Our meeting was perfunctory, and although I was neither charmed nor terribly impressed by the couple, they interested me. In a city like Venice, a museum with the cachet of the Guggenheim automatically conferred a certain status upon its administrator. The Guggenheim was an international nexus of art, society, privilege, money, and culture. The cool, spacious rooms with their white walls and terrazzo floors looked out on the Grand Canal in front and a lush, green garden, where Peggy and her dogs were buried, in back. The palace itself was a curiosity. The Venier family, which had produced three doges, had started construction in 1749 and had completed only the first floor when work stopped for good. The floor of the unbuilt second story served as a spacious roof-garden patio with the Grand Canal spread out before it and huge, towering trees rising up from the garden, providing a verdant backdrop. Inside and out, the truncated white palace offered itself as an elegant setting for receptions, lectures, screenings, gatherings of all types. In addition, the closing of the American consulate in Venice in the early 1970s had left the Guggenheim, by default, the most prominent American presence in Venice. At times the Guggenheim found itself in the role of a surrogate American embassy. The State Department called up now and then to organize receptions and ask other favors. Clearly Philip and Jane occupied a position of prominence and power in Venice, and their evident self-consciousness made me all the more curious about them.
I had followed up our brief cocktail introduction by talking informally with each of them. Philip and I had coffee a few days later in the museum’s café. He was friendly and good-humored, though harried. He told me he had studied art history at Cambridge and written a thesis on the Renaissance painter Palma Vecchio. Alluding to his current work, Rylands mentioned that a small Picasso exhibition would be installed in the fall, but he spoke mainly about the museum’s expansion plans, which were being formulated by the Guggenheim executives in New York. He was hardworking and earnest, but he struck me as being a little on the dull side—the opposite of his wife.
I called on Jane at their apartment later in the week, and we had tea in a light-filled sitting room. She was wearing a modish black-and-white tweed jacket, form-fitting blue jeans, and heels. I found her relaxed, engaging, and opinionated, especially on the subject of society figures in Venice. In the 1970s, she had been a Venice-based gossip columnist briefly for the
Rome Daily American
but had given it up when it started to raise hackles in Venice. Having observed Venetian society carefully, Jane had found ways of navigating in and around it. Venetians, she said, had a weakness for parties, and this enabled even a foreigner to wield a certain amount of power. How? Invitations! The invitation given, the invitation withheld. Certainly Jane was in a position to issue invitations, and to withhold them.
I liked her a good deal more this time. She was quick-witted and shrewd, which appealed to me. But she had a sharp edge and did not hesitate to show it. At one point, I made reference to a man, well known in art-world circles, who had been a close friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s since the early sixties.
“Oh, him,” she said with a lighthearted laugh. “What was he doing when you saw him? Serving drinks to all those rich men?” It was a cheeky remark, I thought, since she could not have known whether the man was a good friend of mine or merely an acquaintance. Nor, it later occurred to me, did she care.
“The name of Olga Rudge never came up?” Peter Lauritzen asked.
“Only once,” I said, “as I was leaving. In a room off the parlor, I noticed a large painting of an old woman seated among various objects—books, I think. The colors were pastel. I liked the painting. I asked who it was, and Jane said Olga Rudge. Then she added, ‘Her archives are at Yale, you know!’ She said it with a perkiness that seemed to say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful!’ which was odd, I thought, because I didn’t think it was at all surprising that Ezra Pound’s mistress of fifty years would have a collection of letters important enough to end up at Yale.”
“That’s not where Jane Rylands had wanted them to end up,” said Peter.
I resisted the impulse to call Jane and ask to talk to her again. It seemed wiser to find out more about the Ezra Pound Foundation first. The Lauritzens begged off, saying their knowledge of the affair was too sketchy and that other people were closer to Olga when it was happening.
Meanwhile Olga’s recent death had made her a frequent topic of conversation in Venice. What emerged from all the talk was a moving and dramatic portrait—of Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound, Mary de Rachewiltz and, in the background, Pound’s legal wife, Dorothy Shakespear, and their son, Omar.
Both Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound had become expatriates shortly after the turn of the century: Olga in 1904, at the age of nine; Pound in 1908, at twenty-three. Olga had been born in Youngstown, Ohio; Pound was a native of Idaho.
Pound settled first in Venice, installing himself in a small apartment on Rio San Trovaso and, with his own money, publishing one hundred copies of his first book of poems,
A Lume Spento
(With Tapers Quenched). Three months later, he moved to London, where he became a driving force of literary modernism. He campaigned for a more austere, direct, and forceful style of expression—as summed up and exemplified by his rallying cry, “Make It New.” He was a poet, a critic, an editor, and an unusually generous promoter of his literary friends and their work. He helped William Butler Yeats shed his Celtic romanticism, counseled Hemingway to “distrust adjectives,” and sang the praises of James Joyce to Sylvia Beach, who then published
Ulysses.
His editing of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” contributed so profoundly to the poem that Eliot dedicated it to him in gratitude and admiration: “Ezra Pound,
il miglior fabbro
”—the better craftsman.
In 1920, Pound reviewed a concert for the
New Age
in which he praised a young violinist for “the delicate firmness of her fiddling.” The violinist was Olga Rudge. Three years later, Pound and Olga met for the first time at the Paris salon of Natalie Barney. Olga, then twenty-seven, was possessed of exotic, black Irish good looks. Pound was tall, impressive in his signature brown velvet jacket, and married. They became lovers.
From the mid-1920s until the Second World War, Pound divided his time between his wife and Olga. The Pounds lived in a beachfront apartment in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera. Olga lived in Venice in the little house at 252 Calle Querini, given to her by her father in 1928 and nicknamed “the Hidden Nest” by Pound. She also rented an apartment in Sant ’Ambrogio, a hill town above Rapallo, that could be reached only by an arduous half-hour climb up a steep path of stone steps.
Olga gave birth to Pound’s daughter, Mary Rudge, in 1925. She and Pound immediately placed the child with a foster family on a farm in the foothills of the Tyrolean Alps. Mary lived there, in the village of Gais, for the first ten years of her life, with visits from her parents on rare occasions and trips to see them in Venice. Omar Pound, born to Dorothy a year later, was sent to England and raised by his grandmother.
Meanwhile Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge pursued their separate careers. Pound worked on his
Cantos,
the epic poem that was to occupy him for fifty years. Olga, proud never to have been financially dependent on Pound, continued touring as a concert violinist, published a catalog of works by Vivaldi, and wrote the article on Vivaldi for
The Grove Dictionary of Music.
The outbreak of war shattered the delicate Pound-Shakespear-Rudge ménage. The Hidden Nest in Venice was sequestered by the Italian government, and the Pounds were forced to evacuate their seafront apartment in Rapallo. That left Pound and Dorothy little choice but to move up the hill to Sant’ Ambrogio, where they lived with Olga for nearly two years. The house was small and had neither electricity nor telephone. It was a difficult time for all. Pound loved Olga and Dorothy, and the women both loved Pound but loathed each other. As Mary later recalled, “hatred and tension permeated the house.”
Pound began making twice-monthly trips to Rome to deliver pro-Fascist broadcasts over Italian radio, for which, in 1943, he was indicted by the United States government for treason. At the close of the war, he was arrested in Rapallo, held in an outdoor cage at a detention center in Pisa for six months, and then sent back to America. Through the intervention of literary friends, the Department of Justice agreed to declare him unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, and he was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington. During his thirteen years of incarceration, Olga wrote to him regularly but was not permitted to visit. That privilege was extended only to Dorothy, his legal wife. When, in 1958, the charges against him were dropped, he was released in Dorothy’s custody. Pound was stripped of his legal rights; Dorothy was named his legal guardian.
Dorothy and Pound went to live with Mary in the South Tyrol at Brunnenburg, a medieval castle that Mary and her husband, the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz, bought as a ruin and then restored. For the next two years, Dorothy and Pound lived with the de Rachewiltzes. In 1961, depressed and ill, Pound chose to put himself into Olga’s hands. For the last eleven years of his life, he lived with Olga at 252 Calle Querini and withdrew into his shell of silence.
Undeterred by Pound’s refusal to speak, legions of researchers, disciples, and the merely curious came seeking audiences. Olga could usually discern who among them was worth admitting to the Hidden Nest. She would simply ask them to quote a single line of Ezra Pound’s poetry, of the thousands he had written, and many could not.
After thirty-five years as the other woman, without any legal rights whatever, Olga no longer had to share Pound with Dorothy. She had stood by him in dangerous and desperate times, and Pound was more than grateful. “There is more courage in Olga’s little finger,” he said of her, “than in the whole of my carcass. She kept me alive for ten years, for which no one will thank her.” Pound died in Venice in 1972 and was laid to rest on the cemetery island of San Michele. Twenty-four years later, Olga would join him. (Dorothy died a year after Pound, in England, where she was buried in her family plot.)
In 1966, Pound composed a poetic tribute to Olga to be placed at the end of the last
Canto,
whatever he might write in the interim:
That her acts
Olga’s acts
of beauty
be remembered.
Her name was Courage
& is written Olga
FOR TWENTY YEARS AFTER POUND’S DEATH, Olga lived alone in the Hidden Nest. Scholars, reporters, and friends kept coming, and Olga welcomed many of them, serving tea, engaging them in lively conversation, and concluding nearly every point she made with the word
“Capito?”
(Understood?) Her sole mission, as she saw it, was to tend Ezra Pound’s eternal flame and to defend him against charges that he had been a Fascist and an anti-Semite—not an easy task, given his pro-Mussolini broadcasts during the war and the constant anti-Jewish ravings in his letters.
Despite her age, Olga was determined to continue living in Venice, even if it meant living alone. She treasured her independence. Mary, who was three hours away in the Tyrolean Alps, was therefore relieved when Philip and Jane Rylands befriended Olga and took a special interest in her welfare. They were young, bright, influential, and obviously respectable. Their attachment to the Guggenheim, which was virtually around the corner from Calle Querini, was doubly reassuring.
Jane and Philip Rylands doted on Olga. They looked in on her every day, took her to dinner, invited her to parties, ran errands for her, made sure the grocery shopping was done. In 1983, Jane organized a seminar at the Gritti Hotel entitled “Ezra Pound in Italy,” featuring talks by three generations of Pound’s “other family”—Olga, Mary, and Mary’s son, Walter. Two years later, Jane arranged for a gala ninetieth-birthday party for Olga, also at the Gritti.
There was nothing Jane and Philip Rylands would not do for Olga. In the winter, they brought firewood from the Guggenheim and mopped up Olga’s ground floor after it had been flooded in high water. If any problems arose—a leak, a stopped-up drain, a blown fuse—Olga knew that Jane Rylands could be counted on to take care of things quickly and efficiently. In time, however, there were signs that Jane Rylands’s care of Olga had begun to verge on control.
In 1986, Olga offered a young American painter, Vincent Cooper, room and board at 252 Calle Querini in exchange for painting a trompe l’oeil mural of arches and columns on the ground floor. Olga wanted the mural as a reminder of one that had been on the walls when she and Pound lived there before the war. It had been removed when the house was sequestered. Cooper would live on the top floor in what had been Pound’s studio and Mary’s childhood bedroom.