the Italian words repeated some ¤ve pages later in another famous passage:
nothing matters but the quality
of the affection—
in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind
dove sta memoria (477)These lines, unusually straightforward for The Cantos, suggest that through-
out the sequence Pound is recalling his past, both of childhood and youth as
well as the more recent and immediate past. But the clinamen represented by
the Nevsky passages I have been citing is that the names invoked do not recall
the poet’s own past but, by a curious sleight of hand, a past he himself never
had. For Pound never saw those cake shops in the Nevsky; he never visited
Russia and indeed never expressed any real interest in things Russian, neither
in Russian literature from Pushkin and Tolstoy to Chekhov and Mayakovsky,
nor in Russian history or religion or art. The cake shops in the Nevsky are
here, as are the houseboats of Kashmir, as ciphers of someone else’s Good
Old Days. The Austrian ambassador to London of Canto 16, the English ex-
army of¤cer of 19: these were hardly members of Pound’s London social
circle. And further, it is doubtful that the impecunious poet, living as he
was in very modest lodgings during his Paris years, frequented Sirdar or
Dieudonné or the elegant Armenonville pavilion in the Bois. Perhaps a rich
friend like Nancy Cunard brought him to one of these places on rare occa-
sions, but these restaurants were no more Pound’s habitat than was Schöners
in Vienna or Bolzano’s elegant Der Greif.
How, then, does Pound relate these names to his sacred places: the Church
of San Zeno in Verona (a frequent point de repère in The Cantos and here
visited with William Carlos Williams’s brother Edgar), to the sacred poetic
characters like Dante’s Farinata and Can Grande, or to the revered poetry
(“E fa di clarità l’aer tremare”) of Guido Cavalcanti?^26 In the lines in question
(26–28), it makes sense to link Farinata to “Ubaldo,” that is, Pound’s good
friend Ubaldo degli Uberti, an admiral in the Italian navy, who was ostensi-
bly a descendant of Farinata’s (see Companion II, 419); but the reference to
“Tommy Cochran,” the name of a Wyncote boy, with whom the young Ezra
attended the Cheltenham Military Academy, is largely de®ationary: no hero-
ics for young Tommy, and not even the smile of the statue, at least not in the
school pictures that depict the young cadets, of whom Ezra was one.^27 In-
deed, it is only after this playful conjunction that we come to a more serious
and coherent autobiographical passage—the memory of conversations with
Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 55