I find the reference to [Vasquez] Amaral. “Now José Amaral, the Aztec, has given me another name … and I can not do other than use it.”
There is a Little Flower pressed and carefully mounted on the initial page of the H.D. section.
We would like to confide Undine to the care of Marie-Thérèse-Françoise, Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux.
June 30
In the Modern American Poetry, Undine writes in the margin of the “sea-girls” section of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song [of J. Alfred Prufrock],” “ ‘an old legend,’ sayeth my mother, ‘says that if a Sea Prince call us and we go live with him everything will be fine unless we can still hear human voices; if we do they immediately wake us from our enchantment and we drown.’ I guess once you’ve decided to walk through a wall you shouldn’t change your mind in the middle.”
July 2, Tuesday
Undine is imposed or super-imposed on Frances [Gregg] Josepha, as I have said. Again, Frances was the Florence of my childhood — all boy’s names. (Florence was a page or youth in the old French legends.) Florence — Frances. Frances said that people were always calling her Florence.
Florence was one of a family of sisters, like the little one of Alençon and Lisieux. I have difficulty sorting out the sisters. There was Marie, Pauline, Celine — and another, Léonie? Florence was a pretty child with the same crop of short curls that we see in the early Thérése pictures. And our little Undine on her sea-rocks with her wind-blown hair, again, looks not unlike the early Florence. For myself, all three, the Saint, the rejected wild and willful Undine and the gracious chatelaine of Bon Air, Virginia (the childhood alter-ego from whom I was parted at 8) become one in consciousness, the “lost companion” who figures so prominently in many analytical case histories.
July 3
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus tells the Thérèse story from a reasoned worldly Protestant standpoint. This does not detract but adds to the overwhelming pathos of the legend. Thérése was very young when she lost her mother, she turned to her older sister. When Pauline enters the Convent, Thérése decides to follow her petite mere. She must wait 7 years until she is 16, before she can join Soeur Agnés or Mere Agnés de Jésus. Soeur Thérése de L’Enfant Jésus lived there until she was 24.
I had heard of the Histoire d’une Ame, her short autobiography, just before War I, but I was not particularly interested. I heard in 1925 of the Vatican ceremony of the elevation of Thérèse, Soeur Thérèse. Sainte Thérése had a peculiar talent. She would spend her heaven, she had promised, doing good on earth. She had thousands of clients. A friend (Protestant) during the second war, brought me a little string of 13 beads. “You say a Glory-be,” she told me, “Glory-be-to-the-Father-and-to-the-Son-and-to-the-Holy-Ghost for each bead, eight days in succession — an octave — my Catholic sister-in-law told me. You can give half-a-crown to a beggar or put it in the poor-box, but it is not necessary. Just for extra, you can buy a rose and lay it on her altar (there is one at Brompton Oratory). You just tell your trouble or worry and ask for help. It works.” During the war the octaves — or was it novenas? — worked wonders:
For a long time after the war, I did not touch or “tell” the beads, but I came back to them.
Madame Mardrus says that she is the only one of the thousands of admirers and clients of Sainte Thérése who never asked for anything.
July 7
I have been reading Denton Welch. He died in 1948, at the age of 31, after a long illness due to criminally careless driving, another “horrible accident.” He was a schoolboy, an art student, on a Whitsun holiday, on his bicycle, happy, free. Then everything went, he was lying in a field. A Voice Through a Cloud49 tells this story, laconically, with touches of grim humor. There is authentic martyrdom; the record, with few if any allusions to “God-the-Father-God-the-Son-and-God-the-Holy-Ghost,” almost has its place beside that of Thérese’s Histoire d’une Ame.
The boy himself has his place with the Eros we have named, that special Angel.
July 11
Now they have gone. The bon-voyage letter that I sent them through Norman would not have reached them in time.
July 13
But I hear from Norman who saw them off on July 1, on the Cristoforo Colombo.
“Tuesday was an event! I went to New York to see Ezra and Dorothy off. He had written and asked me to go. I got to the Pier at 2:30 and after a little false search found my way to Cabin 128, tucked away in a corner of first-class at the end of a corridor. The door was closed but Omar Pound opened it and greeted me, ‘You are the one we want to see. Come in!’ The door closed behind me. There on the bunk lay Ezra, stripped to the waist, his torso rather proudly sunburned. At his knees on the bunk sat Marcella [Spann] shoeless. On the other side of the cabin was Dorothy, smiling and looking very well. She rose and kissed me, to my surprise; and I gave her a single yellow rose. ‘H.D. wanted me to give you this,’ I said. I told her you knew she was going but not when. ‘You were commanded, then!’ Dorothy said, and she was really touched. ‘Yes,’ I answered, for the Spirits had told me you did command.
“Eventually I discovered that Omar was a guard against the press who kept coming for photographs and interviews, neither of which was permitted. It was hot but cozy. Ezra was no different from ever. For half an hour he lectured me on college entrance examinations, and the program I must follow to improve them. He talked about Marcella Spann’s and his anthology [Confucius to Cummings]50 and what I must do about it. He showed me Canto 99 which had just appeared. I will get you a copy eventually. And so it went. Then the whistle blew at 3:30 and we bade farewell. Ezra took both my hands and pressed them warmly; Dorothy gave three affectionate kisses to me and an invitation to Brunnenburg. ‘Don’t look so sad,’ Ezra said.
“And so that is ended and I wonder if I shall ever see either of them again. And in any event your rose was with them. ‘It is for the Paradiso,’ I said at the end.”
Notes to End to Torment
1 Kūsnacht. At the time of the composition (1958) of End to Torment, H.D. was living in Kūsnacht, where she stayed until the Klinik Dr. Brunner was closed in 1961.
2 Ignace Paderewski. The Polish pianist and composer (1860–1941).
3 Erich Heydt. H.D.’s friend and doctor, the Oberarzt (chief doctor) at the Klinik Dr. Brunner in Kūsnacht.
4 Formel. (Literally, formula.) Pound had submitted H.D.’s first poems to Poetry (Chicago) under the signature “H.D. Imagiste,” thereby providing Hilda Doolittle with a pseudonym and the “imagist” movement in poetry with a formal title.
5 “Weekend with Ezra Pound” by David Rattray. This article, to which H.D. refers throughout End to Torment, was published as she notes in The Nation, November 16, 1957, pp. 343-49. In the article David Rattray, then a student of Provençal literature, reports on two days of visits with Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. Others present during his conversations with Pound included Dorothy Pound, Jean Marie Chatel, and David Horton.