The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [139]
A quarter of a century later Eliot wrote a portrait of his sponsor:
No one could have been kinder to younger men, or to writers who … seemed to him worthy and unrecognized. No poet, furthermore, was, without self-depreciation, more unassuming about his own achievement in poetry. The arrogance which some people have found in him, is really something else; and whatever it is, it has not expressed itself in an undue emphasis on the value of his own poems.
He liked to be the impresario for younger men, as well as the animator of artistic activity in any milieu in which he found himself. In this role he would go to any lengths of generosity and kindness; from inviting constantly to dinner a struggling author whom he suspected of being under-fed, or giving away clothing (though his shoes and underwear were almost the only garments which resembled those of other men sufficiently to be worn by them), to trying to find jobs, collect subsidies, get work published and then get it criticised and praised.
When W. B. Yeats showed Pound one of James Joyce’s poems, Pound wrote to Joyce, then living in Italy, and before long he’d reviewed Dubliners and arranged for The Egoist to print A Portrait of the Artist, both serially and in book form. Joyce had earned his keep in Italy by teaching English, and he tried to do the same when he later moved to Zurich with his wife and children. By then he was writing Ulysses. Pound’s efforts to place the art at the center of Joyce’s labors were unflagging. He prevailed upon Yeats to squeeze £75 out of the Royal Literary Fund for Joyce, and he mailed him £25 of his own money as well, saying it came from an anonymous donor. He got the Society of Authors to send Joyce £2 a week for three months.
When the two men finally met in Paris, Joyce arrived thin as a rail, wearing a long overcoat and tennis shoes. Pound, on his return to London, sent a package back across the Channel which, when Joyce finally untangled its string cocoon, revealed a collection of used clothes and a pair of old brown shoes.
Finally, as Wyndham Lewis tells it,
Ezra Pound “sold” the idea of Joyce to Miss Harriet Weaver. Subsequently that lady set aside a capital sum, variously computed but enough to change him overnight from a penniless Berlitz teacher into a modest rentier; sufficiently for him to live comfortably in Paris, write Ulysses, have his eyes regularly treated and so forth. These rentes were his—I know nothing beyond that—until he had become a very famous person: and the magician in this Arabian Nights Tale was undoubtedly Ezra.
There are other stories with similar plots—Hemingway, Frost, Blunt, Cummings, Zukofsky, and others. In 1927 the $2,000 Dial award went to Pound himself. He invested the money (or put it in the bank) at 5 percent and gave away the interest. He sent some of the money to John Cournos, writing: “Investment of Dial prize is due to yield about one hundred bucks per annum. The first 100 has already gone, discounted in three lots, one ten guinea s.o.s. earlier this week … I think you better regard the enclosed as advance payment for something to be written for Exile, when the skies are clearer.” Pound’s magazine, The Exile, was itself a fruit of this award.
Wealth that came to Pound left him in the service of art. As Hemingway wrote in a little “Homage to Ezra”:
We have Pound … devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and he witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses