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

272 Olga Triumphant
failed to mention her extensive Vivaldi research or to include Ezra’s music
reviews in New Age, which she considered among his finest prose. ‘‘My
real pleasure in life is to make notes that no-one will read,’’ she wrote, not
imagining that scholars in the future would sift carefully through every
page of her notebooks.
A beautiful dawn on Ezra’s October 30 birthday. She went to San
Michele early, ‘‘in the morning sun.’’ Rereading Canto 91,
the body of light come forth
from the body of fire
she was reminded of ‘‘the last beautiful dawns we saw together, through
the big tree one could see from my bed with the white satin cover at ‘La
Collina.’ ’’ Throwing the I Ching coins, the morning ritual, turned up
‘‘skilled fire’’ (her sign, Aries): ‘‘She kept Him warm, at least that!’’
Mary telephoned on the thirty-first: ‘‘she let me talk, we seem nearer.
Nearer and nicer . . . let us go on from here.’’
Olga was following in the footsteps of her mother, Julia O’Connell, as a
pillar of the Anglo-American community. The new rector of the Anglican
Church, Reverend Robertson, accompanied her to San Michele in November;
she was present for the Thanksgiving service with other members of
establishment Venice—the Clarks, the Guinesses, the Lauritzens, and
Peggy Guggenheim—as Canon MacDonald prayed for the newly elected
President, Jimmy Carter.
Teddy, still weak but holding his own, called with Christmas greetings.
Olga talked with Mary and the family at Brunnenburg and learned that
Patrizia and Pim were expecting a baby, Olga’s first great-grandchild: ‘‘I
hope all goes well for Patrizia, that they will all three grow up to live in
daylight and not in a false fairy story cum Disney ‘castle,’ i.e., none of that
mawkish ‘little Prince’ and ‘little Princess’ stu√.’’
On New Year’s Day, Olga wrote to Valerie Eliot: ‘‘Get slower and
slower, seeing less people, remember more.’’ A dream before waking:
‘‘Someone crouching by [my] bed, and holding [my] hand. EP? Mother?
A curious . . . metamorphosis in my dreams, Mother becomes EP.’’ Ezra