There is, in another category, Eva Hesse with the German translations and there is Sister M. Bernetta Quinn whose “The Metamorphoses of Ezra Pound” I found so illuminating. There is of course Mary, “the 32-year-old wife of Prince Boris de Rachewiltz,” with her Italian translations of her father’s Cantos.
Last night, I heard on AFN, that Ezra Pound, the American poet, is to sail for Italy on the Cristoforo Colombo.
May 20, Tuesday
The exact Séraphitus image has emerged, manifested from Texas. I am caught away by the Time, May 19, account of the young pianist, “Van [Cliburn] is a born flaming virtuoso.”
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” Music was what I wanted. “What are you hiding?” I was hiding a craving, a hunger for music, such as I had known it as a schoolgirl, at the old Academy in Philadelphia. Once, too shattered to move, after a concert by Paderewski, I found myself alone in the vast empty circle of balcony benches. Clinging to a rail, I was surprised to perceive below me a furtive handful of dark figures clustered in the empty half-lighted theatre before the vacated piano. These were not of the fastidious, fashionable audience that had just surged out. Who were these modest, dark-clothed figures, so far below me, hat in hand, in their overcoats, standing, though now the comfortable plush-covered parquet stalls were empty? Who are they, critics making obeisance to the vacated piano, the empty bench? Who am I? We are of a secret order. The theatre seems to grow darker. It is obvious that we should not be here. The Maestro returned.
The Maestro came back, it almost seemed that he sneaked back, we are “in” on this together. There in the dim light, he played for us for almost an hour. My head was on my arms. I did not cry easily. But I was crying. He was playing Liszt’s symphonic setting of the Erl King.
Erl König, he was himself that Spirit. O Vater, mein Vater.
May 21, Wednesday
Prairie wild-fire — or what? It swept Russia, Leningrad, Moscow, “from Riga to Kiev,” and ourselves are caught up in “the love-affair between Van and the Russians.” What was an equivocal and terrifying enigma, the Soviet Union, becomes part of human consciousness, heart-consciousness. We need not torture ourselves with apprehension, a miracle has happened. I have laughed from time to time at Erich’s reference to a German or Germanic philosophy, Klages’ Cosmogonic Eros.43 We have laughed together. But here it is, it seems. We had almost given up hope of world reconciliation, but America in the person of this strange overgrown maverick (as Time calls him) proclaims, “These are my people, I guess, I’ve always had a Russian heart. I’d give them three quarts of blood and four pounds of flesh… This is familiar, evangelical. “Take, eat, this is my body.” Van, it is said, approached the former Viennese conductor, Josef Krips, before a performance of the Buffalo Philharmonic Symphony, and said, “Maestro, let us pray.” Van’s prayer was, “God give us His grace and power to make good music together.”
May 23, Friday
The Idol that should have been, that could have been, that was somehow “hidden,” was, is the Wunderkind. If I was not the Child, as I obviously was not (as a child), I would have the Child. But the thought, the wish, the will was cosmogonic — and I use the word flippantly, one can’t be too serious and it is a joke of Erich’s and mine. Yes, yes — I never told him of it but the Child at the Stadelhofen station, that summer day, before I went to America for my 70th birthday, was the Child, the Eros. And the Van, this Vanya is the Child. There must be others, perhaps many others. And Ezra, at one time, was an Idol, an Image of its adolescence, in its Ariel or Seraphitus stage. And all this is long ago, and today, and tomorrow, and “existentialist” as Erich would say.
June 4, Wednesday
Yes, all this is today. I have been slowly and laboriously typing these notes, since May 24. In the meantime, Undine emerges. She is a reflection-in-a-mirror, Undine, ghost-like. This is a picture that Norman sent me with a number of photographs of her own drawings and paintings. She has asked him to keep these and some of “la ceramica,” when she goes to Mexico. She took the photograph herself (of herself), reflected in the mirror, in a “bikini,” Norman wrote. It is a graceful little body, and the triangular face belies Rattray’s description in the “Weekend.” No doubt, the young man was puzzled and disturbed at the apparition, “perched like a bird at dusk … with her golden hair falling down around her thin shoulders.” As I reread the “Weekend,” the description, in light of later events, becomes even more poignant and revealing. “I assumed that she was a patient from another ward.” Norman writes that as he left St. Elizabeth’s after his visit, Pound “told me he was not seeing her but gave no reason and still asked me to help her.”
Norman wrote me, asking my advice about some of the pictures. I feel that we have inherited Undine.
June 5
“Pound threw his arms around her, hugged her, and kissed her goodbye.” The second “Weekend” day, “Pound embraced her and ran his hands through her hair,” and on leaving, “Pound embraced Undine as on the day before.”
David Rattray writes, “She had huge eyes like a cat.” He speaks of her enormous forehead, tiny chin and tinier double-chin. There is no suggestion of this chin discrepancy in the mirror. The face seems peaked, triangular, the soft hair pushed off and back from the high forehead. Both Erich and Joan were enchanted with the photograph and said that the impression of Undine conveyed by the “Weekend” seemed strangely distorted.
I see this Undine. Somewhere in Rock-Drill, Ezra writes of dry rocks, desolation, no water, no place for his Undine. When Ezra left finally for Europe, Frances came into my life. She completed or “complemented” the Dryad or Druid that Ezra had evoked so poignantly. Now, it almost seems that we have a super-imposition, as Ezra leaves or will leave or has left this Undine, again so poignantly evoked — but in what desolate surroundings.
June 6, Friday
Undine. “O swallow — my sister … the world’s division divideth us …” off to strange adventure, looking for a Temple, an answer. I tremble at the words, Aztec, Aztlan, which Norman quotes from one of the letters … and a Tomb, a Venus, her own creation, to go with her — where? Frances Josepha completed me after her “father,” as Undine calls Ezra, left America for Europe, in 1908. This is 1958. The year’s division divideth us? No.
June 7, Saturday
Erich Heydt has filled in the “years’ division.” My own “weekend” is empty without him. He comes to see me at tea time (coffee time), as a rule, the first days of the week. Bryher comes on Tuesday and acquaintances from Zürich are due on Wednesday and Saturday. They want to spring-clean me out of my surroundings, one day next week. This is worse than a trip to Mexico. I can not “take” Aztec and Aztlan, though I wait feverishly for news from Norman.
June 8, Sunday
Feverishly? Is that the word?
Dorothy, the pillar of strength, the ivory tower, hides or tries to hide in her corner, “behind a ramshackle old upright piano.” He and his Undine won’t meet again. What did he say? It was a public occasion. They were all public occasions. The dim hall is always filled with the patients, the other patients, but they have their small, pathetic privacy, a semi-enclosed “alcove.” There is a group of Negroes at a table, near by, and others lying on benches along the wall. Did he tell her, then and there, it was the last time, or did he leave it at that, and write one of his all but indecipherable letters, to be understood at least in that connection, “We won’t meet again.” They won’t meet “outside.” She has friends, work, she is not alone.