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156 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL<br />

and forth between France and Italy, but at last he decided to give<br />

up his apartment in Paris.<br />

In November, 1924, he wrote to William Bird, asking him to<br />

dispose of the studio and to sell its furnishings. He pointed out<br />

that the studio held a superior value because of the more favorable<br />

exchange rate. When he had first rented it, it had cost the equivalent<br />

of thirty dollars a month. Thanks to the vagaries of international<br />

exchange, in 1924, it rented for half of that sum. 2<br />

The lease was taken over by Yasushi Tanaka and his wife,<br />

Louise Gebhard Cann. "Paris was in one of its perennial 'crise<br />

de logemont,'" she recalls. "We lived in a furnished lodging that<br />

had to be given up within six months and the time was running<br />

out. We had been frantically seeking for a foothold on which we<br />

could get a lease so we could continue with our work but everything<br />

we looked at was tied up with a big premium, called a 'reprise' by<br />

the actual holder, a demand that could be met only by the rich.<br />

Mr. Pound could have made a similar stipulation. People with the<br />

means, and they were standing in line, would have paid almost<br />

any price to get the lease on his place, but we immediately saw<br />

that he was the kind of person who wouldn't even think of such<br />

a scheme. Quite as a matter of course he had performed what was<br />

then a miracle, opening the way for a destiny." 3<br />

On the third of December, 1924, Pound wrote exultantly to<br />

Wyndham Lewis, "I have never been converted to your permanenza<br />

or delayed dalliance in the hyperborean fogs, ma!! Having<br />

rejuvenated by fifteen years in going to Paris and added another<br />

ten of life by quitting same, somewhat arid, but necessary milieu<br />

etc." 4<br />

Ezra's settling in Rapallo caused many of the international set<br />

to stop there who would have otherwise ignored it. Peggy Guggenheim<br />

relates that she and one of her husbands went down there<br />

to see Pound and to avoid Venice where they had been caught<br />

during the rainy season. "What a horribly dull little town it is!"<br />

she exclaims in reminiscence.<br />

She says that she played tennis with Ezra every day while she<br />

was there, and fought with her husband every night. She recalls<br />

her tennis partner as "a good player, but he crowed like a rooster<br />

whenever he made a good stroke." Her current husband was not

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