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

161 The Road to Hell
seven. More K-rations for dinner. Then they were moved to an adjoining
room, where Olga passed an uneasy night on a sofa, Ezra on two easy
chairs pushed together.
She would recall those four days in a letter to James Laughlin as
‘‘among the happiest of my life, when I shared His cell (a waiting room in a
business o≈ce) and emergency rations . . . incommunicado in the same
room with Ezra.’’
The next morning, the carabinieri guard returned to heat water in tins
for hot bouillon and co√ee (‘‘the first we had had in years’’), and Ezra
asked to send telegrams—to Dorothy, to Olga’s brother Teddy, to their
daughter Mary. He was taken away for another two and a half hours of
questioning by Major Frank L. Amprim, who was later to figure prominently
in the Ezra Pound case.
Ezra felt that he could talk freely with Amprim; at least there was a
chance to explain his views to someone who understood what he was
talking about. He was unaware that Amprim was not an army o≈cer but
an undercover FBI agent from the U.S. Department of Justice, sent to
Rome to deal with war crimes.
Olga was feeling ill and asked to see an American doctor, but her
request was ignored. At four o’clock, still weak, she was led in to be
questioned by Major Amprim. When she told him she wasn’t well, he
released her after only a few questions. He had a friendly and patient
manner, and took careful notes.
Olga and Ezra were left alone to talk privately between sessions. ‘‘It
was your mother who saved me from stupidities . . . she was blessed with
more sense of reality than I,’’ Pound later wrote Mary. ‘‘It was her intelligence
in making me see that I should not babble and joke about being ‘the
American Lord Haw-Haw’.’’
On the morning of May 6, while Ezra was undergoing another three
hours of interrogation with Amprim, Olga asked for an Italian newspaper.
She discovered in Tribuna del Popolo that Pound had been condemned as
a traitor in contumacia (by default) by the U.S. government. When Ezra
was led back to the waiting room, she told him the news. Naively, both
were astounded that his broadcasts on Rome Radio, which he felt he had
undertaken in good faith to enlighten listeners about the folly of U.S.