Beerspit Night and Cursing Read Free Page B

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