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MR. B.H. DIAS AND MR. WYNDHAM LEWIS
'I have asked A[gnes} B{edford]. to go through files of N{ew} Age, Egoist etc. and collect anything of interest, and to submit result to you for expurgation'. (1 1 November 1922).
Pound was writing from his new home in Paris to Cher W., in other words Pound's friend Wyndham Lewis. The next line was an inside joke: ('Dias remarks, if there are any good ones, can be transferred to me'.) As Pound slyly insinuated, his London-based amateur researcher, the pianist Agnes Bedford had plenty of quotable material to chose from. Pound's immediate purpose was to persuade the Little Review to run a special 'Lewis number'. The project fell apart, evidenced in the sizable gap in Timothy Materer's invaluable collection of Pound and Lewis's correspondence between 1 1 November (reference 1 I4.TLS-2) and Pound's letter of 6 September 1923 where he attempts to interest Lewis in contributing to their friend T.S. Eliot's literary review The Criterion. (I 15. TLS-I)
Pound as B.H. Dias makes his appearance in the New Age on 22 November 1917. Pound immediately establishes his mission is to direct the public towards worthwhile contemporary art, including artists the public may struggle to appreciate (Lewis and others). Describing a show at Heal's Gallery Dias disregards he can't show the pictures (this is the New Age, not the Illustrated London News) and taking the reader virtually by the hand accompanies her or him around the exhibition. Dias uses humour to make his point. His tone is scathing. He makes an ambiguous reference to the art-world star Picasso: 'With this allowance and due pleasure therefore deducted, we find the familiar patchiness, blurriness, stickiness; or, in detail, we discover that No. 52 is a sticky blurr, No. 53 a blurr (greasy); 54, a blurr (muddy); 55, blurr pure and simple; 56, blurr (sticky); 57 is a sectionised blurr, a rather soggy, sectionised blurr leaning to the left and to Picasso; 58, a still muddier blurr...'
Dias spends the rest of the column reviewing a small show of sculptures by Jacob Epstein. We expect Pound to avoid feeding Epstein's critics: nonetheless, Pound-as-Dias complains the show at the Leicester Gallery is repetitive and some of the work is shop-worn. However, he picks...