COMPANION TO CANTO XXXVIII

CITATION FORMATS

Annotations in the List of Works Cited:

Contributor name. The Online Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, IV: n.gloss number. The Cantos Project. Web. Date of access.

Example: Preda, Roxana. The Online Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, IV: n.13. The Cantos Project. Web. 5 September 2016.

In–text references

(Contributor name, OCCEP IV: n.no).

Example: (Bressan, OCCEP IV: n.3). If no name is indicated, the gloss was written by Roxana Preda. In this case, the citation will have this format: (OCCEP IV: n.13).

References to The Cantos

As The Cantos Project is numbering the lines of The Cantos, references to cantos already glossed will be by canto number and line(s), as standard with classical works. Example: III: ll.7–17.

For cantos that are not yet glossed within the project, the references will be by canto number slash page number, as standard in the research on the poem. Example: III/12. The page number refers to the American edition of The Cantos by Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1998. 

©Roxana Preda. Companion to Canto XXXVIII, 31 June 2019

Updated 12 September 2023

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1. Il duol… moneta – It. “il duol che sovra Senna / induce, falseggiando la moneta” (“the sorrow that upon the Seine/ he brings by falsifying the coin” (Par XIX ll.118-19).

   Dante’s reference in Paradiso XIX is to the King of France, Philip the Fair (1268-1314, ruled 1285-1314) who, finding himself in fiscal difficulties caused by continuous war, devalued the currency by substantially reducing the proportion of silver in the French coins. The value of a gros tournois (shilling from Tours) was 3.95g of silver when Philip acceded to the throne in 1285. By 1303, its value was 1.3g of silver. But inflation alone was not the worst side of Philip’s fiscal policy. This took a disastrous turn in 1306, when he tried to revalue the silver coins at the purity they had had at the time of his accession (3.96g of silver per coin of 4.2 weight). This was the equivalent of a 70% deflation and led to riots in the streets. In order to raise the necessary quantity of silver needed for the revaluation, the king, in increasing desperation, had to plunder, exile and/or execute his creditors under trumped-up charges: the Jews and the order of the Templars (de la Torre 56-68).

   Philip’s financial difficulties as a result of continuous war and his “stupidity” (i.e. inability to think outside the box in fiscal matters) are the opposite to Kublai Khan’s revolutionary and ingenious finances, which Pound delineated in canto XVIII and which were still on his mind in the spring of 1933 when he revised the poem, as his lectures at the Università Commerciale Bocconi in Milan suggest (EPEC 63).

   Philip the Fair’s disastrous policies, observed by a contemporary poet, Dante Alighieri, introduce this canto, which ends with the situation of France in its post-WWI “defence first!” strategies as observed by Pound himself: Influenced by its armaments industry coordinated by the Comité des Forges, which had a grip on both its politics and newspapers, a succession of French governments built the Maginot Line, developed the navy, and consolidated the naval defence along its Atlantic and Mediterranean shores (Zappa 79-219).

   For a historian who knows the future, it is ironic that despite two decades of military preparations, the German attack in May-June 1940 was so successful that France was defeated in a month.

2. 

   Metevsky – the pseudonym that Pound assigned to Basil Zaharoff in canto XVIII. See OCCEP XVIII n.12.
   
   After the end of WWI, the European armament industries suffered severe contraction, as their governments had ceased to order guns and munitions. This situation made the dealers look for wars elsewhere, mainly in the Far East (both China and Japan were arming and used the same suppliers) and South America.          
   The method Pound dramatizes here was the same Zaharoff had used to sell submarines to mutual enemies Greece and Turkey at the start of his career around 1887 (Zappa 67-8).

3. Pope’s manners – Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti (1857-1939, Pope Pius XI 1922-39). Pius XI was the first to exercise his religious office from the newly-formed papal state of the Vatican, created in 1929 after the Lateran Treaty between the Kingdom of Italy and the Church of Rome negotiated by Benito Mussolini. Pius was also the first pope to deliver his Catholic message, (in Latin), on the radio.
   Judging by his letters to Pound, James Joyce’s manners were polite and conventional, quite at odds with his literary avant-garde reputation. Pound knew the Pope personally, back from the days Ratti was Head Librarian of the Ambrosian Library in Milan.

4. 

   Marconi – Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), Italian engineer credited with the invention of the radio. He set up the Vatican radio station for Pope Pius XI, ensuring that his first message was transmitted over the waves on 12 February 1931. The centuries of bitter enmity between the Church and science were over. A polite truce was established whereby the Church could use technology for its propaganda, whereas scientists were free to investigate and invent without interference or danger.

   “Marconi, representing science and the modern world, is able to converse with the Pope, representing religion and the ancient world, because the two men have a common Catholic culture. The courtesy engendered by that culture (‘a polite curiosity’) facilitates communication between His Excellency and His Holiness. The same courtesy spans the Atlantic no less effectively than the wireless, causing Marconi and Jimmy Walker, the Irish Catholic mayor of New York, to kneel alike ‘in the ancient manner.’ And it brings about an amusing resemblance between the manners of the Pope and those of James Joyce, another gentleman of Irish Catholic descent. In other words, Marconi and his invention simply extend an older communications system that also works through ambient influences” (Witemeyer 234).

5. Jimmy Walker – James Walker (1881-1946) American politician and mayor of New York (1926-1932) during the Prohibition Era. He was renowned for his flamboyant personality, willingness to allow speakeasies in the city to proliferate, scandalous affairs and bribes. After securing his presidential nomination from the Democratic Party, F. D. Roosevelt, who was Governor of New York, finally forced Walker to resign in 1932.

6. Lucrezia… foot – Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519), Duchess of Ferrara and daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Lucrezia had a reputation as a femme fatale. Her first two husbands had had to end their relationship with her in a disastrous manner: the first was forced to admit impotence and consent to marriage annulment because of nonconsummation; the second one was assassinated. While being married to the third one, Alfonso I, the Duke of Ferrara, she had a long, passionate love affair with Francesco Gonzaga, her brother in law.
   A rabbit’s foot is considered a lucky charm in pregnancies, but was ineffective for Lucrezia as died from sepsis at the birth of a sickly child who lived only for the day.       
   Pound mentioned Lucrezia in canto XXX ll.36-43. See OCCEP XXX nn.9-12.

   “The evil of Metevsky’s profiteering is obvious enough. He is associated with Lucrezia Borgia on two grounds. First, his maneuvers among the South American nations recall the Machiavellian diplomacy practiced by the Borgias among the city-states of Renaissance Italy. And second, his kind of production represents no less fatal an abortion of natural processes than does Lucrezia’s. Pound always contended that the usurious practices of modern capitalism were contra naturam, a perversion of nature, and his association of Metevsky with Lucrezia in Canto 38 dramatizes that contention. Metevsky and Lucrezia are deathbringers, and insofar as they influence their environments they do so through fear (of “the other side”) and superstition (the rabbit’s foot)” (Witemeyer 233).

7. cigar makers – Situation described in Dexter Kimball’s Industrial Economics, a book Pound read in 1929. Kimball argued that the extreme division of labour in which workers had to do boring, repetitive tasks was not harmful, as the repetition left the mind free to engage in thought (Industrial Economics 79-80). Pound read Kimball in October 1931, see  Calendar.

8. 

   Dexter Kimball – Dexter Kimball (1865-1952), American engineer, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Cornell University and author of Industrial Economics (1929).
   

9. Akers – pseudonym for Vickers, a British armament firm where Basil Zaharoff was employed as an arms dealer from 1897 until his retirement in 1927 (Lewinsohn 95-7). See also OCCEP XVIII n.12.

10. Mr Whitney – Richard Whitney (1888-1974), New York stockbroker, President of the Stock-Exchange, 1930-35. During the Depression, Whitney embezzled funds in efforts to save his stocks and preserve his lavish lifestyle. In 1938, he was discovered, imprisoned at Sing Sing for three years and prohibited from working in finance. Wikipedia.

11. shortsellin’ – shortselling is a process whereby a financial speculator bets against a company by acting on the assumption that its share price will fall. The investor borrows the shares, sells them immediately to another investor at the price of the day, waits for them to get cheaper, then “covers” them, i.e. buys them back at the reduced price and returns them to the initial borrower’s portfolio. The profit of the short-seller is the difference in price. Shortselling.

12. Geneva – city in Switzerland and seat of the League of Nations (1920-1946). The League was founded after WWI as an international organisation designed to promote and enforce peace by disarmament and diplomatic arbitration of disputes between countries. At its greatest extent (September 1934-February 1935), it had 58 member states. Nevertheless, the League had major difficulties in staving off international military aggression: major powers like the United States and the Soviet Union were not members; Japan, which was in the executive council, invaded Manchuria in 1931; Germany, accepted as a member in 1926, pulled out in 1933, when Hitler came to power; Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935; Spain plunged into civil war in 1937. The League folded at the start of WWII, acknowledging defeat in its major purpose of ensuring international peace. It was replaced by the United Nations in 1946. Wikipedia.

    In 1932, the League sponsored a Conference on Disarmament, which failed to establish lines of agreement. In Europe, the main resistance came from France, which after the Versailles Treaty in 1919 had been arming heavily. The jibe about the two Afghans seeking cheap weapons in Geneva is witness to Pound’s distrust and contempt of the League, sentiments he often expressed in his journalism. As the canto delineates, Pound’s opinion was that war is indivisible from the economic profits made by the international sales of armament and the collusion between munition makers in Germany, Britain and France, the banks to which they are affiliated and the press they own to sell as much military equipment as possible, irrespective of the participants in an armed conflict. The international commerce in armaments went on after WWI under the mantle of the League’s meetings and treaties, a fact that became ever more evident during the 1930s. Pound’s source, Paolo Zappa’s Mercanti di cannoni (published in 1932) delineates the existing networks of armament traffic in detail.

13. Mr D’Arcy – William Knox D’Arcy (1849-1917) British entrepreneur who by acquiring a concession from the Shah of Persia to prospect for oil in 1901, discovered the first commercially viable oil field in Iran in 1908. D’Arcy founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) which promised to pay 16% royalty to the Persian Government on the oil mined for the next 60 years. Wikipedia: D’Arcy concession. This percentage was less than what the APOC paid in taxes at home. In 1914, the British government acquired majority of shares in the APOC, which meant that the machinery of war on the British side worked with Iranian oil for a small fraction of the price it would have had, if APOC had not been in place.
    By drawing attention to D’Arcy, Pound offers an incitement to his readers’ curiosity as to the relationship between oil, foreign intervention, political upheaval, colonialism and war. At the time of writing the canto in the spring of 1933, the Iranian government, considering itself defrauded by APOC’s business practices, attempted to revoke D’Arcy’s concession. A new, sudden agreement favourable to Britain was reached with the current monarch Reza Shah (1925-41) – this was in place until the nationalisation of 1951. Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
    Throughout the years, the resistance to APOC built up and in 1951, the Iranian Parliament finally decided to nationalize the company. In 1953, through an Anglo-American political coup, riots were staged which enabled the arrest of the prime minister driving nationalisation, Mohammad Mossadegh, and the consolidation of the pro-Western Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (r.1941-1979). The APOC, rebranded as British Petroleum, in a consortium with American, Dutch and French oil companies, was able to establish contracts with the newly established National Iranian Oil Consortium (NIOC) to manage and bring the Iranian oil to market in 1954. This arrangement worked until the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when Iran acquired complete control over its own oil reserves, mining, refining, storing and selling. 1953 Iranian coup d'état.

14. 

    Mr. Mellon – Andrew Mellon (1855-1937), American businessman, Secretary of the Treasury (1921-32) during the period which Pound considered to be the “era of shame”: the Republican presidencies of Warren G. Harding (1921-23), Calvin Coolidge (1923-29) and Herbert Hoover (1929-32). In 1932, to avoid impeachment, Mellon was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom, but returned to private life in 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected.     
    “Mellon’s national reputation collapsed following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. He participated in various efforts by the Hoover administration to revive the economy and maintain the international economic order, but he opposed direct government intervention in the economy. […] Beginning in 1933, the federal government launched a tax fraud investigation on Mellon, leading to a high-profile case that ended with Mellon’s exoneration” Wikipedia.

15. Mr Wilson – Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) American statesman, President of the United States (1913-1921).
    When Wilson ended his second term, he would have liked to run for a third, yet he was severely ill. Presidents’ illnesses (not prostatitis but stroke) were traditionally kept very secret, so as not to threaten the national trust in their abilities:
     “In the twentieth century Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower all, to one degree or another, held back the full truth about medical difficulties that could have jeopardized their hold on the Oval Office. Wilson suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1919 that made him merely a figurehead during the last year and a half of his term. After Coolidge’s sixteen-year-old son died of blood poisoning, in the summer of 1924, Coolidge himself struggled with a clinical depression that made inactivity and passivity the principal features of his Administration. It has been well known for some time that Roosevelt went to great lengths to conceal how physically incapacitated he had been rendered by polio. If voters had known the truth about his generally deteriorating health in 1944, it is unlikely that they would have re-elected him a third time—but they did not know, and FDR died just three months into his fourth term, in April of 1945” (The Atlantic: Medical Ordeals).

16. Her Ladyship – Maud Cunard (1872-1948), American-born socialite who married Bache, the grandson of Samuel Cunard, the founder of the Cunard transatlantic shipping line. On a social occasion, Maud heard from her rival, Margot Asquith, of her daughter Nancy’s love affair with a black jazz musician, Henry Crowder.
    Maud challenged the copyright of Henry-Music; campaigned to get Henry deported; and hired detectives to prowl around Nancy and Henry’s rooms near the Eiffel Tower. They received calls full of insults, their hotel keeper was harassed and threatened (Gordon 157-8). Finally, Maud cut Nancy’s allowance.
    For Pound, this act meant that Nancy would not have enough funds to continue being a patron of the arts and contribute constructively to the modernist project. Maud’s racism was a symptom of the general cultural decadence he outlines in the canto.

17. 

    Jenny – pseudonym of Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), socialite, poet, publisher, journalist and patron of the arts. She and Pound had a short affair followed by lifelong friendship: in 1930, she published A Draft of XXX Cantos at her Hours Press. A few months later, her mother, Maud Cunard, cut her allowance because she found out about her love relationship with an Afro-American musician, Henri Crowder.    
    
    “Soon after the trip to Austria [winter of 1930-31] and in a highly agitated state, Nancy ‘dashed off’ two virulent attacks against her mother. These were probably Nancy’s most self-destructive public events, but one can sense the hurt, as well as the rage that motivated the essays. Unable to forget her mother’s remark ‘Does anyone know any Negroes?’ she chose to use it as a title of an article for Crisis magazine in which she mocked her mother’s prejudices: ‘Does anyone know any Negroes? I never heard of that. You mean in Paris then? No but who receives them?... What sort of Negroes, what do they do? You mean to say they go into people’s houses?’ Her second essay, Black Man and White Ladyship, was a scathing attack on Maud. […] The ‘White Ladyship’ section attacked Maud’s value system and racism; ‘Black Man’ was a commentary on the slave trade and the history of blacks in British countries. The piece as a whole was an indictment of British upper-class prejudice” (Gordon 159).
    Pound was familiar with the work and commented to Olga Rudge that Nancy should have left private matters private. See letter of 6 February 1932 in Calendar.

18. Agot Ipswitch – Margot Asquith (1864-1945), Countess, wife of Herbert Asquith, British Prime Minister (1908-1916).
    
    “One day in late 1930, Margot Asquith, Maud’s rival as London’s most prominent hostess, arrived for a luncheon and asked about Nancy: ‘What is it now–drink drugs or niggers?’ Although Maud had heard that Nancy was encouraging a black musician friend to study in New York, she found it unthinkable that her daughter might be living with a black man.
    Not only did Margot’s remark become the subject of gossip within Maud’s genteel circles, but Maud’s behaviour was so odious that it provoked Nancy to retaliate in a severe, unforgiving manner. First, Maud phoned everyone she knew to ask if Margot’s report was true; then she confronted Nancy. Mother and daughter exchanged cruel insults; Maud threatened to have Crowder deported, and Nancy stormed out of the house vowing never to speak to her again. The London press leaped on Margot’s remark and fuelled the rumour mills throughout Britain” (Gordon 157).

19. 

    louse in Berlin – Wilhelm II (1859-1941), Emperor of Germany, 1888-1918.  
           
    “For most of his life before becoming emperor, he was second in line to succeed his grandfather Wilhelm I on the German and Prussian thrones after his father, Crown Prince Frederick. His grandfather and father both died in 1888, the Year of Three Emperors, making Wilhelm emperor and king. He dismissed the country's longtime chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in 1890 before launching Germany on a bellicose “New Course” to cement its status as a respected world power. 
    However, due to his impetuous personality, Wilhelm frequently undermined this aim by making tactless, alarming public statements without consulting his ministers beforehand. He also did much to alienate other Great Powers from Germany by initiating a massive build-up of the German Navy, challenging French control over Morocco, and backing the Austrian annexation of Bosnia in 1908. His turbulent reign culminated in his guarantee of military support to Austria-Hungary during the crisis of July 1914, which resulted in the outbreak of World War I. A lax wartime leader, he left virtually all decision-making regarding military strategy and organisation of the war effort in the hands of the German General Staff. This broad delegation of authority gave rise to a de facto military dictatorship whose authorisation of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram led to the United States' entry into the conflict in April 1917. Losing the support of the German army, Wilhelm abdicated and fled to exile in the Netherlands, where he died in 1941.” Wikipedia.

20. François Giuseppe – Garbled French Italian name of Franz Joseph (1830-1916), Emperor of Austria Hungary.
    The assassination of his heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at Sarajevo in 1914 led to Austria's declaration of war to Serbia, an act which initiated WWI. At the time, Franz Joseph was 84 years old - he had been a monarch for 66 years and would die of a cold midway into the war.

21. Mr Gandhi – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian attorney and political activist, promoter of the nonviolent protest and architect of India’s independence from Britain (1947).
    Gandhi’s economics was an alternative to both capitalism and socialism: it was ethically based, promoting the values of community, solidarity, equality and self-sustainability.  
    Pound wrote about Gandhi in 1922: “Mr Gandhi of course, made the really fatal, or at any rate unpopular, discovery that if you refuse to buy Manchester goods and also refuse to buy British guns to shoot Englishmen, the Empire ceases” (“Paris Letter” The Dial January 1923 in P&P IV: 275).

22. Monsieur Untel – Fr. “Mr. So-and-so”   
    “Any man in 1932 who does not do his utmost to prevent another slaughter by millions for the benefit of a few, has the taint of Cain upon him. Butler [President of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace] is a particularly good example of the murderer’s accomplice. These murderers either are, or ought to be, news.  
    When somebody, for purely social reasons, hunts up Mr. Whatshisname, the French toy-maker, and doesn’t find him in the Jockey Club, but does ultimately locate him in Japan, some weeks before the Manchurian shindy, this either is, or ought to be, news” (Pound “By All Means, Be Patriotic” 378). See also n. 12.

23. Mitsui – Mitsui is a Japanese conglomerate of banks and industrial holdings.         
    Pound was aware of the international ramifications of the armament industry and trade. Any French investor with shares in Mitsui was bound to draw profits from the Japanese imperial expansion, particularly its invasion of Manchuria in September 1931. After WWI, China and Japan were the largest market for European armament factories. See also previous note. Wikipedia.

24. wanted for gunstocks – observation made by John Quincy Adams in his Diary. Adams had a tree nursery on his estate and cultivated oaks, tamarinds, walnuts, almonds. On a visit to the Springfield armory on 7 July 1843, he was shown “thirty thousand stand of arms and we were told that there were 150,000 ready for use. At the armory Major Ripley went round with us, and we saw the various processes of making the gun-barrels and the black walnut gun-stocks.” D 552.      
    See also XXXIV ll. 128-32: “They (congress) wd. do nothing for / the education of boys but to make soldiers, they / wd. not endow a university (in 1826). / Black walnut, almond planted in spring / take two months precisely to vegetate to the surface.” 

25. Italian marshes… time – One of Mussolini’s most important civic projects, which was carried out from 1930 to 1939, was the so-called bonifica, or the draining of the swampland in the Pontine Marshes in Lazio, south-west of Rome. Since Roman times, land reclamation had been prevented by property interests, as well as insufficient technology and financing.     
    Pound includes the bonifica, next to Gandhi’s economics and Douglas’s A+B Theorem as constructive, peace-building projects counteracting the armaments race and foci of war that were beginning to erupt all over the world at the time of writing, early 1933.
    
    “Starting in 1922, the Italian government’s Department of Health […] developed a new initiative to combat malaria called the bonifica integrale. It featured three stages, the first being the bonifica idraulica, which would drain the swamp and control the waters. Mussolini and his party called it “the battle of the swamps” because it required the recruitment, deployment, and supply of an army of workers. In the second stage, the bonifica agraria, homesteads with stone houses and public utilities were to be constructed and the land was to be parcelled among settlers. The third stage, bonifica igienica, took hygienic preventative measures against the malaria mosquitoes (Anopheles labranchiae) such as screens and whitewash, and against the illness itself, by distributing quinine and setting up health services. […]

    Beginning in 1930, the bonifica idraulica cleared the scrub forest, constructed a total of 16,500 km (10,300 mi) of checkerboard canals and trenches, dredged rivers, diked their banks, filled depressions, and constructed pumping stations to change the elevation in the canals where necessary. The final channel, the Mussolini Canal, empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea near Anzio. The project reached a peak in 1933 with 124000 men employed. […]
    The government placed about 2000 families (most from northern Italy and of unimpeachable Fascist background) in standardised but carefully varied two-storey country houses of blue stucco with tiled roofs. Each settler family was assigned a farmhouse, an oven, a plough and other agricultural tools, a stable, some cows, and several hectares of land, depending on local soil fertility and the size of the family. […].
    The new towns of Littoria (1932, now Latina), Sabaudia (1934), Pontinia (1935), Aprilia (1937), and Pomezia (1939) were founded, side by side with several other small borghi (rural villages). The carefully differentiated architecture and urban planning aspects of these towns is striking even today.
    On September 8, 1943, Italy changed sides in World War II, the king having already issued an order for Mussolini’s arrest. […]
    The Germans stopped the pumps and opened the dikes, refilling the marsh with brackish water. They were being advised by the German malariologists Erich Martini and Ernst Rodenwaldt that the return of the salt water would encourage the return of Anopheles labranchiae, which thrives in salty environments. The water would also destroy agriculture, removing the essential supplies of food and fresh water from the vicinity, an act that had minimal military effect, but devastated the population. […]
    The Battle of Anzio left the marsh in state of devastation; nearly everything Mussolini had accomplished was reversed. The cities were in ruins, the houses blown up, the marshes full of brackish water, the channels filled in, the plain depopulated, the mosquitos flourishing, and malaria on the rise. The major structures for water control survived, and in a few years, the Agro Pontino was restored. In 1947, the province of Littoria, created by Mussolini, was renamed Latina. The last of the malaria was conquered in the 1950s, with the aid of DDT.
    Today, a duct system runs through the dried-out area. Wheat, fruit, and wine grapes are cultivated in the Pontine region. The ‘Agro Pontino’ is a flowering landscape with modern cities with both pre- and post-war architecture. By 2000, about 520,000 inhabitants lived in this formerly deserted region. The Battle of the Swamps, however, is never quite over; without constant vigilance, dredging the channels, repairing and updating the pumps, and so on, the mosquito would soon return. The spectre of distant problems remains: the prospect of chemical pollution of the environment, DDT-resistant mosquitoes, and medicine-resistant strains of malaria” Wikipedia.

26. Tiberius – Roman Emperor (42BC -37AD).

27. Beebe – Charles William Beebe (1877-1962), American naturalist, explorer and marine biologist. His book, Beneath Tropic Seas and especially his first chapter, “Brothering Fish,” vividly describes the wonder of his first contact with the undersea living forms near the shores of Haiti:        
    “Dozens of fishes, all strange, all graceful and beautiful, play about you, nibbling at the coral, rushing toward the sponge which you have lifted from its place, hoping for some disturbed titbit. When you sit quietly they gather closer, and peer in through the glass at you again and again. Their absurd mouths forever open and close, and if you are a good lip-reader you cannot fail to decipher the syllables which seem to issue in watery waves. They say, ‘Oh! Oh! Brother! Brother! Oh! Oh!’ And you answer them in kind, speaking from the safe, dry, airy room of your helmet. They are so friendly, so curious, so utterly unlike the nervous, useless-lived inmates of our aquariums” (Beebe 4-5).

28. Rivera – Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870-1930), Spanish aristocrat and general who was Prime Minister of Spain 1920-1930.

    “On 13 September 1923, Miguel Primo de Rivera, Captain General of Catalonia, orchestrated a coup d'état, after issuing a manifesto blaming the problems of Spain on the parliamentary system. Alfonso XIII backed the General and named him Prime Minister. Primo de Rivera proceeded to suspend the Constitution and assume absolute powers as a dictator. He created the Unión Patriótica Española, which was meant to be the sole legal party, abolishing all other parties. During this time, he greatly increased government spending on business and public services, which caused his government to go bankrupt. He lost the support of the military and faced serious health problems. Opposition to his regime was so great that Alfonso XIII stopped supporting him and forced him to resign in January 1930.” Wikipedia. This measure, however did not save the Spanish monarchy: street riots ensued and the king lost the protection of the army and fled Spain on 14 April 1931.

29. 

    Infante – S. “Prince,” title designating all the children of a Spanish monarch, apart from the heir to the throne, who has his own ducal title.
    The eldest son of the King of Spain, Alfonso de Borbon y Battenberg, Prince of Asturias (1907-38) suffered from haemophilia, which led to his death from a minor injury after a car accident in 1938. In 1933, he renounced his right to the Spanish throne to marry a “commoner” whom he divorced four years later. Wikipedia.

30. Gothic type – The typeface more generally called “Fraktur” was commonly used in Germany and Austria until well into the 20^th century. Pressure was high to replace this ornate writing with the simpler Roman fonts, which were introduced by the Nazis after the Anschluss. See also Wikipedia.  
    
    “Herr Baur is (or was a few months ago) still printing his ‘advance guard’ journal in Gothic type. And they explained to me at the party headquarters where I was greeted with the technical terms of comradeship, that they kept this type because the old people were used to it. Every shop sign in Vienna that is intended to be read, to convey information to the by-passer that something in particular is for sale, is printed in Roman or block letters” (Pound “Orientation” 6-7).
    The “advance guard” journal printed in Gothic type was Neues Wiener Journal, which had printed an interview with the poet in May 1928.

31. Schlossmann – pseudonym for Julius Sachs, the reporter of Neues Wiener Journal (referred to in previous note) who took Pound’s interview in May 1928 during his trip to Vienna (Hesse “Queries” 345). Pound mentioned him in a letter to Dorothy – see Calendar.

32. Anschluss – G. “unification; joining.” The political goal of Austria “joining” the territory of a greater Germany had been prohibited by the Versailles Treaty in 1919 and was carried out by the Nazis on 12 March 1938.

33. Der im Baluba das Gewitter gemacht hat – G. “who made the storm in Baluba.” For this line, Pound used an episode out of Leo Frobenius’s Erlebte Erdteile (V: 49-53) but did not follow the original story to the letter. Even if the line looks like a bona-fide quotation in the original language, it is Pound’s own creation. See Hesse – Frobenius as Rainmaker.
    The original anecdote recounts how Frobenius and his team entered a war zone in Africa and used the drum telegraph to signal the explorers’ peaceful intentions. Though the drums were announcing the participation of every village in an impending battle which was supposed to take place the next morning, by midnight, a storm broke out. The war did not take place, as the villagers assumed it was the white man who had created the storm to warn and stop them.

34. Country is overbrained – Pound repeats material he had introduced in canto XXXV ll.89-92: “We find the land over-brained.” /said the bojars or whatever the old savages call it / as they hung their old huntsman friend to his chandelier /in his dining hall after the usual feasting and flagons.”

35. Hungarian nobleman – Lajos Hatvany, whose 1923 book, Das verwundete Land Pound used to diagnose the political and cultural mentality of central Europe after WWI. See XXXV l. 80.

36. 

    Kosouth – Ferenc Kossuth (1841-1914), Hungarian civil engineer and politician. After spending years in Italy, Kossuth returned to Hungary and started a political career. By 1889, he was the president of the Independence Party, which sought to abolish the Hungarian monarchy and divide Hungary from Austria.  Wikipedia.

37. 1927 – Pound is misremembering the year: he was in Vienna in April-June 1928. (See Pound’s correspondence with Dorothy Pound,  at the Lilly Library, Bloomington; see also Pound's letter to René Taupin in L 292 and Eva Hesse, “Queries.”).

38. Losing the Tyrol – Austria lost South Tyrol to Italy as a result of its defeat in WWI. See also canto XXXV ll.20-22: “And the Fraulein Doktor nearly wept over the Tyrol, /being incapable of seeing that the century-old joke on Italia/was now on somebody else.”

39. Frobenius – Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) German cultural anthropologist. Pound was impressed by Frobenius’s field work and cultural intuition derived from local knowledge (See Pound’s letter to T. S. Eliot, 1 February 1940 in SL 336). Pound acquired Frobenius’s Erlebte Erdteile and by 1930 was reading them in German, as the correspondence with Olga Rudge attests. See Calendar. In May 1930, Pound visited Frankfurt and met Frobenius personally.             
    
    Frobenius published the seven volumes of Erlebte Erdteile (Continents Where I Have Lived) from 1926 to 1929: I. Ausfahrt [The Voyage out]; II. Erschlossene Räume [Opened up Spaces]; III. Vom Schreibtisch zum Äquator [From the Writing Desk to the Equator]; IV. Vom Volkerstudium zur Philosophie [From Ethnology to Philosophy]; V. Das sterbende Afrika [Dying Africa] (1928); VI. Monumenta africana [African Monuments] (1929); VII. Monumenta terrarum [Monuments of the Earth] (1929). Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt Abteilung Buchverlag, 1929. 

40. 

    Bruhl – Lucien Lévy Bruhl (1857-1939) French philosopher and anthropologist, author of How Natives Think (1926).
    
    Pound connected Bruhl’s work to Fenollosa’s as impulse and model for poetry:
    “Another stimulus came from Africa; it is not so important for our purpose but it is not negligible. Lévy-Bruhl points out the savage’s lack of power to generalise. He has forty verbs where we have two or three verbs and some adverbs. The savage language grades down into pantomime and mimicry.          
    What Lévy-Bruhl says about the verbs of savages, what Fenollosa says about verbs in Chinese, what I had written about Dante’s verbs before I had heard of Fenollosa all joins up. The good writer need not throw over anything humanity has acquired but he will in the measure of his genius try to recover the vividness of Dante, Li Po and the bushman. The savage to whom the wood or the bend in the river is not a wood or a bend but one particular stretch of wood, one particular bend in that river.” (How to Write 90.)
    See also Dowthwaite (2019) for a detailed elaboration of the Pound and Lévy Bruhl.

41. Romeo and Juliet – The vignette about the unhappy outcome of a love in Vienna that Pound is signalling here, superficially looks like the classic story of Romeo and Juliet, yet it is different in subtle ways. In Shakespeare’s play, the lovers want to risk everything to live together: When Juliet simulates death, she is breaching the prison of family to live with the man she loves – she does not “know,” or assume that Romeo will die for her. Indeed, had she known the future, we can safely assume she would not have risked Romeo’s life in any circumstances. 
    By contrast, the story of the Viennese lovers looks more like love-fulfillment in death, a symptom of cultural exhaustion well documented in Symbolist art. In such context, the suicide pact of the Austrian Crown Prince Rudolf and Baroness Maria Vetsera at Meyerling on 30 January 1889 could be idealized as an apotheosis and serve as an ideal. 
    As a political undertone to the episode, the weakness and sickliness of the Spanish Infante rhymes with Prince Rudolph’s inability and unwillingness to assume the responsibilities of power. Both heirs to monarchies enter into political suicide pacts by shadowing the Romeo and Juliet love story in their own lives.

42. Mr Blodgett – Sherburne C. Blodgett, one of the inventors of a prototype sewing machine, which Isaac Singer found in a workshop in Boston in 1849. Singer perfected Blodgett’s sewing machine and devised means to slash the price, increase the velocity of stitches (an experienced seamstress could make 40 stitches per minute, Singer’s machine achieved 900) and market the machine successfully after 1850. See Threading Through Time.     
    Pound may have found out about Blodgett and his opinion from his acquaintance Winaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, who was Singer’s daughter.

43. cash is constant – quotation from The New and Old Economics, a five-part essay that C.H. Douglas published in the New English Weekly II.6-10 (1932).
    The statement refers to the widespread opinion in Pound’s time that the quantity of “cash” represents people’s deposits in the banks, or in other words, that banknotes and coins are the complete expression of a nation’s money. A corollary of this is the opinion that no money is loaned out by a bank without its having been previously deposited in it by somebody. As Douglas demonstrated over and over, cash is about a tenth of a nation’s money in circulation because banks loan out roughly ten times (the ratio is varied and can be raised ad libitum) the money it stores as deposits. Douglas accurately called this invisible quantity of money “credit” since it is created in bank loans and vanishes when the loan is paid back. When a bank creates a loan, it also creates a “deposit” equivalent of the loan, for accounting purposes. But this “deposit” is created ad hoc for the loan to exist, no actual person deposits cash for it. In times of panic, people ask the banks to give back their deposits, which the banks obviously do not have – hence the measure to close operations until more “cash” can be printed to satisfy the demand.

     “I have, of course, never said that the cash (by which in Great Britain is meant not merely ‘till’ money, but deposits of the Joint Stock Banks with the Bank of England) is constant in amount no matter what may be the amount of deposits which the banks acquire as the result of creating loans. The ratio of cash to loans, which is generally assumed to be about 1-10, but has at times dropped to 1-15, is simply a result of an actuarial estimate of the percentage of ‘till’ money in a given country which is required to meet the ordinary habits of the population. On August 4th, 1914, as a result of a panic, the population of Great Britain suddenly demanded cash for an unusual proportion of its deposits, with the result that, in the ordinary meaning of the word, all the banks became bankrupt simultaneously. When the depositors had drawn out all the cash, about eight hundred millions of deposits remained, which were only satisfied by printing Treasury notes. That situation was a proof, if any proof was needed, of the proposition with which the mathematical proof criticised by Professor Copland is concerned. This merely demonstrates that every bank loan creates a deposit. What Professor Copland is saying is that, while every bank loan creates a deposit, the banks do not exercise this power beyond a certain point because they may become short of cash, which is perfectly true, but they do not normally become short of cash until they have created, say, nine new pounds for each original pound deposited by the public, although they might, as in 1914, become short of cash at any time” (Douglas The New and the Old Economics 7).

44. Douglas – Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952), Scottish engineer, inventor of the economic theory called Social Credit. In canto XXII, Pound presented a confrontation between Douglas and John Maynard Keynes (OCCEP XXII: nn. 7-10). Here, he quotes Douglas and his A+B Theorem, which is the fundamental premise of Social Credit.

45. A factory – Lines 107-25 are Pound’s presentation of the A+B Theorem, as written in Douglas’s book Credit Power and Democracy 21-22.

46. per forza – It. “necessarily.”

47. Herr Krupp – Alfred Krupp (1812-1887), German steel and armaments manufacturer from Essen. The Krupp factory was famous for producing high quality cannons which came to be widely sold at home and internationally. Krupp’s breakthrough was made by the first orders made by France and Egypt in 1847. Krupp is the pioneer of the international marketing of armament, with no regard for national interest.

48. Order of Pietro il Grande – For his supply of cannon to Russia, Krupp was decorated with the order of Tsar Peter the Great. The Italian form of the name betrays Pound’s source, Paolo Zappa’s book Mercanti di cannoni (1932): 33.

49. Legion of Honour – The highest decoration of the French Government awarded to people who delivered greatest service to the French nation. It was initiated in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte.
    The order has five degrees of increasing distinction: Chevalier (Knight), Officier (Officer), Commandeur (Commander), Grand Officier (Grand Officer), and Grand-Croix (Grand Cross). Wikipedia.
    For his service to France, Eugène Schneider was made Commander.

50. 

    Napoleon Barbiche – Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (1808-1873) was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. He took power by means of a political coup, and he ruled France under the name Emperor Napoleon III, during the period called the Second Empire (1851-1870). France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war at Sedan on the 2nd September 1870, and at Strasbourg on the 28^th, marked the end of his rule. The second Empire was followed by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the restoration of the Third Republic.          
    Napoleon was called “Barbiche” because of his goatee. Pound mentions him derisively in Canto XVI, as his loss of Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians was widely considered to be the reason of the French participation in WWI. See OCCEP XVI: nn. 20-21, 26-27.

51. Creusot – The Schneider armaments company was Krupp’s equivalent in France and his greatest competitor. The business was started by the brothers Adolphe and Eugène Schneider in 1848 and its location was in the small town of Creusot.

52. Sadowa – The battle between Prussia and Austria at Sadowa (Königssgrätz) took place in 1866. Both parties in the war were furnished with weapons by Alfred Krupp, a proof of an idea forcefully expressed in Fenner Brockway’s book, Bloody Traffic, that the nation producing armaments is suffering the most because by direct or circuitous routes, it ends up selling arms to its present or future enemy. In the case of the battle at Sadowa, German youths were being killed by weapons produced in their own country, created and produced by their own countrymen. Brockway would bring examples of the same process happening again and again in the case of Britain and France before and during WWI.         
    Pound’s direct source was Paolo Zappa, who recounted that when the Berlin government asked Krupp not to sell arms to the enemy, he responded that he “ignored political contingencies.” He honoured the Austrians’ order of 24 heavy cannons (Zappa 36).

53. (’68) – In April 1868, Krupp sent Napoleon III an illustrated catalogue with his types of cannon. The French imperial response, signed by Edmond Leboeuf and dated 29 April 1868, was noncommittal. This is the version in Italian, which Pound read:     
    “L’Imperatore si è molto interessato al vostro album e Sua Maestà ha dato ordine di ringraziarvi del vostro invio e di farvi sapere che augura vivamente il successo e lo sviluppo di una industria chiamata a rendere all’umanità segnalati servizi.” Zappa 37.  
    [“The Emperor is much interested in your album and His Majesty has given order to thank you for your letter and to let you know that he strongly wishes you success in developing an industry called to render notable services to humanity.”]

54. 

    Leboeuf – Edmond Leboeuf (1809-1888) French general who distinguished himself in the Crimean and Italian Wars. A year after the letter to Krupp, he became Minister of War and shortly afterward Marshal of France. He played an important role in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, but as France was defeated, he withdrew to private life.     
    Zappa mentioned that he was related to the Schneider family, which might explain why on that occasion, Krupp was not able to arm both France and Germany: for patriotic reasons, France was furnished with weapons from Schneider’s factories in Creusot. Zappa 37. See also note 48.

55. Herr Schneider – Eugène Schneider (1835-1875), founding member of the Schneider dynasty, the symbol of French armament industry. See diagram above.

56. operai – It. “workers.” The number of workers in the Krupp factories in 1900 is taken from Zappa 39.

57. 53 thousand – Numbers concerning the production of Krupp canon on the eve of WWI. Gustav Bohlen und Halbach was in charge, continuing Alfred Krupp’s policy of selling guns both to Germany and her enemies to a much greater magnitude:       
    “Alla fine del 1912, su 53.600 cannoni, 26300 furono fabbricati per la Germania. 27.300 per l’estero.” (Towards the end of 1912, over 53.600 cannon was produced for Germany. 27.300 for the foreign market.”) Zappa 39.

58. 

    Bohlem and Halbach – As Friedrich Krupp did not have sons but one daughter, Bertha, the family business was continued by her husband, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach (1870-1950), who took over Krupp’s name and developed the German armament industry through the two world wars. “Bohlem” is a printing error. 

59. Eugene, Adolf and Alfred – Pound emphasizes the unity of interests of the arms manufacturers in France and Germany. Alfred refers to Alfred Krupp, the cannon manufacturer from Essen. His competitors were Adolphe and Eugène Schneider from Creuzot in France, whose business arose at the same time and who were competing for the same contracts. The French government bought arms from Krupp in the 1850s, but during its conflict with Prussia in 1870-1, the Emperor Napoleon III bought the weaponry from the French company Schneider. The Franco-Prussian war was the only instance when these two companies did not arm their country’s enemy. As a matter of course, they sold their arms to all possible customers, with no consideration of present and future national interest. Pound thus lists their founders as if they were brothers, not competitors.

60. Eugene – Eugène Schneider (1868-1942), French industrialist, see notes 55 and 59. While his brother Adolphe controlled the banking interests of their business, Eugène was both industrialist and politician, member in the French parliament. He was made Minister of Agriculture and in 1865 he became President of the Chamber of Deputies. Zappa 51.

61. guns coming from anywhere – Zappa commented on Schneider’s political mission:    
    “Le armi si possono fabbricare ovunque, ma le ordinazioni provengono da Parigi, dove i crediti necessary vengono votati dal Parlamento. E’ bene trovarsi sul posto.
    Con la sua autorità politica, dunque, l’industriale del Creusot riesce, poco a poco, ad eliminare Krupp dal mercato francese. Nel ’68, gli subentra definitivamente. Durante la Guerra del ’70, Le Creusot fornirà all’esercito 25 batterie da campagna e 16 pesanti : 250 bocche da fuoco, la maggior parte, però, in bronzo.” Zappa 51.  
    (The arms can be produced anywhere, but the orders come from Paris, where the necessary loans are voted by Parliament. It is a good thing to be on site.
    With his political authority, therefore, the industrialist from Creusot succeeds little by little to eliminate Krupp from the French market. In 1868, he finally takes over. During the war of 1870, Le Creusot furnished the army with 25 field batteries and 16 heavy cannons: 250 guns, but in greater part made of bronze.)

62. Adopted by 22 nations – It was the merit of Henri Schneider, Eugène’s son, to perfect a good quality cannon, the “field 75”: “robust, simple, manoeuvrable, precise.” It was adopted in 22 countries, including Italy. Zappa 52-3.

63. 1885 … country – Pound proceeds to reinforce the similarities between Krupp’s and Schneider’s marketing policies. The production numbers of cannon were rising steadily, half for the internal market and half for export. Zappa 53.

64. always a conservative – both Henri and his son, Eugène II, were members of parliament in parties of the right. At home, they ruled with iron fist and provided for the workers at Creusot schools, churches and hospitals to ensure obedience and discipline. Yet, the workers humiliated them occasionally by sending the socialist Fauré to represent them in the Chamber of Deputies. Fauré was especially dangerous as he campaigned for the nationalisation of the armament industry. But these were small defeats – in 1932, Schneider ensured that his own man of confidence, Victor Bataille, succeeded in the elections. Schneider was “il padrone della regione.” Zappa 54.       
    See also canto XXXVII ll.14-19: “Ambrose (Mr.) Spencer, Mr Van Renselaer/ were against extension of franchise. / ‘Who work in factories and are employed by the wealthy / (State Convention 1821) dixit Spencer: / ‘Man who feeds, clothes, lodges another / has absolute control over his will.’”

65. monument to Herr Henri – Henri Schneider (1840-1898) was Eugène Schneider’s son and took over the business at his father’s death in 1875. See also diagram above.

66. Chantiers de la Gironde – shipyard in Bordeaux partly owned by the Schneiders, “where the most formidable battleships and fastest cruisers” were produced. Zappa 58.

67. Bank of the Paris Union – The Bank of the Paris Union and the Franco-Japanese Bank were under Schneider’s direct control. Zappa 59.

68. François de Wendel – François de Wendel (1874-1949), industrialist and politician from Hayange, in the Lorraine. President of the Comité des Forges, 1918-1940.

69. Robert Protot – probably Robert Pinot (1862-1926), secretary general of the Comité des Forges and author of the book Comité des Forges au service de la nation (Août 1914-Novembre 1918). Pinot became secretary of the Comité in 1904 and was an effective lobbyist for the heavy industry. Drafts of the canto show the mistaken name is Pound’s error (YCAL 43 Series 4 73/3269).

70. Comité des Forges – Iron and steel industries cartel in France. It was active between 1846 to 1940, when it was dissolved by the Vichy Government. Its goals were to coordinate production and prices, as well as manage the relationships between the heavy industries and the political sphere. Eugène Schneider was its first president until his death in 1875. Under the presidency of François de Wendel, the Comité coordinated the French armament production during WWI. Zappa called it “il vero padrone della Francia” (“the true master of France”) (60). 

    “with France completely bamboozled by La Comité des Forges, and, in short, things being what they are in Europe as Europe, I believe in a STRONG ITALY as the only possible foundation or anchor or whatever you want to call it for the good life in Europe” Jefferson and/or Mussolini 34-5.

71. Hawkwood – Vignette from Franco Sachetti’s Il Trecentonovelle (1399) novella no. 181. Pound mentioned it in SR 70.
    Two monks approached John Hawkwood at his castle. They greeted him with “God give you peace.” Hawkwood retorted with “And God take away your alms.” The brothers, shocked, asked him: “Milord, why are you talking this way?” John replied: “And you, why are you saying this to me?” The monks: “We thought we said the right thing.” And John retorted: “How can you think you said the right thing when you come to me and say that God should make me starve? Don’t you know I live off war and peace would undo me?” See Sachetti 181.

72. 15 million… Paris  – Pound includes the sums that the Comité was paying to three newspapers, Journal des Débats, Le Temps, and Écho de Paris (Zappa 121). The source gives a 10, not 30 million subvention to Le Temps. Drafts of the canto show this is Pound's error (YCAL 43 Series 4 73/3269).

73. Journal de Débats – French nationalist paper which included the debates of the Assemblée nationale, the French Parliament.

74. Le Temps – Fr. “The Times.” French newspaper.
75. Écho de Paris – French newspaper that campaigned against disarmament.

76. Polloks – a slang term for Polish people, often heard in western Pennsylvania. Zappa delineated the involvement of Schneider in Eastern Europe: since the Soviet Revolution in 1917, regional tensions had intensified, and Poland was arming. Schneider, who had done excellent business with the Tsarist regime, found the Soviet one odious and helped Poland develop naval bases, gave it loans, and exported cannons, airplanes and machine guns. After 1928, there were 60.0000 workers in 22 production units in Poland who worked on the basis of Schneider patents. Zappa 187, 195-6.

77. Faire passer ces affaires / avant ceux de la nation – F. “make these interests prevail against those of the nation.”