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

96 The Breaking Point
She invited Egerton Grey’s stepsisters, Ethel and Mabel Duncan, to
visit at the end of August. ‘‘She hasn’t had time to breathe . . . these old
ladies!’’ she wrote Ezra. ‘‘She hopes to die youngish and spare her friends
the grasshopper talking noises and parrot laughing they make!’’ (Olga
lived to 101, and was never accused of ‘‘grasshopper talking noises.’’)
Old ladies were not her only visitors. Adrian Stokes returned from the
Stone House, Pangbourne, Berkshire, ‘‘completely undone by England
and my family.’’ He presented Olga with a discarded male dressing gown
from one of the smart shops in Venice (‘‘I suspect he thought it was a bit
e√eminate’’). ‘‘My stay in Venice was vivid, so too my impression of the
Young Lioness [Mary], for which I thank you,’’ he wrote after returning to
England. Olga remembered Adrian, in those days, as ‘‘a beautiful young
man, and very charming. He sent me many more letters thanking me for
the privilege of meeting my daughter. She was on the new bed that had to
be hauled up through the first floor window . . . pretty and pink on pink
sheets, with golden hair on a pink pillow, gazing starry-eyed at the most
beautiful young man she had ever seen before (or since?). But her dark
infant soul held some grudge against the female parent.’’
Ezra did not join Olga in Venice that fall. ‘‘She hasn’t any place to attach
him to,’’ she wrote him. ‘‘He is floating ’round in a most god-like manner
. . . please think of her a√ectionately.’’
On September 29, a year after the crash, her father sent two drafts for
one thousand francs each, with this poignant message: ‘‘I will not be able
to send more this year. I have never been so hard up in my life. You may do
as you wish with the Paris flat and its content. It is too expensive traveling
back and forth.’’ Like many su√ering from the Depression, the elder
Rudge was no longer willing to indulge a daughter who, in his view, was
not earning her keep. ‘‘Too bad if you cannot make a go of it with your
music,’’ he wrote. ‘‘You won’t stay in one place long enough. When you
started to teach in Paris a few years ago, I was in hopes you would soon
have enough pupils to keep you busy. There are teachers who have not had
the start you had making a living there. . . . You are old enough now to
settle down to hard work.’’
After receiving his letter, Olga wrote Ezra from Paris: ‘‘Nothing de-