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

4 Olga and Ezra in Paris
or drew them up on his knee. But there was about Ezra an air of someone
confidently living his life in high gear. It was not entirely in jest that he
wrote to Francis Picabia in the summer of 1921 that he had been in Paris
for three months ‘‘without finding a congenial mistress.’’
Pound and his British wife, Dorothy Shakespear, had crossed the Channel
in January 1921 and settled into a pavillon at 70 bis, rue Notre Dame
des Champs, a first-floor apartment facing an alleyway, the bedrooms
above reached by an open stairway. There was a tiny lean-to kitchen, of
little interest to Dorothy (in Canto 81, Ezra would write ‘‘some cook,
some do not cook’’). As he described his digs to the wealthy art patron
John Quinn: ‘‘The rent is much cheaper than the hotel . . . 300 francs a
month [about twelve dollars in 1921] . . . and I have built all the furniture
except the bed and the stove’’ (sturdy wood and canvas-back chairs, and a
triangular typing table that fit neatly into one corner). The books, manuscripts,
and a Dolmetsch clavichord were brought over later from London,
and Pound added a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture and the canvas
by Japanese artist Tami Koumé that covered one wall.
At age thirty-six, Ezra still lived on small stipends from reviews and
other literary endeavors, supplemented by Dorothy’s allowance and contributions
from the elder Pounds in Philadelphia. Since the time of Victor
Hugo, Notre Dame des Champs, close by the Luxembourg Gardens and
the charcuteries and bakeries of the rue Vavin, has been home to improvident
writers and artists. Ernest Hemingway, who lived with his wife Hadley
above the sawmill at No. 13, wrote that Ezra’s studio was ‘‘as poor as
Gertrude Stein’s [on the neighboring rue de Fleurus] was rich.’’ Ezra was
not a welcome guest on the rue de Fleurus; during his first audience with
Stein, he sat down too heavily on one of her fragile chairs, causing it to
collapse. Stein did not find Pound amusing: ‘‘he is a village explainer,’’ she
famously said, ‘‘excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.’’
Pound ignored the Stein circle and joined forces with Barney, another
fierce individualist. He had corresponded with Natalie as early as 1913
about the translation of de Gourmont’s Lettres à l’Amazone, open letters to
Barney then appearing in the Mercure de France, the sensation of Paris.
When Ezra arrived on the scene, Natalie provided introductions to Anatole
France, André Gide, Paul Valéry, the distinguished literati of an older