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

281 Olga Triumphant
Olga to San Michele. On such autumn mornings the fuoci fatui, will-o-thewisp
gas fires from the decomposing bodies, bathed the graves in a misty
light. McNaughton was surprised to find Olga still recording hexagrams of
the I Ching, not only for herself, but for Ezra: ‘‘It is like examining one’s
conscience daily, part of my convent teaching,’’ she said. ‘‘When I have
cleared my mind with The Cantos and Guide to Kulchur, I feel as if He was
coming closer, that the mist is rising, and that soon I may see Him plain,
sitting there in His chair.’’
Jane Rylands was organizing a seminar at the Gritti Palace with three
generations of Pound’s ‘‘other family’’—Olga, Mary, and Walter—for the
University of Maryland’s European Division. When Walter spoke, Olga
noted his resemblance to her younger brother Arthur, ‘‘his sagoma [shape]
and carriage in a new woolen suit, woven from sheep he had sheared
himself!’’ He was ‘‘quick on the uptake—like myself.’’ A Chinese dinner at
the Rylandses’ Ca’Torta ended with ginger, reminding Olga of ‘‘the ginger
Walter bought his Nonno in 1960, which brought him back to life.’’
Grandson-in-law Pim de Vroom won kudos for helping to put the slides in
order for another showing of ‘‘The Last Ten Years’’—scenes of Venice,
London, Zurich, Spoleto, and Rapallo, ending with Natalie Barney’s Temple
à l’Amitié in Paris in 1968—of which critic Robert Vas Dias remarked:
‘‘Toward the end, the face becomes set in monumental haggardness, the
figure . . . like a Giacometti.’’
On Christmas Eve, Olga arranged the figures of Ezra’s presepio on the
mantelpiece, jotted a passage from the Confucian Odes: ‘‘I am alone / look
up to moon and sun / In my thoughts the long pain / the road is so long,
host / shall he come again?’’
She was astonished to discover in the February 4 La Stampa that Boris
de Rachewiltz, her son-in-law, was implicated in the sale of arms to the
Arabs. She immediately telephoned Mary, who ‘‘gave correct information
re. Boris.’’ The Rylandses had mentioned a sale of arms by G.I.s stationed
in Italy, so she telephoned Jane to set the record straight: it was possible
that Boris felt an obligation to help Arab friends who had helped him in his
archeological research.
There was more unwelcome publicity when her son-in-law was