End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound Read online

  “That is what Ezra’s Cantos were trying to do—what they do. I must find you a beautiful Canto image—” and I found it and read “San Cristoforo provided transport / with a little Christo gripping his hair”29 And this—and I started to read from Rock-Drill but put the book down. “I read too much this morning. I have only lately dared to try to read through the Cantos. But just now, before you came in, when I felt dazed and dizzy, some of my own lines came to me and laid the ghost, as it were. I had developed along another line, in another dimension—only the opposites could meet in the end. How funny, I remember how he said to me in London, … ‘Let’s be engaged—don’t tell …’ well, whoever it was, not just then Dorothy.” “Then you were the third in line?” “No—I was the first—.” “And he came to you in the Nursing Home, you said, and wanted you to have his child—.” “Well, wanted the child that I was about to have to be his, to have been his, ‘My only real criticism is that this is not my child.’ ”

  March 27

  I read Canto 90, Latin, Greek, Italian and all the rest of it, aloud to Erich, this afternoon. Did I really read all of it? Probably, only a section. I gain a new power over the material, the invocation “m’elevasti” does invoke, does call one out “from under the rubble” of daily cares and terrors.

  I have been seeing or trying to see a whirling kaleidoscope. “Ubi Amor ibi oculus est.” The thought of Ezra was part of the “rubble heap,” my actual war experiences. Nor could I follow the intricacies of the legal accusation. My eye, following too rapidly the uneven lines of the difficult pages, was yet part of my intellectual equipment. I refused to be taken in, I must see clearly. I could not see clearly but I could hear clearly, as I read, “m’elevasti / out of Erebus.” I could at last accept the intoxication of “Kuthera sempiterna” and the healing of “myrrh and olibanum on the altar stone / giving perfume.”

  March 30, Palm Sunday

  Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel

  but is jagged,

  For a flash,

  for an hour.

  Then agony,

  then an hour,

  then agony, …

  Dorothy Shakespear, Dorothy Pound, the “Weekend” article tells us, sits in a corner, “her corner,” sheltered, not wishing to see or be seen. I had a letter from her yesterday, the first in many years. I keep looking for her in the Canto series, Rock-Drill. To me, she is Leucothea, who in the last section, had pity on the ship-wrecked Odysseus. She is “leukos, Leukothea / white foam, a sea-gull.”

  Undine,30 in the “Weekend,” is sketching D.P., as Dorothy signed herself in the letter. Undine is reported to have said, “I think she has a beautiful profile, but it is so difficult.…” It is indeed difficult. We don’t hear enough of D.P. and her heroic fortitude, though I do not visualize her as Penelope in this special instance, but rather as that “mortal once / Who now is a sea-god.”

  March 31

  Erich says again this afternoon when I question the exact meaning of “indicted,” as used in the December 1957 number of Poetry,31 in a letter to the editor about Ezra, “but why do you get so excited?” I explained that I had read in the [William Rose] Benét Reader’s Encyclopedia that Ezra had been arrested and tried for high treason (1945), but was “judged insane.” Erich thought “indicted” referred simply to the formal accusation. I don’t know.

  “In any case,” I say to Erich, “it is good to be excited, to feel this.”

  My story as lived out in the second war in London might well have been that of Dorothy Shakespear; her story could not have been, but becomes in retrospect, mine. The two men, diametrically opposed, set off each other, the London “opposite number” of my life-long Isis search, and the Odysseus-Pound descended into the land of the shades in the Pisan Cantos. No. There is no resemblance. But I completed my own cantos as Norman called them, again in the Greek setting; mine is Helen and Achilles [Helen in Egypt].32 There is resemblance in this, the two men meet in war, the Trojan War, the Achilles of my fantasy and imagination and the Odysseus of Ezra’s. They do not meet, they never can meet in life. But the two women, Helen (of my creative reconstruction) and the Penelope (a human actuality) can communicate.

  April 1

  Erich queries my quotation from the Benét and looks up the Eva Hesse reference in Dichtung und Prosa, in which she states that Ezra’s condition was diagnosed as friihzeitige Senilitat, brought on by his unjust treatment in the Pisan camp. I question the Senilitat and Erich explains that actually it is a psychological word that is sometimes used, as it is in a way less damaging or derogatory than paranoia or one of the other technical terms for madness or insanity.

  It is painful to discuss this but I feel that an almost algebraic formula is necessary. I can not say that any of us are satisfied with the equation, Fascist-party-line-by-short-wave-to-America + Poet = Senilitat. There is, as I myself felt in my “Lady Luba” or Lupe finding, the hint of the crime passionnel, for which (as the second letter to Poetry, in this same December issue, states) “ ‘no jury,’ as the phrase has it, ‘will convict.’ ”

  The two letters are very revealing, “An Exchange on Ezra Pound.” The second, by Hugh Kenner, concludes with an injunction to the “literary critic” and, it follows, to every intelligent reader of Ezra Pound. Apart from and along with the purely legal aspect, Mr. Kenner makes it quite clear that anyone who has “made himself conversant with the thought, the poetry, and the intentions has the duty of testifying as he can.”

  April 4, Good Friday

  I had a long letter from Norman Pearson yesterday. He had seen them both. Erich has gone, for ten days, on his Easter holiday to Venice. I long to share my news with him but it must wait. Bryher is here with Sylvia Beach for Easter. Perhaps I can talk with them, as I discussed the “Weekend” with Bryher and George in the beginning, and laughed, really laughed, as I have said, for the first time, about Ezra. But Erich’s is a different, “existentialist” (his word) dimension. I am trembling beside him. We are seated at the end of a crowded station bench. He has taken my hands. “Must you hold my hands?” “Yes.” Into our consciousness and in our consciousness, in mine at any rate, is a small, delicate yet sturdy male object. The child reaches into the market basket of the woman on the bench beside us. His curls are short and red and gold. He is the “fiery moment” incarnate.

  How many loaves and fishes are here? But we need not feed this multitude, not loaves and fishes. It is mostly apples. “Pomona, Pomona. Christo Re, Dio Sole.”33

  April 5, Easter Saturday

  “But,” he said, “my only real criticism is that this is not my child.”

  This is the child but a long time after, drawn into consciousness by Erich Heydt, stabilized, exactly visualized, one summer day on the crowded platform of the Zürich-Stadelhofen station.

  The Child was with us when George Plank, Bryher, and I first discussed the “Weekend” and I laughed about Ezra, for the first time in the 12 years of his confinement. I heard his voice, “Goodbye Dave, you’ll come over Christmas Day, won’t you?” There is no reason to accept, to condone, to forgive, to forget what Ezra has done. Sylvia [Beach] made it very clear last night. And here, I should renounce my hope of recalling Ezra, if I dare think of Sylvia’s confinement in a detention camp, her near-starvation, the meager rations shared with her by her friend Adrienne Monnier, during a term of hiding. Dare I go on? There is no reason to hope for his release. “He has books, everything; students come to me in Paris and tell me about him. Fascist. Those dreadful people he knows—that man—.” “Yes,” I said, “I know, news items have been sent me, but.…” “There is a group there. He has everything.…” “I know.” “It was a great mistake, that official prize they gave him.” I said, “But…

  I said, “But.” There is no argument, pro or con. You catch fire or you don’t catch fire. “This fruit has a fire within it, / Pomona, Pomona. / No glass is clearer than are the globes of this flame / what sea is clearer than the pomegranate body / holding the flame? / Pomon
a, Pomona.”

  April 7, Easter Monday

  So the very day I enter this last note, I hear again from Norman Pearson, “It looks more and more possible that the day of liberation may finally come.” He sends New York Times, April 2 report, and a short article from April 3; London Times is sent me, and Joan found a Jours de France, April 5 notice, “Ezra Pound, le Mallarme U. S. ne mourra pas chez les fous.” I have among my Easter letters, one too, from Mary de Rachewiltz from Schloss Brunnenburg, Tyrol, “There is some hope of having father with us soon.”

  April 9

  Mary asked me to visit her when I was at Lugano. There was a local bus, she said, it was not far. But I never went. She sent me photographs of herself and the children. She is looking out of a window of the Schloss or castle, like a girl in a fairy tale, or “Sister Helen,” a poem. She gazes out over the romantic Tyrol landscape, far, far. I hardly dare think of her and a copy of an early portrait that Ezra had sent me, with her hair, wheat-gold, flowing down over her shoulders. There is Sigifredo too, reaching up to a sort of della Scala knocker on a great door, with fair hair in a halo. Mary again asks me to visit them, “especially now as there is some hope of having father with us soon.”

  I wait for letters with the intense apprehension with which I waited almost 50 years ago, when Ezra left finally for Europe. Through the years, I have imposed or superimposed this apprehension on other people, other letters. A sort of rigor mortis drove me onward. No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano. Not rigor mortis. No, No! The vines grow more abundantly on those volcanic slopes. Ezra would have destroyed me and the center they call “Air and Crystal” of my poetry.

  Now, I am in a fever of apprehension and excitement. I was separated from my friends, my family, even from America, by Ezra. I did not analyse this. When Frances came into my life, I could talk about it—but even so, only superficially. But I read her some of the poems that Ezra and I had loved together, chiefly Swinburne. “You read so beautifully,” said Frances. I read Andrew Lang’s translation of Theocritus that Ezra had brought me. I wrote a poem to Frances in a Bion and Moschus mood.

  O hyacinth of the swamp lands,

  Blue lily of the marshes,

  How could I know,

  Being but a foolish shepherd,

  That you would laugh at me?

  April 10

  Father. In the new Eva Hesse Arche Verlag34 edition of selections of Ezra’s prose, there is a photograph of Ezra as he left the Pisan camp, fettered, between two detectives. There are the 1946-1948 pictures which are familiar from the book jackets, and the 1955 one in the deck chair in the garden at St. Elizabeth’s. There is the earliest photograph, taken, they state here (and in the little booklet35 that Mary sent me, published by Pesce d’Oro, Milan, for the 70th birthday) in Venice, at the time of the publication of his first book, A Lume Spento, 1908. I am sure that this picture is much earlier. The atmosphere is not Venetian—nor the chair. This is a younger Ezra even than the one I met first when I was 15.

  April 11

  He shakes his tawny head (wheat-colored, I have written, and Ezra has written, “a sheaf of hair / Thick like a wheat swathe”), gone grey now, they say, and the Ameisen, he seated on the grass, clutch eagerly for the scattered grains. Some fell by the wayside. Bushel baskets of inseminating beauty fell upon barren ground. There is much chaff among the wheat. Who can sort out the contents of the controversial Cantos?

  April 12

  Norman Pearson can sort them out. He writes me, “They are an ambitious poem and a great poem, and the problems he presents (even when I don’t agree with the solutions) are the problems of our age.”

  I spoke of provincial colleges having had a curious insemination. But years ago, the older foundations accepted Ezra Pound. We know of his staunch supporters, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Hemingway, and we have the names of that gallant band that awarded him the rabidly contested or controverted Bollingen Prize in 1949, for the Pisan Cantos. But my contact is with Pearson and that poignant appeal, “Tell Pearson I can’t go it alone.”

  April 13

  Pearson mentions this in one of his last letters, as “his agonized appeal.” Joan finds me a notice from Le Figaro Littéraire, April 12, Ezra Pound “ressuscité”? It seems that a great deal will be resurrected or re-born once Ezra is free. Consciously or unconsciously, it seems that we have been bound with him, bound up with him and his fate.

  April 14

  Waiting—what news, what letters, what press cuttings? I don’t suppose that I really wanted to keep his letters. There was a great untidy bundle of them, many of them written on notepaper he had appropriated from hotels, on a sort of grand tour a wealthy aunt or old family friend had taken him. There was a group photograph, tourists in costume, a young Ezra in a fez. Was that among the papers? It was as if he wrote me from those fabulous romantic places, Carcassonne, Mount St. Michael. I see the illustrations on the letter heads. The writing did not change appreciably, it scrawled as always, or was comparatively neatly spaced, as in the autografo of the reproduced “Venetian Night Litany”36 in the Piccola Antologia that Mary sent me. I did not ask about the letters when I met my parents in Genoa, autumn 1912—was it? But my mother took me aside, “I think you will be relieved to know that your father burnt the old letters.…”

  Erich was very shocked. Perhaps I was too, but that shock, as with the other Poundiana, lay dormant.

  Erich liked my fertility symbol, as he called it, the head, the tawny wheat-colored hair (now gone grey), scattering grains or seeds for the eager Ameisen, clustered on the grass or crowded in the dim, uncanny hall of St. Elizabeth’s. We wait with apprehension but with a new sort of peace. This is what supremely matters. Sheath upon sheath of self seems peeled away. I begin to understand this “strange man” as the London Times of April 9 called him, in a sympathetic special article. I was not equipped to understand the young poet.

  April 15

  I had letters at one time from a certain Charles [Martell], one of the St. Elizabeth’s circle. He moved later to New Jersey and I had not the heart or energy to continue answering his strange, fascinating letters. Ezra suggested that I send him cards or pictures. I had sent Ezra most of my old Venice cards and some photographs of St. Mark’s mosaics. Charles wrote that Dorothy had sent him a Redouté rose-card (I think it was) that I had sent her. In the last post card that I had from Charles, he spoke of seeing Ezra again. Charles wrote, “He said you were a ‘pink moth.’” It was a line from an early poem. I don’t know where or if it was ever published, “she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery.”37

  I danced in the garden in the moonlight, like a mad thing. Maenad and bassarid. It is not necessary to understand.

  April 16

  Erich brought me a beautiful ruby-glass bowl from Venice. It is exactly Pomona, Pomona. “No glass is clearer than are the globes of this flame.” I had not read this pomegranate section to Erich but the small cup-bowl—“no, no, not an ash-tray,” I tell him—exactly materializes these lines. “This fruit has a fire within it.” The small bowl is heavy with a white-blue-silver rim, one feels that it is filled with red wine. It is. “It is the Grail,” I tell Erich.

  A letter from Bryher says, “I heard on A[merican]-F[orces]N[etwork] this morning that they had moved to quash the indictment and release Pound …, but it will take a while anyhow.”

  April 18, Friday

  Joan found me Undine’s little book38 in Zürich, with Ezra’s introduction. The pictures turn on the wheel or turn the Wheel, “Undine, who is the first to show a capacity to manifest in paint, or in la ceramica what is most to be prized in my writing.” This seems a return to the early D. G. Rossetti and the Vita Nuova translation and pre-Raphaelite pictures that Ezra brought me. Concern with “The Blessed Damozel”! Surely, Ezra read it to me—yes—and the “Dante in Verona.” Undine seems myself then. One esteems Ezra’s Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Brancusi enthusiasms. But this is some
thing different. A hand (Ezra’s?) holds a tiny ceramica head, in the first picture, called “Testa Invocatrice.” All the heads in this little book are an invocation; there is “Patria” with the “Christo” and the sad “St. Elizabeth’s Madonna.”

  April 19, Saturday

  Undine seems myself then. I think of her when AFN, last night, at 8, says simply that Ezra Pound, the American poet is to be released. AFN concludes that he will live in Italy. But this is not 1908. Undine is a mature artist. I was 21 when Ezra left and it was some years later that he scratched “H. D. Imagiste,” in London, in the Museum tea room, at the bottom of a typed sheet, now slashed with his creative pencil, “Cut this out, shorten this line.”

  H.D.—Hermes—Hermeticism and all the rest of it.

  April 20, Sunday

  The picture in the Corriere della Sera, Milan, of April 19, that Joan brings me last night, reminds me of William Morris, of Mark Twain. I do not say that the radiofoto looks like either the Englishman or the American, but I am reminded of them. “Ezra Pound verso La Liberta.” The Ezra of the London period and the Ezra of my early American background are synthesized—as I am. There is also the Italy of his early affiliations, Rossetti and the Dante sequence. There is Dorothy Shakespear Pound “who technically brought the motion for dismissal of the indictment.”

  April 22, Tuesday

  It was Friday, April 18 that the “indictment” was dropped. I find it very hard to catch up. I have not had time for meditation or day-dreaming and I need this.… It was on Friday, March 7 that I began these notes.

  April 23, Wednesday

  Now I hear from Norman with the press cuttings. He wants me to send these notes for his secretary to type. “And now another canyon has been bridged by Ezra’s end to torment. … I am glad you are writing it down, and Erich knows how important it is that you should write it down. … It is so good not to be hiding something—anything from those you love and who love you.”