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EZRA POUND 307
stationed in Rome. After the war, Stalin incorporated Bulgaria,
including the considerable Stancioff estates, into his Socialist paradise,
as a gift from Roosevelt and Truman. Luckily, Stancioff had
married an American girl whose father not only built bridges, but
owned some of them. This nest egg enabled the Stancioffs to
purchase a place in Urbana, near Washington, which had formerly
been General Jubal Early's headquarters during the Civil War. It
was a magnificent old house, set on an elevation that allowed
General Early to see if the Yanks were coming. Unlike his
Northern counterpart, General Sherman, he did not burn it when
he left.
Ezra occasionally farmed out some of his disciples to the Stancioff
place, and one of his protégés, the painter Sheri Martinelli,
spent much time there. She had perfected a jewel-like tone in her
painting, much like the ancient Persian painting, which was very
effective. At the time of Ezra's release, Sheri had gone on to San
Francisco, so that she was not present to welcome him on regaining
his freedom, an event which all of his friends had anticipated
for so many years.
I was present when Edith Hamilton and Ezra had such a stimulating
talk that I took notes on it. The company had been criticizing
the annoying habit of young people today of regretting everything
they did, and the following excerpts are indicative of the way
the talk flowed at the madhouse:
"EDITH HAMILTON: I'm eighty-four years old, and I have never
regretted anything I have done.
POUND (with gusto): It's just as well. If they didn't stop to
regret it, they would be doing something worse.
(He shows Miss Hamilton one of the Confucian ideograms.)
POUND: This ideogram means respect, the root of respect, respect
for the kind of intelligence which enables the cherry tree
to grow cherries. Now, this other ideogram represents the man
carrying a lance and the spoken word from the mouth, meaning the
crusade to find the rightly-aimed word. Yeats said to me that if
they knew what we thought, they'd do away with us. They want
their poets dead.
EDITH HAMILTON: A Chinese friend of mine was told in the