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EZRA POUND 133<br />

Hemingway was then living in the room in which Verlaine had<br />

spent his last years. It was more romantic than convenient, for it<br />

had no heat or running water. The rent was very low, but Hemingway<br />

could have afforded better, as he was on a salary from the<br />

"Moose Jaw Clarion" or some such Canadian sheet.<br />

Pound's first lesson for Hemingway was, as usual, Flaubert,<br />

whom he offered as an example of precision of working and for<br />

his employment of le mot juste. Although Hemingway learned to<br />

work, it is difficult to say whether he uses the "right word". The<br />

language is spare and clean, the tone is masculine, but one does<br />

not hear the particular thud of the bullet landing in flesh. It is<br />

Americanese, a language more fit for vituperation than for romance.<br />

Perhaps it is this to which Wyndham Lewis refers when he<br />

speaks of the "staccato of the States". If Hemingway had not been<br />

a city boy, he might not have been quite so impressed with the<br />

hunt. Boys in Virginia learn to shoot squirrels plumb through the<br />

eye with .22 rifles. The lesson is one in precision. As for bulls . . .<br />

Malcolm Cowley says that Ezra read Hemingway's stories and<br />

blue-pencilled most of the adjectives. 11<br />

In a letter to me, dated<br />

June 30, 1959, Ezra says,<br />

"Hem re/Cowley , 1922 aprox ; on sight ; Kent yeh see the<br />

s o b in ten years' time, setting in an office; turnin'<br />

some good guy down?"<br />

Hemingway later remarked, "Ezra was right half of the time,<br />

and when he was wrong he was so wrong you were never in<br />

doubt." 12<br />

This is high praise, as most criticism merely adds to the<br />

general confusion.<br />

In The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, Charles Fenton<br />

says, "It was from Ezra Pound's edicts about imagism, in fact, and<br />

from their application to his own verse, that Hemingway profited<br />

most strongly from the exercise of writing poetry." 13<br />

Although he was a successful journalist, and had won praise for<br />

his newspaper stories, Hemingway was quite modest in submitting<br />

his work to Pound for editing. He also went to another Parisian<br />

teacher, Gertrude Stein, who looked over his stories. The results of<br />

this process, or the advantages accruing to Hemingway, are in<br />

doubt. The statement, "You are all a lost generation," which was<br />

printed opposite the title page of his novel, The Sun Also Rises

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