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EZRA POUND 187
fire you now. Why the hell don't you have a bit of real fun before
you get tucked under? Damn it all, I never did dislike you." 39
James Laughlin, Pound's publisher, has described the Rapallo
studio as a shadowy room in which many documents hung overhead,
suspended on ropes. The poet was surrounded by stacks of
papers and letters and books which he was using as the multitudinous
references for the Cantos. He was determined to get in
as much as possible.
Desmond Chute, who had first met Pound and Yeats in his
London tobacco shop before the first World War, says that the
Pounds "were living on the top floor of a cliff-like building facing
the sea, in a narrow, pergola-like flat giving onto a vast roof terrace
and chiefly remarkable for a wealth of works in various
mediums by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
"I had come to Rapallo in 1923," continues Chute, "and the
Pounds in 1924, soon followed by Ezra's parents. Homer L.
Pound, despite his total lack of Italian, was much liked by the
denizens of Rapallo, who seldom failed to describe him, in a
phrase lifted from dialect, as 'una pasta d'uomo.' If Ezra owed to
his father that disarming simplicity so inextricably woven with his
own sophistication, from his mother he derived even more striking
characteristics: a fine carriage, a springy walk, a sybiline poise of
the head, an occasional wilfulness in not admitting or even seeing
the other side. Not even a long and tedious year in the hospital
could break Isabel Weston Pound's octogenarian determination
never to allow the conversation to drop below a cultural level. Of
course she and 'Son' held differing conceptions of culture. She
would insist on reciting his 'juvenalia,' although two years had
passed since T. S. Eliot had hailed him as 'il miglior fabbro' and
the Cantos were already in spate. Any attempt to put in a word
for the greater importance of his maturer work would be quenched
with a glance while the early verses swept on to their Ninetyish
close." 40
Stella Bowen, one of Ford's later wives, came to see the Pounds
in Rapallo. She described the situation in Paris, the occasion of
their removal to Italy, as follows: "Their studio in the Rue Notre
Dame des Champs had in any case become untenable for persons