“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.
Harald Böhm, a sculptor, told me Jane had enlisted his aid in moving the papers. “Jane asked me if I would help her move some furniture. It was Christmastime. I said okay, because she had a certain power in the art world. She could make connections between rich people and artists, and at the time I was hoping she would find me a big commission. B
ut when I arrived at Olga’s house, I found out we would be moving papers, not furniture. Jane said the papers were very valuable and that if they were left in Olga’s house, someone might steal them, or Olga’s family might sell them. Jane spoke as if we were doing something heroic. But I noticed that while Philip and I were moving the papers out of the house, Jane was keeping Olga occupied in conversation upstairs. I did not think Olga was aware of what we were doing, and it made me nervous. I knew she had a kind of Alzheimer’s. Everybody knew it. I was afraid Olga was being duped, and that I had been duped into helping. I was worried I’d be arrested, especially when Jane said afterwards, ‘Be sure you don’t tell anybody about today, or peggio per te—it will be bad for you.”
Friends of Olga’s, their suspicions already aroused, became alarmed when the episode of the missing papers occurred. Several people called Mary de Rachewiltz and implored her to come down to Venice quickly and find out what was happening. Walter and his father, Boris de Rachewiltz, came in her stead and asked Olga to show them the foundation’s legal papers. Olga said she had none; Jane Rylands had them. When Boris and Walter finally read the documents, they understood what Olga had done. And, finally, so did Olga. To Christopher Cooley, Olga said simply, “What a fool I was. Oh, what a fool I was.”
Having discovered that the foundation was the instrument through which her mother had virtually disinherited her, Mary de Rachewiltz sought help from friends in Venice. One of the people she appealed to was Liselotte Höhs, an Austrian artist who lived near the San Trovaso gondola workshop, not far from Olga. Liselotte and her late husband, the lawyer Giorgio Manera, had been friendly with both Olga and Pound and had made it a tradition over the years to invite them for Christmas dinner. After Pound’s death, Olga had expressed a desire to create a foundation in Venice dedicated to Pound’s memory, and Liselotte had tried to help her. She accompanied Olga to a meeting with the head of the Cini Foundation and on Olga’s behalf went on her own to see the heads of the Marciana Library and Palazzo Grassi. But she was not able, at the time, to secure any commitments.
Mary had given Liselotte copies of the foundation’s legal papers, and Liselotte had been incensed by what she saw. I was told that she still had the copies, and when I called her she invited me to come and have a look at them.
We sat in her living room, a large studio with a double-height ceiling and a northern skylight. Liselotte was a passionate Valkyrie with flashing eyes and blond hair flowing in waves down her back.
“Mary didn’t know what to do,” she said. “She begged me to please help her find a lawyer. Olga had always wanted control to remain in Venice and always with her grandson, Walter, involved. He was her favorite.”
Liselotte handed me the foundation’s incorporation papers. They were in English. The foundation had been recorded as a not-for-profit corporation on December 17, 1986—in Ohio. The principal office was located in Cleveland, not in Venice.
“Why Ohio?” I asked.
“A good question,” said Liselotte.
Jane was from Ohio, I recalled. And Olga had been born in Youngstown, but she had not lived in Ohio for more than eighty years at the time these papers were signed.
The foundation had three officers: Olga Rudge as president, Jane Rylands as vice president, and a Cleveland attorney as secretary. The foundation’s bylaws stated that two of the three could outvote the third. This meant that from the outset Olga had ceded control of the foundation to Jane Rylands and a lawyer from Cleveland, neither of whom had ever met Ezra Pound or had any expertise in his life and works.
Liselotte now handed me a contract between Olga and the foundation, this one in Italian, documenting Olga’s donation of her house to the foundation, outright, free of charge. At the time she signed it, Olga was ninety-two.
Liselotte then handed me a second contract. In this one, Olga had agreed to sell the foundation all of her “books, manuscripts, diaries, private correspondence, newspaper clippings, writings, papers, documents of any kind, drawings, books and albums of drawings and sketches, photographs, tapes and magnetic cassettes, and any objects that might be added to the collection before her death”—all for the sum of 15 million lire, or seven thousand dollars, which, according to the contract, Olga had already received.
The significance of this contract was very clear. For a pittance, not only had Olga sold fifty years’ worth of her correspondence with Ezra Pound, she had also sold letters to her and to Pound from T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, e. e. cummings, H. L. Mencken, Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, and other literary figures, as well as drafts of the Cantos, books that bore marginalia and annotations by Pound, and first editions of books inscribed to Pound by their authors. The total value of the collection could have approached $1 million, the market for Poundiana being what it was at the time. Any number of items were, by themselves, worth more than the sale price of the whole lot. Among the most valuable would have been the notebooks of the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, a founder, along with Pound, of the vorticism movement. Gaudier-Brzeska died during the First World War, at twenty-four, rendering his notebooks particularly rare and valuable.
“Did Olga have her own lawyer with her when she did all this?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
When Olga finally realized what had happened, she became hysterical. She called Joan FitzGerald at night, saying she wanted to dissolve the foundation and rushed over the Accademia Bridge to see her in tears. Liselotte handed me another page. It was a photocopy of a letter handwritten in Olga’s large, clear script, addressed to the Cleveland attorney:
24 April 1988
Dear [Sir],
I wish to inform you that it is my firm intention to dissolve the “Ezra Pound Foundation.”
I have revoked the donation of my house at Dorsoduro 252, Venice—I would like to make it very clear that I never knowingly sold my archive to the “Foundation” or to anyone. Any deed to this effect can only be due to some misunderstanding.
Cordially yours,
Olga Rudge
The reply, which was sent seven weeks later, informed Olga that the Ezra Pound Foundation could not be dissolved just because she wanted it to be; it would take a majority vote of the trustees. And even if the trustees did vote to dissolve the foundation, its property could not be returned to Olga, but it would have to be passed on to another tax-exempt institution. That was the law, he said.
Olga apparently wrote several letters declaring her desire to dissolve the foundation. Liselotte handed me another one, dated March 18, 1988. This one was not addressed to anyone in particular. “My intention,” Olga wrote, “has always been that any foundation formed in the name of Ezra Pound would include Trustees from the Cini Foundation, Ca’ Foscari University, the Marciana Library and my grandson Walter de Rachewiltz. . . .” The handwriting was clearly Olga’s, but there was no way of knowing whether the letters were in her own words or had been composed by someone else and then copied by Olga.
Given all this commotion—friends of Olga’s rallying against the foundation, Olga herself declaring she wanted to dissolve it—one would have thought that Jane Rylands might have backed off a bit, saying, “I’m so sorry. I only meant to help.”
But it was not until two years later that she finally transferred custody of the papers to Yale. Then she dissolved the foundation. There were rumors that Yale had paid Jane Rylands a considerable sum of money for title to the papers, but they were only conjecture.
FOR WHATEVER REASON, the Venetian press never covered the story of the Ezra Pound Foundation and the uncertain fate of Olga Rudge’s house and papers. News of it spread through word of mouth, however, raising questions about Jane and Philip Rylands.
When the Rylandses arrived in Venice in a Volkswagen camper in 1973, this much was known about them: Jane had been born in Ohio, graduated from the College of William and Mary, and moved to England, where she taught freshman composition at the Amer
ican air base in Mildenhall, near Cambridge. She was outgoing, ambitious, well read in English and American literature, a dedicated Anglophile, and popular with the boys in Cambridge for serving fried-chicken dinners bought from the PX at the air base. Philip was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, when he met Jane. He was shy, serious, and best known for being the nephew of George “Dadie” Rylands, a distinguished and influential Shakespearean scholar, actor, and director. Dadie Rylands was a surviving link to the Bloomsbury group, a protégé of Lytton Strachey, and still a beloved fellow at King’s, where he had been living in the same rooms since 1927. His apartment had been decorated by Dora Carrington and visited by countless intellectuals. Virginia Woolf described a luxurious lunch there in her book A Room of One’s Own.