Pound was looking up other old friends—Violet Hunt, Agnes Bedford, Joseph Bard—and meeting political contacts. Someone who had been in the secret service told him that ‘he cd/ buy any of the big politicians EXCEPT Chamberlain’, and that he ‘had the dope on ALL the communist leaders… definitely paid by Russia for military espionage’. He heard Oswald Mosley speak at a public meeting in Lewisham, and later attacked the BBC in Action for keeping off the air what he had said about Chamberlain, apparently that he was not ‘a moral coward’. When they met, Mosley was surprised to find Pound ‘a vivacious, bustling and practical person’, ‘exactly the opposite of what I expected from the abstruse genius of his poetry’. Pound had the idea of telling Chamberlain in person ‘what he was headed for’, but missed a phone call—possibly from the Prime Minister’s office.
Olga Rudge meanwhile was feeling increasingly put out by his giving up to disposing of his mother-in-law’s furniture the precious time he was to have spent with Mary and herself in Venice. At the end of October she calculated that ‘in 13 years the L’cna has had the benefit of His company for say 3 weeks all told’; and as for herself, ‘This one feels that the best years of her life have been spent in solitary confinement out of consideration for His family’s feelings—and she feels it is the limit to be sacrificed now to their furniture.’ A couple of days later she exploded at his ‘damn unfair’ treatment of her, ‘that He should always have her front door key and come and go as He likes and she never has His’. Then she sent a telegram, ‘IN GREAT ANXIETY BEG HIM TO REASSURE HER OF HIS AFFECTION UNALTERED CANNOT STAND MORE DISAPPOINTMENT TENEREZZE OLGA’. Pound responded, ‘ASSURED DURABLE RETURNING SOON’, and wrote, ‘He ain’t stayin in this town for no skoit an thazzat’, also that ‘he purrfers St Ambrogio with her in it to London or elsewhere without her’. At that Olga wrote back, ‘She breathing again—literally’.
‘To make up for the short stay in Venice he took us to Rome’ that Christmas, so Mary remembered. Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was showing, and Ezra said they must see it at once. At the end when the lights went up, he and Mary looked at each other, and they stayed to watch it through again. ‘I think he enjoyed the film even more than I did’, Mary wrote. Her mother developed a cold and spent much of the week in bed. Mary and her father visited the zoo; spent the evenings with Italian friends in the Caffè Greco; visited Marinetti who showed his Futurist paintings but ‘seemed more interested in what I knew about sheep’. One afternoon a monsignor took them to fashionable Doney’s in the Via Veneto for pastries and hot chocolate, Pound and the monsignor ‘two bulky figures talk[ing] with such animation that [Mary] feared tables and chairs would be knocked over’; then he took them in a carriage to St Peter’s, and later to the garden of the Knights of Malta where he told her to look through the keyhole of a door in the high wall, and there was ‘the dome of Michelangelo in the pale golden mist of the setting sun—something to remember’.
At the beginning of January 1939 Pound learnt that Eliot was closing down the Criterion—that month’s number would be the last. He was surprised that Eliot had said nothing to him about it during his recent five weeks in London, and in fact had been rather ‘projecting continuance’. But then Eliot’s reason, it emerged, was that he had been ‘deeply shaken by the events of September 1938’, which he viewed, not as a triumph of peace-making, but as the failure of a civilization to oppose a godless barbarism. He might well have felt that Pound would not have understood his state of mind, nor sympathized with his ‘depression of spirits so different from any other experience of fifty years as to be a new emotion’. And indeed Pound’s reaction to the end of the Criterion was rather jovial. ‘Who killed Cock Possum? | Who bitched his blossom?’, he enquired of Ronald Duncan. And to Eliot he wrote that ‘Olga, scandalized at my levity thus reproves me: “I liked The Criterion, it was respectable | none of your other magazines are respectable | You have no feeling for the sorrows of yr/ friend Possum”.’
What would prove to be the last of the Rapallo music weeks took place that year between 2 and 13 March, four of the six concerts being devoted, as in the first series in 1933, to Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano, with Olga Rudge and Renata Borgatti the musicians throughout. The assumption behind both the first and the last series of concerts, Pound explained in Il Mare, was that these sonatas ‘constitute a source, a concentration of musical intelligence as unique in its way as Dante’s Paradiso is in the realm of poetry’, and it had been the aim to ensure ‘that at least in one part of the world the public could periodically, every year, have the opportunity to hear and re-hear this series of sonatas in its entirety, sharpening its ear and training its critical judgment’.
At this time Pound was hastening to complete his ‘China’ and ‘John Adams’ cantos. He had decided that he should go to Washington in the spring to talk some sense, his sense, into President Roosevelt if only he could get to see him, and he wanted to get those cantos off to Faber & Faber before leaving. Besides, his two great source books were not portable and he could work from them only while in Rapallo. They were the thirteen thick folio volumes of an Histoire générale de la Chine; and the ten fat volumes of the Works of John Adams. The history of China he had acquired in November 1937 and he had been working intermittently since then at condensing its 6,376 pages down towards the 2,500 lines of Cantos LII–LXI. The John Adams Works he had acquired only in June 1938, and the work of condensing its 8,000 pages down to the matching 2,500 lines of Cantos LXII–LXXI appears to have been his main occupation in January and February of 1939. ‘Chewing thru Adams’, he noted to Olga Rudge on 1 February; then ‘he on vol. Ten and ult. of J. Adams’ on the 3rd; followed by ‘he got to the end’, on the 7th, with the addition, ‘J. Adams, wottaman!’ He had become convinced that the neglected second president was ‘much more the father of Jackson and Van Buren than Jefferson was’, that indeed he was the true ‘pater patriae U.S.A. more than Washington or Jefferson/ though all three essential and all betrayed by the first congress’. In mid-February he was ‘havin a helluva time’ with cantos 53 and 54, and with 60 and 61, and even when he had a clean typescript of them on the 19th he still felt that two needed to be ‘humanised | too condensed as they set’. By 3 March, however, his clean typescript was up to canto 67, and he had all twenty new cantos polished and shined and sent off to Faber before he sailed for America on 13 April.
The end of Czechoslovakia
Hitler had not been appeased by being allowed to seize the Sudetenland. Already on 21 October 1938 he had ordered his military chiefs to be in a state of readiness to liquidate the rest of Czechoslovakia; and then, to further destabilize the now ruined and defenceless remnant, he had encouraged the Slovaks to break away, and the Hungarians to annexe Ruthenia and the Hungarian-speaking districts, and the Poles to annex territory adjacent to their border. Then, at 6. a.m. on 15 March 1939, German troops entered Moravia and Bohemia, and on the 16th occupied Slovakia, nowhere meeting resistance. Hitler made a triumphant entry into Prague, followed by the SS and the Gestapo, and Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, being now wholly incorporated into the Nazi Reich as Austria had been. ‘Neither Britain nor France’, Shirer wrote, ‘made the slightest move to save it, though at Munich they had solemnly guaranteed Czechoslovakia against aggression.’
Britain and France did, however, begin to realize that Hitler was not to be appeased, and to acknowledge that his next move would be against Poland. On 31 March 1939, Chamberlain declared that the two countries had given assurances to the Polish Government that if it were attacked they would lend it all the support in their power.
Hitler still had September 1939 firmly pencilled in as the moment for all-out war.
Two books for governors: (1) cantos 52–61
More than the history of a State, or even of a people, the history of China is that of a civilization, or rather that of a tradition of culture. Its chief interest…would perhaps be to show how the idea of civilization has been able, in such a lengthy his
tory, to keep priority, almost constantly, over the idea of the State.
—Marcel Granet
As Hitler was driving his people towards a criminal war which would devastate Europe morally as much as materially, Pound was condensing into verse the epic story of how the civilization of China was founded upon, and renewed itself dynasty after dynasty upon, the Confucian conviction that good emperors brought peace and abundance for all their people, and that those who did not would rightly be overthrown. It was a simple enough ethic, this idea that the true aim of government was to secure the welfare, liberty, and contentment of its citizens, and it had served China well through all the vicissitudes of its 5,000-year history. According to its own historians the empire flourished under good rulers, those who observed the processes of nature and distributed its abundance equitably among the whole people; and under bad rulers, those who went against the natural law or who let particular interests come before the common good, the empire fell apart and the people suffered.
It was primarily the historians who kept this ethic, this paideuma, in force through all that vast stretch of time, the historians being Confucian scholars who wrote up, preserved, and revised the records of the successive dynasties. Theirs were moral histories, like the books of the Bible and Shakespeare’s history plays, ‘school books for princes’ they called them, the predominant concern being to so mirror the conduct of emperors and their officers as to make of them examples of wise rule or of misrule for the instruction of their successors. A Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government was the explicit title given to the major compilation put together by a team of scholars in the eleventh century of our era. Their aim was not so much to record events as to pass on and to perpetuate the fundamental principles of good government and to have them acted upon.
That tradition was continued down into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the time when there were Jesuit missionaries in China, learned men who were conveying to the Chinese along with their Christian doctrine the latest advances of European science and technology, and in exchange carrying back to Europe news of China’s own civilization. In this way a knowledge of the Confucian principles of government became current in Europe at just the moment when some of its leading thinkers, notably Voltaire and the Philosophes in France, were conceiving a social order based on natural reason and natural justice rather than on royal prerogative and religious dogma. The revolutionary ideas that were gradually taking hold, that all should have a share in the common wealth, and that governments should not tyrannize over the people but rather serve their needs, such ideas were found to have been long established in China and to have been the key to its enduring civilization. It seemed, to those seeking a more enlightened Europe, that Confucian China afforded a model of their ideal society, and Confucius himself was set up as an icon of enlightenment. His idea of civil government, as transmitted in the Jesuits’ versions of the works attributed to him, and by Voltaire in his Essai sur les mœurs, helped form the minds of those who made the American and the French revolutions.
With the betrayal of the American Revolution very much on his mind, and with Europe descending into political chaos, Pound had written in 1937 of an immediate need for Confucius, meaning specifically a need for his model of responsible government. He had done something towards meeting the need by translating the Ta Hio and by making a digest of the Analects in Guide to Kulchur. Then in the autumn of 1937 he bought the thirteen-volume Histoire générale de la Chine (Paris, 1772–85), a translation of the Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government made at the court of the Manchu emperor K’ang Hsi by the French Jesuit Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1669–1749). His ‘China Cantos’ would be cantos ‘having to do with instruction’—the second part of his long poem as he had first conceived it at Hamilton College in 1904 or 1905—and they would be addressed implicitly to the governments of Europe and of America, and in a few places fairly directly to Italy’s Il Duce.
Canto 52 opens in the voice of instruction, ‘And I have told you’; and the body of the canto, an account of the rites and customs of ancient China, will begin in the same way with ‘Know then’. What we have been told in the previous ‘Siena’ cantos is that ‘the true base of credit’—and, by implication, of order in society—‘is the abundance of nature | with the whole folk behind it’. This is to be the major theme of this canto, and the underlying theme of the entire decad. Just here the counter-theme is re-stated, that anti-social neschek, a Hebrew term for the usurious taking of interest, goes unopposed in the contemporary world. Even ‘the groggy church is gone toothless | No longer holds against neschek’.
The neschek passage does not reprise the investigation of usury in the preceding twenty cantos, but instead distils from Pound’s worst prose the vicious prejudice which would blame the Jews for the universal blight of usury, and which would go on to hold the Jews themselves responsible for anti-Semitism. ‘Rothschild’s sin drawing vengeance’, Pound wrote, ‘poor yitts paying for Rothschild | paying for a few big jew’s vendetta on goyim.’ When Eliot at Faber & Faber saw this passage he wrote to Pound, ‘if you remain keen on jew-baiting, that is your affair, but that name of Rothschild should be omitted’. Use ‘Stinkschuld’ instead then, was Pound’s unrepentant response; but Faber blacked out the name and blacked out five lines of petulant abuse of the Rothschilds. After Pound’s death, however, the blacked-out lines and ‘Stinkschuld’ were restored, thus fully exposing for censure the most disgracefully flawed page of the Cantos.
The poem recovers from this lapse into wilful prejudice on the next page when the poet is restored to his right mind by attending to the wisdom of ancient China. The rest of the canto, a hundred or so lines, is extracted from Li Ki, the Confucian book of rites and folk customs. Li signifies traditional behaviours that make for harmony in nature and in society—these, rather than government legislation, were the guiding principles of Confucian China. Pound’s rendering of the Li Ki is deliberately selective. He chooses to emphasize just the primary relation of man to nature, and the need for the whole folk from emperor to peasant to observe its seasons and processes in order to secure the abundance:
Know then:
Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades
Sovran is Lord of the Fire
to this month are birds
with bitter smell and the odour of burning
To the hearth god, lungs of the victim
The green frog lifts up his voice
and the white latex is in flower
In red car with jewels incarnadine
to welcome the summer
In this month no destruction
no tree shall be cut at this time
Wild beasts are driven from field
in this month are simples gathered.
The empress offers cocoons to the Son of Heaven
That is when the cultivation of the silk worms is done for the year. And the empress’s offering to the emperor is to be followed, so Li Ki goes on, by all the women, rich and poor, old and young, paying a tribute of cocoons in proportion to the number of their mulberry trees; and the silk from them will go to make the robes used in the customary rites in the countryside and in the halls of the ancestors. Pound barely notices such evidences of a developed social organization. He passes over the mass of detailed directions for imperial ceremonies, and for the written characters and musical tones appropriate to each season and each ceremony; and he leaves out nearly all the directions for the proper conduct of ministers and court officials—for example, that they should advance men of talent and open to them a career with honour. Instead his China in this first canto of the sequence appears in its primitive state, or rather in what Lévi-Strauss preferred to call the primal state of its civilization.
De Mailla’s history, Pound’s source in cantos 53–61, begins with the first stirrings of that civilization. As de Mailla tells it, the condition of the inhabitants of China before the first emperors was nearer to that of the beasts than of
men: they lived in the wild without house or cottage, ate their food raw, dressed in the skins of animals, knew no laws or rules of conduct, and had no thought for anything beyond a purely animal existence. They differed from the beasts only in this, that they had a soul capable of arousing an aversion to such a life. De Mailla, being a product of the French enlightenment and a Jesuit, was pleased to see in heathen China’s ascent to a civilized state proof that reason, the divine spark in man, would draw him towards heaven even without the aid of the Christian revelation. His first emperors, horrified by the brute state of their people, teach them to house and clothe themselves, to burn wood and cook food, and by page four are teaching them that in order to live well and happily they should follow the guidance of that reason with which Heaven has supplied them so that they may perform Heaven’s will. In short, de Mailla’s China is a China for his time.
Pound’s too is a China for his own time; that is, he brings to its history his own preoccupations and ignores de Mailla’s. The latter’s first four pages are condensed to just three lines—
Yeou taught men to break branches
Seu Gin set up the stage and taught barter,
taught the knotting of cords
That places the emphasis simply on the teaching of elementary skills, and strips away all reference to ‘reason’ and ‘Heaven’. Pound’s first pages go on to notate in ‘luminous details’ the incremental growth of Chinese civilization over a thousand or more years, with each named emperor both honouring his ancestors’ achievements and moving to a further cultural level. The legendary Chin Nong taught what grains to grow, ‘and made a plough that is used five thousand years’; the Yellow Emperor Hoang Ti, around 2611 ‘ante Christum’, ‘contrived the making of bricks | and his wife started working the silk worms’; money was in use in his time, and he measured the lengths of hollow reeds ‘to make tune for song’; a century later ‘Ti Ko set his scholars to fitting words to their music’; his son Yao noted ‘what star is at solstice | saw what star marks midsummer’; Yu, first emperor of the Hsia dynasty, controlled the waters of the Yellow River, and ‘let his men pay tithes in kind’; and Chun—who reigned between Yao and Yu but is placed by Pound as the peak of this first phase of development—on assuming his responsibilities sacrificed to ‘the spirit Chang Ti’ that moves the sun and the stars, and gave the instruction that ‘your verses should say what you mean, and the music should accord with your meaning’. Tradition acclaims these three emperors, Yao, Chun, and Yu, as the exemplary models for all later rulers, and after naming them over Pound adds the name of Yu’s wise minister of public order, Kao-Yao, with the culminating word ‘abundance’—that being what he would have this first 48-line section of the canto add up to.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 40
