a comic
anecdote
Pound heard Rhys tell.
A-Companion-to-the-Cantos-of-Ezra-Pound-II
"
74/442-444
387. Genji: Central character in Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. A play translated by Pound is entitled Suma Genji [CNTJ, 22-36]. In speaking of the qualities of the Noh, Pound notes "the blue-grey waves and wave pattern in Suma Genji" [p. 27].
388. Suma: Village on Oska Bay, near Kobe, Japan. Here Genji lived in exile from the court [CNTJ,22].
389. Tiro, Alcmene: [cf. 143 above]. People Odysseus sees in Hell.
390. Europa . . . Pasiphae: L, "Europa nor chaste Pasiphae. " Europa, the daughter of Agenor, king of Tyre, was courted and captured by Zeus in the form of a bull. Pasiphae was the wife of King Minos of Crete, the sister of Circe, and the mother of the minotaur.
391. Eurus: The East or Southeast Wind. 392. Apeliota: The East Wind.
393. 10 son la luna: [cf. 285 above]. 394. Cunizza: [cf. 286 above].
395. Rupe Tarpeia: L, "the Tarpeian Cliff," a place in Rome where criminals and traitors were hurled to their death. Perhaps a restau- rant had this name.
396. Castelli: Among the most common wines in Rome.
74/444
"Dawn. " ~PObOb&KTVAO( is the Aeolic form,
found in Sappho as the epithet of oeMvv", Doric of GEAr,Vf], "the moon": Lyra Graeca I, fr. 86, 246 [OBGV, no. 145].
404. Ie contre-jour: F, "against the light. "
405. Achaia: Achaea, region of ancient Greece, N Peloponnesus, on Gulf of Corinth; later the Roman province Achaia, founded by Augustus.
406. Venere: I, "Venus. "
407. Cytherea: L, "Cythera. "
408. aut Rhodon: L, "or Rhodes. "
409. vento ligure, veni: I, "Come Ligurian wind. "
410. Mr. Beardsley: Aubrey Vincent B. , 1872-1898, English illustrator and writer, associated with the symbolist movement and contributor to The Yellow Book.
411. Mr, Kettlewell: Prob. John Kettelwell, a student at SI. John's College, Oxford, in 1913, when Edward, Prince of Wales, was in his first year at Magdalen.
412. pseudo-Beardsley: An unfinished draw- ing of the Prince of Wales on a bicycle done in the manner of Beardsley by W. Lawrence.
383
German initiated project to build a railroad linking western Europe, Istanbul, Mesopo- tamia and the Persian Gulf. J;ingland opposed the plan, thinking it would jeopardize British control of the sea route between Europe and India. Construction started in 1888 and was mostly completed by 1904. The project became a symbol of German imperialism
[EH, Pai, 2-2, 336; Hankins, ibid. , 337; Martin,Pai, 6-2,167-173].
418. Arabia Petra: Arabia Petraea, an ancient cliff city, "a rose-red city half as old as time" [Hankins, Pai, 2-2, 337]; but T. E. Lawrence described the stones there as "red and black and grey with streaks of green and blue. " Lowell Thomas wrote of them as "great rainbows of stone flashing out white, vermilion, saffron, orange, pink, and crimson. " Lawrence was a photog- rapher and probably had his own pictures of Petra.
419. LL. G. : Lloyd George, English prime minister at WWI peace conference at Ver- sailles.
420. frogbassador: Georges Clemenceau, chairman o f V ersailles peace conference. In JIM Pound wrote :"1 saw Arabian Law- rence in London one evening after he had been with Lloyd George and, I think, Clemenceau or at any rate one of the other big pots of the congeries. He wouldn't talk about Arabia, and quite naturally he wouldn't talk about what happened in the afternoon" [p. 33]. Fang writes: "From January to October 1919 T. E. Lawrence was at the Peace Conference with the Arab delegation; he was disgusted with the 'power politics played by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. " And Fang quotes Vyvyan Richards, Portrait of T. E. Lawrence, p. 176: "At Versailles, though, however sympathetically Lloyd George understood Lawrence's concern for Feisal, and however much he would have liked to fulfill the promises made to the Arabs, the French proved immovable. So they got Damascus in the end, and with it endless trouble and expense" [II, 181].
421. Talk modern art: T. E. Lawrence was reluctant to talk of his personal experiences,
397. "Spiritus spirit,' /come. "
veni"/adveni: L,
"'come
398. schema: L, "figure, form. "
399. Arry: Aristotle, who in Nicomachean Ethics, 1, 3, 5-7 (1095a), says political science is not for the young because "they have not experience of life and conduct . . . and they are led by their feelings" [cf. 354 above ] .
400. stagiri! e: Aristotle.
A native
o f
Stagira, here
401. Apeliota: The East Wind.
402. Time . . . evil: [30/147].
George L. , T. E. Lawrence; Will Lawrence invited Pound to SI. John's College to speak on poetry. Pound read a paper on Cava1can~i at Oxford in February 1913 and while there seems to have witnessed Kettlewell telling W. L. , who had run his bicycle into the Prince of Wales, that it was a pity he hadn't run into him
hard enough to kill him.
414. W. L. : William George Lawrence.
415. Edvardus: Future King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor. Here a student at Oxford.
416. a. d. 1910: It would have to be 1913 to have all the people of the passage present in the circumstances indicated.
417. Berlin to Bagdad : [or Baghdad]. A .
413. W. Lawrence:
William brother of
1889-1915,
younger
? 384
which is what people wanted to hear about.
He preferred to talk about the arts [cf. T. E. Lawrence and His Friends, passim, which mentions often his passion to set up a printing press] .
422. T. L. : T. E. Lawrence. Will Lawrence probably showed Pound some of his brother's photographs of the rock temples in Arabia Petra which were probably taken during his second stay at Carchemish (spring 1912- spring 1914). During that time T. E. L. had an unpleasant encounter with Germans constructing the Constantinople-Bagdad line of the 3B (Berlin-Belgrade-Bagdad) railway.
423_ Snow: Thomas Collins S. , M. A. Oxford 1874, lecturer in English language and literature at Jesus College in 1913. He was among those who took part in the discussion after Pound had read his paper on Caval- canti, in which he probably asserted that in some ways Cavalcanti could compare with Sappho_
424. 1JCd/Je~TMT-T-TTT-Cx. { flOL: H, cpCt. llJ? TmI1Ol: "He seems to me. " Sappho's poem "To Anactoria", Lyra Graeca I, fr. 2, p. 186 [OBGV, no. 141], begins with the words: </JIXivEr"" ) l O t <f}Vt<: iao<: ( " A very god he seems to me"). The very aged Snow cited this line as evidence that Sappho was better than Cava1canti.
425. l'aer tremare: I, "the air to tremble"; part of 2d line of Cava1canti's sonnet 7 [T, 38].
426_ Magdalen: A college of Oxford Uni- versity.
427. "The Hound of Heaven": Poem by Francis Thompson, 1859-1907, which appeared in his Poems (1893).
428. burn . nd freeze: Traditional hallmark of Sappho because of an Ambrose Philips translation (1711) of her "Hymn to Aphro- dite" ["To Anactoria" in 424 above], in which he interpolated two lines: "Though now to freeze, he soon shall burn / And be thy victim in his turn. "
429. Siki: "Battling" Siki, a light- heavyweight boxing champion of the 1920"
74/444-446
a Senegalese of brutish strength. But Pound remembered Siki for his deftness not his brutality [HK].
430_ Burr: Prob. prisoner at DTC.
431. Corporal Casey: Member of cadre at DTC.
432. Ie bonhomme Staline: F, "simple Stalin. "
433. Koba: R, "the bear. " Nickname of Stalin as a boy in Georgia [52: II].
434_ Rhys: Ernest R. , 1859-1946. One of the few English editors Pound knew from his earliest years in England and could praise.
435. "A'hv joost. . . . . . . . Tommy Luff": Prob.
a comic anecdote Pound heard Rhys tell. The carefully counted dots prob. replace "buggered. "
436_ Clio: The muse of history.
437. Terpsichore: The muse of the dance.
438. Granville: Prob. Harley Granville- Barker, 1877-1946, English actor, manager, and playwright.
439. three ladies: Perhaps the "Tre donne Intorno" [78:133], or the three Graces, or both.
440. eaao/. 1? vowL: H (aspirate euao/J. ? vmm), "for generations to come" [Elpenor's line: 1:12;Od. XI,76].
441. aram vult nemus: L, "the grove needs an altar" [first statement of recurrent theme: 78:91; 79:126; 90/607].
442. Madame Lucrezia: Lucrezia Borgia [30:8,11].
443. Cesena: Town in Fadi Province, Emilia, Italy; controlled by the Malatestas from 1385 to 1465. Site of the Biblioteca Malatestiana, where Pound deposited a copy of A Draft o f XVI. Cantos in 1926.
74/446-447
445_ Torquato where art thou? : Manlio Torquato Dazzi, in 1926 director of the Malatestiana. "There will be a public copy of the XVI in the Malatestiana at Cesena, if Dazzi consents to house it for me" [L, 190].
446. Tevere: I, "Tiber. " Evokes assassina- tion of Duke of Gandia at 5/18 ("Click of hooves on the cobbles") [5 :32,46].
447. la Stuarda: I, "the Stuart. " Mary Queen of Scots [80:423].
448. Mead: George Robert Stow M. , 1863- 1933, editor of a quarterly review called The Quest (London 1909-1930), which was devoted to occult and/or mystic subjects such as reincarnation. Pound wrote about him as having a sense of humor and gave lines from Mead to illustrate: "'1 know so many people who were Mary Queen of Scots. And when I consider what wonderful people they used to be in their earlier incarnations, I ask WHAT they can have been at in the interim to have arrived where
385
pours down" [HK, Pai, I-I, 83; 4:20; 85 :214; cf. 88 above].
456. formato locho: I, "in a prepared place" [LE, 166, from "Donna mi prega"; 36/178].
457. Arachne: The girl who challenged Athena to a weaving contest; because the girl dared to contest the gods, Athena changed her into a spider so she could weave forever; hence, "a spider. "
458. mi porta fortuna: I, "brings me good luck. "
459. EIKONEl:: H, "pictures, images. " 460. Trastevere: [cf. 24 above]. Pound
wrote in A Visiting Card: "And the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere recall a wisdom lost by scholasticism. . . . In his After Strange Gods Eliot loses all the threads of Arachne" [SP,320].
461. black Jim: A servant, during the 1890s, at the Hotel "Easton," the boarding- house at 24 E. 47th St. , New York, run by the Weston branch of Pound's family, where he spent time as a youth ["Indiscre-
tions," PD, 42-50].
462. . . . Ritz-Carlton: Famous luxury hotel,
now the office building at 380 Madison Ave. , which replaced the Westons' boarding- house at 24 E. 47th St. , New York [JW].
463. Monsieur Fouquet: John D. F. , an architect with an office in Grand Central Depot who lived at the boardinghouse during the early 1890s. He had once been Uncle Ezra's partner in a hotel they ran at Nyack. Their lively arguments impressed young Pound, who described Fouquet as having a "shrill, high, normal tone . . . ascending to pure Punch and Judy or droop- ing to a false double-bass . . . I adored both him and my great-uncle" [PD, 34; JW, Pai, 12-1,55-75]_ Uncle Ezra is named Amos in "Indiscretions. "
464. Napoleon 3rd: Charles Louis N. Bona- parte, 1808-1873, known as Louis Napoleon; emperor of the French (1852-1871); called Barbiche because of his goatee.
444. joli . _. Mal. testiana: F, quarter-hour. " I, "in the Biblioteca Malates- tiana. " Fang says now there are no initials on the back of the door [II, 269] .
450. Fortean Society: A society, organized in 1931, directed by Tiffany Thayer, de- voted to the study of the works of Charles Fort (1874-1932), an American journalist who was interested in researching and documenting unusual and unexplained natural phenomena. The Fortean Society's magazine was called Doubt.
451. bambooiform: Neologism to suggest shape of grass.
452. "La Nascita": I, "_the birth. " The Birth of Venus by Botticelli. The child is prob. Mary, Pound's daughter, and the eyes are those of her mother Olga Rudge.
453. Capoquadri: Name of the house in Siena where Pound used to stay during visits [83 :36].
454. Helios: The sun. The "form beached" is Aphrodite in La Nascita.
455. funge la purezza: I, "the tensile light
"pleasant
they are' " [GK,226]_ 449. metempsychosis at
tion.
. . . .
? :
Reincarna-
? ? ? ! ' I
i!
386
74/447
74/448-449
387
465. barbiche: F, "goatee. "
466. Mr. Quackenbos, or
Abraham Quackenbush, a real estate man who in 1906 had an office at 236 E. 87th SI. He was an old bore who lived at the board-
:inghouse and was always put at the head of "the other long table" so that he would not interfere with Uncle Ezra's heated conversa- tions with M. Fouquet [ibid. ].
467. Mrs. Chittenden's . . . : Poss, Kate SaraC. , 1856-1959, American organist, composer, and lecturer, who may have been a transient resident at the boardinghouse, which, along with Ezra Weston's hotel in Nyack, preserved the elegance of "the old South" observed by Weston when he was caught in the American South during the
Civil War.
468. Mouquin's:
rant Pound referred to in letter to WCW [L, 159].
469. Train: George Francis T. , 1829-1904, American merchant and writer. Founded Train & Co. , which sent clipper-ships to California and made a fortune backing the Union Pa~iflc Railroad. As an independent candidate for U. S. President in 1872, Train made famous inflammatory speeches against politicians, for which he was castigated. He traveled around the world in 67 days and
delivered speeches on the downfall of Napoleon III which were hailed by the French people. Before his death Train often sat on the street outside Mills Hotel in Greenwich Village; earlier he was called the "Sage of Madison Square" because he fed birds and spoke to people openly in the park. Train spent many of his later years in silence, writing messages. He died a pauper
[JW]. In "Indiscretions" Pound wrote: "Francis Train still sat white-headed, or with I think a stiff straw hat on the back of his head, in' a plain wooden hemicycular chair on the pavement before some hotel . . . I was told that he was Francis Train . . . and I read that . . . he had been jailed" [PD, 10].
470. fellow throwing a knife: "Indiscre- tions" gives: "a man throwing a large jack-
knife some fifty feet after a fleeing male figure" [PD, 10].
471. Towers of Pisa . . . : First in a long list of brie-a-brae brought back from Europe and North Africa by Aunt Frances (Frank) Weston. She took the young Pound with her in 1892 and 1898. Also mentioned are family memorabilia from Massachusetts, the home state of the Westons [PD,3-10].
472. 1806 Barre Mass'chusetts: Barre, Mass. Town in central Massachusetts, NW of Worcester.
473. Charter Oak: In writing of his ancestry Pound said: "hence Joseph Wadsworth, who stole the Connecticut charter and hid it in Charter Oak, to the embarrassment of legitimist tyranny" [PD, 6].
474. Torwaldsen lion: Bertel Thorwaldsen, 1770-1844, the Danish sculptor; one of his best known works is the statue of a lion at Lucerne, Switzerland.
475. Paolo Uccello: Paolo di Dono U. , ca. 1396-1475, Florentine painter; one of the "realists" of the 15th century. "I liked Quattrocento paintin'. P. Uccel1o. First freshman theme, I wrote was on Paulo Uccello, picture in Louvre I reckon" [Speak- ing, 138].
476. Al Hambra: The famous group of buildings of Granada, Spain.
Tangiers area, with Gibraltar: "He heard then a warm heavy sigh . . . and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingles . . . All the way from Gibraltar" [DG].
480. Mrs. Jevons' hotel: Prob. an inn Pound stayed at in Gibraltar.
481. veder Nap'oiiiii: [vedere . . . ]: I, "to see Naples.
74/442-444
387. Genji: Central character in Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji. A play translated by Pound is entitled Suma Genji [CNTJ, 22-36]. In speaking of the qualities of the Noh, Pound notes "the blue-grey waves and wave pattern in Suma Genji" [p. 27].
388. Suma: Village on Oska Bay, near Kobe, Japan. Here Genji lived in exile from the court [CNTJ,22].
389. Tiro, Alcmene: [cf. 143 above]. People Odysseus sees in Hell.
390. Europa . . . Pasiphae: L, "Europa nor chaste Pasiphae. " Europa, the daughter of Agenor, king of Tyre, was courted and captured by Zeus in the form of a bull. Pasiphae was the wife of King Minos of Crete, the sister of Circe, and the mother of the minotaur.
391. Eurus: The East or Southeast Wind. 392. Apeliota: The East Wind.
393. 10 son la luna: [cf. 285 above]. 394. Cunizza: [cf. 286 above].
395. Rupe Tarpeia: L, "the Tarpeian Cliff," a place in Rome where criminals and traitors were hurled to their death. Perhaps a restau- rant had this name.
396. Castelli: Among the most common wines in Rome.
74/444
"Dawn. " ~PObOb&KTVAO( is the Aeolic form,
found in Sappho as the epithet of oeMvv", Doric of GEAr,Vf], "the moon": Lyra Graeca I, fr. 86, 246 [OBGV, no. 145].
404. Ie contre-jour: F, "against the light. "
405. Achaia: Achaea, region of ancient Greece, N Peloponnesus, on Gulf of Corinth; later the Roman province Achaia, founded by Augustus.
406. Venere: I, "Venus. "
407. Cytherea: L, "Cythera. "
408. aut Rhodon: L, "or Rhodes. "
409. vento ligure, veni: I, "Come Ligurian wind. "
410. Mr. Beardsley: Aubrey Vincent B. , 1872-1898, English illustrator and writer, associated with the symbolist movement and contributor to The Yellow Book.
411. Mr, Kettlewell: Prob. John Kettelwell, a student at SI. John's College, Oxford, in 1913, when Edward, Prince of Wales, was in his first year at Magdalen.
412. pseudo-Beardsley: An unfinished draw- ing of the Prince of Wales on a bicycle done in the manner of Beardsley by W. Lawrence.
383
German initiated project to build a railroad linking western Europe, Istanbul, Mesopo- tamia and the Persian Gulf. J;ingland opposed the plan, thinking it would jeopardize British control of the sea route between Europe and India. Construction started in 1888 and was mostly completed by 1904. The project became a symbol of German imperialism
[EH, Pai, 2-2, 336; Hankins, ibid. , 337; Martin,Pai, 6-2,167-173].
418. Arabia Petra: Arabia Petraea, an ancient cliff city, "a rose-red city half as old as time" [Hankins, Pai, 2-2, 337]; but T. E. Lawrence described the stones there as "red and black and grey with streaks of green and blue. " Lowell Thomas wrote of them as "great rainbows of stone flashing out white, vermilion, saffron, orange, pink, and crimson. " Lawrence was a photog- rapher and probably had his own pictures of Petra.
419. LL. G. : Lloyd George, English prime minister at WWI peace conference at Ver- sailles.
420. frogbassador: Georges Clemenceau, chairman o f V ersailles peace conference. In JIM Pound wrote :"1 saw Arabian Law- rence in London one evening after he had been with Lloyd George and, I think, Clemenceau or at any rate one of the other big pots of the congeries. He wouldn't talk about Arabia, and quite naturally he wouldn't talk about what happened in the afternoon" [p. 33]. Fang writes: "From January to October 1919 T. E. Lawrence was at the Peace Conference with the Arab delegation; he was disgusted with the 'power politics played by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. " And Fang quotes Vyvyan Richards, Portrait of T. E. Lawrence, p. 176: "At Versailles, though, however sympathetically Lloyd George understood Lawrence's concern for Feisal, and however much he would have liked to fulfill the promises made to the Arabs, the French proved immovable. So they got Damascus in the end, and with it endless trouble and expense" [II, 181].
421. Talk modern art: T. E. Lawrence was reluctant to talk of his personal experiences,
397. "Spiritus spirit,' /come. "
veni"/adveni: L,
"'come
398. schema: L, "figure, form. "
399. Arry: Aristotle, who in Nicomachean Ethics, 1, 3, 5-7 (1095a), says political science is not for the young because "they have not experience of life and conduct . . . and they are led by their feelings" [cf. 354 above ] .
400. stagiri! e: Aristotle.
A native
o f
Stagira, here
401. Apeliota: The East Wind.
402. Time . . . evil: [30/147].
George L. , T. E. Lawrence; Will Lawrence invited Pound to SI. John's College to speak on poetry. Pound read a paper on Cava1can~i at Oxford in February 1913 and while there seems to have witnessed Kettlewell telling W. L. , who had run his bicycle into the Prince of Wales, that it was a pity he hadn't run into him
hard enough to kill him.
414. W. L. : William George Lawrence.
415. Edvardus: Future King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor. Here a student at Oxford.
416. a. d. 1910: It would have to be 1913 to have all the people of the passage present in the circumstances indicated.
417. Berlin to Bagdad : [or Baghdad]. A .
413. W. Lawrence:
William brother of
1889-1915,
younger
? 384
which is what people wanted to hear about.
He preferred to talk about the arts [cf. T. E. Lawrence and His Friends, passim, which mentions often his passion to set up a printing press] .
422. T. L. : T. E. Lawrence. Will Lawrence probably showed Pound some of his brother's photographs of the rock temples in Arabia Petra which were probably taken during his second stay at Carchemish (spring 1912- spring 1914). During that time T. E. L. had an unpleasant encounter with Germans constructing the Constantinople-Bagdad line of the 3B (Berlin-Belgrade-Bagdad) railway.
423_ Snow: Thomas Collins S. , M. A. Oxford 1874, lecturer in English language and literature at Jesus College in 1913. He was among those who took part in the discussion after Pound had read his paper on Caval- canti, in which he probably asserted that in some ways Cavalcanti could compare with Sappho_
424. 1JCd/Je~TMT-T-TTT-Cx. { flOL: H, cpCt. llJ? TmI1Ol: "He seems to me. " Sappho's poem "To Anactoria", Lyra Graeca I, fr. 2, p. 186 [OBGV, no. 141], begins with the words: </JIXivEr"" ) l O t <f}Vt<: iao<: ( " A very god he seems to me"). The very aged Snow cited this line as evidence that Sappho was better than Cava1canti.
425. l'aer tremare: I, "the air to tremble"; part of 2d line of Cava1canti's sonnet 7 [T, 38].
426_ Magdalen: A college of Oxford Uni- versity.
427. "The Hound of Heaven": Poem by Francis Thompson, 1859-1907, which appeared in his Poems (1893).
428. burn . nd freeze: Traditional hallmark of Sappho because of an Ambrose Philips translation (1711) of her "Hymn to Aphro- dite" ["To Anactoria" in 424 above], in which he interpolated two lines: "Though now to freeze, he soon shall burn / And be thy victim in his turn. "
429. Siki: "Battling" Siki, a light- heavyweight boxing champion of the 1920"
74/444-446
a Senegalese of brutish strength. But Pound remembered Siki for his deftness not his brutality [HK].
430_ Burr: Prob. prisoner at DTC.
431. Corporal Casey: Member of cadre at DTC.
432. Ie bonhomme Staline: F, "simple Stalin. "
433. Koba: R, "the bear. " Nickname of Stalin as a boy in Georgia [52: II].
434_ Rhys: Ernest R. , 1859-1946. One of the few English editors Pound knew from his earliest years in England and could praise.
435. "A'hv joost. . . . . . . . Tommy Luff": Prob.
a comic anecdote Pound heard Rhys tell. The carefully counted dots prob. replace "buggered. "
436_ Clio: The muse of history.
437. Terpsichore: The muse of the dance.
438. Granville: Prob. Harley Granville- Barker, 1877-1946, English actor, manager, and playwright.
439. three ladies: Perhaps the "Tre donne Intorno" [78:133], or the three Graces, or both.
440. eaao/. 1? vowL: H (aspirate euao/J. ? vmm), "for generations to come" [Elpenor's line: 1:12;Od. XI,76].
441. aram vult nemus: L, "the grove needs an altar" [first statement of recurrent theme: 78:91; 79:126; 90/607].
442. Madame Lucrezia: Lucrezia Borgia [30:8,11].
443. Cesena: Town in Fadi Province, Emilia, Italy; controlled by the Malatestas from 1385 to 1465. Site of the Biblioteca Malatestiana, where Pound deposited a copy of A Draft o f XVI. Cantos in 1926.
74/446-447
445_ Torquato where art thou? : Manlio Torquato Dazzi, in 1926 director of the Malatestiana. "There will be a public copy of the XVI in the Malatestiana at Cesena, if Dazzi consents to house it for me" [L, 190].
446. Tevere: I, "Tiber. " Evokes assassina- tion of Duke of Gandia at 5/18 ("Click of hooves on the cobbles") [5 :32,46].
447. la Stuarda: I, "the Stuart. " Mary Queen of Scots [80:423].
448. Mead: George Robert Stow M. , 1863- 1933, editor of a quarterly review called The Quest (London 1909-1930), which was devoted to occult and/or mystic subjects such as reincarnation. Pound wrote about him as having a sense of humor and gave lines from Mead to illustrate: "'1 know so many people who were Mary Queen of Scots. And when I consider what wonderful people they used to be in their earlier incarnations, I ask WHAT they can have been at in the interim to have arrived where
385
pours down" [HK, Pai, I-I, 83; 4:20; 85 :214; cf. 88 above].
456. formato locho: I, "in a prepared place" [LE, 166, from "Donna mi prega"; 36/178].
457. Arachne: The girl who challenged Athena to a weaving contest; because the girl dared to contest the gods, Athena changed her into a spider so she could weave forever; hence, "a spider. "
458. mi porta fortuna: I, "brings me good luck. "
459. EIKONEl:: H, "pictures, images. " 460. Trastevere: [cf. 24 above]. Pound
wrote in A Visiting Card: "And the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere recall a wisdom lost by scholasticism. . . . In his After Strange Gods Eliot loses all the threads of Arachne" [SP,320].
461. black Jim: A servant, during the 1890s, at the Hotel "Easton," the boarding- house at 24 E. 47th St. , New York, run by the Weston branch of Pound's family, where he spent time as a youth ["Indiscre-
tions," PD, 42-50].
462. . . . Ritz-Carlton: Famous luxury hotel,
now the office building at 380 Madison Ave. , which replaced the Westons' boarding- house at 24 E. 47th St. , New York [JW].
463. Monsieur Fouquet: John D. F. , an architect with an office in Grand Central Depot who lived at the boardinghouse during the early 1890s. He had once been Uncle Ezra's partner in a hotel they ran at Nyack. Their lively arguments impressed young Pound, who described Fouquet as having a "shrill, high, normal tone . . . ascending to pure Punch and Judy or droop- ing to a false double-bass . . . I adored both him and my great-uncle" [PD, 34; JW, Pai, 12-1,55-75]_ Uncle Ezra is named Amos in "Indiscretions. "
464. Napoleon 3rd: Charles Louis N. Bona- parte, 1808-1873, known as Louis Napoleon; emperor of the French (1852-1871); called Barbiche because of his goatee.
444. joli . _. Mal. testiana: F, quarter-hour. " I, "in the Biblioteca Malates- tiana. " Fang says now there are no initials on the back of the door [II, 269] .
450. Fortean Society: A society, organized in 1931, directed by Tiffany Thayer, de- voted to the study of the works of Charles Fort (1874-1932), an American journalist who was interested in researching and documenting unusual and unexplained natural phenomena. The Fortean Society's magazine was called Doubt.
451. bambooiform: Neologism to suggest shape of grass.
452. "La Nascita": I, "_the birth. " The Birth of Venus by Botticelli. The child is prob. Mary, Pound's daughter, and the eyes are those of her mother Olga Rudge.
453. Capoquadri: Name of the house in Siena where Pound used to stay during visits [83 :36].
454. Helios: The sun. The "form beached" is Aphrodite in La Nascita.
455. funge la purezza: I, "the tensile light
"pleasant
they are' " [GK,226]_ 449. metempsychosis at
tion.
. . . .
? :
Reincarna-
? ? ? ! ' I
i!
386
74/447
74/448-449
387
465. barbiche: F, "goatee. "
466. Mr. Quackenbos, or
Abraham Quackenbush, a real estate man who in 1906 had an office at 236 E. 87th SI. He was an old bore who lived at the board-
:inghouse and was always put at the head of "the other long table" so that he would not interfere with Uncle Ezra's heated conversa- tions with M. Fouquet [ibid. ].
467. Mrs. Chittenden's . . . : Poss, Kate SaraC. , 1856-1959, American organist, composer, and lecturer, who may have been a transient resident at the boardinghouse, which, along with Ezra Weston's hotel in Nyack, preserved the elegance of "the old South" observed by Weston when he was caught in the American South during the
Civil War.
468. Mouquin's:
rant Pound referred to in letter to WCW [L, 159].
469. Train: George Francis T. , 1829-1904, American merchant and writer. Founded Train & Co. , which sent clipper-ships to California and made a fortune backing the Union Pa~iflc Railroad. As an independent candidate for U. S. President in 1872, Train made famous inflammatory speeches against politicians, for which he was castigated. He traveled around the world in 67 days and
delivered speeches on the downfall of Napoleon III which were hailed by the French people. Before his death Train often sat on the street outside Mills Hotel in Greenwich Village; earlier he was called the "Sage of Madison Square" because he fed birds and spoke to people openly in the park. Train spent many of his later years in silence, writing messages. He died a pauper
[JW]. In "Indiscretions" Pound wrote: "Francis Train still sat white-headed, or with I think a stiff straw hat on the back of his head, in' a plain wooden hemicycular chair on the pavement before some hotel . . . I was told that he was Francis Train . . . and I read that . . . he had been jailed" [PD, 10].
470. fellow throwing a knife: "Indiscre- tions" gives: "a man throwing a large jack-
knife some fifty feet after a fleeing male figure" [PD, 10].
471. Towers of Pisa . . . : First in a long list of brie-a-brae brought back from Europe and North Africa by Aunt Frances (Frank) Weston. She took the young Pound with her in 1892 and 1898. Also mentioned are family memorabilia from Massachusetts, the home state of the Westons [PD,3-10].
472. 1806 Barre Mass'chusetts: Barre, Mass. Town in central Massachusetts, NW of Worcester.
473. Charter Oak: In writing of his ancestry Pound said: "hence Joseph Wadsworth, who stole the Connecticut charter and hid it in Charter Oak, to the embarrassment of legitimist tyranny" [PD, 6].
474. Torwaldsen lion: Bertel Thorwaldsen, 1770-1844, the Danish sculptor; one of his best known works is the statue of a lion at Lucerne, Switzerland.
475. Paolo Uccello: Paolo di Dono U. , ca. 1396-1475, Florentine painter; one of the "realists" of the 15th century. "I liked Quattrocento paintin'. P. Uccel1o. First freshman theme, I wrote was on Paulo Uccello, picture in Louvre I reckon" [Speak- ing, 138].
476. Al Hambra: The famous group of buildings of Granada, Spain.
Tangiers area, with Gibraltar: "He heard then a warm heavy sigh . . . and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingles . . . All the way from Gibraltar" [DG].
480. Mrs. Jevons' hotel: Prob. an inn Pound stayed at in Gibraltar.
481. veder Nap'oiiiii: [vedere . . . ]: I, "to see Naples.
