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

241 The Last Ten Years
have said ‘please,’ I said. It wouldn’t have been di≈cult for you to use
persuasion.’’
Olga: ‘‘Were you annoyed? Was she [H.D.] recognizable?’’
Ezra: ‘‘Yes, I was annoyed. Both recognizable.’’
On September 5, Olga booked the 9:12 p.m. sleeper to Paris, where they
were invited to stay in M. L. Bardevant’s studio flat. After a nostalgic
lunch at La Coupôle, they visited Natalie Barney on the rue Jacob. The
courtyard surrounding the Temple à l’Amitié was in shambles and the
house appeared ‘‘derelict,’’ but Barney herself was ‘‘better than two years
ago—she asked about my violin.’’ They went on to the Brancusi studio
and the Gaudier-Brzeska room at the Musée d’Art Moderne, and enjoyed
a superb lunch with James Laughlin and his wife, Ann, at the five-star
Tour Ei√el restaurant.
Olga booked a sleeper the same night to arrive in Venice the next
morning. Ezra’s only complaint was an ache in his shoulder (he would
never admit pain, so Olga had to deduce it from his actions). He was also
su√ering from diarrhea, impossible to hide and doubly di≈cult for Olga,
who was unable to wash the soiled clothes while traveling. She noted other
physical infirmities of advanced age: he was developing a cataract, and
‘‘for the past year, EP [has been] slightly deaf, so that conversation, when
many are participating, tires him and he retires into himself with fits of
needless anxiety, but never enough to keep him from doing anything
which pleases him—going out to meals, theater, travel, with no special
fatigue, no aches or rheumatism.’’ He endured his bête noire, a tub bath,
‘‘without tears.’’
At the year’s end, they were settled in again at the Hidden Nest. Ezra
read aloud from Yeats one evening, Olga read the tarot cards the next.
They discussed ‘‘oddments’’ in the news and viewed photographs of the
Apollo 8 spacecraft (Olga was astonished that nothing but the crust of the
earth was showing). The couple spent Christmas Eve reminiscing over old
photographs discovered in a suitcase.
On the first page of the 1969 notebook, Ezra wrote this tribute to the
woman he loved: ‘‘For the gift of life, sensibility and courage—those two
were the opening bars of the Jannequin (Olga’s)—never admit defeat!’’
Desmond O’Grady, the poet who had been at the dock in Genoa to