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

237 The Last Ten Years
Cornelio Fazio, who examined Pound, wrote this report: ‘‘The patient
was . . . almost completely silent, uttering only a few words when questioned,
impaired physically, often refused food. . . . Sometimes, prompted
by external situations (travels, environmental modification), Mr. Pound
exhibited fairly normal activity and interest. . . . Ideas of self-accusation
and hypochondriacal delusions were always present. . . . These ideas and
the general inhibition could probably account for the refusal of food. . . . It
seemed as if the personality of the patient had always been on the autistic
side . . . so that a psychotic-like situation came out permitting, and perhaps
encouraging, poetic activity.’’
Pound had been under the care of a young specialist, Romolo Rossi,
who prescribed Tofranil, a powerful drug that left him in what Olga
described as a ‘‘catatonic state.’’ She telephoned Dr. Bacigalupo, who
moved him out of the clinic.
In Olga’s view, travel was a better way to restore Ezra’s equilibrium.
They went to Ravenna at the end of May to hear Antoine de Bavier
conduct Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in the Church of Sant’Apollinaire.
Ezra was invited again to Poetry Week in Spoleto in July, and read ‘‘most
beautifully.’’ They heard a fine performance of the Verdi Requiem in the
square before the cathedral conducted by Zubin Mehta, and Olga recalled
that she had first met Mehta when he was a promising new student at the
Accademia.
Later that summer, news came from Siena that Count Guido Chigi Saracini,
her mentor and benefactor since the founding of the Accademia in
1932, who had furthered the careers of Mehta and many other young musical
stars, was dead. At the time Olga was too preoccupied with Ezra’s care
to attend the memorial service. Without revealing the depth of the mixed
emotions she felt about the ‘‘zoo’’ and its master, she wrote to close friends:
‘‘He is greatly missed. The Accademia is not the same without him.’’
That November, a tidal wave brought the highest water in Venetian
memory; they were trapped in the house for forty-eight hours. The water
soon reached the cheekbones of Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head, and
before it stopped rising it reached table height and stayed there all the next
day. ‘‘But the most striking thing was the dead silence.’’
In another determined e√ort to restore Ezra’s health, Olga checked into