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

155 The Subject Is—Wartime
British writer Richard Aldington had earlier said of Dorothy: ‘‘The
impression she gave was not of a woman [who was] . . . hurt and o√ended
by infidelity. . . . Why should she object because her husband found the
only trained musician in the world who would take his ridiculous caperings
seriously?’’ Another friend who observed the couple remarked that
Olga helped to use up Ezra’s excess energy.
Later, after the triangular living arrangement had abruptly ended, Olga
recorded her true feelings: ‘‘One solid year, Dorothy made use of me to
the fullest, shared my house [while] I worked like a slave—cooking, cleaning,
finding food—which I only undertook owing to her incapacity, so
that E. should not su√er. I cannot understand the incredible meanness of
the way she was behaving . . . in terror lest I have some advantage over
her, considering our respective positions: she, with the war years’ income
saved up, a family legal advisor to fall back on and right to appeal to any of
E’s friends for help, a child provided for with no trouble on her part. I,
with no rights of any kind—income completely knocked out by war—
high and dry in a country I never would have lived in by choice except to
be near E., having to improvise a living, with Mary.’’
Mary later recalled those months in her autobiography: ‘‘Whatever the
civilized appearances, the polite behavior and façade in front of the citizens
of Rapallo, hatred and tension permeated the house. . . . Never have I
seen Mamile [Olga] cry so unrestrainedly as when she read Canto 81: the
cry ‘AOI!’ is an outburst more personal than any other in The Cantos, and
expressed the stress of almost two years when [Pound] was pent up with
two women who loved him, whom he loved, and who coldly hated each
other. . . . I had a glimpse of the madness and the vision: Zeus-Hera-
Dione, the two di√erent consorts of one god, one a sky goddess and one an
earth goddess . . . many shades of emotion remain hidden, embedded in
The Cantos as mythology.’’
On June 4, the Allies’ armored and motorized infantry roared through
Rome and crossed the Tiber River; the Eighty-eighth Division was the
first to enter the Piazza Venezia, in the heart of the capital. Two battered
German armies were fleeing to the north as five hundred heavy bombers
joined lighter aircraft in smashing rail and road routes to northern Italy.
The Eighth Army captured a number of strategic towns.