City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

Author:John Berendt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781594200618
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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

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 American 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.

Word had it that Philip’s parents were less than enthusiastic about his marriage to Jane, who was ten years his senior.

When they arrived in Venice, Philip had long hair held back on the sides by two bobby pins, and Jane wore “frumpy” clothes and her hair in a bun.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.