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

198 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
8:00 We will dine . . . have to change dress and doll up. Sister
Gertrude, American nun, turned up . . . telephoning and
interruptions, one walks kilometri in the Palazzo, but the heat has
broken.
The Direttore dell’Archivio, whom she called ‘‘Little’’ Cecchioni,
amazed her. He was ‘‘the neatest and cautious-ist of old bachelors,’’ but he
came in after dinner ‘‘incredibly tight.’’ She had never seen anyone drink
to excess in the Palazzo. He talked like an encyclopedia for two hours,
‘‘boiled down to ‘the end of civilization in ten years’—doesn’t want to wait
to see it, he’d rather be dead,’’ Olga commented, and then added, ‘‘her own
sentiments.’’
In September the violinist and composer Enesco was in residence for a
two-week course, bringing his wife, the Princesse Cantacuzene. ‘‘I had
heard of the extreme poverty of their lives in Paris,’’ Olga noted. ‘‘His
choice of Siena was due to his being happy to see her again in palatial
surroundings.’’ Enesco had had a heart attack in London two weeks before
the session began and was unable to manage the steps and the long walk to
the violin classroom upstairs. So a room was fitted up for him in a passageway
on the lower floor; with an electric fan at full blast behind him, he was
able to keep going. His class was crowded with composers and young
orchestral conductors—Antoine de Bavier and the Queen of Belgium
were among those who never missed a lesson—and young Yehudi Menuhin
played Bach concertos with him.
The concert of Musica Contemporanea Americana (‘‘wangled after
months of angling’’) was a great success, and opening night of the Teatro
dei Rinnovati on September 16 recalled evenings with Ezra: ‘‘It hasn’t
been spoiled by ghiribizzi [Canto 80],’’ she wrote, ‘‘but how can she enjoy
it without Him?’’
In November, Olga joined Mary and the family at Brunnenburg: ‘‘The
view from the back windows . . . very Chinese . . . where rocks [have]
broken o√, a steep ravine with trees, chestnuts, the most beautiful yellow.
Yesterday it rained, they came up out of the mist with Schloss Tirol
perched on top, more beautiful than a sunny day. . . . His daughter a bit on
[the] thin side, but looks better for it. . . . We cut o√ Walter’s topknot in