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

196 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
which Olga refused. After a leisurely dinner at the Hotel Connaught, Eliot
gallantly saw her home in a taxi. She later attended a matinee of Eliot’s
successful play The Cocktail Party, and admonished Ezra to ‘‘encourage
His friend, the Possum, who does love Him, she feels it.’’
There was a pleasant weekend with Ronald Duncan at his country
home, Welcombe, ‘‘most beautiful and unspoiled, not even a petrol station,
soft air, drizzle of fine rain on one’s face.’’ She liked Duncan’s wife,
Rosemary, and considered the children well brought up. But Duncan’s
play, Stratton, in Olga’s view was ‘‘a flop!—all these young men trying to
do too much and too quickly.’’
She was staying with Peter Russell in exchange for having put him up at
Sant’Ambrogio; he was ‘‘a very clever young man, where he will land [is]
another matter . . . like [Richard] Aldington (pre-war), as a Times critic?’’
Next was a family reunion with Teddy and his family at Spondon.
Peter, who had been living with Mary in Brunnenburg and working on the
farm until a tractor accident injured his knee, was en route home to
recuperate when Olga met him at Paddington Station. John, her other
nephew, had been sent down from Malvern School ‘‘in disaccordance with
[the] authorities.’’ Olga complained to Ezra about her talented brother’s
wasted life, but he wisely reminded her: ‘‘A country doctor [is] as useful as
just more d—- easel pixchoors—don’t see why not as sazfakery a life to
the liver.’’
On the way back to Italy, Olga stopped over in Paris for a night and a
day to see the Duncan sisters again, but she was too late: Mabel ‘‘died last
month shortly after I saw her and was buried at Dinard—Ethel has now
become Mabel.’’
Back at the Accademia, she sent the Bollettino to press during the heat
wave of August, ‘‘completely demoralized . . . she never reads a book,
hears no music, just talks to people she will never see again.’’ Though she
often considered her e√orts in vain, she had helped to put the Accademia
‘‘on the map.’’ An illustrated article in Terra di Siena, a quarterly magazine
of Italian tourism, touted its e≈cient segretaria as ‘‘la vestale del Centro
Vivaldiano.’’ Time devoted two columns to the Accademia and Count
Chigi, ‘‘the last of the truly civilized.’’ Due to Olga’s e√orts, his eighthundred-year-old
Palazzo housed one of Europe’s finest music libraries.