this would be about £8, but when I did my translation of the "Suppliants" and wrote a sequel to fill up the evening, at £5% I got £5 for the lot. Errcher.

My forestage walks down into the auditorium without room for musicians. Any orchestra we have, plays in a separate room round the corner on light cues and has to play into a microphone. Seldom successful, but out of the question for opera, though. I like the idea of doing one of yours. Are they published? Or is that a silly question? People seem intrigued by the report of Nishikigi, and Kagekiyo may well follow.

Joseph Garand Macdonald

THE FESTIVAL THEATRE (NEW LEASE), CAMBRIDGE

Director and Lessee: Joseph Gordon Macleod

Telephones and Telegrams: Cambridge 1931

5th October, 1933.

Dear Ezra Pound,

I will refer to Fenellosa and his original(s), because I run a sort of review-magazine-journal-programme which sells in the auditorium as well as in some bookshops, and propose to do some transposition from the Noh play volume in the matter of facts and other information for all the dons; that is, with your permission. If only the damn book weren't out of print, this might encourage people to read it. I know several people who have it already and I suppose their copies will go journeying. I suppose you would not care to give me a word or two on the subject which I could print straight from the exhalation of the Oracle? Bunchi has just sent me your information about Chilesetti. I will tell all my friends! They are paupers anyhow. And I will put the news into the programme if you will tell me more about it. The rich travellers and musical pilgrims of Cambridge might like to go.

Joseph Gordon Macleod

29th November, 1933.

Dear Ezra Pound,

I enclose a copy of the programme for Experiment week, and hope it is causing you no offence. This is a joke, for everything else in this programme seems to have caused everybody offence.

The general effect of 'Nishikigi' was admitted to be very fine though no Japanese scholar would have found any connection with the traditional methods of performing it. We could not face bad scholarship and inefficient craftsmanship which would have been the necessary result of trying to reproduce a Noh performance. What we did was to stylise it very carefully and put it in the contemporary theatre in the matter of lighting and stage.

I have lost the copy of the letter I sent you referring to terms. I cannot remember whether I said 2½ or 2½%. The total gross receipts are not high but I want to be honest and abide by the bargain. Would you mind letting me know what the percentage was that we agreed on ?

About the Operas, I hope you realise that any musicians would have to play on the stage in full view of the audience as part of the show. We have no orchestra pit, and the only way of using hidden music is by light cues transmitted to a separate room, whence the music is amplified through a radio adaptation to the auditorium. This is not promising for the production of opera, but it would be interesting to do with the musicians on the stage.

Very sincerely,

5th December, 1933.

Ezra Pound Esq.,
Rapallo,
Via Marsala, 12 - 5,
Italy.

Dear Sir,

Mr. Macleod asks me to send you the enclosed cheque
for the sum of £3. 6. 11, representing royalties at
2% on the performances here of "Nishikigi".

Secretary.

THE MANOR HOUSE
HEMINGFORD GREY
HUNTINGDONSHIRE

23 march 1936

Dear Ezra Pound,

On the contrary, there is every reason
in the world why you should have been notified, if
I had been doing anything...in the sense of having
poetry published. My wife gave me, by request, your
first volume of Cantos last Christmas..all done up
in tissue paper, with a whole lot of // and & & and
// and @ @, in your best typescript manner, to whet
the appetite before opening; and since then I've been
meaning to write you a tribute about that poem.
(What with two years' day-and-night work over that
doomed theatre, a narrow avoidance of actual personal
appearance in the Bankruptcy Court, a complete dis-
appearance of my personal capital, plots to outwit
my bloodsucking landlord-late-employee, and a couple
of nervous breakdowns in one Household, etc., and
other such, I found I was shockingly behind on reading
and had missed apparently a whole generation of
poets.)

The above explains my lack of output,
too. The year The Ecliptic was published I had finished
another long poem, Foray of Centaurs, which Faber turned
down because Eliot turned it down because Herbert
Broken-Read thought it was too Greek. I tried a few
bookmakers with it, but they wouldnt bet: that was
before W.H.Daunder-Lewis made poetry Paying and Popular.
(Ism meditating an article on The Influence of Rupert
Brooke on Daunder-Lewis). So I let it go: I was too
busy learning the theatre, about which I now know quite
a lot.

I've written and produced two or three
plays. One, Overture To Cambridge, showed the awful
example of a live and sensitive man in Cambridge. His
tragic weakness was in not clearing out of that centre
of Culture. Everybody flocked to it: they thought it
was so true about the other fellow...all except some
Dons, who got together and wrote a review saying it was
no more true than Eric, or Little by Little.

While my poor wife was having her nervous
breakdown last summer, and after I had lost all my
lucre and closed the theatre down, I fiddled with the
plot and turned it into a novel, of a sort. God Help
Me! I, who had sworn never to burden the earth with
such a misfortune. (I forgot to explain that Eliot
wouldnt publish this, either, because he said, it was
an acting play. When I replied that one could only
look for real plays from people that had worked in or
near a theatre, he replied in agreement, and added that
he was speaking purely as about a commercial proposition,
or some such phrase. I expect he put it more neatly and
tastefully than that, though. I dont remember the words.)

We made three copies and sent them to three
publishers. One jumped at it in ten days: another in
three weeks; and Faber turned it down. I'm through with
Eliot for ever. Even when Daunder-Lewis has had his day
and the sales go down.

The successful contestant is Allen & Unwin,
who are publishing it next month. They petitioned for
another. So I'm writing another, nearly finished.

11

After that I want, (I), to rewrite bits of the Centaur
poem: 2, to get started on another long poem, nominally
about a tree, as far as a poem ever is "about" anything:
and, 3, to write a real play in verse, if it's possible
these days. Eliot and Auden and Co have rather queered
the pitch for good plays in verse. My God, you should
have seen The Dog Without A Skin! The undergraduates of
Mudland on the Cam have done better than that at Smokers.

I think I had better not write any more; I don't want to
lose your regard. But if my landlords hadn't done as they
did, and as all rich men, and all landlords to my certain
knowledge in the theatre world anyway...and these were
Gentlemen...I think I should probably have gone Left, any way,
My upfall started with Social Credit. Indeed the
dramatic version of Overture to Cambridge ended with a
super-Douglas world with no money at all. But as time
and thought went on, I saw my landlords still behaving
like themselves and English Gentlemen, and all their like
continuing to do the same to all my like: you can't save
a soul or clean up the remnants of a civilisation with a
Discount and Dividend: and in any case, what's the benefit
if you can only value a man by the money he can spend?
So in the fiction form, that world appeared as a return to
the Fascism of the Hottentot, with Scientist-Doctors as
Priests, keeping the intelligence down. All this must be
making you spit, but it's nothing to what happened when
I started thinking about the new story....

O damnation! Now I've forfeited your token about the
intelligence of a kind so bloody much needed. Well, if
you go with Eliot, I suppose I've no seniors among my
contemporaries any more. And precious few contemporaries
either, except a pack of half-rhming undergraduates.

The trouble is that there's more work than there ever was
in the world before to be done, nobody to do it, and no
opportunity to get it done. Hence the fiction policy.
It appears that If You Make a NAME at beekeeping or
making people laugh, you can be the finest poet in the
country, and everyone will publish your poems. So I
hope to make a NAME with one book, and a little money to
live on with another: and then I shall be able to write
something worth taking real trouble with.

It isn't quite as bad as that. There is something worth
while in both books... But I'm afraid you won't like them,
politically, I mean.

What has happened to Adrian Stokes? He's given me up too.
Querulous, am I not? So would you be.

I got a copy of your Gaudier book the other day. That's
interesting. What guts you all had. (It's because of the historical fact.)

Ownership v. Use. It's nogood communising the product.
The damned owner decides what the product shall be! Why
the devil shouldn't the User own?
But there isn't any question of ownership. One cant own
anything. Even one's mind is part-owned by us or rather
partpossessed by the people one has met or been taught
by. Your Kung was part owned by Yuan Jung and Wong-
Chang, and even by Wang, whenever he ruled. It's the
right to exclude others;-which is of course allowed by
the others. What most people call ownership is just
squatting.

Now we're off again.

iii

I've done a translation of Theocritus, Pharmacutriai, for a girl to dance to. I produced her a bit last month, ready for an audition by one of the London impresarios. English Hexameters, of a kind. With sprung rhythms lovely for talking on the stage. I arranged (Bearbeitet) the end for dramatic drive. I learned a lot.

That Nishikigi was a lovely thing. We've had some good fun at the Festival. On the whole it was worth it, even if I'm now living on a sort of charity. I used to fulminate @ at Town and Gown on the subject of Co-operation: but that's all over now. There's nothing worse than the Cambridge mind. There couldn't be. It's caused by the chemical reaction of the East Wind on the Pen Mud, and disfigures for life.

I haven't heard of Kings Jewry: but there are so many good plays one hears of too late. If things don't go to schedule, I'll have to get a job in the autumn as a producer. Even then I don't suppose I'll be able to choose my plays. Who pays the piper is entitled to call the worst tunes he likes. And will continue to do so till more of the world is forced to alter. If it's in my power, and I think it is, I'll see it altered the right way before I give up.

I liked your postscript about improving the papers that need it. My short poems are no good. I can only work on a large canvas, even if it is by inches.

The Honourable Editor of Comparatively New Verse threw one back at me last winter. Like an Under-grade of Cambridge who said I hadn't the first idea of what poetry was.

Sometimes one thinks gloatingly of what the next war will be like. Only the wrong ones will be killed, as in the last.

I don't know why this letter is so peevish. I really don't object to this sort of thing any more than I did. Perhaps because I am nearly 33. My own fault, you're quite right.

If you're still reading it, here it's nearly ended.

When are you coming to England again? Because I shant be abroad till 1966. At the present rate.

With homage to your Muse,

Joseph Garden Macaulay.

P.S. Some send is a pretty thing.

P.S. It was written at the Cambridge mind. It sort of aside. Pen are exceptions. I love my real 'Petron' (Dent) by H. H. Sikes Davies, a some Cambridge. Don't love him, though. I'm sure the best thing in it isn't his age.

THE MANOR HOUSE

HEMINGFORD GREY

ST. IVES

HUNTINGDONSHIRE

TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAMS: ST. IVES 143

13 december 1936

Dear Ezra Pound,

I haven't seen Scrutiny. I've seen
nothing. What with one magazine and what with
another dozen, I've given them all up, and read
nothing but politics and poetry. Denys Thompson?
It's a bit thick when I have to hear, all the
same, of a new British dynamo from you in Italy.
No, I haven't come across him either. But I have
noticed a very young man in the Contemporary Prose
& Verse group, who seems more genuine and ripe
than the others...Dylan Thomas. A new voice, all
right; but whether a dynamo or just a siren, I
shouldnt like to say yet.

I met Spender the other day and didn't
think much to him, as they say in the Midlands.
The others get on the liver. There's a young
man was at Harvard last year, Delmore Schwartz,
heavily intellectualised, but I thought awake. He
liked the Ecliptic, perhaps that's why. But I
haven't heard from him for 12 months. Critic and
apoet by his own telling, though I haven't read any
of him in the latter capacity.

What's in your head about better organ-
isation? Another periodical? I doubt if there is
room. The fashion is for Communism here. Nothing
else is up to date. Whether a Fascist state is the
next impulse, now that Surrealism has in a dozen years
managed to get across the Channel, remains to be
seen. Would there be corporate poetry in a Corpor-
ative state? If so, there should be drama. I see
none in those existing. Ergo, the next poetic impulse
of fashion will be art-suicide. The artists renounce
art for action. All of us little Sir Philip Sidneys.

Before that I want to live. What
about U.S.A. If I applied for a post as lecturer in
the history of the theatre (having a course already
in being on the history of production through the
ages) would you put in a word for me at a University?
God knows I don't want to be a Don, not even in America:
but a man must live. And if so, can you suggest a
place and a name I could write to?

2

About "Villon", I'm out of the musical world. But given the right man to impress, I fancy a performance in London might go down very well. The Surrealists have opened an interest, whatever else they have not done, in non-VicWells cumDiaghilev doings. But who is to sponsor it? London in Cochran's bankers have turned down both Mei Lan Fang and the Russian Theatre. But that, of course, was on a Cochran scale. I wish I could have put Villon on the Festival Stage.

I suppose Ashley Dukes is out of the question? He doesn't seem to worry much whether he feels what he sponsors or not. The Embassies his audience would probably approve distantly and enough to get it going. Modern Poets is his cry. And Macleish is a compat-riot of yours: so nationality is no bar. I expect to be seeing him at the end of this month, if I can get my own play finished in time. He won't like it, and wont do it: but shall I sound him on the subject of Villon? Then your critical push might be pushed.

It's a miserable little stage, his: but it might be used well.

*(Dukes)*

Dear Macleod

I don't imagine that you or 60 men in England
have the FAINTEST idea what fascism IS.

The Briton and rabit headed American
too god damned incapable of IDEAS : or demarcations of MIND
to get even an inkling of latin function

a latin need not be ABNormal to
move among demarcations. fascism is a higher degree of
ORGANIZATION than the ang/sax is capable of reaching OR
comprehending.

Guild system did WORK/ and the century of
usury shat on all terms and mingled them in one shitten
soup.

//

In any case my main contention is that ALL men who dare
not face the truth about the nature of money are PAST
they are of a lower grade of civilization/ damn jews still
nomadic ethos/ and Wall St and Shit that is City of London and
Paris the same plus criminal streak.

AND Lenin quoted Hobson/ and now all parties quote both
in blank IGNORANCE that they are doing so.

Have you seen Hitler's recent remarks on CURRENCY ?
and if not, why not get aboard and learn.

Wilton I suppose you like because Cromwell