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EZRA POUND 181
sole editor, cancelled in the third number of This Quarter the
dedication which the first number bore in honor of Ezra Pound,
in a long editorial from which we abstract the following: 'I herewith
take back that dedication. I have said before that Ernest
Walsh was disillusioned about Ezra Pound before he died. We
take back our generous dedication.' Now that reason which underlay
the withdrawal of the dedication did not interest us then and
does not interest us now, but the passion, the frenesie mystique,
the courage, the moral fervor, the gesture, the utterly rectitudinous
illwill and the unprecedented irregularity of it aroused our admiration.
In the history of literary quarrels it is, as far as we know,
unparallelled. 'Meriting the gratitude of this generation,' the
Arbiter Poetarium,—as once the Roman populace hurled from the
cliffs Eumolpus, the playmate of that other Arbiter, Petronius,
wreathed in vervain and sacred garments,—was by the frail hand
of brave little Ethel Moorhead thrown headlong from his eminence."
In 1931, Pound agreed to become a contributing editor for
another little magazine, called The New Review. It was to be edited
by Samuel Putnam, who had arranged for the printing of Ezra's
magazine, The Exile, in Chicago. Putnam had been assisting Edward
Titus, husband of Helena Rubinstein, in editing This Quarter, but,
according to Alfred Perles, he quarrelled with the stingy Titus and
started his own review. Perles describes Putnam as a "dried-up,
dyspeptic scholar who translated Rabelais into Modern American."
36
The New Review attained a total circulation of seventy-three
subscribers. Putnam turned it over to Perles and Henry Miller for
a few weeks while he was engaged in New York, and discarding
a long story by McAlmon, they enlivened the issue with some of
Miller's prose. When Putnam returned, he threw them both out.
Pound's association with the magazine also was a short one. He
intensely disliked one of the other editors, Peter Neagoe, author of
Easter Sun (1934), and so he resigned. His place was taken by
Maxwell Bodenheim.
In August, 1932, Olga Rudge was present when Ford Madox
Ford came to Rapallo. She recorded the following conversation,