, 27 Oct. 1929 (Lilly). On 16 July 1927 DP had written from London to EP in Venice: ‘Signed up a new Will yesterday:/Parkyn worried about my leaving you the necklace—but it’s done: also all my USA money to you absolutely: and interest for life on my parents’ marriage settlement money, the capital of which goes on to Omar’ (Lilly).

the sterling crisis: this was the major preoccupation of the many letters exchanged between DP and EP in September and October 1931.

Pound reported: EP to DP, 23 Sept. [1931]—second part—(Lilly).

‘cooking again’: EP to DP, 30 Sept. [1931] (Lilly).

‘more exciting’: EP to DP, 23 Sept. [1931]—second part—(Lilly).

126 ‘insurance policy’: EP to DP, [7 Oct. 1931] (Lilly).

‘man without a country’: in quotes in EP to DP, 13 Oct. [1931] (Lilly). On this see also EP to DP, 24 Sept. [1931] (Lilly).

‘crowd of unemployed’: DP to EP, 7 Oct. 1931 (Lilly).

his bust by Gaudier: see EP to DP, 1 Nov. [1931] (Lilly); and ‘Peregrinations, 1960’, GB 146.

‘When I can git on’: EP to Aldington, 26 Aug. 1927 (HRC).

‘have now material’: EP to DP, 4 Oct. [1931] (Lilly).

127 ‘toward Canto XXXX’: EP to editors of Contempo, 8 Nov. [1932] (HRC).

‘dead with work’: EP to editors of Contempo, [20 Dec. 1932] (HRC).

‘Form of the whole’: EP to FMF, 5 Sept. [1932], EP/FMF 111.

collected edition of his prose: see Gallup: 1983, 452 (E6h).

To, Publishers: details from Mary Oppen, Meaning A Life, pp. 131–2; and from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ed., The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1990), pp. [1], 370 n. 2.

‘no possibility’: George Oppen to EP, [Aug.? 1932], Selected Letters of George Oppen, p. 3. Darantière: a printer in Dijon.

Pound’s idea: EP to IWP, 22 Nov. 1927, EP/Parents 641.

Pound’s outline: with ‘Collected Prose’ (Beinecke).

128 ‘instinct of negation’: EP, ‘Henry James’, LE 324n.

‘a critical narrative’: EP, Active Anth, p. [5].

Profile: my outline follows Pound’s ‘Table’ on p. 113.

‘the first effort’: EP, ‘Manifesto’, Poetry XLI.1 (Oct. 1932) 41.

129 ‘neo’-Gongorism’: EP, Profile 127.

‘feel of actual speech’: EP, ‘Notes on Particular Details’, Active Anth 253–4.

‘something solid’: EP, ‘“Active Anthology” (Retrospect twenty months later)’, Polite Essays 153–4.

‘the revolution’: EP, ‘Praefatio aut tumulus cimicium’, Active Anth 10; and PE 136.

‘to admire Ezra’s peceptions’: LZ to WCW, 23 Feb. 1949, The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams & Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), p. 410.

‘Omar’s birthday’: DP to EP, 11 Sept. 1932 (Lilly).

‘Max Ernst’: Caresse Crosby to EP, 13 Dec. 1932; EP to Caresse Crosby, 15 Dec. 1932; as in Anne Conover, ‘Ezra Pound and the Crosby Continental Editions’, Ezra Pound and Europe, ed. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), p. 117.

130 ‘Le Fiamme Nere’: see Gallup:1983, 156–7 (B31); Niccolò Zapponi, L’Italia di Ezra Pound (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1976), pp. 48–9; also EP to DP, 23 Dec. [1932] (Lilly).

PART TWO: 1933–1939

3. A DEMOCRAT IN ITALY, 1933

Il Poeta meets Il Duce

Note: Mussolini’s political programme is referred to throughout as Fascism (with a capital) to avoid confusion with lower-case ‘fascism’—the former has a definite reference; the latter now is so ill defined and so charged with undiscriminating prejudice as to be nearly unusable. It is particularly important to observe the differences between Mussolini’s Italian Fascism and Hitler’s German National Socialism: the twin dynamics of Nazism were anti-Semitism and the will to be the master race destined for world conquest; while Fascism was not racist, not intent on dominating other nations, and had its own quite distinct dynamic. The current habit among critics of lowering ‘Fascism’ to ‘fascism’—though still writing ‘Nazism’ and ‘Communism’—does not, to put it mildly, make for accurate perception and judgement. The fact that Pound frequently omitted the capital does not establish a precedent, since he was writing before the word had become detached from Mussolini and Italy. For the sake of clarity, in quoting him, I have silently introduced the capital wherever it is apparent that he was referring to Mussolini’s Fascism, as he invariably was.

In this section I have been helped by the following: John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003); Wendy Stallard Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Luca Gallesi, Le origini del Fascismo di Ezra Pound (Milano: Edizioni Ares, 2005); A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1947); Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German–Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy 1922–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Institute of Jewish Affairs, London, 1978); Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography (Hutchinson & Co., [1928]); Benito Mussolini, The Corporate State, 2nd edn. (Florence: Vallecchi Publisher, 1938/XVI); Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (New York: New American Library, 1969); Odon Por, Fascism (Labour Publishing Co., 1923); Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); [Lincoln Steffens], The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931); Zeev Sternhel, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, 1996); Niccolò Zapponi, L’Italia di Ezra Pound (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1976).

133 Capo del Governo…Il Duce: see Farrell, Mussolini, pp. 178–9.

134 ‘whose crowning glory’: Farrell, Mussolini, p. 190.

‘The great Public Utilities’: Mussolini, Autobiography, pp. 268–9. ‘A lady who had long known the Duce complained about Italy’s being Prussianized one day when a train started on time’ (EP, J/M 51).

‘The citizen’: Mussolini, Autobiography, p. 257. The Dottrina del fascismo (1932) declared Fascism’s idea of the state to be anti-individualistic—see Farrell, Mussolini, p. 222.

135 ‘increasingly important’: Mussolini, Autobiography, p. 258.

‘to end the cruel fact’: Mussolini, ‘To the Workers of Milan’, 6 Oct. 1934–XII, The Corporate State, p. 57.

‘The Roman genius’: Churchill’s words as cited in Farrell, Mussolini, p. 225. From Pound’s viewpoint it appeared that Churchill could only have spoken in favour of Fascism because he did not understand it—see ‘Murder by Capital’, Criterion XII.49 (July 1933) 592.

‘the virtue of force’: from Fortune in 1932, as in Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 38.

‘only real friend’: Roosevelt’s words as cited in Farrell, Mussolini, p. 225.

136 The democratic consensus: see Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 37 and generally.

‘Ours was like that’: 46/231.

‘VOLUNTÀ’: EP, ‘Ave Roma’, Il Mare XXVI.1243 (7 Jan. 1933) 3, 4.

Sala del Mappamondo: details from Farrell, Mussolini, pp. 228–9.

137 at 17.30: EP, note prefacing Oro e lavoro (1944), reprinted in Lavoro ed usura: tre saggi (Milano: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro di Vanni Scheiwiller, 1996), p. [28].

‘went poking around’: EP to MdR, 17 Oct. 1957 (Beinecke).

‘One of [my]’: EP to Sarah Perkins Cope, 15 Jan. 1934, L(1951) 335.

‘to put my ideas in order’: EP as told to McNaughton, see William McNaughton, ‘Kingdoms of the Earp: Carpenter and Criticism’, Pai 21.3 (1992) 13–14; see also 87/569 and 92/626.

as Pound told it: to McNaughton; also to John Dewey—the words attributed to Mussolini are in EP to Dewey, 13 Nov. 1934, as cited in Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), p. 257 n. 37. In a letter to W. E. Woodward dated 28 Nov. [1933] EP emphasized Mussolini’s wanting to ‘think before yapping’ (EPEC 76).

eighteen items: see EP, note prefacing Oro e lavoro (1944), reprinted in Lavoro ed usura (1996), p. [28]; and ‘Di un sistema economico’, Meridiano di Roma V.48 (1 Dec. 1940) [1]–2—this gives the 18 points raised in 1933. That ‘taxation is unnecessary’ was a main point is confirmed by EP to Borah, 7 July 1934, EP/WB 29.

‘had a long hour’: EP to DP, 30 Jan. 1933 (Lilly).

Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel: EP to DP, 2 Feb. 1933 [‘Giov. soir’] (Lilly).

the town band: detail recalled by Guiseppe Bacigalupo, Ieri a Rapallo (Pasian di Prato (UD): Campanotto Editore, nuova edizione accresciuta 2002, 2006), p. 82.

138 ‘end with Sigismondo’: EP to John Drummond, 18 Feb. [1933], L(1951) 320. L’s assigning this letter to 1932 is shown to be mistaken by EP’s writing ‘Faber is bringing out my ABC of Economics in a few weeks’.

Zagreus: see p. 34 above.

Isis-Osiris: see EP: Poet I 169.

‘“Dio ti benedica”’: EP, J/M 40.

hotel-keeper in Rimini: EP, J/M 26–7.

Farinacci: EP, J/M 53–4.

139 ‘cavalieri della morte’: EP, J/M 50–1.

will: this and the following two paragraphs are based on J/M 15–21. For the sentence concerning Physique de l’amour see NPL 153–6, and p. 73 above.

his De Monarchia: EP to Carlo Izzo, 23 Aug. [1935], P&P IX, 97. Dante’s De Monarchia is concerned with the problem of how to achieve a just society on earth, and there are indeed close parallels with J/M. Dante states that the well-regulated society will be achieved when love of natural perfection directs the will to act justly (directio volontatis); he declares the opposite of Justice to be Greed; and he maintains that only under a single ruling or guiding power, a king or an emperor, will the earthly paradise be attained. 140 ‘a risorgimento’: EP, J/M 89.

‘I was there’: Steffens, Autobiography, 818.

Gregor…found reason: see Gregor, Young Mussolini, 233.

‘driven by a vast and deep “concern”’: EP, J/M 34.

Steffens…come to terms’: Steffens, Autobiography, 818, 816.

‘passion for construction’: EP, J/M 34.

141 ‘any means’…‘the best’: EP, J/M 95, 91.

dictatorship…‘intelligence’: see EP, ‘Dictatorship as a Sign of Intelligence’, ABCE 119.

‘presumably right’: EP, J/M 45.

‘stabilize the lira’: Steffens, Autobiography, 824.

breaking free…preconceptions: Steffens, Autobiography, 816; EP, J/M 25ff., 35, 45.

‘takes a genius’: EP, J/M 26.

invented new laws: EP, J/M 76–7.

embargo on emigration: EP, J/M 72.

‘birds in the olive-yards’: EP, J/M 91.

distribution of credit: see EP, J/M 48, 69, 80–1, 116–17.

142 ‘nothing in Europe’: EP, J/M 93.

‘no other clot’: EP, J/M 61.

‘damning and breaking’: EP, ‘Declaration’, New Democracy II.2/3 (30 Mar./14 Apr. 1934) 5.

‘use of the public credit’: EP, ‘The Italian Score’, NEW VII.6 (23 May 1935) 107.

‘greed system’: EP, ‘Mussolini Defines State as “Spirit of the People”’, Chicago Tribune, Paris (9 Apr. 1934) 5.

‘firm belief’: EP, J/M 128. Cf. ABCE 38 re ‘will toward order’.

Confucian vision: see J/M 112–13, and pp. 74–6 above.

dreaming again…a renaissance: see EP: Poet I 262–3.

‘I dream for Italy’: EP, ‘Marches Civilization…’, Chicago Tribune, Paris, 5, 975 ([?31 Dec. 1933]), Italian Supplement 1933, p. 21.

did not advocate…‘the American system’: EP, J/M 98.

‘greater care’…‘orientation of will’: EP, J/M 104, 105.

‘accidental’: EP, J/M 127–8.

143 Roosevelt: EP expressed a measure of hope in his ‘September [1933] Preface’ added to J/M in the 1936 Liveright edition.

‘our democratic system’: emphasis added here.

‘I have a country’: EP to DP, 5 July 1933 (Lilly).

Revolutionary economics

There is a great deal of material relevant to this section in Pound’s contributions to periodicals in the years 1933 to 1935 collected in P&P VI, 1933–5. ABC of Economics (1933) is included in S Pr, along with a substantial selection of Pound’s essays on ‘civilisation, money and history’. The commentary and notes by E. P. Walkiewicz and Hugh Witemeyer [W&W] in their Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting: A Political Correspondence, 1930–1935 (1995) are outstandingly helpful. Other welcome editions of EP’s politico-economic correspondence are: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah (2001), ed. Sarah C. Holmes; ‘Dear Uncle George’: The Correspondence Between Ezra Pound and Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts (1996), ed. Philip J. Burns; ‘Ezra Pound: Letters to Woodward’, [ed. James Generoso], Pai 15.1 (1986) 105–20—see also James Generoso, ‘I reckon you pass, Mr Wuddwudd’, Pai 22.1-2 (1993) 35–55; Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940, ed. and annotated by Roxana Preda (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

Among the many studies of Pound’s economics I have consulted particularly chapters in these books: Leon Surette, A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ (Macmillan, 1986); Wendy Stallard Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Alec Marsh, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams and the Spirit of Modernity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998); Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Luca Gallesi, ed., Ezra Pound e l’economia (Milano: Edizioni Ares, 2001). Extensive bibliographies can be found in the books by Marsh, Redman, and Surette: 1999.

144 ‘Contemporary economics’: EP to Zabel, [? 1934] (Beinecke).

‘The vitality of thought’: EP to Ibbotson, [5 Apr. 1935], EP/Ibb 18.

‘Without an understanding’: EP, ‘The New English Weekly’, Contempo III.9 (15 May 1932) 2.

‘Your generation’: EP, ‘To the Young, If Any’, Little Magazine I.4 (July/Aug. 1934) 1–3.

‘god dam it’: EP to Woodward, 7 Feb. [1934], Pai 15.1 (1986) 116.

‘the modern mind’: EP, ‘What Price the Muses Now’, [a review of TSE’s The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism], NEW V.6 (24 May 1930) 132.

not that ‘economics’: EP, ‘Mr. T. S. Eliot’s Quandaries’, NEW V.2 (26 Apr. 1934) 48.

impatient with Joyce: see for example EP, ‘Past History’ (May 1933), in EP/JJ 251–2.

‘worse than blind’: EP to LZ, 28 May]1935], EP/LZ 169.

‘The next anthology’: EP to LZ, 6 Mar. 1935, EP/LZ 162.

145 ‘I think both you and Hem’: EP to Robert McAlmon, 2 Feb. [1934], L(1951) 337. See also L(1950) 283 for EP to Hemingway, 28 Nov. 1936.

‘if you agree’: EP to WCW, [Oct. 1934], EP/WCW 146.

‘Aw what’s the use’: WCW to EP, 23 Oct. 1934, EP.WCW 149.

‘fed u p (up)’: EP, ‘Jean Cocteau Sociologist’, NEW VI.13 (10 Jan. 1935) 272; repr. S Pr 405.

‘Against [the] phalanx’: EP, ‘The Matter of Life or Death’, unpublished TSS, n.d. (HRC).

‘The college presidents’: EP,‘Ignite! Ignite!’, Harvard Advocate CXX.3 (Dec. 1933) 3.

having boiled: cf. EP to Borah, 23 [May] 1935—‘I observe these internal boilings, just like a man in a laboratory’ (EP/WB 34).

146 ‘all my cursing’: EP to John Buchan, 22 Oct. 1934, ‘Letters to John Buchan, 1934–1935’, ed. S. Namjoshi, Pai 8.3 (1979) 470.

‘What causes’: this paragraph and the next from EP, ‘Murder by Capital’, Criterion XII.49 (July 1933) 585–92; repr. S Pr 197–202.

‘miserliness’: EP, ABCE 126.

147 private correspondence: Roxana Preda in preparing her selection from EP’s economic correspondence in the 1930s noted that in 1935 alone ‘the poet was writing letters on economics to about seventy people—EPEC 43.

Committee for the Nation: see EP/BC 109 (under ‘Vanderlip’).

‘A Jeffersonian’: EP to Woodward, 8 Oct. [1933], Pai 15.1 (1986) 108, 107.

that…work be shared: see ABCE 20–1; also 42–5, 54–6, 74. For EP against the dole see EP to Cutting, 11 Feb. 1932, EP/BC 71–2.

‘no real overproduction’: EP to Woodward, 7 Feb. [1934], Pai 15.1 (1986) 111.

148 ‘an infamy’: EP, ‘Ecclesiastical History’, NEW V.12 (5 July 1934) 273; repr. S Pr 63. EP repeated this or similar formulations on innumerable occasions.

contrary to the Constitution: see Art. I, section 8, par. 5 of the US Constitution; also Jerry Voorhis, ‘The Mysteries of the Federal Reserve System’, Pai 11.3 (1982) 488–97.

‘What does the government do’: Bronson Cutting, ‘Government Bank Urged by Cutting’, New York Times (20 May 1934) 32, from a speech to the People’s Lobby in Washington, quoted by W&W in EP/BC 99–100, 245 n. 41.

‘monopolize the credit’: BC, speaking in the Senate 27 Jan. 1934, quoted by W&W in EP/BC 101, 245 n. 48.

might have made it clear: EP to Cutting, 12 June [1934], EP/BC 136.

‘nation owns its own credit’: EP, ‘Ez Sez’, ‘Cutting’s Mind Was Best in the Senate’, Santa Fe New Mexican (3 Aug. 1935) 3, repr. EP/BC 206.

149 ‘old stuff’: EP to Woodward, 7 Feb. [1934], Pai 15.1 (1986) 111–12.

the cultural heritage: EP, ‘Individual and Statal Views: Mr Ezra Pound’s Views’, Plain Dealer, [Brighton, England], XIII n.s. 1 (July 1934); see also ‘In the Wounds: (Memoriam A. R. Orage)’, Criterion XIV.46 (Apr. 1935), S Pr 413–14, and ‘The Individual in his Milieu: A Study of Relations and Gesell’, Criterion XV.58 (Oct. 1935), S Pr 245.

Douglas’s idea: for Douglas’s ideas as Pound first knew them see C. H. Douglas, Economic Democracy (Cecil Palmer, 1920); —Credit-Power and Democracy…With a Commentary by A. R. Orage (Cecil Palmer, 1920); —Social Credit (1924) (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 3rd edn. rev. and enlarged, 1937). Since it is sometimes stated that Douglas was anti-Semitic, with the implication that his economic ideas were tainted with anti-Semitism, it should be noted that in these writings there is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic. For a brief account of Pound’s initial enthusiasm for Douglas see EP: Poet I 372–4.

150 Hugo Black…proposed: see W&W, ‘The Length of the Working Day’, EP/BC 89–90.

a growing consensus: W&W, EP/BC 91. In spite of that consensus, seventy years on, eighty-five years after Douglas’s analysis—see vol. i, 394–6—the problem is still ‘new’:

Herein lies the conundrum. If dramatic advances in productivity can replace more and more human labour, resulting in more workers being let go from the workforce, where will the consumer demand come from to buy all the potential new products and services? We are being forced to face up to an inherent contradiction at the heart of our market economy that has been present since the very beginning, but is only now becoming irreconcilable.…This is the new structural reality that government and business leaders and so many economists are reluctant to acknowledge.

—Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington,

in The Guardian 48979 (2 Mar. 2004) 23.

too radical: see W&W’s note, ‘radical idea’, EP/BC 138.

Father Coughlin: for expressions of EP’s enthusiasm see ‘American Notes. Father Coughlin’, NEW VII.12 (4 July 1935) 225–6, and ‘For a Decent Europe’, British–Italian Bulletin II.11 (14 Mar. 1936) 3. Father Coughlin is invariably characterized by hostile critics as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘populist’, with the implicit and frequently explicit suggestion that that accounts for EP’s interest in his broadcasts and writings. Such critics rarely mention Coughlin’s preaching social justice, and that EP’s endorsements are exclusively of his concern for social justice and monetary reform. Moreover, those endorsements were in 1935 and 1936, whereas Coughlin kept his anti-Semitism out of his broadcasts and writings until 1938.

‘populist demagogue’: see W&W, ‘Huey Long and the “Share Our Wealth Plan”’, EP/BC 93.

‘splendid education’: Woodward to EP, 7 Mar. 1935, cited by W&W, EP/BC 94.

‘Better a wild man’: EP, ‘More Jazz’, unpublished light verse submitted to New Democracy, [? 1935] (HRC).

‘Long wants’: EP, ‘huey , God bless him’, unpublished TSS sent to New Democracy ‘13 or 14 Aug.’ 1935 (HRC)—reproduced here as Appendix D. For EP’s covering letter to Gorham Munson see EPEC 158–9.

153 ‘With sane economics’: EP to Woodward, 8 Oct. [1933], Pai 15.1 (1986) 108; also EPEC 68.

‘utterly necessary’…‘inconceivable’: EPEC 68; re England, see EP to John Buchan, [1934], ‘Letters to John Buchan, 1934–1935’, Pai 8.3 (1979) 467.

‘“Never”, said Winston’: 41/204–5.

‘the mind of the people’: EP, ‘Social Credit: An Impact’ (1935), as in Impact 144.

‘the few powerful’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VII.13 (11 July 1935), 245.

‘Can’t move ’em’: see ABCE 35, J/M 27, Cantos 19/85, 78/481, 117/678, 113/735, and EP: Poet I 407

154 ‘to base a system on will’: ABCE 33, 38.

‘the first writer’: EP, ‘The Acid Test’, Biosophical Review IV.2 (Winter 1934/5) 23.

‘an heretical movement’: EP, ‘Personalia’, NEW II.19 (23 Feb. 1933) 443.

in his De Monarchia: see Bk. I, chap. xi.

Pound’s agitprop prose: see pp. 99, 106–7 above.

‘Sir,—Without claiming’: EP, ‘Stamp Scrip’, NEW V.7 (31 May 1934) 167. My paragraph is indebted to Flory, The American Ezra Pound, pp. 71–2. For Pound’s review article around Gesell’s The Natural Economic Order see ‘The Individual in his Milieu: A Study of Relations and Gesell’ (1935), S Pr 242–52. For detailed accounts of the theory and practice of stamp scrip see the relevant chapters in Flory, Redman, and Surette: 1999. For John Maynard Keynes’s recognition of Gesell as ‘an unduly neglected prophet’ see his The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (Macmillan & Co., 1936), pp. 353–8.

155 how the miracle was worked: in fact it can be explained very simply—

Imagine for a moment you come across an unexpected ten pounds…you go out and spend it all at once on, say, two pairs of woolly socks. The person from the sock shop then takes your tenner and spends it on wine, and the wine merchant spends it on tickets to see The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and the owner of the cinema spends it on chocolate, and the sweet-shop owner spends it on a bus ticket, and the owner of the bus company deposits it in the bank. That initial ten pounds has been spent six times, and has generated £60 of economic activity. In a sense no one is any better off; and yet, that movement of money makes everyone better off. To put it another way, that first tenner has contributed £60 to Britain’s GDP. Seen in this way, GDP can be thought of as a measure…of velocity.

—John Lanchester, ‘Let’s Call it Failure’, LRB 35.1 (3 Jan. 2013) 3.

‘the state need not borrow’, ‘all the slobs’: 74/441.

‘strangle hold’: EP, ‘Slim Hope’, Chicago Tribune, Paris (3 July 1933) 4.

Borah’s similar views: see EP/WB 7 n. 5.

‘Sir: As an Idahoan’: EP to Wm. A. Borah, 27 Nov. 1933, EP/WB [1].

‘“As an Idahoan”’: Borah to EP, 3 Jan. 1934, EP/WB 4.

156 ‘Thank you’: Borah to EP, 30 Oct. 1935, EP/WB 45.

a traitor to America: see EP/WB 27 n. 2.

‘KINGFISH’: EP to Huey Long, 13 Apr. 1935 (Beinecke)—as in Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism 161; also in EPEC 148.

157 ‘a sufficient phalanx of particulars’: 74/441; see also EP, ‘T. S. Eliot’ (1917), LE 420.

‘The people’: EP to Borah, 23 [May] 1935, EP/WB 35.

158 ‘Roose(n)velt’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VII.12 (4 July 1935) 225. In his ‘American Notes’ in NEW VI.13 (10 Jan. 1935), EP wrote, ‘There is positively no evidence against Roosevelt’s being utterly under the thumb of international finance.’

‘S/S/ should attack’: EP to R. C. Summerville of the Silver Shirt Legion of America, 7 May 1934, as published by New Masses XVIII.12 (17 Mar. 1936) 15.

‘The anti-semitic fury’: EP to [Graham Seton] Hutchinson, 26 May 1936, EPEC 190. In this connection see Miranda B. Hickman on ‘Pound and Arnold Leese’, EP/SN 289–93.

Mussolini’s speech: Mussolini’s words (in my translation) are from Pound’s marked copy of the printed version of his speech (Brunnenburg). EP’s comments are from his ‘The Acid Test’, Biosophical Review IV.2 (Winter 1934/35) 22ff. See also his letter dated 29 Oct. [1934], New York Herald, Paris (1 Nov. 1934) 4.

Making music of history: ‘Cantos 31–41’

159 ‘An epic is’: EP in unpublished draft preface [for Polite Essays], (c.1936) (Beinecke).

‘Never has been’: EP to John Hargrave, [? 1935] (Beinecke).

‘The poet’s job’: EP to Basil Bunting, Dec. 1936, L(1951) 366.

‘to get economic good’: EP to Mary Barnard, 13 Aug. 1934, L(1951) 346.

160 ‘Tempus loquendi’: EP, ‘Three Cantos’ [XXXI, XXXII, XXXIII], Pagany II.3 (July/Sept. 1931), 43.

‘ten fat volumes’: EP, ‘The Central Problem’, Townsman IV.13 (Mar. 1941) 15—translation from ‘L’economia ortologica: Il problema centrale’ (1937).

An early reviewer: Philip Blair Rice, ‘The Education of Ezra Pound’, Nation CXXXIX (21 Nov. 1934) 599–600, in Homberger: 1972, 292–3.

161 ‘a great ruin’: J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Marvels of Walter Benjamin’, New York Review of Books XLVIII.1 (11 Jan. 2001) 33.

William M. Chace: see his ‘The Canto as Cento: A Reading of Canto XXXIII’, Pai 1.1 (1972) 89–100.

‘They say they are chosen’: David Anderson. ‘Breaking the Silence: The Interview of Vanni Ronsisvalle and Pier Paolo Pasolini with Ezra Pound in 1968’, Pai 10.2 (1981) 332, 338 (in part my translation).

‘Can impressions’: WBY, ‘Introduction’, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1936) xxiv.

A time of speaking, | A time of silence: see Ecclesiastes 3: 7.

‘Whatsoever thy hand’: Ecclesiastes 9: 10.

162 Jefferson…the shaping force: see EP, J/M 14–17. See also EP, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’ (1937), ‘National Culture —A Manifesto 1938’, and ‘An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States’ (1944), all three in S Pr.

164 ‘renascent civic sense’: EP, ‘The “Criterion” Passes’, British Union Quarterly III.2 (Apr./June 1939) 71.

composition [of canto 34]: the drafts are at Beinecke.

167 ideogrammic method: see pp. 76–8 above, and, inter alia, EP, ‘Abject and Utter Farce’ (1933), in PE.

168 ‘deficient in capacity’: EP, J/M 37.

169 ‘puritanitis’: EP, J/M 89.

170 ‘le problème des surréalistes’: EP, [reply to questionnaire circulated by André Breton and Paul Éluard on ‘la rencontre capitale de votre vie’], Minotaure, Paris, I.3/4 (15 Dec. 1933) 112.

Jefferson ‘informed’: EP, J/M 14.

‘in the mind indestructible’: 74/442; ‘in jeopardy’: 74/426; ‘formed in the mind’: 74/446.

171 Van Buren and Jackson: see EP, J/M 95; ‘Nothing New’, NEW IV.9 (14 Dec. 1933) 215; ‘Woodward (W. E.) Historian’, NEW X.17 (4 Feb. 1937) 329.

172 ‘life-long fight’: EP, ‘Woodward (W. E.) Historian’, NEW X.17 (4 Feb. 1937) 329.

‘saved the nation’: EP, J/M 95.

misrepresenting the historical facts: on the issue of ‘historicity’ in this canto see Makin: 1985, 190–5. Pound may have held it against Andrew Jackson that—in John Quincy Adams’s words (which were refracted in canto 34)—he had, as a general in the army, ‘by the simultaneous operation of fraudulent treaties and brutal force’ deprived the Cherokee nation in Georgia of their lands ‘and [driven] them out of their dwellings’ (Terrell, Companion: I, 138 n. 83). See also EP to WCW, [Jan. 1935], EP/WCW 156.

173 ‘where is FACTS’: EP to FMF, 16 Nov. [1933], EP/FMF 134.

‘the evil’: EP, ‘The Master of Rapallo Speaks’, Outrider, Cincinnati, I.1 (1 Nov. 1933) 1—in P&P VI, 96.

‘than the production of foodstuffs’: EP, ‘Is it War?’, Time and Tide XIV.39 (30 Sept. 1933) 1149—in P&P VI, 80.

‘100 francs on every 400’: both Monsieur Schneider’s words and those of the other French manufacturer are as in EP, ‘Orientation and News Sense’, NEW II.12 (5 Jan. 1933) 274.

174 ‘between humanity’: EP, ‘Orientation and News Sense’, 273.

‘not proceeding’: EP, ABCE 37.

The ‘thought’: Hugh Witemeyer reads these items very differently—see ‘Pound & the Cantos: “Ply over ply”’, Pai 8.2 (1979) 231–5.

175 a tailor’s: cf. ‘the tailor Blodgett’, EP, ABCR 18–19.

176 Hathor: details from Alain Blottière, Petit Dictionnaire des dieux égyptiens (Paris: Zulma, 2000).

‘Regina coeli’…‘fulvida di folgore’: Dante, Paradiso XXIII, 128, XXX, 62.

‘Coition, the sacrament’: see p. 114 above.

177 ‘We were diddled’: EP, J/M 97.

178 civic responsibility…life of the spirit: see pp. 75–6 above.

Fugue: for a pioneering and still insufficiently noticed investigation see Kay Davis, Fugue and Fresco: Structures in Pound’s Cantos (University of Maine at Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1984).

Yeats…failed to understand: see WBY, A Packet for Ezra Pound (1929), as in A Vision (1937) 4–5.

Note: A historian, the Bank Wars, and the New Deal

181 The source of this note is Arthur Schlesinger Jr, ‘History and National Stupidity’, New York Review of Books LIII.7 (27 Apr. 2006) 14.

4. Things Fall Apart, 1933–1937

To spread order about him

182 Bard…lecture: from TS copy of lecture in Hugh Kenner Archive (HRC).

‘get action’: EP to WCW, [Mar. 1935?], EP/WCW 169.

183 ‘build in his own’: EP, ‘Possibilities of Civilization: What the Small Town Can Do’ (1936), Impact 81. The rest of this paragraph is from the same article—see Impact 75–82.

Herr Hitler: paragraph drawn from William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Secker and Warburg, 1961), pp. 189–213. Sebastian Haffner wrote that there was ‘a one-day—1 April 1933—boycott of Jewish shops’, in his The Meaning of Hitler (1978) (Phoenix Press, 2000), p. 27.

‘Miss Weaver present’: EP to DP, [? 15 May 1933] (Lilly).

184 ‘beeyewteeful blue’: EP to DP, 3 June [1933] (Lilly).

‘“entre nous”’: EP to DP, [24 July 1933] (Lilly).

‘O is livin’: EP to DP, 7 June 1933 (Lilly).

‘Settimana Mozartiana’: details of concerts in June and July 1933 from EP&M 331–4.

‘done privately’: EP to Tibor Serly, Apr. 1940, L(1951) 442.

‘too complicated’: DP to EP, 27 July 1933 (Lilly).

‘deader than mutton’: DP to EP, 15 May 1933 (Lilly). Further details from her letters to EP of 6 and 29 June, and 7 July 1933.

‘All right’: DP to EP, 30 July 1933 (Lilly).

‘Don’t purrpose’: EP to DP, 2 Aug. 1933 (Lilly).

‘pride of the town’: BB to James G. Lieppert (J. Ronald Latimer), 30 Oct. 1932, as cited in Peter Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 64.

185 ‘more savage disciples’: WBY to OS, 2 Mar. 1929, as cited in Norman: 1960, 300.

‘to see you’: LZ to EP, 12 July 1933, EP/LZ 151.

‘chiefly to meet’: from the account in Norman: 1960, 318. Further details, Norman: 1960, 316–18. Bunting spoke of their efforts to reform Pound’s way of reading his cantos at the International Pound Conference, Durham, 27–30 Mar. 1979, when reading from them in his own very fine Northumbrian voice.

‘wit and brilliance’: BB’s phrase for EP’s conversation, in interview with Jonathan Williams cited in Carroll F. Terrell, ‘An Eccentric Profile’, Basil Bunting: Man and Poet (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), p. 50.

telling Zukofsky: see EP to JL, 24 Dec. 1933, EP/JL 9, 10n.

‘about bombarding’: JL to EP, 21 Aug. 1933, EP/JL 3. Further details from the editor’s extracts from JL’s letters to EP, 29 Aug. and 8 Oct. 1933, and from his notes. See also JL’s poem ‘Ezra’, as printed in Pai 26, 2–3 (1997) 231–5.

186 prose blasts: e.g. ‘Abject and Utter Farce’, Harkness Hoot IV.2 (Nov. 1933) 6–14 (included in PE); and ‘Ignite! Ignite!’, Harvard Advocate CXX.3 (Dec. 1933) 3–5.

at Pound’s instigation: ‘It was Ezra’s idea and Munson seems to approve of it and want it’ (JL to WCW, 20 Sept. 1935, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) p. 3).

‘music in winter’: details of the ‘Concerti “Inverno Musicale”’ from EP&M 336–65 and 377–83.

articles for Il Mare: EP wrote these in English, they were published in Italian translation, and translated (not by EP) from the Italian into English for EP&M.

187 Le Chant des Oiseaux… for solo violin: thus EP in Il Mare, 11 Nov. 1933, EP&M 346. See also GK 152–3.

‘Maestro Sansoni’: EP in Il Mare, 16 Sept. 1933, EP&M 337–8.

League of Nations Disarmament: paragraph drawn from Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life, 247–9; and Shirer, Third Reich 210–12.

Mary Barnard: 1909–2002; details from her Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 52ff.

‘How hard’: EP to Mary Barnard, 29 Oct. 1933, Assault on Helicon 53, also L (1951) 331.

‘the medium’: EP to Mary Barnard, 2 Dec. 1933, Assault on Helicon 55.

188 ‘rules’: EP to Mary Barnard, 23 Feb. 1934, Assault on Helicon 56, 57; cf. L (1951) 339.

‘work to a metric scheme’: EP to Mary Barnard, 28 Nov. 1934, Assault on Helicon 76.

translation of Sappho: Sappho: A New Translation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958).

‘Do understand’: EP to Mary Barnard, 22 Jan. 1934, Assault on Helicon 56; L (1951) 336. As to the lessons in ABCR, see particularly EP’s ‘Treatise on Metre’, ABCR 197–206.

‘How to Read’: see LE 15–40.

‘The teacher’: ABCR 83.

‘shd. consume itself’: this formulation is from EP to Laurence Binyon, 30 Aug. 1934, L (1951) 347.

‘dance of the intellect’: EP, ‘How to Read’, LE 25, q.v. for EP’s definitions of all three terms.

‘you will never know’: ABCR 45–6.

189 ‘Literature is news’: ABCR 29.

eases the mind: cf. EP, ‘How to Read’, LE 20; maintaining the language: cf. LE 21, and ABCR 32–5.

‘natural destructivity’: ABCR 192–3.

‘complete exposure’: JL to EP, 8 Oct. 1933, EP/JL 4.

‘point of this experiment’: ABCR 23–4; see also EP&M 323–4.

William Young: see EP&M 356–60.

‘Nevuh’: EP to AB, 4 Apr. 1934 (Lilly).

‘about 95%’: EP to Langston Hughes, 13 May 1935, David Roessel, ed., ‘“A Racial Act”: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Ezra Pound’, Pai 29.1-2 (2000) 229.

‘wackin a tennis ball’: EP to Viola Baxter Jordan, 7 Apr. 1936 (Beinecke).

‘to the movies’: EP to Viola Baxter Jordan, [? 1934] (Beinecke).

190 ‘a new heave’: EP to John Drummond, 4 May 1933, L (1951) 329.

‘syllable by syllable’: EP to Laurence Binyon, 21 Jan. 1934, L (1951) 336. See ‘Hell’, LE 201–13, for EP’s review of Binyon’s version.

‘putting money-power’: EP to Laurence Binyon, 6 Mar.1934, L (1951) 340.

‘would talk of nothing’: WBY, The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (New York: Macmillan Company, 1935), pp. vi–vii. For ‘nobody language’ and ‘the buzzard’ see Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound… (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 81–2.

‘large dog kennel’: JL, Pound as Wuz: Essay and Lectures on Ezra Pound (St Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1987), pp. 13–14. Note: Many of the details in JL’s account appear to be more colourful than accurate. Though he wrote that he ‘was in Rapallo’ when Henghes, ‘a bedraggled figure with his feet bleeding turned up on Ezra’s doorstep’, he was not in fact in Rapallo at that moment (see EP/JL 30–2), and it may be that it amused Henghes to tell a tall tale to his friend JL. Ian Henghes, the sculptor’s son, has kindly communicated the following information. Heinz Clusmann (1906–75), who called himself Heinz Henghes after 1934, ‘had a Jewish mother, a Lutheran father and a Lutheran upbringing’. He was not a refugee from the Nazis, nor did he walk from Hamburg to see Pound. He ran away from home in Hamburg in 1924 and stowed away to America where he lived until 1932. He was then in Paris, where he briefly assisted Brancusi, and went on by train to Italy where he called on Pound. (That was in April 1934.) From Rapallo he wrote to a Dr Kahn: ‘Ezra Pound has given me a place to stay, food & marble to work on for 3 months to finish 3 statues.’ Donna Virginia Agnelli bought three pieces by Henghes in 1934 and 1935, but not (as JL wrote) ‘the striking figure of a centaur, which later became the model for the New Directions colophon’. So far as Ian Henghes knows that drawing was never made into a sculpture. One further correction: the editor of EP/JL writes that the ‘perfect schnorrer’ in 35/174 is Henghes, though this is improbable since Cantos 31–41 were already with the US publishers by Feb. 1934 (L(1951) 338).

‘New sculptor’: EP to Sarah Perkins Cope, 22 Apr. 1934, L (1951) 342.

‘unable to do’: DP to EP, July 1934 (Lilly).

‘This family life’: DP to EP, 20 Aug. 1934 (Lilly).

‘Child very good’: EP to DP, 4 Sept. 1934 (Lilly).

He would write: rest of paragraph from MdR, Discretions 43–57.

191 ‘whatever his crimes’: Shirer, Third Reich 230.

‘Education by provocation’: Samuel Becket, ‘Ex Cathezra’, Bookman 87 (Dec. 1934) 10, cited by JL in ‘Pound the Teacher’, The Master of Those Who Know (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), p. 26.

Hugh MacDiarmid: in Scottish Observer, 24 Dec. 1931, writing under his proper name, C. M. Grieve.

‘bundle of prejudices’: ‘Current Literature’, Spectator 153 (13 July 1934) 66. This and the next five notes are drawn from Vittorio Mondolfo and Helen Shuster, ‘Annotated Checklist of Criticism on Ezra Pound, 1930–1935’, Pai 5.1 (1976) 155–87.

‘insulting’: Eda Lou Walton, ‘Ezra Pound lops off a few more heads’, New York Times Book Review V.7 (7 Oct. 1934) 8.

‘atrocious style’: ‘Mr. Pound as critic’, TLS 1709 (1 Nov. 1934) 751.

192 ‘stumped’: Philip Blair Rice, ‘The Education of Ezra Pound’, Nation 139 (21 Nov. 1934) 600.

‘design is wanting’: Babette Deutsch, ‘With Seven League Boots’, New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 25 Nov. 1934, 18.

‘serious menace’: Rayner Heppenstall, ‘Poetry’, NEW VII.18 (Apr. 1935) 10.

Pound would complain: e.g. in ‘The Acid Test’, Biosophical Review IV.2 (1934/35) 24.

‘more bloody work’: EP to JL, 18 Oct. 1934, EP/JL 34.

‘some brat’: EP to LZ, 16 Oct. [1934] (HRC).

two or three weeks: JL was never specific as to exactly how long he spent at what he called the ‘Ezuversity’ on this his most extended stay. It is usually said that he was there in Nov. and Dec. JL said in Pound as Wuz (p. [3]) that it was arranged for him ‘to study with Pound in his famous Ezuversity for several months’. However, in the summer and autumn of 1934 JL was mostly in London and Paris, and EP/JL gives letters from EP to JL through Oct. and Nov., with one dated 2 Dec.: since JL was spending a good part of every day he was in Rapallo in EP’s company it seems improbable that EP would also be typing full letters to him while he was there. JL’s thank-you letter to EP from Lausanne is dated 21 Dec. 1934—it is cited by Emily Mitchell Wallace in her invaluably informative portrait, ‘“A Bridge over worlds”: A Partial Portrait of James Laughlin IV’. Pai 31 (2002) 210. Also, EP was away from Rapallo for at least a day or two around the 10th, when he went down to Rome to record a radio talk. Evidently the magnitude of the occasion for JL was not to be measured by the amount of time but by its intensity.

‘learned more’: JL, as cited from his Random Essays by Emily Mitchell Wallace in ‘“A Bridge over worlds”’, Pai 31 (2002) 210.

‘trying…to write poetry’: JL, Pound as Wuz 7—rest of paragraph from JL, Pound as Wuz 7.

the daily class: JL, ‘Pound the Teacher’, The Master of Those Who Know 2–5. Cf. the similar account in Pound as Wuz 4–6.

193 ‘So that he could easily find’: JL, Pound as Wuz 6–7.

‘spose the keynote’: EP to Francesco Monotti, 22 Nov. [1934] (Beinecke). Further details from letters exchanged between EP and Monotti in Nov. 1934 (Beinecke). The article seen by Ciano would have been ‘Mussolini Defines State as “Spirit of the People”: Fascism Analyzed by Ezra Pound, Noted American Writer’, Chicago Tribune, Paris (9 Apr. 1934) 5.

‘greatly honoured’: EP to Galeazzo Ciano, 23 Nov. 1934, as cited in Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism 158.

‘economic triumph’: William Bird to EP, 2 May 1935, as cited in Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism 158.

‘don’t understand’: [? Ciano] to EP, 17 Jan. 1935 (Beinecke).

194 ‘onlie begetter’: W. H. D. Rouse, ‘Note’, The Story of Odysseus: A Translation of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ into Plain English (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1937), p. v.

‘about the campaign’: EP to W. H. D. Rouse, 30 Dec. 1934, L (1951) 349–51.

‘a readable story’: W. H. D. Rouse, ‘Note’, The Story of Odysseus v.

‘What we have done’: William Atheling (E.P.), ‘Throttling Music’, NEW VII.13 (11 July 1935) 247–8, as in EP&M 377.

‘save ten lire’: EP, ‘Money versus Music’, Delphian Quarterly XIX.1 (Jan. 1936), as in EP&M 382.

195 ‘a racket’: EP, ‘Throttling Music’, EP&M 375.

‘black rot of usury’: EP, ‘Throttling Music’, EP&M 375.

‘Serly sees’: EP, ‘Tibor Serly, Composer’, NEW VI.24 (28 Mar. 1935) 495, in EP&M 372.

‘Stravinsky’: NEW VI.24 (28 Mar. 1935) 495, in EP&M 372.

‘at Dead End’: EP to DP, 1 July 1935 (Lilly).

‘no use arguing’: EP to DP, 5 July 1935 (Lilly).

into Austria…Wörgl: details from EP to HLP, 5 Aug. 1935 (Beinecke); EP to DP, 5 Aug. 1935, (Lilly); Wallace, ‘“A Bridge over worlds”’, Pai 31 (2002) 212; 74/441; JL, Pound as Wuz 12; see also p. 155 above.

troops…to the Brenner: cf. Farrell, Mussolini, 250–1.

‘proudly showed’: MdR, Discretions 79.

196 ‘Marieka’: EP to DP, 2 Sept. 1935 (Lilly).

‘amazin kid’: EP to JL, 23 Sept. 1935, EP/JL 44.

laws for maria: MdR, Discretions 69–70.

The turning point: 1935–1936

Sources: G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, A Short History of International Affairs, 1920–1939 (Oxford University Press under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 4th edn., 1950); William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Secker and Warburg, 1961); Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 2003).

196 ‘Jews had been excluded’: Shirer, Third Reich 233.

197 Hitler…mad: see Farrell, Mussolini, 249–50.

‘First of all’: Mussolini to Jean-Louis Malvy, June 1936, Farrell, Mussolini, 279, citing Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il duce, i. 749–50.

198 ‘A large and influential’: Claud Cockburn, The Week (18 Oct. 1933). Further details from The Week (30 Aug. 1933). Cockburn’s weekly newsletter was mimeographed from typewritten copy and published from 34 Victoria St., London SW1. In Pound’s library (now in HRC) were forty-two issues, starting with no. [20], 9 August 1933.

‘The main line’: Cockburn, The Week (1 Nov. 1933).

199 ‘German and Italian’: Shirer, Third Reich 298, citing Ciano’s Diplomatic Papers, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, pp. 43–8.

‘The boss knows his business’

199 a storm: see EP to Tinkham, 2 Sept. [1935], EP/GT 52.

‘Keep KAAAAAAM’: EP to HLP, 13 Sept. 1935 (Beinecke).

‘Seminole war’: Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edn., New York, 1910), xxiv. 616.

‘clear conscience’: EP to Borah, 10 Oct. 1935, EP/WB 42.

sorry: EP to Borah, [15 Nov. 1935], EP/WB 46.

‘necessary’: EP to WCW, [1935], cited in note, EP/WCW 174.

‘wrong’: EP to Borah, [15 Nov. 1935], EP/WB 46.

‘victim tribes’: EP to Borah, [Nov. 1935], EP/WB 49.

‘enormous advance’: EP to Borah, 10 Oct. 1935, EP/WB 42.

uncivilized: see EP to Borah, [Nov. 1935], EP/WB 49.

‘had no battles’: PE 49, 51.

‘Italy needs Abyssinia’: EP, ‘The Fascist Ideal’, British–Italian Bulletin II.16 (18 Apr. 1936) 2. Mussolini had said on 23 Mar. 1936–XIV, that Italy, under siege in an economic war decreed by Geneva on account of its glorious victories in Abyssinia, ‘can and must attain the maximum level of economic independence’ (Benito Mussolini, The Corporate State, 2nd edn. (Florence: Vallecchi Publisher, 1938/XVI)).

200 poison gas: see A. W. Palmer, A Dictionary of Modern History, 1789–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 15.

‘Abyssinian acquisition’: GK 229.

‘Italian empire’: EP, ‘A Good Surgeon Does Not Always Amputate’, British–Italian Bulletin II.39 (24 Oct.1936) [1].

‘I am, if you like’: EP, ‘For a Decent Europe’, British–Italian Bulletin II.11 (14 Mar. 1936) 3.

‘international’: EP, ‘Twelve Years and Twelve Years’, British–Italian Bulletin I.8 (27 Dec. 1935) 1. According to Douglas Goldring, in a letter dated 4 Feb. 1944 to the editor of Tribume, Pound’s ‘views on Abyssinia were shared by most English Catholic converts as well as by a considerable number of English Army officers and Foreign Office high-ups. Admiration of Mussolini, as of Franco, was prevalent among our Conservative class, at least until June 1940’—a copy of Goldring’s letter is in Pound MSS II, Box 20 (Lilly).

‘for humanity’: EP, ‘“We Have Had No Battles But We Have All Joined In And Made Roads”’, PE 55.

‘during the two months’: EP, ‘For a Measure’, British–Italian Bulletin II.12 (21 Mar. 1936) 4.

a project: see below.

Minister of Agriculture: detail from EP to HLP, [Oct. 1935] (Beinecke).

Olivia Rossetti Agresti: details from EP to DP, [Nov. 1935] (Lilly), and 76/452.

‘old New Age–Orage man’: Odon Por to EP, Apr. 1934, as in Redman 156.

worked…with Por: see EP to DP, 31 Oct. 1935 (Lilly).

British–Italian Bulletin set up: see EP, ‘Readers of the B. I. B. Listen!’, British–Italian Bulletin II.32 (5 Sept.1936) 3.

201 ‘offered to pay’: EP to Por, [c.21 Dec. 1935], as in Redman 167.

Por arranged: information in this para. from Redman 169–70. See also EP to Por, 4 Jan. [1936], EPEC 175–8.

‘anything except economics’: Por to EP, 14 June 1935, as in Redman 163.

‘can’t put [him]’: Por to EP, 21 Mar. 1936, as in Redman 170.

‘Foreign Office is afraid’: Por to EP, 13 May 1936, as in Redman 170.

‘A strong Italy’…‘pressure towards war’: EP, ‘Twelve Years and Twelve Years’, British–Italian Bulletin I.8 (27 Dec. 1935) 1.

small war in Africa: see EP to Tinkham, 2 Sept. [1935], EP/GT 53; see also EP to Borah, 10 Oct. 1935, EP/WB 42.

202 ‘attempt to starve’…‘main purpose’: EP to Borah, [1935], EP/WB 55. EP/WB gives ‘large scare crime’, but ‘larger scale’ appears to be intended.

‘The question’: EP to Borah, 1 Oct. 1935, EP/WB 40; carbon copy to Tinkham, EP/GT 57.

‘signed statements’: EP, ‘Italy’s Frame-up’, British–Italian Bulletin II.5 (1 Feb. 1936) 2.

Eden…‘married into’: EP to Tinkham, 27 Dec. [1935], EP/GT 60; see also EP to Borah, [Dec.] 1935, EP/WB 52.

Lord Cranbourne: EP to Tinkham, [Jan. or Feb. 1936], EP/GT 65.

‘the men now crying out’: EP, ‘Twelve Years and Twelve Years’, British–Italian Bulletin I.8 (27 Dec. 1935) 1.

Mussolini’s secretariat…project: The project is reproduced in Zapponi, L’Italia di Ezra Pound, pp. 205–8; for the secretariat’s comments see Zapponi, L’Italia di Ezra Pound, p. 51.

203 ‘The total’: EP, ‘A Good Surgeon Does Not Always Amputate’, British–Italian Bulletin II.39 (24 Oct. 1936) [1].

in the Fascist press: see Farrell 268. EP told Cunningham Graham (in late 1935?) that the letter from Captain Goldoni was ‘not press propaganda’ but a ‘private letter from a chap I know, sent to a friend in this village’ (Beinecke).

204 ‘a blind eye’: BB to EP, ‘last of 1935’ (Beinecke).

time he was got rid of: BB to EP, 21 Mar. 1934 (Beinecke).

his faith in Mussolini: see for example, EP, ‘Moneta fascista’, La Vita Italiana, Rome, XXIV.274 (Jan./June 1936) [33]–37.

military virtues: see EP, ‘Confucius’ Formula Up-to-date’, British–Italian Bulletin II.3 (18 Jan. 1936) 4; ‘The Treasure of a State’, British–Italian Bulletin II.13 (28 Mar. 1936) 4.

Bank of Italy nationalized: see EP, ‘Great Comfort of Latin Mind: The Italian Bank Act’, British–Italian Bulletin II.14 (4 Apr. 1936) 4; ‘Organic Democracy’, British–Italian Bulletin II.15 (11 Apr. 1936) 2; ‘A Civilising Force on the Move: The Bank Reform’, British–Italian Bulletin II.21 (23 May 1936) 3.

‘DUCE!’: EP to Mussolini, 22 Dec. 1936, in Zapponi, L’Italia di Ezra Pound, 52.

Music, money, cantos

204 announced in Il Mare: [EP], ‘Studi Tigulliani’, Il Mare XXIX.1409 (14 Mar. 1936) [1]; in English translation in EP&M 384–7.

‘being interned’: EP to OR, 5 May 1935 (Beinecke/OR)—cited Conover, 122.

had resolved themselves: EP, ‘A Letter from Rapallo’, Japan Times & Mail, Tokyo (7 and 8 Jan. 1940) [8]—in EP&M 455, in EP&J 158.

‘eccentric musicologists’: from Stephen J. Adams, ‘Pound, Olga Rudge, and the “Risveglio Vivaldiano”’, Pai 4.1 (1975) 118. This article, and R. Murray Schafer’s pp. 328–30 in EP&M, provide expert information on the Vivaldi revival. Further details concerning Olga Rudge’s part from Conover, 125–8.

205 makes order…‘an example of order’: see GK 255 and 281–3.

would deliver to Faber & Faber in November: information from EP to LZ, 29 Nov. 1936 (HRC); also EP to AB, 2 Dec. 1936 (Lilly),

Swabey’s recollections: Henry Swabey, ‘A Page Without Which…’, Pai 5.2 (1976) 329–30.

206 Pound had suggested: EP to Swabey, 3 Mar. [1935], L (1951) 359. See also EP to Swabey, 26 Mar. [1936], L (1951) 367–8.

defeated by the champion: EP to WCW, 28 Apr. 1936, EP/WCW 180, 181n.

‘I don’t see you’: EP to Antheil, 4 May 1936 (Lilly).

‘Now that I had reached’: Henry Swabey, ‘A Page Without Which…’, Pai 5.2 (1976)

330. Pound’s ‘Guide to Italy’ is printed on pp. 336–7.

207 painted ceiling: cf. EP from Siena to Katue Kitasono, 12 Aug. 1936, ‘This is the only town where I have ever been able to live in a palace with a painted ceiling’ (EP&J 31).

‘Depressing country’: DP to EP, 27 July 1936 (Lilly).

‘Main points’: EP to DP, 29 July 1936 (Lilly).

what he had written: see Social Credit: An Impact: reprinted, revised and condensed, in Impact 147; also ‘Banking Beneficence and…’, NA LVI.16 (14 Feb. 1935) 184–5.

interest-bearing current account: information from EP, Personal Papers (Beinecke).

‘hot here’: EP to HLP, 29 July 1936 (Beinecke).

‘damn HARD’: EP to DP, 20 Aug. [1936] (Lilly).

five notebooks: now with Poetry Notebooks in Beinecke.

‘the 10-vol bloke’: Il Monte dei Paschi di Siena e le Aziende in Esso Riunite, ed. Narciso Mengozzi (Siena, 1891–1925). EP’s principle other historian was Antonio Zobi, Storia civile della Toscana dal MDCCXXXVII al MDCCCXLVIII, 5 vols. (Firenze, 1850–2).

good music in Siena: EP to HLP, 7 Aug. 1936 (Beinecke).

208 ‘thanks & love’: DP to EP, 26 Aug. 1936 (Lilly).

‘new raise in pay’: EP to DP, 20 Aug. 1936 (Lilly).

‘money money money’: EP, ‘Ezra Pound Shouts the Money Money Money Chorus’, Attack! ([after 10 July] 1935) [2]. The ‘Venison’ song was first printed in NEW V.9 (14 June 1934) 205, and was collected with the other ‘Poems of Alfred Venison’ in a pamphlet published by Stanley Nott in 1935—reprinted in P&T; the collection was included in appendix II of the new edition of Personae (1926) published by New Directions in 1949, and in Faber & Faber’s 1952 edition of Personae.

‘OUT of Bloomsbury’: EP to Hargrave, 21 Jan. 1935, as cited (with informative commentary) by Wendy Flory in her The American Ezra Pound, p. 76.

didn’t think much of…Mosley: e.g. EP to Gorham Munson, [16 June 1935], ‘do can those asses who talk of fascism as if the Corporate State/Hitler & stinky Mosley were all one’ (HRC).

‘Big nooz’: EP to HLP, 12 Aug. 1936 (Beinecke). Also EP to DP, 12 Aug. 1936, ‘BUF agrees to Social Credit analysis’ (Lilly).

209 ‘pickin’ daiseyes’: EP to DP, 26 Aug. 1936 (Lilly).

‘the word “fascism”’: DP to EP, 26 Aug. 1936 (Lilly).

‘Stalinists’: EP to DP, 29 Aug. 1936 (Lilly).

‘end of Analects again’: EP to HLP, 29 Aug. 1936 (Beinecke).

One of the sayings: see EP, Analects 13.III, 1–2; then S Pr 99, 303; GK 16; etc.

left Siena: EP to DP, 2 Sept. 1936 (Lilly).

‘hottern Siena’: EP to HLP, [3 Sept. 1936] (Beinecke).

‘this machine sticks’: EP to HLP, [4 Sept. 1936] (Beinecke).

‘imperfect copy’: EP to DP, 5 Sept. 1936 (Lilly).

210 ‘frame for a fourth’: EP to DP, 7 Sept. 1936 (Lilly).

sent them off: EP to HLP, [10 Sept. 1936] (Beinecke). ‘Cantos XLII–XLIV’ were in Criterion XVI, no. LXIV (Apr. 1937) 405–23.

‘Dunning mss’: EP to DP, 10 Sept. 1936 (Lilly). Concerning Dunning see pp. 62–3 above.

‘amateur publisher’: EP, ‘Responsibility? Shucks!’, Globe II.4 (Feb./Mar. 1938)110.

new music at the Venice Biennale: paragraph drawn from EP&M 399–417, including EP, ‘Mostly Quartets’, Listener XVI.405 (14 Oct. 1936) 743–4; ‘Music in Ca’ Rezzonico’, Delphian Quarterly XX.1 (Jan. 1937) 2–4, 11; and ‘Ligurian View of a Venetian Festival’, Music & Letters XVIII.1 (Jan. 1937) [36]–41.

record of a struggle: see GK 135, and Schafer, EP&M 400.

‘some WANT’: EP to DP, 15 Sept. 1936 (Lilly).

‘for 500 lire’: EP to Tibor Serly, [Sept. 1936], L (1951) 372–3; also in EP&M 400–1.

‘fixed to come’: EP to Münch, Dec. 1936, L (1951) 374. Details of March concert from EP, ‘The New Hungarian Quartet’, EP&M 421–2, and ‘The Return of Gerhart Münch’, EP&M 422–3—translated from Il Mare of 13 Feb. 1937, and 13 Mar. 1937. ‘Sandwiched between’ is from GK 183. See EP to Tibor Serly, Apr. 1940, L (1951) 442–3, for his clearest account of his ‘laboratory idea’ in the construction of a concert programme.

‘richness and abundance’: EP, ‘Mostly Quartets’, Listener XVI.405 (14 Oct. 1936)—in EP&M 405.

211 a great man, ‘Any man’: Tinkham to EP, 20 June 1936, EP/GT 75.

The congressman arrived: details of the visit drawn from EP/GT 75, 80, 82, and from EP letters to HLP and DP.

‘talked relentlessly’: MdR, Discretions 82–3.

‘Eleven hours’: EP to DP, 21 Sept. 1936 (Lilly).

‘much more concentrated’: EP to DP, 22 Sept. 1936 (Lilly).

‘brother tinkham’: EP to HLP, 22 Sept. 1936 (Beinecke).

‘We putt in nine hour’: EP to HLP, 25 Sept. 1936 (Beinecke).

‘Better not say’: EP to DP, 24 Sept, 1936 (Lilly).

‘for all your courtesies’: Tinkham to EP, 17 Oct. 1936, EP/GT 87.

‘whereafter’: EP to DP, [c.25 Sept. 1936] (Lilly).

‘articl/ a day’: EP to DP, 16 Oct. 1936 (Lilly).

‘Worst supposed’: EP to HLP, 20 Nov. 1936 (Beinecke).

212 ‘cdn’t figure’: EP to OR, [Nov. 1936] (Beinecke/OR)—as cited Conover, 128.

Rome on his own: see EP to DP, 29 Dec. 1936 (Lilly).

‘turkey and chocolates’: OR to EP, [?Dec.1936] (Beinecke/OR)—as cited Conover, 128

‘The Fifth Decad’: against Usura

In this section I have found especially helpful—whether in following or in departing from—the guidance of George Kearns and Peter Makin: George Kearns, Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Cantos (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), and Ezra Pound: The Cantos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Peter Makin, Pound’s Cantos (George Allen & Unwin, 1985).

212 scholar-sleuths: see the invaluable researches of Ben Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, ‘Sources of Cantos XLII and XLIII’, Pai 6.3 (1977) 333–58—the misreading or change of ‘animo’ is noted on p. 345; ‘The Sources of the Leopoldine Cantos’, Pai 7.1–2 (1978) 249–77; ‘Pound’s Use of Sienese Manuscripts for Cantos XLII and XLIII’, Pai 8.3 (1979) 513–18.

220 Canto 47: my discussion is indebted to Daniel Pearlman’s profoundly insightful chapter ‘Man, Earth and Stars’, in his The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 172–92.

223 ‘annoying interruption’: George Kearns, Ezra Pound: The Cantos 42.

224 Von Unruh: information from Walter Baumann, ‘The German-Speaking World in The Cantos’, Pai 21.3 (1992) 44–6.

‘the sergeant tramping down’: EP, ‘Waiting’, New Democracy IV.2 (15 Mar. 1935) 28.

225 intelligence of insects: see pp. 139–40 above.

canto 49: the spacing between the ‘Seven Lakes’ verses was incorrect in the first edition, and though corrected in Faber & Faber’s 1954 edition, and in the bilingual I Cantos in 1985, the error persists in both the New Directions and the current Faber editions. The four stanzas should begin: ‘For the seven lakes’, ‘Autumn moon’, ‘Where wine flag’, ‘Wild geese swoop’—there should not be a line-space after ‘cross light’. For the fullest account of the background and sources see Zhaoming Qian, ‘Painting into Poetry: Pound’s Seven Lakes Canto’, in Ezra Pound & China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 72–95. Qian gives reproductions of the eight scenes. See also ‘Miss Tseng and the Seven Lakes Canto. “Descendant of Kung and Thseng-Tsu”’, in Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 9–17. For the original poems and further commentary see Sanehide Kodama, ‘The Eight Scenes of Sho-Sho’, Pai 6.2 (1977) 131–43.

‘The still centre’: William Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Croom Helm, 1985), p. 53. In a 1941 article EP explicitly stated that Confucianism is not quietist, ‘meno quietista’, but rather ‘a philosophy for anyone taking up state office, a party seat, to administrate or to perform some public function’ (‘Ta Hio’, Meridiano di Roma VI.46 (16 Nov. 1941) 7).

‘turned government over’: Qian, ‘Painting into Poetry’, Ezra Pound & China 73.

Confucian historians: see John J. Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1983), pp. 237, 240.

227 re emperor Shun’s hymn, and the peasants’ folk song, see Hugh Kenner, ‘More on the Seven Lakes Canto’, Pai 2.1 (1973) 45–6; Sanehide Kodama, ‘The Eight Scenes of Sho-Sho’, Pai 6.2 (1977) 142–5; Achilles Fang to James Laughlin, 23 May 1950, EP/JL 205. These helpful commentators are not responsible for my reading.

228 ‘the dimension of stillness’: here I have been stimulated by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, ‘“The Fourth; The Dimension of Stillness”: D. P. Ouspensky and Fourth Dimensionalism in Canto 49’, Pai 19.3 (1990) 117–22; also by Peter Makin, Makin: 1985, 208–9.

229 Napoleon’s ‘brilliant Italian campaigns’: Thomas Carlyle, ‘Lecture VI. The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon, Revolutionism’, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841).

‘The force which he challenged’: Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (George Routledge and Sons, 1935), pp. 88, 133–4.

‘weighed down’: Hollis, The Two Nations, p. 134.

230 ‘the century of usury’: EP, ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, British Union Quarterly II.1 (1938) 36–7.

231 ‘Wellington was the key’: Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the Truth in Contradiction’, Critical Inquiry 15.1 (1988) 18–23.

‘Shines | in the mind of heaven’: there is a translation of Guinicelli’s canzone by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his Early Italian Poets (1861).

232 The Art of Angling: information and opinion from Robert Demott, ‘Ezra Pound and Charles Bowlker: Note on Canto LI’, Pai 1.2 (1972) 189–98.

‘since fly-fishing’: Terrell: Companion 198 n. 7.

‘That hath the light’: EP gives the source in Albertus Magnus in ‘Cavalcanti’, LE 186.

Among the drafts for Canto LI in Beinecke there is his translation of the passage: ‘“that thy mind be the receiver of images (speculativa) receiving with them the light of the doer (lumen agentis) of the doer, daily more like one to other and when this is accomplished | hath the possible the light of the agent, as it were a form cleaving to it so the god’s mind may give largess to it, all thing[s] mirrored, perceived/.”’

233 ‘trout rise’: EP to Eva Hesse, 17 Apr. 1959 (Beinecke).256

‘a system of living’: EP TS note (Beinecke). EP’s citation of Hess is problematic. My reading of the lines in the canto trusts the text and the historical context which together make Hess figure as one fraudulently speaking peace. I cannot be sure that that was Pound’s intention. A draft of canto 45 begins with Hesse’s words and appears to endorse them wholeheartedly as having ‘the light of the doer’ about them (Za Pound/2612, Beinecke).

Dante’s Geryon: Inferno XVII. Virgil’s explanation is in XI, 91–111.

234 ‘The light of the doer’: EP, ‘We Have Had No Battles But We Have All Joined In And Made Roads’, PE 51.

chêng⁴ ming²: information from Paul Wellen, ‘Analytic Dictionary of Ezra Pound’s Chinese Characters’, Pai 25.3 (1996) 65, 85. See also 66/382; and, again, ‘We Have Had No Battles But We Have All Joined In And Made Roads’, PE 50–5.

Ta Hio’s Confucian ideal: see pp. 74–6 above; also GK 247–8, 281.

The form and pressure of the time

235 ‘a sufficient phalanx’: 74/441.

‘a new mode of thought’: EP, ‘We Have Had No Battles But We Have All Joined In And Made Roads’, PE 51.

Edward VIII: information from A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 489–95.

236 Bunting…told Pound: BB to EP, Jan.1937 (Beinecke).

‘British-conservative-antifascist-imperialist’: LZ to EP, 23 July 1938, EP/LZ 195.

‘flummydiddles’: EP, ‘Abdication’, Globe I.1 (Mar. 1937) 87.

‘pseudo-Fascist rage’: EP to LZ, 6 Apr. 1933 (HRC).

‘a parody’: EP, ‘Orientation and News Sense’, NEW II.12 (5 Jan. 1933) 273.

‘parades’: EP, J/M 127.

‘the Hun’s travesty’: EP, ‘From Italy’, NEW V.6 (24 May 1934) 143–4.

‘do can’: EP to Gorham Munson, [16 June 1935] (HRC).

‘not a hitlerite’: EP to Claude Cockburn, [1935] (Beinecke).

‘certainly no anti-semitism’: EP to Claude Cockburn, 18 Jan. [1935] (Beinecke).

‘never been any anti-Semitism’: EP to Arnold Gingrich, 22 Aug. [1934] (UPenn).

‘main trends or drifts’: EP, ‘American Notes. Time Lag’, NEW VII.1 (18 Apr. 1935) 6.

237 financed from London: see EP, ‘A Thing of Beauty’, Esquire IV.5 (Nov. 1935) 195–7.

‘even Hitler’: EP to GT, 11 Mar. 1936, EP/GT 72.

‘Germany being forced’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VIII.25 (2 Apr. 1936) 489.

‘under very unfavourable’: EP, ‘New Italy’s Challenge’, British–Italian Bulletin II.18 (2 May 1936) 3.

‘both Germany and Italy’: EP to GT, 11 Apr. 1937, EP/GT 117.

‘getting wiser’: EP to GT, 12 Apr. 1937, EP/GT 119.

‘the resurrection’: EP, GK 134—drafted about ‘March 5^th, 1937’ (see p. 135).

Lewis had associated: in his Hitler (1931)—see D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (Cassell, 1972), pp. 109–10. EP cited in his 1939 pamphlet, ‘What is Money For?’, the sentence Lewis had isolated from Mein Kampf: ‘The struggle against international finance and loan capital has become the most important point in the National Socialist programme: the struggle of the German nation for its independence and freedom’ (S Pr 269).

‘Do for God’s sake’: EP to Gerhart Münch, 15 Apr. [1938] (Beinecke). Münch’s letter to EP, dated ‘14.4.38’, is with EP’s.

238 ‘schacht’: EP to GT, 26 May [1938], EP/GT 156.

Dr Schacht: information in this paragraph drawn from Shirer, Third Reich 258–67, and Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler 27–34. See also JL, ‘Notes on Ezra Pound’s Cantos’ (1940), in Homberger: 1972, 342.

239 noted in previous chapters: see EP: Poet I 392, and pp. 45 and 157–8 above.

‘Never expected’: EP to Fred R. Miller, 21 Dec. [1934] (Beinecke).

‘Never disliked’: EP to HLP, 3 Mar. 1926, EP/Parents 589.

‘tried to kill’: EP to HLP, 4 Mar. [1926], EP/Parents 591–2.

‘Racial curse’: EP to Aldington, 4 Mar. 1926 (HRC).

‘oooo sez’: EP to HLP, 1 Nov. 1927, EP/Parents 638–9.

‘Personally I like’: EP to OR, 29 Sept. [1927] (Beinecke/OR).

‘The only good Jew’: LZ to EP, 19 Dec. 1929, EP/LZ 27. In the same letter LZ wrote, ‘it wouldn’t have been the likes of an anti-semite like myself’.

240 ‘next wave’: EP to LZ, 9 Dec. 1929, EP/LZ 26–7.

‘Zukofsky is coming’: EP to HLP, 12 Feb. [1929] , EP/Parents 682.

‘Mittle and Nord’: EP to LZ, 24 Apr. 1933 (HRC).

should alert him to…Silver Shirts: see LZ to EP, 12 Mar. 1936, EP/LZ 177 and 179n.

Pound’s response: EP to R. C. Summerville of the Silver Shirt Legion of America, 7 May 1934, was published by New Masses XVIII.12 (17 Mar. 1936) 15–16.

‘According to Bismarck’: see EP to LZ, 6[–7] May [1934], EP/LZ 157 and 159n.; also 48/240–1.

‘Waal I sez’: EP to LZ, 6[–7] May [1934], EP/LZ 157, 158.

241 ‘utterly irrelevant’: EP, ‘“VU”, No. 380 and subsequent issues’, New Age LVII.27 (31 Oct. 1935) 218.

‘red herring’: EP, GK 242.

‘Usurers have no race’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VIII.6 (21 Nov. 1935) 105.

‘Hell makes no distinction’: EP, ‘“VU”, No. 380’, New Age LVII.27 (31 Oct. 1935) 219.

‘an allegory’: EP, ‘Such Language’, G.K.’s Weekly XX.517 (7 Feb. 1935) 373.

‘are we never to see’: EP, ‘Ezra Pound Asks Questions’, Current Controversy I.2 (Nov. 1935) 3.

‘The Jew usurer’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VIII.6 (21 Nov. 1935) 105.

‘great chief usurer’: EP, ‘John Buchan’s “Cromwell”’, NEW VII.8 (6 June 1935) 149.

‘drawing vengeance’: 52/257. When Faber & Faber refused to print ‘Rothschild’, Pound substituted ‘Stinkschuld’—see Kenner, Pound Era 465.

‘The Jews are supposed’: EP, ‘American Notes’, NEW VIII.6 (21 Nov. 1935) 105.

genocide…not then in anyone’s mind: on this see Albert Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

‘If the book is honest’: EP to M. J. B. Ezekiel, 31 Mar. [1936] (Beinecke).

242 ‘there wd. be no need’: EP to James Taylor Dunn, 18 Mar. 1937 (Beinecke)—cited in Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, 178.

‘warning me’: EP to M. J. B. Ezekiel, 31 Mar. [1936] (Beinecke).

‘Even decent Jews’: LZ to EP, 12 Mar. 1936, EP/LZ 177.

‘eating her heart out’: Lina Caico to EP, 14 Mar. 1937 (Beinecke).

243 ‘You hit a nice sore spot’: EP to Lina Caico, [between 15 and 17 Mar. 1937] (Beinecke).

‘Dear Ez’: Lina Caico to EP, 18 Mar. 1937 (Beinecke).

244 ‘Dear Ezra’: Nancy Cunard to EP, [June 1937], on copy of SPAIN: THE QUESTION (Beinecke).

‘Dearest N’: EP to Nancy Cunard, [June 1937] (Beinecke).

no more was he with Franco’s Falange: Stock: 1970, 346–7, records that EP replied to a pro-Franco organization seeking his support later in 1937 in very nearly the same terms as he had to Cunard.

‘Questionnaire an escape’: EP’s ‘Answer’ in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937), as in Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War, ed. Valentine Cunningham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 57.

‘you’re not being read’: LZ to EP, 15 Mar. 1935, EP/LZ 164.

‘You seem to think’: LZ to EP, 7 June 1935, EP/LZ 171.

‘If you’re dead set’: LZ to EP, 12 Mar. 1936, EP/LZ 177.

losing readers: information from Gallup: 1983, 53 and 60.

‘You are suspect’: BB to EP, 3 Sept. 1936 (Beinecke).

245 ‘too damn gullible’: LZ to EP, 12 Mar. 1936, EP/LZ 178.

‘worthless’: John Hargrave to Gorham Munson, as reported by Charles Norman, Norman: 1960, 326.

‘Pound was trying’: Charles Norman’s account of what Gorham Munson told him, Norman: 1960, 326.

‘the Boss’s reclamation’: LZ to EP, 7 June 1935, EP/LZ 172.

Soviet farm collectivization: see Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (Allen Lane, The Penguin Group, 2004), pp. 42, 235.

‘the manoeuvres’: BB to EP, 3 Sept. 1936 (Beinecke).

246 ‘distribute the purchasing power’: EP to James Crate Larkin, 8 Apr. 1935, EPEC 145—EP was laying down what he thought should be the stated aims of a proposed national credit bill.

Note: The financial crisis of 2007–8 brought many commentators to express views similar to Pound’s. Robert Skidelsky, biographer of Keynes the economist who devised an answer to the Great Depression following the 1929 Crash, wrote on the Guardian’s online commentisfree on 15 Mar. 2008, under the heading ‘Morals and markets’: ‘The paradox of capitalism is that it converts avarice, greed, and envy into virtues.’ He also wrote of ‘capitalism’s lack of a principle of justice’. In the Guardian on 10 Apr. 2008 Ulrich Beck, Professor of Sociology in Munich and at the London School of Economics, wrote that capitalism’s free market system ‘has shrugged off any responsibility for democracy and society in the exclusive pursuit of short-term profit maximisation’.

5. IDEAS OF ORDER, 1937–1939

‘Immediate need of Confucius’

Works consulted for this section include: James Legge, Confucian Analects, The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean, translated, with Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, Copious Indexes, and Dictionary of All Characters (New York: Dover Publications, 1971)—an unabridged republication of vol. 1 of ‘The Chinese Classics’ Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893); James Legge, The Works of Mencius (New York: Dover Publications, 1970)—an unabridged republication of vol. 2 of ‘The Chinese Classics’ Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895); Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound (Stanley Nott, 1936); Bernhard Karlgren, Sound and Symbol in Chinese (1923) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1971); Colin A. Ronan, The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original Text, vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); François Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Arthur Cooper, ‘The Poetry of Language-making: Images and Resonances in the Chinese Script’, Temenos 7 (1986) 241–58; David M. Gordon, ‘A Rayogram M.7306…Yao⁴’, Pai 16.3 ((1987) 93–5; Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Scott Eastham, ‘In Pound’s China —The Stone Books Speak’, Pai 33.1 (2004) 89–117; Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)—note particularly pp. 118–21 and 132–8 for Fenollsa’s remarks on sound in Chinese poetry, an aspect he is supposed to have not understood.

247 ‘Am sending’: EP to Tinkham, 10 July [1937], EP/GT 137.

‘the most valuable’: EP, ‘Immediate need of Confucius’ (1937), S Pr 89.

‘To call people’: EP, GK 16; ‘a man should not be called’: GK 21.

as defined in…the Ta Hio: see pp. 74–6 and 226 above.

written rapidly and off the top of his head: at several points in GK EP gives that day’s date thus marking the rapid progress of the writing; and there are his letters to Morley, his editor at Faber, to fix starting and finishing dates; moreover, throughout the book he makes a virtue of writing from memory and not looking things up.

‘a-sailing’: EP to F. V. Morley, Feb. 1937, L (1951) 380.

‘I believe’: EP, GK 347.

248 ‘Plato’s Republic’: EP, GK 38.

excessive emphasis: cf. ‘our time has overshadowed the mysteries by an overemphasis on the individual’ (EP, GK 299).

‘Rapacity’: EP, GK 15–16.

‘hoggers of harvest’: GK 31, 45, and elsewhere—EP’s translation of St Ambrose’s ‘captans annonam’.

‘the main character’: EP, GK 29.

‘way of life’: EP, GK 24.

‘processes biological’: EP, GK 51–2.

‘the totalitarian view’: EP, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Correspondence’, North American Review CCXLIV.2 (1937/1938) 319.

‘superior to Aristotle’: EP, GK 279.

‘Most days’: JL, Pound as Wuz 263.

in the light of Fenollosa’s essay: Twentieth-century sinologists, concentrating on Chinese as a spoken language, were generally dismissive of Fenollosa’s reading the written language as a system of visual signs, and Pound scholars and critics have tended to accept their verdict. Fenollosa was perfectly aware that in the majority of characters there is a phonetic component related to the pronunciation, but he found it incredible that those components could be merely phonetic and contribute nothing to the play of meaning, as the lexicographers maintained. His detractors have done him the injustice of disregarding his explicit terms of reference—the written character as a medium of poetry—and of pretending that what was taken to be the case in a majority of characters was more or less true of all. Now it has been demonstrated by Arthur Cooper and by François Cheng that Fenollosa’s intuition was correct and that the so-called phonetic element does often if not always have a meaningful function in the ideograms in ancient and traditional poetry.

Legge’s editions: the edition Pound was using (now at Hamilton) printed only the pages giving the Chinese text of the four books with Legge’s translation and exegetical notes below—it was published in Shanghai and he thought it was ‘probably a Shanghai’d (pirated) edtn.’ (L (1951) 390).

‘When I disagreed’: EP, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’ (1938), S Pr 96.

249 ‘one hour on’: EP to DP, 4 Aug. 1937 (Lilly).

‘read a good deal’: EP to Katue Kitasono, 14 Aug. 1937, EP&J 42.

‘started Kung again’: EP to DP, 15 Aug. 1937 (Lilly).

‘got to end of Analects’: EP to DP, 29 Aug. 1937 (Lilly).

‘three times through’: EP, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’ (1938), S Pr 99.

an essay published in the Criterion: i.e. ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’ (1938)—details in this paragraph are drawn from this essay as printed in S Pr 98–9, 106–8, except for the explication of ‘the character which combines the human being with the number two’, which is from Eastham, ‘In Pound’s China’, Pai 33.1 (2004) 97.

‘a door’: EP, ‘How to Write’ (1930), MA 88. For ‘the sign of metamorphosis’ see 57/313.

‘abstracts or generalizes’: EP, ‘How to Write’ (1930), MA 89.

250 ‘at no point’: EP, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’ (1938), S Pr 101. The whole paragraph is drawn from EP, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, 100–3.

‘The “Christian virtues”’: EP, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, 104.

‘citizen of a chaos’: EP, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, 110.

‘alternating periods’: EP, ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’, 104.

‘spending my spare time’: EP to Tinkham, 22 Nov. [1937], EP/GT 140.

‘I think you are intellectually’: Tinkham to EP, 10 Dec. 1937, EP/GT 141.

‘Am only doing Mencius’: EP to Tinkham, [9 Jan.1938], EP/GT 144.

251 ‘to give a few lectures’: EP to Tinkham, 23 Feb. [1938], EP/GT 150.

‘Great historical events’: Tinkham to EP, 10 Dec. 1937, EP/GT 141.

classic anthology: see EP to Kitasono, 21 Oct. 1937, and Kitasono to EP, 15 Nov. 1937, EP&J 45, 50.

‘a cheap edition’: EP to Kitasono, 2 Mar. and 14 Aug.1937, EP&J 39 and 42.

Signor Mussolini speaks

Source: cutting from London Morning Post, 21 Aug. 1937, with EP/DP correspondence (Lilly).

To educate

251 ‘So much prosperity’: DP to EP, 5 Sept. 1937 (Lilly).

252 ‘The Child’: DP to EP, 8 Aug. 1937 (Lilly).

‘To govern’: Confucius 57—EP’s 1945 translation is cited.

‘looking at the bronze’: MdR, Discretions 96–7. The following paragraph is drawn from Discretions 96–103.

253 ‘the charming stories’: Katue Kitasono to Maria Pound, 25 Dec. 1938, EP&J 70. See also EP&J 53 and 56–7 for exchange between EP and Kitasono concerning the stories; and see Maria Pound, ‘Gais, The Beauties of the Tirol’, Pai 37 (2010) 59–151 for a reproduction of the original text in Italian, English, and Japanese.

‘a swelled head’: EP to Katue Kitasono, 14 Jan. 1939, EP&J 70–1.

‘Then a huge fuss’: paragraph drawn from Mary de Rachewiltz’s own account, Discretions 107–10.

‘since the days’: EP, ‘Tigullian Musical Life’, as translated (not by EP) from Il Mare, 4 Dec. 1937, EP&M 426–7.

David Nixon was agitating: see OR to EP, 23 Oct. 1937, cited in Conover, 130.

254 ‘Starting [Tuesday]’: most details in this paragraph drawn from ‘Tigullian Musical Season’ and ‘February Concerts—The Pianist Renata Borgatti’, as translated (not by EP) from Il Mare, 1 Jan. 1938, and 8 Jan. 1938, in EP&M 428–31.

first modern performance: see EP, ‘Tigullian Musical Season. The February Concerts’, as translated (not by EP) from Il Mare, 22 Jan. 1938, EP&M 432; also ‘Musicians’. Action 16 July 1938, as in EP&M 441.

‘wooden’: EP as Atheling, ‘Music’, NA 25 Nov. 1920, as in EP&M 234.

‘plan of work’: EP to Gerhart Münch, 19 Nov. [1937] (Beinecke).

another image: rest of paragraph drawn from MdR, Discretions 119–20. See also Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life (1940) (Maidstone: George Mann, 1974), p. 145.

255 the use of microfilm: for some of EP’s many calls for it to be brought into use see ‘Tigullian Musical Life’ and ‘Tigullian Musical Season’, EP&M 426–9; and ‘Notes on Micro-Photography’, Globe II.5 (Apr./May 1938) 29.

‘enormous quantities’: EP&M 429.

‘another 600 pages’: EP to AB, 29 June 1938 (Lilly).

persuaded the editor of Broletto: see EP, ‘Notes on Micro-Photography’, Globe II.5 (Apr./May 1938) 29.

tried to persuade Faber: details from EP to L. Pol[linger], 23 Feb. [1938] (Beinecke).

presented his microfilm copies: details from O.R.’s Antonio Vivaldi, Quatro concerti autogafi, and Antonio Vivaldi, Due concerti manoscritti (Siena: Academia Musicale Chigiana, 1949 and 1950) (HRC).

‘the 100 best’: EP to Kitasono, 14 May 1938, EP&J 63–4.

256 ‘since Imagism’: Kitasono to EP, 26 Apr. 1936, EP&J 27.

‘a poet can not neglect’: EP to Kitasono, 24 May 1936, EP&J 27–8.

‘neither Zen’: EP to Kitasono, [13 Aug. 1936], EP&J 31.

‘to meet any member’: EP to Japanese Ambassador in Rome, 26 Dec. 1936, EP&J 34–5.

a three hour talk: EP to Kitasono, 1 Jan. 1937, EP&J 35.

‘The new microphotographic’: EP to Hajime Matsumiya, Secretary of the Japanese Embassy, Rome, 15 Dec. 1937, EP&J 248.

257 ‘bilingual or trilingual’: ‘Trilingual System Proposed for World Communications’, Japan Times and Mail, 15 May 1939, in EP&J 150.

‘Two young poets’: Kitasono to EP,10 Feb. 1939, EP&J 72.

‘my chinese Cantos/’: EP to Kitasono, 3 Mar. 1939, EP&J 72.

Anschluss

Details from William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), pp. 322–56.

Going wrong, thinking of rightness

258 ‘you are not to concede’: EP to Montgomery Butchart, 12 Dec. 1938 (HRC).

six or even eight sets: EP to DP, [? 2 June 1938] (Lilly).

‘copying out’: from an unpublished notebook kept by Noel Stock in the 1960s, as in Carpenter 520. About 17 July 1938 EP told DP he was ‘doing Vivaldis’. In ‘Muzik, as Mistaught’, Townsman I.3 (July 1938) 8, EP wrote: ‘No process with pen in hand teaches a man so much both of the thought and of the actual idiom; of the actual way to write down the sound desired and the durations desired as the copying out of work of genius’ (EP&M 436).

idea of relaxing: see EP to Laurence Binyon, 8 and 12 May 1938, L (1951) 412 and 414.

Guide to Kulchur: the copy marked by TSE is now in HRC. Gallup: 1983, 61–2 gives details.

‘Omar says’: DP to EP, 7 Aug. 1938 (Lilly).

259 ‘not yet very grown up’: DP to EP, 5 Aug. 1938 (Lilly).

‘Daily Mirror’: DP to EP, 20 July 1938 (Lilly).

‘A consciousness’: EP to DP, 26 July 1938 (Lilly).

‘Is the Pope’: DP to EP, 30 July 1938 (Lilly).

cutting from an Italian newspaper: enclosed with EP to DP letters (Lilly). Farrell, Mussolini, 309, cites L’Osservatore romano, 30 July 1938, and Il Giornale d’Italia, 20 Sept. 1938, to same effect.

the race laws: paragraph drawn mainly from Farrell, Mussolini, 303–11; some further details from Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German–Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy 1922–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1978)—see particularly pp. 171–2.

‘a spiritual enemy of the Fascist faith’: Farrell’s words, Mussolini 308.

‘policy of segregation’: Mussolini’s words, cited Farrell, Mussolini 310.

260 ‘a Jew could embrace the Fascist faith’: Farrell’s words, Mussolini 308.

‘excellent and sober stuff’: EP to DP, 21 Aug. 1938 (Lilly).

‘like it has been bottled’: EP to DP, [2 Sept. 1938] (Lilly).

Waaal all yits’: EP to DP, [3 Sept. 1938] (Lilly).

‘the jewish Problem’: Gerhart Münch to EP, 29 Aug. 1938 (Beinecke).

‘Lots today’: DP to EP, 2 Sept. 1938 (Lilly).

‘I am sorry for you’: reported by Aldo Tagliaferri, ed. Ezra Pound Lettere (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980), p. 115, as cited by David Anderson in Pai 10.2 (1981) 440.

an earlier Fascist statement: see Farrell, Mussolini 306.

‘where they touch Russia’: EP to DP, [3 Sept. 1938] (Lilly).

‘What are Jews to do?’: Lina Caico to EP, 2 Aug. 1938 (Beinecke).

261 ‘Get down to USURY’: EP to Lina Caico, [? before 10 Aug. 1938] (Beinecke). Preda, EPEC 215–16, prints this letter and dates it [3 Aug. 1938].

‘when you have seen’: Lina Caico to EP, 25 Mar. 1939 (Beinecke).

‘The Revolution Betrayed’: EP, British Union Quarterly II.1 (Jan./Mar. 1938) 36–8.

‘aryio-kike’: EP wrote a verse squib: ‘Did I not coin the term: “Aryio-kike” | to designate just those Aryan bastards | whom, quo ante | Our eminent brother Dante | had also found need to stigmatise; sic vide: | Che fra voi | di voi | Il Guideo non ride!’—‘Usury’, NEW XIV.19 (16 Feb. 1939) 292.

‘It will be a great pity’: EP, ‘Pity’, Action 139 (15 Oct. 1938) 16.

262 Another contribution to Action: ‘Infamy of Taxes’, Action 120 (4 June 1938) 13.

‘could not get at the masses’: Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 116–17.

praising Wyndham Lewis: see GK 134.

Leihkapital: international loan capital. In ‘Symposium-I. Consegna’, Purpose X.3 (July/Sept. 1938) EP wrote: ‘Hitler’s declaration on the bases of German currency, this spring (1938) was a public event, important and interesting to some people as the “axis” to others. Hitler’s statement on Leihkapital in “Mein Kampf”, so masterfully cited by Wyndham Lewis and used at chapter head in his “Hitler” already pre-existed as an idea in J. A. Hobson’s exposition of the syphilitic venom of international lending.’

‘the German terror’: LZ to EP, 14 Nov. 1938, EP/LZ 196–7.

‘Why curse Adolphe’: EP to LZ, 2 Dec. 1938 (HRC).

‘You know as well as any man’: BB to EP, 16 Dec. 1938, as cited by A. David Moody, ‘“EP with two pronged fork of terror and cajolery”: The Construction of his Anti-Semitism (up to 1939)’, Pai 29.3 (2000) 78–9.

263 ‘Dear Zuk’: EP to LZ, 7 Jan. 1939 (HRC).

‘let’s not correspond’: LZ to EP, 18 Jan. 1939, EP/LZ 198–9.

‘theoretical’: Carlo Izzo, [Notes accompanying] ‘Three Unpublished Letters by Ezra Pound’, Italian Quarterly (Riverside, California) XVI.64 (1973) 118.

‘not anti-semite’: EP, ‘Symposium-I. Consegna’, Purpose X.3 (July/Sept. 1938) 167–8.

thinking of rightness: cf. ‘And as to why they go wrong, | thinking of rightness’ (116/797).

Czechoslovakia sacrificed

264 ‘the most democratic’: Shirer, Third Reich 358. This section is based on Shirer’s chaps. 12 and 13, ‘The Road to Munich’ and ‘Czechoslovakia Ceases to Exist’, pp. 357–427 and 428–54.

‘a quarrel in a faraway country’: Neville Chamberlain, radio broadcast to the nation, 27 Sept. 1938, as cited by Shirer, Third Reich 403.

‘symbolic of the desire’: declaration of Hitler and Chamberlain, 30 Sept. 1939, as in Shirer, Third Reich 419.

‘peace with honour’: Neville Chamberlain, 30 Sept. 1939, as reported by Shirer, Third Reich 420.

‘under protest’: Czechoslovak official statement, 30 Sept. 1939, as reported by Shirer, Third Reich 420.

‘We have been forced’: Dr Kamil Krofta, Foreign Minister, as cited in dispatch to Berlin of German Chargé d’Affaires in Prague, in Shirer, Third Reich 420–1.

Comings and goings

265 ‘Chamberlain is the f irst’: EP, ‘Who Profits?’, NEW XIV.4 (3 Nov. 1938) 55–6.

‘If ever war’: EP, ‘A Money Is’, Delphian Quarterly XXI.4 (Oct. 1938) 47.

‘a ruler promotes’: EP, ‘Ubicumque lingua Romana’, Fascist Europe/Europa Fascista (Milano), 1 (28 Oct. 1938) 41–6—this paragraph and the one following are based on this article.

267 composition was interrupted: EP to Willis Overholser, [after 21] Nov. 1938, ‘Just home after 5 weeks in London/continuity broken’ (Beinecke).

a temperature of 102°: DP, entry for 2 Oct. in her 1938 diary (Lilly). On 3 Oct. DP noted ‘Olivia died’ and ‘four telegrams’; and on 5 Oct. ‘EP returned’.

‘animated and indignant’: MdR, Discretions 111.

‘gotta start’: EP to OR, 13 Oct. 1938 (Beinecke/OR).

‘Oh…Cremate’…‘against letters’…‘For goodness sake’: DP to EP, 19 Oct. 1938 (Lilly).

‘ridiculously generous terms’: Henry Swabey, ‘A Page Without Which’, Pai 5.2 (1976) 330–1. Swabey also provides the detail about WL and a chair.

‘pockets bulging’: Ronald Duncan, All Men Are Islands (Hart-Davis, 1964), p. 197—as cited in Carpenter: 1988, 555.

‘bring her back some thing’: DP to EP, 16 Nov. 1938 (Lilly).

13 cases: detail from Carlo Rupnick to EP, Jan. 1939 (Beinecke).

268 ‘acted as the leader’: Swabey, ‘A Page Without Which’, Pai 5.2 (1976) 331.

a Noh play: details from Wilhelm: 1994, 139–40.

‘coat-tails flying’: WL, ‘Early London Environment’, T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, compiled by Tambimuttu and Richard March (Frank Cass & Co., 1965), p. 29.

what to put in on the left: see WL to EP, 17 Dec. 1938, EP/WL 202.

‘rapturous applause’: WBY to his wife, 18 Nov. 1938, as cited in Foster: 2003, 642.

‘he cd/ buy’: EP to Tinkham, 13 Jan. 1939, EP/GT 161.

not ‘a moral coward’: EP, ‘Does the Government of England Control the B.B.C.?’, Action 150 (7 Jan. 1939) 3.

‘vivacious, bustling and practical’: Oswald Mosley, My Life (Nelson, 1968), p. 226—as cited in Carpenter: 1988, 551.

‘what he was headed for’: EP, ‘To Albion’, ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 397.

269 ‘in 13 years’: OR to EP, 31 Oct. 1938 (Beinecke/OR). See also Conover, 133–4.

‘damn unfair’: OR to EP, 2 Nov. 1938 (Beinecke/OR). See also Conover, 134.

‘in great anxiety’: OR to EP, 8 Nov. 1938 (Beinecke/OR).

‘assured durable’: EP to OR, 9 Nov. 1938 (Beinecke/OR).

‘He ain’t stayin’: EP to OR, 9 Nov. 1938 (Beinecke/OR).

‘She breathing again’: OR to EP, 10 Nov. 1938 (Beinecke/OR).

‘To make up’: MdR, Discretions 111—paragraph drawn from Discretions 111–14.

‘projecting continuance’: EP to WL, 9 Jan. [1939], EP/WL 204.

‘deeply shaken’: TSE, The Idea of a Christian Society (Faber & Faber, 1939) 63–4.

270 ‘depression of spirits’: TSE, ‘Last Words’, Criterion XVIII.71 (Jan. 1939) 274.

‘Who killed Cock Possum’: EP to Ronald Duncan, 10 Jan. 1939, L (1951) 415.

‘Olga, scandalized’: EP to TSE, [Jan. 1939] (Beinecke), cited Conover, 134. The source is an unpublished poem, ‘Elegy (1936)’—though obviously written 1939—beginning ‘O weep for Buck Possum | the arrow-collared Adonis’ (Beinecke).

‘constitute a source’: EP,’Concerti Mozartiani a Rappalo, in Marzo’, Il Mare 1561 (11 Feb. 1939) [1], translated in EP&M 448. For the programmes see EP&M 446–8.

to Washington in the spring: see EP to Tinkham, [21 Dec. 1938], EP/GT 160; also EP to WL, 8 Dec. [1938], EP/WL 200, with WL’s response of 17 Dec. on p. 201.

acquired in November 1937: in a letter to W. H. D. Rouse, 1 Dec. [1937] (Beinecke), EP wrote, ‘Moyriac de Mailla “Histoire de Chine” which I have just bought from continental bookseller for 200 lire’.

in June 1938: information from Dr Gyorgy Novak. In Jan. 1939 EP wrote to TSE, ‘Took me 53 years to find out Braintree; Quincy, Merrymount wuz all on or by “a plantation named Weston’s”/damn all my folks don’t never stik to their real estate till it rizes’ (Beinecke)—he turned 53 in Oct. 1938, and would have found that information on p. 4 of vol. i of John Adams’s Works. EP also told Tinkham in Jan.1939,‘Has taken me years to get John Adams’ works’ (EP/GT 161). Near the close of canto 62 (62/350) there is the line ‘(11^th Jan. 1938, from Rapallo)’, a misdating for ‘1939’ originating in the notebook draft.

‘Chewing thru Adams’: EP to OR, 1 Feb. 1939 (Beinecke/OR).

‘on vol. Ten’: EP to OR, 3 Feb. 1939 (Beinecke/OR).

‘got to the end’: EP to OR, 7 Feb. 1939 (Beinecke/OR).

‘much more the father’: EP to Willis Overholser, [Jan.–Mar. 1939] (Beinecke).

‘pater patriae U.S.A.’: EP to Katue Kitasono, 3 Mar. 1939, EP&J 72.

‘helluva time’: EP to OR, 19 Feb. [1939] (Beinecke/OR).

271 up to canto 67: see EP to Katue Kitasono, 3 Mar. 1939, EP&J 72.

polished and shined: see EP letters to TSE in Jan. 1939 (Beinecke).

sent off to Faber: ‘Cantos 52/71 to Faber’, EP to AB, 4 Apr. 1939 (Lilly).

The end of Czechoslovakia

Details from William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), pp. 427–54.

271 ‘Neither Britain nor France’: Shirer, Third Reich 450.

Two books for governors: (1) cantos 52–61

This section is particularly indebted to: Carroll F. Terrell, ‘History, de Mailla and the Dynastic Cantos’, Pai 5.1 (1976) 95–121; Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, [vol. i] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 199–258; David Gordon, ‘“Confucius Philosophe”: An Introduction to the Chinese Cantos 52–61’, Pai 5.3 (1976) 387–403; David Gordon, ‘The Sources of Canto LIII’, Pai 5.1 (1976) 122–52; John J. Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1983); Dun J. Li, The Ageless Chinese (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1968).

271 More than the history: Marcel Granet, Chinese Civilization (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), p. 132. A page from the abridged version of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China provides further valuable background:

Confucianism appeared in the sixth century B.C. and is named after its founder…[whose] family name was Khung…[and who] is always referred to by his title of honour as Khung Fu Tzu (Master Khung) of which Confucius is the Latinised form. Born in 525 B.C. in the state of Lu (now Shantung) he traced his descent from the Imperial house of Shang, and spent his life developing and propagating a philosophy of just and harmonious social relationships. From about 495 B.C. he spent a number of years in enforced exile from Lu, wandering from state to state with a group of disciples and conversing with feudal princes, ever hoping for a chance to put his ideas into practice. For the last three years of his life he was back in Lu, writing and instructing his students. In 479 Confucius died, his life an apparent failure; yet as it turned out his influence proved, in the end, so great that he has often been called ‘the uncrowned emperor of China’.

Confucianism…strove for as much social justice as was possible in a feudal-bureaucratic society. This was to be achieved by a return to the ways of ‘the ancient Sage Kings’—a use of legendary historical authority that led Confucius to term himself a transmitter rather than an innovator. In a chaotic feudal society torn apart by wars between states, Confucius sought order. In a society in which human life was cheap, where there was little law and order save what each man could enforce by personal strength, armed followers, or intrigue, Confucius preached peace and respect for the individual.…He advocated universal education and taught that diplomatic and administrative positions should go to those best qualified academically, not socially: in this sense he was revolutionary. The true aim of government, he taught, was the welfare and happiness of all the people, brought about by no rigid adherence to arbitrary laws but by a subtle administration of customs that were generally accepted as good and had the sanction of natural law. In early Confucianism, then, there was no distinction between ethics and politics…(Colin A. Ronan, The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original Text, vol. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 78–9)

273 de Mailla’s translation: to be exact, what de Mailla translated was the version in the Manchu language made for Emperor K’ang-hsi, of the most recent revision of the ‘Outline and Digest of the Comprehensive Mirror’, originally compiled in the mid- twelfth century under the direction of the Sung neo-Confucian scholar Chu Hsi (1130–1200), that being a condensation of ‘A Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government’ put together in the eleventh century by a team of scholars led by Ssu-Ma Kuang (1019–1086). De Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine was published in 13 vols., in Paris, between 1777 and 1783—(from Nolde, Blossoms from the East 25–7).

‘having to do with instruction’: see EP: Poet I 24.

to Italy’s Il Duce: see 55/298—‘put up granaries | somewhat like those you want to establish’—and 61/335 where Mussolini’s Italian term is used, ‘amassi or sane collection, | to have bigger provision next year, | that is, augment our famine reserve | and thus to keep the rice fresh in store house’.

‘if you remain keen’: TSE to EP, 15 July 1939 (Beinecke).

274 so Li Ki goes on: see Li Ki: ou Mémoires sur les bienséances et les cérémonies, Texte Chinois avec une double traduction en Français et en Latin par S. Couvreur S.J. (Ho Kien Fou: Mission Catholique, 1899), tome premier, chap. IV, article iii, §19 (p. 358). Canto 53 is drawn from IV.iii–vi (pp. 353–410).

De Mailla’s history: the title and opening pages are reproduced in Terrell, ‘History, de Mailla and the Dynastic Cantos’, Pai 5.1 (1976)100, 110–21.

275 ‘luminous details’: see EP/Poet I 170. Cf. GK 277 re picking ‘the live details from past chronicle’.

277 a song to be found in the Shih King: see CA 8 (no. 16).

two odes in The Classic Anthology: see CA 190–3 (nos. 262, 263).

279 Ngan, the next great reformer: see The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original text, i. 53.

280 a gigantic encyclopedia: see Dun J. Li, The Ageless Chinese 306.

281 a Jesuit’s version: i.e. A. De Lacharme, Confucii Chi-King, ed. Julius Mohl (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1830).

283 ‘one of [the poem’s]’: Robert Fitzgerald, ‘Mr Pound’s Good Governors’, Accent 1 (Winter 1941) 121–2, as in Homberger: 1972, 352.

‘this survey’: George Dekker, Sailing After Knowledge: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 182.

‘monotonous didacticism’: Randall Jarrell, ‘Poets: Old, New and Aging’ (1940), Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews 1935–1964 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), pp. 43–4.

‘There is no alternative’: Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 161.

Hugh Kenner: see ‘Inventing Confucius’, The Pound Era (Faber & Faber, 1972) pp. 445–59. On the apparent contradiction see pp. 454–8. Kenner could see why the Comprehensive Mirror is anti-Taoist while the other Confucian books are not, so it is puzzling that he should not credit Pound with the same insight. Possibly it was because he did not quite fasten on the key to the paradox: that for good government the tao, the process of things, must be enacted by the rectified human will (Dante’s directio voluntatis). Civilization means harmony with nature, but its root, in Pound’s reading of Confucius, is volition (cf. GK 279). One might say that to Make It New requires Tao + Kung—tao alone won’t do the job.

Two books for governors: (2) cantos 62–71

This section is indebted to: The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. (Boston, 1850–6)—Pound’s set is now in the Rare Book Room of the Library of the University of Toledo, Ohio; Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961); The Adams–Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1959, 1988); EP, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’ (1937, 1960), S Pr 117–28; Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950); Frederick K. Sanders, John Adams Speaking (Orono, Me.: University of Maine Press, 1975); Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, [vol. i] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 259–360; Kay Davis, chap. 5, ‘Fugue’, Fugue and Fresco: Structures in Pound’s Cantos (Orono, Me.: National Poetry Foundation, 1984); Philip Furia, chap. VIII, ‘The Adams Papers’, Pound’s Cantos Declassified (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984); Jean-Michel Rabaté, chap. 3, ‘Ezra Pound and Pecuchet: The Law of Quotation’, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Macmillan, 1986); A. D. Moody, ‘Composition in the Adams Cantos’, Ezra Pound and America, ed. Jacqueline Kaye (Macmillan, 1992); David Ten Eyck, Introduction and chapters 1–3, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (Bloomsbury, 2012).

284 If we are a nation: EP, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’ (1937–8), S Pr 118. The paragraph in full: ‘If we are a nation, we must have a national mind. Frobenius escaped both the fiddling term “culture” and rigid “Kultur” by recourse to Greek, he used “Paideuma” with a meaning that is necessary to almost all serious discussion of such subjects as that now under discussion [i.e. American civilization]. His “Paideuma” means the mental formation, the inherited habits of thought, the conditionings, aptitudes of a given race or time.’

285 ‘nonsensical hurly-burly’: Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor 161.

288 ‘a society’: the reading of the early Faber editions—the current ‘of society’ is an error.

‘mowed all the grass’: Adams wrote ‘mowed’, but all editions give ‘moved’, due to a misreading of EP’s notebook transcription where the ‘w’ is unclear.

289 ‘before Lexington’: see Cantos 32/157, 33/161.

291 depreciation of the paper money: for details of the depreciation and the immense profits made see Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913, 1935), pp. 32–8.

293 THEMIS: see The Adams–Jefferson Letters 378–80. See also Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912, 1927; reprinted Merlin Press, 1963).

294 ‘cruel war’: Jefferson’s draft of ‘A Declaration [of Independence]’, in his Autobiography, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 22.

295 ‘re usury’: EP, ‘Foreword’, S Pr 6.

Cleanthes’ hymn: for EP’s translation see Cantos [256]. For a full version see Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (1938), no. 483.

296 ‘governments are instituted’: Jefferson’s draft of ‘A Declaration [of Independence]’, Thomas Jefferson: Writings 19.

6. ALIEN IN AMERICA

A good deal of the detail in this chapter comes from Charles Norman’s interviews with persons who saw Pound while he was in the United States between 20 April and 17 June 1939, as used in Norman’s Ezra Pound (1960). Further details have been added to his account by Stock, Wilhelm, Carpenter, and Conover. See also Maurice Hungiville, ‘Ezra Pound, Educator: Two Uncollected Pound Letters’, American Literature XLIV.3 (Nov. 1972) 462–9.

297 ‘dug up for shelters’: DP to EP, 19 Apr. 1939 (Lilly).

‘Dear Ezz’: WL to EP, 16 Apr. 1939, EP/WL 209–10.

‘There should be no war/’: EP to Ronald Duncan, 8 Apr. [1939] (HRC). EP had written to Senator Borah on 13 Jan. 1939, ‘What every decent man in Europe wants is a sane Europe and no war west of the Vistula’ (EP/WB 68)—Chamberlain and Baldwin were saying much the same thing at the time (see Paul N. Hehn, A Low Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930–41 (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 25).

‘the last whimper’: EP, ‘The “Criterion” Passes’, British Union Quarterly III.2 (Apr./June 1939) 67.

‘to try to be American’: EP to Hubert Creekmore, Mar. 1939 (Beinecke)—printed with deletions in L (1950) and L (1951).

298 ‘manifestly honorific’: EP to Tinkham, 16 Jan. [1938], EP/GT 148–9—most of this paragraph is drawn from this letter, and from the editor’s note 1. The names of those EP nominated are from Ahearn’s editorial note (s.v. ‘a body’) in EP/EEC 122.

‘Mr Tinkham seems to think’: G. C. Hamelin, Secretary to Mr Tinkham, to EP, 19 Apr. 1938, EP/GT 152.

‘educated or drowned’: EP to FMF, 31 Jan. 1939, L (1951) 416.

‘scurrilous attacks’: Henry Seidel Canby to EP, 14 Mar. 1938, as in editor’s note, EP/EEC 147.

‘a working, model’: FMF to EP, 17 Feb. [1938], EP/FMF 153–4.

‘Does Olivet use’…‘Will he get’: EP to FMF, [21 Feb. 1938], EP/FMF 155.

‘I do not approve’…‘have already a press’: FMF to EP, 16 Mar. 1938, EP/FMF 156.

299 ‘they start’: EP to FMF, 18 Mar. [1938], EP/FMF 158.

‘small Western college’: EP to Kitasono, 14 May 1938, EP&J 64.

‘a revival’: EP to John Crowe Ransom, 15 Oct. 1938, L (1950) 319.

Introductory Text Book: first published following EP, ‘Are Universities Valid?’, NEW XIV.19 (16 Feb. 1939) 281–2; then privately printed as a single folded sheet broadside, 500 copies for distribution gratis by the author; subsequently reprinted in several periodicals in 1939; added as an appendix to the new edition of GK in 1952. (For other reprintings see Gallup: 1983, 433.)

‘Fundamentals’: EP, ‘Are Universities Valid?’, NEW XIV.19 (16 Feb. 1939) 282.

‘utter treachery’: comment accompanying copies of Introductory Text Book sent to new President of Hamilton and to the Alumni Committee, as enclosed with EP to Ibbotson, 25 Mar. 1939, EP/Ibb 93, 96.

300 ‘the pivot’: EP, ‘Communications [following ‘Introductory Text Book’]: I. Money’, Townsman II.6 (Apr. 1939), 12.

‘possible to restore’: EP to John Slocum, 6 Aug. 1939 (Beinecke).

‘Saw again Mongiardino’: Carlo Rupnik to EP, 4 Mar. 1939 (Beinecke).

The Globe: the relevant correspondence with James Taylor Dunn, the editor, is at Hamilton College. The Globe (1937–8) was published from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as ‘an intimate journal of travel . romance . adventure . world interest…a truly international magazine’ (Gallup: 1983, 315).

‘The “Ente Provinciale”’: Rupnik to EP, 17 Mar. 1939 (Beinecke). The ‘Ente’ would be the Provincial Tourist Office.

‘un’ottima cabine’: Rupnik to EP, 21 Mar. 1939 (Beinecke).

His cheque for $299: the cheque, endorsed as cashed, is with other used cheques from EP’s account no. 252 with the Jenkintown Bank & Trust Co. (Brunnenburg). A further cheque for $10 was paid to the ‘ITALIA Soc. An.di Nav. —NY’ on 6 June. Possibly in preparation for his trip to America, EP had withdrawn three amounts of $100 from the account on 21, 27, and 31 March; and he withdrew a further $150 from the account while in America.

‘descriptive booklet’: EP to Rupnik, [before 1 Apr. 1939] (Beinecke).

‘an important collaboration’: Rupnik to EP, 17 July [1939] (Beinecke).

‘He iz feelink’: EP to DP, 12 Apr. 1939 (Lilly).

301 ‘magnificent quarters’: EP to DP, 13 Apr. (Lilly).

‘Aboard in surroundings’: EP to HLP, 13 Apr. 1939 (Beinecke).

‘very calm trip’: EP to HLP, 19 Apr. 1939 (Beinecke).

‘give economic’: Munson’s wire, and details of the interview, are in Norman: 1960, 357–8; Wilhelm: 1994, 146–7; Carpenter; 1988, 558–9.

‘literature…is now’: Edmund Gilligan, New York Sun, 26 May 1939, as given by Redman: 1991, 190.

‘Gargling anti-semitism’: Cummings to James Sibley Watson Jr, [30 May 1939], EP/EEC 139.

302 ‘10 . 11 . 12’: EP to DP, 22 Apr. 1939 (Lilly). Further details in this paragraph from EP to DP, 26 or 27 Apr. 1939 (Lilly).

warned him against trusting England: according to Stock: 1970, 363.

‘found Pound wandering’: Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981), p. 428.

‘I can hardly bear’: WCW to JL, 5 Apr. 1939, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Hugh Witemeyer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), p. 45.

‘very mild and depressed’: WCW’s impression, according to FMF in a letter to Allen Tate, 3 May 1939, The Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 319.

‘somewhat incoherent’: Mariani, William Carlos Williams 428.

‘Bill Wms here’: EP to HLP, [1 May 1939] (Beinecke).

‘fed me’: EP to OR, 3 May 1939 (Beinecke/OR).

‘a very poor show’: EP, 83/536. Copy of pass to Senate seen at Brunnenburg.

his ‘catch’: EP to DP, 10 May 1939 (Lilly).

‘Bridges, Lodge’: EP to HLP, 10 May [1939] (Beinecke).

303 ‘Pound seemed normal’: Henry Wallace to Charles Norman, in Norman: 1960, 360.

a long article: EP, ‘Ezra Pound on Gold, War, and National Money’, Capitol Daily V.89 (9 May 1939) [1], 4–5.

Munson recalled: Norman: 1960, 364–5.

207 pounds: EP to DP, [c.18 Apr. 1939] (Lilly).

‘fatigue that prevented’: EP to Cummings, 13 Nov. [1946], EP/EEC 200.

‘gallant combatant’: EP, ‘Ford Madox (Hueffer) Ford; Obit’, (Aug. 1939), S Pr 431, 433.

304 ‘suggested to the Harvards’: JL to EP, 23 Apr. 1939, EP/JL 104.

‘the steep rows’: Norman: 1960, 365–6.

‘he spent 2½ hours’: EP to OR, 17 May [1939] (Beinecke/OR).

His voice on the recording: for details see Gallup: 1983, 443 (E5a).

‘would have been magnificent’: John Holmes, as recorded by Norman: 1960, 366.

‘academic world orful’: EP to DP, 16 May 1939 (Lilly).

305 ‘across miles of Mass’: EP to HLP, [13 June 1939] (Beinecke).

‘letters of introduction’: Tinkham to EP, 15 May 1939, EP/GT 170.

Corker remembered Pound: Charles E. Corker to Daniel Pearlman, 25 Aug. 1980, printed as ‘Appendix B: The Meeting between the Poet and the Senator’, in EP/WB [79]–83.

‘I can still feel his hand’: EP, ‘On Resuming’ (29 Jan. 1942), ‘Ezra Pound Speaking’: Radio Speeches of World War II, p. 25. See also 84/537.

306 a foreign columnist: details from EP to Ibbotson, 4 Nov. [1940], EP/Ibb 108, and Redman: 1991, 189–90.

should be impeached: see EP to Tinkham, 20 Jan. [1939], EP/GT 165.

Mary Barnard: this paragraph and the next based on her own account in Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 158–67.

‘real old-fashioned’: Mrs Serly, as in Norman;1960, 362.

‘exchange of frankness’: Louis Zukofsky in Charles Norman, The Case of Ezra Pound (New York: The Bodley Press, 1948), pp. 55–7; reprinted in Charles Norman, The Case of Ezra Pound (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), pp. 87–8.

307 Eastman’s first impression: Max Eastman, ‘Memorandum on Dining with Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings’, dated 24 May 1939, in EP/EEC 138.

‘What is Money For?’: reprinted in S Pr 260–72—citations from pp. 268–71.

308 ‘desperate attempt’: EP to DP, [9 June 1939] (Lilly).

‘keen on J. Adams’: EP to DP, [9 June 1939] (Lilly).

‘one of the serious characters’: EP to Douglas Fox, [? 1939], as cited by Norman: 1960, 372.

an ‘essential book’: WCW, ‘Penny Wise, Pound Foolish’, New Republic XCIX (28 June 1939) 229–30, as in Homberger: 1972, 336–7. Homberger omits WCW’s accusing EP of ‘thirty years’ anti-Semitism’—see Witemeyer’s note in EP/WCW 203.

Pound had ‘spread himself’: WCW to JL, 7 June 1939, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, p. 49.

309 ‘useful’: EP to DP, 10 and 16 May 1939 (Lilly).

‘Hamilton at least to try’…‘with increasing irritation’ etc.: EP to Ibbotson, 17 Jan. [1939], EP/Ibb 87–8.

‘95%’: comment accompanying copies of Introductory Text Book sent to new President of Hamilton and to the Alumni Committee, as enclosed with EP to Ibbotson, 25 Mar. 1939, EP/Ibb 94, 96. See also Ezra Pound. A Selected Catalog from the Ezra Pound Collection at Hamilton College, compiled with notes by Cameron McWhirter and Randall L. Ericson (Clinton, NY: Hamilton College Library), p. 29—a facsimile of the copy sent to William Bristol, Jr, a member of the Alumni Committee.

‘Ez axd’: EP to Dr A. P. Saunders, 30 May 1939 (Hamilton).

‘such an agile’: Olivia Saunders (Mrs Robert W. Wood, Jr), to Charles Norman, as in Norman: 1960, 368.

‘down from 207’: EP to OR, [? 10 June 1939] (Beinecke/OR).

310 ‘if war came’: Mrs Edward Root to Charles Norman, as in Norman: 1960, 367.

‘Dupont (gun family)’: EP to DP, 8 June 1939 (Lilly). Cp. ‘Du Pont powder works to lunch’, EP to HLP, 8 June 1939 (Beinecke).

‘econ. & hist dept.’: EP to DP, 8 and 9 June 1939 (Lilly).

‘finally had to interpose’: Mrs Edward Root to Charles Norman, as in Norman: 1960, 368.

the Alumni Luncheon: primary source for this paragraph is Norman: 1960, 369–71.

a gentleman’s agreement: see William Hoffa, ‘“Ezra Pound: A Celebration”, Hamilton College, April 25–26, 1980’, Pai 9.3 (1980) 576.

‘About bust the commencement’: EP to OR, 13 June 1939 (Beinecke/OR).

‘Hamilton ought’: EP to President Cowley, 28 June [1939], reproduced in facsimile in Ezra Pound: A Selected Catalog from the Ezra Pound Collection at Hamilton College, 26–7.

311 ‘I won’t attempt’: President Cowley to EP, 11 July 1939, Ezra Pound: A Selected Catalog from the Ezra Pound Collection at Hamilton College, 28.

‘git over the idea’: EP to Cowley, 25 July [1939] (Hamilton).

‘Ezra Pound’: the citation is as given in Norman: 1960, 369.

APPENDIX C. OUTLINE OF CAVALCANTI. A SUNG DRAMEDY IN 3 ACTS

321 ‘dramedy’: ‘T. J. V.’, ‘Dramedy’, Athenaeum XCIV. 4688 (5 Mar. 1920) 315.

‘wother hell’: EP to AB, 24 Oct. 1933 (Lilly).

Decameron: see the ninth tale of the sixth day. Cited here in the translation by Guido Waldman in The World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 401–3.

323 ‘tour de force’: EP to AB, 20 Aug. 1932 (Lilly).

‘thought melody came up’…‘meagre’: EP to AB, 20 Aug. 1932 (Lilly).

‘dull’: as echoed by EP in letter to AB, 7 June 1933, cited CPMEP(1) 78. Margaret Fisher reports, however, that in the Bolzano 2000 performance this aria was sung impressively and to ‘mesmerizing’ effect.

remarked in The Spirit of Romance: SR 116, 177, 127.

background to Sordello’s song: see EP, ‘Troubadours—Their Sorts and Conditions’, LE 97; GK 107–8; 6/22–3, 29/141–2, 36/180. Dante placed Cunizza in the Third Heaven (under Venus)—see Paradiso IX, 25ff. See also Peter Makin, Provence and Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 79–82 and chap. 9 (pp. 186–214) especially pp. 204–5.

‘formed [Sordello’s] genius’: Makin, Provence and Pound, p. 204.

‘Background’: EP, as given in CPMEP(2) vii.

324 historical record: see Niccolo Machiavelli, History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy, Bk. I, chap. 4.

‘Guido turns to an intellectual sympathy’: EP, ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), T 20, Anderson 14–15.

the cypher: see Margaret Fisher, EPRO 182–91 and 286–90 (n. 136). An issue for critics has been how seriously Pound took suggestions that in Cavalcanti’s (and Dante’s) poetry there was enciphered the ‘secret language’ of a mystic cult. In his ‘Cavalcanti’ essay he accepted as a useful ‘irritant’, while declaring them not applicable to ‘Donna mi prega’, ‘Luigi Valli’s theories re secret conspiracies, mystic brotherhoods, widely distributed (and uniform) cipher in “all” or some poems of the period, etc.’ (MIN 375–6—see also 382–6, LE 173, 179–82). In a letter to OR, 6 Feb. 1928, he was, however, simply dismissive: ‘a big book on Linguaggio secreto di Dante which explains a lot of things re/Guido that don’t need it and…don’t explain any of the ones that might stand a bit of xplaining’—‘fails to fit the facts’ (Lilly). In GK he wrote that ‘Valli’s wanderings in search of a secret language…are, at mildest estimate, unconvincing’ (294—see also 221). Re the critics on the issue, see Colin McDowell, ‘Literalists of the Imagination: Pound, Occultism and the Critics’, Pai 28.2–3 (1999) 56ff. McDowell argues that Pound was ‘questioning the whole idea of using codes for writing or interpreting poetry’ (57).

325 Pound’s notes: ‘Notes on Act III’, CPMEP (2) 126.

‘fortune shows her power’: Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 91.

Guido’s failure: see Fisher and Hughes, CPMEP 113, for a somewhat different account of the failure.