, cited in editors’ note, EP/DP 182.
‘much emptier’: EP to DP, 11 Nov. 1945, EP/DP 185.
‘grizzled and red-eyed’: MdR, Discretions 256.
132 ‘EZRA POUND, American’: COMGENMED to AGWAR, 22 Oct. 1945 (Nat. Arch. WO 204/12602, item 43).
‘The Department of Justice’: AGWAR to COMGENMED, 5 Nov. 1945 (Nat. Arch. WO 204/12602, item 45).
‘on regular flight’: AGWAR to COMGENMED, 16 Nov. 1945 (Nat. Arch. WO 204/ 12602, item 46).
‘to escort’: Travel orders for escort to Rome, 16 Nov. 1945, as in EP/DP 191.
a 1,000-word ‘NOTE’: EP, ‘NOTE on “The Mission to Moscow” by J. E. Davies’, 4 typed sheets, dated at end ‘15 nov 1945’ (private collection).
‘Leaving probably Rome’: EP to DP, [14 and?16 Nov. 1945], EP/DP 189.
small attaché case: the contents were listed when EP was committed to the DC Jail on 20 Nov.
greatcoat: DP to A. V. Moore, 14 Nov. 1945, ‘He had had a greatcoat issued to him’, cited in editors’ note, EP/DP 182.
‘cold raw night’: Lt. Colonel P. V. Holder’s report, 19 Nov. 1945, EP/DP 195.
133 ‘so that no one’: Lt. Colonel P. V. Holder’s report, 19 Nov. 1945, EP/DP 195. Details in this paragraph of the flight from Rome to Washington are drawn from this report.
‘Pound, in dirty shirt’: unidentified newspaper clipping in Charles Olson’s ‘Pound file’, as in Charles Olson, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths, ed. Catherine Seelye (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975), 119n.
Besides Carroll F. Terrell’s invaluable Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), there are helpful annotations in Richard Sieburth’s edition of The Pisan Cantos (New York: New Directions, 2003).
134 working on his Confucius: Pound’s Confucius (1949) is dated on the last page ‘D.T.C., Pisa; 5 October—5 November, 1945’. His translation of ‘The Great Digest’ was drafted in the same notebook as cantos 80–3, but starting from the back.
135 the leading themes: Ronald Bush has argued on several occasions that the late insertion into the DTC drafts of the opening eleven lines transformed the entire sequence into an angry requiem for Italian Fascism—see his ‘“Quiet, not scornful”: The Composition of The Pisan Cantos’, in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 198ff.; see also Sieburth’s account of Bush’s argument in the introduction to his edition of The Pisan Cantos xxxv–xxxvi. That now influential interpretation seems to me to be simply not in accord with the way the opening 31-line passage of canto 74 develops, nor with the way the Pisan sequence as a whole develops; nor is it in accord with the evidence (see Chapter 11) that Pound had come to terms with the failure of Fascism and was looking beyond it politically. And note the judgment on Mussolini in canto 78: ‘Sd/one wd/have to think about that | but was hang’d dead by the heels before his thought in proposito | came into action efficiently’ (78/482). Bush’s argument takes off from his speculative interpretation of Pound’s reaction to learning on 8 October that Angold had been killed in the war, and his then beginning canto 84 with five lines marking his death with phrases from Bertran de Born’s highly rhetorical lament for the death of the young English king (Pound’s version of the ‘Planh’ is in Personae). Pound responded to the news which he had from Dorothy by writing back to her, ‘Heart-break re/ Angold’ (EP/DP 117, 119), and Bush makes much of that ‘Heart-break’; but he does not note how the long letter goes on to other matters, and returns to Angold only to add, ‘Can’t say Angold was necessarily loss to literature as wasn’t sure he would go on writing.’ Canto 84 similarly moves on from the brief Angold threnody to quite other concerns. Pound cared that Angold’s ‘few poems the best granite of that generation up to 1938’ should be collected, but there is not the least evidence in the letter, nor in the canto, of an ‘angry wound opened up by Angold’s death’, a wound which supposedly led him to reveal at the end that the whole sequence was really an act of mourning for Mussolini and Fascism. Bush’s argument would have the lament for Angold at the end, and the protest at the manner of Mussolini’s death at the start—each a matter of a few lines only—determine our reading of the entire sequence.
I have great respect for Bush’s work on the The Pisan Cantos, but I find his interpretation in this instance thoroughly misleading; as, from his own different vantage point, does Massimo Bacigalupo—see his ‘The Myth of the Revised Opening of The Pisan Cantos’, Notes & Queries 54 (2007) 169–71.
136 ‘the city of Dioce’: see p. 99 above.
virtù irraggiante: EP, Confucio 4; also ‘Nota’, ‘Chung Yung [L’asse che non vacilla]’, in Opere Scelte 504–5.
137 Confucianism made new: on this see the following: Mary Paterson Cheadle, chap. 8: ‘Confucianism in The Cantos’, Ezra Pound’s Confucian Translations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 217–66; Wendy Stallard Flory, ‘Confucius against Confusion’, in Ezra Pound & China, ed. Zhaoming Qian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 143–62; Ronald Bush, ‘Confucius Erased: The Missing Ideograms in The Pisan Cantos’, also in Ezra Pound & China, 163–92; Feng Lan, Ezra Pound and Confucianism: Remaking Humanism in the Face of Modernity(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), passim; Feng Lan, ‘Confucius’, in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 324–34.
ch’eng2: ‘“Sincerity”. The precise definition of the word, pictorially the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally. The right hand half of this compound means: to perfect, bring to focus’ (EP, ‘Terminology’, Confucius (1951) 20).
‘the biologist’: EP, ‘Epstein, Belgion and Meaning’ (1930), EP&VA 166.
‘It is music’: EP as in David Anderson, ‘Breaking the Silence: The Interview of Vanni Ronsisvalle and Pier Paolo Pasolini with Ezra Pound in 1968’, Pai 10.2 (1981) 332 (my translation).
138 ‘not words whereto’: cf. Mencius IV.B.11. Ronald Bush, ‘Confucius Erased’, Ezra Pound & China, 170, shows that Pound was thinking of Confucian doctrine in parallel with his composition of the cantos, and that he was drawing mainly on the Analects and Mencius.
‘paraclete’: John 14.
‘Sincerity’: EP, ‘Note’, Confucius (1949) [vii].
140 ‘Gassir’: see pp. 98–9 above.
‘seed-gestalt’: see Ezra Pound Poet I, 228.
did radically revise: see Ronald Bush, ‘Remaking Canto 74’, Pai 32 (2003) 157–86.
Amber Rives: otherwise Princess Troubetzkoi—see pp. 30 and 57 above.
142 the economic theme: on this see A. David Moody, ‘Directio voluntatis: Pound’s Economics in the Economy of The Cantos’, Pai 32 (2003) 187–203.
144 serial bigamist: this information about Charles Granville, born Charles Hosken, I owe to the researches of Steve Holland published on the Web, 13 Feb. 2009.
146 ‘not to know words’: EP, Analects XX.iii, 3 (p. 135). Legge’s commentary on chap. iii is helpful, and also his commentary on ‘The Text of Confucius’, the first part of The Great Learning—see James Legge, Confucius: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean(1893; reprinted New York: