316
PARTISAN REVIEW
leg-pulled everyone, particularly Adrienne Monnnier. He was always
merciless to blue stocking ladies.
•
The first time I went to tea with Gertrude Stein, at 27 rue de Fleurus,
I thought I had never seen a more magnificent head-she looked like the
bust of a Roman emperor and, at the same time, like a Buddhist monk.
She seemed to take for granted that no one knew anything about painting
until they had proved themselves in agreement with her. She showed Amy
Nimr and me round her magnificent collection of Picassos in exactly the
way as one is shown round a public gallery by a lecturer. "This," she said
pointing to a Picasso, "is the Rose period, and this is the Blue period."
She ended by showing us the paintings by Francis Rose she had bought.
There were about fifteen of them. I found these decadent in feeling and
ill-drawn, but Miss Stein said they had a quality of poetry which was what
we needed now. I had written a book on modern painting, published by
Cahiers d'Art
in 1928, and Amy Nimr was a painter who knew far more
about painting than I did, but we did not say a word and pretended we
knew nothing. It was evident that Gertrude Stein enjoyed lecturing.
The last time I .saw Gertrude Stein was in London, the summer before
the war, at an exhibition of paintings. I had my poodle with me. "Does
he like painting?" she asked me, "my poodle always recognizes pictures;
he knows a Renoir when he sees one." This was said so matter of factly
that there was no possible answer.
•
Ezra Pound must spend a great deal of his time writing letters. Dur–
ing the time I edited
Eclumges,
I received sheaves from him. This kind
of thing,
"Dear Miss Harper,
A poem by
J.
G. Macleod has come in. It is remarkable,
and the sort of thing that OUGHT to be printed. There are 70
pages of it, but it is divided into 12 parts; each with zodiacal sign
ruling; so that it cd. be serialized, three signs at a time in a quar–
terly. It is not like anything else; and wd. confer character on
any review that pubd. it. One wd. have to be sure that there wd.
be four numbers of the review appearing with fair regularity."
And his comment on the first number,
"Your review finally arrived this a.m. general appearance
very good.
T~e
charge 'reed. by recent post' that you are i.e. your
review is completely plastered over with Bloomsbury wd. I sup–
pose be hard to refute, which doesn't mean that you are fore–
ordained to be damned the Little Review started as reaction
against the wildness of another American periodical which
it
a
few years later left hopelessly embedded in past age.
I suppose discrimination will organise itself into a tendency
of some sort during the next few issues.
Yours
Ezra Pound."
Needless to say I was unable to publish a poem of seventy pages, or
Pound's
How To Read,
equally long. Pound did not like the translation
