March 24
Then Frobenius;27 another mystery is partly solved in Motive and Method in an essay, “Pound and Frobenius” by Guy Davenport. Ezra kept writing me to get Frobenius. It was when I was in Lausanne, soon after Ezra was installed in St. Elizabeth’s. No bookshop had Frobenius and they seemed never to have heard of him. I imagined Frobenius as a Swede, a mystic, perhaps unconsciously relating him to Swedenborg and the early books that Ezra brought me. It turned out, after a number of letters between us, that he wanted me to get Frobenius for myself, not to send to him, as I had at first imagined. Now, I find that Frobenius was a sort of Kultur archeologist and that Ezra had at one time made a sort of Odysseus-Pound alter-ego of him. Frobenius had a connection with Frankfurt but of “incredible obscurity,” to use the phrase of the author of this essay. Ezra Pound and Carl Jung, the author states, were the chief enthusiasts for Frobenius’ work on primitive cultures.
We find oddly, then, another clue to Ezra’s divided loyalties. If Italy is the “Lady Loba,” the Lupa mother-symbol, is not Germany by way of Frobenius (the Odysseus of Ezra’s fantasy) the giant father? Of course, we need not remind our readers, if we ever have any, that his father’s name was Homer.
These clues that I personally find so fascinating are jeered at by the supersophisticated. I painfully got together some notes in this naif manner after being urged and urged to pay some tribute to the “Maestro” for a birthday (65?). The short article was judged “not suitable” but was not even returned to me.28
March 25
There is the incident of the “Hilda Book.” I heard it was up for sale or had been sold. Is this a forgery or is it the Is-hilda set of poems that Ezra bound together in a parchment cover and gave me? Erich was very angry about the article. “You had no copy? But I thought you always made copies. Surely, this is a theft, a crime. Can you not get a lawyer to see to it? Why didn’t you at the time — and the ‘Hilda Book’—” of which I had just told him.
I explained to Erich that I had been busy then, in Lausanne and Lugano, on my prose and poetry, dealing with, or directly or indirectly inspired by, the dramatic war years in London. I was annoyed, no doubt emotionally shaken at the thought of the “Hilda Book,” for the only possible clue that I could imagine to its appropriation was by way of Frances, of whom I have written. She was killed with her mother and daughter in the Plymouth Blitz. A friend of hers had written me of it and of certain of his own books that were found. But I knew that Andrew [Gibson] would have been the first to tell me of this book, which possibly I might have given to Frances, so very long ago, after parting with Ezra.
March 26
“Was Andrew her husband?” Erich asked me this afternoon, when I read him this last entry. “No, no, no — Louis had faded out years and years ago. Andrew was the godfather of her son Oliver.” “Where was Oliver?” “He was allegedly in the Navy, but Andrew could not trace him, and I wrote and never heard. Andrew said he thought that Oliver ‘was lost from his ship,’ but maybe Oliver turned up after all; maybe he found the ‘Hilda Book’ among his mother’s relics — literally, reliques.” “How strange it is, how you weave over and back; the threads hold Europe and America together.”
“That is what Ezra’s Cantos were trying to do — what they do. I must find you a beautiful Canto image—” and I found it and read “San Cristoforo provided transport / with a little Christo gripping his hair”29 And this — and I started to read from Rock-Drill but put the book down. “I read too much this morning. I have only lately dared to try to read through the Cantos. But just now, before you came in, when I felt dazed and dizzy, some of my own lines came to me and laid the ghost, as it were. I had developed along another line, in another dimension — only the opposites could meet in the end. How funny, I remember how he said to me in London, … ‘Let’s be engaged — don’t tell …’ well, whoever it was, not just then Dorothy.” “Then you were the third in line?” “No — I was the first—.” “And he came to you in the Nursing Home, you said, and wanted you to have his child—.” “Well, wanted the child that I was about to have to be his, to have been his, ‘My only real criticism is that this is not my child.’ ”
March 27
I read Canto 90, Latin, Greek, Italian and all the rest of it, aloud to Erich, this afternoon. Did I really read all of it? Probably, only a section. I gain a new power over the material, the invocation “m’elevasti” does invoke, does call one out “from under the rubble” of daily cares and terrors.
I have been seeing or trying to see a whirling kaleidoscope. “Ubi Amor ibi oculus est.” The thought of Ezra was part of the “rubble heap,” my actual war experiences. Nor could I follow the intricacies of the legal accusation. My eye, following too rapidly the uneven lines of the difficult pages, was yet part of my intellectual equipment. I refused to be taken in, I must see clearly. I could not see clearly but I could hear clearly, as I read, “m’elevasti / out of Erebus.” I could at last accept the intoxication of “Kuthera sempiterna” and the healing of “myrrh and olibanum on the altar stone / giving perfume.”
March 30, Palm Sunday
Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel
but is jagged,
For a flash,
for an hour.
Then agony,
then an hour,
then agony, …
Dorothy Shakespear, Dorothy Pound, the “Weekend” article tells us, sits in a corner, “her corner,” sheltered, not wishing to see or be seen. I had a letter from her yesterday, the first in many years. I keep looking for her in the Canto series, Rock-Drill. To me, she is Leucothea, who in the last section, had pity on the ship-wrecked Odysseus. She is “leukos, Leukothea / white foam, a sea-gull.”
Undine,30 in the “Weekend,” is sketching D.P., as Dorothy signed herself in the letter. Undine is reported to have said, “I think she has a beautiful profile, but it is so difficult.…” It is indeed difficult. We don’t hear enough of D.P. and her heroic fortitude, though I do not visualize her as Penelope in this special instance, but rather as that “mortal once / Who now is a sea-god.”
March 31
Erich says again this afternoon when I question the exact meaning of “indicted,” as used in the December 1957 number of Poetry,31 in a letter to the editor about Ezra, “but why do you get so excited?” I explained that I had read in the [William Rose] Benét Reader’s Encyclopedia that Ezra had been arrested and tried for high treason (1945), but was “judged insane.” Erich thought “indicted” referred simply to the formal accusation. I don’t know.
“In any case,” I say to Erich, “it is good to be excited, to feel this.”
My story as lived out in the second war in London might well have been that of Dorothy Shakespear; her story could not have been, but becomes in retrospect, mine. The two men, diametrically opposed, set off each other, the London “opposite number” of my life-long Isis search, and the Odysseus-Pound descended into the land of the shades in the Pisan Cantos. No. There is no resemblance. But I completed my own cantos as Norman called them, again in the Greek setting; mine is Helen and Achilles [Helen in Egypt].32 There is resemblance in this, the two men meet in war, the Trojan War, the Achilles of my fantasy and imagination and the Odysseus of Ezra’s. They do not meet, they never can meet in life. But the two women, Helen (of my creative reconstruction) and the Penelope (a human actuality) can communicate.