April 1
Erich queries my quotation from the Benét and looks up the Eva Hesse reference in Dichtung und Prosa, in which she states that Ezra’s condition was diagnosed as friihzeitige Senilitat, brought on by his unjust treatment in the Pisan camp. I question the Senilitat and Erich explains that actually it is a psychological word that is sometimes used, as it is in a way less damaging or derogatory than paranoia or one of the other technical terms for madness or insanity.
It is painful to discuss this but I feel that an almost algebraic formula is necessary. I can not say that any of us are satisfied with the equation, Fascist-party-line-by-short-wave-to-America + Poet = Senilitat. There is, as I myself felt in my “Lady Luba” or Lupe finding, the hint of the crime passionnel, for which (as the second letter to Poetry, in this same December issue, states) “ ‘no jury,’ as the phrase has it, ‘will convict.’ ”
The two letters are very revealing, “An Exchange on Ezra Pound.” The second, by Hugh Kenner, concludes with an injunction to the “literary critic” and, it follows, to every intelligent reader of Ezra Pound. Apart from and along with the purely legal aspect, Mr. Kenner makes it quite clear that anyone who has “made himself conversant with the thought, the poetry, and the intentions has the duty of testifying as he can.”
April 4, Good Friday
I had a long letter from Norman Pearson yesterday. He had seen them both. Erich has gone, for ten days, on his Easter holiday to Venice. I long to share my news with him but it must wait. Bryher is here with Sylvia Beach for Easter. Perhaps I can talk with them, as I discussed the “Weekend” with Bryher and George in the beginning, and laughed, really laughed, as I have said, for the first time, about Ezra. But Erich’s is a different, “existentialist” (his word) dimension. I am trembling beside him. We are seated at the end of a crowded station bench. He has taken my hands. “Must you hold my hands?” “Yes.” Into our consciousness and in our consciousness, in mine at any rate, is a small, delicate yet sturdy male object. The child reaches into the market basket of the woman on the bench beside us. His curls are short and red and gold. He is the “fiery moment” incarnate.
How many loaves and fishes are here? But we need not feed this multitude, not loaves and fishes. It is mostly apples. “Pomona, Pomona. Christo Re, Dio Sole.”33
April 5, Easter Saturday
“But,” he said, “my only real criticism is that this is not my child.”
This is the child but a long time after, drawn into consciousness by Erich Heydt, stabilized, exactly visualized, one summer day on the crowded platform of the Zürich-Stadelhofen station.
The Child was with us when George Plank, Bryher, and I first discussed the “Weekend” and I laughed about Ezra, for the first time in the 12 years of his confinement. I heard his voice, “Goodbye Dave, you’ll come over Christmas Day, won’t you?” There is no reason to accept, to condone, to forgive, to forget what Ezra has done. Sylvia [Beach] made it very clear last night. And here, I should renounce my hope of recalling Ezra, if I dare think of Sylvia’s confinement in a detention camp, her near-starvation, the meager rations shared with her by her friend Adrienne Monnier, during a term of hiding. Dare I go on? There is no reason to hope for his release. “He has books, everything; students come to me in Paris and tell me about him. Fascist. Those dreadful people he knows — that man—.” “Yes,” I said, “I know, news items have been sent me, but.…” “There is a group there. He has everything.…” “I know.” “It was a great mistake, that official prize they gave him.” I said, “But…
I said, “But.” There is no argument, pro or con. You catch fire or you don’t catch fire. “This fruit has a fire within it, / Pomona, Pomona. / No glass is clearer than are the globes of this flame / what sea is clearer than the pomegranate body / holding the flame? / Pomona, Pomona.”
April 7, Easter Monday
So the very day I enter this last note, I hear again from Norman Pearson, “It looks more and more possible that the day of liberation may finally come.” He sends New York Times, April 2 report, and a short article from April 3; London Times is sent me, and Joan found a Jours de France, April 5 notice, “Ezra Pound, le Mallarme U. S. ne mourra pas chez les fous.” I have among my Easter letters, one too, from Mary de Rachewiltz from Schloss Brunnenburg, Tyrol, “There is some hope of having father with us soon.”
April 9
Mary asked me to visit her when I was at Lugano. There was a local bus, she said, it was not far. But I never went. She sent me photographs of herself and the children. She is looking out of a window of the Schloss or castle, like a girl in a fairy tale, or “Sister Helen,” a poem. She gazes out over the romantic Tyrol landscape, far, far. I hardly dare think of her and a copy of an early portrait that Ezra had sent me, with her hair, wheat-gold, flowing down over her shoulders. There is Sigifredo too, reaching up to a sort of della Scala knocker on a great door, with fair hair in a halo. Mary again asks me to visit them, “especially now as there is some hope of having father with us soon.”
I wait for letters with the intense apprehension with which I waited almost 50 years ago, when Ezra left finally for Europe. Through the years, I have imposed or superimposed this apprehension on other people, other letters. A sort of rigor mortis drove me onward. No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano. Not rigor mortis. No, No! The vines grow more abundantly on those volcanic slopes. Ezra would have destroyed me and the center they call “Air and Crystal” of my poetry.
Now, I am in a fever of apprehension and excitement. I was separated from my friends, my family, even from America, by Ezra. I did not analyse this. When Frances came into my life, I could talk about it — but even so, only superficially. But I read her some of the poems that Ezra and I had loved together, chiefly Swinburne. “You read so beautifully,” said Frances. I read Andrew Lang’s translation of Theocritus that Ezra had brought me. I wrote a poem to Frances in a Bion and Moschus mood.
O hyacinth of the swamp lands,
Blue lily of the marshes,
How could I know,
Being but a foolish shepherd,
That you would laugh at me?
April 10
Father. In the new Eva Hesse Arche Verlag34 edition of selections of Ezra’s prose, there is a photograph of Ezra as he left the Pisan camp, fettered, between two detectives. There are the 1946–1948 pictures which are familiar from the book jackets, and the 1955 one in the deck chair in the garden at St. Elizabeth’s. There is the earliest photograph, taken, they state here (and in the little booklet35 that Mary sent me, published by Pesce d’Oro, Milan, for the 70th birthday) in Venice, at the time of the publication of his first book, A Lume Spento, 1908. I am sure that this picture is much earlier. The atmosphere is not Venetian — nor the chair. This is a younger Ezra even than the one I met first when I was 15.