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EZRA POUND 43
the poems, and sent off a wire that he had accepted them. He
invited Lawrence up to London for a lunch to celebrate the first
publication of a writer whose importance he had already recognized.
On the day that the November, 1909, issue of The English
Review was sent out to its subscribers, Lawrence arrived for his
lunch. Pound was also present at this affair. Roast beef and plum
pudding were served with champagne (Violet Hunt had been
entrusted with the responsibility for the arrangements; Hueffer has
written somewhere that champagne is appropriate only for children's
birthday parties and for Americans!). Hueffer jocularly
asked Lawrence, a miner's son, how he liked having champagne
for lunch, and assured him that that was the way successful authors
lived. He did not mention the sad state of affairs at the Review,
nor the fact that he was exhausting his own savings in the effort
to keep it going.
The offices of the Review were at 84 Holland Park Avenue, a
"maisonette over a poulterer's and fishmonger's combined," 20
according
to Violet Hunt. The rooms also served as the living
quarters of the editor. He had engaged, without salary, a subeditor,
Douglas Goldring, who worked by day as a writer for
Country Life, the sedate periodical of the English squirearchy.
His evenings were spent in laboring for the Review, for Hueffer
had assured him of its great expectations. While Goldring was
answering correspondence and wondering how to pay the printer's
bills, Hueffer, surrounded by his many friends, was host to the
continual party which went on in the office.
"Gobbets of blood," complains Goldring, "oozing from the suspended
carcases of rabbits, made the threshold positively unsafe." 21
Henry James, who had been informed of the circumstances in
which the Review was published, refused to come near the place.
Whenever he was required to confer with the Master, Hueffer
usually disappeared for a day or two, going down to James'
place in Rye.
Violet Hunt says that the doors to the office were never locked,
and that a strange assortment of characters came and went during
the day. The Russian spy Azef, notorious as the murderer of
Father Gapon, often stopped in to rifle the editor's desk while
Hueffer was away. A lady who, in the style of those days, was