Ezra Pound
Lived here · 1921–1924
Ezra Pound's Paris base — the courtyard studio where he built the furniture himself and ran the movement's business, a few doors from Hemingway's flat at No. 113.
70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
Still standing
Outside only
Private flats
Ezra Pound's courtyard studio — the workshop of modernism's impresario during his Paris years, a few doors down the street from Ernest Hemingway's later flat above the sawmill.
- 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 75006 Paris
- 1921–1924
Illustration
The place, briefly
When Pound moved from London to Paris in 1921, he took a ground-floor studio at the back of a courtyard at 70 bis rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and furnished it his own way — building the chairs and tables himself, hanging the walls with his own history of the movement he had run from two capitals. The street already had an artists' pedigree stretching back to Whistler's day; Pound gave it three years at the center of literary Europe.
The studio was less a home than a switchboard. Manuscripts moved through it for the transatlantic review, young George Antheil's scores were championed from it, the Bel Esprit scheme to free T. S. Eliot from his bank was hatched in it, and a young Hemingway climbed the street from the sawmill flat at No. 113 to trade boxing lessons for the most valuable editing of his life — a debt he acknowledged, for once, without irony. A Moveable Feast gives the studio a whole chapter.
Pound left Paris for Rapallo in 1924, and the courtyard went back to being a courtyard. The building stands; nothing marks the studio. Its neighbors tell the story — Hemingway's flat up the street, the Closerie and the Luxembourg a short walk in either direction.
In their words
The studio where he lived with his wife Dorothy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was as poor as Gertrude Stein’s studio was rich. It had very good light and was heated by a stove and it had paintings by Japanese artists that Ezra knew.
Ezra wanted me to teach him to box and it was while we were sparring late one afternoon in his studio that I first met Wyndham Lewis.
Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble.
Key facts
- Ezra Pound's ground-floor courtyard studio, 1921–1924
- Built by Pound himself — a point every visitor's memoir mentions
- Whistler's old street; Hemingway's sawmill flat was at No. 113
- The setting of the Pound chapter in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast
- A private building; no plaque marks the studio
Documentary photographs
In images
Timeline
Pound arrives from London and takes the courtyard studio.
The switchboard years — the transatlantic review, Antheil, Bel Esprit, and Hemingway's editing lessons.
Pound leaves Paris for Rapallo; the center of his operation goes with him.
Hemingway's A Moveable Feast fixes the studio in the era's literature.
The building stands unmarked on a quiet street.
On the map
Writers who knew this place
Within walking distance
113 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
Ernest Hemingway's second flat, above a working sawmill — where the journalism stopped, The Sun Also Rises was finished, and the first marriage ended.
Visit the place
La Closerie des Lilas
Ernest Hemingway's favorite writing spot, where he drafted much of The Sun Also Rises. Quieter than the other cafés, which was the point.
Visit the place
La Rotonde
The café every taxi driver delivered Americans to — the novel's driest Montparnasse joke, and before that the painters' living room, where the patron took drawings for drinks.
Visit the place
Black Manikin Press (4 Rue Delambre)
Edward Titus's Montparnasse bookshop and small press, where D. H. Lawrence settled terms on 5 April 1929 for the cheap Paris edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover that finally undercut the pirates.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.