The City of Falling Angels (32 page)
Read The City of Falling Angels Online
Authors: John Berendt
Tags: #History, #Social History, #Europe, #Italy
“Olga Rudge and her family were twice the victims in this affair,” said Walter. “First, the loss of my grandmother’s papers to the foundation. Then, in the course of negotiations with Yale, the family received less than the true value of the papers, and Ralph Franklin, who had become the director of the Beinecke Library, fired my mother as curator of the Pound Archives. Mr. Franklin had never really liked the arrangement; it had been set up by the previous director.”
Walter turned more pages. “Here’s a check for six hundred dollars made out by my grandmother to the law firm in Cleveland, Ohio. Six hundred dollars! My grandmother never had any money. I don’t understand why she had to pay that law firm anything. The gift of her house and her papers should have been enough.
“My grandmother may have been president of the foundation, but it was in name only. Jane Rylands assumed certain exclusive powers for herself. She put my grandmother’s Gaudier-Brzeska notebooks in a safe-deposit box, which actually seemed a wise thing to do, because they were very valuable. But when my grandmother and I went to the bank to retrieve them, we were turned away. The bank official told us that Jane Rylands was the only person who had authority to open the safe-deposit box of the Ezra Pound Foundation. My grandmother said, ‘But I’m president of the Ezra Pound Foundation!’ The bank officer said, ‘I’m sorry, we have our instructions from Mrs. Rylands.’
Walter turned more pages in the red notebook.“Ah, I found it,” he said. It was a small piece of light blue writing paper on which was written, in large letters, as if for a child to read, words to the effect of “Look in the safe-deposit box. Count the notebooks. How many notebooks do you see? 1 2 3 4 5 6.” It seemed the written equivalent of speaking slowly and with exaggerated clarity to a child, or perhaps to an old person who was a bit confused. The piece of paper was unsigned, and whoever was intended to circle a number did not.
“What is the significance of this?” I asked.
Walter shrugged. “I am sure Jane Rylands wrote it. I think it’s indicative of my grandmother’s state of mind and Jane’s caution once the gossip had begun.”
He slipped the piece of paper back into its clear plastic sleeve.
“Sometimes Jane involved herself in matters that had nothing to do with the foundation,” he went on. “My grandmother owned two important paintings—by Fernand Léger and Max Ernst. Jane took them to the Guggenheim to be framed, she said, and for safekeeping. When we asked Jane to give them back, it took her months to return them, and when she did, they were still unframed.”
“Did you ever ask Jane why she got into all of this?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Mary, “and she said, ‘I’m in it for business reasons.’ She spoke about setting up Ezra Pound libraries in major cities around the world. There would be symposiums, conferences, publications.”
“She repeated that comment several times,” said Walter. “That she was ‘in it for business reasons.’”
“Why didn’t you sue to have your grandmother’s contracts declared invalid?”
“We were told the only way the contracts could be nullified was through criminal law,” said Walter. “We would have had to make accusations of fraud, or
circonvenzione d’incapace,
which means ‘deception of the disabled,’ and we were not prepared to do that. Anyway, we were told that no lawyer in Venice would take a case against another Venetian lawyer or notary. We’d have to find a lawyer in Milan or Rome.”
circonvenzione d’incapace,
which means ‘deception of the disabled,’ and we were not prepared to do that. Anyway, we were told that no lawyer in Venice would take a case against another Venetian lawyer or notary. We’d have to find a lawyer in Milan or Rome.”
Walter closed the notebook and pushed it aside.
“Well,” I said, “in spite of everything that’s happened, Jane and Philip still seem to have fond recollections of Olga Rudge. They have a portrait of her.”
“Oh?” Mary looked surprised. “Where is it?”
“In their apartment,” I said.
“I would like to know who paid for it.”
“I gather Jane commissioned it and paid for it herself,” I said.
Mary smiled a sardonic smile. “I would like to know who paid for it.”
ON A BRIEF RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES, I spent a day at the Beinecke Library in New Haven. There I found the Olga Rudge Papers filed in 208 boxes, taking up 108 feet of shelf space. I read dozens of letters and other documents, each providing a fragmented glimpse into the world of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge.
One letter was of particular, if ironic, interest. It was from Mary in Brunnenburg to Olga in Venice, in August 1959. Disciples and scholars had been coming to the castle and foraging through Pound’s papers like “hogs after truffles.” Mary was growing weary of it and wrote to her mother, “Have re-read The Aspern Papers last night, God I have a mind to make a big bonfire and burn up every single scrap of paper.”
Nearly thirty years later, on February 24, 1988, Mary again wrote to Olga from Brunnenburg:
Dearest Mother,
You asked me to “put it in writing.” Time is precious, hence briefly: DEfund your “Foundation” and make sure that the only place we can call home will be kept up by one daughter, two grandchildren, four great-grandsons of whom you carry photographs around. If you want to entrust the “technicalities” to Walter, I am sure he’ll be ready to assume responsibility. At present you are tending the fire in a place that does not belong to you.
With love,
Mary
Mary
My most curious discovery at the Beinecke, however, was not something I read, but something I was not permitted to read. All but one of the 208 boxes of the Olga Rudge Papers were available for perusal. One box, number 156, was off-limits, “restricted” until the year 2016. Box 156 contained the papers of the Ezra Pound Foundation.
I would like to have asked Jane Rylands what the sealed box contained and why it was sealed. There were a number of other questions I would have put to her as well, but since Philip had warned me that he would view even the submission of written questions as an “invasion,” I did not. Instead I called the Beinecke’s director, Ralph Franklin, and asked him why this box, and only this box, was sealed.
“That was one of the conditions upon which the Ezra Pound Foundation agreed to the sale.”
“Why the year 2016, which is twenty-six years after the deal was signed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you pay Jane Rylands any money?” I asked.
“We never dealt with Jane Rylands directly,” he said. “We dealt with the Ezra Pound Foundation. There were two competing parties, both claiming ownership of Olga Rudge’s papers: Olga Rudge on the one hand and the Ezra Pound Foundation on the other. We bought out both claims and thereby bought the papers.”
“At that point, of course,” I said, “the foundation consisted only of Jane Rylands and a lawyer in Cleveland. Shortly after making the deal with Yale, they dissolved the foundation. What happened to the money?”
“I don’t know what the foundation did with the money it was paid.”
“Would that information be revealed in the box that’s sealed until 2016?”
“Even I don’t know what’s in the box,” he said.
UPON MY RETURN TO VENICE, I went directly to Calle Querini and knocked on the door of the Reverend and Mrs. James Harkins. Reverend Harkins greeted me warmly and handed me the key to the house next door. Mary had left it for me. I had made arrangements to rent the Hidden Nest for the next six weeks. The interior had been renovated recently, Mary said, and no longer had any of her parents’ effects in it, but the idea of seeing Venice from the perspective of the Hidden Nest, however briefly, appealed to me.
“Don’t forget,” said Reverend Jim, “we generally sit down to cocktails at five-thirty!”
I thanked him and walked next door, turned the key in the lock, and opened the door.
The house was sixteen feet square, broom clean, and spare of furniture. Its white walls had been freshly painted. On the ground floor, where Olga’s papers had once been stored in trunks and where, before he lapsed into silence, Ezra Pound read his poetry aloud to friends, there was now a dining room table, four chairs, and a small kitchen behind sliding doors. Two windows on either side of an open fireplace looked out on the Cipriani garden in back and, on the far side of the garden, the high brick wall of the old Customs warehouse. A framed poster from a 1920s concert, featuring Olga Rudge and George Antheil, hung on the wall. But there were no books or bookshelves and no mural.
Up a flight of wooden stairs, the second floor, once Olga’s bedroom, was furnished now with a table and two chairs.
On the third floor, which had been Pound’s studio, there was a bed and a bathroom. A simple wooden writing table had been built into the stair rail in front of the window.
An object on the table caught my eye. It was a book, the only book in the house: a paperback copy of
The Aspern Papers.
I turned to the title page and read the inscription: “May the ‘hidden nest’ inspire an equal masterpiece—M de R.”
The Aspern Papers.
I turned to the title page and read the inscription: “May the ‘hidden nest’ inspire an equal masterpiece—M de R.”
{10}
FOR A COUPLE OF BUCKS
YOU’RE SURPRISED?” Ludovico De Luigi raised an eyebrow and peered at me, greatly amused at my response to the day’s news. We were sitting at an outdoor café in Campo San Barnaba, and the newspaper on the table in front of us bore a headline that contained the word “arson.” The experts looking into the Fenice fire had changed their minds. Back in February, they had decided the fire had been caused by a combination of accident and negligence. Now it was June, and they had come to the conclusion it was arson.
“Why shouldn’t I be surprised?” I said. “Months ago they ruled out arson with ‘near-mathematical certainty.’ Have you been sure all along it was arson?”
“No, and I’m not even so sure now,” said De Luigi. “But it was inevitable that someone would be accused of arson. I knew it would happen as soon as Casson said he was going to prosecute a lot of very important people for criminal negligence—the mayor, the general manager of the Fenice, the secretary-general of the Fenice, the chief engineer of Venice. These are men of means. They’ve hired the best defense lawyers in Italy. These lawyers know they can’t prove their clients weren’t negligent, because they
were
negligent. But if they can persuade the court that it was a case of arson, and if an arsonist can be found and convicted, then all charges of negligence are automatically dropped, by law.”
were
negligent. But if they can persuade the court that it was a case of arson, and if an arsonist can be found and convicted, then all charges of negligence are automatically dropped, by law.”
“Are you suggesting that the experts have been pressured into changing their minds?”
De Luigi shrugged. “It’s never that blatant. It’s more subtle than that.”
I was about to ask De Luigi what kind of subtlety he had in mind when a woman sitting at the table next to us gasped. A seagull had landed in the midst of a cluster of pigeons pecking at bread crumbs and had seized one of the pigeons in its beak. The pigeon was flapping and wriggling, trying to free itself from the much bigger seagull. In short order, the seagull had the pigeon pinned to the pavement and was jabbing its chest with its long, sharp beak. After a few moments, it pulled out a bloody morsel the size of a large grape—the pigeon’s heart, no doubt—juggled it in its beak, and swallowed it.
The seagull left the dead pigeon lying on the paving stones and strutted toward the edge of the San Barnaba Canal (toward the very spot, as it happened, where many years earlier Katharine Hepburn fell backward into the canal in
Summertime
). The other pigeons, having flown away in panic during the attack, fluttered back and resumed pecking at the bread crumbs only a few feet from the seagull, sensing perhaps that its appetite had been satisfied. The woman at the next table shuddered and turned away. De Luigi chuckled silently.
Summertime
). The other pigeons, having flown away in panic during the attack, fluttered back and resumed pecking at the bread crumbs only a few feet from the seagull, sensing perhaps that its appetite had been satisfied. The woman at the next table shuddered and turned away. De Luigi chuckled silently.
“There you have it,” he said, “acted out before your eyes. An allegory: the strong versus the weak. It’s always the same. The powerful always win, and the weak always come back to be victims all over again.” He laughed.
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