End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound

by Hilda Doolittle

  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.

  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 f
orget, “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, …”

  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.

  6 Ramon Guthrie poem. “Ezra Pound in Paris and Elsewhere,” by Ramon Guthrie, is published together with the Rattray article in The Nation, November 16, 1957, p. 345.

  7 Gaudier-Brzeska. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was a young sculptor and friend of Ezra Pound in London. He was killed in World War I. Pound’s study of his work, first published in 1916, was reissued in a revised and expanded edition by New Directions in 1960, under the title, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir.