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

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.”

“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” 29And 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, 30in 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 , 31in 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] . 32There 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.