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

221 A Piece of Ginger
‘‘Is it possible EP remembers me?’’ he wrote to Olga. ‘‘I remember climbing
a circular iron staircase at St. E’s to his doorway, and being warmly
greeted by EP, arms outstretched and head thrown back, like some lord in
the upper reaches of the Inferno.’’ (In The Cantos Pound wrote, ‘‘and
Lester brought the Odes to St. Elizabeth’s.’’) Littlefield found ‘‘handsome
little 252 . . . in apple-pie order—the sun pours in each day from the
Cipriani courtyard.’’
As Olga anticipated, Casa 60—the cottage she had occupied for so
many years in Sant’Ambrogio—was sold, but she soon found a place up
the hill let by Signore Cesare Beltrami. She described it to Esther Heacock
as ‘‘a tiny cottage, equally un-getattable, but with a lovely view.’’ A thankyou
note from her grandson for the gift of the New Hampshire Bird Bulletin
was enclosed, with a photograph of a blackbird ‘‘that remained a widow
because of a cat that went on top of this tree!’’ Walter was already planning
to apply for a scholarship to an American university.
In early January 1961, another letter from Ezra at Brunnenburg: ‘‘Perfectly
monstrous Christmas here, under perverted circ[umstance]s / if he
gets into Purgatory, he’ll be lucky.’’ Mary described the December morning
when ‘‘I found the Christmas tree lying on the floor. A bad omen . . . if
love be not in the house, there is nothing.’’ Soon after, Olga received a
postcard with scenes of bookstalls along the Seine and the nostalgic message,
‘‘The Christmas that might have been.’’
Later in the same month, another poignant letter: ‘‘Why couldn’t I have
come to you? . . . Crazier when I got out of bughouse than when in. Inside
was where he belonged for comfort, no responsibility, able to be lord of
creation with no fuss / . . . O some way to roll back [the] curtain and get
to good years that he ruin’d. . . . May be still time . . . how much time he
will be given, now he looks like a Tyrolese devil mask?’’
Disillusioned with life en famille, Ezra again fled Brunnenburg, this
time to the Rome apartment of Ugo Dadone, a retired military attaché and
friend of Boris’s. The poet Donald Hall, who interviewed Pound for the
Paris Review, described Ezra as he found him there: ‘‘His eyes were watery,
red, weak. As he spoke, he separated the words into little bunches:
‘You have driven—all the way—from England—to find a man—who is