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EZRA POUND 183
POUND: Are there new writers on a level with Henry James and
Hudson?
FORD: (After qualifying Henry James' talent at some length)
Yes. Hemingway, Elizabeth Roberts, Caroline Gordon, George
Davis. Read 'The Opening of a Door' and 'Penhelly.'
POUND: But as artists? If James is a consummate artist, is
Hudson something else? He may be called a pure prose writer, not
a novelist.
FORD: The difference between weaving and drawing.
POUND: Now for the term 'promising.' What makes you think
a new writer 'promises'?
FORD: The first sentence I read. When two words are put together
they produce an overtone. The overtone is the writer's soul.
When Stephen Crane wrote, 'The waves are barbarous and abrupt,'
he presented simultaneously the sea and the small boat. Waves are
not abrupt for a ship. 'Barbarous and abrupt'—onomatopoeic, like
'Poluphloisboion' in Homer (when the Cyclops throws the rock).
POUND: (concluding) How many have kept their promises since
the English Review was founded twenty-five years ago?
FORD: Stephen Reynolds is dead. Ezra has become hangman's
assistant to interviewers. . . . I don't know what Wyndham Lewis
is doing. Norman Douglas. D. H. Lawrence is dead, but kept on
'till the end. Rebecca West. Among the successors: Virginia
Woolf; Joyce in 'The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'; the
Hughes who wrote 'High Wind in Jamaica,' a dramatist's novel, not
a novel writer's." 37
Ford is the only critic who has defined the prose writer. The
statement, "When two words are put together they produce an
overtone. The overtone is the writer's soul", may be illustrated by
quoting the opening of Chapter VI of Ford's novel, Some Do
Not (1924):
"He let himself in at the heavy door; when he closed it behind
him, in the darkness, the heaviness of the door sent long surreptitious
whisperings up the great stone stairs."
Pound, we may note, is all poet—he seldom writes a complete
sentence of prose. Ford is the greatest prose writer of his time
because he represents an end product of Western civilization, the