Percy, Bob & Assenpoop

Having encountered them in my teens, I''ve been told that I''m possibly the only living person to have known both Wyndham Lewis and Robert Frost.  It''s an ennobling thought, the kind that gives a delusory sense of significance to one''s life.  And it''s been enhanced by my failure to discover any direct contact between the two men — no correspondence, not a single mention of one by the other, not a shred of evidence that they ever met.  That leaves me as a minor link between them, so I defer to the major one.

            This, of course, was Ezra Pound, who played so prominent a role in both their lives.  His name came up when I was with them, long after he''d seen either, and as I write this his shadow hovers close by.  I am in the Kensington borough of London, within a stone''s throw of the triangular sitting room from which he once held forth, and only one Underground stop from "Rotting Hill," Pound''s term for Notting Hill Gate, later used by Lewis as the title of a book.  Also, my block of flats was built on the site where the second V-2 rocket landed and killed one hundred and sixty-two people while Pound was making enemy propaganda broadcasts from Italy.

            On a personal level, I once met and exchanged letters with his fellow-poet and loyal friend, William Carlos Williams.  The letter I received contained what might be the only rhyming couplet Williams ever wrote and I quote it proudly.

            "You have our academic recorders down pat,

            But they have us by the balls for all that."

            Williams was "Little Bill" to Pound, "Big Bill" being William Butler Yeats.  Pound, in turn, was often called "Assenpoop" by Williams, especially where his political and economic theories were concerned, and I''ve appropriated this pet name for my title.

            My only other connection with Pound has much more remote and tangled roots.  These include the film star Charles Bronson and Alexander Hamilton and an Arab Prince and a burlesque comic and a male impersonator.  And if this assortment doesn''t hook your interest it''s doubtful if anything ever will.  But let''s get the politics out of the way first.