End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound Read online

  “You mean, Ezra told people that you were engaged to him?” “I don’t know—only Walter said, ‘I think I ought to tell you, though I promised Mrs. Shakespear not to—don’t let her know or anyone. But there is an understanding. Ezra is to marry Dorothy Shakespear.20 He shouldn’t tell other people or imply to other people that he—that you—.’ ” “Did you speak to Ezra of this?” “No.”

  “What exactly did he say to people?” “O—I don’t know.…” Drifting. Drifting. Meeting with him alone or with others at the Museum tea room. We all read in the British Museum reading room. Dark walls and statues that looked dingy. Frances had gone home. I could wait till my parents came. My father, at 70, had retired from the University. My mother wrote, “We could meet in Genoa.” I had my own allowance now. Drifting? “But Dryad,” (in the Museum tea room), “this is poetry.” He slashed with a pencil. “Cut this out, shorten this line. ‘Hermes of the Ways’ is a good title. I’ll send this to Harriet Monroe of Poetry. Have you a copy? Yes? Then we can send this, or I’ll type it when I get back. Will this do?” And he scrawled “H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom of the page.

  I was hiding. There was the heroic sequence, those last years in London. “What is it you are hiding?” Erich Heydt insisted. I was hiding myself and Ezra, standing before my father, caught “in the very act” you might say. For no “act” afterwards, though biologically fulfilled, had had the significance of the first demi-vierge embraces. The significance of “first love” can not be overestimated. If the “first love” is an uncoordinated entity, Angel-Devil—or Angel-Daemon or Daimon, Séraphitus-Séraphita—what then? Find a coordinated convention, Man-Hero who will compensate, complete the picture. By what miracle does the mariage du del et de la terre find consummation? It filled my fantasies and dreams, my prose and poetry for ten years. But in the end, intellectual and physical perfection, the laurel wreath of the acclaimed achievement must be tempered, balanced, re-lived, re-focused or even sustained by the unpredictable, the inchoate, challenged by a myth, a legend—the poet (Vidal, shall we say), changed to Wolf or Panther, hunted down and captured.

  There is a stir of dust from old leaves

  Will you trade roses for acorns …21

  March 16

  “Goodbye Dave, you’ll come over Christmas Day, won’t you?” This “Weekend with Ezra Pound” by Rattray seems to me the first human personal presentation of Ezra that I have seen. True, I had lost touch, was “hiding,” but I had newspapers and periodicals showered on me during the years. The German was too difficult but I felt they cared—but was that a political dodge? I asked a young German whom I met when Erich Heydt had his apartment here in Geduld. The boy said, “No—we read him for himself, in East and in West Germany.” Still, I was not satisfied.

  Erich said, “I was disappointed that Ezra did not give your address to the Ratt—.” “Don’t call him the Ratt—but maybe Ratt doesn’t mean rat in your language.” “It’s easier, than Ratt-ray—doch, doch—he gave Richard’s name, anyhow, though he said not to mention E.P. to him, ‘just be the jeune homme modeste.’ Why doesn’t he mention you?” “He must know that I don’t see many people—.” “But it says the Ratt-ray is in Europe, a Fulbright scholar in France. He could come to Zürich. Or are you afraid that he might make fun of you? Of us? What did they think, the girl with the double chin, the double chins, sketching, and the boy with the coarse features, and the one with a face, slippery as if modelled in soap?” “You seem to know the article by heart.” “Wouldn’t these visitors be hurt? The girl, for instance—he said he thought when he first saw her, that she was a patient from another ward.”

  Just now, hearing Solveigslied on my radio, I am reminded of how Ezra took me to see Richard Mansfield’s Peer Gynt in Philadelphia. Solveig—Penelope—spinning, weaving. I couldn’t remember how the story ended. I remembered the button-molder and Peer’s escape. He wasn’t melted down again into an unrecognizable nonentity. He remained an entity, he is recognizable. Mad? He always was eccentric. “O, Ezra Pound’s crazy” was the verdict of my schoolgirl contemporaries. “He wanted them to throw him in the pond.” So the story was going around from the beginning, but I forgot it till it cropped up again after the incident that had lost him his job. Spinning? Weaving? Then, I remembered the end of the play, an ancient Solveig in a white wig, a decrepit Peer Gynt in a white wig, meet in the doorway of the original Solveig cottage, on the edge of a picturesque pasteboard forest. No, this is something different.

  Dr. Erich Heydt injected me with Ezra, jabbing a needle into my arm, “You know Ezra Pound, don’t you?” This was almost five years ago. It took a long time for the virus or the anti-virus to take effect. But the hypodermic needle did its work or didn’t it? There was an incalculable element. There was something. To say nothing “happened” in Heydt’s studio apartment is to put it very crudely. “Tired? Rest on the couch—.” “No.” The very idea of a studio couch and tenderness brought with it a cloud, not a crowd of memories. “Why don’t you tell me?” “I’m always telling you.” “Yes—but you’re hiding something.”

  “What is it? What is it?” We were running to catch the train. “But what does it matter if you miss it—you can take the next one—.” I had stopped suddenly, leaning against a wall, gesturing as for a taxi. He caught my wrist, “There’s plenty of time. You’re hysterical. Something’s upset you—.” “It reminds me, running along a town street—a town—Philadelphia—.” “You’ve something there but you won’t tell me—.” “I can’t tell you. I don’t know what it is.” Room is made for us—but only just—on the end of a crowded station bench. He took my hands in his. “Must you hold my hands like this?” “Yes.” The crowd surged around us. “There’s sure to be someone from Küsnacht—to report Herr Doktor Heydt and Madame A., huddled on a bench together.” No. There was no one from anywhere, we were enclosed in another dimension. A small male child with short red-gold curls poked into the market basket of the woman beside us. Where did he come from? How did he get there? It is only a moment. The inevitable parent emerges, moving against the crowd. Parent? Guardian? He is tall and gaunt. I can not take it in. He isn’t there or I am not there but the market basket is adequately materialized and the typical Hausfrau beside us on the station bench. “I’m sorry, I said you were hysterical. I was just worried.” The train was rumbling nearer. “Should you go back?” “No—I shouldn’t.” But I pushed forward with the crowd. “Tomorrow?” he calls up to the open window of the moving train.

  March 17

  Erich asked me if my parents liked his parents. “They only met a few times but yes—yes,” I said, “in a purely conventional way. Mrs. Pound was a beautiful woman, well-bred, somewhat affected in manner. One was inclined to be embarrassed and baffled by her little witticisms, her epigrams, as one so often was by Ezra’s. Mr. Pound was hearty, informal, very kind. He was a government assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. He invited a group of us to visit the inner sanctum. He showed us minute weights and measures, explained superficially the analysis of the gold—“There,” and he unlocked a heavy door—it seems it was a door to an iron-bound cupboard, rather than a safe; anyway, there were stacks of gold bars—“Here,” and coins were piled in neat rows, “will you help yourself,” chuckling heartily.

  Has anyone ever noted, reported this, or even known this? It seems to me that Homer Pound’s government job in Philadelphia played an extravagant part in Ezra’s later compulsions. Usury? Usura. Ezra was at one time, it seems, obsessed with this word. I followed these Canto references with difficulty. I don’t mean that Ezra wanted the gold for himself. He wanted to change the world with it. Can one change the world with it?

  Gold on her head, and gold on her feet,

  And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet,

  And a golden girdle round my sweet;

  Ah! qu’elle est belle, La Marguerite.

  He read me William Morris in an orchard under blossoming—yes, they must have been blossoming—apple trees.


  March 18

  It was Ezra who really introduced me to William Morris. He literally shouted “The Gilliflower of Gold” in the orchard. How did it go? Hah! hah! la belle janne giroflee. And there was “Two Red Roses across the Moon” and “The Defence of Guenevere.” It was at this time that he brought me the Séraphita and a volume of Swedenborg—Heaven and Hell? Or is that Blake? He brought me volumes of Ibsen and of Bernard Shaw. He brought me Whistler’s Ten O’Clock. He scratched a gadfly, in imitation of Whistler’s butterfly, as a sort of signature in his books at that time. He was a composite James McNeill Whistler, Peer Gynt and the victorious and defeated heroes of the William Morris poems and stories. He read me “The Haystack in the Floods” with passionate emotion.

  He brought me the Portland, Maine, Thomas Mosher reprint of the Iseult and Tristram story.22 He called me Is-hilda and wrote a sonnet a day; he bound them in a parchment folder. There was a series of Yogi books, too.

  Actually, the gadfly hieroglyph was suggested by a book of that name. I do not know who wrote The Gadfly.23 It was a novel about Italian patriots or partisans, as we now call them, or some Risorgimento incident. The word “zany” came in. I have never seen it before. The hero gets mixed up with some travelling actors—or fair or circus? I don’t remember. Disguise? Escape? It is a bitter, tragic hero, this Gadfly. Does the story predict or foreshadow the last episodes and the Pisan legend?

  Joan just came in for my letters; to my surprise, she remembers The Gadfly—“Rather before my time, mother had it.” She found the author, Ethel Voynich, in my Reader’s Encyclopedia. She does not remember any circus or fair, but she has the same impression that I have of some grim, involved, political tragedy.

  I see from Eva Hesse’s note in the German-English Ezra Pound, Dichtung und Prosa24 that it is Wabash College, Indiana, that was the scene of “this girl he found” that Erich spoke of. “Were you jealous of this girl he found who slept in his bed?” Ezra was only four months there. But I must have addressed a good many letters to Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana. I confused it with Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, where he was a student for two years. Is this important?

  It perhaps helps to clarify the cloud of memories. It is the emotional content that matters. I wrote, “The perfection of the fiery moment can not be sustained—or can it?” Erich says of himself that he is the Spiegel, the mirror, the burning-glass that “catches the light all round.” Yes, he gets the situation ins rechte Licht, but I can not explain to him how painful it is to me at times to retain the memory of the “fiery moment.”

  Maybe Erich catches it in the Spiegel—but he has only to reflect it. I have to substantiate it.

  March 19

  I am walking on air, though I can hardly walk at all, due to a regrettable bone fracture. Over a year ago, I slipped on a small rug on an overwaxed, highly polished floor. Ezra wrote, “ ’ow did you ’appen to step on that thar soap”—or something of that sort. He kept writing, urging me to do some Greek translations. I found his letters almost indecipherable or untranslatable—and this made me and Richard Aldington too, to whom he was writing at the time, very sad. But the “actual” Ezra only manifested with the reading and re-reading of the “Weekend.” And now Joan has discovered a cache of his books, behind other books in my cupboard. So now we find the original Dichtung und Prosa, pencilled by Erich Heydt, 1954, in the H.D. and Imagist section.

  The original lot of the early books must still be in London or with my friend Bryher in Vaud, but there is a ripe crop here; a huge Cantos volume, Rock Drill, American and English editions of Confucius, the Sophokles [Women of Trachis] and several of the beautiful little English-Italian books of the Pesce d’Oro, Milan, sent me by Mary de Rachewiltz.

  Facsimile of early manuscript poem with Ezra Pound’s “gadfly” signature

  “Why are you so excited when you read these notes to me?” said Erich this afternoon. “I don’t know—I don’t know—it’s the fiery moment but it’s all so long ago.” “It has no time,” said Erich, “it’s the existentialist” ( word that I can never cope with) “moment. It has no time, it’s out of time, eternal.”

  March 21

  I was baffled, puzzled, bewildered. I see references, in “Weekend,” to certain Canto omissions or black-outs. I must check on this. It is difficult to check up on separate sections, without becoming entangled in the whole. Soon after seeing some of these original or early Canto variations, in the Pounds’ Holland Place apartment in Kensington, opposite our own flat, we moved. Black-out. Just a memory of a shock at the look, the lines, the words on the newly printed pages that Ezra showed us. Mrs. Shakespear’s brother said, “Why must he write about things that we all do every day and don’t talk about.”

  Chthonian darkness—the black-out. I don’t pretend to understand. We have gone through some Hell together, separately.

  March 22

  Am I mad then, or is he? I could not answer the question but handed the letter to Dr. Heydt to read. This was in the beginning when I did not know Erich Heydt so well. He laughed at the letter—“What does he mean by telling you to crawl out of your pig stye?”25 I didn’t know what Ezra meant. I don’t know now. I read in Motive and Method26 today of various Canto references to Circe. In time, I will look them up.

  March 23

  Piere Vidal, the troubadour of whom I have spoken, “dressed in wolf-skins for the love of Lady Loba de Peugnautier (whose name means wolf). …” I quote Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, O.S.F., from her contribution to the series of essays on the Cantos, Motive and Method. Sister Bernetta refers to this madness as “lycanthropy.” I follow her exposition, “The Metamorphoses of Ezra Pound,” with admiration and respect. Myself, I have so far, felt too involved in the legend to judge fairly, or rather to see clearly.

  I see, but perhaps not clearly, the poet appropriating the attributes of the famous founder of Rome—or rather of the legendary Wolf (Lupus or Lupa) who rescued and saved that founder. Is our Pard or Panther a Savior, a Lover rather than an outlaw, an iconoclast? Was it love of the incomparable “Lady Loba” that lured him to Radio Rome and that in the end, was his undoing? But no and yes. He is far from lost. He is centralized and accessible. A thousand Ameisen, ant hill upon ant hill of provincial colleges, have had a curious insemination. Has this ever happened in the history of America or anywhere?

  Lycanthropy, a kind of madness in which the patient fancies himself to be a wolf; Lycanthrope, a wolf-man; wolf, Greek lykos—I read in my Chambers dictionary. The word lykos, as a word, recalls the Lynx, so poignantly invoked in the famous section of the Pisan Canto LXXIX.

  March 24

  Then Frobenius;27 another mystery is partly solved in Motive and Method in an essay, “Pound and Frobenius” by Guy Davenport. Ezra kept writing me to get Frobenius. It was when I was in Lausanne, soon after Ezra was installed in St. Elizabeth’s. No bookshop had Frobenius and they seemed never to have heard of him. I imagined Frobenius as a Swede, a mystic, perhaps unconsciously relating him to Swedenborg and the early books that Ezra brought me. It turned out, after a number of letters between us, that he wanted me to get Frobenius for myself, not to send to him, as I had at first imagined. Now, I find that Frobenius was a sort of Kultur archeologist and that Ezra had at one time made a sort of Odysseus-Pound alter-ego of him. Frobenius had a connection with Frankfurt but of “incredible obscurity,” to use the phrase of the author of this essay. Ezra Pound and Carl Jung, the author states, were the chief enthusiasts for Frobenius’ work on primitive cultures.

  We find oddly, then, another clue to Ezra’s divided loyalties. If Italy is the “Lady Loba,” the Lupa mother-symbol, is not Germany by way of Frobenius (the Odysseus of Ezra’s fantasy) the giant father? Of course, we need not remind our readers, if we ever have any, that his father’s name was Homer.

  These clues that I personally find so fascinating are jeered at by the supersophisticated. I painfully got together some notes in this naif manner after being urged and urged to pay some
tribute to the “Maestro” for a birthday (65?). The short article was judged “not suitable” but was not even returned to me.28

  March 25

  There is the incident of the “Hilda Book.” I heard it was up for sale or had been sold. Is this a forgery or is it the Is-hilda set of poems that Ezra bound together in a parchment cover and gave me? Erich was very angry about the article. “You had no copy? But I thought you always made copies. Surely, this is a theft, a crime. Can you not get a lawyer to see to it? Why didn’t you at the time—and the ‘Hilda Book’—” of which I had just told him.

  I explained to Erich that I had been busy then, in Lausanne and Lugano, on my prose and poetry, dealing with, or directly or indirectly inspired by, the dramatic war years in London. I was annoyed, no doubt emotionally shaken at the thought of the “Hilda Book,” for the only possible clue that I could imagine to its appropriation was by way of Frances, of whom I have written. She was killed with her mother and daughter in the Plymouth Blitz. A friend of hers had written me of it and of certain of his own books that were found. But I knew that Andrew [Gibson] would have been the first to tell me of this book, which possibly I might have given to Frances, so very long ago, after parting with Ezra.

  March 26

  “Was Andrew her husband?” Erich asked me this afternoon, when I read him this last entry. “No, no, no—Louis had faded out years and years ago. Andrew was the godfather of her son Oliver.” “Where was Oliver?” “He was allegedly in the Navy, but Andrew could not trace him, and I wrote and never heard. Andrew said he thought that Oliver ‘was lost from his ship,’ but maybe Oliver turned up after all; maybe he found the ‘Hilda Book’ among his mother’s relics—literally, reliques.” “How strange it is, how you weave over and back; the threads hold Europe and America together.”