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276 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
the June, 1918 issue of The Little Review, Pound wrote, "He
(Hecht) alone, of the few bards with whose work I am acquainted,
preserves an exquisite balance in the current of his own emotions."
Pound also wrote, "Ben Hecht is an asset. . . . He is trying to
come to grips."
Hecht later became a highly-paid Hollywood scenario writer,
but kept up his literary associations, especially with Sherwood
Anderson. Anderson wrote to Roger Sergel, December 25, 1923,
"The rest of them in Chicago, except Ben Hecht, now and then,
when he isn't being a smarty, are just talking. The smartiness will
perhaps defeat Ben. It may have already." 11
On October 13, 1936, Anderson wrote to Laura Lou Copenhaver,
"Had a long talk yesterday with Ben Hecht, who has gone
sour on the movies. You know we were once great friends in
Chicago. His old mother was killed in an auto accident, in Los
Angeles, and the last thing she said to him was that he should have
stuck with me and gone with me on my road." 12
John Cournos, of Russian Jewish background, wrote of his
acquaintance with Ezra in London, in his autobiography, as follows:
"Ezra, as I had cause later to find out, was one of the kindest
men that ever lived. Ezra . . . was the ideal missionary of
culture." 13
Cournos also stated that "Ezra Pound divined my loneliness
and went out of his way to get me acquainted." 14
Another of his protégés was the poet Louis Zukofsky, who
wrote, in a contribution to Charles Norman's The Case of Ezra
Pound, "I never felt the least trace of anti-Semitism in his presence.
Nothing he ever said to me made me feel the embarrassment I
always had for the 'Gentile' in whom a residue of antagonism to
'Jew' remains. If we had occasion to use the words, Jew and Gentile,
they were no more nor less ethnological in their sense than
'Chinese' or 'Italian.' " 15
In 1938, Pound dedicated his book Guide to Culture to Louis
Zukofsky, an individual Jew, and Basil Bunting, an individual
Quaker. On February 18, 1932, Pound wrote to John Drummond
of the need for "some place where men of good will can meet without
worrying about creed and colour etc." 16
During the years that he was aiding these Jewish artists, Pound