Beerspit Night and Cursing (2 page)

“She came to see me,” Nin goes on, “blue eyes dissolved in moisture, slender, orphaned child of poverty, speaking softly and exaltedly. Pleading, hurt, vulnerable, breathless. Her voice touches the heart…. She looks mischievous and fragile. She wears rough, ugly clothes, like an orphan. She is part Jewish, part Irish. Her voice sings, changes: low, gay, sad, heavy, trailing, dreaming.” Sheri approached Nin for the same reason she would approach Pound a few years later: “She came because she felt lost,” Nin writes. “I had found the words which made her life clearer.” She goes on to quote Sheri: “Oh God, all the books one reads which don’t bring you near the truth. Only yours, Anaïs.” As ingenuous as it may sound, it was this quest for truth, rather than celebrity-worship, that led Sheri to apprentice herself to writers like Nin and Pound.

Sheri joined Nin’s entourage, a group mostly made up of young male admirers, with whom Nin felt more comfortable than with people of her own age (she was in her mid-forties). At twenty-seven Sheri was a bit older than these young men, but she began accompanying them to parties and outings. In the
spring of 1946 she joined Nin and the others to act in Maya Deren’s film
Ritual in Transfigured Time
. She continued to paint and to take classes, studying engraving under Stanley W. Hayter at his workshop Atelier 17. She met Jackson Pollock there, and was in a class with Spanish painter Joan Miró, who ogled her shamelessly; as she later wrote me, “his round blue eyes ‘ate’ all of t/ black net off my chorus girl stockings.” Her work was written up in
Art Digest
.

During the late 1940s Sheri supported herself by modeling, principally for
Vogue
. Such noted photographers as Karl Bissinger, Cliff Wolfe, Tommy Yee, and Dick Rutledge took hundreds of shots of her. Like many a
Vogue
model today, Sheri also experimented with heroin during this time, in addition to softer drugs, though not so often as to become addicted.

She had many suitors during this period. For a while she lived with a Chilean-American painter named Enrique Zanarte; journalist Anatole Broyard claimed to have lived with Sheri for three months (she is the “Sheri Donati” of his
Kafka Was the Rage
), though Sheri disputed that; and critic Richard Gilman once visited Sheri to present an elaborate argument why he would be a more suitable partner for her than Broyard. For a while novelist William Gaddis had a crush on her, and when he left the country to write his monumental first novel
The Recognitions
, he used Sheri as the model for Esme, a promiscuous, manic-depressive, schizophrenic junkie who writes poetry and models as the Virgin Mary for the novel’s painter/protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon. Esme slips into madness and religious mania by the end of the long novel, wasting away from unrequited love, and eventually dies. (Gaddis sent her a copy of the novel upon its publication in 1955, but she never read it.) By the early 1950s she was living with a musician named Joseph Castaldo; aware of her ennui, Castaldo suggested that she go down to Washington, DC, and visit Ezra Pound, then incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital. There she met the man who would dominate the rest of her life.

Writing in 1973 to one of Pound’s biographers, Sheri gave this lively, freely punctuated account of her state of mind in 1952 when she first met Pound:

Pound was in his own form of Purgatory at the time. Detained by the U.S. Army in 1945 for making allegedly treasonous broadcasts over the Italian radio network during the war, Pound had, on the advice of his lawyer, pleaded insanity rather than risk being tried for treason—and if convicted, executed—and had been confined since the end of 1945 to St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane. (The government’s plan was to keep Pound there rather than risk an acquittal after a trial, so the fiction of his insanity was maintained by sympathetic psychiatrists.) During his first few years there he was allowed few visitors, but by 1951 his visiting privileges had been extended, as they would continue to be over the years. Surrounded by madmen and with the threat of being tried for treason hanging over his head should he “recover” from his insanity, Pound was understandably miserable and his creative drive at a standstill.
The Pisan Cantos
, written in 1945 while Pound was incarcerated in Italy, had been published in 1948, and he had written nothing since. In 1949 Pound won the Bollingen Prize for
The Pisan Cantos
, and the controversy
surrounding the award attracted the attention of a new generation of readers, many of whom began making pilgrimages to St. Elizabeths in the 1950s to study under the master at his “Ezuversity” and do his bidding.

Sheri wrote to Pound’s supervisor Dr. Overholser on 26 December 1951 to ask permission to visit him; her request was granted, and though there’s no record of their first meeting, the mutual attraction must have been immediate. Pound encouraged her to move down there and informally adopted her. She got a job working in the admissions office of George Washington University, which didn’t last long, and then worked in a waffle shop on K Street until Pound made her quit so that she could concentrate on her painting. He paid the rent on her apartment and gave her a dollar a day for expenses. Aged sixty-six and thirty-three, respectively, there was a father-daughter relationship at first (or older: she called him “Grampaw”). Pound was still married to Dorothy Shakespear, who had taken a small apartment near the hospital and visited him daily, but the older woman was apparently not jealous of the younger one; she even approved of Pound’s financial assistance to Sheri. In the summer of 1954, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey notes in his book
The Roots of Treason
, “Dorothy wrote to Dr. Overholser requesting that Sheri Martinelli be allowed to take her place as [Pound’s] guardian while out on the lawn because she had to go away for a week; Dorothy reassured Dr. Overholser that Ezra thought of Sheri as his own daughter.” The following year Pound asked Dr. Overholser whether Sheri could move onto the grounds of St. Elizabeths and work as an art therapist; both requests were denied. Dorothy too seems to have looked upon Sheri as a daughter; spotting Sheri walking up toward Pound and her, “Dorothy once commented, ‘Here comes “family.”’” Sheri proudly accompanied Dorothy on various outings in Washington, DC, dazzled by the older woman’s Edwardian elegance.

Sheri lived in a variety of small apartments in and around Washington, DC, for the next seven years—once sharing a basement apartment with another Pound disciple named David Horton—and visited Pound almost daily. (She did, however, maintain a studio apartment on New York’s Lower East Side for occasional visits; after another disciple, John Kasper, moved to New York and opened his Make It New bookshop on Bleecker Street, Sheri used the store as a mailing
address. She received more than a hundred letters from Pound during her periods away from St. Elizabeths.) She joined the growing number of young acolytes who visited Pound, listening to his pronunciamentos and undertaking various projects at his suggestion. Sheri could always be seen with sketchpad in hand, doing studies of the Maestro, and occasionally of Dorothy.

Virtually everyone who has written about Pound’s life at St. Elizabeths mentions Sheri, in terms ranging from praise to bemusement to condemnation. Noel Stock, one of Pound’s earliest biographers, calls her “a strange, rather scatterbrained young woman” and a later biographer, J.J. Wilhelm, dismisses her as a manipulative, troublesome “odd-ball.” On the other hand, Bill McNaughton has observed: “so far as I could tell the only visitor of those years who had any perception at all of what Pound was doing then was a young woman painter from one of those ‘passionate religious traditions conscious of its roots in European paganism,’” and critic Wendy Stallard Flory goes so far as to suggest that Sheri practically saved Pound’s life, at least his creative life: “the poet sees her as more than an individual; she comes to represent for him the very idea of love as inspiration. Set against the bleak and stultifying reality of the asylum ward, her youth, enthusiasm, and spontaneity must seem to provide a contact with all those things in the outside world that he most minds being shut away from.”

Pound playfully called her “La” Martinelli, adding the honorific
la
more often used in reference to actresses and divas, which Sheri adopted as her professional name thereafter. Ostensibly she was at St. Elizabeths to study “the classic arts and letters” (as she would later put it in her résumé), and her art did undergo a change under Pound’s tutelage. “Stay between Giotto and Botticelli,” he advised her, so she supplemented her previous abstract style with an older, more representational style. She painted portraits almost exclusively, and mostly self-portraits. Pound was delighted with the development of Sheri’s painting under his direction and actively sought to promote her career. His rooms were decorated with her paintings and he proudly talked them up to his visitors. His letters of 1955 are full of exhortations to correspondents like poet Archibald MacLeish and James Laughlin, his American publisher, to do something for Sheri: grants, foundation support,
publication, museum showings, anything, but nothing came of his efforts.

He did, however, arrange for publication in book form of a small selection of her paintings. His Italian publisher, Vanni Scheiwiller, brought out in February 1956 a miniature booklet entitled simply
La Martinelli
, a limited edition that reproduced nine of Sheri’s paintings and two ceramic works. Pound wrote an introduction, noting that several of the paintings were works in progress (indeed, she would continue working on some of them up until her death), and stating: “The unstillness that delayed my recognition till quite a while after that of my less restless contemporaries [e.g., Joyce and Eliot] runs parallel in the work of la Martinelli, who is the first to show a capacity to manifest in paint, or in la ceramica what is most to be prized in my writing.” In his introduction Pound also mentions two of Sheri’s paintings not included in
La Martinelli
but that are mentioned in
The Cantos: Lux in Diafana
and
Ursula Benedetta
, both dating from 1954. By that time Pound had resumed work on his epic poem, and the next two installments he would publish,
Section: Rock-Drill
(1956) and
Thrones
(1959), are, at a basic level, a record of what he was reading and, in Sheri’s case, seeing at St. Elizabeths. Through the thicket of Pound’s elliptical, allusive poetry, Sheri can be glimpsed in various guises.

Sheri’s presence in these cantos takes two forms: references to her person and/or her role in Pound’s life at the time—she was his lover as well as his student—and references to her art. As in
The Recognitions
, she is mythologized as a romantic figure of redemption, and like Gaddis, Pound associates Sheri with a wide range of women in myth and literature. The first half of
Rock-Drill
(cantos 85-89) continues the manner and matter of the pre-Pisan cantos in their concern with history and ethics. But Canto 90 makes a sudden shift to the lyrical mode, recalling the love poetry of the troubadours Pound had studied nearly a half-century earlier. “In fact,” writes Italian scholar Massimo Bacigalupo, “the forty pages of [cantos] 90-95 may be taken as a single new
Canzone d’amore
, modeled upon Cavalcanti’s (and Dante’s)
poesis docta
and on Provençal
trobar clus
.” Pound later told Sheri that cantos 90-95 were “her” cantos, for like the troubadour’s Lady, she personified love as a creative force. On the second page of Canto 90 the poet cries out to Cythera (Aphrodite), and then addresses a prayer to “Sibylla,”
the all-seeing sibyl of the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece. Most critics agree with Carroll F. Terrell’s annotation: “Sheri Martinelli is understood to be the real-life sibyl at St. Elizabeths” (
A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound
). Chanting in liturgical refrain the phrase “m’elevasti” (“you lifted me up”—from Dante’s praise of Beatrice in his
Paradiso
), Pound registers his gratitude to Sheri for lifting him up out of his personal hell and reanimating him with the spirit of love:

Isis Kuanon conflates the Egyptian goddess with the Chinese goddess of mercy. Next Sheri is referred to as the mermaid Undine, a nickname Pound gave her (“Thus Undine came to the rock” [91/630]; “Yes, my Ondine, it is so god-damned dry on these rocks” [93/643]). Although this could be a reflection on her dangerous, siren-like persona—Sheri was, after all, tempting Pound away from his wife and practicing what Laughlin learnedly calls “
concitatio senectutis
” (the arousing of desire in old men)—the undine is another redemptress, especially when Pound further conflates her with the sea-nymph Leucothea (from book 5 of the
Odyssey
). In the second half of
Rock-Drill
Pound resumes the persona of wandering Odysseus, and Leucothea makes her charming entrance in Canto 91. Appearing in the form of a seagull to Odysseus, who is adrift on a raft in wet clothes, Leucothea coos, “my bikini is worth your raft” (91/636), a flippant paraphrase of her offer in the
Odyssey
to
give him her magic veil in exchange for his wet clothes. The flirty line is repeated in Canto 95 (665), and even J.J. Wilhelm, who goes out of his way to deny Sheri’s role in
The Cantos
, grudging admits that Leucothea “may well have been a tribute to Sheri Martinelli at this time” for rescuing Pound just as the sea-nymph rescued Odysseus. When Sheri left St. Elizabeths in 1958, among the paintings and drawings she left with Yale professor Norman Holmes Pearson for safekeeping was a photograph she had taken of herself in a mirror, wearing a bikini.