China and the West

William McNaughton's Memoir: /
"What Pound and Carsun Chang [Zhang Junmai] Talked About at St Elizabeths".
I met Dr Chang through mutual friends in the intellectual Chinese community in Washington, DC. Chang then had a private cubicle at the Library of Con¬gress, where he was working on his book on neo-Confucian philosophy. When he heard that I was acquainted with Pound, he asked if it would be possible for me to introduce him to Pound. Having received Pound's permission to do so, I took Dr Chang with me the next time I went to St Elizabeths. It was almost certainly the second or third Tuesday in November 1953. Over the next eighteen months Dr Chang went to see Pound many times. I would judge that there were a total of about ten interviews between the two men, all taking place not later than May 1955.
During their first meeting Pound told Chang—rather frankly, I thought, in view of Chang's absorption at that time in his work on neo-Confucianism - that he (Pound) wanted Confucianism as Confucius had it and that he "found little of interest in later dilatations." Among "late dictations" it was clear that Pound intended to include neo-Confucianism.
Pound and Dr Chang talked about Pound's work ; about Leopoldine reforms ; and about Thomas Jefferson. Chang knew a good deal about Jefferson. He told Pound how he had come to draft a constitution for China on Jeffersonian principles. The draft later became the basis of the Constitution which was adopted and which is still supposed to be in effect in Taiwan.
On one of my visits to St Elizabeths with Carsun Chang. Pound said to him, "if there were only four Confucians in China who would get together and work with each other, they could save China." "Four ?” Dr Chang laughed. "One is enough." In the exchange Chang showed himself, perhaps, to be the more orthodox Confucian. But into the Rock-Drill cantos, Pound did write from the Canonic Book of History the idea that it may depend on one man. Before Dr Chang and I left that day, Pound said to me, "Bring him out again. He is somebody you can talk to. He is interested in the definition of words." Mrs Pound also asked me to bring Chang out again. "Eppy," she said, "is very hungry for adult company out here."
Later on Chang asked Pound to write an introduction for his book on Chinese philosophy. Pound wrote one page in which he said he thought that the reader would be delighted with a book about a thinker who once clapped his hands with joy at the sight of a leaf. Chang dccided not to use the introduction. He had wanted something more scholarly, and Pound had written the introduction "like a poet". (In addition to his formal Chinese education, Dr Chang had been a post¬graduate student in Germany, and his attitude perhaps had been colored by Germanic ideas of scholarship.) From Chang's manuscript Pound got the "rules for a man in government" which appear at the beginning of Canto 89 : To knew the histories / to know good from evil / And know whom to trust.