4pQonT

324 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
entire output, not only his books, but his articles, letters and references
to him in other places. "Total research" is the only key to a
man's thought, and this makes it necessary to live near a great
library, of which there are only a few in the world, and but two in
the United States, the Library of Congress and the New York
Public Library.
Pound was sometimes abrupt with those who were looking for a
place to begin their education. "I put all that in ABC of Reading,"
he would say. "I don't want to go over it again." One might suppose
that a prospective visitor would at least read one of his
volumes of criticism, Instigations, or Pavannes and Divisions, before
visiting Pound, but most of the curious were not at all abashed
by their lack of familiarity with his work.
On a few occasions, I produced a small notebook, but Pound
would wave it aside. "You'll be able to remember what is worth
remembering," he said. I usually scribbled the day's notes on scraps
of paper as I left the hospital on the bus.
Neither he nor his wife ever mentioned the influence he had
exercised on so many of his contemporaries through direct association.
His friends and admirers rarely discussed the role of teacher
that he had fulfilled for so many twentieth century poets. As I
delved into the careers of such writers as Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and
Hemingway, I began to realize how much he had done to develop,
guide and correct the maturation of these fine talents. 3
Occasionally, some visitor would ask Pound about his relationship
with Joyce or Yeats. I noted that Dorothy Pound would smile
a quietly contented smile, and Pound would mention these absent
luminaries with fond recollection. His reticence about his aid to
these writers has caused some of his critics to discount his effect
upon them. Babette Deutsch gave the final summation of Pound's
role as teacher in The Yale Literary Magazine, December, 1958:
"The major poets of the twentieth century have acknowledged
publicly their debt to Pound, the teacher. Not all have been as
explicit about it as the author of The Waste Land (and how much
the rest of us could learn from the blue pencillings on the 'sprawling
chaotic' first draft of that poem by the 'miglior fabbro!'). In
any event, makers as diverse as Eliot, Yeats and William Carlos
Williams were tutored to some degree by this ruthless critic, this