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 something 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.”