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

286 Olga Triumphant
was Ezra . . . don’t you think Jews would be comforted to hear a man by
the name of Ezra on the radio?’’ Mary also defended her father: ‘‘Have
you ever read the work of Mussolini? Or did you just hear what other
people have said and written about him?’’
Back in Venice a week after this exhausting journey, she wrote William
Cookson in England that she had taken a collection of Ezra’s photos to
Zoagli for the new exhibition hall and returned the same day: ‘‘ a little too
much going on for this 90-year-old!’’
In 1987, the Comune di Venezia placed a commemorative plaque on the
house at 252, calle Querini—Olga’s house, the house her father had
bought for her in 1929: ‘‘In un mai spento amore per Venezia ezra pound,
Titano della poesia, questa casa abitò per mezzo secolo [In his neverextinguished
love for Venice, Ezra Pound, titan of poetry, lived in this
house for half a century].’’ Scholars and the curious continued to come
from distant lands to sign the guest book. Rajiv Krishman from Kerala,
India (via Christ’s College, Cambridge); Gabrielle Barfoot from Belfast,
and Desmond O’Grady of County Cork, Ireland; Professor Walton Litz,
of Princeton University; Mary and Polly Andersen from Hailey, Idaho;
Erica Jong, author of La Serenissima; Christine Stocking, a little-known
artist from Milwaukee (who filled a page with a Dali-inspired sketch).
It was a time of reconciliation with Mary and the family. In her birthday
gift to Olga, ‘‘A Little Book for Your Thoughts,’’ Mary had written on the
flyleaf: ‘‘Mary’s thoughts these days are mostly ‘What does my mother
think, feel, dream?’ ’’ Walter sent photos of great-grandsons Michael Ezra
and Nicholas Thaddeus (born in 1986) with him at Torre di Angles, the
highest peak of the Tyrolean Alps at Val Venosta (Olga noted in the
margin, ‘‘chips o√ the Old Block’’).
When Carroll Terrell came to Venice for a Pound symposium in 1988,
he visited the gravesite at San Michele with Olga. She ‘‘pushed through all
of us,’’ he remembered, ‘‘tossed away her cane, and . . . tearing the grass
away from the tombstone, said, ‘I pay good money for them to maintain
this . . . but I’ll do it myself if I have to.’ ’’
The daily jottings in the notebook were becoming more di≈cult with
each passing year: ‘‘This page has taken me one hour!’’ (She checked the
clock: two minutes past midnight.) ‘‘Mind racing, pulse irregular—appe-