ABSTRACT
During the second half of 1913, at the home in London of the Bengali poetess, Sarojini Naidu, Pound met an American widow, Mrs Mary Fenollosa. After reading Pound's ‘Contemporania’ and possibly other poems Mrs Fenollosa decided that he was the one to whom she could entrust the literary remains of her late husband Ernest Fenollosa. Son of a Spanish musician and a young woman from Salem, Massachusetts, Fenollosa studied at Harvard and in the 1870s became an instructor in rhetoric at the Imperial University in Japan. He so loved the arts of Japan and fought so strongly for them at a time when many Japanese had eyes only for the West and westernization that eventually he was appointed Imperial Commissioner of Art in Tokyo. In addition to his work of conservation and the assembling of a personal art collection which is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he studied Chinese and Japanese literature under Japanese instructors: Mori, Ariga, Hirai and Shida for Chinese and Umewaka and Hirata for the Japanese Noh drama. After his death in 1908 Mrs Fenollosa saw to the publication in 1911 of his two-volume Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art and began to look for a suitable person to take charge of his literary papers. Her introductory note to the book on art shows that she was hostile to academic experts; it may have been this, as much as anything else, which caused her to think of Pound as the one best fitted to act as literary executor. Some of the material, I think, she handed to Pound personally, other material she posted in London — this was towards the end of 1913 — and in November 1915 she sent a further packet from Alabama. In a letter to John Quinn on 17 May 1917 he said that after three weeks' acquaintance, Mrs Fenollosa had not only given him a free hand to edit and publish the material but the right to any profit plus £40 to go on with. Altogether there were about sixteen notebooks containing notes on Far Eastern literature, draft translations of Chinese poetry and Noh dramas, and an essay by Fenollosa on ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’.
