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

185 What Thou Lovest Well Remains
She had recovered her sense of humor when she described a new arrival
from Bombay who appeared at Count Chigi’s board: ‘‘The Indienne is . . .
out to get H.N. [His Nibs], considers the black head in the Saracini arms
symbolic that a black woman will return into the family. . . . She read the
Count’s hand, gives him six years more . . . says she can renew his youth . . .
leaves the drawing room to ‘retire’ before the others, [and] H.N. will duly
conduct her with ceremony a quarter-hour later to the Swan Room. So far,
the Indienne reports a kiss on the forehead. The problem . . . troubling His
Nibs is how to keep the Indienne here without ‘keeping’ her.’’
In Olga’s view, the Count’s obsession with ‘‘the Indienne,’’ one of the
students at the Accademia, came from his ‘‘desire to escape from the
lagnanze [complaints] of the now dreary Marchesa, and an element of
sadism which delights in tormenting, having something inferior and humble
always there to pick on . . . a remarkable man, in spite of all.’’
Sir Steuart Wilson, then head of programs at the BBC, and his wife, a
cellist, were among the distinguished guests at the week-long series of
concerts in 1949: ‘‘a great relief to meet people who speak one’s own
language—I don’t mean the English language—but who can get one’s
point of view.’’ The conductor for sacred music was Guido Cantelli, a
talented twenty-eight-year-old who later, in 1956, died in a plane crash.
On September 29: ‘‘Finito la Settimana! . . . His Nibs does not have the
courage to keep the Indienne ‘per sempre,’ so she is leaving, having
charmed everyone. . . . [She] came into the little o≈ce where I was writing
late at night in a beautiful orange sari and little censer chasing evil spirits
with incense!’’
An excursion to San Gimignano with the Chigiana Quintette playing in
the Sala Dante was a great success, but the Count did not travel with them.
He held a strong dislike for San Gimignano that stemmed from when he
had been sent there as a youth by his family to separate him from a young
sweetheart. To eradicate the memory, he had sold the Torre facing the
piazza that he inherited from the Chigi-Saracini clan, and never went back.
Olga found that the hill town had been invaded by Twentieth Century–
Fox filming Prince of Foxes, a costume-adventure movie notable as one of
the first postwar productions made on location in Europe. The piazza was
full of their decorations, ‘‘festa with floats that must have come from the