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

89 The Breaking Point
working with di√[erent] voices in the Fugues?’ etc. What makes her able
to keep all the threads in her head, separate and distinct, like, in a way, The
Cantos?’’
Landowska was booked for a series of concerts in America, but was
sacrificing her fee if they would allow her to play with her pupils: ‘‘The
fact of its being with Revue Musicale puts it on [a] better footing—no fees
for us, but receipts may give us a trifle.’’ Both Olga and Pound appeared
unaware of the disastrous nosedive the New York stock market had taken
on Black Friday (October 28, 1929), marking the beginning of one of the
world’s worst economic crises. The Graf Zeppelin was circling the globe
and construction had just begun on the Empire State Building, the world’s
tallest skyscraper, when U.S. securities lost some $26 billion in value in
one week. In European artistic circles, André Breton’s second ‘‘Surrealist
Manifesto’’ and Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles caused another kind
of memorable tremor.
To augment her income, Olga began trying her hand at writing a novel,
‘‘The Blue Spill,’’ in the tradition of British ‘‘whodunits,’’ a genre both she
and Pound enjoyed for light reading. The setting was Graylands, an estate
in Surrey, modeled on the British country houses Olga knew in her youth;
the characters included a stereotypical butler and an Inspector Love presiding
over the inquest. The paterfamilias, Marshall, was found shot to
death in his study, a presumed suicide, though his wife insisted it was
murder. Pound cut the work mercilessly, scribbling editorial queries about
inconsistencies in the margin in blue pencil. The draft manuscript ended
after only 133 pages and—like so many of Olga’s enthusiasms—was abandoned
before completion.
In a late November letter to Ezra, Olga again revealed ambivalence
about her role as mother: ‘‘I’ve got to do something about the Leoncina—
either to go there, or have her come. . . . I have been putting it o√ and
putting it o√. . . . no reason why she should su√er for my complexes. . . .
She is of [an] age to understand grown-up conversations, to get it into her
head that she is abandoned, di√erent—not healthy ideas to grow up on.
. . . It’s a year and a half since anyone has seen the child, and I have been in
Italy most of that time. . . . I only want to be sure in most selfish manner