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

179 What Thou Lovest Well Remains
Cornell advised against distributing the booklet, though he found
nothing treasonable in it. After visiting Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, he wrote
to James Laughlin (who forwarded the letter to Olga): ‘‘I had not seen
Ezra for about a year, and was impressed with the further deterioration of
his mind. His delusions have become more clearly defined. . . . Dr. Overholser
says that he is willing to testify that E. will never get any better, also
that he does not require hospitalization.’’
Laughlin also refused to support If This Be Treason . . . ‘‘You don’t
grasp the facts of the situation,’’ he wrote Olga. ‘‘It does not matter what
E. said over the air. If he had only said Jesus was a good man, it would still
be treason if he had been paid to do it by an enemy government, with
whom we were at war. That is the whole nub.’’ Eliot, whom Olga considered
Ezra’s true friend, also registered his dissent: a limited selection from
the documents would have no legal value for Pound’s defense.
Laughlin undertook to help Olga financially: ‘‘Ezra has expressed the
wish, and D[orothy] has approved, that all his royalties from the books I
publish should be paid to you until further notice. I hope you won’t make a
fuss about taking this money.’’ He had visited Pound, who ‘‘said for me to
explain that there was much he could not put in his letters to you because
they are read. He has enemies on the hospital sta√ who communicate with
the enemies outside—or so he thinks.’’ Dorothy Pound, he reported, had
aged a little, ‘‘is terribly intense, and completely centered on Ezra. I got the
impression that she does exactly what he says, not the other way around.’’
‘‘The absolute refusal to face facts is a strong family trait,’’ Olga
agreed. ‘‘Both his mother and Mary show it to a marked degree and
D[orothy], I should imagine, has acquired it. . . . I won’t make a fuss about
taking [this] money, and thank him kindly for the thought, but nothing has
happened to change her feeling about using his money at this distance.’’
(She did not object to Laughlin’s keeping it for her in case of emergency.)
‘‘The reason she would like to come to the U.S.,’’ she wrote Ezra, ‘‘was
the same that made her leave a comfortable flat and friends in Paris for bare
rooms and solitary meals at Sant’Ambrogio . . . but no-one understands
her likes and dislikes.’’
Ronald Duncan, one of the first of the young writers to attend the
‘‘Ezuversity,’’ understood. ‘‘I have always suspected Cornell and Laughlin