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EZRA POUND 205
having known Pound some five years, I was surprised at how
much of this material continued to reappear during our daily talks.
Perhaps two-thirds of the anecdotes, constitutional points, and
literary references contained therein have been reiterated to me
time and again in Pound's conversation. Some of the material
appears in the Cantos. Consequently, I have selected from the
transcripts available at the Library of Congress those items that are
chiefly of biographical interest.
These transcripts comprise a very incomplete and inadequate
collection of Pound's post-Pearl Harbor broadcasts. On some occasions,
the transcribers failed to tune in until Pound's broadcast
was almost over; on other occasions, poor shortwave reception made
it impossible for them to understand what he was saying. The transcribers
also had considerable difficulty understanding Pound's
delivery, which was basically a Yankee "cracker-barrel" accent,
interspersed with cockney, Flea Market, and other Continental accents.
They seemed to be unfamiliar with artistic and literary
matters—the transcripts are sprinkled with such errors as "money"
for "Monet", "confusion" for "Confucian", and throughout one
entire broadcast on the work of Louis Ferdinand Céline, the transcriber
has put this name down as "Stalin", and even as "Ferdinant
Stalin".
In order to make them readable, I have corrected the numerous
misspellings of the transcribers and have noted where they
occur in brackets. The following excerpts from Pound's broadcasts
will be useful to students of Pound.
December 7, 1941:
"Europe calling. Pound speaking. Ezra Pound speaking, and I
think I am perhaps speaking a bit more to England than to the
United States, but you folks may as well hear it. They say an
Englishman's head is made of wood and the American head made
of watermelon. Easier to get something into the American head but
nigh impossible to make it stick there for ten minutes. Of course,
I don't know what good I am doing. I mean what immediate good,
but some things you folks on both sides of the wretched ocean will
have to learn, war or no war, sooner or later. Now, what I had
to say about the state of mind in England in 1919, I said in Cantos