JOHN QUINN
ATTORNEY AND COUNSELLOR AT LAW
31 NASSAU STREET

NEW YORK March 15, 1916.

My dear Pound:

Here goes to clean the deck, and first as to the cables.
On March 11th, which was Saturday of last week, at 5:45 P.M., just
as I was leaving the office I was handed your cable as follows:

"Quinn,
31 Nassau Street,
New York.

Brzeska now demands five hundred pounds for ten best statues,
not including "Singer". Wire acceptance. Mail cash. May be
worth it.

(Signed) Pound."

I was late for an appointment uptown but I dictated the
following cable which was sent deferred rate Saturday, March 11th,
about six o'clock:

Ezra Pound,
5 Holland Place Chambers,
Kensington, London.

"March 11, 1916.

Please cable names ten best statues. Can identify from names
your book. Amounts involved justify asking definite understand-
ing identity objects. Also whether Singer for sale and price.
(Signed) Quinn."

On Monday the 13th, at 4:55 P.M., I received your cable of
that date as follows:

"Marconi London 61.

Local office refused names Saturday. Prices as follows: "Stags"

17

If you don't get actual possession of Brzeska's things
or in the warehouse with the assignment from her containing a cer-
tificate that she has the lawful title to sell and deliver them, then
call it quits and take my name out of the book.

Why should I take a chance on her title?

Why should I risk £ 500?

Why should I pay monthsin advance of delivery?

Why should I pay before the things are actually in New York?

Why should I risk £ 500?

And remember I have paid £ 150 before I have seen anything.

And I was largely moved to do this in order that his things
might be kept together. I can't eat them. I would not give them
away or sell them, and as I am not a Chinaman or a Japanese or a
Confucionist or a Buddhist or a chemist they wouldn't be buried
with me, as the Bugs and the Chinks and the Confucs used to do.

But damn sentimentality: Cold business now, an assignment,
transfer and delivery before paying further cash. Her assignment
need not be in any special form. I give you the rough outline
of it on a separate sheet of paper attached to this letter.

This letter is a long one. But I haven't the time to
make it shorter. I find when I am talking fast I talk a lot
and repeat myself, and sometimes talk first and then think.
But after all that is better than merely to talk and talk and
never think.

You can read or show as much or as little of this letter
as you please to Miss Brzeska, with my compliments, regards,
distinguished consideration and admiration - for her business
acquaintance and her nerve. She has both and in abundance, I only

NEW YORK May 16, 1916

My dear Pound:

Re Your three books, "This Generation",
"Poems" and the "Book on Lewis".

John Marshall (331 Fourth Avenue) used to be
with Lawrence Gomme in what is known as the Little Book Shop,
on East 29th Street. That was Kennerley's former headquarters.
When Kennerley moved out Gomme continued the business. Marshall
had some falling out with Gomme and is now in business in a small
way for himself, in a very small way. I am told that he has no
capital whatever. He may go on for six months or for two years,
but the chances are absolutely against his making a go of it from
a business point of view. He has taken over a little magazine
called "Free Verse", which I don't think will pay.

Confidentially, I have talked this matter over with
Kennerley and with one or two other publishers who are disinterested
and they say that they think that you are making a mistake in
going with Marshall; that you ought to stick to your old people,
Small, Maynard & Co., or if you do make a change, which I think you
ought to, you ought to go to some good house like Macmillan's.

I had a talk with Brett, the president of The
Macmillan Company. He would be willing, I am sure, to take your
books. I hope that you are not irrevocably tied up with Small,
Maynard & Co. But if Brett took any of your books he would want

them. I hope you don't think that is being a Jew, but frankly
they are not great and I think that is all they are worth. I
enclose you herewith London draft to your order for £50. This is
for Stchells. If he doesn't think it is satisfactory, don't har-
itate to let me know.

I don't care for any of the Diameter things, either the
painting or the drawings.

Nor for the Saunders drawings.

Nor for the paintings by Wadsworth. Nor for the drawings
by Wadsworth.

I will take the set of twelve woodcuts by Wadsworth which
you priced at £1 each, and I enclose you herewith London draft to
your order for £12 to pay for these.

I may change my mind and take one of the Wadsworth drawings, but if I do I will write you about it again.

Re Roberts:

One of Roberts' drawings is much larger than the other,
but of course that is no criterion of price. He invoices the two
"The Dancer" and "Religion" at £10 each. If he is willing to put
these in at £8 each, £16, I shall be glad to take them. I enclose
you herewith London draft to your order for £16 in payment of those.

I won't do any "swapping" of Lewis's things. It would be
confusing and the prices are reasonable, perhaps too reasonable.
I will write you more fully about Lewis in my next.

Re books:

Heubsch is all right if he takes the Joyce book. He is a Jew but a fairly decent Jew.

I read your letters of July 13th and of July 19th on art to Walt Kuhn. He agreed with every word of them and said that it had never been put better.

I don't think Dulac will come on. He seems too soon published.

Tell Lewis that I won't exchange any of the three first ones for any of the late ones. I will think it over as soon as I have a little time. I will write you next week about it then.

Re your books:

I am disappointed in not hearing from Krymborg. I can't do anything about your books until I hear from you exactly what Small, Maynard & Company have and until I get the copy of "This Generation" from Krymborg or Marshall.

If I were you also I should hold back your Jap book with the New York Macmillans until you hear from me. But don't let that interfere with the arrangement with the London Macmillans. It doesn't follow automatically, I should say, that because a man goes with the London Macmillan, the decent House, that he is automatically linked up with the New York Macmillan, the shit-House.

Re Irish and Casement:

I kept my peace during all these weeks hoping to save
Casement. I sent a cable to Grey last week, signed by twenty
five representative Americans, reading:

"The undersigned, American citizens, all of whom have been and are pro-Ally in their sympathies, respectfully appeal in the interests of humanity for clemency in the case of Roger Casement, and are profoundly convinced that clemency would be wise policy on the part of the British Government at this juncture and in this great crisis in the history of our race."

Gilbert Murray at my request cabled on Tuesday as follows:

"I venture to send you my opinion based on careful observation in different places that execution of Casement would produce most unfortunate effect on public feeling in America. All pro-Ally sentiment would welcome clemency."

The Senate acted, the only time it has acted since the war began, and requested the State Department to cable, which it did.

There was some reason why they killed him. I think he knew too much. I have kept peace during all these weeks hoping to save him. There is no reason now why I should, and yesterday afternoon I dictated about five thousand words. It will appear in next Sunday's paper. I pay my respects to Mr. Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Lord Newton and some of the others, and hint at Casement's being forced to leave Germany and driven to his death.

Good luck and kind regards.

NEW YORK January 12, 1917.

My dear Pound:

Personal and general.

I am writing you a separate letter regarding your books.
I don't know what you will think of me for not having written long,
long ago.

None of your letters were lost. I think I received them
all. The two months of November and December were months of hell and
torture. I won't bore you with going into details. But during that
time I was unable to give any attention to any personal matter. Dozens
of personal matters have piled up and I am badly in default with them
and I am trying to work out of them, but it has been terrible.

Sheffield, the lawyer who is with me on a good annual
charge. in strict confidence, is a peculiar man. and though a brile
liant lawyer is very erratic. To put it quite bluntly, he has simply
loafed; got to the office late and left early, and has been horribly
neglectful. And then he was out of the office for three solid
weeks on a personal case of his own, and so far as helping me with
the general drive of work, he might almost as well have been in
Alaska. I ought to have cut the knot and busted the thing last
autumn. But each week I have been hoping that it would be better.
But it is no better. Then I had to go to Jacksonville, Florida,
and expected to be away only a few days, and from there I was

2

called out to Illinois and was away from the City much longer than I had planned. I had been dreadfully driven before I went, and when I got back. Just before I left I was retained in a big will case and Sheffield promised that he would work faithfully on it. Outside of three or four days spasmodic work at the beginning and two Sundays and the two holidays at Christmas and New Years, when he worked with me going over witnesses' statements, he has done scarcely nothing. He thinks he is fooling me. The situation is not merely irritating and at times depressing, but it is maddening. I have been on the point several times of throwing up the whole retainer, although there may be a big sum in it if we win the case. The client has some rights and should be thought of a little.

So what with Sheffield neglects, other stupid asses in the office—idiotic bookkeepers, the first a mere fool, the second worse than a foetus, and the third an expert accountant at ten dollars a day, a damned fool, and then a green young lawyer in the office who has to be told the same thing six times and then kicked before he does it, and has to be given a verbal physic before you can get anything out of him—I have had hell's own time.

It has worried me that I haven't been able to answer your letters and each week I would hope that I would have an hour for a letter, and each Sunday I would hope that I would do it. But always something else has turned up.

3

All I can say is that I am very sorry that I haven't been
able to write you sooner.

I don't know whether you know the pseudo-Bohemianism of
Washington Square. It is nauseating to a decent man who
doesn't need artificial sexual stimulation. It is a vulgar,
disgusting conglomerate of second and third-rate artists and
would-be artists, of I.W.W. agitators, of sluts kept or casual,
clean and unclean, of Socialists and near Socialists, of poet-
asters and pimps, of fornicators and dancers and those who dance
to enable them to fornicate--But hell, words fail me to express
my contempt for the whole damned bunch. They have neither
culture nor reticence nor pride. All then can do is talk and
talk about art and litera-choor. The women dress badly;
their hair looks greasy and unkempt; and they're either whores
or near-artists or fifth-rate kept ones, and they're altogether
a pathetic and disgusting bunch. Words fail me when I think
of them. A self-respecting real artist like Arthur Davies or
Walt Kuhn wouldn't be caught dead within gunshot of the damned
place. I'd rather scrape up manure on the street than endure
their nauseating drivel at a table for an hour. That is the
kind of stuff that Sheffield apparently wallows in, and naturally after
hours of talk of that sort, and then dancing, and then fornicating,
he isn't any good the next day, or the next day. There have
been times when I couldn't stand him in the room, when his
efforts to keep awake were painful to look at.

4

You may say, Why in the hell don't you get rid of him?
And you may well say it. I admit it. I should have got rid
of him last autumn. But he is a brilliant man if he would
only apply himself, and he promised twice in the autumn that
things would be better. But just like a whore or a drunkard,
they promise and don't keep their word. He is a very attrac-
tive fellow in his better moods. And then besides competent
men don't grow on every tree. I could get second-rate or
third-rate men, but it is a difficult thing to get a first-rate
man.

But here I am, when I don't want to go into any of these
details. This is personal, and for the sake of my biographer,
as Yeats used to say, I hope you will tear this part of the
letter up when you have read it.

Vorticists.

On December 13, 1916, when I was away, there was received
at my office your cable of that date reading as follows:

"Marconi, London, - 14.

Can you send some cash for Lewis?

(Signed) Pound"

I got back and ran into a devilish rush of work, and not
until the 28th did I have a chance to give any attention to
personal matters. There was a week there that I was simply

5

driven nearly crazy.

On December 28th I cabled you as follows:

"New York, December 28, 1916.

Ezra Pound,
Five Holland Place Chambers,
Kensington, London

Bank Commerce cabling you hundred pounds through London City and Midland Bank, which please pay Lewis. Been dreadfully driven. Utterly unable attend personal matters recently. Hope get time write fully soon.

John Quinn"

On January 2d I got a cablegram by Marconi from London as follows:

"John Quinn,
31 Nassau Street, New York.

Cablegram received. Many thanks.

(Signed) Lewis"

I hope you will explain to Lewis how dreadfully driven I have been.

I haven't got time at present to go into the details of Lewis's accounts, but I think that there is a balance of forty pounds due him on one account and seventy-five pounds on the other. The seventy-five was to be paid, as I recall it, part by the end of December and part by the end of January. This letter is dictated at night and the bookkeeper has gone away and I haven't the records before me, but you can tell Lewis that he can count on a draft for seventy-five pounds being sent by mail at the end of this month. If he wants it before that time or if he would like to have me cable it to him, please cable me two words

6

"Cable Lewis" and I will understand by that that he wants the seventy-five pounds sent by cable rather than by letter, and I will cable it to you for him.

Vorticist exhibition.

After the Montross throw-down, nothing was done last summer. Kuhn used to be the guiding genius of a little art club called the Kit Kat Club. They give an annual ball called the Kit Kat Ball. Last year they cleaned up about fifteen hundred dollars and the asses in the club got the swelled head and tried to dictate to Kuhn; so he got out. He started another little club called the Penguin Club, 8 East 15th Street. Confidentially, Davies and I have helped him to fit out the place. He is going to have art exhibitions there occasionally and going to try to make it a meeting place for young artists, and they are giving their own ball, known as the Arts Ball, early in February. They have got a very good room, and the Vorticist pictures (not the Brzeska drawings) have been put in, and they look very well. The thing opened on Wednesday of this week. They haven't money for regular attendants, and so Kuhn is paying Brodzky an almost nominal sum to be there for the first week or two from one until five or six. Other young men of the Club fill in the rest of the time. No admission is charged. The things look very well. Everything is hung, the drawings as well as the paintings, and they look very fine indeed. I read the proofs for the catalogue. The things

7

appear on the catalogue just as they are numbered and hung on the walls, and that accounts for the fact that drawings are mixed in with paintings and that Roberts' things are separated by a painting of Etchells'. Kuhn had a short foreword by Lewis, selected out of the second Blast, but he cut it out for simplicity's sake.

I enclose you with this a copy of the catalogue and of the postal card announcing the exhibition. He sent out about two thousand of them. The exhibition will be roasted of course. I doubt very much whether there is a critic here who will understand it or write with a grain of sense about it, much less with sympathy. For example, there appeared a column in today's Sun which the writer I suppose thought was funny. I send you two copies of that page. You might want to send one to Lewis.

I will send you some more of the catalogues as soon as I have them. I thought I had several with me but it appears that I have only the one which I am enclosing. The show will go on for three or four weeks.

Kuhn wanted to open the show in November, but I hadn't a moment's time, not even to sort out the things and to arrange them and to have the catalogue written. As it was I did it only a few nights ago, going over the things with your invoice and writing the names, at my apartment till late into the night, on the back of each picture, giving the name of the artist and the subject. But Kuhn was patient and waited until I had time.

8

He is now beginning with the suggestion of having a sculpture show. He wants me to lend the ten or eleven or twelve Epsteins that I have; the four or five Brancusis that I have; the three or four Villons that I have; the two or three Derains, and the two or three Manolas, and the three little Brzeskas, the two that you sent, "The Cat" and "The Water Carrier", and one that I bought of Frank Harris, a little marble thing or a dog about the same size as "The Cat" only with a background painted red. I think I told you that I had bought that. Harris was hard-up and I bought a John drawing of him for twenty pounds and paid him thirty pounds for the marble dog.

(I forgot to say that I hope you will set me right with Lewis and will explain to him, without going into details, how damnably driven I have been and how utterly impossible it was for me to give any attention to personal matters during November and December. I'd feel very badly if my delay in sending the money to him had caused him any real embarrassment.)

Now for your letters:

Re yours of August 15th, received August 28th.

I got Lewis's receipt and I think now I have got all the receipts, including Lewis's receipt for the twenty-five pounds which you got from Miss Brzeska.

You probably never got my article on Casement. I sent a copy to you and to Yeats and a copy to T. W. Rolleston, but apparently Yeats never got his copy. Lady Gregory got her copy, and so did George

9

Russell get the one I sent him. Russell liked it very much, and James Stephens wrote me a letter. It seemed to touch the Irish.

Give my regards to Lewis.

I bought a dozen or so copies of your "Lustra" from Mathews and have given several of them away. It is a corker, and if you had half as much fun out of the book as I have had in reading several of the things out loud to some friends recently, I congratulate you.

Re yours of August 19th, received September 1st.

Part of this letter about your books I read to Knopf. I understand it perfectly, namely, that they have a twenty-years' right to your poems "Provenca", and the same to your "Cavalcanti" translations, beginning 1910. If you decide to go with Knopf and he makes a go of your "Lustra" and earlier poems, the Small Maynard matter can be arranged later. Knopf liked that part of your letter saying that their manager said he wouldn't stand in your way. I have explained in my separate letter about the books that it would be much better if you could get the English Macmillans to let him have the American rights to the Jap book instead of letting it go to Brett of the American Macmillans.

Yes, Brentano's have gone to sleep. And they are worse. They are petty and cowardly.

10

By the way, just today young Heubsch sent me a copy of Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" with a note stating that at the request of James Joyce he had sent me a copy of the book, which he was about to publish. Heubsch writes: "I think that this work very nearly approaches genius and I trust that you will find an early opportunity to examine it". Inserted in the book is a scribble in Joyce's handwriting dated Zurich "With the author's compliments". I notice in an advertisement that Heubsch is going to publish "Dubliners" or has published it.

So your efforts for Joyce have come to something. I don't know whether I told you that I sent him the ten pounds and got a letter from him a couple of months ago from Switzerland. In the letter he alluded to some government pension. So he is probably on Easy Street by this time.

Damn the election. It's all over. We have got Wilson, for our shame and for our peril, for four years more. He is a verbal masturbator, and nothing else. He ought to have been defeated upon his own speeches. He has been on all sides of all questions.

Itow has been over here and I thought I might hear from him, but I haven't. He gave a performance or so, but I believe he was rather unhappy on a big stage. A young man told me that Itow was doing parlor things now and was much happier and was pleasantly located. But I haven't had a chance to see him.

11

Re yours of August 22d, received September 5th.

I don't blame you for being disgusted over the reviews of your
Gaudier book. They were indeed imbecile.

In my separate letter about your books, you will see that
Knopf thinks he can get back the MS of "This Generation" from
Marshall. I hope to God that he recovers "This Generation".
I will make him publish it even if I have to pay for the plates
myself.

I don't know much about Pisastratan sculpture. I hope that you
have struck oil in that field.

I don't think anything will come of Dulac. His stuff is
principally Persian paintings, plus Indian paintings, plus Beardsley,
plus occasionally Max Beerbohm. A Jew dealer here named Birnbaum,
who has now gone with the Fifth Avenue firm of Scott & Fowles, had
an exhibition of Dulac's things the other day. Apart from a mask
or two that were not offered for sale, the drawings were not worth
hell-room. I wouldn't have them around the place. And yet they
were "all sold". No, Dulac won't do.

I spoke to Kuhn and Davies about photographs. But Davies
thought it would be better for you to wait until you had seen his
and Kuhn's stuff. Besides, you couldn't get any idea of their

12

stuff from photographs. Davies is a difficult person, but he is one of the best artists that we have. Kuhn is a fine fellow, just a great big boy, but he will go far. It would take a lot of pulling to get an article by you on Davies and Kuhn in an American magazine, but I think it would be best for you to see their things before you write about them.

Re yours of August 25th, received September 11th.

There is no use in my re-writing about the payments to Etch-
ells, Roberts and Wadsworth.

In a word, I sent you drafts in full for all of the things I bought of all of them, except for Lewis, and my recollection is that there is due a balance of forty pounds on the first big lot, and a balance of seventy-five pounds on the second big lot.

So there is nothing further to say about yours of August
25th.

13-14

Re yours of August 31st.

I am glad to know that my offers to Etchells and Roberts
and Wadsworth were all right. I don't think there is much
chance of selling Lewis's big "Kermes" or his "Plan of War",
but if there is I shall be delighted to let you. know. I am
sending down the Wadsworth wood cuts, but I doubt if they will
sell although some of them may go.

Re yours of August 31st, relating to your books,
A, B, C and D, I read to Knopf.

Re yours of September 3d, received September 15th.

I congratulate Lewis on getting his commission.

I congratulate you on getting out of the Abbey director-
ship. That would have been a calamity. You would not have
been happy in Dublin and you would have been in trouble.

I know something, by hearsay, about the Seven Arts business.

The editor is James Oppenheim. They have got some wealthy
woman to stake them for ten or fifteen thousand dollars. Knopf
is going to try to find out, confidentially, how much of a stake
they have and how much they have spent on advertising. Building
up a circulation of a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thousand
or twenty-five hundred for a magazine is merely a question of
how much money people are willing to spend for advertising. The
Kahlil Gibran whose name you saw is a very third grade artist

15.

who likes to pose. Van Wyck Brooks I know. He is a competent young critic and has written a book on Wells and one on John Addington Symons, and so on, a nice fellow personally, but he has not guts. The thing will go on and a few good things will be published in it and it will have a lot of drool and when the guarantor gets tired it will stop.

Re yours of September 3d, received on September 15th.

God, how long ago that seems and what I have lived through since;

This is about:

## The Magazine.

I have thought of it over and over again. If I thought that a guarantee of four hundred pounds would be all right I could arrange it in a day or two. I would guarantee a hundred pounds. I would get my friend James Byrne to guarantee a hundred pounds. I would get Otto Kahn to guarantee the third hundred, and somewhere we would pick up the fourth hundred. But there is more to it, very much more than that. I have had it all out with Knopf and a couple of others. It is too long a story to include in this letter. Knopf is going to find out for me, confidentially, how much backing the Seven Arts has and how much they have spent on advertising. If you didn't care a damn about an American market or about selling the thing in this country you could probably get along in England in a small

16.

way with the four hundred pounds and I could probably get that
much of a guarantee for a first and a second year. But if you
decide that you want an American audience then the thing will run
into much larger figures. But let's wait until I have had
another talk with Knopf. When he gets me details about how
much they have spent in advertising I will be able to write more
definitely. Offhand his opinion was that it would take about
four to five thousand dollars to get two thousand or twenty-
five hundred subscribers, and then there would be the cost of the
stuff even if you get some American publisher to give his imprint to
it. I will write you about the magazine fully within ten days
or two weeks. That will save generalities in this.

Re yours of September 9th, received September 23d.

No, indeed, I do not regret having bought any of the
Lewises. I like them very much. And the show is a stunning one.

Archer Huntington won't help very much. He is
cemented to Spanish things. I sounded him twice over a year ago.
But he was shy and full of excuses and evasions. The next time I
see him I will ask him how he liked Lustra. I passed him on
the street the other night but had only time to say "hello".

On September 9th I sent you this cable:

"New York, September 9, 1916.

Met your father and mother today. Seems

17.

impossible trace Marshall. Can you conveniently
assemble another copy This Generation, also
copy Joyce's book. Write when I can receive
same.

Quinn".

Your father and mother spent a couple of hours with me
at my apartment. I was on my way to the country for overSunday,
taking Mr. Yeats, Sr. with me. And so I could not ask them
to dine with me. I like them immensely. I never saw two
persons have a keener delight in things. I showed them all
of the Vorticist things, and while Mr. Yeats knocked them your
father and mother enjoyed them immensely and were very much
excited by some of them. I congratulate you on your father and
mother. Your mother is the youngest looking woman of her age
I have ever seen, with such bright eyes. And your father is
young too. You have two genuine admirers there, and enthusiasts
about you and your work, and I congratulate you upon their interest
in what you are interested in, their admiration for what you
admire, their pleasure in what you like. I don't know when I
enjoyed meeting two people more than I did them, and I hope
when you write to your father you will tell him that I will be very
much offended if he don't let me hear from him when he is next
in the city, and your mother too.

Re yours of September 11th, received September 23d.

This deals with the Marshall book which I have written
about in my separate letter.

About Lewis, you mention his accepting my offer of

18.

seventy-five pounds for "The Workshop" and the eight drawings.
So I know now that the balance is forty pounds plus seventy-
five pounds making one hundred fifteen pounds in all. And of
that, as I have said, I will send a London draft to his order
to you for seventy-five pounds the end of this month. If
you want it sooner, as I have said, just cable.

It is too damn bad about the loss of "This Generation".
But I hope it isn't lost yet. If anybody can get it I think
Knopf can.

Next, as the lecturer would say, is the one page
letter of Ezra Pound to J. Q. of October 13, received October 30th,
enclosing receipts of Patchells and letter and also receipt of
Miss Saunders.

Let me know what the Vortoscope is. I hope if there
is anything in it that Coburn won't let the secret get out. The
trouble about the moving picture stuff is that it isn't art.
Let me know how your exhibition comes out.

Re yours of October 31st received November 13th:

Now that I re-read it, this letter covers me with
shame for it mentions Lewis speaking to you about money, and so on.
I hope to God it has not caused him any embarrassment. Please
set me right with him.

Finally and lastly, yours of December 27th received

January 9th:

19.

Again I am covered with shame at Lewis being worried. But I hope that from the cable that I got from him things are all right. I never would forgive myself if I had caused him real embarrassment or if he had been compelled to throw up his commission. I am sure from the tone of his cable that it is all right. Damn the bookkeeper for the week's delay there was in cabling the money for him after your cable was received.

about
The Vorticist show, as you say, was "to open" two months. But I have not the time to get the things out or to turn them over to Kuhn or give any attention to it and he waited patiently.

Kuhn has been thinking and talking a lot to Davies about the possibility of doing something artistic with moving pictures. So what you write about the show of Vortography interests me very much. For God's sake don't let any one of the professional moving picture fellows get on to it. I don't quite know what it is but if you have got something good hold on to it until the process is copyrighted or until you have hit the market hard first. If I can be of any help in saving the rights for you here don't hesitate to let me know and I will give it prompt attention.

This is a damn stupid letter but I fedl stupid and am stupid, I imagine.

It will relieve my mind if you will let me know that

20.

Lewis is all right with his commission. Remember me to him and give him my good wishes.

I see in re-reading your letters that Krymborg had recommended Knopf. Knopf is a Jew and perhaps an orthodox Jew. He is not a big publisher. But I think he is an honest kid and means well and I candidly think would do as well if not better by your things for the next five or ten years than any one I know. Even Kennerly, who is not friendly to him, told me that he was perfectly honest and financially trustworthy, which is more than I could say of Kennerly.

I am trying to hammer out an appeal for John MacNeill, the Celtic scholar, who was sentenced to life imprisonment and is now in jail in England. He broke the back of the rebellion and limited it to Dublin and had no connection with it, was opposed to it, had no connection with Germany, was anti-German, and his sole offense was that he was the commander-in-chief of the National Volunteers. He offered to co-operate with Maxwell and was arrested and came damn near being shot. It is a shame to have a scholar like that and a perfectly honest man doing a life sentence as a common fellon. Shane Leslie and I are going to get the signatures of forty or fifty scholars and university professors. And Spring Rice, the British Ambassador at Washington says that he will forward it with a strong favorable recommendation. I hope to get that off my chest next week. Each week I am trying to clean up one or two back

21

things and I hope before very long to have the arrears of the
last three months of irritation and torture cleaned up.

Wilson's peace twaddle was nauseating to every self-respecting
American. It is past now. I kept in touch with Spring-Rice,
the British Ambassador, and told him that the English would make a
great mistake if they over-did their reply. Well, their reply has
come and it was over-done. I think they made a great mistake in
giving their terms. Germany didn't give her's, and Lloyd George's
answer could have been put in twenty lines—that if Germany wanted to
make terms she had to state what terms she was prepared to offer.
Those twenty lines could have been prefaced by the charge that she
brought on the war and an allusion to the atrocities that she had
committed and a calm statement that the Allies felt sure that the
American people understood their motives and sympathized with
their struggles. It is making too damned much of Wilson to
have the whole of Europe outside of Germany pay so much attention
to his chatter. Colossal egotism and verbal masturbation are
all that there is to Dr. Wilson.

Remember me to Yeats and tell him that I will write him
very soon. His father keeps well for a man of his years.

I have heard nothing from Miss Brzeska. Have you ever
heard from her? I didn't include his drawings in the Vorticist
show because there wasn't wall space in the big room and it would
have cost too much to fit up the rear room where the fellows work.
In a week or so I may send down the Brzeska stuff to put the wall

NEW YORK January 12, 1917.

Re books.

My dear Pound:

I ought to have written you a long time ago
about this but for the reasons which I have explained in
my other letter to you it has been impossible for me to
give attention to personal matters for nearly two months.

As to publishers.

Brett, as I think I told you, decided or
was advised not to take up the volume of poems. Marsh, his
adviser, is, as far as letters go, an old fogy; plays safe;
is ultra-conservative; and is a mere tradesman, as Brett is
a very successful tradesman-publisher. And further I don't
think you would have been happy with Brett with your other
things.

Scribner's would be, I should say, the best
of all, but they don't go in for anything advanced or
revolutionary. They are very conservative and one has to
satisfy five or six people and you would be irritated and
annoyed beyond words with them. Their chief advisers are
Robert Bridges and W. C. Brownell, whose books you probably
know about. He's a conservative old cuss, and in art hasn't

-2-

got beyond Rodin and in letters not much beyond the Victorians.

Brentano's don't do much as publishers and have never done much except with Shaw. The bulk of their publishing consists of importing sheets of gift books and fiction which they sell in their store. They don't attempt to cover the country as thoroughly as most other publishers do. They are pretty small about things and I think would irritate you. What I have in mind is that sooner or later you will be coming over here for a long or shorter time and you don't want to have a publisher like Brentano that would irritate you or be unsatisfactory, or people like Scribner's that would be fussy.

Re Duffield & Co.: I haven't seen them but I am told, in confidence, that the chief trouble with them has been their financial difficulties. I am told that they have just reduced their capitalization from $350,000 to $50,000.

I don't think you would want to go to Duffield's.

Re Dutton's: This is a good house but not interested in modern work. Its a smaller and much more conservative house than Scribner's. They do less publishing than Scribner's and possibly more book selling.

Re Putnam's: I don't think you could stand Putnam or his advisers half an hour. They will take Lady

-3-

Gregory's comedies and books on the theatre, and so on, but I don't think they publish much poetry and I don't think they have any free verse on their list at all. I am certain that you wouldn't care for them.

Kennerley you wouldn't care for at all. He's given up "The Forum" or had to give it up and he's not serious about publishing now. He's become the president of the Anderson Auction Company and I imagine that that was a good deal of a lifesaver for him and he's giving his best energies to that.

Small, Maynard & Co. of Boston aren't bad. They are a reputable house and moderately large. You could do worse, perhaps, than go on with them. New York is unquestionably the publishing centre of the country and I think, other things being equal, a New York publisher would be preferable. And then there's the question of how much Small, Maynard would do for you, whether they would go on and publish this volume of "Lustra and Earlier Poems".

Houghton, Mifflin Co. are publishing considerable poetry and they have got out a series called the "New Poetry Series", books published in paper covers at 50 or 75 cents a volume, and even as to those I was told that some of these authors pay a couple of hundred dollars per book. That may not be true. But I should say the chief objection to your going with them would be that you would be classed with a

-4-

lot of second-raters published by them.

There's a young man here named Alfred Knopf. He knows the publishing game thoroughly. He was for some years with Doubleday, Page & Company, who are very large publishers, one of the largest in the country. Then he was with Kennerley a year or two. About a year and a half ago he started in business for himself. He knows the business and is a very much more important figure as a publisher than a man like Marshall was or ever will be. When he was with Doubleday, Page & Company he did a lot for Conrad. Pinker, Conrad's English literary agent, knows Knopf and I think thinks highly of him. He is not a plunger. He's a man of his word. And I believe that he's in the business to stay. The enclosed list will tell you some of the things that he has been publishing. In verse he took over a volume of Kreymborg's called "Mushrooms"; he's just got out a volume called "The Collected Poems of William H. Davies", copyrighted here; he got out the first "Others: An Anthology" with another to follow next fall; and is doing this spring James Oppenheim's newest book of verse, and he's going to publish a volume of poems by Orrick Johns. I send you the cover of the Davies book.

I have talked your matters over with Knopf personally twice. He has read the Cuala edition of the

-5-

Japanese plays and has also read the volume of Lustra and
the earlier poems which you were going to include in the volume
entitled "Lustra and Earlier Poems".

I told him to put his suggestions in letter form.
He has written me a letter and I enclose you the original of it.

I cabled you on Wednesday of this week as follows:

"Letters received. Hope English MacMillans have not contracted with American MacMillan for Japanese plays. Would be swamped with American MacMillans. Best all your things one publisher. Suggest you see English MacMillans and arrange postpone decision regarding American rights Japanese plays pending receipt letter. Writing."

I gathered from your letters that the arrangements
with the English MacMillan house for the American edition of
the Japanese plays had not yet been completed. I gathered this
from two of your letters. In yours of August 31st you wrote
proposing "A. Poems. B. The American rights of the larger
Japanese play book being done here by MacMillan. (It has
fifteen plays in place of the four in the Cuala book. Vide
circular enclosed.) This would have to be negotiated with the
English MacMillans. I would assist negotiations. C. Book of
Wyndham Lewis." And in yours of December 27th you wrote that
Duffield had written about the Japanese plays, and you said:

"Of course they can't have it as it is included in the MacMillan book, already printed but not yet published. Also MacMillan terms rather better.

"I don't know whether Duffield would rise to anything else of mine. I suspect it is Japan and not me that he wants."

-6-

I gathered from that that the English MacMillans hadn't yet definitely agreed with the American MacMillans. The English house may have already settled with Brett. If that is so, I shall be sorry, for I should hate to have any of your books with Brett. I think you ought to teach Mr. Brett a lesson. If you decide to put "Lustra and Earlier Poems" with Knopf I think it would be to your advantage to have him take the book of Japanese plays also, - very decidedly to your advantage. Brett would naturally want it because it has a Yeats introduction. Brett is Yeats' American publisher. He would feel that Yeats' name would help its sale.

I don't know what terms the American MacMillans had offered the English MacMillans or whether the American house was going to import sheets only and not print or copyright here. Knopf told me that he would be willing, in the dark, to agree to as good terms or the same terms that the American MacMillan house is willing to make with the English MacMillan house for the Japanese plays. If he knew the terms that Brett of the American house has offered he might possibly be willing to improve on them. That's a mere matter of dollars and cents. There's no sentiment in Brett; so if the matter is still open or negotiate-able it might be well for you to find out from the English MacMillans and let me know what terms the American house offers, or whether they are going to set up in print here, or whether they are going to import sheets and what they

-8-

a year. They have four thousand miles to cover instead
of a few hundred as in England. In other words, publishing
in America is a seasonable business. I think Knopf is
right about that although I can imagine your feeling of
wanting to have this volume out in the spring. He says
that any other house would come to the same conclusion,
only more so. The larger the house the further in advance
they make up their lists.

I think the copyright should be taken out
in your name. He suggested that he have the right to
the book for the life of the copyright and renewals
thereof. I suggested that you should be free after five
years. He would agree to that, and so we finally compromised
upon his having the rights for ten years. Brett would
insist on having the rights for the life of the copyright,
and so would Scribner's or any of the larger houses.
You will see his statement that if at the end of ten
years he still has the book in print he should be given
the "first refusal" of any arrangement you might want to
propose. That's very fair for it leaves it all in your
hands.

As to the suggestion about your purchasing
the plates in that event, it's a matter of economics pure
and simple, and if you took the book to somebody else they
would want to buy the plates anyway. Besides, I would put

-9-

in the contract a provision as to the value of the plates,
in the event that we couldn't agree on their cost. The
provision on page 2 of his letter as to jobbing the book
again in three years is, I think, fair.

The provision as to semi-annual reports and
payments is the customary one.

The provision at the bottom of page 1 regarding
the Canadian market is the customary one. He might sell
fifty or a hundred copies in Canada in five years.

As to the book on Lewis, Knopf suggests it
should be taken up by itself in due time, together with
any other work that you may produce. But Knopf doesn't
bind himself to accept it nor do you bind yourself to
give it to him.

What I had in mind in making the ten year
provision was that you wouldn't want to provide for a
collected edition before ten years at the earliest.
Then if you are an important enough person you may want
to assemble all your things with one publisher. If you
closed with Brett you couldn't do that, or with most of
the other larger publishers, and I think you ought to see
to it that in the contract between the English MacMillans
and Brett of the American house you will be free to do what
you want to with the Japanese plays after ten years. If
Brett wouldn't agree with the English house that you should

-10-

have the Japanese book back again at the end of ten years,
there ought to be inserted in the contract a provision that
at the end of ten years you should have the right to include
the book in a collected edition. I think this is worth
paying attention to.

I feel sure that Knopf will do the best he can
to get back the MS. of "This Generation" from Marshall,
and I believe that he would be keen on publishing that.
If he got the MS. back within a reasonable time, say two
or three months, it also would be included in his list for
the autumn, but he wouldn't want to bind himself to publish
the book until he had read it, which I think is a reasonable
stipulation.

As to Knopf generally: He is a careful young
man; he knows the business; he has had good training in
the business; his father is a very reputable man; and Knopf
isn't likely to go broke or abscond with manuscripts or
money or anything else; he's too sensible and level headed to
do any of those things. I don't think that he would make any
obligation or undertake any financial responsibility that
he didn't honestly feel able fully to discharge. In fact,
Kennerley, who is not friendly to Knopf now, told me sometime
ago when I discussed Knopf with him that Knopf was financially
perfectly responsible. I might put in the contract a provision
that if Knopf closes out his business or fails or

-11-

should go into the hands of a receiver or anything of that
sort, the rights in the book should revert to you. So that
if any such thing as that did happen, or if he died, for
example, or anything of that sort, you wouldn't have to
bother with an executor or with a receiver or anybody of
that sort.

If we closed with Knopf for either "Lustra and
Earlier Poems" or for that book and the Japanese plays, I
would of course prepare the contract.

You ought to come to a decision, Knopf tells me,
rather soon. He will want to get the book set up, you will
want to read proofs, and besides he says that as long as
this matter is in abeyance he would probably turn down
other suggestions for books of poetry which he might accept
if he hadn't made an offer to you.

Coming back to the book of Japanese plays, the
best thing for you to do is to see whether you can keep it
open or reopen it, and then to get from the English MacMillans
Brett's terms. Knopf might well be willing to better them.
You never can tell. If they are low it is quite on the cards
that he might better them. Of course, his agreement that
he is willing to equal Brett's terms is made somewhat in the
dark and should, I think, in fairness be conditioned upon
the understanding that Brett, the head of the American house,
is not going to bid a prohibitively large price. That's a

ALFRED A. KNOPF
PUBLISHER

NEW YORK

220 WEST FORTY-SECOND STREET • TELEPHONE BRYANT 4786 • CABLES "KNOPF NEW YORK"

January 12, 1917.

John Quinn, Esq.,
31 Nassau Street,
New York, N. Y.

Dear Mr. Quinn:

I should be glad to ~~give~~ become Ezra Pound's American Publisher and would suggest the following arrangements. I will import the volume of NOBLE JAPANESE DRAMAS with an introduction by Yeats if this can be arranged with the English House of MacMillan.

I will try to get hold of the manuscript of Pound's which John Marshall has apparently lost and if I succeed in finding it I will give it careful consideration, although I should not care to bind myself to publish it without first reading it. This also applies to any other work by Pound with the exception of the volume to be entitled LUSTRIA AND EARLIER POEMS

This last I should be willing to publish in the fall of 1917 if the matter can be arranged between us. I will set the book up over here and pay Pound a royalty of 10% on the first 500 copies sold, 12-1/2% on the second 500 copies sold and 15% on all sales over 5000 copies. These royalties will of course be figured on the retail price of the book. If possible I should also like to have the Canadian market for these POEMS and should I get it, I would of course pay only half royalty on copies sold to Canada at a special edition price.

I would take out ~~all~~ copyright in either my own name or the

ALFRED · A · KNOPF
PUBLISHER

NEW YORK

authors and I should agree if necessary, to being given the
license to publish the book and sell it for ten years, at the
end of which time however, should I still have the book in
print, I feel I should be given first refusal of any new ar-
rangement that Mr. Pound might want to propose. In the event
of his deciding to go elsewhere with this book I think he should
bind himself to purchase plates, dies, etc., belonging to it
from me at cost.

I should want the privilege at the end of three years,
should the book in my judgment have become unsalable, to job
off at the best price I could procure, any copies I might
have on hand, and it would be agreed that should I sell such
copies at or below cost no royalty on such sales would be
due the author.

He would then have the privilege of purchasing the plates
from me at cost should he desire to do so in which case all
rights to the book would revert to him. Otherwise I might
melt up the plates myself in which case also all rights to
the book would revert to the author.

I would render accurate reports of sales semi-annually
up to the first day of February and August respectively and
settlement thereof would be made in cash four months later,
(i. e.) June 1 and December 1.

I have tried in this letter simply to bring out the es-
sential points of the contract which I presume you will draw
up between us. Over and above points mentioned in this
letter the contract will include various customary clauses

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THE MEMOIRS OF A PHYSICIAN From the Russian of
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which has placed its author in the first rank of Russian writers.
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THE LITTLE DEMON A novel from the Russian of Feodor
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THE OLD HOUSE From the Russian of Feodor Sologub. A
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contribution by one of the greatest modern authorities.
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OTHERS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE NEW VERSE
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-2-

of critics. It was at the Penguin Club for three weeks. I
paid the expense of sending the pictures there, carting and
so forth, the expense of hanging them, arranging them, of
the catalogue, of the stamping and mailing, of the printing,
of the electric light and watchmen and of two attendants for
three weeks, and the taking of the pictures down and carting
them back to my place, and I made up the catalogue. The
thing cost me something over two hundred dollars, actual cash.
All the critics had notices of it. Not a single one noticed
it. That was partly Pound, for some of these damn fools seem
to be down on him; and partly stupidity and narrowness and
partly a desire to hit at Kuhn, who is the whole thing at
the Penguin. He organized the Penguin? Who is the Penguin?

Walt Kuhn

But you are perhaps more interested in problems
of transportation and gunnery than you are in art at the
present time, for you wrote that you would be going to the
front in from two to six weeks. I should have written you a
long, long time ago, but I hope this will reach you.

The unsold pictures have been returned to my
apartment.

Would you care to part with the two paintings
"Kermess" and "Plan of War" to me at B100, payable one-half in
three months and one-half in five months or two months there-
after? I have made so many purchases that I cannot afford

His "plo
symbols

Pinous aram

omt las pinous I

smeed jo sewntov omf o ene e

I Quesnby
Wynon leaue I

-3-

at present
that much in the ~~se็นtive.~~ *In the same time* If you accept
my offer you will have that to look forward to. That is £60
for the "Kermess" and £40 for the "Plan of War". "Kermess"
is rolled up, lying on the floor in one of the spare rooms
of my apartment. I don't know when I would be able to have
it unrolled but it would be expensive to return it. The
unsold other things I am going to return to you as soon
as the submarine warfare lets up a bit.

There remain of your things the following:
"The Architect"; "Architect with Green Tie"; "Detectives";
"Il Candelario"; "Design for Box Lid"; "Movement in Thirds";
and "Dinah". The prices that I paid upon these were:

```
"The Architect" (ink)          £ 25
"Architect with Green Tie"      15
"Detectives"                   12
"Il Candelario"                 6
"Design for Box Lid"            5
"Movement in Thirds"           5
"Dinah"                        3
```

If you care to part with those seven I should
be glad to allow you the following:

```
"The Architect"          £ 8
"Architect with Green Tie"  8
"Detectives"             10
"Il Candelario"          4
"Design for Box Lid"     4
"Movement in Thirds"     4
"Dinah"                  3
                         £41
```

That would save me the trouble of returning them
to you.

There was also a portfolio of 11 sketches of

(COPY)

ALFRED A. KNOPF
PUBLISHER

NEW YORK

220 West Forty-Second Street - Telephone Bryant 4786 -

March 29, 1917.

John Quinn, Esq.,
31 Nassau Street,
New York.

My dear John Quinn:

I have your letters of March 24th and 26th, together with the Bragdon essay on Mem. Blavatsky, which I shall return to him. You are certainly welcome to keep the three pamphlets and the little brochures as far as I'm concerned.

Now as to Ezra Pound: I have the volume you sent me of CANZONI AND RIPOSTES, which seems to be quite intelligible. As for LUSTRA, as far as I can gather, my edition looks exactly like yours except that it is not numbered and initialed on the title page. As for type, I cannot say that I would relish printing the book in any such type as Matthews used for LUSTRA, but I have already written Pound that I shall print him (in Caslon probably) of a larger size than that used in the Davies volume. I do not think that there will be any chance of our quarreling about this matter of type, and as it would be a quite considerable nuisance to send Pound sample pages, I am going to take a chance and go ahead.

Now as to NOH: I shall probably publish this in April or the beginning of May, and retail it at $3.00 net. I shouldbe very glad indeed, however, to let you have 40 copies at 25% off, or $2.25 net each. I guess this is as good as Drake would do for you anyway.

I am wondering about the binding of the book, and would like to know what you think. I am proposing to use a paper label on the back, and for this I think that a blue buckram would be more satisfactory than the blue vellum cloth used by Macmillan, although as a matter of fact I find I can exactly match the English cloth. Let me know what you think, and also write me if you want these 40 copies at the above mentioned price.

Yours faithfully,
(Signed) Alfred A. Knopf

K.M.

9

the Hackett appreciation and the Hackett disinterestedness.

But to hell with them! I'm through with both of
them, and I don't want ever to hear from them or of them again.

As Joyce didn't reply direct to my cable, I shall not
reply direct to him. So when you write to him please tell him
that I congratulate him on the success of his book. My dic-
tation of the Vanity Fair article was designed to help the book
along. I am not a critic. I am not even a practiced writer.
But I thought that what I did say would stimulate interest in
the book. At any rate James Huneker liked it very much, for
I sent it to him when I had it in the form of a letter to The
Sun apropos of his article. And J. B. Yeats Senior liked it
very much. I hope Joyce won't think it was too personal.

Sincerely yours,

(Sgd) John Quinn

P.S. Friday March 30, 1917.

Since dictating the above, I have received three
sets of the revised proof of my article on Joyce. I enclose two
of the proofs to you with this. I have made some corrections on
one of the copies. One you can send to Joyce, and one you can
keep yourself. I hope that Joyce won't object to my talking about
him personally. It is the way to get people interested in a
writer. I wrote my article to aid the sale of the book. Dozens
of people will buy the book because I write about it, who would not

NEW YORK

April 3, 1917.

Re Knopf and your poems

My dear Pound:

I enclose with this a copy of Knopf's letter of
March 29th to me. I had only copies of the large paper limited
edition of "Lustra" and I didn't want one of them chopped up or
dirtied by the printer, so I asked Knopf to use a copy of the
bound edition which he had. The type is the same although the
margin and quality of paper perhaps are not as good.

Knopf is going to charge $3 net retail for his
copies of "Noh". I got five copies of the book through James F.
Drake, 4 West 40th Street, at $2.40 each. He was not going to
publish "Noh" until the autumn. In order to encourage him I
agreed to take forty copies, which you will see he is letting
me have at $2.25 net each. That doesn't make any difference to
you because you get your royalty in London.

I got his letter of March 29th last Friday. I
was very much driven at the time in preparing my case for trial.
I hadn't time to write him and so I called him on the telephone.
He agreed that he would send me down two samples of binding.

I made the suggestion of a booklet and told him
some time ago that I would be willing to pay the major portion
of the expense. You will see from the postscript of his letter

-2-

that he talks about a 16 page booklet, 5000 copies, at a cost of $100. I asked him on the telephone how that should be divided. He suggested that he pay $10. I told him that I thought that ninety for me and ten for him on a thing which advertised him and you, was a little lopsided, and I suggested eighty, to which he agreed. I then said to him over the telephone: "Well, now we can consider the whole thing closed." He is apparently as suspicious as Joyce. For yesterday, Monday, the 2d of April, I got a letter from him of which I enclose you a copy, marked "2".

I turned it over to Curtin for a reply. Curtin brought the letter to me in court with a lot of other mail. I was irritated for a moment that Knopf should have written again after he had written fully once before and after he had had a perfectly definite and perfectly audible and precise agreement on the telephone. I enclose you a copy of Curtin's reply. At that I think Curtin is doing him a favor in trying to convey to him the understanding that in matters of this sort one should not treat a man who is offering to do what I am offering to do as though he were a Jew stock broker who had to be mailed down in writing.

Forty copies of "Noh" I am taking to get the thing started, and I would take fifty copies of "Lustra" and the other poems, if it were necessary, to have them published this spring. That is for the cause. I will send them to friends of mine and if you have any friends to whom you want copies sent, let me know. It is easier for me to distribute them here than

COPY

April 3, 1917.

Alfred A. Knopf, Esq.,
220 West 42d Street,
New York City.

Dear Mr. Knopf:

Mr. Quinn directs me to acknowledge your letter of March 31st, which he asks me to say appears to be a restatement of your letter of March 29th and a confirmation of his talk with you on the telephone. Your letter correctly summarizes the understanding which Mr. Quinn and you arrived at, and is accordingly a repetition of that conversation which, so far as Mr. Quinn is concerned, was unnecessary,

-2-

that there isn't a cash advance to you, but a cash advance is
the exception these days in the case of poetry rather than the
rule. As soon as we hear from Small, Maynard Knopf will begin
to set up the book.

Do you want proofs sent to you? Knopf is
anxious to know that. If you want proofs you had better cable
me the words: "Send proofs". If you were here you would
probably go over the galley proofs and then page proofs, but
Knopf agrees with me that all you will want will be page proofs.

Of course, these contracts say nothing about "Noh".
That is a matter entirely between the London Macmillan Company
and Knopf as apparently you have sold the London Macmillan Company
the American market. Its as broad as its long so far as your
royalties are concerned. Whatever you get out of that book you
get from or through or underneath or appertaining to the London
Macmillan Company.

Knopf tells me that there is nothing about "This
Generation" from Marshall. Knopf has been in touch with Kreymborg
two or three times. Marshall seems to have vanished and Knopf
has heard of no one who has seen Marshall or heard from him.
I almost envy a man who can be so in love with a woman that he
is willing to vanish utterly from the earth for her sake. If
I had time I would make a Vorticist sonnet on it. It would be
something like this:

(Carbon copy of letter of Mr. Quinn
mailed May 5, 1917)

April 29, 1917.

Re Lustra:

My dear Lustra:

I received yours of April 11th on the 25th.
I was thrown by my horse a couple of weeks ago and split
the elbow end of the radius bone of my arm. It has been in
a sling since; damned inconvenient doing office work, reading
letters, answering telephones, and trying to hold the receiver
and transmitter with one hand.

The Irish home rule question has been seething
here. I send you with this pages of the New York "World"
of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I have been in Washington
on the subject. I have had no time to practise law much of
late. I have written you several letters without referring
to the folder where several of your unanswered letters are.
I have dictated those letters in intervals, between telephone
calls, and even while standing up, literally with my back to
the wall against office calls, personal calls, telephone calls,
and bookkeepers' and filing clerks' and law clerks' attempted
invasion. I sometimes imagine myself drowning in a sea of
letters and memoranda and trying to swim out. I scarcely
turn my back or go out of the room for lunch or for a few
minutes' conference when the pile of incoming stuff mounts
again. I tackle it, struggle with it, reduce it, exhaust myself

-2-

over it; and I scarcely turn around again or step out of the
office for a few minutes when on my return the pile is there
again. It is never ending. I am going to try to get some
handsome woman with brains and make her fall in love with me
and have her mount guard in the office so she will keep away
nuisances, irrelevancies, bores, patriots, and all but first-
rate artists. But I imagine it will be a long time before I
can get that combination in a woman - beauty, good looks,
good temper, a keen mind, power to concentrate, a knowledge of
art and letters and persons and the world; a woman who knows the
difference between a third-rate poet-aster and a good poet,
and a fifth-rate artist and a real artist.

'Twill be a combination hard to get.

I will deliver the contract signed by you to Knopf
tomorrow, after making a copy for my files. I don't think he
will object to your striking out the last part of paragraph IX.
I will tell him that it is a matter of agreement, and that if the
type pleases you it may be understood that you would agree to do
that, as in your letter to me you base your striking out of that
part of clause IX on the ground that you don't want to take
plates until you know whether the type suits you. I don't like
the format of his edition of Davies. I will tell Knopf that if
the plates are, at the end of ten years, suitable for inclusion
in another volume, then you will buy them on the merits.

As to clause II, I think you can rely upon him to do
the right thing, for as you say, his interest and yours are the

-3-

same.

He is going to send you proofs, galley proofs I think.

He has also agreed to send a set to your father.

I am having made and sent to him the copy, enclosed
in your letter, of the poems which have not appeared in American
magazines or have been copyrighted.

The contract expressly excludes the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Ireland.

I will write to Knopf about getting over the Lewis
"Timon of Athens" portfolio.

In my letter to Knopf I will call his attention to the
N. B. on page 3 of your letter as to the two poems that did not
appear in Small, Maynard's "Provenca", and that they can be
used in "Lustra".

So much for the book.

P. S. I assume that you have made the same changes in your
copy signed by Knopf that you made in the copy that you signed
and sent for him, namely, striking out the last four lines of
paragraph IX and initialing them.

Ezra Pound, Esq.,
5 Holland Place Chambers,
London, W. 8, England.

(See next page)

-4-

P.P.S. Since dictating the above I have heard from Knopf. He agrees to the change in the contract and says that he is writing you direct. So that matter is closed. Knopf says that he is sending you galley-proofs so that any additional poems that are to be inserted can be indicated or inserted by you. So that that will avoid any possibility of mistakes. The matter of the illustrations and cover of the book I suggest that you take up with him direct, and tell him if there is any question about it to refer to me. You can post me as to what your wishes are. But don't let him make the cover of the book that brown shit-color that he did in his last two books. The two books of poems that he sent me, the one by Johns (feeble stuff) and another one by Oppenheim (futile stuff) were bound in shit-color boards. One was woman-shit color and the other was baby-shit color. Neither one had a sound man-shit look, or I may add a bull-shit look. So look out for color. Knopf has no color sense.

April 29, 1917.

My dear Pound:

Further re your second letter of April 11th.
I never heard of young Rodker.

I am not familiar with Eliot's work.

You do not state in your letter how much the
cost of the printing bill for Eliot's poems by the "Egoist"
is going to be. I am quite willing to stake you for that
amount if you will let me know. No one would know about it,
neither Eliot nor anyone.

I want to keep a hold on Knopf and not press him
too hard. I have dropped a hint to that effect to your father.
Knopf is not the broadest minded man and is not a man of deep
culture. But few publishers are. He has a keen business sense.
He knows what will go. And he is honest. He won't bust or
get over his head financially.

So much for Eliot and his poems in the Egoist.

I feel about "Tarr" just as you do — more
inventive and more volcanic. I wrote you yesterday about Joyce's
play, a separate letter. I am waiting to hear from Lewis now
about "Tarr". I hope that Knopf will take it and not Huebsch.
I can get better terms out of Knopf for Lewis than I can from
Huebsch.

You do not say how, if Menken can do nothing with

-2-

the "Smart Set" about Rodker's novel, I am to know about it,
so I am telling Knopf to write to Menken about it in line
with your suggestion.

I will write you in a separate letter, in a day
or two, about the Little Review which is referred to on page
6 of your second letter of April 11th.

Sincerely yours,

(Sgd) John Quinn

P. S. I wrote to Knopf about the Rodker thing. He replied yesterday, thanking me and saying that he would write to Menken and ask Menken to let him know about the Rodker thing, and do what he could about the matter.

(Carbon copy of letter of Mr. Quinn)

mailed May 5, 1917)

May 3, 1917.

My dear Pound:

Just a short note. Everything that you wrote in your letter of January 10th about the Seven Arts has come true. It's rot of the most damnable kind. I have been looking for them to have something by you but nothing has come. Why don't you take back from them the Fenollosa essay on the Chinese written character? Where is it? If you want to have it appear in the Little Review, I suggest that you cable me on receipt of this letter saying "withdraw Fenollosa", which I will take as authority to ask for the return of this essay. The May number had a lot of drool by John Dewey, the half-ass-pragmatist-professor of philosophy at Columbia, that would have made William James writhe with pain.

Knopf wrote me a day or two ago that he was thinking of letting the Seven Arts have those of your poems that had not been published here, under the provision of the contract that gave him the right to do that for pay. I replied to that part of his letter saying that I thought that would be all right to let the Seven Arts have some of the unpublished poems provided they pay well for them. But I should make the pay a good pay. Then they will appreciate the poems.

2

But if you object to their appearing in the Seven Arts
just cable me the word "object", and I will understand that
you don't want the Seven Arts to have the poems of yours that
have been unpublished in this country.

Did you put any price upon the Fenollosa essay?

I agree with you fully about China and Japan.
I can't stand much of Japanese art. The Chinese stuff,
the great old paintings, stone carvings, wonderful potteries,
are the real things. I suppose you know Giles' books on
Chinese poetry.

Sincerely yours,

(Sgd) John Quinn

Ezra Pound, Esq.,
5 Holland Place Chambers,
Kensington W.,
London, England.

COPY

August 16, 1917.

Dear Miss Anderson:

I received your note yesterday morning.

I return you herewith the Pound poem, which is amusing. I have deleted the two periods from the title at the top of page 1; inserted one at the end of line 8 instead of a comma; put a comma in where indicated on the 8th line on page 2, and a comma where indicated at the end of the 4th line on page 3. The quote on the third line from the bottom of page 3 is "Message to Garcia".

I have given careful consideration to the Sumner allusion. I think that an allusion to the "mind of Sumner" as a "sink" might be regarded as libelous and held so by the court. Besides, even if it were not libelous, it would almost certainly be called to Sumner's attention, and he might get after you for the Lewis article in the last number. It is almost certain he will do that. I have therefore deleted "mind" and suggest the substitution of the word "acts" or "feats". I prefer "feats". I recommend you to use "feats". One might say: "The feats of Sumner are a sink",

Whether one does or doesn't think

As Sumner does or doesn't.

Don't forget to put in "feats" for "mind".

My other suggestions in pencil explain them-

-2-

selves.

The Eliot thing I have only had time to glance at.

In the other Pound thing, the prose, I have made
one or two pencil suggestions which explain themselves.

The Lewis thing is amusing. I made one or two
pencil suggestions there,-- the capital H on the 6th line from
the bottom of page 2, the deletion of the comma after the word
"Bouvard", where it does not belong, and the deletion of the
periods after the twelve Arabic numbers on page IV which
disfigure the page. The space between the numbers and the
text is quite ample without the periods.

I haven't had time to read the Lady Gregory yet.
It will have to await my return. I am off to Washington tonight,
to be back in New York for an hour or two Saturday morning,
then to Chicago and near Peoria, and back in New York next
Thursday morning.

I got the new number this morning and read it after
breakfast. Those seven poems by Yeats are about Mabel Beardsley,
the sister of Aubrey. I remember when Yeats was writing them.
She was dying or supposed to be dying of cancer. I imagine you
know that Aubrey became a Catholic before he died. The artists,
Charles Shannon, Charles Ricketts, Laurence Binyon, Yeats and
others of her old friends, used to take turns in visiting her.
They used to take her their best and choicest and most off-color
stories. In fact, her room became sort of a clearing house for
off-color stories. Everyone that got one treasured it for Mabel,
and Mabel passed them on. I think she did die -- but not for

-3-

some years after that. I hope she kept a diary and entered
the stories in it. Yeats was tremendously moved by her fine
spirit and gaiety, and these poems were the result. They
are very fine poems. But they won't be appreciated as much
as they would be if all of your readers knew the circumstances
of their writing as I have told you. I think that the
story is quite a French one, don't you? Quite like a French
woman of spirit, not wearing black, not making a luxury of her
grief, not flaunting it in the face of others who cannot share
in it or sympathize with it, in hotels, or restaurants, or at
theatres. The spirited Frenchwoman doesn't wallow in horrible
black, although I am told that there is a good deal of it
worn in France now. But in wartime it is a symbol, worn with
pride as well as in grief.

Sincerely yours,

(Sgd) John Quinn

Miss Margaret C. Anderson,
24 West 16th Street,
New York City.

COPY

ALFRED A. KNOPF

220 West 42d Street,

New York, August 17, 1917.

Dear John Quinn:

I have read Eliot's little book of poems with immense enjoyment. I do not know whether it is great poetry or not. I do know that it is great fun and I like it. I surely hope that he writes some more of it so that we can make a book of him over here. You see the present volume consists of only 32 pages of poetry, and it would be quite impossible to do anything with such a thing over here, except to give it away as an advertisement. And even that would be difficult. I am returning it to you herewith; likewise the copy of THE CATHOLIC ANTHOLOGY which I am glad to have seen. A good many of the poems that were in this, however, were printed in my 1916 OTHERS and even Eliot's PRUFROCK is also included. So if Pound ever does another (anthology) I think it will have to be an entirely new one.

I have decided to try to get Huneker and the rest of you up some evening during Mencken's September visit to New York. As soon as I can get a more definite date I will let you know as far in advance as possible.

Yours,
(Sgd) Alfred A. Knopf

NEW YORK August 25, 1917.

My dear Pound:

I am writing Huebsch a letter of which I enclose you a
copy. It is part about Joyce and part about Lewis.

In his letter of August 24th Huebsch wrote regarding Tarr:

"In response to an inquiry from me about Tarr, Miss Weaver writes me that Pound has arranged to send the manuscript to you for publication in New York. If you haven't any plans for the book I should like to take a look at it. Miss Weaver seems to think well of it but doesn't grow enthusiastic. I haven't read any part of it but am interested because of occasional references that have come to my attention."

The sooner I receive the complete "Tarr" the earlier I
will be able to submit it to Knopf, and if he doesn't agree, to
Huebsch. At any rate the point about this Huebsch letter is that
we have got a second string to our bow for "Tarr".

Your father was in town yesterday. He telephoned me in
the morning, and then came to my office. I had him at lunch, but
not alone, because not having heard from him again I had made another
engagement with another friend of mine, and brought your father along.
He had been with your mother up on the Massachusetts coast for a
couple of weeks. He looks strong and rugged. I was sorry not to
have seen your mother, but he said she was quite well.

You have an exceptional Dad. It is not often that a man
like you, or even me, has the approval of his parents. My father
and mother approved of every damned thing I did, even my follies. I
remember when I was a kid about eighteen that I drew five hundred

2

presidential
dollars out of the bank and bet it on an election and lost it. It
got over town that I had lost considerable money. I never mentioned
it to my mother, but she was told it by the family doctor. She prompt-
ly came to me with five one-hundred-dollar bills and said: "I hear you
have lost some money on the election and that it is being talked about.
I don't want you to be talked about, and I want you to take this five
hundred dollars and deposit it in your bank account." It was the best
lecture against betting that I ever got, and the only one that I ever
got from her. I sailed into the bank, the biggest bank in town,
with the five hundred, the bank out of which I had drawn it a few days
before, and very cheerfully and successfully told them the following
lie: "I bet five hundred dollars for a friend of mine on the election
a few days ago. He has returned it to me and I am re-depositing it."
That ended the rumors of my big losses. My mother never mentioned it
again. You see, she believed in me even at that time. And so your
Dad believes in you. Blessed are the sons whose mothers and fathers
believe in them. And happy are the mothers and fathers who believe
in their sons.

(Copy)

August 25, 1917.

Dear Mr. Huebsch:

I received yours of the 24th this morning, on my return to
the City after an absence of a week.

I cabled a week or so ago to Pound to send me the typewritten
copy of "Exiles". As soon as it is received I will send it to you.
I have the MS. in Joyce's handwriting, for which I sent him £25.
Joyce and his wife evidently thought I had overpaid him with the £20
for the printed sheets with his page or two of MS. corrections of The
Portrait. And so he has offered to send me some other MS. after
the war is over, besides sending me the eight or ten pages of correc-
tions in Joyce's handwriting.

Joyce suggested that I have the play copied here at his ex-
pense by a stenographer. But I refused to do that. In the first
place, I would have no time to read the typewritten copy with the MS.,
and secondly, he doesn't always write plainly and there might be mis-
takes, just as there were in The Portrait and in Dubliners, and thirdly,
it is a case where one had better make haste slowly. I think I told
you that Grant Richards was to publish The Exiles in London and that
Joyce gave me peremptory orders that when I submitted it there was to
be a decision about it inside of three weeks; that if there was no
decision within three weeks, then I was peremptorily to withdraw the
play from consideration of any publisher to whom it might be submitted.

As soon as I get the typewritten copy, as I have said, I
will send it to you. He expressly said that you were to have the
first chance at it.

6

was not entitled to. When he knows the whole facts he may feel
like sending me a word of thanks for the thought that I had in mind
when I made my "sporting proposition" to Hackett of sending ten or
twelve pounds to Joyce. Suspicion is a damned good thing, but I
get so much of it from rich bastards that I don't like to see it
in a man that I want to think well of.

I daresay you have seen James Huneker's two columns on
Joyce in The New York Sun. I told Huebsch to send you copies of
that.

I am glad to send this twenty pounds to you for Joyce.
It is actually twenty pounds for one page of MS., which is about what
a page of MS. by Meredith or Swinburne would bring, or more.

As I have said, I am sending you a carbon copy of this
my letter, together with a copy of the Hackett correspondence, so
that you can send it all to Joyce if you care to.

As to The Portrait, it is going well here. In Huneker's article he asked the question 'Who is James Joyce' and so on. I dictated an answer to it, used one or two phrases in your letter, told about "Dubliners" and "Chamber Music", and gave my opinion of Joyce. Mitchell, the editor of The Sun, said that two columns in The Sun on Joyce was all that they felt like printing now, and that my letter was a little too long. I then revised it and sent it to Vanity Fair. It is going to appear, with a portrait

P.S. In a letter that I had from Miss Weaver she
acknowledges the typewritten corrections for the second edition of
The Portrait, forwarded by you, as having arrived safely, and says
that they are being embodied in the second English edition in the
printer's hands. She says:

"Mr. Joyce will see a complete proof, and so this edition
should be exactly as he would wish it to be."

written Pound I doubt whether it would have as wise an appeal. I
spoke to Knopf about it and told him how highly I thought of it, and
he said he would like to look at it. He did not bind himself. Nor
did I. But I should like to give him the first crack at it. If
he does not decide yea promptly, I should be very glad to give you
back number 2 at it.

Mr. B. W. Huebsch,
225 Fifth Avenue,
New York City.

September 13, 1917.

Re Lustra.

My dear Knopf:

I received (a) the corrected page-proofs; (b) the proofs on which I originally made my corrections, and (c) the printer's original page-proofs, into which, as you explained in the postscript to yours of September 10th, you had copied my corrections.

I think there is a great improvement. I am delighted that the ugly big caps have all been removed. I am sure you will admit that the page looks better.

On page 18 in the poem entitled 'Salutation the Second' I indicated a space between the second and third lines and between the fourth and fifth lines, which the printer followed, and then I indicated a corresponding space between the sixth and fifth lines from the bottom and between the

2

lines. I assume that you have not done so because in the galley-
proofs, which passed under Pound's eye, he did not indicate such
a space. (It is ok. as it *nov* is)

I am glad that you have made the spaces in the parts of
the poem entitled 'Commission' uniform throughout, as I indicated.
The spacing was not uniform in the original printing, which of
course was a printer's error.

I am glad to see that on page 30 you struck out the
capital word 'Songs' at the top of the page above the title
'Further Instructions'. The inclusion of 'Songs' was of course
a printer's error.

Page 33, line 1, I am glad that you have spelled
' afore-time' as a hyphenated word, which it is, and not as one
word, as the printer had put it.

Pages 33 and 34: In correcting the first proof I
suggested that two or three exclamation points, following
some Latin or Italian words or phrases printed in italics,
should be straightened so as to stand straight up and down.
The printer has so straightened them in one or two cases,
but not in others. So I have had a chance to see how they
look both ways. They look better on the slant, and therefore
on page 33, the exclamation point at the end of the 6th line
from the bottom should be on a slant instead of straight
up and down; and on page 34, 7 lines from the top, the
exclamation point at the end of the line should be on a slant
instead of straight up and down.

Page 36, I am glad to see that you have taken the

3

quotation marks off of the poem 'The New Cake of Soap'. Of course they
did not belong there, and they were obviously printer's errors.

Page 37, line 7, the period in the original proofs after the
word 'immortal' was of course a mistake, for the next line began with
'For'. I am glad to see that you have restored the comma as indicated
by me. The period was of course a printer's error and was not in the
proof submitted.

Page 39, poem I, I am glad to know that you have made the
space between the italicized title and the text similar to the space
after the italicized title of poem II, as I indicated it. In the proof
submitted it was an obvious printer's error, or rather lack of a sense
of proportion, and the spacing in the copy submitted was as it is now
in the final proof. Therefore the printer's "improvement was"— the usual
printer's improvement, namely, a mistake.

Page 42, line 6, the exclamation points, one in the middle
of the line and the other at the end of the line, should be on a slant
instead of straight up and down.

Page 43, I am glad that you have closed up the ugly space
that was between the third and fourth lines. It was of course a
printer's error, for there was no such space in the copy submitted.

I am glad also that you have taken off the quotation marks
from the title of the poem 'The Seeing Eye', which were not in the
copy submitted and were a printer's mistake.

Page 51, third poem 'The Faun' looks infinitely better in the
revised proof, where you have followed my correction of not having a
space between the third and fourth lines, which of course was a
printer's error.

6

Page 84, fifth line from bottom, I am glad that you have put the comma after the word 'playing,' which was in the copy. The printer's period after 'playing' was a mistake.

Page 89, I am glad that you have removed the space between the first and second lines. There was no such space in the copy, and there should be no such space. It was a printer's mistake.

Page 94, I am glad that the sub-title has been put in larger type. It is a great improvement and makes it uniform with the type of the other sub-titles as, for example, the sub-title in the poem 'The Game of Chess' on page 65. Here again it was a printer's mistake. He should have made both sub-titles in the same type, but he did not.

Page 95, I am glad that you have put the words 'End of Cathay' in larger caps, the same as the caps used in the sub-title, page 71. It is a big improvement.

Page 99, line 8, I am glad that you have moved the word 'Papiol' from away over at the righthand margin to a little beyond the centre as I suggested, my suggestion restoring the printing in the Mathews edition and correcting the printer's innovation.

Page 100, seventh line from bottom, the semi-colon as indicated by me in place of the comma after the word 'teeth' restores the Mathews reading. The printer's departure was a printer's error.

Page 109, the poem 'Pagani's' is now spaced and the

7

lines broken up as in the Mathews edition, except the word 'beautiful'
should not be divided. Please put that by itself in the second line,
beginning it where the letter t now is, because it looks better that
way and that is as it was in the Mathews edition and as it was in the
original proofs. The printer has apparently carried out the letters
'beau4' to the end of the first line because he had more space by
getting rid of the ugly capital S at the beginning of the line. But
that is no reason for dividing the word 'beautiful' in that way.

Page 111, I am delighted that the printer has followed my
directions for more space between the Arabic letters at the bottom of
the page giving the page number, and the text. It is a tremendous
improvement, and the following pages show it plainly: 16, 17, 20,
21, 22, 26, 27, 30, 32, 35, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,
49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68,
73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 92,
93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107,
108, 110, 111, 112, 116, 117, 118, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133,
134, 136, 138, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151,
152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169,
170, 172, 175, 177, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192,
193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200 and 201.

Changing those pages has been such a great improvement that
I hope he can squeeze out a little space still between the Arabic
numbers at the bottom and the text on the following pages: 18, 36,
86, 135, 137, 139.

had the line: 'Oh, to be out of this'. That was and is correct. There
should, it seems to me, be a period after the word "water" at the end
of line 14. And the next line should read, as it now does:

Oh, to be out of this!

My suggestion 'Oh, but far out of this' was all wrong.
I can't recall now where I got it; but I got it somewhere and did not
invent it.

Page 180, I am very glad that you have stricken out the
words 'A Draft of' and 'for'. The half-title as it originally read was:

the second and third lines from the bottom,
which was not followed. In order to make the thing uniform, I have
indicated that the spaces now between the third and fourth lines and
between the fourth and fifth lines from the beginning be closed up.
So that the first six lines will be by themselves, as are the last
six.

Page 22, I indicated a space between the second and third
lines, because there was such a space in the Mathews edition. I
notice that you have not made the space between the second and third

As sure as my tortoise housebound years agone,
because you say they were deleted by Pound in the galleys.
He is the boss and that goes. So I am glad that my suggested restoration of these two lines has not been carried out.

Page 125, line 2, I am glad that you have put the word 'Thou' in smaller caps than the hideous big caps they were first put in by the printer.

Page 132, I think the words 'O world' and the words

11

hope you have been able to get some good paper for the book. I congratulate you on it, and I can now read your edition with great pleasure.

I hope you will give me a chance to look at the title page and table of contents before it is printed.

Sincerely yours,

COPY

September 21, 1917.

My dear Knopf:

I received yours of the 20th.

First, the title page of Lustra. You say: "The
truth of the matter is that I have never published a book, and

2

carefully copied out and carefully punctuated the poems that appear
in it that do not appear in the limited edition. I think we
ought to disregard the popular edition entirely. I understood from
you that you would include all of the poems that appeared
in the sheets, that do not appear in the limited edition, except one,
and that is "The Temperaments".

I at first thought of having each one of these poems
typewritten separately and then put each one separately as a rider
upon the galley proof where it would properly go, and return the
whole thing to you. But the enclosed copies indicate where they
should go and you can do that work yourself better than I, and in
your own way. The copies that I enclose to you I have carefully
compared, with Mr. Curtin of my office, with the poems as they appear
in the unbound sheets. Where any one of those do not appear
in the limited edition, it is so indicated in the margin. So
now you have the whole story. Personally I see no objection to
"The Temperaments". But you tell me that it might result in
Wenemakers not selling the book, and that is a business question
that you know about better than I, and better than Pound. I am
writing to Pound telling him that you are going to print them all
except that one, and that you have written to him about it, so that
that will clear the whole matter up.

I don't know what he means by the "Three Centos" referred
to in his cable, but I assume there will be no objection on your

3

part to awaiting his manuscript.

Yours very truly,

(Sgd) John Quinn

Alfred A. Knopf, Esq.,
220 West 42nd Street,
New York City.

P.S. If you don't mind the suggestion, I think the enjoyment of a poem is greatly increased if it is well placed in the pages of a book and if the page is not too crowded. I thought that the arrangement of the Mathews limited edition, as to the placing of the poems on the page and as to their not being too crowded, was admirable. Of course you have full leeway still in the spacing.

I return you the galley proofs.

J. Q.

May 22, 1917

# MEMORANDUM

The following poems appear in the Mathews' edition:

After "Salutation" and before "The Spring" insert
"Salutation the Second" as follows:

## SALUTATION THE SECOND

You were praised, my books,
because I had just come from the country;

I was twenty years behind the times
so you found an audience ready.

I do not disown you,
do not you disown your progeny.

Here they stand without quaint devices,
Here they are with nothing archaic about them.

Watch the reporters spit,
Watch the anger of the professors,
Watch how the pretty ladies revile them:

"Is this," they say, "the nonsense
that we expect of poets?"

"Where is the Picturesque?"
"Where is the vertigo of emotion?"

"No! his first work was the best."
"Poor Dear! he has lost his illusions."

Go, little naked and impudent songs,
Go with a light foot!
(Or with two light feet, if it please you!)

Go and dance shamelessly!
Go with an impertinent frolic!

Greet the grave and the stodgy,
Salute them with your thumbs at your noses.

Here are your bells and confetti.
Go! rejuvenate things!

Rejuvenate even "The Spectator."
Go! and make cat calls!

Dance and make people blush,

(This appears
in both the
privately-
printed Mathews'
edition and
the limited
Mathews' ed-
ition)

1-a

Dance the dance of the phallus
and tell anecdotes of Cybele!

Speak of the indecorous conduct of the Gods!
(Tell it to Mr. Strachey.)

Ruffle the skirts of prudes,
speak of their knees and ankles.

But, above all, go to practical people—
go! jangle their door-bells!

Say that you do not work
and that you will live forever.

After "Causa" and before "A Pact" insert "Commission"
as follows:

COMMISSION

Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,
Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to the enslaved-
by-convention,

Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors,
Go as a great wave of cool water,

Bear my contempt of oppressors.

Speak against unconscious oppression,

Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,

Speak against bonds.

Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,

Go to the women in suburbs.

Go to the hideously wedded,

Go to them whose failure is concealed,

Go to the unluckily mated,

Go to the bought wife,

Go to the woman entailed.

Go to those who have delicate lust,

Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted.

Go like a blight upon the dulness of the world;

Go with your edge against this,

Strengthen the subtle cords,

Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles
of the soul.

Go in a friendly manner,

Go with an open speech.

Be eager to find new evils and new good,

Be against all forms of oppression.

Go to those who are thickened with middle age,

To those who have lost their interest.

2

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in
family—

Oh how hideous it is

To see three generations of one house gathered
together!

It is like an old tree with shoots,
And with some branches rotted and falling.

Go out and defy opinion,

Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.

Be against all sorts of mortmain.

After "The Bellaires" and before "Salvationists" insert
"The New Cake of Soap" as follows:

## THE NEW CAKE OF SOAP

(This is in
both)

Lo, how it gleams and glistens in the sun
Like the cheek of a Chesterton.

After "Salvationists" and before "Arides" insert "Epitaph"
as follows:

## EPITAPH

(This is in
both)

Leucis, who intended a Grand Passion,
Ends with a willingness-to-oblige.

After "The Bath Tub" and before "Amities" insert "The
Temperaments" as follows:

## THE TEMPERAMENTS

(This is only in
the privately-
printed Mathews
edition)

Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications and
something approaching a rape

3

Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friend
Florialis,
And yet the man is so quiet and reserved in
demeanour
That he is held to be both bloodless and sexless.

Bastidides, on the contrary, who both talks and
writes of nothing save copulation,
Has become the father of twins,
But he accomplished this feat at some cost;
He had to be four times cuckold.

After "Amities" and before "To Dives" insert "Meditatio"

as follows:

MEDITATIO

(This is
in both)

When I carefully consider the curious habits of
dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

After "Ladies" and before "Coda" insert "Phyllidula"

and "The Patterns" as follows:

PHYLLIDULA

(This is
in both)

Phyllidula is scrawny but amorous,
Thus have the gods awarded her
That in pleasure she receives more than she can
give,
If she does not count this blessed
Let her change her religion.

5

After "The Tea Shop" and before "Epitaphs" insert "Ancient Music" and "The Lake Isle" as follows:

### ANCIENT MUSIC*

*(This is in the privately-printed edition, but not in the Mathews limited edition)*

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raine&h drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!

Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver

Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm,
Sing goddamm, dann, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

*This is not folk music, but Dr. Ker writes that the tune is found under the Latin words of a very ancient canon.

### THE LAKE ISLE

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little
tobacco-shop
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright virginia,
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too greasy,
And the girls dropping in for a word or two en
passant,
For a flip word and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop
Or install me in any profession
Save this dam'd profession of writing
Where one needs one's brains all the
time.

September 21, 1917.

My dear Knopf:

Thanks for your note received at 5:55 re the elimination of the dog from the title page of "Lustra".

I got a letter from Pound today about one or two changes. I am writing to Pound and I enclose you a copy of my letter to him.

I have read the table of contents and, assuming that the letters referring to the pages are all right, I think the whole thing is satisfactory. I return it to you with this.

Re "Tarr": I have sent both copies of the contract, with the amendment agreed to by you, to Pound with a letter to Lewis with full instructions.

I note that your printer cannot make matrices and that
that disposes of my idea that matrices might be made here from
the plates and sent from here to the London publisher.

I am sending a copy of this my letter to you to Pound
so you will both be up to date.

Re Little Review: Thanks for your letter authorizing
the advertisement in the coming number of the Little Review, but
the "copy" didn't come. I will pass it on to her in the morn-
ing. I am sure Pound will like it.

Sincerely yours,

(Copy)

September 21, 1917

My dear Lewis:

I received on September 17 yours of August 21, and was delighted to hear from you.

I received the copy of "Tarr" from Alfred Knopf, the publisher, a few days ago. Pound had forwarded it to Knopf. Knopf and I lunched over the publication. He asked me in detail my reasons for thinking it a great work. I told him. They seemed to carry weight with him. Knopf is the man who is about to publish Pound's "Lustra", and he has imported sheets of the Noh book. I knew he was fencing about terms. He finally suggested that he have the right to publish and sell the first 500 copies without royalty. I objected to this and said if he was not interested in the book I would arrange for its publication with Macmillan Company or Doran, a new big publisher here, as easily as with Brett. That brought him. He came to terms quickly after that. He agreed to pay 10% on the retail price on the first 5000 copies sold, 12 1/2% on the next 5000 copies sold and 15% on all copies sold after 10,000 had been sold.

I have had his contract signed in duplicate by him and witnessed by me. You will observe that on the first page, paragraph 1, I have stricken out, in accordance with Knopf's approval in writing, the phrase "all English speaking countries" and have substituted the phrase "the United States and Canada".

I have explained to Knopf that if you had not arranged

2

or if Pound does not arrange for you for the publication of the
book in England, a subsequent arrangement by Knopf for the pub-
lication and sale of the book in England would have to be made
the subject of a separate agreement.

This contract of Knopf's is on a printed form, and fol-
lows the form of the contract that I drew, between Knopf and
Pound for "Lustra" which Knopf said, the other day, was the clear-
est and best arranged publisher's contract he had ever seen, and
which he had printed, without however, by the way, paying me a
fee for drawing it for him.

Knopf says that he will publish the book "next spring",
and when I pressed him to let me know just what "next spring"
meant he said it was sometime between the first of March and the
middle of May. He wants the text and final form by the 1st of
November. I *assume* / you want to have retained the horizontal
*in the text*
parallel lines that *occur* / toward the end of the copy. I like
them very much. They did not appear in the printed parts lift-
ed from the Egoist. I have written to Pound asking him if he
could not get me the typewritten copy that was used by the Egoist
which would doubtless show those parallel horizontal lines. If
*for that part of the copy*
*part of the*
Pound can't find that *copy* / it will have to be set up with the copy
sent. There are some duplications of the typewritten copy in
the printed copy, but they can easily be detached. I will un-
dertake to look after that part of it.

I am sending this letter and two copies of the con-
tract to Pound. He should send both copies of the contract to
you. You should sign each above the printed word "Author".

3

Pound can witness your signature when it is returned to him.
Pound should keep one original and send the other to me for delivery to Knopf. That will close the contract.

If anything happens to you I am sure Pound will not
merely give an eye, but will give all the strength and judgment
and interest that he can support not merely to the "spiritual
welfare" of your little lad but to your name and work. Whatever
I can do to aid him, if such painful duty should fall, you can
count on my doing.

I believe that Knopf will do quite as well if not better by "Tarr" than Huebsch would.

You cannot imagine how I envy you your war experience.
Outside of personal family griefs, I have never in my life
regretted anything so much as I regret that I am not able to
take part in this war in some way, either as a volunteer or on
the staff or in connection with the Red Cross work or as an
observer, on the other side; not at the War Department in Washington at the end of a telephone, or dictating to a stenographer.

I have a great many friends in the war and have lost
some. I knew Captain Tom Kettle very well. I have lost two
or three French friends.

I do not know how well the Little Review is getting on
from the point of view of numbers sold, but I do know that your
things and Pound's and Eliot's contributions are alive and kicking and full of radium.

I know that you do not have time for letter writing,
but if you do feel in the mood for writing you know my address

NEW YORK December 3, 1917

My dear Pound:

Here's to clear the deck again. As I am very much behind in my law work and personal work also, I'll bust my own rule and go against my own preference and answer all your unanswered letters in one, taking the eldest first.

(1) Re yours of August 27, received September 17, 1917, re Spanish autographs: This I have still to attend to with Huntington and two or three dealers. Libraries will hardly pay the price that a private collector may. More of this later.

(2) Yours Sept. 9 received Sept. 24: Eliot essay put in process promptly. I liked it very much. Knopf, who is really stingy and mean about money, was going to put it in paper covers: cheap and its effect lessened! So I agreed to increase my $100 by $30, making $130 for this brochure, on condition that he put it in boards. He is, of course, a greed. I'll bet it costs him in all not a cent beyond that $130.

Tell Eliot I liked it very much. I read proofs twice: first in galley and then page-proofs. I straightened out the bibliography at the end. I don't think Knopf ever reads any proofs and his printings are very careless. A more careless bit of printing than Lustra as he had it in galleys, would be hard to imagine.

And I had to put up $30 to have those ugly, big, block initial

-3-

the Little Review. I'll read the final page-proofs. You may
tell Lewis that when you write. It takes a hell of a lot of
time. It's tedious and no fun but necessary with a cheap Jack
like Knopf who evidently has a poorly paid lot of assistants
with little taste.

I have had nothing from the Monist. I hope your
essay on Chinese character has not gone astray. Let me know
whether I am to write for it direct to Chicago myself. Carus of
the Monist is of course pro-German, pacifist. A good bunch
to steer clear of. I'll see if Knopf is interested in it when
I get it, or try some magazine.

Why don't you write Knopf direct about your translations
from de Gourmont? If I urge it, he'll hold back for money or
subsidy or a guarantee.

If you think I ought to have four or five or six
more of Lewis' drawings, bearing in mind what I now have, I'm
game, but not anxious to go too deeply into art purchases for a bit.

Give Lewis my good wishes when you write or see him.

(5) Yours Sept. 18 received Oct. 10: Glad to do all
I did re Lustra. It was worth it. It would have been murder to
let it go out as he had it first. You ought to ask him straight
how many review copies he has sent out and ask him for the list.

(6) Yours 20 Sept., received Oct. 10: Knopf now
knows Eliot's essay is not to be signed.

-4-

You're right about that "thrice". When I reconsidered
I felt it could not be changed. So your text is all there,
unchanged.

(7) Yours, undated but containing your copy of Lewis'
letter, got to my office October 13: Thanks for going to the
trouble of copying out Lewis' letter. I read it with great
interest. Give him my best wishes when you write. His letter
reminded me a little of "Cantleman's Spring Mate". Alas! Here's
the fact, as I believe it: M.C.A. broke into the papers last
spring over that lousy old anarchist Berkmann and that old slut
Emma Goldman; in court every day; greatly excited and all "het up";
thought Goldman a "great woman"—ad nauseam. Result, she got
into the papers. I feel sure I sent you a clipping. She had
to move out of her 14th Street offices on account of the newspaper
publicity following the Goldman trial. That trial was in the
Federal Court. M.C.A. had her fun then. But she then also
attracted the attention of the Federal officials to her. Then
she had some pacifist and anti-war jabs in later numbers of the L.R.
She is known as a pacifist if not a pro-German. So there you are!!
Attention centered on her! The country going through a spasm of
spy-hunting and a greater spasm of "virtue". The result is clear
to me. Old Lamar in Washington acted in good faith. He's an
old ass. The court side-stepped. Technically the Judge was right.
The P. O. Dept.'s decision was "not without reasonable foundation",