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

136 Overture to War
Georgetown with the Misses Ida and Adah Lee Mapel, old family friends
he had not seen since they visited Paris in 1919. His first postcard to Olga
was from Thomas Je√erson’s honeymoon lodge at Monticello. He had
viewed some of the Vivaldi scores in the Library of Congress, after lunching
with ‘‘the boss’’ and the heads of the music and Chinese divisions. He
was also invited to the Japanese Embassy, and he viewed the films of Noh
plays at the National Archives. His old friend from the University of
Pennsylvania, the poet William Carlos Williams, then a medical doctor in
New Jersey, came down for lunch. ‘‘Uncle Jorje’’ (George) Tinkham, a
Republican congressman from Boston whose economic policies Pound
touted, fed him diamond-back terrapin, Maryland style. Ezra wrote Homer:
‘‘seen more senators—Bridges, Lodge, Dies, etc.—[had] a kind word
from [Senator William] Borah in [the] corridor.’’ To Olga: ‘‘A joke on me
& FDR . . . Washington Post said that ‘the only person in Washington Ez
wants to meet is mrs. Roosevelt.’ ’’
In Massachusetts, he visited the Adams houses in Cambridge, saw the
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the poet Archibald MacLeish,
dined with Harvard University’s president, and heard Olga’s friend Nadia
Boulanger present a music school faculty concert featuring Vivaldi’s Four
Seasons. He then spent ‘‘2 ∞ ⁄≤ hours in an airless room bellowing his cantos
into a microphone fer record wi√ 2 kettle drums at his disposal.’’ James
Laughlin drove him to the Loomis (Pound’s grandmother’s) homestead,
and afterward to the Laughlin estate in Connecticut, ‘‘a quiet-type country
house . . . miles of rolling white birch.’’
He denied plans to repatriate: ‘‘He wants to come home . . . been here
long enu√ . . . [but] tarrying fer Hamilton [College] celebrashun.’’
Olga complained to Ezra that she might lose him ‘‘to some college
cutie—or that Mrs. [E. E.] Cummings or someone similar put something
decorative in His way.’’ The role of ‘‘the other woman’’ was a di≈cult one:
‘‘She su√ering from ‘back-street-itis’ . . . having met His wife and bin
asked if I knew when He wuz coming back. . . . He might have found time
to send her at least a few letters having a beginning, a middle and end.’’
When he cabled gladiolas to appease her, Olga copied Ezra’s characteristic
jargon: ‘‘She wuz walking down the salita and met a man with a