IN MEMORIAM      
____________

Anne Conover (Carson) 1937-2018

By Walter Baumann

Just as well our friendship started before email replaced letters. She had a wonderful “Handschrift,” as I realized again when looking through the sizable folder with our correspondence. The year that stands out is 1995. Both Anne and her second husband, Tom Carson, were at the Brantôme Pound conference and I took up their invitation to visit them at 3323 Nebraska Avenue in Washington D.C., their marvellous house, formerly a manse. The restaurant at which we had dinner one night was high up in a building hardly a stone’s throw from the White House. No wonder it was closed after 9-11.

Tom had made arrangements with E. Fuller Torrey for us to be admitted to St. Elizabeths. I was even given a photographer’s permit. Unfortunately, one of the worst migraines I ever had prevented me from taking decent pictures, but—apart from the name “Ezra Pound” on a white card beside the door to what was his room, at the time the dumping ground of clothes collected for the poor heaped up in black plastic bags—there was no other trace left of the twelve and a half years Pound spent in St. Liz.

Anne Conover was a graduate of Stanford University. She earned a BA in English Literature and an MA in Latin American Studies. Fluent in Spanish, she lived in Latin America and was Editor and Writer in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress for 8 years (1968-76). She also worked for the U.S. Information Agency for 14 years (1976-1990), before she became a free-lancer. It is as a very gifted biographer she will be remembered. In 1989, she published Caresse Crosby: From Black Sunto Roccasinibaldo and in 2001 Yale University Press brought out her Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: “What Thou Lovest Well . . .,” which was widely reviewed and generally praised. In fact, the book was a nominee for the Best Scholarly Biography of the Year. Readers of Paideumaand the volumes containing papers from the Pound conferences are privileged to be able to study early or different versions of her Rudge/Pound story. 

In summer 2015, her poor health made her miss the 2015 Brunnenburg conference, but she was luckily fit enough to attend the Penn conference last summer. She had sent in a proposal for a paper on Pound and Eliot, but I persuaded her to switch to one for which I thought she was far better equipped, a paper on Pound and Caresse Crosby. If the Guardian reviewer of the very recent The Heart is a Burial Ground by Tamara Colchester, her great-grand-daughter, is representative of literary journalism in his ignorance of Crosby, he has no excuse, since Anne’s fine book is still available, as it has been reissued several times.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES RELATING TO EZRA POUND 1993-2015

Bibliography by Archie Henderson

Carson, Anne Conover 

“Her Name Was Courage: Olga Rudge, Pound’s Muse and the ‘Circe/Aphrodite’ of The Cantos.” Ezra Pound: Nature and Myth. Ed. William Pratt.  Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 2002. 25-40.

 “Deliverance! Ezra Pound’s Last Days.” Ezra Pound, Ends and Beginnings: Essays and Poems from the Ezra Pound International Conference Venice, 2007. Eds. John Gery and William Pratt. New York: AMS Press, 2011. 43-52.

 “Ezra Pound and the Crosby Continental Editions.” Ezra Pound and Europe. Ed Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior.  Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.  105-18.

 “Ezra Pound, Confucius, and the Fenellosa [Fenollosa] Notebooks: ‘The Very Real Principle of Modernism.’” Ezra Pound and London. New Perspectives. Ed. Walter Baumann and William Pratt.  New York: AMS Press, 2015. 43-52.

 “The Young Olga.” Paideuma 26.1 (Spring 1997): 47-67.

 “‘Beyond civic order, l’AMOR’: Olga, Ezra, and Benito Mussolini.”  ROMA/AMOR: Ezra Pound, Rome, and Love. Eds. William Pratt and Caterina Ricciardi. New York: AMS Press, 2013. 37-50.

 “Her Name Was Courage: Olga Rudge, Pound’s Muse and the ‘Circe/Aphrodite’ of the Cantos.”  Paideuma 24.1 (Spring 1995): 7-23.

Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: “What Thou Lovest Well . . .” New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.

REVIEWS OF OLGA RUDGE & EZRA POUND: “WHAT THOU LOVEST WELL . . .”  

Anon.  Publishers Weekly (Sept. 10, 2001).

Bacigalupo, Massimo. Yale Review 91.2 (2003): 158-62.

Bate, Jonathan. Sunday Telegraph (London, England) (February 3, 2002): 16.

Davenport, Guy. Harper’s Magazine304.1820 (Jan. 2002) 63.

Dirda, Michael.  Washington Post Book World (December 2, 2001): 15.

Harmon, William. “Pound and the Other One.”  Sewanee Review 111.3 (Summer 2003): lxxiv-lxxvi.

Marsh, Alec, and Ben Lockerd.  “Pound and Eliot.” American Literary Scholarship 2001. 155-157.

Peck, John. “Whom Thou Lovest Well.”  PN Review 29.1 [no. 147] (September-October 2002): 67.

Smith, Dinitia.  “Handmaiden to an Egotist: The Years With Ezra Pound.”  New York Times (Feb. 15, 2002): Section E 50.

Taglienti, Paolina.  Library Journal 126.18 (November 2001): 90.

Wilmer, Clive. “New subtlety of eyes.”  Times Literary Supplement 5169 (Apr. 26, 2002): 6.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WALTER BAUMANN

Baumann, Walter.  Photographs. The 15th Ezra Pound Conference, “Nature and Myth in Ezra Pound,” Rapallo, Italy, July 13-16, 1993.  Paideuma 22.3 (Winter 1993): 125-136.

Baumann, Walter.  Photo Gallery of the Sixteenth Ezra Pound Conference July 18th-21st, 1995, Brantôme, France. Paideuma 27.2 & 3 (Fall & Winter 1998): 239-252.