Abstract
Pound found his return to Italy more difficult, in some ways, than his departure. At seventy-three, his arrival at Brunnenburg brought problems not peace. Appearing with Dorothy and Marcella raised immediate difficulties for Mary whose marriage in 1946 against her mother’s wishes created a rift between the two and contributed to the estrangement between Olga and Pound. Olga was also jealous at having to share Pound with yet another (and much younger) woman whom he constantly wanted near him; this new and unclear grouping naturally complicated life at the castle.
When one’s friends hate each other how can there be peace in the world? Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
(CXV/814)
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Notes
For a detailed discussion of the composition of Drafts & Fragments, see Peter Stoicheff, The Hall of Mirrors: Drafts & Fragments and the End of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Pound to Cookson in 1959 letter rpt. in Agenda 21st Anniversary issue, 1980. The issue contains forty-five letters from Pound to Cookson. Was Pound an Italian Fascist? Probably not, since he was not a nationalist nor a militarist. Pound did not see the state as an authoritarian apparatus but as an instrument of distributive justice. But Pound, according to Peter Nicholls, inhabited Fascist rhetoric yet distanced himself from its practice in Italy. The key to understanding this act may be a greater focus on Pound’s economics rather than his fascist commitments or even anti-Semitism. Economics is the absolute ground from which everything else emerges as Pound states in Canto XCVIII. On this everything else rests. See Leon Surrette’s Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999); for Pound on banks and the bank wars see Roxana Preda’s final chapters in her Ezra Pound’s (Post) Modern Poetics and Politics (NY: Lang: 2001). Also see Peter Nicholls’ critique of Pound’s fascism in Modernism/Modernity (10: January 2003) 212–24.
Among the challenges is the way error undermines the textual authority of The Cantos. Pound’s refusal to correct oversights of fact, reference or translation contradicts his understanding of fascism which privileges authority, discipline and order. At best, Pound treated errors in his text ‘eclectically;’ at best, ‘the concept of “authorial intention” is [for Pound] lacking in neatness’ Christine Froula writes with understatement. See Froula, To Write Paradise, Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos (new Haven: Yale UP, 1984) 144 and Ch.3 ‘The Pound Error.’
See, for example, Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988) and Ronald Bush, ‘Modernism, Fascism, and the Composition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,’ Modernism/Modernity 2 (1995) 69–87.
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© 2004 Ira B. Nadel
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Nadel, I.B. (2004). ‘The European Mind Stops’: Drafts, Fragments and Silences, 1958–72. In: Ezra Pound. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378810_8
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