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EZRA POUND 35
His stay in these bucolic surroundings lasted but four months.
In The Nation of April 18, 1928, he writes of this experience, "At
twenty-two, stranded in Devil's Island, Indiana." One evening, he
went out to post a letter. It was snowing heavily, and he encountered
a girl in the storm who told a sad story. She had been stranded
in the town with a burlesque show, when the manager took what
cash was on hand and purchased a single ticket to more favorable
climes. She had no money, and no place to go. The centennial
history of the college recounts that Pound took her home with
him. He gave her his bed, and slept on a pallet that he had prepared
on the floor.
The next morning, he left early to give an eight o'clock class.
His landladies, the maidens Hall, rushed upstairs, ostensibly to
clean his room, but actually to see for themselves the creature who
had sullied their home. Pound was too young to know that no
female can enter a house inhabited by maiden ladies without their
antennae registering the alien craft. The young lady was booted out
by one Hall, while her sister was frantically buzzing the town's
lone telephone operator. Having established the fact that an emergency
did indeed exist, she had the lines cleared while she talked
to the president of the college and two of the trustees. By noon of
that day Pound's career in the Groves of Academe was over.
Although no wrongdoing was charged, the president informed
Pound that he was too much the "Latin Quarter" type, a phrase that
he had read somewhere, and that to him summed up all of the vice
that pervaded the decadent world surrounding Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Some critics have seized upon this episode as at least a partial
explanation for Pound's years as an expatriate, while others, leaning
heavily upon the syndrome theory, have imagined that it accounts
for his continual biting criticism of life as it is lived in America.
Such observations ignore the fact that all of Pound's criticism
of his homeland is soundly based upon educational and cultural
grounds. On no occasion has he suggested that the reins of the
prevailing sexual mores be lightened in the United States. Most of
these suggestions have come from his critics.
H. Glenn Hughes, historian of the Imagist movement, questioned
Pound about the Wabash College incident in 1930. He said that
the episode was recalled without embarrassment or rancour. In-