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EZRA POUND 113
the dictatorship of Pound. Our idea of having a foreign correspondent
is not to sit in our New York office and mess up,
censor, or throw out work sent us by our editor in London. We
have let Ezra Pound be our foreign editor in the only way we
see it. We have let him be as foreign as he likes: foreign to
taste, foreign to courtesy, foreign to our standards of Art. All
because we believe in the fundamental idea back of our correspondence
with Mr. Pound: the interest and value of an intellectual
communication between Europe and America. If anyone
can tell us of a more untiring, efficient, better-equipped poet
to take over the foreign office, let us hear from him. I have had
countless letters from Jews, Letts, Greeks, Finns, Irish, etc.
protesting against Mr. Pound's ignorance and discrimination. I
have answered that this is always true of mushroom nations: the
fixed imperception of the qualities and cultures of all other
nations." 24
One of the more interesting aspects of running an off-beat,
experimental, or radical magazine is that the editor is constantly
besieged by protests from offended readers. This is as true in
1961 as it was in 1918.
Not all of the subscribers to The Little Review demanded
Pound's head. Witter Bynner, one of Ezra's first boosters, wrote
in to say that "Pound has a rhythm he can't kill." 25
Lola Ridge contributed an interesting tidbit to the same issue
called "Ezra's Mind", in which she said, ". . . There is something
about Pound's vituperations that savors of not too remote
gutters—and coal stalls and tongues akimbo and herrings obvious
in a rising temperature. I've sometimes felt like saying something
like this out loud but—I'm frugal! And then he's done lovely
things and I admire his cold shining thin-glass mind through
which so many colors pass leaving no stain—and then—my stonearm
balks at swinging in rhythm with the mob's."
Ezra was soon chafing at his inability to exercise more control
over the magazine. Although Margaret Anderson was much
more prompt in printing the gems that he sent her from Europe,
she was little better than Miss Monroe when it came to judging
the work of her American contributors. In a letter printed in
the July, 1918 issue, Ezra wrote,