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

91 The Breaking Point
enough income to pay mortgages and taxes; her allowance curtailed, she
would have to rely on concerts and violin lessons to support herself. Ezra
appeared to be pulling back, if not withdrawing entirely, from the relationship,
and she was too proud to accept his contributions for anything
but the modest needs of their child. (A check for five hundred pounds
enclosed in a January 2 letter remains in the archive, uncashed, in its
original envelope.) Olga faced the reality that she would have to raise her
daughter alone (in her words, with very little talent for motherhood). Not
for the first time, she reached the bottom of her despair and considered
suicide.
Instead of rushing to her side, Ezra presented a carefully reasoned
argument against it: ‘‘It is so damned hard for anyone to understand
anything about what goes on in another head. Only she wd. be perfectly
wrong to . . . stop living now, now of all times . . . nobody ever does get a
strange idea into their heads till they get to [the] breaking point. . . . She got
rid, as her father said, of her religion. . . . You can’t scrap a whole thing like
that, pericoloso, pericoloso, unless one has another house to go to—in
Ireland, one talks of ‘making one’s soul.’ ’’
Olga:
She doesn’t think that she has ‘‘given up’’ her religion, because she
doesn’t think that with her character, anything that she had ‘had’
could slip away as easily as water o√ a duck’s back. . . . As for god,
she is probably at a stage of low development. One god permeating
everything might as well not exist . . . she wants her god
incarnate. . . . She is not tryng to tell him He is a god, but her only
feeling of god is in him.
Ezra:
He never said she was more bother than she was worth; he said she
had given him more trouble than all the other women on the
planet . . . but [that is an] estimate of value. . . . She don’t seem to
understand when she gets inside him, which she did not at first. . . .
She knows they haven’t stai’d si bene insieme [so good together]