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

184 What Thou Lovest Well Remains
Fascism. ‘‘At a meeting in front of the Monte dei Paschi [Bank], someone
threw a bomb, four guardia wounded. . . . The contadini came into Siena,
unarmed—their women were waiting for them and handed out bastoni . . .
[then] a general strike, everything hermetically shut, Communist posters
against the ‘Governo degli assassini,’ government posters asking population
to assist at this morning’s funeral.’’ Olga went with the Count to the
Duomo, near the headquarters of the Fedel Terra, a peasant Communist
association. ‘‘The procession had hardly got past the turn which leads to
the Via di Città when more spari, people started to run. . . . The Sindaco, a
Communist, came to the funeral in his o≈cial capacity . . . someone
shouted, ‘fuori il Sindaco,’ which was taken up by the crowd, and shots
fired from the Fedel Terra balcony . . . armoured cars came out of the
prefettura courtyard, immensely applauded . . . [and] the co≈ns [were]
brought back.’’
The Accademia opened the fifteenth with half the teachers missing,
making it ‘‘very hard to concentrate on anything.’’ Peter Russell, one of
Ezra’s disciples and founder of the Pound Society in London, came to
Siena. He had met the poet Eugenio Montale, later a Nobel Prize winner, at
a café favored by the Florentine literati, and Montale had launched into a
long tale about Pound’s red-haired mistress, ‘‘well calculated to shock a
young Englishman before the days of permissiveness.’’ Russell was inspired
to visit Olga. To her eyes, he was ‘‘a nice young man—been all
’round Italy following his Cantos, Mantova, Venice, Rimini, etc., I think a
‘serious character’ ’’ (a term of approval Pound used in Canto 114). Thus
began Olga’s correspondence with ‘‘his enthusiastic Russell,’’ which continued
for many years.
‘‘My own problems are becoming less important to me,’’ she wrote
Ezra, ‘‘[but] the life of a segretaria is a dog’s life. One’s head continually
filled with other people’s concerns. . . . Had my violin cleaned, looked
over by the lutero here, but I have no time or strength or place to play . . .
so much going on, she doesn’t know if she is on her head or heels.’’
At St. Elizabeth’s, Ezra remembered ‘‘the flurry in Siena, and the 999
things for her to do, and he ain’t complainin’ about anything save her
wasted energies. . . . He prefers her not to waste energy on hack work any
peon can do.’’