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

268 Olga Triumphant
Olga to the Museum of Modern Art, where they viewed the works of the
futurists and cubists, in ‘‘EP’s friends’ corner’’—Francis Picabia, Fernand
Léger, Jacob Epstein—and Gaudier’s Birds Erect. The Brancusi on a
raised, carved platform made her think that the Gaudier Hieratic Head
‘‘would look wonderful similar.’’
On the plane back to London, her neighbors the Arrigo Ciprianis (of
Harry’s Bar) were seated behind her and helpful in making the transfer in
Milan and home to Dorsoduro by taxi. Early the next morning she went to
San Michele to be alone with Ezra, ‘‘a beautiful sun and faint mist . . . no
birds, the leaves on Ezra’s tree, all fallen.’’
Well into her nineties, Olga was an omnivorous reader with an inquiring
mind: ‘‘Must remember Greek letters . . . Milton’s daughter learned
enough to read to her father,’’ she observed. ‘‘All this Italian verbosity is
bad . . . read French to learn to write in English.’’
Rereading Yeats, she discovered that Lady Gregory’s son Geo√rey was
killed in Italy in 1917 in an air battle, like her brother Arthur. She recalled
Yeats quoting Lady Gregory’s praise of ‘‘writers pursued by ill luck, left
maimed or bedridden by the War—the injustice of what seems to her the
blind nobility of pity.’’ Olga added her own wisdom: ‘‘Yeats puts his finger
on the right word: pity, a characteristic always of EP, from feeding the
stranded actress at Wabash, to feeding La Martinelli on the lawn at St. E’s
with left-overs. But he did not pity me, because I do not like pity?’’
At year’s end she recorded a quotation from Confucius: ‘‘Things that
accord in tone vibrate together . . . things that have a≈nity in their inmost
natures seek one another.’’ After another cold winter, the Easter service
at San Giorgio (on Olga’s birthday, April 13th) brought back poignant
memories.
Family ties were increasingly important as she grew older. On May 20,
Teddy—the only surviving member of Olga’s birth family—who had
driven from England via Germany and Bolzano, arrived, ‘‘true to form, on
the dot of a quarter to one. . . . talked poor Teddy to death . . . he is a good
and remarkable egg!’’
She took a sentimental journey in August, stopping first in Verona to
revisit Vittoriale, Gabriele d’Annunzio’s villa, where she discovered, ‘‘in a
suitable but unlighted place,’’ Romaine Brooks’s fine portrait of the World