SNIPPETS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 20, 14 April 1927, Page 12

SNIPPETS

The Bookman’s Gleanings

A writer in “The Manchester Guardian” contributes a delightful specimen of Continental English. The less strenuous boarders in a hotel at Arolea complained that the mountaineers were noisy. A notice was pinned up by the manager: “It is forbidden to circulate the corridors in boots of ascension.” Mr. Guedalla’s picture of Lord John Russell, in his recent life of Palmerston : Thin-lipped and earnest, RuSsell was a small enbodiment of Whiggery, an evening at Holland House incarnate. To unfriendly eyes his calendar seemed to consist of Whig anniversaries fi'om 1688 to 1832, his meditations to require for their accompaniment a bust of Charles .Tames Fox. Such perfect orthodoxy kept him a trifle prim. The Prime Minister flirted no cane; his hat was never tilted; he exchanged no friendly notes with the unhallowed Disraeli. Was he not Peace, Retrenchment and Reform in his own person ? Ezra Pound, the American poet, is to Mr. Ford Madox Ford, simply "Ezra.” Some of Mr. Ford's recent remarks on Ezra: Of all the unlicked cubs whose work I have thrust upon a not too willing world, Ezra was the only one who did not, subsequently kick me in the face. . . . His accent is so appallingly Pennsylvanian—let those who fear expatriates be reassured! —that with all the experience I have had of cisAtlantic intonation I invariably fail to understand one-half of his talk. . . Ezra had a forked red beard, luxuriant chestnut hair, an aggressive lank figure; one long blue single stone earring dangled on his jawbone. He wore a purple hat, a green shirt, a black velvet coat, vermilion socks, openwork, brilliant tanned sandals . . . and trousers of green billiard cloth, in addition to an immense flowing tie that had been hand-painted by a Japanese Futurist poet. . . . I understand that Mr. Pound had to leave London because he sent a challenge—to fight a duel with swords—to Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, a poet, because Mr. Abercrombie had published in the “Times Literary Supplement” an article in praise of Milton. . . Most poets take to drink, narcotics, lechery, meanness—to some form of derivative. Ezra takes it out in writing abuse of fools in hideous prose that is seldom quite comprehensible. If there is an abuse to remedy Ezra discharges a broadside of invective in unusual jargon at the head of the oppressor. . . . Mr. Pound is an admirable, if eccentric, performer of the game of tennis. To play against him is like playing against an inebriated kangaroo that has been rendered unduly vigorous by the injection of some gland or other. Once he won the tennis championship of the south of France, and the world was presented with the spectacle of Mr. Pound in a onehorse cab beside the Maire of Perpignan or some such place. An immense silver shield was in front of their knees, the cab was preceded by the braying fanfare of the city and followed by defeated tennis players, bull-fighters, banners, and all the concomitants of triumph in the South. . .