“What exactly did he say to people?” “O — I don’t know.…” Drifting. Drifting. Meeting with him alone or with others at the Museum tea room. We all read in the British Museum reading room. Dark walls and statues that looked dingy. Frances had gone home. I could wait till my parents came. My father, at 70, had retired from the University. My mother wrote, “We could meet in Genoa.” I had my own allowance now. Drifting? “But Dryad,” (in the Museum tea room), “this is poetry.” He slashed with a pencil. “Cut this out, shorten this line. ‘Hermes of the Ways’ is a good title. I’ll send this to Harriet Monroe of Poetry. Have you a copy? Yes? Then we can send this, or I’ll type it when I get back. Will this do?” And he scrawled “H.D. Imagiste” at the bottom of the page.
I was hiding. There was the heroic sequence, those last years in London. “What is it you are hiding?” Erich Heydt insisted. I was hiding myself and Ezra, standing before my father, caught “in the very act” you might say. For no “act” afterwards, though biologically fulfilled, had had the significance of the first demi-vierge embraces. The significance of “first love” can not be overestimated. If the “first love” is an uncoordinated entity, Angel-Devil — or Angel-Daemon or Daimon, Séraphitus-Séraphita — what then? Find a coordinated convention, Man-Hero who will compensate, complete the picture. By what miracle does the mariage du del et de la terre find consummation? It filled my fantasies and dreams, my prose and poetry for ten years. But in the end, intellectual and physical perfection, the laurel wreath of the acclaimed achievement must be tempered, balanced, re-lived, re-focused or even sustained by the unpredictable, the inchoate, challenged by a myth, a legend — the poet (Vidal, shall we say), changed to Wolf or Panther, hunted down and captured.
There is a stir of dust from old leaves
Will you trade roses for acorns …21
March 16
“Goodbye Dave, you’ll come over Christmas Day, won’t you?” This “Weekend with Ezra Pound” by Rattray seems to me the first human personal presentation of Ezra that I have seen. True, I had lost touch, was “hiding,” but I had newspapers and periodicals showered on me during the years. The German was too difficult but I felt they cared — but was that a political dodge? I asked a young German whom I met when Erich Heydt had his apartment here in Geduld. The boy said, “No — we read him for himself, in East and in West Germany.” Still, I was not satisfied.
Erich said, “I was disappointed that Ezra did not give your address to the Ratt—.” “Don’t call him the Ratt — but maybe Ratt doesn’t mean rat in your language.” “It’s easier, than Ratt-ray — doch, doch—he gave Richard’s name, anyhow, though he said not to mention E.P. to him, ‘just be the jeune homme modeste.’ Why doesn’t he mention you?” “He must know that I don’t see many people—.” “But it says the Ratt-ray is in Europe, a Fulbright scholar in France. He could come to Zürich. Or are you afraid that he might make fun of you? Of us? What did they think, the girl with the double chin, the double chins, sketching, and the boy with the coarse features, and the one with a face, slippery as if modelled in soap?” “You seem to know the article by heart.” “Wouldn’t these visitors be hurt? The girl, for instance — he said he thought when he first saw her, that she was a patient from another ward.”
Just now, hearing Solveigslied on my radio, I am reminded of how Ezra took me to see Richard Mansfield’s Peer Gynt in Philadelphia. Solveig — Penelope — spinning, weaving. I couldn’t remember how the story ended. I remembered the button-molder and Peer’s escape. He wasn’t melted down again into an unrecognizable nonentity. He remained an entity, he is recognizable. Mad? He always was eccentric. “O, Ezra Pound’s crazy” was the verdict of my schoolgirl contemporaries. “He wanted them to throw him in the pond.” So the story was going around from the beginning, but I forgot it till it cropped up again after the incident that had lost him his job. Spinning? Weaving? Then, I remembered the end of the play, an ancient Solveig in a white wig, a decrepit Peer Gynt in a white wig, meet in the doorway of the original Solveig cottage, on the edge of a picturesque pasteboard forest. No, this is something different.
Dr. Erich Heydt injected me with Ezra, jabbing a needle into my arm, “You know Ezra Pound, don’t you?” This was almost five years ago. It took a long time for the virus or the anti-virus to take effect. But the hypodermic needle did its work or didn’t it? There was an incalculable element. There was something. To say nothing “happened” in Heydt’s studio apartment is to put it very crudely. “Tired? Rest on the couch—.” “No.” The very idea of a studio couch and tenderness brought with it a cloud, not a crowd of memories. “Why don’t you tell me?” “I’m always telling you.” “Yes — but you’re hiding something.”
“What is it? What is it?” We were running to catch the train. “But what does it matter if you miss it — you can take the next one—.” I had stopped suddenly, leaning against a wall, gesturing as for a taxi. He caught my wrist, “There’s plenty of time. You’re hysterical. Something’s upset you—.” “It reminds me, running along a town street — a town — Philadelphia—.” “You’ve something there but you won’t tell me—.” “I can’t tell you. I don’t know what it is.” Room is made for us — but only just — on the end of a crowded station bench. He took my hands in his. “Must you hold my hands like this?” “Yes.” The crowd surged around us. “There’s sure to be someone from Küsnacht — to report Herr Doktor Heydt and Madame A., huddled on a bench together.” No. There was no one from anywhere, we were enclosed in another dimension. A small male child with short red-gold curls poked into the market basket of the woman beside us. Where did he come from? How did he get there? It is only a moment. The inevitable parent emerges, moving against the crowd. Parent? Guardian? He is tall and gaunt. I can not take it in. He isn’t there or I am not there but the market basket is adequately materialized and the typical Hausfrau beside us on the station bench. “I’m sorry, I said you were hysterical. I was just worried.” The train was rumbling nearer. “Should you go back?” “No — I shouldn’t.” But I pushed forward with the crowd. “Tomorrow?” he calls up to the open window of the moving train.
March 17
Erich asked me if my parents liked his parents. “They only met a few times but yes — yes,” I said, “in a purely conventional way. Mrs. Pound was a beautiful woman, well-bred, somewhat affected in manner. One was inclined to be embarrassed and baffled by her little witticisms, her epigrams, as one so often was by Ezra’s. Mr. Pound was hearty, informal, very kind. He was a government assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. He invited a group of us to visit the inner sanctum. He showed us minute weights and measures, explained superficially the analysis of the gold—“There,” and he unlocked a heavy door — it seems it was a door to an iron-bound cupboard, rather than a safe; anyway, there were stacks of gold bars—“Here,” and coins were piled in neat rows, “will you help yourself,” chuckling heartily.
Has anyone ever noted, reported this, or even known this? It seems to me that Homer Pound’s government job in Philadelphia played an extravagant part in Ezra’s later compulsions. Usury? Usura. Ezra was at one time, it seems, obsessed with this word. I followed these Canto references with difficulty. I don’t mean that Ezra wanted the gold for himself. He wanted to change the world with it. Can one change the world with it?