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

201 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
with relatives, and after Olga’s long absence, ‘‘it is better to remain among
your friends than to come to a few tired old people who are dropping out
of things. . . . You will not find anyone here much interested—fifty years is
a long time.’’
Olga was at the Palazzo Chigi to celebrate the Count’s seventy-first
birthday: ‘‘For a man who has so many ‘friends,’ surprisingly few remembered.’’
The Marchesa came back from Florence, bringing a new tie and
some large pears, and Olga contributed a plate of mascarponi cheese, ‘‘not
often seen in Siena, he likes—but [not] at [the] end of [the] long stu√y
lunch with bad champagne—ils ne savent pas vivre!’’ She viewed his
position perceptively: ‘‘an old man . . . with the pack closing in, waiting
for the spoils.’’
On the way back to Rapallo, Olga met Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean
poet and Nobel Prize winner then living in a villa at San Michele by the
sea. ‘‘Female Gabe a remarkable specimen,’’ she wrote Ezra, ‘‘full of good
will and sound sense, a sense of humor—anti-Fascist, so much so that she
had a guardiano tailing her.’’ A friend had called her a ‘‘jolie juive’’ years
ago, but Donna Gabriela said she was ‘not jolie nor juive’. When she was a
little girl, her grandmother used to read the Bible aloud, and it a√ected her
writing. She also spoke fondly of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who at
that time was a political refugee in France.
Olga was happy to be back at Casa 60 for the summer, to smell the
honeysuckle on the salita. ‘‘He wouldn’t recognize the Rapallo shop
fronts, all modernized,’’ she told Ezra. ‘‘The Café Yolanda [is] going in for
ices, and Dante (the waiter) in a white coat.’’ Reverend Chute invited her
to play the violin with an English friend, Cecilia Kynaston, on viola: ‘‘We
did Mozart and Corelli, Purcell trios, and the Bartók two-violin duets
[Tibor] Serly gave me, which [I] have never had [a] chance to try.’’
She was back at the Accademia in September for the Settimana Musicale,
dedicated to Verdi, beginning with the choral excerpts of Nabucco
and Falsta√. She asked Ronald Duncan to come, and to bring Pound’s
score of Le Testament de Villon, which she was planning to take to Washington.
Caresse Crosby also came to Siena. Caresse had first visited Ezra
at Howard Hall in 1945 and remained a steadfast friend through the years
at St. Elizabeth’s. On their most recent encounter, she had found Ezra