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298 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
the privilege of drinking wine. It has been said that man turned to
alcohol as consolation for the loss of his freedom when he
abandoned the life of an itinerant hunter and settled for the advantages
of civilization. However this may be, it is certain that
wine has brought considerable amelioration to the life of the plowpusher
and the clodhopper as well as the townsman. Few scholars
seem to know that Gutenberg got his inspiration for the mechanics
of the printing press while watching the operation of a medieval
wine press.
The rules at St. Elizabeths, as at all mental institutions, strictly
forbid giving any alcoholic beverage to a patient. I thought this was
an uncivilized situation, and on my third or fourth visit to Pound, I
brought him a bottle of white Graves, 1945. It was the first wine
he had been offered since his arrest almost five years before, as
none of his other visitors had wished to defy the regulations.
He insisted on uncorking the bottle himself (this was in the
gloom of a ward afternoon), and after the corkscrew had done its
work, he jerked it out with a tremendous "Pop!" while Dorothy
Pound and I looked on aghast. We were sure that the noise would
summon an attendant, but none appeared. Our bottle contained a
very pleasant white wine (there has been some criticism of James
Joyce for drinking white wine, which was supposed to be bad for
his eyes, instead of red). We had nothing to drink from but little
paper cups, which did not interfere materially with the flavor.
After several quaffs, Ezra became quite mellow.
This was the first of many such bottles, always smuggled in and
drunk without permission. I do not wish to convey the impression
that Ezra became an alcoholic; generally, there was but one bottle
of twelve per cent wine for three or four of us, which was consumed
over a period of three hours. We usually insisted on Ezra
draining the bottle, and it is pleasant to think that some of the
later Cantos were penned in the afterglow of a few paper cups of
Graves.
After I had been bringing wine to him for several years, the
Flemings decided to risk a libation to celebrate the publication of
the Confucian Odes. (This is the classic anthology defined by
Confucius, translated by Pound, and published by Harvard University
Press in 1954.) They took the precaution of decanting the