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

266 Olga Triumphant
the United States by delegates—Professor Leonard Doob of Yale and
Walter Pilkington, the librarian at Hamilton College, respectively. ‘‘From
these earnings a very decent pension is to be paid to Olga,’’ James Laughlin
noted.
Olga drafted a letter to Laughlin about the agreement: ‘‘The Trustees
have far too much power and far too little knowledge of EP. None . . .
knew Ezra before the war. [They are] trying to squash a man born in 1885
into the . . . hats Eva H[esse] and Hugh K[enner] are wearing in 1973.’’
She had to turn down an invitation from Laughlin to visit him in
Norfolk. ‘‘[I] won’t take on any trips until some money rolls in,’’ she
answered. ‘‘Have spent over $2000 for [a] copy of [the] Gaudier head for
the grave, as EP instructed.’’ She had asked Isamu Noguchi to design a
base for Gaudier’s Hieratic Head, and Gianfranco Ivancich went with him
to the Henraux marble yard in Pietrasanta to give instructions to the stone
cutter.
In late summer, Donald Gallup, curator of American literature at the
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, visited Brunnenburg and
encouraged Mary to sell Pound’s papers to Yale University. On October
30, Ezra’s birthday, Yale announced the establishment of a Center for the
Study of Ezra Pound and His Contemporaries, with Mary named curator
of the archive. Members of the committee for the center were Gallup,
Frederick W. Hilles (professor emeritus of English literature), Louis Martz
(then director of the Beinecke), and Norman Holmes Pearson. In Laughlin’s
words, the archive ‘‘is hedged about with a considerable number of
rather sti√ restrictions . . . no personal or family letters can be looked at by
anyone until ten years after Dorothy’s death.’’
Scholars would gain access to the collection sooner than anticipated.
One year and one month after Ezra died, Dorothy—his wife of more than
fifty years (thirteen faithfully spent near St. Elizabeth’s)—died in her
sleep, on December 8, 1973. One can only speculate about Olga’s true
feelings when the rival she had disdained for so many decades, and in the
end accommodated herself to, was gone.
In the same month, the Donnell Center of the New York Public Library
on West Fifty-third Street was observing the poet’s death with ‘‘A Quiet
Requiem for Ezra Pound,’’ taped interviews by many whose work he had