From the latest letters of the London Review of Books:
Elizabeth Vandiver mentions H.D.'s daughter Perdita (Letters, 2 March). In her memoir The Days of Mars, H.D.'s partner Bryher records that during the Second World War the American academic and OSS official Norman Holmes Pearson 'rescued Perdita from a dreary job in the country to do more interesting work in London'. The 'job in the country' was with the codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park, which Perdita called 'Tapeworm Manor'. In London, Perdita first became Pearson's secretary, then worked for his assistant, James Angleton, in the counter-intelligence unit of OSS. It seems that Perdita's pet name for Angleton was 'Ezra', a reference to Angleton's poetry and to his favourite poet, her mother's one-time lover Ezra Pound. Perdita's letters to 'Kitten' and 'My pets', her collective names for H.D. and Bryher, are at Yale.
The record scratch emitted by my brain on reading this submission was not the intelligence career of Perdita Macpherson, which I have been delighted by for years; it was the presence of Pearson, whose introductions to H.D.'s collected works I have been cordially side-eyeing for decades as he airbrushes as much of the poet's bisexual, non-monogamous life as he can from the picture. If he knew the family, what was his excuse? I need to get my hands on that memoir of Bryher's. I was just recommending her superb and still strange Visa for Avalon (1965) the other night.
I was thinking earlier this afternoon that I can remember having the energy to write long, excited, unimportant e-mails about my life and what it had contained lately, casually to friends and family without devouring all of my concentration and stamina for the rest of the day or the next. It hasn't been true for years. I miss those minimal resources. I am beginning to think that even when my health disintegrated and my entire former life with it, I wasn't in as bad a shape as the world over the last three and a half years has left me. I am enjoying my returned ability to watch and write about movies; it is something I look forward to making the time for. Everything else is like dragging a river for lead.
Elizabeth Vandiver mentions H.D.'s daughter Perdita (Letters, 2 March). In her memoir The Days of Mars, H.D.'s partner Bryher records that during the Second World War the American academic and OSS official Norman Holmes Pearson 'rescued Perdita from a dreary job in the country to do more interesting work in London'. The 'job in the country' was with the codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park, which Perdita called 'Tapeworm Manor'. In London, Perdita first became Pearson's secretary, then worked for his assistant, James Angleton, in the counter-intelligence unit of OSS. It seems that Perdita's pet name for Angleton was 'Ezra', a reference to Angleton's poetry and to his favourite poet, her mother's one-time lover Ezra Pound. Perdita's letters to 'Kitten' and 'My pets', her collective names for H.D. and Bryher, are at Yale.
The record scratch emitted by my brain on reading this submission was not the intelligence career of Perdita Macpherson, which I have been delighted by for years; it was the presence of Pearson, whose introductions to H.D.'s collected works I have been cordially side-eyeing for decades as he airbrushes as much of the poet's bisexual, non-monogamous life as he can from the picture. If he knew the family, what was his excuse? I need to get my hands on that memoir of Bryher's. I was just recommending her superb and still strange Visa for Avalon (1965) the other night.
I was thinking earlier this afternoon that I can remember having the energy to write long, excited, unimportant e-mails about my life and what it had contained lately, casually to friends and family without devouring all of my concentration and stamina for the rest of the day or the next. It hasn't been true for years. I miss those minimal resources. I am beginning to think that even when my health disintegrated and my entire former life with it, I wasn't in as bad a shape as the world over the last three and a half years has left me. I am enjoying my returned ability to watch and write about movies; it is something I look forward to making the time for. Everything else is like dragging a river for lead.
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