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

166 The Road to Hell
you get it and having no answer. If I could only do something for you . . .
but things go contrary for the moment . . . the depressing influence of
Saturn ’til next March! I expect He will be out waving his wild tail again
before long, outside the barbed wire of the DTC and inside the domestic
reticolate [barbed wire]. The child [Mary] exhorted me to be a ‘good
loser’ . . . reminded me of Violet Hunt’s story of how you consoled her
when [Ford Madox] Ford left her: ‘You will soon be old, and then you
won’t care.’ ’’
She added news of their mutual friends in Paris, lost during the war
years: Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Paul Valéry (all dead). Jacobole√,
whom she had met at Capri with Lindy Shaw-Paige in the 1920s with his
amante Nadine Witowski, had joined Pétain’s Vichy government during
the Occupation. The Princesse de Polignac (dead, too), had left the Canal
Grande Palace to her nephew, the Prince of Monaco. She was beginning to
view Pound’s enforced confinement as a mixed blessing: ‘‘I felt it the best
thing they could have done for the Cantos, to shut you up for awhile. She is
glad he has begun to sing again.’’
Ezra’s situation improved when Lieutenant Colonel Steele, a Harvard
graduate and former professor of economics at Boston University, returned
from home leave to his post as commanding o≈cer of the camp in
Pisa. He was aware of Pound’s reputation as a poet and had studied his
theories of economic reform. He was also acquainted with Pound’s friend
in Rome, the poet-philosopher George Santayana. Under Steele’s benign
influence, Ezra was allowed to write on the old o≈ce Remington in the
medical unit, punching away with his index finger, accompanying himself
with a high-pitched humming sound. With no library but a well-stocked
mind, he completed his finest work, the Pisan Cantos. Supplies were often
short, and Pound used whatever scraps of paper he could find; parts of
Canto 74 were composed on sheets of toilet paper. It was his custom to
send the new Cantos to Dorothy, who forwarded them along to Mary
(who had joined her mother in Sant’Ambrogio) to type clear copies. ‘‘EP
has been singing in his cage, all right,’’ Olga said, when a third large
brown envelope arrived at the Café Yolanda on October 15.
Several days later, Olga went with Mary to the Yolanda to meet John
Drummond. A very young G.I. entered the cafe, ‘‘whether by design or