Lee Lady writes:
 
>I recently read a suggestion that Pound had set aside certain days of the
>week at St. Elizabeths for literary visitors, and certain others for
>political ones.  This does not correspond to my memory at all.  I
>definitely recall being at the hospital almost every day of the week for
>at least one summer (1957), and every weekend during the school year.
>If some more or less distinguished literary vistor was present, then
>naturally Pound would talk primarily about literature, but mostly what
>he talked about seemed to depend both on his mood and on questions that
>visitors might ask.  I never had any sense that he tried to conceal his
>political views from anyone.  Quite the contrary.
 
Lee was there and I wasn't, but I don't think it can be correct that Pound
was simply at home to anybody who felt like dropping in. Evidence to the
contrary can be found on Jonathan Williams' Website,
 
www.jargonbooks.com/ep.html
 
The story is this. With Robert Creeley, Williams drove to St. Elizabeths
one day in 1956 to deliver an inscribed copy of a book by Louis Zukofsky.
At the hospital, and I quote:
 
"Pound was sitting out on the lawn, surrounded by the likes of Eustace
Mullins, John Kasper, and the retinue from Catholic University. Dorothy
Pound came over and asked us who we were. We explained. Pound told her he
didn't want to see people who were friends of Charles Olson. Off we slunk."
 
Incidentally, though, this anecdote may confirm that Pound did mix his
poetic friendships with his political ones. By "retinue from Catholic
University" I assume Williams means Craig LaDriere and Giovanni Giovannini.
 
And incidentally #2, Williams' site contains a nice color photograph of
Pound in 1966.
 
But about Agassiz and the fish: I've always been puzzled by Pound's version
of the anecdote in _ABC_. It's always seemed to me to be missing a punch
line -- especially when I compare it to the other version I know.
 
That one was told to me some time ca. 1956 by my high school physics
teacher, a man who I'd now guess would have been born ca. 1895. The outline
of the story is the same as Pound's, but the conclusion was that the
student studied the fish until he'd articulated a descriptive statement
that satisfied Agassiz because it could be expanded into a systematic
generalization: the statement, namely, that the fish was bilaterally
symmetrical. Now, I don't think Mr. Shadel read Pound, and I'm not even
sure he'd read Agassiz. No; I suspect the two versions of the anecdote had
a common source, possibly in a biography or a book of popular science
published some time around 1915. Does anybody have an idea of what that
hypothetical book might have been? Something by H.G. Wells, maybe?
 
Jonathan Morse
Department of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa