Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

83 The Hidden Nest
American expatriate, Dorothea Watts (at that time Mrs. Albert Landsburg).
She mentioned to Olga that Watts was eager to sell one of three
adjoining small houses on a cul-de-sac near the old church of Santa Maria
della Salute in Dorsoduro, the quiet ‘‘back’’ of the city.
Watts’s cousin, May Dodge, had fallen in love with the house, but Watts
o√ered Olga first chance to buy it. Olga began to consider ways to get
together enough money. ‘‘It was the house that changed my life, and I got
it just for the asking,’’ she remembered. ‘‘First, I asked Ramooh if she
would she give me what she had promised in her will now—to buy a
house—and she said, ‘Yes.’ That was half. Then I wrote my father and
asked him if he could give me the rest, and if so, to cable ‘yes,’ and he did. I
still feel guilty at not having told my father that I had not seen the house
(he was in the real estate business). If I had, he might not have acted at
once. As it was, he lost his money in the 1929 stock market crash, and I
would have been left with nothing but my three-year-old.’’
‘‘Gretchen is very cockawhoop that you’ve bought it,’’ Ezra informed
her a few days later. At the same time, Green wrote Olga from Venice:
‘‘Here am I, established in this casa . . . with plumbers and plasterers . . .
making your house into a home. . . . You are welcome to the use of [my
things], as at present I have neither home nor prospect. . . . Olaf, the
sculptor, has definitely bought [the house] at the end, so you will be a
square of busy, happy people. Perhaps some friend of yours would rent
this house, the one you know?’’
Olga suggested to Ezra that his young friend Adrian Stokes (author of
The Stones of Rimini) might be persuaded to buy the second house, so Ezra
might keep the studio with an entrance next to hers. ‘‘I could put [in] a
chattière, and give you double entrance and exit, very convenient for
comédie Venetienne.’’ To which he replied: ‘‘He think next step after piedà-terre
is really large cage. . . . he ain’t goin’ to have his cage in a cellar,
he don’t care wott it is nex’ to . . . however, he will endeavor to visit the
Queen of the Adriatic.’’
Olga’s retort: ‘‘He doesn’t want [a] cage next [to] hers with sliding door
in between—very unsuitable He says. . . . She decided against taking the
second house, though I would so like to have a place of my own that didn’t
have to be let—ever.’’