A Fan Letter

A good cen­tu­ry almost to the day after its hav­ing been mailed, THE REVELATOR received the fol­low­ing let­ter. We cast no blame here on the much-maligned USPS as it was clear that the let­ter had been for­ward­ed numer­ous times and often to the wrong address. We mere­ly thank our postal work­ers for their per­se­ver­ance. After all, it is they who must bear the dai­ly weight of mail­bags stuffed with let­ters from our numer­ous fans.

Two items deserve note in regards to the let­ter. First, there is the obvi­ous con­fu­sion with regard to the gen­der of THE REVELATOR’s edi­tors in 1918, which was then under the purview of the cur­rent edi­tors’ great grand­moth­ers, not their great grand­fa­thers. More­over, Schaller’s great grand­moth­er Alice used the fam­i­ly name of Bell in 1918. But per­haps Pound received some pre­mo­ni­tion across the eddies of time, alert­ing him to the years that would pass before his let­ter was read by the cur­rent edi­tors, in which case his terms of address are cor­rect. Sec­ond, although Pound ref­er­ences a sub­mis­sion to THE REVELATOR, appar­ent­ly an arti­cle relat­ed to his inter­est in Bud­dhism, we can­not locate the draft in our files of accept­ed man­u­scripts, nor find ref­er­ence to it in our files of cor­re­spon­dence. As such, we can nei­ther repro­duce it nor reim­burse Pound’s heirs for what­ev­er mon­ey they may con­sid­er them­selves as owed.

Ezra Pound served as THE REVELATOR’s Lon­don war cor­re­spon­dent from 1914 – 1916.