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:
I was going around t/world with the/clouds and t/air like Chief of All The Chiricahuas Apache: Cochise—when Ezra Pound (known to us as: “E.P”) “spoke to my Thoughts.” I, too, “carried My Life on My Finger-Nails” and they were each & all a different colour because I was a working painter—a Fighter in The Ethical Arena wherein you KNOW what’s Really Wrong because you did that yourself and you found out by The Way of Being There. Artist.
Maestro.
Was There Ever Such A Man, Dear Goddess. A Man who found me Lost in Hellishness but FIRST I had been Made Trusting & Loving & Innocent & Ignorant “Love One Another Children”…so as not To Even Know for a split second that I was Lost. I was having a Ball. All Those Sweet-faced Indians! T/guiltless sex of animal desire; pure, simple & uncomplicated by The Falsities of Any Other Facts! Freedom of Diet & No Two Days Running The Same….
Today I remembered: His great Faith in Art when he said: “PAINT me out of here, Cara.” So Painted E.P. in Paradise as he had sung me from Purgatory…. This is The Power of Art Work. With Out A Picture of It inside your mind—how can you Find It?
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 poetr
y, 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:
Sibylla,
from under the rubble heap
m’elevasti
from the dulled edge beyond pain,
m’elevasti
out of Erebus, the deep-lying
from the wind under the earth
m’elevasti
from the dulled air and the dust,
m’elevasti
by the great flight,
m’elevasti,
Isis Kuanon
from the cusp of the moon,
m’elevasti (90/626)
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.
Sheri assumes many shapes and forms in Rock-Drill: she is apostrophized as “Bright hawk whom no hood shall chain” in Canto 91; she is the Regina Coeli (queen of heaven) of Canto 92; and the blue jay of Canto 94. Pound’s finest tribute to Sheri comes at the conclusion of Canto 93:
You are tender as a marshmallow, my Love,
I cannot use you as a fulcrum.
You have stirred my mind out of dust.
Flora Castalia, your petals drift through the air,
the wind is ½ lighted with pollen
diafana,
e Monna Vanna…tu mi fai rimembrar. (652)
“You remind me of Monna Vanna” that last line translates, a reference to Guido Cavalcanti’s lady love. (One of Pound’s earliest books had been a translation of this medieval Italian poet’s work; Pound gave his personal copy to Sheri, who filled the margins with drawings and love poems to Pound.)
In Canto 97 there are two intriguing descriptions of Sheri’s hair and eyes. Brooding on the Homeric epithet “wine-dark,” Pound again refers to Sheri as “Sibilla” and tries to describe the color of her hair, settling on “russet-gold.” Sheri had been a brunette earlier, but at St. Elizabeths she sported “splendid red hair” (as Laughlin remembered it), which she later explained in this wise: “It was a spectacular crimson & it came about because E.P. had placed his hand on one’s head and where E.P. put his hand on one’s hair (a bit later on not instantly) that hair turned crimson…. E.P.’s touch (a ‘laying on of hands’??) also deep’n’d t/eye colour into a lavender which E.P. is also noting in C/97 indicating that E.P. was aware of t/changes.” Sheri’s second reference is to the lines:
with eyes pervanche [violet-blue]
three generations, San Vio
darker than pervanche?
Pale sea-green, I saw eyes once (97/696)
A little later in Canto 97 there are some lines that some have knowingly said refer to Sheri, but which she disavowed:
mid dope-dolls an’ duchesses
tho’ orften I roam
some gals is better,
some wusser
than some (97/700-701)
Sheri told me this was merely the chorus of a bawdy song Pound had composed; she was no longer a “dope-doll,” having given up heroin by then. But it’s true that during her first years at St. Elizabeths she was still using heroin and marijuana, which caused Pound considerable grief. Sheri was also the victim of a dope plant by the police and went to trial in 1956, but she was easily acquitted, “jury out 5 minutes,” as Pound explained to MacLeish.
The sibyl at Delphi was also known as the pythoness (from her familiar), and in this guise Sheri makes her final appearance in The Cantos: born “Of the blue sky and a wild-cat, / Pitonessa / The small breasts snow-soft over tripod” (104/760). Sheri had given Pound a comic drawing of herself as a sibyl, standing next to a tripod and with a python in hand, which Pound thus worked into Canto 104. Sheri said Pound told her, “t/drawing is good because it shows you can laugh at yourself.”
In a similar manner, several of Sheri’s paintings became part of The Cantos. She would show Pound her works in progress and often he would give them titles and then work them into his poem. Her Sibylla of 1954 coincides with her appearance in Canto 90 (written the same year). In Canto 93, the two paintings Pound mentions in his introduction to her book, Lux in Diafana and Ursula Benedetta, become the subjects of the poet’s prayer for compassion (“Lux in diafana, / Creatrix, oro. / Ursula benedetta, / oro” [93/648]). The lines “Isis Kuanon /…/ the blue serpent / glides from the rock pool” (90/626-27) have been associated with Sheri’s painting Isis of the Two Kingdoms, which Pound admired, though in this case it’s impossible to determine which came first. Other cantos refer to two subjects of Sheri’s artwork, Princess Ra-Set and Leucothoe (not Homer’s nymph but a character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). And Canto 106 opens with a description of another painting Sheri had been working on, a portrait of a woman with black hair surrounded by the faces of four girls, which Pound transformed into:
And was her daughter like that;
Black as Demeter’s gown,
eyes, hair?
Dis’ bride, Queen over Phlegethon,
girls faint as mist about her? (106/772)
Sheri would continue to illustrate figures from The Cantos after she left St. Elizabeths, including an Undine in 1964 in memory of Pound’s nickname for her.
“Undine” is also the name the poet H.D. used for Sheri in her End to Torment, written in 1958 in the months leading up
to Pound’s release from St. Elizabeths. In journal form she records her memories of him and their teenage romance, when he called her “Dryad.” After reading an article in The Nation about Pound that mentioned Sheri and receiving La Martinelli from a friend, H.D. developed a keen interest in Sheri, finding a parallel—as Nin had done a decade earlier—between her younger self and the artist: “Undine seems myself then.” When she learned Pound would not be taking Sheri with him to Italy upon his release, she decided to help her; though she doesn’t mention it in End to Torment, H.D. gave Sheri the money from her Harriet Monroe Prize award in 1956. She was enchanted by the photos of Sheri and her artwork that Pearson had sent her, and somewhat reluctantly entered into correspondence with her. Sheri seems already to have known her work and wrote her an effusive letter of praise, but also expressed her rage at being dumped by Pound. “The male just can’t go about like that, ditching a spirit love,” Sheri fumed. “I have known Ezra for 6 years. The last 4 years I took a vow in St. Anthony’s Church in NYC not to leave the Maestro until he was freed. A month before he was freed he made me break that vow.”
“He killed her,” Sheri wrote of herself to Pearson, describing Pound’s decision to desert her. Instead of taking Sheri to Italy, Pound took Marcella Spann, a young teacher who had started visiting Pound at St. Elizabeths a year earlier and had supplanted Sheri in the Maestro’s affections by 1958. “With her serious, rather reserved expression and her hair done neatly in a bun,” Pound biographer Humphrey Carpenter writes, “she made a marked contrast to the ultra-exuberant Sheri Martinelli, who until then had been undisputed queen of the disciples.” Dethroned, Sheri married Gilbert Lee, ten years her junior, whom she had met shortly after coming to St. Elizabeths, and together they left for Mexico at the beginning of the summer of 1958.