the cake shops in the Nevsky, and Schöners
not to mention der Greif at Bolsano la patronne getting older
(74/453)Both Sirdar on the Champs Elysées and Voisin’s on the Rue St. Honoré, were,
according to the Companion to the Cantos (II, 372), fashionable Paris restau-
rants. Bouiller refers to the dance hall (Le Bal Bouillier) on the Boulevard
Saint-Michel, which we might recognize from its appearance in a number of
Impressionist paintings. And Les Lilas is the Closerie des Lilas, a large bras-
serie at the intersection of the Boulevards Montparnasse and Saint-Michel,
which makes frequent appearances in Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As for
Dieudonné, the Companion tells us (II, 372) that it was a London restaurant at
11 Ryder Street, St. James, where the ¤rst number of Blast was celebrated on
15 July 1914 and where later Amy Lowell gave an Imagiste dinner that Richard
Aldington called her Boston Tea Party for Ezra. The next line juxtaposes
these restaurants with “Uncle George”—a reference to the isolationist con-
gressman from Massachusetts, George Holden Tinkham, whom Pound had
met in Venice. The allusions in line 181 to Mencius’s Confucian commentary
(“[water] ¤lls up every hole, and then advances, ®owing up to the four seas”)
and to Heracleitus (rei panta, “all things ®ow”) suggest that unlike those
senators who caved in, Tinkham, like the water “advancing,” behaved like a
true statesman (Companion II, 373). And now come more ¤ne restaurants:
Schöners in Vienna (where Pound may have encountered George Antheil)
and Der Greif at Bolzano in the Tyrol.
But why the “cakeshops in the Nevsky,” which reappear in Canto 78, again
together with Sirdar and, this time, with Armenonville, the elegant pavilion
restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne, with which it has already been coupled
in 74 (456)? And what about those “Kashmiri house-boats”—an echo, like
the cakeshops, of Canto 19, although Kashmir is not juxtaposed to the Nev-
sky but appears at the end of the Canto, where an elderly Englishman, remi-
niscing about his “ten years in the Indian army,” recalls with pleasure those
“healthy but verminous” girls to be had “at a bargain / For ten bobs’ worth
of turquoise” in Kashmir “in the houseboats” (19/87–88).
Canto 76 opens famously with the lines:
And the sun high over horizon hidden in cloud bank
lit saffron the cloud ridge
dove sta memoria (472)54 Chapter 3