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

203 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
Chestnut Ward, which was granted by Dr. Samuel Silk, acting superintendent.
She booked third-class passage on the S.S. Italia out of Genoa,
posting her first letter to Ezra from Gibraltar: ‘‘She ain’t occupying the
bridal suite . . . nine hundred immigrants got on at Naples, buona gente,
three in a cabin for four . . . [but] found [the] shower room functions, got a
top berth, [and] am doing well.’’ Her circumstances improved when she
went to the purser’s o≈ce to collect mail. Noticing correspondence from
the Accademia, the purser explained that he was also a lover of good
music—his aunt had a Steinway, and the Trio di Trieste practiced on it. He
handed over a pass to first class with his blessing for the rest of the trip.
There was also a letter from Pound. ‘‘O.K., you bin put on as custodian,
and can take me out to grass from 1–4 p.m. Will be at window at 1, if you
don’t see me, yowl!’’ Ezra had asked Olga to bring her violin ‘‘to play the
Jannequin for 5 or 6,’’ but Olga refused: ‘‘He never realized that it [is] as
great a strain for her to play for 5 or 6 as for 500 or 600. She is not going to
play the violin until she can make a proper comeback, and that is that.’’
It was not the season for Ezra’s nostalgic eucalyptus pips or favorite
apricots, but she was bringing two small suitcases containing copies of the
Cavalcanti opera, a few oro (gold coins), clippings, the Accademia Quaderni,
the Villon score (‘‘will do the copying myself in Washington’’), and,
for sentimental reasons, his gift of a flask of perfume in a tiny red heart.
Olga did not linger to visit friends in New York; instead she immediately
caught the Pennsylvania Railroad to Washington. She received a
warm welcome at Caresse Crosby’s red brick row house on Q Street in
Georgetown. Crosby, who had been Pound’s publisher in Paris in the
1920s, had moved to Washington during World War II to open a contemporary
art gallery as a venue for war-exiled artists. She was then publishing
Portfolio, an innovative literary magazine for promising young writers,
and lobbying for Women Against War.
Olga timed her visit to St. Elizabeth’s for her fifty-seventh birthday,
April 13. The hospital occupies a group of venerable red brick buildings in
southeast Washington across the Anacostia River, and from the grounds
high on a hill an unsurpassed view of the nation’s capital stretches as far as
the eye can see. The wife of a former superintendent whose hobby was
horticulture supervised the landscaping, soliciting donations of rare trees