End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound Page 5

  Thinking of Ezra’s work, I recall my long Helen sequence. Perhaps, there was always a challenge in his creative power. Perhaps, even, as I said to Erich, there was unconscious—really unconscious—rivalry. My older brother was my mother’s favorite; I, my father’s. But the mother is the Muse, the Creator, and in my case especially, as my mother’s name was Helen.

  It all began with the Greek fragments—and living in seclusion in Lugano and Lausanne (and here, too) I finished, 1952, 1953, 1954, the very long epic sequence, my “cantos,” as Norman called them.

  April 24, Thursday

  “I’m sorry I said you were hysterical. I was just worried.” I was hysterical. “My only real criticism is that this is not my child.” I could not scream in St. Faith’s nursing home, March 30, 1919. I can not scream now. The train is rumbling nearer. The Child disappears. How did He come? How did He go? This was the summer before I went to America for my 70th birthday. I did not see Ezra and Dorothy. I did not want to see them. Now the “fiery moment,” the whole creative output is centered on those two. He walked out of the gate, was she with him?

  He is still there at St. Elizabeth’s. He will stay five days more or so, I read in one of the papers that Norman sent. But, they said, he walked out alone. He took a walk alone. He walked into another dimension, as I do when I write of them. Dorothy is the Bona Dea of classic definition.

  April 30, Wednesday

  But there are others. Norman writes that Undine is going to Mexico. I look at Ezra’s picture; this is an old man, they say. It is only by admitting that Ezra is an old man that I can say that I am an old woman. But this is not true. There are others. They go on painting pictures or they go on writing poetry.

  What now? The curtain falls. I don’t seem to see any further. They walk out, the battered Poet and the Faithful Wife. In my much-quoted “Weekend,” Undine is reported to have said, “Grandpa loves me. It’s because I symbolize the spirit of Love to him, I guess.”

  May 1, Thursday

  “Grandpa loves me.” That was long ago. There was Is-hilda and the Tristram with the harp, the lyre. Long, long after, there was a new role, but it was the old Round Table. The music was incidental. As in the original legend, Lancelot, the bravest knight, was marred. But he remains the King’s favorite. The Queen is a fortuitous character. But strength is given her. She meets the challenge, in the end. So separated, the characters synthesize, as I have said: Tristram-Odysseus, Lancelot-Achilles, each with the final partner, so balanced that they are almost one. And that having been achieved they retire from actual life; yet in their cloister, their country house or their remote Costello, they are working as toward a final unity.

  May 7, Wednesday

  Are they? I don’t suppose it matters. Last Sunday’s London Chronicle that George Plank sent me, reports an immediate blustering, “Roosevelt was a fool,” a challenge to reporters who met him on a visit to the Congressman who had been most instrumental in his release, and a broadcast on the BBC, reiterating the old, tiresome, outworn themes, sending his barbaric yap or yawp, like Walt Whitman, “over the roofs of the world.”

  This last picture varies in the process of reproduction. This is the photograph I first saw in the April 19 New York Times that Norman sent me, but showing the hand, clasping presumably, a spectacle case. “Testa Invocatrice”? Erich said of the Corriere della Sera, April 19, Milan, print that I had received earlier, that Ezra looked like Wotan. We are back with our Lupus or Lupa, the “Lady Loba.” Our pard or panther, loosed finally from his cage, is still snarling. Would we have it otherwise? Erich bewails with me, however, the pity of it—“They might yet refuse him his passport”—but “this is psychologically inevitable,” he says.

  This last London Chronicle article balances the poet and his gifts with the wayward prophet. Where are we? We who have profited by his inspiration must take our stand—here, now.

  May 8, Thursday

  Actually, this is a premonition. Here is the legend. America has had Poe, localized; Whitman (for all his “cosmic” integration), localized; New England school, Emerson, Thoreau, localized; Emily Dickinson, localized. Here is the legend, the myth; actually, the basic myth can not be localized. Wotan, Odysseus or Herakles, born in Hailey, Idaho or wherever it is, educated in … wherever it was, and the young iconoclast finds himself in Venice, le Byron de nos jours, having been tacitly cold-shouldered by a distinguished section of a narrow slice of the American continent, in Philadelphia, because of a scandal, not very near, in Indiana, a very minor scandal, if a scandal at all.

  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. But we, the partisans of world-thought, of the myth, shiver apprehensively. What now?

  I heard from Norman yesterday. He speaks of the original interview that was quoted in the London Chronicle. “It was really dreadful. As his friend Horton remarked (he is the Square Dollar man who took me to the hospital in Washington), ‘one or two more interviews like that and the government will shanghai him out of the country.’ ”

  May 9

  I said when I first heard of Ezra’s freedom, that he walked out of the gate of St. Elizabeth’s alone, into another dimension. I was wrong. He walked out into the same dimension; that is, he seems to have walked out into life as he left it, 12 years ago. He goes on with “all the clichés,” as Norman calls them, picking up the cudgels where he was forced to lay them down.

  Who are these dummies, these ogres of a past age, these fearful effigies that wrecked our world, these devils, these dolls? Who are they? We put away childish things. It is we who walked into another dimension. Did they ever exist? Did Ezra ogre-ize himself by his association with Radio Rome? Joan laughed immoderately when I told her of Ezra’s broadcast! Hitler and Mussolini flung at this late date into the very teeth of the British Lion!

  It is funny. It isn’t even sad.

  No. It isn’t sad. There is a reserve of dynamic or daemonic power from which we may all draw. He lay on the floor of the Iron Cage and wrote the Pisan Cantos.

  Vidal,

  Vidal. It is old Vidal speaking,

  stumbling along in the wood,

  Not a patch, not a lost shimmer of sunlight,

  the pale hair of the goddess.

  May 10

  This is an earlier Canto (IV), it is true, but this theme runs through the Pisan series and the later Rock-Drill, to the end, so far, to 1955. This Canto IV is listed alone as from the Ovid Press, London, 1919. That is the year that Ezra came to St. Faith’s Ealing, London, and stormed into my room. A window looked out on a garden with rows of crocuses and the first flowering trees. There was a Child, there is a Child, implicit somewhere. Its image manifested at the Stadelhofen station, Zürich, that summer day, before I went to America for my 70th birthday. Perhaps Ezra “manifested” too, perhaps he never came to my room and jeered at me. There was no tenderness. Perhaps there was passion and regret “that this is not my Child.”

  I did not follow the course of the Cantos, listed in the Eva Hesse Dichtung und Prosa, 1925, 1927, 1930, 1934. I did see Ezra in Paris, once, twice (perhaps three times) in those intermediate years. I did see him and for the last time in London, after Mrs. Shakespear’s death—was it about the time of The Fifth Decad of Cantos, 1937?39 Now, Cantos LII—LXXI, 1940 and we are far apart.

  The Children’s Crusade by Marcel Schwob.…40

  May 11, Sunday

  I made that last entry yesterday. It flashed into my mind, a book that I have not thought of, for perhaps 50 years. It was one of the little deluxe reprints of the Portland, Maine, Mosher series that Ezra brought me at the time of the avalanche of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Shaw, Yogi books, Swedenborg, William Morris, Balzac’s Séraphita, Rossetti and the rest of them. It was the time of writing “a sonnet a day when I brush my teeth,” the time of the lost Is-hilda book.

  I am not sure of the spelling of Schwob and Joan looks it up, but it is not in
my reference book. “Children’s Crusade,” however, is there, 1212, and the 50,000 unarmed children from France and Germany who set out to rescue the Holy Sepulcher. Bryher, who is here, seemed shocked that I did not know of Schwob. “He was associated with the Mallarmé group—you must have heard Aldington and Flint discuss him.” I said, “I didn’t always listen and I can’t remember everything.” It is hardly a process of remembering, but almost, as I have said, of “manifesting.”

  May 12

  “Writing down,” Erich says, “is putting up all your defenses against impopery—impropery or improperty—.’’ I suggest, “Impropriety.” “Writing down is another defense.…”

  The Chronicle spoke of Ezra collecting, appropriating, stealing lines and phrases from Greek, Latin, mediaeval and oriental poets, and building a nest like a magpie. It asserted, however, that the effect was astonishing and “make it new” had vitalized a host of lesser satellites. I tell this to Erich but explain that I feel the process is that of a Phoenix, rather than of a magpie. There is fragrance. What did he write? “Myrrh and olibanum”? I said, “You catch fire or you don’t catch fire.” There is the drift of incense (almost perceptible in my room here) from the dim gold cave-depth of St. Mark’s and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, in Venice. That was the miracle, the Child that day at the Stadelhofen station, “Christo Re, Dio Sole.” Was the Child that until then, I had not visualized, lurking, hiding? It is the Child of Séraphitus-Séraphita. There are Mary de Rachewiltz and Ezra’s grandchildren in Italy. There are my own daughter and my grandchildren in New York. Do I feel disloyal to them all? What am I hiding? “Good-bye, Dave, you’ll come over Christmas Day, won’t you?” Am I stealing, have I stolen? Is my own magpie nest a manger?

  May 13

  Norman writes, “Do keep on with the private E.P. notes. This is the moment on paper for a kind of catharsis, the ordering and getting it down which will free you. It is the ordering, not the data which is important.” This letter is full of news, though Norman has not heard directly from the Pounds. I don’t know why I feel restless, myself selfishly frustrated, when I read of their plans of sailing for Italy. Does it recall the first break when Ezra left, on a cattle-ship (I read somewhere) for Venice? Undine leaves or is to leave for Mexico, though not alone. I no longer identify myself with her, but I would like to help, via Norman, who is to keep her art treasures for her while she is away. I have no nostalgia for Aztec temples. If I am frustrated and jealous, it is because I myself am immobile, as far as travelling is concerned. They gossip too much, of course. Will Ezra rush off to Rome, Florence or Venice? But he can’t, Norman writes, “for, after all, he is released in Dorothy’s custody.”

  Custody? Marriage? “He might want to break away, for that very reason,” said Erich. Did he want to break away from me? Of course he did. Was I hiding suppressed memories of that infinitely remote equivocal “engagement”? He broke it by subconscious or even conscious intention, the little “scandal,” the loss of a job was intentional? Logically it was all impossible, we know that. So long ago …, but the two-edged humiliation, from the friends and family, from Ezra, was carefully camouflaged, covered with the weeds and bracken of daily duties and necessities, and a bridge finally crossed the chasm or “canyon,” as Norman called it, a forceful effort toward artistic achievement.

  May 14

  “And now another canyon has been bridged by Ezra’s end to torment.” Ezra’s end to torment—that is all that matters. It is not easy to readjust, for it is only in retrospect that we dare face the enormity of the situation. There must be many others who feel as we do.

  In Ezra’s early poem, “The Goodly Fere,”41 a tough Anglo-Saxon peasant fisherman tells the original Galilean story. He is the center of some kind of communal integration-disintegrating toward rebirth, as personally Ezra severed me (psychically) from friends and family. If having been severed, painfully reintegrated, we want only to forget the whirlwind or the forked lightning that destroyed our human, domestic serenity and security, that is natural. It is, in a sense, sauve qui peut.

  I did not hear the raucous voice from Radio Rome. Friends listened and one especially, whose job it was to check up during the war on the BBC foreign broadcasts, said the effect was baffling, confused, confusing, and she didn’t feel that the “message,” whatever it was, was doing any harm or any good to anybody. It had, in a way, nothing whatever to do with us and the 20,000 victims of the first big air attacks and the fires in London. “Tudor indeed is gone and every rose.”42 No, Ezra!

  May 15, Thursday, Ascension Day

  To recall Ezra is to recall my father.

  To recall my father is to recall the cold, blazing intelligence of my “last attachment” of the war years in London.

  This is not easy.

  Or it is easy enough in terms of Helen and Achilles, my 1952, 1953, 1954 “cantos,” as Norman called them.

  And all that time, and years before and years after, Ezra was in “torment,” to use Norman’s word. “And now another canyon has been bridged by Ezra’s end to torment.”

  May 17, Saturday

  He blustered his way in, he blustered his way out. Violet Hunt’s very old mother, bedridden, with the door open at the head of the stairs, said fretfully, “Tell him to go away, tell him to go home, he always makes too much noise, that young Mr. Browning.”

  He wrote an opera, Villon, broadcast, I read [in “Weekend”], in 1932 by the BBC. At least, he hummed tunes or whistled them and they must have been transcribed by some musical expert. I did hear Olga Rudge, the accomplished violinist, play some Provencal fragments in London in the early days, (I did not pretend to follow them), presumably composed or resurrected by Ezra. He seemed unintimidated by the fact that (to my mind) he had no ear for music and, alas, I suffered excruciatingly from his clumsy dancing. I suffered, indeed I suppose we all did. He himself, in a certain sense, made no mistakes. He gave, he took. He gave extravagantly. Most of the tributes to his genius, his daemon or demon, have come, so far, from men. But at least three women, whether involved in the emotional content or not, stand apart; he wanted to make them, he did not want to break them; in a sense, he identified himself with them and their art.

  May 18, Sunday

  There is, in another category, Eva Hesse with the German translations and there is Sister M. Bernetta Quinn whose “The Metamorphoses of Ezra Pound” I found so illuminating. There is of course Mary, “the 32-year-old wife of Prince Boris de Rachewiltz,” with her Italian translations of her father’s Cantos.

  Last night, I heard on AFN, that Ezra Pound, the American poet, is to sail for Italy on the Cristoforo Colombo.

  May 20, Tuesday

  The exact Séraphitus image has emerged, manifested from Texas. I am caught away by the Time, May 19, account of the young pianist, “Van [Cliburn] is a born flaming virtuoso.”

  “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” Music was what I wanted. “What are you hiding?” I was hiding a craving, a hunger for music, such as I had known it as a schoolgirl, at the old Academy in Philadelphia. Once, too shattered to move, after a concert by Paderewski, I found myself alone in the vast empty circle of balcony benches. Clinging to a rail, I was surprised to perceive below me a furtive handful of dark figures clustered in the empty half-lighted theatre before the vacated piano. These were not of the fastidious, fashionable audience that had just surged out. Who were these modest, dark-clothed figures, so far below me, hat in hand, in their overcoats, standing, though now the comfortable plush-covered parquet stalls were empty? Who are they, critics making obeisance to the vacated piano, the empty bench? Who am I? We are of a secret order. The theatre seems to grow darker. It is obvious that we should not be here. The Maestro returned.

  The Maestro came back, it almost seemed that he sneaked back, we are “in” on this together. There in the dim light, he played for us for almost an hour. My head was on my arms. I did not cry easily. But I was crying. He was playing Liszt’s symphonic setting of the Erl Ki
ng.

  Erl König, he was himself that Spirit. O Vater, mein Vater.

  May 21, Wednesday

  Prairie wild-fire—or what? It swept Russia, Leningrad, Moscow, “from Riga to Kiev,” and ourselves are caught up in “the love-affair between Van and the Russians.” What was an equivocal and terrifying enigma, the Soviet Union, becomes part of human consciousness, heart-consciousness. We need not torture ourselves with apprehension, a miracle has happened. I have laughed from time to time at Erich’s reference to a German or Germanic philosophy, Klages’ Cosmogonic Eros.43 We have laughed together. But here it is, it seems. We had almost given up hope of world reconciliation, but America in the person of this strange overgrown maverick (as Time calls him) proclaims, “These are my people, I guess, I’ve always had a Russian heart. I’d give them three quarts of blood and four pounds of flesh… This is familiar, evangelical. “Take, eat, this is my body.” Van, it is said, approached the former Viennese conductor, Josef Krips, before a performance of the Buffalo Philharmonic Symphony, and said, “Maestro, let us pray.” Van’s prayer was, “God give us His grace and power to make good music together.”

  May 23, Friday

  The Idol that should have been, that could have been, that was somehow “hidden,” was, is the Wunderkind. If I was not the Child, as I obviously was not (as a child), I would have the Child. But the thought, the wish, the will was cosmogonic—and I use the word flippantly, one can’t be too serious and it is a joke of Erich’s and mine. Yes, yes—I never told him of it but the Child at the Stadelhofen station, that summer day, before I went to America for my 70th birthday, was the Child, the Eros. And the Van, this Vanya is the Child. There must be others, perhaps many others. And Ezra, at one time, was an Idol, an Image of its adolescence, in its Ariel or Seraphitus stage. And all this is long ago, and today, and tomorrow, and “existentialist” as Erich would say.