The City of Falling Angels (29 page)
Read The City of Falling Angels Online
Authors: John Berendt
Tags: #History, #Social History, #Europe, #Italy
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. But 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.”
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.
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
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 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.
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. Philip was still writing his dissertation, which would take him the better part of twelve years to finish. Meanwhile Jane supported both of them by teaching at the American air base in Aviano, an hour north of Venice.
At first they knew no one in Venice, but Philip regularly attended St. George’s Church, then the focus of Anglo-American expatriate social life. There he met Sir Ashley Clarke, the former British ambassador to Italy who headed Venice in Peril, the British counterpart of Save Venice. Sir Ashley and Lady Clarke took a liking to the Rylandses, who in turn were attentive and helpful to the Clarkes. Philip became involved with Venice in Peril, and it was reported that he would eventually succeed Sir Ashley. The two collaborated on a small booklet commemorating the restoration of the Madonna dell’Orto Church. Before long, Jane and Philip underwent make-overs: Philip cut his hair respectably short, and Jane began to fashion her hair and clothes in a more up-to-date style.
As the bright new young couple in town, they were taken up by established expatriates, notably the sculptor Joan FitzGerald, who introduced them around. They met John Hohnsbeen, a friend of Peggy Guggenheim’s since the 1950s. Hohnsbeen in turn introduced them to Peggy, and almost immediately Philip and Jane began to ingratiate themselves. Jane bought Peggy dog food and various supplies at a discount from the PX in Aviano, walked Peggy’s dogs, volunteered for household chores. In short, they made themselves indispensable to Peggy.
John Hohnsbeen was at first relieved that Philip and Jane were being so helpful to Peggy; it lifted some of the burden from him. For years Hohnsbeen had come to Venice from Easter to November to stay with Peggy and act as the unpaid curator of her collection. After Peggy’s death, he continued his Venetian summers in a rented apartment. It had always been Hohnsbeen’s custom to spend most of the day at the Cipriani pool, which is where I found him having a spartan lunch and chatting with friends among the rich international set. Residents of Venice could, for a stiff fee, enjoy daily pool privileges all summer.
“I was a houseguest who sang for his supper,” said Hohnsbeen, whose white hair was combed straight across his tanned brow so that he resembled Pablo Picasso. “Peggy and I were sort of a couple. I’d owned a gallery in New York and knew most of the Old Guard of the New York art world. I would hang Peggy’s exhibition at the beginning of the season and take it down at the end, which would involve all sorts of unpleasant duties, like scraping the maggots off the back of the Max Ernst
Antipope
canvas, because it had been in the surrealist gallery, off the canal, which was very humid. The maggots loved the glue.
Antipope
canvas, because it had been in the surrealist gallery, off the canal, which was very humid. The maggots loved the glue.
“The first few years with Peggy were marvelous, but then her arteries began to harden, and it was awful. I’d come in late at night and navigate around the artwork—through the Calder, past the Giacometti matchstick people, whose arms got broken all the time but not by me, then turn right, dodging the Pevsner, and into the bedroom. I was with her when she had her first heart attack, and her face went all funny. After that, Peggy kept a fifteen-pound cowbell by her bed, and I’d leave my door open with the understanding that if she clanged, I would leap up and run to her assistance. It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.
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