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

209 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
nion: ‘‘a day of great clarity and contrasts, blue mountain ridges laced with
snow, little girls in long, full white lace and loose curly hair on the green
meadow under flowering cherry trees.’’ Her granddaughter wore the dress
Julia O’Connell had designed for Olga’s First Communion, and Olga took
pride in family continuity.
She continued to make plans, pleased that Eliot would be in Washington
on or about the sixteenth. Blanche Somers-Cocks had attended a meeting
of Peter Russell’s Amici di Pound in Rome and agreed with Olga that ‘‘a
real rumpus is needed . . . the years pass, and he becomes forgotten by
those who hold him prisoner.’’
When Olga arrived in Washington in early June, Caresse Crosby had
been called to Paris following the death of her son, Billy Peabody, so she
booked a room at the Women’s Equal Rights Club on Constitution Avenue
with women of many di√erent backgrounds. ‘‘I had not lived in the
States since 1904,’’ she recalled, ‘‘and thought it a chance to learn about
them. Instead, they started telling me all about Italy, from what they read
in the newspapers.’’
D. G. Bridson, who observed Ezra during the time of Olga’s visit, wrote
that ‘‘the beard [was] no longer [an] aggressive dark auburn, [but] white
with an almost Confucian cut. He was also far less erect, less alert and
agile.’’ ‘‘Grandpa’’ was the persona Pound adopted in the presence of
young scholars who visited him: Hugh Kenner, a student of Marshall
McLuhan at the University of Toronto, future author of the groundbreaking
work The Pound Era; Guy Davenport, avant-garde writer and professor
at the University of Kentucky; David Gordon, an expert in Chinese
art and history, then at the University of Maine in Orono; and Dellum
Simpson, author of a work about Basil Bunting. The poet Charles Olson,
later of the Black Mountain School in North Carolina, then living in
Washington, was the acolyte of whom Pound wrote: ‘‘Olson saved my
life.’’ Hangers-on who did not know Pound or his reputation as a poet
came because ‘‘Gramps’’ was a colorful character who saved snacks from
his lunch to feed the squirrels (and the young people).
A number of young women came, among them Sheri Martinelli, a
painter in her thirties who had a studio in Georgetown. A visitor described
Martinelli: ‘‘golden hair falling down around her thin shoulders . . .