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

246 The Last Ten Years
met the Spenders and others in the piazza after, and Noguchi and Menotti
discussed staging Ezra’s Women of Trachis the next season.
They were in Rapallo for another memorable happening on July 20,
1969, when an American spacecraft landed human beings on the moon for
the first time. As they watched the Apollo 11 drama on television at the
Café Dante (formerly the Yolanda), Olga asked, ‘‘Should the astronauts
have left the American flag on the moon—or that of the United Nations?’’
Ezra: ‘‘The American.’’
Olga: ‘‘Which do you consider of greater importance, the discovery of
America, or the landing on the moon?’’
Ezra (without hesitation): ‘‘Landing on the moon.’’
They were back in Venice in October, when critic Cyril Connolly, a
dandy of the early 1920s—then very plump with a bald spot, ‘‘looking like
a Roman poet in exile’’—arrived. In Canto 76, recalling his early years in
Venice, Pound had written:
by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio
meets with il Canal Grande
between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos . . .
Remembering, Connolly wrote a colorful account of Ezra’s eighty-fourth
birthday party:
The soapstone posts are still there on the corner of the Canal San
Vio . . . ‘the house that was of Don Carlos’ is the Palazzo Guggenheim.
Our host, Count Cini, was an old friend, an outstanding octogenarian
whose fortune is devoted to his foundation on the island of
San Giorgio. . . . The Count was a gourmet. . . . We had place cards
and menus and rows of gold-engraved glass goblets. I shall never
forget the white tru∆es in cheese sauce. . . . We ate persimmons and
local muscats and white figs, while the Count’s beautiful Roman
wife cut up an apple for Mr. Pound. After luncheon, the guests
gathered ’round while the Count toasted the Maestro in Marc de
Bourgogne. . . . His birthday party [was] a mixture of Americans