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

243 The Last Ten Years
As a hostess gift, Valerie brought a pair of shoes, to Olga’s eyes the act
of a warm and caring person. ‘‘May I say how much I admire the way you
take care of Ezra . . . so sweet and patient with everybody, no matter how
tiresome they are,’’ Valerie wrote after returning to London. Back in ‘‘EP’s
Kensington,’’ she was reminded that ‘‘we had our wedding breakfast at 10
Kensington Church Walk where Father Wright, who married us, lived.’’
On the fifteenth, the couple celebrated again—at Harry’s Bar, then
luncheon at Torcello. When Olga asked Ezra what historic character he
would have chosen to dine with, his answer was ‘‘Chaucer.’’
On May 11, Olga awakened Ezra early to catch the train to Rome.
Another hour to the Citadella, where he was to sit on the platform for the
awarding of the Premio Letterario. Ezra was silent, but the poet Olma read
from Mary’s translation of The Cantos, a ‘‘very moving’’ event.
Their busy schedule continued until June 4, when they left their Venice
garden at 1:45 p.m., arrived at JFK Airport at 8:30 the same evening, and
went directly to the Hotel Schuyler on Forty-fifth Street, a hotel Olga had
used in the past, apparently unaware that the neighborhood had gone
downhill in the fourteen years since her last visit. James Laughlin was
surprised to hear they were staying there; he did not even know they were
coming to the States.
Ezra had been invited by Mrs. Hugh Bullock, then president of the
Academy of American Poets, to attend the academy’s thirty-fifth anniversary
in the board room of the New York Public Library and the presentation
of a fellowship award to Richard Eberhart. Valerie Eliot was at the
library editing a new edition of The Waste Land, which included Pound’s
extensive annotations, and joined Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Margaret
Cohen, Lewis Freedman, Norman Holmes Pearson of Yale, and
Ezra, who ‘‘would arise in a most courtly fashion to shake hands when any
admirer came up to speak to him.’’
The following day, the couple drove with grandson Walter de Rachewiltz,
then studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey, to Norfolk,
Connecticut to stay with James and Ann Laughlin at Meadow
House. Laughlin was to receive an honorary doctor of letters degree from
Pound’s alma mater, Hamilton College, on Sunday June 8. Olga, Walter,