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

46 Lost Loves
firmness of her fiddling, when paired with Hela Ziemska, a very alert and
promising young pianist,’’ but he found little to praise in Borgatti’s technique:
‘‘Miss Rudge . . . committed a serious error in changing partners
and was unable to overcome the wooden burden of Mlle. Renata Borgatti’s
piano whack.’’ (In later years he became more tolerant of Renata’s technique
and her tempestuous personality.)
In the spring, Olga sublet the rue Chamfort apartment and traveled to
Ravello to practice in that quiet place, isolated from tra≈c by narrow
medieval streets. Another wealthy patron, the sister of Lord Grimthorpe,
invited her to stay at the Villa Cimbrone, a magnificent medieval-style
palace surrounded by gardens, terraces, and belvederes, with a breathtaking
view of the rockbound Amalfi coast a thousand feet below.
After leaving Cimbrone, Olga joined Renata and her group on the isle
of Capri. Borgatti was staying at the Hotel Subario, in one of her ‘‘crises de
mysticisme and music,’’ seeing no one and practicing hard, when Olga
arrived.
Compton MacKenzie and his wife were among the first to discover the
island, arriving before World War I when it was still unspoiled by tourists,
souvenir stands, and holiday campers. In those days, one had to pick one’s
way up the winding, stony path to the village square (there was no funicular)
to an unpretentious inn where one could get board and lodging (with
wine) and a view of Vesuvius for a few shillings a day. They joined that
group of expatriates escaping the respectability of late Victorian society:
the Swedish doctor Axel Münthe, novelist W. Somerset Maugham, and
Norman Douglas, the scandalous Austrian-born Scot who put Capri on
the literary map with his novel South Wind. To Douglas, it was Nepenthe,
‘‘gleaming with golden rocks and emerald patches of culture.’’
MacKenzie, who served with the British Army in Gallipoli before being
invalided out, also described the island in lyrical terms: ‘‘The mountains
and the sea, the snowy cloud above Vesuvius . . . the white villas of today,
the brown ruins of yesterday . . . all were fused here.’’ His roman à clef,
Extraordinary Women, attracted considerable attention because of its portrait
of the women who came to Capri, their frivolous love a√airs, petty
backbiting, and intrigues.
MacKenzie’s method to avoid libel suits was to ‘‘change the background