In the course of newspaper research about Ernest Hemingway's short story
"Che Ti Dice la Patria", I came across a diverting account of a visit by
Hemingway and his friend Guy Hickok to Pound in Rapallo in March, 1927. I
thought it might be of interest to those going to Rapallo in July for the
international conference, and I append it without attachments at the end of
this message.
    By way of background, Hickok was the manager of the Brooklyn Eagle
bureau in Paris from 1918 until the bureau closed in 1933 and had befriended
Hemingway soon after Hemingway's arrival in Paris in December, 1921. Hickok,
an Oberlin graduate, was a fairly sophisticated journalist for his day and
had contributed occasional non-fiction pieces to little magazines in Paris.
In the first issue of Pound's The Exile (March, 1927) he has some satirical
impressions of America and American college girls.
    Hemingway, between wives and between novels, and Hickok made a hurried
reporting trip to northern Italy between March 18 and March 24, 1927,
covering nearly 2,000 kilometers in Hickok's battered Ford coupe. Despite
the dateline of the article, their visit to Pound occured in the evening of
the 18th of March.
    I would be grateful for any observations about the piece. In particular,
who is the "prospect" from Detroit?

Cheers.
Paul Montgomery
Lausanne, Switzerland



Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday, April 17, 1927, page B4 (editorial page)

Ezra Pound, American Author,
 Now in Genoa, Has Regular
  Bathtub and Charming Wife

                     By Guy Hickok
           (Staff Correspondent of The Eagle)

 Rapallo, Italy, April 7 - Twenty miles beyond Genoa, and after a rather
terrifying leap of the road away from the coast over a hill and back again,
one plunges into Rapallo, already the most modern, rapidly becoming
excessively so, of Italy's Riviera resorts. Here we found Ezra Pound.
 Too swift modernization has wrought incongruities. A venerable Roman bridge
that for centuries has arched a stream must be astonished to find one of its
gray granite ends nudging a new flower bed in the front yard of a pink and
white villa.
 Realtors have torn down buildings which local residents insist should be
preserved as historical relics to make place for cheaply gaudy boarding
houses. And more are threatened.
           Rapallo Ignores Ban on Cabarets.
 In spite of Mussolini's edict that cabarets and jazz must go, we were led,
after dinner, into a perfectly good cabaret opening directly on the shore
front promenade, where saxophones gurgled as shamelessly as anywhere in the
world. The only effect of the Duce's pronouncement has been that the
proprietor had hung up plush curtains at the windows to dim the lights and
deaden, slightly, the sound.
 The reason Ernest Hemingway, author of "The Sun Also Rises," and I stopped
at Rapallo was that that strange enigma of American letters, Ezra Pound, had
gone there to live. We agreed before arriving that "strange enigma of
American letters" was the best possible term to apply to Pound. And when he
paid the dinner bill we decided the stop might be called a pilgrimage. Had
he not done so we would have merely said that we stumbled on him there while
passing through on more important business.
           Pound Does Queer Things.
 All sorts of queer things have been written about Pound. A reddish beard
and some velvet coats he used to wear got him called eccentric. He insists,
however, that he wore the velvet coats only because they were given to him
when he was too poor to buy any others; that they were given him by would-be
bohemian Americans who hadn't the courage to wear them after they had bought
them for their own use.
 He edits and publishes queer little short-lived magazines with no
advertising and circulations numbering only a few hundreds. He resurrects
forgotten songs of the medieval troubadours, and, strangely enough, gets
grand opera singers to sing them at rare, though crowded concerts in Paris.
He has written and published in expensive editions cantos and cantos of the
life of the great Fifteenth Century Italian mercenary soldier Sigismund
Malatesta. He writes them in mixed Italian, Latin and modern slang.
 He publishes at intervals strange-looking, thin books of prose and verse by
unknown writers and calls them an "inquest into the present state of English
letters."
 He "discovers' unheard-of sculptors and painters and writes big books about
them.
                   Often Proves Himself Right.
 The puzzling part of it is that Pound so often turns out to be right. A
surprising number of persons whose things appeared in his little magazines
and booklets when they were totally unknown have since gained international
recognition, become lauded as among the best of their day. D.H. Lawrence,
James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and the sculptors, Brancusi and
Gaudier, are among his finds. Pound was one of the first to introduce
William Butler Yeats to America.
 After they get famous they write no more for Mr. Pound. They go sailing
away on their successful careers. But that bothers Pound very little. He
enjoys hunting new ones.
Away out of the world down here in Rapallo, in the last place on earth one
would pick for finding literary talent, he is still at it. He doesn't find
them at Rapallo. Oh no!
             Finds Prospects in Detroit.
His last prospect is in Detroit. How from Rapallo he could see that there
was a promising author in Detroit isn't explained. But he did see it and he
thinks the Detroit man "has something."
"If only he will bite on the nail," said Pound. "I'm a little afraid he won'
t. I've seen so many of them come up and put their lips against the nail,
and look as if they were really going to do something and then slip away
without setting their teeth in it."
"Biting on a nail" seems to be Pound's estimate of how hard run [? at most a
four-letter word] a talented man must work to do something good.
Why he should care whether they do or do not, is another part of the Pound
enigma. He makes no money out of this business. It costs him money to
publish the first efforts of his finds, and he gets nothing from them after
he has launched them.
That fact absolves this piece from the charge of "press agenting" Pound. It
will bring him no graft. He makes no money from either his own works or
those of his finds.
           An Enigmatic Person.
Very enigmatic person he is. One expects to find some literary bomb thrower
with odd personal habits and bohemian morals. His past reputation makes one
expect it.
One does find him living in an odd corner of the world. But he wears very
regular clothes, since he can now afford to buy them. He has a regular
bathtub, not too easy [? a four-letter word at most] to have in Italy, and
he has a regular and very charming wife, Mrs. Dorothy Pound.
He talks shyly and hesitatingly about what he is at; in such a way that a
dub reporter like the present one cannot make head nor tail of what he is up
to. And yet somehow one feels that, like certain old beverages, he has
"authority."
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