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

249 The Last Ten Years
in the amount of $100 per month as compensation for her services
to the patient.
However benign the intent, the petition placed Olga in a subservient
position; the one hundred dollars per month was not su≈cient compensation
for the blow to her pride. She had long accepted the sacrifice of taking
on the responsibility of Ezra, and had come to terms with ‘‘appearances.’’
But it must have rankled to be Ezra’s ‘‘housekeeper and nurse’’ in the eyes
of the world.
Cyril Connolly was one correspondent who clearly recognized Olga,
not as Pound’s companion but more as a second wife. With a series of turbulent
a√airs and three marriages behind him, he was now three years
older than his fifty-three-year-old father-in-law. His blond and pretty
third wife, Deirdre, was expecting another baby. Would Ezra agree to be
godfather by proxy? Cyril had dreamed that an old leather hatbox arrived
from Venice, inside which he discovered a small child with a note from
Ezra pinned to it: ‘‘I am sending you a wunderkind—his mental age is
four!’’
Connolly apologized for the publication of a recent article calling
Robert Lowell ‘‘the greatest living American poet.’’ He had meant living
in America, he explained diplomatically. As a resident of Venice Pound
was, in Connolly’s view, ‘‘the greatest living American poet’’—but ‘‘I only
got to know his work well in the last few years.’’
Valerie Eliot invited the couple to come to London, but Olga regretted
that they couldn’t go. She reported their busy schedule of the previous
year: ‘‘We hibernated in Venice—as good a place an any other in winter,
[then] went to France . . . a choreographer friend had a spectacle during
the Fêtes Jeanne d’Arc . . . three days in Paris, Orleans in May . . . to Rome
[in] early June for two performances of Noh [plays], then to Spoleto,
where Gian Carlo Menotti has lent his flat to E. for the Festival the last five
years . . . as always, something or someone of interest.’’
Back in Sant’Ambrogio ‘‘heat, muggy heat.’’ But the ‘‘coup de grace’’ to
Olga was ‘‘the Noel Stock book [a new biography of Pound] and the
favorable press it has received.’’