Gold on her head, and gold on her feet,
And gold where the hems of her kirtle meet,
And a golden girdle round my sweet;
Ah! qu’elle est belle, La Marguerite.
He read me William Morris in an orchard under blossoming — yes, they must have been blossoming — apple trees.
March 18
It was Ezra who really introduced me to William Morris. He literally shouted “The Gilliflower of Gold” in the orchard. How did it go? Hah! hah! la belle janne giroflee. And there was “Two Red Roses across the Moon” and “The Defence of Guenevere.” It was at this time that he brought me the Séraphita and a volume of Swedenborg—Heaven and Hell? Or is that Blake? He brought me volumes of Ibsen and of Bernard Shaw. He brought me Whistler’s Ten O’Clock. He scratched a gadfly, in imitation of Whistler’s butterfly, as a sort of signature in his books at that time. He was a composite James McNeill Whistler, Peer Gynt and the victorious and defeated heroes of the William Morris poems and stories. He read me “The Haystack in the Floods” with passionate emotion.
He brought me the Portland, Maine, Thomas Mosher reprint of the Iseult and Tristram story.22 He called me Is-hilda and wrote a sonnet a day; he bound them in a parchment folder. There was a series of Yogi books, too.
Actually, the gadfly hieroglyph was suggested by a book of that name. I do not know who wrote The Gadfly.23 It was a novel about Italian patriots or partisans, as we now call them, or some Risorgimento incident. The word “zany” came in. I have never seen it before. The hero gets mixed up with some travelling actors — or fair or circus? I don’t remember. Disguise? Escape? It is a bitter, tragic hero, this Gadfly. Does the story predict or foreshadow the last episodes and the Pisan legend?
Joan just came in for my letters; to my surprise, she remembers The Gadfly—“Rather before my time, mother had it.” She found the author, Ethel Voynich, in my Reader’s Encyclopedia. She does not remember any circus or fair, but she has the same impression that I have of some grim, involved, political tragedy.
I see from Eva Hesse’s note in the German-English Ezra Pound, Dichtung und Prosa24 that it is Wabash College, Indiana, that was the scene of “this girl he found” that Erich spoke of. “Were you jealous of this girl he found who slept in his bed?” Ezra was only four months there. But I must have addressed a good many letters to Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana. I confused it with Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, where he was a student for two years. Is this important?
It perhaps helps to clarify the cloud of memories. It is the emotional content that matters. I wrote, “The perfection of the fiery moment can not be sustained — or can it?” Erich says of himself that he is the Spiegel, the mirror, the burning-glass that “catches the light all round.” Yes, he gets the situation ins rechte Licht, but I can not explain to him how painful it is to me at times to retain the memory of the “fiery moment.”
Maybe Erich catches it in the Spiegel—but he has only to reflect it. I have to substantiate it.
March 19
I am walking on air, though I can hardly walk at all, due to a regrettable bone fracture. Over a year ago, I slipped on a small rug on an overwaxed, highly polished floor. Ezra wrote, “ ’ow did you ’appen to step on that thar soap”—or something of that sort. He kept writing, urging me to do some Greek translations. I found his letters almost indecipherable or untranslatable — and this made me and Richard Aldington too, to whom he was writing at the time, very sad. But the “actual” Ezra only manifested with the reading and re-reading of the “Weekend.” And now Joan has discovered a cache of his books, behind other books in my cupboard. So now we find the original Dichtung und Prosa, pencilled by Erich Heydt, 1954, in the H.D. and Imagist section.
The original lot of the early books must still be in London or with my friend Bryher in Vaud, but there is a ripe crop here; a huge Cantos volume, Rock Drill, American and English editions of Confucius, the Sophokles [Women of Trachis] and several of the beautiful little English-Italian books of the Pesce d’Oro, Milan, sent me by Mary de Rachewiltz.
Facsimile of early manuscript poem with Ezra Pound’s “gadfly” signature
“Why are you so excited when you read these notes to me?” said Erich this afternoon. “I don’t know — I don’t know — it’s the fiery moment but it’s all so long ago.” “It has no time,” said Erich, “it’s the existentialist” (word that I can never cope with) “moment. It has no time, it’s out of time, eternal.”
March 21
I was baffled, puzzled, bewildered. I see references, in “Weekend,” to certain Canto omissions or black-outs. I must check on this. It is difficult to check up on separate sections, without becoming entangled in the whole. Soon after seeing some of these original or early Canto variations, in the Pounds’ Holland Place apartment in Kensington, opposite our own flat, we moved. Black-out. Just a memory of a shock at the look, the lines, the words on the newly printed pages that Ezra showed us. Mrs. Shakespear’s brother said, “Why must he write about things that we all do every day and don’t talk about.”
Chthonian darkness — the black-out. I don’t pretend to understand. We have gone through some Hell together, separately.
March 22
Am I mad then, or is he? I could not answer the question but handed the letter to Dr. Heydt to read. This was in the beginning when I did not know Erich Heydt so well. He laughed at the letter—“What does he mean by telling you to crawl out of your pig stye?”25 I didn’t know what Ezra meant. I don’t know now. I read in Motive and Method26 today of various Canto references to Circe. In time, I will look them up.
March 23
Piere Vidal, the troubadour of whom I have spoken, “dressed in wolf-skins for the love of Lady Loba de Peugnautier (whose name means wolf). …” I quote Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, O.S.F., from her contribution to the series of essays on the Cantos, Motive and Method. Sister Bernetta refers to this madness as “lycanthropy.” I follow her exposition, “The Metamorphoses of Ezra Pound,” with admiration and respect. Myself, I have so far, felt too involved in the legend to judge fairly, or rather to see clearly.
I see, but perhaps not clearly, the poet appropriating the attributes of the famous founder of Rome — or rather of the legendary Wolf (Lupus or Lupa) who rescued and saved that founder. Is our Pard or Panther a Savior, a Lover rather than an outlaw, an iconoclast? Was it love of the incomparable “Lady Loba” that lured him to Radio Rome and that in the end, was his undoing? But no and yes. He is far from lost. He is centralized and accessible. A thousand Ameisen, ant hill upon ant hill of provincial colleges, have had a curious insemination. Has this ever happened in the history of America or anywhere?
Lycanthropy, a kind of madness in which the patient fancies himself to be a wolf; Lycanthrope, a wolf-man; wolf, Greek lykos—I read in my Chambers dictionary. The word lykos, as a word, recalls the Lynx, so poignantly invoked in the famous section of the Pisan Canto LXXIX.