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

207 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
Driere invited her to read the Italian translation of Pound’s first Canto at
the Catholic University.
While Mary was away, Olga had the two grandchildren at Sant’Ambrogio,
plus a third child Mary said she had rescued from a Roman orphanage,
two-year-old Graziella. ‘‘This place is a Paradiso terrestre, with
those three kids running ’round—children [are] necessary to complete the
picture.’’ Ezra urged her to devote more time to the violin. ‘‘Yes, she
should be playing, [but] when does she ever get time for herself?’’ she
answered. Mary’s children ‘‘had come to that period in life when a grandmother
was useful,’’ she explained to Ezra. ‘‘Mary told me she was ‘always
afraid of me.’ Mary’s brats [are] not afraid of me, though I keep them in
order, show no favoritism.’’
Blanche Somers-Cocks stopped by for a week’s visit on her way to
Menton, and at eighty-one was a perfect guest, a ‘‘great help with the
children—sews, mends, plays with them.’’ She remembered Somers-
Cocks ‘‘sitting up in bed, happily reading Yeats, living on yoghurt, rusks,
fruit, writing letters, darning the children’s socks, making herself useful—
though deaf, really deaf, since a young woman.’’
When Mary arrived back unexpectedly, instead of bright, burnished
kids waiting for mama’s arrival she found Patrizia sulking from some
scrap with ‘‘Cri-Cri’’ (the family’s nickname for Walter). ‘‘I am all for
formal politeness, which makes life possible,’’ Olga stated, one of her
unbending principles.
The young people invited her to the castle for Christmas and ‘‘hoped till
the last minute’’ she would come, but Olga preferred the solitude of
Sant’Ambrogio. ‘‘Have kept out of any Rapallian entanglements. . . . Anita
[Pellegrini] is going to bring me a plate of their Xmas dinner, i.e., lasagna.’’
She was enjoying the simple life, ‘‘the luxury and joy of this place
after the Palazzo Chigi . . . to look out of the window first thing in the
morning, to rejoice in the sight of five healthy cabbages growing below, to
climb that salita in the dark, and sit on a bench with stars to look at.’’
James Laughlin, in Europe on a skiing holiday, visited Olga at the
Accademia in the new year. He adopted Pound’s style when writing to
‘‘the Venerable’’ at St. Elizabeth’s: ‘‘I was in Siena, and found The Lady in