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

2 Olga and Ezra in Paris
an essential one nonetheless. But not just any woman would serve as the
receptacle for this poet’s creativity; only an artistic and accomplished
woman would do for a permanent liaison, and the high-spirited Olga was
an obvious choice—a striking, poised young artist with dark hair bobbed
and parted in the middle in the high fashion of the Twenties. Meeting her
for the first time, one could not forget her fiercely energetic way of talking
and moving about—an ‘‘Irish adrenal personality,’’ as one friend described
it—that drew into her circle handsome and talented people.
She was wearing a jacket in her preferred shade of red embroidered
with gold Chinese dragons the night she met Ezra. Another of Pound’s
enthusiasms was translating the works of Li Po, a task left unfinished by
the late Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, and the oriental-motif jacket established
a point of communication. Olga had inherited the jacket from Judith
Gautier, daughter of the esteemed writer and translator of Chinese poetry,
Théophile, whose apartment she visited as a child with her mother. There
was instant attraction between the poet and the young musician with the
violet, or periwinkle blue, eyes he would describe in The Cantos as the eyes
of Botticelli’s Venus. But he left the fête with Mademoiselle Raymonde
Collignon, a blonde singer of ballades, and soon thereafter departed for
the South of France with his wife, Dorothy.
‘‘Paris is where EP and OR met, and everything in my life happened,’’
Olga said later of the chance encounter with Ezra at 20, rue Jacob, in the
salon of Natalie Barney. Like Olga, Barney had arrived in the City of Light
as the child of an expatriate artist. Her historic townhouse near the boulevard
Saint Germain was a refuge for escapees from Puritan mores, and her
explicitly lesbian novel, Idylle Saphique, contributed to the legend of ‘‘the
wild girl from Cincinnati.’’ In her youth, Barney wore white flowing
gowns by Schiaparelli or Lanvin and presided like a goddess under the
domed, stained-glass ceiling of her drawing room—a rich blend of Turkish
hassocks, lavish fur throws, tapestries, portraits, and vast mirrors—
described by one guest as ‘‘hovering between a chapel and a bordello.’’
The grand piano that Wanda Landowska played in an earlier era premiered
the contemporary works of Darius Milhaud and George Antheil in
the Twenties. The large hexagonal table in the dining room was always
spread with a feast prepared by Madame Berthe, the housekeeper, confi-