End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, with the Poems from "Hilda's Book"

by H.D., Ezra Pound (Contributor), Norman Holmes Pearson (Editor)

End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound is the deeply personal journal kept by the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle. 1886-1961) in 1958, the year Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeth's in Washington, D.C., and returned to Italy. H. D., hospitalized in Switzerland from a fall, was urged to put down on paper, once and for all, her memories of Pound, which reached back to 1905, when she was a freshman at Bryn Mawr and he a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.  They had been engaged for a period, and what began as a brief romance developed into a lifetime's friendship and collaboration in poetry. Throughout the reminiscence runs H. D's conviction that her life and Pound's had been irrevocably entwined since those early days when they had walked together in the Pennsylvania woods and he wrote for her verse after William Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Chaucer. Twenty-five of these poems, handbound in vellum by Pound and called "Hilda's Book," are published here for the first time as an epilogue to this important and moving document.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, 20th Century, Biography Memoir, American

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

An innovative modernist American writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. H.D., most well known for her lyric and epic poetry, also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano. The vines grow more abundantly on these abandoned slopes.

There isn't a fixed perspective in this memoir. Matters appear to float into view in an almost tracking manner and the poet parses her own memory, often jostled by the annoying questions of others. She shelters and memories tumble, images are akimbo but resonate. While this being prompted Ezra Pound was preparing for his release from St Elizabeth's. He was headed back to Italy. It isn't with envy or regret but Doolittle remembers amorous fumbling in an arm chair, clumsy dancing and the cache of books Pound brought her. Phrases linger, even as the focus goes haltingly to the secondary literature which had enveloped Pound even before the final acts. Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner appear on stage, like a really nerdy Stoppard play. I loved that part.

The book concludes with a reprint of the poems Pound wrote for HD. They are youthful but steely, built to last despite haze of infatuation.

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

The First Part of the book consists of the exchange of affectionate correspondence between H. D. and Ezra Pound.
The Second Part: The ultimate nobility is to use classical and mythological references without becoming draping like Victor Hugo, making them live in a poetic gesture that will make you more alive than your spouse. The sky is bouncing on earth - Young people reconciled with the old ones.

'The Wind' by Ezra Pound

"I would go forth into the night", she saith.
The night is freezing beneath the moon.
'Twere meet, my Love that thou went forth at noon
For now, the sky is cold as very death.
And then she drew a little sobbing breath.
"Without a little lonely wind doth crane
And calleth me with wandered elfin rune
That all real wind-born children summoneth
Dear, hold me closer! So, until it is past.
Nay, I am gone the while. Await!"
And I await her here, for I have understood.
Yet held I not this much wind – bound fast.
Within the castle of my soul, I would
For very faintness at her parting, die.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am frozen in this moment.[…] 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. […] One would dance with him for what he might say.
*
The perfection of the fiery moment can not be sustained — or can it?
*
I don’t pretend to understand. We have gone through some Hell together, separately.
*
It is not easy to readjust, for it is only in retrospect that we dare face the enormity of the situation.

[Leslie]

Some quotes I admired:

"The years were immaterial. He liked my light summer dresses. Ezra was not consciously a love-image. But he lurked there, hid there, under the years."

"No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano. The vines grow more abundantly on these abandoned slopes."

"We only want to forget the forked lightning."

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning. HD's prose is possibly even more evocative than her poetry, an associative memory-collage equipoised between Freud and Sappho. The effect is a kind of self conscious flattening of the past, present and future, where reminiscences become premonitions, names and words are polysemic, and memories have multifoliate resonance. The fact that this is a rough, spontaneous journal and not an intricately composed prose poem is astounding, as reading it often felt like seeing concentric circles of people and places unfurling into patterns of meaning.

Will write more about this on a reread as lots went understandably over my head, but HD's old-age melancholia is very affecting, as is her implicit sadness about the direction of Pound's life. Despite this, she can't bring herself to condemn him, responding to the bafflement of friends with the simple "either you catch fire or you don't". I just wish this were a few hundred pages longer.

[Sarah Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed returning to H.D. through this little collection of her thoughts on Ezra Pound past and present. The way she weaves him in and out of her work and her life speaks to the eternality of first and later loves, the mutual impact we have on one another, and the endless entanglement of lives.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just got this in the mail! Am so excited to read the spleen of H.D. as vented upon Ezra Pound.

After having read it, I must say there was not as much spleen as I expected. I was hoping for some real Jerry Springer style antics. However, this is my favorite kind of memoir, messy, with lots of beautiful diction, introverted and elliptical, so personal that it totally excludes the reader, kind of autistic. I loved it.

[sophie esther · Rating 3 out of 5]

The perfection of the fiery moment can not be sustained — or can it?

A woman's perspective of both Ezra Pound the man as well as the writer. Also the chronology of the poet herself's own experiences of eroticism, identity, love, and art.

[Neha · Rating 5 out of 5]

“First kisses? In the woods, in the winter—what did one expect? Not this. Electric, magnetic, they do not so much warm, they magnetize, revitalize. 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?”

[Javier Galarza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Las memorias de HD sobre Pound, y a la vez la serie conocida como "El libro de Hilda", poemas de Pound dedicados a Doolittle. Poesía, mito y vida se entrelazan en una pareja que cambió la poesía del siglo XX.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

"He wore lurid, bright socks that the older students ruled out for freshmen. The sophomores threw him in the lily pond. They called him 'Lily' Pound."

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“under the Rock of Gibraltar”

What a waste of a man

[✿⁠ · Rating 3 out of 5]

The perfection of the fiery moment can not be sustained — or can it?

[JoAnn Zhang]

If a man writes you one sonnet, he loves you. If a man writes you 800 sonnets, he loves Fascism.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who doesn't remember their first love? Overshadowing this deeply personal journal authored by Hilda Doolittle is her early romantic encounter with Ezra Pound in the Pennsylvania woods. They were young and inspired poets. Pound suggested she use the initials H.D. when writing her imagist poetry. An engagement and marriage seemed forthcoming but was thwarted by her father. Still, their lives remained deeply intertwined.

Her publisher chose the book's title and while I think he was referring to Pound upon his release from imprisonment after WW II (due to his fascist sympathies), I think Hilda must also have found writing this memoir cathartic--her writing perhaps therapeutic, sometimes even mythological.

The epilogue, "Hilda's Book," is a collection of poems Pound wrote for her in the style of William Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Chaucer. I found that reading them was challenging since I am not familiar with each of these styles but even without this knowledge one cannot help but be moved by the near holiness with which he lifts up his friend, H.D.

[Deni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un libro maravilloso en dos partes. Por un lado, el diario de Hilda Doolittle donde la autora recorre entre la memoria y cierto sincretismo en clave con los "Cantos" poundianos su relación con Pound en 1908 y piensa su presente, en aquel momento internado en un psiquiátrico producto de las gestiones de sus amigos para evadir los cargos por alta traición. Es un libro que está más allá del tiempo, precisamente por eso es que hace tanto sentido cuando posteriormente a ese diario llegan los poemas de "El libro de Hilda", una serie de versos radiantes que muestran a un Pound juvenil con su poética afinada y asombrosamente elegante, de una aristocracia radical.

[Mark Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book by a crazyish lady about her former crazy boyfriend. Very poetic in style, told from a mental institution, it was one book where the footnotes definitely came in handy.

[Lorenzo Gomez oviedo · Rating 3 out of 5]

cuidadísima edición que contiene algunos preciosos poemas de amor del gran Pound a Hilda Doolitle