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

6 Olga and Ezra in Paris
who came unannounced to 70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs, in the
throes of composing an opera with the assistance of Agnes Bedford, an
English pianist and voice coach, on the notation.
Pound’s study of music had begun on his mother’s piano in Wyncote,
Pennsylvania. In 1907, he became enamored with the French troubadours
and the works of François Villon, the fifteenth-century vagabond poet, an
interest reinforced by long walking tours in Provence. ‘‘He sang it [Le
Testament] to me, with one finger on the piano,’’ Olga remembered. ‘‘I
discovered the pitch was noted accurately, but not the time. We started to
work correcting the time.’’ Looking over Ezra’s shoulder, Olga interrupted
his ‘‘piano whack’’ to protest that the poet was not playing the
written score. But Pound, the creative genius, was not easily instructed; he
continued to play the music he heard with his inner ear, not the notes on
the page before him.
The Rudge–Pound correspondence began on June 21, 1923, with a
brief pneumatique between the Right and Left Bank. These messages on
blue paper transmitted through underground tubes from one post o≈ce to
another and hand delivered by messengers on bicycles were then the most
rapid means of communication. This one was the first of many short notes
to make or break appointments: ‘‘Me scusi tanto, ma impossible per oggi
. . . domani forse da Miss B[arney]?’’ They were often written in Italian
and closed with the pet name he often used for Olga, ‘‘una bella figliuola’’
[beautiful young girl].
Ezra soon introduced Olga to Margaret Anderson’s protégé, George
Antheil, a young pianist and composer from New Jersey who had arrived
in Paris to attend the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces on June 13.
With his Romanian belle amie Böski Marcus, he took rooms above Sylvia
Beach’s landmark Left Bank bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Short
and slight, with clipped blond bangs that made him look even younger
than his twenty-three years, Antheil met avant-garde composer Erik Satie
and ‘‘that Mephistophelian red-bearded gent, Ezra Pound,’’ at a tea honoring
Anderson and the actress Georgette Leblanc.
Ezra began to take Antheil to Olga’s flat to practice. Olga suggested
Pound’s initial interest in her was her mother’s piano—for Ezra, she
insisted, work came first. Antheil soon set to composing a violin sonata for