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

270 Olga Triumphant
Omar lunch and a receipt for the Gaudiers. He left gifts of Earl Grey tea
(which she liked), and photos of Ezra and Dorothy, circa 1935 (which she
did not like).
At a lecture at the Ateneo Veneto attended by a room full of old women,
she introduced herself as the oldest inhabitant of Venice on her April
birthday. If not ‘‘the cruelest month,’’ April was to be approached with
caution: ‘‘My month—be careful of it!’’
In Sant’Ambrogio on Easter morning, superstitious contadini urged her
to go down to the sea and wash her face first thing, and when she came out,
to take up a stone and throw it behind her. Easter bells at San Pantaleo
serenaded her while she was taking breakfast with the birds. She was
readying Ezra’s room for a welcome visitor on June 12, Leonardo Clerici,
a Pound scholar, who ‘‘seems to be studying with the mind of a grandson
. . . told me that ‘Ezra’ means ‘help’ in Hebrew.’’ Clerici accompanied Olga
to the Rapallo cemetery to put flowers on Homer Pound’s grave, and won
high praise as a houseguest who was very patient, good company, and
cooked supper.
Her brother Teddy’s second son, John Rudge, arrived next with his
wife Pearl. Olga noted a family resemblance between John and his aunt
Olga—‘‘[John is] as loquacious as I am.’’
In July, granddaughter Patrizia and her new husband, Pim de Vroom,
visited after their wedding at Brunnenburg, which Olga had not attended;
‘‘if it had been a true family reunion,’’ she wrote, ‘‘I would have.’’ As one
guest recalled the wedding: Pim’s long-haired friends arrived from Holland
in bluejeans, the international costume of the young of that era, a
contrast to the well-dressed and coi√ed Italians. Boris, the father of the
bride, played a recording of Pound’s translation of the marriage song from
the Confucian Odes, and after the ceremony two white doves were released
from their cages to go free. But the birds clung to the wall, terrified
—not a good omen—and indeed the marriage, like so many others that
begin with high hopes, did not last.
After seeing the couple in Venice, Olga considered Pim ‘‘a nice young
man, well brought up, sensitive. . . . P[atrizia] seems thinner, which brings
out the good lines of her face.’’ She took them to San Michele to see
Gaudier’s Hieratic Head on the new Noguchi-designed base.