The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound: Composition, Revision, Publication 9781474258746, 9781474258777, 9781474258760

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
List of Figures
Note on the Text
1. “I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology
2. “To copy and amplify”: Section: Rock-Drill
3. “No, that is not textual”: Thrones
4. “Or true editions?”
Bibliography
Index of (Published) Works by Pound
Index of Names

Citation preview

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

Historicizing Modernism Series editors Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway. Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK. Editorial board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, and Erik Tonning

Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Howard Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie van Mierlo John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett and Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood Upcoming titles Chicago and the Making of American Modernism, Michelle E. Moore James Joyce and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen Politics and 1930s Literature, Natasha Peryan

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound Composition, Revision, Publication Michael Kindellan

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Michael Kindellan, 2017 Michael Kindellan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii-xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kindellan, Michael, author. Title: The late cantos of Ezra Pound : composition, revision, dissemination / Michael Kindellan. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Historicizing modernism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017010086| ISBN 9781474258746 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474258753 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972. Cantos. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. Classification: LCC PS3531.O82 C2859 2017 | DDC 811/.52–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010086 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5874-6 PB: 978-1-3501-0723-6 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5876-0 ePub: 978-1-4742-5875-3 Series: Historicizing Modernism Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In gratitude and friendship, this book is for Richard.

Contents Series Editors’ Preface Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations List of Figures Note on the Text 1 2 3 4

“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology “To copy and amplify”: Section: Rock-Drill “No, that is not textual”: Thrones “Or true editions?”

Bibliography Index of (Published) Works by Pound Index of Names

x xi xiii xv xvii xix 1 53 137 203 251 269 271

Series Editors’ Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentiethcentury literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions, and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, two burgeoning sub-disciplines of Modernism, Beckett studies and Pound studies, feature heavily as exemplars of the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of “canonical” authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly “minor” or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the Englishspeaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also be included. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic “autonomy” employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers, and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept “Modernism” itself. Similarly, the very notion of “historicizing” Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

Preface This book forwards a series of speculative arguments about the material history of the late cantos of Ezra Pound, construing this history as something implicitly resistant to, and therefore critical of, the kind of textual scholarship I also try to deploy. Knowing something about how Pound planned and wrote Rock-Drill and Thrones, how he revised them (or did not revise them, as was often the case), and the circumstances of their publication can lead to new insights at the same time as creating new obstacles for interpretation. Combining an investigation into how these sections were written with an explication of what they mean is appropriate to the late cantos especially because they, more than any other cantos, constantly foreground writerly concerns, making them into topics and subjects of the poetry. In what follows I do not propose to do much in the way of elucidating what seems to me to be Pound’s purposeful opacity. The aim of this book is not to provide some radically new revelations. In fact, only rarely do I even try to shed new light on old readings. As such, this book is susceptible to the entirely legitimate criticism that it shirks some of the hard and necessary graft involved in identifying and elucidating extensive networks of reference, associations and cross-linkages that imbricate these cantos at every turn. Instead, this book proposes to read the late cantos philologically, looking into their stages of development, from first inception to final published version(s), and to extrapolate therefrom new understandings about the processes and procedures that governed Pound’s writing. Even though this decidedly modest attempt itself cannot come close to giving a comprehensive account of Rock-Drill and Thrones, my underlying argument is that a more detailed description of how this poetry came into being will contribute to a clearer understanding of its significance. That said, such reasoning might easily apply to every literary artifact ever created; indeed, scholars, editors, and literary critics who are either sympathetic to materialist hermeneutics or who are interested at some level in how

xii Preface

texts come into existence would take this supposition as read. What makes my approach—one that combines elements of textual scholarship (the investigation into the provenance and development of texts) with literary criticism (the interpretation or evaluation of those texts)—particularly germane to cantos 85 through 109 I can only hope to show over the course of this study.

Acknowledgments This project was begun during an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship (2012–14). I am enormously grateful to that organization for its support, as well as that afforded to me by Prof. Sylvia Mayer and my host institution, Universität Bayreuth. I am also very grateful to colleagues at the University of Sheffield, particularly the head of the School of English, Prof. Adam Piette, and Charlotte Harden, coordinator of the Vice Chancellor’s Fellowship scheme, who have graciously allowed me the time needed to finish writing. By the time this book comes into print, some early sections of it may well have appeared, in rather different forms, in Paideuma and Glossator. I am grateful to Ben Friedlander and Betsy Rose of the former, as well as to Alexander Howard and Ryan Dobran of the latter, for their support and encouragement. I would also like to thank the anonymous peer-reviewers of both journals for their comments and advice. Some ideas, arguments, and examples appear intermittently throughout the first chapter (mainly pages 12–24) that were developed in grateful collaboration with Joshua Kotin, in an essay we co-wrote called “The Cantos and Pedagogy.” Since my recent thinking has been deeply influenced by our work together, the reader may wish to read chapter 1 alongside our essay and consider the former my extended meditation on the latter. “The Cantos and Pedagogy” is due for publication in Modernist Cultures later this year. Having undertaken some archival work over the past few years, I remain deeply indebted to a number of archivists and librarians: Ingrid Lennon-Pressy, Diane Ducharme, and Nancy Kuhl of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Raffaella Gobbo of the Fondo Scheiwiller, Archivi della Parola dell’Immagine e della Comunicazione Editoriale, Università degli Studi di Milano; Gabriel Swift and AnnaLee Pauls of the Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University; Leslie Morris and her colleagues of the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Richard Watson and

xiv Acknowledgments

Chido Muchemwa of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; Erika Dowell and Carin Graves of the Lilly Library, Indiana University; James Maynard of The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, SUNY Buffalo; Josh McKeon of the Archives and Manuscript Division, Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Mark E. Tillson and Christian Goodwillie at the Burke Library, Hamilton College; Anna Flügge of the Amerika-Institut at LMU; and Katherine McInnis of Meanjin. I have had fruitful, often necessary conversations with many friends and colleagues over the past several years. Tim Redman, Zhaoming Qian, John Gery, Alec Marsh, Lucas Klein, Meredith Warren, Ranjan Sen, Roxana Preda, Steven Yao, Peter Manson, Ben Dawson, Chris Woods, and Mark Byron all provided timely and often essential expertise. I owe especial debts of gratitude to Miranda Hickman, Peter Nicholls, Sam Ladkin, Eric White, Peter Middleton, and Keston Sutherland, without whose insights and criticisms I could not have begun to frame the outlines of this project let alone get it off the ground. I have been in regular contact with Alex Pestell who has continually offered much needed critical common sense. David Avital, Mark Richardson, and Lucy Brown at Bloomsbury, as well as series editors Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, have been gracious and patient and kind. David Tucker has been integral throughout, both in terms of guidance and support. To my wife Julia and my two young daughters, Greta and Agnes, was kann ich noch sagen? Ich danke euch sehr! Now that this work is done there should be fewer cries, screams, and tantrums about the house. Throughout, I have been granted unrestricted access to Richard Taylor’s monumental project “Annals, Documentation for a Variorum Edition of The Cantos.” This as-yet unpublished work is a breathtaking achievement of individual scholarship that gathers together, in a file currently some 300,000 words long, an enormous mass of chronologically presented ancillary information regarding the composition, revision, and publication of Pound’s Cantos. Taylor’s Annals gives a detailed history of the development of Pound’s poem; it has proved an invaluable resource to a project such as this. Without his work, mine would be all the poorer.

Abbreviations Works by Pound ABCR

ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960).

Cantos

The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1975).

CWC

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

EPCF

Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends: Stories in Letters, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

EPJL

Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: The Selected Letters, ed. David M. Gordon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994).

LE

The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1960).

SL

The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1971).

SP

Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973).

Archives APICE

Fondo Scheiwiller, Archivi della Parola dell’Immagine e della Comunicazione Editoriale, Università degli Studi di Milano.

EHA

Eva Hesse Archive of Modernism and Literary Translation, Die Bayerische Amerika-Akademie, Munich, Germany.

xvi Abbreviations

EPC

Ezra Pound Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

EPP

Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. References to EPP are followed by folder number.

HRA

Ezra Pound Material 1949–1960, Subseries 3A–G, Hudson Review Archives (C1091), Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

NDPC

New Directions Publishing Corp. Records, circa 1932–1997, MS Am 2077, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

NHP

Norman Holmes Pearson Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This collection contains box but not folder numbers.

SMP

Sheri Martinelli Papers, YCAL MSS 868, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. This collection contains box but not folder numbers.

List of Figures Figure 1.1: Detail from Séraphin Couvreur’s Chou King. 29 Figure 1.2: Ezra Pound, page from manuscript draft of Canto 85, Notebook 80, Beinecke.

30

Figure 1.3: Ezra Pound, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro proof-page, APICE. 32 Figure 2.1: Ezra Pound, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro proof-page, APICE. 76 Figure 2.2: Ezra Pound, detail from manuscript draft of Canto 90, Notebook 87, Beinecke.

93

Figure 2.3: Ezra Pound, detail from All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro proofpage showing altar design, APICE. 94 Figure 2.4: Ezra Pound, Sheri Martinelli’s copy of Canto 90 typescript, Beinecke. 104 Figure 3.1: Ezra Pound, detail from manuscript draft of Canto 102, Notebook 91, Beinecke.

188

Figure 3.2: Ezra Pound, detail from first typescript of Canto 102, Beinecke. 188 Figure 3.3: Ezra Pound, detail from second typescript of Canto 102, Beinecke. 188 Figure 3.4: Ezra Pound, detail from manuscript lines used in Canto 103 with subsequent correction, Notebook 71, Beinecke. 191 Figure 3.5: Ezra Pound, detail from first typescript of Canto 103, Beinecke. 191 Figure 3.6: Ezra Pound, detail from later typescript of Canto 103 with subsequent correction, Beinecke.

191

Figure 4.1: Ezra Pound, front cover of Thrones, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro (1959).

213

xviii

List of Figures

Figure 4.2: Ezra Pound, back cover of Thrones, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro (1959).

213

Figure 4.3: Ezra Pound, title page of Thrones, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro (1959).

213

Note on the Text Every attempt has been made to render Pound’s words, and indeed those of his correspondents, as written, which means that I have not tried to correct anyone’s eccentricities of syntax or spelling. In square brackets, I do occasionally make minor editorial interpolations to avoid what Pound colorfully referred to as “further dambiguities.” Where not otherwise attributed, translations are my own. All previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound: © 2017 Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, agents. All published material by Ezra Pound used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. I am grateful to Mary de Rachewiltz and Christopher Wait of New Directions for their help and support. In addition, for permission to quote from unpublished correspondence and other archival material, I am grateful to Eva Hesse; Alina Kalczynska, executor of the estate of Vanni Scheiwiller; the Estate of Frederick Morgan; the New Directions Ownership Trust, which represents the estate of James Laughlin; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which represents the estate of Norman Holmes Pearson; and the individual estates of Sheri Martinelli, Willis Hawley, Achilles Fang, Hugh Kenner, Archibald MacLeish, George Oppen, and John Espey. All copyrights are retained by their respective holders.

1

“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology

The persistent avoidance throughout a full decade of most of the past and all living authors of high dynamism, the perpetual dalliance with tepidities, of blunt and crummy mentalities, leave a printed page that I find utmost difficulty in traversing.1

On May 17, 1955, Ezra Pound wrote to Michael Reck from St. Elizabeths Hospital: “I have always loathed reading, and can now read practically nothing save to learn what I don’t know / FACTS.”2 If the sentiment expressed here is sincere, the gentle and long-suffering reader will probably be taken by surprise. Surely Pound’s “laborious appropriations”3 of classical—and, by this stage in The Cantos, increasingly recondite—literatures indicate the work of a poet not in hate with but in fact excessively passionate about reading? Is Pound not the twentieth century’s pre-eminent poet-philologist, literally in love with logos? Entering at that time its late stages of composition, what is this vast, compendious, encyclopedic, and impressively intertextual poem, if not a testament to the enduring value of and pleasure in reading? Surely Pound stands unambiguously at the leading edge of “the tradition of twentieth century philological poetry,”4 and as such, is committed deeply to a scrupulous attention to language in all its material and transmitted forms? Counterintuitive as Pound’s disclosure might seem, he made similar statements throughout his life, albeit with neither the frequency nor the

Ezra Pound, “Toward Orthology,” EPP, 6062. Quoted in Michael Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), facsimile opposite 99. 3 Keston Sutherland, “J. H. Prynne and Philology” (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2004), 11. 4 Ibid., 13. 1 2

2

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

vehemence of some of his other, more celebrated claims. As early as 1911, he wrote that since “the eye-sight is valuable, we should read less, far less than we do.” Besides, the “best of knowledge,” he continued, is “in the air” and not, therefore, upon any printed page.5 Towards the opposite end of his prosewriting career, Pound elaborated further. In Guide to Kulchur, published still some twenty years before his letter to Reck, we read (if we must): To read and be conscious of the act of reading is for some men (the writer among them) to suffer. I loathe the operation. My eyes are geared for the horizon. Nevertheless I do read for days on end when I have caught the scent of a trail. And I, like any other tired businessman, read also when I am “sunk”, when I am too exhausted to use my mind to any good purpose.6

These remarks point to a rather peculiar fact: for Pound, writing existed in a deeply problematic relation to reading. Far from being complementary activities, the two are if not opposed then radically disarticulated. Rather than being a poem that celebrates (however masochistically) its status, as Margaret Dickie once so brilliantly described it, as a “fragment between its beginning in other writing and its end in other readings,”7 The Cantos as writing could itself constitute an explicit protest against reading. In this light, the oft-cited slogan, “Dichten = condensare,”8 which Pound borrowed from Basil Bunting, sounds more like a plan designed to allay suffering than a prescription for new poetic texts. That Pound found reading loathsome is supremely ironic given the fact he dedicated most of his adult life to writing one of the longest poems in the language, so that a strong detestation of reading is expressed as an equally strong compulsion towards writing. This disjunction results, somewhat predictably, in the following double-standard: the poem, though written in flagrant contravention of “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” SP, 23. GK, 55. Pound echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature,” so that his being a poet is somehow consistent with his inability to notice certain detail: “there is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all parts, that is, the poet”; and later: “the health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.” Emerson’s Essays, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 3, 7. Relevantly, the expansive vision Emerson describes chimes with Pound’s own condemnation of “philology” as kind of shortsighted provincialism (more about which below): “Take a man’s mind off the human value of the poem he is reading (and in this case the human value is the art value), switch it on to some question of grammar and you begin his dehumanisation.” “Provincialism the Enemy,” SP, 197. 7 Margaret Dickie, “The Cantos: Slow Reading,” ELH 51, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 823. 8 ABCR, 36. 5 6

“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology

3

normative standards of attention, diligence and care nevertheless demands as much from its readers. In the late verse especially, Pound cultivates an air of haste, approximation and urgency— in discourse what matters is to get it across e poi basta9

—even though it is not normally read hastily or urgently or with only approximate attention. Instead, we usually read The Cantos with a great deal of scholarly care, a fact which reveals a further irony, namely that Pound’s attempts to circumvent, détourne, travesty and otherwise eschew the protocols of philology have led to the formation of so many more philologists, almost to the exclusion of every other kind of reader. No poem I can think of is so temperamentally opposed to institutionalized learning, and yet—despite steady commercial saleability—no poem is so ensconced within the ivory tower. (Polite notice: there exists a comparatively small but highly informative body of scholarly work on Pound’s renowned antipathy for philology, an antipathy expressed most often and most eloquently early in his career. Generally, this scholarship focuses on what Pound said about philology and why, offering biographical, historical, and cultural context by way of explanation. This study, though deeply indebted to such work, neither rehearses these arguments nor adopts methodologies used in making them. Instead, I attempt to describe, and where possible assess, the impact of Pound’s attitude to certain scholarly approaches upon the theory and practice of his own late work. That is to say, I am interested in how and why his disdain for what he

9

Cantos, 79/486. The Chinese characters in question, 辭 tz’u (M6984) and 達 ta (M5956), meaning “Words; speech. A sentence, an expression or phrase. A message; instructions; statements. A form of poetical composition” and “Intelligent; successful. To succeed. To obtain advancement. To be in office. To apprehend. Prominent” respectively, were for Pound a summary of Confucius’s thoughts on style: “He said: Problem of style? Get the meaning across and then STOP.” The abbreviated rendering of the second ideogram may be thought of as either a consideration to the reader, limiting the communication to only the bare essentials, or as a nuisance to him or her, impeding the search for a referent. The numbers in parentheses refer to ideogram entries not pages. Unless otherwise stated, the “meanings” ascribed to “ideograms” throughout are derived from Mathews not because they are necessarily correct but because they are usually those Pound consulted.

4

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

once called “scholar-sheep”10 is not just complementary to, but constitutive of, the verse that comprises Rock-Drill and Thrones.) The fact remains that Pound’s staunch refusal of philological care is habitually responded to by scholars with even stauncher demonstrations of the need for philology as such: the hermeneutics Pound effectively banished from his own reading practices are precisely those employed by scholars in theirs. In other words, there exists an essential—and ultimately irreconcilable— disjunction between the kind of reading exhibited in Pound’s late cantos and the kind of reading imposed by them. One consequence of the disjunction between disparate reading strategies is evident in the schedule of difficulties Rock-Drill and Thrones present: rampant intertextuality, obscurity of reference, violent shifts in semantic and syntactic registers, cacophonous deployment of multiple languages all exist in part because Pound, actually in hate with reading, moved so quickly through whatever text he had before him (his theories of luminous detail and ideogrammic writing were attempts to save readers from the drudgery of their vocation). We, in contrast, and in many cases as a direct result, cannot do the same. Dickie put it succinctly, extending a line of thinking that reaches back via Roman Jakobson to Friedrich Nietzsche, when she wrote that Pound’s “rapid switches in language and contexts” solicit “the art of slow reading”; since the poem is, in her opinion, “open, fragmented and discontinuous,” we must read slowly.11 In the course, as it happens, of advocating the opposite approach, that is, “fast” reading, Donald Davie nevertheless noted that: the Cantos, erudite though they are, consistently frustrate the sort of reading that is synonymous with “study,” reading such as goes on in the seminar room or the discussion group. It is hopeless to go at them cannily, not moving on to line three until one is sure of line two. They must be taken in big gulps or not at all. This means reading without comprehension? Yes, if by comprehension we mean a set of propositions that can be laid end to end.12 Ezra Pound, DK/ Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek (Montréal: DC Books, 1974), 72. Dickie, “The Cantos: Slow Reading,” 819. Mark Kyburz also speaks of what he calls Pound’s method or model of slow reading. See Mark Kyburz, “Voi Altri Pochi”: Ezra Pound and his Audience, 1908–1925 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996), 52, 57, 132–3. 12 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 84. Davie does not deny that “some teasing out of quite short excerpts, even some hunting up of sources and allusions, is profitable at some stage”; and also concedes that though “the verse lines of The Cantos have to be read fast for their meanings,” they should be read “slow for their sounds.” Davie, Pound, 93. 10 11



“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology

5

Christine Froula makes a related point: However fundamental our scholarly tracing of sources and their interrelations is to study of The Cantos, it is not in itself the act of reading Pound designed, and it is finally only groundwork and prelude to the actual challenge his poem including history presents.13

Which is to say that Pound’s anti-philological disposition, insofar as it exists, highlights, therefore, a problem both of and for scholarship. Under pressure, if not attack, is what Pound considered to be the pervasive positivistic attitude of scholarship at large (though he would not have used a term like “positivistic”), so that a consequence of his distaste for “criticism” is a structural sabotage of it, a claim that this book as a whole works towards bringing into greater focus. Pound’s contradictory, obscure, and, in the end, highly idiosyncratic methods of composition, revision, and dissemination must become, I mean to suggest, the objects of critical inquiry because the late cantos are not designed to reward reading strategies that we learn in universities. Davie’s larger point is that a reader’s “bewilderment” must be consciously retained. While it must of course be admitted that aforementioned difficulties characterize The Cantos more generally, so too must it be admitted that by the 1950s they had become especially acute: the mere look of Canto 85 on the page, especially the very beautiful Italian printing of Rock-Drill, announces itself as “unreadable” […] This is at least an advance on the Chinese History and American History cantos, which looked readable but were not. All the same, what are we to do with it? Most readers will understandably decide that life is too short and close the book—though reluctantly, because of the beauty in the look of it.14

Such unreadability is partly what attracts scholarly attention in the first place (the present book is itself moved by this attraction). Another way of framing the central interpretive problem of the late cantos is to suggest a troubled rapport between aesthetics and legibility. Towards the Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 165. Cf. Michael Coyle’s suggestion that “although Pound was unquestionably interested in his source texts, this was not the kind of reading he sought to produce.” Michael Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 226. 14 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 204–5. 13

6

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

end of his “de luxe” period (roughly 1930), a younger Pound satirized this conundrum: “ Buk! ” said the Second Baronet, “ eh… “ Thass a funny lookin’ buk ” said the Baronet Looking at Bayle, folio, 4 vols. in gilt leather, “ Ah… “ Wu… Wu… wot you goin’ eh to do with ah… “ … ah read-it? ” Sic loquitur eques.15

In Rock-Drill, Pound subjects his readers to something more audacious. The question now is no longer merely are you going to read it, but can you?

not water, ôu iu chouèi min kién

10.12

There be thy mirror in men.

Tán

iue p’ei houâng 15

Cantos, 28/139. For a longer discussion of the relation in Pound’s thinking between beauty, ownership, and legibility, see my, “Ownership and interpretation: on Ezra Pound’s deluxe first editions,” in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer, and Christine Reynier (New York: Routledge, 2016), 187–202.

“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology XIII, 9

7

k’i p’eng

Odysseus “to no man”

tcho

and you can know the sincere16

I read self-consciously exotic passages like this one as demonstrative of a work, despite appearances to the contrary, formally closed to the myriad literary possibilities of multilingual writing events (though here just English and Chinese). Readers competent in English are radically excluded from the discourse because it is mostly in Chinese; readers competent in Chinese are impeded by nonsensical appropriation: the second ideogram in the sequence, 戾 (M3854), meaning “To do violence. Perverse; rebellious. Calamities; tribulations; miseries; crime; sin,” is a misprint for 民 (M4508), “The people; mankind,” so that what Pound probably meant as “supervise the people” reads more like “oversee violence/perversity.” The other ideograms are excerpted from disparate parts of Couvreur’s Chou King. Pound’s protests against reading manifest, as in the foregoing passage, as a fidgeting inconsistency whose startling juxtapositions throw up as much confusion as insight and makes that self-same activity all the more challenging for us. Though less ostentatiously exotic—it has markedly fewer ideograms, for example—Thrones is arguably even more recondite than Rock-Drill, while rendering questions about reading and intelligibility increasingly central and urgent. David Moody has suggested, in contradistinction to Davie’s remarks about the visual allure of Rock-Drill, that in Thrones “Pound is not writing now for aesthetic effect” at all; instead, Pound said his “intentions were paideutic and anagogical,” “a form of verbal algebra.”17 The result of which is usually a

16 17

Cantos, 85/554–5. A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3: 399.

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The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

considerable abbreviation of style, at times so extreme that Richard Sieburth, commenting upon Canto 97, remarked: the economy of this text is virtually autistic. Pound seems to have wilfully withdrawn his poem from circulation and deposited its signs in a secret account whose arcane dividends are accessible only to the initiate. If there is an economy to this text, then, it is primarily self-referential, autarkic: the reader is more or less precluded from participating in its hermetic systems of exchange.18

In some senses, Pound understood readerly access to this later work as a process of habituation, a kind of non-associative education wherein learning takes place only after the repeated presentation of stimuli. As Pound wrote to Vanni Scheiwiller, whose Milan-based press, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, first published both Rock-Drill and Thrones: nobody can understand what the final cantares are ABOUT until they have read the earlier ones/ hard enough to DRILL an idea into the mush headed mokes ANYhow. And I doubt if anyone will have the necessary technique until they have been thru the earlier parts of the poEM. poEM, not poems.19

On the face of it, Pound makes a fairly banal point. As with a great many works of literary art, if you want to know what is happening now you must have an inkling about what happened before—though, interestingly, Pound implies the process entails a gradual familiarization with technique rather than, say, narrative action. As Pound put it to Ingrid Davies, with whom he carried on a lengthy correspondence during his time in St. Elizabeths, most readers have “minds so LOW that they eggspeck the 85th Canter of a long poEM to be instantly understandable without ref/ to preceding parts of the poEM.”20 And yet, much of this late verse is actually composed for those, as Pound phrases it in Canto 91, “who are skilled in fire.”21 Like any aptitude, acquiring this skill (whatever it may be) is partly a function of one’s innate ability, and Richard Sieburth, “In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry / The Poetry of Economics,” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 144. Cf. Peter Nicholls’ more recent remarks that as The Cantos progresses it becomes “ever more recondite and privatized.” Peter Nicholls, “The Cantos: Thrones de los Cantares,” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 46. 19 November 14, 1956 Letter, APICE. 20 June 4, 1955 Letter, EPC, Box 5, Folder 15. 21 Cantos, 91/615. 18

“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology

9

partly a function of practice. The ratio of this balance will depend very much upon who and also what kind of reader one is. As Pound told Davies, “you can’t START start with experience … all you can start with is sensibility,”22 where sensibility is a crucial prerequisite for any subsequent understanding. That Pound begins Canto 85 with an ideogram he translated as “sensibility”— that is, ling2 靈—underscores the point. Evidently Pound considered Davies’s sensibility exceptional and encouraged her to forgo the habituation required of most readers: “you can read the Hud cantos,” namely Canto 85 to Canto 89, “without waiting to get thru 83 [sic] precedent.”23 Davies belonged, so Pound believed, to what Peter Nicholls has described as “a small but trusty band of readers who have the tenacity to follow him into the difficult paradisal regions of his poem.”24 Though this band of readers may have actually been limited, historically, to a handful of acolytes gathered at Grampa’s feet on the lawns of St. Elizabeths, we might be best advised not to underestimate the extent to which Pound failed to consider the prospect that anything he was saying was even remotely opaque. As conviction in the radiant clarity of his verse increased, so too did his work slip further into idiosyncrasy: cheng king The text is somewhat exigeant, perhaps you will consider the meaning of cheng king25

If the text is somewhat exigent, its author is more so. The exactitude of his verbal deployment here amounts to an object lesson in tautological definition, 22 23 24 25

March 16, 1955 Letter, EPC, Box 5, Folder 15. June 19, 1955 Letter, EPC, Box 5, Folder 15. Emphasis added. Nicholls, “Thrones de los Cantares,” 46. Cantos, 98/691.

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

10

a proverbial “stopping” even before anything like a “meaning” has gotten across. Terrell notes that “authorities differ about the significance of these two characters in the Chinese classics,”26 while Pound is either unconcerned or unaware of an ambiguity surrounding 正 經. How could 正 經 be ambiguous? In his updated Confucianism, a man means what he means, e basta. In stark counter-distinction to the slow, decentralized, and fragmentary reading philology requires, Rock-Drill and Thrones are marked by an urgency, itself central to Pound’s late poetics. His push for communicative immediacy— at once prioritized and direct—is especially evident in the drafts and other pre-publication material, though its signatures are everywhere apparent in the published texts as well. Ideograms are emblematic of textual exigency because their meanings are “Manifest and not abstract.”27 While the repetition of ideograms seems actually to be suggested by an entry in Mathews,28 a passage such as this suggests that readers should be well beyond the indignity of actually looking words up, that most basic of philological assignments: “A DICtionary and learn the meaning of words!” Kuan Ming Double it Kuan Ming29

The linguistic and aesthetic ideal being suggested is one where consulting a dictionary is borderline preposterous because the terms in question are so self-evidently self-evident. The model tacitly proposed here, and throughout 26

27 28 29

Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 633–4, note 141. Cantos, 93/625. See the fifth entry under M3583: “光 亮 or 光 明 clear, bright; glorious.” Cantos, 100/719.



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these late cantos, is that a work of literary art should effectively disclose, interpret, and otherwise read itself. As Pound wrote to his daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, on December 10, 1955: wd/ certainly be better in long run to go straight thru the Cantos/ especially as 85/95 have richiami / echos / the whole thing working in fugally/ and if you haven’t the earlier phrase in yr/ head, especially when it is much abbreviated, I don’t see how the later Cantares will fit the earlier.30

In this same letter, Pound also refers to “the more compact technique of later sections,” implying a development in technique that is tantamount to an increase in obscurity, albeit one, counterintuitive though it sounds, designed to allay not exacerbate difficulty.31 The telos of allayed difficulty would be the redundancy of interpretation itself. In suggesting that the technique the poem demonstrates is one its readers must also learn, Pound implies that interpretation is not necessarily something readers actively do, but a demand to which they must passively accede. Though every poem will in some regards show its audience how to read it, the subtler and more compelling claim latent in Pound’s remarks is that The Cantos is interpretive. This is not exactly a new idea for Pound. He posited a similar one when he wrote in “A Retrospect” that “a man’s rhythm must be interpretative, EPP, 2745. Pound makes broadly similar claims in his now well-known “Note to base censor,” published alongside “The Art of Poetry, No. 5,” The Paris Review 28 (Summer–Autumn 1962): online. Jean-Michel Rabaté has suggested that Pound “uses the classical Chinese device of repeating a character, which transforms an adjective or a noun into a verb” so that “the name will be identical with the function.” Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986), 179–80. 31 In making a distinction between obscurity and difficulty, I am appealing to J. H. Prynne’s recent contention: “When poetry is obscure this is chiefly because information necessary for comprehension is not part of the reader’s knowledge. The missing information may be specific (a personal name, say, or some tacit allusion), or general (an aspect of religious belief, say); and finding out this information may dispel much of the obscurity. When poetry is difficult this is more likely because the language and structure of its presentation are unusually cross-linked or fragmented, or dense with ideas and response-patterns that challenge the reader’s powers of recognition. In such cases, extra information may not give much help.” In combination, Prynne concludes, “each type of hardship for the reader makes the other type harder (and, it may be, more rewarding) to deal with and to understand.” J. H. Prynne, “Difficulties in the Translation of ‘Difficult’ Poems,” Cambridge Literary Review 1, no. 3 (Easter 2010): 160, note 1. “Difficulty” is probably more diverse a problem than the demographic which frequently tends to write about it. Anyway, see, for instance, Howard Nemerov, “The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry,” Reflections on Poetry and Poetics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 19–32; Charles Bernstein, Attack of the Difficult Poems (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011); Charles Altieri, “On Difficulty in Contemporary American Poetry,” Daedalus 133, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 113–18. 30

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The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

it will be, therefore, in the end, his own.”32 When practiced astutely, prosody is inherently both analytic and true. Its essential output is not an object to be interpreted but is itself an interpretation. The Cantos is an extended, indeed highly protracted, demonstration of this. From rather early on, the structure (however much still open to debate) of this work was predicated on the basic notion that what is presently opaque will be brought into “some sort of design and architecture later.”33 That is, the arc of the poem’s development is essentially revelatory. Pound understood The Cantos in this manner, writing to Davies on February 14, 1955 that “the buzzards who yelp about incoherence, will look sillier and MORE so as time moves onward.”34 Pound thus believed that the late cantos promised to reveal patterns that would, retrospectively, render intelligible everything that preceded them. A poetic text like that reads itself. So when Pound recommends in Kulchur that “we shd. read for power,”35 the power we should read for is not ours. We might bear witness to the poem’s meaningful self-disclosures, but we cannot precipitate, contribute to, or otherwise constitute them. Deference, not criticism, is paramount. As such, we must “study with the mind of a grandson.”36 Furthermore, when Pound writes in Kulchur that “the book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand,” he quietly recalls the method of luminous detail, the basic premises of which are constantly evoked in the ubiquitous light imagery of the later sections whose purpose, if not their accomplishment, was to “let the light pour.”37 If Pound’s poetics are interpretive, then the ideogrammic method is a hermeneutic.38 But because this method is based upon intuition and LE, 9. SL, 180. EPC, Box 5, Folder 15. Admittedly, as he conceded to Donald Hall in his Paris Review interview, his mission remained unaccomplished up to and including Thrones: “it is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.” Pound accepted, too, that more work needed to be done: “I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations.” “Art of Poetry, No. 5,” online. 35 GK, 55. 36 Cantos, 85/550. 37 Ibid., 94/635. 38 Michael Kindellan and Joshua Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” Modernist Cultures 12, no.  3 (forthcoming). I recognize that the meaning of “ideogrammic method” remains improperly nailed down, even largely unexplored, here and throughout. I leave it as such since its potency and relevance depend upon a certain malleability of application. Canto 4, normally construed as the exemplary instance thereof, is qualitatively and quantitatively different than, say, Canto 89. But I see no particular gain in calling the poetics of Canto 89 by some other name. Ideogrammic writing means, as Pound defined it in 1933, “heaping together the necessary components of thought.” Ezra Pound, ABC of Economics (London: Faber, 1933), 37. Admittedly, as Ronald Bush has demonstrated, Pound’s conception of the “ideogrammic method” did change during the poet’s career. 32 33 34



“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology

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immediate insight, understanding Pound’s active intention39 is practically a precondition for knowing something about what (and how) The Cantos means. Apprehension must somehow precede reading and interpretation. This illogical circumstance is typical for a poetics resolutely opposed to rational formulation.40 And while it is self-evidently true that we cannot know Pound’s intentions with absolute certainty, we should still suspend our disbelief and resist the temptation to confuse the impossibility of certainty with the impossibility of understanding.41 As Pound wrote to Reck concerning the latter’s work on The Women of Trachis (translation being one of the few forms of scholarly endeavor Pound recognized the value of), “dont bother about the WORDS, translate the meaning.”42 Don’t bother about the words? Pound frequently gave his German translator Eva Hesse similar advice. Indeed, he had been doling it out since the 1930s. As he told W. H. D. Rouse in 1935, “taint what a man sez, but wot he means that the traducer has got to bring over.”43 According to E. D. Hirsch (a theorist whose ideas are not exactly new and not exactly unproblematic, but with which I find Pound’s attitudes consonant), “without the stable determinacy of meaning there can be no knowledge in interpretation, nor any knowledge

Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 7–20. But what did not change was the prime importance of Pound’s intention. The ideogrammic method is more an ideology than it is a mere structural device or technique. 39 The phrase “active intention” is borrowed from Michael Hancher: “Active intentions characterize the actions that the author, at the time he finishes his text, understands himself to be performing in that text.” Michael Hancher, “Three Kinds of Intention,” Contemporary Literature 87, no. 7 (December 1972): 830. In this article, Hancher means to discriminate “active” intentions from “programmatic”—intentions to do something, like write an epic—and “final” ones—intentions to cause a certain effect. As most commentators recognize, “intention” is a complex phenomenon and, as such, has been variously construed. Like “ideogrammic” writing, the ambiguity surrounding “intention” strikes me as an essential feature of its character, even though it nevertheless remains an unsettled object of critical reflection. 40 This is not to suggest that Pound’s poetics should be logical not least since, as Veronica ForrestThomson notes, “linguists, logicians and philosophers have long ago abandoned the assumption that language works through logic in the restricted sense: that is, consists of true propositions that are well-formed grammatically and can be verified, or falsified, either by an appeal to induction (the empirical method) or an appeal to deduction (the high priori road).” Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, ed. Gareth Farmer (Bristol: Shearsman, 2016), 113. But it is to suggest that their formulation undermines quasi-rational attempts at critical evaluation. Cf. Davie’s remarks above. 41 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), 17. 42 May 12, 1954 Letter, quoted in Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close-Up, 98–9. When a poet does not care much for words the consequences are probably serious. Scholars have for decades been perplexed by Pound’s advocacy for “right naming” as a remedy for political malfeasance, on the one hand, and his cantankerous use of vulgar slurs, on the other. 43 SL, 271.

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The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

in the humanistic disciplines based upon textual interpretation.” For Hirsch, meaning is nothing other than the object of an author’s intention; or, to put it rather more simply, “a text means what its author meant.”44 In making these claims—that the ideogrammic method is hermeneutical in orientation and a fundamentally intentionalist mode of writing—I do not propose to martial evidence in its defense (as I argue below, such materiality would be anathema to Pound’s intentionalism). Instead, I want to consider the implausibility of its contrary.45 At root, the ideogrammic method enacts a policy of baseless assertion.46 Girolamo Mancuso once described something similar in recognizing Pound’s tendency towards “reasonless juxtaposition,” only to dismiss the idea as superficial by claiming to discover “connection” at a “much deeper and more significant level.”47 Hugh Kenner, to my mind the exemplary intentionalist reader of The Cantos—that is, a reader supremely sensitive to and appreciative of Pound’s intended meanings—put the matter another way, describing Pound’s arrangement of facts as “resistant to propositional formulation and derived from observed particulars that have no syllogistic connection with one another.”48 Perhaps most famous, however, is George Santayana’s reservation that Pound’s “tendency to jump is so irresistible that the bond between the particulars jumped is not always apparent.” Verse composed in this

Hirsch, Validity, 247. A discussion of “intention” will strike some readers as old-fashioned, a throwback to a time before theory. A suspicion governing this project, however, is that Pound, in The Cantos, presupposes (albeit theoretically) that “the meaning of a text is simply identical to the author’s intended meaning.” Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 724. Typically, someone like Jacques Derrida might be said to celebrate the schism between authorial intention and the meaning of a text, but as Kaye Mitchell notes, Samuel Weber’s translation of “Signature Event Context” in Limited Inc gives equivocal translations of “vouloir-dire” as either “intention” or “meaning,” reinforcing the inextricability of those concepts. Kaye Mitchell, Intention and Text: Towards an Intentionality of Literary Form (London: Continuum, 2008), 123. For wide-ranging critiques of Knapp and Michaels’s position, see the responses thereto in Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 46 Kindellan and Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” n.p. 47 Girolamo Mancuso, “The Ideogrammic Method in The Cantos,” trans. Peter Makin, in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: A Casebook, ed. Peter Makin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67. Cf. Coyle’s contention that the fragmented character of Pound’s late verse is ironic because Pound is actually attempting to realize a “long-held Ruskinian vision of totality.” Coyle, Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture, 214. In this sense, the stronger the vision of totality, the less motivated the connections between the terms need to be. 48 Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1951), 84. 44 45



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manner seemed, to Santayana anyway, a “mental grab-bag” that required “latent classification” in order to avoid “utter miscellaneousness.”49 Some commentators—including, as it happens, E. D. Hirsch himself— have understood the “impersonal, objective and autonomous” appearance of Pound’s verse to be proposing a theory of semantic autonomy in which textual meaning is independent of authorial control.50 James Laughlin epitomized this view when he suggested that Pound “presents verities and compares them so that students can judge for themselves,”51 as though judgment operates independently of the thoughts and feelings underlying their arrangement. It was Pound’s prerogative to present a phalanx of very often discrete particulars and then to insist, by means of such presentation, upon some essential relation between them, extant nowhere except in Pound’s own mind. The paratactic juxtaposition of “material images” therefore implies “immaterial” relationships between them. Though still essentially metaphorical in its structure, the ideogrammic method is commonly understood as expressive of “a desire to move beyond metaphorical construction.”52 But the ideogrammic method is also deeply anti-philological. The real work of The Cantos, it might be said, consists in establishing and maintaining lacunae between particulars so that philologists, in an attempt to repair and explain ligatures of sense Pound has purposefully withheld, must perforce contravene their own vocation—the examination of physical texts—by finding recourse in metaphysics—through an appeal to Pound’s intentions. The poetics of The Cantos might justly be described as the “intentional deformation of philological work” as such.53 One scholar framed the situation succinctly in a review of Carroll F. Terrell’s monumental philological achievement, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound: “how little good, finally, such exegesis does, how small a stage it advances us toward an understanding of the Cantos […] We have still to confront the question: what does Pound mean by the details he gathers and presents?”54 All of which is not merely to identify something George Santayana, January 20, 1940 Letter to Ezra Pound, quoted in Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Penguin, 1974), 477. 50 Hirsch, Validity, 1. 51 James Laughlin, Pound as Wuz: Essays and Lectures on Ezra Pound (Saint Paul, MN: Greywolf Press, 1987), 35. 52 Laszlo K. Géfin, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), xiii. 53 Kindellan and Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” n.p. 54 Jim Powell, “A Conspiracy of Scholars, a Tribe of Poets,” The Threepenny Review 10 (1982): 11. 49

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The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

about Pound’s poetry that “resists the grasp of everyday understanding”; indeed, from Plato, who referred to the poet as both “inspired” and “out of his senses,” through to the rationalistic neoclassical theorists, the Western tradition has more or less agreed that great literature produces “experience beyond the level of ordinary reason.”55 It is to further suggest that Pound’s aversion to philology is constitutive of his poetics, both in theory (what he thought about poetry and philology) and in practice (by which I mean simply the way in which he wrote and revised poems). To make sense of a passage, readers must typically attempt to ground whatever connection they mean to describe in some kind of historiographical record, though this procedure usually ends up combining “sympathetic identification with extreme generality,”56 or “a union of particulars transposed onto the conceptual plane.”57 Pound’s ideogrammic passages frustrate—I think both temperamentally and purposively—readers who try to evaluate the poem according to objective criteria and known “facts.” The absence of any real connection—that is, bound by something more than a forméd trace in the poet’s mind—among them is what precisely motivates Pound to juxtapose them in the first place. To risk a bit of privatleben Pound would have abhorred, as Andrew J. Kappel has reminded us, Pound’s tendency towards “solipsistic systematization as the characteristic operation” of mind was consistent with Dr. Wendell Muncie’s psychiatric diagnosis of advanced and complex paranoia.58 In solipsistically organized systems, relations between things are created, not revealed by, juxtapositions. Or, as Jean-Michel Rabaté suggests, in one of the few sustained psychoanalytic readings of The Cantos, we might understand Pound’s work as projecting “model intentionalities consciously mastering their worlds.”59 Taken to one argumentative extreme, the “reader the poem requires is not a philologist but a psychic.”60 Moreover, a lack of substantiating evidence galvanizes Pound’s conviction Gerald Graff, “Determinacy / Indeterminacy,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 163–4. 56 Kindellan and Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” n.p. 57 Géfin, Ideogram, xiii. 58 Andrew J. Kappel, “Psychiatrists, Paranoia, and the Mind of Ezra Pound,” Literature and Medicine 4 (1985): 74. See also Charles Norman, The Case of Ezra Pound (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), which reproduces psychiatric opinions on Pound’s condition. 59 Rabaté, Language, 143. 60 Kindellan and Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” n.p. The following example was first presented in this essay.

55

“I have always loathed reading”: Pound and Philology

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in the accuracy of his intuitions—the existence of such evidence would in fact undermine his intuitions, forcing him to rely upon the false positivism of philology rather than baldly asserting conceptual relations. For example, as early as 1945 Pound identified Ecbatana, the “city of Dioce” in Canto 74, as a holy, paradisal city, “la Città di Dio.”61 (Pound later went so far as to describe the idealized polis as one of the poem’s “constant themes,” a confession more reminiscent of Olson than Pound.)62 In a February 11, 1952 letter to Eva Hesse, Pound gives Dioce a pseudo-Chinese heritage: “Rawl/ sees story is exotic, but goes, as I see it, the wrong way. pr[onounced] / Di o say / which I suppose wuz Tai Wu Tzu.” Hesse, in many ways committed to the philological approaches Pound dismissed insofar as she regularly checked given names and dates against the best and most recent scholarship available to her, balked at the association: “Explanation re Dioce don’t seem quite kosher to me as far as Wu is concerned. Don’t see how, by any stretch of the imagination, it could possibly have remotest connection with Wu family, (not even as parallel).” In response, Pound wrote, “The text [of Canto 74] does NOT affirm that Dioce was de facto Tai Wu Tze.” Nevertheless, two years later, Pound did affirm the connection, beginning Canto 94 as follows: “Brederode” (to Rush, Ap 4. 1790) … treaties of commerce only, Blue jay, my blue jay that she should take wing in the night by the Kingdom of T’ai

Wu

Tzu

61 62

March 14, 1945 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2707. March 10, 1952 Letter to Eva Hesse, EHA. The following string of quotations cites passages from an exchange that took place in letters dated between February and March 1952. “Rawl” is George Rawlinson, the editor of the 1858–60 English language edition of Herodotus’s Histories, Pound’s source.

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The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound as mentioned in Rollin, re/ Lincoln, 14th May. 181063

The link between them can only be rationalized via pun, the most tenuous of homophonic relations, though even this falls flat: in the Wade-Giles system of Mandarin Chinese pronunciation, the unaspirated dental initial “t-” is pronounced “d,” while “t-apostrophe” is aspirated and pronounced “t.” Terrell suggests Pound “may not have recalled” this difference.64 Consciously or not, Pound’s intention to assert an aural resemblance—and thus, surmise a real historical link—is all that matters. In doing so, he promotes poetic volition instead of actual fact. The knowledge the poem seeks to override is precisely that which might be said to exist outside Pound’s own mind. To write “the kingdom of T’ai 太 / Wu 武 / Tzu 子” but have it mean “Ecbatana” only makes sense if we know what Pound thinks and ignore things like extant scholarship on the subject. As Bob Perelman writes, “the stability of Pound’s faith ultimately rests on its being untestable.”65 The ideogrammic method, thus, is not really a method.66 In employing it, Pound was emphatically uninterested in producing texts that could be subjected to quasi-scientific investigations launched by philologists endlessly “pondering over some utterly unanswerable question of textual criticism;”67 nor was he particularly concerned with amassing knowledge in a manner that might be either independently evaluated and verified. While Pound did claim a parity between ideogrammic writing and scientific method, likening the poet’s articulation of “ply over ply” to the biologist’s comparing “a few hundred or thousand slides,”68 he never did more than merely assert a casual equivalence. Pound might have gathered his textual specimens inductively, but his readers must proceed deductively, making sense of each reference according to the larger scheme into which they know Pound already believes they fit. The model of understanding The Cantos tries to realize is one where Cantos, 94/633. Terrell, Companion, 570, note 6. 65 Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 57. 66 Kindellan and Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” n.p. 67 Ezra Pound, “Raphaelite Latin,” Contributions to Periodicals, 1902–1914, vol. 1, Ezra Pound: Poetry and Prose, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and James Logenbach (New York and London: Garland, 1991), 5. 68 ABCR, 22. 63 64

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philological difficulties can be overcome by belief. As a hermeneutic, though deeply occupied by the pursuit of truth, ideogrammic writing is, as Gadamer noted of the “hermeneutic phenomenon” in general, “basically not a problem of method at all.”69 As Peter Nicholls has remarked, the late cantos betray the poem’s early promise to present knowledge and understanding as dialogical.70 In Rock-Drill and Thrones, Pound’s work is intolerant of “dialectically resolved models”71 of meaning: “Name for name, king for king.”72 End of story. Ideogrammic writing in Pound’s late verse, far from being the non-contingent, open-ended, and aleatory event that its haphazard presentation suggests, is prejudicial—and radically so. Its apparent veracities, conveyed by the relation of juxtaposed luminous details, are, far from encoding externally verifiable insights, preconceived and arranged to corroborate interpretations settled in advance. The obstinance of Pound’s bald assertions of meaning finds expression in rigid equation: that the king

shd/ be king

μὴ ἐνομιλούντων not a melting pot.73

While this brief passage hardly constitutes a complex or sophisticated specimen of ideogrammic writing (even if it contains actual ideograms), it does display the kind of structural clarities that reinforce Pound’s prejudicial thinking. Uncompromising identifications—king = king; 王 = 王; μὴ ἐνομιλούντων = not a melting pot—are ushered in as proxies for ethical certitude, a kind of “might makes right” masquerading as ontology. Here, the basic claim is 69

70

71 72 73

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinscheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), xx. Peter Nicholls, “‘You in the dinghy astern there’: Learning from Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound and Education, ed. Steven G. Yao and Michael Coyle (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012), 152. For Nicholls it was not always so. Kathryne V. Lindberg, Reading Pound Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 38. Cantos, 89/591. Ibid., 94/641.

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that whether in China (implied via ideograms), Sparta (μὴ ἐνομιλούντων is lifted from Book 6, Chapter 20 of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius) or America (for which the metaphor “melting pot” was commonplace since 1908), just government is always a function of clearly enunciated political roles and responsibilities. Most critics (as far as I can tell quite legitimately) connect Pound’s linguistic idealism to the Confucian doctrine of zheng ming 正 名, the rectification of names.74 Hugh Kenner probably had passages like this one in mind when he nominated philology as the special plane of attention in both Rock-Drill and Thrones.75 For Kenner, Pound’s concern for “individual terms, precisions, distinctions, correlations” means “words, as never before, are exhibited.”76 Indeed, Pound’s linguistic idealism is predicated upon the perdurability of terms’ meanings. Without such perdurability, Pound long contended, there could be no ethical dimension of language as such. Stable and determined meanings provided the foundations upon which all other relations—social, aesthetic, political—could and must be built. Pound had been claiming as much for quite a while. As he wrote in the compound essay “Cavalcanti,” composed between 1910 and 1930: Unless a term is left meaning one particular thing, and unless all attempt to unify different things, however small the difference, is clearly abandoned, all metaphysical thought degenerates into a soup. A soft terminology is merely an endless series of indefinite middles.77

Though this rather well-known quote was issued at least twenty-five years before the composition of Rock-Drill, it remained very much in Pound’s mind and, I mean to suggest, central to the concerns of his late verse. A notebook containing material for Canto 89, composed between February and March See, for example, Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). For anyone thinking that stable political relations do not in any way ensure good ones, Lan offers an extended discussion of how Chinese philologists long understood “ming” 名 to refer to foundational codes concerning the social relations of feudal hierarchies. 75 Hugh Kenner, “Drafts & Fragments and the Structure of The Cantos,” Agenda 8 (Autumn/Winter 1970): 15. 76 Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 532. In The Pound Era, Kenner revises the assertion in “Drafts & Fragments” somewhat, here deeming Rock-Drill to be about “vegetable growth” and only Thrones to be about “philology,” one now tempered by a delight in “linguistic accidents” and “lexicographic high-jinks.” 77 LE, 185. 74



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1954, actually contains the lines “against indefinite middles / against terms undefined.”78 Much has been made of Pound’s outspoken positions on language and its (im) precision. The consensus view amongst both Poundian and Confucian scholars is that this doctrine pertains largely to an ethical principle rather than to an actionable program of semantic housekeeping.79 However, what has hitherto gone unnoticed is the extent to which Pound’s pronouncements on the subject both motivate and rationalize an intentionalist literary agenda. As an ethical mandate, Pound’s linguistic idealism all but disqualifies the claims of an “other,” specifically where this “other” is manifest as a reader intent on interpreting The Cantos according to criteria determined by something other than authorial intentions. In a literary text whose horizon of concern is simply past metaphor— Gt. is gt. . Little is little; With friends one is one 2 is 280

—the relativism of reader-response would be a chaos. The Cantos is composed in such a way as to forestall scenarios wherein the same text could have different meanings for different readers. Now, if we agree to understand “philology” as, at the very least, taking a diachronic view of the history and development of meanings, we might also agree that it is premised upon the idea that a word can never only have one narrow meaning. Pound’s insistence upon linguistic rectification, wherein key terms have specific and unambiguous meanings, now and forever, is essentially anti-philological. What Pound’s anti-philological attitude is designed to facilitate is a staunchly author-centric conception of literary production. In this sense, the author is a means of controlling and containing pluralities of meaning, since such pluralities imply more than one meaning-maker. It would be easy to imagine an author for whom a word or phrase or entire work should mean lots of things to lots of different people, but it would be impossible (or disingenuous) to understand Pound as being an author of this kind. We might find it critically or ideologically attractive to read The Cantos as an open or Notebook 84, EPP, 4952. Mary Paterson Cheadle, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 66. 80 Cantos, 99/705. 78 79

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unstable or indeterminate work; but it is important to recognize that Pound did not conceive it this way. As Kathryn V. Lindberg points out, Pound does not grant a constitutive role to the reader. The force of her claim can be felt by trying (and failing) to imagine a situation in which, upon hearing a reader offer a particularly ingenious interpretation of a canto, Pound would respond, “I never thought of it like that, but yes, the meaning of the text could be construed that way.”81 Pound would never have accepted a model of reception in which his readers could either know more (as in psychoanalytic criticism) or think differently (as in reader-response criticism) about his work than he did. We must, then, be careful not to misconstrue a few lines from the late cantos, such as “Not all things from one man,”82 or “This is not a work of fiction / nor yet of one man,”83 as proof that Pound’s texts are somehow deeply committed to social constructions of meaning, contingency, and plurality. Meanings in The Cantos may be at once under- and over-determined: we usually have both too much and not enough to go on, so that every reading is ultimately speculative or conjectural. But the meanings themselves are never indeterminate. Our bewilderment should not be mistaken as an invitation to become what Richard Sieburth (in a different but still relevant context) once called an “active participant.”84 Canto 89 begins with a plan for right reading: To know the histories to know good from evil

And know whom to trust.85 81

82 83 84

85

Kindellan and Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” n.p. Cf. Hancher’s claim that “often the author’s unique meaning is not the only meaning that a text will seem to bear; often the reader will be able to see or intend a ‘meaning’ in the text that the author never dreamed of.” Over and against this, Pound would take up the following position: “the utterer must intend that his utterance mean one thing rather than another for that utterance to mean that thing; he must therefore intend his audience to recognize that meaning because it recognizes that prior intention.” Hancher, “Three Kinds of Intention,” 851, 843. Cantos, 85/558. Ibid., 99/708. “By presenting Hölderlin’s texts as events rather than objects, as processes rather than products, it converts the reader from passive consumer into active participant in the genesis of the poem, while at the same time calling attention to the fundamentally historical character of both the reader’s and writer’s activity.” “Introduction,” Friedrich Hölderlin: Hymns and Fragments, ed. and trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 35. Cantos, 89/590.



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Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive community” might be usefully considered here. For Fish, an interpretive community is a particular arrangement of readers “who share interpretive strategies” that “exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.”86 The idea is that we must understand Pound’s work before interpreting it: “one hears an utterance within, and not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and concerns, and that to see and hear it is already to have assigned it a shape and given it meaning.”87 Robert Casillo offered a good description of such a community when he suggested that “many Pound critics have been deeply influenced by Pound himself […] Often they have chosen methodologies which agree with Pound’s assumptions and explain him in the terms (often taken from his prose) which he provides.”88 In this respect, the “egoism” that Thrones attempts to transcend in order “to establish some definition of an order” is not Pound’s egoism, but ours. Transferred to the realm of hermeneutics, this is tantamount to declaring the sovereignty of authorial intention. This sovereignty is regulated, I mean to suggest, by a fundamental disparity between the kinds of reading that Pound expects and the kinds of reading his poem demonstrates. Pound expects an interpretive community to identify and accept (which are not the same as endorsing or believing, though he surely hopes for these also) his own assumptions and prejudices; but he does not write in a way that makes sense to anyone not already familiar with the ways in which he habitually dismantles shared beliefs and communal assumptions (historical, aesthetic, economic, political). Ever suspicious of socially constructed (and applied) meanings, Pound abandons them. Instead, Pound shows commitment to what Walter Benn Michaels has called “the materiality of the signifier.”89 A reader committed to this ideology of texts will replace “the idea of the text’s meaning (and the project of interpreting

Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 483. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 310. 88 Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 21. 89 Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 13. At this point the reader might fear yet another discourse on “textual materiality” as though it were still 1993. But I will not set forth that argument here; Chapter 4 argues against the hermeneutic materialist assumption that The Cantos is especially concerned with its bibliographic codes. 86 87

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that meaning) with the idea of the reader’s experience and with a certain indifference to or, more radically, repudiation of meaning and interpretation.”90 I find this attitude operative in the reading-as-writing Pound presents throughout The Cantos, but functioning therein more as an orientation than an absolute. Nevertheless, explicit instances are not far to seek. Canto 1 can be understood in precisely these terms. As Pound told Eva Hesse in 1951, after she queried him about the philological accuracy of his opening canto, “NOT taking Canto I, back to Homer. but looking at it fer wot is there on the page.”91 Indeed, the much remarked upon pair of lines “Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, / In officina Wecheli, 1538 out of Homer” is a conspicuous indication of how Pound understood the physical scene of reading as the imposition of his readerly experience upon other authors’ intentions. As Michaels argues so cogently, if “you find yourself committed to the materiality of text,” you also, because of that commitment, find yourself committed to “the subject position of the reader”; and if you find yourself committed to the subject position of the reader, then a question about what is there on the page will always really be a question about “what’s there to you, a question about what you see.”92 Freed from the singular control of authorial intention, any given text can have any number of meanings that correspond to any particular reader’s subject position at any given time. In other words, materialist readers so-described are interested in what they can detect, in what a text makes them feel and think; they are indifferent to “what the text means.”93 These readers do not “have different interpretations of the text; they have different experiences of the text.”94 So when Pound told Hesse he was not taking Canto 1 “back to Homer,” he meant he was not reading philologically, not attempting to retrace a fraught history of transmission. Instead, Pound is predominantly concerned with his own contemporary, personal reading experience. Such commitment to the primacy of the reader’s subject position is itself expressive of a concern over the “social control of meaning.”95 Or, as Pound put it, “the truth is the individual.”96 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 6. June 20, 1951 Letter to Eva Hesse, EHA. 92 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 11. 93 I must emphasize, to avoid confusion, that I am here trying to identify one of many disparities between how Pound reads other texts, and how we (should) read his: Pound is committed to materiality; as a consequence, we must commit ourselves to intention. 94 Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 8. 95 Ibid., 2. 96 Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” SP, 33. 90 91



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No, that is not philological Nowhere is Pound’s “materialist” approach to reading more apparent than in his inclination towards etymographic analysis of Chinese characters, an inclination probably inspired—as Pound tells it—by Gaudier-Brzeska’s ability to read “primitive Chinese ideographs” without any special training. “Skilled in fire,” Gaudier-Brzeska was reportedly “disgusted with the lexicographers who ‘hadn’t sense enough to see’,”97 and confirmed Pound’s burgeoning suspicion that the science of philological investigation suppressed, if not absolutely then certainly in large part, the aesthetic sensibility (a point returned to later). I do not know if philology can be said to have an ethics in the way that medical or legal practices do, but it certainly has an ethos that Pound sought to escape, namely that socially constructed meanings cannot simply be transcended at will. Gaudier-Brzeska’s contretemps with “lexicographers” was complemented, as James Longenbach has suggested,98 by Ford Madox Hueffer’s scathing critique of Prussian culture in When Blood is Their Argument. In the preface, Hueffer slams the “professorial hypocrisy of impersonalism” (i.e., an overreliance on existing data and on empirically verifiable fact) and advocates instead a more “personal method.”99 Exemplary of the recommended approach, Pound’s “playful, transformative and prolific” etymographic readings of the 1930s and after were, according to Lan, “useful for the purpose of appropriating key Confucian concepts and then enriching them, inflating them, and remaking them so that they came to serve his agenda.”100 A typical reading occurs very near the beginning of Rock-Drill, setting the tone for what follows: The sun under it all: Justice, d’urbanité, de prudence wei heou, Σοφία the sheltered grass hopes, chueh, cohere. (No, that is not philological)101 Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 46. For a later, slightly altered version of this anecdote, see CWC, 59. 98 James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot and the Sense of the Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 96–130. 99 Ford Madox Hueffer, When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (New York: Hoddard and Stoughton, 1915), xi. 100 Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism, 32. Emphasis added. 101 Cantos, 85/544. 97

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There is quite a lot in this passage that can be construed as not philological. For one thing, “chueh” does not mean “sheltered grass hopes.” In suggesting it does, over and against what philologists believe it means, Pound epitomizes the constitutive reader his own work discouraged. The Cantos is the record of one man’s experiences of texts that are different—usually profoundly so—from those anyone else has ever had. As Thomas Grieve explains in his pioneering “Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill,” Pound’s rendition of the character chüeh 厥 is “certainly not philologically sound” and even in terms of his own procedures seems “especially wilfull” [sic].102 While the component 厂 (han4 M2016), meaning “cliff,” which Pound sees as a shelter, seems a fairly straightforward mis-attribution, breaking down 屰 (ni4.5 M4676), meaning “disobedient,” so as to get at its constituent radical 屮 (ch’ê4.5 M283), “plants sprouting,” as well as reading 欠 (ch’ien4 M904), “to owe money,” “deficiency” or “lacking,” as “hopes,” represent decidedly audacious excursions into fanciful etymologizing. Grieve connects “wei heou” (惟 M7066 meaning “only” and 后 M2144 meaning “ruler”), whose righteousness brought to fruition the coherent structure of the state, with “the integrity of another noble emperor,” that is, Alexander the Great, who “paid the debts of his soldiery.” For Grieve, “Pound’s non-philological breakdown of this character creates a compelling pathetic fallacy that attributes a motivating desire for ordered growth to both the natural and the human world.”103 That distinct plausibility aside, there is a more general set of assertions at stake here that suggests debt can have meaning and that acting disobediently in the face of certain normative reading practices can productively contravene those practices. Likewise, Pound’s critique of philology stems from what he perceives to be its tendency to hamper rather than facilitate human understanding. Just as Canto 14 ends by equating “obstructors of knowledge” with “obstructors of distribution,” for Pound philology is to learning as usury is to economics: lines following the explicit admission of non-philological practice quoted above distinguish between the growth of vegetation and the lusty contrivances of the worm living in the dirt: “not led of lusting, / not of

Thomas Grieve, “Annotations to the Chinese in Section: Rock-Drill,” Paideuma 4, no. 2/3 (Fall and Winter 1974): 398. Ibid., 398–9.

102

103



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the worm, contriving.”104 I mean to suggest that certain errors, certain kinds of waywardness and certain deficiencies of accuracy are acceptable provided they produce meaning, just as here Pound eliminates from the sign for “disobedient” only the part of the ideogram that will allow him to get to “sprouting plants.” Taken to one extreme, the implication is that standardization of any kind, because unresponsive to the absolute and particular personality of the poet, is, if not structurally opposed to his meaning, then somehow less efficient in conveying it. In counter-distinction, we do not care much about words Pound used consistently and correctly. Terrell’s explication of these lines suggests that Pound’s “analysis” of chüeh (M1680) rhymes with what the latter called, in a footnote to his translation of The Women of Trachis, “the key phrase, for which the play exists”: “what / SPLENDOUR, / IT ALL COHERES.”105 But as William Arrowsmith noted in a bad-tempered letter to Frederick Morgan, editor of The Hudson Review (where this play was first published in the winter of 1954), this is an “inane interpretation”; “simply mistranslated, [it] just doesn’t mean ‘Splendour! It all coheres.’ […] The translation is hopelessly inaccurate […] It’s the simple creation of confusion by a man who is either mad or ignorant.”106 Arrowsmith’s objection has been echoed by any number of commentators who question the faithfulness of Pound’s translations.107 But the argument being put forward, however obliquely, suggests that what something means to “a sensitive Hellenist who has shown great care for Sophokles’ words” does not in truth mean the same to someone able to “grasp the main form of the play.”108 This is what Pound means when he says, as he variously does, that translation is a form of criticism: a deciphering of meaning not of text. This is

Cantos, 85/544. Ezra Pound, trans., Women of Trachis (New York: New Directions, 1957), 50; and note 1. 106 William Arrowsmith, quoted in Mark Jarman, “Your Anonymous Correspondent: Ezra Pound and ‘The Hudson Review’,” The Hudson Review 59, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 366. Arrowsmith’s attack on Pound is pretty rich considering his later essay, “Nietzsche on Classics and Classicists (Part II).” There he argues that “although a sorites of rigorous argument and proofs may be relevant to strict philological work […], a thesis like Nietzsche’s—a large, intuitive, esthetic insight, addressed finally to esthetic experience—cannot be defeated by showing errors of fact in the argument. And to think that it could be is the kind of crude category-mistake to which philologists, insofar as they are primarily technicians, are professionally susceptible.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 2, no. 2 (Summer 1963): 8–9. Arrowsmith seems to have come round to Pound’s point of view. 107 As we know, of course, Pound could not care less. 108 Arrowsmith, quoted in Jarman, 366. 104 105

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also an instance of what Pound means when he describes, as in Canto 14, philologists as “pandars to authority” guilty of “obscuring the texts with philology.”109 Such obscurantism distorts the author’s meaning because it attends (perhaps too) closely to what he wrote and not to what he meant, which is really a separate vector for Pound. Framed in terms of the present discussion, this circumstance is of considerable consequence because it puts pressure on a prevailing editorial assumption that a “correct” text is perforce a practicable and efficient medium through which to exchange and convey its author’s intended meanings. A further consequence, therefore, is a tabling of the opposite claim, that a faulty text might in itself convey, perhaps more efficiently, an author’s meaning. Pound said as much: “abrupt and disordered syntax can be at times very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage.”110 What are, in Pound’s late cantos, the expressive potentials of inaccuracy and indeed of error; how might they be both discovered and read; and in what ways is an inability to decide between error and intention itself meaningful? Such are the questions that will variously occupy me throughout this book, not least because they also occupied Pound during the writing of his.111 The following sketch, extending the discussion of the brief passage quoted above, might prove useful. Pound’s etymographic translation of chuëh is not the only “not philological” part of these few lines, if by “philological” we mean something like “valid according to an assessment utterly beholden to historical conventions of usage and material presentation”; or, more diplomatically, any “configuration of skills that are geared toward historical text curatorship.”112 In this respect, the transcription of “wei heou,” ostensibly from Séraphin Couvreur’s Chou King: Les Annales de la Chine, is not an accurate transmission.113 If Pound were faithful to what appears to be his source text and cautious not to introduce textual deviation into his re-presentation of it, he would have ensured that the published text printed an accent circonflexe on Cantos, 14/63. ABCR, 34. 111 Questions of editing—policy, usefulness—were particularly relevant to Pound during the 1950s because it was during these years that both poet and publisher started to consider the value of a fully revised collected text (more about which in Chapter 4). 112 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 2. 113 Chou King: Les Annales de la Chine, ed. and trans. Séraphin Couvreur (Paris: Cathasia, 1950), 109. 109 110



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Figure 1.1  Detail from Séraphin Couvreur’s Chou King.

the e of “wei” and an accent aigu on the o of “heou”; he would also have been careful to place an umlaut over the u in “chueh.” An inspection of the original manuscripts114 shows that initially Pound transcribed all three of these words’ diacritical marks correctly, and that only during the production of typescripts115 did the accents disappear. Why they vanish—or were erased—is a matter of conjecture. Either Pound forgot to add them after completing a typescript of the draft because his typewriter EPP, 4948. APICE; carbon copies of which can found in EPP, 3418.

114 115

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Figure 1.2  Ezra Pound, page from manuscript draft of Canto 85 showing accents.



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was incapable of making such basic diacritical marks and/or he just did not care to check—this would be an a-philological poet at work; or, he decided to withhold them from the record, thereby introducing intended typographic distortions—this would be an anti-philological poet’s prerogative. My guess is that Pound left them out purposefully because in successive typescripts and setting copies other accents do appear, duly inscribed with manuscript annotation. The accent aigu over the e in “d’urbanité” is an immediate case in point, but there are many instances where Pound requested (and his text received) additional diacritics. Pound was nothing if not alert to the aurality of his verse. It seems hard to believe that such a distinctly minute, even inconsequential infraction, given the sprawling enormity of the work overall, such as leaving out several measly diacritical marks, could impinge properly upon the meanings of so vast and compendious a text. But let us suppose that attention to the proper representation of vowel sounds, though quite exacting, is by no means too exacting for a poet of Pound’s temperament and skill. Indeed, Pound wrote to Achilles Fang, who had had the audacity to update an outmoded transliteration Pound had submitted for his scrutiny, “The PENalty for altering a VOWEL in verse is DEATH.”116 Let us then suppose imprecision, on whatever scale, matters at least a little. Let us suppose that precision, manifest as a conscientious and rigorous attention to detail, informs the basic character of the “particularity” that Pound’s Cantos allegedly takes as a basic methodological tenet, and that this applies to written language.117 Let us then suppose that a reader who believes these things turns to the French source text given in the quotation above in order to inspect the passage from which Pound excerpts and puts forward for our consideration. This reader will find the following: Le ciel, en donnant l’existence à l’homme, met en son cœur des principes d’humanité, de justice, d’urbanité, de prudence et de bonne foi. Ces principes

Ezra Pound, March 15, 1954 Letter to Achilles Fang, EPCF, 141. Cf. Ian Balfour’s remarks about Walter Benjamin’s praise of Jakob Grimm for Grimm’s philological “reverence for small things” and Benjamin’s own attraction to generic chronicle for its attention to “insignificant things,” both of which were for Benjamin indicative of the “spirit of true philology.” Ian Balfour, “The Philosophy of Philology and the Crisis of Reading: Schlegel, Benjamin, de Man,” in Philology and its Histories, ed. Sean Gurd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 201, 202.

116 117

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Figure 1.3  Ezra Pound, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro proof-page showing holograph addition of accent circonflexe.



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ne dévient ni dans un sens ni dans l’autre; c’est pour cela qu’on les appelle 衷 le juste milieu.118 [The sky, in giving life to man, put in his heart principles of humanity, of justice, of urbanity, of prudence and of good faith. These principles deviate neither in one direction nor another; that is why we call them 衷 the just middle.]

With this text before us, we can notice that in recounting the catalogue of foundational principles, Canto 85 omits the last, namely “bonne foi,” meaning “good faith” or “sincerity.” Such tacit editing of a source quote clearly instances an aspect of Pound’s poetics he was keen to stress, as he did in a June 21, 1955 letter to his Milanese publisher Vanni Scheiwiller ahead of Rock-Drill’s publication, in which Pound tells Scheiwiller that in some places quotations were not grammatical exercises and therefore “devono [sic] mantenere rapporti con un contesto non presentato” [“should keep their relationship with an absent context”].119 Pound’s method of composition is inextricable from editorial processes, processes that invariably obscure as much as they express. What the text includes and what it excludes are part of the same interpretive continuum. Of course, one only discovers Pound’s editorial omission if one accepts that Pound’s eschewals of certain kinds of philological scholarship are themselves meaningful and interpretable acts and agrees to try to find out how (especially, as in this instance, when practically goaded into doing so). Similarly, a reader only discovers the minute but not inconsequential history of the texts’ progression into a state of probably intentional “mistake” from “wêi heóu” in the Chou King to “wei heou” in Rock-Drill if he or she consults the manuscripts and drafts. Doing so demonstrates that Pound’s poem repays a model of textually informed reading. The critic piqued into thinking Pound may have made an error of transcription and who pursues this suspicion uncovers something more than a minor omission: he or she may be given reason to believe the omission was intentional. Doing so, one also discovers an intelligibly anti-philological cancellation of “good faith,” that is, another kind of purposive deletion. This reader’s style of interpretation—call it philological—sure enough discovers a textual inaccuracy that strictly speaking is

Couvreur, Chou King, 109. APICE.

118 119

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not correctly transcribed; but he or she also participates in the cancellation of bonne foi itself. And yet, and yet! It could be that Pound, by way of reference to Couvreur’s Chou King, is actually quoting Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary. It is true that Pound consulted Couvreur’s French and Latin translations of the Chou King, but he also used Mathews as semantic guide, a source that does not give diacritics in its transliteration of the characters 惟 and 后, rendering them simply “wei” and “hou.” In this scenario, Pound would still have mis-transcribed the second, writing “heou” for “hou”, but it would justify his omission of accents. It would also then be possible to consider this passage demonstrative of his understanding that, as Lawrence Rainey punningly put it, “citation concerns not only the roots of reference, but the routes of reference.”120 Pound told James Laughlin in the summer of 1950: NO need to CORRECT Chinese Cantos/ they are NOT philology, all them funny spellings indicate TRADITION, how the snooze got to Your-up some by latin, some by portagoose, some by frawg.121

In this respect, Pound’s deletion of the diacritics in Couvreur signifies a further development in, not damage to, the “history” he claimed his poem contained, which necessarily includes the history of its own composition.122 By writing “no, that is not philological,” Pound means to declare himself exempt from the passive reception of received and conventional meaning, just as by writing “wei heou” instead of “wêi heóu” or “wei hou,” his constitutive reading of two different but related texts effectively produces a new one, an operation indicative of what is at stake in what I understand to be the “antiphilological” bias of Pound’s poetics, where by “poetics” I mean the actual construction of the verse itself. Lawrence Rainey first used the term “antiphilology” to describe how Pound “invokes the standards of philological accuracy only to savage the institutional apparatus that sustains them.” For Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 69. 121 EPJL, 202. 122 Pound, “Art of Poetry,” n.p.: “An epic is a poem containing history,” by which Pound really means his modern verse epic. 120



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Rainey, Pound attempts to manipulate ancient texts in ways that “enables one to perceive, rescue and represent the lost vitality of a culture” and to establish “a combative critique of the culture that has engendered its [philology’s] very structures.”123 In what follows, I mean to circumscribe philology’s remit more stringently, narrowing my discussion from philology so broadly construed down to one of its “quasi-autonomous functioning sub-disciplines,”124 that is, textual criticism. In doing so I mean to suggest that The Cantos is not just morally, intellectually, and ethically opposed to this particular approach to reading and scholarship, but constitutionally resistant to it as well.

Textual criticism The ideogrammic method is not only intentionalist, it is anti-philological. Achilles Fang acknowledged as much when he wrote to Noel Stock on July 20, 1955, “EP’s technique operates on three levels: words, lines, and the entire structure.” To an analysis of “words” and “concepts by their components” Pound was “most vulnerable”: “it is easy enough to demolish the id[eogrammic] method philologically.”125 Fang’s letters to Pound are in fact filled with reservations, corrections, admonishments, and other such attempts to temper Pound’s obvious enthusiasm, at one point writing of a few characters Pound has arranged into verse that they “cannot mean what you intend […] sorry to disappoint you.”126 But of course Pound relished, and actively sought after, situations where the meaning of words, on the one hand, and his intentions, on the other, were in productive disagreement. To passively accept the meaning of words was to resign oneself to forms of cultural intermediation that obscured the active relations between a language and those who use it. When Pound wrote, in Canto 81, that it is not vanity “to have gathered from the air a live tradition,” the keyword here is “live” rather than “tradition.” “For Pound, mediated knowledge is, at best, imprecise and easily corruptible; at worst, it is spurious.” Philologers sitting on piles of stone books, obscuring the Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture, 69. Sean Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity, Radical Philology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 4. 125 EPC, Box 12, Folder 1. 126 Achilles Fang, February 5, 1952 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPCF, 76. 123 124

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texts with philology are intermediaries, middlemen. Therefore “to begin to access the unmediated truth of a poetic text, we must abandon various forms of scholarly mediation.”127 David Moody is right to suggest that “philology would become the catchword for all that Pound thought wrong with the university teaching of literature.”128 Beyond the caricatured dismissals of philology as practiced by dry-asdust pedants interested less in the “genius of their author than in such artifice as intervenes between that genius and its expression,”129 there is a more fundamental disagreement in play between Pound’s poetics and philological scholarship, particularly textual criticism—what A. E. Housman once economically defined as “the science of discovering error in texts and the art of removing it.”130 Pound’s side of the argument is discernible in his appreciation of Fenollosa’s speculations on the pictographic origins of Chinese writing. Though Fenollosa’s maverick scholarly sensibility was viewed by some as philological naïveté,131 Pound understood The Chinese Written Character not as “a bare philological discussion, but a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics.”132 So, when Fenollosa writes that “Chinese shows its advantage” over other languages insofar as “its etymology is constantly visible” and that “it retains the creative impulse and the process, visible and at work,” he appeals to Pound’s “materialist” conception of “the reader” (i.e., himself) as an “active

Kindellan and Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” n.p. A David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1:16. 129 Ezra Pound, “M. Antonius Flamininus and John Keats: A Kinship in Genius,” Book News Monthly 26, no. 6 (February 1908): 445. The interventions—note the language of mediation—Pound has in mind are “syntax, metric, errors in typography.” 130 A. E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” Proceedings of the Classical Association 18 (1921): 68. 131 Most famously George A. Kennedy called the essay a “mass of confusion” in “Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character,” Yale Literary Magazine 126, no. 5 (December 1958): 25. See also: Hugh Gordon Porteus, “Ezra Pound and His Chinese Character: A Radical Examination,” in An Examination of Ezra Pound: A Collection of Essays, ed. Peter Russell (New York: Gordian Press, 1973), 203–17; James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 5–16; Kenner, The Pound Era, 228; Hwa Yol Jung, “Misreading the Ideogram,” Paideuma 13, no. 2 (Fall 1984): 210–27; Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Literary Vorticism of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis: Towards the Condition of Painting (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 109; Victor P. H. Li, “Philology and Power: Ezra Pound and Regulation of Language,” boundary 2 15, no. 1/2 (Autumn 1986–Winter 1987): 194; and Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. For a recent and groundbreaking reappraisal of common censures of Fenollosa’s ideas see Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” CWC, 1–40. 132 CWC, 41. 127 128



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participant”133 in the making of textual meaning. Fenollosa goes further to suggest that: after thousands of years the lines of metaphoric advance are still shown, and in many cases actually retained in the meaning. Thus a word, instead of growing gradually poorer and poorer as with us, becomes richer and still more rich from age to age, almost consciously luminous.134

The argument Fenollosa advances here, namely that the original semantic value of a Chinese character not only resists degradation but, conversely, actually appreciates over time, directly contravenes the foundational premise of textual criticism: there is no history of textual transmission that is not also a history of textual distortion.135 Which is to say that textual criticism is based on the assumption that all text is mediated historically. Those who practice it perforce construe “texts in infinite regress from their point of composition.”136 As Jerome McGann put it, “whenever information is mediated some contamination results: this is the law of information theory which necessitates textual criticism.”137 The expectation of textual criticism is thus “degenerative”; no author, scribe, or typesetter can improve a “presupposed flawless original,”138 they can only ever copy it exactly (which is unlikely) or introduce a “corruption” (which is more probable). Fenollosa’s theory of ideogram, by contrast, is ameliorative. Or, as Pound told Davies, though “gtly annoyed at NOT having spare carbon of Cantos 88/9,” “one ALWAYS improves ANYthing if forced to retype.”139

Philology, as Pound understood it, was not an active discipline. CWC, 55–6. 135 This line of thinking is absolutely central to Anglo-American textual scholarship. Cf. R. W. Chapman, “Old Books and Modern Reprints,” in The Portrait of a Scholar and Other Essays Written in Macedonia, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920), 49: “Those who have made it their business to reconstitute the texts of English classics know that the history of a text is the gradual accretion of error”; James Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1972), 51: “the ordinary history of the transmission of a text, without the intervention of an author or editor, is one of progressive degeneration.” 136 D. C. Greetham, “Preface,” A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), xv. 137 Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 102. 138 Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 61. Though Cerquiglini and McGann recognize the same set of problems, they interpret them differently. Whereas Cerquiglini thinks philology’s concerns for the degradation of impeccable origins surreptitiously annexes a theory about authorial genius, McGann argues that texts only become meaningful as a consequence of the various forms of social interference sustained in transmission. 139 Ezra Pound, April 23, 1955 Letter to Ingrid Davies, EPC, Box 5, Folder 15. 133 134

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Notwithstanding Pound’s own high esteem for certain forms of manuscript originality (a fact which, as discussed below, mires him in some of the same concerns he sought to otherwise transcend), and ignoring the fact he was never particularly enthusiastic about retyping typescripts despite his recognition of the gains made in doing so, Pound shares with Fenollosa, but not with philologists, a relative lack of concern over the perils of diachronic textual transmission. Good art, because it is good art, will necessarily survive unscathed, invincibly so. “Literature is news that STAYS news.”140 Archibald MacLeish corroborated this notion when he submitted the following blurb to James Laughlin: “Most work ages with time. His doesn’t. It keeps the hard sharp glitter.”141 Pound put it differently in one of the many anonymous one-liners he published during his time in St. Elizabeths: “Thought grows, administrative arrangements decay.”142 The larger claim here concerns a belief in the permanent condition of real value, a belief that permeates Pound’s thinking about not just poetry, but economics and indeed just about every other form of cultural production too. Guide to Kulchur, in many ways a kind of prose version of The Cantos, is entirely based on the premise that whatever endures, qua such endurance, is true. This book, Pound suggests, was “written without opening other volumes” and contains “so far as possible only what has resisted the erosion of time, and forgetfulness.” The precision being displayed by this technique can, Pound asserts, distinguish “knowledge from not-knowledge”; it is ideal, a psychic precision wholly exempt from “material stringency”: “any other course wd. mean that I shd. quite definitely have to quote whole slabs and columns of histories and works of reference.”143 Immune to degradation, it accords only to personal experience, emotion, memory, “that forméd trace in his mind,”144 the remains of what has been well-loved. Ultimately, the distinction lies between understanding and knowledge: “knowledge is or may be necessary to understanding, but it weighs as nothing against understanding, and there

ABCR, 29. Archibald MacLeish, October 21, 1955 Letter to James Laughlin, NDPC, 2917. Ezra Pound (unsigned), “[Note beginning ‘Thought grows…],” Strike 7 (December 1955): 2. Reprinted in Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, 10 vols., ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz, and James Longenbach (New York and London: Garland, 1991), 9: 87. 143 GK, 33. 144 Cantos, 36/178. 140 141 142

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is not the least use or need of retaining it in the form of dead catalogues once you understand process.” Later, Pound makes a parallel distinction between knowledge and culture: “knowledge is NOT culture. The domain of culture begins when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book’.”145 Therefore despite the rare but striking occurrence of pseudo-scholarly citation in Rock-Drill and Thrones, when Pound offers in-text references to external sources he is not in fact admonishing his readers to consult independently the passages to which he refers; normally, Pound is attempting to relieve us of that obligation. There are of course exceptions to this rule, as in “This is the great chapter, Mencius III, i, iii, 6.”146. But the chapter references that populate the opening pages of Canto 86 function primarily as ornamental markers of authenticity, that is, of reading—Pound’s reading—already accomplished: Edictorum t’i

ioa ta seu tá hiún te í tá hiún

(xxiv, ii)

Quis erudiet without documenta? even barbarians who button their coats t’other way on Non periturum kiue sin

13

(xxiv, 15)

leading to Mencius, chi4 (453, Mathews)147

The line “Quis erudiet without documenta?” is adapted from Couvreur’s “qui non sequitur antiquorum documenta, in quibus ille erudiet?”148 Here GK, 53; 134. Cantos, 87/574. 147 Ibid., 86/561. 148 Couvreur, Chou King, 367. 145 146

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“documenta” is not just any old text, but ancient teachings. Access to such wisdom is the privilege of the teacher, not the student. They are constitutive of a pedagogy and a poetics but not a curriculum. The student—here, as ever, figured in Pound’s mind as “the reader”—is excluded. That most of the best scholarship dealing with Pound’s Cantos adopts what Tim Redman calls a more “inductive approach to Pound’s work,” “that valuable but neglected activity of literary scholarship, source hunting,”149 only corroborates Pound’s suspicion that scholars, engaged in philological work, lack the intuition necessary to grasp his gists and piths with sufficient alacrity. Canto 96 laments the “unprepared young burdened with records,” for whom “forgetting-what-book” would be anathema and tantamount to critical neglect. Just as for philologists generally, for neophytes knowledge must precede understanding. In contradistinction, the epistemological ideal Pound imagines in The Cantos is post-hermeneutic: beyond interpretation, an examination of meaning after the language that conveys it. “T’aint wot a man sez but wot he means…” Philology, in this sense, is, as Paul de Man once asserted, “an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.”150 Pound understood textual criticism as little more than the mechanical application of rules governing recension and emendation of texts (though he rarely called any particular textual scholars out for abuse, it is fairly clear that he has someone like Karl Lachmann in mind). In a rather well-worn extract from one of Pound’s first published essays, “Raphaelite Latin,” the young poet vituperated: the scholar is compelled to spend most of his time learning what his author wore and ate, and in endless pondering over some utterly unanswerable question of textual criticism, such as: “In a certain epigram”, not worth reading, and which could not get into print to-day, “is a certain word seca or secat? The meaning will be the same, but the syntax different.”151

In Pound’s caricature, the textual critic engages with something “not worth reading” because, presumably, the literary merit (or lack thereof) of the text under consideration is entirely irrelevant. Why, in Pound’s estimation, would Tim Redman, “Pound’s Library: A Preliminary Catalog,” Paideuma 15, no. 2/3 (1986): 213. Paul de Man, “The Return to Philology,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 24. 151 Pound, “Raphaelite Latin,” 5. 149 150



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such a critic bother? I submit the answer is that Pound bases his reproval upon an (at the time) utterly prosaic circumscription of bibliographic and textual research to positivistic and, as D. C. Greetham has described it, “prehermeneutic” activity. Prehermeneutic or “noncritical” reading practiced by such philologers, so this account goes, is both foundational—conceptually and ontologically anterior—and uninterested in literary and cultural understanding: it is “a kind of first knowledge that serves as the precondition of any further literary criticism or historical interpretive work.”152 In other words, the scholar works hard on an epigram not worth reading because the scholar is oblivious to everything that makes the artifact in question an object of aesthetic contemplation. In his polemical 1917 essay “Provincialism the Enemy,” Pound describes philology as an “uncritical habit of mind” that he thought posed a threat to humanity itself: “take a man’s mind off the human value of the poem he is reading (and in this case the human value is the art value), switch it on to some question of grammar and you begin his dehumanisation.”153 Philology, moreover, was “a professional, ‘professorial’ trahison des clercs, a conspiracy by the ‘clerisy’ of the professoriate to use the mumbo jumbo of supposedly scholarly method to deny the amateur.”154 If philology is wrong, it is so from the start, because its animating assumption, that texts degrade through transmission, is also its raison d’être. As Fredson Bowers, a leading proponent of the intentionalist school of AngloAmerican editorial theory, once remarked, the aim of textual criticism is to restore original purity “despite the usual processes of reprint transmission.”155 In theory and in practice, then, textual criticism is focused upon error, upon what is wrong with this or that text, and according to whatever policy how best (if at all) to fix it. Pound, of course, spent much of his career writing about what was wrong with literature, economics, politics, and aesthetics. But his interpretive approach, along with his style of expression, though capable of damning diagnoses, is orientated towards rightness (however wrong he was

Jonathan Culler, “Anti-Foundational Philology,” Comparative Literature Studies 27, no. 1 (1990): 50. “Provincialism the Enemy,” SP, 197. D. C. Greetham, “The Resistance to Philology,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11. Greetham’s ventriloquism comes close to Pound’s idiom, which may have been his model. 155 Fredson Bowers, “Textual Criticism,” in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (New York: MLA, 1970), 30. 152 153 154

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about rightness per se). Though often dangerously essentialist and simplistic, Pound’s radical naiveté expresses a temperamental orientation towards the good.156 It meant, much else besides, that he could place without apparent cognitive dissonance Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun at the threshold of his own private paradise: Castalia like the moonlight and the waves rise and fall, Evita, beer-halls, seminar motuum, to parched grass, now is rain not arrogant from habit, but furious from perception157

Jerome McGann has suggested Pound used this “Blakean phrase” to describe both himself and Hitler as flawed, but not fundamentally so; and, anyway, as Walter Benjamin said, there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.158 For McGann, Pound’s poem admits transgressions, but only ones for which he can be forgiven (not making it cohere, etc.). But I think this assessment does not fully appreciate the further implications of such intransigence: The Cantos refuses the condition of error outright. Such refusal led to all sorts of political, judicial, and cultural consequences, for which Pound has become rightly infamous. My focus here is more upon the implications for reading and interpretation (which, depending on one’s critical credo, might itself constitute a myopia similar to the one I have just suggested characterized Pound’s method of luminous detail) than upon broader issues. As Michael Alexander once put it, “Pound so often gets things wrong. He misuses his sources or does not check them against other sources”; “his Chinese philology is amateur”; “his phobia about Jews is horrifying”; and so forth. While Alexander suggests “there is no point in glossing over his blunders and his sins of prejudice,” ultimately Pound’s “learned errors are in I have argued elsewhere that this naiveté begins with Whitman, and is basically a function of fantastic American optimism. Michael Kindellan, “Credible practices: Whitman’s candour; Pound’s sincerity; Olson’s literalism” (PhD thesis: University of Sussex, 2011). Though “unpublished,” this DPhil dissertation is freely available via Sussex Research Online. 157 Ezra Pound, Cantos, 90/606. That the line “furious from perception” refers to Hitler is clarified by a reiteration in Canto 104: “Adolf furious from perception.” 158 Jerome McGann, “The ‘Cantos’ of Ezra Pound, The Truth in Contradiction,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 25; McGann’s essay concludes, as does Benjamin’s, with this famous sentence. 156



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the cause of imaginative truth and fullness of knowledge.”159 Which is to say, they do not really matter. Taken to one extreme, the work these cantos display is that of a writer unwilling to imagine a mind not his own, or at the very least someone unable to think not just what but as he did. Doing otherwise would tacitly admit the intentional agency of the reader that ideogrammic writing temperamentally forecloses. If the actual work of The Cantos consists in the suggestion and articulation of immaterial relations, then the things that convey such suggestions (i.e., language, texts, and documents) merit rather less scrutiny than the ideas intended by them. This might come across as counterintuitive given the brilliant critical work of hermeneutic materialists like McGann, Lawrence Rainey, and George Bornstein; but the fact remains Pound often cared rather little for the physical condition of writing: some louse of Laughlin’s was SUPPOSED to watch the greek, as I was in hell hole, no dictionary/ BUT I spose that was only a classic ref/ sob didn’t bother or see. I am the WORST proof-reader natr/ ever let liv. so loathe the physical action of reading I do NOT see anything if I know it is supposed to be there. Even in Odys/, with my ignorance of the language I do NOT see or READ tag lines like ἀμειβομένη προσέειπε and have NO idea who how they are spelled after running on.160

Admittedly, his inability to revise was exacerbated by the circumstances in which he had to work.161 Being confined for a year in Howard Hall (i.e., the “hell hole,” a building at St. Elizabeths for the most dangerous and criminally insane of its patients) doubtless provided its share of distractions. At the Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 138–9. 160 Ezra Pound, February 9, 1955 Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, NHP, Box 78. This “tag line” occurs first in book 4, line 706 of The Odyssey and recurs twice thereafter at lines 214 and 252 of book 19, with a close approximation also occurring at line 234 of book 4: ἀμειβομένη προσέειπε. A semantic equivalent is something like “spoke to him [or them, as in the close approximation] in answer.” 161 For Hugh Kenner, as for most readers, Pound’s oversights were caused by his privileging of the aural over the verbal: “As if Ezra, not seeing, but hearing what ought to have been on the page, hadn’t been the worst of proofreaders.” Hugh Kenner, “Notes on Amateur Emendations,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 26. I return to this question in Chapter 3, but suffice it to say that while Kenner is clearly correct, there is more to it than Pound having merely privileged one sense over another. As Peter Nicholls has recently suggested, there is a strong connection between musicality and indoctrination in Pound’s late style. Peter Nicholls, “‘You in the dinghy astern there’: Learning from Ezra Pound,” 137–61. 159

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same time, supposing that if Pound had been free he could have paid closer attention to the errors in his texts is counterfactual at best. At worst, it ignores the simple fact that if Pound hated reading, which by all accounts he did, he found proofreading particularly repellent. His confessed anathema for this most mundane of authorial tasks forms (an admittedly distinctive) part of a continuum with his disdain for the operations of both textual scholarship specifically and philology more widely construed. On March 14, 1955 he confessed to Frederick Morgan, whose Hudson Review would publish Canto 85 later that year, “I cannot READ proofs/ damBall, when I know what is coming my eye ceases to function, save under greatest possible pressure.”162 In knowing what should be there Pound did not see what was. If this functions as a neat summation not only of his “materialist” reading practices but of his political shortcomings, it serves also to further illustrate the degree to which politics and poetry were for him mutually inclusive: though outwardly belonging to morality and to ethics, much of Pound’s vocabulary frequently carried aesthetic implications as well. In closing a 1953 letter, also to Morgan, Pound wrote, “y[ours]. v[ery]. t[ruly]. / deh woild’z woist proof-reader,” as though being very true meant being unable to see one’s own mistakes. The moral overtones here are important, especially given Pound’s belief that philology was a species of depravity. In 1922, A. E. Housman delivered a lecture called “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism” wherein he not only offered a succinct definition of textual criticism (quoted above), but described an important and relevant distinction between a “sincere” text on the one hand, and an “interpolated” text on the other. The more sincere a text, the closer it is to what the author actually wrote. Interpolation—scribal or editorial interventions—may lead to a more “correct” text (or what we would nowadays call a corrected text) by doing away with certain original “corruptions,” such as slips of the pen and misprints, omitted or misspelled words, but it also removes by degrees the immediacy between a writer and his text. Nor does it in fact guarantee less corruption, since new errors can be introduced as others are eradicated. Pound’s default position, in the face of such uncertainty, was always to prefer the sincere over the correct. As for proposed corrections to his own texts, Pound was often pretty blasé. HRA, Subseries 3A.

162



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To Norman Holmes Pearson he wrote on February 15, 1956, “Fang-Pearson text as accurate as the natr of the goodam [sic] author permits. wotterELL, CIV/N aint a one man chop”;163 and to James Laughlin on May 17 of the same year, balking at a proposed “Definitive Cantares” because of the inevitable delays to publication such a project would cause, Pound wrote, “Git the ideaHHHHH canto text as printed.”164 This is not to say that Pound was totally unconcerned by textual errors. On January 29, 1956 he wrote to Pearson: Some urge toward a correct edtn/ of Cantares / WITH Fang’s ideog/s in margin of Chink Canters. still keep on findin errors/ Faber qt/ gk/ Canto 39 p. 202 three errors. Damn all I cant spend my time readin what I HAVE writ/ got to pay some attention to the FURTHER devilUPment of the poEM.165

But it is to say that getting the text right was always of second-order importance, with the following rather significant proviso: the rejection of certain forms of rigorous exactitude is absolutely essential to the kind of poem Pound was now writing. Like Canto 85, Canto 96, the first canto of Thrones, begins with a startling plethora of languages: Κρήδεμνον … κρήδεμνον … and the wave concealed her, dark mass of great water. Aestheticisme comme politique d’église, hardly religion. & on the hearth burned cedar and juniper … that should bear him thru these diaphana Aether pluit numismata Tellus vomit cadavera Thusca quae a thure, from the name of the incense, in this province is roma quae olim … In the province of Tuscany is Rome, a city which formerly …166

This is verse that frustrates the provincialism of both the monolingual reader (who might find the Greek, Latin, or French incomprehensible) and the

NHP, Box 78. NDPC, 1371. 165 NHP, Box 78. 166 Cantos, 96/651. 163 164

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philological expert (who would find “Thusca” incorrect). In their mutual albeit distinct frustrations, they are being equated. Pound communicates despite, not through, such linguistic precision.

Against interpolation On March 23, 1955, Pound wrote to John Espey, who was then editing Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, to respond to some queries and proposed revisions: “I am unconvinced re/ CERTAIN sorts of accuracy. Vid the spellings in the REAL text of Guido, my Marsano, paleog/ edtn. in confronto the ed/ pr/ after Medici editing.”167 Pound refers here to his 1932 edition Guido Cavalcanti Rime. While the text itself is something of a patch-up job, consisting of pages salvaged from the partially printed but never completed Aquila Press edition, it represents a significant instance of what Poundian anti-philology is: though marked by both textual duplications (six Italian sonnets are repeated) and incomplete translations (including no translations whatsoever of the ballate) resulting from a complicated and partly improvised process of publication, Pound’s “paleographic text”168 nevertheless attempts a direct (if not exactly scholarly) treatment of archival material.169 In Pound’s anti-philological imagination, the actual manuscripts of a poet are the closest any reader can get to an uninterpolated presentation of a poet’s authorial intentions. In a 1937 essay called “Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma,” Pound makes his position clear: Material science does not wait on professors of literature and on aesthetes. The whole of textual criticism, whether for poetry or for music, has been

Quoted in Froula, To Write Paradise, 144. Ezra Pound, Pound/Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 259. 169 The book received a poor review from Mario Praz, who accused Pound of being a bad philologist not least because, as David Anderson aptly puts it, Pound’s “Complete Works” of Guido Cavalcanti was issued in “fragments.” David Anderson, Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), xxiii. Massimo Bacigalupo is more sympathetic: “it was easy enough to point out that a man who barely spoke Italian could hardly attempt a critical edition of a thirteenth-century poet […] But Pound’s Guido Cavalcanti Rime is to be read as the work of a poet copying for his own use the text of another poet.” Massimo Bacigalupo, “Rapallo and Rome,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 252. Emphasis mine, demonstrating yet another instance of Pound’s materialist approach to reading. 167 168



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revolutionized, something which the conservatories, and music schools and hired philologists are a bit slow in finding out. For my “Cavalcanti” I had, six years ago, the aid of a process perfected in Zwickau, the Manuldruck. Given that process, it was no longer necessary to offer the student a mere opinion as to manuscript readings. That edition was, so far as I know, the first edition of a great medieval poet which gave anything like adequate comparative paleographic evidence. The student can SEE at a glance the character, age and relative care taken in the textual source.170

For Pound, the opportunity to publish verse meant also perforce the loss of some integral aspects of the primary writing scene, aspects that the various stages and complications of setting poetry in type could only tend to obscure. A printer’s prerogative should always be to first limit the damage to “sense” typesetting invariably caused, not to enhance the poem by virtue of print technology. Pound goes on to conclude: By all means let us have editors: let our Walter Rummels, Münchs, Whittakers and even our lyric and predatory Nachez lay open, interpret, rewrite and renow [sic] this treasure. By all means let Igor Stravinsky put new and strange life into Pergolesi—BUT let us also have, and for a reasonable price, the verification, the ten inch strip of photographic print which will enable us to distinguish Pergolesi from Igor, Vivaldi from Nachez; or Vivaldi from the great Johann Sebastian where Bach has put new foundations under the swift writing, inspired Venetian. That is a new phase of scholarship; it is a small part of the totalitarian Paideuma.171

This is an important statement about the inherent value of archival work (of being able to see not just what but how an author wrote), an activity that, as Ron Bush and Lawrence Rainey have demonstrated, Pound always deemed important, interesting, and often necessary.172 The point to take away Ezra Pound, “Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma,” ed. Douglas Fox, Germany and You 7, no. 4/5 (April 1937): 96, 123. Cf.: “The distinction between manuscripts as text carriers and their printed, book copies is a distinction between the physical singularity that characterizes any holograph manuscript and reproducibility, which is the essence of print. Working manuscripts contain vital clues to how authors worked and writings evolved—clues that the reproduction processes of print regularly erase.” Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, introduction to Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), 8. 171 Pound, “Totalitarian Scholarship,” 123–4. 172 See in particular Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos; and Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 170

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from this, however, is that Pound understood archival work as a means of circumventing scholarly mediation and not really a participation in it. Essentially an early method of photo-reproduction designed to reprint manuscripts in trade publications, the Manuldruck was invented by Max Ullmann in 1913. Such advances in the material science of publication—including what Pound elsewhere in this essay refers to as “microphotography”—for him obviated the need for textual scholarship by giving full relevancy to the original document. Pound thus seems to indulge what Bernard Cerquiglini has subsequently called the “temptation” of the facsimile. For Cerquiglini, giving into this temptation is expressive of a belief in the “immanent truth of the textual object.” In turn, this belief “represents an abdicated responsibility for thought.”173 The idea here is that editing, though outwardly a choice between competing readings, is always already thought about them; whereas representation via facsimile actually avoids the obligation to choose. In other words, editing is interpretive. Or, as D. C. Greetham puts it in “The Resistance to Philology,” “editing can never be prehermeneutical because it is already embedded, as a cultural artefact, in the hermeneutic circle.”174 By this logic, then, not-editing (or what Pound calls the scholarly provision of “verification” via facsimile presentation) equally might be construed as a species of non-interpretation; so that tied into Pound’s disposition to eliminate editorial intervention is, by extension, consequently a refusal of criticism outright. Of course, as Cerquiglini rightly says, if “every edition is based on a theory,” then facsimile editions, as editions, also must be theoretically constituted, even if the theory they advance concerns the rejection of theory per se. Opting for no editorial intervention whatsoever is still an editorial decision. The question therefore is not whether Pound’s proposed circumvention of editorial obligations puts forth a literary theory, but which theory? In supposing, for the sake of argument, that presenting Manuldruck reproductions avoids editorial interpolation altogether (even though it clearly does not), we might simply observe that the theory supporting Pound’s admiration for facsimile editions remains essentially “materialist,” that is, (re)productive rather than interpretive. The

Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, 21. Greetham, “The Resistance to Philology,” 19.

173

174



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point of the facsimile is to convey to the reader not just the meaning of the text but, crucially, “an experience of its physical features.”175 The emphasis for Pound is on seeing. Insofar as Pound would rather simply present a manuscript facsimile than prepare a text using more invasive editorial measures, he subscribes to the idea that “a text which shows no editorial intervention will be prima facie more sincere than one that exhibits intervention.”176 Such an ideal generally informs both the way he read other texts and the way he wrote his own. For Pound, the acts of the author during the earliest stages of composition were both most real and most sovereign. If the title of his article sounds like little more than the exaggerations of an overanimated poet, typical Poundian bluster, we should think again. “Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma” was published in the English-language Nazi propaganda journal Germany and You. Its lionization of authorial presence manifested by manuscripts is essentially an alibi for fascist fetishization of authenticity, authority, and authorship. Though the extract from the essay cited above shows Pound calling for a kind of new transparency and scholarly responsibility managed by the elimination of editorial interpolation, its larger idea is that a manuscript is beyond critique. Without putting too fine a point on it, there is a remarkable parallel between textual criticism and what Pound calls “Freudianism or the doctrine of enema,” on the one hand, and “Fascist culture” on the other. The former is preoccupied with identifying imperfections and removing them: “freudianism […] is not a culture but a pathology which is devoted to taking or trying to take something out of a diseased or infirm mind.” Whereas, fascism “seeks not to combat a particular malady but to produce a state of health impermeable to disease.”177 “Freudianism,” like textual criticism, seeks to find inadvertent faults and correct them; fascism sought to transcend error altogether, managed through a kind of radical naivety. Pound’s oft-discussed suggestion that Mussolini can only be properly understood as artifex is itself an argument facilitated by his enthusiasm for the idea that understanding is largely a matter not of Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 4. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 82. I should say, because it is not clear from the way I’ve had to decontextualize this quotation, that McGann finds this position ideological and therefore deeply problematic; but my hunch is that Pound would have endorsed it. 177 Pound, “Totalitarian Scholarship,” 95. 175 176

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scrutinizing facts but of transposing extant beliefs onto whatever it is that is being contemplated: “Any thorough judgment of MUSSOLINI will be in a measure an act of faith, it will depend on what you believe the man means, what you believe that he wants to accomplish.”178 In other words, Pound’s high tolerance for verbal error is coterminous with a desire, as Vincent Sherry describes it, to ensure that authority does not vanish into the “inconclusiveness of words.”179 Pound would rather indemnify meaning against error than allow the latter to be generative of the former.180 Consistent with the underlying premise of all philological activity, namely (as described above) that transmission entails corruption necessarily, Pound implicitly endorses an important principle of textual criticism, that “authority accrues from its closeness to the archetype.”181 It could be said that in restricting the meaning of philology so that it denotes little more than “textual criticism” I have in part accepted Pound’s own impoverished view of an enormously complex and amorphous field of intellectual endeavor—so much so that most recent studies on the subject begin by noting the impossibility of defining philology as such.182 (Thus, for Pound, textual criticism was an ideological approach to reading, enacted without regard to meaning, often without regard to the possibility of meaning.) It could even be suggested that arguing that Pound’s poetics are anti-philological is itself an Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L’idea statale; Fascism as I Have Seen It (London: Stanley Nott, 1935), 33. Emphasis added. 179 Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 178. 180 Pound’s attitudes towards philology protect his verse from accusations of wrong-ness; indeed, his aversion to philology, and specifically textual criticism, might also be understood as signs of his own desire for infallibility, an imperviousness to criticism. 181 Bowers, “Textual Criticism,” 38. 182 For a contemporary and quite thorough discussion of the problems involved in defining this term let alone the parameters of the disciplines it describes, see Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). The problem is widespread, as Sean Gurd notes: “it may be prudent to resist single definitions of philology.” Gurd, introduction to Philology and its Histories, 8. And, as Geoffrey Galt Harpham reminds us, even prominent figures of literary critical movements as diverse as Edward Said and Paul de Man each “claimed to be the true heir of the philological tradition” in their identically titled essays “The Return to Philology” and yet, in using the term, each meant “utterly different things”: “intimacy, resistance, emancipation, and historical knowledge for Said, and, for de Man, a harsh and explicit corrective to precisely such humanistic fantasies, as he regarded them. It is as if each appropriated the term ‘philology’ for his own purposes.” Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Roots, Races and the Return to Philology,” Representations 106, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 35. For even more recent accounts of this diverse and fascinating discipline, see James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 178



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anti-philological move, given the rich variety of philological work The Cantos has been instrumental in prompting scholars to develop. But the larger points remain: Pound’s caricature of philology was central to his critique of scholarship generally; and, as I have suggested, internalizing Pound’s thinking is a hermeneutical prerequisite. No doubt Pound respected some experts, even some who happened to practice philology. “Old Lévy” from Canto 20 comes to mind, even if this tribute is nicely lampooned by Pound’s inability to spell the man’s surname, as does Joseph Darling Ibbotson, a professor at Hamilton College with whom Pound claimed to have had a conversation that inaugurated The Cantos.183 Of course we know by now that The Cantos should not and cannot be held to account by measures of scholarly responsibility, whose etiquette and ethos it attacks. If The Cantos is a kind of scholarly engagement, it is a travesty thereof, subverting its practices and denying its values.

Cameron McWhirter, “Ibbotson, Joseph Darling (1869–1952),” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, 154.

183

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composition – dichten – leads to obscurity – but not always in vain1

This chapter explores some aspects of the composition, revision, and dissemination of Section: Rock-Drill 85–95 de los cantares (1955) and argues that knowing something about the conditions of its production should contribute to an interpretation of it. While a proponent of materialist hermeneutics would recommend we take this position about every text, especially those highly reflexive works now considered constitutive of Modernism per se, the constant foregrounding of self-conscious textuality in Rock-Drill presents its readers with what seems to me an unmissable schedule of opportunities to investigate the processes of its formation, as well as to reflect upon the structures of authority that led to the intemperate, fidgeting, and unstable surface of cantos 85–89 on the one hand, and those that informed the more poised serenity of cantos 90–95 on the other. Though loathe to suggest that the inspection of pre-publication material will somehow uncover an interiority easily usable for critical gain, I do hope to show how an eclectic methodological approach to the cantos of this section, one that combines textual scholarship and literary criticism, can enrich our understanding of why (and how) these poems remain so demanding.

Notebook 72, EPP, 4940.

1

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Composition: manuscripts First drafts and notes for the cantos that would eventually be published as part of either Rock-Drill or Thrones are contained in forty-seven spiral bound stenographer’s notebooks dating from sometime in 1946 to March 1958. There is a remarkable coincidence here between the kind of verse Pound was writing—predicated on a poetics of abbreviated shorthand and maximum condensation—and the sort of medium onto which he wrote it. The spiral binding facilitated quick turning of pages for ease of consultation forwards and backwards. Pound normally wrote, whether reading notes or drafts of cantos—the difference is often hard to decide—on rectos only, reserving versos for mnemonics, or page numbers of his sources, and for other miscellany such as doggerel or the calculation of dates. The notebooks have been divided into two groups, twenty-two (numbering 68–89) pertaining to Rock-Drill, and twenty-five (numbered 90 to 114) pertaining to Thrones. These numbers indicate their inclusion in a larger sequence of “poetry notebooks” cataloged and described by Mary de Rachewiltz during her tenure as curator of the Pound archive at Yale.2 The first six notebooks are all written in pencil (suggesting perhaps some sort of ward-wide restriction on conceivably more dangerous writing implements); thereafter they are largely written in blue ball-point pen. On the cover of each notebook Pound often recorded a date, sometimes even a start and finish date, making the business of determining sequence a fairly straightforward affair. Covers usually contain a note or two detailing a general theme or concept, a result of retrospective clarification. Internally, large “C”s indicate the start of a canto, or the return to a canto following a bout of note-taking, and are often enclosed in red squares, presumably to facilitate easy reference. Notebook 88, the penultimate in the Rock-Drill series, is exemplary. Pound has marked on the front: “φροντιστηριον / Lug 25 / Sept 6 / 54.”3 At the bottom left he has Mary de Rachewiltz, A Catalogue of the Poetry Notebooks of Ezra Pound (New Haven, CT: Yale University Library, 1980). These notebooks are housed at the Beinecke, YCAL MSS 43, box 118, folder 4936 to box 122, folder 4982. There are 116 “Poetry Notebooks” in all. 3 “φροντιστηριον” appears in Aristophanes’ play The Clouds and means “thinking place” or “thinkshop,” perhaps deployed here as a kind of foil to the Poundian conception of the American beanery. Aristophanes himself used the term to lampoon self-professed intellectuals. It remains, however, a “philologist’s” word par excellence. 2



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marked “? series / no. 41 / approx”—meaning he was keeping his own internal ordering system, which was not entirely sequential: notebook 89, composed after notebook 88, is nominated as “No. 40.” At the top in red pencil crayon is written “1956 1957 / PARAD[ISE] / reserve / C / 92 /93.”4 Pound revisited the Rock-Drill notebooks in 1957 and 1958, meaning that he did so with a view to writing further cantos, annotating earlier drafts and notes to indicate unused material that could be incorporated into Thrones. Notebook 83, labeled “Bento II” and dated “14 Feb 54,” contains the subsequent note, “a lot still usable Oc 58.”5 If Thrones comes across as somehow more fractured and less internally coherent than Rock-Drill (I recognize this is a gross generalization), there are probably numerous reasons for this. One is that it was very much composed from scraps left over from Rock-Drill in combination with the new material Pound wanted to introduce. Thrones is both retrospect and prospect. The notebooks containing verse that would eventually comprise Rock-Drill typically display very little revision; and only a handful of what revisions do exist seem decidedly post-facto. Most consist of the cancellation of miswritten or misspelled words. Deletions of more extensive passages were normally struck through with the same pen used to write them, suggesting that longer but ultimately rejected passages were typically refused soon after their inscription. (Changes in pen, suggesting breaks in composition, are noticeable throughout these notebooks. The fluctuating legibility of Pound’s handwriting is another indicator of different spells of composition.) It might be important to distinguish between passages Pound cancelled and those he withheld.6 Still, whether Pound was omitting as he wrote, or reincorporating into new writing what he had already written, authorial and editorial functions were for him deeply coincident activities. This fact alone makes reading The Cantos genetically a necessary if not, at least in Pound’s eyes, a legitimate activity. Notebook 89, EPP, 4957. Notebook 83, EPP, 4951. 6 Notebook 88, for instance, features several struck-through pages from an otherwise near-verbatim draft of Canto 93, a gesture that feels final and convincing. In contrast, the vile outburst in Canto 91 was originally twice as long as that which found its way into print, suggesting the omitted text was suppressed without being emphatically rejected. Granted, as Peter Stoicheff rightly warns,“the difference between authoring the lines and authorizing their publication is enormous.” Peter Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 65. 4 5

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Revision for Pound was not really a question of working over a manuscript and adjusting the minutiae of sound and sense in an attempt to bring the verse under inspection into accord with some exact shades of meaning or musicality. Any such refinements were rarely made on the manuscript page itself but, instead, during the process of rewriting—the copying, as it were— from manuscript to typescript. To say or write something again is, for Pound, to say or write it better (cf. his remarks to Davies above), and this provides a rationale in minuscule for the deeply refracted, self-repeating cantos of Rock-Drill and Thrones. For Pound, revision entailed a process of actively writing again. The poem’s network of echoes and refrains can be understood as a function thereof. The musicality of these cantos, in structure if not in sound, is a consequence of this also.

Composition: typescripts Pound typed out his own typescripts, which he prepared directly from his notebooks.7 He used carbon-copy paper, thereby producing each typescript in triplicate, and inscribed the ideograms and Greek phrases in holograph (usually) before separating the sheets. Here, as with manuscript drafts, substantial revisions and emendations are rare (though they do exist: entire typescript pages were expunged, for example, from what appears to have been destined to belong in Canto 88 or Canto 89).8 What erasures do exist focus on accidentals like punctuation and actual accidents of typing (mis-hit keys, etc.). Holographic inscriptions not in either Greek or Chinese mostly consist of the addition of accents that his typewriters were unable to produce. Unlike the substantive addition of foreign languages, which were The Hudson Review Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library house the original top sheets of Canto 85 to Canto 89 because The Hudson Review first published them. Their typesetters needed the clarity only the top sheets afforded. Carbons thereof are held by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University and the Fondo Scheiwiller at the Archivi della Parola dell’Immagine e della Comunicazione Editoriale, Università degli Studi di Milano. Copies located at Yale belonged to Pound and were acquired when it bought Pound’s papers; copies located at Milano belonged to Vanni Scheiwiller whose press All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro first typeset and published both Rock-Drill and Thrones as individual collections. Pesce d’Oro used The Hudson Review printings of cantos 85–89 as setting copy. 8 EPP, 3411. 7



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almost always made before the top-sheet was separated from its carbon copies, some holograph emendations of “accidentals” were clearly made on the top copy whilst still attached to its carbons, though others were made on individual copies, meaning Pound sometimes reviewed one copy without reviewing all of them, and, in consequence, he frequently made separate, different revisions to each. Discrepancies in textual witnesses thus entered the record at the earliest possible opportunity and then proliferated in subsequent retyping. Pound made between one and three typescripts of each canto. As Ron Bush and David Ten Eyck have shown, the tendency towards version proliferation by emending typescripts in this manner dates back at least to The Pisan Cantos.9 Richard Taylor’s work on the history of the texts of Pound’s Cantos has shown this tendency to be fundamental to the poem tout court. On account of factors including geographical location, printing methods employed, different publication schedules influenced by differing sales figures, and indeed Pound’s own inconstant attitudes towards revision and the correction of texts, two very different versions of the “collected” cantos existed between 1950, when Faber first introduced its big volume (New Directions issued its first in 1948), and 1975, when the London firm decided to replace its edition with unbound sheets from its US counterpart. Pound had, as Taylor makes clear, generally made better decisions in, and paid more careful attention to, the British text.10 This historical circumstance of differing authorized texts implicitly corroborates Peter Shillingsburg’s claim that “intention is not always one thing that a single edited text can be made to conform to.”11 The history of the publication of The Cantos can be summarized as the dissemination of non-identical textual artifacts. On August 23, 1956, Pound wrote to Hesse, in response to her having passed on a publisher’s request for a few lines from a new canto in his own handwriting with a view to promoting her forthcoming translation Pisaner Gesänge: “Have TYPED direkt for years/ if ms/ note it wd/ not be likely to Ronald Bush and David Ten Eyck, “A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions,” Textual Cultures 8, no. 2 (2013): 125. 10 Richard Taylor, “The History and the State of the Texts,” A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 235–65. 11 Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 41. 9

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be text finally used / save for a line or two.”12 This retort echoes (consciously or not) a vignette Pound gave about Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in his Memoir of the same, in which the young sculptor is asked by Joseph Epstein, “do … you cut … direct”?13 Pound’s claim—that substantial changes were regularly made between manuscript versions and typescripts—is not wholly corroborated by the archival record.

Beginnings Work on the Washington cantos (85–109) began soon after Pound’s incarceration at St. Elizabeths, though of course the applicability of even such a general statement depends very much on what is meant by “work.” As several biographers report, the conditions at Howard Hall, the ward at St. Elizabeths reserved for the most dangerous and criminal of its inmates (Pound called it “hell hole”), were hardly conducive to writing verses.14 That said, an early and pertinent record clearly showing the language and themes of Rock-Drill appears in Notebook 68 dating back to at least 1946.15 It contains lists of ideograms and their translations on its rectos (which are probably older), and notes on Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome and Harry Elmer Barnes’s The Genesis of the World War and In Quest of Truth and Justice: De-Bunking the War Guilt Myth on its versos. The juxtaposition of shorthand descriptions of Western political (mis)deeds and Chinese ideograms predicts, at least in the syntax of its basic arrangement, the kind of verse Pound would eventually write and publish. Take, for instance, the following binary note on poetry and politics: No   they do  not like poets EHA. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 76. 14 In his formative biography, Humphrey Carpenter gives the longest and clearest account of the conditions inmates like Pound had to endure in the hospital’s various wards. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988), 694–848. 15 Notebook 68, EPP, 4936. 12 13



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sd. Unc. Wm they like to think they like poetry but they like someth[in]g else ____________________________ that Scott + Lansing lied a[t] Versailles that is to say cut out an austrian paragraph   re/ Sarajevo

These lines face the following notes regarding Chinese characters: emotions (6) 192 怨 resentmt 夗 [yuan4 turn over when asleep] 210 156 恕 reciprocity    symp. 230 . ? patience 忍 425 怒 ? ir  290 ? mood 232 餒 hunger 假 假 M.540 [jia3 false] 永 always 求 seek 607 恐 = fear (deferential) am afraid apologetic 而 而 中 [er2 and; zhong1 center] 35816

A page earlier, Pound quoted Barnes’s description of Albert Bushnell Hart’s view that the “subjective emotions of war time were more trustworthy than the Notebook 68, EPP, 4936. “Unc Wm” is Yeats; James Brown Scott and Robert Lansing were US representatives at the Paris peace negotiations in 1919 and members of the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of War and on Enforcement of Penalties. Pound’s summary conclusion that they “lied a[t] Versailles” probably echoes Barnes’s contention that these figures misrepresented, by means of cynical decontextualization, Dr. Friedrich von Wiesner’s July 13, 1914 investigative report to Imperial Foreign Minister Count Leopold Berchtold concerning the Serbian government’s involvement in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, making it sound as though Wiesner believed the Serbian government innocent of any connection, when really the reverse was true. See Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War: An Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt (New York: Knopf, 1929), 186–8.

16

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contents of archives.”17 At the top of the page he inscribed the sinograph 敗, meaning “to be defeated.” Though its relevance to the Barnes quote is probably accidental, the question of guilt during the war, and especially that of those who were defeated during it, was very much at the forefront of Pound’s mind. Several pages later he made the following note, dated August 5, 1946: BBC during war saw some of E’s talks verbatim . I always sd. there was nothing treacherous in them + if one couldn’t criticize a form of Cntr what seemed damnable what was use of free speech anyway.18

As David Moody has recently argued, Pound was ultimately kept from trial by Julien Cornell and Winfred Overholser partly out of a fear that, though Pound might not have technically committed treason (Pound himself always insisted he had not), in the court of public opinion he was guilty of antiSemitism: that is, the “subjective emotions of war time” would have borne more weight, even in Federal Court, than the contents of the radio speech “archives.”19 Another notebook dating from roughly the same period does, however, contain passages not only redolent of Rock-Drill, but prototypical versions of lines Pound used in the first cantos of that installment, such as “bumped off Cleopatra / because she thought about / currency” (cf. Canto 85); “still buttoning / coats to the left” (cf. Canto 86); “‘Europe’ / sd Mr. Picabia – ‘exhausted’ by the conquest of / alsace-lorraine” (cf. Canto 87); and “Captans anonnam / maledictus / in plebe sit / dixit Ambrose” (cf. Canto 88).20 The final Harry Elmer Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice: De-Bunking the War Guilt Question (Chicago: National History Society, 1928), 151. Quoted verbatim in Notebook 68. 18 Notebook 68, EPP, 4936. Cf.: “That free speech without radio free speech is as zero.” Cantos, 74/426. 19 A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007–15), 3: 170–1. The tenor of Moody’s general argument is that while surely vulgar, Pound’s speeches did not legally constitute treason. The poet’s descent into slur is indicative of the frustrations of a flawed idealist rather than a virulent anti-Semite. Other recent studies, taking Robert Casillo’s foundational The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988) as a cue, adopt a less sympathetic line. See Meghnad Desai, The Route of All Evil: The Political Economy of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 2006); Matthew Feldman, The Fascist Propaganda of Ezra Pound, 1933–1945 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013); and Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 20 Notebook 69, EPP, 4937. 17



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two pages of Notebook 62, dated around 1947, used mainly for the purposes of transcribing the phonetic values of the Confucian Odes, contain early lines and/or ideas that Pound would also eventually include in the Rock-Drill cantos: so that I beheld thrones the Bodhisat v Kung fu tzü it is unfitting sd. the latter that Chün Tzu shd have anything under heaven on which he leans That god can sit on (sd. Erigena) w/out having it sqush but for scaffolding21

These pages also contain an early draft of the iconic conclusion to Canto 88: the old trees propped up with beams who played the 52 wks in 4 seasons plus the 12 moons to the changes22

Indeed, Pound seems to have reserved habitually the last couple of pages in a number of the Confucian Odes “sound” notebooks for jotting down ideas for future cantos. Notebook 63 contains a few lines about the distributive function of money, manifested by the copper mines that facilitate this distribution (à la Canto 87) and Thaddeus Coleman Pound “trying to keep / some of the non-interest bearing / national debt in / circulation as currency.”23

Notebook 62, EPP, 4930. Ibid. Notebook 63, EPP, 4931.

21 22 23

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Ovid Though Pound’s early notes and sketches refer to a variety of sources and ideas, Ovid is by far the most important and consistent therein. The opening pages of Notebook 69 weave together citations from both the Tristia (or, Sorrows) and Fasti (or, Book of Days)—the former a collection of elegiac letters written during its author’s exile from Rome following, as Ovid famously put it, “carmen et error” (a poem and a mistake); the latter is a didactic poem structured around a series of eyewitness reports by a first-person vates (poet-prophet) interested in explaining the origin of civil customs. As such, this notebook provides a fascinating (though in the end suppressed) context for these cantos’ inception. A few pages in, Pound transcribed the following fragments from the Tristia: nil non mortale pectoris exceptis ingeniique bonis -ingenium tamen ipse comitor fruoque Tr. III . 6 46

These lines, some of whose words have been mistranscribed—no, that is not philological—are from book 7 (not 6, as Pound has it here) of the Tristia. The full passage in question has been rendered into English as follows: “We possess nothing that is not mortal except the blessings of heart and mind. Behold me, deprived of native land, of you and my home, reft of all that could be taken from me; my mind is nevertheless my comrade and my joy; over this Caesar has no right.”24 Clearly the passage must have resonated with Pound who considered himself a prisoner of political conscience.25 Ovid, Tristia, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 131. Overholser’s affidavit reads: “Ezra Pound is […] suffering from a paranoid state which has rendered and now renders him unfit to advise properly with counsel or to participate intelligently and reasonably in his own defense, and that he was and is, and has continuously been, insane and mentally unfit for trial.” Quoted in Julien Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer (London: Faber, 1966), 128–9. It is of course well known, if still mildly controversial, that judicial authorities accepted this as part of a demonstration from Cornell that his client was non compos mentis, though the idea that Pound was unable to understand the charges against him might, from the accused’s point of view, indicate his accusers’ insanity, not his.

24 25



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Immediately pursuant to these lines Pound skips back to Ovid’s fifth letter, and simply notes the following: “non liber hic / ullus . / Tr. V. xii . 53.” Meaning “there is not a book here,” the aside might readily be interpreted as expressing a complaint about restricted access to reading material characteristic of both his detention at Pisa and his first year at St. Elizabeths.26 The context of Ovid’s protest is revealing. He tells his muses: you are the chief cause of my exile […] I am paying the penalty for my art. I ought to have nothing more to do with verse, for once shipwrecked I rightly shun every sea. But, forsooth, if I should be mad enough to try once more the fatal pursuit, will this place afford me the equipment for song! There is not a book here, not a man to lend ear to me, to know what my words mean. All places are filled with barbarism and cries of wild animals, all places are filled with the fear of a hostile sound.27

By analogy, Ovid’s exile to Tomis (modern day Constanta in Romania) resonated with Pound in his own experience of Howard Hall, which John Tytell has described as almost akin to a caricature madhouse comprised of windowless rooms, steel doors, and populated by screaming lunatics frothing at the mouth.28 The early, and mostly suppressed,29 Ovidian context out of which this plan emerges may help to explain an early line in Canto 85, namely “Queen Bess translated Ovid.” Though, as Eva Hesse explains, via Terrell, the fact that Elizabeth translated Horace, Plutarch, and Boethius was more or less common knowledge to students of Pound’s generation, it seems to me at least plausible that this line might hint at the section’s own origins, wherein “Bess” is at once Queen Elizabeth and St. Elizabeths; the latter “translates”—that is, converts, deciphers, and explains to Pound—the Augustan’s suffering,

Carpenter notes that, upon being moved from Gallinger Municipal hospital to St. Elizabeths in December 1945, Pound was forced to leave his books and papers behind. Carpenter, A Serious Character, 727. The notebook therefore probably dates from early 1946. 27 Ovid, Tristia, 255. 28 John Tytell, Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano (New York: Anchor Press, 1987), 304–5. Pound makes a further comparison in February 1956, though by then his own conditions had improved: “Ovidius had no steam heated bug house.” Notebook 98, EPP, 4966. 29 Pound does later mention Ovid’s plight, albeit only in passing. Both instances appear in Thrones. In Canto 103 he writes, “Winter in Pontus distressing.” Cantos, 103/736. And in Canto 104, “Mirabeau had it worse, Ovid much worse in Pontus.” Cantos, 104/742. Pound also quotes from Fasti in Canto 93: “agitante calescemus.” Cantos, 93/628. 26

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resonant now because especially relevant to the living poet himself undergoing a kind of internal exile:30 Tomis being to St. Elizabeths as Rome was to Rapallo. On the verso of another page Pound scribbled a note that records an actual incident at St. Elizabeths, something that is wholly unknown in his published verse, which here affords us an unprecedented glimpse into the other patients’ experiences of Pound’s incarceration, and shows that some may have been aware of his particular predicament. Pound wrote: mad coon in the locked room singing (cantilena) fo(r) he is Judas fo(r) “ “ Judas loo kout loo kout (to me) (in warning).31

Whilst stuck in this “hell-hole,” Pound wrote to his lawyer, Julien Cornell, protesting the conditions of his institutionalization: “Coherent areas constantly invaded / aiuto / Pound.”32 It must have been paramount to Pound to maintain sanity despite incarceration in an insane asylum. As he wrote again to his attorney in an undated letter early in his captivity: enormous work to be done + no driving force + everyone’s inexactitude Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 468, note 11; 701, note 126. 31 Notebook 69, EPP, 4937. The incident was later recorded in a typescript entitled “C/ 98 (?*)”— discussed below in another context—containing material that both was and was not eventually published. There, Pound wrote, “But the black-man locked in, warning me : FO’ / ‘he is Ju DAS, fo’ he is Ju DAS / look out ; loo- KOUT!” EPP, 3433. 32 Reproduced in Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound, 75. The plea for assistance is also a kind of word-play insofar as “aiuto” and “Ezra” both mean help (in Italian and Hebrew respectively), so that “aiuto / Pound” is really a way of writing “Ezra Pound.” 30



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very fatiguing33

The “enormous work / to be / done” here includes a new suite of cantos, even if it remained Pound’s resolute intention not to publish anything during his time there. As late as 1949 he told the poet and editor Peter Russell quite unequivocally that “[t]here will be NO new work from EZ while in Bughouse.”34 Pound made such claims frequently in his early years, perhaps underlining the fact he expected to be released sooner rather than later. Even by 1953 he still had no plans for publishing: “Birdie no sing in cage.”35 As in the case of Notebook 68, not much of the writing in Notebook 69 actually finds its way into his finally published verse (with a few exceptions). These lines, for instance, appear early on and therefore should be counted amongst the first belonging to Rock-Drill that Pound ever wrote (they would eventually be incorporated into Canto 87): Where find a Jacques de Molay Where a builders compas[s] + golden square to measure in Poictiers a Judges’ – That six lights   cast no shadow @ all  .36

Ezra Pound, reproduced in Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound, 73. Cornell does not date this letter, but a reference to “Olson” several pages earlier is, in all likelihood, the poet Charles Olson (not a doctor of this name, as Cornell supposes), who was among Pound’s first regular visitors to St. Elizabeths, attending between early 1946 and early 1948. See Charles Olson, Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths, ed. Catherine Seelye (New York: Paragon, 1991). These letters are therefore written probably around the time of the composition of the notebooks in question. 34 Undated Letter, Contemporary Manuscripts Collection, SUNY Buffalo, Box 744, Folder 5. It ended up being a rather productive time in terms of both writing and publishing. 35 Ezra Pound, “Apologia: Letter from an Exile,” Listen 1, no.1 (Winter 1953/Spring 1954): 24. 36 Notebook 69, EPP, 4937. 33

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Similarly, “bumped off Cleopatra / because she thought about / currency”37 appears in a variation omitting her purported assassination in Canto 85. What is familiar throughout, even if the actual lines are not, is the poet’s angry condemnation of social and economic malfeasance (of which the foregoing examples are also exemplary): + here the hell of mud foetid for bureaucrats extending their powers for makers of laws ex post facto + for newspaper lice   who support them Luce + the rest of them For the seekers of fault in far countries defending their own even in altis the hell of mud foetid The stink for all memory38

It is possible that such lines were intended for cantos. The suppression of lines contesting the ideological bases of seeking “fault in far countries” and the

Ibid. Ibid.

37 38



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fourth estate that undergirds such attempts was expedient politically as well as aesthetically. A few pages later, Pound wrote and underlined a large “C” in blue pencil— which, as this and other notebooks show, normally indicates material for, or the beginning of, a new canto. The first passage might therefore be properly construed as some of the earliest authorially recognized post-Pisan lines. Pound wrote: b -------- rs perched upon slavery fell To the sovran every man as to all the men as to the emperor duty [illegible]. all men   or noman39

This forecasts Pound’s renewed concern—following the monumental hiatus that is The Pisan Cantos—for government and legislation, two particularly ubiquitous themes in Rock-Drill and Thrones. The reference to “no man,” recalling ΟΥ ΤΙΣ of Canto 74, shows how the justice and ethical rectitude these cantos eventually demand is motivated at once by a general desire for social good (“all men”) which includes Pound (“noman”). These cantos, which for such long stretches eviscerate radically the lyric ego, remain deeply personal affairs. Amid and out of such fragments and textual debris, and following on from his topical notes on Ovid, Pound sketched a tripartite plan that outlines the gist of the cantos he was planning to write and publish over the next several years:

Ibid.

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68 cantos 85–100 in brief

1

Bellum cano perenne – to which Troy but a flea bite __ between the usurer + the man who wd do a good job by hand or by [invest?] Thrones belascio or Topaze something (Erigena)   god can sit on without having it sqush

2

make it new from T’ang to Ocellus.40

3

“Bellum cano / perenne” or some variation thereof becomes for Pound a signature “tag” that recurs throughout Rock-Drill and Thrones. Its first Ibid. Pound then writes, using a different pencil (indicative of an interval in composition, itself signifying an end to the outline at “Ocellus”), “‘to keep some of the / non-interest bearing / national debt / in circulation / as currency’. T.C.P. // A tithe, not a / fix tax / in something a man hasn’t got / minimum of / acres free / from bureaucratic / interference / assemblies to / have / access to / air.” These lines forecast the published verses of Canto 88: “‘Trying’, he said, ‘to keep some of the / non- / interest-bearing national debt in circulation as currency. / one, eight, seven, eight, / Mencius on tithing.” Cantos, 88/580. Pound reformulates this passage for inclusion in Cantos, 99/699.

40



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occurrence, in the final line of Canto 86, indicates, as this outline does too, that the marked engagement with “Chinese” in cantos 85 and 86, which so distinctly characterizes Rock-Drill, had not yet occurred to Pound as he planned his new work. This means, probably, that he was not yet aware or in possession of Séraphin Couvreur’s Chou King: Les Annales de la Chine. Pound’s notebooks do not show any sign of his engagement with this important intertext until July 1953.41 As this outline makes clear, by virtue of the fact that everything it enumerates eventually first appears in Canto 87 and Canto 88, these cantos form the germ of Pound’s post-Pisan sequences. Additional to the abundant Ovidian material, this seminal notebook is also devoted to sketching out a few salient points of highly personal western history: “govt. by torture shd end;” “they sell [good?] govt sd. Knitl;” “Americains avec les voix impuberes;” “Orage on recession of power, Douglas ‘perversion;’” “Doomsday + Ed Confessor.”42 In sum: Europe, America, and their relations (historical or otherwise), not China or a notional paradiso terestre, were Pound’s foundational concerns when Rock-Drill was first conceived. In fact, as Pound revealed in a letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, “the title is: SECTION: ROCK DRILL which applies specificly to 85/89. The Paradiso proper starting with 90. However, the reader will have to find THAT out for himself.”43

“Iterum dico”44 Notebook 70, the third in the Rock-Drill series, was composed sometime later in 1946 and reads like a sounding board for the cantos that would eventually emerge from its preliminary sketches.45 In fact, reading through the twentytwo notebooks of Rock-Drill and the twenty-five of Thrones, one is struck with the frequency of which certain phrases, associated either with important personages or basic concepts, recur. Antoninus Pius is but one particularly Notebook 76 contains the first explicit references to Couvreur. EPP, 4944. Ibid. 43 November 23, 1954 Letter, EPP, 2738. 44 Cantos, 85/556. 45 Notebook 70, EPP, 4938. It is a notebook resonant not just of cantos to come but also of those recently composed, as in: “+ Dioce / whose terraces as / the colour / of stars.” 41 42

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salient example, not least because he appears so frequently not just in the notebooks but in the cantos’ texts as printed (Canto 42, Canto 46, Canto 78, Canto 87, Canto 88, Canto 89, Canto 94, Canto 96, Canto 97, Canto 98, Canto 102, Canto 105, Canto 106, and Canto 107). Praiseworthy in Pound’s mind for putting law above personal authority, keeping the interest rates down (4%) and for contributing some of his own wealth towards the good of the state,46 Antoninus is a historical figure Pound uses as a recurrent exemplar of good governance. Equally importantly, and in Pound’s mind no doubt connected to what he understood as his upright ethical conduct, is the fact that the historical record of Antoninus’s accomplishments has been suppressed, its truth driven from curricula: “Of Antoninus very little record remains”; “Antoninus; / Julian / would not be worshipped”; and “Alex, Antoninus in blot-out.”47 The recurrent presentation of interpretive detail (in this case of Antoninus’s accomplishments and their subsequent obfuscation) in Pound’s verse is a signature feature of his poetics of this time, and indeed, I would suggest, stands amongst its most salient attributes. The impulse towards such reiteration was, as Pound jotted down under a note giving the dates of Antoninus’s rule (later included in Canto 94): a modus pensare (out of the bug house) in times of the infamy.48

The metaphor of rock-drilling pertains not just to a way of writing, or as Pound wrote in an August 2, 1956 letter to Wyndham Lewis, of trying “to drill something into the pliocine occiput of the b.bloody pupLick,”49 but to a way of thinking. Pound’s understanding of iterability—a term he would never himself have used—is categorically opposed to what, say, Jacques Derrida would later The Historia Augusta says, “vel quod vere natura clementissimus et nihil temporibus suis asperum fecit. idem faenus trientarium, hoc est minimis usuris, exercuit, ut patrimonio suo plurimos adiuvaret” [or because he was in fact very kindly by nature and did no harsh deed in his own time. He also loaned money at four per cent, the lowest rate ever exacted, in order that he might use his fortune to aid many]. Historia Augusta, trans. David Magie (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1921), 104–5. 47 Cantos, 97/682, 102/731, and 107/760. 48 Notebook 70, EPP, 4938. 49 Ezra Pound, Pound/Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 294. 46



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mean by it. For Derrida, iterability is the condition of language, whether as written or oral communication, and does not simply signify repetition, though it means this too of course. Iteration, in Derrida’s understanding of it, is always also alteration: fixed identity is an illusion. So the iteration of “Antoninus” as a Roman tag throughout Pound’s verses, in which each new appearance also implies a new context, would for Derrida mean renewed constitutions of significance. The further implication here is that a sign can never have a single meaning, but a range of meanings limited only by the number of (potentially infinite) contexts. Since every re-iteration implies recontextualization, each iteration carries new, different meanings. Ultimately this does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary, that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring.50 Derrida’s account inverts Pound’s linguistic idealism, which is predicated upon the perdurability of the meaning of terms. Without such perdurability, Pound long contended, there could be no ethical dimension to language as such. Stable and determined meanings provided the foundations upon which all other relations—social, aesthetic, political—could and must be built (cf. Pound’s “Cavalcanti,” quoted in Chapter 1). This demand is belied by the fact that, as Pound himself recognized both in being so vocal about how terms should be semantically stable and in materialist reading practices that promoted instability, individual terms can be used to mean many different things.51 His insistence in “Cavalcanti” that “what we need now is not so much a commentator as a lexicon” because “it is the precise sense of certain terms as understood at that particular epoch that one would like to have set before one”52 demonstrates a philological sensi For Derrida, “iterability” links “repetition to alterity”: “unities of iterability,” “separable from their internal and external context, and separable from themselves,” are never permitted “a unity of selfidentity.” Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 315, 317. Cf. also J. A. Cuddon, “iterability/iteration,” in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 5th rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2015), 373. I have borrowed some of Cuddon’s language in the foregoing summary. 51 Alan Golding makes the related point that “the central irony of Pound’s self-construction as teacher is the way in which self-evidence, one of his primary pedagogic principles, contradicts his persistent impulse to explain.” Alan Golding, “From Pound to Olson: The Avant-Garde Poet as Pedagogue,” in Ezra Pound and Education, ed. Michael Coyle and Steven G. Yao (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012), 192. In other words, the more Pound insists upon the self-explanatory nature of his cantos, the harder the work of interpretation. 52 Ezra Pound, “Cavalcanti,” LE, 162. 50

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tivity to historical mutation he usually suppressed. However, it was Pound’s prerogative in The Cantos to write in resistance to mutability as such. The reiterative texture of Pound’s late work, a quality absolutely characteristic of the manuscripts as well as the published verse, indicates Pound’s rejection of “context” as a major determining factor of meaning. Now, this rather bold claim needs to be qualified by a number of important exceptions. First, Pound certainly found the relationship between different contexts meaningful. Ideogrammic writing relies upon the truth of this assertion. Second, Pound found the relation between his verse and the “absent context” of the text to which his writing referred (or was borrowed from) meaningful, as he told Scheiwiller explicitly. That Pound frequently preserved some spellings found in certain of his source texts—Couvreur’s Chou King for instance—also indicates a certain faith in particular and retraceable paths of transmission. Third, Pound’s own concern for the original context of writing (over and against writing that, post-facto, has been handled and reframed by editors) as bearing important indicators of intention and meaning seems a strong counter-example to the suggestion that context is rather less than essential. A rejoinder to all three foregoing objections might point out that, like the other theoretical arguments I have made, I am trying to identify an orientation rather than an absolute. Further, in each instance, Pound’s concern for some kind of significant contextualization is in reaction to editorial mediation and attempts to resist interventions in the textual record that he found neither relevant nor ameliorative. Still, as Pound made explicit in a note for the printer of The Pisan Cantos, one in which he advises the printer that it is “probably better to copy my corrections carefully on the carbons than to make a new typescript”: “repeats from earlier cantos are intentional for clarity + reminder).”53 (Re)iteration in these cantos is something, Pound recognized in advance, that certain kinds of readers would construe not as clarification but as error. The sense of déjà vu (perhaps déjà lu is the more apt phrase) one feels in reading these late cantos is a palpable and in fact deeply intended effect that, at the same time, reflects Pound’s own inclination to eschew self-editorialization. As Pound writes in Canto 93: EPP, 3405.

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Peitz trai pena d’amor Que Tristans l’amador Qu’a suffri mainta dolor per Iseutz la bionda First petals and then cool rain sward Castalia again Peitz trai pena d’amor Que Tristans l’amador Qu’a suffri mainta dolor Per Iseutz la bionda First petals and then cool rain By sward Castalia again54

It seems likely but not certain that this passage is an instance of lyric repetition and not an accidental but ultimately sanctioned duplication similar to that Kenner describes in “Notes on Amateur Emendations”: proposing to anthologize Canto 13 in 1956, Kenner noticed duplicate lines in the Farrar and Rinehart edition of A Draft of XXX Cantos not extant in the corresponding Faber edition. He queried Pound about his preferences, who replied, “Repeat in 13 sanctioned by time and the author, or rather first by the author, who never objects to the typesetter making improvements.”55 As it turns out, it is lyrical repetition, but one that Pound was at pains to ensure his typesetters recognized as intentional. On the sole existing typescript Pound wrote, “si ripete in altra disposizione tipografica va bene / non e uno sbaglio / le parole si ripetono,” which translates loosely as “it is okay if repeated in different typographical arrangement / not a mistake / the words are repeated.”56 Readers willing to understand the poem in terms of musical structure will undoubtedly explain repetition as refrain or leitmotif, and I agree. But as Peter Nicholls has pointed out, if we do conceive of The Cantos as motivated by an essential orality, one based on sound, rhythm, reiteration, and association, that is, if we allow ourselves, as Eric Havelock put it, to “become ‘musical’ in the functional sense of the Greek term,” then we also might submit to the poet’s “paideutic spell,” amounting to little more than indoctrination.57 For Cantos, 93/624–5. Hugh Kenner, “Notes on Amateur Emendations,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 26. 56 Ezra Pound, APICE. 57 Peter Nicholls, “‘You in the dinghy astern there’: Learning from Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound and 54 55

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Nicholls, Pound’s preoccupation with the recurrent and the typical enacts “a damaging stylization of intellectual activity for which all particulars become part of one allegorical and conspiratorial design.” Nicholls understands this feature of the verse as detrimental, but Pound would have disagreed. The forcible inculcation of ideas, attitudes, and prejudices is the whole point of Rock-Drill, as its very name implies. Its modus pensare is its m.o. In other words, Rock-Drill is designed to damage “critical” intelligence. Pound wants its readers to have “forgotten-what-book,” what reference refers to what. Not knowing what anything refers to is normally taken as the starting point for any critical reading, its primary catalyst. But in The Cantos such an untethering operates as an ideal where understanding is unencumbered by knowledge, is, indeed, the unencumbering of knowledge itself. A draft press release (of all things) for Rock-Drill, published by New Directions in 1956, makes the point: “the ‘Rock-Drill’ of the title refers to the purpose of this part of the great poem in which ‘the lies of history must be exposed to the truth hammered home by reiteration, with the insistence of a rock-drill’.”58 This recommends that we approach The Cantos uncritically for its proper appreciation to begin. All of which is to suggest that the poem is profoundly un-self-critical. A passage from the first draft of Canto 93 reads: know agenda to the utmost of its own virtù virtude propria of its own all of which may be a little slow for the reader or seem platitudinous   unless closely examined59

The cancellation is significant: Pound means to discourage close examination. Something unique—a line, phrase, or some striking figuration—may not, in the first instance, bear less examination than something reiterated; but once Education, ed. Steven G. Yao and Michael Coyle (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012), 156. 58 New Directions, NDPC, 2948. Cf. the blurb on the inside flap of the New Directions edition: “Drilling it into their heads …” Rock-Drill (New York: New Directions, 1956), n.p. 59 Notebook 88, EPP, 4956.



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it has been examined its recurrences escape similar attention. They become tags, labels: “This section is labled: Rock Drill.”60 Granted, there is a lot more in The Cantos that is unique than is repeated, but once something is reiterated its critical status changes from something that is unknown and bears further scrutiny to something that begins to stop attracting attention as such, and instead starts assisting in the interpretation of surrounding text. When Pound writes in Notebook 70, in an apparent draft of a canto— Canto  sd in ’78 he was trying to keep some of the non-interest bearing nat debt in circ as currency Must go keep on repeating this61

—and then repeats this idea over again throughout the pre-publication material (especially Notebook 71),62 and in fact in the published verse as well, each reiteration shifts the critical station of this reference from something subject to interpretation to something that actively interprets. Likewise, Pound understood the transmission from manuscript to published poem as reiteration, not transformation. Again, over and against Derrida, this implies a stability of meaning despite contextual variation. As tags, repeated lines must maintain transferable significance. Terrell’s Companion offers a schematic image of the result: 92. Ionides: [40:26]. 93. Pulchra documenta: L, “beautiful examples”. 94. Bulow: [cf. 77 above]. 95. Gold … 1204: [89:79] 96. El Melek: [97:1–15] 97. kalos kagathos: H, “beautiful and well born [33:11]. 98. Del Mar cites … : [96:119].63 Cantos, 89/601. Pound misspells “labeled”. Notebook 70, EPP, 4938. EPP, 4939. 63 Terrell, Companion, 680. 60 61 62

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Amongst the many curious aspects of Pound’s late verse is the way its prosodic surface is set upon a primary architecture composed of clichés and stereotypes, which I mean in their contemporary senses, that is, of fixed and oversimplified ideas (“Herr Marcher: Der Jud will Geld”),64 as well as in their older, printing senses, that is, as relief printing plates cast in a mold. Common amongst Vanni Scheiwiller’s various marginal instructions to his printer, preserved in the margins of the first set of Rock-Drill proofs, is “fare il cliché” [make the cliché]. Scheiwiller’s instructions to his typesetter make explicit (albeit in relation to ideograms) directions Pound’s poetics tacitly issue his readers. Though most of the clichés that Pound uses will be startlingly new to readers, and thereby evade the most obvious signature of a cliché (namely such wide and frequent usage amongst a discourse community that they lose any semblance of originality), the intention that structures their use remains fundamentally faithful to the underlying logic of cliché as such. For cliché, as Elizabeth Barry puts it, consists of persistent, even habitual, assumptions that are fixed in the memory and are symptomatic of what Deleuze Figure 2.1  Ezra Pound, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro proof-page, APICE. and Guattari have called language’s “molar” tendency. This tendency is contrasted to the molecular, which is based on principles of multiplicity, instability, and transformation.65 Anthony Uhlmann, also Cantos, 89/600. Elizabeth Barry, Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliché (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 1–2. Theories of the “molar” and “molecular” (or, the singular and the multiple), are developed in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

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cited by Barry, gives a description of the “molar” tendency of language that is rather pertinent given Pound’s own earlier use of the same image: “words accumulated like metal filings around the molar polarity.”66 Pound’s metaphor of the organization of The Cantos, understood initially as a long vorticist poem, is of course predicated on “the forma, the immortal concetto, the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet.”67 Again, the concept is immortal, expressive of Pound’s idealized resistance to change. This immortality stands in direct contrast to the changeable deadness of the iron filings which are enlivened into patterned integrities. The language here echoes a passage from earlier in Guide to Kulchur, in which Pound talks about the “the ideogrammic method,” and says it “consists in presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized reader’s mind, onto a part that will register.”68 This registration, once made, must be permanent. For it to be permanent, so too must the fact be. Permanence is achieved when a thing means what it means irrespective of changes in context. Taken to a conceptual extreme, the consequences of this are potentially serious. If the elemental building blocks one uses to compose verse are construed in advance as resistant to time and context and interpretation (what is fixed about them is their ideational content not the physical form: the physical form does not really matter to Pound), then their arrangement becomes arbitrary. Pound will occasionally festoon a particular passage of verse with clichéd phrases such as “Alex paid his soldier’s debts” or “chêng ming” or “bellum cano perenne” or “trying to keep some of the non-interest bearing national debt in circulation” or “without having it sqush” or whatever. But really, these tags are permanently relevant. If that is the case, if nothing matters because everything always does, then close reading is a kind of mistake. It is a mistake because the sort of reading Pound wants is not one Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78. Cf. Uhlmann’s remarks with Pound’s from 1915: “if you clap a strong magnet beneath a plateful of iron filings, the energies of the magnet will proceed to organize form. It is only by applying a particular and suitable force that you can bring order and vitality and thence beauty into a plate of iron filings, which are otherwise as ‘ugly’ as anything under heaven. The design in the magnetized iron filings expresses a confluence of energy. It is not ‘meaningless’ or ‘inexpressive’.” Ezra Pound, “Affirmations—II: Vorticism,” The New Age 16, no. 11 (January 14, 1915): 277. 67 GK, 152. 68 Ibid., 51. 66

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rewarded by scrupulous attention to the minute details of his language. His method—the getting “together of a few hundred slides” to facilitate the picking out of “what is necessary” is also predicated on the presentation of commonplace knowledge (or, what should be commonplace, an important distinction Pound always forgets): “the Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS.”69 Despite its usually bewildering array of intertextual references, seemingly without either homogeneity or consistency, what the pre-publication material shows above all else is that, during the St. Elizabeths years, Pound neither said nor wrote anything of some importance to him only once (well, who does). Though the manner of any given iteration can vary (Pound, unlike Deleuze, advocates sameness despite difference rather than difference within sameness), the same basic messages were issued over and over again. This means that even the most spontaneously composed of cantos were not really themselves without considerable premeditation. In a way, the true first sketches and drafts of Pound’s late verse are actually his letters, where an extraordinary number of lines were first mooted.70 There is an implicit acknowledgment of this in the lines from Canto 89: “And the Portagoose, as we cease not to mention, / uprooted spice trees.”71 This is, so far as I am aware, the first time this practice is mentioned in The Cantos, though it is repeated in Canto 93 and Canto 104. But Pound, here the royal “we,” had been going on about it since at least 1951 (as this passage intimates), especially in letters to Eva Hesse: “goddam portagoose no sooner got into Goa, seicento, sooner got into Goa, than he started digging up spice trees (all for libero scambio, and keeping up prices.);” a fact he repeated for good measure six weeks later: “remembering that the goddam Portagoose started digging up spice trees as soon as he got into Goa/ gornoze when but centuries ago.”72 As David Moody reminds us, William McNaughton, a frequent visitor to Pound during his incarceration, recalled he “thought that Pound was ABCR, 22. I note in passing Marjorie Perloff ’s important essay on the essential contiguity between Pound’s correspondence and his Cantos, in obverse to the equally extraordinary disparity between Joyce’s letters and his prose fiction. Marjorie Perloff, “‘Letter, penstroke, paperspace’: Pound and Joyce as co-respondents,” in The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 74–87. 71 Cantos, 89/602. 72 April 29 and June 14, 1951 Letters to Eva Hesse, EHA. 69 70



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rehearsing his cantos in his conversation.”73 McNaughton noticed that Pound tended to reiterate what he (McNaughton) called “entire ‘raps’”—“paragraphs and blocks of paragraphs” that “would eventually appear in print as parts of cantos.”74 Moody reminds us also that Michael Reck said Pound would preach his visions constantly. Of course no one’s life consists of an unbroken chain of absolutely unique actions, feelings, and utterances. The point being that Pound was especially beholden to reiteration. Behind this lies an idealistic theory of language and ethics that makes the promulgation of any one of his handful of idées fixes permanently appropriate because they are perforce true everywhere and forever. Despite appearances to the contrary, relativism and plurality are anathema to the poetics of these cantos.

Cantos 85–89 The lines comprising the first and only extensive draft of Canto 85 were composed in December of 1953. What Pound saw through to publication in The Hudson Review in late 1954 is practically a verbatim transcription thereof.75 But over and against such transmissional integrity, several things are worth noting. First, at the time of writing, the draft was not initially conceived of as the opening canto for a new section of cantos (nor was it conceived of, as aforementioned, before other cantos). Pound indicates retrospectively that these lines were actually for a new canto: two “c”s appear in red crayon on the second and third pages of the mss, suggesting he was sure the text was canto material, even if he had not yet conceived of its place in the overall movement of the poem. Text recognizably part of Canto 85 begins on the fifth page of Notebook 80, following some unpublished notes on James Buchanan, beneath a thinly drawn line: gallileo index’d 1616 Wellington’s peace after Vaterloo — ____________________________ Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 3: 311. Quoted in ibid. Ezra Pound, “Canto 85,” Hudson Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1955): 487–51.

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our science is from the watching of shadows76

The strikingly large ideogram ling2 and the four lines that follow in all published versions are missing; the lines exist elsewhere, rehearsed twice in Notebook 76, once with and once without the prominent ling2 ideogram. Though their composition precedes the rest of the canto, their place in the emphatic opening of Canto 85 was also a kind of retrospective editorial decision.77 Versions of the lines “our dynasty came in …” actually occur three more times in Notebook 80, that is, after or marginal to the main draft of the poem. Notebook 77, composed between July and October 1953, contains another six additional reiterations of this opening, a clear indication of their wide application. Significantly, though the published verse mentions I Yin, chief minister of Ch’êng T’ang, first emperor of the Shang dynasty (1766–1753 bce), affording the whole a degree of historical specificity, Pound’s drafts are not so particular. The second reiteration of this opening in Notebook 76 reads: our dynasty because of gt

sensibility

ling2, + had the gtst duration under wei kin[gdom].78



The reference here seems to be to the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 bce). Other instances, here extant in Notebook 77, make no attempt at specificity at all, but demonstrate, instead, how the idea of great sensibility plus dynastic longevity are always coincident:

EPP, 4948. Cf. Ron Bush, “‘Quiet, Not Scornful’? The Composition of The Pisan Cantos,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 199. Here Bush observes that the opening lines of The Pisan Cantos were added only after most of the sequence had already taken shape. 78 EPP, 4944. 76 77



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Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility To the Habsburg furrow — the Leopoldine for 100 years France betrayed Talleyrand.79

Elsewhere in the notebook, Pound connects this convergence of sensibility and resilience with Brancusi, who is having (yet again) one of those days when he would not give up “15 minutes of my time / for anything under heaven” (itself adjacent to lines about Mussolini),80 and to a host of other leitmotifs: bellum cano perenne, usury, and so on. Amongst the only substantive differences between this first draft of Canto 85 and its published version is the word “dolmen” for “gnomon.”81 The revision better coordinates a description of the ideogram with the language of light that pervades these cantos: dolmens—single-chamber megalithic tombs usually consisting of two or more upright stones supporting a large flat horizontal capstone—are, perforce, dark places, whereas gnomons—the part of the sundial that casts a shadow—are associated with the sun and, etymologically, point to the luminosity of understanding Pound sought to cultivate in himself if not his readers.82 Amongst the very few other substantive cancellations is the omission of the lines “if I can time / my moments of weakness / 伊 尹” from the following passage: From T’ang’s time until now That you lean ’gainst the tree of heaven + know Ygrasail

C

EPP, 4945. Cantos, 85/559. Ibid., 85/543. 82 Eva Hesse notes in a November 24, 1968 Letter to James Laughlin that “chih3” “does not mean ‘gnomon’, nor is it a pictogram of a gnomon as Ezra suggests; according to the ancient Chink Webster’s, Shao-wen, it is a pictogram of a foot with ankle, toes and heel.” NDPC, 2917. Achilles Fang, in contrast, approved: “By the way, your interpretation of 止 seems to solve a number of knotty problems in Kung’s book. I’ve been looking through commentaries, but so far failed to come across any that lays emphasis on that term. Please accept my congratulations.” EPCF, 52. Note that Pound decided to sanctify a sign no scholar had so far cared to address. 79 80 81

82

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound poi 時 shih2 90 忱 che ch’ên2 if I can time my moments of weakness — 伊 尹 : “Birds + Tarrapin lived und[er] Hia beast + fish held their order83

Given the rarity of recensions in this draft, the removal of an admission of weakness is doubly significant. It points to the suppression of fallibility.84 A draft of Canto 86 exists in Notebook 81, labelled “LXXXVI” and dated in Pound’s hand “10 Jan 54” in blue ink, and also post-dated “Oct 1958” in red. The manuscript draft is remarkably the same as the published version. Put otherwise, it is, as a draft, very unremarkable insofar as it affords its readers no particularly new insight through recorded actions like cancellations, false starts, or poignant rephrasings. With the exception of a five-page passage where different sequences of the canto are written in parallel—one section running along versos, the other rectos—the manuscript reveals little more than Pound’s total mastery over this subject matter. Enough said. Canto 87, the beginning of which Pound does unambiguously indicate with an [L]XXXVII, seemed to cause the poet more trouble, marked as it is by a number of different cancellations. One such cancellation was as follows: all things, that are are lights “dead november, ver novum “Tu autem non sic” sd. the vision out of “Benjamin minor”? greek tags in Notebook 80, EPP, 4948. The only other substantive cancellation in this draft is of the line “che prende l’occhio per la mente,” which Pound originally placed between the lines “the 4th part: marginalia” and “Liu dogs, serendipity,” published in Cantos, 85/553. Part of this line is printed in Cantos, 94/634 and translated as “who shd/ take the eye for the mind.” Pound asks in this canto if it was not Frate Egidio who said this. Terrell’s Companion says the origin of the phrase is unknown. I have discovered a similar phrase in Guiseppe Pomba (ed.), Nuova Enciclopedia Popolare (Turin: Giuseppe Pomba, 1841), 439, which prints: “che prende l’occhio per canale di comunicazione con la mente.” I do not know if this is Pound’s source.

83 84



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in Erigena’s verses— Ocellus, an Oirishman ?85

As far as I can tell, Pound is attributing a line—“tu autem non sic” [you however are not so, i.e., not at the center of a circle]—from Dante’s Vita Nuova to Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor; and then confusing Ocellus’s—a figure of dubious historical legitimacy—land of birth with Eriugena’s. The confusion, indicative perhaps of Pound’s attainment of real kulchur wherein he has “forgotten-what-book,” can be explained insofar as both Dante and St. Victor deploy the geometrical language of center and circumference as a metaphor for moral enlightenment. In actual fact, though these verses are cancelled here, related ones appear in the previous and subsequent cantos.86 As ever, Pound is tracing a history of transmission. Notebook 81 also contains an emphatic heading, “LXXX V III,” one that, like the draft for Canto 87, starts directly after the previous canto’s conclusion. But what follows bears almost no resemblance to Canto 88 as published. Instead, this draft is a mixed bag of lines used in Canto 87 (“‘art’, sd Vlamnick, / ‘is local’”); Canto 89 and Canto 97 (“‘got no civilization’ / sd knitl / ‘they got no stone’”); Canto 92 (“Io facevo il / sentinella? o non facevo il / sentinella?”); Canto 93 (“better feed ’em / easier to convert ’em / when fed”); Canto 100 (“sd the old ex Commissioner / for Agra / ‘That sticks in / my throat”); Canto 106 and Canto 114 (“+ in thy mind beauty / O Artemis”). Placed midway between the complete draft of Canto 85 and the draft of non-Canto 88, Pound jotted down a kind of map: Alex  p[ai]d debts. Pont[ifex] Max[imus] Anton[inus] P[ius].  = P. Mx gold g[old].s[ilver]. bronze law rules the local sea control St.  Vic[tor]. contemplation ? g[uido].c[avalcanti]. Fortuna Notebook 81, EPP, 4949. Cf.: “Dante, out of St. Victor (Riccardus), / Erigena with greek tags in his verses,” Cantos, 85/546; and “‘Cogitatio, meditatio, contemplatio.’ / Wrote Richardus, and Dante read him,” Cantos, 87/570.

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84

Charters Blackstone Habs[burg] furrow Mirab Mirabeau Tal[leyrand] Bis[marck] Chlod[wig] Ag[assiz]. Del [Mar].87

This shiftable matrix of representative ethical models is, effectively, an ideogram of political commitment in Rock-Drill. Which is to say, what we have here is no mere outline, and its not being an outline is important. Conceiving of it as such would lend (falsely) a kind of causal structure to Pound’s verse, and impute a sense of contingency based on sequence and logic that it categorically lacks. Certainly Chlodwig, for instance, does not, in Pound’s system, enjoy the same caché as Alexander, but Richard of St. Victor or Antoninus Pius or Bismarck each might easily replace Alexander at the uppermost position. The composition of Canto 89 is somewhat reminiscent of a technique Pound used in writing the Adams Cantos. The canto is constructed mostly from notes in Notebooks 82–84 taken during a reading of Thomas Hart Benton’s A Thirty Years’ View. While this fact is old news, the extraction method deserves a brief description. Quite simply, this canto is a result of a kind of double distillation. Pound seems to have gone through his already highly abbreviated reading notes and excerpted lines therefrom, further reducing and compacting an already deeply fragmentary narrative. Often, though by no means always, Pound has marked off sections to be transposed into this canto text with red crayon. What is striking is that, like the Adams cantos, Pound never rearranges the sequential order. Consider this exemplary instance from Notebook 83 (canto text in bold): How often they hd been Told Trade was paralyzed + ships idle hid the books but could not hide weekly statements + the Senate’s imitations of Notebook 81, EPP, 4949.

87



“To copy and amplify”: Section: Rock-Drill Volney or Palmyra (with samples) 不 in specie + without interest against which such a bank is a nuisance 16 to 1 for about 300 years the Spanish dominions enormous bounties, pd. by its late managers To trading politicians, publishers” whatnots and etceteras. Bank against Biddle $1,018,000 for which no vouchers can be found loss 56 million besides injuries to individuals venditioni exponas to sherif of Phila. pubk. sale 4 of November levari facias “andalusia” 99 acres 1/2 Biddle, Jaudon and J. Andrews get out on bail Louis Phillipe suggests Jackson stand firm + not sugar his language a fact not then public The public debt was extinguished 1834 ‘diminish the inconvenience to travellers’ (gold) Mr Tyler’s report needed some rectification.88

Notebook 83, EPP, 4951.

88

85

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Often the gap between excerptions is considerably wider than the above (though quoting such instances for the purposes of this demonstration is rather impractical). There are, for example, eight intervening notebook pages, and two verso notes, between the line about extinguished public debt and the passage from Mencius, including what appears to be a false start for another canto.89 Though there are some extended passages where Pound does not take his cue from Benton’s text (lines between “Those who wish to talk” and “Out of Humboldt” are cases in point),90 this canto is largely a kind of writing-through thereof. Put otherwise, the canto is tantamount to a reading of reading, an editing of editing. This process might prompt us to think “condensation to maximum attainable” or “the method of luminous detail” or some other slogan Pound has provided, but at 405 lines the longest canto in the sequence and the one most dedicated to a single intertext, it is anything but. If Canto 89 is supposed to provide us with a précis of Benton’s narrative that obviates our need to consult it, it fails: its refractions and distillations are too extreme. If it is designed to encourage a reading of it for ourselves, and to function as a guide thereto, it is more a hindrance and obstruction. If its purpose is not to have a purpose, to refuse a usefulness as a sign of its status as art not document, well, there it may succeed. But if true, this only complicates matters further because it puts into question Pound’s earnest attempts to write socially efficacious verse. All such appraisals can be subsumed under the more general tendency pervasive throughout Pound’s late work: to intentionally disfigure texts as a way of facilitating meaning. As he scrawled on a verso of Notebook 84 (a document, by the way, that contains a good deal of notes to Benton’s text but, aside from a stray line or two written earlier, contains nothing approximate to published cantos as such): Know names but not whats ; not wheres ; whys, nor aims — Pound has written “-Canto-” very clearly atop one page, which begins: “Clear sky, vernal sun / order, without troops / such as power never commanded / nor man in power received / 靈.” These lines are taken from Chapter CLXV in Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years’ View; or, a History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, 1820–1850, Vol. 1 (New York: Appleton and Company, 1854), 735. 90 Cantos 89/597–8. 89



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they know only names91

This is the condition that Pound fights against, but it is also one his verse perpetuates. Unless Canto 89 is designed to alert its readers to their own ignorance of the processes of political and economic control—different from “real life” where we are, in Pound’s view, simply unaware of this ignorance— this canto seems bound inextricably and intentionally into the same schedules of obfuscation it ostensibly wants to expose.

Versi Prosaici Notebook 86 contains further notes that are relevant to, but only intermittently used in, Canto 89. These are written on the versos, back to front. The rectos contain a near-complete draft of a text that would be published in 1959 as Versi Prosaici. The volume includes a note by Pound that reads, “Questi Versi Prosaici non appartengono ai Cantos (a Los Cantares) ma forse ne rischiareranno alcuni ritornelli a qualche lettore benevolo”92 [These Prosaic Verses do not belong to the Cantos (to Los Cantares) but perhaps they will clarify some of the refrains to the benevolent reader].93 By “do not belong to the Cantos” Pound only means they were not included therein. In terms of style, subject matter, and content, they are absolutely contiguous with those that comprise Canto 86 and Canto 87. While neither drafts nor versions thereof, they remain entirely of their ilk. The draft begins: Joseph,  his furrow a road still somewhere in Belgium From Maria Theresa — salt.  Tax free —94 Notebook 84, EPP, 4952. Ezra Pound, Versi Prosaici (Rome: Salvatore Sciascia Editore, 1959), 59. 93 Massimo Bacigalupo’s translation. See Ezra Pound, Posthumous Cantos, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo (Manchester: Carcanet, 2015), 208. Nota bene: Bacigalupo’s edition reprints selections from a long, ultimately unused typescript Pound prepared from notes made around this time under the sectional title “Prosaic Verses”; the identical title notwithstanding, these are not the same verses as those printed as Versi Prosaici in 1959. 94 Notebook 86, EPP, 4954. 91 92

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If we are familiar with Rock-Drill we absolutely already know the lay of the land: Alexander paying debts; Edward VIII postponing World War II for three years (another refrain ramified throughout Pound’s unused notes for published cantos); “Dummheit nicht bosheit”; Valla’s discovery of the forgery of Donatio Constantini; and so on. The book is rare, so most readers will not have seen this text, but it is entirely familiar (it even has an ideogram printed upside down, meaning it encountered the similar production problems as other late cantos). Though Pound’s 1959 volume is not to be confused with the “Versi Prosaici” in the recently published “Posthumous Cantos,” the published verses are also similar to those in Bacigalupo’s edition. To read the latter is to “git the ideaHHHH”95 of the former, which is a remarkable thing to say about a poet who stressed more than most the absolute value of the particular. Increasingly, as these late verses make clear, it is actually not the particulars that matter so much as the interpretive tags that accompany them: “Slowness is beauty”; “news that stays news”; “the problem / of issue”; “phullotaxis” [sic]; John Heydon’s theory of signatures; Χρεία; METATHEMENON; “direction voluntatis.” In the schema of Pound’s late poetics, the iterated tags equal understanding; intervening particulars are mere knowledge. In sum, the writing that comprises the first five cantos of Rock-Drill falls largely into two distinct but related categories. The first is writing done with an open book definitely before the poet (be it Séraphin Couvreur’s Chou King or Benton’s Thirty Years’ View). The second is a kind of ad hoc polemical historical revisionism that, of the published poetry, finds expression most clearly in Canto 87 but which is extant in each canto and throughout Versi Prosaici. There is a discursive fluidity to this writing that, despite its radical disjunctions, seems to issue from a consciousness definitely meditating on its subject matter. During such composition, Pound is clearly not consulting specific external sources as he goes along, but taking stock of a mental inventory. Notebook 75 begins in a mode clearly of this variety: USURA + Alexander paid debts   did not guarantee  loans made to veterans Ezra Pound, May 17, 1956 Letter to James Laughlin, NDPC, 1371.

95



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52 weeks in 4 seasons ♦s  ♣s  ♥s + ♠s samphire or crest marine Dionysus the swamp god all ἀλλὰ μάλ᾽ αὔτως ἄξων αἰέν ἄρηρεν96 + to miss or misse mrs ‘Frua from whatever d’espangles in Palmerston’s company a little packet of tea (mr Gladstone) but did not sell England for 4 million quid to the Rothschild (i.e., for Suez Canal shares) Foundations, anonymous juries Regius professorships. (vide Hollis, – later sunk into parliament get yr ear full of greek Homers, Callimachus + the top in ΤΡΑΧΙΝΙΑΙ govt by cads is not perpetual von Bülow getting his news from the agencies but in filth never ending Vealsohn + FDR (+ under s. to lie) These lines are from Aratus, Phaenomena, trans. G. R. Mair (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 208. The facing-page translation reads as follows: “the Axis shifts not a whit, but unchanging is for ever fixed.” What they are and where they appear in their own context are questions for philologers; what they mean to Pound is 中.

96

90

The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound iggurunce (Bülow) of coin credit [our?] circu lation for an 100 years betrayed Talleyrand after 40 years betrayed Bismarck sold England for 4 million quid to the Rothschild (Suez Canal shares) “expansion” sez little Eva territorial grabbery — the lust for  \\  \\ + sd Orage “pickin daisies” He (Wells) wont have an opinion i.e., wont go get “ “ Attlee vs. Gladstone post mortem disliked our (US) constitution cause it didn’t fit international villainy “Nicht bosheit, Dummheit” sd. Q. Margherita or Eleanor or whoever she was re Germans in 1914. no limit to Dummheit _________________________ rien que ——— pour donner une idée de l’infini Renan



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+ if they wd pray for clear definitions Hilary’s significatio” but that is not all of precision – which is of words in combination get yr news from “ j + yu lose not merely one word @ a time get yr news from “ j an’ yu lose97

Idées fixes swirl around Pound’s mind with fleet interchangeability. “Dummheit, nicht bosheit” is wrenched so severely from the context of its original utterance that whoever said it is beside the point. The truth of this luminous detail means that it is secure against even suppressed context, now revealed: that it refers to Germans during World War I does not properly alter its meaning which carries a more general significance for the sequence as a whole. A rather less explicitly political—though by no means apolitical—version of this mode of writing characterizes the second half of Section: Rock-Drill, the so-called paradisal cantos.

Cantos 90–95 The drafting of Canto 88 and Canto 89 took a minimum of six months, roughly from the end of December 1953 to late June 1954.98 By the summer, however, these cantos were complete. Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on July 8, 1954, “now I am crawlin OUT of mukrn hizzery/ into more POetiKKK sphere.”99 Indeed he was. Pound wrote “Canto 90,” the first of the so-called paradisal cantos (numbered 90–95) between June 24 and 27. The first and only Notebook 75, EPP, 4943. On April 23, 1955 Pound sent “a better copy of 88 and start of 89” in typescript to Mary de Rachewiltz. “These two are going to Hudson for July.” Letter, EPP, 2740. 99 EPP, 2736. 97 98

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extant manuscript draft of this canto begins on the second page of Notebook 87, preceded by a page and a half of notes and/or poetry about Van Buren and Andrew Jackson, clear remnants of the cantos that came before. Then, beneath a bold line in red crayon (literally drawing a line under that discursive modality), Pound writes a prayer: Rise in light let the venom go out of her. There is a god in each member Rise in light let the venom go out of her. By the boat of Ra in the east heave this soul upwards



hsin jih jih  hsin

lux enim That beauty be drawn up out of hell instructing the angels . The viper make clear the dark air virtu enter the stone to enlighten ______________________________ + her mind racing, racing like that what truth will come into it ?



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what light not enter ? __________________________ Kuanon by the golden rail?100

Following these few distinctly paradisal but ultimately unused lines, the notebook contains the verses corresponding to the poem as we know it from published versions, starting at “Castalia like the moonlight” and continuing right through to the end. One notable difference between the manuscript version and the published version is the presence in the former of an “altar” drawing after the final line on page 607. As prayer, the poem’s incantations are at once spontaneous and a dictation the poet seemingly knows by heart, enacting a sort of “benediction before knowledge.”101 These manuscripts are, in this way, “sincere” in the textualcritical sense of being mostly uncorrupted by editorial intervention. They are also sincere in the modern sense of displaying an absence of “dissimulating,

Figure 2.2  Ezra Pound, detail from manuscript draft of Canto 90, Notebook 87, Beinecke. EPP, 4955. The lines concerning “venom” might constitute a prototypical instance of these that Pound would later write for Canto 94: “Eleanor / who sucked the venom out of his wound.” Ezra Pound, Cantos, 94/641. 101 Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 227. 100

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Figure 2.3  Ezra Pound, detail from All’ Insegna del Pesce d’Oro proof-page showing altar design, APICE.



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feigning or pretence”:102 as discussed in the previous chapter, Pound puts Hitler at heaven’s door, a decision that shows the limitations of sincerity as a sole criterion for ethical care. Only someone radically unashamed of his own prejudices would consider so brazen an act, as though radical truth-telling seems to demand of its speaker the surrender of any capacity for moral adjudication.103 From an editorial standpoint, retrospective judgment is suspended (and prejudice reigns). With the possible exception of what appears to be a somewhat fractured compositional process of “Canto 91” (see below), the first four paradisal cantos are all substantially printed as first written; at times the printed cantos—despite schematizations natural to the transfer of manuscript subtleties of spacings and Pound’s idiomatic markings dividing sections, or one line from another—are virtual transcriptions of the notebooks, suggesting Pound practiced what he preached, “the action resultant from this straight gaze into the heart. The ‘know thyself ’ carried into action.”104 The intransigence of the late poetry—manifest prosodically through repetition and echo; and manifest otherwise in Pound’s insistence upon his own rightness against the error of others—is backed up textually by a resistance to revising the textual record once inscribed. This fact expresses an extraordinary conjunction between authority and authenticity, the culmination of what Maria Louisa Ardizzone called Pound’s repeated attempts to replace “theoretical knowledge” with a knowing “coincident with making.”105 The bibliographic fact of minimal revision from first draft to final published poem, at once authoritarian and sincere, offers a compelling demonstration of “man standing by his word.”106 To Pound’s mind, his poems could always be improved, but were basically impervious to vitiation.107 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 13. Cf. Leon Surette, who quotes Pound’s remarks that Hitler, though “crazy as a coot,” was capable of “extraordinary flashes of lucidity.” Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 282. Though pointing out the good things about Hitler might be consistent with a strong aversion to self-editorializing, simply ignoring the Final Solution is a radically disingenuous omission and represents, as Surette aptly puts it, the complete moral collapse of Pound’s “metahistory.” 104 Ezra Pound, Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects (New York: Directions, 1969), 21. 105 Maria Luisa Ardizzone, “Introduction,” in Machine Art & Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 7. 106 CWC, 69. 107 David Moody has also noted of the “Adams” cantos that “given the intractable nature of the documentary materials one would expect to find evidence of laborious composition and revision. Amazingly, the first drafting in the notebooks is very near to the final state.” David A. Moody, 102 103

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The textual critic whose interest is aroused by the draft-like character of these verses and checks the drafts for instances of informative revision will be, in most cases, frustrated. The primary intensity of these poems is, in the main, intolerant of textual critical evaluation. But such a critic will not always be disappointed (and even the cause of disappointment—a relative lack of variation between initial draft and published versions—is interpretable). The manuscript of Canto 91 is an exception that proves the rule. It begins directly after Canto 90’s concludes, except it appears as though the final lines of the latter, those that translate the canto’s Latin epigraph from Richard of St. Victor, were slightly later additions. Which is to say, Pound’s original draft of Canto 90 ended with “trees die + / the dream remains”; Canto 91 originally began, “That the body of light come forth / from the body of fire.” On June 27, Pound added the St. Victor translation to the end of Canto 90 (it would also not be positioned as epigraph to the canto and indeed the section until later); on June 29, he added the conflated troubadour lines and got quite as far as “qui laborat, orat.” None of the above is especially revelatory except, like Canto 85 and Canto 89 definitely, and to a lesser extent Canto 87 and Canto 88, the opening lines of the cantos were retrospective inclusions, each effectively naming the poetic fact they also introduce. Unlike Canto 90, the composition of Canto 91 was fraught, a material fact corroborating Bacigalupo’s claim that in the diptych formed by these two cantos, Canto 90 is the still point whereas Canto 91 is “more extensive, arresting and problematic.”108 The main disturbance in the textual integrity of the draft occurs at the center of the canto, extending from the prayer beginning with the line (grafted in from Laʒamon’s Brut) “Leafdi Diana, leove Diana” and running until the end of the italicized section starting with “Democracies electing their sewage.”109 There is a kind of poignancy about this, because, taken “Composition in the Adams Cantos,” in Ezra Pound and America, ed. Jacqueline Kaye (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 79. Even large sections of The Pisan Cantos are composed largely as published, written in landscape in double columns, as though inscribed directly into a notional codex. Pisan Cantos Manuscripts, YCAL MSS 183, Box 1, Folder 19. The paradisal cantos of Rock-Drill are as much a culmination as a continuation of this sort of forceful writing—David Ten Eyck has recently shown explicit connections and congruities between the formal procedures of composition germane to what he calls Pound’s documentary method in the “Adams” cantos and those comprising Thrones—whose rebarbative style is contiguous with the way Pound wrote with only minimal revision, indicative of both what and how he thought. See David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 108 Massimo Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 259. 109 Cantos, 91/612–14.



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together, the prayer, on the one hand, and fanatical venting of spleen on the other, form an extended and rather startling juxtaposition central to much of Pound’s thinking at the time. Put bluntly, Pound’s metaphysics are inextricable from his opprobrious politics. Both exist in these cantos rather abundantly. Following several pages of unused notes from the Brut—a prayer to the goddess Diana that deeply preoccupied Pound—the poet draws, literally, a (double) line under it all, writing in synthetic Laʒamon, “so hath Sibil a boken isette”: Sibyl set it in a book. The phrase serves, as it does in Laʒamon’s Brut, as both a conclusion to the foregoing narrative and as a prophecy of things to come. Sibil’s prophecy marks the boundary between a sacred, heroic past and, as Pound conceived of it, a profane, more recent present. His handwriting (never the neatest anyway) in the original draft of the canto’s most notorious passage swells into an almost violent scrawl as he rants, once more, against the usual suspects. The manuscript passage in full reads: Till there is no clear 3 thought about holiness democracies Electing their sewage 2 a dung flow from 1913 . 1 + in this kikery functioned Marx, Freud + the american beaneries filth under filth Maritain, Hutchins or as Benda remarked “la traison — the defilers of news print Spewlitzer, Ochs + the Mire homophorous ≈ + @ time buggers ceased to be mentioned _____________

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I cite this in part to show, somewhat contrary to my own contentions, that Pound was not entirely oblivious to the necessity of self-censorship. I cite it also because of this passage’s deep similarity to the conclusion of Canto 14.111 Bacigalupo suggests “a small gain can be made” if we know that Pound marked in the margins of the existing typescript, “caratere un poco più piccolo [a somewhat smaller type],”112 as though printing “kikery” in ten-point font is less problematic than “kikery” in twelve. Setting this passage in smaller, italic typeface might actually serve to emphasize rather than disguise its content. Notebook 88 contains notes and the rest of the first draft of Canto 91, the last two lines of which were composed on August 3, 1954. Canto 92 appears to have been begun immediately thereafter. Pound was on a roll. He did not always mark down the dates of his composition, but he often did, sometimes with truly hilarious precision:

Notebook 87, EPP, 4955. The italicised passage in Canto 91 has been roundly condemned by most critics, for obvious reasons. Bacigalupo offers his condemnation of the lines as indicative of “mean hate” and then says: “at this point the decision of how to respond to the old man’s obsessions must be left to the individual reader.” Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 296; Bob Perelman calls them “probably the most notorious in the poem” but attempts to “remind readers of the vast effort he [Pound] made to energize poetic language” and “live in epic conditions,” all of which are part of an effort to understand the “violent dynamics of Pound’s writing.” Bob Perelman, The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Stein, Joyce and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 36, 39; Randall Jarrell calls it “a moral and intellectual disaster.” Randall Jarrell, “Randall Jarrell on the Extraordinary Misuse of Extraordinary Powers,” in Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Eric Homberger (London: Routledge, 1997), 440; Philip Kuberski thinks it is symptomatic of what he calls “sign anxiety,” the “slippage or instability at this juncture between vocal or written form and conceptual or physical reference”. Philip Kuberski, The Calculus of Ezra Pound: Vocations of the American Sign (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), x; Wendy Flory has suggested that the outburst “kikery” is the sole example of explicit anti-Semitism in these late sections. Wendy Stallard Flory, “Pound and Antisemitism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 294; astonishingly, James Wilhelm quotes only the first three italicized lines in an argument about the generally high level of cultural interest amongst autocratic leaders! James J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925–1972 (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1994), 72. 112 Ezra Pound, APICE. 110

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under the rain in the dark many many wings wings fragile Dom[enica].8 12.22113

Such accuracy, when it does appear, indicates an underlying esteem for the event of writing that finds its expression in Pound’s habitual fidelity to notebook inscription. Though ultimately withheld, inscribing such time signatures in the first place indicates Pound’s sense of accountability, his responsibility to the word once written. The rest of the canto was composed in another straight shot on August 14. The omission of this time signature aside, the printed canto is virtually identical to the manuscript version (only lineation varies with any degree of regularity; substantively, the versions are deeply alike). Canto 93, like the canto that precedes it, was begun immediately upon the completion of Canto 92. The manuscript for it, contained in Notebook 88 and Notebook 89, reveals a trend in Pound’s writing of “paradise.” The composition of Canto 90, as already indicated, was a fairly straightforward affair. So too was Canto 91, notwithstanding the exceptions noted above; the extended passage of bilious ire, in particular, though not easy to print, seemed easy enough to write. Canto 92 appears also to have come fairly naturally, the result of a contemplative mode, one in which Pound sought not irritably after fact or reason, but felt unified with his object. Canto 93, on the contrary, contains a number of notes that either were omitted upon transcription or which may never have been intended as canto texts, making it a transitional text between paradise proper and the more testing verse of Thrones, which cantos 93–95 anticipate. A nearly complete draft of Canto 94 exists in a state very close to that of its eventual publication, where by “nearly complete” is meant the first 199 of some 232 lines: the draft effectively breaks off after 本 at the bottom of what is now page 640. The abrupt interruption of the manuscript draft of Canto 94 at the character 本 signals an equally abrupt change in subject matter. This

Notebook 88, EPP, 4956. Cf. also this draft of Canto 107: “Wheat was in bread in the old days / Luigi’s communion / 1.46 after midnight 1.46 3/4.” Notebook 112, EPP, 4980.

113

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outbreak of legalistic discourse seems to have been prompted by Pound’s reading of a hitherto unacknowledged source: William Seagle’s Men of Law,114 a book that provided fodder for the rest of the canto and sparked (or reignited) Pound’s serious interest in law and lawgivers, thereby providing a new vista onto which Thrones would open. Seagle’s book is the dominant intertext for the rest of Canto 94, starting after the Dantescan line “That is of thrones, / and above them: Justice” (though Seagle’s work may have inspired this line as well). Certainly from “Acre, again” on—“The following spring, Edward was back in the Holy Land, besieging the great city of Acre”115—the canto is formed from an admixture of Men of Law and Life of Apollonius, itself a basic ideogrammic alignment of visionary-sage + benevolent ruler. The lines about Eleanor, Edward(us) I, Frederico Secondo, Alfonso X, St. Louis, Magnus of Norway, John Baliol, Robert Bruce, Athens, Aristides, and Coke are all derived from Men of Law, a book which, aside from those already mentioned, features chapters on Gaius and Justinian, both of whom feature earlier in this canto. A typical but unused sequence from Notebook 89 is the following: Thrones + above them justice + accorded pretty much with the “Timaeus” + Coke after he got into Parliament Mansfield let Blackstone off λαλεπώτερον ἡγοῦμαι τὸ μεῖναι as Delcroix also had said more or less said I think said Apollonius that yu denature the birds […] + below this mildness

Ves[pasian]. 69–79 T[itus]. 79–81 Nerv[a]. 81–96 [sic]116

William Seagle, Men of Law: From Hammurabi to Holmes (New York: Macmillan, 1947). Ibid., 124. Pound has forgotten Domitian, who ruled from 81 to 96. Nerva was emperor from 96 to 98.

114 115 116



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σοφρυσυνη [sic]117 There are thrones under Edwardus Coke after he got into parliament That dud Signor Beccaria the attendants Edward alone [reigneth?] Cythera Apollonius in Periplum […] Till the bastardly Bentham wormed out of his hock shop118

Blackstone, Beccaria, and Bentham also all featured in Seagle’s book—the former would become increasingly important for Pound though is not afforded any pride of place in the poem itself (he is mentioned only once). Though Pound would go to primary source texts in further engagements with these heroes of jurisprudence, as well as engage figures not specifically mentioned by Seagle (such as Leo the Wise or K’ang hsi in Thrones), Men of Law provided him with a basic introduction to those “responsible for something more than their personal conduct.”119 Pound’s range of reference could be quite wide, but his range of source texts was not (despite all appearances to the contrary).120 Unlike the other paradisal cantos, but rather similar to Canto 88 and Canto 89, there is no substantial manuscript draft of Canto 95. Despite the fact that several phrases used in Canto 95 do exist in manuscript form, scattered throughout Notebook 88 and Notebook 89, either the manuscript is lost or Pound typed this canto “direct.” At any rate, an examination of these notebooks shows the extent to which cantos 90–95 were an exceptional Pound means σωφροσύνη, an ancient Greek concept in which soundness of mind leads to excellence of character. 118 Notebook 89, EPP, 4957. 119 Ezra Pound, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review 28 (1962): online. 120 Pound read through Men of Law rather quickly, during what appears to be a mere few days in September 1954. By all accounts it left a strong but not indelible impression upon him. At one point he writes, “+ even the jhoker / Jhering / admitted that flowers / grow upon rocks,” in reference to Rudolph von Jhering, discussed in Men of War, 306–30. Upon reviewing the notebook above “Jhering” Pound wrote, “Jeremy Bentham???” Notebook 89, EPP, 4957. 117

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departure from what Pound had planned to write. The above-cited sketch for cantos 85–100 presages very little about cantos 90–95 as they actually came to exist, indicating that Pound had, at the time he started to write Rock-Drill, no firm notion of, let alone plan to write, “paradise” at the time he started this section, even though paradise, as a formal telos in itself, was always scheduled for the poem’s later stages. In a way, the paradisal cantos took Pound by surprise and are epiphanic in both process and content. The contiguities that exist between cantos 90–95 and those that frame it either side cannot really conceal the fact that the paradisal dimension of these cantos is anomalous (albeit predicted not just by stated intentions but by the Dantescan schema Pound intermittently evoked as model). The exceptionality of this verse is, internally, expressive of a certain fundamental feature of Pound’s Privatleben; outwardly, it is expressive of certain facts regarding its publication. I deal with these in turn.

La Martinelli Richard Taylor has traced this “turning point” in Rock-Drill to Pound’s “personal reinvigoration through his relationship with Sheri Martinelli.”121 Martinelli was a Vogue model, painter, and Greenwich village eccentric, a “New Age enthusiast before that term was even invented,”122 and muse inspirational to cantos 90–95. In these cantos she is represented as Sibylla-Beatrice, Kuthera (Aphrodite), Kwanon, Ra-set, and Leucothea, among other idealized female figures.123 And, of course, she is closely associated with repeated references to Castalia, the spring of poetic inspiration at Delphi. These cantos were written both for and about her. Alec Marsh even contends, in a forthcoming but hitherto unpublished chapter on the Pound–Martinelli relationship, that “there is no question that she had a hand in them [i.e., cantos 90–95], not only

Richard Taylor, “The Cantos: Section: Rock-Drill de los cantares LXXXV–XCV,” in The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 44. Much of the biographical detail in what follows is gleaned from Taylor’s article, as well as from Taylor’s fascinating essay, “Sheri Martinelli: Muse to Ezra Pound,” online. 122 Taylor, “The Cantos: Section: Rock-Drill,” 44. 123 And Pound, immodestly, is the referent behind every hero. In paradise, identity is not bound to the physical manifestation of its expression. 121



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as a subject of Pound’s praise, but also in transcribing them. Her green pen can be found in the notebooks in which the Rock-Drill cantos were drafted, correcting Pound’s head-long scribble into something readable.”124 The importance of Martinelli can hardly be overstated when it comes to an understanding of Pound’s paradise. To be sure, the opening line of Canto 90, “From the colour the nature / & by the nature the sign!,” is attributable to John Heydon’s doctrine of signatures (as Terrell, via Walter Baumann, relates). That is, the idea behind the lines is attributable to Heydon, but the lines themselves quote Martinelli. Pound makes the attribution in a typescript called “C/ 98 (?*),”125 wherein he typed, “‘From the colour the nature, and by the nature the sign’ / SM that was” where “SM” appears in holograph whose interlocking initials are reminiscent of Malatesta’s entwined cipher “SI.” Martinelli’s copy of a typescript for Canto 90 corroborates this. Following the Latin epigraph from Richard of St. Victor, her text begins: “Beatific spirits welding together …,” while its typed component ends with “Trees die and the dream remains,” the same as the notebook manuscript. In other words, her copy of the typescript exist without either the opening or closing lines as we now have them. Upon receipt of her typescript, she must have asked Pound for a translation of the epigraph and, receiving it (it is written in Pound’s hand at the bottom of the last page), connected it to Heydon’s doctrine of signatures. The opening line of Pound’s paradise is thus a epiphanic moment of understanding, but Martinelli’s not Heydon’s. Martinelli thus figures as these cantos’ first and perhaps only intended audience. This is not to suggest that Pound never planned to publish them— quite the contrary—but it is to suggest that their publication announced a new kind of exclusivity. Readers, so far as they existed, were invited to peruse a recondite sub-suite of cantos that, despite superficial sense, were little more than a concatenation of personal references. Making sense of allusions by appealing to, say, mythological conventions works well enough and is indeed a dimension of the text’s meaning that Pound was more than sensitive to, but this verse is really about him and Martinelli. The ritualistic scenes—“aram vult Alec Marsh, “Sheri Martinelli: Right Wing Muse” (unpublished manuscript, June 6, 2016), Microsoft Word file. I am grateful to Marsh for allowing me to read and cite his work in advance of its appearance in print. 125 EPP, 3433. 124

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Figure 2.4  Ezra Pound, Sheri Martinelli’s copy of Canto 90 typescript, Beinecke.

nemus”—in these cantos give accounts of Pound and his muse play-acting on the lawns of St. Elizabeths, a federal institution established upon a former arboretum that the pair came to think of as their sacred grove.126 With David Moody’s recent Ezra Pound: Poet a notable exception, Pound’s biographers have tended to dismiss Martinelli out of hand. But, as Taylor reminds us (in his also much overlooked essay on the subject), Pound’s letters to her show her Taylor, “The Cantos: Section: Rock-Drill,” 45. Cf. David Moody: “[Canto 90] goes on to enact a dionysiac rite which the lovers observed on the lawn in St. Elizabeths, where they burnt olibanum obtained by McNaughton from a Washington store.” Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 3: 314. See also Martinelli’s extraordinary 1959 letter to Norman Holmes Pearson entitled “The Tao of Canto 90”: “the year is 1954 around Easter-tide; the scene is on the lawn of St. Liz—Merlin the Magician is being held political prisoner by the High Priests of the Prince of Black Magic—with his magical powers Merlin the High Priest of White Magic has called into being a female; created out of love by love …” And so on. NHP, Box 67.

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importance to him, especially from 1953 through 1955.127 Among Martinelli’s papers, in fact, are several poems in typescript designated as “canto” material but never properly included therein. One is a prayer that Martinelli’s marginal note refers to as “E. P.’s poem for my brother when he learned that my brother had gone / Part of T/Cantos / 23 Sept. ’54” that begins: May his soul walk under the larches of Paradise May his soul walk in the wood there and Adah Lee come to look after him. Queen of heaven receive him.128

There are also two typescript fragments that are now preserved with a note, presumably typed by Martinelli herself or at her behest. The note reads: “These are a part of your Cantos. They are not for publication.” E.P. / St. Liz./ late 1950’s. … the “Blue flash” fragment of The Cantos. this is the document he handed to me/

The note prefaces the following fragments. First: swirling of azure ; of carmine under serenitas Ixion ever unstill. Not Olympus, Dodona . From Malis, May 29th, saw flames upon Oeta, God’s pyre. o.24 : Tranquility. Dec. 27 a nice quiet heaven where everyone loves everyone else, that, yes, the wildest dream yet. Those who have seen it pass whirling, Like coment comets to hell’s deep, then emergent, unstable, hurled. Sheri has seen it. Richard Taylor, “Sheri Martinelli: Muse to Ezra Pound,” n.p. SMP, Box 18.

127 128

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And then, on a different document (read: scrap of paper): “Last trace of justice de Bosschere, “cannot reveal”. Bitter child, Jean in retrospect gnawed by perceptions.129

Other poems in Martinelli’s private collection include a ballad called “Voice of Experience” that begins with the lines “Mid dope-dolls an’ duchesses tho orften I roam / some gals is better, some wusser than some,” later redeployed in Canto 97.130 Those lines from Thrones thus reference this unpublished poem, an act of privation that goes beyond Pound’s references to even the most obscure of publicly-available texts. Sheri’s copy of “Voice of Experience,” a typescript top copy that might not have been duplicated, is decorated by her drawing of a naked female torso, an amalgam of Renaissance nude and Fernand Léger. A final poem in Martinelli’s possession is called “Honi Soit,” from the French motto of the Order of the Garter: “honi soit qui mal y pense” (shame on him who thinks it evil). This poem intimates the erotic exploits of Honi Soit (a.k.a. in this poem “Honey Swat”), a beautiful young woman admired by “eager masculines,” whose skirt, à la Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, keeps flipping up in the breeze.131 Somewhat akin to “Voice of Experience,” “Honi Soit” is decorated with a reclining nude drawn in a similar style, though in this instance the figure dons a bacchanalian mask of leaves and flowers. Martinelli’s drawing is accompanied by the following marginal note: “Maestro wrote this to make a ‘chune’ [read: tune],” dated “1955 or thereabouts.” There exists a manuscript version of this poem too. Written on the inside of an envelope from Martinelli to Pound, dated October 7, 1955, it is covered with drawings of parted female lips. All of which is to suggest merely a rather intimate creative connection between the older poet and the younger artist. As Taylor and Marsh suggest, Martinelli was obviously Pound’s muse, both inspiration for and subject of much of this verse. Above I do not describe the sexually suggestive content

Ibid. Cantos, 97/680–1. SMP, Box 18.

129 130 131



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of their unpublished collaborations as a means of implying collaborations of a more corporeal kind. To the contrary, so far as it even matters, I agree with Marsh’s assessment that their infatuation was “astral” rather than physical.132 Instead, the above proves, without a doubt, Martinelli’s influence upon and participation in Pound’s creative endeavors. To reframe this discussion, we might consider the Pound–Martinelli relation materially, that is, at the level of document. Pound gave Martinelli a more or less complete typescript copy of “her” cantos (90–95). Some are carbons of what appear to be first-typescript drafts whose top copies are missing and which contain manuscript additions in Pound’s hand, such as Martinelli’s typescript of Canto 90; some of these sheets are copies of those in Vanni Scheiwiller’s possession (printers typically required top copies of any typescript to avoid ambiguous readings that arise from blurry carbons), such as Martinelli’s typescript of Canto 93; some of them are not otherwise extant in the available archives, and whose texts consist of an admixture of typescript and manuscript (Martinelli’s typescript of Canto 91); and some appear to be amalgams of extant carbons and newly typed-out copies, such as Martinelli’s copy of Canto 95. By far the most striking feature of these typescripts is Martinelli’s decoration of her copies of Canto 90 and Canto 91: each is covered with all manner of leaves and feathers, affixed to the foolscap with sellotape. These private interactions aside, it was also Pound’s intention to publish Rock-Drill with public input from Martinelli, though this intention, with the exception of a design for Ra-Set’s boat133—which was originally supposed to be printed much larger—remained ultimately unfulfilled, and Martinelli contributed no work to The Cantos as published. But Pound had commissioned her to design capitals for Cantos 90–92 and Cantos 94–95. Unfortunately, she fell ill (or was strung out) at a crucial stage and did not in the end complete them. As far as I know, no designs survive, although Pound does briefly describe one: S/M has copied the Durer initials . to serve as basis for the five ornamental caps/ THEY wont look amateur/ She made a lllovely dragon a month ago and spoiled Marsh, “Sheri Martinelli: Right Wing Muse,” n.p. A March 15, 1958 letter from Martinelli to Pound seems to confirm Marsh’s position: “it is my pride that you never touched more than my imagination.” SMP, Box 7, Folder 6. 133 Cantos, 91/612. 132

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him by trying to put a T for a tail, only it came out like a bloomin Xtn cross, and wd/ not have reduced … Painting is NOT tipography [sic].134

He also hoped she would produce the sun-hawk hieroglyph for Canto 94 (in the end it was provided by Boris de Rachewiltz) and draw an altar stone as decoration for Canto 90, to appear after the line “the curled stone at the marge.” In lieu of receiving something from her, and on account of the fact that it would only fit at the top of the following page, Pound scrapped this idea during the second proof stage. Lastly, Pound had hoped to include an image of a painting by Martinelli called “Leucothea” as colophon: I wonder if the coloured Leukothea I sent […] wd/ go as black and white colophon/ she fits after the end of Canto 95/ perfectly […] I will cheerfully pay for the experiment. question of what process wd/ be in accord with Mar[d]e[r] steig/??135

Scheiwiller discouraged this kind of ostentation, writing to Pound that “Io preferisco la sobrietà tipografica” [I prefer typographic sobriety],136 and eventually put the kibosh on the idea. Pound did arrange for several of Martinelli’s paintings to be published by Scheiwiller’s press, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, in a miniature book called La Martinelli, for which Pound wrote a preface. In it, he claims for her a place in the highest pantheon of Western art—an appreciation so far not otherwise acknowledged, let alone universally accepted.137 For Pound, the public’s inability to recognize Martinelli’s genius proved her excellence and its ignobility. Pound tried (and failed) to have “20 or 30 special copies of Rock Drill” made, a few of which he even wanted printed on vellum.138 Into these special copies he wanted bound what he elsewhere refers to as “gordonprints”—that is, photographs of Martinelli’s work taken by David Gordon—used as frontispiece and final colophon. Such special copies were never produced. Ultimately, it was not Scheiwiller’s Pesce d’Oro that heeded Pound and printed Martinelli alongside his Cantos, but Frederick Morgan’s Hudson Review. Pound had February 16, 1955 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2739. Ezra Pound, December 13, 1954 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2738. 136 Vanni Scheiwiller, December 2, 1954 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 2055. Translation by Richard Taylor. 137 Ezra Pound, introduction to La Martinelli (Milan: Vanni Scheiwiller, 1956), 5–12. 138 Ezra Pound, Undated Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2739. 134 135



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intimated to Morgan that Martinelli’s work was worth publishing, and it was in fact Morgan that suggested “Gea Mater” be included in the same issue as Canto 85.139 Pound of course concurred, and advised Morgan to add a note saying the Martinelli print was “accompaning [sic] Canto 85,” escorting it into the world, as it were.140 Rock-Drill effectively begins, therefore, not with 靈 but with a painting by Martinelli.

The Hudson Review Pound’s partnership with The Hudson Review—what he at one point called “the nearest to an official residence that I have”141—was important for both poet and publisher alike. The Hudson Review had already published The Analects of Confucius in the spring and summer issues of 1950, and The Women of Trachis in the winter 1954 issue. In Morgan and The Hudson Review, Pound found an enthusiastic and fairly expedient publisher—though this expediency, along with Pound’s patience, would be sorely tested during repeated delays to the publication of Canto 85, which was not the easiest canto to typeset, especially for a printer not prepared to handle its various eccentricities. Pound, never able to count patience among his authorial virtues, was particularly allergic to delay during his time in St. Elizabeths. Already sore after the protracted publication process of The Pisan Cantos, and eager to find a venue that would publish what and when he wanted, he wrote to Morgan (who was stuck between a poet demanding results and a printer unable to deliver them quickly): 86/7 ready. I had been intending to reserve ALL future Cantos for the Hudson, or at least all that I intended to print before the next volume which ought to run to eleven. But I am growing impatient after nine years govt. hospitality and the infamy of the Harvard mutilation of serious sinology.142

As would become usual during this phase of his thinking about transmission and dissemination, the actual mechanics of publication seemed to Pound Ezra Pound, November 13, 1954 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. See: Sheri Martinelli, “Gea Mater,” Hudson Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1955): n.p. 141 Ezra Pound, May 5, 1955 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. 142 Ezra Pound, September 29, 1954 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. 139 140

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entirely straightforward. Any problems encountered in production were tantamount to willful obfuscation, tampering, and conspiracy. In short, for Pound, delay = sabotage. Following several unforeseeable setbacks in bringing out Canto 85 (originally slated for the summer issue of 1955, it did not appear until the winter), Pound wrote, “O.Kay then 85 Winter/ 86/7 Spring. I have Specific reason for NOT printing the three together. But definite agreement that no pink punk in print shoppe cause appearance of Spring issue MINUS 86/7.”143 A few days earlier Pound had wondered if his enemies were alert to, and worried about, the imminent publication of Canto 85: “If you are being bullied and blackmailed, there is one line in 85 you may omit/ I am not asking anyone else to suffer for the sake of getting rid of historical blackout.”144 Pound’s use of the phrase “historic blackout” recurs in one form or another in Canto 89, Canto 95, Canto 96, Canto 99, and Canto 110, and frequently in his 1954 letters to Morgan. Encouraged by James Laughlin’s corroborating suspicions, Pound had been sensitive to the possibility of sabotage in the printing house since they started publishing collected editions of Cantos together in 1948. Laughlin reported to Dorothy Pound on August 16, 1945 that “his enemies have scored another setback on us. They must have found out where the Cantos were going to press, or there may have been Jews in the plant who acted on their own.”145 Laughlin, as a result, switched printers: “they [Vail-Ballou] have no objections and don’t foresee any pressure from their union, which is not Jew controlled.”146 Things did not go so smoothly. In 1951, when it came time to reprint the first American edition of Cantos, there was again suspicion of foul play. Laughlin wrote to Kenner to explain: “we had all the corrections made in proofs, and Ezra Oked them”; but, he continued, “they seem to have printed from old plates without making the corrections, and now they are very obtuse about an explanation. Something leads me to suspect this may be sabotage.”147 Ezra Pound, November 3, 1954 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. Ezra Pound, October 27, 1954 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. Pound did not say which line he would have been willing to omit. Morgan never asked him because this was not the cause of the delay. 145 Letter to Dorothy Pound, EPP, 1208. 146 James Laughlin, Letter to Ezra Pound, in Olga Rudge Papers, YCAL MSS 54, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Folder 1421. 147 James Laughlin, July 11, 1951 Letter to Hugh Kenner, Hugh Kenner Papers, MS-2270, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Box 45. 143 144



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Little did those saboteurs realize, Pound’s meanings cannot be obscured by such tampering: a wrong text would not inhibit the communication of their essential rightness. Morgan implored Pound for his patience, telling him in October that a strike at the printers had indeed transpired, but that it had nothing to do with him (Pound).148 Pound was not appeased, telling Wyndham Lewis on December 6, 1954 that “Cantos damn well not officially, or any howsodam FINISHED//. Hudson was going to print 85/ but the print shoppe has antiMcCarthies and Dex White placed to throw monkey wrenches […] proofs for NEXT issue promised ten days ago have NOT arruv […] Buzzards (and cockroaches) trying every wheeze to get me into congeries of mouse-traps and to put up a false defence.”149 A fear of sabotage in the printing presses might help explain the rampant obscurity of Pound’s late cantos (of Thrones especially). “Their” obstruction— whoever “they” are—is met with and circumvented by Pound’s obscurity: increasingly radical fragmentation; “Aesopian language”;150 reliance on ever more recondite texts; and his apparent celebration of ever more unfamiliar cultural traditions. “Aesopian language” especially, in which a given communication conveys an innocent meaning to outsiders but holds a concealed meaning to informed members of a conspiracy or underground movement, strikes me as another contravention of the ethical imperative seemingly operative throughout these cantos, namely “right naming.” On the other hand, “Aesopian language” is entirely consistent with what I have been describing as Pound’s anti-philological disposition. Critics who take this or any of these characteristics of Pound’s late verse as signatures of his innovative poetics might have to consider the possibility that their underlying rationale is really paranoid evasiveness. The facts surrounding Pound’s publication of what would eventually be Canto 85, Cantos 86–87, and Cantos 88–89 in The Hudson Review underlines an important distinction between the two halves of this section. As regards the first section, he wanted Canto 85 published unaccompanied by other cantos; October 6, 1954 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 1012. Pound, Pound/Lewis, 283. 150 Cantos, 100/713. Cf. my brief discussion of Alex Pestell’s work on this phenomenon in the next chapter. 148 149

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setting it apart from the other cantos in the sequence clearly underlines its special status.151 Though Pound offered it to Morgan in January, and delivered a draft in February, it was called right up until the final proofing stages “A Draft of a Further Canto,”152 meaning that, despite its obvious significance, Pound was until fairly late in the day unsure about its place. He even questioned in one exchange whether the canto required a title at all, and suggested it might be more effective, as well as more affecting, if it simply opened with the large ideogram 靈.153 Pound’s larger discrimination between the “rock-drill” cantos and the “paradisal” ones is clearly legible in the different publication strategies Pound had for Cantos 85–89 on the one hand and Cantos 90–95 on the other. As he told Boris de Rachewiltz on April 28, 1955, “I MUCH prefer the paradisal 90/95 to come out in volume and NOT as magazine serial.”154 He repeated the point to de Rachewiltz on May 16: “Hudson WANTS 90/95, which I do not want circulated before they are in personel [sic] edition, NOT surrounded by carne in scatola” [meat in tins]. Pound’s attitudes towards inclusivity and exclusivity during this time are complex, but there’s a definite trend at play. On the one hand, he sought to place his most (some might argue) challenging cantos yet in as wide a circulation as he could. These cantos were important components of his public education curriculum, in which their purported difficulty was central to pedagogical efficacy. Pound told Morgan: possibly not more than ten lines comprehensible at first reading. Dantescan formula is NOT that verse shd/ be instantly comprehensible, but that it is shameful not to be able to explain what one HAS written. Doubt if it looks any worse than 23 rd/ Canto did 30 years ago. In fact WITH key [it] is very simple.155 Pound published cantos by themselves before and after this, of course; the point is not to claim special status for every canto ever published by itself, but I mean to highlight the fact that he had a coherent plan in mind for the dissemination of these cantos, all of which were to appear in the same journal. There is a logic of serialization at play. 152 HRA, Subseries 3C. 153 HRA, Subseries 3A. 154 Letter to Boris de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. 155 February 9, 1954 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. The possibility of notes accompanying Canto 85 intrigued Morgan, and he wrote to Pound on October 16, 1954 asking about them. Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 1022. Pound replied, “What NEEDS notes? I forget what I had intended.” HRA, Subseries 3A. Two days later, Pound changed his mind: “Waaal buggah me yant / ef yu wanna splanation, will this do,” and supplied the following: “Kung said that he had added nothing. Canto 85 is a somewhat detailed confirmation of Kung’s view that the basic principles of government are found in the Shu, the History Classic.” HRA, Subseries 3A. Of course a version thereof was eventually used at the end of Canto 85 as printed in Rock-Drill and after. 151



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Conversely, the least taxing of Pound’s late cantos—who among us does not find that cantos 90–95, and especially cantos 90–92, offer a certain lyric respite before being launched once more into the breach of Thrones—are, at the same time, those Pound wanted kept most materially recondite, so much so that he tried to keep their mere existence secret. Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on October 24, 1954: Canto 85 in proofs / 86/7 sent to Hud/ 88 started/ and then 4, further along, not quite sure what numbers, may be 91 onward/ well now, TRY to keep this information to you and B[oris de Rachewiltz] and to NO one else. unless viva voce to O[lga Rudge] and ORA [Olivia Rossetti Agresti].156

The question of why Pound was keeping this information quiet is important to answer. For one thing, it is consistent with a general strain of criticism of these late cantos, namely that they address themselves to a highly exclusive, specialized audience, one already au fait with the understandings they convey. The following day Pound reiterated the above, asking only that his daughter “retain in yr/ head, in fact dont even WRITE to Boris, but tell him when he gets to Brb [Brunnenburg] […] there are more done for Paradiso after I end ‘Section Rock Drill’,”157 as if committing such facts to paper with ink would make the cantos themselves somehow vulnerable to betrayal. It elucidates something else, too, about the production of these late cantos. Despite obvious care for certain aspects of the material condition of his verse, Pound did not ultimately consider the publication process, let alone the intermediary act of making typescripts, to be utmost in determining the nature or meaning of the poetry.158 Aside from instructions to Scheiwiller that, with very few exceptions, ideograms must be precisely centered, Pound neither wanted nor exerted much control over the precise placement of his words across the page. He told Mary de Rachewiltz: I don’t care about what indents/ per line/ merely to preserve the articulation . the divisions to show the SENSE pf [sic] the text. amount of space left or right,

EPP, 2737. October 25, 1954 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2737. 158 Cf. Richard Taylor’s remarks (plus evidence from the archive): “The poet’s preoccupation with page design, typography, and uniformity are all represented in his correspondence with Vanni Scheiwiller”; and yet, “it is interesting to note how impervious Pound was to questions of formality and accuracy as well as how ready he was to leave certain decisions for others.” Richard Taylor, “The Texts of The Cantos,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 176, 177. 156 157

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or between lines, simply to suit the compositors eye […] No fuss about the variation in the margin, so long as the lines are divided and articulated.159

Both Section: Rock-Drill 85–95 de los cantares and Thrones 96–109 de los cantares contain the disclaimer, “this volume has been printed in conformity with the typographical instructions given by the author,” though Pound never issued instructions of any kind. As he told Mary de Rachewiltz in the letter just quoted above, “so long as the SENSE is not bitched, E.P. is not likely to wail”; several months later, Pound confessed his “amusement” over “Mardersteig’s taking cover under typographic instructions.”160 This puts Pound at distinct odds with a good deal of Modernist ideology at large, especially with a line of thinking that likes to see an artistic and critical emphasis on “process” as a replacement for “product.” Which is to say, unlike a number of Modernist and Postmodernist poets who, as critics have long noticed, deliberately incorporated aspects of writing technology (such as the typewriter) into their aesthetic and therefore into the meaning of their writing, Pound conceived of his verse as formed almost entirely prior to the modern realities of literary production and dissemination. The real “work” of the cantos is the forméd trace in the mind and quality of the affection that preserves it. If “process” is everywhere apparent in The Cantos, this is not because it constitutes a major strand of Pound’s aesthetic, but because he cared so little about it. When Pound writes in Canto 104 that “The production IS the beloved,”161 he refers not to the literary product, but to the originary act of making meaning. Furthermore, Pound demanded secrecy around these cantos’ existence from his closest confidants because he was plotting a conspiracy of his own. As he wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on November 2, 1954, “I am wondering if it mightn’t be a good stunt to have Vanni [Scheiwiller] do the NEW cantos in english without mentioning the fact to Possum or Mr Laughlin. ABSOLUTE secrecy required until the book is actually ready/ Limited edition, collectors item/ no sale except to persons known to be trustworthy.” The next day, he continued, “as D.P. feels, damn good thing for Jas/ and Possum and the

January 11, 1955 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2739. October 25, 1955 Letters to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2743. Cantos 104/742.

159 160 161



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DAMNlotuvum to have it come out with Vanni / BANG, and to HELL wiff ’em.”162 Pound went through with this plan. Scheiwiller had Rock-Drill printed by the internationally respected master printer Giovanni Mardersteig, founder of the esteemed printing house Officina Bodoni (though Pound’s books were actually produced by Mardersteig’s mechanized printshop, Stamperia Valdonèga). Pound must have felt that Scheiwiller’s and Mardersteig’s operations were less infiltrated by Jews and communists than his American and English publishers and printers. But the impetus here seems distinctly also one of payback for perceived delays and obstructions: “certainly NOT Mr Eliot/ Mr Eliot can buy one if he likes/ He has left the Kung/ Anthology out of print for five years AND not prevented the mangy little Harvard edition, minus seal text and graph of the prosody.”163 Though Scheiwiller was already an experienced and talented publisher, that he was at the time still only twenty years old might have appealed to “grampa” Pound, who could foresee less push-back from Scheiwiller than from established firms. Scheiwiller was not only ready to start right away, but aspired to high production values. Pound found it a “comfort to be decently printed.”164 To Pound’s way of thinking, “by doing it in woptaly, one avoids gross mess. So far only one comma to be added to Rock drill.”165 Partly because of contractual arrangements—“Morgan prints 85 in Jan/ and 86/7 in April/ I agreed not to print abroad until then”—and partly for ideological reasons, Pound wanted the volume to be “NOT on sale.” In addition to this stealthy trade edition, Pound proposed further limitations: “four copies on REAL parchment.”166 There is more than a conceptual relation between the studied intractability of Pound’s “late” verse and the creation of a bibliographic artifact as rarefied as a private edition. Verse so draftlike in its disposition (and, remember, Pound initially called Canto 85 a “Draft of a Further Canto”) asks its readers to suspend their final judgment;

EPP, 2738. Pound’s scheme had been gestating for a while. On February 18, 1954 he wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz, “AlZO Vanni moves/ much better small Vanni, than ten years cunctation by some large commercial firm, however piously covered by pretenses of seriousness.” EPP, 2735. 163 Ezra Pound, November 23, 1954 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2738. 164 Ezra Pound, November 8, 1955 Letter to Eva Hesse, EHA. 165 Ezra Pound, January 29, 1956 Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, NHP, Box 78. 166 Ezra Pound, November 23, 1954 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2738. 162

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as a bibliographic act, inscribing such verses on parchment asserts an enduring validity, one exempt from, not reliant upon, the materiality of their presentation. Ultimately, such a deluxe first edition of Rock-Drill was never attempted. In the hermeneutical economy of Pound’s poetics, ownership is tantamount to interpretation:167 on January 14, 1955, Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz, “Of course IF the right kind of pergamena [parchment] can be found, and IF it costs 35 $ per copy for materiale [sic], we wd/ have to reduce from 4 copies to 2. The temple is holy because it is not for sale,”168 a line Pound would use severally in Canto 97.169 Pound’s association of The Cantos with “the temple,” adjoining both to holiness, underscores his sense that Section: Rock-Drill and indeed Thrones were hallowed texts, a fact supported by his various comments on format. Writing to Mary de Rachewiltz on December 8, 1954, Pound said that Scheiwiller had sent “MOST ADmirable style of type” but that he wanted a slimmer page: “LONG poem, vade mecum, part of sacred book, shd/ be narrow to go in pocket. One don’t want to carry round a mazzo di carta bianca/ [bunch of white paper], called in England ‘printer’s fat.’ ”170 Rock-Drill itself as a vade mecum, unencumbered by the handbooks we usually employ to read it, is Pound’s (unrealized) ideal. Though Scheiwiller would eventually produce editions of cantos whose workmanship and attention to detail, especially when it came to typesetting and material, tread the line between trade and finer editions, it was Pound not Scheiwiller who pushed for lower production costs. He wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz: Try to wear down his objection to offset. Perhaps due to Verona people [Valdonèga] not having an offset machine, BUT sane economy demands lowest possible production costs/ so as to serve public at lowest possible cost. ESPEcially when it comes to cleaning their minds.171

This is a highly condensed version of my recent article, “Ownership and interpretation: Ezra Pound’s deluxe first editions,” in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer, and Christine Reynier (London: Routledge, 2016), 187–202. 168 EPP, 2739. 169 Cantos, 97/676 et seq. Cf. this undated letter to Sheri Martinelli, one she later dated to “53 or 54”: “the filth of hell should have NO idea what you are painting. Sacrum / the temple / holy, i.e. NOT for sale.” SMP, Box 12, Folder 1. 170 EPP, 2738. Both Rock-Drill and Thrones are set in Bembo. 171 June 5, 1954 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2736. 167



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In operation here is a contradiction prevalent throughout Pound’s work: what used to be called his elitism collides directly with an avowed populism. High- and low-brow impulses compete perpetually until they are twisted into a scowling, rather wobbly middle. The fallout from this contradiction—here between an extremely limited edition whose production values were so high it was never actually produced and low-cost fodder for the edification of the masses—was that Pound got neither. The story told by the material history of The Cantos is not one about the fulfillment of Pound’s intentions, but about their frustration. Though Pound did not admit to this in any straightforward sense, it is everywhere apparent in his ultimately lukewarm commitment to the integrity of texts. He wanted correct texts; but far more than that he wanted published ones. Or put otherwise, what was sacred about his texts could not really be corrupted by the profanations of their material production, which was, as material production, by definition corrupt (i.e., transmission = degradation). Just as Pound could not fully control the processes of production—as D. F. Mckenzie has argued, all textual transmissions are perforce social ones—so was he unable to avoid the realities of modern publishing.172 Despite his aversion thereto, he spent a good deal of time reading and revising typescripts, proofs, and other pre-publication materials, the dynamics of which are instructive in themselves. When Pound received proofs, for example, of cantos 86 and 87 in April 1955, he wrote back, saying “vurry li’l to korekt,” suggesting only a few token changes: to Canto 86 he wanted exactly three dots placed as ellipses points between ταῦτα and χαχοῖσι;173 a “line space” closed between “Africa” and “standard in our time”;174 and “fugitive” changed to “fugitives” plural.175 Regarding Canto 87, he wanted to make sure it began with ellipses points, and added an accent to Αθάνα.176 About the spelling of Δηάνειρα (Canto 87, bottom of page 571), Pound was a little more vexed: but goRRRDAM/ I copy deaneira out of the Loeb gk/ text p 260 and then it looks as if there ought to be an i inserted D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 173 Cantos, 86/564. 174 Ibid., 86/565. 175 Ibid., 86/568. 176 Ibid., 87/571. 172

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as in the bloody greek caps at the page heads. DEIANEIRA I dunno if yu have a scholarly edtn/ looks as if there ought to be the extra i YES Liddell putts in a i unless the bloody nurse is sposed to be talking cockney for the metre’s ache. At any rate it will be a field day for the Spitzes and Shitzerald’s, if grampaw dont correct, Mr. Storr. and if he corrects him wrong. Esp/ as he has NOT followed Liddell re/ Day’s air ANYhow. at any rat [sic] there is a cedilla under the atah, ^eataw, ateer^ wich we HAVE got indisputably.177

Pound’s publishers never did insert a “cedilla” (iota subscript) under the eta in any of his texts. If he is claiming, as he seems to be, that he copied verbatim from Francis Storr’s Loeb edition of Sophocles (1913), he has copied selectively: Storr’s edition actually gives ΔΗΙAΝΕΙPΑ as a character name, and Δῃάνειρα (as Pound does in Canto 87) when she is referred to in the speech of other characters (it could be significant that Pound preferred to transcribe the name as spelled when spoken). Storr transliterates both as Deianira.178 The former is far more ubiquitous than the latter in the text Pound had to hand; the former, moreover, as Pound himself recognized, is how Liddell and Scott spells it. More interesting than all of this is Pound’s reluctant motivation for a “correct” text, namely to defer or avoid critical dismissals by so-called experts. Such criticisms would matter in a philological argument which, though Pound did not deem legitimate, he understood gave those who cared about such things the chance to cast aspersion on his work (though the question of who is casting aspersions on whom—vide “Shitzerald,” i.e., Robert Fitzgerald—is pretty clear). In Women of Trachis, Pound transliterates the name as DAIANEIRA, translates it “The Day’s Air,” and gives the character name “Daysair.”179 It seems that Pound is not concerned so much with Ezra Pound, April 21, 1955 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. In the last line, Pound means eta, seventh letter in the Greek alphabet, Η, η, transliterated as “e” or “ē.” 178 Sophocles, Trachiniae, in Sophocles, ed. and trans. F. Storr, vol. 2 (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 253–359. Liddell & Scott does render the name Δηιάνειρα. 179 Sophokles, “Women of Trachis,” trans. Ezra Pound, The Hudson Review 6, no. 4 (Winter 1954): 177



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orthographic accuracy (in fact the more creative the departure the better), but rather is worried that he might be perceived by critics and experts as being interested in (and consequently failing to achieve) such precisions. When Pound wrote to Morgan on May 5, 1955 to complain of “5000 bloody profs/ fussing over commas/ OUGHT to correct errors,”180 he distinguishes between mere grammatical inaccuracy and faults of another kind. Of course Pound was not always wrong. On April 27, 1955, Morgan wrote to Pound querying a line of Greek included in Canto 88, namely, “Γᾶν ἄφθιτον, ἀκαμάταν ἀποτρύεται” from lines 338–9 of Sophokles’ Antigone. Morgan wonders whether ἀκαμάταν should in fact read ἀκάμαντ because he found “ἀκάμας ἀκάμαντος” in “my Liddell & Scott.”181 Pound resisted the revision not on scholarly grounds (even though, as it happens, he had transcribed the words correctly) but on poetic—specifically musical—ones: “anyhow leave me the terminal AN akamatan for sound. I can’t have just stuck on those two letters out of nowhere. tho gorNoze I cd/ err re an AGGzent.”182 Pound then makes the admission, “GorNoze I dunno ANY greek, and am poifikly defenceless if copying a quote from somebody’s misprint.” He admonishes Morgan to “fais qu’ ’ou’ ’ouldra” (do as you wish), but quickly adds, “Only thing is that in an earlier typescript I have definitely taken that accent OFF the first a in RED, and corrected it to the second a/.” Pound here is referring to Morgan’s suggested ἀκάμαντ (by “first a” Pound means the alpha Morgan has accented, not that which begins the word). Again he is correct in terms of remaining faithful to his source though “Gorr knoze WHY.” He concludes, “Not worth delaying the printer. and probably better leave an error than to correct it wrong.” Man standing beside (im)perfect word. At the same time, the intentions Pound had for his text were often thwarted or else otherwise unrealized because of production restraints. Morgan wrote thus to Pound on May 3, 1955: “Sorry we weren’t able to have the ideograms checked by Fang—it would have held us up too long.”183 Similarly, Pound’s intentions were often curbed by costs. In the same letter, Morgan explained to 487–523. Pound’s translation was republished the following year by New Directions as an independent volume. 180 HRA, Subseries 3A. 181 EPP, 1013. 182 Ezra Pound, Undated Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. 183 EPP, 1013.

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Pound that “color for the hearts and diamonds at the end of 88 wd run us into a lot of $, I’m afraid.” (Scheiwiller’s text, like the American and British editions of Rock-Drill after it, does print the heart and the diamond in red.) Pound paid what he could to help his publishers at least approximate what he had in mind. Aid included deferring payments owed to him or offsetting them by accepting payment in kind, in the form of extra copies of magazines, which he would distribute to friends and acquaintances. Pound even tried to loan Scheiwiller money during the preparation of Rock-Drill.184

Hawley Amongst the most significant contributions Pound made to the production of his own late cantos was in procuring Chinese text through Willis Hawley in California. Hawley had been on Dorothy Pound’s (and thus Ezra’s) radar since the late 1940s, as someone with an agent in Shanghai who could get hold of hard-to-find books, dictionaries especially (at one point Hawley told Pound that he had more than 1,600 different dictionaries). The way this normally worked was that Pound would send Hawley a list of hand-drawn ideograms, grouped into relevant clusters, along with money for parts and labor, and Hawley would print these out (or, if he did not have a certain character in his font already, he would have one made and then print it) and send them back on duplicate sheets. Pound would then cut the desired characters out and paste them directly onto the typescript and/or proofs. Copies of Hawley’s sheets were also passed to Scheiwiller and Mardersteig, who would make zinc plates from them. (Pound sometimes took possession of these plates as payment from The Hudson Review, which he gave to Scheiwiller to use.) Hawley and Pound worked rather closely together during Pound’s incarceration in St. Elizabeths; Hawley offered advice, constructive criticism, and other comments that Pound usually took on board. Hawley is singularly On June 5, 1954, Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz: “Start work on Vanni […] capital can be found. Tho Van/ wd/ and prob/y should pay his share. AND merely return what ever else is put in, when it has come back from sales. NO question of buying in for a share in the profits. Simply a productive loan / at no interest.” EPP, 2736.

184



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responsible for the distinctive change in Chinese character style between The Pisan Cantos and Rock-Drill: Next time you want a few characters to use like in the CANTOS, let me supply them, don’t take any more from that God-awful DeGuines dictionary which used characters engraved by Frenchmen on a spree. Throw it away and buy a Morrison part I, which has beautiful hand written characters 3/4” high.185

Evidently Pound agreed: from this point on, Hawley would be the source of every ideogram Pound would ever use. As such, their correspondence is instructive for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and history of Pound’s engagement with Chinese. In an undated letter (c. 1954), Pound asked Hawley to supply a different variation of 教: Have you a Mat/ CHIAO. 719, in form it stands in Mats/ text NOT the form he has in his index. ?? i.e. the one you have in C/ size in this proof/ and which does NOT give the interesting combination of elements. namely rad/ 125/, rad 39 and rad 66, Not quite clear re/ yr/ set of equivalents. As I am commenting on a text I dont see how I can use different form of character. wd/ confuse the reader (IF any).186

The sinograph Hawley supplied, identical to M3833, incorporates a shorthand variant of what Pound construed as the 125th radical lao 老, “old,” above the 39th radical zǐ 子, “child,” next to pū 攴, “to tap.” The old knocking (sense into) the young is a fairly accurate description of Pound’s pedagogy. But let us be clear: Pound is requesting a change to Chinese morphological convention to accommodate his reading of a character. Hawley recognized as much, and resisted where he could. He wrote to Pound as the latter was preparing Canto 85 for The Hudson Review: “Shades of Confucius! Now the damn furrineers are inventing characters to confuse themselves! * * There aint so sech— you been had.” He continued: “don’t expect me to go along with creating little bastards with no pappa nor mamma Willis Hawley, August 9, 1950 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 947. Hawley, whose knowledge and understanding of Chinese was light years beyond Pound’s, received Pound’s shoot-from-the-hip sinology with wit and humor. He goes on, “Characters of Pisan Cantos page 41 to 54 are OK but Canto LIII page 10 looks best upside down as it is, or is that a NEW DIRECTION?” 186 EPP, 947. “C/ size” refers to larger of the two most common sizes of ideogram in Rock-Drill; the ideogram under consideration here is given in such a size on the last page of Canto 85. The other common size is “B,” the smallest size used throughout these volumes. The large ling2 character at the beginning of Canto 85 is a special case. Size “A” does not appear because “grampaws eyes got to get some consideration,” as Pound also says in this letter. 185

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like that tien you dreamed up. It isn’t in K’ang Hsi or other dict. and even the Nipps haven’t gone that far.”187 Often such confusions were the result of Pound’s frequently awkward calligraphy; at other times, Pound was asking for characters that really were quite recherché. In response to Pound’s request for shēn 燊, Hawley wrote, addressing his correspondent as “manufacturerof-Chinese-characters,” “aint no sech animule”: Y’r umble svt. has spent 15 of the best yrs of his otherwise unprofitable existence in assembling the mostest stupenjus array of good, bad & bastard Chinese ids known to man; namely & to whit—an encyclopaedia collossi of same! One to a card, with all known old forms attached thereto. Said index now running over 50,000 cards […] So, if I aint got it somebody just invented it out of spite!188

In this instance, Pound had supplied a version of the character based on David Wang’s own handwriting; Hawley observed that “most of ’em take pride in writing with careless abandon.” This episode is nonchalantly mentioned in Canto 96 when Pound writes: Wang’s middle name not in Mathews189

Hawley continued in a subsequent note, “No complaints on how your pal signs his name; if he wants to short-change a stroke or two, this is legit. All I’m saying is that and are one and the same char. The first does not exist except when someone maltreats the second.”190 At issue here is a conflict between, on the one hand, the way a word should be written (Hawley) versus, on the other hand, the way something is written (Pound). Upon receiving Hudson Review copies containing Canto 85, Hawley urged Pound to “throw away that Couvreur! It isn’t even acceptable in archaic Paree anymore […] Worst of all is EPs system of mixing Couv-Math-Wade. Are you following standard Chinese procedure of keeping the erudish for the erudite?”191 Hawley is concerned less about Pound’s bad sinology than with the fact that his method is counterproductive to his stated aims, calling October 22, 1954 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 947. September 15, 1955 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 948. Cantos, 96/653. Pound returns to this in a line in Canto 98: “despite Mathews this wang was a stylist,” Cantos, 98/690, where “Wang” refers to David Wang and not the “salt commissioner,” also featured in Canto 98 and 99, Uang-iu-p’uh. 190 September 22, 1955 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 948. 191 February 25, 1955 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 948. 187 188 189



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him a “com-POUND-er of Confusion.” He recommended instead that Pound “convert all to Modern [romaji] to save strain on various and sundry mentalities which according to your own statement need to have things dumbed down to their level.” The kind of consistency that Hawley recommends, beholden to abstract and external authorities, was inconsistent with the kind of poetry Pound wanted to write. Critics continually point out, following Pound’s own lead, that The Cantos encodes the history of its own transmission, thus displaying at a formal and structural level how “the tradition” has come down to “us.” Hawley’s point, though, is that it makes little sense, philological or otherwise, to read, and to offer the reader in turn, Couvreur’s Latin translations and French transliterations of the Chou King while using (and also offering) Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary as semantic guide if what is under consideration is the meaning and history of those texts. Hawley failed to recognize that Pound could not have cared less, implicitly refusing the viability of textual integrity as such. In all likelihood, Pound imagined his non-traditional approach to what he nevertheless called “TRADITION” signified a further development in, not damage to, the lineage he transmited. What the Hawley–Pound correspondence amounts to, ultimately, is a debate that might be reframed as one between proscriptive and descriptive lexicologies, respectively.192 The former is generally construed as conservative, the latter liberal or democratic; but in Hawley’s and Pound’s case, the paradigm is reversed. Pound’s individualism is destructive and intolerant of everything that would inhibit it, a kind of authoritarian individualism. Impediments range from received wisdom to iambic pentameter; at its extremity, Pound seems intent upon eviscerating cultural authority and replacing it with a more autonomous and personal species thereof.

To my mind, David Foster Wallace’s 2001 review essay, “Tense Present: Democracy, English and the War over Usage,” Harper’s (April 2001): 39–58, is easily still the best interrogation of this debate in modern American letters (though Foster Wallace’s article properly concerns lexicography). Reprinted as “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006): 66–127.

192

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All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro On June 15, 1955, Scheiwiller told Pound that proofs of Rock-Drill were complete and that two copies were in the post to him. Scheiwiller asked Pound to review one copy, glue ideograms into the positions he wanted them, and return it by airmail. Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on June 20, 1955: “Comfort to have somebody like Vanni who fusses. usually correctly.”193 Then Pound turned on Achilles Fang, who had been repeatedly offering his help with regard to Pound’s uses (and abuses) of Chinese. Unlike Scheiwiller, who tried hard to understand and then realize Pound’s intentions exactly, there was Fang who CAN NOT get [it] into his head that no 2 chinks ever pronounce the same word in the same way AND that the tradition comes via 4 or 5 different languages/ Wonder what will be left of the musicality of my original draft when he has subjected it to current fads re/ non-representation of noise.194

This is a clear expression of Pound’s understanding of Chinese as a calligraphic not typographical form of linguistic representation. For Pound, Chinese is more like handwriting than printing, and therefore closer to manuscript than mechanized copy. On pronunciation, Pound is, I suppose, technically correct. For as Tom Jones observes, “all language uses are specific, and pertain to particular ideolects, dialects, generic conventions, and so on, that specify their properties. All language uses, that is, are particular, are deviant.”195 But Pound deploys this argument not to admonish ever-greater sensitivity to the singularity of speech events, but instead to rationalize his own whimsical deviations. To put Pound’s rejection of Achilles Fang in perspective, this is akin to a Mandarin poet telling his daughter that a respected and native Englishspeaking professor currently working at Tsinghua University, who has offered to help this poet ensure the English words he is having printed in and shipped from Hong Kong by the sheet-full, words he, upon receipt, cuts and pastes onto proofs of his poem, just cannot face the obvious fact that no guǐlǎo says a particular word the same as any other guǐlǎo, even though said poet has never actually studied how any guǐlǎo pronounces anything in the first place. EPP, 2741. Ibid. 195 Tom Jones, Poetic Language: Theory and Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 172. 193 194



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This poet’s understanding of English, furthermore, was formed during a long embargo on knowing anything about English phonology in order to facilitate his arbitrary decision that the “-s” on the end of the word “cats” is a picture of a tail; and that, furthermore, the basic correctness of this intuition is the foundation upon which this poet’s ethics rest. In all seriousness and fairness, Pound was deeply (and rightly) upset by the failure of Harvard University Press to publish a scholarly edition of his Odes, which would have featured not only his translations alongside seal script, but also his “singing text” (transliterations with tone numbers), the suppression of which explains the aforementioned “fads re/ non-representation of noise.” Fang was involved in helping Pound secure the Harvard contract, and Pound partially blamed Fang for the press’s eventual reneging on their promise (only the trade edition exists). But Pound’s “singing texts” are remarkable. Notebooks 60–67 contain one for each and every ode (305 in total), reminiscent of the (dubious) transliterations near the end of Canto 49. They finally dismiss any lingering suspicion that Pound was basically uninterested in the sound of Chinese. But this interest was only ever on Pound’s own terms. In this sense, they stand also as a striking demonstration of Pound’s negative capability, his persistence in (and despite) his own ignorance in regards to the material with which he was working.196 As Pound wrote to Fang after Fang had suggested updating some transliterations to be included in this never-to-be edition of the Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius, “PENalty for altering VOWEL in verse is DEATH. You are reprieved because of yr/ love of exactitude, but don’t do it again. I am trying to teach these buzzards PROSODY, as well as respect for a few civilized chinese.”197 It indicates a kind of essential disagreement between prosody and conventional meaning: Fang proposed the right word (or, transliteration thereof); but Pound wanted the right sound. Pound’s tendency to resist Fang’s help and accept Scheiwiller’s indicates too, maybe predictably, a privileging of the craftsman over the philologist. Scheiwiller’s queries and suggested emendations do not often differ significantly from Fang’s: mostly each correspondent has occupied himself with suggesting to Pound that he bring his spelling Then again, my appraisal here is itself almost entirely speculative: I do not speak or read Chinese. It could be that Pound was actually an excellent and careful scholar thereof. March 5, 1954 Letter, EPCF, 141.

196

197

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into line either with his source texts or with generally accepted orthographic standards. But Pound’s simple refusal of Fang’s corrections and his general acceptance of Scheiwiller’s invests the amateur with an authority denied to the expert. Moreover, in denying Fang authority over his text, Pound asserts a kind of expansive, open-minded counter-expertise that trumped, in Pound’s view, Fang’s close-minded inability to “get it into his head” that something evidently preposterous is, in fact, true. It must be acknowledged that Pound is writing poetry not doing philology and therefore a proportion of his deviations from orthographic standards are intended to prioritize phonemes over graphemes. Pound aligned himself with competence in the field of making, which he had, against competence in the field of learning, which he did not have with regard to Chinese. Of course, Pound neither accepted all of Scheiwiller’s suggested corrections nor refused all of Fang’s. Upon receiving proofs of Rock-Drill on June 21, 1955, Pound responded, “tante grazie per assidue cure/ specialmente dove hai trovato errori. Ma in alcuni punti CITAZIONI non sono esercizi” [many thanks for assiduous care/ especially where you have found errors. But in some places quotations are not grammatical exercises]. Pound goes on to give a couple of examples, and is worth quoting in full: le parole latine devono mantenere rapporti con un contesto non presentato/. Canz/ della Fortuna/ Io son la donna che VOLGO. L’ortografia FISSA appartienne a certe epoche non ad altri. Certi casi non valgono la pena di cambiare il metallo già composto. etc. Ma ti ringrazio da cuore per correzioni degli errori, IL Hudson per essempio stava per rovinare un verso abandonando il dialetto della citazione. Spero che lasciarano la mia correzione. e non insisteranno sull’ ortografia del lessicone […] Dove non ho niente contrario io ho lasciato i tuoi emendementi o correzioni […] Fa come ti piace/ ma per me non vale la pena di incommodare Marde[r]steig per uniformare Riccardus et Richardus, etc. perche nel Medioaevo NON si osservava questa uniformita. L’idea dei poeti dei primi secoli è un po falsificato quando i testi sono cinquecentizzati etc. Ma io non sono fanatico nel domandare questa diversità in ogni punto. Fai come TI piace, salvo nei casi dove io fatto indicazione in inchiostro. [Latin words should keep their relationship with an absent context/. Canz/ della Fortuna/ Io son la donna che VOLGO. FIXED spelling belongs to certain periods not to others. Certain cases are not worth changing type already set. etc. But very many thanks for the correction of errors. Hudson for example



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was on the verge of spoiling a line by abandoning the dialect of the original. I hope they will keep my corrections. and not insist on the spelling of the lexicon […] Where I have nothing against it, I have left your emendations or corrections […] Do as you like/ but as far as I am concerned it is not worth bothering Mardersteig in order to make Riccardus and Richardus uniform, etc. because in the middle ages such uniformity was not observed. The concepts of the poets of the early centuries are a bit falsified when the texts are Renaissanced etc. But I am not fanatical in asking for this diversity in each case. Do as you like, except in cases where I have inked in preferences.]198

A few months later, as the final set of proofs were in Pound’s possession, he wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz, telling her he was grateful for Scheiwiller’s care and his “pignoleria,” or fastidiousness, conceding that “even pign/ sometimes useful,” especially for a poet like Pound, unable to spot his own mistakes. But, he continued: CAN you get it into his head that when one quotes Homer or Cavalcanti one does NOT change the words to make a new grammatical sentence/ having NO associative value. ONE echos the fragment AS IS. also the dialect is SACRED, Calcutty, Californy. Caroline is NOT the state of N or S Carolina. Good that he shd/ queery these points. Also UNIFORM spelling has some uses, BUT god damned academes have WIPED out knowledge by trying to make things uniform […] My big Cavalcanti was done to show that Lorenzo di Medici’s editors were NOT Guido. AND the mss also indicate probability that in some cases they were written locally from spoken tradition […] Uniformity based on imperfect knowledge + HUNwarranted assumption.199

Understandably, Scheiwiller was having trouble distinguishing between quotes whose effects, according to Pound, depend upon their being rendered exactly, and references or allusions whose force relies upon mere suggestion. The problem here is that Pound was never exact or precise about exactitude or precision. Nevertheless, the sacredness of the dialect form, where it exists, must be upheld against the corrupting influences of editorial interpolation. While the original records may be imperfect, the work is sacrosanct. “ART is what the artist DOES. Talk about it is yatter, and all the audience can do is EX POST FACTO.”200 Letter to Vanni Scheiwiller, APICE, trans. Richard Taylor. The Italian is Pound’s verbatim. September 9, 1955 Letter, EPP, 2742. Ezra Pound, January 14, 1955 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2739.

198 199 200

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Not that spoken language is exempt from philological study properly construed, but the “HUNwarranted assumption” of Germanized (i.e., philological) inquiry, as Pound understood it, was a tendency to privilege the written over the oral. As such, the urge to attend minutely to the written record is expressive of a misunderstanding of the nature of the work under inspection (more about which in Chapter 4). Broadly speaking, Pound’s attitude to writing during these years was (and, arguably, always had been) phonocentric, a claim decidedly opposed to Derrida’s avowal that Pound, via Fenollosa and on account of the use of Chinese characters, had formulated an “irreducibly graphic poetics.”201 As Yunte Huang has pointed out, there is nothing “irreducibly graphic” about Chinese written characters if you happen to know the language.202 Pound’s poetics is graphic, I would suggest, not irreducibly but contingently, only insofar as he sought, through graphic analysis, to redeem the written word by restoring it to the orality its inscription obscured. Pound never explains what knowledge is wiped out by uniform spellings,203 but he was animated by this idea during the 1950s. Encoded in this endorsement of orthographic diversity is a defense of meaningful variation, and of the idea that truth is revealed not just in what is said, but how and by whom. Indeed, what dialect forms point to—as variants from a dominant linguistic orthodoxy not actually spoken by anyone—is the specificity of living language. This is a central tenet of what Pound called “Sagetrieb, or the / oral tradition.”204 Granted, the distinction between the textual and the oral is radically insecure, and Pound’s poetics are not blind to this fact, but despite their apparent materiality, the late cantos want to eschew not revel in the encumbering condition of their textuality. It is worth in this context recalling Walter Ong’s remarks on “primary orality”: Writing makes “words” appear similar to things because we think of words as the visible marks signaling words to decoders: we can see and touch such

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 92. 202 Yunte Huang, “Chinese Whispers,” and Brian M. Reed, “Visual Experiment and Oral Performance,” in The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 56–8 and 273–6 respectively. 203 Ezra Pound, September 10, 1955 Letter to Vanni Scheiwiller, APICE. 204 Cantos, 89/597. 201



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inscribed “words” in texts and books. Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.205

For Ong, there is a strong difference between the “oral tradition” and “literature,” and he calls the phrase “oral literature” a “strictly preposterous term.” That we still use it reveals, for Ong, the difficulty in “represent[ing] to our own minds a heritage of verbally organized materials except as some variant of writing, even when they have nothing to do with writing at all.”206 The remarkable documentary complexity of The Cantos expresses a profound resentment against its own necessary textuality (where textuality is equated however inadequately to materiality) and is the record of a struggle to transcend it. We should pause here to note simply that, however intensely “written” The Cantos is, its citations are usually related in the form of reported speech. While statistics are not interpretations, it might begin to give a sense of the preferences Pound affords the spoken to note that the words “write(s)” and “wrote” take up about one full column in the Concordance, whereas “said” and “says” (and attendant shorthands, such as “sd/”) fill eight. Just because Pound writes that someone “said” something, does not necessarily mean he heard it (though such instances do of course exist). For Pound, printed text is perforce an abstraction from the self-presence of its speaker; the designation of text-as-speech goes some way in returning the medium from abstraction to artifact.207 Against “historic blackout,” Pound overloads regularly these cantos with choruses of different voices: “Those who wish to talk May leave now” said Rossini, “Madam Bileau is going to play.” “Trade, trade, trade!” Sang Lanier. Van Buren already in ’37 unsmearing Talleyrand. And the elderly Aida, then a girl of 16, in the ’90s, visiting some very stiff friends in New England Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002), 11. Ibid. 207 David C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 167. 205 206

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giggled (and thereby provoked sour expressions) when some children crossed the front lawn with a bottle of water strung on a string between them and chanting: “Martin Van Buren, a bottle of urine”. Sagetrieb, or the oral tradition. “Ten men”, said Ubaldo, “who will charge a nest of machine guns for one who will put his name on a chit.” “No dog, no goat.” said Pumpelly. Said Bonaparte: Imagination. 220 riflemen and one piece of artillery “To environ us” said Mr Dix. “The irish are devout, moral, industrious” he even said: sober. Kit Carson sea-sick. Cuidad de los Angeles. That g sounded as h.208

Even the term “sagetrieb,” used by Pound to describe his ideal alternative mode of poetic communication, is marked by (and fraught with) many of the same difficulties just described. We know it to be a neologism combining the German words sagen, to say, and der Trieb, urge or instinct. As far as I am aware, the origin of this term remains a mystery. Even Pound was unsure of its provenance, telling Eva Hesse in response to her question about it, “I cert/ got the woid Sagetrieb out of somewhere I spose I got it spelled wrong for TREIB astigmatic eye, allus gittin things spelled usteronprot.”209 A term of uncertain provenance, used by an author who “HAS forgottenwhat-book,” and spelled in a form that does not accord with orthographic rules—Hesse says “the nearest one cd get in krautisch wd be Sagen-Trieb. though still not readily understandable cos no such expression actually exists”210—are the hallmarks of Pound’s especially sacred dialect. Cantos, 89/597–8. November 28, 1956 Letter, EHA. November 25, 1956 letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 969.

208 209 210



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Leucothea Scheiwiller was a careful proofreader as the extant proofs indicate. Indeed, they show that he read proof and suggested emendations and revisions before sending them to Pound for his perusal: both first and second sets of proofs contain Pound’s marginalia that record his own suggestions and his reactions to his publisher’s proposed emendations. In addition, letters between Pound and Scheiwiller reveal ongoing discussions about things the latter still found troubling or ambiguous. One situation that particularly aroused Scheiwiller’s concern was Pound’s different spellings of Leucothoe / Leucothea. Her quasiubiquitous presence in Rock-Drill (and her appearance on several occasions in Thrones) make her a going concern; Pound’s attitudes towards her various textual identities are instructive more broadly of his attitudes outlined above. In these volumes, she appears in various (linguistic) forms. In Canto 91 she is “the sea-gull Κάδμου θυγάτηρ […] KADMOU THUGATER” who says to Odysseus “get rid of parapernalia” [sic].211 She reappears in Canto 93 simply in Greek as “Κάδμου θυγάτηρ,”212 lifted from a phrase in The Odyssey: “Τὸν δὲ ἴδεν Κάδμον θυγάτηρ, καλλίσφυρος Ἰνώ, Λευκοθέη.”213 And, seeing out Rock-Drill, she appears thrice in Canto 95: Queen of Heaven bring her repose Κάδμον θυγάτηρ bringing light per diafana λευκὸς Λευκόθοε white foam, a sea-gull214

Λευκόθοε with a terminal “ε” is Pound’s personal invention—he has simply taken the Latin name of a different goddess and spelled it with Greek letters.215 Cantos, 91/615. Ibid., 93/623. 213 Homer, The Odyssey, ed. and trans. A. T. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 1: 194, lines 333–4. 214 Cantos, 95/644. 215 Isaac Bickerstaff published a dramatic poem, “Leucothoe,” in 1756, but I doubt if Pound knew of it. See Isaac Bickerstaff, The Dramatic Cobbler: The Life and Works of Isaac Bickerstaff, ed. Peter A. Tasch (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1971). Christine Brooke-Rose calls this spelling a simple “mistake.” For her otherwise indispensable reading of Leucothoe / Leucothea, see Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 138–56. See also Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 375–7; and Hugh Kenner, “Leucothea’s Bikini: Mimetic Homage,” in Ezra Pound: Perspectives, ed. Noel Stock (Chicago: Regnery, 1979), 239–59. 211 212

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He gives a transliteration of it on the following page: “‘My bikini is worth yr/ raft’. Said Leucothoe.”216 Readers not consulting either the Pesce d’Oro first edition, the New Directions or Faber photo-off prints thereof, or any pre-1971 collected edition of The Cantos, will not find a transliteration ending “-oe” at all, but instead “Leucothae.” This is an unauthorized and faulty emendation, even though its Latinate pluralization via the suffix “-ae” does make a kind of sense, insofar as Pound did have multiple goddesses in mind. There are, in fact, two white goddesses in the mythological repertoire. On the one hand there is Leucothea, who in mortal life was named Ino before being chased into the sea by Hera for babysitting Dionysus. Ino was the daughter of Cadmus who in turn, according to Herodotus, had invented the Phoenician alphabet, which makes her lineage relevant to any discussion about unorthodox spelling. Following convention, Pound casts her in the Homeric role of Odysseus’s rescuer, appearing to him as a common gull perched on the side of his raft and admonishing him to abandon his makeshift vessel in favor of her veil, an emblem of protection. The second mythical figure, on the other hand, is Leucothoe, a princess who, as Ovid tells it, was raped by Solis and then betrayed by her sister Clytie for this “indiscretion” to their father Orchamus who, angry at his raped daughter, buried her alive. Solis, in some kind of penance, turned her dead body into an incense tree so that she might “still touch the air.” But when, towards the middle of Canto 95, Pound writes: “My bikini is worth yr/ raft”. Said Leucothoe. And if I see her not No sight is worth the beauty of my thought217

—he of course means Leucothea not Leucothoe. Catching this deviation, Scheiwiller queried Pound, who replied on November 25, 1954, “non preoccuparti che Leocothoe, sta scritta in due modi” [don’t be upset that Leucothoe is written in two ways].218 Making a rather different conflation, Pound told Mary de Rachewiltz:

Ezra Pound, Section: Rock-Drill 85–95 de los cantares (Milano: All’ Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1955), 105. 217 Ibid. 218 Letter to Scheiwiller, APICE, trans. Richard Taylor. 216



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Non è il fine del mondo [It is not the end of the world]. AND Calliope is Leucothoe ANYhow. 500 years later they were still sacrificing to that seagull. Art is longer than dachshunds. I don’t mind Anubis having one n / O.K. ONE n in ANubis […] yr/ venrbl/ ancestor is the woild’z woist proofreader ANYhowe […] I cant be expected to spell correctly in ANY language, let alone seven.219

Pound reiterated the point to Scheiwiller on June 21, 1955: “Variazione Leucothoe, Leucothea/ fatto con intenzione” [Variations Leucothoe, Leucothea/ done intentionally].220 Then to Mary de Rachewiltz on September 9, 1955, he wrote, “There are TWO Leucothoes, clas/dic/etc. the other daughter of Orahamus [sic]/ etc. (different spellings) given.”221 And finally, again to Scheiwiller, he explained the following day: “Odysseus Leuk/ and the Daughter of Orchamus ALZO people spell proper names to suit themselves. Dialect forms are SACRED, and prevent obliteration of things the god damned professors don’t understand.”222 Further intermeshing of figures Pound called “Odysseus Leuk/ and the Daughter of Orchamus”223 occurs in Thrones, principally in two related sequences in Canto 98 and Canto 102. Canto 98 begins with a kind of catalog recapitulating the main themes, in which is included the line “Leucothea gave her veil to Odysseus.” Soon after, there follows: And that Leucothoe rose as an incense bush — Orchamus, Babylon — resisting Apollo. Patience, I will come to the Commissioner of the Salt Works in due course. Est Deus in nobis. and They still offer sacrifice to that sea-gull est deus in nobis Χρήδεμνον

January 11, 1955 Letter, EPP, 2739. “Calliope” here refers to a (misnamed!) painting by Martinelli. Pound is not asserting that the goddess Calliope is also “Leucothoe.” 220 Ezra Pound, Letter to Scheiwiller, APICE. 221 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2742. In The Pisan Cantos and then Rock-Drill, Pound similarly conflates Isis-Luna with Artemis/Diana. See Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos, The Celestial Condition: A Study of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press, 1992), 187. 222 Ezra Pound, September 10, 1955 Letter to Vanni Scheiwiller, APICE. 223 Ibid. 219

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She being of Cadmus line, the snow’s lace is spread there like sea foam224

Here the distinction between the two Leucos remains, though their being conjoined in this way suggests an affinity whose attraction begins to break their identities down. Terrell’s note on Leucothoe here tells his readers that this goddess is “not to be confused” with Leucothea on the preceding page. But it seems Pound wants confusion. The jarring interjection “Patience […] in due course” falls away in Canto 102 (because the salt commissioner was dealt with later in Canto 98 and in Canto 99). Now nothing intervenes: Leucothoe rose as in incense bush, resisting Apollo, Orchamus, Babylon And after 500 years still offered that shrub to the sea-gull, Phaecians, she being of Cadmus line, The snow’s lace washed here as sea-foam225

The distinction remains, only just. That “non-Leuco” related material has been removed; that Leucothea is not actually named but only referred to via other guises, as though borrowing her proper name from Leucothoe; that the shrub offered to the sea-gull (Leucothea) gestures towards the “incense bush” (and thus the transformed body) of Leucothoe as the object of sacrifice itself: all point towards a ritualized twining of previously discrete entities.226 This, anyway, would be the telos of Pound’s opposition to loose terminology. Rather than a single word meaning different things, different words mean the same thing. In the case of Rock-Drill, whether Pound writes Leucothea, Leucothoe, Sea-Gull, Kadmou Thugater or Ino, he means Sheri Martinelli. Cantos, 98/685. Cantos, 102/728. 226 The key word here being ritual, and the various kinds of (mis)recognition it entails. In Notebook 90, EPP, 4958, the first in the Thrones sequence (composed in late 1954), Pound refers to Leucothea in the context of the Eleans’ questioning of Xenophanes about correct ritual practice. Xenophanes recommended always that those paying tribute should be clear about the nature their honorand. Either the Eleans are mourning a deceased human, or they are sacrificing to a god. The guidance becomes muddied in Leucothea’s case, who was born a human but became a goddess. See James Warren, “Gods and Men in Xenophanes,” in Poloteia in Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. Verity Harte and Melissa Lane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 301. 224 225



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An historically based, philologically sound vocabulary sensitive to shifting meanings promised a chaos of nuance and imprecision that Pound refused in favor of a more transcendent vocabulary, one whose referent remained constant despite a variety of expressions. Pound valued dialect forms not just because they were idiosyncratic but on account of the fact that their differences could be overcome by volition.

3

“No, that is not textual”: Thrones



Knowledge of a thing is its imprint not its composition or its creation.1

Vision and revision Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on August 28, 1957, “now up to me to do something better than Rock-Drill, if you have any suggestions, send ’em on.”2 He repeated the claim on September 12, 1957, saying he now needed the “guts to make next decade [sic] of Cantos better than Rockdrill.”3 The critical consensus is that he did not succeed. This history of the composition, revision, and publication of these cantos is very much a movement from chaos to order. In many respects it is deeply similar to Rock-Drill, which is not surprising given that most of Thrones was composed under similar circumstances: like Rock-Drill, Thrones was conceived of and written while Pound was in St. Elizabeths; it was written almost exclusively first as manuscript drafts in stenographer’s notebooks, and then transferred to typescript by Pound himself; the first half of its cantos were published initially in journals, while the latter half, cantos 103–109, were reserved for book publication; Pound published the complete section with Vanni Scheiwiller’s Pesce d’Oro, who used the same printer (Mardersteig of Valdonèga), and the pair followed much the same procedure as before, communicating via marginal notes in proofs and via letters, sent either directly Ezra Pound, Notebook 113, EPP, 4981. EPP, 2753. EPP, 2754.

1 2 3

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or via Mary de Rachewiltz who acted as an intermediary; Mardersteig’s setting was used by both New Directions and Faber for their American and British editions respectively. A typical “Thrones” notebook will contain material for four or five different cantos. Notebooks were not always filled in consecutive order: a draft of Canto 105 for instance begins in Notebook 98, the bulk of whose material is chronologically later than the bulk of the material in Notebook 96, where the draft concludes, suggesting Pound was writing as and when (and on what) he had to hand—this notebook, incidentally, contains lines that would be published as parts of Canto 97, Canto 101, Canto 102, Canto 104, and Canto 105. A kind of conceptual logic inheres in this: given the extent to which the texts of Thrones contain echoes and reiterations, such rhizomatic composition is consistent with Pound’s aesthetic. As he told Donald Hall in his 1962 Paris Review interview, Pound understood The Cantos as a project of ongoing elaboration and clarification, but not of revision.4 The composition of Thrones was a somewhat complicated affair; it makes little sense to describe or discuss it linearly. Aside from filling twenty-five new stenographers’ notebooks with notes and drafts of these cantos, Pound also revisited his Rock-Drill notebooks, pulling out material he had either forgotten or otherwise been unable to use. These “revisions” took place somewhat after Pound had already started writing the new sequence, which he began directly after finishing, but before publishing, Rock-Drill: “I have brutally gone on with writin’ a canto, I suppose 97, tho 96 ain’t yet tucked in, got to get from the Odyssey, thru Paul the deacon, down to Del Mar’s marrrvelous account of rascality. BUT the deacon is there as a wedge, unless I am much in error.”5 Indeed, letters sent around this time indicate Pound had a fairly clear idea about how to proceed; it was only in the process of doing so that he became increasingly uncertain (the letters cited in this chapter’s opening paragraph were written two years after the ones just cited). It was around this time, in 1957 and 1958, that Pound went back to the Rock-Drill notebooks, mining them for material, a fact that shows how much of the writing of Thrones was born quite literally out of a rereading of Rock-Drill’s first texts, even though

Ezra Pound, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review 28 (1962), online. Ezra Pound, July 7, 1955 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2741.

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Thrones was, in part anyway, conceptualized before the paradisal cantos.6 Notebook 98, composed between February 5 and March 23, 1958, contains a rough plan for Canto 96 through Canto 100, demonstrating that even at this relatively late stage Pound remained uncertain of cantos 101 through 109: επαρχ 96  

97

Sac. Ed. 98 Muan Bpo 99 Anselm 1007

Even this sketch does not reflect what Pound eventually published. Muan Bpo appears in Canto 98 not Canto 99, the former composed with one eye on the cantos that would come after: “Without 2muan 1bpo … but I anticipate.”8 Certainly, after the unanticipated paradise in cantos 90–95, a return to business as usual functioned as a rappel à l’ordre. He knew, in the medium-toshort term, how to proceed. In a letter to Mary de Rachewiltz written on July 12, 1955, Pound names his intertexts, knowing them relevant before having perused them: am trying to get hold of the EPARCHIKON BIBLION need a bit for Canto 96/ to go with Habdimelich “satanice stimulatus/ and issuing gold coin same weight as Byzantine Emperor/ all of which will be clarified in due course […] at any rate, and parts of 96/ one whole (presumably 97) and start on 98. Held up for EPARCHIKON, Livre du Prefet but got the scouts out looking for it.9

Which is to say that Pound had established the dominant relations of ideogrammic terms of these cantos in advance not just of writing but of reading. The late Modernist poet George Oppen once remarked, in an unpublished note to one of his poems, that what he called “Pound’s copiousness” was a consequence of the fact that “Pound knew what he thought[.] The fact ruined much. (but when the wasp takes him by surprise – - ) !.” “Whereas for me,” “Thrones” itself gets a first mention in Notebook 69, dated tentatively around 1946. EPP, 4937. Notebook 98, EPP, 4966. Similar outlines exist in the first notebook for Drafts & Fragments, facsimiles of which are now available as Ezra Pound, Drafts & Fragments: Facsimile Notebooks, 1958–1959 (New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2010). 8 Ezra Pound, Cantos, 98/685. 9 EPP, 2741. 6 7

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Oppen goes on, in an instructive comparison, “the writing of the poem is the process of finding out what I mean, discovering what I mean – - THIS IS the labor of revision.”10 Oppen’s revisions were laborious; having drafted a poem, he would regularly make hundreds of adjustments to it over dozens of readings and rereadings, trying any number of different punctuations, line breaks, and word orders until it achieved a kind of union between form and sense.11 Studying the manuscripts and pre-publication material of Thrones shows Pound to be a very different kind of writer. For Oppen, the immediate grammatical, syntactic, and semantic context of an utterance was radically constitutive of that utterance’s meaning, whereas Pound’s manuscripts show that once Pound set a canto’s text into an initial arrangement, alterations and adjustments were made only out of necessity and for purposes of removing what appeared to him to be ambiguities. The ideogrammic method, as manifest in Thrones, privileged the ideo- over and against the -gram. Put otherwise, Pound’s default position was: unless a certain textual configuration alters and therefore interferes with meaning, the text should be allowed to stand unmolested. Pound of course did make a lot of changes—these texts are copious—but they were almost always cosmetic, suggesting that even when obliged or motivated to revise, he took the task lightly. On November 7, 1955 he told Ingrid Davies, for instance, that “Canto 96 [had been] sweated into let us hope correct form and transmitted” to The Hudson Review. But discussing the process of preparing a typescript, he confessed: [I] must have added 46 or thereabouts commas, faked two gk. accents, no longer having text of whatever they are quoted from/ the suffering reader may console herself with the thought that the blasted author will HAVE to look up some of the gk/ himself in future, BUT then it is all stuff he wd/ like to look up if there is NO other way of recalling wot the HELL it refers to. One bright spark has admitted that whatever the h/ EVERything in ’em means SOMEthing.12

George Oppen Papers, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego, MSS 0016, Box 24, Folder 14. The wasp in question is presumably “Brother Wasp” in Cantos, 83/352. For a detailed account of Oppen’s compositional processes, see Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 64–93. See also my “The labor of revision: George Oppen’s sincerity,” The Wolf 23 (Summer 2010): 88–101. 12 Ezra Pound, November 7, 1955 Letter to Ingrid Davies, EPC, Box 5, Folder 15. 10

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Compared to Oppen’s rather obsessive processes of revision, Pound’s approach seems frivolous at best. Readers will detect an early, epistolary version of the more humorously bad-tempered lines “I shall have to learn a little greek to keep up with this / but so will you, drratt you,”13 a line I have long understood as an admonition to learn something about the Greek language. What Pound really means is that the reader will have to know something of its (Greece’s) literature, specifically that which Pound has decided to include in The Cantos. Reading, of any kind, should be condensed to an attainable minimum. Cantos 100–106 seem to have emerged rather more spontaneously and precariously. Several commentators have noted that there is something quite provisional about Thrones, the later cantos therein especially. Peter Stoicheff, for instance, suggests Pound “moved swiftly” to complete the latter half of Thrones, detecting a haste of both mind and pen which he collapses into the adverb “mechanically” (by which I think he means impetuously or automatically).14 Moreover, “the poems after Canto C shorten in length quite noticeably, and their composition is much more hurried, the typescripts less emended, than was usual for Pound.”15 Massimo Bacigalupo suggests that, though Cantos 100–109 were close to their present form when the poet left St. Elizabeths, they clearly “still needed some ordering and revision which never eventuated.”16 The implication here is that though Pound saw these texts through to publication, they remained permanently unfinished. Indeed, as Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on December 9, 1957, having just sent her a copy of Canto 98, and mentioning a fairly complete version of Canto 99 (missing only an ideogram or two), “Dunno what will need to be cut/ in the next lot/ then there are Coke Institutes, fairly sold about 107/108. got to get the dust out 100–104. re/which no hurry.”17 Bacigalupo speaks of several of the cantos in the second half of Thrones as being in “bad textual shape,” a fact which begs certain obvious questions. As

Cantos, 105/750. For Pound, to proceed “mechanically” would be to proceed “philologically,” that is, without thought. Peter Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 27. 16 Massimo Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 336. 17 EPP, 2756. 13 14 15

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Peter Nicholls put it directly in an unpublished paper concerning Canto 107, “we might note, in somewhat ironic parenthesis, that for a text concerned with precise definitions, Pound’s own is full of textual uncertainties; observe, as we pass on, the two periods after ‘Inst. 2..’: deliberate or not – they don’t constitute proper ellipses and they are not part of legal citation.”18 Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on May 25, 1957, “Have typed a draf[t] up to what may be end of Canto 105 but dont broadcast, as am not sure stuff really finished.”19 By late October he had “96/106 ‘Thrones’ in rough draft, dunno how much needs correcting. and a few lines of 107.”20 This update indicates that, early on, Pound may have conceived of Thrones as effectively ending with Canto 106 (which would not have been a bad choice). This means that the so-called Coke cantos of 107–109 represent a fairly late addition to the volume as a whole, and may indeed have been initially intended as part of the next sequence. As it stands, the Coke cantos are in some ways structurally analogous to the Paradisal cantos of Rock-Drill insofar as they were unplanned, epiphanic, and quickly written. Moreover, Pound was explicitly clear that the Coke cantos were themselves intended to be “paradisal”: “72 years to get to him, exactly when needed fer Canto 107 or wotever. or 108. Parad. X.”21 Pound acquired Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England on October 30, 1957, a text recommended to him by Moelwyn Merchant (Anglican priest) and procured on Pound’s behalf by Giovanni Giovannini (St. Elizabeths acolyte). Hard upon the heels of this receipt, he set about doing two things in earnest: to anyone who would listen, he began damning the conspiracy responsible for such an historic blackout: “the COMPLEAT filth and decomposition of all teaching in this distressed area/ was well under weigh when I got to college […] but that a copy of Coke’s Institutes never came into my hands until yesterday is DISGUSTING and a measure of the ROT.”22 The other thing he got down to was writing the Coke cantos. Drafts of Peter Nicholls, “Canto 107,” paper presented to the Ezra Pound Reading Group (Senate House, University of London, February 6, 2008). 19 EPP, 2752. 20 Ezra Pound, October 26, 1957 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2754. 21 Ezra Pound, November 2, 1957 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2755. 22 Ezra Pound, October 1957 Letter to Archibald MacLeish, EPP, 1330. On October 31 he wrote to John Theobald, “Damn it I only got Coke this morning, or yestre. I mean G[iovanni]. Giov[annini]. brot 2nd/ Institutes yester, and I only got the full sense of clarity an hour or two ago.” Ezra Pound 18



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all three cantos exist in Notebook 112, composed between November 8 and December 27.23 The drafts of Canto 107 and Canto 108 bear strong likenesses to what Pound ultimately published; whereas the draft of Canto 109, though it contains a majority of the lines that eventually comprised the published version, is significantly different therefrom. Lines used in 109 are interpolated by unused lines throughout the draft, as though Pound’s typescript revision is a further editing down of an already reticent text—indeed, after a good deal of unused but distinctly “canto-esque” material, filling out the remainder of this notebook (along with some notes from July 1958 written back-to-front at the end), a recognizable draft of the final page and a half of Canto 109 resumes in the early pages of Notebook 113, dated December 28, 1957.24 What revisions do exist mostly consist of simple excisions. Speaking of editorial principles, he told Frederick Morgan, “you canNOT include everything. only one way to define, or at least one effective way, is to EXclude.”25 The faultlines within an attempt to defy historic blackout by reintroducing excluded texts through poetic and editorial processes of radical attenuation are readily apparent. Thrones is marked by reticences, lacunae, curtailments, and suppressions of grammatical and semantic sense. The Cantos is like this too, of course; Thrones only more so. Pound always had a penchant for ellipses, but here, where the discursive quality of his verse is pressed to within almost an inch of its life, they take on a certain poignancy: The production IS the beloved. And Gladstone took a little packet of tea to Miss What’s-her-name, Palmerston’s fancy but did not sell England for four million quid to … (deleted … Suez Canal shares Said Hollis (Christopher) Regius … (deleted) Professorships and John Theobald, Ezra Pound/John Theobald Letters, ed. Donald Pearce and Herbert Schneidau (Redding Ridge: Black Swan, 1984), 111. And on November 7, 1957 he wrote to Noel Stock, “the compLEAT and damnable putridity of education/ univs/ kulch/ nowhere more foetid than in it taking me till aetat 72 to get to Coke Institutes […] ROTTEN educ by 1900.” EPC, Box 9, Folder 6. 23 Notebook 112, EPP, 4980. 24 Notebook 113, EPP, 4981. 25 Ezra Pound, April 29, 1954 Letter, HRA, Subseries 3A.

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for falsification and Coke disappeared from curricula.26

Alex Pestell will shortly publish an article in a “Thrones” special issue of Glossator wherein he suggests that Pound’s use of Aesopian language and other such indirections is less “to evade detection” than to “ostentatiously draw attention to the author’s unfreedom”: “ellipses are after all conspicuous, indeed often melodramatic, markers of omission.” Pestell’s claim is that Pound’s Aesopian language, ellipses, and other short-circuiting of sense are at once part of “a process of encryption” and also theatrical gestures, ones mimicking the “strategies of mystification” they excoriate, “as if to demonstrate their malignant effects even on those (like Pound) who are alert to them.” “Aesopian language itself becomes a ‘marker’ for affiliation with a far right that views itself as under constant threat of enslavement.”27 As the excerpt from Notebook 75 cited in the last chapter indicates, where Pound is forced to print “four million quid to … ( deleted” on account of libel, he actually wrote “Rothschild.” Thrones is a text disfigured by its omissions. Its poetic evasiveness results in the kinds of extreme privations that many (the author included) find so terribly obnoxious about this verse. In a rather different context, Jeffrey Blevins argues for what he sees as “Mencius’s profound importance” for “The Cantos as a whole,” citing the fact that dozens of notebooks contain passages related to him, but noting, too, that he is “mentioned in the poem a scant eight times.” “Behind the scenes of the poem” the “well field system” and what Blevins calls simply “#”—often but not always Pound’s version of 井, that is, “[water] well” (M1143)—together figure as an “ur-concept in Thrones, one that rarely makes it blatantly into the poem, but one that nonetheless persists in its foundations.”28 The same could be said for any number of other “tags” found in these verses: Alexander paying the debts of his soldiers; make it new, “alla non della”; T. C. P. and his attempts to keep some of the non-interest-bearing debt in circulation as currency; the temple is holy; Talleyrand’s rescue of Europe; 2muan 1bpo; and so on. Despite

Cantos, 104/742. Alex Pestell, “Canto C,” Glossator 10 (forthcoming). I gratefully acknowledge Pestell’s permission to quote from this forthcoming essay. 28 Jeffrey Blevins, “Pound Sign,” ELH 81, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 1335. 26 27



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only relatively infrequent recurrences, these and other tags form the structure upon which Pound arrays his exemplars. All of which is bound up unto what Peter Liebregts describes as a sort of Poundian hilaritas adapted from Eriugena and modified via a reading of Gemistus Plethon, in which gods are literally super-natural by virtue of their capacity for “acting solely by thought”; as such, they can communicate with an alacrity far in excess of what is possible for men who must submit to the material encumbrances of either talking or writing. For Pound, the swifter a man’s communications the more god-like he seems: “this communicative mental swiftness fits the context of Thrones which, both in terms of its philosophy and its textual strategy, is a poetry of intuitive understanding rather than of rational discourse.”29 These categories are neither discrete nor absolute, especially when it comes to The Cantos (but what self-respecting poet aims to write a poetry whose discursive rationality supplants its intuitive understanding). What is so fascinating, and so enervating, about this work is that, during the Washington years especially, Pound no longer distinguishes between these two registers, effectively collapsing them into a single discursive mode. The trouble is, what is inwardly an intuitive, non-rational discourse presents itself as the opposite, particularly when Pound ostentatiously deploys the language of what are normally quite rational discourses such as economics, history, and anthropology.30 So what sounds like a reasoned authorial aside occurring roughly halfway through Canto 96 is really anything but. Letters show this note originally belonged as an introductory note to “Cantos 98/ 99,” but Pound could have plunked it anywhere without much difference insofar as it applies to the volume as a whole. Pound first wrote: Introductory note for Cantos 98/ 99 If we never write anything save what people can now understand we will never extend the field of poetry or of our own comprehension. I find that I have already forgotten some of the greek in Canto 94, which merely means that I

Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 339. 30 Of course, from the beginning, Pound presented the ideogrammic method as scientific. Ideogrammic juxtaposition was “very much the kind of thing a biologist does.” ABCR, 22. 29

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must go back and study it come qualsiasi altro lettore o studente. Che c’è di male? [like any other reader or student. What’s the harm in that].31

The revised, and eventually published, version of this note suppresses a sense of Pound’s own ignorance, of his disciplinary specialization as a poet interested in “the field of poetry,” and of the efficacy of, or need for, “study” as a means of acquiring knowledge: If we never write anything save what is already understood, the field of understanding will never be extended. One demands the right, now and again, to write for a few people with special interests and whose curiosity reaches into greater detail.32

Outwardly some kind of “apology” for the rather difficult verse fore and aft, this is really a proleptic rejoinder to those readers, as Hugh Kenner conceived them, who would “complain of the didacticism of the later [cantos].” But what seems a fairly straightforward self-exoneration is far from internally coherent. This rare moment of prosaic candor in fact represents one of Pound’s more radically articulated juxtapositions. The conditionality of the opening sentence jars against the demands of the closing one, as though the latter ignores the contingencies the former describes. An argument for the value of what might be described as speculative or experimental poetics is undercut by a defense of pre-existing special interests, interests whose more detailed curiosity defines them in direct opposition to the ignorance of those who might (but will not) have their fields of understanding developed. This quasi-pedagogical statement encodes a refusal of pedagogy per se. Pound did not write Canto 96 for the uninitiated, for neophytes, or for novices. This fact is apparent to all upon first looking into Pound’s late cantos, and it raises questions about the role of the reader, as Sean Pryor has been amongst the most recent to explain. Pound told Robert Lowell, “I don’t see how the hell anyone can start at 96 or 97 or even with the Pisans an see wot the hell is goink on.”33 Pryor goes further, suggesting that the circuit of exclusion proposed December 1, 1957 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2756. The note introduces both cantos because Pound conceived of them as a diptych, and wanted them published together. 32 Cantos, 96/659. 33 Ezra Pound, September 19, 1958 Letter to Robert Lowell. Robert Lowell Papers, Am 1905, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 928. 31



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here is more radical than that. Pound “excludes every reader. None of us are ‘we’ […] By turning each and every reader away, the poem guarantees that paradise exists” (where I have given ellipses points, Pryor traces a lineage of holy, mysterious election back to Plotinus).34 Indeed, as the earlier version of the note in question reads—“I find that I have already forgotten some of the greek in Canto 94”— Pound himself could be excluded from the poem’s readership.35 Responding to Moelwyn Merchant’s November 1959 request to quote some lines from the as-yet unpublished Canto 99, Pound replied “nobody, including the author, knows the Cantos well enough to swear ANY 3 lines.”36 In Thrones Pound’s querulous engagement with philologists, for whom knowledge and writing are if not identical then at least coincident, is alive and well. His jeers at Jules Nicole in Canto 96 are as bathetic as they are desperate. Yet there is no question he engages, if only loosely, with the methods he derides. A good proportion of the text following Pound’s statement about extending the field of knowledge reads as follows: θόλος a round building καμάρα arched over all ἀσφάλειαν to be unlikely to fall ἐμπειρίαν & experienced θεμέλιος the foundation, not wobbly37

If we find such verse difficult, it is so conceptually rather than, as George Steiner once defined it, “contingently.” (For Steiner, the “ontological economy” of a poetic text, in which the poet works as a kind of etymologist, presents “contingent difficulties,” most of which can be resolved by resorting to the authority of the dictionary.) This verse is conceptually difficult because it seems so staunchly opposed to concepts per se. In this passage, Pound’s writing approaches the condition of scholia, a form of ancient scholarship in which commentators focus on the words rather than the ideas of a text. Pound Sean Pryor, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 172. Ibid., 177. 36 November 1959 Letter to Moelwyn Merchant, Annals. Mary de Rachewiltz recently made the impressive remark that the only essential supplementary texts for a proper understanding of The Cantos are Dante’s Commedia and A Concordance to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Robert J. Dilligan, James W. Parins, and Todd K. Bender (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981). Mary de Rachewiltz, interview by author, Brunnenburg, April 15, 2014. 37 Cantos, 96/662. 34 35

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deletes overt conceptualization in order that it might somehow exist latently. As the classical philologist Eleanor Dickey notes, scholia are usually discrete annotations, and medieval scholia particularly showed almost no attempt to reconcile the contents of different notes or to integrate their syntax into contiguous new commentaries. Often based upon extant commentaries they severely abridge in order to represent in elemental form, scholia frequently exist for contemporary readers without the commentaries upon which they are themselves based.38 With no derogation to the work of those who wrote scholia, the format is a fairly low-level form of interpretation, a kind of second-order criticism compared even to, say, hypomnemata, ancient self-standing commentaries that sought to achieve more than isolated instances of clarification in view of providing bases for detailed or systematic commentaries. Pound’s dim view of critical scholarly endeavor is matched, in this canto especially, only by his own mock-pedantic critical nit-picking, piqued by disturbances in the sonic integrity of a language he would rather hear than read: Who useth an unstamped stater ad pretium empti κατὰ τὴν ἐξώνεσιν νομίσματος ἑνὸς That’s how Nicole slanted it, grave on the omicron, meaning one aureus, bankers to profit one keratiοn 2 miliarisia μηδεμιᾷ λειτουργίᾳ and no liturgy (as above) nor their beasts, but that baking be uninterrupted and that they take due care against fire.39

The force of Pound’s philological gotcha (identifying a grave instead of acute accent on the indefinite article ἑνὸς) is promptly attenuated by a misprint of “bankers” for “bakers” two lines later, a silly error in the text of a work whose poet harbored serious economic pretensions. Pound variously heckles Nicole, in the process ungraciously failing to acknowledge the professor’s central role Eleanor Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11–12. 39 Cantos, 96/660. 38



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in recovering from oblivion the only known text of what Pound eventually considered to be a central document in the canon of Western writing pertaining to good governance. Rather later in the canto we read: And no one to be brought into the guild without notice (aveu du prefet) What was the greek for aveu in this instance? εὶδήσεως τοῦ ἐπάρχου rather nice use of aveu, Professor,    though you were looking at ἄνευ.40

These passages illustrate how deeply fraught the question of textual propriety is in these cantos; and how the complications and uncertainties about such propriety (or its lack) are central to the character of this verse. Admittedly myopic when it came to his own textual errors, the value and sincerity of Pound’s corrections of another’s text are not undercut exactly (if Nicole’s accent is wrong, it is wrong), but deeply compromised. Textual propriety is impoverished, its value as a standard of evaluation diminished. By implication, Pound models a form of reading that mistrusts or disbelieves in the stable self-sufficiency of the printed text, simultaneously encouraging and ridiculing ever closer attention to it. Sorting out such aporia would be urgent if it was not also so summarily dismissible. While manuscript evidence shows that Pound initially wrote “baker” before typing “banker,” it could be more interesting to note that the error, once introduced, has persisted across all versions, and moreover, was never flagged in the copious correspondence between expert readers such as Hugh Kenner, Norman Holmes Pearson, Eva Hesse, Mary de Rachewiltz, and James Laughlin, who eventually became responsible for maintaining and improving the state of the text (though Terrell does note the error in his Companion).41 Given that the context of the error concerns coinage, such an oversight is entirely understandable (bankers seems at least plausible). But the silliness of it is compounded by the fact that Pound is trying to emphasize the prohibition on mixing up professions in Le livre du préfet by Leo the Wise: “Perfumers not to buy groceries, […] Let him be either

Ibid., 96/667. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 604, n. 209.

40 41

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perfumer or grocer, / Candle-makers to work in their own ergastorios” [premises].42

Canto 97 Thrones is a volume of poetry that it would be easy to believe is “about” the history of the Lombards, the history of Byzantium, the history of exchange rates, the history of China, and/or the history of the English law (more or less in that order). This may be true superficially, but “history” provides the mere material of Pound’s work. The real “history” in these cantos is the relatively short and relatively discrete sequence of events that can be called “Pound’s reading” during his time at St. Elizabeths (and even that would be much too wide a gamut). But central to these cantos’ concerns is Pound’s engagement with a highly selective group of texts: volume 95 of J. P. Migne’s Patrologiae (which contains The Complete Works of the Venerable Bede and Paul the Deacon’s History of the Langobards); Alexander Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems; The Eparch’s Book of Leo the Wise; The Twelve Tables by Lucilius; The Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus; Baller’s edition of Kang hsi’s Sacred Edict; Plotinus’s Enneads; St. Ambrose’s De Moribus Brachmanorum; Theory of Social Revolutions by Brooks Adams; various works by Joseph Rock on the Na-khi; Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England; and of course the Odyssey and the Commedia (though I presume that by this point Pound had long since stopped “reading” Homer or Dante). This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it constitutes the underlying curriculum of Pound’s study and provides the basic subjects of his writing. Canto 97 in particular is a canto deeply concerned with reading, interpretation, and the transmission of texts. Specifically, it is concerned with the difficulties involved therein. “Of Antoninus very little record remains,” Pound writes towards the end: you cannot read documents that have been lost, destroyed, or blacked-out. And yet, Pound (and, by extension, his readers) must persist. After all, “quis erudiet without documenta?”43 Leaving aside the

Cantos, 96/665. Ibid., 86/561.

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content for a minute (no mean suspension, but it remains an anachronistic yet central contention of this book that in Pound’s case the rift between content and form is actually more real than apparent),44 the first half of the canto is largely an involved set of reading notes on Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems.45 As Pound put it in a headnote to this canto when it was first published in The Hudson Review, “this Canto deals with the different rates of exchange between gold and silver, as in imperial Rome and the Orient.”46 Theodosian Code thirteen, eleven, eleven, £. s. d. from Caracalla first fish & vadmal or cloth money, then “baug” rings pseudo roman, and then, later, moslem dinars, maravedis, kelt coin & norse “herring”, 8 stycas: one scat “That most powerful engine” says Del Mar.47

A good deal of bewilderment induced by this catalog of exchange rates, exotic numismatics, fiduciary policies, and commentaries thereupon can be dispelled by reading Pound’s source in parallel. Insofar as Del Mar’s text is a key to Pound’s, the canto shares a structural and procedural affinity with Canto 85. Such reading, at any rate, diminishes the poem’s referential obscurity, which in turn foregrounds its formal difficulty. Such difficulty becomes, for me at least, the primary consideration. A question pertinent to ask of this section of the canto is not what it is all about but why it is so. It is generally considered to be the case that source hunting is an important and indeed necessary occupation for anyone wanting to properly understand The Cantos. Certainly Terrell’s Companion is predicated upon the assumption that the difficulty of this poem consists not so much in “abstruse levels of thinking as in the extraordinary and wide ranging fields of reference […] hence the need for A Companion to the Cantos.”48 The idea here—of which Terrell’s awesome feat of scholarship is a demonstration—being that consulting texts Pound exploited in writing The Cantos will provide essential That distinction is encoded in Pound’s 1951 remark to James Laughlin: “2 kinds [of] top notch; that which absoLOOTly will not translate and that which cant be obliterated by translation.” EPJL, 215. 45 Alexander Del Mar, A History of Monetary Systems (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1895). 46 Ezra Pound, “Notes on Contributors,” The Hudson Review 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1956): n.p. 47 Cantos, 97/670. 48 Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, ix. 44

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information and supply deleted or incomplete context necessary for any interpretation of the poetry. But the direction of this hermeneutical traffic is entirely reversible even if it remains rare. It is possible to conceive of The Cantos as the book resistant to, rather than exemplary of, what Jerome McGann calls “radial reading.” For McGann, the “elementary sign of radial reading is probably illustrated by a person who rises from reading a book in order to look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary or to check some historical or geographical reference.”49 Radial reading occurs, in other words, when the reading process becomes fractured by a reader driven to other texts: ancillary materials, notes, appendices, intertexts, or sources—that is to say, to Terrell’s Companion or to any of the texts he lists at the head of each canto entry. This is undoubtedly the kind of reading The Cantos induces, and it is obvious why McGann introduces this concept in the context of a larger discussion of The Cantos. But radial reading is a centrifugal, abstracting kind of engagement. Pound probably intends the obverse: a centripetal reading event wherein The Cantos is positioned at the center, an organizational force like the magnet arranging its iron filings. Instead of “radial reading,” wherein one might “rise from” The Cantos, it should be the book that, having risen, one consults for purposes of clarification. This, at any rate, would be to construe The Cantos in vorticist terms, and to view it as exemplary of Pound’s foundational principle of “sincerity”: “pictorially the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally.”50 That would mean a subtle but nevertheless quite remarkable alteration in an understanding of what The Cantos is. In this scenario, The Cantos is not a text to be deciphered or interpreted, but is itself the key. Pound rendered a version of this argument as early as 1918 when he suggested that “a man’s rhythm must be interpretive.”51 Pound does not say that a man’s rhythm must be interpret-able. His rhythm, which is to say, his patterns of thought and expression (i.e., his verse), is a tool for deciphering other things, not an object or specimen itself subject to critical scrutiny. A radial reading practice that presumes The Cantos is interpretable by means of other texts implicitly misunderstands Pound’s intentions for it. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 116. Ezra Pound, ed. and trans., Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects (New York: New Directions, 1969), 20. 51 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” LE, 9. 49 50



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Conceiving of The Cantos as a text that deciphers and interprets other texts is not such a surprising reversal as it may sound (it may not be surprising at all). Anyone who suggests that The Cantos is a pedagogical text, specifically insofar as it directs us to texts beyond itself, is enacting some aspects of this claim. Canto 97 certainly “sends” its reader to Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems, probably for the first time. Without question, reading Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems sheds light upon Pound’s verses. My contention is that the more significant clarification—possibly the one Pound intended— comes not from reading Del Mar in order to “make sense” of Canto 97, but from reading Canto 97 in order to shed light upon Del Mar’s work. Put otherwise, I mean to suggest that the first section of Canto 97 (though not just here) radically departs from techniques of collage and assemblage characteristic of earlier parts of the poem (Canto 4 being the exemplary instance thereof). Canto 97 is a set of directions for reading. Whether or not such directions, pointers, and admonishments (or whatever you want to call them) are effective, functional, or even comprehensible as tools for interpretation—or how we might begin determining them as such—is another question entirely, and one which I will try to address below. Amongst the most powerful indictments of the dysfunctionality of these verses comes from Peter Nicholls in his brilliant “‘Two doits to a boodle’: reckoning with Thrones.” There, Nicholls argues that “a return to sources often fails to satisfy.”52 For Nicholls, “Pound’s habit of ellipses and decontextualization is now so extreme that it does not so much invite this work of recovery as make a countervailing claim for the autonomy of his own text.”53 “Only tenuous links to its original” present “a problematic independence from the source.”54 Nicholls’ return to Pound’s sources is (for him) disappointing since he finds Pound continually refusing to coordinate “dramatic local detail” with a clear sense of “large-scale social and political forces”; as such, “his use of textual materials often seems curiously unmotivated.” Nicholls goes on to give several convincing examples of passages from Del Mar that could have been exploited by Pound. Ultimately, “violence is done to the syntax of the Peter Nicholls, “‘Two doits to a boodle’: reckoning with Thrones,” Textual Practice 18, no. 2 (2004): 233. 53 Ibid., 233–4. 54 Ibid., 234. 52

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source-text so as to produce an opacity that speaks more eloquently about the principle of occluded meaning than it does about the actual matters at hand.”55 Just so. What an attention to the language of Canto 97 reveals—as opposed to the language of Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems—is Pound’s patent disinterest in a lot of what Del Mar does write in favor of what he does not write. Though loathe to allow Pound to supply me with a critical vocabulary useful to the interpretation of his work, he puts the tenor of his engagement succinctly when he writes “optative, not dogmatic.”56 Indeed, the mood of this canto is wishful, explicitly but not exclusively a commemoration of opportunities Del Mar missed, culminating in “But Mr Del Mar does not, at this point, / connect issue with backing.” Myriad other instances in which Pound mildly rebukes other writers for their failings (rendering the poetic text critical) are not far to seek: “Monsieur Gibbon nearer than Mommsen at this point” (but presumably not near enough); “‘I am sorry.’ / said the London judge, ‘that this case has been brought as a civil / and not as a criminal action’,” a clear counterfactual; “the plebs / not then in public affairs,” ditto; “Mons of Jute should have his name in the record” but does not; and “by curious segregation Brooks Adams ignores him, Del / Mar.”57 Forfeitures, missed opportunities, refusals of all sorts, apologies, missing records, speculations, abbreviations, gaps, indebtedness, degradations, and things that would and should have been populate this canto until the emergence of a new mode of writing at “New fronds.” Del Mar’s History is not just Pound’s source—it is his object. The emergence of the ideograms, roughly at the midpoint of the canto, mark a shift in the emphasis and technique therein, and also a considerable widening of its scope. Appropriately enough, and in confirmation of the thematic and formal emphases of this canto on reading, this second section begins with a glossarial note on the word “gloss”: New fronds, novelle piante

what ax for clearing?  ch’in1 

 tan4 

 ch’in1

Ibid., 237. Cantos, 97/668. 57 Ibid., 97/669; 97/670, 97/670, 97/672, 97/673 respectively. 55 56



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οἷνος αἰθίοψ the gloss, probably, not the colour. So hath Sibilla a boken ysette as the lacquer in sunlight ἁλιπόρφυρος & shall we say: russet-gold. That this colour exists in the air not flame, not carmine, orixalxo, les xaladines lit by the torch-flare,

& from the nature the sign58

Several commentators have weighed in expertly on this passage,59 perhaps none better than Massimo Bacigalupo, who says of the transition between sections, “the poet rises from ‘the coil of Geryon’ to the threshold of paradise”:60 the axe Pound chooses symbolically clears away the preceding lines laden with “historical” specificity and permits him to write his paradise afresh in “reverence.” This reverence is marked by “the contemplation of the sign, the word,” a fact made explicit in this passage.61 Except when Pound is at his most reverent he is also at his most manipulative. The phrase “οἷνος αἰθίοψ” does not occur in any Homeric text. The phrase that does occur in the Iliad in book 1, line 462; book 4, line 259; book 4, line 341; book 6, line 266; book 14, line 5; book 16, line 230; book 24, line 641; and in the Odyssey in book 2, line 57; book 3, line 459; and book 7, line 295 is αἴθοπα οἶνον. Which is to say that in order to read Pound’s line, or to make any sense of it, we too are forced to acknowledge this phrase as both reference and adulteration. Pound, after all, wrote αἰθίοψ not αἰθοψ. Liddell & Scott’s Lexicon defines αἰθίοψ as “Burnt-face, i.e., an Ethiop, a negro”; it defines αἰθοψ as “fiery-looking, flashing, sparking.” As Bacigalupo suggests, “Pound has inserted into his matter-of-fact quest for the right colour and word an esoteric pun, by writing not aithops but aithiops, i.e. Ethiopian wine.”62 Terrell calls this a “Homeric variant of ‘wine-dark sea’,” but it is Pound’s invention. Cantos, 97/675. See in particular, Hugh Kenner, “Notes on Amateur Emendations,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 23–4; and Albert Cook, Forces in Modern and Postmodern Poetry, ed. Peter Baker (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); 140–1. 60 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 350. 61 See also Cantos, 102/730. 62 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 352. 58 59

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Pound’s reverence (born of such contemplation) leads to a peculiar refinement of language. Whatever reverence he may bestow, it does not lead him to take a philological interest in tracking accurate, historical uses of any particular word (rather the opposite is true). This tendency of Pound’s—to deviate from accepted notions of linguistic precision—is especially true in regards to his most important terms. In his handling of terminology, Pound was deeply committed to giving not just new shades but entirely new meanings to the key phrases of others. His deployment of the term μεταθεμένων [metathemenon] is a notable example (but by no means unique). Liddell & Scott defines the root word μετατίθημι as “place among” or “place differently,” though Pound reads μεταθεμένων as denoting “the voluntary variation of the value for purchasing power, or the metallic content, or the amount of metal, referred to by a given piece of money.”63 The term occurs six times in The Cantos,64 each time indicting the same ethical and economic sin: And King Wang thought to vary the currency μεταθεμένων τε τῶν χρωμένων against council’s opinion, 65 and to gain by this wangling.

It was, to Pound’s mind, almost on par with usury: and the two largest rackets are the alternation of the value of money (of the unit of money METATHEMENON TE TON KRUMENON and usury66

Pound took it to be a central part of Aristotle’s condemnation (in Politics) of fraud committed by anyone intentionally manipulating, and subsequently benefiting from, arbitrary fluctuations in the value of currency. In reality, Aristotle is making a version of the argument that you simply cannot eat money: “money is nonsense, and entirely a convention but by nature nothing,

65 66 63 64

Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound Speaking, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), 263. In cantos 53, 74, 76, 77, 78, and 97. Cantos, 53/273. Ibid., 74/440.



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because when those who use it have changed currency it is worth nothing, and because it is of no use for any of the necessary needs of life.”67 In misappropriating (intentionally or otherwise) Aristotle’s actual meaning, is Pound committing a species of transgression against the stable value of the signs he has otherwise dedicated himself to preserving? Does his poem benefit from this transgression? Is the value that adheres in μεταθεμένων precisely its conventionality of use, our agreement to mean by it what we also believe Aristotle meant it to mean, and is not Pound’s decision to charge it with different meaning also a kind of racket? I suspect Pound would not recognize the validity of these comparisons. This is not to either exonerate or condemn his verbal manipulations, but it is enough, I hope, to disturb any critical approach interested in conflating Pound’s stated ethical-economic ideas and his poetics—unless we take the view that Pound transgressed against his own standards. Pound’s compromised position as a hypocrite lecteur, or rather, a hypocritical writer, should not be overlooked. His pedagogical approach can be boiled down to admonishing his readers to find out for themselves by looking for the raw facts uninterpreted for them in advance by reputed authorities. And yet, the history, anthropology, economics, and whatever other disciplines his poetry might be said to “contain” are all acquired secondhand via writers and theorists whose ideas Pound appreciated because they already conformed to his pre-existing Weltanschauung (a favored term of his during the St. Elizabeths years, from the German meaning “worldview”).68 Like μεταθεμένων, paideuma is a word Pound famously borrowed from Leo Frobenius. But note the characteristic fashion in which Pound elevates his own understanding over that of his source: “Frobenius uses the term Paideuma for the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period”; “I shall use Paideuma for the gristly roots of ideas that are in action.”69 Playing Aristotle, Politics, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 43, 1257b 16. Karl Marx quotes the same passage in his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, ed. and trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1904), 154. Pound complained frequently that Marx never discussed money. This suggests to me that he never read Chapter 2, “Money or Simple Circulation.” 68 Pound deploys this term with scant recognition of its Kantian overtones indicating either ignorance or reappropriation. 69 GK, 57, 58. Cf.: “Frobenius’s use of the term paideuma was derived from the Greek to mean the way in which culture, as teacher, imprints itself on man, whereas Pound used the word to imply the more mystical sense of a submerged complex of ideas of any given period.” Tony Tremblay, “Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938),” Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 126–7. 67

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fast and loose with technical terms was a basic characteristic of Pound’s creativity from the start: “an ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term ‘complex’ rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.”70 Frobenius’s sevenvolume Erlebte Erdteile was not, by the way, translated from German into English, and therefore remained beyond Pound’s comprehension. We have yet to fully come to terms with the extent to which the most important of Pound’s textual influences were written in languages he could not properly understand. These kinds of inventions of course occur throughout Pound’s verse; they, indeed, make up a substantial portion of whatever we actually take his poetry to be. Two significant repercussions arise from this “inventive” appropriation of scholarly material. First, it indemnifies the poet against clear associations with the scholar’s point of view, which, good or bad, mean that clear lines of association remain permanently obscure. And second, they perturb the idea that error can ever serve as a meaningful criterion for aesthetic evaluation. Pound’s use of L. A. Waddell, in Canto 97 and elsewhere, is a case in point. Terrell says that aside from the Hawk King seal, the Sumerian hieroglyphs in Canto 97 “are not identifiable as hieroglyphs but bear some resemblance to early Chinese bone inscriptions and may suggest fields and plants.”71 (They are, in fact, Pound’s copies of drawings found in Waddell’s Egyptian Civilization: Its Sumerian Origin.)72 Robert Casillo’s groundbreaking and detailed work on this subject has demonstrated that Pound was drawn to Waddell, probably via David Gordon, because Waddell’s work “contained a panoply of themes in which he had already shown great interest and to which he gave constant ideological support: light and solar worship, agrarianism, patriarchal authority, anti-Semitism, Aryanism.”73 As Alec Marsh has suggested more recently, Waddell’s emphasis upon the racial (specifically) Aryan roots of Sumerian civilization chimed easily with far- and LE, 4. Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 624, n. 240. 72 L. A. Waddell, Egyptian Civilization: Its Sumerian Origin & Real Chronology and Sumerian Origin of Egyptian Hieroglyphs (London: Luzac & Co., 1930), 19. 73 See Robert Casillo, “Ezra Pound, L. A. Waddell, and the Aryan Tradition of ‘The Cantos’,” Modern Language Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 70. 70 71



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ultra-right-wing groups both scholarly and societal with whom Pound had tangential affiliations.74 As an intrepid auto-didactic, Pound approved of Waddell’s method above all. That his findings were judged scientifically unsound by those with opinions qualified to have them must, in Pound’s eyes, have proved rather than diminished Waddell’s intellectual integrity. Indeed, some reviews of Waddell’s work sound remarkably like reviews of Pound’s translations, especially pertinent given Pound’s amateur appropriations of Chinese written characters in Rock-Drill and Thrones.75 Pound discovered Waddell and had read his Egyptian Civilization by mid-1954. He recognized Waddell’s racial biases but did not consider them important problems for scholarly endeavor. On July 27, 1954 he told Mary de Rachewiltz, “Waddell hel fer leather aryan ( not necessarily in contradiction. ) […] Whether Waddell as important as Frobenius, I can’t tell.”76 By October he had formed an opinion, placing Waddell in the vicinage of, but not upon the pedestals afforded to, his real intellectual heroes. In December, Pound wrote again to Mary to report that “Wad/ don’t seem to hv/ heard of Frobenius/ so there is liveliness in hooking THOSE 2 together,”77 a further indication of the idea that the use of ideogrammic juxtaposition lies in its assertion of links where none can be established (i.e., it is lively because they are conceptual not historical). Waddell’s Egyptian Civilization provided Pound with Canto 97’s most striking features, the “temple” and “sun-hawk” pictograms: Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 3, 56. Cf.: “Not only does Mr. Waddell accept this impossible theory [that Egyptian hieroglyphs are Sumerian in origin] ultimately deriving the alphabet from an early cuneiform script, he also argues that the Sumerians were an Aryan race and the Phoenicians as well. He claims to have found in Ireland inscriptions of Brito-Phoenician kings in the Phoenician alphabet, which he positively dates before 1075 b.c. This is obviously an immense delusion, and his comparisons of the Phoenician characters with the Sumerian signs are frankly preposterous.” S. Langdon, “Waddell: The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet,” review of The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet and A Sumer–Aryan Dictionary, by L. A. Waddell, Scottish Historical Review 25, no. 97 (October 1927): 53. The reviewer goes on to say of Waddell’s A Sumer–Aryan Dictionary—both titles were published in 1927 and form something of a piece—that “equally impossible is his A Sumer-Aryan Dictionary […] in which he attempts to prove that Sumerian and Egyptian are Aryan Languages. The author has slight knowledge of Sumerian, and commits unpardonable mistakes.” Langdon was by no means unique. In a review of Waddell’s The Makers of Civilization in Race and History, H. L. Shapiro writes, “The reader does not need to peruse this work very far to become aware of its distinct bias and unscientific method” in Pacific Affairs 3, no. 12 (December 1930): 1168. In a brief review of Waddell’s Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered, R. L. Turner said, “We are hurt that in this volume the author has made no acknowledgement of our valuable suggestion, contained in a review of one of his previous fantasies, of the intimate connexion between Tibet and top-hats.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4, no. 2 (January 1926): 376. 76 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2736. 77 December 2, 1954 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2738. 74 75

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The temple is holy 

  because it is not for

From Sargon of Agade



sale

a thousand years before T’ang78

Critical, philological consensus understands the sign Pound reads as “temple” to really mean “palace.” Indeed, even Waddell recognized the tenuousness of his interpretation. In 1964, Laughlin suggested to Pound they revise it accordingly, but Pound refused. Laughlin later told Eva Hesse, who had registered the error and suggested its correction, that Pound said “to put in a footnote that he picked up the error from Waddell, but otherwise leave it.”79 Pound’s authorial intentions override scholarly precision. No footnote was ever included.

Sound, sign, Canto 99 The value of Pound’s work with and on Chinese texts poses questions I cannot hope to answer, not least because I categorically lack the linguistic competence needed to properly assess Pound’s maverick sinology. Of course, it mattered a great deal to him that his poetry should not answer to the opinions of “experts” or measure up to standards of correctness (orthographic or factual) some pedantic busybody might try to impose. Pound’s philological poetics, insofar as he might practice these at all, were idiosyncratic and aleatory rather than rigorous and disciplined, designed to derail the sort of laborious and detailed work that has nevertheless helped me and doubtless many other readers understand what these cantos are all about. Attempting even a notionally comprehensive breakdown of every quotation, Cantos, 97/679. September 14, 1964 Letter to Eva Hesse, NDPC, 782.

78 79



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allusion, citation, and reiteration would be decidedly counter to the kind of reading Pound hoped for or that his verse properly requires. Christine Froula is surely right when she suggested that “however fundamental our scholarly tracing of sources and their interrelations is to a study of The Cantos, it is not in itself the act of reading Pound designed, and it is finally only groundwork and prelude to the actual challenge his poem including history presents.”80 I will attempt something more speculative: a species of commentary upon the nature of Pound’s commentary upon commentaries. Canto 99, unusually amongst the other cantos of Thrones, relies heavily upon a single intertextual source—namely F. W. Baller’s edition of The Sacred Edict. In its original form, Baller says in the preface, “the Sacred Edict consisted merely in the sixteen maxims of the Emperor K’ang-hsi, each containing seven words, and written in the highest literary style.” These terse, formal maxims were issued in 1670 as hortatory proclamations and posted in prominent positions in courts throughout the empire. In 1724, Iong-cheng, K’ang-hsi’s son and successor, had the edicts reissued, “superadding a series of expositions of his father’s texts, written in a simple literary style” or Uen-li.81 Totalling 10,000 characters, the Uen-li “amplifications” are nowhere near as highfalutin or concise as the maxims themselves; but according to William Milne, a translator and former student of Robert Morrison’s, nevertheless they are written in a style still “above the capacities of most of those who have had but a common education.”82 Consequently, the Salt Commissioner of Shensi, whose name Baller transliterates as one Uang-iu-p’uh—mentioned in the previous canto83—wrote a “paraphrase” of the foregoing in a still more Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 165. 81 F. W. Baller, ed. and trans., The Sacred Edict, 2nd ed. (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1907), iii. As Haoming Liu and Rong Ou both point out, this term—Uen-li in Baller; wenli in pinyin—for literary Chinese was common amongst Western missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth century but is no longer current today (wenyan 文 言 is now considered correct). See Haoming Liu, “Pharmaka and Volgar’ Eloquio: Speech and Ideogrammic Writing in Ezra Pound’s Canto XCVIII,” Asia Major 22, no. 2 (2009): 180; and Rong Ou, “‘The King’s Job, Vast as Swan-Flight’: More on The Sacred Edict in Canto 98 & 99,” Cambridge Journal of China Studies 9, no. 2 (2014): 65. To reiterate, unlike these scholars, who use pinyin in their discussions, I continue to use Pound’s romanizations as found in Mathews and Baller’s transliterations throughout this commentary in order to remain not only consistent with Mathews and Baller, but also because “correcting” Pound’s sinology can both obscure its idiosyncrasies and give it a scholarly veneer it purposefully lacks. 82 William Milne, “The Translator’s Preface,” in The Sacred Edict, ed. and trans. Willian Milne (London: Black, Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1817), viii. 83 Cantos, 98/686. 80

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simplified style, rendering the royal injunctions “easy, and the style acceptable to the people,” or as Pound also puts it in Canto 98, “in volgar’ eloquio taking the sense down to the people.”84 Baller’s translation—not to mention Pound’s canto—represents a further stage in the ongoing and ever-widening dissemination of K’ang-hsi’s maxims.85 As Bacigalupo put it succinctly, until Pound’s “gloss to a document of law,” Baller’s Sacred Edict was the “final link in a chain of transmission.”86 Baller’s edition of The Sacred Edict was designed to serve a specific purpose: to help Christian missionaries “acquire a good knowledge of colloquial” Chinese; in his edition of The Sacred Edict, “the Student will find a thesaurus of everyday words, phrases, and idioms” necessary to being “well understanded [sic] of the common people.”87 Consequently, Baller prints the text of the maxims and the Uen-li text of Iong-cheng together with his (Iong-cheng’s) original preface at the back of the book, but does not translate them because “to have translated them would have been foreign to [the] object in view.” As Terrell puts it in the headnote to his glossary of this canto, “For most of Canto 98, Pound used the language of the salt commissioner. For most of Canto 99, he goes to the Wen-li (Literary Text) of Yung Chêng, analyzes all the components of the characters, and gives the results in his own idiomatic or colloquial English.”88 Terrell’s supposition is corroborated by Kimpel and Eaves—“the fact that Pound often used Yong Ching’s version shows what progress he had made in reading Chinese”89—both of whom follow Gordon’s lead.90 Bacigalupo, on the other hand, contends that because he was “unable to read the untranslated Uen-li text, Pound concentrates, with the aid of Baller’s version, on Wang’s colloquial rendering.”91 The point here is not to gauge Pound’s proficiency in Chinese (which, based on letters to numerous Chinese correspondents, seems even at so late a stage as the composition of this canto, between February and

Ibid., 98/688. As Haoming Liu and others show, these maxims are not themselves exactly original, but elaborations on previously-issued maxims. Liu, “Pharmaka and Volgar’ Eloquio,” 180, n. 2. 86 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 372. 87 Baller, The Sacred Edict, iii. 88 Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 637. 89 Ben D. Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, “Pound’s ‘Ideogrammic Method’ as Illustrated in Canto 99,” American Literature 51, no. 2 (May 1979): 210. 90 David Gordon, “Thought Built on Sagetrieb,” Paideuma 3, no. 2 (Fall 1974): 169–90. 91 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 372. 84 85



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April 1957, to be rudimentary if always ingenious).92 I mean merely to draw attention to the fact that such differing opinions point to the vague nature of Pound’s textual references—an ambiguity that induces confusion about what Pound’s source text even is. Such bewilderment might be further exacerbated by the fact that Uang-iu-p’uh, whose “paraphrase” in the “vulgar’ eloquio” Pound made so much of in cantos 98–99 and in letters, may not have written the text that Baller attributes to him.93 In one sense, this should hardly change things for Pound, who said as early as “A Retrospect” that it “is tremendously important that great poetry be written, it makes no jot of difference who writes it.”94 Though Pound might have been unconcerned by such a misattribution of authorship (had he even known about it), he certainly could not have been oblivious to the ambiguities and problems of the actual source-texts at hand, by which I mean both Baller’s Sacred Edict and R. H. Mathews’ eponymous Chinese–English Dictionary. For example, Achilles Fang wrote to Pound on March 7, 1952 condemning Mathews as “scandalous” and Mathews himself as “downright stupid” about certain key concepts (such as the four TUAN Pound used frequently as leitmotif); Fang concedes, however, that because Mathews is based on Baller’s Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary,95 its author cannot be held responsible for all its stupidities.96 So too did Willis Hawley warn him against Mathews: “I much prefer Commercial Press ‘New C-E Dict’ because of arrangements by radicals and its 10,000 characters. Mat[hews] rates 3rd or 4th around here.”97 Pound’s ignoring such expert advice is central to his proselytizing in these cantos. In fact, “proselytizing” might be the mot juste Pound told David Wang in a February 18, 1957 letter that he still found the Wen-li difficult: “some Yong Ching very damnbiguous/ Salt commissioner much needed.” EPCF, 183. A letter from Willis Hawley to Pound on April 9, 1957, in response to a query about this very text, reads, “now you’re getting over my depth! I have never studied the Wen Li form of Chinese litt. 1 lifetime ain’t enough for that stuff! Better stop at Page 181.” EPP, 949. “Page 181” marks the boundary between Baller’s translation of text attributed to the Salt Commissioner and Iong-cheng’s Wen-li. The fact is, Pound is commenting on both texts, relying on Baller’s translations to find his way into the Wen-li. Or, as Thomas Grieve put it succinctly, “when it comes to Chinese,” Pound was always “translating translations.” See his introduction to “Ezra Pound / Willis Hawley Correspondence,” Line 1 (Spring 1983): 6. 93 Ou, “The King’s Job,” 66. Ou’s article traces the complex history of these texts’ transmission. 94 LE, 10. 95 R. H. Mathews, Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943); F. W. Baller, An Analytical Chinese–English Dictionary (Shanghai: China Inland Mission, 1900). 96 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPCF, 81. 97 April 24, 1957 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 949. Hawley, as aforementioned, was a fervent collector of Chinese dictionaries. He explained to Pound in this letter how “Mathews” is not properly himself the author of this dictionary: “Mat merely revised Inland Mission Dictionary along with whole staff

92

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insofar as the chain of transmission and renewal (a.k.a. sagetrieb)98 important to Pound’s thinking in this canto specifically—i.e., K’ang-hsi to Iong-cheng to Uang-iu-p’uh—and, more generally, to his entire post-Fenollosan engagement with Chinese literature, is facilitated through texts written, translated, and/ or edited by Christian missionaries.99 Indeed, Fang excoriated Mathews on account of the theological biases of its compilers: “I am sure old Baller or stupid Mathews was misled by ‘principle’, thinking that principle is the thing itself. So does the mind (if we may credit it to Xtians) of missionaries work.”100 Hawley made a related claim when he told Pound that “Mat[hews] did job for the glory of the Church.”101 Pound wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on September 1, 1950 that a “copy of Sacred Edict came this a.m. so I have (I suppose) some suitable & highly moral literature.”102 On September 23 he reported to Olga Rudge, “OBvious fr/ a.m. with the Sacred Edict that the stupidities of Eng. syntax are not to be born. vid. Cantos 59/ 60 Kang Hi wot wrote it. AND that the bloke who translated it lost a lot of fun. but has useful notes.”103 He wrote again to Rudge in November, “there ain’t no peace n’ quiet except in the Sacred Edict.”104 While the Confucian mandates expressed in the maxims are clearly of importance to Pound, by 1955 he had come to see the commentary—specifically the Salt Commissioner’s (or, whoever’s)—as the most important element of the work: “it is not the bare 16 points of the Edict, or the Yong Tching but

of experts under Gov’t subsidy in war-time […] He is already getting credit for whole job, of which not 5% was result of his effort.” 98 Cf. Gordon, “Thought Built on Sagetrieb,” 171. 99 Joseph-Anne-Marie de Mailla (Histoire Générale de la Chine), Séraphin Couvreur (Chou King), Robert Morrison (Dictionary of the Chinese Language), F. W. Baller (Sacred Edict) and R. H. Mathews (Chinese–English Dictionary) were all missionary scholars. The exception to the rule is of course Joseph Rock, but he exhibits an unqualified intrepidity that no doubt appealed in complementary ways to Pound’s own enterprising spirit of untrained and intuitional scholarly self-reliance. 100 Fang, March 7, 1952 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPCF, 81. Fang is referring here to the “four tuan.” Needless to say, Pound refused to believe Fang’s argument that the four tuan—love, duty, propriety, and wisdom—were not actually principles or foundations. Conceiving of them more as vague inklings, as Fang recommends, would have undercut Pound’s ethical program. But the fact remains that the very notion of stable semantic relations Pound found reified in Chinese was, so far as Fang was concerned, actually foreign to it: “as for the meaning of the four concepts, I am really at a loss to suggest any sensible translation. Perhaps it would be best not to try to translate them.” EPCF, 82. 101 April 24, 1957 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 949. 102 EPP, 2726. 103 Olga Rudge Papers, YCAL MSS 54, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 27, Folder 765. 104 Rudge Papers, Box 27, Folder 767.



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Wang’s expositions that gets up to Khati/ ‘the flaming light in the heart is one’s heaven’.”105 His later reflections are nevertheless consistent with his first: whether it be Baller’s notes or his translations of Uang-iu-p’uh’s own commentaries, the Edict’s paratexts first and foremost piqued his interest; not the text of the maxims themselves, but those subsequent to and concerned with them were of more importance. Canto 99 begins with ideogrammic writing about the transmission of the Edict’s commentaries:106 Till the blue grass turn yellow and the yellow leaves float in air And Iong Cheng (Canto 61) of the line of Kang Hi by the silk cords of the sunlight non disunia, 2nd year 2nd month 2nd day SHENG U, the Edict Each year in the elder spring, that is the first month of the spring time, The herald shall incite yr/ compliance There are six rites for festival and 7 instructions that all converge as the root tun1 pen3

The first two lines recall the three that conclude Canto 13: “The blossoms of the apricot / blow from east to the west, / And I have tried to keep them from falling.”107 Gordon offers a crafty explanation of their origin and meaning, supposing that Pound conceived them through a chance graphic similarity. The “ideogram chiang has an element on the right described by Karlgren as ‘intertwining trellis work’ which looks similar to the ‘blue grass’ radical: a typical instance of Poundian ideogrammic de-construction.” Likewise, “kuang has within it the ‘yellow’ radical.”108 Chiang3 (M645) 講, “To preach, to expound. To argue, to discuss. To speak” occurs in the Uen-li text (at page Ezra Pound, September 27, 1955 Letter to Boris de Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. 106 Cantos, 99/694. 107 Ibid., 13/60. 108 Gordon, “Thought Built on Sagetrieb,” 179–80. 105

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182) and does indeed contain the 174th radical ch’ing1 (M1168) 青, which Gordon defines as “blue grass,” but which Mathews defines only as “The colour of nature; green, blue, black”; and though kuang3 (M3590) 廣, the first of two characters in the phrase 廣訓 or “amplified instructions,” that is, the colloquial exposition, contains within it the 201st radical huang2 (M2297) 黃, “Yellow. It was the Imperial colour,” there seems little essential connection between them. While the lack of apparent causality might in fact be interpreted as the ideogrammic method in full swing, bringing together disparate terms to form new ideas in which the depth of thought is commensurate with its novelty, Gordon provides less of an explanation of these lines than a postfacto rationalization.109 We could heed Ford’s advice, namely to “get a dictionary and learn the meaning of words.” In doing so, we might notice that between the entry in Mathews for the ideogram ching1 (M1168) 青, “The colour of nature,” which is a leitmotif of the Sacred Edict section of Canto 98—one anticipated in some ways by the opening of Canto 90: “From the colour the nature / & by the nature the sign!”110—and the ideogram ching2 (M1170) 情, “The affections, the feelings,”111 we encounter an example of ching1 (M1168) in use, which strikes me as the likely inspiration for these lines: “青 黃 不 接 the green crops of this year will not be ripe before the yellow grain of last year is exhausted.”112 So what reads like a lyrically imagistic epigraph to an otherwise more straightforwardly propositional canto in fact encodes a piece of practical advice that speaks to an imperial undertaking laid out more discursively in Canto 61 to which we are directed. The relevant lines from which are probably: Kimpel and Eaves find Gordon’s explanation fantastic, though their own explanation seems equally unlikely: “This reminder of Nature and the seasons is basic to Pound’s world view and to his concept of Chinese society in particular, but could have been suggested by page 8 [of The Sacred Edict]: ‘Parents are like heaven. Heaven produces a blade of grass. The arrival of spring causing it to germinate, and autumn coming to kill it with frost, are equally the will of heaven’.” Kimpel and Eaves, “Pound’s ‘Ideogrammic Method’ as Illustrated in Canto 99,” 224. 110 Cantos, 90/605. 111 Ching1 (M1168), a.k.a. radical 174, is actually a component of ching2 (M1170), which is a combination of ching1 (M1168) and the the 61st radical hsin1 (M2736), “The heart. The moral nature, the mind, the affections. Intention.” Hence the line at Cantos, 98/689—“that his feelings have the colour of nature”—is literal in the sense that the word “feelings” does really contain (have in it) “the colour of nature.” 112 Mathews, Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary, 165; example 67. The ideograms appear in Mathews as: ching1 (M1168), already defined; huang2 (M2297), “Yellow”; pu4-5 (M5379), “Not; a negative”; chieh1-5 (M800), “To receive; to welcome; to meet. To take with the hand; to accept.” Hence, I suppose in Pound’s mind anyway, “to harvest.” 109



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A 100,000 pund capital wd/ mean Thirty thousand great measures At moderate price we can sell in the spring to keep the market price decent And still bring in a small revenue which should be used for getting more next crop AMMASSI or sane collection, to have bigger provision for next year, that is, augment our famine reserve and thus to keep the rice fresh in store house. IN time of common scarcity; to sell it at the just price in extraordinary let it be lent to the people and in great calamities, give it free Lieou-yu-y Approved by the EMPEROR113

Or, as Pound puts it more succinctly early on in Canto 99 (a rare instance in which Pound’s attempted simplification actually makes something simpler): “Food is the root. / Feed the people.”114 Like any extended passage in The Cantos, immediate frame of reference is always double, gesturing at once internally, towards earlier treatments, and externally, towards whatever reading material Pound was presently engaging. An internal reference more proximate than Canto 61 of this canto’s opening passage is not far to seek insofar as it recycles, with striking fidelity, these closing lines of Canto 98: Iong Ching, Canto 61

of the light of 

by the silk cords of the sunlight, Chords of the sunlight (Pitagora) non si disuna (xiii) Splendour 2nd year 2nd month Cantos, 61/335. Ibid., 99/695.

113 114

hsien

ming,

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2nd day   as to the Sheng  The Edict.

“Each year in the Elder Spring, that is the first month of it, The herald shall invite your compliance. There are six rites for the festival and that all should converge!115

In attempting to account for the close affinity between these cantos it is perhaps important to note that Pound initially wanted to publish them together in a single periodical;116 that they were first published separately, and on different continents, means that the boon of wide dissemination was countered by lowered cohesion.117 That said, such reiterations in Canto 98 and Canto 99 should not go unnoticed, especially in cantos ostensibly about textual transmission and the integrity of a message to be conveyed with frequency to those in need of it. The repetition is probably therefore rhetorical as well as pedagogical. That the repeated lines “2nd year, 2nd month, 2nd day” are taken from Iong-cheng’s “preface” (Pound had enough Chinese to get at least that far) means that Pound is soliciting our particular attention to the preface, foregrounding Iong-cheng’s historic re-presentations of the maxims, and by extension making paratext central to the disquisition that follows.118 There are, of course, numerous differences between these passages. In the short space of a single page “Iong Ching” becomes “Iong Cheng”; “disuna” (the word Dante used in Paradiso XIII, line 56) becomes “disunia” (a hapax legomenon—the antithesis of reiterated terminology); and the local herald Ibid., 98/693. “I think Mag/ better have BOTH 98 and 99. I am doing 99 with only one ideogram/ AND it is useful to clarify what is postulated in 98 that makes 24 pages typescript 38–40 lines per page, IF he wants it.” Ezra Pound, December 1, 1957 Letter to Mary de Rachewiltz, EPP, 2756. 117 “Canto 98,” L’Illustrazione Italiana 85, no. 9 (September 1958): 34–9; “Canto 99,” Virginia Quarterly Review 34, no. 3 (Summer 1958): 339–54. The latter actually appeared first. 118 Baller, The Sacred Edict, 183. The ideograms in question are those set apart from the rest of the text, i.e., the nine characters comprising the sixth column from the right. Pound might have felt the actual date of the Uen-li less significant than its format, which in classical Chinese texts are usually keyed not to some abstract origin but to the reign of living monarchs. (There exists, too, an analogy here to the era fascista.) During the Washington years, Pound was obsessed with the dates of estimable rulers: drafts of Rock-Drill and Thrones show him constantly making quick calculations of the durations of various reigns. For an example of this in print, see Cantos, 85/549. 115 116



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tasked with inviting compliance in Canto 98 will instead “incite” it in Canto 99. But by far the most striking difference between the conclusion to Canto 98 and the opening of Canto 99 is the latter’s recension of ideograms. I say “recension” because the passage that ends Canto 98 and which begins Canto 99 only appears once in manuscript form, meaning one passage has been used and then reused. The lines that introduce Canto 99, in other words, are those that close Canto 98, except with the ideograms left out. (Indeed, manuscripts show that Pound might not have originally conceived of these lines as either the end or beginning of the canto he was writing. But the recension of Chinese characters for Canto 99 is clearly intentional.)119 Letters to Charlotte Kohler of the Virginia Quarterly Review, in the pages of which Canto 99 first appeared, show that Pound made a conscious decision to limit the number of Chinese characters included therein (there are only four in total).120 Being careful not to burden the long-suffering reader (or new editor) with an overplus of taxing linguistic exotica, Pound could present this canto to Kohler as reasonably approachable. On March 19, 1958 he wrote: Don’t be alarmed by the photo of ideograms most of them are for canto 98 / and only four have to be put on lead blocks for 99 […] There is NOTHING in the chinese words (spelled out in english letters) or in the ideograms which is not stated in the english text. They are merely underlinings to emphasize the source of the statements, ideas.121

Pound had insisted upon ideogrammic “underlining” before, once in a It looks as though originally Pound may have intended to end Canto 98 at line 229—“and with the colour of nature”—and to begin the next canto with “+ Iong Cheng (Canto 61) / of the light of 顯 hsien / 明 ming / by the silk cords of the sunlight,” having written “Canto” with a line under it near the top of his page. The first two lines of Canto 99, however, do not appear in the original mss, which, notwithstanding several significant omissions, is published roughly as Pound wrote it. They are found instead in Notebook 97, dated November 10, 1955 to February 4, 1956, preceding the composition of Canto 99 by about a year. EPP, 4965. The drafts of Canto 99 are otherwise contained in two notebooks: Notebook 106 contains the most substantial portion of the draft, along with numerous cancelled lines; Notebook 107 contains the remainder of the canto. EPP, 4974 and 4975. 120 It was originally Pound’s plan to publish Canto 99 with one solitary ideogram in the margins. As he wrote to Mary de Rachewiltz on December 7, 1957, “am not putting ideograms (apart from one) in 99, to show that the sense runs on without them. also simplifies printer’s labor.” EPP, 2756. The point to take away here is that Pound is making a connection between contiguity of sense and a simplified typesetting. 121 Letter to Charlotte Kohler, EPP, 2461. 119

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headnote to Cantos LII-LXXI: “other foreign words and ideograms both in these two decads and in earlier cantos enforce the text but seldom if ever add anything not stated in the english”; and again at the end of Canto 85: “Meaning of the ideograms is usually given in the English text.”122 Canto 99, however, represents a significant development in this paradigm: no longer does Pound represent ideograms graphically (not including the aforementioned four exceptions) but phonetically, as romanized transliterations. This seemingly innocuous move is actually one of Pound’s most significant textual distortions. Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary, Pound’s main lexicographic reference during his Washington years, is organized according to the classification of the Chinese alphabet known then as “Chinese Phonetic Script” (注 音 字 母) as used in the Dictionary of the Chinese National Language (obsolete since 1932);123 the romanizations deployed in Mathews are based on Wade’s Syllabary. The point is that Pound’s dictionary encouraged him to pay attention to sound. Two undated notebooks contain nothing but phonetically organized definitions of Chinese, presumed groundwork for the “Preliminary Survey” of Chinese sounds, wherein Pound postulates tendencies such as “ü” sounds pertain to “gradual action”; “y” sounds pertain to branching or united energy; “j” sounds pertain to “hard and soft,” and so on.124 This phonetic rather than visual emphasis—in which Chinese words are “spelled out in English letters”—is a recurrent feature of Pound’s thinking, writing, and teaching during the Washington years: “the block prints with tone circles = which hellup the iggurunt; I am (after all), working for them as wants ter learn.125 A passage such as this might seem like a concession to the Anglophone reader— To discriminate things shih2-5 solid 2 mu a pattern fa1 laws Cantos, 256, 85/559. Mathews, Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary, vi. 124 Notebook 104, EPP, 4972. These examples are taken directly from the notebook cited here, but Zhaoming Qian reprints the “Preliminary Survey” in EPCF, 207–28. The Beinecke dates these notebooks 1956–7, but Pound sent the survey to Fang in January 1951. 125 Pound, “Ezra Pound / Willis Hawley Correspondence,” 10. 122 123



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kung1 public szu1 private126

—not least since Pound also defines his terms. But far from concessionary, such passages are not, as Grieve puts it, efforts to “goad his readers’ curiosity and industry.”127 Masquerading as some sort of literalism, this represents a disfiguration of the source text, one that makes it, in fact, harder for the reader to understand Pound’s text (and harder to detect the difficulty). The phonetic transferral of words from Baller’s text into Pound’s own not only decontextualizes them, but gives them in a form that impedes recontextualization. In a bygone world, one before Terrell’s Companion and the scholarship upon which it is based, a reader confronted with what Davie famously described as the announced “illegibility” of Canto 85128 would have had to learn to look up characters in Mathews. One can acquire this ability following some measure of application and patience (and trial and error) without too much trouble. Or again, tracing Pound’s sources in Couvreur based on his in-poem citations of chapter and verse (provided one can draw on at least some knowledge of French or Latin and has access to a copy of the Chou King) is relatively straightforward. But reading a text that presents its ideograms solely as romanized transliterations introduces a new kind of obscurantism, a new obstacle between reader and Pound’s source. Pedagogical goading aside, the sudden change of approach is legible as a technique designed to recreate the experience of The Sacred Edict’s first audiences, who, unable to understand the maxims on account of their highly compressed literary style, needed to have them explicated in increasingly straighter talk (this would be to cast Pound in the role of Village Explainer, as Stein famously called him); as in “‘This clean out and that’s all.’ / Sd/ Chu, the accomplished / re Tao talk / ‘e basta’. Thazz all there is to it.”129 The move towards greater simplicity—no more Chinese characters, just approximations of what they should sound like when spoken aloud—is more apparent than real. As Bernhard Karlgren writes in Sound and Symbol in Chinese: the literary language lacks, as we have already said, all those elucidative means Cantos, 99/694. Grieve, “Ezra Pound / Willis Hawley Correspondence,” 8. 128 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 205. 129 Cantos, 99/700. 126 127

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created by the colloquial idiom for distinguishing the homophones. There are, of course, in the edict any number of those short words which are entirely unsuggestive to the ear because they sound exactly like dozens of others.130

Karlgren’s point was not news to Pound. As he wrote to David Wang on March 21, 1957, “wot is the min chih party/ it’s [sic] badge not in ideogram/ the people’s WHAT party, there being 5000 chihs.”131 Karlgren is distinguishing between the compressed literary language and the more loquacious colloquial (loquacious because its denotations are clarified by “elucidative compounds”).132 Regardless of whether Pound is referencing the literary Uen-li or the more colloquial commentary of the Salt Commissioner, he still writes in a highly paratactic style. The risk inherent in doing so solely in transliteration (the written equivalent of speech) is a confusion that is at best annoying, at worst counterproductive. Trying to trace back, for instance, what Mathews gives as the definition for pien1 hu4 at line 36 of Canto 99, one might turn to entries given for characters romanized as pien and proceed to try to find a definition of a sinograph in the first tone that roughly corresponds—or which could be laterally related—to “cognome, indirizzo” (this assumes that the foregoing Italian words correspond to the transliterations in the first place). For example, pien1 (M5225), “A Bamboo sledge”? No. Pien1 (M5227), “The penis of a horse”? Hopefully not. Pien1 (M5234), “The bream, the carp”? No. What about pien1 (M5236), “A stone probe”? There are several other characters belonging to the romanization pien1, including “A side, a border”; “a splint basket”; “Determined, in a bad sense”; “to run to and fro”; “a leaf of a book”; “a skiff ”; and “to walk with a limp.” It turns out that Mathews gives an example under pien1 (M5231) 編, “To plait, to weave. To fabricate” as follows: “ 編 戶 a registered person,” that is, someone with a name and an address, “a recurrent axiom of Fascist thought which Pound repeats often in his prose: ‘We are tired of a government in which there is no responsible person having a front name, a hind name and an address’.”133 This is a text that demands accountability-through-identity and Bernhard Karlgren, Sound and Symbol in Chinese (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), 38–9. EPCF, 187. Karlgren was an important influence on Pound; his work certainly encouraged Pound to consider phonetics as well as graphics. The romanization of Chinese in the “Key to Pronunciation” in Pound’s 1954 The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius adopts and adapts Karlgren’s system. 132 Karlgren, Sound and Symbol in Chinese, 32. 133 Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 417, n. 48. 130 131



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yet proceeds unaccountably, splitting sound and symbol. Far from underlining meanings, Pound’s transliterations forge new ambiguities. Karlgren continues: So long as one follows the text with the eye, one can easily distinguish by means of the different characters all the is, sïs, chïs, &c., but as soon as one takes the eye from the paper, and relies solely upon the ear, the sentences teem with homophones, and the result is complete incomprehensibility.134

Even Hesse, Pound’s most scrupulous reader, was defeated by several instances of homophones without graphics. She wrote to Laughlin, “perhaps you could see if Olga can settle the following two left-over questions that I was unable to solve myself […] please supply ideograms to fan1 hua4, which is unintelligible without them.”135 Meaning that in Canto 99, Pound has taken our eyes from the paper. In exchange for being able to vocalize his verse, we cannot very easily trace it to source; now we read:136 Kuang Kuang Ming Ming tien t’ang2 hsin1 li3-5

Saith Khaty

Pound has in mind here kuang1 (M3583) 光, “Light; favour; brightness; honour. To illumine. Glossy”; and ming2 (M4534) 明, “Bright, clear, intelligent. Light, brilliant. To understand. To illustrate. To cleanse.”137 The first four lines instantiate in a more literal way the “doubled kuang1 ming2” mentioned earlier in the canto,138 but aside from such autarkic self-referentiality, the phonetic representation gives readers precious little to go on, attenuating whatever is Karlgren, Sound and Symbol in Chinese, 39. January 20, 1964 Letter, NDPC, 2921a. Pound himself was sensitive to the difficulties that homophones present readers. He writes in Canto 104, “Can you tell pao three from pao four, a wild cat: 豹 da radice torbida / is no clarity.” Cantos, 104/740. 136 Cantos, 99/702. 137 Not without historical irony, the Guangming Daily (光 明 日 報) was a Beijing-based newspaper launched in 1949 by the China Democratic League that, by 1957, the same year Pound wrote these lines, had come under direct control of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, which used the paper to attack intellectuals. Or so saith Wikipedia. 138 Cantos, 99/699. 134 135

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meant to be conveyed. Moreover, the initial draft actually included graphic presentations not of kuang or ming (we should know what these mean to Pound by now) but of tien1 (M6361) 天, “The material heaven, the firmament. The sky. Heaven. The weather, a day”; t’ang2 (M6107) 堂, “A hall; a reception room; a meeting place”; hsin1 (M2735) 心, “The heart. The moral nature, the mind, the affections. Intention”; and li3–4 (M3865) 裏, “Within, inside. A lining.” Such graphic representations have been, here and throughout, omitted in the process of transmission from manuscript to typescript. Terrell glosses this as “Heaven’s temple is in the heart,” but since tien1 t’ang2 together mean “paradise,” Pound probably intends these transliterations as a repeat of the leitmotif introduced in the first line of Canto 93: “‘A man’s paradise is his good nature’ / sd Kati.”139 This way of engaging with Chinese—sonically rather than visually—is remarkably different from what Kimpel and Eaves call Pound’s more familiar practice of “‘enriched’ paraphrase,” or what Feng Lan more recently named Pound’s tendency towards “etymographic” character analysis.140 Citing line 290—“a low-flow and a liu2 flow”—Kimpel and Eaves suggest that, because the u in “liu2” is pronounced o, Pound makes “a real sound pun, perhaps the only true instance of one in the canto and the only case we can think of (if it were not accidental) where Pound paid attention to the sound of Chinese.”141 This observation is undoubtedly true; but in Canto 99 Pound everywhere attends to sound. Where once he would have demanded ideograms, now Pound writes only:142 VIII. Let the laws be made clear, Illumine the words of procedure, Peace comes of good manners Feng1 su2-5 li feng su INTENZIONE li feng su jang4

Terrell offers no gloss on these transliterations, a reticence justified in the headnote to his commentary on this canto: “lines will not be glossed unless the meaning in context is unclear.” Terrell’s earlier use of the term “idiomatic” Ibid., 93/623. Kimpel and Eaves,“Pound’s ‘Ideogrammic Method’ as Illustrated in Canto 99,” 232; Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 32. 141 Kimpel and Eaves, “Pound’s ‘Ideogrammic Method’ as Illustrated in Canto 99,” 214. 142 Cantos, 99/698. 139 140



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is the precise word here, insofar as idiom is defined by the OED as “a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words.” Though the context here conveys Pound’s sense that “Feng1 su2-5 li feng su” means “Peace comes of good manners,” this isn’t really a translation. Nor does Pound’s gloss, actually, result from any kind of analysis of characters, but instead cribs Baller’s translation of the first sentence of Uang’s commentary on the ninth’s maxim, “Elucidate Courteousness, with a view to improving the Manners and Customs.” Baller writes, “The peace of the Empire depends entirely upon the existence of good manners and customs.”143 These transliterations are from Mathews: Li3 (M3886), “Good manners”; fêng1 (M1890), “Wind, breath”; su2–5 (M5497), “Vulgar, common. Worldly. Unrefined. Lay, in contrast to clerical”; jang4 (M3985), “To yield, to resign; to cede. Politely, yielding.” Far from the language of elucidative commentary, these characters are four of the seven characters in K’ang-hsi’s original maxim: 明 禮 諼 以 厚 風 俗; a maxim, let us be reminded, deemed by early Chinese commentators too abstruse to be functional. In offering a commentary that reads like an elucidation of transliterations that have been themselves abstracted from both context and graphic representation but which in fact is not technically speaking an elucidation at all, the poem slips precipitously towards a kind of privation that is also an idiosyncratic privacy (indeed, idios means own, private; while idiousthai means “to make one’s own”). It is at once curiously plain spoken—there is no other canto in Thrones comparably so straightforward, a “you-do-this-but-don’t-do-that” canto—and recalcitrant, cryptic about its operations. The instructions are explicit but their source, and hence their authority, is withheld, beyond inspection. While this canto demonstrates beyond doubt that Pound was attempting to engage with Chinese phonetics, an engagement he himself admitted to having avoided hitherto, it also shows how far the mere engagement with a language’s phonetics is from its understanding. In saying this, I am referring actually to my own experience of reading this canto, not Pound’s of writing it: the presentation of ideograms in romanized transliteration not only tells me nothing practical about the meaning of the text Pound comments upon, reacts to, or translates, but deeply impedes any search for the referent because even Baller, The Sacred Edict, 99.

143

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the often futile hunt for a character or a definition that might prove to be the likely inspiration for whatever gloss I am hoping to clarify mostly leads me only as far as the dictionary. Engaging in the laborious process of reading— encountering a transliteration in The Cantos; identifying likely corresponding characters in Mathews; returning to The Cantos in order to make educated guesses about the likely chapter to which Pound refers; going to Baller’s Sacred Edict and trying to find the character in either the Uen-li or Uang’s text to confirm the character; then either scanning Baller’s translation for possible sources of citation or “deconstructing” complex ideograms into their constituent elements in order to develop a rationalization for Pound’s own interpretations—cannot be the kind of reading practice Pound wanted for us or which we should subject ourselves to (it is hardly reading at all, and certainly not the immersive experience of the book being a ball of light in the hand). Nor does this canto “illumine the words of procedure”—in this case those of K’ang-hsi’s maxims, Iong-cheng’s amplifications, and Uang’s paraphrase; rather than illumination, we experience the obfuscation of procedure per se. So what is going on here? Pound’s enthusiastic attention to and presentation of Chinese sounds in this canto is, I want to suggest, the latest development in the long schedule of complications Pound presents his reader.144 Since at least 1952, Pound had begun to think of Chinese (at least in part) as being a network of complex ciphers, whose structure was not necessarily coincident with their significance. As he wrote to Fang, “often meaning not important. but want some indication of approx sound.”145 In this canto—but I would suggest the tendency is discernible in Pound’s lifelong anathema for philology—the very emblem of Pound’s commitment, that is, the ideogram, undergoes a species of dematerialization, even desemanticization. Granted, Pound gives tone numbers almost consistently, which serve to narrow the range of possible meanings, but withholding the word itself—Pound’s transliterations are neither English nor Chinese—is calculated to assert the authority of the poet over both the languages he uses. Not that Pound set out to write ambiguously in Canto 99; instead, idiosyncrasy and intention, not discursivity That said, a reader only encounters the difficulty I am trying to describe if he or she insists in reading a certain way (call it philologically). Should the reader abandon an approach to reading akin to “study,” instead trusting the validity of Pound’s illuminations, these problems disappear, and Canto 99 becomes the easiest canto in Thrones. 145 January 14, 1952 Letter to Achilles Fang, EPCF, 73. 144



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or convention, underpin the precision of his terminology. The new attention to transliteration, giving the reader some semblance of Chinese sonority, as well as the careful preference for tone signatures, indicates that in Canto 99 Pound prioritizes sound above sense (i.e., reference). When Pound writes that “Mr Baller animadverts on the similarities / in all priestcraft” and then refers the reader to “(vide subject: ‘Missions’ in Canto whatever),”146 the implication is that the reader know in advance the precise reference imprecisely referred to. This is in part a function of Pound’s own entirely human inability to remember everything about this sprawling poem as well as of the fact that this canto, like several others written during his incarceration at St. Elizabeths, is little more than a transcription of a first draft, often hastily composed. But it does also convey something about Pound’s ideal mode of communication: one where meanings are transmitted and received despite errors in orthography, withheld page references, and Chinese given only in its most attenuated forms. Pound writes towards the end of Canto 99, “Precise terminology is the first implement / dish and container,”147 and his poetics throughout seem to recommend precision in terminology as actually a critique of language pointed towards its content, instead advocating a precision that pits forms against content. The precision implied by a line like “wu2 mu ch’i2 ying2 pei2 li4” is, presumably, prosodic rather than semantic. As Zhaoming Qian usefully suggests, “in Thrones, it seems Pound designates the tones not so much for differentiating meaning as for signalling Chinese cadence […] Canto 99 is one of Pound’s most lyrical cantos.” If this assertion surprises some readers, so might Qian’s subsequent observation, namely that in totalling 160 words, there is more Chinese in Canto 99 than in any other canto, including the ultra-Chinese Canto 85 (which contains a comparatively meager 104 characters).148 The success or failure of Pound’s engagement with Chinese cadence is not for me to judge, a circumstance that perforce includes most of Pound’s projected readership, so that the poetry might in a very real sense formally resist appraisal (and critique)—a kind of one-way channel of communication the canto’s pedagogical model also seems Cantos, 99/701. Ibid., 99/711. 148 Zhaoming Qian, The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 217. 146 147

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to advocate. Qian politely reserves his own criticism, observing merely that “in Canto 99, Pound shows his passionate rejection of a prolonged indifference to melopœia in Chinese,” but tempers this with the proviso that “we still cannot conclude that by the late 1950s Pound had come to grips with the place of Chinese sound.”149 Achilles Fang was more forthright, responding to a request for commentary upon a 16-character poem Pound wrote in Chinese: [it] cannot mean what you intend […] As for the sounds, there are too many gutterals and too many of what the vorchristlicher Christ called snake sounds; one labial does not seem to relieve the overwrought alliteration. And rhyme? The fourth line sounds like a jeu d’esprit. Sorry to disappoint you.150

By February 4, 1956, Pound had still not fully resigned himself to the Mathews system of romanization, rebuffing Achilles Fang for “wanting to satisfy [his] letch for precision” by lamenting, “Gaw Damn it/ there is NO alphabetic representation of chinese sound, let alone any fad of spelling it in amurkn alPHAbet that will fit 27 different kinds of chinkese thru 3000 years.”151 A propos of this, Pound informed Fang, “[I] got to find some means of fixing approx sound in remains of disjecta mente.”152 A few weeks later Pound wrote concerning “the total impossibility to form any idea of REAL sound of any language save HEARING it spoken.” He continued in this February 1952 letter to Fang: But I have not the slightest idea whether there is ANY similarity between the noise I make when “singing” the syllables. (EVEN supposing that I had some faint concept of what the difference between tones 1, 2, 3, 4 are.) Which I have NOT. and am unlikely to obtain from ANY printed statement about it. unless illustrated by musical notes. 153

Mathews writes in his “Introduction on Pronunciation” that “it goes without saying that in Chinese, as in any non-tonal language, the pitch of the speaking Ibid., 218. September 3, 1954 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPCF, 76. 151 EPCF, 156. 152 January 25, 1952 Letter to Achilles Fang, EPCF, 75. 153 EPCF, 77. 149 150



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voice glides portamento fashion instead of jumping from one pitch to another discontinuously. Thus, no resemblance to the Chinese tones could be got by playing any sequence of notes on a keyed instrument.”154 Pound was not only ignoring advice against over-reliance on Mathews, but ignoring also Mathews’ own admonitions.155 Lexicological transgression is the name of the game in Canto 99, a fact Pound announces explicitly. His drawing attention to such distortions recalls that earlier admission from Canto 85 following an etymographic character analysis, another implicit instance of the tag line “no, that is not philological.”156 Firstly, Focus of men of ability solidified our good customs. Shut out graceful bigots and moderate thundering phalloi (this is mistranslation)157

The fact is underlined towards the end of the canto, which concludes with an insistence upon the non-textuality of Pound’s gloss on Iong-cheng’s paraphrase of the seventh maxim: All I want is a generous spirit in customs 1st/ honest man’s heart demands sane curricula (no, that is not textual) Let him analyze the trick programs and fake foundations The fu jen receives heaven, earth, middle and grows.158

Mathews, Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary, xv. Unless of course the instrument he had in mind was not “keyed,” like, say Olga’s violin. The larger point being, however, that musical notation as a guide to pronouncing Chinese is not a serviceable analogy. It also goes against his own insistence that one can’t learn pronunciation by reading about it. 156 Cantos, 85/544. 157 Ibid., 99/710. The original manuscript reads “(this is a mistranslation) / according to Mathews,” indicating that the contortion Pound notes originates not with him but with his source (but, again, both source and authority are withheld). The consequence of this shift is to appropriate an expression of opinion in a source text and make it a statement of authorized fact. Notebook 107, EPP, 4975. 158 Cantos, 99/711. 154 155

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That the Wen-li gives 朕 惟 欲 厚 風 俗,先 正 人 心。欲 正 人 心,先 端 學 術 159 is immaterial because this is, despite a definite and traceable affinity to the “source,” very much Ezra Pound speaking, as Terrell rightly notes, in his own idiomatic (appropriating, privatizing) style. The “I” in “All I want” might be attributed to the emperor, as in “This much I, Chên, have heard. Yo el rey.”160 But the first-person pronoun might just as easily be attributed to Pound himself, not least because he clearly endorses these expressed beliefs. The ambiguity between authorities is managed precisely by the deliberate obfuscation of source text and reference, an obfuscation reconceived as a new instance of communicative clarity. In a notebook entry dated “Ap. 2” (1957), Pound writes: Chen (yo el rey) wd like to see you come to perfection lo4-5 kuan1 ch’êng2 cant bear to see yu abrogate (jên 2 two) (fei four) the gent’s job (chin three) is to watch language to care for the idiom that is forced in translation.161

I wonder, then, whether or not the obfuscation of the source text, whilst clearly appropriating its content and sometimes its tone, is in fact essential to the structure of Pound’s own authority in Thrones, in which forcing translations and abandoning philological curation in favor of romanizations that, technically speaking, belong to no actual language, is construed as exemplary of the gentlemanly act of caring for the idiom. According to this logic, obscuring the textual record, as Pound does in Canto 99, is really a means of keeping it straight, albeit “in a / spoken tradition,”162 a kind of inverted philology (for Baller, The Sacred Edict, 194. For the reader who, like me, is ignorant of Chinese, these characters are to be found in the seventh line from the right, descending from the top. 160 Cantos, 99/695, 99/709. 161 Notebook 108, EPP, 4976. 162 Ibid. 159



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Pound, philology entails undue care to the written record, a care that in trying to set the record straight actually destroys its integrity). The attenuation of a clear connection with the source text (unlike in Canto 85, in Canto 99 Pound does not normally quote chapter and verse,163 neither anticipating nor inviting such radial reading) tends to loosen deictic signifiers from their referents. Despite the fact that Canto 99 appears absolutely encumbered by a deep fascination with the written, material artifact, its actual function is to fantasize an oral tradition exempt from textuality per se.164

Definition by exclusion It is pretty common for critics to find Canto 100 something of a let-down, given its numerical significance, not least since The Cantos had at one time been modeled, however loosely, on Dante’s Commedia. On “27 or 28 December 1954” Pound jotted down the following, meaning he had not yet abandoned the idea: “joyce odys as outline / E.P. Divine Commedia as general form.”165 As Bacigalupo put it, “What could have been a telos, the hundredth canto, goes by with little to distinguish it from the rest.”166 It may not be the best Thrones canto, but it certainly took the longest to write. Some of the earliest post-Pisan canto material is included in Canto 100. Large portions of the canto are contained in Notebook 72, dating from mid-1951; and the canto concludes with the date “1 Jan ’58,” though was not actually published until December that year, in Yale Literary Magazine.167 That said, even as late as 1968, Pound still had not “finished” it. He told Laughlin that he wanted

There are several exceptions to this rule: “14.5” on page 706 refers us to the fifth paragraph of Baller’s translation of Uang’s commentary on the fourteenth maxim. Baller, The Sacred Edict, 152. Occasional Roman numerals indicate which maxim/corresponding commentary is under consideration, but these headings are neither consistently given nor do they tend to pertain to more than the single line in which they are found. 164 An anecdote: in a March 16, 1990 Letter from Frederick Morgan to Linda Tucker of Black Sun Books, Morgan tells Tucker that Pound would habitually make corrections on proofs and pass them to Dorothy Pound, who would subsequently have telephoned them to the then-managing editor of Hudson Review, Lisa Dyer. HRA, Subseries 3A. Sagetrieb or the oral tradition indeed. Note also that Canto 99 was amongst the only Thrones cantos Pound made an audio recording of, done just before leaving Washington. 165 Notebook 90, EPP, 4958. 166 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 344. 167 Ezra Pound, “Canto C,” Yale Literary Magazine 12, no. 5 (December 1959): 45–50. 163

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a fragment published in 1942 called “Canto Preceding (72 Circa)” added to Canto 100, even though it had already been in print for almost nine years. Pound asked for it to be retitled “From Canto C” and included in Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CVIII, published in 1969 as a means of protecting copyright after Ed Sanders’ Fuck You Press “freak[ed] into print” a pirated copy, procured via Donald Hall, in 1967. Laughlin dissuaded Pound from calling it that on the grounds that “it would foul up our title.”168 Add this to the long list of things Pound wanted but never got. The verses in question were eventually incorporated into Drafts & Fragments as “Addendum for C,” though as Richard Taylor has observed, the lines beginning “now rise in ram sign” were never supposed to be included in this,169 thus constituting an instance wherein the editing of The Cantos proceeded without interpretation. Here, editing took place in lieu of it. The point being that dates of composition for Canto 100 are effectively 1942–68. Traces of it, ranging from a single line to several pages of as-published text, can be found in six of the twenty-two Rock-Drill notebooks. Similarly, additional lines for it are extant in at least four of the twenty-five Thrones notebooks. Disappointing though the poetry might be, structurally, Canto 100 is cumulative, a recombination of twenty years’ work. Its typescripts are rather more chaotic, subject to greater editorial attention (and concomitant revision and cancellation) than was Pound’s norm at this time. Parataxis, as a basic principle underlying his poetics, has built into it a strong editorial impetus. A first draft of Canto 102 offers a relatively coherent example of the way in which definition by exclusion works in the compositional process. The notebook does not contain a complete draft of the poem: the opening two lines are splintered off from the body of the draft by several pages, not all of it particularly Canto-esque material (doggerel, etc);170 while the last lines contained in this notebook that would appear in Canto 102 are those concerning Tcheou, who said “they ought to be brother-like” (meaning that the Na-khi material in the lines that follow was a later addition). But in the Laughlin, June 27, 1968 Letter to Kimberley Merker, NDPC, 2917. Richard Taylor, “Reconstructing Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Variorum Edition—Manuscript Archive— Reading Text,” in Ezra Pound and America, ed. Jacqueline Kaye (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 143. 170 The last two lines of the doggerel in question confirm what we already know: “In any case let us lament the psychosis / of all those who abandon the Muses for Moses.” Notebook 91, EPP, 4959. 168 169



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main, Canto 102 as printed is a selection of lines taken from a more copious original text. The method here is not unlike that of Canto 89: + the gods be thy martyrs swig it down, no attention to vintage μαψιδίως what did Athene say she was up to? toting iron they read the Odyssey + do not nor see why Penelope waited κεῖνος . . εώργει 693 religion not being a racket That Leucothea rose as an incense bush. Orchamus, in Babylon resisting twice Apollo + after twice 500 years years [sic] her shrub was burnt for that sea-gull we presume est deus in nobis somebody’s colony κρήδεμνον she being of Cadmus’ line. A colony of Phaeacians + snow’s lace washed there as sea-foam but the lot of ’em Yeats, Possum, old Wyndham 不 no ground beneath ’em in his age @ say 70 Wyndham learning Orage had of course

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said so or @ least noted directions divers directions but for god 2 weeks before broadcast last + only write not for men but for — that kept him going 30 years, 40 years indirizzi . . ‘per ragione vale’ + their black shawls still for Demeter171

And so forth. The line “per ragione vale,” excluded from Canto 102 but extant in the parallel passage in Canto 98—a canto that also contains a fleeting reference to Orage, elaborated upon here—indicates a common origin for these two passages. In fact, there is no comparable separate draft of the parallel passage in 98, meaning that Pound would have consulted the same mss section twice, once during the typescript composition of Canto 98, and again during that for Canto 102. This is another example of the reiterative impulse in Pound’s writing. Such echoes are usually considered structural devices, akin to repetitions in Homeric poetics, that is, “recomposition in performance.”172 But the striking feature of the transitional cantos in Thrones, that is, Cantos 100–105, is that they emerge largely from a body of writing much larger than the actual cantos themselves. Put otherwise, Pound wrote a great deal more than he decided to publish. First drafts were not initial ideas to be elaborated upon, but represented an overplus which needed to be cut back.

Notebook 91, EPP, 4959. Gregory Nagy, “Poetics of Repetition in Homer,” Greek Ritual Poetics, ed. D. Yatromanolakis and P. Roilos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 139.

171 172



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Epos ≠ Eros Canto 102 presents readers with a sustained ideogram about reading, writing, orthography, and textual transmission. It contains, in brief: a derisory remark relating to the quote unquote illiteracy of the US Senate; a (possibly) intentional misquotation from The Odyssey; the ideogram puh4-5 meant to underline the failure of the men of 1914 to think through the true nature of money; a rare appreciation of the philological acumen of Winckelmann (whose name Pound also misspells, or rather, gives the French transliteration of, thereby recording the history of reading); a recognition of Eva Hesse’s improvement, by way of translation, of one of his own lines in an earlier canto (“daß Redefreiheit ohne Radiofreiheit gleich null ist”); a note defending the orthographic naivety of schoolchildren celebrated by Leo Frobenius; a lament for the lack of important (albeit anti-Semitic) texts in a London correspondent’s local library; some speculative glosses on obscure Homeric lexicography; a statement of the ideal of motivated signification; a quote about the similarity between Chinese and Japanese literature; and a quip concerning the continuing validity of dead languages. It begins, forged from the just-quoted notes, with an account of oral transmission and the usage of the first-person singular pronoun, rare at the inception of a canto: This I had from Kalupso who had it from Hermes “eleven literates and, I suppose, Dwight L. Morrow” the body elected, residence required, not as in England “A cargo of Iron” lied Pallas and as to why Penelope waited keinas … e Orgei. line 639. Leucothoe rose as an incense bush, resisting Apollo, Orchamus, Babylon And after 500 years still offered that shrub to the sea-gull, Phaecians, she being of Cadmus line

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The snow’s lace washed here as sea-foam

But the lot ’em, Yeats, Possum, Old Wyndham

had no ground to stand on Black shawls still worn for Demeter in Venice, in my time, my young time OIOS TELESAI ERGON … EROS TE173

These opening lines present a number of perturbing problems. First, there is an instance of a common but “fascinating Poundian topos” that consists in the rewriting and “experimental reconsideration”174 of the text of his own poem, since many lines given here are repeated almost verbatim from an earlier section of Canto 98. Second, the text misattributes “keinas … e Orgei” to line 639 of the fourth book of The Odyssey, when the correct line is 693—“κεῖνος [δ᾽ οὔ ποτε πάμπαν ἀτάσθαλον ἄνδρα] ἐώργει.”175 This is curious not only because the error seems to undermine the (theatrical?) accuracy of giving a line number in the first place, but because Pound correctly cited it as line 693 in the first draft of the canto,176 proof of the instability of textual transmission. Whether or not Pound meant to sacrifice the factual integrity of his poem in demonstration of this point remains open to debate, but the question is: are readers really being directed to external sources? If not, the precision of the reference is irrelevant. Third, there is the association of “Leucothoe” (the “incense bush”) with “Leucothea” (the seagull). Though Pound here gets the distinction between these “two Leucos” right, elsewhere in the poem and in earlier printed versions, Pound actually mixes their names up, which seems to be, as discussed in the previous chapter, something of a willful conflation of two distinct entities. But as the ensuing example makes clear, sometimes Pound’s aberrant spellings seem other than mere heterography—the practice of spelling contrary to standard usage. The question is, what then? Cantos, 102/728. Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 406. 175 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 1: 156, 1: 157. Murray gives the facing-page translation, “He never wrought inequity at all to any man.” 176 Notebook 91, EPP, 4959. See above. 173 174



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Consider the final line quoted above. Richmond Lattimore translates it “such a man he was for accomplishing word and action.”177 Philologists accept line 272 of Book II of The Odyssey gives ἔπος, meaning “word,” not ἔρως (in Pound’s transliteration “EROS”), meaning “love.” Commenting on this passage, Bacigalupo writes that “misnaming has done its habitual work in the quotation, changing word to love, the essential ground.”178 Jean-Michel Rabaté goes further than Bacigalupo to call this line a “superb misquotation from Homer […] just at the moment when the factive personality of men of action […] is beginning to blend with neoplatonic contemplation of pure mind identified with Love!” Rabaté’s larger (and to my mind largely convincing) argument, that such textual instabilities are volitional, is set up as an opposition between “official” culture on the one hand and “idiomatic and extemporised culture” on the other. As Rabaté put it, such instabilities stimulate a reader’s curiosity by presenting him or her with an outwardly fallible narrator “liable to commit blunders” even as it is excoriated in others.179 The unreliability of textual transmission can best be proved by an author who commits errors despite cautioning against them. In this respect, Pound’s (mis)appropriations constitute a critique of philological practice. The “superb misquotation” instantiates an anti-philological argument: Pound overwrites (literally) “word” with “love.” And just as in this passage “EROS” eventually overwrites ἔπος, so too in Pound’s work does philos always trump logos: “nothing matters but the quality / of the affection— / in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind.”180 In transgressing against “word” in the name of “love,” Pound cultivates a more ambiguous process of calculated carelessness, restoring “the tale of the tribe” through instinct and affection. Indeed, for Pound, “‘meaning’ cannot be restricted to strictly intellectual or ‘coldly intellectual’ significance. The how much you mean it, the how you feel about meaning it, can all be ‘put into language’.”181 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Collins, 1967), 46. Other earlier translators do likewise, albeit retaining the original word order from which Lattimore departs. A. T. Murray renders the line “such a man was he to fulfil both deed and word.” Odyssey, 1: 57. George Herbert Palmer translates it thus: “and you like him can give effect to deed and word.” The Odyssey, trans. George Herbert Palmer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 23. 178 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 408. 179 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 37. 180 Cantos, 76/457. 181 ABCR, 47–8. 177

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But this is not by any means the whole story. Just as the ellipses points in “oios telesai ergon … eros te,” indicating fragmentation or excerption, might prompt a reader to consult Pound’s source text, so too might the substitution of “R” for “P” prompt the reader to consult his pre-publication material. The underlying claim here is that since the texts Pound adulterated so idiosyncratically included his own, the scope of reading needs to be expanded to include not only the original texts he references, but also his own notes, manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs. These documents comprise something genetic critics call a “genetic dossier” that, when ordered critically into a meaningful sequence of development, forms the avant-texte of a published work.182 Reading this way—that is, genetically—we discover an interesting complication of Rabaté’s and Bacigalupo’s interpretations: in the original first draft of the passage in question, Pound actually gets the partquotation “right,” clearly writing “ἒπος” not “ἒρως” or “EROS.” What we in fact witness when reading this passage might just as feasibly constitute a kind of “miswriting” followed by an episode of myopic proofreading during its preparation for publication rather than what Bacigalupo calls “mis-naming” (although it remains this also). This accurate rendering of the source text is not accidental because the English transliteration of the word ἔπος is also given in the first typescript as “EPOS.”183 Though it is perfectly Figures 3.1–3  Ezra Pound, detail from manuscript draft of Canto 102, Notebook possible that Pound decided to 91, Beinecke; Figure 3.2: Ezra Pound, detail from first typescript of Canto 102, change ἒπος to EPOS and then Beinecke; Figure 3.3: Ezra Pound, detail EPOS to EROS when typing out from second typescript of Canto 102, a second, revised typescript,184 Beinecke. Dirk Van Hulle, Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 11. See also Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (eds.), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 183 EPP, 3452. 184 EPP, 3453. 182



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there is nothing to suggest that he did not just make a mistake, and in fact circumstantial evidence in the form of an understanding of how Pound wrote these late cantos—which are characterized by a great many such inadvertent errors of transcription made in combination with marked disdain for the drudgery of proofreading anything once written—makes this latter case possible if not exactly probable. Besides, the capital letter “R” in English looks more like the lower case letter pi (π) with its two descenders than it does rho (ρ), which actually looks more like the letter “P.” At any rate, the misnomer’s revelation of “essential ground” is at best a reconsideration, at worst a typographical error resulting from lax attention. Nor is changing EPOS to EROS a disorder resulting from Pound’s refusal “to accept ANY alphabetic display as final/ AND the sagetrieb/ different spellings used to dictate the stream wherethru and whereby our legend came.”185 As such it feels tenuous, and even internally conflicted (which of course in a genetic sense it definitely is). In sum, this emphatic but distorted utterance—marked, even marred, by an ellipsis and potential mis-transcription—remains radically open to the prospect of uncertain writing. It therefore invites, but I would say requires, equally uncertain reading. Its very form, as a transliteration but not a translation, so that Greek sounds appear before us in Roman letters, signals the intermediate quality of the verse. Far from being “down on the word with exactness,” this language is neither here nor there. Pound’s certainty about what was supposed to be there leaves the reader with doubts about what is. From such a state of textual indeterminacy emerges a minor precedent in the process of Pound’s composition of this verse, namely an initial accuracy rendered “inaccurate” during its preparation for publication. This fact alone rationalizes a reading practice that, if we do it at all, should include a genetic approach, taking the manuscripts and typescripts as necessary parts of the total record available to literary criticism.

France, after Talleyrand The further claim could be made that textual discrepancies must be preserved in order to show that the difference between them does not ultimately matter Ezra Pound, quoted in Froula, To Write Paradise, 146.

185

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(this is an iteration of the argument that close attention to the details of the text is anti-pathetic to Pound’s more idealistic aspirations, whose aim is to demonstrate how meaning is intentional not textual).186 That said, there were a handful of errors that really exercised Pound’s patience, and it is important to attend to them because they are special cases. Thrones contains an error that mattered to him more than any other. Most of the 300 copies of the first Italian edition of Thrones have an errata slip tucked in at page 85. It reads: ERRATA – CORRIGE Page 85 line 8 & 9 read: France, after Talleyrand started no war in Europe until ’70.187

The lines as printed read: France, after Talleyrand started no war in Europe.188

Donald Gallup’s Bibliography states that “Some of the copies have a misprint in line 9, page 85, ‘no war’ for ‘One war’ with ‘no’ cancelled in manuscript by the publisher.”189 Gallup’s use of the term “misprint” is not, strictly speaking, accurate, if by it we mean a typographical error introduced either by a false keystroke, or during transcription or typesetting. Notebook 71, dated September 1952 and containing the word “Talleyrand” on the back cover (Pound used this notebook back-to-front), contains the following lines: + after Tallyrand France started no war in Europe190

The passage, written in pencil, is struck through with a ball-point pen (suggesting a relatively rare instance of revision), and contains the note “? 70” above the words “no war.” So Pound at some point had cause to query the My understanding of Pound’s attitude to all this is thus in direct opposition to, for example, Kaye Mitchell, Intention and Text: Towards an Intentionality of Literary Form (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), wherein Mitchell locates intention neither in the author nor the reader but the text’s very form: i.e., intention is an attribute of text per se. 187 Ezra Pound, “Errata Slip,” Thrones 96–109 de los cantares (Milano: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1959), n.p. 188 Pound, Thrones, 85. 189 Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 99. 190 Notebook 71, EPP, 4939. 186



“No, that is not textual”: Thrones

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Figures 3.4–6  Ezra Pound, detail from manuscript lines used in Canto 103 with subsequent correction, Notebook 71, Beinecke; Figure 3.5: Ezra Pound, detail from first typescript of Canto 103, Beinecke; Figure 3.6: Ezra Pound, detail from later typescript of Canto 103 with subsequent correction, Beinecke.

accuracy of this assertion. The printing of such a line does not jive too well with a note Pound scrawled a few pages later: the pseudo intelligentsia with their squalid   ignorance of all exact history.

Typescripts—of which there are at least three different sets—show that the historical error survived through several instantiations. The first reads, “After Talleyrand, France started no war in W Europe.”191 Folders 3457 and 3459 contain an original top copy and a carbon copy of the next instantiation of this canto, respectively. The top copy contains manuscript corrections in red pen whose impressions do not appear on the extant carbon copy, meaning they postdate the documents’ separation.192 These notes represent fairly robust interventions in the text, and indicate, for example, that Pound EPP, 3456. As mentioned above, Bush and Ten Eyck note that Pound habitually separated top copy and carbon leaves after he removed them from the typewriter, often subjecting them to discrepant revisions (because revised at different times). Ronald Bush and David Ten Eyck, “A Critical Edition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: Problems and Solutions,” Textual Cultures 8, no. 2 (2013): 128.

191 192

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wanted ideograms for “Yu” and “min,” at lines 21 and 24 of the published text (which he never got). The carbon copy contains a solitary annotation in blue pen of the line “no war in Europe”: “till ’70.” This suggests that Pound either made the correction and then simply omitted it when he prepared his next typescript, or he made the emendation subsequent, not prior to, the printing of the canto, and thus retrospectively corrected the documentary record (it is even conceivable that the same pen was used to annotate both the manuscript and the carbon copy as part of a single, wholesale revision). This scenario actually appears most likely since a later typescript—its lateness determinable from the fact that it altogether more closely resembles the published canto in regards to its lineation and accidentals—incorporates all of the manuscript emendations made on the typescript in folder 3457, with the exception of the ideograms and the “till ’70” addition. The implications of this are ultimately not very serious—Pound is not retroactively manipulating tax returns or something—but they do suggest by this late stage of his career, he could conceive of a reader with access to both the Cantos’ text as published and to pre-publication materials held in archives. He was indicating to future scholars that he was aware of his mistake. Pound wrote to Vanni Scheiwiller on November 5, 1959: Calamity. Tutto il mondo sa che Napoleone III incomincio la guerra di 70. [The whole world knows that Napoleon III started the war of 70.] Pag[e] 85, Thrones. parole [words] “until 70” must have got lost and was too weak to notice until today. from typescript or wherever. Erratum?? possibile. o cancellare due versi [or cancel the two verses]. France, after Tallyrand, [sic] Erratum. France, after Tallyrand [sic] started no war in Europe until ’70.193

He typed a memorandum to Scheiwiller, dated December 1, 1959, writing, “IL fatto è, Napoleon incomincio la guerra del ’70. BISMARCK NON voleva guerra DOPO ’70.” [THE fact is, Napoleon began the war of ’70. BISMARCK wanted NO war AFTER ’70.] Pound then provides Scheiwiller with some “possibile rettifichi” [possible corrections]: A APICE.

193

^meglio^

cancellare vers  8 9

[cancel verses 8/9 ^better^]



“No, that is not textual”: Thrones B. C.

193

aggiungere: until 70   [add:] France, after Talleyrand started no war in Europe until ’70 France after Talleyrand started a war in Europe.194

As per options “B” and “C,” Pound wrote in the manuscript “possible errata slips.” According to Gallup’s description, which does not mention errata slips, some copies must have been issued without one, so that I suppose those copies read effectively “France, after Talleyrand started / no war in Europe,” which is correct but also fails to make Pound’s point.195 Pound was deeply perturbed by this particular muck-up. As Mary de Rachewiltz relates, “it can be safely assumed that the last spontaneous ‘corrections’ made by Pound himself were in Thrones, Canto 103.” She goes on: It had been a distressing day when the first copy of Thrones arrived. At that time there was no telephone in the house, and, like a furious bull with a beehived head, Pound charged up the steep path to send a telegram […] to Scheiwiller and Laughlin, the publishers.196

Letters Pound sent to New Directions, Faber, and other interested correspondents show the extent to which this mishap distressed him. He wrote to Peter de Sautoy, poetry editor and a director at Faber & Faber, about what he had discovered: Most awful muddle on p. 85 of THRONES, as every school boy knows Napoleon III started the war in 1870. No possible excuse save that I was too ill to watch proofs, and I suppose the meticulous Vanni Scheiwiller read for words and not meaning. words “until ’70” or something of that sort must have got lost somewhere. The Times L.S. will go to town on it and rejoice.197

Of peculiar interest is Pound’s concern that the Times Literary Supplement— emblem of his arch enemy, the middlebrow reader—will find something they EPP, 3460. I surmise that the copy Gallup describes (i.e., with manuscript emendation) might have been an advance review copy sent out ahead of publication on December 7, 1959. Pound mentions to Moelwyn Merchant, in a letter cited below, that review copies were in all likelihood already distributed and therefore “no erratum slip possible.” 196 Mary de Rachewiltz, “Afterword,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 271. 197 November 26, 1959 Letter, Pound mss. II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, Series V, Box 1. 194 195

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could easily fault him on, a rather important historical fact.198 The problem with this was not that the whole edifice would come crumbling down, but that the criticism, if it came, would believe such a discovery tantamount to a fatal blow. Pound wrote to Moelwyn Merchant two days later of “the most AWFUL howler on p. 85, of Thrones, probably enough to throw the whole vol/ out as serious history of anything […] We hand it to the T.L.S. on a plate.”199 This kind of mistake, made during a rare foray into empirical fact, seemed to Pound a chink in the poem’s otherwise stern armor. Davie’s remark seems relevant here: “the poet’s vision of the centuries of recorded time has been invalidated by The Cantos in a way that invalidates also much writing by Pound’s contemporaries. History, from now on, may be transcended in poetry, or it may be evaded there; but poetry is not the place where it may be understood.”200 Pound wrote to James Laughlin on the same day he wrote to Peter de Sautoy (New Directions published Thrones simultaneously with Pesce d’Oro in America and Italy respectively, Faber in London on March 4, 1960), and made much the same lament. His preference, as in his note to Scheiwiller on December 1, was to delete the two lines rather than attempt to “fix” them via errata slip: “gawd gawd gawd after Vanni’s agony for every accent mark.”201 And in a follow-up note to de Sautoy on November 30, 1959, he explained, “I was too ill to watch for proofs, and I suppose the meticulous Vanni Scheiwiller read for words not meaning. words ‘until ’70’ or something of that sort must have got lost somewhere.”202 Extant proof sheets at the Scheiwiller archive in Milan were corrected in Pound’s own hand and do not indicate any suggested revision was overlooked during production (in several letters he suggests his own fatigue was an important contributing factor to his having missed it in the first place). Though of course Pound bears ultimate responsibility for this situation, it is interesting to note that he condemns what he characterized as a philological mode of reading, namely one that watches, as Pound

Pound noted on September 15, 1956 that “to read the TLS [one] wd need to like cotton wool in their soup.” Notebook 101, EPP, 4969. November 28, 1959 Letter, Annals. In this letter, Pound goes on to suggest that he is “only getting back to reading a page or two (book page, not newspaper page) at a time. and can’t do much.” 200 Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, 244. 201 Ezra Pound, November 26, 1959 Letter to James Laughlin, NDPC, 1371. 202 Ezra Pound, November 30, 1959 Letter to Peter de Sautoy, Annals. 198

199



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just put it, “words not meaning.” It could be that Scheiwiller was reading pre-hermeneutically, engaged in the scrupulous search for—in this case answerable—questions relevant to textual criticism, so intent on grammar that he missed errors of sense.203 Or, upon reading these lines, he figured they manifest another of “Pound’s doubtful insights into modern history,”204 in which case Scheiwiller had not misunderstood the “meaning,” but had instead become so habituated to Pound’s “modus pensare” he could not recognize factual inaccuracy as textual error. Bacigalupo has suggested that Pound’s original lines hint at a “slanted view” towards the origin of some of the wars of the last century. This is certainly plausible. Mary de Rachewiltz disputes the claim, however, as reinterpreted by Carroll F. Terrell: “Note 24 to Canto 103 in The Companion is unsatisfactory. The fact is that Pound himself was confused and realised he was confused, but passionately wanted to get it right.” She continues, “He knew he was not remembering details, had no time to reread all the history books he had underscored, and recheck his notebooks.”205 Pound did passionately want to get it right, but the motive for doing so is less a desire for historical accuracy than to escape critique. As de Rachewiltz goes on to say, “in two copies at Brunnenburg his own handwritten corrections differ.”206 Given the fact Pound only caught the error after all the Pesce d’Oro and New Directions sheets had been printed if not bound, Pound’s preferred emendation—total omission of lines 8 and 9—was, as far as these presses were concerned, out of the question. (New Directions’ edition was printed via photo offshoot meaning their text was identical to that of Pesce d’Oro.) Faber, however, who had delayed publication until 1960, were apprised of the mistake in time and suppressed the lines. Their first and all subsequent editions (until 1968) contain a gaping blank space—not without its own semantic value, depending how much one reads into such things—where these lines were scheduled to The way Pound put it to Laughlin, this is certainly feasible: “[Scheiwiller] is a magnif. proof reader and knows greek and FUSSES like blue hell over every letter and comma.” August 22, 1958 Letter, NDCP, 1371. 204 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 416. 205 De Rachewiltz, “Afterword,” 271. Terrell’s note reads, “for some time Pound preferred the idea that, after Tallyrand [sic], France started no war in Europe. When the facts dictated otherwise he blanked these two lines, but they were restored in the New Directions edition.” Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 665, n. 24. 206 These copies have subsequently been sold to private collectors and were not available for inspection at the time of writing. 203

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appear. Laughlin suggested that “we ought to prepare a little mimeographed slip to go into the copies that have already been bound up, and perhaps a printed slip to be inserted with the next binding,” which was duly prepared.207 An in-house erratum slip says that line 9 on page 85 should read: “no war in Europe until ’70,” the same as the Pesce d’Oro erratum slip. But a letter dated December 5, 1959 from Pound to Laughlin suggests a different reading for the erratum: More plausible erratum would be France, after Talleyrand, started One war in Europe. That is I think handier and more plausible. Your staff of experts can decide whether the Crimea is too near Europe to be excluded from general statement. etc. re 70.208

Pound’s request is somewhat at odds with Laughlin’s so-called “master-copy” of The Cantos—the latest edition of Faber’s text inscribed with planned revisions Hugh Kenner had gathered from a range of scholars, including those suggested by Eva Hesse, that Laughlin took with him on a visit to Pound in 1964—in which Pound seems to have indicated that he wanted the line emended to “a war in Europe” not “one war in Europe.” Despite Bacigalupo’s note that “in recent American printings some bright editor has perpetrated the following emendation: ‘France, after Talleyrand started / one war in Europe’,”209 the confusion over the text is largely a function of Pound’s own hesitancies, themselves a function of the practical exigencies of publishing texts of this complexity in faraway lands. Contrary to Bacigalupo’s suspicion—one shared by Barbara Eastman210— that “one” for “a” is a correction of dubious provenance, the fact is, Pound authorized both options at one point or another. Deciding which instantiation is the best—or least bad—is a question for future editors to answer. A literary critic, by contrast, must ask what these differences mean. Pound preferred the option of what he called a “BLACK OUT,” as he put it in a December 6, 1959 letter to Scheiwiller, because it meant “niente

December 1, 1959 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 1216. NDPC, 1371. 209 Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace, 417, n. 29. To be fair, this line is the least good. 210 Barbara Eastman, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Story of the Text, 1948–1975 (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 124. 207 208



“No, that is not textual”: Thrones

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discussione, niente ambiguita” [no discussion, no ambiguity]—an interesting turn of phrase given Pound’s penchant to use these words exactly in describing conspiracies against knowledge. Such reasoning squares properly with the kind of poetics animating Pound’s late work especially: one that is not “open to” interpretation, but which, conversely, seeks control over it. Wherever Pound determined ambiguity could lead to discussion, specifically a discussion about meaning (or to interpretation ungoverned by the intentions of the author), he made decisive “corrections.” Pound’s instructions to Scheiwiller in this respect are typical (he made several similar ones to Frederick Morgan at The Hudson Review): Bozze arrivate/ tante grazie per assidue cure/ specialmente dove hai trovato errori […] Fai come TI piace, salvo nei casi devo io fatto indicazione in inchiostro. [Proofs arrived/ many thanks for assiduous care/ especially where you have found errors […] Do as YOU like, except in cases where I have made indications in ink].211

What is noticeable across the two sets of proofs that Scheiwiller sent Pound for his perusal is that the poet mainly corrected “accidentals,” not “substantives” (exceptions noted below). While these terms have been much debated since their introduction in 1950 by W. W. Greg in his foundational essay in AngloAmerican editorial theory, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” they appertain well to Pound’s own practices. Explaining them, Greg wrote: we need to draw a distinction between the significant, or as I shall call them “substantive”, readings of the text, those namely that affect the author’s meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I shall call them “accidentals”, of the text […] As regards substantive readings their aim may be assumed to be to reproduce exactly those of their copy […] As regards accidentals they will normally follow their own habits or inclination.212

Pound actually failed to recognize “accidental” infelicities as mistakes: “5000 bloody profs/ fussing over commas/ OUGHT to correct errors.”213 In many

Ezra Pound, June 21, 1955 Letter to Scheiwiller, APICE. W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950/1951): 21. 213 Ezra Pound, May 5, 1955 Letter to Frederick Morgan, HRA, Subseries 3A. 211 212

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respects, Pound’s refusal of substantive changes is perfectly reasonable—few authors traditionally understood as such would approve such changes introduced by others, a standard Pound applied even to himself when revising his own work. Remarkably, during the inspection of the first and second sets of proofs for Thrones, Pound made only two “substantive” changes: the addition of “B. 18” to Canto 107; and the replacement of the word “learn” with the word “know” in Canto 96—an exchange that has a certain resonance beyond the mere fact of its circumstance.214 Education, for Pound, is less a process than a condition of being, making this last exchange indicative of something more than a mere tightening of the poetic line or an adjustment to sense. It represents a minor but fundamental alteration thereof. As such, it proves useful as an exception to an otherwise firm rule. Processes of composition are one thing, involving—in terms of substantives—making changes often. But once those structures settle into a draft they are rarely subjected to further tinkering. The changes Pound requested in Scheiwiller’s proofs consisted largely of catching “accidentals”: mainly small errors that snuck in during either typing up scripts or typesetting. A further complication, as has long been recognized, is that the distinction between accidentals and substantives is far from clear-cut. Greg himself was by no means blind to this: “it will, no doubt, be objected that punctuation may very seriously ‘affect’ an author’s meaning; still it remains properly a matter of presentation, as spelling does in spite of its use in distinguishing homonyms. The distinction I am trying to draw is practical, not philosophic.”215 And yet, differences that Greg would have deemed substantive, such as word-order, and changes (sometimes dramatic) to the actual words themselves (usually but by no means always a simple deletion), often seemed to Pound to be “accidental.” Whereas Greg, for example, would deem “Alexander paid the debts of his troops,” as in Canto 85, and “Alex, the debts of his soldiers,” as it appears in Canto 104, to be substantively different, Pound, I rather suspect, would have regarded such discrepancies as “accidental,” that is to say superficially different, wherein the difference does not affect his meaning. Furthermore, some deviations from “accidental” norms actually encode Pound, Cantos, 107/761 and 96/652. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text,” 21, n.4.

214 215



“No, that is not textual”: Thrones

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intentional substantives, for example, how “all them funny spellings indicate tradition.”216 Pound was prone, too, to leaving some errors in the record. As he told T. S. Eliot in 1948, “I dont care which way [creées] is printed. A little saving ignorance on the part of the bard might allay venom.”217 Suffice it to say that Pound agrees tacitly with Greg that some textual records are “accidental” and some “substantive”; but Pound’s conception of that distinction cannot be abstracted into a “rationale.”218 As discussed in the next chapter, Pound’s inconsistency when it came to textual matters posed—and continues to pose—would-be editors with a series of significant challenges, so much so that it might be that his text presents an existential threat to the very idea of editorial policy per se. Certainly, when it came to practical dealings with Scheiwiller, Pound preferred to proceed on a case-by-case basis. On August 6, 1959, Scheiwiller wrote to inform him that Mardersteig had been instructed to make the following corrections: 1) pag. 62 riga [line] 10: dure non doure 2) pag. 30 riga 18: e beata si gode inf. VII, 96 Io quindi corretto la citazione sbagliata, controllato sull’edizione critica [I have corrected the misquotation, checked in the critical edition] 3) p. 82 riga 12: Winkelmann non Winklemann 4) p. 68: Lume non è, se non dal sereno non: Non lúme, se non da sereno. Par. XIX, 64 5) p. 87 riga 15: Hia caeca ragione agebant. Ho così corretto: Hi caeca ratione agebant. [so I have corrected:] o forse ci voleva QUIA? Comunque il senso è salio [or perhaps you wanted QUIA? However the sense is loose.] 6) p. 108 riga 23: color NON calor. Par. X, 42 Questo era il più grave! [That’s the most serious one!]

Ezra Pound, EPJL, 202. Ezra Pound, February 23, 1948 Letter to T. S. Eliot, Annals. Pound is referring to Cantos 80/513. 218 This distinction has come under proper suspicion—see, for instance, David J. Nordloh, “Substantials and Accidentals vs. New Evidence: Another Strike in the Game of Distinctions,” CEAA Newsletter 3 (June 1970): 12–13; Morse Peckham, “Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing,” Proof: The Yearbook of American Bibliographical and Textual Studies 1 (1971): 122–55; and G. Thomas Tanselle, “Two Basic Distinctions: Theory and Practice, Text and Apparatus,” Studies in the Novel 7, no. 3 (Fall 1975): 404–6. 216 217

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7) p. 109 riga 11: vicineto (???) Ho messo il “medioevale” vicinato per il senso che non capivo [I’ve put in the “mediaeval” vicinato for the meaning which I don’t understand] Un dubbio: [A doubt:] p. 82 riga 12. xaladines(???). intende baladines (???) [it intends] Credo siano in Cocteau [I think they are in Cocteau] 8) pag 110 penultima riga: [penultimate line: ] ho citato esattamente il pezzo del De Officiis I, xi, che lei riportava a senso [I’ve quoted that bit from De Officiis I, xi, exactly, the one you interpreted in the sense?] 9) pag 113 riga 19: μὴ ὄν oppure [or] μὴ ὄὐ ? a che non ne non 10) p. 118 riga 20 libererorum (?) ho corretto in liberorum [I corrected to liberorum] 11) p. 125 riga 26 Azaleas NON Azaleias 12) p. 126 ultima riga: [last line: ] piccioletta NON piccoletta219

To 1), Pound responded “stet,” saying that Napoleon’s mother pronounced it “doure” not “dure.” (“Stet,” a proofreader’s abbreviation in the jussive subjunctive of the Latin verb “stare” meaning “let it stand,” is, in Italian, “vive,” pitting the living, spoken language against the deadening effects of orthographic correctness.) Regarding 2), Pound responded “stet,” because “not a quote, a reference”; Pound acquiesced to point 3, authorizing a change from one incorrect spelling to another: the intended reference here is Winckelmann. Pound authorized 4), meaning, I suppose, it was intended as a quote not a reference, but both instances miss out the word “vien,” at least according to my edition of the Paradiso. In regards to 5), Pound sought to dispel ambiguity by printing Hia in capital letters (a request Scheiwiller

EPP, 2061, trans. Richard Taylor.

219



“No, that is not textual”: Thrones

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ignored); he acquiesced to the change of spelling of “ragione,” as he did to 6), that is, changing the spelling of “calor” to “color.” As pertaining to 7), Pound insisted his spelling be retained, because it was the same used by his source, Coke’s Institutes. Pound accepted the change to 8); he confirmed that what he wrote was what he meant as per 9), a reference to Aristotle; and Pound approved Scheiwiller’s suggestions for 10)–12).220 The tussle over Scheiwiller’s doubt—“un dubbio”—concerning “xalandines” would last several rounds of correspondence, with Scheiwiller repeatedly wondering whether it should be changed, and Pound defiantly resisting. At one point, Pound wrote a marginal annotation in response to Scheiwiller’s query: “stet. vid. French poets essay,”221 by which he means his “Study in French Poets.” In this study, Pound reprints Stuart Merrill’s “Ballet,” but gives “xaladines” instead of “paladines”—“of lady knights,”222 an error Bacigalupo traces to the poem’s original publication in La Wallonie in 1888.223 On August 18, Pound again insisted upon “xaladines/ poema francese, di Mockel o domentico di chi NON baladines. vide my French Poets.”224 The following day he wrote, “Malarme, xaladines, rhymes with baladines. xaladines is correct in proofs as they stand. But it should read les xaladines, not le singular.”225 Pound concluded finally, “per CHARITAAAAA/ xaladines. Mallarmé, rime xaladines avec baladines. baladines/ banal/ les xaladines. orixalko/ xaladines. emphasis on X. damn baladines.” Terrell suggests numerous reasons for this, one being a relation to the Greek “sound of copper.”226 Pound’s manuscript indeed contains several instances of Greek copper-related words (χαλκίον, καλκοειδής, χαλκῶ [sic]), written in landscape tangent to the otherwise portrait orientation of lines about how a bear cub’s fur is like copper and wine in sunlight.227 I do not see the connection to Mallarmé (except that Stuart Merrill was taught by him), nor do I think he ever used this word himself. That Pound believes

Pound’s responses are found as marginal annotations on Scheiwiller’s letter and in a confirmation from Scheiwiller dated August 20, 1959, EPP, 2061. 221 August 6, 1959 Letter from Vanni Scheiwiller, EPP, 2061. 222 Ezra Pound, Instigations (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920), 91. See Albert Cook, Forces in Modern and Postmodern Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 232, n. 15. 223 Massimo Bacigalupo, L’ultimo Pound (Roma: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 1981), 414. 224 Letter to Vanni Scheiwiller, APICE. 225 Ezra Pound, August 19–21, 1959 Letters to Vanni Scheiwiller, APICE. 226 Terrell, A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 661, n. 38. 227 Notebook 91, EPP, 4959. See Cantos, 102/730. 220

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he did, or thinks it otherwise connects him to it, remains clear. In insisting upon the basic rightness of this word, despite it being a misfit, Pound models practices of reading and writing whose historicity inheres in something other than the literary record.

4

“Or true editions?”



Nobudy thinks but grampa he sits round all day [whistlin] in the bughouse just to pass the time away.1

St. Elizabeths According to one well-known commentator, “the literary work is always produced under institutional conditions.”2 This statement has an accidental but still pertinent relevance for any discussion of Rock-Drill and Thrones, both of which were conceived of and written while Pound was detained in St. Elizabeths. Admittedly, by “institutional conditions,” McGann meant any form of dynamic social relation necessary to facilitate modern literary production rather than a hospital for the criminally insane. That said, Pound would not have recognized an absolute distinction between them. Apropos of this, upon his eventual release in 1958, Pound quipped, “all America is an insane asylum”;3 and, according to the Richmond News Leader, “when I was in the bug-house […] I used to think there were 160 million worse cases outside, but until I was driven through Washington traffic, I didn’t realize what the

Notebook 67, EPP, 4935. Jerome J. McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992 (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 103. McGann’s larger point is to critique what he regards as the romantic view of original and autonomous authority, one that deems any mediating process to be a form of structural contamination. 3 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 848. 1 2

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poor devils were up against.”4 Despite Taylor’s observation that the realities of Pound’s incarceration do not frankly appear as content in the late verse—the key word here being frankly, because oblique references to St. Elizabeths in the Cantos do exist5—the texts of these cantos show everywhere the signatures of their transmission, the history of which is fraught with instances wherein publishers, typesetters, editors, and agents, all ostensibly engaged in realizing his life’s work, interfered with, and so disrupted, his idiosyncratic intentions. The analogy between “publishing house” and “bug house” is therefore far from arbitrary. Pound told William Cookson on August 17, 1958 that “I think I have just got Canto 100 into form for ‘release’.”6 Pound’s Canto 100 gets “out” around the same time he did. Davie: “one cannot read Thrones without remembering that the author spent twelve years in a hospital for the insane.”7 A March 1949 letter to his (at that time) new publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions, typifies the intemperate way in which Pound railed against certain obvious imperfections introduced into the textual record by others: and god DAMN it get that FISH correct into Canto 51 galley 42/ as I told whatever loony lubber was in the office to get [it] into the BIG Cantos. f i s h/ not FLY godbloodydamn their halyards. AND put the KAO*YAO ideogram right side up/ there are probably two on one cliche/ and the whole thing should be put the other way up.8

Guy Friddell, “Poet Ezra Pound, 72, Stops Over in City,” Richmond News Leader, May 1, 1958. Richard Taylor, “Mindscape and Structure in The Cantos,” online. Certainly St. Elizabeths did not feature like the Army DTC in The Pisan Cantos: “the loneliness of death came upon me / (at 3 P. M., for an instant).” Cantos, 83/527. But nor is it totally suppressed: “Old crocks to die in a bug-house.” Cantos, 87/576; cf. also, “Grevitch, bug-house, in anagram: ‘Out of vast / a really sense of proportion / and instantly.’ / wanted me to type-write his name on an handkerchief.” Cantos, 100/714. More obliquely, the asylum features as allegory: “Erebus, the deep-lying,” out from which the Sibylla lifts the poet up, might be readily construed as a proxy for St. Elizabeths. Cantos, 90/606. 6 Letter to William Cookson and D. G. Bridson, Bridson Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, Box 1. 7 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 241. 8 [March] 1949 Letter, NDPC, 1371; added emphasis. The typographic errors Pound refers to are in Canto 51, “As long as the brown continues, no fly will take Granham.” Ezra Pound, The Fifth Decad of Cantos, XLII–LI (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 52. And Canto 53, Ezra Pound, Cantos LII– LXXI (New York: New Directions, 1940), 18. The ideogram is not only upside down but backwards. Readers consulting any post-1950 edition will not encounter either this ideogrammic error or a reading of “fly” for “fish” since Faber corrected both before its 1950 edition of Seventy Cantos and New Directions did likewise for the second impression (1951) of its 1948 collected Cantos. That said, neither publisher, in spite of Eva Hesse’s recommendation, ever corrected “Granham” to “grannom.” See Barbara Eastman, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text, 1948–1975 (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 78–80; Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 77–80; and Richard Taylor, “The History and 4

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Here Pound reverses accusations of insanity, questioning the mental clarity of “whatever loony lubber” in the printing press to whom he issued plain instructions, while simultaneously asserting his own cognitive orderliness: his ideas are in order; failure to see them as such indicts others’ insanity, not his. Like his living quarters, Pound found what he deemed to be poetically “coherent areas” were “constantly invaded”9 by those who either ignored his instructions or otherwise disappointed his expectations. In continuation of the above-quoted outburst, he writes regarding his Selected Poems:10 I acceded to request to put in a FEW bits of cantos/ you have made HALF Cantos/ The selection up to galley 44 is not bad/ BUT the PISAN chunk is just a mess of snippets/ and CANNOT stand as is. Better omit the whole of it. at any rate it is not in scale with rest. and to print it with invisible dots for breaks is LOW. I haven’t energy to do the selecting. but the ONLY possible alternative to TOTAL and preferable omission is to put in one or two coherent bits. NOT a lot of breaks in the sense.11

The context of this outburst is that Laughlin had contracted the poet John Berryman to make a selection, who submitted a rhapsody of what, to his mind, were the best lines of the sequence. Berryman’s selection was ultimately to everyone’s dissatisfaction, including his own.12 Pound’s outburst bears intrinsically upon some trends discussed throughout this book. It exhibits, for instance, a characteristic feature of his regular demand for revisions only on condition they do not retard the publication process, in which case all bets were off, and the text must be issued when, not as, planned. Put otherwise,

the State of the Texts,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 235–65. Anecdotal accounts of Pound’s cell recount how he had no door and would be subject to frequent interruption from fellow inmates wandering the halls in search of amenities or conversation. 10 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1949). 11 Ezra Pound, [March] 1949 Letter to Laughlin, NDPC, 1371. Pound’s sense of coherence remained subjective from the very first. Cf. this well-known letter to Eliot: “[‘The Waste Land’] runs from April … to shantih without break. That is 19 pages, and let us say the longest poem in the English landwidge.” Ezra Pound, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber, 1988), 497. 12 Cf., “Just heard back from Possum. I had sent him Berryman’s introduction for an opinion. He says absolutely not—it is NOT at all suitable for a come-on in a popular selection. Now I have been looking at Berryman’s selections, and [Rolfe] Humphries has too, and they are not good either, especially the Cantos, which has been snipped up in funny snippets proving some abstruse point.” James Laughlin, January 10, 1949 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPJL, 177. 9

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this passage shows Pound’s habitual preference for imperfect publications over late ones.13 More to the point, it conveys Pound’s sense of the contiguous texture of his text, a sense that was not shared—and I dare say still is not—by a majority of readers. What appear to Pound as integrities of energetic pattern easily appear as madness without method. Laughlin explained in response, “If you think it is snippety now, you ought to have seen what it was like when Berryman turned it in. In many instances, he had picked out single lines from here and there or little short paragraphs that had no connection with anything at all.”14 Berryman’s editorial process sounds a lot like Pound’s compositional process, minus the requisite authority! Pound’s response was to re-edit editorial decisions further so that coherence could be restored not through pretensions of completeness but through an annihilation of the incomplete itself (a speculative distinction at best). At the same time, those involved in the production and dissemination of the cantos written whilst Pound was “inside” frequently use a language that belies the sanity they otherwise insisted he maintained; insinuations of madness decorate the language of their discussions. Laughlin, for instance, on April 13, 1949 wrote to the printer of the Selected Poems, John Phillips of Vail-Ballou Press, “it is in an awful confusion because the old boy is quite off his rocker, and makes endless difficulties, and some-times it’s hard to understand even what he wants.”15 On September 15, 1955, amateur sinologist and bookseller Willis Hawley wrote, playfully regarding the poet’s philological creativity in Chinese, that certain ideograms were being “invented by some screwball in Wash. Not mentioning names.”16 On December 29, 1955, Laughlin wrote to T. S. Eliot to say that a corrected edition will one day be necessary because “there is certainly a lot of crazy spelling in the Cantos.”17 On April 24, 1957, Robert MacGregor of New Directions wrote to freelance editor Hayden Carruth to Pound’s prioritizing of speed over care puts his maverick brand of philology in distinct opposition to Nietzsche’s: “I have not been a philologist in vain—perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste—a perverted taste, maybe—to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is ‘in a hurry’.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn of the Day, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. J. M. Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 8. 14 Laughlin, March 28, 1949 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 1372. 15 Annals. 16 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 948. 17 NDPC, 513. 13



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say that “we did send proofs to Pound and they have come back with a lot of crazy marks, but he agreed with most of our selections and changes.”18 And even following the publication of Thrones, Eva Hesse (Pound’s German translator and one of his strictest but also most sympathetic critics) wrote to Laughlin on February 11, 1960 to report she had caught a batch of frequently horrid printing mistakes in Italian edition of “Thrones”, starting with the “aryan! Heresy” on p. 2 and threading all the way through to the end of the book. I have found at least twenty mad ones without really looking for them. Wish he’d send his proofs to somebody who can spell.19

Pound himself, despite his use of “funny spellings [to] indicate tradition,”20 often conflated error with lunacy (albeit in a rather different way): in a note regarding an errata slip to the 1954 edition of Seventy Cantos—which he himself had commissioned!—Pound wondered if “all errata lists are for idiots.” Ultimately, he considered the “feat” of making proper corrections to a corrupt text apparently “beyond the capacity, mental or mechanical, of Faber’s printers,” and concluded simply: “STET & be damned.”21 As Julien Cornell (Pound’s postwar American lawyer) makes clear in his memoir, St. Elizabeths’ own Dr. Winfred Overholser, the senior psychiatrist responsible for overseeing Pound’s incarceration and star witness for the prosecution, acted regularly in what he (Overholser) perceived to be the poet’s best interests in order to protect him from state violence. According to Cornell, Overholser considered Pound incurably insane, and therefore unable to stand trial; but he also considered Pound benign and his incarceration tantamount to the indefinite imprisonment of a man presumed innocent: Pound was suffering, and always would suffer (in the words of a motion to dismiss Pound’s indictment submitted to the District Court for the District of Columbia) “from a paranoid state which rendered him mentally unfit to Annals. NDPC, 782. 20 Ezra Pound, EPJL, 202. Of course, neither Laughlin nor Hesse were unaware of this tendency in Pound’s writing. Laughlin wrote to Hesse on October 30, 1963, “I am greatly impressed with your report on the work you are doing to correct the ‘Cantos’. I am afraid that it does not really surprise me that you have found so many spellings. I guess Ezra has never really cared about such details. Perhaps this is because in old manuscripts and texts things are spelled so many different ways, and he feels that if the general meaning gets through, that is enough.” NDPC, 782. Laughlin has it exactly right. 21 Ezra Pound, quoted in Letter from Laurence Pollinger to Peter de Sautoy, February 22, 1953, Annals. 18 19

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advise properly with counsel or to participate intelligently and reasonably in his own defense.”22 It goes without saying that such “protection” was not without repercussions. Similarly, the curatorial role played by publishers like Frederick Morgan, Vanni Scheiwiller, and James Laughlin maintained Pound’s authority by implementing various restrictions upon it. Laughlin continues in his letter to Hesse cited above, that despite Pound’s preference to leave the text as is, “nevertheless, I do feel that we must do our best to try to make things right for him.” Because Pound never properly embarked on an independent publishing venture of his own,23 a condition of such help always entailed the imposition of certain restrictions on Pound’s ongoing projects: his typographic and bibliographic eccentricities pushed against the limits of convention, not unlike the way incarceration in St. Elizabeths curtailed his basic freedoms, to which Pound inevitably resigned (some might say accommodated) himself. The mere fact that Pound was locked up presented all manner of extra difficulties, including limited access to secondary material; delays and difficulties in communicating his exact instructions; and the necessarily strenuous conditions in which he had to work. That said, like the “publishing houses” that printed him, the “bug house” afforded the poet time and space to write.24 By incarcerating Pound, the federal government of the United States, despite itself and under conditions Pound himself could hardly have found either convenient or salubrious, oddly fulfilled the poet’s own long-standing demand Julien D. Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the Treason Case by the Defendant’s Lawyer (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 42–3, 126. 23 Cf., “My work is almost always DELAYED, sometimes 20 years, / / The foetor of the pub/ling system makes it quicker to start a new publishing house than to get an ext^bld^ [sic; read: established] one to print anything containing an invention or a disturbing element.” Ezra Pound, Letters to Ibbotson, 1935–1952, ed. Vittoria I. Mondoflo and Margaret Hurley (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 41. An unsigned memorandum (1949), possibly issued by Dorothy Pound, does, however, indicate that Pound was interested in purchasing a small electronic press and having it installed in the basement at Brunnenburg. EPP, 2720. 24 Beyond a certain attention to the poems’ texts, this book is not primarily biographical, perhaps to a fault. Numerous studies of Pound’s life treat his time at St. Elizabeths in some detail and supply more information about its conditions and circumstances than I can or will. See Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 436–58; Eustace Mullins, This Difficult Individual (New York: Fleet, 1961), 264–368; Michael Reck, Ezra Pound: A Close-Up (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 75–135; Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982), 531–69; Wendy Stallard Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 157–90; Anne Conover, Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 192–212; Alec Marsh, Ezra Pound (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 164–206; and A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 3 vols, Vol. III: The Tragic Years 1939–1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007–15), 167–444. 22



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that the state support its artists by providing them with material subsistence (in this case room and board).25 The most important condition governing the composition of Rock-Drill and Thrones was the forced, and, as it turned out, permanent forfeiture of Pound’s authority manifest as a loss of legally competent personhood. As soon as Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths, in the spring of 1946, Cornell proposed that Pound should cede to him power of attorney “by reason of your mental condition” as a kind of stop-gap measure to see to the poet’s immediate needs and affairs until such a time as a more permanent arrangement could be achieved; Pound agreed, but limited Cornell’s power to the oversight of “matters pertaining to publishing,” effectively rendering Cornell his literary agent. By September 1946, Cornell had arranged for Dorothy Pound to become “guardian of her husband’s estate.” The effect, as Moody writes, from whose astonishing biography I glean this brief history, was not only to grant absolute control over Pound’s business affairs, but also to “vest in her all of his rights as a person.” From this point on, “Dorothy had the power to grant or refuse permission to publish his work, to receive and dispose of his royalties, and to generally control his intellectual property.”26 And so, Dorothy Pound became “the Committee for Ezra Pound.”27 In practical terms, this was more a formality than a proper stumbling block: Dorothy abided by her husband’s wishes in terms of authorial dispensation.28 More abstractly, the implication was that during the Washington years and those ensuing, Dorothy became Ezra’s authority-by-proxy, a kind of real-life persona the poet’s younger self could hardly have imagined. This introduced a serious disjunction between “ego scriptor cantilenae” and “my authority.”29 Just as Taylor notes that there is “heavy irony in the celebration of good governance and civic order imposed by outside authority (or authoritarians) Cf., “My problem is to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization. The arts must be supported in preference to the church and scholarship […] Scholarship is but a hand-maid to the arts.” January 1915 Letter to Harriet Monroe, SL, 48. This is not meant to diminish the real torment Pound must have suffered in St. Elizabeths, nor to “normalize” that experience through tentative analogies to the publishing world, from which I am almost ready to desist. 26 Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, 3: 246–7. 27 Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound, 124. 28 The impact of this new reality on family affairs was undoubtedly more pronounced and divisive, though it is neither my desire nor my intention to address that issue here or elsewhere. 29 Cantos, 62/350. 25

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in those cantos” written “amid mental disorders of varying degrees and strict house rules,”30 so too are the bullish manners of Rock-Drill and Thrones legible as signs of eviscerated legal personhood, and of whatever residual authority remained there. Incessant reiterations—which, in these sections, come thicker and faster than in any previous section—index a shrill but impeachable certainty. And yet, Pound was still not permitted to write with total impunity—libel laws remained applicable—but these cantos’ profound concern for and interest in law and the regulation of conduct beyond the merely personal, not to mention their often flagrant and usually aggressive antipathies for “the reader,” indicate a poet properly off the proverbial hook. Once forfeited, Pound would never regain his authority. Following his release from St. Elizabeths on April 19, 1958, and especially after his return to Italy on June 30, there was some debate about the legality of the Committee for Ezra Pound’s continuing existence, having to do with different jurisdictions. Italy did not recognize the need for a “committee” because it considered Pound compos mentis;31 but Pound’s status as an American author publishing books in the United States meant that he would forever be of unsound mind there.32

Strictly anonymous communique Pound’s attenuated authority is quietly manifest in aspects of the kinds of artifacts he (and his publishers) produced. Though Pound never managed to use Sheri Martinelli’s paintings as frontispieces to either Rock-Drill or Thrones, he was successful in his petition to keep his name off the cover of the former, which reads merely Section: Rock-Drill / 85–95 / de los cantares, and is decorated with nothing but the (now-ubiquitous) brush drawing of Pound’s Taylor, “Mindscape and Structure in The Cantos,” n.p. It could be that Pound’s loss of authority in the eyes of the law and his engagement in pseudo-historical inspections of legality per se (Eparch’s Book, Sacred Edict, Institutes) is not so much ironic as reactive. 31 Despite this, he effectively abdicated his legal authority in literary matters, writing to Mary de Rachewiltz in April 1954, “Anything YOU do is authorized,” meaning that he wished her to act on his behalf. EPP, 2735. Similarly, Pound informally sanctioned Eva Hesse to look after his Germanlanguage literary affairs (i.e., in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). 32 “Upon his release from St. Elizabeths, Pound was a ward of the state and unable to alter his will.” Norman Holmes Pearson, “Statement of Support for Financial Support of Mary de Rachewiltz,” NHP, Folder “Yale Pound Center,” Box 79. 30



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head in profile by Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound recognized the gesture was “forse un po arrogante, Ma …” [perhaps a bit arrogant, but …]33 Undoubtedly far from an act of modest anonymity, to withhold one’s name is to presume one’s reader knows it. On December 13, 1954 he told Mary de Rachewiltz that he wanted merely “E.P.” on the spine (in the end his name was given there in full): “Vanni can have the full name on back cover if he thinks the E.P. (as on Cavalcanti) wd/ leave anyone in doubt. re/ authorship. Of course there is NO trace of EP in the ODES save the fact that nobody else cd/ have done ’em.”34 Such a theatrical anonymity is of a piece with a rather more real anonymity Pound regularly insisted upon in correspondence written during his time at St. Elizabeths. The vast majority of letters written at this time are typed and unsigned, and many—especially new correspondence—begin, “strictly anonymous communique,”35 and refer to himself frequently as “yr/ anonymous correspondent.” “My name is noman”36 indeed. Pound took these injunctions very seriously, as this particularly ill-tempered letter to Louis Dudek makes clear: God bloody DAMN it and save one from ones friends. SHUT UP. You are NOT supposed to receive ANY letters from E. P. They are UNSIGNED and if one cannot trust one’s friends to keep quiet re/ their supposed source / whom can one trust? […] Who the HELL told YOU that E.P. has carried on correspondence?37

The idea, presumably, was to maintain a plausible deniability about the authorship of anything he wrote in case he accidentally said something lucid and thereby risked presenting prosecutors, eager to intercept his communications, with evidence of sanity. Likewise, the vast majority of prose published during the St. Elizabeths years consists either of reprints of passages selected from already-published books and articles, or unsigned editorials stylistically reminiscent of the

November 24, 1954 Letter to Vanni Scheiwiller, APICE. EPP, 2738. 35 As in Pound’s June 29, 1949 Letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, in Ezra Pound, “I Cease Not to Yowl”: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, ed. Demestres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surette (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 28. Pound began a September 19, 1950 Letter to Eva Hesse in a similar fashion: “E.H. Strictly Anonymous Communique.” EHA. 36 Cantos, 74/426. 37 Ezra Pound, DK/ Some Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. Louis Dudek (Montréal: DC Books, 1974), 105. 33 34

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“lexical aside”38 in Canto 96—“if we never write anything save what is already understood …”—that appeared mostly in acolyte-run journals such as Strike and Four Pages (edited by William MacNaughton and Dallam Simpson respectively).39 Such withheld anonymity—only ever a rhetorical gesture because the authorship was never really in doubt—resonates with Pound’s oft-repeated refusal to “sign on the dotted line” for the enemy.40 That Pound was acutely aware of the ethical importance of a person’s signature is evident in the recurring phrase “for one who will put his name on chit,” which appears in Canto 89, Canto 93, and Canto 97. Signing—or, not—on the dotted line was a kind of political gesture, an essential condition of responsible citizenship, which Pound had never been shy to assert. It is significant, therefore, that Pound did not want his name on the cover of Rock-Drill, itself a kind of protest against attacks on his authority, while, at the same time, declaring its perseverance against attempts to impeach it. Though now legally worthless, it remained “in the mind indestructible.”41 Both New Directions and Faber followed Scheiwiller’s lead, not printing Pound’s name on the cover of their editions, published in 1956 and 1957 respectively. The Pesce d’Oro edition is an elegant but sober affair: the title stamped directly onto grey boards and protected by cellophane. Faber issued their edition in yellow papers and printed short, expository texts describing Rock-Drill on the front inside flap and The Cantos on the rear. New Directions’ edition looks much the same; it contains, however, an Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 103. 39 See Ezra Pound, “Anonymous Contributions to Strike!,” Paideuma 3, no. 3 (Winter 1974): 389–400; and volume 9 of Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz and James Logenbach (New York and London: Garland, 1991). 40 “What it signified  de facto  in Turin, is best exemplified by the specific occasion on which a Peidmontese [sic] parliament refused to sign on the dotted line of a treaty. Victor told the people to elect another that would,” Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L’idea statale; Fascism as I Have Seen It (London: Stanley Nott, 1935), v; “And the traitors were afraid that he might balk at the last moment and refuse to sign on the dotted line, for mobilization,” Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound Speaking, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1978), 173; “The kike salesman from Tarsus ‘St’ Saul taught the catholics to lie. i.e. sign on the dotted line and profess to believe a rigamarole whether they understood it or not,” Pound, “I Cease Not to Yowl,” 34; “whether or no we sign on the dotted line,” GK, 342; “In writing so as to be understood, there is always the problem of rectification without giving up what is correct. There is the struggle not to sign on the dotted line for the opposition,” Ezra Pound, “The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review 28 (1962), online. Pound considered Edward VIII’s abdication exemplary of this refusal. Lines alluding to Edward Windsor, and the three years’ peace he won for Europe, appear frequently in the notebooks dating from this period. See, in particular, Notebook 78, EPP, 4946, and Notebook 79, EPP, 4947. 41 Cantos, 74/442. 38



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extended, deeply partisan defense of Rock-Drill written (also anonymously) by James Laughlin,42 the purpose of which was “to give the true meaning of history as one man has found it.” This defense, “continued from the front flap,” concludes with a short paragraph whose true authorship is clear: “To hell with cookie-pushers who think poetry is a bun shop.”43 Scheiwiller’s edition of Thrones, appearing after Pound’s release, changes tack and prints his name on the cover, replacing the Gaudier profile with ling2 靈 (M4071) or sensibility ideogram, positioned at the lower right-hand corner, graphically reinforcing connections to the previous volume already easily observable; it also prints

Figure 4.1–3  Ezra Pound, front cover of Thrones, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro; Figure 4.2: Ezra Pound, back cover of Thrones, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro; Figure 4.3: Ezra Pound, title page of Thrones, All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro (1959).

chen4 震 (M315), “To shake; to excite. To terrify,” on the back.44 The title page of Thrones features the reproduction of Pound’s name in seal script. The seal itself was suggested to Pound by Hawley after Pound joked that Hawley should try to find some “eng/ interpretations” of “pound”—as in “enclosure for stray animals”—which “has allus seemed to [me] mos’ propriate for actual status. I mean the natr of the critter, basicly, not mere circs.”45 Hawley replied Robert MacGregor, February 17, 1956 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 1318. Ezra Pound, Rock-Drill 85–95 de los cantares (New York: New Directions, 1956), n.p. Pound frequently referred to bad poetry in terms of confectionary: “Stale cream-puffs,” etc. 44 New Directions and Faber also print Pound’s name on the cover, but do not otherwise adopt this new design. 45 January 31, 1957 Letter to Willis Hawley, Ezra Pound, “The Ezra Pound / Willis Hawley 42 43

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on February 5 with characters Pound accepted: “Pao-en-te read Pao-n-dah,” “protect (&) favour virtue.” So, the title page of Thrones effectively prints Pound’s name twice, doubling down on his attenuated authority at the same time as gesturing towards a deep affinity between the syntax of the title page and that of the verse it serves to announce. Mark Byron has suggested that Pound’s sense of personal authority, based on his reading of Eriugena, “is vested in consistency of character and precedent stemming from past actions,”46 or what Pound himself called “accumulated prestige based on intuition”: “we make an act of faith.”47 This conception is much older than, and remarkably at odds with, a now-ubiquitous model of authority first suggested by Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author,” for whom a “text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”; for Barthes, “it is the language which speaks, not the author.”48 Barthes’ aim, as the conclusion to his brief essay makes clear, is to displace the primacy of the author who, for classical criticism, was the “only person in literature,” and to make room for the reader. For some, I believe Pound included, these two positions are not dialectically related but mutually exclusive. Pound’s poem may be a tissue of quotations drawn from different centers of culture, but his appropriations do not mean that he, as its producer, is withdrawn from the list of things its readers must consider. On the contrary, in The Cantos Pound seems emphatically supportive of the “traditional” idea that an author is the ultimate explanation of a literary work. Pound’s ideal of contemporary culture has a tyrannical artist-figure at its center (Alexander the Great, Sigismondo Malatesta, Benito Mussolini); so too does The Cantos: the ego scriptor cantilenae. This authority’s presumptive power disfigures whatever texts he appropriates; and he alone can resolve such disfiguration. Formal incoherence and fragmentation—often more aphasic than articulate—induces us to imaginatively reconstruct a strong poet-guide and install him in the role of the poem’s dominant authority. This means more than internalizing Pound’s ideas, but doing so is an essential part of the process. This is not to say that critiques are impossible. Quite the contrary. Every responsible assessment of Correspondence,” ed. Thomas Grieve, Line 1 (Spring 1983): 22. Mark Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 29. 47 GK, 165. 48 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 146, 143. 46



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The Cantos takes seriously the perils of sympathetic modes of understanding. But, the fundamental orientation of The Cantos’ critical industry is towards a recreation of Pound’s state of mind, a conception of “authorship” Michel Foucault also so famously refused.49 In Pound’s post-Pisan Cantos, authority (as the name itself implies) is predicated rather precisely upon the maintenance of an unequal relationship between a strong poet and, by extension, a weak reader. Pound’s late cantos do more than presume a readerly ignorance; they turn it into a basic instrument of poetic policy. The “difficulty” that ensues is not to be abolished but adored (so authority is a matter of belief). Though the multiple authorized versions of almost any canto one cares to name are records of Pound having been in different minds about his texts at different historical moments, this does not point to a diffusion of authority. Quite the opposite. A variorum edition of The Cantos—including all extant variant readings of all cantos, published or otherwise—would show “ego scriptor cantilenae” to be highly resilient, and certainly robust enough to maintain what Foucault calls the “privileged position of the author.”50 By which I mean that, in the face of a proliferating and unstable textual record that a variorum would uncover and present for critical inspection, Pound’s meanings would not be fundamentally affected by variation as such. This points to a distinction made, in reaction to Foucault’s famous essay, by Alexander Nehamas, between the writer and the author. The writer, for Nehamas, is an “actual individual,” someone “firmly located in history” and the “efficient cause” of their text. As such, “they often misunderstand their own work and are as confused about it as we frequently are about sense and significance.” The author, in contrast, “is whoever can be understood to have produced a particular text as we interpret it”; they are “formal causes” that are “postulated to account for a text’s features and are produced through an interaction between critic and text.”51 When Pound wrote back in 1918 that “it is tremendously important that great poetry be written, it makes no jot of difference who writes it,”52 he seems to have intuitively understood Rumours concerning the death of the Author have been, it seems, grossly exaggerated. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rainbow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 2003), 378. 51 Alexander Nehamas, “What an Author Is,” Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 11 (November 1986): 686. 52 “A Retrospect,” LE, 10. 49 50

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the distinction before it was necessary to describe it. Pound’s authorial intention—initial, medial, or final—remained abstract from, rather than connected to, his biographical self. Again, unlike Joyce’s authorial intention, which Hans Walter Gabler regarded “not as a metaphysical notion to be fulfilled but a textual force to be studied,”53 Pound’s intention transcends his texts. They really are meta-physical constructs. Put otherwise, we might say that Pound’s assertion of authority over his texts is a fiction; and that he had, in actual fact, no real control whatsoever. Pound’s objections to “privatleben” and to philology were on account of the fact that both conceive of authors as “writers.”

Editorial committee While Pound’s authorial intentions escaped the vulgar material concerns of actual text-production, his writerly intentions did not. If, at St. Elizabeths, Pound’s authority was enervated by “The Committee for Ezra Pound,” thereafter it was further interpolated by another kind of committee, one comprised of Pound’s expert readers. The idea of a “corrections committee” was mooted as early as 1953, by Pound himself. There is an irony in the fact that, on account of both their late position in the overall sequence and the means by which they were reproduced (photo-offshoot), the texts of Rock-Drill and Thrones are relatively stable through their various published editions, whilst at the same time, Pound was thinking most seriously about revision and correction to The Cantos as a whole. In a letter to Pound on December 20, evidently in response to a request for some kind of update, Hugh Kenner wrote that “Ez proposed Kenner, [Roy Harvey] Pearce, [Norman Holmes] Pearson, [Clark] Emery, [Guy] Davenport, O[mar] P[ound], [Achilles] Fang, [John Thomas] Idlet. Not necessarily in that order.”54 This idea did not go swiftly into action. Pound complained as much to Hesse in 1955: “if the lice in am/ univs/ had any kulch they wd/ get on with corrected edtn.”55 Writing to T. S. Eliot on December 28 of that same year, Laughlin said: Hans Walter Gabler, “The Text as Process and the Problem of Intentionality,” Text 3 (1987): 111–12. EPP, 1140. April 14, 1955 Letter to Eva Hesse, EHA. Pound wanted Achilles Fang to help “correct” the China

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[Pound] wants us to do a completely new edition of [The Cantos] because there are so many variations and errors in our present texts. He wants to appoint a committee consisting of Achilles Fang up at Harvard and Norman Holmes Pearson at Yale to work up the corrections […] I believe myself it is needed.56

That Pound wanted New Directions to do this, seemingly without informing Faber, was more or less par for the course: Pound habitually submitted corrections to one publisher without submitting identical instructions to the other.57 Even as late as 1959, Pound was still concerned by some errors of the text. In a remarkably candid note to Pearson he wrote, “every time I open a file or look at anything I find errors, and no end of violent language, quite needless, needless offences, etc. Has anyone the list of corrections for Cantos?”58 This note is amongst the few predicting Pound’s near-total withdrawal in 1964. In the years after Pound’s having first suggested it, very little progress was made. In 1956, New Directions senior editor Robert MacGregor wrote to Norman Holmes Pearson; MacGregor told Pearson that he thought Pearson might “be the best” expert reader to lead the project, implying that no coordinated work had yet been undertaken. Pearson was an important correspondent for Pound during the 1950s, and seemed to MacGregor well suited to the role of committee chairperson, not least because “it was a kind of open secret” that he was collecting errors in The Cantos, managed in part by concurrently-run graduate seminars at Yale University, in which students were assigned individual cantos and then asked to fact-check them by comparing them to their sources. Pearson reviewed these findings, and then ran questionable readings past Pound, along with suggested revisions. Usually Pound asked Pearson to retain all queries in a dossier until such a time that he could adequately address them. On the few occasions Pound did respond to Pearson, he normally acquiesced to minor changes (as in correctly spelling an historical surname) by writing “ok, if you’re sure” or “sur[e], but don’t cantos, by which he meant add “ALL the proper names in chink cantos […] to avoid ambiGEWerty.” Laughlin reported to Reno Odlin on June 17, 1963 that Pound still wanted Fang in charge of the Chinese but that Fang declined because he felt Pound’s Chinese so odd that it could never “be brought into line with traditional Chinese” and so had better be left alone. NDPC, 2921a. In sum, criticism, particularly of a textual nature, could not act without further damaging the very thing it sought to analyze and repair. 56 NDPC, 513. 57 For a detailed account of this see Richard Taylor, “The History and State of the Texts,” 235–65. 58 Ezra Pound, November 22, 1959 Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, NHP, Box 79.

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matter.”59 Only rarely did Pound whole-heartedly endorse revisions, such as when they resolved important ambiguities (“Yates” for “Yeats” in Canto 37, for instance). Otherwise Pound mostly demanded a “stet,” citing either textual precision or the fact that the change would not demonstrably improve the text (so why bother). All of which is to say that for Pound, there are two kinds of error in The Cantos: those he cared about, and those he did not. This distinction is as dubious and unstable as it sounds. Ultimately, Pearson was not the editorial asset Laughlin expected. A “distressed” letter written on December 14, 1963 indicates that Laughlin was in possession of lists of potential corrections from Mary de Rachewiltz, Reno Odlin, Hugh Kenner, and Eva Hesse, “but I shall feel badly indeed if we don’t have any from you.”60 Laughlin never did receive any such list; Pearson’s folder “Corrections for Pound’s Cantos” at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University, contains nothing on the scale Laughlin probably imagined; nor do the ten folders comprising the “Corrections File” in the New Directions Publishing Corporation Records at the Houghton Library, Harvard University (at least nothing much from Pearson). Rather more substantial lists were provided by Kenner and Hesse, along with additional suggestions by Odlin and Mary de Rachewiltz (the latter had the special privilege after 1958 of being able to ask her father in person). Always a loose formation, the organization of the editorial committee (with Laughlin as its notional center doing his unenviable best to record all suggested changes) ensured low levels of coordination amongst its worthy constituents. The editorial mare’s nest that is The Cantos induced the members of those committed to the philological task of correcting it, despite their best efforts to coordinate, into the very intellectual sequestration it diagnoses and abhors. During the mid- to late 1950s, Laughlin and MacGregor generally kept soliciting and encouraging scholarly revision while simultaneously continuing to publish non-definitive “stop-gap” short runs of Cantos with no or only minimal alteration. Towards the end of the 1950s, especially following the publication of Thrones in 1959, the feeling that “collected” editions of Cantos should also be “corrected” ones became ever more urgent.61 Such “definitive Ezra Pound, “Corrections for Pound’s Cantos,” Undated Folder, NHP, Box 79. Laughlin, 14 October 1963 Letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, NDPC, 1311. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1948); Seventy Cantos (London: Faber, 1950).

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cantares” were of course dependent upon one man: as Pearson put it to Pound, “nothing could be done without imprimatur of senior professor of St Lizzie’s.”62 By this time, however, and with such little progress having been made, Pound’s enthusiasm for the project waned severely (much like his ability to concentrate on anything for even short amounts of time). So, despite early support for the project, Pound only ever played a bit-part role. Indeed, there is a remarkable coincidence between the end of his enthusiasm for corrections and his release from St. Elizabeths.63 Still, Laughlin persisted in “try[ing] to make things right for him” despite acknowledging that “Ezra has never really cared very much about such details.”64 Committee members agreed that someone should visit Pound armed with a list of corrections and, as Hesse put it, “clobber him” with it. Ultimately Laughlin was the chosen delegate, and travelled to Italy in August 1964, meeting Pound at Rapallo. As he reported to William Cookson, he found Pound physically well but “in a terribly depressed mental state.”65 In terms of the corrections, Laughlin discovered Pound “just couldn’t concentrate, or didn’t want to, enough to answer most of the points that are in doubt”: Pound would stare at the page with the question for a few moments and “then start aimlessly turning pages of the book, without answering.”66 Laughlin’s timing was unfortunate insofar as Pound had fallen silent in January, some seven months previous.67 Laughlin persisted in his solicitations, without success. Eventually, Pound told Laughlin to simply let any remaining errors stand. Though the corrections committee was never more than a casual, nearly ideational formation (it never met formally to discuss policy or hash out differences), its notional existence speaks directly to the kind of writing Pound produced and the kinds of reading it attracted. For more complete accounts of this process, see Eastman, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text; and Taylor, “The History of the State of the Texts,” 235–66. February 14, 1956 Letter to Ezra Pound, EPP, 1677. 63 This fact is apparent in the correspondence, in which Pound more or less stops responding to queries about the text. Norman Holmes Pearson says so explicitly in a June 8, 1960 letter to James Laughlin: “Collecting of errata for the Cantos struck a snag, as you know, just before Ezra left the hospital because of this lack of interest in the matter.” NDPC, 1311. 64 Laughlin, October 30, 1963 Letter to Eva Hesse, NDPC, 782. 65 Laughlin, September 14, 1964 Letter, Agenda Records, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, GEN MSS 87, Box 47, Folder 2544. 66 Laughlin, July 28, 1967 letter to Dorothy Pound, Pound mss. II, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, Box 9. Letters between Laughlin and Mary de Rachewiltz indicate that from 1959 on, Pound was simply too sick and tired to care. NDPC, 1397. 67 A letter from Hesse to Laughlin, dated January 20, 1964, is amongst the first reports of Pound’s fall into near-silence. NDPC, 2921a. 62

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Individual members did, each in their own way, exert certain influence over the texts of The Cantos, with Hugh Kenner’s and Eva Hesse’s contributions being particularly significant. Hesse’s thorough and detailed source hunting, aided to a great extent by her partner Mike O’Donnell, provided the groundwork for large sections of Terrell’s Companion. Laughlin himself took her to be the authority on textual matters, suggested even at one point that she vet Kenner’s suggested corrections.68 Hesse took up an enthusiastic correspondence with Pound in 1950. Her work as a translator of Pound’s poetry and prose into German during the 1950s and 1960s meant that she was in more or less constant contact with him, and she frequently appended “Fragebogen” [questionnaires] to her letters, quizzing Pound about his sources and meanings. Her correspondence with Laughlin is also extensive, and includes long lists of suggested corrections, some of which were okayed by Pound during her translation work, but most of which were merely “suggested” revisions that would need the poet’s approval. Though not a professional scholar, Hesse’s approach is broadly philological (in a way Pound would have understood the term) in its commitment to correct spellings of names and foreign words, correct dates, and so on—whereby “correct” I mean verifiable via some external, scholarly responsible authority. In her master copy of The Cantos, Hesse pencilled in over 800 suggested corrections,69 tacitly believing, as Barbara Eastman later put it, that to suggest a poet’s mistakes should be retained because “we cannot judge The Cantos as we would a piece of scholarly research or a prose argument from historical or literary sources” is really to say they do not matter. This, in turn, “is to make an extraordinary assumption about aesthetics, equivalent to saying that poetry is the ‘redeeming feature’ of the work.” Furthermore, “if we choose to ignore the errors, we come close to denying the modus operandi of the poem itself.”70 In other words, to ignore Pound’s errors in this way—indeed, to believe them essential to the verse itself—would be tantamount to special pleading. But special pleading, as a form of double standard, is precisely what Laughlin, October 30, 1963 Letter to Eva Hesse, NDPC, 782. Hesse actually annotated three copies of Cantos, and dispatched them all to Laughlin. On January 17, 1964, Laughlin confirmed their receipt and suggested that he transcribe Hesse’s annotations into the margins of a further volume of Cantos for Kenner’s inspection. Self-evidently, even the process of correction was prone to error. 70 Eastman, Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text, 9. 68 69



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The Cantos specializes in. Claiming the city of Dioce is T’ai Wu Tzu supposes an identity for which there is no evidence save Pound’s assertion thereof, just as preferentially etymologizing certain Chinese characters in ways “not philological,” however associative and highly imaginative, is to make unexplained claims of exemption from principles and procedures commonly thought relevant. Hesse’s scrupulous attention to textual detail makes her a foil to the kind of reader that Joshua Kotin and I have elsewhere argued The Cantos tacitly endorses.71 In a different but related context (i.e., in regards to the pedagogical aspirations of The Cantos), we argued that Pound’s work wants an ingenuous, not a scrupulous reader, someone able to accept his poetry’s “quiddity” as basically intentional, not factual. Pound of course borrowed the word from Dante, who defined it as the essence of “faith,” “the substance of things hoped for,” and “the proof of things not apparent.”72 Pound himself, of course, usually spells this word with one “d,” not two, though at least one instance of that—in Canto 103—has been “emended” since its initial publication. That emendation obscures without destroying a kind of word play Pound might have detected in “quid,” namely pound sterling, that is, an oblique reference to his own name. Philologers, Pound bluntly asserts in Canto 93, not having heard of “quidity,” set up a biographical butcher’s block and proceed to chop the poet (and poem) to pieces.73 In the end, corrections made to Rock-Drill and Thrones were neither consistent nor thorough. In June of 1963, Kenner sent Laughlin a short list of errors in Rock-Drill: page 9, near bottom: Praecognita should be praecogita (as in E.P.’s source, Couvreur’s Chou King, p. 156). page 19, end of canto: the ideogram is slightly wrong. Should be #4373 in Mathew’s Chinese dictionary, which looks like 冒 […] page 37, line 9 from bottom, principle should be principal. page 76, Greek line. This is Odyssey V, 332. Delete the sigma from the end of the

Michael Kindellan and Joshua Kotin, “The Cantos and Pedagogy,” Modernist Cultures 12, no. 3 (forthcoming). 72 Cf., “any thorough judgement of MUSSOLINI will be in a measure an act of faith, it will depend on what you believe the man means, what you believe he wants to accomplish.” Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 33. 73 Cf. James Wilhelm, The Later Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: Walker & Co., 1977), 62–3. 71

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first word, and put an iota subscript under the last letter of the word beginning with Z: ἄλλοτε δ᾽ αῦτ᾽ Εὖρος Ζεφύῳ εἴξασκε διώκειν. page 96, line 2 from bottom, Pharaotes’ should be Phraotes’ page 97, line 7 from bottom, second Greek word should end with e instead of o, and three dots (to mark omission) should be inserted before last word of line.74

Of these six suggested revisions, the first was ignored, for unknown reasons; the second was ignored, probably because it was discovered that Kenner had observed merely a different style of printing mao, not a different sinograph; inexplicably, his third suggestion was ignored; his fourth recommendation was partially actioned (the terminal sigma was deleted but no iota subscript was added); his fifth and sixth suggestions were accepted. In the same letter—1963 being a sort of the annus mirabilis of the corrections committee, so far as it existed—Kenner further recommended Laughlin also get in touch with Reno Odlin, who, according to Kenner, had a proofreader’s eye. Laughlin made contact, and Odlin duly obliged, sending back an extensive list (about 40 items in total) of what seemed to him like errors in Rock-Drill and Thrones, as well as discrepancies between New Directions’ photo offsets of Scheiwiller’s editions and those texts of cantos published in The Hudson Review. Odlin rightly mentions the extraordinary difficulty of deciding about misspelling, “when any one of them has a chance of being deliberate”; a few of his suggested corrections are accompanied with indications of Pound’s approval: “items marked ‘E.P.’ are specifically by him corrected, either in his copy or by dictation or letter.”75 John Espey wrote to Laughlin along similar lines. His comments nicely sum up editorial problems: And of course it’s a problem to distinguish between EP’s fondly cherished variant form which he may have dug out of a corrupt MS and the unintentional error. Everyone thinks he has the answer, and I tremble to think how many of the 400 suggested corrections are wilder than the original. On the other hand, there are some things that I think I would correct silently if I were the publisher. In Rock-Drill, for instance, and as I’m sure many a classicist (I’m not one) has told you, between pages 97 and 100, lower-case xi is substituted four times for lower-case zeta, omicron once for epsilon, epsilon once for theta, and on page 101 a tau is missing, not to mention all the confused accents which most Annals. Reno Odlin, June 12, 1963 Letter to James Laughlin, NDPC, 2921a.

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of us have learned to live with and really aren’t as important as some pedants would have us think. But if there are going to be accents it would be nice to have the correct ones. On the other hand, when EP changes the spelling of a proper name I’m frequently not sure if it’s an error or a distortion to fit a larger pattern.76

Laughlin wrote to the Bollingen Foundation on November 12, 1963 to try to get help in funding the correction committee’s work: Kenner and a number of the other experts who have been working on Pound, feel that an attempt should be made to correct obvious mistakes, and reach a stabilized text. I am perfectly prepared to stand the expense of eventually resetting the book, long as it is, when such a good text is established, but I have neither the funds nor the knowledge to bring about the preparation of it.77

No support was forthcoming. Nor, even, was Faber especially keen on pushing for a total correction of the text, since their text was already in much better condition than that of New Directions.78 Laughlin and New Directions were left to their own devices. On December 15, 1963, Kenner drafted a “proposed procedure for establishing the text of the cantos,” a document he submitted for the scrutiny of none other than Fredson Bowers—“the world’s greatest authority

July 23, 1967 Letter to James Laughlin, NDPC, 2917. Letter to Jackson Mathews, NDPC, 2921a. Barbara Eastman reckons that between the firms’ two most recent printings, before Faber abandoned their text for New Directions’ in 1975, there were about 450 differences in total. Until 1970, New Directions printed collected Cantos from plates, meaning that changes were both technically more difficult and more expensive to make (and therefore less abundant), whereas Faber had been printing from photo offset since 1950, meaning they could more readily—i.e., easily and cheaply—make the changes Pound wanted made, though Faber had been more assiduous in respecting Pound’s changes even before this technological advance. In photo offset, one needed simply to reprint the line in question, glue it over the old one, and take a photo of the entire page. In contrast, New Directions’ typesetters had to cut out parts of metal plates and weld the new type into place. Indeed, so laborious was this process that it was not until 1970 that New Directions’ editions had consecutive numbering. Laughlin, who recognized the superior condition of the Faber text, had initially intended to take Faber’s edition as unbound sheets for his American editions. Eventually, copyright complications—specifically the stipulation that text had to be not just printed but physically typeset in the US in order to be afforded copyright protection—meant he had to abandon these plans. It is for these same reasons that New Directions’ edition of Rock-Drill (1956) does not contain, as Faber’s edition (1957) does, acknowledgment that the text was reproduced by permission of Vanni Scheiwiller’s Pesce d’Oro, an omission that sorely exercised both Pound’s and Scheiwiller’s patience. In March 1964, Faber reset the entirety of Rock-Drill and Thrones, so that the typeface of those editions would match the rest of the collected volume. But insofar as no definitive word on the state of these texts was forthcoming from Pound, Faber’s Peter de Sautoy insisted that mistakes in the first edition be retained in later ones.

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on such things”—before distributing it to both New Directions and Faber.79 Kenner did not actually send the memorandum until January 23, 1964, but when he did, it bore Bowers’s handwritten comments in the margins. For Kenner, the issue of “error” broke down into “two [main] types: (1) corruptions that have crept into the text through myriad resettings; (2) errors of fact, date, etc.” If type-1 errors were not corrected now, “some scholar is going to have to do it in the future, and make us all look like jackasses.” Such errors, in other words, were boring to deal with but easy to fix. Type-2 errors, conversely, cut to the quick of the poem’s status as art-object (vide supra). It was these, Kenner opined, that “Eva is really looking for.”80 Much of the story of the text, both prior to and beyond this point in time, has been told already by Barbara Eastman and Richard Taylor. I will not duplicate their work here, except to say that the texts of Rock-Drill and Thrones were not “corrected” until the 1971 second printing. The reason for their being left uncorrected in the 1970 first printing was a matter of depleted stocks necessitating the “emergency” printing of yet another imperfect stop-gap edition, that is, supplying the demand. There is a poignant irony in the fact that the corrected text Pound initially seems to have wanted (not above all else but if possible) was scuppered by professors who failed to get moving and a business model necessarily based on “profit motive.”81 In the end, the hundreds upon hundreds of suggested revisions submitted by various members of the corrections committee resulted in 138 changes to the 1970 printing; and ninety-two further revisions to the 1971 edition, most of which were supplied directly by Hugh Kenner in a list of “bedrock misprints,” “ones I’m absolutely sure of.”82 Kenner proposed the list as a step towards a more thorough correction—a “full Evajob”—which was becoming increasingly impractical due to Pound’s ill health. Almost seventeen years after its first being proposed, Kenner was still asking Laughlin about who was heading up the editorial committee tasked with keeping track of errors and potential emendations. NDPC, 2921a. Hugh Kenner, January 23, 1964 Letter to James Laughlin, NDPC, 2921a. Kenner gives a fairly similar run-down in his “Notes on Amateur Emendations,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 28. 81 Cantos, 96/662. 82 Kenner first mentions such a list on December 7, 1970. Laughlin registered his interest on December 30, and made an “SOS appeal” for them on February 7. Frederick Martin, New Directions Managing Editor, received them “just in time” on February 15, 1971. NDPC, 907. 79 80



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The 1975 New Directions third printing saw two further revisions; while the fifth printing underwent another four: the last being a final correction— suggested by Eva Hesse—to that vexed line concerning denominational equivalence beginning “two doits to a boodle” (or “doigts,” depending on what edition is being consulted). Hesse caught the “mistake” in this line upon receiving Faber’s photo offset edition of Thrones in March of 1960; she immediately dispatched a preliminary list of eighteen “Printing Errors”: “if one really went hunting one would no doubt find several times as many.”83 But the line is not strictly speaking a “printing error” as Kenner would have understood it, that is, a printer’s corruption of what Pound actually wrote. Pound wrote “two doigts to a boodle, one bawbee: one sixty doigts” in manuscript draft; he typed it in typescript; The Hudson Review printed it as such; and Pesce d’Oro followed suit.84 As Eastman’s history of the text shows, a series of imperfect revisions first obscured the etymology (i.e., finger) Del Mar gives of “doigts,”85 then changed the ratio first from one bawbee to 3 1/3, and then to 13 1/3 (as well as shifting “one sixty” to “160” doits). Mary de Rachewiltz’s English text in her Lerici edition “restores” the etymological link and foregoes the decidedly awkward “13 1/3 bawbees,” offering instead: “2 doigts to a boodle, one bawbee: twelve doigts.”86 The History of Monetary Systems reads: The term merk is still in use by the Scots. In their ancient scale of moneys there were 2 doits (fingers) to a boodle, 2 boodles to a plack, 3 placks to a bawbee, and 131/3 bawbees, or 160 doits, to the merk.87

The governing assumption behind the editorial revisions—none of which, as far as I can tell, were Pound’s, though he must have acquiesced to the revision probably suggested by de Rachewiltz—is that the line formulates a ratio (an abstract but stable relation between monetary units) and that, as such, its integrity depends upon getting this right. Aside from the faulty revision from “one bawbee” to “3 1/3,” which is an understandable printer’s error, both March 22, 1960 Letter to James Laughlin, NDPC, 782. Notebook 94, EPP, 4962; HRA, Box 210; Ezra Pound, “Canto 97,” The Hudson Review IX, no. 3 (Autumn 1956): 389; Ezra Pound, Thrones 96–109 de los cantares (Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce D’Oro, 1959), 23. 85 Alexander Del Mar, History of Monetary Systems (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1895), 59. 86 Ezra Pound, I Cantos, ed. and trans. Mary de Rachewiltz (Mondadori: Milan, 2013), 1276. 87 Del Mar, History of Monetary Systems, 288. 83 84

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New Directions’ and Lerici’s texts make Pound’s line accord with Del Mar’s footnote. Each intervention is governed by an assumption about the validity of Pound’s text being contingent upon a fidelity to source, which is remarkable at so late a stage in a poem whose entire ethos seems calibrated to ruthlessly if not systematically explode that very belief. The original line should be read not as reference but as writing-through: The term merk is still in use by the Scots. In their ancient scale of moneys there were 2 doits (fingers) to a boodle, 2 boodles to a plack, 3 placks to a bawbee, and 131/3 bawbees, or 160 doits, to the merk.

Taking his cue from this very passage, Peter Nicholls has suggested that the idea of ratio, so important to the opening of Thrones, displays an extreme proclivity for abstraction in these late cantos, where “local detail” can “be coopted into a sort of allegory” in which “anything can stand in for anything else”: “to be told that two unknown quantities are equal to each other is to be told nothing.”88 But while “Two doits to a boodle” may well be a ratio, the rest of the line as Pound first wrote it, and then allowed to pass through several stages of revision, is emphatically not one. Taking the editorial decision to restore this line to its proper ratio constitutes a rationalization of a fundamentally and purposefully irrational formulation. As such, it brings to a head certain questions about editorial procedure and its attendant difficulties, particularly the danger in assuming that Pound’s intentions are essentially coincident with the textual artifacts he used as sources. According to this line of thinking, the texts of The Cantos can often seem at once corrupt and redeemable through acts of philological recovery. This chafes against the idea that Pound’s intentions obtain despite various textual accuracies. If we know anything about boodles and merks, we know also, when we encounter the line in Thrones, that back in the day one bawbee was worth twelve doigts not 160. So if we insist on understanding the intention here as to give a ratio, we can still “git the ideaHHHHH” in spite of the “canto text as printed.” (Suggesting that we must read for intention is not to say we cannot also be wrong about or disagree over the nature of it—I mean to emphasize the obligation not the outcome.) At best, to emend the text so Peter Nicholls, “‘Two Doits to a Boodle’: reckoning with Thrones,” Textual Practice 18, no. 2 (June 2004): 236, 239.

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that this equation is correct, at least insofar as it accords with Pound’s source, is to compromise Pound’s authority without necessarily making his meaning any clearer.

Document / work Amongst the many conundrums The Cantos presents to readers interested in its material history is the fact that the texts’ reliability as witnesses to Pound’s intentions is not particularly contingent upon their correctness. In fact, in some respects, the wronger but more authoritative the texts are, the more viscerally do Pound’s intentions emerge. The term “authoritative” is used here in a textual-critical sense to describe texts written by Pound and whose authenticity can be verified. That is to say, a text’s “authority” exists in direct proportion to its reliability as a witness to its writer’s actions. As Peter Shillingsburg once put it, this notion of “textual purity has not been an exciting concept to critics enthralled by the role of the reader in the act of re-creating the work of art.”89 In fact, such a notion should strike most readers this side of theory as shuddering with all kinds of ideologically suspicious assumptions about the autonomy of artifacts and the idealism of the individuals who make and preserve them. But when Pound claims in Canto 103 that France started no war in Europe, the reader who does not understand that The Cantos is a record of struggle between official and idiosyncratic understandings of the past, one that asserts the dominion of the latter over the former, will say he is wrong and dismiss the work outright (Pound recognized and reacted to this eventuality). But the “right” way—the way Pound’s wants us!—to read this error is to understand that, despite it being untrue, the idea he means to assert by it remains fundamentally correct (in this case, that we should recognize and respect those who broker peace instead of war). The authority of such texts—their dependability as indicators of Pound’s authorial intentions—actually inheres in their wrongness.90 Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 12. Cf. Keston Sutherland’s conceptual category “wrong poetry”: “I want the category not merely to be

89

90

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Put otherwise, Pound’s later attitudes towards the material production of literary artifacts implies an essential (even if by now somewhat hackneyed) “distinction between texts of documents and the texts of works,”91 a distinction traditionally upheld by intentionalist editorial theorists. As this tradition’s most respected and fervent spokesman once put it, “because the media of the sequential arts […] are not tangible, works in those media can never be damaged physically; but we can never know, from surviving physical artefacts, what constitutes the texts of those works.”92 For Tanselle, “because the medium of literature is the words (whether already existent or newly created) of a language,” poems can exist exclusively “in the mind, whether or not they are reported by voice or in writing.”93 Such an intentionalist approach to criticism and editing is by no means the consensus view. McGann, perhaps the most articulate and compelling critic of intentionalism, has convincingly argued that not only are literary works “fundamentally social rather than personal or psychological products,”94 but that a “work” is always and necessarily coterminous with material representation: “textuality cannot be understood except as a phenomenal event”; “reading itself can only be understood when it has assumed specific material conditions.”95 This is not to suggest that McGann advocates what Gregory Currie calls a “textualist” position in which “text” and “work” are considered absolutely identical.96 “‘Text’ is the linguistic state of a ‘poem’s’ existence. No poem can exist outside of a textual state any more than a human being can exist outside of a human biological organism.”97 Text and “poem,” in other words, “work,” unstable, counterintuitive, or arbitrary, but to be extremely hard to get into any sort of right focus. If it means anything, ‘wrong poetry’ means just that: a trial of doubt that confounds identification, the loss of confidence in being right, an unease about what will qualify or matter, a compulsion to sublate first reactions under the pressure of sheer insistence on whatever most emphatically escapes them, and a passionate resistance of whatever thought seems most nearly conclusively acceptable or is in any measure already familiar and satisfying.” Keston Sutherland, ‘Wrong Poetry,” Textual Practice 24, no. 4 (2010): 778. 91 G. Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Criticism and Deconstruction,” Studies in Bibliography 43 (1990): 7. 92 G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1989), 30. 93 Ibid., 17. 94 McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, 44. 95 Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 11. Later McGann describes “the linguistic importance of the material form of every script.” Textual Condition, 136. 96 Gregory Currie, “Text and Work,” Mind 100, no. 3 (July 1991): 325–40. 97 Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 22.



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cannot be separated but they are not the same thing. But whereas McGann typically considers their relationship symbiotic and mutually reinforcing— after all, what bibliographic feature could fail to superadd meaning to the linguistic code it carries?—Tanselle, like Pound, views the “intractability of the physical” as an inherent liability, one unlikely to faithfully represent the necessarily abstract entity that is a literary work.98 Actual “verbal documents,” as Tanselle puts it, form a “partial record of that struggle,” but they are never adequate to it. Late on, Pound himself understood his writerly predicament in precisely these terms: to “see again,” the verb is “see,” not “walk on” i.e. it coheres all right even if my notes do not cohere. Many errors, a little rightness, to excuse his hell and my paradiso. And as to why they go wrong, thinking of rightness And as to who will copy this palimpsest?99

By “it,” Pound means the literary “work” called The Cantos, “that forméd trace in his mind,”100 or what Shillingsburg named “the imagined whole implied by all differing forms of a text that we conceive as representing a single literary creation.”101 Conversely, the “notes” that do not cohere comprise the texts of the numerous artifactual documents entitled The Cantos, or “the actual order of words and punctuation contained in any

G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 65. He continues: “when one tries to create a work of verbal art, one aims for perfection, for the objectivity of an independent entity, expelled from the mind to exist in a space where (one hopes) other receptive minds can find it. But the vehicles required, from neural pathways to pens and inks, are uncooperative. As a result, we have manuscripts and typescripts that exhibit authors’ slips, false starts, cancellations, and revisions (and second and third revisions) or copyists’ misreadings and erasures; and we have printed books that show how difficult it is for typesetters to set the right pieces of type. The world of documents is a world of imperfection.” This book being no exception! 99 Cantos, 116/796–7. 100 Ibid., 36/178. 101 Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 42. 98

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one physical form.”102 Jean-Michel Rabaté has suggested that “it” in Pound’s usage leaves open a whole range of indeterminacies: “the world? the dream? the thing? logos? language? the revelation of truth? love?”103 Not that “it” (i.e., The Cantos) could not in fact comprehend all those things, but it strikes me as odd that, especially at so late and crucial a point as this, readers might still be left so uncertain as to what Pound is talking about. Such confusion is entirely appropriate, indicative of how Pound’s ardent particularity in fact promotes extreme abstraction, which is all the more reason to suppose these lines promulgate what James Thorpe once called a theory of literature in which “the reality of the work of art is independent of its written or printed form.”104 Though “see again” probably does not mean revise in the editorial sense, nor do typographical mistakes rank highly amongst the “many errors” admitted to here, the poem does go wrong textually because Pound was always thinking of rightness.

A variorum “And as to who will copy this palimpsest”? This is a question conspicuously addressed to a rather specific kind of reader, namely someone tasked with its retransmission and not (or not necessarily) tasked with its interpretation.105 The Cantos urges, if only implicitly, those who would engage it to reconsider its texts as “scenes of writing” rather than “scenes of reading,” however much the work appears to abhor its own textual condition. Indeed, the “writtenness” of the late cantos is everywhere on display:

Ibid., 43. D. C. Greetham notes that Shillingsburg’s “non-materialist definitions of ‘work’, ‘version’, and ‘draft’ are predicated on a basic acceptance of Tanselle’s eclectic editorial models.” David C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44. Granted, unanimous agreement about the definitions of these terms is not forthcoming, especially not after the rise of theory. Indeed, the distinction I believe Pound posits between them does not accord very well with some seminal attempts to articulate their separation. 103 Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1986), 27. 104 James Thorpe, The Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1972), 6. Thorpe actually attributes the development of this theory to D. H. Lawrence, a writer whose abstractions are, though different, easily as extreme as Pound’s. 105 As Mark Byron has shown, Pound was certainly au fait with medieval forms of scribal endeavor. See in particular his “Bathtub philology: Ezra Pound’s annotative realism,” Archives and Manuscripts 42, no. 3 (2014): 258–69. 102



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With eyes pervanche, all under the Moon is under Fortuna



 CHEN,

e che permutasse. With castled ships and images Dei Matris, HERACLIUS, six, oh, two imperator simul et sponsus, found the “reip’s” business unstuck, that is, Avars made Europe a desert, Persians exterminated all Asia Chosroes (Second) pro sun  & melted down the church vessels & coined them νομίσματα καὶ μιλιαρίσια (which is not in Liddell D. D.), The Deacon, col. 1026, thinks it “argenteos”106

According to McGann, the “‘readerly’ view of text has been most completely elaborated through the modern hermeneutical tradition in which text is not something we make but something we interpret.”107 Taking, conversely, a “writerly” view of the text would mean attending more to a text’s construction, not its meanings (really, it suggests that we approach a text as its maker would or did, not as a reader might or should). As an abstract “work,” then,

Cantos, 96/656. Here Chosroes was silently revised from Chosdroes at Hesse’s behest. Laughlin reported Hesse’s rationale to Faber’s Peter de Sautoy on October 30, 1963: “some of the errata are terribly amusing mixups. The one I spotted the other day, for instance, in ‘Thrones,’ Canto 96. After seeing Chosroes I spelt correctly on page 3, one naturally wonders why Chosroes II suddenly turns into Chosdroes on page 8. As it’s repeated three times that way it is clearly Ezra’s intention to have it written just like that. Thus we must take it that Chosroes II suffered from a ‘cold in de dose’ or something similar. And there’s the rub! Ezra has confused Chosroes II (killed 627 AD) with Justinian II in the enemy camp, whose nose was amputated (695 AD) as a punishment, hence his nickname Rhinometos, which Ezra has equated quite ingeniously except… . Of course, Ezra will be terribly mad at us if we delete his ‘d’ and spoil his little joke, and yet he will be even more mad with us if we try to explain how he’s got everything balled up.” NDPC, 2921a. As it happens, Pound had copied correctly from his source text. Column 1007 of Paul the Deacon’s “Historia Miscella” in volume 95 of J. P. Migne’s Patrologiae gives “Chosdroes” with a “d.” 107 McGann, The Textual Condition, 4. 106

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The Cantos has exceeded, and always will, the capacity of anyone (author, publisher, editor) to represent it; but as a “text,” The Cantos is the sum of its different constitutive drafts and versions, and may be represented by accumulating and displaying them. By “draft” I mean any instance of writing undertaken as either about or for The Cantos; by “version,” I mean any specific form of a canto intended at any given time whose text differs from any other because it has been either revised, corrected, or somehow changed either by Pound or by subsequent typesetters, editors, and publishers. But whereas I have suggested that (like it or not) discovering, deducing, or divining Pound’s intentions should centrally preoccupy a reader’s interpretation of the work, the discovery of authorial intentions cannot become the basis for an editorial policy for Pound’s texts for the simple reason that they cannot be reduced to textual representation. Kenner’s “Proposed Procedure for Establishing the Text of The Cantos” certainly recognizes the value of comparing versions. In a section of this document called “Note on Textual Transmission,” he writes: “Procedure: usual check on names, languages, &c., and against sources when these can be identified. Magazine appearances and mss. when available, may help resolve problems.”108 The key word here being may. If anything, what philological energies persist should be marshalled against the textual-critical urge to “correct the text” and, instead, to preserve it comprehensively, in its adulterated, corrupt state. The Pesce d’Oro edition of Thrones contains these lines from Canto 101: and Cambacérès Cap. x A constitution given to Italy, Xmas day of that year, Bonaparte’s maximum.109

The corresponding lines first appeared in print, in The European, thus: and Cambaceres A constitution given to Italy, Xmas day of that year, Bonaparte’s maXimum.110

Hugh Kenner, “Proposed Procedure,” NDPC, 2921a. Pound, Thrones, 76. 110 Ezra Pound, “CI de los Cantares,” The European XII, no. 6 (February 1959): 382. The European, 1953–9, was a magazine edited by Diana Mosley, wife of Oswald Mosley. 108 109



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And from 1975 onwards, all trade editions of collected Cantos read: and Cambacérès A constitution given to Italy, Xmas day of that year, Bonaparte’s maximum111

Though the version in The European omits the accents in “Cambacérès,” it succeeds in replicating Pound’s desired typography in “maXimum.” The earliest typescript for Canto 101 (there are four) gives only “maximum”; the three others all contain “maXimum” and some version of the note “Cap. x.”112 Evidently The European typesetter understood this as an editorial instruction (in some typescripts the note is much closer, and therefore less ambiguous, to the word “maXimum” than in others) whereas Mardersteig, having by this point typeset Rock-Drill and half of Thrones, mistook it as an instruction to the reader, that is, as an authorial aside or a citation indicating “Cap[itolo] x” (“Chapter 10”). As Eastman explains, Noel Stock identified this error and wrote to Laughlin in December 1969. Stock recommended that the “Cap. x” be removed and that the instruction it gives be followed. Laughlin relayed this recommendation to his printer, but in the end only “Cap. x” was removed. Such interference has resulted in a canonical version furthest from what Pound intended, partly, it seems, on account of the fact that said interference proceeded without the poet’s explicit approval (a criterion the corrections committee had always deemed necessary before making any changes). The Pesce d’Oro version at least still carries the editorial instruction, something that conveys a vestigial trace of Pound’s intention. In fact, the Pesce d’Oro first and second proofs each contain “Cap. x” as printed, and each survived Pound’s personal inspection without comment (as other lines on this same page did not).113 It could be that Pound simply didn’t notice it, thereby giving it his passive authorization.114 More interestingly, Pound could have noticed but misinterpreted it—as a chapter reference wherein “x” stands either for 10 or acts like a placeholder, in

Cantos, 101/724. EPP, 3448–51. 113 APICE. 114 Hans Zeller, “Record and Interpretation: Analysis and Documentation as a Goal and Method of Editing,” in Contemporary German Editorial Theory, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, George Bornstein, and Gillian Borland Pierce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 27. 111 112

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other words, “chapter whatever”—meaning its inclusion represents a marker of Pound’s own confusion and/or inattention to his text. Or Pound might have recognized it for what it was, a note to the printer that had found its way into the text and decided to retain it (a gesture on a par with Ellmann’s account of Joyce’s decision to retain Beckett’s “come in” in Finnegans Wake) as a preferable state of affairs to that which the instruction was designed to realize.115 This foregoing example is but one of many instances of a textual instability characteristic of The Cantos as a whole, a poem “never innocently subordinate to the dictates of its poet, but a product of the combined and interpretive ‘readings’ of its readers and editors.”116 Froula goes further, to suggest that the disparity between what Pound wanted and what his publishers and editors did concerns “not simply the poem or the text, nor Pound’s accuracy or lack of it, but assumptions about error and the authority of the printed word which are so deeply ingrained in us that they are rarely questioned.” For Froula, foremost amongst the questions raised is one concerning the nature of the “interdependence of critical assumptions and editorial policy.”117 Pound’s Cantos radically destabilizes both. Any close critical scrutiny of a canto in Rock-Drill or Thrones will raise questions about the integrity of the text. Not every canto contains a “howler,” but the theatrical self-consciousness of their status as written artifacts might solicit curiosity about how they were written, revised, and published. In post-1975 New Directions collections, Rock-Drill and Thrones are particularly marked by two dozen or so lines whose typeface is decidedly thinner than those of the surrounding lines, drawing our attention both to the historical development of the text, its potential interpolation, and the question of “corrections.” Canto 103 contains a line conspicuously revised in this manner, “no sense of quiddity in the sovreignty.” In the Pesce d’Oro edition it reads “no sense of quidity in the sovreignty,”118 with a double, perhaps triple space between “quidity” and “in.” Now, this might hardly matter, but the reader might then wonder why “sovreignty” was not also corrected to a more standard spelling, or why “quidity” is not also revised Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 662. Peter Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 70. 117 Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 148. 118 Pound, Thrones, 84. 115 116



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elsewhere, in Canto 93 as aforementioned, where it appears in a passage that goads philologers about such decisions: amid dangers; abysses going six ways a Sunday, how shall philologers? A butcher’s block for biographers, quidity! Have they heard of it? “Oh you,” as Dante says “in the dinghy astern there” There must be incognita119

Hesse suggested “quidity” in Canto 103 be corrected to “quiddity” on March 22, 1960; it was made and accepted probably on grounds of consistency with the scholastic spelling quidditas, even though Pound makes it clear that he associates it with Dante in Canto 89—“Quiditas, remarked D. Alighieri”120— and Canto 93. Dante’s text normally gives quiditate, with one “d.” The quiddity, “the inherent nature or essence”121 of The Cantos, that is to say its basic structural principle, is the resistance to stable presentation. The variations themselves are frequently minor; their implications less so. Tim Redman has convincingly suggested that The Cantos is a “hypertext containing poetry”: its “radically intertextual” nature undermines “notions of textual autonomy that have been a staple of most poetic and aesthetic theory and practice for centuries.”122 For Redman, the texts of Pound’s Cantos are contiguous with, not meaningfully discrete from, those it (mis)appropriates, (mis)quotes or otherwise engages. The same must be said of the intra-textuality of Pound’s texts, a term I mean to denote any canto’s particular genetic development. My proposal is that we might be obliged to take the “processual” character of The Cantos literally, not just as trope. The notion is not particularly new. In “La critique génétique: Origines et perspectives,” Louis Hay, a central figure in the development of contemporary genetic criticism in France, cites Cantos, 93/631. Ibid., 89/600. Patrick Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16. 122 Tim Redman, “An Epic is a Hypertext Containing Poetry: Eleven New Cantos (31–41) by Ezra Pound,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 125. 119 120 121

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Friedrich Schlegel: “one can only claim to have real understanding of a work, or a thought, when one can reconstitute its becoming and its composition. This intimate comprehension […] constitutes the very object and essence of criticism.”123 But intratextuality is not so much a romantic search for origins as an attempt to foreground the “historical dimension of the text itself.”124 It has long been recognized that “the next step, clearly, is a variorum.”125 That was Kenner’s opinion in 1979, and it remains the consensus view.126 Two years before Kenner, Froula put it forthrightly when she observed, “it is obvious that an annotated variorum which registers Pound’s evolving complex of intentionality and the incursions of chance upon the text would be immensely valuable to the serious reader of the poem.”127 Richard Taylor best laid out the theoretical principles for such an undertaking in his “Reconstructing Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Variorum Edition—Manuscript Archive—Reading Text.”128 As opposed to a critical edition, in which an editor sets out to curate a single coherent text according to a defined editorial policy in order to produce a new edition accompanied by textual apparatuses, a variorum would set out all extant textual variants, including not only all published versions of cantos, but also page proofs, typescripts, and manuscripts.129 Taylor includes sound recordings, bilingual editions, and posthumous publications in his list of variant readings. This is neither the time nor the place for an exposé on the technical details of a complete variorum edition of The Cantos, but suffice to say it would be an utterly enormous undertaking that in the end could exist only as a digital database, one that gathered together and rationalized, Louis Hay, “Genetic Criticism: Origins and Perspectives,” in Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avanttextes, ed. Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 18. 124 Ibid., 21. 125 Hugh Kenner, introduction to Ezra Pound’s Cantos: The Story of the Text, by Barbara Eastman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), xix. Kenner continues to suggest that a variorum is “the only thinkable edition that can be reasonably faithful both to textual givens into what the poet aimed at, besieged as he was, decade after decade, by melodic patterns versus semantic ones, and by afterthoughts.” 126 This statement is based on my sense of the general attitude of Pound scholars. 127 Christine Froula, “Groundwork for an Edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound” (PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1977), 66. 128 Richard Taylor, “Reconstructing Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Variorum Edition—Manuscript Archive— Reading Text,” in Ezra Pound and America, ed. Jacqueline Kaye (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 132–48. See also Richard Taylor (ed.), Variorum Edition of ‘Three Cantos’: A Prototype (Bayreuth: Boomerang Press–Norbert Aas, 1991). 129 At present, Taylor has collated all published versions of every canto, and has also included page proofs where extant, going back to what he refers to as “presumed setting copy.” He has not incorporated manuscripts or early typescripts into his data set. 123



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through codicological and stemmatological analysis,130 the relationship between all published and pre-publication material (including annotations thereupon). The question of presentation is key. Taylor has for all intents and purposes finished the philological legwork; he lacks only a platform for its demonstration. The complexity of the artifactual record (not to mention other mitigating factors)131 has so far frustrated his attempts. Ideally, a digital variorum would present every witness document as marked-up PDF files, with the texts of each file connected via hyperlinks to a network of other documents’ texts, so that users could trace a history of a canto’s development; or the repetition of certain words or phrases across a defined period of time (or indeed Pound’s entire canto-writing career)—or simply compare differences and similarities across multiple versions. A principal virtue of this set-up—especially one in which any particular version, be it first manuscript draft or final published document, can be selected as the “base” to which all other variants can be compared—would be its structural and ideological opposition to the notion of textual stability as such: at the very level of organization, a variorum would show how “options for interpretation are governed not only by the poem’s semiotics but by its material production.”132 McGann has argued that the textual condition is “always a condition of loss,” by which he meant to agree with D. F. McKenzie’s suggestion that documents bear within themselves the history of their own making, while at the same time suggesting that “it is equally true that those histories are defeatured from the start.”133 As its name implies, a main function of a variorum is not to restore some original purity (either notional or historical), but rather to recover the distortions of process that any individual text necessarily obscures. In a discussion of the complexities thrown up by a variorum, Stanley Fish remarked that such problems are “not meant to be solved, but to be experienced […] consequently any procedure that attempts to determine

The study of manuscripts and their interrelationships, and the study of the transmission of texts, respectively. See Richard Taylor, “The Tragi-Comical History of the Variorum Project and its Betrayal by Cambridge University Press,” online. 132 Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors, 2. 133 Jerome J. McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 168. 130

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which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail.”134 Deciding not to choose, in other words, deciding not to adopt a “critical” approach, in the editorial sense of that word,135 is to recognize something essential about the texts of The Cantos (their quidity). Though by no means a particularly “collaborative” project, The Cantos is replete with instances where the authority responsible for a certain textual feature cannot be reliably determined. Indeed, a key point of agreement amongst the many accounts of the state of the texts pertains to this phenomenon. Cognisance of textual history, which a variorum would facilitate, might induce a kind of failure of (textual) criticism as Pound understood it: “KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That’s what the word means.”136 Approaching The Cantos from this textually-aware, philological vantage would lead not to definitive answers about Pound’s intentions, but instead demonstrate how his commitment to intention as the dominant source of meaning leads to all kinds of irresolvable textual aporia. Did Pound write “EPOS” or did he write “EROS”? Obviously he wrote both, making it clear that authorial action is not the same as authorial intention.137 So, in the end, what Pound meant is still a question of what we believe he meant. Which is to say the kind of editorial construction a philological approach to The Cantos demands will frequently exacerbate rather than clarify the sorts of difficulties it is designed to overcome. The idea would be to implement a weak editorial policy whose principles guard against the strong imposition of any particular approach. A Cantos variorum should aim to give as complete an account of its textual conditions as possible. Which is to say that a Cantos variorum would be responsive to a diverse range of scholarly interests: biographical, literary critical, philological, historical, theoretical, in which no one is excluded or privileged over another. The ideal result would be a radically decentralized textual environment wherein any particular textual variant could become the primary object of critical attention, rendering every other textual witness supplementary to it: Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 465. By “critical approach” I mean the analysis and collation of different drafts and versions of texts in order to construct a new text whose authority is based on scholarly judgments about their faithfulness to Pound’s intentions. 136 ABCR, 30. 137 Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticism, 78. 134 135



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in other words, the opposite of a “traditional model of apparatus, presenting one text with a plurality of variants.”138 Editorial weakness is no mere prostration in the face of Pound’s authority. But it adopts a method basically sympathetic to Pound’s own skeptical attitude towards text production. As Sean Gurd has recently put it, in refusing “the task of the modern critical edition,” namely, to “produce a single text and apparatus on the basis of a comprehensive examination of all relevant witnesses,” a reader can remain “fundamentally and unavoidably critical of the process of producing a text,” and acknowledge that “every history of a text is implicitly a history (singular) of textual histories (plural).”139 The practical consequences of this are readily apparent: such a variorum would in effect become an edition “useful to persons wishing another orientation had been employed.”140 Which is not to recommend a kind of “choose-your-own edition” of The Cantos; that would be to sanction the “materialist” approach to reading and interpretation the ideogrammic method is purposed to impede. It would be, however, to open the poem up to different editorial/critical policies and approaches. Although a variorum would not presume to edit a new text in the sense of preparing a revised or corrected edition for publication, it would make Pound’s hitherto frequently suppressed expressions of preference newly relevant to literary critics. Readers could identify and evaluate the importance of things Pound wanted but never got (say, a portrait of Leucothea as a frontispiece to Rock-Drill), as well as those things he did not want but still got (as in, for example, “corrections” to Leucothea’s name). The detailed historical account of The Cantos that a variorum affords would foreground Pound’s evolving intentions (via both pre-publication materials and through evidence of explicitly-stated desires, as evidenced in Taylor’s Annals) even as it refuses to invent new texts to be realized in print. Mainly, documents stating unrealized intentions (mostly in letters) as legitimate objects of

Daniel Ferrer, “Production, Invention, and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism,” in Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Niel Fraistat (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 55. 139 Sean Gurd, introduction to Philology and its Histories, ed. Sean Gurd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 8. 140 Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, 29. 138

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literary-critical interpretation that should take their place beside printed texts. Second, and set in a productive contrast to the first approach, a variorum would permit a reader to adopt a tendency of German editorial theory (Editionswissenschaft) to focus on textual historicity: unlike the Greg–Bowers model where textual criticism seeks to establish the text that should have been (i.e., Pound’s unrealized wishes), Editionswissenschaft tends to analyze and explain the texts that have been (the texts as printed in their various forms). Under these auspices, a variorum should present all known published versions of every canto; explain discrepancies between various editions and imprints; and offer readers fully searchable scans of original publications, along with relevant bibliographical and biographical information. Bringing together each and every known published version would rectify—if only virtually—a state of affairs Lawrence Rainey noted in 1997: “no library in the world, including the library that houses Pound’s own papers, holds all the journals and volumes in which The Cantos were gradually issued.”141 Methodologically, a variorum aims not to hierarchically inscribe the value of one printing over another, even though it would provide means for establishing chronology and provenance. As Hans Walter Gabler succinctly put it, “since the instability of the text in process is not cancelled out by the final or any other authorial textual version, it can and should not be editorially neglected.”142 Third, in assuming the relevance and legitimacy of using pre-publication material in making literary critical judgments (Pound was his own first and ideal reader), a Cantos variorum should be informed by, and facilitate, genetic criticism, the object of which is neither an authorized final text, as in the Greg–Bowers editorial model, nor any single instantiation of the text, as tends to be the case in current German editorial practices, but rather the reconstitution and analysis of process. Such an approach refuses to subsume all variation into an “accuracy-vs.-error dichotomy,” preferring

Lawrence S. Rainey, introduction to A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 3. Gabler, “The Text as Process and the Problem of Intentionality,” 111. Gabler continues, “An edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos is nowhere yet in sight. If and when it is undertaken, it cannot merely aim at establishing a text. It can hope to be an adequate response to the work only if it lays open the text in process as moved into multiple directions and dimensions of meaning.” Gabler, “The Text as Process and the Problem of Intentionality,” 115.

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instead the documented description of compositional movements represented and reconstructed in the multifaceted network of Pound’s myriad writing events.143 A variorum would give in to what Cerquiglini calls the “temptation […] of the facsimile,”144 not least as a means of destabilizing the presumed hegemony of print. Readers could heretofore decide to inspect (and critique) manuscript or typescript versions of cantos, either independently or in relation to later instantiations. Certainly, a variorum of this description would raise as many questions as it answers. While The Cantos may be “a poem which will have already theoretically imagined a critical edition of itself,”145 it might be equally true to say that it imagines its non-critical receptivity, one where a reader could encounter, identify, but ultimately learn to ignore as much as focus on this or that factual accuracy, typographical error, or infelicity of style. For to care about such things would be to mistake actual production of documentary text for the moral and cultural achievement of The Cantos as work (however one might be personally inclined to construe them). The exaggerated “textuality” of these cantos is not, finally, an assertion of the innate value of the same. Moreover, not striving for a “best text” ideal—which in the case of such an esoteric work as The Cantos can easily function as a proxy for understanding—and to instead embrace variation and uncertainty is to abandon rear-guard philological positivism. It is also, counterintuitive as it sounds, to accept the prerogatives of Pound’s authorial intentions. The irony of all of this being that the tremendous work of compiling and presenting The Cantos in its myriad “multiplicity of versions” will show it “enacts the same basic work,”146 whatever specific version we happen to read. In sum, the recommendation here is for an emphatically “non-critical” editorial approach to Cantos text curatorship, one resolutely determined to eschew critical editing at all costs. It would “avoid constructing a new ideal

Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds., Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 10–11. 144 Bernard Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, trans. Betsy Wing (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21. 145 McGann, The Textual Condition, 129. The grammar of McGann’s claim is fascinating: The Cantos is, present tense, a poem that will, future tense, already have done something, past tense. It gestures towards the diachronic nature of the textual object in front of him. 146 Taylor, “Reconstructing Ezra Pound’s Cantos,” 132. 143

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text in favour of [a] more objective recording.”147 The idea would be, instead, to promote editorial weakness in the face of Pound’s strong textual instability. The truth is, Pound cared sometimes passionately and sometimes not a jot about the correctness of his text: “horrible cover on Illustrazione, but text beautifully and CORRECTLY printed. Canto 98”148 versus “NO interest in corrections of Cantos/ mere minutae, INTEREST in getting some god dam NEWS.”149 (For Pound, a text was always both sufficient and deficient.) We might have to forfeit the possibility of achieving a corrected text, some new and better approximation of what Pound actually wanted us to read, but we could gain a sense instead of what Daniel Ferrer calls “the process of writing,” an approximation “reconstituted from existing documents” only “imperfectly represented.”150 Such a presentation would allow us to track Pound’s shifting authorial intentions without necessarily having to turn them from psychological states into philological problems.151

Redemptive criticism In Chapter 1, I suggest that no one has done better work in theorizing and describing the conceptual category and textual reality of “error” in Pound’s work than Christine Froula in To Write Paradise. Her work thereon is at once insightful and powerfully argued. Therein, however, she also offers an elegant expression of what I have begun to think of as a redemptive mode of literary critical argument. She writes: Pound’s insistence on the historical aspects of orthography reflects his awareness that language is conventional, underwritten by historical and social factors and not by a transcendent and absolute authority. On the other hand, the kinds of changes Pound’s editors made, against his own toleration of error in his text, reflect the view that language and culture have “absolute”, static, and standard forms which the poem’s mirroring preserves and which its deviations threaten. David C. Greetham, foreword to A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, by Jerome J. McGann (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), xviii. Ezra Pound, September 10, 1958 Letter to Robert MacGregor, NDPC, 1371. 149 Ezra Pound, 1950 Letter to Peter Russell, Contemporary Manuscripts Collection, SUNY Buffalo, Box 744, Folder 5. 150 Ferrer, “Production, Invention, and Reproduction,” 49. 151 Zeller, “Record and Interpretation,” 24. 147

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This assumption is implicitly countered by Pound’s advocacy of sagetrieb, a true “philologer’s” notion. Conceiving the forms of language and culture as historical and therefore relative, and their authority as social rather than transcendent, Pound’s sagetrieb values the diachronic traces of thought and language, the historical directions of their metamorphic flowing and the paths of their dissemination, over standardised orthography. The sagetrieb principle opposed a commitment to the ideal of a static, homogenous, dominant culture with “standard” forms, as befits a poem which, to fulfil its project of “including” modern history, must register not one closed culture, but a polyphonic global interpretation of cultures, languages, and histories.152

Froula is surely right to suggest that an editor interested in rectifying names Pound “misspells” could be acting on behalf of a hegemonic culture whose authority is expressed through the perpetuation of standards and conventions, and that Pound was opposed to such regimentation. She offers a persuasive version of Pound’s complaint that uniform spelling destroys knowledge that professors do not understand. But I balk at the idea that Pound’s highly selective, philologically reckless appropriations of other cultures and languages somehow makes his work a paragon of polyphonic globalism. Indeed the hectoring tone through these late cantos suggests just the opposite: I shall have to learn a little greek to keep up with this but so will you, drratt you. “They want to bust out of the kosmos” acensio Anselm verus damn Rufus “Ugly? a bore, Pretty, a whore!”153

Froula of course has no intention of redeeming Pound biographically or politically, quite the contrary. But in supposing the poem’s sense will come through regardless of distortions in its material record, it is Pound and not his editor(s) who exhibits pretensions to transcendence, actively cultivating a dissociation between what he means and what he says. In his remarkable study of Pound and Eriugena, Byron writes that “Pound required a method of reference that was not legitimated by exact quotations from determined Froula, To Write Paradise, 155–6. Pound, Thrones, 102. Subsequently, “verus” was corrected to “versus.”

152 153

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sources, but by the verbum perfectum combining the orders of earth and the heavens in one unbroken ray of light.”154 If Byron’s assessment is right, and I believe it is (as an approximation of what Pound thought he was up to, not empirically), it begs the question: whose attitude towards language is more transcendent than whose?155 Eva Hesse—I think it is, after all, Hesse whom Froula has in mind—may have been wrong to try to standardize Pound’s orthography and correct his dates, and in doing so distorted some “diachronic traces” of Pound’s thought and language. But her motivation stemmed from a lifelong commitment to the careful handling of others’ language. She believed, perhaps too avidly, that a corrected text was perforce a better text, and she tried to achieve this out of a sense of responsibility: one she owed to Pound, as well as one she thought he owed to his readers. Even so dedicated and careful a reader of Pound’s most demanding verse (in both senses of that phrase) such as Hesse found herself, in the end, unwilling to devote her considerable energies to a full translation of Thrones.156 The schedule of interpretive, intellectual, and ideological contradictions is so busy that there are (I surmise) no unconflicted readers of either Rock-Drill or Thrones, and this includes Pound, who himself continued to predict, during the composition of these most fragmented and paratactic instalments, their essential though as-yet unrealized unity. Readers of cantos 85–109 seem to persist in their critical endeavor almost despite themselves, at once fascinated and repelled. Massimo Bacigalupo—whose The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound remains easily the best book on this stage of Pound’s literary work as a whole—put a widely-held critical verdict succinctly when he wrote that these cantos are “very unlike Pisa’s discoursein-progress […] The syntactic and semantic form of these units is most simple and curt, its lack of perspective and articulation insistently recalling infantile and primitive thought.”157 He begins this chapter on Rock-Drill by Byron, Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, 216. Cf. Byron’s further observation that Pound “often invests outsized authority to fragmented texts which, in their fragile state, can suggest instead the unbending light of transcendental knowledge […] The Cantos might be seen [as a] compendium of fragments that radiate across and beyond its structural boundaries.” Byron, “Bathtub philology,” 260. 156 In Die Cantos, Eva Hesse’s monumental translation of the entire poem, she left Canto 105 and Cantos 107–109 to her colleague Manfred Pfister. See the “Editorische Notiz,” Die Cantos, trans. Eva Hesse (Zürich: Arche, 2012), 9. 157 Massimo Bacigalupo, The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 233. 154 155



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asserting that “vision cannot be severed from dross.”158 Though he goes on to make a robust defense of Pound’s “non-traditional” modes of coherence, his ambivalence is ultra-apparent in this brilliantly equivocal opening. More recently, Peter Nicholls has argued that “the monumentality of the poem is still there to challenge us, perhaps in the very deliberateness with which it seeks ultimately to disempower the reader, so it hands back to us the means with which to unsettle its ideological certainties.”159 Nicholls writes in a tradition of critical inquiry that understands the fundamental contradiction in The Cantos to exist between the poet and his poetry, or more specifically, between Pound and his text. While Charles Bernstein, in a rather different expression of this tradition’s basic assumption, argued that the “systematic self delusions and fragmentary illuminations, with magnificent gleanings and indulgent fraudulences” resulted in “a text made beautiful by its damages and ugly by its claims of knowledge”; for Bernstein, the “most positive thing that might be said of Pound’s poetic works” is that the “nature of its contradictions” dismantles the integrity of “any single social or political claim” it makes.160 Similarly, Jerome McGann finds contradiction in The Cantos embodies “a disturbing model of truth,” one whose “critical authority” is bound inextricably to “uncertain knowledge”.161 The larger notion behind this appraisal is that what causes The Cantos to fail is what really causes it to succeed, despite itself.162 Pound’s intemperate attitudes towards critical scholarly activity are what facilitate this redemption in the first place. As Peter Stoicheff remarks in Hall of Mirrors, “it is perhaps best commemorative of the enterprise of writing The Cantos that its termination would frustrate, and continue to frustrate, such an assumption [i.e., that the text must Ibid., 231, 232. Peter Nicholls, “‘You in the dinghy astern there’: Learning from Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound and Education, ed. Steven G. Yao and Michael Coyle (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2012), 158. 160 Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 126. 161 Jerome J. McGann, “The ‘Cantos’ of Ezra Pound, The Truth in Contradiction,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 25. 162 “As it proceeds, the poem develops its own logic and, in the process, becomes an inexhaustible record of the condition humaine. One has in fact to be thankful that the poet insists on his failure.” Eva Hesse, “Introduction,” New Approaches to Ezra Pound: A Co-ordinated Investigation of Pound’s Poetry and Ideas (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 51. “This failure to establish order, a failure the record of which is an extraordinary success …” Andrew J. Kappel, “Psychiatrists, Paranoia, and the Mind of Ezra Pound,” Literature and Medicine 4 (1985): 74. “Pound’s inability to finish the Cantos could be seen as a measure of his success.” Stephen Wilson, “Ezra Pound,” in Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism, ed. Paul Poplawski (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 320. 158 159

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eventually achieve some canonical form]. The poem’s exotic and unrehearsed negotiation between form and flux, interpretation and fact, narrative and lyric, reading and writing, language and what it signifies” means that nothing in the poem can “stand as unequivocally ‘correct’.”163 And he concludes, “Pound sensed the failure of his vision of coherence for his poem and himself strongly enough to not attempt to master the threat of its revelation in its final cantos. Their refusal to resolve is the success of its poetics in weakening the tenacity of its closural dynamic.”164 This seems to me a compelling reading of the material conditions of the final instalment, but one deeply invested in using the “dispersed and accretive nature of the textual record”165 as a means of redeeming the poem’s moral and ethical failings, as though the deficiencies of the letter ensure an in-built critique of authorial spirit. This is itself consistent with the equally predominant notion, one Alec Marsh attributes to Burton Hatlen but which permeates a great deal of thought about Pound, that the late poetry is “ideologically closed but formally open.”166 Typically, the poetry’s formal openness is construed as a redemptive quality of the verse, textual indeterminacy standing in as a structural correction to what might be construed as its ideological closed-mindedness. But, actually, the contrary is true. As Jane Elliott noted, in commenting on Claudio Guillén’s discussion of the picaresque (whence, as far as I can tell, this phrase is derived), the only variations that an “ideologically closed but formally open” system allows are those that have no permanent consequences.167 Which is say that far from being challenged by its plethora of differences, the underlying ideologies are further reinforced, specifically Pound’s contempt for the drudgeries of textual criticism, philology, and all the social and cultural idiocies those things to him implied. As Peter Glassgold of New Directions put it in 1989, “the ND opinion […] is that the intrinsic character of the work is constituted in part by the very things—the so-called mistakes and inconsistencies—that a scholarly

Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors, 2–3. Ibid., 168. 165 Mark Byron, “Textual Criticism,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 141. 166 Alec Marsh, John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 159. 167 Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 85; and Jane Elliott, Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 93. 163 164



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editing of the text would alter.”168 Glassgold concluded by reiterating that the company believed the integrity of the text would be compromised by its correction: the adjectival “so-called” even reports a basic skepticism about the existence of textual corruption in the first place. The virtue at once defended and promulgated is that The Cantos is basically incorruptible, and resists any critical attempt to master it. My hunch is that this kind of redemptive reading, even if it insists upon the inadvertence of such redemption, is, if not properly disproved, then certainly complicated by a better understanding of the production of the cantos that came before Drafts & Fragments, of those texts over which Pound was able to exercise ample control. Rock-Drill and Thrones are exemplary of Pound’s later persistence in the face of error, and of his refusing accusations of guilt. To read the ideograms in Rock-Drill in terms of what they “really” mean (that is, according to the definitions offered by a descriptivelyorganized dictionary, say) rather than in terms of what Pound wanted them to mean, or thought they might have meant, is to read Rock-Drill incorrectly. Likewise, Pound would not have wanted his ideas, which he knew to be unpopular—“the thought of what America would be like / If the Classics had a wide circulation”169—recuperated into middlebrow liberal acceptability by a philologically-informed argument claiming that incoherence in the textual record implicitly unsettles them. Pound’s texts are unstable not because he was unsure about his meanings; they are unstable because he was sure. In recommending that readers defy what contemporary textual theory insists is true—“that authors are not unified, integral personalities, and that we err in supposing that they naturally work toward the creation of an end-product170— and in attempting to rely upon intentio auctoris, something many if not most modern critics have found to be “radically useless,”171 I mean to question our desire to read the failure of The Cantos as its—and our—success. It will be

Peter Glassgold, “A Statement from New Directions,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 275. 169 Ezra Pound, “Cantico del Sole,” in Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1990), 182. 170 Richard Taylor, “The Texts of The Cantos,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161. 171 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 66. 168

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an agony worth enduring if we are to understand The Cantos as a revenge of written art upon interpretation.172

Conclusion In the foregoing chapters I have tried to offer a critical account of some of Pound’s negative attitudes towards philological scholarship as manifest especially in Rock-Drill and Thrones, verse wherein his complaints are arguably most fully realized at the level of content and method; I have also attempted to demonstrate how the basic orientation of Pound’s antipathies can implicitly refuse the legitimacy of textual scholarship in ways that are themselves interpretable and therefore part of the meaning of the poem. At root, the draft-like nature of The Cantos is more than a superficial feature of Pound’s highly abbreviated poetic style. It is a real incitement to read the published poetry in relation to the wealth of pre-publication material from which it emerged. A poem that so conspicuously foregrounds its own compositional process cannot really be separated from an actual inspection thereof. Pound’s late cantos turn information usually interesting only to the textual scholar or bibliographer (each practicing a sub-category of philology per se) into legitimate data for aesthetics. His fraught critiques of literary authority must be scrutinized in both theory and actual practice if they are to be not just applauded or decried but believed or arraigned. There is absolutely no question that Pound’s conception of philology is bunk, a caricature of a various and richly diverse discipline characterized by a wide spectrum of sophisticated and humane intellectual approaches and sensitivities. The reader may justly accuse me of having, to a certain extent at least, internalized Pound’s own anti-philological prejudices; I would respond to this suggestion by agreeing that I have, in part, done so; but I would go further to suggest that the sometimes coercive structures of intention that inform so much of Pound’s work must be both identified and adopted. Though any innovative and sympathetic philologist would hardly recognize

Cf. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009), 7: “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

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as valid Pound’s conception (and critique) of philological work, I think it pertinent to recognize that to read Pound’s Cantos rightly is not to hold his work to the same standards we must abide by in doing so, but instead to allow his misconceptions to unfold according to the logic of their errancy. In her article “Philology: What is at Stake,” Barbara Johnson asked, “what if the close attention to the language of a text didn’t produce a sensible or determinable meaning? What if the philologist’s attentiveness to language were great enough to open up unresolvable difficulties, resistances to meaning, or other, unexpected meanings within the text?”173 As Froula put it, in Pound’s verse there is often “no way to distinguish positively between intentional divergence and unintentional error.”174 Rabaté takes the suggestion further: “as soon as it is accepted that certain errors may be intentional, no error can be corrected.”175 This is tantamount to suggesting that The Cantos is beyond error, essentially turning error into a species of textual variation, and therefore not something to rescind but something else to explain. This should have repercussions for what we do when we read closely. Textual scholars have long argued that before you read closely you should do a bit of philology; but if you do, you almost always find the bsuiness of reading gets more rather than less complicated as a result. Pound’s Cantos turns an epistemological virtue into a critical liability.176 No doubt Pound would have abhorred the approach I have taken to his work. As he wrote to William Harold Cowley, at that time President of Hamilton College, in March of 1939, “the distinction between a greatwriter [sic] like Hardy and hangers on of the Rhymers club being that Hardy looked at the WHAT, whereas the poetasters worried about the HOW. Pea [sic] Pedagody [sic] has often fussed about how to get ideas into the student, long before it had anything substantial or useful to transmit.”177 Pound is making an almost absolute distinction between content on the one hand and method on the other. Looking at how he wrote should have, according to this logic, no bearing on what he meant. The discrepancy is as plain as it is untenable. An Barbara Johnson, “Philology: What is at Stake,” Comparative Literature Studies 27, no. 1 (1990): 28. Froula, To Write Paradise, 14. 175 Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, 38. 176 David C. Greetham, “The Resistance to Philology,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. David C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 15. 177 NHP, Folder “Letters to Cowley,” Box 79. 173 174

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editorially-neutralized approach respects the poet’s intentionality by declining to prefer or select one witness instead of another, so that meaning inheres precisely in the interstices between the differences in variants. The point being to allow the history of Pound’s composition, revision, and publication to problematize critical labor. In discovering and discussing what the poem means, we must also grapple with the question of what the poem is. But then again, when it comes to reading The Cantos, the difference between hermeneutics and ontology is entirely academic.

Bibliography Archives Agenda Records. GEN MSS 87. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Contemporary Manuscripts Collection, c. 1880–2009, Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Eva Hesse Archive of Modernism and Literary Translation. Die Bayerische Amerika Akademie. Munich, Germany. Ezra Pound Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Ezra Pound Papers. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Ezra Pound Papers. YCAL MSS 43. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. George Oppen Papers. Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. MSS 0016. Hudson Review Archives. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Hugh Kenner Papers. MS-2270. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. New Directions Publishing Corporation Records. 1932–97. MSS Am 2077. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Norman Holmes Pearson Papers. YCAL MSS 899. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Olga Rudge Papers. YCAL MSS 54. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Pisan Cantos Manuscripts, YCAL MSS 183. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Pound Manuscripts. Series II & V. LMC 1871. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Robert Lowell Papers. MSS Am 1905. Houghton Library, Harvard University. Scheiwiller Archive and Library, Archivi della Parola, dell’Immagine e della Comunicazione Editoriale, Università degli Studi di Milano.

252 Bibliography Sheri Martinelli Papers. YCAL MSS 868. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Works and translations by Pound ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960. “Affirmations—II: Vorticism.” The New Age 16, no. 11 (14 January 1915): 277–8. “Anachronism at Chinon.” The Little Review 4, no. 2 (June 1917): 14–21. Reprinted in Pavannes and Divagations. London: Peter Owen Ltd, 1958. 85–96. “A Retrospect”. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1960. 3–14. “Apologia: Letter from an Exile.” Listen 1, no.1 (Winter 1953/Spring 1954): 24. “The Art of Poetry.” Paris Review 28 (1962). Online. Canti postumi. Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo. Milano: Mondadori, 2002. “Canto 85.” The Hudson Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1955): 487–501. “Canto 86.” The Hudson Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1955): 13–20. “Canto 87.” The Hudson Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1955): 21–7. “Canto 88.” The Hudson Review 8, no. 2 (Summer 1955): 183–93. “Canto 89.” The Hudson Review 8, no. 2 (Summer 1955): 193–204. “Canto 90.” Meanjin 14, no. 4 (Summer 1955): 488–91. “Canto 96.” The Hudson Review 9, no. 1 (Spring 1956): 7–19. “Canto 97.” The Hudson Review 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1956): 387–98. “Canto 98.” L’Illustrazione Italiana 85, no. 9 (September 1958): 35–9. “Canto 99.” Virginia Quarterly Review 34, no. 3 (Summer 1958): 339–54. “Canto C.” Yale Literary Magazine 126, no. 5 (December 1958): 45–50. Cantos LII–LXXI. New York: New Directions, 1940. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1975. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1996. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, CX-CXVI. New York: The Fuck You/Press, 1967. “CI de los Cantares.” The European 12, no. 6 (February 1959): 382–4. “CII de los Cantares.” Listen 3, no. 2 (Spring 1959): 1–3. ed. and trans. Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects. New York: New Directions, 1969. Die Cantos. Translated by Eva Hesse. Zürich: Arche, 2012. DK/ Some Letters of Ezra Pound. Edited by Louis Dudek. Montréal: DC Books, 1974. Drafts & Fragments: Facsimile Notebooks, 1958–1959. New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 2010.

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254 Bibliography “Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma.” Edited by Douglas Fox. Germany and You 7, no. 4/5 (April 25, 1937): 95–6, 123–4. Variorum Edition of ‘Three Cantos’: A Prototype. Edited by Richard Taylor. Bayreuth: Boomerang Press–Norbert Aas: 1991. Versi Prosaici. Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1959.

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266 Bibliography Shapiro, H. L. Review of The Makers of Civilization in Race and History, by L. A. Waddell. Pacific Affairs 3, no. 12 (December 1930): 1168–9. Sherry, Vincent. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Radical Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Shillingsburg, Peter L. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Sieburth, Richard. “In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry / The Poetry of Economics,” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 142–72. Sieburth, Richard. Introduction to Friedrich Hölderlin: Hymns and Fragments, edited and translated by Richard Sieburth, 3–44. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009. Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982. Stoicheff, Peter. “The Composition and Publishing History of Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments.” Twentieth Century Literature 32, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 78–94. Stoicheff, Peter. The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Stoicheff, Peter.“The Interwoven Authority of a Drafts & Fragments Text.” In A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, edited by Lawrence S. Rainey, 213–31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Surette, Leon. Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Sutherland, Keston. “J. H. Prynne and Philology.” PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2004. Sutherland, Keston. “Wrong Poetry.” Textual Practice 24, no. 4 (2010): 765–82. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention.” Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976): 167–211. Tanselle, G. Thomas. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Textual Criticism and Deconstruction.” Studies in Bibliography 43 (1990): 1–33. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Two Basic Distinctions: Theory and Practice, Text and Apparatus.” Studies in the Novel 7, no. 3 (Fall 1975): 404–6. Taylor, Richard. “The Cantos: Section Rock-Drill de los cantares LXXXV–XCV .” In The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, edited by Demetres Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams, 44–5. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005.

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Index of (Published) Works by Pound ABC of Economics 12 ABC of Reading 2, 18, 28, 38, 78, 145, 187, 238 “Affirmations—II: Vorticism” 77 “Apologia: Letter from an Exile” 65 “Art of Poetry, The” 11–12, 34, 101, 138, 212 Cantos, The passim Canto 1 24 Canto 4 12 n.38, 153 Canto 13 73, 165 Canto 14 26, 28 Canto 20 51 Canto 28 6 Canto 36 38 Canto 49 125 Canto 51 204 n.8 Canto 53 121 n.185 Canto 61 165–7, 169 n.119 Cantos LII-LXXI 170, 204 n.8 Drafts & Fragments 139 n.7, 182, 247 Addendum for Canto C 182 Canto 114 83 Fifth Decad of Cantos, XLII-LI 204 n.8 Pisan Cantos, The 57, 67, 69, 72, 80 n.77, 96 n.107, 109, 121, 133 n.221, 146, 204 n.5, 205, 215 Canto 74 17, 60, 67, 211–12 Canto 79 3 Canto 83 140 n.10, 204 n.5 Section: Rock-Drill 85-95 de los cantares passim Canto 85 5–7, 9, 11–12, 25–7, 30, 33, 44–5, 53, 56, 58, 60, 63, 66, 68–9, 79–83, 96, 102, 109–113, 115, 121–2, 151, 168, 170, 177, 179, 181, 198 Canto 86 39, 60, 69, 82, 87, 109–11, 113, 115, 117, 150, Canto 87 39, 60–1, 65, 69, 70, 82–3, 87–8, 96, 117–18, 204

Canto 88 56, 60–1, 68–70, 83, 91, 96, 101, 119 Canto 89 9, 12, 20, 22, 56, 70, 78, 83–4, 87, 91, 96, 101, 110, 183, 212, 235 Canto 90 42, 53–4, 69, 91, 93, 96, 99, 101–4, 107–8, 112–13, 139, 166, 204 Canto 91 8, 55, 95–6, 98–9, 107, 113, 131 Canto 92 55, 83, 98–9, 107, 113 Canto 93 10, 55, 63, 72–3, 78, 83, 99, 107, 131, 174, 212, 221, 234, 235 Canto 94 12, 17, 19, 70, 82 n.84, 93, 99–100, 107–8, 145, 147 Canto 95 53, 91, 99, 101–2, 107–8, 110, 112–13, 131–2, 139 Thrones 96-109 de los cantares passim Canto 96 40, 45, 70, 110, 122, 139–40, 142, 145–50, 198, 224, 231 Canto 97 8, 70, 83, 106, 116, 138–9, 150–1 153–6, 158–60, 212, 225 Canto 98 9, 64, 70, 103, 122, 130–4, 139, 141, 145, 161–3, 166–9, 184, 186, 242 Canto 99 21–2, 68, 110, 122, 134, 139, 141, 145, 147, 161–3, 165–81 Canto 100 10, 68, 83, 102, 111, 139, 141, 181–2, 184, 204 Canto 101 138, 232–3 Canto 102 70, 133–4 138, 155, 182–6, 188, 201 Canto 103 63, 157, 191, 193, 195, 221, 227, 234–5 Canto 104 42, 63, 78, 114, 138, 141, 144, 173, 198 Canto 105 70, 138, 141–2, 184, 244 Canto 106 70, 83, 141–2 Canto 107 70, 99, 141–3, 198, 244 Canto 108 141–3 Canto 109 58, 137, 139, 141–3, 244

270

Index of (Published) Works by Pound

“Cavalcanti” 20, 71 Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, The 25 n.97, 36 n.131, 37, 95 Classic Anthology as Defined by Confucius, The 115, 125, 172 n.131 Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects 95, 109, 152 Ezra Pound Speaking 156, 180, 212 Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir 25, 58 Guide to Kulchur 2, 12, 38–9, 77, 83, 157, 212, 214 Guido Cavalcanti Rime 46–7, 127

Jefferson and/or Mussolini 50, 212, 221 “M. Antonius Flaminius and John Keats: A Kinship in Genius” 36 “Notes on Contributors” 151 Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound 247 n.168 “Provincialism the Enemy” 2, 41 “Raphaelite Latin” 18, 40 “Retrospect, A” 11–12, 152, 158, 163, 215 “Totalitarian Scholarship and the New Paideuma” 46–9

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 46

Versi Prosaici 87–91

“I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” 2, 24

Women of Trachis 13, 27, 109, 118

Index of Names Adams, Brooks 150, 154 Agresti, Olivia Rosetti 113, 211 Alexander, Michael 42–3 Alexander the Great 25, 70, 77, 83–4, 88, 198, 215 Alfonso X, King of Castile 100 Alighieri, Dante 83, 100, 102, 112, 147, 150, 168, 181, 221, 235 All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro 124, 225 bibliographic layout of Thrones 212–13 erratum 194–6 first editions 132 La Martinelli 108 publisher of individual collections 8, 56 n.7 publisher of Thrones 137 textual variation from other cantos 232–4 typesetting 223 n.78 Ambrose, St. 60, 69, 150 Anderson, David 46 n.169 Antoninus Pius 69, 70 84 “Application of Thought to Textual Criticism, The” 36, 44 Aratus 89 n.96 Ardizzone, Maria Louisa 95 Aristides 100 Aristophanes 54 n.3 Aristotle 156–7, 201 Arrowsmith, William 27 Bach, Johann Sebastian 47 Bacigalupo, Massimo cantos 90–91, on 96, 98 Canto 97, on 155 Canto 100, on 181 cantos 100–9, on 141 editor of “Prosaic Verses” 87 n.93, 88 error in Cantos 195–6, 201 exemplary critic, as 244 Pound’s Italian 46 n.169

Poundian mistranslation 187–8 on Sacred Edict 162 Balfour, Ian 31 n.117 Baller, F. W. 150, 161–5, 168, 171, 175–7, 181 n.163 Balliol, John 100 Barnes, Harry Elmer 58–60 Barry, Elizabeth 76–7 Barthes, Roland 214 Baumann, Walter 103 Beccaria, Cesare 101 Beckett, Samuel 234 Benjamin, Walter 31 n.117, 42 Bentham, Jeremy 101 Benton, Thomas Hart 84, 86, 88 Berchtold, Leopold 59 n.16 Bernstein, Charles 11 n.31, 245 Berryman, John 205–6 Blackstone, William 84, 100–1 Blake, William 42 Blevins, Jeffrey 144 Boethius 63 Bollingen Foundation 223 Bornstein, George 43 Bowers, Fredson 41, 223–4, 240 Brâncuși, Constantin 81 Braun, Eva 42 British Broadcasting Corporation 60 Brooke-Rose, Christine 131 n.215 Bruce, Robert the 100 Brunnenburg Castle 113, 196, 208 n.23 Buchanan, James 79 Bunting, Basil 2 Buren, Martin van 92, 129–30 Bush, Ronald 12, 47, 57, 80 n.77, 191 n.192 Byron, Mark 214, 230 n.105, 243–4 Carpenter, Humphrey 58 n.14, 63 n.26 Carruth, Hayden 206 Casillo, Robert 23, 60 n.19, 158

272

Index of Names

Cavalcanti, Guido 83, 127 Cerquiglini, Bernard 37 n.134, 48, 241 Chapman, R. W. 37 n.135 Chosroes I 231 n.106 Chosroes II 231 n.106 Chou King 7, 28, 31–4, 39, 69, 72, 88, 122–3, 164, 171, 221 Coke, Edward 100–1, 141–4, 150, 201 Committee for Ezra Pound 209–10, 216 Communist Party of China 173 n.137 Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, A 15, 75, 82, 149, 151–2, 171, 195, 220 Concordance to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, A 129, 147 n.36 Confucius 3 n.9, 20–1, 61, 81 n.82, 109, 112 n.155, 115, 121, 164 Cookson, William 204, 219 Cornell, Julien 60, 62 n.25, 64, 65 n.33, 207–9 Couvreur, Séraphin see Chou King Cowley, William Harold 249 Coyle, Michael 5 n.13, 14 n.47 Cuddon, J. A. 71 n.50 Currie, Gregory 228 Davenport, Guy 216 Davie, Donald 4–5, 7–9, 12, 13 n.40, 171, 194, 204 Davies, Ingrid 37, 56, 140 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 76, 78 Del Mar, Alexander 75, 84, 138, 150–1, 153–4, 225–6 Derrida, Jacques 14 n.45, 70–1, 75, 93 n.101, 128 Dickey, Eleanor 148 Dickie, Margaret 2, 4 Dioce, City of 17, 69 n.45, 221 Divus, Andreas 24 Donatio Constantini 88 Dudek, Louis 211 Durer, Albrecht 107 Eastman, Barbara 196, 220, 223 n.78, 224–5, 233 Ecbatana 17–18 Editionswissenschaft 240 Eleanor of Castile 93 n.110, 100 Eliot, T. S. 114–15, 199, 205 n.11, 206, 216

Elizabeth I, Queen 63 Elliot, Jane 246 Ellmann, Richard 234 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 2 n.6 Emery, Clark 216 Epstein, Joseph 58 Erigena, Johannes Scotus 61, 68, 83, 145, 214, 243 Espey, John 46, 222 European, The 232–3 Faber and Faber collected editions of Cantos 57 errors and corrections 45, 73, 132, 193–6, 204 n.8, 207, 217, 223–5, 231 n.106 Section: Rock Drill, UK edition of 212 Thrones, UK edition of 138, 213 n.44 Fang, Achilles authority on Chinese 119, 124–6, 176, 178 chih 止 81 criticism of Mathews 163–4 ideograms 45 member of corrections committee 216–17 Pound’s poetic technique 35 “Preliminary Survey” 170 n.124 transliteration 31 Farrar and Reinhardt 73 Fenollosa, Ernest 36–8, 128, 164 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 59 n.16 Ferrer, Daniel 242 Fish, Stanley 22–3, 237–8 Fitzgerald, Robert 118 Flory, Wendy Stallard 98 n.111 Fondo Scheiwiller 56 n.7 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica 13 n.40 Foucault, Michel 215 Frederico Secondo 100 Freud, Sigmund 49, 97 Frobenius, Leo 157–9, 185 Froula, Christine 5, 161, 234, 236, 242–4, 249 Gabler, Hans Walter 216, 240 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 18–19 Gaius 100 Gallup, Donald 190, 193



Index of Names

Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 25, 58, 211, 213 Gemistus Plethon 145 Germany and You 49 Giovannini, Giovanni 142 Glassgold, Peter 246–7 Golding, Alan 71 n.51 Gordon, David 108, 158, 162, 165–6 Greetham, D. C. 41, 48, 230 n.102 Greg, W. W. 197–9, 240 Grieve, Thomas 26, 163 n.92, 171 Grimm, Jakob 31 n.117 Guillén, Claudio 246 Gurd, Sean 50 n.182, 239 Hall, Donald 12 n.34, 138, 182 Hamilton College 51, 249 Hancher, Michael 13 n.39, 22 n.81 Hart, Albert Bushnell 53 Harvard University Press 125 Hatlen, Burton 246 Havelock, Eric 73 Hawley, Willis 120–3, 163–4, 206, 213 Herodotus 17 n.62, 132 Hesse, Eva chih 止 81 n.82 corrections committee 149, 160, 196, 204 n.8, 207–8, 216, 218–21, 235 correspondence 17, 57, 78, 211 n.35 criticism 245 n.162 German-language representative 210 n.31 personage in drafts of cantos 90 philology 24, 63, 130, 220–1, 224–5, 231 n.106 translator of Pound’s work 13, 173, 185, 244 Heydon, John 88, 103 Hirsch, E. D. 13–15 Histoire Générale de la Chine 164 History of Rome, The 58 Hitler, Adolf 42, 96 Hölderlin, Friedrich 22 n.84 Homer 24, 89, 127, 131–2, 150, 155, 184, 185–7 Horace 63 Houghton Library, Harvard University 218 Housman, A. E. 36, 44 Howard Hall 43, 58, 63

273

Huang, Yunte 128 Hudson Review, The 108–12, 120–2, 140 pre-publication 44, 56 n.7, 79, 91 n.98, 126, 181 n.164, 197 published cantos 151, 222, 225 Women of Trachis, The 27 Hueffer, Ford Madox (later Ford) 25, 166 I Yin 80 Ibbotson, Joseph Darling 51 Idlet, John Thomas 216 Iong cheng 161–5, 167–9, 176, 179 Jackson, Andrew 85, 92 Jakobson, Roman 4 Jarrell, Randall 98 n.111 Jhering, Rudoplh von 101 n.120 Jones, Tom 124 Joyce, James 78 n.70, 181, 216, 234 Justinian I 100 Justinian II 231 n.106 K’ang hsi 101, 122, 161–2, 164, 175–6 Kappell, Andrew J. 16 Karlgren, Bernhard 165, 171–3 Kennedy, George A. 36 n.131 Kenner, Hugh 110 corrections committee 149, 196, 216, 218, 220–5, 232, didacticism in The Cantos 146 intentionalist reader 14 lyric repetition versus error 73 philology 20 sensory privileging 43 n.161 variorum 236 Kimpel, Ben D. and T. C. Duncan Eaves 162, 166 n.109, 174 Kohler, Charlotte 169 Kotin, Joshua xiii, 14 n.46, 221 Kuberski, Philip 98 n.111 Kyburz, Mark 4 n.11 Lachmann, Karl 40 Lan, Feng 20 n.74, 25, 174 Lansing, Robert 59 Laughlin, James 34, 38, 43, 45, 81 n.82, 151 n.44, 173 blurb writer 213 Canto 103 debacle 193–6

274

Index of Names

literary authority and madness 206–8 Pound’s conspiracy against 114 sabotage of Pound’s work 110 Selected Poems 204–5 semantic autonomy 15 textual curatorship 149, 160, 181–2, 216–25, 231 n.106, 233 Laʒamon 96–7 Léger, Fernand 106 Leo the Wise 101, 149–50 Lerici 225–6 Leucothea/Leucothoe 102, 108, 131–4, 183, 185–6, 239 Lewis, Wyndham 70, 111 183, 186 Liebregts, Peter 145 Lindberg, Kathryn V. 22 Liu, Haoming 161 n.81, 162 n.85 Longenbach, James 25 Longshanks, King Edward I 100–1 Lowell, Robert 146

Merchant, Moelwyn 142, 147, 193 n.195, 194 Michaels, Walter Benn 14 n.45, 23–4 Migne, J. P. 150, 231 n.106 Milne, William 161 Mitchell, Kaye 14 n.45, 190 n.186 Momma, Haruko 50 n.182 Mommsen, Theodor 58, 154 Monroe, Marilyn 106 Moody, David A. 7, 36, 60, 78–9, 95 n.107, 104, 209 Morgan, Frederick 27, 44, 108–12, 155, 118–19, 143, 181 n.164, 197, 208 Morrison, Robert 121, 161, 164 n.99 Mosley, Diana 232 n.110 Mosley, Oswald 232 n.110 Münch, Gerhart 47 Muncie, Wendell 16 Mussolini, Benito 49–50, 81, 214, 221 n.72

MacGregor, Robert 206, 217–18 MacLeish, Archibald 38 Magnus the Good, King of Norway 100 Mailla, Joseph-Anne-Marie de 164 n.99 Malatesta, Sigismondo Pandolfo 103, 214 Man, Paul de 40, 50 n.182 Mancuso, Girolamo 14 Mardersteig, Giovanni 108, 114–15, 120, 126–7, 137–8, 199, 233 Marsh, Alec 102–3, 106–7, 158–9, 246 Martin, Frederick 224 n.82 Martinelli, Sheri 102–9, 116 n.169, 133 n.219, 134, 210 Marx, Karl 97, 157 n.67 Mathews, Jackson 223 n.77 Mathews, R. H. and Mathews’ ChineseEnglish Dictionary 123 Fang’s excoriation of 163–4 Pound’s source text 3 n.9, 10, 34, 161 n.81, 166, 170–2, 175–6, 178–9 references in Cantos 39, 122 McGann, Jerome 37, 42–3, 49 n.176, 152, 203, 228–9, 231, 237, 241 n.145, 245 McKenzie, D. F. 177, 237 McNaughton, William 78–9, 104 n.126 Men of Law 100–1

Nachéz, Tivadar 47 Na-khi 150, 182 Nehamas, Alexander 215 New Directions 132, 193, 204, 205–6 collected Cantos 57 correcting the text 217–18, 222–6, 234, 246–7 publication of Rock-Drill 138, 212 publication of Thrones 194–5, 213 n.44 Rock-Drill press release 74 Women of Trachis 119 n.179 Nicholls, Peter 8 n.18, 9, 19, 43 n.161, 73–4, 142, 153, 226, 245 Nicole, Jules 147–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 27 n.106, 206 n.13 Ocellus 68, 83 Odlin, Reno 217 n.55, 218, 222 O’Donnell, Mike 220 Odysseus 7, 131–3 Odyssey, The 43 n.160, 131, 138, 150, 155, 183, 185–7, 221 Officina Bodoni 115 Olson, Charles 17, 65 n.33 Ong, Walter 128–9 Oppen, George 139–41 Orage, A. R. 90, 183–4 Ou, Rong 161 n.81



Index of Names

Overholser, Winfred 60, 62, 207 Ovid 62–3, 67, 69, 132 Paul the Deacon 138, 150, 231 Pearson, Norman Holmes 45, 104 n.126, 149, 216–19 Perelman, Bob 18, 98 n.111 Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista 47 Pestell, Alex 111 n.150, 144 Philostratus 19, 100, 150 Picabia, Francis 60, 69 Plato 15 Plotinus 147, 150 Plutarch 63 Pound, Dorothy 110, 114, 120, 181 n.164, 208 n.23, 209 Pound, Ezra passim anti-Semitism 42, 60, 98 n.111, 91, 110, 115, 158 authorial intention 13–16, 18, 21–4, 28, 33, 35, 46, 72–3, 76, 117, 119, 124, 152, 160, 176, 190, 204, 216, 221, 226–8, 232–3, 236, 238–42, 248–250 difficulty 1, 4–5, 9, 11–12, 18, 112, 129–30, 146–7, 151, 163 n.92, 171, 173 n.135, 176 n.144 206, 215, 222, 226, 238, 249 error 27–8, 33, 36–7, 41–2, 44–5, 49–50, 62, 72, 95, 119, 126, 138, 148–9, 158, 160, 177, 186–7, 189–91, 195, 197–9, 201, 204 n.8, 207, 217–25, 227, 229–30, 33–4, 240–2, 247, 249 fascism 49, 50, 168 n.118, 172, 212, 240 ideogrammic method 4, 12–16, 18–19, 35, 37, 43, 72, 77, 100, 139, 140, 145 n.30, 159, 161 n.8, 139–40, 145 n.30, 159, 165–6, 169–71, 185, 239 poetics 10–16, 33–4, 36, 40, 50–1, 54, 70, 76–9, 111, 116, 128, 146, 157, 160, 177, 182–3, 197, 246, philology 1–5, 10, 15–18, 20–1, 24–8, 31, 33–8, 40–2, 44, 46–8, 50–1 71, 111, 118, 123, 125–6, 128, 135, 141 n.14, 147–8, 156, 160, 176, 180–1, 185, 187, 194, 206,

275

216, 218, 220–1, 226, 232, 235, 237–9, 241–3, 246–9 sagetrieb 128–30, 164, 181 n.164, 189, 243 Pound, Omar 216 Pound, Thaddeus Coleman 61, 68 n.40, 144 Prynne, J. H. 11 n.31 Pryor, Sean 146–7 Qian, Zhaoming 170 n.124, 170–8 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 11 n.30, 16, 187–8, 230, 249 Rachewiltz, Boris de 108, 112–13, Rachewiltz, Mary de 11, 54, 69, 91, 108, 112–16, 120 n.184, 127, 132–2, 137–42 Rainey, Lawrence 34–5, 43, 47, 240 Rapallo 64, 219 Rawlinson, George 17 Reck, Michael 1–2, 13, 79, 208 n.24 Redman, Tim 40, 235 Rock, Joseph 150, 164 n.99 Rome 45, 62, 64, 151 Rothschild family 89–90, 144 Rouse, W. H. D. 13 Rudge, Olga 113, 164 Rummel, Walter 47 Russell, Peter 65 Sacred Edict, The 150, 161–6, 168, 171–2, 175–6, 180, 181, 210 n.30 Said, Edward 50 n.182 Saint Louis IX, King of France 100 Sanders, Ed 182 Santayana, George 14–15 Sautoy, Peter de 193–4, 223 n.78, 231 n.106 Scheiwiller, Vanni 8, 33, 137, 208, 222 Fondo Scheiwiller, APICE 56 n.7, 72 instructions to typesetter 76 Rock-Drill, preparation and publication of 113–16, 120, 124–5, 126 127, 131–3, 212 Thrones, preparation and publication of 192–201, 213 typescripts, possession of 107 typographic sobriety 108 US copyright 223 n.78 Schlegel, Friedrich 31 n.117, 236

276

Index of Names

Scott, James Brown 59 Seagle, William 100–1 Shang Dynasty 80 Sherry, Vincent 50 Shillingsburg, Peter 57, 227, 229, 230 n.102 Sieburth, Richard 8, 22 Simpson, Dallam 212 Sophokles 27 Stamperia Valdonèga 115, 137 Stein, Gertrude 171 Steiner, George 147 St. Elizabeths 9, 38, 78, 120, 142, 157, 203, 207, 209 authority 216 correspondence while incarcerated 1, 8, 211 “Hell hole” 43, 58 gardens as sacred grove 104 reading while incarcerated 150 references in Cantos to 204 release from 210, 219 Tomis, as foil for 63–4, 65 n.3 writing and publications while incarcerated 109, 137, 141, 177, 208 Stock, Noel 35, 142 n.22, 233 Stoicheff, Peter 55 n.6, 141, 245 Storr, Francis 118 Stravinsky, Igor 47 St. Victor, Richard of 83–4, 96, 103 Surette, Leon 95 n.103 Sutherland, Keston 1, 227 n.90 T’ai Wu Tzu 17–18, 221 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de 81, 90, 129, 144, 189–93, 195–6 Tanselle, G. Thomas 228–9, 230 n.102 Taylor, Richard 204, 209 Annals, compiler of xiv Martinelli 102, 104–6 textual history of Cantos, work on 57, 113 n.158, 182, 217 n.57, 219 n.61, 224

variorum 236–7, 239 Ten Eyck, David 57, 96 n.107, 191 n.192 Terrell, Carroll F. 10, 15, 18, 27, 63, 75, 82, 103, 134, 149, 151–2, 155, 158, 162, 171–2, 174, 180, 195, 201, 220 Theobald, John 142 n.22 Thorpe, James 37 n.135, 230 Times Literary Supplement 193–4 Tomis 63–4 Tytell, John 63 Uang-iu-’puh 122 n.134, 189, 161–5 Uhlmann, Anthony 76, 77 n.66 Ullmann, Max 48 Valla, Lorenzo 88 Vail-Ballou Press 110, 206 Virginia Quarterly Review 169 Vivaldi, Antonio 47 Waddell, L. A. 158–60 Wallace, David Foster 123 n.192 Wang, David 122, 163 n.92, 172 Weber, Samuel 14 n.45 When Blood is Their Argument 25 White, Dexter 111 Whittaker, W. Gillies 47 Wiesner Friedrich von 59 n.16 Wilhelm, James 98 n.111 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 185, 199–200 Windsor, Edward 88, 212 n.40 Xenophanes 134 n.226 Yale Literary Magazine 181 Yale University 54, 56 n.7, 210 n.32, 217–18 Yeats, William Butler 59, 183, 186 zheng ming 20 Zhou Dynasty 80