Beerspit Night and Cursing (3 page)

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 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:

A little later in Canto 97 there are some lines that some have knowingly said refer to Sheri, but which she disavowed:

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:

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.

“Poor Undine!” H.D. laments in her book. “They don’t want you, they really don’t. How shall we reconcile ourselves to this?”—remembering that a half-century earlier Pound had likewise abandoned her to go to Europe. Sheri had commented on the “sea-girls” section of Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in an anthology she sent to H.D., and the older poet’s last vision of Sheri is of “our little Undine on her sea-rocks with her wind-blown hair,” utterly forlorn.

At Pound’s suggestion, José Vasquez-Amaral, another member of the Ezuversity who would eventually translate
The Cantos
into Spanish, had arranged for an art scholarship for Sheri in Jalisco. He also arranged for her and Gilbert to stay with a friend at his country house in Cuernavaca “in case the Jalisco scholarship fell through. It did,” Vasquez-Amaral later wrote. “After a while the fiery and imaginative Sheri was also unwelcome at the Cuernavaca place.” The Mexican authorities expected someone who would paint pretty landscapes and glorify the republic, but Sheri was more interested in sketching beggar girls and exploring Aztec temples. After about six months Sheri and Gilbert left Mexico for San Francisco.

The best thing to have come out of her Mexican odyssey was a newfound interest in writing. Vasquez-Amaral was dazzled by a piece she wrote on Mexico in 1958: “The title is
Mexico, his Thrust Renews
; the subtitle is
Cheap Hollywood Movie
. In little over 7 pages, Sheri manages to give one of the strongest and most vivid
impressions
I have ever read on a trip to Mexico from the border to Mexico. It is all there. I don’t say that her painting is to be sneezed at but I still maintain that if given half a chance, Sheri—the Sheri of 1958—would have given Kerouac, Bellow and all the others who have ventured on the quicksands of Mexico some very worthy competition.” A portion of this work, entitled “The Beggar Girl of Queretaro,” was published in 1960 and is indeed a remarkable piece of writing.

It was published in the
Anagogic & Paideumic Review
, a periodical (what we’d now call a ’zine) she started in 1959 after settling in San Francisco. Pound encouraged his disciples to start magazines, resulting in such periodicals as Noel Stock’s
Edge
and William Cookson’s
Agenda
. Sheri had forgiven Pound by this time and began the journal to fulfil a promise she made him to help raise the level of culture in this country. (Its motto: “to promote civilisation.”) In issue number 4 she gave this explanation of its forbidding title: “A = the direction of the will UP & P = the kulchur born in one’s head or wotever/ authority is E.P.—one might have not been listening for real but more or less that is wot one recalls.” The
anagogic
is a spiritual interpretation of a text, and
paideumic
derives from
paideuma
, a term Pound picked up from ethnologist Leo Frobenius to describe “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (or, more simply, the culture taught by educators). Typed by Sheri and mimeographed in purple ink, the magazine was sold at City Lights bookstore and mailed to select friends and libraries. She usually ran off only fifty copies of each issue, so not surprisingly few copies exist anymore, and few if any libraries have a complete set of all nine published.

A typical issue would consist partly of contributions by others and partly of Sheri’s own writings, drawings, and commentaries on the other contributions. Pound is frequently quoted—the first issue, in fact, reprinted a 1928 essay of his entitled “Bureaucracy and the Flail of Jehovah”—and two issues were devoted to H.D.’s work. Four issues were published between September 1959 and March 1960, but publication lagged after that; numbers 5 and 6 appeared in 1961, but number 7 didn’t appear until April 1966. Two final issues, unnumbered and consisting mostly of Sheri’s own work, appeared in 1970. The places of publication track Sheri and Gilbert’s movements during that period: the first four issues were produced in their cottage at 15 Lynch Street on top of Nob Hill, number 5 was issued from San Gregorio, and number 6 from Half Moon Bay, both small towns down the coast from San Francisco.

While still in San Francisco Sheri reestablished her connection with the Beat Generation, especially since many of the Beats she had known earlier in Greenwich Village migrated to San Francisco in the late fifties. She was introduced to Jack Kerouac during one of his visits there, though he apparently already knew who she was, and Allen Ginsberg visited when in town. Sheri became friends with most of the major Beat writers in San Francisco—Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman (with whom Sheri was especially impressed)—and dabbled in the North Beach scene, a mother hen to the younger beatniks. But mostly she kept to herself, drinking vodka and producing her magazine.

In the early sixties Sheri decided she wanted to get out of the city (though Gilbert would continue to work there as an auto mechanic). She first moved down to a cabin in La Honda, but found the towering redwoods too oppressive, so instead moved into some cabins on the coast about halfway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, where Tunitas Creek empties into the Pacific Ocean. She would live there at “the Creek” for the next twenty years, though for a mailing addresses she rented a post office box up in Pacifica, about twenty miles north. While Gilbert worked in the city Sheri spent her days writing, drawing, painting, and making jewelry, at night studying
The Cantos
by the light of an old kerosene lamp.

In 1964 Sheri gave her first and only one-woman show. A Cleveland advertising copywriter named Reid B. Johnson had developed an interest in her work when making a documentary radio program on Pound while he was still incarcerated at St. Elizabeths. In the course of corresponding with him, Pound sent Johnson a copy of
La Martinelli
, which so impressed him that a few years later he decided to organize an exhibit. The show ran for a month in September 1964 at the Severance Center in Cleveland, and was the subject of a photo-essay in the local paper.

Details are sketchy on Sheri’s life during the second half of the sixties. She developed a strong interest in astrology, drawing up charts of friends, and delved deeper into the occult philosophy of mystics like Swedenborg and Edgar Cayce. Allen Ginsberg visited whenever he could, often bringing along a friend like Peter Orlovsky or Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In his 1966 poem “Iron Horse” Ginsberg recalls

A year later Ginsberg visited Pound in Venice and asked a favor: