No notice was taken by the press of artist-writer Sheri Martinelli's death in November 1996, unfairly ignoring the significant role she played in the cultural history of our time. A brief overview of her career indicates her range of roles: she was a protégée of Anaïs Nin and is described at length in her infamous Diary; she was the basis for a major character in William Gaddis's novel The Recognitions and then became the muse and (some say) mistress of Ezra Pound (she appears in various guises in the later Cantos); Charlie Parker and the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet hung out at her Greenwich Village apartment; Marlon Brando was an admirer and Rod Steiger collected her art, as did E. E. Cummings; she knew and was admired by all the Beats, Ginsberg was an especially close friend and mentions her in one of his poems, and was herself known in San Francisco in the late 1950s as the Queen of the Beats; H. D. identified with her and wrote about her in End to Torment; Pound wrote the introduction to a book of her paintings, and her art is now in collections throughout the world.  She wrote unusual prose and poetry, much of it published in her own ‘zine.  She was a regular correspondent with Charles Bukowski, who mentions her in a few of his poems, and was one of the first to publish his work.  More recently, she appeared under a pseudonym in Anatole Broyard's posthumous memoir Kafka Was the Rage, under her own name in David Markson's novel Reader's Block, and she was anthologized in Richard Peabody's A Different Beat.  When younger, she even modeled for Vogue and acted in one of Maya Deren's experimental films.  And yet not a single obituary marked the passing of this remarkable woman, whom it was my honor and pleasure to have known the last dozen years of her life, and no account of her life exists anywhere.

So, for the record: Sheri Martinelli was born on 17 January 1918 in Philadelphia, on Ben Franklin's birthday and in his city, with the given name Shirley Burns Brennan.  Her father, Alphonse Brennan, was the son of a fisherman, and in later years Sheri liked to refer to herself as"The Fisherman's Granddaughter."  Her mother was Mae Trindell, who was from New Orleans.  Sheri's grandmother claimed descent from Scottish poet Robert Burns.  Shirley Burns Brennan began using the name Sherry by the time she was a teenager, but she was later told that her first name had the wrong numerological value, so to rectify that she modified it to Sheri.  (All her life she had a weakness for occult and metaphysical notions.)  She was the oldest of three girls and a brother and was largely responsible for raising them.  At some point her family moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, but in the late 1930s Sheri moved back to Philadelphia to study art, specifically ceramics under John Butler at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Arts.

In Philadelphia she met Ezio Martinelli, a painter and sculptor who was studying at the Barnes Foundation in nearby Merion, Pennsylvania.  Born in 1913, he was five years older than Sheri.  They got married at the beginning of World War II, and in 1943 Sheri gave birth to a daughter, Shelley (named after the poet).  The family moved to New York City, but by the end of the war they had grown apart.  Sheri and Ezio separated; she kept his surname, and he kept the daughter.  (It's been said that Sheri left her husband because she felt she was a better painter, though by conventional standards Ezio Martinelli went on to achieve considerably more success in his field than she did:  his abstract paintings were regularly exhibited at the Willard Gallery in New York City and respectfully reviewed; several sculptures of his are on display at the United Nations complex; from 1947 to 1975 he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, he won many grants and awards, and so on.  A photograph of him receiving one such award appears in Art Digest, 15 September 1947, p. 21.)

Sheri stayed in Greenwich Village, moving into an apartment at 23 Jones Street in the West Village.  Talented, beautiful, and intriguingly eccentric, she made a striking impression on all who met her, evident from the writings of those who knew her.  In her diary entry for December 1945, Anaïs Nin recounts how she learned that a"romantic-looking girl" was reading her short-story collection Under a Glass Bell and had told her publishing partner Gonzalo Moré that she wanted to meet Nin but was too shy to approach the older woman.  Nin suggested that she attend a lecture of hers at Mills College.  When Sheri approached her at the end of the lecture, Nin writes,"I recognized her.  She was like a ghost of a younger me, a dreaming woman, with very soft, burning eyes, long hair streaming over her shoulders."  At first, Sheri didn't say a word: "She merely stared at me, and then handed me a music box mechanism, without its box.  She finally told me in a whisper that she always carries it in her pocket and listens to it in the street.  She wound it up for me, and placed it against my ear, as if we were alone and not in a busy hall, filled with bustling students and professors waiting for me.  A strand of her long hair had caught in the mechanism and it seemed as if the music came from it."

"She came to see me," Nin goes on,"blue eyes dissolved in moisture, slender, orphaned child of poverty, speaking softly and exaltedly.  Pleading, hurt, vulnerable, breathless.  Her voice touches the heart. . . . She looks mischievous and fragile.  She wears rough, ugly clothes, like an orphan.  She is part Jewish, part Irish.  Her voice sings, changes: low, gay, sad, heavy, trailing, dreaming" (107-8).  Journalist Anatole Broyard, forty years later, remembered her in much the same way: "She had a high, domelike forehead, the long silky brown hair of women in portraits, wide pale blue eyes with something roiling in their surface.   Her nose was aquiline, her mouth thin and disconsolate, her chin small and pointed.  It was the kind of bleak or wan beauty Village people liked to call quattrocento.  Her body seemed both meager and voluptuous.  Her waist was so small, it cut her in two, like a split personality, or two schools of thought.   Though her legs and hips were sturdy and richly curved, her upper body was dramatically thin.  When she was naked it appeared that her top half was trying to climb up out of the bottom, like a woman stepping out of a heavy garment." (3-4).  Nin observed the same dichotomy: "Half of her body is heavy and animal, and the upper half is childlike and fragile" (144).

Sheri approached Nin for the same reason she would approach Pound a few years later: "She came because she felt lost," Nin writes. "I had found the words which made her life clearer."  She goes on to quote Sheri: "Oh God, all the books one reads which don't bring you near the truth.  Only yours, Anaïs" (108).  As ingenuous as it may sound, it 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). "The presence of the young lightens the world and changes it from an oppressive, definitive, solidified one to a fluid, potentially marvelous, malleable, variable, as-yet-to-be-created world.  I call them the transparent children" (95).  At twenty-seven Sheri was a bit older than the young men who surrounded Nin, but she began accompanying them to parties and outings.   In the spring of 1946 she joined Nin and the others to act in Maya Deren's film Ritual in Transfigured Time; she appears in the party scene in the middle of the short film and in the park scene at the end.  At this time Sheri was still starstruck; Nin quotes her as gushing,"You're a legendary character.  I keep thinking that in the future I will look back and say:  ‘I was here in Yonkers Park with the legendary Anaïs!'" (145).

One of the young men dancing attendance on Nin was a French surrealist poet named Charles Duits (1925-91), who had come to the U.S. in 1941 to attend Harvard, but left it a year or two later to live la vie bohème in New York. He is mentioned frequently in volumes three and four of Nin's Diary, always singled out as the most brilliant and talented of her"transparent children."  He seems to have been quite taken with Sheri, for he gave her a poem entitled"La Naissance de Sherry Martinelli" (like Nin and some others, he used the earlier form of her first name).  Written in French, which Sheri couldn't read, it was apparently never published; it follows as an appendix to this essay in a translation made by Sheri's and my mutual acquaintance George Kearns, a Pound scholar (and revised by writer-artist Rikki Ducornet).  It is a surrealist birth myth in which no sooner is Sheri born than she is"preyed upon by starving men."  Sheri came across the poem in her papers in 1985; when I sent her Kearns's translation she commented,"One regrets that it has one's name on it.  Charles Duits was forsooth writing this to his own dream female ‘twin soul' born into t/mind of t/male that he ever cherishes/nourishes/seeks/desires & possesses in every female he meets outside his mind.  His perfect opposite/his extreme norm/his action polarity."  Duits was the first of many"starving men" to mythologize Sheri, an act her strange beauty and endearing eccentricity encouraged.  It is the inverse of her own exaltation of wise teachers like Nin and Pound.

In the same diary entry for December 1945 quoted earlier, Nin reports that Sheri was then living with a Chilean-American painter named Enrique Zanarte; Anatole Broyard gives his first name as Nemecio.  But she seems to have been living alone in 1946 when she met Broyard, who says he moved in with her and was her lover for about three months.  Their affair is recounted at length in his memoir Kafka Was the Rage, written in 1988 but not published until 1993, three years after his death.  It is an engaging account of life in Greenwich Village immediately after the war and of the"sentimental education" he received from Sheri (he changed her surname to Donatti to protect her privacy), but its reliability is in doubt.  When I sent Sheri a copy of the book in 1993 she insisted Broyard had never spent a single night with her and dismissed the book as"a voyeur's wet dream."  It's difficult to know whom to believe.  Sheri sometimes misrepresented her past, glossing over some of its scandalous aspects, not so much out of vanity as (she said) to avoid giving young people any encouragement to emulate bad behavior.  But Broyard himself was duplicitous; as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., shows in his recent memoir of him, Broyard's entire life can be said to be a lie. (He hid his black heritage and passed for white, keeping his secret from his friends and family until near the end of his life.)  The Sheri Donatti of Kafka Was the Rage certainly has much in common with Sheri Martinelli:  Broyard's physical descriptions of her are accurate and he captures her unique way of talking and her oblique intelligence, but Sheri told me many of his details are wrong: her apartment was clean and comfortable, not dirty and crowded as he says, and she most often wore cloth pants, not the clinging dresses and no underwear that Broyard obsesses over.  (He constantly worried that she would inadvertently expose herself, most comically the time she accidentally knocked W. H. Auden over and on top of herself.)  In some ways Broyard's portrait of Sheri is as fanciful as Charles Duits's surrealistic one and springs from the same male tendency to project desired qualities onto the unsuspecting female.  Taken with a huge grain of salt, however, Broyard's book provides yet another testimony to Sheri's appeal.  For Broyard, she was literally unforgettable; on his deathbed forty years later, Sheri was one of the people he spoke of (Gates 80).

Broyard notes that Sheri was still an abstract painter at the time (like her former husband) and describes a few of her works.  She continued to take classes during this time, studying engraving under Stanley William Hayter at the Atelier de Sept.  She was in one 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."  One of her projects was described by Josephine Gibbs in the 15 December 1946 issue of Art Digest:

(Sheri would continue to find"inspiration in the accidental forms of nature" in her later artwork.)  This portfolio was limited to 100 copies, priced at $40.00 each; I've never seen a copy.  In fact, little if any of her art from this period survives.  Sheri also kept an ungainly printing press in her apartment at this time, no doubt in emulation of Nin, who owned one and typeset her own books, which she used for her etchings.

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.  I haven't been able to identify any of them in the pages of Vogue, though Sheri's second husband has folders full of these photos.  Like many a Vogue model today, Sheri also experimented with heroin during this time, though not so often as to become addicted.  

One thing Broyard got right is that Sheri had many suitors.  He describes an amusing episode when critic Richard Gilman came over one night and presented an elaborate argument why he would be a more suitable partner for her than Broyard.  He also describes a similar visit from Zanarte; if they had indeed lived together earlier, perhaps he was there to win her back.  But Broyard doesn't mention another rival for Sheri's attention, novelist William Gaddis, whose portrayal of a thinly disguised Sheri in his novel The Recognitions is the most extensive and memorable of her various appearances in literature.  

Leaving Harvard (without a degree) in 1945, Gaddis had moved to Manhattan and been hired as a fact-checker at the New Yorker.  He lived on Horatio Street in the West Village and frequented the same places Sheri did, such as the San Remo bar on the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal Streets. He was twenty-five when he met her, five years her junior.  In her first letter to me Sheri remembered attending an opening at the Museum of Modern Art with Gaddis; he had borrowed someone's shoes for the occasion, which were too big and flapped noisily the entire time.  He was quite smitten with her by all accounts, but she apparently didn't reciprocate his interest, regarding him as something of a"mama's boy" (which he was, literally, having been raised by his mother because his father left her when Gaddis was three).  I don't know how long they were involved, or how deeply; if The Recognitions is any indication, it was a case of unrequited love that lasted only a few months.  Polite and gentlemanly, Gaddis was no match for more practiced skirt-chasers like Broyard, but he would rout all his rivals when it came to immortalizing Sheri in a book.

Broyard writes that Sheri"looked more like a work of art than a pretty woman" (3).  She is introduced in The Recognitions in the same way:  Otto (Gaddis's self-deprecating self-portrait) is attending a Greenwich Village party given by Max (Broyard, more or less) when he briefly glimpses"the face of a girl who was sitting alone on the couch, . . . Then she was gone, with the silent consciousness of a painting obscured by a group of nattering human beings" (183).  A little later, having taken down a volume of Browning and pretending to read it while spying on her, Otto reads the following lines from"A Likeness" just as he realizes she is watching him:

He never saw, never before today,
What was able to take his breath away,
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of, meet death with . . .(193)

Her name is Esme, and in almost every respect she is Sheri Martinelli:  she lives on Jones Street, has a four-year-old daughter somewhere, owns a printing press, and speaks in a curious way.  (Broyard:"Like everything else about her, her style of talking took some getting used to. She gave each syllable an equal stress and cooed or chanted her vowels.  Her sentences had no intonation, no rise and fall, so that they came across as disembodied, parceled out, yet oracular too" [5].)  Otto introduces himself and even manages to sleep with her that night, but his relationship to her throughout the rest of the novel is one of frustration.  Otto has a rival in the unsavory person of Chaby Sinisterra (based on a jazz musician Sheri knew named Eddie Shu [1918-86]; The Recognitions is very much a roman à clef), but Esme is hopelessly in love with the painter for whom she models, the enigmatic Wyatt Gwyon.

A romantic quadrangle links Wyatt and Otto with the novel's two principal female characters, Esme and Wyatt's wife Esther (based on a woman Gaddis knew named Helen Parker), both of whom tolerate Otto only because of Wyatt's chilly indifference to them.  Both women have additional lovers, making Otto even more superfluous, and many of the other male characters seem to have slept with Esme or Esther.  But the promiscuity of Greenwich Village women is hardly Gaddis's chief concern.  Esther and Esme represent the two traditional forms of female salvation open to the mythic hero, and their inadequacies as suitable anima figures dramatize Gaddis's critique of that very tradition.  Though both women share initials and an avocation for writing, they are diametrically opposed:  Esther is rational, big-boned, ambitious, and writes prose, while Esme is mystical, delicate, aimless, and writes poetry.  Gaddis's prose sharpens the contrast further: his character analysis of Esther (78-80) is written in the well-balanced, logically ordered style of Henry James, an author Esther admires, while Esme's equivalent analysis is fractured into two sections (276-77, 298-302), presaging her incipient schizophrenia, and written with the illogic of an interior monologue, punctuated with solipsistic questions and fragments of poems, fictions, and esoteric trivia.  They are united, however, in their unrequited love for Wyatt and, after losing him, in their despair.  

Gretchen to Wyatt's Faust, Esme has been sent to him by the novel's Mephistopheles, Recktall Brown.  A promiscuous manic-depressive schizophrenic junkie, she nevertheless models as the Virgin Mary in Wyatt's religious forgeries ("No needle marks on your Annunciation's arm, now," Brown reminds him [259]).  Although Esme is associated with a wide variety of other female figures of salvation in addition to Mary and Faust's Gretchen, Dante's Beatrice, Saint Rose of Lima, the Egyptian goddess Isis, the Flying Dutchman's Senta, Peer Gynt's Solveig (like other modernist masterpieces, The Recognitions is thickly allusive to other texts), she is elsewhere associated with succubae and sirens, and when Wyatt deigns to think of her at all, it is unfortunately in her role as temptress.  Rebelling from Brown in his role as the Troll King, Wyatt comes to view Esme more as Ibsen's Green-clad One than as the maternal Solveig and at that point rejects her offer of intimacy to return to his father and take up the priesthood.  In her face Wyatt had found the lines necessary to complete his childhood portrait of his dead mother Camilla, but this only adds unconscious fears of incest to his relationship with Esme.  After he spurns her, she attempts suicide, and though she is rescued she drifts through the rest of the novel in a state of acute schizophrenia, referring to herself in the third person.  Wyatt eventually comes to his senses and realizes that Esme is the one woman capable of offering him selfless love, but by that time she has disappeared, a stowaway on a ship taking Stanley, a neurotic Catholic organist also in love with Esme, to Italy.  By day Stanley tries to convert her to Catholicism, but by night her"simulacra" assail him"immodest in dress and licentious in nakedness, many-limbed as some wild avatar of the Hindu cosmology . . . full-breasted and vaunting the belly, limbs indistinguishable until he was brought down between them and stifled in moist collapse" (828).  Ever the victim of male projections, Esme slips deeper into madness and religious mania as the long novel nears its conclusion, her unrequited love for Wyatt causing her to waste away,"so quickly as though she . . . she had no will to live," as Stanley mournfully confesses, reporting her Firbankian death (a"staphylococcic infection . . . from kissing Saint-Peter-in-the-Boat" [953]).

On the one hand, all this sounds like an elaborate revenge fantasy contrived by Gaddis because of Sheri's indifference to him, but on the other, it shows that he learned from her how ridiculous some of his preconceived notions about her had been.  One of the strangest yet memorable heroines in contemporary literature, Esme betrays the absurdities of the role of romantic redemptress forced upon so many female characters by males who prefer virgins and whores to any more complex woman in between.  As with Broyard, Sheri provided Gaddis with an invaluable"sentimental education."

Gaddis sent a copy of The Recognitions to Sheri upon publication in 1955, but she never read it.  At that time she was visiting Ezra Pound regularly at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC.  She showed the novel to Pound, but he wasn't interested in such"verbiage." "I'll help your friends any way I can," he told her,"but I won't read their books."  The jacket carried a blurb by Stuart Gilbert favorably comparing The Recognitions to Ulysses, so Pound added: "Tell your friend Joyce was an ending, not a beginning."  (It should be remembered that Pound didn't care for Ulysses, and regarded Finnegans Wake as unreadable.)  

In addition to inspiring Esme, Sheri made a literal contribution to The Recognitions: a long letter of hers to Gaddis is reproduced verbatim on pages 471-73. (Gaddis didn't ask Sheri's permission to do so, and since she never read the novel she was unaware of the letter until I pointed it out to her, after Gaddis told me the letter was hers.)  The thousand-word letter is too long to reproduce here, but it's a remarkable piece of writing and valuable both as a statement of her aesthetics at the time and as the earliest surviving example of her prose style.  Written under Nin's obvious influence, just as Sheri would adopt Pound's idiosyncratic way of writing in later years, the letter discusses"the demands of painting," principally the psychological demands made on the painter.  A short extract follows, concluding with a striking image of the sort Nin is known for:

The painter concerned for his mortal safety, indifferent because he fears to scrutinize, paradoxically sacrifices that very safety, for he will not be allowed to escape painting.

He will make paintings or they will revolt and make him, unhappy being in the grasp of them. He compulsively must, then, live them cold as they are, static, perversely with warmth and movement he cannot know but feel painfully, a bird with broken eggs inside. (472) 

In the context of the novel, the letter is a suicide note Esme leaves for Wyatt; Broyard too describes a suicide attempt by Sheri (65-66), but she told me she never attempted suicide.  Perhaps she meant she never seriously attempted suicide, because the attempts described in both The Recognitions and Kafka Was the Rage are half-hearted, more theatrical than suicidal.

 Gaddis left for Europe in 1948 to write his novel.  Anaïs Nin seems to have drifted away by then too; a year earlier Sheri had found a doctor to perform an abortion for Nin (Bair 328), and in later years Nin would send Sheri inscribed copies of her books, but she was no longer part of her entourage.  (When Nin died in 1977, Sheri wrote a poem entitled"Goodbye Anaïs," which was eventually published in the journal Anaïs.)  Sheri was popular with jazz musicians at that time, who would hang out at her Jones Street apartment and sometimes give her shirts that they had worn too often on the bandstand.  Charlie Parker was a frequent visitor, as were the members of the Modern Jazz Quartet.  Sheri painted a splendid abstract portrait of MJQ bassist Percy Heath entitled Daw oo that was later included in her book.  At some point she became friends with Leonard Bernstein's fiancée, Felicia Montealegre (she lived a few blocks from Sheri), who was to become something of a patron to her.  It was the heady beginning of the Beat era, and Sheri was leading a hedonistic but (as she later admitted) empty life.  In the early 1950s she was living with a musician named Joseph Castaldo, who was studying at Julliard School of Music; aware of her ennui, Castaldo suggested that she go down to Washington, DC, and visit Ezra Pound, then incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. There she met the man who would dominate the second half 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, when Ezra 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 Be-ing 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? (Heymann 226; his ellipses)

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 during the war, Pound had, on the advice of his lawyers, pleaded insanity rather than risk being tried for treason (and if convicted, executed), and had been confined since the end of 1945 to St. Elizabeth's Federal Hospital for the Insane.  (The government's plan was to keep Pound there rather than risk an acquittal after a trial, so the fiction of his insanity was maintained by sympathetic psychiatrists.)  During his first few years there he was allowed very few visitors, but by 1951 his visiting privileges had been extended, as they would continue to be over the years. Surrounded by madmen and with the threat of being tried for treason hanging over his head should he"recover" from his insanity, Pound was understandably miserable and his creative drive at a standstill.  The Pisan Cantos, written in 1945 while Pound was incarcerated in Italy, had been published in 1948, and he had written nothing since.  In 1949 Pound won the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos, and the controversy surrounding the award attracted the attention of a new generation of readers, many of whom began making pilgrimages to St. Elizabeth's in the 1950s to study under the master at his"Ezuversity" and do his bidding.  

Sheri wrote to Pound's supervisor Dr. Overholser on 26 December 1951 to ask permission to visit him; her request was granted, and though there's no record of their first meeting, the mutual attraction must have been immediate.  Pound encouraged her to move down there and informally adopted her.  She got a job working in the admissions office of George Washington University, which didn't last long, and then worked in a waffle shop on K Street, but Pound made her quit so that she could concentrate on her painting.  He paid the rent on her apartment and gave her a dollar a day for expenses.  Aged sixty-six and thirty-three, respectively, there was a father-daughter relationship at first (or older: she called him"Grampaw").  Pound was still married to Dorothy Shakespear, who had taken a small apartment near the hospital and visited him daily, but the older woman was apparently not jealous of the younger one; she even approved of Pound's financial assistance to Sheri.  In the summer of 1954, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey notes in The Roots of Treason,"Dorothy wrote to Dr. Overholser requesting that Sheri Martinelli be allowed to take her place as [Pound's] guardian while out on the lawn because she had to go away for a week; Dorothy reassured Dr. Overholser that Ezra thought of Sheri as his own daughter" (242).   The following year Pound asked Dr. Overholser whether Sheri could move onto the grounds of St. Elizabeth's and work as an art therapist; both requests were denied (Torrey 241).  Dorothy too seems to have looked upon Sheri as a daughter; spotting Sheri walking up toward Pound and her, Dorothy once commented,"Here comes ‘family.'"  Sheri proudly accompanied Dorothy on various outings in Washington, DC, dazzled by the older woman's Edwardian elegance.  In her letters and phone conversations Sheri told me she loved Dorothy, and often sang her praises.

Sheri lived in a variety of small apartments in and around Washington, DC, for the next seven years, once sharing a basement apartment with another Pound disciple named David Horton, and visited Pound almost daily.  (She did, however, maintain a studio apartment on New York's Lower East Side for occasional visits; after another disciple, John Kasper, moved to New York and opened his Make It New bookshop on Bleecker Street, Sheri used it as a mailing address.  She received more than a hundred letters from Pound during her periods away from St.  Elizabeth's.)  She joined the growing number of young acolytes who visited Pound, listening to his pronunciamentos and undertaking various projects at his suggestion.  Sheri could always be seen with sketchpad in hand, doing studies of the Maestro, and occasionally of Dorothy.  Virtually everyone who has written about Pound's life at St. Elizabeth's mentions Sheri, in terms ranging from praise to bemusement to condemnation.  Noel Stock, one of Pound's earliest biographers, calls her"a strange, rather scatterbrained young woman" (439) and a later biographer dismisses her as a manipulative, troublesome"odd-ball" (Wilhelm 287, 308).  On the other hand, one visitor at the time said of her,"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'" (McNaughton 323), 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" (246).

Pound playfully called her"La" Martinelli, adding the mock title la more often used in reference to actresses and divas, which Sheri adopted as her professional name thereafter.  Pound obviously enjoyed her company: "Seeing Sheri approach across the lawn," another visitor recalls,"he jumps out of his chair and hurries to greet La Martinelli with his most affectionate and energetic bear hug" (Booth 383).  It's been said she and Pound became lovers, as Sheri herself claimed in a letter to Archibald MacLeish (Torrey 241), though a later biographer doubts the couple would have had much opportunity to do so (Carpenter 803).  Allen Ginsberg called Sheri Pound's"girlfriend," and one of her musician friends teased her with"I guess you're Ezra's pound cake now." In Timothy Findley's play The Trials of Ezra Pound, Sheri is portrayed as a concubine, there merely to satisfy Pound's sexual needs.  As late as 1957, they acted like lovers:  when David Rattray visited Pound that fall he recorded for the Nation another example of Pound's greeting Sheri upon her arrival: "Pound embraced her and ran his hands through her hair, and they talked excitedly, each interrupting the other." "Grandpa loves me," she told Rattray. "It's because I symbolize the spirit of Love to him, I guess."  She also boasted,"Grandpa says I know intuitively what it takes a great genius years of study to learn."  When she left,"Pound threw his arms around her, hugged her, and kissed her goodbye."  To Rattray's critical eye,"Her appearance suggested a frayed and faded survivor of the early bobby-sox days.  She had huge eyes like a cat.  They bulged in a flushed face that tapered down from an enormous forehead to a tiny chin and tinier double chin.  Her lips were tight and pale, but sometimes relaxed and parted into a naive smile.  I assumed that she was a patient from another ward."  Sheri was infuriated by Rattray's article and wanted to sue for slander, but Dorothy talked her out of it.

Pound was attentive to her emotional needs as well.  On 23 September 1954 her only brother, Walter Albert Brennan (Buddy to his sister), committed suicide, the result of a decade of misery ever since being wounded in World War II.  So great was Sheri's grief that Pound wrote a"Prayer for a Dead Brother" for her, which was eventually published in 1972.  When Charlie Parker died the following year, Pound again attempted to assuage her grief with a poem, which remains unpublished.  He also fed her during these years, passing along items from the hospital cafeteria.  However, by 1956 he began tiring of her, and"turned her over" (as her second husband put it) to Gilbert Lee, ten years her junior, whom she had met shortly after coming to St. Elizabeth's.  Sheri moved in with Gilbert at his mother's gallery on Mount Vernon Avenue across the Potomac in Alexandria, Virginia. Gilbert drove her into Washington frequently, though, so she could continue her studies at the Ezuversity.

Ostensibly Sheri 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 abstract style with an older, more representational style.   She painted portraits almost exclusively, and mostly self-portraits.  The paintings are small, 12" by 14" at the largest, and are richly colored.  As with Sheri herself, her art elicited contradictory reactions from Pound's visitors:  his U.S. publisher James Laughlin has said"Her drawings were not very good, in fact, quite bad" (24), but Eustace Mullins, a photographer and sculptor among other things, wrote:"She had perfected a jewel-like tone in her painting, much like the ancient Persian painting, which was very effective" (307; a shadowy photograph of Sheri and Mullins is reproduced on p. 292 of his book).  Art historian Max Wykes-Joyce paid her splendid tribute by writing,"La Martinelli, Italo-American, brings to painting a sense of hieratic splendour lost since Byzantium.  The Testa Invocatrice, the terra-cotta head of a Madonna, no higher than a man's thumb, is a manifestation of religious art in the direct tradition of Giotto and Crivelli" (249).

Pound himself 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.  (On p. 339 of the winter 1974 issue of Paideuma there is a photograph from the 1950s of Pound seated at a desk displaying her painting Giotto.)  His letters of 1955 are full of exhortations to correspondents like MacLeish and Laughlin to do something for Sheri: grants, foundation support, publication, museum showings, anything, but nothing came of his efforts (Pound/Laughlin 236-42).  As late as 1958 he was still trying to get some sort of subsidy for her from a European admirer (Stummvoll 75-78), again without results.

He did, however, arrange for publication in book form of a small selection of her paintings.  He suggested the project to Vanni Scheiwiller, the son of Pound's Italian publisher, and offered to write an introduction for it.  David Gordon, a photographer who later became a leading Pound scholar, photographed the paintings he thought should be included, Sheri wasn't consulted and later was irritated at his selection, and in February of 1956 Scheiwiller published La Martinelli, a miniature booklet (2 ¾" x 4") limited to 500 copies.  It reproduces nine paintings, St. Elizabeth's Madonna (also reproduced on the cover), Giotto, Patria, Cleofe Santa, Isis of the Two Kingdoms, Daw oo (the portrait of Percy Heath mentioned earlier), Ch'iang (Fortuna), E.P., and Leucothoe, Daughter of Orchamus, and two ceramic works, the Testa Invocatrice admired by Wykes-Joyce and a Ra Set.  In his introduction, Pound notes that several of Sheri's paintings were works in progress (indeed, she would continue working on some of them up until her death) and states: "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" (11).  (Pound's introduction was reprinted later in 1956 in Noel Stock's magazine Edge with the title"Total War on ‘Contemplatio'",a phrase from Canto 85,and has been reprinted a few times since.)

Pound 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. Elizabeth's.  Through the thicket of Pound's dense, 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, and references to her art.  As in The Recognitions, she is mythologized in The Cantos 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 nearly a half-century earlier.  "In fact," writes Italian scholar Massimo Bacigalupo,"the forty pages of [cantos] 90-95 may be taken as a single new Canzone d'amore, modelled upon Cavalcanti's (and Dante's) poesis docta and on Provençal trobar clus" (259).  (One of Pound's earliest books had been a translation of the sonnets and ballads of the medieval Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti; Pound gave his personal copy of the book to Sheri, who filled the margins with drawings and love poems to Pound.)  Pound later told Sheri that cantos 90-95 were"her" cantos, for like the troubadour's Lady, she personified love as a creative force.  On the second page of Canto 90 the poet cries out to Cythera (Aphrodite), and then addresses a prayer to"Sibylla," the all-seeing sibyl of the Delphic oracle in ancient Greece.  Most critics agree with Carroll F. Terrell's annotation:"Sheri Martinelli is understood to be the real-life sibyl at St. Elizabeth's" (542).  Chanting in liturgical refrain the phrase"m'elevasti" ("you lifted me up," from Dante's praise of Beatrice in the Paradiso), Pound registers his gratitude to Sheri for lifting him up out of his personal hell and reanimating him with the spirit of love:

                                              Sibylla,
from under the rubble heap
                                   m'elevasti
from the dulled edge beyond pain,
                                   m'elevasti
out of Erebus, the deep-lying
             from the wind under the earth,
                                   m'elevasti
from the dulled air and the dust,
                                   m'elevasti
by the great flight,
                                   m'elevasti,
                                             Isis Kuanon
from the cusp of the moon,
                                   m'elevasti (90/626) 

Isis Kuanon conflates the Egyptian goddess with the Chinese goddess of mercy. Next Sheri is referred to as the mermaid Undine, a nickname Pound gave her ("Thus Undine came to the rock" [91/630];"Yes, my Ondine, it is so god-damned dry on these rocks" [93/643]).  Although this could be a reflection on her dangerous, sirenlike persona, Sheri was, after all, tempting Pound away from his wife and practicing what Laughlin learnedly calls"concitatio senectutis (the arousing of desire in old men)"(25), the undine is another redemptress, especially when Pound further conflates her with the sea-nymph Leucothea (from book 5 of Homer's Odyssey).  In the second half of Rock-Drill Pound resumes the persona of wandering Odysseus, and Leucothea makes her smashing entrance in Canto 91.  Appearing in the form of a seagull to Odysseus, adrift on a raft in wet clothes, Leucothea coos,"my bikini is worth your raft" (91/636), a flippant paraphrase of her offer to give him her magic veil in exchange for his wet clothes.  The flirty line is repeated in Canto 95 (665), and even J. J. Wilhelm, who goes out of his way to deny Sheri's role in The Cantos, grudgingly admits that Leucothea"may well have been a tribute to Sheri Martinelli at this time" (302) for rescuing Pound just as the sea-nymph rescued Odysseus.  When Sheri left St. Elizabeth's in 1958, among the paintings and drawings she left with Norman Holmes Pearson for safekeeping was a photograph she had taken of herself in a mirror, wearing a bikini (H. D. 52).

 In Canto 92, Pound writes:

"And if I see her not,
             no sight is worth the beauty of my thought."
Then knelt with the sphere of crystal
That she should touch with her hands,
                                     Coeli Regina
The four altars at the four coigns of that place,
But in the great love, bewildered
             farfalla in tempesta (92/639)