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EZRA POUND 147
would be dressed in his banker's suit; and Wyndham Lewis wore a
suit of jet black, with tie and cape to match.
The expatriates led a rather narrow existence in Paris. They took
the bus over to the Rive Droit only to pick up a money order or
letters at the American Express or Lloyd's. Those who were more
affluent would visit their bankers, which, for most of them, was
Morgan, Harjes & Company, the firm with which Harry Crosby
had been associated.
On certain occasions, the entire colony would turn out. The
première of Ezra's opera, François Villon, was one of those evenings.
The opera was given in the old Salle Pleyel, where the dying
Chopin is said to have fainted at his piano. McAlmon records that
the audience, having come to scoff, was pleasantly surprised at the
excellence of the work. It has since been performed over the BBC,
and one day may even be heard in the United States. McAlmon
says that Eliot was the only one of the audience to leave before the
opera was concluded. 31
Another enterprise of Pound's in Paris was the Three Mountains
Press. A journalist named William Bird, who had founded the
Consolidated Press Association with David Lawrence in Washington
(now U.S. News & World Report), had come to Paris to manage
the European branch of the enterprise. A jovial fellow, he
soon became an integral member of the expatriate community. He
got out a book on wines, and decided to spend some money in
printing avant-garde works. Then as now, Ezra had masses of
unpublished material, and the two entered into a worthwhile collaboration,
which was called the Three Mountains Press.
An impressive early edition of the Cantos, gotten out under this
imprint, now fetches very fancy prices. Only ninety copies, with
giant initial letters on each page, reminiscent of the Irish illustrated
manuscripts, and drawn by the artist Henry Strater, were printed.
Dorothy Pound had two copies of this edition in Washington, perhaps
for a rainy day.
A less happy occasion when the quarter turned out was the
funeral of R. Cheever Dunning. A poet in the classical tradition of
the starving artist, or rather, the western tradition, Dunning lived
in a tiny garret room, slowly dying of malnutrition and tuber-