双语·流动的盛宴 第十六章　一个邪恶的特务

An Agent of Evil

The last thing Ezra said to me before he left the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to Rapallo was, “Hem, I want you to keep this jar of opium and give it to Dunning only when he needs it.”

It was a large cold-cream jar and when I unscrewed the top the content was dark and sticky and it had the smell of very raw opium. Ezra had bought it from an Indian chief, he said, on the avenue de l’Opéra near the Boulevard des Italiens and it had been very expensive. I thought it must have come from the old Hole in the Wall bar which was a hangout for deserters and for dope peddlers during and after the first war. The Hole in the Wall was a very narrow bar with a red-painted façade, little more than a passageway, on the rue des Italiens. At one time it had a rear exit into the sewers of Paris from which you were supposed to be able to reach the catacombs. Dunning was Ralph Cheever Dunning, a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat. When he was smoking too much he could only drink milk and he wrote in terza riruce which endeared him to Ezra who also found fine qualities in his poetry. He lived in the same courtyard where Ezra had his studio and Ezra had called me in to help him when Dunning was dying a few weeks before Ezra was to leave Paris.

“Dunning is dying,” Ezra’s message said. “Please come at once.”

Dunning looked like a skeleton as he lay on the mattress and he would certainly have eventually died of malnutrition but I finally convinced Ezra that few people ever died while speaking in well rounded phrases and that I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza riruce and that I doubted even if Dante could do it. Ezra said he was not talking in terza riruce and I said that perhaps it only sounded like terza riruce because I had been asleep when he had sent for me. Finally after a night with Dunning waiting for death to come, the matter was put in the hands of a physician and Dunning was taken to a private clinic to be disintoxicated. Ezra guaranteed his bills and enlisted the aid of I do not know which lovers of poetry on Dunning’s behalf. Only the delivery of the opium in any true emergency was left to me. It was a sacred charge coming from Ezra and I only hoped I could live up to it and determine the state of a true emergency. It came when Ezra’s concierge arrived one Sunday morning at the sawmill yard and shouted up to the open window where I was studying the racing form, “Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre.”

Dunning having climbed to the roof of the studio and refusing categorically to come down seemed a valid emergency and I found the opium jar and walked up the street with the concierge who was a small and intense woman very excited by the situation.

“Monsieur has what is needed?” she asked me.

“Absolutely,” I said. “There will be no difficulty.”

“Monsieur Pound thinks of everything,” she said. “He is kindness personified.”

“He is indeed,” I said. “And I miss him every day.”

“Let us hope that Monsieur Dunning will be reasonable.”

“I have what it takes,” I assured her.

When we reached the courtyard where the studios were the concierge said, “He’s come down.”

“He must have known I was coming,” I said.

I climbed the outside stairway that led to Dunning’s place and knocked. He opened the door. He was gaunt and seemed unusually tall.

“Ezra asked me to bring you this,” I said and handed him the jar. “He said you would know what it was.”

He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You bastard.”

“Ezra said you might need it,” I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle.

“You are sure you don’t need it?” I asked.

He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door.

I picked up the jar which was only slightly cracked and put it in my pocket.

“He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound,” I said to the concierge.

“Perhaps he will be tranquil now,” she said.

“Perhaps he has some of his own,” I said.

“Poor Monsieur Dunning,” she said.

The lovers of poetry that Ezra had organized rallied to Dunning’s aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase “Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre” gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very great poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery.

“We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,” he once said to me. “The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.”