“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 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 good 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 'The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time.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.”
―
Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast
