‘Our London, My London, Your London’

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Peter Brooker

Yayın yılı:

2007

Yayıncı:

Palgrave Macmillan UK

Dil:

en

This was in 1909. It was a year when the character of Pound's London and his own artistic persona began to take shape. It was the year too, most probably, when, in one of modernism's legendary set-pieces, he first met Wyndham Lewis (Lewis guessed it was in 1910) at the Vienna Café close by the British Museum. Both men made a significant early appearance in Ford's English Review though whether either registered this or knew anything of each other's work is doubtful. The Vienna Café, Lewis remembered, had a distinctive triangular first-floor room with a glass ceiling 'which reflected all your actions' (1982: 280). The motives and emotions at their meeting were far from transparent, however. The café had been adopted by readers and officials at the British Museum including Laurence Binyon who effected the first introduction ('his bulldog, me… Lewis... Mr T. Sturge Moore's bull-dog' as Pound painted the scene in the Cantos (1975b: 507)). Lewis didn't remember himself as anybody's bull-dog. He was an 'idle student', biding his time, who 'looked like a moujik' but 'bought his clothes in Savile Row or Brook Street' (1982: 272, 273). Somehow he had slipped easily into this company of mandarin scholars on his return from Europe. For Pound it was an introduction to English class attitudes, cultural snobbery and complacent racism. He was dismissed in advance as 'Jewish' and American, and Lewis, when they met, was surly and indifferent.KeywordsBritish MuseumGlass CeilingCritical Circl…

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