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

109 Rare and Unforgettable Concerts
Lenten afternoon service.’’ Ramooh, a talented artist, recovered her health
and good spirits su≈ciently to ask Olga to sit for her portrait.
Olga met Ezra in Milan at the Hotel Angioli e Semproni on March 21 en
route to Paris for her next performance. His work on The Cantos was
progressing, and Olga was ‘‘very bucked up being allowed to see a canto
[38] again—quite a sti√ one for the meanest intelligence.’’ Ezra ‘‘wuz
pleased to see her lookin’ more cheerful before she left.’’
Frau Marcher sent a Buona Pasqua card of two little girls in a meadow,
enclosing a snapshot of Leoncina in the new shoes Ezra had purchased.
Olga was not with her daughter. She was with the Richardses in Hook
Heath, embroiled in family problems—Kathleen’s separation and divorce.
‘‘The unspeakable Dale,’’ Ezra wrote, unaware of his own shortcomings:
‘‘[He] is the kind of male pustulence that does not appeal to muh [me]!!
However how th’hell iz the male to give pleasure to the utterly kantankerous
sex?’’
Kathleen, who was ‘‘astonishingly fit,’’ played six Beethoven sonatas in
concert with Olga, who was herself su√ering from another nervous crisis,
‘‘past caring . . . in a state of fatigue.’’ She could always rely on the old
family friends for sustenance, ‘‘being fed on cream and stout and sleeping
in feathers and half asleep most of the time, which is probably good for the
nerves, the rest of the time she is playing, which is good for morale, so she
will probably survive.’’
Teddy’s telephone call from Spondon on her April birthday she considered
‘‘kind and brotherly.’’ She had begun to take contract bridge lessons
from Mrs. Richards, ‘‘worryin’ when she gets a good hand, in case it means
she is to be ‘unlucky in love’.’’
She and Kathleen ‘‘got through all Beethoven, all Brahms, Debussy, and
John Ireland, and a new Mozart concerto . . . so time not wasted,’’ she
wrote Ezra (though Olga considered all time away from Ezra lost time).
He again postponed their meeting in Paris because Dorothy was ill with
flu. He was passing the time editing the manuscript of Olga’s detective
story, ‘‘The Blue Spill,’’ and reserving her description of a day in London
for a Canto.
Olga’s ‘‘day in London’’ began at five o’clock in the afternoon, when
she left Hook Heath by car with Kathleen and the Richardses to dine at the