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160 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
summer home on the Baltic Island of Hiddensee. He would spend
his autumns at a resort in the Alps, and then go on to Rapallo.
Yeats does not record whether he was able to exchange any
conversation with Hauptmann, but they were almost the same age
and had been successful for about the same number of decades.
Hauptmann had received his Nobel Prize in 1912, while Yeats was
a more recent winner, having been awarded this honor in 1923.
Yeats again mentioned Hauptmann in a letter to Olivia Shakespear
of December 12, 1929: "Hauptmann has returned. He
also has had blood-pressure. He uncautiously ventured to the
doctor, enticed there by his son though feeling 'perfectly well.'
The doctor said, 'Blood-pressure, produced by the strain of walking
upright, you must become a quadruped once more,' and put him
to bed for a month, depriving him of meat dinners and champagne.
'But why should anybody say I drink too much champagne? I
only drink two or three bottles a day, and there are men who
drink four.' Now he is out of bed and can't make out why he
feels so extraordinarily vigorous but is quite certain that the doctor
is a great genius, especially as he is now allowed to eat and drink
as much as he likes. (It would have been no use telling him
not to.)" 10
The champagne regimen does not seem to have adversely affected
Hauptmann. He lived on in good health until 1945, when
the shock of seeing his home and the city of Dresden levelled by
foreign bombers put him to bed, and he died soon afterwards.
Ezra's early years in Rapallo were enlivened by an amusing
struggle between himself and his old Vorticist cohort, Wyndham
Lewis. The battle, an international affair, was fierce; the weapons
were magazines. Lewis began the fray in January, 1927, with the
first issue of a periodical which he called The Enemy. Although
the number contained an article by T. S. Eliot, most of it was
taken up with the first section of a book by Lewis, The Revolutionary
Simpleton, which later appeared under the title, Time and
Western Man (1927).
The "revolutionary simpleton", of course, was none other than
our Ezra.
Lewis wrote, "He [Ezra] was a born revolutionary, a Trotsky
of the written word and the painted shape. Where he detected