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

138 Overture to War
the background so that my daughter may have advantages.’’ When Ezra
went to Siena, he found the door to the Palazzo Capoquadri apartment
double-locked. ‘‘You are the limit,’’ he wrote hastily on a note he pinned
to the door. But as always they reconciled and were guests of Count Chigi
at the Palio.
Olga wrote to Ezra after he returned to Rapallo: ‘‘everyone seems to
think the Boss [Mussolini] met with Adolf [Hitler] and going to turn
’round and help frogs [French] . . . have those dam Germans sunk a ship
with 1,000 non-coms—or is it talk?’’
‘‘Mebbe still some chance of Eng[land] & Italy keepin’ out of the
shindy,’’ Ezra replied. He enclosed a clipping from a Roman newspaper
about Olga’s friend Dorothea Watts of Newport, Rhode Island, who had
been ordered to leave Bolzano province in the Tyrol—a restricted zone
near Mary’s foster parents—within forty-eight hours, in one of Mussolini’s
‘‘political and military measures against anti-fascism and the espionage
activities of Western nations.’’
On September 3, 1939, the long-anticipated war was declared by the
Allies, England and France, and Germany. Along with news of his victories
on the tennis courts, Ezra wrote: ‘‘Hitler apparently intends fer the
moment to set pretty on his Siegfried line . . . [Hermann] Goering’s speech
vurry good . . . English fleet not here yet. . . . The only thing Eng[land]
hasn’t done is to putt [Anthony] Eden into [the] cabinet.’’
‘‘All the Brits running ’round in gas masks and Him piling up tennis
scores?’’ Olga commented. ‘‘Whoever will be editing His epistles in the
year 2000 will be surprised.’’ She sent for the Leoncina to come to Rapallo
and introduced her, for the first time, to Father Desmond Chute: ‘‘The
news [was] unexpected and a shock . . . [but] he did not ask questions . . .
highly civilized.’’
Olga’s greatest accomplishment of 1939 was to write the entry on
Vivaldi in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. ‘‘The individual
authors . . . are in themselves a guarantee for the value of their contributions,’’
the editor noted, ‘‘involving much time and laborious research.’’
Vivaldi Week at the Accademia—September 16 through 21—took place
in spite of the hostilities. Maestro Casella had revised twelve of Vivaldi’s