Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

94 The Breaking Point
Olga furnished the cottage simply, with a long bookcase and mirror
near the entrance, a dining table and four cane-bottomed chairs along the
walls, one painting—blue sea, a white shell. No clutter, no electricity, only
candlelight. In the kitchen was an old-fashioned potbellied stove meant
for charcoal, but one guest remembered that Olga preferred to cook with
pine cones or a spirit lamp, and used them ‘‘with as much success as some
people do with gas.’’
Olga was near enough to descend the footpath to Rapallo and be with
Pound in less than an hour. But she was never comfortable with provincial
resort life or the tight little world of the British colony that wintered there.
William Butler Yeats and his wife Georgie Hydes-Lee, who first visited ‘‘in
Dorothy and Ezra’s charge,’’ were delighted with the town and moved
their furniture from Merrion Square in London to 12, via Americhe, in
Rapallo, transporting with them their English way of life. Yeats described
to Olivia Shakespear, Ezra’s mother-in-law, their ‘‘first dinner-coated
meal’’ with the couple, where they met the 1912 Nobel Prize winner,
Gerhart Hauptmann, ‘‘who does not speak a word of English, but is fine to
look at, after the fashion of William Morris.’’ Yeats also relayed the news
that ‘‘George Antheil and his lady-wife might be there, and a certain Basil
Bunting, who had got into jail as a pacifist, one of EP’s more savage
disciples.’’ Peggy Guggenheim, who arrived after the rainy season drove
her out of Venice, admitted that, in Rapallo, ‘‘we had sun, but we paid for
it. What a horrid, dull little town it was!’’
To Olga’s eyes, the hills above Rapallo were di√erent. Even the dialect
of the contadini was not the same as the lingua of the townspeople. The
weather was variable, with clouds hanging over Zoagli for several days,
bringing rain in from the sea. But nothing could dim her enthusiasm for
the remote cottage where she spent part of each year.
‘‘Those people didn’t know I was in Sant’Ambrogio over their heads all
the time,’’ Olga said, refusing to recognize how closely il poeta’s activities
were monitored by the gossips of the colony. Ezra, who spent mornings at
work in the via Marsala apartment and then stopped o√ for a set at
the Tennis Club, in the afternoon was observed climbing the salita to
Sant’Ambrogio. If he was too busy or too tired to climb the steep, narrow
mule path up the hill, Olga would descend and leave notes for him in the