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PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLE AND UNIQUE SUCCESS." Pound published Eliot in Blast, Poetry, and the Catholic Anthology. However, Pound's efforts to get Joyce's A Portrait or his own Lustra published were not going well. His frustration was growing, and he was further alienating others, finding himself more and more isolated. Never the less, he became the London editor of The Little Review in 1917. Now finally he had a publication in which he could publish himself, Joyce, and others. The satisfaction was not lasting though, as Pound's disenchantment with England grew and his political ideas got more twisted. Major C. H. Douglas' doctrine of Social Credit became his cause. The dogma of the theory gave fuel to Pound's belief that the "system" was against him. He wrote his attack on British culture, the Hell Cantos. In correspondence to Williams in September of 1920, Pound wrote "And now there is no longer any intellectual life in England save what centres in this eight by ten pentagonal room."7
Pound spent the next few years in Paris. In Paris he became involved with the Dadists while he continued to work. It was here that he began his editing of Eliot's The Waste Land, and here, influenced by Joyce's Ulysses, which Sylvia Beach had published under the imprint of Shakespeare & Company, that he continued work on the Cantos completing the rough draft for the first volume by the summer of 1922. That same year as he made one of his restless trips to Italy, he announced that "The Christian Era was over and that the 'Pound Era' had begun."8 The only real new friendship Pound made during this time was with Ernest Hemmingway. Hemmingway taught him boxing, and he tried to instruct Hemmingway in writing. The two also toured the Italian battlefields together. A young American violinist, Olga Rudge, who was in Paris at this time also attracted Pound's attention, and they became lifelong lovers. In 1923 Gertrude Stein and Pound met. She was not impressed, but Pound did not care about her opinion of his ideas. By now he was further alienated from the mainstream even of expatriates, as disillusioned with Paris as London, and absorbed with "The Pound Era." In October of 1924 Dorothy and Ezra Pound moved to Italy.
After a few months in hotels, the Pounds settled in an apartment in Via Marsala overlooking the Bay of Tigulio. Work continued on the Cantos, and he started The Exile. Although well on his way to becoming a Fascist, he had not settled on that exact course yet. As late as the spring of 1927 he still expressed an interest in Fascism as well as the Russian revolution, both totalitarian philosophies of course, since Pound despised Western capitalism. As the Twenties moved forward, the only close friendship Pound retained was with Yeats, whom he saw often.
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