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

202 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
surrounded with ‘‘not very interesting young men,’’ and felt that his old
friends ‘‘were getting rather shoved out of things.’’ This strengthened
Olga’s determination to go to Washington.
After the annual music festival, Olga returned to Venice to set in motion
the necessary repairs on the calle Querini house. At a November
concert at La Fenice, ‘‘so many Chigianist names on the program that she
had to go, in spite of a deluge of rain,’’ she wrote to the Count. ‘‘Ettore
Gracis was directing, and the duo Corini-Lorenzi were soloists; the cellist
di Kunert, and little Vianello (percussion). I find it very moving to see
‘your’ young musicians getting such a welcome.’’ A documentary about
the Accademia was then showing at the Olimpia Cinema, but she had been
too busy fighting it out with the acqua alta, which was receding at last,
leaving the zattere covered with crabs.
She sent condolences to the Count on the death of His Highness Prince
Sigismundo Chigi, a Grand Master of the Order of Malta, a Chigi cousin.
After making an unaccustomed journey to Rome for the memorial service
at the Villa Malta on the Aventine Hill and accompanying the body to the
Verano Cemetery, the Count was lauded with speeches and an honorary
parchment at the Choral Society’s annual banquet. On Saint Cecilia’s Day
(November 22), there was a benefit concert for the flood victims, and he
reminded Olga that ‘‘crabs are very good to eat, if prepared properly!’’
Throughout that winter, Olga complained of her despair and loneliness,
being shut out of St. Elizabeth’s and hence out of Ezra’s life. She
continued to make plans for traveling to America, renewing her passport
at the U.S. consulate in Florence. But she added: ‘‘I wish I had the courage
to eat it—like Garry Davis!’’ (referring to the World War II fighter pilot
who had destroyed his U.S. passport and encamped on the steps of the
Trocadero, at the time the meeting place of the United Nations in Paris, in
protest against the war—all wars.)
Eliot and Laughlin opposed her visit. In their view, Pound’s reputation
would be compromised by having ‘‘the other woman’’ in Washington,
knowing that his wife Dorothy had lived in an apartment near St. Elizabeth’s
since 1946. They feared that the ‘‘yellow press’’ might pick up on
Olga’s arrival and spark unwanted publicity.
Olga went ahead with her o≈cial request to visit patient 58102 in