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

16 Julia and Her Daughter
greener place. On one of the last days of May 1903, Olga observed a wellto-do
gentleman questioning the elevator boy. The stranger was looking
for a furnished apartment for the summer, ‘‘when business calls me to New
York.’’ On impulse, Olga piped up: ‘‘My mother is renting our flat on the
fifth floor.’’
Julia had learned to answer opportunity when it knocked. She sublet the
apartment for a serendipitous sum that allowed the family to escape for the
summer—in Olga’s words, ‘‘three of the most glorious months of my
life’’—to an old farmhouse in the White Mountains, with an unobstructed
view of Mount Chocorua. In Canto 74, Pound—writing from his ‘‘cage’’
in Pisa—later compared Mount Chocorua to Tai’chen, the sacred mountain
of Confucius, recalling the purity of the air on Chocorua ‘‘in the land
of maple.’’
Among memories of that summer were visits to nearby Meriden, New
Hampshire, where her mother’s sister, Aunt Louise Birt Baynes, lived with
Olga’s beloved Uncle Harold. Baynes, an early conservationist, was a
friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and co-founder of the American
Bison Society and the Long Island Bird Club, which met in the drawing
room of the Roosevelt home at Oyster Bay. After Roosevelt left the White
House, Uncle Harold and his club presented ‘‘Sanctuary, a Bird Masque’’
(an e√ort to stop the then-widespread use of bird plumage on women’s
headdresses), under the patronage of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. He was
never too busy lecturing and writing to enchant his favorite niece with
stories of Jimmie, the black bear cub, a central character in one of his many
books. Until his premature death in 1925, Baynes was a beloved presence
in Olga’s life.
In September 1904, when Olga was nine, Julia sent the child to England,
to provide her with ‘‘advantages’’ she herself never had. She was to board
at St. Anthony’s Convent, Sherborne, Dorset, under the direction of
Madame Anselm, the British head, and Madame Pharaïlde, a Belgian nun
(whom Olga credited with her fluency in French). She remembered being
left in the charge of the captain of the H.M.S. New York. Every morning, a
stewardess delivered a fresh letter from her mother (from the packet Julia