I'm back in Honolulu now. I've just finished a strange little book called End to Torment by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) on Ezra Pound, published in 1979 by New Directions. Towards the end, she refers to Sheri Martinelli in a number of places, giving her the pseudonym ``Undine.''
Hilda Doolittle was Pound's first love. They were engaged in Pennsylvania before Pound went to Europe in 1907. Hilda later followed him to Europe. Pound later married Dorothy Shakespear and H.D. married the poet Richard Aldington.
End to Torment was written in the Fifties, when Pound was in St. Elizabeths and H.D. was in Switzerland, still much obsessed with Pound and her memories of that early romance.
H.D. never actually met Sheri, so what she says about her is all based on second-hand information. But what is interesting is the way, in her writing, H.D. comes through as very much like Sheri. So here we have these two women that Pound had had affairs with about fifty years apart, and who in spirit are very much like each other.
The book may not be that interesting to you, since your interest in in Sheri rather than Pound. But it refers to an article called ``Weekend with Ezra Pound'' by David Rattray (``Rat Tray,'' as Sheri called him) published in The Nation, November 16, 1957, pp. 343-349, which gives some first-hand impressions of Sheri. I believe that this article has been reprinted in some of the books on Pound.
Rattray's description, at least as filtered through H.D., is a bit misleading, since H.D. makes much of Rattray's referral to a double chin, which may be accurate but gives a misleading impression that Sheri was fat, whereas she was, if anything, almost emaciated.
Here's the longest quote H.D. gives from the Rattray article: ``Pound threw his arms around her, hugged her, and kissed her goodbye.'' ``Pound embraced her and ran his hands through her hair.'' ``She had huge eyes like a cat.'' Rattray speaks, according to H.D., of her enormous forehead, tiny chin, and tinier double chin. There is no suggestion of this chin discrepancy in the mirror, H.D. writes.(?) The face seems peaked, triangular, the soft hair pushed off and back from the high forehead.
Rattray's article was written just shortly before my first meeting with Sheri. The description above is not the way I would have described her. Certainly the eyes were very remarkable, though, as well as the triangular face.
When I read accounts of Sheri now, I regret not having stayed in contact with her. And yet I have memories of her very different from yours. I remember the constant screaming fights between her and Gilbert, and one horrible day when I was alone with her in that tiny cottage on Lynch Street (it no longer exists) and she was drunk and making long-distance calls all over the country. She called the famous poet Allen Tate at Harvard, and he talked to her for ten or fifteen minutes, and then she tried to call President Eisenhower in Washington. Finally I removed the mouthpiece from the phone. People would call and she'd answer the phone but couldn't talk to them, which infuriated her. For my part, I was 19 years old and rather scared by the situation.
When I met her again in 1964 or so, she was not quite so wild. But she showed up totally drunk at our apartment in San Francisco one night, yelling at the top of her voice, and it was more than my wife could deal with. (Most likely she was calling my wife a cunt and a whore. My wife just wasn't used to people like that.)
--Lee