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32 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
seen and the most fun—except for his painful self-consciousness
and his coughing laugh." 3
A small group of students occasionally gathered at Pound's
home for a Sunday afternoon sandwich and song fest. Williams
says that Pound never learned to play the piano, and Mrs. Pound,
whom he describes as "erect and rather beautiful in an indifferent,
middle-aged way," usually played for them. 4
With great gusto, Pound involved himself in extracurricular
activities. He took up fencing under the tutelage of the University's
master, Signor Terrone, but dropped it when Williams, who had had
the benefit of a year's study at a Swiss school, informed him that
the French style was much superior to the Italian style that was
taught by Signor Terrone.
In 1903, Pound, irritated by the faculty at the University,
decided to make a change. He enrolled at Hamilton College. In his
Autobiography, Williams says that Pound may have left the University
because of some difficulty with his parents, 5
but he may
have forgotten that Pound enrolled as a special student, rather than
as a candidate for a degree, indicating that he had not planned to
spend more than a year or two there.
Pound continued to visit his parents and his friends in Philadelphia
on weekends. One result of this was the first known character
analysis of Pound, expressed in a letter written by Williams to
his mother, dated March 30, 1904:
"He is really a brilliant talker and thinker but delights in making
himself exactly what he is not: a laughing boor. His friends must be
all patience in order to find him out and even then you must not let
him know it, for he will immediately put on some artificial mood
and be really unbearable. It is too bad, for he loves to be liked, yet
there is some quality in him which makes him too proud to try to
please people." 6
Pound could hardly have known of this letter when he later
described Williams as "bloody inarticulate", for it is one of the
most expressive things that Williams has written.
At the age of eighteen, Pound was already exhibiting those
traits that were to excite contumely for the rest of his life. It has
often seemed that Pound did exactly what Williams describes in
this passage, that is, to deliberately obscure his finer qualities, and