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EZRA POUND 145
Pound's studio. No wonder that Ezra felt the need to escape his
admirers.
Not all of the visitors were merely tourists. Harriet Monroe
arrived in 1923 to meet the man who had done so much to put her
magazine on the map. Pound informed her that the poem he was
then working on would take forty years to complete. By this estimate,
the Cantos should be in their final form by 1963.
Margaret Anderson also came to Paris in 1923, to meet her
ex-foreign editor. The Little Review, having lasted almost a decade,
was now on its last legs. She was impressed with Pound's lovely
garden studio, and she describes the poet as wearing a large
velvet beret, with the famed emerald dangling from his ear, a
flowing tie like an artist of the 1830s, and a high Rooseveltian
(TR) voice. She noted his "robust red blondness" and his nervous
self-consciousness.
With some irritation, she comments, "Ezra had become fairly
patriarchal in his attitude to women. He kissed them upon the
forehead or drew them upon his knees with perfect obliviousness
to their distaste for these mannerisms. In fact Ezra ran true to
form, as the academic type, in everything—as I had anticipated." 29
One can only wonder what sort of academicians Miss Anderson
had been accustomed to. She declared that Ezra had stayed away
from his homeland too long, and had become "a typical expatriate,
which results in an oriental attitude towards women." 30
Ezra never failed to arouse conflicting emotions in the opposite
sex. One of my first missions for him was to call upon a pair of
aged spinsters in Washington, the originals of the "Soeurs Randall"
of the Imaginary Letters. One of them said, with some asperity,
that Ezra had gotten into trouble because he had failed to come
back to the United States every couple of years. The elder of the
two was eighty-seven, her little sister was eighty-four, but even
here I felt they had a lingering feminine irritation with Ezra.
They were characters from a Henry James story, who lived in
a charming Georgetown house, and the gulf between them and Ezra
was simply the gulf between Henry James' characters and life.
Ezra had not come back to the United States every couple of
years, to refresh his roots in the Fountain of Youth, because he
did not have the money for the trips. But Henry James' characters