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

44 Lost Loves
A few weeks later, having received no answer, Egerton wrote: ‘‘Some
months must still pass before all legal formalities are complied with, after
which I shall come to you and ask you to be my wife. . . . You can be with
me in public as often as you wish . . . trust me. Four years ago I made an
irrevocable vow . . . I would never marry any woman but you, [a] vow
binding till death.’’
In her journal many years later, Olga confessed: ‘‘If I had let my mother
know how much [Egerton] meant to me, she would have acted and felt
di√erently. She was right. I did not care enough.’’ Thumbing through the
pages of The Cantos, she turned to the line ‘‘Nothing matters save the
quality of the a√ection.’’ Distancing herself from the event, she spoke
of herself in the third person: ‘‘For eight years, [Egerton] was her one
thought, which she brutally, childishly, put from her, thinking that her
dramatic gesture of sacrifice would placate the spirit of her mother.’’
After she stopped communicating with him, Egerton—concerned that
Olga was alone in the Belsize Park flat—wrote to Katherine Dalliba-John,
who invited her to come to Italy in late May. She traveled to Assisi to seek
consolation with her second mother. There she met another woman who
would play a very important role in her life, the pianist Renata Borgatti,
daughter of Giuseppe Borgatti, the renowned Italian tenor. The composer
Pizzetti, a friend of the elder Borgatti then visiting in Assisi, introduced
the two young musicians. ‘‘[Pizzetti] gave Renata and me coaching in the
violin sonata which I was to have played with Henri Etlin in London. The
only pianos for public use . . . were those used for training piano tuners at
the Institute for the Blind . . . poor uprights in little rooms with no
daylight. Pizzetti went there [with us].’’
Olga recalled that Etlin had arrived from Paris the night before the
scheduled May concert and discovered the performance canceled due to
Julia’s death. The Sharpe booking agency set a new date at Wigmore Hall
for November, but Etlin was not free then to accompany her. ‘‘Ramooh,
who was as delighted with Renata as I was, said she would pay her
expenses to England to play [the Pizzetti sonata] with me.’’
‘‘She had enough private means to keep her from dependency, but not
enough to free her from the necessity of supplementing her income from
public concerts,’’ the resident novelist on Capri, Compton MacKenzie,