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

168 The Road to Hell
through her correspondence. She had heard on the BBC that William
Joyce, ‘‘Lord Haw-Haw,’’ the British propagandist for the Nazis, had been
condemned to death; his appeal had been heard on October 12. Joyce, who
had been born in Brooklyn of an Irish Roman Catholic father and English
Protestant mother, considered himself a true patriot, the messiah of a
powerful new ideology that would restore an e√ete England to an idealized
and heroic state. His broadcasts from Germany during the war
fascinated—and infuriated—the British public. There were many parallels
with Pound, who always considered himself a patriot trying to educate
and enlighten misguided Americans who supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
New Deal.
Olga wrote to her old friend Blanche Somers-Cocks, who had recently
returned to Venice from Asolo, where she had been sitting out the war,
that ‘‘E’s position is very di√erent . . . he never accepted orders as to what
he should say. . . . I can’t understand the length of time taken in deciding
on E’s trial. Yet I am told that time is working in his favor. One gets so little
news. It seems ridiculous planning, when we might be pitchforked over to
the States at any moment.’’
Ezra was pitchforked over to the States far sooner than she imagined.
One quiet evening, on November 16, 1945, Pound was reading in the
medical unit when two o≈cers entered and told him to get together his
gear—in only one hour, he would be flying back to Washington. He was
escorted from the camp in the custody of two MPs, and not permitted to
send messages to either Dorothy or Mary.
On November 23, the day before Mary’s next scheduled visit, she and
Olga walked down to Rapallo to make arrangements for transportation to
Pisa. Olga wrote Ezra how she had learned of his departure for the States:
‘‘By chance, I had gone into the little sweet shop near the Castello, and the
woman showed me the paper. . . . it was a great blow, not seeing you before
you left. I can’t imagine you in such a place . . . you are still here on the
salita with me.’’ It would be thirteen years before Olga and Ezra walked
the salita together again.
In December 1945, Pound’s temporary address was Cell Block 1, Cell
216, District of Columbia jail, from which he wrote to Mary, ‘‘vers de
Noël’’: ‘‘Dearest child: Tell your mother I bless the day I first saw her, and