Ezra Pound: Poet
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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., 2ième 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.