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

230 The Last Ten Years
Ezra had recovered su≈ciently to travel to Siena for the final concerts
of the season at the Accademia. Olga was warmly received by the Count
and former colleagues, but she appeared to feel no regret at giving up her
prestigious position to care for Pound. She heard that, in her absence,
Pablo Casals and his wife, Martita, felt they ‘‘were not treated with enough
red carpet, and left in a hu√.’’
The couple returned to Sant’Ambrogio at the end of August. Mary, in
the States again, had gone to Boston to visit Robert Frost and to thank him
for helping to secure her father’s release. She was just in time, for Frost
died a week later. She also went to Brooklyn to see Marianne Moore in her
apartment there—‘‘packages, books everywhere, the best knives too tarnished
to use’’—but to Mary’s eyes, Moore was ‘‘perfection, handsome,
temperate and considerate, humorous and talented.’’
In early September, Olga and Ezra returned to Venice via Rimini. Ezra
requested to see for one last time the church of San Francesco with the
tomb of Sigismundo Malatesta, a monument to the fifteenth-century ruler
and his mistress Isotta, central figures in Cantos 8 through 11.
On his birthday, October 30, the Cini Foundation celebrated with a
publication party for the Italian translation of the Confucian Odes and,
according to Olga, ‘‘a large crowd were enthusiastic.’’ Later, Olga recorded
that Ezra had tremendous applause when appearing on the platform
at ‘‘a poetry-prize do’’ in Padua. Constant travel, which Ezra seemed
to enjoy, failed to lift his deepening depression. ‘‘There were more causes
than I realized, i.e., not physical,’’ Olga acknowledged.
Horst Tappe, the photographer who had wangled an invitation to the
calle Querini to record Ezra’s life, recommended La Prairie clinic in
Clarens, Switzerland, specializing in the treatment of nervous disorders.
Lester Littlefield agreed that Dr. Niehaus’s treatment ‘‘gave Pope Pius
some six or more years of life.’’ When Olga delivered Ezra to the clinic on
November 18, they shaved o√ his beard: ‘‘I found E. red-faced like a
monkey’s behind—but when the redness disappeared, [he was] still handsome,
showing a likeness to Homer,’’ she remembered. ‘‘He was disintoxicated,
and never had catatonic symptoms again.’’ Dorothy Pound
paid the bill but complained to Olga: ‘‘Did you know when you took Ezra
to Montreux the prices which reign in Swiss cliniques? You should have