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

45 Lost Loves
wrote of Cleo Gazay in the novel Extraordinary Women, his thinly disguised
portrait of Borgatti published in 1928.
[She] was outwardly Greek of the age of Pericles . . . a marble copy
of the Apoxymenos of Lysippus. . . . So long as she played Bach,
she remained this tranquil and marmoreal youth; but when she
played Wagner . . . she was a valkyrie writhing to be free from the
marble in which she was confined. . . . Picture her then, with
straight nose and jutting brows . . . a finely carved chin outthrust
. . . without any regard to the fashion of the moment, [she]
kilts up her draperies to imitate the garb of some early Artemis.
Renata was among a celebrated group of Parisian lesbians who, as
Marcel Proust’s biographer depicted them, were an ‘‘innocent, proud,
eccentric indispensable leavening in a monotonous society.’’ They enjoyed
freedom, social position, and artistic recognition. MacKenzie attempted
to define her bisexual temperament: ‘‘[Cleo] had su√ered . . . from
passions which were not returned. . . . She was enjoying the masculine side
of herself . . . and avoided the company of women, despising them as every
healthy-minded boy at some period of his development does despise them.
And then she would go and fall in love again with some utterly unsuitable
person.’’
At this most vulnerable time, still mourning the deaths of her mother
and brother, Olga came into Renata’s orbit. After several weeks of practice
sessions in Assisi, the two moved to Dalliba-John’s flat on the Lungarno
Giucciardini near the Scottish Church in Florence.
After more rehearsals in London in the fall, they gave the postponed
concert on November 10 at Aeolian Hall. Handel’s Sonata in D Major
opened the program, followed by Edouard Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole,
Lili Boulanger’s Nocturne and Cortège (the premiere performance in England),
and Pizzetti’s fateful Sonata in A that Olga’s mother was copying
the day she died.
A thirty-five-year-old American poet, Ezra Pound, was in the audience
to review the program for The New Age, writing under the pen name
‘‘William Atheling.’’ Ezra wrote that Olga ‘‘charmed one by the delicate