Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Return to Brunnenburg

When I was at Harvard, Dr. de Rachewiltz --known as "Sizzo"-- was my Tutor (Harvard's word for 'studies director") in the Department of Folklore and Mythology. He has devoted his life to preserving the historical record of the traditions of the South Tyrol, recording the oral histories of the people of the region, documenting the traditional culture before it disappears.

When I first met Sizzo he was affiliated with the house I resided in, North House. He was a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature dining in the House, which is how we met. He invited me, my then-boyfriend and my boyfriend's then-best friend to spend a month at Brunnenburg in exchange for working on the museum project there. I helped to catalogue books, to dig a ditch to lay the foundation for a mill now placed on the site, all in contemplation of Brunnenburg's eventual opening as a museum. Schloss Tirol is the big museum in the area, so with Sizzo directing its day-to-day operations, Brunnenburg had to take a back seat since he assumed the directorship in 1991. Sizzo hopes that, in his retirement from Schloss Tirol, he can devote more time to Brunnenburg, as well as to transcribing the many hours of interviews he made with farmers in the 1970s. The tapes are themselves an artifact now and must be converted before the tapes disintegrate, or be lost forever.

The last time I saw Sizzo it was for the day, fifteen years ago, with Bill. At the time Sizzo's mother Mary was embroiled in a controversy over the remaining papers of her father and Sizzo's grandfather --the poet Ezra Pound, Mary's mother, Olga Rudge, a resident of Venice, had willed them to Jane Rylands, an American active in Venice society circles. The entire tale is amply covered in John Berendt's book City of Falling Angels, so I will not duplicate the telling here. Suffice it to say that the Beinecke Library at Yale University is now the repository of all of the Pound papers, to the organization of which Sizzo's mother, Mary de Rachewiltz, has devoted many years of her life. Pound, born in 1885, was a groundbreaking poet, friend of painters and sculptures also experimenting with new forms; editor of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and center of a set of poets committed to direct poetic expression, unshackled from traditional verse forms. During the Second World War, he was indicted for treason in absentia due to his radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini's regime. Following Mussolini's capture and hanging by Italian partisans, he was also captured by Italian partisans and turned over to the American military authorities who had taken control of Italy. He was confined in a "death cell", a six foot by six foot steel cage kept outdoors on which lights were shone throughout the night. He was brought back to the United States at the end of the war to be tried for treason in Washington, D.C.. then placed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, a mental hospital in the Washington area, during the period of trial preparations, and ultimately found not fit to stand trial by reason of insanity, but released only in 1958. having spent twelve years in St. Elizabeth's. Mary brought him back to Italy and to Brunnenburg, where he stayed until he and Olga returned to their house in Rapallo. He died in Venice in November 1972.

When I stayed at Brunnenburg in July 1972, it was in the large bedroom that had been Pound's that I slept. It boasted a waterbed (a sign of the times) and an enormous photo of Pound, looking like an Old Testament prophet, taken from a negative, white outlines on a black background, making the poet look particularly fearsome. Outside, nearby, stood a white marble statue of Pound's head, sculpted by Gaudier-Breszka, an artist in Pound's circle.

At the time, Boris, Sizzo's father was alive. Of Russo-Italian aristocratic stock, Boris was a tanned, dark-haired man with a trim goatee and moustache, an Egyptologist, a specialist in the cultures of Ancient Egypt. He had been on many "digs" in the Sudan, in whose Egyptian culture he specialized . He was a lively talker, given to telling funny stories. One night he told us about going to see a Sudanese chieftain in the company of a translator. When Boris walked in the tent, he knocked over a small vessel, leading the shaman sitting next to the chief to mumble loudly. The witch doctor said, the translator explained, that this meant the unhappy spirit of a beautiful young woman, prematurely dead, had decided to visit Boris personally. "If she's pretty, I don't mind", he joked, but the chief and the witch doctor were deadly serious, saying that if Boris did not have her spirit cast out, she would pursue him.

Boris went on to chat with the chief and the witch doctor, then took his leave of them. Driving a few hours, he dropped his translator off and continued through the desert. However, he began to feel terribly ill soon after, and with a high fever, drove himself to the nearest town with a hospital, where he lay near death for days, his malady a mystery to the doctors. Finally, Boris told them of his experience in the tent, and asked that the witch doctor be called. End of story: the witch doctor saved Boris' life --and Boris swore that in his delirium, he felt a young woman's body next to his.

***

In July of 1972, I was a member of a student team that helped Sizzo break ground on the Tyrolean Museum of Agriculture. Break ground literally, that is: I was, I think, the only female member of a team of volunteer laborers who dug a ditch for a traditional mill, purchased from a Tyrolean peasant in the mountains who no longer had use for it, to be rebuilt on the castle site.

Seeing the end of my labor of forty years ago standing, refurbished for inspection by any tourists interested in visiting the museum --which opened its season last Saturday-- was quite edifying. Sizzo was unavailable, having gone to town, but Mario, who mans the museum entrance at the castle gate, went to tell Mary of my arrival. A spry and gracious woman in her eighties, she invited me in and took me up to her aerie at the top of the castle, where she has, as she calls it her "retirement home".

Although she has not retired, by any stretch of the imagination. When my visit interrupted her, she was in the middle, she told me, of writing a poem about the mill and was looking for the right decasyllable --ten letter word-- to use to end the line. She had transferred the initial first draft of the poem from a copybook to her computer, where she was working when I called.

I had met Mary once before, when she was working on the Pound papers at the Beinecke Library in New Haven. On that day she gave me a copy of her book, Discretions, about her life as the illegitimate daughter of Ezra Pound and violinist Olga Rudge. She was raised by a Tyrolean farm couple with whom Pound and Olga left her as an infant. In addition to raising her children, Sizzo and Patrizia, she has devoted her life to Pound's legacy, translating his poems, including the most difficult --the Cantos-- into Italian, along with the works of other poets. She is lives at Brunnenburg, where she has resided since 1946, when she married Boris de Rachewiltz, whose family owned the property.

Pound was a polymath, with a taste for the obscure --haiku, the Japanese nineteen-syllable poem form; the I Ching, and Lao Tse, were part of Pound's intellectual armature long before Asian philosophies were of interest to most Westerners. Mary told me her father also read and incorporated into one of the cantos Blackstone and Coke, the English legal thinkers whose compendia of Anglo-American law every English lawyer --and every colonial lawyer in America-- relied on. Being Pound's daughter is a complex legacy, and one that would have destroyed a less resilient and intelligent person. In her father's defense, Mary points out that Mussolini wasTime magazine's Man Of The Year before he became America's enemy, and that Pound wrote and published a book extolling African Art that was rejected for publication in the United States at the time because the subject matter was deemed inappropriate. She has spent much of her adult life elucidating Pound's poetic contributions, and amassing her own archive of Pound papers, and pleading his case. This has also involved intervening to protesting against the manipulation of her father's name by Italian right-wing fascist groups, particularly Casapound, a neo-fascist social organization located in Rome, founded in 2003.

Sizzo comes in at about noon, and I am invited to lunch with the students from Green Mountain College spending their semester abroad at Brunnenburg. Sizzo teaches two courses, one on agro-archaeology, the study of pre-modern farming methods; and another on the folklore and saints of the South Tyrol. Brigitte, Sizzo's wife, who is Austrian, cooks for the students and runs the household, while in addition to his duties at Schloss Tirol, Sizzo has responsibility for managing the land attached to Brunnenburg. He does this with the help of his son, Nick, a viticulturalist, who is growing wine without pesticides in pesticide-free soil, hoping it will be the basis of a chemical-free wine business. In contrast, Michael, Sizzo and Brigitte's other son, is pursuing a Masters in Modern Philosophy thinking about the mind-body problem --the analysis of consciousness and the quest to define it precisely and scientifically.

After lunch, Sizzo takes me on a virtual tour of the farm acreage around Schloss Tirol and explains the changes that have taken place in the area since he was a child. The valley was historically not farmable, as the land was swampy. So farmers terraced their crops high in the mountains. The farming was done on small plots of land, not large estates, tenant farmers paying a percentage of their crops to the local lord in return for being able to farm the land. Unlike Tuscany, Sizzo tells me, where those who worked the land were little better than serfs, the Tyrolean farmers had a strong attachment to the land because they knew that the lords of the area needed their produce in order to be able to maintain their estates. In Sizzo's interviews in the 1970s, farmers expressed pride in their heritage and its continuance into their generation.

The present is another matter, however. Thirty years later the sons of these farmers cannot live by farming as their fathers did. To survive, they must combine farming with tourism. The hotel I am staying in is on former farmland, for instance, although it is an extreme example of abandonment of farming altogether. Other farmers resort to farming by industrial methods: one the farms adjoining Sizzo's land grows apples on the most intensive scale possible, using pesticides to produce a crop of apples with few discards, maximizing the profit.

The local government has been supportive of efforts to help farmers maximize their access to markets, yet that strategy can be self-defeating when apples from China also farmed with pesticides and produced in large batches can be more competitively priced than smaller batches of apples produced with pesticides in the South Tyrol. Sizzo thinks that environmentally sensitive production may be more viable as a strategy for the future, although when I suggest that the higher cost of production makes these goods tantamount to luxury items for the well-heeled environmentally aware, he counters by telling me that if average consumers reject pesticide-driven production methods, chemical-free produce will not be a luxury.