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

267 Olga Triumphant
influenced, including James Joyce, who wrote: ‘‘It is twenty years since he
first began on my behalf. . . . There are few living poets who could say . . .
my work would be exactly the same if Mr. Pound had never lived.’’
‘‘The highlights [of the late ’70s] are mostly of things ‘not done,’ ’’ Olga
wrote in her notebook. ‘‘I shall be eighty next April . . . I confess to feeling
very shocked to find lives used for the ending. . . . Venice is a spider’s web
that I am anxious to get out of.’’ But she remained close to Ezra at San
Michele. Ezra’s umbrella cane was ‘‘a help in walking and standing’’ on
pilgrimages to the gravesite. One morning she planted ‘‘Chinese-looking’’
pink-and-white dahlias. ‘‘Caro, does my fussing disturb you?’’
Through the miracle of modern aviation, Olga—who first traveled by
horse and buggy—left Venice for Milan at eleven in the morning on
November 11, 1973, and landed at JFK Airport at 10:30 the same night.
The next day, she took a taxi to Grant’s Tomb to see the neighborhood
where she had lived as a child with Julia and her two brothers, ‘‘no people,
but the leaves to scu∆e through, the sun and gold-leaved trees. [I] feel an
air of old times, calm, quiet.’’
She went on to New Haven the fifteenth to have lunch with Mary and
Donald Gallup of the Beinecke Library, and discovered in the archives
photocopies of Pound’s delightful letters to his first love, Mary Moore of
Trenton. ‘‘What a joke, Caro!’’ she noted. ‘‘Me, enjoying His love letters
to another woman!’’
She was with Mary at the Beinecke when Archibald MacLeish came for
a conference; she ‘‘would have liked a quiet talk with him, but do not think
Mary really wanted that.’’ There was still di≈culty in keeping o√ argumentative
subjects with her daughter.
Olga next visited grandson Walter at Eliot House in Cambridge and
enjoyed what she later described as the ‘‘highlight of [my] visit to the
States . . . 1939 recordings of Ezra—magnificent!’’ On the train back to
New York, she took with her a volume of the avant-garde poetry of
Charles Olson, whose work was influenced by The Cantos, and who had
visited Pound at St. Elizabeth’s. The collection provoked a violent reaction,
she said: she ‘‘literally vomited . . . in a plastic bag containing said
book! Have never done such a thing in public before.’’
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, who was then living in Manhattan, went with