The amusing controversy between Arensberg and Du Champs on one side, and the rest of the hanging committee on the other as to whether the porcelain urinal was to be admitted to the Palace Exhibition of 1917 as a representative piece of American Sculpture should not be allowed to slide into oblivion. One day Du Champs decided that his composition for that day would be the first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store he should enter. It turned out to be a pickaxe which he bought and set up in his studio. This was his composition. Together with Mina Loy and a few others Du Champs and Arensberg brought out the paper, The Blind Man, to which Robert Carlton Brown with his vision of suicide by diving from a high window of the Singer Building contributed a few poems. In contradistinction to their south, Marianne Moore’s statement to me at the Chatham parsonage one afternoon—my wife and I were just on the point of leaving—sets up a north: My work has come to have just one quality of value in it: I will not touch or have to do with those things which I detest. In this austerity of mood she finds sufficient freedom for the play she chooses. Of all those writing poetry in America at the time she was here Marianne Moore was the only one Mina Loy feared. By divergent virtues these two women have achieved freshness of presentation, novelty, freedom, break with banality. * * * * * When Margaret Anderson published my first improvisations Ezra Pound wrote me one of his hurried letters in which he urged me to give some hint by which the reader of good will might come at my intention. Before Ezra’s permanent residence in London, on one of his trips to America—brought on I think by an attack of jaundice—he was glancing through some book of my father’s. “It is not necessary,” he said, “to read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everybody I said so,” he added. During this same visit my father and he had been reading and discussing poetry together. Pound has always liked my father. “I of course like your Old Man and I have drunk his Goldwasser.” They were hot for an argument that day. My parent had been holding forth in downright sentences upon my own “idle nonsense” when he turned and became equally vehement concerning something Ezra had written: what in heaven’s name Ezra meant by “jewels” in a verse that had come between them. These jewels,—rubies, sapphires, amethysts and what not, Pound went on to explain with great determination and care, were the backs of books as they stood on a man’s shelf. “But why in heaven’s name don’t you say so then?” was my father’s triumphant and crushing rejoinder.