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

June 21, Saturday

Undine seemed myself then, I wrote when I heard the April 18th broadcast — the then , however, extends in time. It is the creative pencil that reshaped a poem in the Museum tea room in London. The poem was “Hermes of the Ways.” I wonder if this first published poem is in the book Undine wants to send me.

June 25

Poor Undine! They don’t want you, they really don’t. How shall we reconcile ourselves to this? …

Sentiment, sentimentality struggle with reason.…

June 26

Undine writes, “The male just can’t go about like that, ditching a spirit love.” She writes, “I have known Ezra for 6 years.” She says, “The last 4 years I took a vow in St. Antony’s Church in NYC not to leave the Maestro until he was freed. A month before he was freed he made me break that vow.”

6 years? Where does that take us on the pattern-parallel, the map or graph? 1958—6 years—1952. That summer we began the long Helen sequence, an attempt, not unsuccessful, to retain a relationship, materially “ditched.” That is the only way to keep a vow. “But this is WAR,” Undine writes. Mine was WAR too, transposed to the heroic, retaining sea-enchantment. Nothing is lost or can be, of what Undine calls “a spirit love.”

June 27, Friday

On June 19, we wrote, “We would reach out, snatch a victim from the altar. Aztec. Aztlan .” A letter came yesterday from Norman. “Her [Jos6 Vasquez] Amaral 47was taking her paintings to Mexico for an exhibition, there was a horrible accident in Texas, which killed his girl friend driving with him and wrecked the car. One gathers the art was destroyed, but she also speaks of now having to go there to get it.”

I wrote Norman that I had had a premonition of disaster but did not want to write her of it. I wrote on June 7, “I can not ‘take’ Aztec and Aztlan, though I wait feverishly for news from Norman.”

Is this the news? Has Aztec, Aztlan taken its victim? Will they let Undine go?

June 28, Saturday

Calendar days now have precedence and procedure. On June 10, Undine posted me the copy of Modern American Poetry . It has just come. It was sent from Washington, but the return address is given as Mt. Vernon Ave., Alex., Va. It must have been in her long June 9 letter that she spoke of the marginal sketches. But one is a full page drawing of Ezra, done over the “Evadne” 48lines, “I first tasted under Apollo’s lips / love and love sweetness, …”

I find the reference to [Vasquez] Amaral. “Now José Amaral, the Aztec, has given me another name … and I can not do other than use it.”

There is a Little Flower pressed and carefully mounted on the initial page of the H.D. section.

We would like to confide Undine to the care of Marie-Thérèse-Françoise, Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux.

June 30

In the Modern American Poetry , Undine writes in the margin of the “sea-girls” section of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song [of J. Alfred Prufrock],” “ ‘an old legend,’ sayeth my mother, ‘says that if a Sea Prince call us and we go live with him everything will be fine unless we can still hear human voices; if we do they immediately wake us from our enchantment and we drown.’ I guess once you’ve decided to walk through a wall you shouldn’t change your mind in the middle.”

July 2, Tuesday

Undine is imposed or super-imposed on Frances [Gregg] Josepha, as I have said. Again, Frances was the Florence of my childhood — all boy’s names. (Florence was a page or youth in the old French legends.) Florence — Frances. Frances said that people were always calling her Florence.

Florence was one of a family of sisters, like the little one of Alençon and Lisieux. I have difficulty sorting out the sisters. There was Marie, Pauline, Celine — and another, Léonie? Florence was a pretty child with the same crop of short curls that we see in the early Thérése pictures. And our little Undine on her sea-rocks with her wind-blown hair, again, looks not unlike the early Florence. For myself, all three, the Saint, the rejected wild and willful Undine and the gracious chatelaine of Bon Air, Virginia (the childhood alter-ego from whom I was parted at 8) become one in consciousness, the “lost companion” who figures so prominently in many analytical case histories.

July 3

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus tells the Thérèse story from a reasoned worldly Protestant standpoint. This does not detract but adds to the overwhelming pathos of the legend. Thérése was very young when she lost her mother, she turned to her older sister. When Pauline enters the Convent, Thérése decides to follow her petite mere . She must wait 7 years until she is 16, before she can join Soeur Agnés or Mere Agnés de Jésus. Soeur Thérése de L’Enfant Jésus lived there until she was 24.

I had heard of the Histoire d’une Ame , her short autobiography, just before War I, but I was not particularly interested. I heard in 1925 of the Vatican ceremony of the elevation of Thérèse, Soeur Thérèse. Sainte Thérése had a peculiar talent. She would spend her heaven, she had promised, doing good on earth. She had thousands of clients. A friend (Protestant) during the second war, brought me a little string of 13 beads. “You say a Glory-be,” she told me, “Glory-be-to-the-Father-and-to-the-Son-and-to-the-Holy-Ghost for each bead, eight days in succession — an octave — my Catholic sister-in-law told me. You can give half-a-crown to a beggar or put it in the poor-box, but it is not necessary. Just for extra, you can buy a rose and lay it on her altar (there is one at Brompton Oratory). You just tell your trouble or worry and ask for help. It works .” During the war the octaves — or was it novenas? — worked wonders:

For a long time after the war, I did not touch or “tell” the beads, but I came back to them.

Madame Mardrus says that she is the only one of the thousands of admirers and clients of Sainte Thérése who never asked for anything.

July 7

I have been reading Denton Welch. He died in 1948, at the age of 31, after a long illness due to criminally careless driving, another “horrible accident.” He was a schoolboy, an art student, on a Whitsun holiday, on his bicycle, happy, free. Then everything went, he was lying in a field. A Voice Through a Cloud 49tells this story, laconically, with touches of grim humor. There is authentic martyrdom; the record, with few if any allusions to “God-the-Father-God-the-Son-and-God-the-Holy-Ghost,” almost has its place beside that of Thérese’s Histoire d’une Ame .

The boy himself has his place with the Eros we have named, that special Angel.

July 11

Now they have gone. The bon-voyage letter that I sent them through Norman would not have reached them in time.

July 13

But I hear from Norman who saw them off on July 1, on the Cristoforo Colombo .

“Tuesday was an event! I went to New York to see Ezra and Dorothy off. He had written and asked me to go. I got to the Pier at 2:30 and after a little false search found my way to Cabin 128, tucked away in a corner of first-class at the end of a corridor. The door was closed but Omar Pound opened it and greeted me, ‘ You are the one we want to see. Come in!’ The door closed behind me. There on the bunk lay Ezra, stripped to the waist, his torso rather proudly sunburned. At his knees on the bunk sat Marcella [Spann] shoeless. On the other side of the cabin was Dorothy, smiling and looking very well. She rose and kissed me, to my surprise; and I gave her a single yellow rose. ‘H.D. wanted me to give you this,’ I said. I told her you knew she was going but not when. ‘You were commanded, then!’ Dorothy said, and she was really touched. ‘Yes,’ I answered, for the Spirits had told me you did command.