Olga Rudge: Encyclopedia II - Olga Rudge - Alone in Venice

Olga Rudge - Alone in Venice

Following Pound's death Rudge, aged 78, began the final phase of her life. She became one of Venice's resident celebrities, quick witted, intelligent, and cultured. She sat on many committees organizing the city's many charities and galas. She was an essential guest at the city's profuse "dolce vita" gatherings, but continued to inhabit the same small house she had shared with Pound. Encouraging young aspiring poets and artists, she often offered them free use of the top floor of her home in return for a small painting or dedicated poem. Frequently asked to write an autobiography, she always repled "write about Pound".^[14] She saw it as her raison d'être to promote Pound's work and defend his reputation against charges of anti-Semitism and Fascism.^[15]

Rudge's relationship with her daughter Mary had always been complex: at the time of the birth, Rudge had in fact wanted a son. Having boarded the child with Tirolean farmers at birth, Rudge was later surprised to find the child developed into "a dialect speaking farm girl".^[16] Rudge tried to rectify this situation upon being permanently reunited with Mary when the child was ten. Elocution, etiquette, and music lessons were met with fierce opposition; a violin that Rudge gave to her daughter was smashed against a chicken coop: in short, Mary Rudge found her mother distant, impenetrable and authoritarian. Her relationship with her father was better. She learned of her illegitimacy only in her late teens. Pound asked Mary to translate his epic work The Cantos into Italian. This was to be the beginning of a lifelong passion and study of Pound's work, with Mary later referring to The Cantos as "my bible". ^[17] Mary wrote her autobiography, Discretions, in 1971 (the title being a play on words on Pound's autobiography, Indiscretions). The revelations contained in the book "deeply hurt" Rudge,^[18] and she and her daughter did not communicate for several years, although she communicated with Mary's children, Walter de Rachewiltz and Patrizia de Rachewiltz de Vroom regularly. Mother and daughter later overcame their estrangement.

Venice with its many steps and lack of motorised road vehicles is a difficult city for the old and infirm, and with her family several hours' drive away, Rudge had to become dependent on friends and acquaintances for the necessities of life. In later life her memory began to fail her.

It had always been Rudge's intention to set up a foundation of some kind to house Pounds's archives, but this was a task she always deferred, while continuing to assist scholars of his work and organize several exhibitions devoted to him. In 1986, Rudge together with an American friend, Jane Rylands, and an attorney from Cleveland, Ohio, formed the "Ezra Pound Foundation". Rudge sold most of her archive and her house to the Foundation for a sum of approximately seven thousand dollars. After the establishment of the Foundation, Rudge's family alleged that this had not been her intention, and that the house and archive were worth considerably more. Part of the problem was that, aged 91, Rudge was becoming forgetful of things she had agreed to. In April 1988, Rudge wrote to the Cleveland attorney informing him of her wish to dissolve the Foundation.^[19] The reply told her that such a request was not within the law. The papers were later deposited in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, where they are housed today, and the Ezra Pound Foundation was dissolved. One box of papers concerning the transfer of the archive from the Ezra Pound Foundation is withheld from public viewing.

At the time of the creation of the Ezra Pound Foundation, Rudge's friends were becoming increasingly concerned for her. The sculptress Joan Fitzgerald contacted Rudge's daughter, and Rudge's son-in-law and grandson immediately came to Venice. They found that ownership of her house "The Hidden Nest" had not yet been conveyed to the Foundation and were able to recover it, but the archive, containing letters not only from Pound but from other great literary figures of the day, had passed from her ownership.^[20] Rudge continued for a short while to live at "The Hidden Nest" until old age and infirmity forced to her to leave Venice and make her final home with her daughter at Schloss Brunnenburg. Her family — her daughter, two grandchildren and four great-grandsons — were protective of her, and it was at their home, Brunnenberg Castle, that Rudge died aged 101 on 15 March 1996.

She was buried with Pound in Venice. Joan Fitzgerald, a close friend of the couple, engraved on their simple tombstones the verse "O God, what great kindness have we done in times past and forgotten it, That thou givest this wonder unto us, O God of waters?" (Night Litany). An alternative epitaph to Rudge could have been that written by Pound in 1966 and intended to be placed at the end of the final Canto:

The courage to which Pound was referring was her resolute and very public loyalty to him after the war, when not only Pound but also his work and those that supported it were vilified as a result of Pound being perceived as an anti-Semitic, fascist traitor. Her loyalty and devotion to Pound continued until the moment of her own death.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Alone in Venice", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki