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150 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Guggenheim Foundation, which has given grants to so many of
Ezra's critics.
E. E. Cummings was one of the beneficiaries of these grants.
Malcolm Cowley says that the early Cummings was influenced
by Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", 34
which characterized the
post-war period,
the age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace.
Another of Pound's works of this period, "Homage to Sextus
Propertius", has been described by John J. Espey as "That boobytrap
for the classicist who is also a pedant." 35
He mentions William
Gardner Hale's attack upon Pound in the April, 1919 issue of
Poetry, as adding to the confusion. The London Times Literary
Supplement still refers to the Propertius poem as evidence of
Pound's ineptitude at translation, despite Pound's notification that
the poem is not an exact rendering, but rather a poem designed as
homage to the Latin poet.
Most classicists are also pedants, and they have had a field day
with the Propertius poem. Pound says that his lack of a union
card—that is, twenty years of slow deterioration at Balliol or some
such place—rouses the academicians to fury whenever he presents
a translation. Of course, he has been just as hard on them.
It would be a mistake to suppose that all of the expatriates were
engaged in the production of serious works of art. Most of them
frequented salons or cafés where no work was done or even contemplated.
Such were the establishments of Harry and Caresse
Crosby, and of Peggy Guggenheim.
Harry Crosby was a nephew of J. P. Morgan, and he maintained
an elaborate place in Paris. The Crosbys often entertained forty
or fifty people. He ended this regime by shooting himself in the
temple, in order to get nearer to the sun.
Peggy Guggenheim, being a woman, did not shoot herself when
she became bored. She simply changed husbands, a recipe which
the envious Caresse was not slow to follow. The Guggenheim autobiography,
Out of This Century, is "must" reading for many