A Moveable Feast

When Ezra Pound leaves the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to Rapallo, he gives Hemingway a jar of opium and instructs that he only give it to Dunning when he needs it. Ralph Cheever Dunning is “a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat” (64). Pound had bought this opium at a bar called the Old Hole in the Wall, where deserters and dope peddlers drink during and after the first war. It is up to Hemingway’s judgment when to give Dunning opium, and such an emergency soon arises. Ezra’s concierge arrives at the sawmill to find Dunning having climbed onto the roof. By the time Hemingway reaches the top of the sawmill, Dunning had already returned to his room. Hemingway still gives him the jar of opium, but Dunning throws it back in anger. The poetry patrons Pound had contacted soon come to Dunning’s aid. Looking back Hemingway ponders if Dunning disliked him or took him for some evil agent. A few years later Hemingway speaks to Evan Shipman about Dunning. Shipman says that Dunning’s poetry should be left a mystery because the “The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time” (66).