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82 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
with her on a new Imagist anthology, she should donate two hundred
dollars to some indigent poet. She termed this "blackmail"
and said that Ezra had demanded of the Aldingtons that they
choose between him and Miss Lowell.
"The truth is," she continued in her plaint to Miss Monroe,
"Ezra has ducked and draked his reputation with his last work.
His poetry is too indecent to be poetical, and even when it is
not indecent, it is too often merely vituperative . . . He looks
very ill, and has a bad cough, and I'm afraid he is tuberculous.
It has even been hinted that this may have attacked his brain.
No one knows anything about it, and this is merely surmise." 17
Amy Lowell's fears about Ezra's health have not been corroborated
elsewhere. There is reason to suppose that the hint of brain
damage was hinted only by herself. As she says, "no one knows
anything about it," although this is no reason to suppress the
rumor. She knew that the story would be circulated in Chicago,
thanks to her letter to Miss Monroe, that Ezra was ill and perhaps
insane, and that this tale would lower resistance to her capture
of the Imagist movement. Her letter, which is quite an instrument
of intrigue, rambles on for many pages, replete with such items
as "Ezra has always thought of life as a grand game of bluff." 18
Unable to resist the prospect of again appearing in print, the
Aldingtons, Flint, and Fletcher turned over their manuscripts to
Miss Lowell, and she sailed back to America, to bring out the
first of several anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets (1915).
Ezra was already preoccupied with another movement, Vorticism,
when Amy held a victory celebration in London. His Vorticist
group gave a dinner at the Dieudonne Restaurant on July
15, 1914, to hail the appearance of Wyndham Lewis' Blast. Amy
Lowell gave a dinner there two evenings afterward, on the 17th.
The Pounds, the Aldingtons, John Cournos, John Gould Fletcher,
F. S. Flint, Gaudier-Brzeska, the Hueffers, Allan Upward, and
Miss Amy Lowell's companion, Mr. Harold Russell, were the guests.
After the dinner, the poets were asked to stand up and give a
brief personal statement about their understanding of the term
"imagist". Aldington was the first to speak, and he launched
into an impassioned defense of Miss Lowell. He was soon interrupted
by Pound's impetuous friend, Gaudier-Brzeska. As the two