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

234 The Last Ten Years
the way were a daily joy to the man who had written: ‘The magic of music
is its e√ect on volition, a sudden clearing of the mind of rubbish and the reestablishment
of a sense of proportion’.’’ After, there were unexpected
meetings with old friends in the piazza: Benedetta Marinetti, Yvonne
Casella, Caresse Crosby, Buckminster Fuller, John Drummond, Desmond
O’Grady, Isamu Noguchi (who spoke of Brancusi and Gaudier). ‘‘In late
afternoon, sitting at the window, he [Ezra] might listen to rehearsals
outside the Duomo, the swallows he loved making themselves heard above
the orchestra. How better could ‘an old man rest’? He rambled ’round the
city at all hours, stopping for ice cream, or speculating on the Arena as a
possible setting for Women of Trachis (if Menotti would write the music he
wanted for it). He returned to Spoleto each time with joy.’’
After Spoleto, Caresse Crosby sent Robert Mann to meet the couple at
the Rome station and to have Ezra carried on a chaise à porteur to the eagleshaped
fortress of Roccasinibalda, her World Peace Center and Italian
Yaddo Colony. The castello, designed by Michelangelo’s contemporary
Baldassarre Peruzzi, is carved out of sheer solid rock in the Abruzzi
mountains of Rieti province. At the back, there is a hanging garden with
towering cypresses and a swimming pool where, at sunset, Caresse’s
guests used to gather for cocktails. The Great Hall in the north wing was a
succession of large, empty spaces with co√ered ceilings and huge open
fireplaces. The sparsely furnished bedrooms, Olga remembered, had
paneless windows that opened onto the Turano valley below, and were
uninhabitable for five or six months of the year; the swooping and darting
of bats interrupted her sleep. Since Roccasinibalda rises above the clouds,
she felt as if she were on a floating island.
The castle was cold and damp that summer, and Ezra could never find a
room warm enough to suit him, though he spent long sunny hours in the
courtyard, Caresse recalled. The ‘‘rambunctious, combative’’ youth of the
Twenties, who had arrived in Paris bronzed and negligé to dance a ‘‘voodoo
prance’’ with her at the Boule Blanche, had become ‘‘a tired old man
with listless eyes and a shock of white hair.’’ There were days when he
didn’t say a word, just whispered ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ to direct questions, and
his mood swings were dramatic, ‘‘by turns, alert and energetic, despondent
and apathetic.’’ Frances Stelo√, owner of the Gotham Book Mart, a