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

204 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
and plants from governments around the world. In fine weather, nonviolent
inmates were permitted to wander on the well-maintained grounds,
and some, like Ezra, exercised on the tennis courts. The main building,
dating back to the 1860s, originally housed Civil War wounded, mostly
amputees, but in more recent history it had become an institution for
serious cases of mental illness.
Pound was first an inmate of Howard Hall, a dreary building for the
criminally insane, but soon was transferred to Center Building, which in
Ezra’s time housed elderly patients su√ering from senile dementia. The
superintendent, Winifred Overholser, assigned him a room near his o≈ce
at the end of the second floor hall, where he could keep an eye on the poet.
Olga was permitted three visits of three hours each. While Ezra joined
her on the lawn in the afternoon, Dorothy was discreetly absent. No
written record remains of their first reunion after seven long years, but
Olga recalled in a taped interview: ‘‘You feel that you’ve got a few minutes
to—[a long pause]—it was not the kind of thing that he would have
discussed by letter, nor would I, except indirectly.’’
Back in New York, Gibner King, a friend from Ohio, took her to the
Old Vanderbilt Hotel: ‘‘all them past glories filled with such people!’’
Another evening, a teacher at the Julliard School invited her to join the
musicians before a concert. She booked passage on the S.S. Vulcania, due
to arrive in Cannes May 17 (with stops in Halifax and Genoa). In her first
letter to Ezra from aboard the ship, she wrote: ‘‘He forgive her for argyfying,
it’s only [that] she doesn’t want Him to miss a chance. He gave her a
beautiful trip. Gratz! . . . He go on being wonderful. He is wonderful.’’
The ‘‘argyfying’’ was a result of Olga’s determination to seek Pound’s
release from the hospital, and his equally strong desire to maintain the
status quo. Olga objected strongly to John Kasper, one of the young followers
at St. Elizabeth’s, who had first corresponded with Pound as an admirer
of his poetry. A recent graduate of Columbia University, Kasper was
working toward a doctorate in English and philosophy. He would later
cause Pound’s supporters embarrassment when he was revealed as an anti-
Semite and a racist who was outspoken in his support of the Ku Klux Klan.
Olga wrote again aboard the Vulcania: ‘‘This one, who expected after
having at last seen Him to want nothing more than to lie down and die, has