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

150 The Subject Is—Wartime
Nora Naldi and her husband. They tried to convince him to stay with
them, that the war would soon be over, but he refused, saying he was
going to the Tyrol to see Mary. Nora o√ered him a rare black-market egg,
some bread, and a cup of tea, then another hard-boiled egg and more
bread for his backpack. Pound—at fifty-eight years old—set o√ on foot for
his first long walking trip since Ussel and Ventador in the 1920s. He
traveled the fifty miles from Rome to Rieti, spending ‘‘one night under the
stars, one on a bench in Rieti’’ (Canto 84), before boarding a train going
north with ‘‘a herd of the dismantled Italian army.’’ He hopped another
train at Bologna that took him as far as Verona, where he had to decide
whether to go north to Bruneck or to the coast and Rapallo. In that area the
trains were under e≈cient German control, so he decided to continue on
to Mary in Gais.
On a clear September day, a traveler covered with dust and carrying a
rucksack approached the door to the farmhouse. The Marchers presumed
he was a beggar, and the frau was about to turn him away when she
recognized his voice.
‘‘Gruss Gott,’’ ‘‘Der Herr!’’ ‘‘Tatile ist gekommen!’’ (Canto 78). A short
time later, Mary returned to the farmhouse on her bicycle and fell into
Babbo’s embrace. She sent a telegram to her mother assuring her that her
father had arrived safely, and Olga dutifully went down the hill to share
the good news with Dorothy.
By the end of September a puppet Fascist government—the Repubblica
Sociale Italiana—was operating from Salò in northern Italy. Ezra stopped
there on his way back from Gais to be interviewed by the new minister of
popular culture, Fernando Mezzasoma, hoping to broadcast again from
Milan, the new center of radio propaganda. Many years later Pound wrote
of this incident that it had been ‘‘great folly to have destroyed the batch of
letters re/that,’’ and only oral reports of that crucial time remain.
As the September season at the Accademia began, Count Chigi sent
news to his ‘‘Carissima Segretarissima Olga’’: ‘‘At the end of this twelfth
academic year, there are plenty of problems to deal with.’’ A performance
of Giovanni Pergolesi’s Il Maestro di Musica, the second act of La Traviata,
and Pietro Mascagni’s Zanetto had taken place on the afternoon of the