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36 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
stead, Pound responded "with considerable amusement, and insists
that he was absolutely innocent of any misdemeanour." 12
Pound returned to Wyncote for a brief visit. His father agreed
that if he could get a favorable opinion from an expert about his
poetry, he would finance another trip to Europe. A visit to Witter
Bynner, then literary editor of McClure's Magazine, produced the
necessary recommendation, but apparently not much money was
forthcoming, for Pound says that he landed in Europe in January,
1908, with eighty dollars in his pocket. He had taken passage on
a cattle boat, landing at Gibraltar. From there, he made his way on
foot across the continent to Venice, an excursion that he still recalls
with relish. The important thing, he says, is that he was able
to make such a trip without a passport. He had no identification
papers, these personal indignities being largely unknown until after
the First World War.
When he arrived in Venice, he still had sufficient funds to
finance the printing of one hundred copies of his first book of
poems, A Lume Spento. As contrasted to the approximately one
thousand dollars that a young poet has to advance in order to get
out a slender volume of verse in the United States, Pound had this
one produced for the equivalent of eight dollars! It was offered for
sale at the modest price of one dollar per copy. Pound noted in
the 1930s that copies were bringing as much as fifty dollars. James
Laughlin, Pound's publisher, says that he paid one hundred and
twenty-five dollars for his copy, and that the price has since
gone higher.
From Venice he set out once more, again on foot (youth hostelers,
please note). He now had his box of poems, in addition to his
modest luggage. He had decided to assault the citadel of London,
and stopped over for but one night in Paris. From London, he
applied again for the renewal of his fellowship on the Lope de
Vega study, but he was refused. He applied a third time the following
year, with the same result.
The name of Pound at that time was a familiar one in London.
A Sir John Pound had been Lord Mayor in 1904-5, and in 1908
he was the chairman of the London General Omnibus Company. If
worst had come to the worst, Pound could probably have appealed