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

186 What Thou Lovest Well Remains
Viareggio carnival, some enormous plaster figures on horseback, Walt
Disney faces and grotesque plaster heads projecting from the windows of
the towers . . . all the population dressed as Italian peasants, the cloister of
the Duomo used as a wardrobe department.’’ She asked Ezra to imagine an
Italian historical film with Hollywood trimmings and English voices, and
‘‘that unspeakable Orson Welles’’ in the leading role.
In October, Olga arrived in Rapallo after circling around the peninsula
for fifteen hours due to a washout. A thunderstorm had blown in during
the night, ‘‘the like she [has] never seen—continuous flashes.’’ The next
morning, she went down to circulate a petition to be signed by the citizens
of Rapallo—‘‘clergy, doctors, bank cashiers, shop keepers’’—attesting
that Pound had never at any time been a member of the Fascist Party. One
of Ezra’s many friends led her to the barber shop where they accosted
customers sitting around in their lather and coerced them to sign on the
corner of a dressing table. ‘‘Nobody ever thought of Him as a Fascist, but
as an American citizen who sympathized with certain things in the [Fascist]
regime,’’ she wrote later to Peter Russell.
Olga was starting a translation of Enrico Pea’s Il Romanzo di Moscardino,
but she felt ‘‘she let Mr. Pea down badly . . . he was worrying, and Jaz
[Laughlin] . . . waiting to publish, [but] she can’t work at things like that
with her head stu√ed with other people’s a√airs.’’
In October, Mary and her family moved into their permanent home,
Schloss Brunnenburg. A former watchtower for Schloss Tirol (which gave
its name to the district), Brunnenburg perches high above the valley of the
Adige, a half day’s drive from the Brenner Pass. The main tower is
Roman, the outside walls eleventh century. In the nineteenth century, an
eccentric German added the crenelated turrets that reminded Olga of
illustrations in her beloved Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The schloss had almost
fallen into ruin when Mary and Boris moved into one top room of the
tower. ‘‘[Mary] apparently feels she has done well for herself in life,’’ she
wrote Ezra. In the postwar Tyrol, she noted, ‘‘they’ve got Swiss cigarettes
hidden under the cows. . . . You can buy Swiss watches cheaper than in
Switzerland.’’
She received news from Count Chigi that the Marchesa Fabìola Lenzoni