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

222 A Piece of Ginger
only fragments,’ then his face would sag and he would collapse onto a sofa
into silence; then he would jump up in five minutes and begin the cycle
again, his speech newly vigorous and exact.’’
On May 10, 1961, Dadone summoned Mary to Rome. He could no
longer care for her father, he said; the doctors thought his heart was
failing. Mary found Ezra very weak, and entered him in the clinic J. Pini,
recommended by Dadone.
Olga visited him there May 14. To her eyes, J. Pini was ‘‘as near the
atmosphere of St. Elizabeth’s as could have been found.’’ Ezra’s room on
the ground floor opened onto a garden, but the gate was always kept
locked. Ezra was confined to his bed, could not be encouraged to eat, or to
drink water. After a long silence, he said, ‘‘There’s an eye watching me.’’
Olga feared he had indeed lost contact with reality, but the same afternoon
she saw the eye of one of the attendants, looking through a crack in halfopen
shutters!
She kept a careful log of visits to the clinic, and wrote Ronald Duncan:
‘‘Thanks to the [John] Drummonds, I was able to get to Rome weekends—
the last two weeks, every day, twice a day.’’ Her devotion remained
unflagging, even at sixty-six years old, while holding a demanding position
at the Accademia and having to endure a physically exhausting fivehour
train ride from Siena to Rome. This pattern continued until June 15,
when Ezra showed no progress and Olga—with Mary’s consent—decided
to move him back to Brunnenburg.
Mary came down in a hired car. ‘‘He [Ezra] curled up on the back seat
like a foetus,’’ Olga wrote of their return. They stopped over in Florence
for lunch, though Ezra ate nothing, and reached Merano late that evening.
Ezra was too weak to ascend the mountain, and the two women deposited
him in the Sanatorium Martinsbrunn, the Casa di Cura on the Fonte San
Martino.
Her commitment to the Accademia prevented Olga from spending the
rest of the summer at Martinsbrunn, but she continued to correspond with
Ezra. Early August was an especially busy time. The British ambassador
had been to Siena, as had Adlai Stevenson, the former presidential candidate,
who was staying with his sister at her villa in Florence. Olga was
responsible for arranging lodging, meals, concert tickets, and other enter-