4pQonT

180 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
by Congress, thanks to Sherman Adams; and that egregious Swedish
hired hand, Mr. Sandburg, recently addressed a "hushed"
Congress (the adjective is Time's) on the occasion of somebody's
birthday, but this is not a cultural revolution.
On February 24, 1925, Pound wrote to Simon Guggenheim,
congratulating him on the establishment of the Memorial Foundation.
He suggested Eliot, Antheil and Marianne Moore as possible
beneficiaries of grants, and offered his fullest cooperation. Guggenheim
did not avail himself of the offer. 34
On December 25, 1927, the New York Times announced that
Ezra Pound had been awarded the annual two-thousand-dollar prize
given by The Dial for distinguished service to literature. The prize
was then discontinued.
Ezra is described on one of his return trips to Paris, in 1930, by
Caresse Crosby in a volume appropriately entitled The Passionate
Years (1953): "We Parisians were ragged pale with winter, but
Ezra arrived from Rapallo bronzed and negligé—there was a becoming
saltiness to his beard." 35
He had made the trip to arrange
for the publication of his Imaginary Letters by Caresse's Black Sun
Press. They decided to do the town, and she tells us that Ezra
danced a wild dance with a tiny Martiniquaise cigarette vendor.
Another of the little magazines, This Quarter, began in 1925
with a bold fanfare in honor of Pound, including an enthusiastic
letter from James Joyce. The magazine's editors soon shifted their
allegiance, as recounted in an editorial by Edward W. Titus in the
August-September, 1929, issue of This Quarter:
"Arbiter Poetarium. . . . For clarity it should be recalled that
the first issue of this quarter, dated Spring, 1925, bore the following
eulogistic dedication: 'this number is dedicated to Ezra Pound
who by his creative work, his editorship of several magazines, his
helpful friendship for young and unknown artists, his many and
untiring efforts to win better appreciation of what is first rate in
art, comes first to our mind as meriting the gratitude of this generation.'
Thus read the dedication, and let us say on our part that the
qualities enumerated therein were understated rather than overstated.
But in the interval between the first and third numbers of
this quarter something had happened. Through the demise of her
co-editor, Mr. Ernest Walsh, Miss Ethel Moorhead, having become