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EZRA POUND 109
Pound enlisted Wyndham Lewis and others of his circle as
contributors to the Review. Lewis wrote some rather strong pieces
for the magazine, and, in the October, 1917 issue, Pound noted
that some objections had been raised:
"There was also a lady or mother who wrote to me (personally)
from New Jersey, asking me to stop the magazine as Lewis'
writings were 'bad for her milk.' (I'm afraid there is no way of
softening her phrase for our readers.) Madame, what you need
is lactol and not literature. You should apply to a druggist."
Lewis wrote a series of "Imaginary Letters" for The Little Review,
and Pound was moved to disagree with some of his sentiments,
and to answer him with a like series. Some of Pound's
most edged statements are found in these letters, which were
collected and published by Caresse Crosby in 1930, in Paris,
under the imprint of the Black Sun Press. Excerpts follow:
"I. Walter Villerant to Mrs. Bland Burn.
. . . I am, with qualifications, Malthusian. I should consent
to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the
reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and
the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would
produce only a victim—beautiful perhaps, but a victim; expiring
of aromatic pain from the jasmine, lacking in impulse, a mere
bundle of discriminations. . . .
"There is no truce between art and the public. The public
celebrates its eucharists with dead bodies. Its writers aspire to
equal the oyster; to get themselves swallowed alive, thus encompass
it. Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially.
It is art made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the
public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad
because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for
assent, a mania to be 'in on it.' . . . Even the botches of a
good artist have some quality, some distinction, which prevents
their pleasing mass palates . . . this nonsense about art for the
many, for the majority. J'en ai marre. It may be fitting that men
should enjoy equal 'civic and political rights'; these things are a
matter of man's external acts, of exterior contacts. (Machiavelli