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

211 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s
boy’’ grin, an expression that said, according to Martinelli, ‘‘anything can
happen now . . . when you looked into EP’s eyes, you could see he was
only four years old.’’ Olga ‘‘stared like a lioness’’ when she saw the
attractive young woman sitting close to Pound. ‘‘In a magnificent fury, she
[Olga] lifted the folded parasol over my head. I could see she was reading
my face, and when she looked into my eyes she saw—‘iggurance.’ She
waved the parasol over me, but never did bring it down.’’
Olga did not record this encounter at St. Elizabeth’s, but she failed to
live up to her promise to ‘‘keep o√ the grass.’’ There was an ‘‘argymint’’—
so devastating that Olga, for the first and last time in their relationship,
broke o√ all correspondence with her lover. The only comment she jotted
in her notebook more than twenty years later was: ‘‘If Dorothy had not
told me a lie in answer to a direct question before I saw EP, I would have
been prepared and not gone over the deep edge.’’
A letter from Mary to her mother o√ers some clues to Olga’s state of
mind after the visit: ‘‘I can’t see how you can separate yourself from
Babbo,’’ she wrote. ‘‘I understand he has hurt you very much, but he still
needs you more than ever. . . . D[orothy] is certainly not acting like a
lady . . . all the falsehoods and subterfuges, etc . . . [a] situation [that] has
gone on for thirty years, I do not see how he could alter [it].’’ She assessed
her mother’s position: ‘‘Your best weapon is that you are much calmer and
look younger and better than you have in all these years. . . . Don’t be too
hard on Babbo. All of us should give him as least trouble as possible, after
all he has gone through.’’
Pound’s ‘‘painter of Paradise’’ attracted undesired publicity when the
Washington Post reported Martinelli’s arrest on a drug-related charge.
Archibald MacLeish rebuked Ezra for mixing with such people. Ezra’s
retort: ‘‘Sheri acquitted, jury out five minutes.’’
There is no record of Olga’s visit to her father’s grave or to relatives in
Ohio in 1955. She stopped in the Philadelphia suburbs to see Esther and
Priscilla Heacock, the sisters who headed the ‘‘dame school’’ Ezra attended
as a child, cousins of her late Uncle Harold Baynes, the naturalist. Baynes’s
ninety-three-year-old widow (her mother’s sister, Louise O’Connell) had
lived with the Heacocks before they gave up housekeeping. A published
writer herself and member of the Author’s Union, this lively old woman