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

273 Olga Triumphant
had been the comforting, guiding presence in Olga’s adult life that Julia
was in her childhood. ‘‘Shall not homing man tread like a ghost where he
cares most?’’ she wrote, inspired by the Confucian Odes.
Word reached Olga of the death from congestive cardiac failure of
another correspondent and confidant, Cyril Connolly—in his seventies,
younger than she. One of the last friends to visit Connolly in the hospital
had read aloud, at the patient’s request, Pound’s poem ‘‘Tomb of Akr
Caar.’’
Time reported the death of Tibor Serly, her accompanist in the 1930s at
the Rapallo chamber concerts, and she was more than ever aware that she
had outlived many performers of her own generation and some who were
younger. ‘‘She should have tried harder to keep music,’’ she reflected.
‘‘EP—no-one—understood my not being able to play unless I practiced,
and found [a] place to do so . . . a very deficient musician, yes, but even He
noted ‘a delicate firmness.’ ’’
At eighty-three, Olga was constantly in motion: to Munich for a screening
of a film about Pound that included his first recordings on Telefunken
(1967), and a meeting with their old friend Eva Hesse. In May in Venice,
Liselotte Hochs displayed Olga’s portrait in a vernissage that ended with a
formal dinner in the garden, and Vittorio Branca introduced the D. G.
Bridson film about Pound in another showing at the Cini Foundation.
When Lia Sicci stopped by to enlist her help in the cause of ‘‘Women’s
Liberation,’’ Olga listened but commented that though she was a liberated
woman herself, she refused to join any organization.
Yet she contributed ten thousand lire for the Festa della Madonna della
Salute on August 5 in appreciation of the Rapallese friendship and support
on Ezra’s behalf. She was ‘‘putting her house in order’’ in Sant’Ambrogio;
for the first time considering installing a shower in the kitchen and Mary’s
room. (They were accustomed to bathe in an iron tub, or in the sea like the
contadini.) In an orgy of cleaning and rearranging, using an old toothbrush
to dust the book edges, she was reminded that Ezra used a toothbrush
to dust down the black cat who waited for him at the top of the
salita: ‘‘Hiz cats—Tiger Tim and his Black Lady—verrry thin, verrry ravenous.
[He] climbs up a tree to look in, but can’t jump, as his jumping-o√