Out of This Century, is "must" reading for many reasons, none of them literary

Yeats had recently come through a harrowing experience with the self-professed master of black magic, Alistair Crowley. The two men, both interested in psychic phenomena, had founded a Society for Psychical Research. They set up a "temple" in order to perform their works, but Yeats soon discovered that he, a practitioner of beneficial "white magic", had been lured into an association with a practitioner of evil, or "black magic".

To counteract Crowley's baneful activities, Yeats moved into "the Temple". A titanic struggle for the soul of one of the members ended in a draw between the master of white magic and the lord of black magic. Tiring of the contest, Crowley decided to move to the Continent. He insisted on selling all of the furnishings of "the Temple" before he left, with the proceeds to be divided between the two founders. Yeats refused to let him enter "the Temple", and Crowley, finding his black magic insufficient for the purpose, re-sorted to the courts. The lawsuit was grist for Crowley's mill, but Yeats found the court battle very upsetting.
*
Although Maud Gonne was willing to smoke hashish with Yeats, she was not willing to marry him. Each time that he was rebuffed, he went back to his verses with renewed determination. Perhaps poets should not consummate their love affairs.
*
Fletcher, a shy, neurotic youth who was determined to become a poet, had taken rooms near George Bernard Shaw in Adelphi Terrace, but he could never muster the courage to call upon him.
He led a solitary life during his first year in London. He had met a few would-be writers at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, but they could not afford to dine with him at the expensive French restaurant where he usually took his meals. He ate alone, reading at table.

In 1910, Fletcher brought out five small volumes of his poetry, engaging four separate London publishers for the work. He paid the entire costs of publication himself, and hopefully sent the books to critics. There was no enthusiastic reception, such as had greeted Pound, for the poems, although well-written, offered nothing new.

Most of the recipients did review them, and the unsold copies were kept in storage until the outbreak of the First World War, when Fletcher contributed them to the British war effort as paper pulp.

In addition to his duties as foreign editor of Poetry, Pound had also created for himself the post of literary editor of a suffragette newspaper, The New Freewoman, which had formerly been known as The Freewoman. Pound's position on suffragism is not clear; he once remarked in a letter to me that each new dilution of the suf-frage weakened the entire system on which voting was based. His alliance with the staff of The New Freewoman may have been occasioned by the fact that the journal was militantly opposed to the excessive virility of the Pankhurst wing.

These suffragettes chained themselves to fences, in a poor imitation of the Andromeda myth, and also re-enacted other folk-tales which this writer does not care to discuss. In order to re-emphasize the intellectual facets of the suffragette movement, such as they were, a wealthy lady named Miss Harriet Weaver had financed this newspaper. It was written and edited by her friend Dora Marsden. Miss Weaver felt that the paper was not attracting a sufficiently wide audience, and when Ezra Pound chanced upon her at one of Hulme's evenings, he persuaded her that she could get more readership by incorporating a literary review with the suffragette editorials. He agreed to furnish this department without salary, and thus he obtained an English outlet for the promotion of his various disciples and enthusiasms.

Pound praised one of Fletcher's volumes in The New Free-woman, and soon afterwards, he called upon the Arkansas bard at his French restaurant in London. Fletcher has recorded the occasion in his autobiography:

"I must confess that I eyed Pound with considerable interest, having already heard about him while in London, and having read with attraction and repulsion about equally balanced, his own early volumes. What I saw was a man of about my own age and height, dressed in a brown velvet coat, a shirt open at the neck and no necktie, and pearly-gray trousers. His fine-chiseled, for-ward-jutting features were set off by a rounded mass of fiery, curly red hair and beard and mustache similarly red and curly, trimmed to a point. Gray-blue penetrating eyes, shielded by a pince-nez, peered at the world behind his projecting cheekbones; and a high-pitched, shrill, almost feminine voice provided strange contrast to the pugnacious virility of the poet's general aspect. He had, I soon saw, slender feminine hands, which, as he talked, he fluttered to and fro. His body was almost equally mobile, jumping and twitching in his chair, with a backward jerk of the head, as he emphasized each point."

Ezra was quite the innovator in dress, for it took considerable courage to wear an open-necked sport shirt in London at that time. He has told me of an occasion in Rapallo, on a scorching afternoon, when a little Frenchman approached him in the town square. The Frenchman was choking in a high starched collar, as he passed by the comfortable Ezra, who was sauntering along in his customary sport shirt, open wide at the neck. The Frenchman's eyes protruded, first in hate, and then in envy. He reached up and with a single violent gesture ripped open his tie and shirt. It may be said that Ezra found the world writhing in stiff collars and left it in sport shirts.

"I discovered him to be as baffling a bundle of contradictions as any man I have ever known," says Fletcher, continuing his description of Pound. "Internationally Bohemian in aspect, he yet preserved marked farwestern ways of speech and a frank, open democracy of manners. Hating the academicians of England, he yet laid claim to be a great scholar in early Provençal, Italian and Latin. Keen follower of the dernier cri in arts and letters, his own poetry was often deliberately archaic to a degree that repelled me. In short, he was a walking paradox."

Fletcher was unable to understand how a man could dislike academicians and yet devote himself to the study of the classics. Apparently he was unfamiliar with the type of scholar who had grown up in the universities of England like a particularly difficult type of clinging ivy, and is epitomized by T. S. Eliot's pronouncement on Professor Gilbert Murray's translations of the Greek: "He has erected a barrier between the student and the plays greater than that represented by the original Greek."

At first, Pound and Fletcher got along, to such an extent that Fletcher contributed some money to The New Freewoman. Having pumped this masculine source, Pound proposed to Miss Weaver that the journal's title be altered to a noun of more neutral gender. He suggested The Egoist, and she agreed to it.
*
There is no misanthropy in a thorough contempt for the mob. There is no respect for mankind save in detached individuals.
*
Stupidity is a pest, a bacillus, an infection; a raging lion that does not stay in one place but perambulates. When two fools meet, a third springs up instanter between them, a composite worse than either begetter.
*
A more intimate view of Joyce has been given us by Oliver St. John Gogarty:

"Joyce was an unloveable and lonely man; but he willed his life. He was an artist deliberately and naturally, and for this he sacrificed everything, even his humanity. . . . He had the wrong idea of an artist when he dressed himself as a Rembrandt and sent postcards with his portrait to his friends—or rather to his acquaintances, for he would not acknowledge that anyone could be his friend."
*

The character Dick Diver, in Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, is based upon McAlmon, although the critics seem to have missed it. Diver is portrayed as a handsome and intelligent minis-ter's son who meets a neurotic girl from a very wealthy family. He marries her, and abandons his career in order to traipse around with her. Because of the emptiness of his life, he eventually be-comes an alcoholic, gets a divorce, and returns to America as a drunkard and a failure, having dissipated his life in a few short years.

While living with Bryher, McAlmon failed to do any significant work, although everyone expected great things from him. He be-came more of a dilettante, began to drink heavily, and asked her for a divorce in 1926. More than anyone else, his life typifies what has been described as "the lost generation". As such, he is one of the important figures of the Jazz Age. He wandered about Europe for the next few years, returned to America, and lived in Mexico for a while. In 1940, he found that he had contracted tuberculosis.

His last years were spent as a traveling salesman for a surgical supply house, owned by one of his brothers, that was located in El Paso, Texas. He died in 1956.

*
A less happy occasion when the quarter turned out was the funeral of R. Cheever Dunning. A poet in the classical tradition of the starving artist, or rather, the western tradition, Dunning lived in a tiny garret room, slowly dying of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Pound and other expatriates helped him as much as they could, but at last he died in his garret.

McAlmon tells the story of another casualty of the Left Bank, a lively and brilliant young Japanese of samurai stock. For some months, Toda had been seen daily at the Café Dôme, the Rotonde, and other haunts of the expatriates. Then he disappeared, and none of his friends could find out what had happened to him. Finally they located him in a tiny room, dying of starvation. His money had run out, and either he could get no more from his family, or he had exhausted his inheritance. At any rate, he was too proud to let anyone know of his dilemma, and he went to his room to await death. When he was discovered, it was too late to save him.
*
It would be a mistake to suppose that all of the expatriates were engaged in the production of serious works of art. Most of them frequented salons or cafés where no work was done or even con-templated. Such were the establishments of Harry and Caresse Crosby, and of Peggy Guggenheim.

Harry Crosby was a nephew of J. P. Morgan, and he maintained an elaborate place in Paris. The Crosbys often entertained forty or fifty people. He ended this regime by shooting himself in the temple, in order to get nearer to the sun.

Peggy Guggenheim, being a woman, did not shoot herself when she became bored. She simply changed husbands, a recipe which the envious Caresse was not slow to follow. The Guggenheim auto-biography, Out of This Century, is "must" reading for many reasons, none of them literary. In describing the aftermath of her parties at the Boulevard St. Germain flat, which were distinguished by the guests' lack of concern for their hostess, she says, "After the guests would leave, I went around, like my aunt, with a bottle of lysol. I was so afraid of getting a venereal disease."

It wasn't safe to lie down in the Guggenheim apartment. Her book also offers a delightful description of a sexual experience atop a Portuguese manure pile. The tome really has something for everybody, and we should be grateful to all purchasers of copper for having made Miss Guggenheim's charming autobiography possible.
*
With the demise of the transatlantic review, the expatriates had to read imported copies of Samuel Roth's quarterly, Two Worlds, for they no longer had a magazine of their own. This too was short-lived, for Roth was sent to prison for selling through the mails a four-hundred-year-old work on love by an Arab physician —or was it four-year-old work on a hundred ways of making love? At any rate, poor Roth, victim of innumerable prejudices, went to jail.
*
Miller's columns attracted some attention, and he began to expand them into a book. He developed a peculiar, foaming, self-propelled prose to describe his adventures in the prone, and soon had sufficient pages for two books. They eventually appeared as The Tropic of Cancer (1931) and The Tropic of Capricorn (1939).

The publisher was one Jack Kahane, formerly of Dublin. His out-fit was called the Obelisk Press, and its chief claim to fame was the publication of Frank Harris' Autobiography, four or five vol-umes in which Harris monotonously recounts in detail his seduction of innumerable Amys and Lillies. These works were sold to tourists who had advanced beyond the "feelthy postcard" stage.
Despite the success of the Harris work, Kahane was very cau-tious, and he did not publish anything else as daring. The rest of the Obelisk list was composed of innocuous volumes by "Cecil Barr" or by "Basil Carr", which were Mr. Kahane's pen-names.

Unlike bootleggers, dope peddlers, or pimps, publishers of pornog-raphy are usually shy, nervous fellows, and are as reluctant to publish books as their more respectable colleagues. Kahane vir-tually swooned from fear when he read the purple pages of Miller's books, but he could not refuse them. They made a fortune for both himself and the writer, mostly because of the Second World War.

When the Americans liberated Paris, a vast stock of the "Tropic" books was discovered, and Kahane's nephew sold them for fifty dollars apiece to the victors. Soon Miller had a nest egg of forty thousand dollars in a French bank, enabling him to retire in California like any professor emeritus of biology, which, perhaps, he is.
*
In August, 1932, Olga Rudge was present when Ford Madox Ford came to Rapallo. She recorded the following conversation, which subsequently appeared in Il Mare, Western Review, and Mood:

"POUND: What authors should a young Italian writer read if he wants to learn how to write novels? 

FORD: (Spitting vigorously) Better to think about finding himself a subject.

POUND: (Suavely, ignoring Ford's irritation) Well, suppose he has already had the intelligence to read Stendhal and Flaubert? 

FORD: A different curriculum is needed for each talent. One can learn from Flaubert and from Miss Braddon. In a certain way one can learn as much from a rotten writer as from a great one. 

POUND: Which of your books would you like to see translated into Italian and in what order? 

FORD: I don't trust translations; they would leave nothing of my best qualities. Some writers are translatable. 

POUND: What are the most important qualities in a prose writer? 

FORD: What does 'prose writer' mean? The Napoleonic Code or the Canticle of Canticles?
POUND: Let us say a novelist. 

FORD: (In agony) Oh Hell! Say philosophical grounding, a knowledge of words' roots, of the meaning of words. 

POUND: What should a young prose writer do first? 

FORD: (More and more annoyed at the inquisition) Brush his teeth. 

POUND: (Ironically calm, with serene magniloquence) In the vast critical output of the illustrious critic now being interviewed (changing tone) . . . , you have praised writer after writer with no apparent distinction (stressing the word 'apparent' nearly with rage). Is there any? 

FORD: There are authentic writers and imitation writers; there is no difference among the authentic ones. 

POUND: Stick to literary examples. 

FORD: Hudson, and Flaubert in Trois Contes. Not all of Flaubert, let us say the Trois Contes. 

POUND: You have often spoken to me of 'fine talents.' Are some finer than others? 

FORD: (Tries to evade comparison.)

POUND: Are there new writers on a level with Henry James and Hudson? 

FORD: (After qualifying Henry James' talent at some length) Yes. Hemingway, Elizabeth Roberts, Caroline Gordon, George Davis. Read 'The Opening of a Door' and 'Penhelly.'

POUND: But as artists? If James is a consummate artist, is Hudson something else? He may be called a pure prose writer, not a novelist.

FORD: The difference between weaving and drawing. 

POUND: Now for the term 'promising.' What makes you think a new writer 'promises'? 

FORD: The first sentence I read. When two words are put together they produce an overtone. The overtone is the writer's soul. When Stephen Crane wrote, 'The waves are barbarous and abrupt,' he presented simultaneously the sea and the small boat. Waves are not abrupt for a ship. 'Barbarous and abrupt'—onomatopoeic, like 'Poluphloisboion' in Homer (when the Cyclops throws the rock).  

POUND: (concluding) How many have kept their promises since the English Review was founded twenty-five years ago? 

FORD: Stephen Reynolds is dead. Ezra has become hangman's assistant to interviewers. . . . I don't know what Wyndham Lewis is doing. Norman Douglas. D. H. Lawrence is dead, but kept on 'till the end. Rebecca West. Among the successors: Virginia Woolf; Joyce in 'The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'; the Hughes who wrote 'High Wind in Jamaica,' a dramatist's novel, not a novel writer's."

From:

T H I S  D I F F I C U L T  I N D I V I D U A L , E Z R A  P O U N D

B y E U S T A C E  M U L L I N S