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

250 The Last Ten Years
James Laughlin had written the author, an Australian professor then at
the University of Toledo, in Ohio: ‘‘It seems to be crammed with information
and facts . . . and reads well . . . looks like a triumph. I hope that all the
family will be pleased, including Olga.’’
Olga was not pleased. ‘‘Ezra has not seen him since 1960 (or written
him) except for a half-hour in Venice two (or three?) years ago. . . . [Stock]
was a friend of DP’s . . . (details in the book, EP says, could only have been
given by her).’’
Olga never forgave Stock, and from this experience she acquired a
distaste for all biographers (in her daughter Mary’s words, they appeared
as ‘‘hogs after tru∆es’’). She complained to Valerie Eliot that ‘‘all human
sentiments are being crushed out of [me].’’
Olga and Ezra were in Venice for the rest of that summer with many
visitors, some welcome and some unwanted. ‘‘The filthiest of the hippies
invading Europe . . . sit ’round here on dirty pavements, just like the
pigeons. . . . I got rid of one hippie by the simple expedient of turning the
hose on him.’’ Canaletto paintings, she observed, ‘‘portrayed a clean Venice
—nary a pigeon.’’
When Robert Lowell arrived, Olga ‘‘got in some other people,’’ and
Ugo Fasolo read his ‘‘Pigeon’’ poem, their grandson Walter followed with
Ezra’s translation. Then Lowell read from his recent collection, For the
Union Dead. ‘‘Ezra sat on a hard chair from dinner till midnight, and noone
said ‘perhaps we should not keep E. up too long,’ or ‘how wonderful
he is able to do it.’ ’’
During Pound’s birthday week in October, Gianfranco Ivancich
stopped by, bringing a recent issue of William Cookson’s Agenda dedicated
to Ezra, which pleased him. Mary arrived with granddaughter Patrizia
on the twenty-ninth. The morning of his eighty-fifth birthday, Ezra
announced that he had ‘‘dreamt of leopards’’ (possibly remembering the
Roman zoo in the early days of their liaison). At Joan Fitzgerald’s suggestion,
Olga celebrated Mass with Mary and Patrizia at San Moise and took
Communion. Count Cini rang up with auguri for Ezra, and came later,
bringing a bottle of champagne. Other devoted friends stopped by: Lotte
Frumi (‘‘[with] a repertoire of Jewish jokes’’); the ‘‘beautiful blond,’’
Lisalotte Hochs; Fasolo, Fitzgerald, and Gianfranco Ivancich.