Ernest and Ezra would travel through Italy together and would write pithy, back country epistles while away. For awhile they were rarely apart. They were living in the same arrondissement in Paris through the 20s. This was a breakthrough time for both of them. Ezra would write Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and reanimate Propertius and Ernest would publish his first groundbreaking short stories and the blockbuster novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway had the charm of a disciplined but irascible disciple and Ezra by all accounts was a generous, ingenious and dubious mentor. They relished the posture of a cowboy bohemian in Paris. Twin modernist from Idaho and Illinois, Hem and Ez brought verve and musculature to the efflorescent Parisian kulture of that epoch.
They really were soulmates in those early days. Lovers of satire and honesty with a taste of bawdy humor and womanizing that would go on to define American verse and prose prosody. Disagreeing on politics and the universality of bullfighting, Papa and Grampa had a falling out. Hemingway condemning Pound to ridicule from his fascist sympathies (if you could call it that) and Pound for Papa's lack thereof. Among the insults flung this one surpasses all: “Since when are you an economist, pal? The last I knew you you were a fuckin' bassoon player." Ezra famously had an avid taste for music with indefinite (to put it delicately) talent. Pound also pursued a colossal range of interests from Confucian odes to Social Credit. Impresario par excellence Pound corresponded with everybody from Cocteau to George Santayana. Hemingway had diverse interests as well. 'Gee I'd love to take you to a bull fight. You'd like it better than anything I'll bet ... I saw 3 matadors badly gored out of 24 bulls killed.' Tourists before tourism was almost universal among middle class Americans, these youngins bragged to their compatriots back home of distant Romantic lands of matadors and holocausts.
When Hemingway writes that Ezra was "more Catholic" of course we must take him at his word.
"Great literary periods, like that of Provence in the twelfth century, may be almost destitute of literary sense and of literary criteria; this sense and these criteria might even have prevented the periods." | "Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture." -Juan Ramon Jimenez
And after the litany of misplaced names "Also Alcools, by Guillaume Apollonaire (Mercure), is clever."
When Hemingway writes that Ezra was "more Catholic" of course we must take him at his word.
"Great literary periods, like that of Provence in the twelfth century, may be almost destitute of literary sense and of literary criteria; this sense and these criteria might even have prevented the periods." | "Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture." -Juan Ramon Jimenez
And after the litany of misplaced names "Also Alcools, by Guillaume Apollonaire (Mercure), is clever."
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