Ezra Pound left Paris for Italy and gave Hemingway a cold-cream jar of opium to give to a poet, in an emergency.

The poet was Ralph Cheever Dunning.

An emergency came and Hemingway delivered the jar. The poet threw it at him.

I can't explain this. Hemingway thought he might have confused him with an agent of evil, or of the police.

Evan Shipman told Hemingway he believed there should be more mystery. More unambitious writers, more unpublished poems.

"There is, of course," Shipman said, "the problem of sustenance."

The problem of sustenance is a separate problem from writing good poems, I have found. You can write the best poems in the world and they aren't going to be published, and, if they are published, they won't bring you a sou.

To me, most of literature is about the problem of sustenance.