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.
May 14
“And now another canyon has been bridged by Ezra’s end to torment.” Ezra’s end to torment—that is all that matters. It is not easy to readjust, for it is only in retrospect that we dare face the enormity of the situation. There must be many others who feel as we do.
In Ezra’s early poem, “The Goodly Fere,”41 a tough Anglo-Saxon peasant fisherman tells the original Galilean story. He is the center of some kind of communal integration-disintegrating toward rebirth, as personally Ezra severed me (psychically) from friends and family. If having been severed, painfully reintegrated, we want only to forget the whirlwind or the forked lightning that destroyed our human, domestic serenity and security, that is natural. It is, in a sense, sauve qui peut.
I did not hear the raucous voice from Radio Rome. Friends listened and one especially, whose job it was to check up during the war on the BBC foreign broadcasts, said the effect was baffling, confused, confusing, and she didn’t feel that the “message,” whatever it was, was doing any harm or any good to anybody. It had, in a way, nothing whatever to do with us and the 20,000 victims of the first big air attacks and the fires in London. “Tudor indeed is gone and every rose.”42 No, Ezra!
May 15, Thursday, Ascension Day
To recall Ezra is to recall my father.
To recall my father is to recall the cold, blazing intelligence of my “last attachment” of the war years in London.
This is not easy.
Or it is easy enough in terms of Helen and Achilles, my 1952, 1953, 1954 “cantos,” as Norman called them.
And all that time, and years before and years after, Ezra was in “torment,” to use Norman’s word. “And now another canyon has been bridged by Ezra’s end to torment.”
May 17, Saturday
He blustered his way in, he blustered his way out. Violet Hunt’s very old mother, bedridden, with the door open at the head of the stairs, said fretfully, “Tell him to go away, tell him to go home, he always makes too much noise, that young Mr. Browning.”
He wrote an opera, Villon, broadcast, I read [in “Weekend”], in 1932 by the BBC. At least, he hummed tunes or whistled them and they must have been transcribed by some musical expert. I did hear Olga Rudge, the accomplished violinist, play some Provencal fragments in London in the early days, (I did not pretend to follow them), presumably composed or resurrected by Ezra. He seemed unintimidated by the fact that (to my mind) he had no ear for music and, alas, I suffered excruciatingly from his clumsy dancing. I suffered, indeed I suppose we all did. He himself, in a certain sense, made no mistakes. He gave, he took. He gave extravagantly. Most of the tributes to his genius, his daemon or demon, have come, so far, from men. But at least three women, whether involved in the emotional content or not, stand apart; he wanted to make them, he did not want to break them; in a sense, he identified himself with them and their art.
May 18, Sunday