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

275 Olga Triumphant
The social life of Venice picked up in the fall. At Giorgio Manera’s
party, Olga wore a lion-print dress Ezra used to admire; she had sent a
scrap of it to him at St. Elizabeth’s, which he fastened to the bars of his
window. The Rylandses invited her to Palazzo Ca’Torta to meet a ‘‘large
and lolling Stephen Spender’’ (Olga’s words), who wanted to talk about
his son, then studying painting in Siena. She was ‘‘flapi’’ (her word for a
confused and upset condition): ‘‘Too much talk! Too much food! Too
much drink!’’ She was happier in the company of winged friends, especially
in winter—‘‘grated bread for the birds, so they could eat more
easily.’’
Peggy Guggenheim died just before Christmas. In the calle, Olga happened
upon the young Rylandses with Peggy’s and Lawrence Vail’s son,
Sinbad, and Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim Museum in New
York. Under the terms of Peggy’s will, they let it be known, it was her
wish to be cremated, the ashes to be buried in her beloved dogs’ graveyard.
Olga considered her own burial: ‘‘perhaps to be cremated in Venice,
if it were possible to cremate EP’s remains at the same time.’’
Nearing her eighty-fifth birthday, Olga kept to an active schedule,
entertaining visitors from around the world, taking long walks in Venice,
traveling continuously in Italy, England, France, the United States. The
photographer Sarah Quill came and asked her to sit in the window with
the strongest light. ‘‘A few years ago, I would have worried about the
results,’’ Olga said, ‘‘but now I don’t care—a few wrinkles, more-orless
. . . I lost a tooth this morning!’’
‘‘The things that excite me now are reading, the book ‘coming alive.’ ’’
In Canto 77, she discovered ‘‘Jactancy,’’ and jotted the definition in the
notebook: ‘‘ ‘Jactitation’ (law), of marriage, o√ence of claiming to be a
person’s wife or husband’’ (‘‘they can’t get OR on that’’). Another pensée:
‘‘Osmosis of persons? (consoling thought). There is no marriage, or
giving in marriage, in heaven? The thing is not to break the thread, the
light—‘the sun’s silk, tensile,’ (Canto 90)—the stars, the body of light. His
writing is her clock, as [the] sun in these transcriptions, her greatest—her
only—consolation.’’
Mary called from the Netherlands to announce the birth of another
great-grandchild, Cyril Gautier, ‘‘a handsome blond boy, with long limbs,