In the spring & summer of 1958, Hilda Doolittle was living in Klinik Hirslanden in Kűsnacht, Switzerland, functionally a private hospital for the well-to-do that would be viewed today – indeed, it is now a part of the Hirslanden Private Hospital Group – as something between a board-and-care home & long-term psychiatric facility, really in H.D.’s case an assisted living accommodation. At the behest of Norman Holmes Pearson, the critic who proved to be H.D.’s greatest advocate during the post-WW2 years, Doolittle attempts to construct a memoir of her first love, Ezra Pound, with whom she has not been seriously romantically involved since before the First World War. Pound at this point is also in a psychiatric facility, albeit one with far fewer pretensions to being a resort, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. Indeed, it is at just this moment that Pound gains his release “into the custody of Dorothy” & heads back to Italy.

 

Doolittle’s process approximates that of Tribute to Freud, which New Directions published two years before & the success of that project is no doubt at least part of what Pearson hoped to get at in getting Doolittle to restart a project she had attempted earlier in 1950 but never been able to complete. End to Torment, her Pound book, was not published until 1979, eighteen years after her death and after those of Pound & Pearson as well. It’s even more slender & fragmentary than Tribute to Freud, and its title – ostensibly an allusion to Pound’s release from his hospital – strikes me as remarkably ambiguous.*

 

Thinking of Robert Duncan’s own H.D. Book, I find it remarkable to imagine that Doolittle herself had been involved in an almost parallel process with regards to Pound right before Robert himself embarked on his own project. Robert, of course, never had been involved personally with Doolittle, having met her only briefly during her one trip to America in the 1950s. But H.D. was, more than Pound, Williams or even Stein, the modernist around who – just as Duncan was embarking on his mature poetry starting with The Opening of the Field – Duncan would organize his mythological pantheon around. H.D. serves as a touchstone – she, both in her person & in her work, enables Duncan’s imagination to go anywhere & to do so with a sense of cohesiveness.

 

So, to understand Duncan (my original idea as I set out in the summer of ’02 to finally fully read The H.D. Book, a process I’m still only half through), I need to understand his Doolittle, which means that I also (finally!) need to fully come to terms with her myself. And here, in End to Torment, I am struck with, more than forty years after the affair, how emotionally enmeshed with Pound Doolittle still was.

 

My evidence for this is Doolittle’s white hot jealousy for what she presumes to be Pound’s love interest of the moment, a young painter then in her early thirties by the name of Sherri Martinelli. By 1958, H.D.’s own relationship to Pound is at best one of sporadic correspondence – she notes that his letters are incomprehensible. Yet, having begun this memoir at Pearson’s suggestion, she gets through Pearson a copy of “Weekend with Pound,” a slightly more than six-page account of Pound’s life at the hospital by poet David Rattray, accompanied by Wyndham Lewis’ famous portrait of Pound reclining & a poem, “Ezra Pound in Paris and Elsewhere” by Ramon Sender, that appeared in The Nation the previous October.** Rattray’s portrait of Pound is studded with cameo portraits of the various acolytes who regularly visited Pound, allowing the old fascist to pontificate to a willing audience & turning St. Elizabeth’s into “Ezuversity.” Rattray does not think much of Martinelli – he originally mistakes her for another inmate of the asylum – and comments at length as to Pound’s hugs, kisses, and literally running his hands through her hair. Rattray’s suggestion is quite clear – Pound may have a wife but, as always, he also has a mistress.

 

Elsewhere & much later, Humphrey Carpenter takes up the question of whether or not Martinelli was ever Pound’s lover in his biography, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, and isn’t fully convinced. But Martinelli herself appears to have acknowledged it & was clearly involved with more than a few other artists in her time – she is the source for Esme in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and was once involved in a triangle between him & Anatole Broyard. She became a friend to Allen Ginsberg & later had a long correspondence with Charles Bukowski.

 

Lover or not, Martinelli is viewed remarkably by H.D. She calls her Undine – she seems unable or unwilling to actually employ Martinelli’s name*** – Goethe’s symbol for water (or mermaid, or, perhaps most pointedly, siren). She pulls quotes from The Nation, substituting the name – thus H.D.’s quotation “’Pound embraced Undine as on the day before’” is actually derived from Rattray’s “It was time to leave, and Pound embraced Miss Martinelli as on the day before.”

 

[New Directions was exceptionally cautious in the area of libel in those decades, the result I believe of a suit that arose from Williams’ own autobiography, but it is unimaginable that the press would have required this symbolism of Undine when any half competent reader could walk down to the library and look up the original text.]

 

As Pound returned to Italy, Martinelli – who at some point was living more or less on the scraps from the hospital cafeteria that Pound saved for her – headed for Mexico. In her own Swiss asylum, H.D. writes, in the passage immediately following the one that quotes (or misquotes) the most passionate evidence from Rattray’s article:

 

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 [Holmes Pearson] quotes from one of the letters . . . and a Tomb, a Venus, her own creation, to go with her – where? Frances Josepha [Gregg, H.D.’s first female lover] completed me after her “father,” as Undine calls Ezra, left America for Europe, in 1908. This is 1958. The years division divideth us? No. [Ellipses in the original]

 

I take as index of just how emotional H.D. is in that passage the fact that the her that precedes the word father (bracketed in quotes no less) is not Gregg, but Doolittle herself. Indeed, elsewhere Doolittle does compare Pound with her father. [It was on a visit to her astronomer father that the 19-year-old Pound first met the 15-year-old Doolittle, just as later in London, it would be Pound who would, in sending her poems to Poetry, literally named her H.D., Imagiste – the echoes of incest are never too terribly far from the surface in Doolittle’s account of Pound & it’s intriguing that Freud, another of her father figures – she calls him “little papa” – sees her mother as the problematic figure in her childhood.]

 

Doolittle at points has a hard time keeping Martinelli/Undine straight in her discussions of her. She compares her writing of Helen to Martinelli’s six-year relation with “the Maestro,” “an attempt, not unsuccessful, to retain a relationship, materially ‘ditched.” The June 25 entry reads, in its entirety,

 

   Poor Undine! They don’t want you, they really don’t. How shall we reconcile ourselves to this? . . .

   Sentiment, sentimentality struggle with reason. . . . [Ellipses in original]

 

On July 2, “Undine” is again not a symbol of H.D., but of Gregg.

 

So this project of Doolittle’s, which I see as parallel at least at some level to the one on which Duncan (himself full of parenting issues, having been “adopted” by mystics literally on the basis of his horoscope) is soon to begin in his own writing of The H.D. Book, has at its heart deeply torn & passionate emotions directed at events long ago & far away. H.D. is rather the queen of unfinished psychic business & End to Torment is, in its own ethereal way, as hot & claustrophobic as any volume Kathy Acker ever wrote. The lust & emotional turmoil of a woman then aged 71 is something we’re not often permitted to see in literature. And it startles me.

 

 

 

 

* Albeit the title may well have been imposed by Pearson & Michael King, who succeeded him as the book’s editor. Nonetheless, Doolittle’s uses of that phrase in the volume made that an almost inescapable choice.

 

** The very next article in the issue is lengthy attack on Jack Kerouac & On the Road  by novelist Herbert Gold. Although, in a surreal little twist, Gold’s piece is followed by Albert Camus’ preface to The Stranger.

 

*** Rattray doesn’t make it any easier for H.D. He never gives us her Christian name, referring to her only as Miss Martinelli, although she was in fact Mrs. Martinelli, having been married to the painter Ezio Martinelli. Her maiden name had actually been Shirley Burns Brennan.