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.