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

101 The Breaking Point
On October 3, Ezra ‘‘went on typing with awful explosions of swearing
and singing’’ while writing the Adams Cantos. When his work was completed,
they ‘‘celebrated in a fitting manner—XXX.’’
Another evening before dinner, Olga played Mozart, Brahms, Schumann,
and Beethoven’s ‘‘Kreutzer Sonata,’’ and Ezra asked to borrow her
‘‘second best fiddle with worst bow, played with unexpected delicacy and
none of [the] roughness one might expect. . . . Whenever I play, he never
just listens . . . it always sets him o√, either composing, or wanting to play
himself or discovering some weak point in my playing.’’
Ezra was composing a new opera, based on the life of the thirteenthcentury
Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti, whose poetry he had translated.
Olga played what he had written, ‘‘he interrupting all the while to make
me ‘try this.’ ’’ Afterward, they ‘‘went out with the most beautiful night to
look for new moon, but couldn’t find it—XXX.’’ Together, they had
proofread the galleys of Ezra’s translations of the Cavalcanti poems, ‘‘he
reading and spelling out each word, the way he says they proofread
telephone directories,’’ while Olga mended his underpants and socks.
When Ezra went to collect the post, he came back with ‘‘a beautiful new
bag for me—black ostrich leather.’’
He arrived for tea, dripping from a heavy rain, and they worked on a
new violin sonata, ‘‘my playing over what he had written so he could get
the time and phrasing right.’’ She cried when he suggested that Dorothy
might use the house when she wasn’t there: ‘‘He very nice when he saw it
upset me—[he has] curious blank spots!’’
On October 25, they listened to the BBC broadcast from Milan of Ezra’s
first opera, Le Testament de Villon, at the Rapallo home of a young
mechanic with a radio. (Olga did not think it proper to be seen there in the
company of the married Pound, so she listened through a crack in the
door.)
On the twenty-eighth, Ezra was at work again on the violin sonata, ‘‘in
a fit of rage because the thing [was] not going right.’’ Olga was told to
‘‘observe how useful a fit of rage was for starting and keeping one at
work.’’ She noted that ‘‘E. wants the same unity in music he has achieved
in poetry.’’
On Ezra’s forty-sixth birthday (October 30): ‘‘I cried in the morning