“The morning I moved in,” Cooper told me, “Mrs. Rylands arrived at the house and came stomping up the stairs and made it very clear she didn’t want me there. She walked toward me with her arms folded and looked me square in the face and told me I was in the home of a major twentieth-century literary figure. ‘There are very important objects in the house,’ she said, ‘and if anything were to go missing, you’re the one who’ll be blamed for it . . . and I don’t think you’d want that.’
“She informed me that she’d arranged to have Olga’s portrait painted in that very room ‘by a very important artist from London who will be arriving very shortly.’ She began hauling various things up to the third floor—books, sculptures, objects—and arranging them to form a background for Olga’s portrait. She advised me to leave and not tell Olga on my way out, because she would only tell me to stay.
“After Mrs. Rylands had left, I went downstairs and told Olga I was leaving because Jane Rylands didn’t want me in the way. ‘You will do no such thing!’ Olga shouted. ‘This is my house, and I invited you here! How dare Jane Rylands tell you to leave! And anyway, I do not want to have my portrait painted!’ She insisted I stay and finish the mural, and at least be there while ‘I’m having my portrait painted by a stranger.’
“Then the doorbell rang, and it was the portrait painter Sir Lawrence Gowing. He had such a choking stutter that Olga couldn’t understand a word he said and was visibly distressed by it. I helped him upstairs with his supplies, and when he saw Mrs. Rylands’s arrangement, he said, ‘I set up my own poses! Really! That Jane Rylands is quite a manager!’ I then left the house.
“Gowing had already gone when I returned in the early evening. He’d made considerable progress on the portrait, but he’d moved Olga to another corner of the room and ignored Jane’s instructions completely. Olga was not surrounded by Jane’s objects at all but was posed in the middle of my belongings, including my suitcase and passport. An unfinished drawing of mine that I’d leaned against the wall was also now part of the background. It framed Olga’s head.
“Olga had arranged for me to go to a party that evening, but I couldn’t get to my clothes without disturbing Gowing’s arrangement of objects. So Olga lent me a black velvet jacket of Pound’s. I was just leaving the house when Mrs. Rylands stopped by to inspect the portrait. She was beside herself when she saw it. ‘I told him where to paint Olga, and that’s where she’s going to be painted!’ She turned to me and, speaking to me now as an ally rather than as somebody to be brushed aside, she said, ‘When Gowing comes back, tell him if he wants the commission, he must paint Olga where I’ve set up the pose and with the objects I’ve chosen.’ She said that since she had commissioned the painting and was paying for it, it would be done her way.
“Gowing left the pose as it was, but he satisfied Mrs. Rylands by agreeing to include life casts of Ezra’s and Olga’s faces in the foreground. He did, however, complain that he was doing three portraits for the price of one. He and Mrs. Rylands did not part on very good terms.
“When the portrait was finished, Mrs. Rylands gave a dinner party at the Gritti to unveil it. Olga never said whether she liked the portrait or not, but she burst out laughing every time she looked at it.”
At about this time—the mid-1980s—Olga began to exhibit lapses of memory. She was then in her early nineties and would lose track of what she was saying, misplace things, forget appointments.
James Wilhelm, a professor of English at Rutgers and the author of
The American Roots of Ezra Pound
and
Dante and Pound,
talked with Olga at a centennial celebration of Pound at the University of Maine in 1985. He noticed signs of forgetfulness. The following year, while on a visit to Venice, he went to see Olga at the Hidden Nest to take her out to lunch.
“Before going out,” Wilhelm told me, “Olga and I sat in the living room talking. She mentioned that guests were staying on the third floor, a young poet and his girlfriend, and that they were asleep, so unfortunately she couldn’t show me the third floor where Pound used to work. Later in the conversation, I heard some noises above, and I said, ‘Olga, I hear footsteps above. The people upstairs must be getting up.’
“Suddenly Olga’s eyes narrowed, and she bent toward me, ‘Who
are
those people upstairs?’
“I said, ‘Olga, I don’t know. You said they were a young poet—and his girlfriend.’
“‘Yes . . . yes . . . who . . . is . . . that . . . girl?!’
“Once again I said, ‘I don’t know.’
“She sat back in her chair. ‘I wish they’d go!’
“I knew she didn’t mean it. She wanted people in the house around her, but I could already see deep-rooted signs of memory loss.
“I told Olga that I was going to Bologna for a week and that I would see her when I came back to Venice afterward. But when I called her house, a strange woman answered. Someone connected with the Guggenheim Museum, I believe. She told me that Olga had fallen ill and was unable to see anyone.” Wilhelm later wrote about these meetings with Olga, in much the same detail, for the scholarly journal devoted to Ezra Pound and his works,
Paideuma.
It was at about this time also that Olga made mention of the Ezra Pound Foundation in conversations with friends, vaguely, without offering much detail. It was clear that Jane Rylands was involved.
“Mrs. Rylands and Olga talked about the foundation all the time,” said Vincent Cooper. “Olga had stacks of letters and papers around and was a bit overwhelmed by it all. She’d have important visits from publishers and lawyers and other people, and when they left, she’d ask me who they were. I thought it was risky for anyone to do serious business with Olga. She was full of enthusiasm but becoming forgetful and very easily confused.”
Jim Wilhelm recalled that “there was suspicion in Venice that the aged Olga might be being used by others for some purpose.”
Christopher Cooley, a friend of both Olga’s and Pound’s, knew the contents of their library very well, having catalogued the books in it for them in the early 1970s. Cooley lived in a house on Rio San Trovaso. We spoke in his garden.
“When Olga told me about setting up a Pound foundation,” Cooley recalled, “I said to her, ‘I hope you’re not signing any papers having to do with this foundation without consulting your family.’ She was vague about that, neither affirming nor denying. She asked me if I’d like to be on the board of the foundation, and I told her I was uneasy about it. I said, ‘You know, Olga, if the house is going to be used by visiting students, there will be various expenses. The foundation will have to raise money. It could become very complicated. ’ So I told her, very gently, no.
“The next time I saw Jane—it was at a party at Palazzo Brandolini—I asked her to tell me about the foundation. She said, all smiles and teeth, ‘I’m just helping an old lady do what she wants to do.’
“Then I asked her pointedly who was on the board of the foundation, feeling entitled to do so, since Olga had invited me to be on it. She snapped, ‘It’s none of your business!’ and walked out of the room. It didn’t smell right to me. I caught up with her a little while later and said, ‘That last remark of yours was the only revealing thing you’ve said about the foundation.’”
Then came the incident of the disappearing papers. Olga had several large trunks full of papers stored on her ground floor. One Christmastime, Jane took the trunks away to make space for Olga, she said, and to put the papers out of danger from high water. Either Olga forgot where Jane had said she was taking them or Jane never told her; in any case, a short while later, Olga became anxious about them and complained to a number of people that Jane had taken her trunks and that she did not know where they were. Finally she asked Jane to return them, and Jane did. But, according to Olga, when she opened them, she found them empty.
At this point, Arrigo Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar, entered the story. Cipriani had grown up in a house on the corner of Calle Querini and Rio Fornace. The rear windows of Olga’s house looked out on the Ciprianis’ garden.
Without telling Cipriani what I wanted to talk about, I made an appointment to see him. As agreed, I stopped by Harry’s Bar one morning at eleven. The waiters and barmen were rushing around the restaurant setting up for lunch. A postman came in and dropped a stack of letters at the bar. Arrigo Cipriani arrived a few minutes later. He was wearing a dapper dark blue suit with peaked lapels. He was in trim condition, still the agile black-belt karate expert.
“Do you mind if we walk while we talk?” he said. “I have an appointment.” He led the way down Calle Vallaresso.
“What can you tell me about the Ezra Pound Foundation?” I asked as I walked alongside him. Cipriani’s face turned from cheery to serious. “It is not a nice story,” he said.
A workman wheeling a cart called out, “Ciao, Arrigo!” as we passed him at a fast clip. Cipriani waved and then ducked into a narrow alley between buildings, still walking at top speed.
“Jane Rylands came to me,” he said, “and told me she was cleaning Olga Rudge’s house. She asked if she could put some things in a
magazzino,
a storeroom, that I own next door to Olga. Just a few boxes, she said. The ground floor was empty, so I said fine.”
Cipriani took another turn, and two businessmen smiled as we passed: “Ciao, Arrigo!”
“Sometime later,” Cipriani continued, “workmen on a job nearby told me Jane Rylands was going in and out of the
magazzino.
Then I happened to meet Joan FitzGerald in the street. You know Joan FitzGerald, the sculptor, a very close friend of Pound and Olga. She made a sculpture of the old man; it’s in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. I mentioned to Joan that I had some things of Olga’s, and Joan told me that Olga was worried about her belongings. She said Jane Rylands had taken several boxes and returned them empty, and now Olga didn’t know where the contents were. I said, ‘I think I know where they are. Let me check.’
“Just to be sure,” said Cipriani, “I went to the
magazzino,
and there they were: big stacks of papers wrapped in sheets of clear plastic. There were signs saying, ‘Do Not Touch,’ ‘Property of Ezra Pound Foundation.’ I called Joan and two businessman friends and said, ‘Come over!’
“It was Easter Sunday. We took Olga into the
magazzino,
and as soon as she saw the papers, she said, ‘Those are my things!’ She began picking up handfuls of stuff and carrying them back to her house, but there was no room. I said, ‘Wait! I have a better idea. I own another
magazzino
right across the
calle,
and I’ve got the keys with me.’ So we carried the papers and boxes across the
calle
into number 248 and locked the door. I was very angry now. I realized I had been an unknowing accomplice to whatever it was Jane had done, legal or illegal. It could have gotten me into serious trouble, and now, by moving these papers with the ‘Do Not Touch’ signs, I was afraid I could be accused of stealing Jane’s property. So I made everybody sign a piece of paper saying we had moved the boxes.”
Cipriani turned another corner, and we were suddenly in the bright sunlight at the foot of the Rialto Bridge.
“You know,” he said, “I had a strange feeling from the beginning. After I told Jane she could put the things in my place, she asked me if I would like to be on the board of directors of the Ezra Pound Foundation. What did I know about the poetry of Ezra Pound?”
Two men standing in a doorway called out to Arrigo and waved him over.
“Ciao! Subito, subito!”
(I’ll be right with you) he said. Then, turning back to me, “Well, that’s it. As I told you, it’s not a very nice story.”
The episode of the disappearing papers became a turning point in the fortunes of the Ezra Pound Foundation. Jane had told Olga she had moved the papers to keep them from being damaged in high water, but it was plain to everyone that the ground floor of Arrigo Cipriani’s
magazzino
was at virtually the same level as Olga’s and therefore no safer.