4pQonT

EZRA POUND 49
Avenue. The Beautiful Lady in the most sonorous of voices would
utter platitudes from Fabian Tracts on my left, Ezra would mutter
vorticist half-truths half-inaudibly in a singularly incomprehensible
Philadelphia dialect into my right ear. And I had to carry the
string bag." 34
No doubt Ford lived in fear that one of his friends from the
Peerage would see him carrying a bag of onions. Men have been
ostracized from London society for less serious offenses. He later
claimed to have been revenged for this indignity, for which he
blamed Pound. He knew that an American, and one from the West
to boot, could not possibly be disgraced by carrying a bag of
onions. The occasion of his revenge, also described in New York
Essays, was an award that Pound won in France:
"Mr. Pound is an admirable, if eccentric, performer of the game
of tennis. To play against him is like playing against an inebriated
kangaroo that has been rendered unduly vigorous by injection of
some gland or other. Once he won the tennis championship of the
south of France, and the world was presented with the spectacle
of Mr. Pound in a one-horse cab beside the Maire of Perpignan or
some such place. An immense silver shield was in front of their
knees, the cab was preceded by the braying fanfare of the city, and
followed by defeated tennis players, bull-fighters, banners and all
the concomitants of triumph in the South. It was when upon the
station platform, amid the plaudits of the multitudes, the Maire
many times embraced Mr. Pound that I was avenged for the string
bag and even the blue earring!" 35
The amiable Ford was beset most of his life by serious marital
and financial problems. At the age of twenty-four, as befitted a
successful young writer who could be counted upon to become a
pillar of the establishment, he had taken in marriage one Elsie
Martindale, whose father was President of the Pharmaceutical
Society of Great Britain. The issue consisted of two daughters, but
the wife showed less concern for Ford's literary efforts when they
became non-profitable, and The English Review proved to be the
breaking-point. Ford left her in 1909, and went to the offices of the
Review to live with Violet Hunt. 36 His wife, being Catholic, refused
to grant him a divorce.
Ford had persuaded Violet Hunt to live with him by painting,