Pesce d’Oro was a far more straightforward affair. I first met Vanni and Lena Scheiwiller , as well as Eva Hesse and Mike O’Donnell, in 1982 over Pascal Lamb during a weekend, house party at Brunnenburg. [How’s that for dropping names?] From the very beginning Vanni lent himself wholeheartedly to the project and welcomed a free run of his archive, as well as direct contact with the present director of the Stamperia Valdonega di Verona.

Winning the trust of Pound’s correspondents who still held private archives (and there were many) also required a good deal of patience and perseverance. Instead of the workman-like grasp of the material at hand which had convinced publishers, the key was to make a convincing show of personal integrity and discretion. That, of course, took much longer and there are many stories to be told – all amusing – but far too personal to be published. I was privileged to meet a number of extraordinarily interesting people who, in the end, all became friends, and either found myself on hands and knees, groping under beds for shoeboxes stuffed with yellowing envelopes or sorting out documents from dust-laden brown-paper, grocery bags.

Interim, funding for the project had become precarious, and I squandered a couple of years getting together a copper-bottomed application to the National (US) Dis-Endowment for the Humanities. On being turned down I invoked the Freedom of Information Act and found that the minor, academic minnows called in to advise government – to a man, and they were all old men – thought The Cantos incoherent (certainly not acceptable poetry) and that the nation should not subsidize research into the literary work of a traitor. They obviously were not aware that no trial had ever taken place, accept, of course, in their own, tiny minds. Naming and shaming isn’t worth the effort. Enthusiastic support, however, had come from my nominee, Frank Kermode.

The next application (more years wasted) was to the Deutsche Forschungsgemainshaft (German Research Council). That too was denied. Sometime later in Munich, having invited a colleague to lunch in a sun-flooded, urban courtyard, he told me – over the coffee and brandy I was paying for – that he was the assessor who had turned down the proposal because he couldn’t read (follow) the format. [see Variorum Edition of ‘Three Cantos’, A Prototype (1991).]Other colleagues reported that they had managed reasonably well, but I finally realized that only a screen-readable, hypertext edition could possibly pass muster. Easy accessibility is vital as there are certainly others within our community who are likely to duck anything which looks too difficult.

The project went on, however limpingly, with occasional travel grants from the DFG to give papers at international conferences; journeys which could be extended out of my own pocket for a month or two in order to glean various archives (both public and private) for relevant information from unpublished correspondence. The Deutsch Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic-Exchange Council) also facilitated attendance at a familiarization program at the Institute des Textes et Manuscrits Moderne, University of Paris (Sorbonne). Research grants were also given by Rare Book and Manuscript Libraries at the Beinecke, Lilly, and Ransome Center. A sabbatical fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge helped a good deal, as did academic exchanges at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) and Lampeter College, University of Wales.

By 1995 a mocked-up (overhead projection) for the windowing system of a hypertext variorum was completed, and I gave that presentation at three different venues within months of one another. All ended in disaster. At the Brantôme International EP Conference, colleagues were largely enthusiastic, but I stupidly chose to offer the piece to Paideuma, thinking that it would thus reach a wider circle of Pound scholars than Text, Transactions of the society for textual scholarship. Paiduema sat on the article for an interestingly long time, and when the guest-editor of the J. Laughlin, commemorative issue asked me to contribute, I made it a condition that my earlier article be published in the same edition. The editors in Maine balked because typesetting was too awkward, but Emily Wallace valiantly persisted. The eventual publication was dated 2002 although it actually appeared in 2004 – nine years of deliberate obfuscation after the event. The Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship for the New York conference at which I gave the same paper came out in 1997.

For the presentation at The Centre for English Studies, University of London, in that same year (1995), I had invited a senior editor at Cambridge University Press with whom I had earlier spoken of the project. As hypertext, he now took definite interest, and I met his computer consultant at the New York, conference. Following long and detailed negotiations, a contract for the first thirty cantos was finally signed, but the computer guru then conspicuously neglected to guru.

It is well to keep in mind that I was at university before ever using a dial telephone and only came to terms with main-frame computers in 1972 at the University of Ife, Nigeria (then they still used punched cards). Actually I had had prior acquaintance with ‘calculators’ as cryptographer in the U. S. Navy, but that’s not quite the same thing. The more sophisticated main-frame at Bayreuth in the early eighties quickly gave way to PC’s, but the procedures remained pretty much the same. I already had a collation program and command of editing procedures. There followed a brief affair with TUSTEP, a program for text processing developed at Universität, Tübingen: it was rather elephantine and couldn’t produce hypertext presentation. Trying it out, however, meant remarking extensive data, and the Bayreuth, home-made system was far more user friendly. George Landow’s hypertext software (Brown University) looked attractive, but required changing over to Apple, and there was no consultant available who might mediate between my data and an eventual integrated design.

CUP’s offer of technical assistance (Peter Robinson, and his ‘Collate’ program, first located at Oxford and then De Montfort University, Leicester) was seductive, even though it, too, only functioned on MacIntosh. At least there would be help in fitting the disparate parts and pieces together. The first step, however, marking-up data in SGML posed significant personal problems as co-operation was consistently avoided. Robinson, the man, is not particularly obstreperous – over-worked perhaps, certainly over-reaching, and infinitely ineffectual, however. Years passed before I finally pried free the relevant ‘commands’ and understanding of interrelationships.

Repeated requests for demonstration CDs to be given at various International EP conferences were ignored. That at the Sorbonne in 2001 gave rise to the next-to-the-last straw. On the morning of my flight from Nürnberg a diskette arrived by snail mail, inscribed: “Pound. Variorum Prototype. note; we have not [underlined twice] tested this on our windows platforms. It should be reliable on NT/98/200. We are not certain of 95.” The diskette proved to be resolutely inaccessible by experts on the spot, and I was forced to cancel the presentation. Two days later at London University I was scheduled to speak before a wider audience of textual critics and had with me a scathing denunciation of the CUP geeks. Robinson appeared, smiling beatifically, with a demonstration CD and offered a rather lame presentation of my material. I had rewritten my paper on the spot, naively believing that he was finally willing to play an significant role in the project.

The hopelessness (and humiliation) of the real situation was confirmed later at a conference in Innsbrück which turned on the concerns of Textual Criticism in honor of Hans-Walter Gabler. The meeting was by invitation and beautifully organized. Instead of twenty-minute presentations, one after another, participants were asked to send, in advance, a précis of their on-going concerns, and an informed audience would then discuss issues in forum. I presented details of my impasse with CUP. Robinson arrived the day after the panel on which I was scheduled to sit and without having bothered to make an advanced submission of his own or even reading mine. He greeted me warmly and tried to shake hands. On returning to Bayreuth I broke the fantasy contract. Obviously I could never be in control of my own work, and the promised assistance of a CUP consultant had proved an absolute farce.

The real problem was not so much Robinson’s insouciance as the failure of Kevin Taylor (Manager of Reference and Electronic Publishing) to rein in his well-paid employee. As is perfectly clear from existing correspondence, Taylor was wholly dependent on Robinson’s presumed technological expertise and dared not direct his consultant. My research had been effectively blocked for over ten years and at a rather critical moment. In order to give more time and effort to editing a Variorum Edition, I had taken early retirement on April Fools Day, 1999.

One continues, however, to creep forward. The present plan is to mount a personal website in order to publish particular texts, such as ‘Mindscape’ and Soundscape’, privately, and then put the Variorum on Internet, bypassing corporate middle men and the endless hassle (not to mention rape) involved. At this point in one’s life, it is possible to manage reasonably well without the two or three hundred pounds one might expect from distribution by a publishing house.

The brighter side to this story is that Eva Hesse’s letters from Pound have finally been made available (another long tale). That material fills a serious gap in the publishing history and is whole-heartedly appreciated. On the other hand a golden opportunity was lost and about at the same time. Walter de Rachewiltz invited me to look through annotated editions of Cantos which he had inherited from his grandparents. A treasure trove, but I misunderstood him and thought it diplomatic not to take notes immediately. The volumes were eventually sold at auction and have gone underground for the time being, as have a number of other known witnesses.

More to the point, an esteemed co-editor, Mark Byron (of Sydney University) is designing a hypertext presentation for a public website of available material. He now uses software designed at the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, which owes everything to the interest of Jerome McGann and is light-years in advance of Robinson’s ‘Collate”. A Variorum Edition seems fairly well on its way.