Hilda Doolittle - End to Torment - A Memoir of Ezra Pound

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? 39Now, 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.