When I was with Pound and Olga in the summer of '68, they
spoke to me about the '67 Ginsburg encounter.  We ate together
at the Restaurante Cici', in Venice, which is where Ginsburg
met them.  According to Olga, they found Ginsburg very distasteful,
and they described the rather comical method in which they
subsequently managed to avoid him.  It seems that the Cici'
has four different entrances--and sections, therefore--and
that they eluded poor G. by eating in sections of the restaurant
that G. either didn't know of or where he didn't imagine he'd find them.
You can, of course, assume that we know only Olga's reaction to
G., since she almost never let EP get a word in edgewise--on this
or on almost any other topic.
 
==DP
 
At 12:27 PM 9/6/99 -1000, you wrote:
>Mark Chan writes:
>
>>From sometime in the 1960s (date unknown to me: I wd
>>love to be informed by one of the more learned members of
>>this list  ) EP repudiated his anti-semitism. (See especially
>>his interview with Allen Ginsberg) He then became silent,
>>either in clinical depression (psychiatric view) or as
>>pennance (religious view.) In either case, the punishment
>>inflicted upon him by the US govt was continued by
>>self-punishment.
>
>So far as I'm aware, the interview with Ginsberg is the only instance of
>anything like a repudiation of the antisemitism. Aside from the difficulty
>of relying on a single case, the interview is problematic in itself for at
>least these three reasons:
>
>1. As has been pointed out on this list, by the time Pound met Ginsberg,
>Olga was doing most of his thinking for him.
>
>2. I could be wrong about this, but I believe that the only evidence we
>have of Pound's repudiation is Ginsberg's own testimony -- a testimony
>depending very much on the interpretation of non-verbal cues such as
>Pound's facial expression. I suppose it's also possible that Ginsberg's
>acount is simply a well-intended fiction.
>
>3. As to the exact verbal form of the alleged repudiation -- "that stupid,
>suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism" -- J.J. Wilhelm (_The Tragic Years_,
>p. 344) points out that Pound's own father defied the antisemitism of his
>Philadelphia suburb. But I think Pound may have been using the word
>"suburban" (if indeed he used it) in the British sense rather than the
>American one -- that is, to connote not middle-class Babbittry but
>lower-class vulgarity. If I'm right, that implies two more things:
>
>(a) Ezra Pound here is speaking the dialect of Dorothy Pound, a Jew-hater
>who never repudiated _her_ prejudices, and
>
>(b) Charles Olson was right: Pound's tragic flaw was snobbery.
>
>In any case, the reference Mark is looking for is Ginsberg's "Allen
>Verbatim," _Paideuma_ 3 (1974): 253+.
>
>Jonathan Morse
>
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