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EZRA POUND 129
Ezra made a tour of Italy and France in the summer of 1920,
before going back to England for his effects. In Venice, where he
had published his first book of poems twelve years earlier, he
began a semi-autobiographical work, Indiscretions, Une Revue De
Deux Mondes, which opens on a typically Poundian note:
"It is peculiarly fitting that this manuscript should begin in
Venice, from a patent Italian inkwell designed to prevent satisfactory
immersion of the pen. If the latter symbolism be obscure,
the former is so obvious, at least to the writer, that only meticulous
honesty and the multitude of affairs prevented him from committing
it to paper before leaving London." 1
Pound returned to England on June 30, 1920, to wind up his
negotiations with the English. He ceded the island back to them,
and departed for Paris on October 29. According to John Gould
Fletcher, as a parting shot at London, Pound said that England
was only a corpse kept alive by maggots. 2
Although this thesis
may be somewhat inaccurate from a biological point of view,
there is much to be said for it sociologically, especially as concerns
the olfactory sense.
When Ezra went to Paris, he was thirty-five years old. He had
married well, had published a number of books (more than we
care to count at the moment), had been listed in Who's Who in
England for the past six years, and had built an international
reputation as a poet and critic. His work with Yeats and Joyce
was largely behind him; the Paris years were to be devoted to
the careers of T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway.
In February, 1921, Pound issued a clarion call for assistance
in rescuing Eliot from Lloyd's Bank. He requested thirty annual
subscriptions of fifty dollars each. Although Eliot was earning
more than the fifteen hundred dollars which might be raised
through the subscriptions, he was willing to accept a cut in pay to
become a poet. Many of the expatriates were living in Paris on
considerably less. Fletcher cites the case of Humberston Skipwith
Cannell, whose poems Pound had managed to get into Poetry, and
who lived on the Left Bank on a modest thirty dollars a month
sent him by his relatives. 3
The outcome of this new campaign was a fortunate one. In