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EZRA POUND 189
Poeta'.) He saw himself, and was, a man of letters. What matter
if he looked the part so long as he lived it? On the Riviera of the
20s and the 30s, besides writing poetry he could work out untrammelled
that vital and cultural synthesis which gave it consistency.
Here he could, with brusque delicacy, befriend promise.
Thus he provided one sculptor, Henges, with stone and the chance
to carve it; musicians with the possibility to be heard, poets to
write, talent to think. (So great indeed was his kindness of heart
that I still remember how distressed and generous he was over
local orphans lacking milk for breakfast, how outraged at the
spectacle of cats mutilated by traps.) Educative activities led
easily to a kindred discipline, which was also one of his main
interests: the anatomy of Culture. An element herein sticks in my
mind—Frobenius, to whom curiously enough Pound bore so
marked a somatic likeness. Another, the most important after
Poetry, was Music.
"Fanned by his disinterested and unflagging enthusiasm, rare
and unforgettable little concerts sprang up according to the frequency
and incidence of performers. One remembers blocks of
music. Block in this context was a great word with Ezra; not only
did he insist at rehearsals on 'blocks' of light and shade in the
performance of old music, he also demanded integrated and consecutive
programs. The Rapallo musical seasons started as weeks,
begun under the sign of Mozart, all of whose violin sonatas were
played at least once by Olga Rudge and Gerhart Munch. One
wonders when the whole series had last, if ever, been heard in its
entirety. There followed all Bach's and all Pergolesi's. In a similar
spirit, though more informally in a private house, Munch gave a
reading on three consecutive afternoons of the complete Wolhtemperierte
Clavier. Meanwhile the weeks went on with Purcell's
Twelve Sonatas in Three Parts (with basso continuo, 1683) and
William Young's for strings and bass ('the first printed English
Sonatas, 1653'). For the latter, absolute priority of execution may
be claimed for Rapallo, actually in advance of the 'first' performance
under the editor, W. Gillies Whittaker, at Oxford. In the
1930s Ezra Pound developed an intense interest in the vast unpublished
output of Antonio Vivaldi, much of which, largely