Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972

<p>zra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).</p>

<p>Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold.</p>

<p>Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound blamed the war on finance capitalism, which he called "usury". He moved to Italy in 1924 and through the 1930s and 1940s promoted an economic theory known as social credit, wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, and expressed support for Adolf Hitler. During World War II and the Holocaust in Italy, he made hundreds of paid radio broadcasts for the Italian government, including in German-occupied Italy, attacking the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in an outdoor steel cage. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.</p>

<p>While in custody in Italy, Pound began work on sections of The Cantos that were published as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949 by the Library of Congress, causing enormous controversy. After a campaign by his fellow writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958 and lived in Italy until his death in 1972. His political views have ensured that his life and work remain controversial.</p>

<p>Pound was born in 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound (1858–1942) and Isabel Weston (1860–1948), who married in 1884. Homer had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the General Land Office. Pound's grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, a Republican Congressman and the 10th Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, had secured him the appointment. Homer had previously worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business.</p>

<p>Both sides of Pound's family emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his father's side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker who arrived from England around 1650. Ezra's paternal grandmother, Susan Angevine Loomis, married Thaddeus Coleman Pound. On his mother's side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, a Puritan who emigrated to Boston on the Lion in 1632. Captain Joseph Wadsworth helped to write the Connecticut constitution. The Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York; Harding Weston and Mary Parker were Pound's maternal grandparents. After serving in the military, Harding remained unemployed, so his brother Ezra Weston and Ezra's wife, Frances Amelia Wessells Freer (Aunt Frank), helped to look after Isabel, Pound's mother.</p>

<p>Isabel Pound was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887 when he was 18 months old. Her husband followed and found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. After a move to 417 Walnut Street in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, the family bought a six-bedroom house in 1893 at 166 Fernbrook Avenue, Wyncote. Pound's education began in dame schools: Miss Elliott's school in Jenkintown in 1892 and the Heathcock family's Chelten Hills School in Wyncote in 1893.[5] Known as "Ra" (pronounced "Ray"), he attended Wyncote Public School from September 1894.[12] His first publication was on 7 November 1896 in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle ("by E. L. Pound, Wyncote, aged 11 years"), a limerick about William Jennings Bryan, who had just lost the 1896 presidential election.[b]

In 1897, aged 12, he transferred to Cheltenham Military Academy (CMA), where he wore an American Civil War-style uniform and was taught drilling and how to shoot.[14] The following year he made his first trip overseas, a three-month tour with his mother and Aunt Frank, who took him to England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and Morocco.[15] He attended CMA until 1900, at times as a boarder, but it seems he did not graduate.[16][c]

In 1901 Pound was admitted, aged 15, to the University of Pennsylvania's College of Liberal Arts.[18] Years later he said his aim was to avoid drill at the military academy.[19] His one distinction in first year was in geometry,[20] but otherwise his grades were mostly poor, including in Latin, his major; he achieved a B in English composition and a pass in English literature.[21] In his second year he switched from the degree course to "non-degree special student status", he said "to avoid irrelevant subjects".[22][d] He was not elected to a fraternity at Penn, but it seemed not to bother him.[24]

His parents and Aunt Frank took him on another three-month European tour in 1902, and the following year he transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of his grades.[25] Again he was not invited to join a fraternity, but this time he had hoped to do so, according to letters home, because he wanted to live in a fraternity house, and by April 1904 he regarded the move as a mistake.[26] Signed up for the Latin–Scientific course, he appears to have avoided some classes; his transcript is short of credits.[25] He studied the Provençal dialect and read Dante and Anglo-Saxon poetry, including Beowulf and The Seafarer.[27]

After graduating from Hamilton in 1905 with a PhB, he returned to Penn, where he fell in love with Hilda Doolittle, then at Bryn Mawr College, and hand-bound 25 of his poems for her, calling it Hilda's Book. (Doolittle became a poet herself, renamed H.D. by Pound.)[28] After receiving his MA in Romance languages in 1906, he registered to write a PhD thesis on the jesters in Lope de Vega's plays; a two-year Harrison fellowship covered his tuition and a $500 grant, with which he sailed again to Europe.[29] He spent three weeks in Madrid in various libraries, including in the Royal Library. On 31 May 1906 he was standing outside the palace during the attempted assassination of King Alfonso and left the city for fear of being mistaken for an anarchist.[30] After Spain he visited Paris and London, returning to the United States in July 1906.[31] His first essay, "Raphaelite Latin", was published in the Book News Monthly that September.[32] He took courses in English in 1907, where he fell out with just about everyone, including the department head, Felix Schelling, with silly remarks during lectures and by winding an enormous tin watch very slowly while Schelling spoke.[33] In the spring of 1907 he learned that his fellowship would not be renewed.[34] Schelling told him he was wasting everyone's time, and he left without finishing his doctorate.[35]

From September 1907 Pound taught French and Spanish at Wabash College,[38] a Presbyterian college with 345 students in Crawfordsville, Indiana,[39] which he called "the sixth circle of hell".[40] One former student remembered him as a breath of fresh air; another said he was "exhibitionist, egotistic, self-centered and self-indulgent".[41]

He was dismissed after a few months. Smoking was forbidden, but he would smoke cigarillos in his room in the same corridor as the president's office.[42] He was asked to leave the college in January 1908 when his landladies, Ida and Belle Hall, found a woman in his room.[43] Shocked at having been fired,[44] he left for Europe soon after, sailing from New York in March on the RMS Slavonia.[45]

Pound arrived in Gibraltar on 23 March 1908, where he earned $15 a day working as a guide for an American family there and in Spain.[46] After stops in Seville, Grenada, and Genoa, by the end of April he was in Venice, living over a bakery near the San Vio bridge.[47] In the summer he decided to self-publish his first collection of 44 poems in the 72-page A Lume Spento ("With Tapers Quenched"), 150 copies of which were printed in July 1908.[48] The title is from the third canto of Dante's Purgatorio, alluding to the death of Manfred, King of Sicily. Pound dedicated the book to the Philadelphia artist William Brooke Smith, a friend from university who had recently died of tuberculosis.[49]

In "Canto LXXVI" (part of The Pisan Cantos), he records that he considered throwing the proofs into the Grand Canal, abandoning the book and poetry altogether: "by the soap-smooth stone posts where San Vio / meets with il Canal Grande / between Salviati and the house that was of Don Carlos / shd/I chuck the lot into the tide-water? / le bozze "A Lume Spento"/ / and by the column of Todero / shd/I shift to the other side / or wait 24 hours".[50]

In August 1908 Pound moved to London, carrying 60 copies of A Lume Spento.[51] English poets such as Maurice Hewlett, Rudyard Kipling, and Alfred Tennyson had made a particular kind of Victorian verse—stirring, pompous, and propagandistic—popular. According to modernist scholar James Knapp, Pound rejected the idea of poetry as "versified moral essay"; he wanted to focus on the individual experience, the concrete rather than the abstract.[52]

Pound at first stayed in a boarding house at 8 Duchess Street, near the British Museum Reading Room; he had met the landlady during his travels in Europe in 1906.[53] He soon moved to Islington (cheaper at 12s 6d a week board and lodging), but his father sent him £4 and he was able to move back into central London, to 48 Langham Street, near Great Titchfield Street.[54] The house sat across an alley from the Yorkshire Grey pub, which made an appearance in "Canto LXXX" (The Pisan Cantos), "concerning the landlady's doings / with a lodger unnamed / az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub".[55]

At a literary salon in 1909, Pound met the novelist Olivia Shakespear[64] and later at the Shakespears' home at 12 Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, was introduced to her daughter, Dorothy, who became Pound's wife in 1914.[65] The critic Iris Barry described her as "carrying herself delicately with the air, always, of a young Victorian lady out skating, and a profile as clear and lovely as that of a porcelain Kuan-yin".[66] "Listen to it—Ezra! Ezra!—And a third time—Ezra!", Dorothy wrote in her diary on 16 February 1909.[67]

Pound mixed with the cream of London's literary circle, including Maurice Hewlett, Laurence Binyon, Frederic Manning, Ernest Rhys, May Sinclair, Ellen Terry, George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint.[68] Through the Shakespears, he was introduced to the poet W. B. Yeats, Olivia Shakespear's former lover. He had already sent Yeats a copy of A Lume Spento, and Yeats had apparently found it "charming".[69] Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 February 1909: "Am by way of falling into the crowd that does things here. London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy."[70] According to Richard Aldington, London found Pound amusing. The newspapers interviewed him,[71] and he was mentioned in Punch magazine, which on 23 June 1909 described "Mr. Ezekiel Ton" as "the most remarkable thing in poetry since Robert Browning ... [blending] the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy".[72]

Ezra and Dorothy were married on 20 April 1914 at St Mary Abbots in Kensington,[130] the Shakespears' parish church, despite opposition from her parents, who worried about Ezra's income. His concession to marry in church had helped. Dorothy's annual income was £50, with another £150 from her family,[131] and Ezra's was £200.[132] Her father, Henry Hope Shakespear, had him prepare a financial statement in 1911, which showed that his main source of income was his father.[133] After the wedding the couple moved into an apartment with no bathroom at 5 Holland Place Chambers, Kensington, next door to the newly wed H.D. and Aldington.[131] This arrangement did not last. H.D. had been alarmed to find Ezra looking for a place to live outside the apartment building the day before his wedding. Once Dorothy and Ezra had moved into the building, Ezra would arrive unannounced at H.D.'s to discuss his writing, a habit that upset her, in part because his writing touched on private aspects of their relationship. She and Aldington decided to move several miles away to Hampstead.[134]

The Pounds settled in Paris around April 1921 and in December moved to an inexpensive ground-floor apartment at 70 bis Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.[189] Pound became friendly with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Tristan Tzara, and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as well as Basil Bunting.[190] He was introduced to the American writer Gertude Stein, who was living in Paris. She wrote years later that she liked him but did not find him amusing; he was "a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not".[191]

Pound's collection Poems 1918–1921 was published in New York by Boni and Liveright in 1921. In December that year Ernest Hemingway, then aged 22, moved to Paris with his wife, Hadley Richardson, and letters of introduction from Sherwood Anderson.[192] In February 1922 the Hemingways visited the Pounds for tea.[193] Although Pound was 14 years older, the men became friends; Hemingway assumed the status of pupil and asked Pound to edit his short stories.[194] Pound introduced him to his contacts, including Lewis, Ford, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, and Derek Patmore, while Hemingway tried to teach Pound to box.[195] Unlike Hemingway, Pound was not a drinker and preferred to spend his time in salons[196] or building furniture for his apartment and bookshelves for Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookstore.[197]

photograph
Olga Rudge, 1920
Eliot sent Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land in 1922. Pound edited it with comments like "make up yr. mind",[197] and reduced it by about half. Eliot wrote in 1946: "I should like to think that the manuscript, with the suppressed passages, had disappeared irrecoverably; yet, on the other hand, I should wish the blue pencilling on it to be preserved as irrefutable evidence of Pound's critical genius."[198] His dedication in The Waste Land was "For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro" (the "better craftsman"), from Canto 26 of Dante's Purgatorio.[199]

Meeting Olga Rudge
Pound was 36 when he met the 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge in Paris in the summer of 1922.[200] They were introduced at a salon hosted by the American heiress Natalie Barney at her 300-year-old house at 20 Rue Jacob, near the Boulevard Saint-Germain.[201] The two moved in different social circles: Rudge was the daughter of a wealthy Youngstown, Ohio, steel family, living in her mother's Parisian apartment on the Right Bank, socializing with aristocrats, while Pound's friends were mostly impoverished writers of the Left Bank.[202]

The Pounds were unhappy in Paris. Dorothy complained about the winters and Ezra's health was poor.[220] At one dinner in the Place de l'Odéon, a Surrealist guest high on drugs had tried to stab Pound in the back; Robert McAlmon had wrestled with the attacker, and the guests had managed to leave before the police arrived.[221] For Pound the event underlined that their time in France was over.[222] They decided to move to a quieter place, leaving in October 1924 for the seaside town of Rapallo in northern Italy.[223] Hemingway wrote in a letter that Pound had "indulged in a small nervous breakdown" during the packing, leading to two days at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly.[224] During this period the Pounds lived on Dorothy's income, supplemented by dividends from stock she had invested in.[225]


Olga Rudge's home in Venice, from 1928, at Calle Querini 252. The plaque can be translated as: Without ever stopping loving Venice, Ezra Pound, titan of poetry, lived in this house for half a century.
Pregnant by Pound, Olga Rudge followed the couple to Italy, and in July 1925 she gave birth to a daughter, Maria, in a hospital in Brixen. Rudge and Pound placed the baby with a German-speaking peasant woman in Gais, South Tyrol, whose own child had died and who agreed to raise Maria for 200 lire a month.[226] Pound reportedly believed that artists ought not to have children, because in his view motherhood ruined women. According to Hadley Richardson, he took her aside before she and Hemingway left Paris for Toronto to have their child, telling her: "Well, I might as well say goodbye to you here and now because [the baby] is going to change you completely."[227]

At the end of December 1925 Dorothy went on holiday to Egypt, returning on 1 March,[228] and in May the Pounds and Olga Rudge left Rapallo for Paris to attend a semi-private concert performance at the Salle Pleyel of Le Testament de Villon, a one-act opera Pound had composed ("nearly tuneless", according to Carpenter) with the musicians Agnes Bedford and George Antheil.[229][u] Pound had hired two singers for the performance; Rudge was on violin, Pound played percussion, and Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway were in the audience.[231]

The couple stayed on in Paris after the performance; Dorothy was pregnant and wanted the baby to be born at the American hospital. Hemingway accompanied her there in a taxi for the birth of a son, Omar Pound, on 10 September 1926.[232] (Ezra was an admirer of Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam.)[233] Ezra signed the birth certificate the following day at Neuilly town hall and wrote to his father, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well."[232] He ended up in the American hospital himself for tests and, he told Olga, a "small operation".[234] Dorothy took Omar to England, where she stayed for a year and thereafter visited him every summer. He was sent to live at first in Felpham, Sussex, with a former superintendent of Norland College, which trains nannies,[235] and later became a boarder at Charterhouse.[236] When Dorothy was in England with Omar during the summers, Ezra would spend the time with Olga.[237] Olga's father helped her buy a house in Venice in 1928,[238] and from 1930 she also rented the top floor of a house in Sant'Ambrogio, Caso 60, near the Pounds in Rapallo.[239]

In May 1944 the German military, trying to secure the coast against the Allies, forced the Pounds to evacuate their seafront apartment in Rapallo. From then until the end of the war, the couple lived with Rudge in her home above Rapallo at Sant' Ambrogio.[315] There were food shortages, no coffee, and no newspapers, telephones, or letters.[316] According to Rudge, Ezra and Dorothy would spend their nights listening to the BBC.[317] In addition to the radio scripts, Pound was writing for the newspaper Il Popolo di Alessandria. He wanted to write for the more reputable Corriere della Sera in Milan, but the editor regarded his Italian as "incomprehensible".[318]

Photograph of a man
Taken at the Disciplinary Training Center
Photograph of steel cages
Pound spent three weeks in the reinforced cage on the far left.[319]
Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot by Italian partisans on 28 April 1945. Their bodies were displayed in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, abused by the crowd, then left hanging upside down.[320] "Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano / by the heels at Milano".[321] On 3 May armed partisans arrived at Rudge's home to find Pound alone. He picked up the Confucian text Four Books and a Chinese–English dictionary and was taken to their headquarters in Zoagli,[322] then at his request to the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps headquarters in Genoa, where he was interrogated by FBI agent Frank L. Amprin.[323]

Pound asked to send a cable to President Truman to help negotiate a "just peace" with Japan. He wanted to make a final broadcast called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he would recommend not only peace with Japan, but American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script was forwarded to J. Edgar Hoover.[324] A few days later Amprin removed over 7,000 letters, articles and other documents from Rudge's home as evidence.[325] On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, Pound gave the Americans a further statement:

photograph
Toilet paper showing start of Canto LXXIV[326]
I am not anti-Semitic, and I distinguish between the Jewish usurer and the Jew who does an honest day's work for a living.

Hitler and Mussolini were simple men from the country. I think that Hitler was a Saint, and wanted nothing for himself. I think that he was fooled into anti-Semitism and it ruined him. That was his mistake. When you see the "mess" that Italy gets into by bumping off Mussolini, you will see why someone could believe in some of his efforts.[327]

Later that day he told an American reporter, Edd Johnson, that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc ... Like many martyrs, he held extreme views". Mussolini was "a very human, imperfect character who lost his head".[328] On 24 May he was transferred to the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa, where he was placed in one of the camp's 6-by-6-foot (1.8 by 1.8 m) outdoor steel cages, with tar paper covers, lit up at night by floodlights. Engineers reinforced his cage the night before he arrived in case fascist sympathizers tried to break him out.[329]

Pound lived in isolation in the heat, sleeping on the concrete, denied exercise and communication, apart from daily access to the chaplain.[330] After three weeks, he stopped eating.[329] He recorded what seemed to be a breakdown in "Canto LXXX", where Odysseus is saved from drowning by Leucothea: "hast'ou swum in a sea of air strip / through an aeon of nothingness, / when the raft broke and the waters went over me".[331] Medical staff moved him out of the cage the following week. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by psychiatrists, after which he was transferred to his own tent.[332] He began to write, drafting what became known as The Pisan Cantos.[333] The existence of two sheets of toilet paper showing the first ten lines of "Canto LXXIV" in pencil suggests he started it while in the cage.[334]

Pound arrived back in Washington, D.C. on 18 November 1945, two days before the start of the Nuremberg trials.[335] Lt. Col. P. V. Holder, one of the escorting officers, wrote in an affidavit that Pound was "an intellectual 'crackpot'" who intended to conduct his own defense.[336] Dorothy would not allow it; Pound wrote in a letter: "Tell Omar I favour a defender who has written a life of J. Adams and translated Confucius. Otherwise how CAN he know what it is about?"[337]

He was arraigned on 27 November on charges of treason,[ad] and on 4 December he was placed in a locked room in the psychiatric ward of Gallinger Hospital.[339] Three court-appointed psychiatrists, including Winfred Overholser, superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, decided that he was mentally unfit to stand trial. They found him "abnormally grandiose ... expansive and exuberant in manner, exhibiting pressure of speech, discursiveness and distractibility."[340] A fourth psychiatrist appointed by Pound's lawyer initially thought he was a psychopath, which would have made him fit to stand trial.[341]

On 21 December 1945, as case no. 58,102, he was transferred to Howard Hall, St. Elizabeths' maximum security ward, where he was held in a single cell with peepholes.[342] Visitors were admitted to the waiting room for 15 minutes at a time, while patients wandered around screaming.[343] A hearing on 13 February 1946 concluded that he was of "unsound mind"; he shouted in court: "I never did believe in Fascism, God damn it; I am opposed to Fascism."[344] Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell, requested his release at a hearing in January 1947.[345] As a compromise, Overholser moved him to the more comfortable Cedar Ward on the third floor of the east wing of St. Elizabeths' Center Building.[346] In early 1948 he was moved again, this time to a larger room in Chestnut Ward.[347]

Tytell writes that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward.[348] At last provided for, he was allowed to read, write, and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day.[349] (In October 1946 Dorothy had been placed in charge of his "person and property".)[350] His room had a typewriter, floor-to-ceiling book shelves, and bits of paper hanging on string from the ceiling with ideas for The Cantos.[348] He had turned a small alcove on the ward into his living room, where he entertained friends and literary figures.[349][ae] It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released.[352]

During a case conference at St. Elizabeths on 28 January 1946, six psychiatrists had concluded that Pound suffered from psychopathic personality disorder but was not psychotic. Present during the meeting, he decided to lie on the floor while the psychiatrists interviewed him.[365] In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association published its first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-1), and St. Elizabeths began diagnosing patients according to its definitions. In July 1953 a psychiatrist added to Pound's notes that he probably suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. The main feature of Pound's personality, he wrote, was his "profound, incredible, over-weaning (sic) narcissism". A personality disorder, unlike conditions that give rise to psychosis, is not regarded as a mental illness, and the diagnosis would have made Pound fit to stand trial. On 31 May 1955, at the request of the hospital's superintendent Winfred Overholser, the diagnosis was changed to "psychotic disorder, undifferentiated", which is classified as mental illness.[366] In 1966, after his release from St. Elizabeths, Pound was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[367]

Shortly before his death in 1972, an American Academy of Arts and Sciences committee, which included his publisher James Laughlin, proposed that Pound be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal. After a storm of protest, the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9.[428] In the foreword of a Faber & Faber volume of his prose, he wrote in July: "In sentences referring to groups or races 'they' should be used with great care. re USURY: / I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause. / The cause is AVARICE."[429]

On his 87th birthday, on 30 October 1972, he was too weak to leave his bedroom. The next night he was admitted to the San Giovanni e Paolo Civil Hospital in Venice, where he died in his sleep on 1 November of "sudden blockage of the intestine".[430] Alerted by telegram, Dorothy Pound, who was living in a care home near Cambridge, England, requested a Protestant funeral in Venice. Telegrams were sent via American embassies in Rome and London, and the consulate in Milan, but Rudge would not change the plans she had already made for the morning of 3 November. Omar Pound flew to Venice as soon as he could, with Peter du Sautoy of Faber & Faber, but he arrived too late.[431] Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed Pound's body to Venice's municipal cemetery, Isola di San Michele, where after a Protestant service he was buried, near Diaghilev and Stravinsky, with other non-Italian Christians.[432] According to Hugh Kenner, Pound had wanted to be buried in Idaho with his bust by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska on his grave.[433] Dorothy Pound died in England the following year, aged 87. Olga Rudge died in 1996, aged 100, and was buried next to Pound.[422]