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

The sword, carnage, vengeance, rage,
fear and want precede us.
In the hurly-burly of the fight
may the fortunes of war deal
a thousand wounds
a thousand deaths.
141 Overture to War
One can only imagine the conflicting emotions they—Olga, Ezra, and
Mary—felt as their adopted homeland, Italy, was at war with England and
France.
Ezra reported on the performance in one of his chatty broadcasts over
Rome Radio: ‘‘Two years ago, the Chigi organization had the sense to
devote the whole of the Sienese fest to Vivaldi. . . . [ Juditha Triumphans is]
a musical whoop in two parts, to celebrate the retaking of Corfu from the
Turks in 1715, very timely and suitable as a bicentenary funeral wreath on
redhead Vivaldi . . . better than the Olimpiade . . . Vivaldi knew more
about using the human voice than Johnnie [Johann Sebastian] Bach ever
discovered . . . he makes ole pop Handel look like a cold poached egg that
somebody dropped on the pavement. . . . I would by god rather hear
Guarnieri conductin’ Vivaldi than Toscanini conductin’ Beethoven in
Salzburg.’’
Mary returned to Bruneck, and Olga complained that the child’s letters
had ‘‘slumped into [the] conventional Gais mentality. She is a perfect
chameleon, natural at her age, but I think rather hard that she should
always be exposed to other influences, considering the trouble I took to get
her decent parents.’’
In Sant’Ambrogio, times were hard and lire scarce. Ezra wrote to Katue
Kitasono in Tokyo that he had ‘‘cashed his last postal money order for 156
lire (about six dollars). . . . As I can’t cash American cheques . . . and as
nothing (now) comes from English publications, this thin line of supplies
from the J[apan] T[imes] would be useful.’’
Reading the correspondence of this period, one might wonder why
Olga and the Pounds delayed returning to America on the eve of the
second major European conflict of their lifetimes. The embassy in Rome