H.D.’s version of the past and present is characteristically enigmatic and emotionally transcendent. “It is the feel of things rather than what people do. It runs through all the poets, really, of the world. One of us had been trapped. Now, one of us is free.” The journal ends with Pound’s freedom, and a rose given by Pearson in H.D.’s name “for the Paradiso.” In the subsequent months, H.D. sent the manuscript to Brunnenburg, Italy, for Pound’s comments, and he responded with a few suggestions and the note, “there is a great deal of beauty.”5 A few days later he added a touching postscript: “Torment title excellent, but optimistic.”6
Norman Holmes Pearson encouraged H.D. to complete the memoir, gave it a title, and was preparing it for publication when he died in 1975. (The manuscript is now a part of the Yale Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) H.D. had written to E.P., “I dedicated it to ‘Norman,’ he wanted me to write it.”7 There had been a false start some years before, when in 1950 she had written a short recollection for a book Peter Russell was editing for Pound’s sixty-fifth birthday. That was never published, and it is due to Pearson’s attentiveness and energy that we have this longer record of the friendship of two of the most important poets of the century. The publication also includes “Hilda’s Book” (which H.D. here calls “the Hilda Book”), the “little book” handbound by Pound and given to Hilda. She had thought it lost during the war in London, where it had been in the keeping of her friend Frances Gregg, but it was saved and eventually came into the hands of Peter Russell, who sold it to the Houghton Library of Harvard University. We are grateful for their permission to reprint it here.
This publication is a project sponsored by the Center for the Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries, in the Beinecke Library of Yale University. I am grateful to Donald Gallup and Louis Martz for their advice and assistance in the preparation of this text.
M.K.
Notes
1 Perdita Schaffner, “Merano, 1962,” in Paideuma, vol. 4, no. 2/3, Fall-Winter 1975, p. 513.
2 Letter from H.D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, June 3, 1958. In the Collection of American Literature [C.A.L.], Beinecke Library, Yale University.
3 Letter from H.D. to Ezra Pound, January 2, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.
4 Letter from H.D. to Norman Holmes Pearson, April 11, 1958. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.
5 Letter from Ezra Pound to H.D., November 6, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.
6 Letter from Ezra Pound to H.D., November 13, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.
7 Letter from H.D. to Ezra Pound, January 2, 1959. C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University.
END TO TORMENT
for Norman
[Küsnacht] 1
Friday
March 7, 1958
Snow on his beard. But he had no beard, then. Snow blows down from pine branches, dry powder on the red gold. “I make five friends for my hair, for one for myself.”
Or did he wear a soft hat, a cap pulled down over his eyes? A mask, a disguise? His eyes are his least impressive feature. But am I wrong? They seem small; color? Pebble-green? Surely not an insignificant feature. Gothic, as they call it, moonlight drifts through these etched trees. Cold?
Some sort of rigor mortis. I am frozen in this moment.
Perhaps I held it all my life, it is what they called my “imagery”; even now, they speak of “verse so chiselled as to seem lapidary,” and they say, “She crystallizes — that is the right word.” They say, “that is the right word.” This moment must wait 50 years for the right word. Perhaps he had said it; perhaps in the frost of our mingled breath, the word was written. He was maybe nineteen, I was a year younger [1905—Ed.]. Immensely sophisticated, immensely superior, immensely rough-and-ready, a product not like any of the brothers and brothers’ friends — and boys we danced with (and he danced badly). One would dance with him for what he might say. It didn’t matter, with a lot of people around. Here, in the winter woods, it seemed significant.
It seemed at the same time, infinitely trivial — was he showing off? Why must he say it? He said, “She said, ‘Have you ever kissed a girl before?’ I said, ‘Never under the Rock of Gibraltar.’ ”
No need, then, to ask the question. First kisses? In the woods, in the winter — what did one expect? Not this. Electric, magnetic, they do not so much warm, they magnetize, vitalize. We need never go back. Lie down under the trees. Die here. We are past feeling cold; isn’t that the first symptom of rigor mortis?
They used to say, “Run around, children; it’s all right as long as you don’t stop running.” Had I stopped running?
Stop running for a moment, if you dare call him back.
There are very few left who know what he looked like then. There is a hint of a young, more robust Ignace Paderewski2 or even of the tawny Swinburne, if his frail body had ever reached maturity. But this young (already) iconoclast is rougher, tougher than the Polish poet or the Border bard. It is whispered among us that he “writes,” but he has not spoken of this to me yet. “Where are you? Come back—,” is shouted by the crowd above on the icy toboggan-run. “Shout back,” I say and he gives a parody of a raucous yodel, then “Haie! Haie! Io,” (you have read this in his poems). He seems instinctively to have snapped back into everyday existence. He drags me out of the shadows.
March 8
Now, no one will understand this. They swarm out of their burrows. “But you must write about him.” But what I write, they don’t like. Erich [Heydt]3 calls them Ameisen, I’m not quite sure of this, but of course it’s “ants” in my little dictionary. Erich says he wants the ants or Ameisen to write a commentary on the Cantos. There are selections from them in a new German-English edition that he got in Zürich. “Do you want it?” he said and handed me the paperbook. The face looked out at me from the dark reflection of the paperbook cover. I liked the feel of the cover. The face, full-face, bronze against the dark background, looked at me, a reflection in a metal mirror. “No,” I said and handed the book back. “But there is about you,” said Erich, “here; Eva Hesse says that he invented the Imagist title or Formel4 to explain the verses of the young poet — poetess — here — you.” But I did not take the book. “I read that somewhere before,” I said. Is this a reprint and not new, of the book I had, maybe three years ago? I had many of the books and stacks of papers and pamphlets but I sent most of them back to Vevey, to be stored with my other books in a friend’s house. I read the Cantos or read at them or in them. Norman Pearson kept asking me to explain references. I gave it all up. Then I read an article, “Weekend with Ezra Pound,”5 and it all came back. I asked Joan [Waluga] to get me the new edition of the old book in Zürich.
There is the Wyndham Lewis Tate Gallery portrait in the “Weekend” by David Rattray, in The Nation of November 16, 1957. Wyndham Lewis used to come to our little flat in Kensington to borrow Richard Aldington’s razor. This annoyed Richard. Ezra and Dorothy had a slightly larger flat across the narrow hall. I found the door open one day before they were married, and Ezra there. “What — what are you doing?” I asked. He said he was looking for a place where he could fence with Yeats. I was rather taken aback when they actually moved in. It was so near. But we went soon after to Hampstead, to a larger flat that a friend had found us.