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EZRA POUND 173
he sat beside me in front of the cafe and admired my beard, and
declared that I should be sent by the Free State as Minister to
Austria, that Austria alone would perfectly appreciate my beard." 19
He again mentioned Ezra's dislike of germs in a letter to Lady
Gregory of April 7, 1930: "Ezra Pound arrived the other day, his
first visit since I got ill—fear of infection—and being warned by
his wife tried to be very peaceable but couldn't help being very
litigious about Confucius who I consider should have worn an
Eighteenth Century wig and preached in St. Pauls, and he thinks
the perfect man." 20
Yeats' conception of Confucius as an eighteenth-century preacher
is an interesting one, not too far removed from the concept of the
"humane man", and one can only wonder what Ezra's disagreement
on this idea could have been.
Soon afterwards, Yeats rented his Rapallo apartment to Ezra's
father, who had retired from the U.S. Mint and joined his son in
Italy. At that time, the Steinach operation for rejuvenation of the
glandular system was the rage, and Yeats underwent it. He said
that he felt very fresh afterwards, but his health never showed any
marked improvement.
He spent several months at Majorca with the Swami, Sri Purohit,
correcting the English translation of that gentleman's version of
the Upanishads, much to his wife's disgust. She felt that he should
be putting in this time on his own poetry. The Swami's language
was much too ornate and flowery for an English audience, and
Yeats' work consisted essentially of what Ezra had done for him
in 1914, that is making the style communicate something, rather
than hang in the air like the swirling decorations for a parade.
Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear on March 9, 1933, "I wish
I could put the swami's lectures into the Cuala series but I can not.
My sisters' books are like an old family magazine. A few hundred
people buy them and expect a common theme. Only once did I put
a book into the series that was not Irish—Ezra's Noh plays—and
I had to write a long introduction to annex Japan to Ireland." 21
On his return visits to Rapallo, Yeats seems to have enjoyed his
bouts with Pound, for their meetings were always, at this stage,
verbal boxing matches. He writes in the preface to The King of the
Great Clock Tower (1934), ". . . I wrote the prose dialogue of