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

232 The Last Ten Years
‘‘No, the music. . . . He used the poetry of François Villon, The
Testament.’’
Matz took Menotti to the Hidden Nest, and as the vespers rang at Santa
Maria della Salute the composer and the poet talked about music—Pound,
a poet who for a time turned composer, and Menotti, a composer who
often turned to poetry and drama. Olga played the tape of the BBC
broadcast of Le Testament, and Menotti asked for permission to perform
the opera in Spoleto in the summer of 1965.
Olga and Ezra had just settled in for another winter when Pound’s
venerated friend T. S. Eliot died. Pound was the last survivor of the
generation of poets and writers ranging from Yeats to Hemingway, and
the death of Eliot left him ‘‘very sad and deeply stricken.’’
On sudden impulse, and after consulting Eliot’s widow, Olga purchased
air tickets to attend the January 4, 1965, memorial service in Westminster
Abbey. Sir Alec Guinness read from the Quartets, and other old
friends delivered eulogies. After the ceremony, the couple returned to the
Eliots’ flat to spend several hours alone with his widow, Valerie. After,
Ezra wanted to see his Wyndham Lewis portrait at the Tate Gallery.
They were in the taxi on the way to Heathrow when Olga noticed ads
for Aer Lingus, and spontaneously suggested a detour to Ireland, the
home of her maternal grandparents. In Dublin, they visited Georgie Yeats,
widow of ‘‘Uncle William,’’ and viewed the paintings of Jack Yeats, the
poet’s father. The only literary people Ezra asked to see were Patrick
Kavanagh and Austin Clarke.
Back in Venice, Pound was invited to read from the Confucian Odes at a
Dante Commemorazione at the Cini Foundation on the island of San
Giorgio Maggiore, sharing the stage with Nobel Prize winner Eugenio
Montale. Caresse Crosby had invited the couple to attend a poets’ seminar
at the Castello di Roccasinibalda, but Olga declined; Ezra was saving
himself for the Spoleto performance of his opera in July, though she hoped
their friend Gianfranco Ivancich ‘‘would bring us to you for a day before
returning to Rapallo.’’ She described herself as ‘‘cook and bottle washer,
sec[retary], counter-irritant and soporific, all in one bottle, and sometimes
I feel as if the bottle had been given a good shaking before taking.’’
Olga’s account of ‘‘Ezra Pound in Spoleto,’’ drafted in her notebook,