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

35 Halcyon Days No More
Olga was booked to play another War Emergency Concert on April 22,
Isadore de Lara’s ‘‘Hour of Music.’’ When Teddy saw his mother and sister
o√ at the Gare du Nord, for the first time U.S. citizens were required to
show passports.
Teddy, then entering his twenties, soon followed them to London to
volunteer for the Artists’ Rifles, a branch of the British Army. He enrolled
with ‘‘private tuition at a tutorial place’’ to study math, Latin, English, and
history for four and a half hours a week, while awaiting a commission in
the O.U.T.C. (O≈cers’ Training Corps). ‘‘I have a little bedroom on the
4th floor, with cold bath every morning . . . porrige [sic] eggs, bacon,
co√ee, toast . . . other meals not as good,’’ he wrote his brother in Paris.
‘‘[Prime Minister Henry Herbert] Asquith is gone at last—the Lloyd
George/Bonar Law contribution will be better,’’ he added, referring to
the coalition government and war cabinet of David Lloyd George and
Conservative leader Bonar Law. Julia and Olga had taken temporary
lodgings on Portman Square. The telephone, then a novelty, was ‘‘such a
convenience . . . I have a chat with [Teddy] every day.’’
This was a time of searchlights, air raids, soldiers’ sheds, and guns in
the park, but Julia focused with single-minded purpose on Olga’s career.
At twenty-one, Olga was touted as ‘‘a young violinist of exceptional
brilliance’’ by T. Arthur Russell of Sackville Street, Piccadilly, who handled
her bookings: ‘‘[Miss Rudge] played with great distinction at several
important functions in that City [Paris] . . . [and] is now available for
engagements in England.’’ In the publicity release photo, Olga appears as
the quintessential young lady of late Edwardian England in a three-tiered,
elaborately pleated silk skirt a fashionable six inches from the floor, with
matching tucked, long-sleeved blouse, cinched at the waist by a pleated
ribbon belt. Another wide ribbon encircling her head like a wreath is tied
over the right ear in a large bow.
At a 1916 concert, Olga introduced the Pastoral by Kathleen Richards
with the composer playing the piano part, ‘‘an imaginative work of a very
young composer’’ according to one critic. This was the beginning of
Olga’s lifelong friendship with Kathleen and the Richards family.
On November 7, Percy B. Kahn again accompanied Olga at Aeolian