Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound's Friendship

Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound's Friendship takes shape less through declarations than through acts: shared work in Pound's studio, the effort to help a fellow poet, and a difficult responsibility passed from one friend to another. Hemingway remembers Pound as generous, often irascible, and capable of errors he embraced with complete sincerity. Their closeness did not require agreement about art; it rested on a broader loyalty to people and to the precarious work of making literature.

A friendship in the studio

Pound lived with his wife Dorothy in a studio on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Hemingway contrasts its poverty with the richness of Gertrude Stein's studio, but recalls that the room had good light and heat from a stove. It also held paintings by Japanese artists Pound knew. Hemingway found those works difficult to understand, yet felt that understanding them did not reveal any lasting meaning to him. This difference in taste did not become a quarrel: he kept quiet about work he disliked, reasoning that criticizing a friend's artistic loyalties was like criticizing a family.

The difference was not absolute. Hemingway liked Dorothy's paintings, admired her, and valued the head of Pound by Gaudier-Brzeska as well as photographs of the sculptor's work that Pound showed him. He disagreed with Pound's enthusiasm for Picabia and Wyndham Lewis, but treated such disagreements as a question of judgment and tact, not as grounds for breaking fellowship. In Hemingway's account, Pound's willingness to like the work of his friends was both a beautiful form of loyalty and a potential weakness as a critic.

Their connection also involved physical instruction. Pound wanted Hemingway to teach him to box, and they were sparring in the studio late one afternoon when Hemingway first met Wyndham Lewis. Hemingway tried to make Pound look as capable as possible in front of the visitor. Pound knew how to fence, but was still learning basic boxing movements: bringing the left foot forward and the right foot parallel, and turning his left hand into a boxing hand. Hemingway had not yet taught him to throw a left hook or shorten his right. When Lewis seemed to be waiting for Pound to be hurt, Hemingway avoided countering and kept Pound moving, then ended the session. The small scene shows Hemingway taking care with Pound's dignity as well as his technique.

Loyalty and literary aid

Hemingway's deepest admiration concerned Pound's conduct toward other writers. He describes him as someone who helped poets, painters, sculptors, and prose writers he believed in, but who would also help people in trouble even when he did not believe in their work. Hemingway regarded Pound's own writing as capable of perfection, and remembered his combination of kindness, irascibility, and sincere attachment to mistaken ideas as the qualities of a complicated, almost saintly figure.

That generosity acquired a practical form in Bel Esprit, which Pound founded with the wealthy American patron Natalie Barney. The plan was to collect a portion of what contributors earned and create a fund to release T. S. Eliot from his bank job. Pound told Hemingway that the work and hours left Eliot too little time to function as a poet. The scheme began with one specific need, though Pound imagined moving on afterward to help others as well. Literary solidarity here meant more than admiration: it meant trying to secure the time and material conditions a writer needed to work.

Hemingway joined the effort with humor and persistence. He called Eliot Major Eliot, pretending to confuse him with Major Douglas, whose economic ideas interested Pound. When Hemingway solicited contributions, friends sometimes asked what a major was doing in a bank or whether the military owed him a pension. Hemingway answered that these questions missed the point: a person either had Bel Esprit or did not. The campaign's small Greek temple, which Barney allowed Pound to feature in its brochure, became part of Hemingway's joking appeal. Beneath the teasing was a real commitment to Pound's project and to the poet it was meant to assist.

Trust under difficult circumstances

Pound's reliance on Hemingway became especially concrete when he prepared to leave Paris for Rapallo. Before leaving, he asked Hemingway to keep a large cold-cream jar of opium and give it to Ralph Cheever Dunning only when Dunning needed it. Hemingway describes the contents as dark, sticky, and strongly smelling of raw opium. Pound said he had bought it from an Indian chief; Hemingway suspected it might have come from the Hole in the Wall, a bar associated with deserters and drug sellers during and after the First World War. The purchase's origin remains Hemingway's conjecture, not a confirmed fact.

The charge followed an earlier crisis. Dunning, a poet who smoked opium and neglected food, had been found close to death on a mattress in the courtyard where Pound had his studio. Hemingway came when Pound urgently summoned him. He argued, partly through jokes about Dunning's speech and terza rima, that Dunning was not necessarily dying, and eventually persuaded Pound to put the matter in a physician's hands. Dunning was taken to a private clinic to be detoxified; Pound guaranteed the bills and sought help from other lovers of poetry. After those interventions, the opium jar remained with Hemingway as a conditional responsibility, not as an instruction to supply it routinely.

The condition was put to a test when Pound's concierge arrived one Sunday morning to report that Dunning had climbed onto the studio roof and refused to come down. Hemingway judged this to be a genuine emergency, found the jar, and set off up the street with the agitated concierge. The account stops as they go toward Dunning; it does not establish whether Hemingway delivered the opium. What it does establish is the weight of Pound's trust: Hemingway had to decide for himself what counted as need, while carrying out a friend's instruction in a situation shaped by illness and danger.

The character of the bond

Across these episodes, the friendship joins difference to service. Hemingway does not present himself as Pound's disciple: he records sharp disagreements about paintings and acknowledges that he sometimes withheld criticism out of courtesy. Nor does he idealize Pound as an infallible judge. His esteem instead grows from Pound's generosity, his willingness to turn literary concern into material assistance, and the confidence he places in Hemingway when a vulnerable person needs help.

The relationship's defining gestures are modest but consequential: teaching basic boxing, listening to Pound's plans for Eliot, soliciting money, and accepting the opium jar with its demand for judgment. Together they show a literary friendship operating as a network of attention and obligation. Pound's generosity extends outward to artists and people in distress; Hemingway, in turn, becomes one of the people through whom that generosity is enacted, even when the task carries uncertainty and risk.