[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
I have left myself very short of time this morning, after getting up very late and finding some unexpected matters, though not very important, to deal with here. I shall write fully on Monday, and shall have one or two matters to discuss, on which I want, if not your advice – as there may not be time for that – but at least your confidence. After your last letter, from Chicago, I am naturally very anxious for news from you when you get to Boston; and I hope that I may have a letter from there at the beginning of the week. I am very glad to know that you are to have a companion, and I trust a congenial one, at Brimmer Street. AndScripps College, Claremont;a5 I am not quite clear as to how the future of Scripps College – the possibility of another invitation – was left.
The enclosed may amuse you, at any rate give you a glimpse of some of the people with whom I used to be associated.1 It seems very long ago now, and it is odd to find the people one knew twelve years ago being treated as kind of historical datum, like the ‘Oscar Wilde Period’ or something of that sort. The account is substantially accurate, though of course highly and journalistically coloured. IrisBarry, IrisTSE on;a1 Barry was a girl from Birmingham – Wyndham Lewis always maintained that she was a Jewess, and I think he was right – who wrote something that Pound like[d], and who came to seek her fortune in literature in London on his encouragement. Nothing much came of that – she drifted about and finally married a journalist named Alan Porter; left him, I believe, wrote reviews of cinema with some success, went to Hollywood, came back, wrote a novel which I never read, and I have [?not] heard of her for some years.2
I wonder, when I write scraps like this, whether you get enough satisfaction from the punctual envelope, to make up for the poverty of the contents!
1.IrisBarry, Irison TSE;a2n Barry, ‘The Ezra Pound Period’, The Bookman, Oct 1931, 159–71. ‘Tall, lean and hollow checked, dressed in the formal manner appropriate to his daytime occupation in Lloyd’s Bank – that was T. S. Eliot, generally silent but with a smile that was as shy as it was friendly, and rather passionately but mutely adored by the three or four young females who had been allowed in because of some crumb of promise in painting or verse’ (165).
2.IrisBarry, Iris Barry (1895–1969), Birmingham-born film critic and cinéaste, came to know Ezra Pound in London in the 1920s. With Wyndham Lewis, she had two children. She wrote on film for the Spectator, and for the Daily Mail, 1925–30; and co-founded the Film Society. After emigrating to the USA, she launched in 1932 the film study department of the Museum of Modern Art; she took American citizenship in 1941, and was a book critic for the New York Herald Tribune. Her publications include Splashing into Society (novel, 1923) Let’s go to the pictures (1926), and D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (1940). In 1923 she married the American poet Alan Porter (1899–1942) – author of a well-received collection, The Signature of Pain (1930) – who was working as assistant literary editor of the Spectator; but the marriage did not last. See further Leslie L. Hankins, ‘Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste: Forming Film Culture in London 1924–6: the Adelphi, the Spectator, the Film Society, and the British Vogue’, Modernism/modernity 11: 3 (2004), 488–515; Haidee Wasson, ‘The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and Iris Barry’, Film History 18: 2 (2006), 154–62.
2.IrisBarry, Iris Barry (1895–1969), Birmingham-born film critic and cinéaste, came to know Ezra Pound in London in the 1920s. With Wyndham Lewis, she had two children. She wrote on film for the Spectator, and for the Daily Mail, 1925–30; and co-founded the Film Society. After emigrating to the USA, she launched in 1932 the film study department of the Museum of Modern Art; she took American citizenship in 1941, and was a book critic for the New York Herald Tribune. Her publications include Splashing into Society (novel, 1923) Let’s go to the pictures (1926), and D. W. Griffith: American Film Master (1940). In 1923 she married the American poet Alan Porter (1899–1942) – author of a well-received collection, The Signature of Pain (1930) – who was working as assistant literary editor of the Spectator; but the marriage did not last. See further Leslie L. Hankins, ‘Iris Barry, Writer and Cinéaste: Forming Film Culture in London 1924–6: the Adelphi, the Spectator, the Film Society, and the British Vogue’, Modernism/modernity 11: 3 (2004), 488–515; Haidee Wasson, ‘The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and Iris Barry’, Film History 18: 2 (2006), 154–62.