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EZRA POUND 143
and could not make good on his pledge. Ford excused him by saying
that he had come out badly in some litigation in Scandinavia. 22
Only Ford could come up with a story like that, that an Irish
lawyer, practicing in New York, should lose all his money in
Scandinavia.
Ford says that he first came upon Hemingway in Ezra's studio,
where the young journalist was shadow-boxing with the statue of
a richly-dressed Chinese bonze. Hemingway later enlivened the
offices of the review by suddenly crouching and aiming at a supposed
tree-leopard crouching on a balcony just above Ford's head. 23
This could hardly have lightened the strain of editorship.
Ford was able to excuse this midwestern élan—he seems to
have had a weakness for Americans, and he wound up his days in
Greenwich Village. Hemingway later quarrelled with him about an
attack on Eliot which appeared in the review. Hemingway insisted
on printing it, but in the next issue, Ford ran an apology to Eliot.
After this, Hemingway refused to have anything further to do with
Ford or the review. Although they often were with the same
groups night after night, they refused to speak. This was not as
awkward as it might sound, as it is quite possible to have good
times in a café without speaking to one's companions.
There are several opinions as to Ford's effect upon young
American writers, and as to young writers' effect upon Ford.
Douglas Goldring claimed that long association with Ezra Pound
and his "troupe of cowboys" severely damaged Ford's literary
reputation. 24
Another view, advanced by Van Wyck Brooks in his
Opinions of Oliver Allston, was that "his (Ford's) mind was like
a Roquefort cheese, so ripe that it was palpably falling to pieces,
and I do not think he was a good mental diet for the young
Western boys, fresh from the prairie, who came under his influence
in Paris." 25
Another of Ezra's Paris protégés was George Antheil, who has
termed himself "the bad boy of music." Mr. Antheil won a certain
amount of respect as a musician at his ultra-modern concerts in
Europe, by his quaint custom of placing a fully-loaded revolver
on top of the piano before he began to play. Besides identifying
him unmistakably as an American artist, the gun also served notice