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 5th, 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).
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 59
