‘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).
&nbs
p; ‘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 Ideolog
y (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.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 55