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

224 A Piece of Ginger
You are lucky to have somebody who loves you as much as this and has
your work so much at heart . . . make certain that it is Mary who has the
power to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about your work.’’
Olga was back at the Accademia for an evening concert with the
Oistrakhs, père et fils, playing Bach and Vivaldi: ‘‘An expensive orchestra
directed by [the] celebrated lion-tamer, Sergiu Celibidache, murdered a
Vivaldi concerto—got hopelessly lost!’’ The Count had just returned from
a wet day in the country on the anniversary of his uncle’s death (‘‘accidentally
shot while out shooting, made His Nibs his heir sixty years ago’’). She
had been asked to unveil a bust of Vivaldi at the inauguration ceremony in
the Parco di Villa at Castelnuovo Berardenga, the Count’s country retreat,
a handsome three-story eighteenth-century building in a woodland setting
with the towers of Siena visible some twelve miles in the distance. She
was also engaged in the editing and writing of the scholarly introduction
to the Vivaldi letters for the Journal of the American Musicological Society,
while trying desperately, through correspondence, to give Ezra the will to
live. When there were no replies to her letters, she sent a new pen and
encouraged Ezra to ‘‘spend a little time doodling . . . it will come back by
degrees.’’
‘‘Please go on,’’ she wrote. ‘‘Does He know that Natalie’s [Barney’s]
friends are thinking of a tribute for her 85th birthday? I suppose it wouldn’t
be proper for me to say, ‘I thank you, Natalie, for Him!’ (I mean,
introducing Him, 20 rue Jacob?)’’
In November, Lester Littlefield asked to extend the lease of the Venice
house through 1963, but Olga refused. She was keeping the house for Ezra
to come back to. She reported an item of interest in the press: ‘‘President
Kennedy doing something to please. . . . His friend Mrs. [Alice Roosevelt]
Longworth [who had visited Pound at St. Elizabeth’s] invited to meet
[Pablo] Casals [at the White House] after fifty years.’’
Back at the Accademia in December, Olga was learning to play the
flauto dolce (recorder), ‘‘a heavenly sound, or can be, and not physically
tiring.’’ Antoine de Bavier had turned up for lunch on his way to Rome,
and she was preparing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion for the Tempio Malatestiano
on December 25. ‘‘Still waiting for news,’’ she wrote. ‘‘What is she