Why did she write Norman of herself, Undine, “He killed her”?
Yes, it was a public occasion. It must have been the last time I saw him, before he left for Europe. It was at the Burd School where we had had the dances and the coasting parties. “Father won’t be back,” Margaret [Snively]44 said, “you and Ezra can stay in his study.” There was a couch. There were fiery kisses. There is a tentative knock. Ezra answers the door and turns to the heavy long velvet curtains. “What is the matter?” It was another shock, again “caught in the very act,” such as it was. It was enough to draw an audience. The school girls, it was discovered, had assembled on the balcony above — one of them loyally had come across to their private apartment and told Margaret. There must have been a gap in the folds of heavy velvet; anyhow, the girls had had their peep-show. I was frozen, then. Now, I think of Undine, the last time at St. Elizabeth’s, and the background of dark faces, a jungle.
June 11, Wednesday
Erich spoke of past, present and future, [Heidegger’s] die drei Ekstasen der Zeitlichkeit when I read these last entries to him, yesterday. “Did you only just remember this last — peep-show?” “I couldn’t really have forgotten it, but it only became real when I wrote of it; past, present and future, as you say, came together, die drei Ekstasen. This is the sort of remembering that is reality, ecstasy. The act of this remembering is an ecstasy, even if the thing remembered is as—“some dull opiate to the brain, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”45 But I couldn’t sink to Lethe — the humiliation dragged me back.” “That happened first with your father?” “Yes — yes — but somehow this second episode only comes true in relation to another (‘he kissed her goodbye’), perhaps that is the future, this sort of remembering, ecstasy.”
He said, “I am sad that you say your “weekend” is empty. I could always come on Saturday.” I try to explain that the emptiness is part of it — part of last summer when he was gone for three months — part (only lately realized) of the emptiness when Ezra left America — and that realization came true, became real, only when I heard on April 18th, of Ezra’s release and plans to return to Europe, and my ecstasy was tempered by my sympathy, identification almost, with Undine. I did not know then that they had already parted.
I show Erich a Time notice (June 9) that speaks of Ezra’s formal application for passport which was granted him. It speaks of “mad old poet Ezra Pound.” Erich says, “But really, how wonderful—mad old poet—it’s out of — out of—.”
“King Lear,” I say.
June 14, Saturday
I read an interesting article by Edmund Wilson, on “Mr. Eliot,” in The New Yorker of May 24, 1958. Mr. Wilson writes of T. S. Eliot, “Of no other poet, perhaps, does Cocteau’s bon mot seem so true, that the artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.” Mr. Wilson speaks of the compulsive drive of Eliot’s poetry, he wrote under compulsion — as we write. The prison actually of the Self was dramatized or materialized for our generation by Ezra’s incarceration.
June 19
There is an intermediate place or plane, however, that can not be ignored. It survives the memory of the first fiery Lupus and the “last attachment,” a Panther of another order, the Ulysses and Achilles of heroic stature. It is le paradis of laisser aller, of the orange groves of Capri, of arcades and arches of Padua and Verona. Let go, it says, the grandiose, let go ambition; scribble and write, that is your inheritance, no grim compulsion.
Make no mistake. Poles apart, two poles made communication possible. Establish the poles. Others may use our invention, extension, communication. We don’t care any more. Only, watching, a purely instinctive gesture impels us. We would reach out, snatch a victim from the altar. Aztec. Aztlan. What can we do about it?
June 20
As I have said, Norman sent me the photographs of her pictures. I had also Undine’s booklet that Joan found me in Zürich. I wrote Norman of my feeling for her work, he wrote her of this. He said she would appreciate recognition from “another artist.” So through Norman, I receive a letter from her and I write her direct. She writes me again. In this letter of June 9, I am all the things that I would forget, “seeress,” “most high,” “most beautiful” and all the rest.
She had a copy of Modern American Poetry,46 she said, and in the H.D. section, she had made drawings in the margin. Should she send me the book?
June 21, Saturday
Undine seemed myself then, I wrote when I heard the April 18th broadcast — the then, however, extends in time. It is the creative pencil that reshaped a poem in the Museum tea room in London. The poem was “Hermes of the Ways.” I wonder if this first published poem is in the book Undine wants to send me.
June 25
Poor Undine! They don’t want you, they really don’t. How shall we reconcile ourselves to this? …
Sentiment, sentimentality struggle with reason.…
June 26
Undine writes, “The male just can’t go about like that, ditching a spirit love.” She writes, “I have known Ezra for 6 years.” She says, “The last 4 years I took a vow in St. Antony’s Church in NYC not to leave the Maestro until he was freed. A month before he was freed he made me break that vow.”
6 years? Where does that take us on the pattern-parallel, the map or graph? 1958—6 years—1952. That summer we began the long Helen sequence, an attempt, not unsuccessful, to retain a relationship, materially “ditched.” That is the only way to keep a vow. “But this is WAR,” Undine writes. Mine was WAR too, transposed to the heroic, retaining sea-enchantment. Nothing is lost or can be, of what Undine calls “a spirit love.”
June 27, Friday
On June 19, we wrote, “We would reach out, snatch a victim from the altar. Aztec. Aztlan.” A letter came yesterday from Norman. “Her [Jos6 Vasquez] Amaral47 was taking her paintings to Mexico for an exhibition, there was a horrible accident in Texas, which killed his girl friend driving with him and wrecked the car. One gathers the art was destroyed, but she also speaks of now having to go there to get it.”
I wrote Norman that I had had a premonition of disaster but did not want to write her of it. I wrote on June 7, “I can not ‘take’ Aztec and Aztlan, though I wait feverishly for news from Norman.”
Is this the news? Has Aztec, Aztlan taken its victim? Will they let Undine go?
June 28, Saturday
Calendar days now have precedence and procedure. On June 10, Undine posted me the copy of Modern American Poetry. It has just come. It was sent from Washington, but the return address is given as Mt. Vernon Ave., Alex., Va. It must have been in her long June 9 letter that she spoke of the marginal sketches. But one is a full page drawing of Ezra, done over the “Evadne”48 lines, “I first tasted under Apollo’s lips / love and love sweetness, …”