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158 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
book, The Well of Loneliness (1928), which deals with the problems
of a lesbian.
Antheil noted that there was only one decent restaurant in
the town, the café at the main hotel. There he sat at table one
afternoon with two Nobel Prize winners, Yeats and the German
playwright Gerhart Hauptmann. They were both fond of reading
detective stories, so Antheil wrote one for them. It was published
under the name of "Stacey Bishop" and was entitled Death in
the Dark.
One day, Antheil fainted on the street. Pound picked him up
and carried him to the doctor, who found that he was suffering
from some sort of condition that would be improved by a stay on
the Isle of Capri. This was the scene of some of Norman Douglas'
scrapes with the law. Antheil departed for this romantic place,
leaving Ezra to the companionship of his Nobel Prize winners
and to such occasional visitors as Emil Ludwig and Franz Werfel.
Richard Aldington has recorded one of the most interesting non
sequiturs in literary history, as follows: "William Butler Yeats and
his wife once dined with me at my hotel in Rapallo. Spaghetti
was served, and a long thin lock of Yeats' hair got into the corner
of his mouth, while the rest of us watched in silent awe his efforts
to swallow a bit of his own hair instead of the pasta. Giving up
this hopeless task, in dudgeon he suddenly turned to me and said
in a deep voice: 'How do you account for Ezra?' "
Apparently Aldington was unequal to the question, for he has
not recorded his reply. He delivered this anecdote in a lecture to
an American university audience, and later included it in his
autobiography. 7
The story proves one thing—whenever one of the
twentieth century literati comes upon something which he cannot
swallow, he instinctively thinks of Ezra Pound. It is odd that
Yeats, who used to introduce his friends to the ghosts who sat
at his table, never considered Ezra as some sort of supernatural
phenomenon; but if so, he never mentioned it. Probably he thought
of Ezra as the most earthbound of men, and Ezra had little use
for Yeats' "spooks", as he termed them.
Nevertheless, it was his friendship with Pound that drew Yeats
to Rapallo for some of the most pleasant months of his life. He
had been a Senator in Ireland for some six years, at a tax-free