The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  “Of course, but it was a financial loss for us. The open market would have fetched ten times what Yale paid for the papers.”

  Mary suddenly realized she had let slip a note of resentment and quickly reversed herself, as if pulling her hand back after touching a hot skillet. “But, really, there’s no rogue in this play. My mother simply changed her mind. Philip and Jane meant well.”

  “As helpful as they were to you,” I said, “do you think at some point Jane and Philip might have gone just a little bit too far?”

  “When it was over, my mother said to me, ‘Oh, these people. Now I see why I was invited to lunch.’”

  This time Mary let the negative comment stand.

  “Was there a moment when you began to feel that things were not quite right?”

  Mary hesitated for a moment. “Well, yes. Jane Rylands was starting to take control of events. A lot of little things made me wonder. There was a pamphlet printed. A lecture being given. Copyright materials not properly handled.”

  “Culminating,” I said, “with a house being given away. Papers sold without your knowledge.”

  “Well, yes. For us the house is a family shrine.”

  “Would you mind if I came up to Brunnenburg to talk to you for an hour or so?”

  “Tell me,” said Mary, “why does all this interest you?”

  “To be perfectly honest,” I said, “I was struck by the similarity between what happened to your mother and the story in The Aspern Papers. Are you familiar with that novel?”

  “We’ve been living with The Aspern Papers for forty years,” she said.

  BEFORE SETTING OUT FOR BRUNNENBURG, I read Mary de Rachewiltz’s 1971 autobiography, entitled Discretions, a play on the title of her father’s early autobiography, Indiscretions. Apart from being a surprisingly moving story, the book introduced me to two new elements in the saga of the Ezra Pound Foundation: the strained relationship between Mary and her mother, and Mary’s near-obsessive adoration of her father.

  Because Mary’s first ten years had been spent with a foster family on a farm in the South Tyrol, just a few miles from the border with Austria, she grew up milking cows, shoveling dung, and speaking a Tyrolean dialect of German. She acquired habits learned from her foster father: spitting a great distance and blowing her nose with her thumb.

  Olga was appalled to discover that her daughter was growing up as a peasant with dirty fingernails, primitive table manners, and teeth that were brushed only occasionally. Mary resisted Olga’s attempts to reshape her into a well-mannered, sophisticated young lady. She felt like a doll in the fashionably short dresses Olga wanted her to wear. She was bored by a violin Olga gave her and slammed it against the chicken coop, confiding in her memoir that she would rather have had a zither or a mouth organ. Mary was intimidated by Olga’s insistence that she learn Italian and speak it all the time when she was in Venice. “Her stern attitude handicapped me more than the language barrier had done,” Mary wrote. There were times when Olga was “majestic and beautiful like a queen towards me; soft and willowy, smiling like a fairy towards [my father].” And when Olga played the violin, “I saw no shade of darkness, no resentment. . . . I [had] a glimpse of her great beauty and my fear of her changed into a kind of veneration.” But as soon as the music stopped, Olga once more became distant, impenetrable, authoritarian.

  In her late teens, Mary learned all at once not only that she was illegitimate but that Olga had wanted a son. At that moment, she wrote, she felt the impossibility of ever winning her mother’s affection.

  Olga was deeply hurt by Discretions and did not speak to Mary for several years. Olga had a copy of the book, and Christopher Cooley noticed that it was heavily annotated. “Whenever the subject of the book came up,” he recalled, “she would grab it angrily from the shelf and start thumbing through it. ‘I’ve put this right,’ she’d say, ‘and I’ve put that right.’ And then she’d slam it back on the shelf.”

  Although the situation had improved over time, a geographical and emotional distance remained between the two women. The Rylands episode, whatever else it proved, made it clear, to Mary’s embarrassment, that she had ceded much of her mother’s care to Philip and Jane.

  Mary’s love of her father stood in contrast to her feelings toward her mother. “The image of my [father] always presented itself as a huge glowing sun at the end of a white road,” she wrote. When Pound took her to see the sights in Verona, his image dimmed the monuments in the background. Mary recalled how he tap-danced all the way home from a Ginger Rogers-Fred Astaire movie. And she remembered sitting in her room on the third floor of the Hidden Nest, listening for the sound of his return—first the tapping of his black malacca cane as he entered Calle Querini and then, as he approached number 252, the sound of a loud, prolonged “Meow,” answered by Olga’s “Meow” from her room on the second floor, after which Mary would run down two flights of stairs to greet him at the door.

  When she was fifteen, her father—the man who had given literary counsel to Yeats and Eliot—sent her a letter about learning how to write:

  CIAO CARA

  To learn to write, as when you learn tennis. Can’t always play a game, must practice strokes. Think; how was it different to go to the Lido to play tennis? I mean different from when one went to play in Siena?? Write that. Not to make a story but to make it clear.

  It will be very LONG. When one starts to write it is hard to fill a page. When one is older there is always so MUCH to write. THINK: the house in Venice is not like ANY OTHER house. Venice like no other city. Suppose Kit Kat or even an American needed to be told HOW to find the Venice house? How to recognize you and me going out of the door to go to the Lido. He gets off train, how does he find 252 Calle Q.?

  Describe us or describe Luigino arriving at ferrovia? has he money, have we, how do we go?

  A novelist could make a whole chapter getting protagonista from train to front door. Good writing would make it possible and even certain that Kit Kat could use the chapter to find the house. ciao.

  THINK about this quite a good deal before you try to write it out.

  While Mary was still in her mid-teens, Pound asked her to translate the Cantos into Italian, as an exercise. Thus began her lifelong study of her father’s work. “[T]he Cantos slowly became the one book I could not do without,” she wrote. “My ‘Bible,’ as friends have often teased me.” In the 1960s, when Yale bought a substantial collection of Pound’s papers, they created the Ezra Pound Archives and named Mary as curator. Once a year for twenty-five years, Mary spent a month at Yale organizing and annotating her father’s papers.

  Mary’s transformation from a dialect-speaking farm girl into a beautiful, refined, educated, multilingual adult was complete by the time she had reached her twenties. But her love of the mountains and farms of her childhood remained undiminished, and her home in the South Tyrol was, in effect, a return to her foster roots.

  The trip from Venice to Brunnenburg Castle took about three hours, first the drive to Merano, then up to the village of Tirolo by means of a funicular lift. I walked the final quarter-mile along “Ezra Pound Weg” toward Brunnenburg Castle, a vision out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales with turrets and crenellations. The castle clung to a steep hillside terraced with grapevines; it commanded a spectacular view of the valley and distant mountains. Mary lived in one of the castle’s two towers. Walter and his wife, Brigitte, lived in the other with their two sons. As I came through the gate, I noticed a cluster of American college students in a courtyard. They were attending one of the month-long, live-in seminars at which Mary lectured on the writings of Ezra Pound and Walter taught classes on medieval saints and heroes.

  I continued up a series of outdoor steps, at one point passing a replica of Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture of Pound’s head, set into a small garden. A few steps above that, I came face-to-face with Mary de Rachewiltz. She was tall and smiling; her blond hair was brushed back from her face, accentuating high cheekbones. There was a quiet
pride in her bearing: She was, after all, despite all the sadness in her life, the daughter of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.

  We sat down at a large table on a terrace, where a few moments later we were joined by Walter. He was dark-haired, angular, and dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans. He had just come from the vineyard, he said, where he had been netting the vines to keep the birds away. He put a bright red binder stuffed with papers on the table and started flipping through the pages. I saw letters, bank statements, legal documents, but they were all upside down from my perspective, and moving so quickly I could not make them out.

  “We’re not allowed to show anybody most of these,” Walter said. “But I can tell you about some of them. The whole story is right here.”

  Mary looked at the notebook and sighed. “There’s really no rogue in this play,” she said, just as she had done on the telephone. Before I could respond, Walter spoke up, saying with some impatience, “Jane Rylands took advantage of your grudge against your mother.”

  Mary said nothing.

  Turning to me, he continued, “The wheels were set in motion by my grandmother. She wanted to perpetuate the writings of Ezra Pound, but she never mentioned to us that she was giving her papers and her house to a foundation.

  “We were finally alerted when Liselotte Höhs and Joan FitzGerald called my mother from Venice and told her we should come down right away and find out what was going on. My father and I went to the office of the notary and read the contracts. We were quite surprised to see how much Olga had given away.

  “My father then went over to the municipal building and found that the Comune bureaucracy had not yet transferred ownership of the house, so we were able to have it put back in my grandmother’s name. But the sale of her papers was a fait accompli.

  “When we showed the contracts to my grandmother, she said, ‘I never saw this piece of paper. I never signed such a document.’

  “We noticed also that the contract for the sale of her papers said that she had already received the fifteen million lire, the equivalent of seven thousand dollars, and perhaps she did, but we’ve never been able to find any record of it. When we tried to have a meeting with Jane to discuss all of this, she became evasive. She didn’t come to appointments.”

  Walter flipped some more pages.

  “Here, for example,” he said. “My father and I had an appointment to meet Jane at her house one day, but when we arrived, she was not home. We found this note.” He held up a three-by-five card. “It says, ‘I am sorry you had to cross the ponte for nothing.’

  “My grandmother was ninety-two when all this happened,” Walter went on. The implication in his remark was that if Jane’s delaying tactics went on long enough, matters would resolve themselves biologically. Olga would die, and Jane would be in control. “The biggest joke,” said Walter, “is that my grandmother lived to be a hundred and one!”

  “No,” said Mary, “the biggest joke is that I got fired from Yale!”

  “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.”

  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, f
our 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.