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266 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Even after Pound had been shut away, Mr. Cerf continued to
sound the tocsin against him. He exhibited raw courage in 1946,
when he deleted twelve poems by Pound from an anthology that
Conrad Aiken had compiled for the Cerf firm of Random House. 2
Some of Cerf s friends thought this might be going a bit too far,
and protests against this quaint Madison Avenue custom of "bookburning"
were heard from W. H. Auden, Max Lerner, and Robert
Linscott of Cerf's own office.
Some months earlier, Cerf had suggested to the editors of The
Saturday Review that he would like to write a weekly column of
chit-chat for them. He had long been one of their heaviest
advertisers, and they were more than delighted by his offer. He
used his column, "Trade Winds", to air his perplexity over the
problem of disposing of Pound and his work. In the issue of
February 9, 1946, stung by Lewis Gannett, book editor of the
New York Herald Tribune, who had called him a book-burner
and akin to the Nazis, Cerf printed his reply:
". . . The war is not over. . . . You say I am being emotional
about this. Of course I am!"
Cerf appealed to his readers for support. In the March 16, 1946,
issue, he reported that readers had sent in 289 opinions on his
deletion of Pound's poems from the anthology. He said that 142
opposed the inclusion of Pound's poems, 140 approved, or wished
that he had included them, and several respondents said that they
hadn't been able to make up their minds. Despite the remarkably
even distribution of opinion on this very controversial matter,
142-140, Cerf admitted that the omission of Pound's work was
"an error in judgment, to be rectified as soon as possible." He
added, "I still think that Ezra Pound and men like him are the
scum of the earth, and must be fought without quarter and without
cease. In this particular issue, however, I went charging off on
the wrong course."
Cerf then printed several pages of excerpts from the opinions
of his readers. These are priceless, but we can only reprint a few
of them, and they, after all, represent but a small number of the
289 that Cerf said he received.
Norman Rosten wrote, "Mr. Pound is a traitor and he should