Hemingway and Pound: A Most Unlikely Friendship by John Cohassey (review)

John Cohassey selected a subtitle certain to grab his reader’s attention. The friendship of Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound is an essential part of any telling of Hemingway’s life and is important in any telling of Pound’s. That much Cohassey’s reader would already know. But “Most Unlikely”?

Reasons for the friendship are many, as Cohassey recounts. Pound enjoyed giving instruction and saw himself as the key shaper of what we now call literary modernism. He envisioned the creation of another Renaissance of great art. Arriving in Paris, Ernest Hemingway had been eager for instruction. He wished to be part of the vanguard, and he had made a good beginning through his friendship with Sherwood Anderson, who had sent him to Paris with a letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and to Pound. Rather quickly, Hemingway learned that Pound, though fourteen years his senior and not a “drinker,” was a “male” and might be companionable as well as professionally helpful. During their initial meeting, Pound informed Hemingway that he wanted to learn boxing. Sharing with Pound the instructing gene, Hemingway was glad to take the acclaimed poet as pupil. He was, of course, delighted that Pound had liked his poetry. Those poems accented Hemingway’s satiric bite and his interest in sexual realities—the young man from Oak Park did not mind challenging the mores of his era. Pound, who had been fired from his teaching position at Wabash College in 1908, repeatedly broke rules of propriety, flagrantly hosting women in his quarters. Pound had denied any wrong-doing, but that he had a keen interest in sex is undeniable. If Pound’s wife could live comfortably with the knowledge that her husband had a mistress (who would birth Pound’s daughter), so could Hemingway.

Pound appreciated that young Hemingway had not been contaminated with college experience. Better that he had gone off to Kansas City after high school to immerse himself in the life of newspaper reporting. Pound liked the independence, the boldness. He could now see to it that Hemingway read the right books. Hemingway proved an apt student, quickly devouring the books his mentor recommended. His mind keen, Hemingway soon gave evidence that on the great works of the Western tradition, he could hold his own with college-educated Americans in Paris. When Pound was guiding T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to its final shape, he was able to give Hemingway on-the-spot instruction—not only on the complicated circumstances of Eliot’s personal life but on the “mythical method” as well. The development of Modernism closely aligned with the history of the “little magazines,” the fountains for the “new.” Pound also insured that Hemingway had valuable experience as an editor. Pound likely never had a better pupil.

There were, of course, striking differences between the friends. Cohassey charts these too. Pound’s appetites were not nearly as broad as Hemingway’s. The Pounds preferred an Old World pace of life. If you were invited to the Pounds, Dorothy would be serving tea. Ezra could drink cup after cup, a ritual conducive to extending conversation. The pleasures of French bistros and cafés did not suit the Pound style. Nor would Pound be interested in following Hemingway to Spain for the corrida. He found the fascination with public killing of bulls barbaric. Pound judged Spain a backward nation. Why was Hemingway wasting his time?

In 1924, the Pounds selected Italy for their residence. A major divergence in the paths of the two friends began. In a 1922 dispatch to the Toronto Star, Hemingway had already described Mussolini as the biggest bluff in Europe. His 1927 story “Che Ti Dice La Patria” portrays the threatening fascism that Mussolini brought to Italy. Il Duce seemed to Pound a harbinger of a better world. In the next decade, Hemingway was in Spain to aid the cause of the Republic against the fascist Franco...