Beerspit Night and Cursing Read Free

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 thespring 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:
    I was going around t/world with the/clouds and t/air like Chief of All The Chiricahuas Apache: Cochise—whenEzra 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