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EZRA POUND 139
which, in the act of defeating the enemy, manages to get itself entirely
annihilated, relieving the succored inhabitants of any necessity
for gratitude or for reabsorbing the veterans into their society.
So, Mr. Ford:
"The story goes—and it is too good not to be true—that, to
add to the harmony of the war years, Mr. Pound left England
because he had sent seconds to a harmless poet of the type that
writes articles on Milton on the front page of the London Times
Literary Supplement. The poet asked for police protection. So
Ezra went. To issue a challenge to a duel to a British subject is, by
British law, to conspire to commit murder, and the British police
model themselves on Milton.
"Anyhow," says Ford, "It is always good to come upon Mr.
Pound in a new city. I never could discover that he had any
sympathy for my writing. He wrote to me last week to say that
eighty per cent of my work is rubbish—because I am an English
gentleman. Patriotism is a fine thing!
"All the same, if Mr. Pound is in Caparnaum and I go there Mr.
Pound leads me in procession incontinently to the sound of shawms
around the city walls. You would think I was the infinitely aged
mummy of a Pharaoh, nodding in senility on the box seat of Miss
Stein's first automobile. And before the car Mr. Pound dances the
slow, ceremonial dance that William Penn danced before the
Sachems. Then when I have told the elders and the scribes that
Ezra is the greatest poet in the world, Ezra goes and whispers into
the loud speakers that beneath the bedizened shawls I have asses'
ears. The drone is thus killed." 19
In Ford's books of reminiscences (there are quite a few of
them), he wanders from the green fields of England to the fields
of Provence, or from Paris to New York, without visible transition
in his prose. In one paragraph, we are sitting in the Brevoort; in the
next, we are ensconced at the Café Dome, and apparently we have
been there for some time. It is a sort of magic carpet prose, rather
pleasant, although somewhat bewildering. Ford himself has written
somewhere, "My brain, I think, is a sort of dove-cote."
The real explanation of this curious mode of transition is that
Ford is the last cosmopolitan; he is at home anywhere in western
civilization. Whether he is observing the antics of a Fifth Avenue