4pQonT

116 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Élysées; Wilson arrived on the scene with a vacant grin already
tugging at his somber mouth; and the old order was suitably
buried. It was a schoolboy farce in which three precocious offspring
of Europe capered about, sniggering at the gaucheries,
pretensions and hallucinations of their American classmate, while
the Germans sat impatiently in the wings, waiting for their cue to
come on stage again.
Pound's growing disaffection with the English was stimulated
by an incident over one of his pet dislikes, John Milton. Pound
considered Lascelles Abercrombie, of The Times Literary Supplement,
a symbol of all that he opposed in modern poetry. Abercrombie
was the leader of the Georgian group of poets, which had
grown steadily in influence, and had even enlisted D. H. Lawrence
in one of their annuals. Abercrombie started a magazine, New
Numbers, which proved very successful, and his successive anthologies
of Georgian Poetry became best sellers. The reason was
simple. He had worked with Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, and
other war poets who obligingly got themselves killed. An inevitable
reaction to the horrors of modern warfare was a sort of
literary shellshock, a wallowing in sentimental slush, such as
inundated the United States during both World Wars (pass the
ammunition, Pops, or whatever!).
The mounting Poundian rage at this tendency, which was sweeping
away his few accomplishments in England, was accelerated
when Abercrombie published an article in praise of Milton in The
Times Literary Supplement. He fired off a letter, challenging
Abercrombie to a duel.
There are several versions of the reaction. Ford insists that
Abercrombie, knowing that Pound was an accomplished fencer,
was genuinely frightened, and that he went to the police. Dueling
had long been outlawed, and the statutes now listed a challenge to
such an affair as engaging in conspiracy to commit a murder. The
police went to Pound, says Ford, and shortly thereafter Pound
removed to France.
Another and perhaps more accurate version (we should not
condemn Ford if he prefers the picture of Pound fleeing England
with Scotland Yard detectives in full pursuit) is that Abercrombie,