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EZRA POUND 151
reasons, none of them literary. In describing the aftermath of her
parties at the Boulevard St. Germain flat, which were distinguished
by the guests' lack of concern for their hostess, she says, "After
the guests would leave, I went around, like my aunt, with a bottle
of lysol. I was so afraid of getting a venereal disease." 36
It wasn't safe to lie down in the Guggenheim apartment. Her
book also offers a delightful description of a sexual experience
atop a Portuguese manure pile. The tome really has something for
everybody, and we should be grateful to all purchasers of copper for
having made Miss Guggenheim's charming autobiography possible.
After Ezra departed for Rapallo, Paris was left to the Crosbys
and to the Guggenheims. If the quality of work declined, at least
everybody had a good time.
With the demise of the transatlantic review, the expatriates had
to read imported copies of Samuel Roth's quarterly, Two Worlds,
for they no longer had a magazine of their own. This too was
short-lived, for Roth was sent to prison for selling through the
mails a four-hundred-year-old work on love by an Arab physician
—or was it four-year-old work on a hundred ways of making
love? At any rate, poor Roth, victim of innumerable prejudices,
went to jail. The several issues of his quarterly had contained,
besides the pirated Joyce, an early poem by Whittaker Chambers.
Luckily, the expatriates were not long without a voice. Eugene
and Marie Jolas happened along, and so, years later, S. J. Perelman
could quip, "D'ya ever see any of the old 'transition' crowd?"
transition published serially Joyce's Work in Progress, and some
Dada poems by Tristan Tzara, but taking up where Pound had
left off was no longer a novelty. When transition folded, the voice
of the expatriates descended to an area considerably below the
diaphragm, when a typesetter for the Paris edition of the Herald
Tribune, Henry Miller, became the heir of the tradition.
By this time, the life of the expatriates had become a saleable
commodity. Wambley Bald's daily column, "La Vie de Bohème
(As Lived on the Left Bank)," which appeared in the Paris
Tribune, had built up quite a following. When his peregrinations
kept him from his typewriter, he allowed Miller to write for him.
Miller gloried in depicting the swaggering existence of the American
in Paris, who sauntered along puffing on the gauloises bleus,