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

199 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
attempt to give him a real ‘Buster Brown’ or ‘Enfants d’Édouard’ cut,
pleasing to his ma and grandma, but not to him. . . . I intend getting him a
black velvet Russian blouse to wear with his lace collar.’’
The kitchen, ‘‘where we have meals, now it’s cold,’’ was a pleasant
room with a large basket of red apples from Walter’s orchard on top of the
white-wood kitchen dresser. A still larger wicker basket held Patrizia,
‘‘sitting up and taking notice of boy-blue brother, the kind of picture wot
would make some poor painter’s fortune as a cover for Home magazine—
so American!’’
To Olga’s eyes, Mary was ‘‘much more sensible than I ever was, in
many ways, older, but she has had wot she wanted with a minimum of
waiting, whereas I have been rotted with waiting, and now it [is] too late.
She can cut a loss, and I go on sorrowing.’’
Ezra asked Olga to send a photograph of herself, but she refused:
‘‘Why should He want photos of her as she is now? He has left it too long.
She doesn’t think she would have the courage to see Him now if He were
here.’’ ‘‘Xmas is upon us again,’’ she continued; ‘‘not feeling festive, but
will make [the] e√ort for the young.’’
Early in 1951, Mary left the castle with her cousin Peter when he
returned to England. She was beginning to share some of her mother’s
disillusionment with her marriage. ‘‘Nothing has turned up in the way of
letting flats . . . no point in my going back, not knowing where the next
money [is] coming from. . . . If I have enough patience, Boris will get on to
something regular in time . . . he wants me back,’’ she wrote her mother.
She had been visiting Oxford, Bath, and Exeter: in Ezra’s words, ‘‘motoring
all over England looking fer [a] farm fer young Peter.’’ ‘‘I think she is
(quite unconsciously) making a refuge for herself and infants—and could
do worse,’’ Olga wrote.
She was at the Palazzo Bonlini with Blanche Somers-Cocks in late
February, in Venice to assess the war damages to the calle Querini house.
She spent all one day at the consulate and with lawyers, got to the Piazza
San Marco in the evening, ‘‘just a bit of mist and people hurrying, not a
soul she knew—like limbo might be.’’
In early March, she went to Rome for a long interview with a legal
adviser to Americans seeking reparations and submitted a damage claim to