4pQonT

188 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
of their nervous and privacy-loving temperament. Being on the
ground floor, they were at the mercy of anyone who chose to stroll
in or knock. Hordes came. So when they got back from their
winters in Italy, they would beg us to keep their return a secret for
as long as possible. But in Rapallo, when we went to visit them,
we found them in a sixth floor flat with a big terrasse, overlooking
the harbor, and although the house was new, the lift was permanently
disabled. Anyone who wanted to see them had six long
flights to climb and with no guarantee that they would find anyone
at home when they got to the top. This eminently satisfactory
arrangement enabled Ezra to write his Cantos undisturbed and to
devote himself to his immense correspondence, which consisted
mainly of the wildest abuse of everyone who did not agree with
him, conveyed in highly impressionist typescript. This gave him
immense satisfaction, and meanwhile Dorothy applied herself to
the composition of abstract water-colours. When disposed for conversation
Pound would place himself on the quaiside terrasse of
the cafe above which he lived, and conversation would come to
him. It was an excellent system, which included one meal a day
at the cafe-restaurant and the minimum of household chores." 41
Pound's furious efforts on behalf of his fellow writers, artists,
and musicians did not slacken during his years in Rapallo. In
1929, Douglas Goldring, whom he had met in London in 1909,
at the office of The English Review, paid tribute to him as follows:
"Pound, like Ford, has a pure, passionate, disinterested love
of good writing. He is one of the few men living who has a sense
of team-work. So long as good literature continues to be produced,
it does not so much matter to him who produces it or where it
crops up. When I used to see a good deal of him, it seemed to me
that he camouflaged extraordinary generosity of outlook in regard
to other writers under a mask of rather amusing self-assertion. As
a literary foster-mother Ezra has had few equals in our time. Let
us look towards Rapallo and drink his health!" 42
Of these years, Desmond Chute wrote, in 1955, "Had he not
found here the freedom he sought: freedom to be a poet? (At
Rapallo he was universally and spontaneously called 'il poeta':
people still stop me in the street to ask for news of 'il Signor