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72 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
occasioned by the fact that the journal was militantly opposed to
the excessive virility of the Pankhurst wing.
These suffragettes chained themselves to fences, in a poor imitation
of the Andromeda myth, and also re-enacted other folktales
which this writer does not care to discuss. In order to reemphasize
the intellectual facets of the suffragette movement, such
as they were, a wealthy lady named Miss Harriet Weaver had
financed this newspaper. It was written and edited by her friend
Dora Marsden. Miss Weaver felt that the paper was not attracting
a sufficiently wide audience, and when Ezra Pound chanced upon
her at one of Hulme's evenings, he persuaded her that she could
get more readership by incorporating a literary review with the
suffragette editorials. He agreed to furnish this department without
salary, and thus he obtained an English outlet for the promotion
of his various disciples and enthusiasms.
Pound praised one of Fletcher's volumes in The New Freewoman,
and soon afterwards, he called upon the Arkansas bard
at his French restaurant in London. Fletcher has recorded the
occasion in his autobiography:
"I must confess that I eyed Pound with considerable interest,
having already heard about him while in London, and having read
with attraction and repulsion about equally balanced, his own
early volumes. What I saw was a man of about my own age and
height, dressed in a brown velvet coat, a shirt open at the neck
and no necktie, and pearly-gray trousers. His fine-chiseled, forward-jutting
features were set off by a rounded mass of fiery, curly
red hair and beard and mustache similarly red and curly, trimmed
to a point. Gray-blue penetrating eyes, shielded by a pince-nez,
peered at the world behind his projecting cheekbones; and a highpitched,
shrill, almost feminine voice provided strange contrast to
the pugnacious virility of the poet's general aspect. He had, I
soon saw, slender feminine hands, which, as he talked, he fluttered
to and fro. His body was almost equally mobile, jumping and
twitching in his chair, with a backward jerk of the head, as he
emphasized each point." 1
Ezra was quite the innovator in dress, for it took considerable
courage to wear an open-necked sport shirt in London at that time.
He has told me of an occasion in Rapallo, on a scorching after-