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

154 The Subject Is—Wartime
empty as Stella Bowen remembered it—six large rooms, with two comfortable
Ezra-made arm chairs, a few small tables, books, and files. There
was no telephone, no electricity, and only a tin hip-bath with rain water
drawn from a cistern by bucket, shared by three other families, a cow, and
several goats.
Not to have ‘‘all their eggs in one basket,’’ the Pounds hurriedly divided
most of their belongings between the Giuseppe Bacigalupos, who had
room to spare, and Isabel Pound’s apartment at the Villa Raggio. Baccin,
the old peasant, helped carry the rest of the household things from the via
Marsala to Casa 60. Olga left a note for Ezra: ‘‘Baccin will be at the steps of
the salita Cerisola at quarter-to-ten domani lunedi. He can wait there as he
has the wall to rest load on.’’
Mary was in Gais again for the summer, so Dorothy moved into Mary’s
room, the one with the best furniture—a bed, night-table, and enamel
washstand that came from the Yeats’s flat in the Villa della Americhe—and
the only rug from the via Marsala. As Olga described that first evening: ‘‘I
had made [the room] as comfortable as possible, spent the day helping to
carry the Via Marsala [possessions] up hill. To help tide over the awkwardness—the
three of us forced to converse at the end of a tiring day, I
thought EP & D. would like me to show that I was minding my own
business—I went to my room and played the Mozart Concerto in A major,
as well as I have ever done. The next morning, E. told me that D. remarked,
‘I couldn’t have done that.’ (D. said nothing to me, good or bad or
indi√erent . . . pointedly spoke to me as she might have to a housekeeper.)
I never played—or was asked to play—again. It was the last time EP had
music at Sant’Ambrogio. After the first night, DP and EP sat listening in
the dark to the BBC broadcasts.’’ Dorothy referred to that time in only one
letter to James Laughlin: ‘‘We spent a year up at Olga’s house.’’
‘‘We were all civilized people,’’ Olga stated publicly of the ménage à
trois, ‘‘with only the usual minor domestic irritations.’’ On the surface, it
appeared to many that the two ladies and one gentleman coexisted in
harmony. They were all practiced in keeping ‘‘a somewhat Henry Jamesian
attitude toward personal feelings,’’ Mary observed. Olga did the shopping
(she spoke better Italian), and contributed her meager income from
teaching English at the technical school in Rapallo.