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EZRA POUND 135
he was. Then it happened. I saw it happening and tried to save
what was fine there, but it was too late. He went the way so many
other Americans have gone before, the way they are still going. He
became obsessed by sex and violent death." 14
We leave Miss Stein before she suggests some more interesting
hobbies. In preparation for this work, I reread The Sun Also
Rises, and it is a fine piece of work. Hemingway never wrote another
book, but then, who does? He had an unsurpassed hero in
the castrato, Jake, for this handicap raised him to the quality of a
god, whose involvement in human affairs was necessarily tortuous,
inconclusive, and important. Never again did Hemingway find
such a symbol.
During Pound's Paris period, he was Gertrude Stein's only rival
in the specialty of handling genius. She looked upon this bountyjumper
from the West with great disfavor. In The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas, their meeting is described by Stein through
the eyes of her consort, Miss Toklas:
"We met Ezra Pound at Grace Lounsbery's, he came to dinner
with us and he stayed and talked about Japanese prints among
other things. Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing.
She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a
village, but if you were not, not. Ezra also talked about T. S. Eliot
at the house. Pretty soon everybody talked about T. S. Eliot at the
house." 15
The "house" was at 27 rue de Fleurus, where the lisstrichous
Miss Stein and her consort, Miss Toklas, held sway over a sea of
Picasso paintings. According to the autobiography, Ezra came once
more to the rue de Fleurus, and again talked about Japanese
prints. In her anxiety to convince him that she was not a village
(an error which anyone could make, as she talked like one),
Gertrude Stein became somewhat vehement. She says that Pound
was not invited back. He does not recall the incident, but, in any
case, he would not have spent much time with her. On the only
occasion I remember when her name was brought up at St. Elizabeths,
he said, rather benevolently, that she was "a charming old
fraud."
As soon as he had settled in Paris, Pound wrote to Joyce, who