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

174 What Thou Lovest Well Remains
earned wide acclaim for these studies . . . [and] the first Thematic Catalogue
of Unpublished Vivaldi Concerts.’’ Yet she felt that her exhausting
labors often were unappreciated by the Comitato Coordinatori, the triumvirate
of Luciani, Casella, and Mortari.
She had not given up the battle to go to the States, but the Count
advised patience, ‘‘especially if the Poet counsels you against it. You would
risk leaving needlessly, and once there, being of no help, even a source of
added worry for him.’’
Olga persisted. ‘‘I can’t understand you making no reference to my
coming,’’ she wrote Ezra. ‘‘If you don’t want me, for God’s sake, say so.’’
His answer left no doubt: ‘‘Yes, he wd/ be pleez to see her anywhere
outside this continent. But she damn well not set foot in this country . . .
has she ever heard of the last Depression. . . . When a man is down a wellhole,
you don’t help by jumpin’ in on top of him.’’
Olga resigned herself to enjoying the diversions of Tuscany. En route
to an attractive old tenuta near Cotormignano that had once been visited
by King Victor Emmanuel, she was driven through ‘‘the most beautiful
Sienese country, side roads bordered with quercia, yellow and red,’’ and
‘‘the bridge Tolomei crossed when being sent to the Maremma, a very
high one arched over the Rosia.’’
The next day, she stopped at Francesca Frost’s Castel del Diavolo in
Florence, ‘‘tower and sala, very old—had been used by contadini as a
stalla—on a hill in an orto of olives.’’ The villa had been reconstructed
before the war by a German-American painter, and Francesca’s room,
with a raised platform bed, was ‘‘suitable to act a Shakespeare play in.’’ It
was a twenty-minute walk from the center, ‘‘can’t bother to wait for
transportation, the bridges all broken [by wartime bombs], trams are more
trouble than comfort.’’ Some of the street names in Florence had been
changed since the war, she wrote, even the Piazza Vittorio Umberto. ‘‘The
Florentines are blue about the condizione di pace, they hate the English! It
is beginning to unite them.’’
She motored in style with the Marchesa Fabiola to the Count’s ‘‘annual
feed for the seventeen Contrade, each rappresentante of [a] Contrada
found mille lire under his serviette. . . . His Nibs [Count Chigi] is 67, talks