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EZRA POUND 33
put his worst foot forward. Malcolm Cowley has observed that
Pound does this in order to remain free of the crowd, and of the
admirers who are attracted by his daring. 7
For a half-century he
has been the tightrope walker of modern letters, and for a halfcentury
the audience has been waiting for him to lose his footing.
If his manner seems unduly rude to some people, it has served
two purposes. First, it tests the tensile strength of the subject's
mind, and, second, it keeps civilian sightseers from lingering
too long in the captain's tent.
This mode of self-defense may be described as armor, if one
desires to tread the manure-strewn path of psychology; some of
it is due to a self-toughening process; but much of it is sheer
perversity. Whatever it is, it has operated to his benefit through
the years. Think of the consequences had he settled down for any
protracted period with Mr. Joyce, Mr. Antheil, or Peggy Guggenheim!
Yet this would have been Pound's fate had he not
occasionally bristled his spine, and the ensuing loss of work
would have been incalculable.
Through the courtesy of The New Yorker, we have two descriptions
of Pound at Hamilton College. His roommate, Claudius
Alonzo Hand, now general counsel for a Wall Street bank, said
that Pound would sometimes come in around midnight, wake him,
and shove a glass of beer into his hand. Then he would read
his poems aloud. When he had finished, he would ask Hand how
much he had understood.
"Not a word," the still sleepy Hand would confess.
"Oh God!" Ezra would exclaim, seizing the glass of beer and
downing it in desperation.
"It must have been pretty discouraging," said Mr. Hand, some
four decades later, as he analyzed his role in Ezra's flight from
the homeland. 8
Another Hamilton boy, Mr. Conklin Mann, became a genealogist.
He discovered, after some years of research, that Ezra had
changed his name from Ezra Weston Pound to Ezra Loomis
Pound. His mother, Isabel Weston Pound, had been a great-niece of
Henry Longfellow, and perhaps Ezra felt that the tell-tale Weston in
his own name might cause someone to remember the connection.
Mann says that Pound did not join a fraternity at Hamilton,