End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound Read online

  Photograph of H.D. by Ezra Pound

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Michael King

  End to Torment

  “Hilda’s Book” by Ezra Pound

  FOREWORD

  This book has been twenty years in the making, and in its brief compass recounts a friendship, a romance, and a collaboration in poetry reaching back to the beginning of the century. Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle began the century together, in Pennsylvania, and though their European odysseys carried them in separate directions, throughout the years they maintained their friendship. Their final correspondence recalls their earliest days together; H.D.’s last letters to Pound are signed “Dryad,” the name he had given her when they were young. H.D.’s daughter, Perdita Schaffner, has written of that time:

  They were young together, young poets together, innovators, close friends. It was he who suggested she use her initials as a byline. She felt that her own name invited puns and facetious jokes. H.D. it was, she was, from then on. They considered marriage. Their betrothal was tentative and unofficial, strongly opposed by her family, and eventually broken off …1

  The story of the professional collaboration of the two young poets has been told many times: how Pound contrived the school of “imagiste” poetry at least partly to describe the specific qualities of H.D.’s early poems and to help get those poems into print. Later, as she records in this memoir, the continuing influence of Pound’s Cantos helped her find a form for her own long poems, Trilogy and Helen in Egypt. And one of her last poems, “Winter Love,” written shortly after End to Torment, transfigures their early love into a mythical relation between Helen and Odysseus. Characteristically, H.D. apprehended a symbolic or universal pattern underlying her own experience and attempted in her writing to give that pattern expression.

  End to Torment, although an intensely personal memoir, shows some of the same techniques and habits of mind. She had written of the artist Undine to Norman Holmes Pearson, as she was composing the memoir: “I want to work this out as it touches (very distantly) my own shock at Ezra leaving for Europe—1908?”2 And she connects Pound’s political isolation and imprisonment, after World War II, with the reaction of the staid Philadelphia community to his return from Indiana, where he had resigned his position as an instructor at Wabash College after a minor scandal. Hilda was loyal to Ezra then, although when she asked him about the malicious rumors, he responded with his characteristic gifts of defiance and self-dramatization: “They say that I am bi sexual and given to unnatural lust.”

  At the time of writing End to Torment (1958), H.D. found herself, once again, nearly alone among her companions in her defense of her fellow poet. Her friends Bryher and Sylvia Beach understandably resented Pound’s wartime activities and sympathies and discouraged her from engaging in apologetics. She herself had no wish to add to the unhealthy publicity surrounding Pound, “on top of the journalists.”3 But while there was no haste for publication, her longtime friend and literary adviser Norman Holmes Pearson encouraged her to record her recollections at this crucial time, when the continuing efforts to arrange Pound’s release from federal custody seemed finally near success. The good news came even while the manuscript was in progress, in a letter from Pearson: “And now another canyon has been bridged by Ezra’s end to torment.”

  Another ally in the struggle to remember was H.D.’s doctor, Erich Heydt, whom she met at the Klinik Dr. Brunner in Kusnacht, Switzerland. His role in the recollections is well documented in the memoir itself. Most importantly, H.D. herself felt the need to recall and express memories that would otherwise be lost forever. She wrote to Pearson:

  [Your letter] has given me back the early American scene, when almost everyone I knew in Philadelphia was against him, after that Wabash college debacle. Erich always said I was “hiding something.” It was all that, my deep love for Ezra, complicated by family (& friends') lack of sympathy—my inner schism—outwardly, I went on, after E. (1908) went to Venice. I have been writing of this & Erich has been helping me … I did have a life in U.S.…

  I have E.P. books piled on my table. I had to try to hide them—& talk of everything but what most deeply concerned me. … I have been so happy writing the E.P. “story”—it must not be taken away from me … poor, poor Ezra. Only now, with the hope of his release, dare I go back & on. “It is so long ago,” I say to Erich. “No,” he says, “it is existentialist,” (his word) “eternal.”4

  The “existential” quality of End to Torment is emphasized by its journal form, which mingles memories with the circumstances of recollection, allowing H.D. to catch resonances which connect past and present. She remembers how the young Ezra reminded her of Paderewski, whom she had heard in concert as a girl; and a red-haired child glimpsed in a railway station, or a young pianist (Van Cliburn) on a tour of Europe, becomes the “spirit-child” that she and Ezra might have had. The form is similar to that used in her Tribute to Freud (New York, 1956; revised edition, Boston, 1974), a journal-essay on her psychoanalysis and her own mythic approach to psychic mysteries. End to Torment can be read as a personal sequel to Tribute to Freud, and ironically its methods contrast sharply with the resolutely impersonal, intellectual attitudes of Pound. H.D. refers deferentially and comically to a letter from Pound in which he decries her interest in the “pig sty” of Freudian psychology.

  Throughout the memoir runs H.D.’s conviction that her life and Ezra’s had been intertwined irrevocably since those early days when they walked together, “maenad and bassarid,” in the Pennsylvania woods, and he wrote for her poems imitating William Morris, Rossetti, and Swinburne, even Chaucer. (Twenty-five of those poems, handbound in vellum by Pound and titled “Hilda’s Book,” are first published here as an epilogue to her memoir of their first love.) Pound goaded her own ambition to write poetry, and his mock-Bohemian manner, his bad luck in his attempt to become a respectable professor, and his romantic departure for Europe under a cloud of disgrace seemed to fulfill the plangent historical novels they had read together. In a few years she followed him, for a summer visit that became a lifetime. “I was separated from my friends, my family, even from America, by Ezra.” Paradoxically, the recounting of Pound’s own confinement in St. Elizabeth’s and the imminence of his eventual release turn her thoughts homeward and tie her to America still: “I feel so violently American, in the pro-Ezra sense, though it has gone so badly with him.”

  As she was writing the journal that became End to Torment, her friends kept her supplied with news from America and reports on visits to the “Ezuversity,” as Pound called his circle at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Erich had stopped there on a cross-country tour; Richard Aldington, her former husband, sent an article from The Nation (“Weekend with Ezra Pound”) which treated Pound with some sympathetic understanding. She ran across another piece in the German periodical Merkur and read the correspondence in Poetry that defended Pound against political slander. The signs seemed to indicate that the atmosphere had changed enough, since the war, so that Pound could soon be set free. Her final entry quotes a letter from Pearson, recounting his farewell visit with the Pounds in a cabin on the Cristoforo Colombo, soon bound for Italy.

  H.D.’s version of the past and present is characteristically enigmatic and emotionally transcendent. “It is the feel of things rather than what people do. It runs through all the poets, really, of the world. One of us had been trapped. Now, one of us is free.” The journal ends with Pound’s freedom, and a rose given by Pearson in H.D.’s name “for the Paradiso.” In the subsequent months, H.D. sent the manuscript to Brunnenburg, Italy, for Pound’s comments, and he responded with a few suggestions and the note, “there is a gre
at deal of beauty.”5 A few days later he added a touching postscript: “Torment title excellent, but optimistic.”6

  Norman Holmes Pearson encouraged H.D. to complete the memoir, gave it a title, and was preparing it for publication when he died in 1975. (The manuscript is now a part of the Yale Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) H.D. had written to E.P., “I dedicated it to ‘Norman,’ he wanted me to write it.”7 There had been a false start some years before, when in 1950 she had written a short recollection for a book Peter Russell was editing for Pound’s sixty-fifth birthday. That was never published, and it is due to Pearson’s attentiveness and energy that we have this longer record of the friendship of two of the most important poets of the century. The publication also includes “Hilda’s Book” (which H.D. here calls “the Hilda Book”), the “little book” handbound by Pound and given to Hilda. She had thought it lost during the war in London, where it had been in the keeping of her friend Frances Gregg, but it was saved and eventually came into the hands of Peter Russell, who sold it to the Houghton Library of Harvard University. We are grateful for their permission to reprint it here.

  This publication is a project sponsored by the Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University. I am grateful to Donald Gallup and Louis Martz for their advice and assistance in the preparation of this text.

  M.K.

  Notes

  1 Perdita Schaffner, “Merano, 1962,” in Paideuma, vol. 4, no. 2/3, Fall-Winter 1975, p. 513.

  2 Letter from H.D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, June 3, 1958. In the Collection of American Literature [C.A.L.], Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  3 Letter from H.D. to Ezra Pound, January 2, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  4 Letter from H.D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, April 11, 1958. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  5 Letter from Ezra Pound to H.D., November 6, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  6 Letter from Ezra Pound to H.D., November 13, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  7 Letter from H.D. to Ezra Pound, January 2, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.

  end to torment

  for Norman

  [Küsnacht]1

  Friday

  March 7, 1958

  Snow on his beard. But he had no beard, then. Snow blows down from pine branches, dry powder on the red gold. “I make five friends for my hair, for one for myself.”

  Or did he wear a soft hat, a cap pulled down over his eyes? A mask, a disguise? His eyes are his least impressive feature. But am I wrong? They seem small; color? Pebble-green? Surely not an insignificant feature. Gothic, as they call it, moonlight drifts through these etched trees. Cold?

  Some sort of rigor mortis. I am frozen in this moment.

  Perhaps I held it all my life, it is what they called my “imagery”; even now, they speak of “verse so chiselled as to seem lapidary,” and they say, “She crystallizes—that is the right word.” They say, “that is the right word.” This moment must wait 50 years for the right word. Perhaps he had said it; perhaps in the frost of our mingled breath, the word was written. He was maybe nineteen, I was a year younger [1905—Ed.]. Immensely sophisticated, immensely superior, immensely rough-and-ready, a product not like any of the brothers and brothers’ friends—and boys we danced with (and he danced badly). One would dance with him for what he might say. It didn’t matter, with a lot of people around. Here, in the winter woods, it seemed significant.

  It seemed at the same time, infinitely trivial—was he showing off? Why must he say it? He said, “She said, ‘Have you ever kissed a girl before?’ I said, ‘Never under the Rock of Gibraltar.’ ”

  No need, then, to ask the question. First kisses? In the woods, in the winter—what did one expect? Not this. Electric, magnetic, they do not so much warm, they magnetize, vitalize. We need never go back. Lie down under the trees. Die here. We are past feeling cold; isn’t that the first symptom of rigor mortis?

  They used to say, “Run around, children; it’s all right as long as you don’t stop running.” Had I stopped running?

  Stop running for a moment, if you dare call him back.

  There are very few left who know what he looked like then. There is a hint of a young, more robust Ignace Paderewski2 or even of the tawny Swinburne, if his frail body had ever reached maturity. But this young (already) iconoclast is rougher, tougher than the Polish poet or the Border bard. It is whispered among us that he “writes,” but he has not spoken of this to me yet. “Where are you? Come back—,” is shouted by the crowd above on the icy toboggan-run. “Shout back,” I say and he gives a parody of a raucous yodel, then “Haie! Haie! Io,” (you have read this in his poems). He seems instinctively to have snapped back into everyday existence. He drags me out of the shadows.

  March 8

  Now, no one will understand this. They swarm out of their burrows. “But you must write about him.” But what I write, they don’t like. Erich [Heydt]3 calls them Ameisen, I’m not quite sure of this, but of course it’s “ants” in my little dictionary. Erich says he wants the ants or Ameisen to write a commentary on the Cantos. There are selections from them in a new German-English edition that he got in Zürich. “Do you want it?” he said and handed me the paperbook. The face looked out at me from the dark reflection of the paperbook cover. I liked the feel of the cover. The face, full-face, bronze against the dark background, looked at me, a reflection in a metal mirror. “No,” I said and handed the book back. “But there is about you,” said Erich, “here; Eva Hesse says that he invented the Imagist title or Formel4 to explain the verses of the young poet—poetess—here—you.” But I did not take the book. “I read that somewhere before,” I said. Is this a reprint and not new, of the book I had, maybe three years ago? I had many of the books and stacks of papers and pamphlets but I sent most of them back to Vevey, to be stored with my other books in a friend’s house. I read the Cantos or read at them or in them. Norman Pearson kept asking me to explain references. I gave it all up. Then I read an article, “Weekend with Ezra Pound,”5 and it all came back. I asked Joan [Waluga] to get me the new edition of the old book in Zürich.

  There is the Wyndham Lewis Tate Gallery portrait in the “Weekend” by David Rattray, in The Nation of November 16, 1957. Wyndham Lewis used to come to our little flat in Kensington to borrow Richard Aldington’s razor. This annoyed Richard. Ezra and Dorothy had a slightly larger flat across the narrow hall. I found the door open one day before they were married, and Ezra there. “What—what are you doing?” I asked. He said he was looking for a place where he could fence with Yeats. I was rather taken aback when they actually moved in. It was so near. But we went soon after to Hampstead, to a larger flat that a friend had found us.

  After that we did not see much of Ezra and the Kensington group, Olivia Shakespear (Dorothy’s mother), Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Hueffer (as he then was) and the rest of them. The 1914 war had begun. Richard and I were married in October 1913 after what Ezra called our “unofficial honeymoon in Italy.”

  I saw Ezra, on the way back from Capri-Naples, in Venice that year.

  He must show me a church. We darted in and out of alleys or calles, across bridges, narrow passageways, the labyrinth. He was “tracing / the lay-out for the Labyrinth,” from the Ramon Guthrie poem6 [on Pound, in the same issue of The Nation]. It was very hot—May, I think. The church was cool, with a balcony of icy mermaids, Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Years afterwards, I went again and I carried the votive card of Santa Maria that the sacristan had given me, in my handbag, with another (St. Mark’s) token picture, during the [World] War II years in London. Ezra was in Rapallo, as we all know.

  When I came here to Küsnacht, May 1946, after the war, I cleared out the grubby contents of my bag. Why did I tear up the pictures? Well, they were frayed and old, as I was, and I must find new talismans. I found them in my writing. I wrote
feverishly, but the real content of my Ezra story was not touched on or only brushed in lightly.

  Mr. Morley, one of the guests here, asked me if I knew Gaudier-Brzeska7—or he said, a Polish sculptor in London who was killed in the first war. How did we come to talk at all? I have coffee downstairs in the dining room, the days that Dr. Heydt doesn’t come in. I had never mentioned Ezra, except to Heydt and Joan—now some door opens. Mr. Morley knew about him.

  Mr. Morley is a tall, depressed American abstract artist, with a pleasant voice. He talked of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot. All this world, these people, come into consciousness. Today, he brings me a picture. “You must keep it,” he said. It is a blue animal, lion, padding behind symbolic bars that might be trees. It is “The Poet in the Iron Cage” (“Der Dichter irn Eisernen Käfig”). The design is hypnotizing. Joan said that she would fasten up the picture for me and came upstairs to find a place for it.

  I am anonymous here or try to be. But talking and thinking of Ezra creates a human, humanizing bond. But this has only happened lately; I mean this simple, natural approach has come to me since reading and re-reading the “Weekend.”

  March 9

  Joan looked and looked at the picture when we had our usual, ritual glass of Chianti before dinner. She had tacked it on the wall above the Lausanne bookcases that Bryher had had sent over for me. I see the lion from my bed as I write here, after breakfast. Joan said, “It looks like a water buffalo.” She said, “There are birds—now, I see another bird.” I don’t see the lion’s head from here, this might be a Minotaur. He seems to burst out of his cage. It is again, “stalking, pacing / as done by jaguar or ounce / in Zagreus’ days,” from the Guthrie poem.