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

47 Lost Loves
but do nothing to the character.’’ He transformed the artist Romaine
Brooks into Olimpia Leigh, a composer and Greek scholar who set Sappho’s
poetry to music. Poet Rory Freemantal was modeled after Radcly√e
Hall, known as ‘‘John’’ to her friends, author of the groundbreaking
lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Mimi Franchetti, daughter of a baron
and a famous beauty of the time who had composed several operas,
became Rosalba Donsante, the flirt of the island and Olimpia’s first conquest.
Mimi (Rosalba) was Renata’s (Cleo’s) love interest one year, Romaine
(Olimpia) the next, until—if one is to believe the MacKenzie script
—a tantalizing new prospect, ‘‘Janet Royle,’’ a violinist, appeared on the
scene.
There are enough similarities in the character of Janet Royle to assume
she was, at least in part, modeled after Olga. Mrs. Royle, Janet’s mother,
appears as Julia must have to those who did not know their true circumstances,
‘‘a rich American widow who had lived in Europe ever since her
daughter was born twenty-eight years ago. . . . They had the best apartment
in Rome [read Paris] and knew all the people worth knowing.’’ Julia
had always considered her daughter’s health ‘‘delicate,’’ and warned Olga
against overexertion. In the novel, ‘‘her daughter was very delicate . . . if
she did not insist on playing the violin so passionately, she might be less
delicate . . . [and] it may be admitted that she played the violin well. . . .
Flowers and music and pictures and friends . . . were always well arranged;
and if Janet’s life seems a little bloodless, it must be remembered
that she had a tendency toward anemia.’’
Janet’s relationship with Cleo ‘‘had reached the delicious state of tremulous
equipoise. . . . Was she or was she not going to allow herself to fall in
love with Cleo? That was the question forever pleasantly at the back of
Janet’s mind while she was talking with junior members of the diplomatic
corps who came to her mother’s ‘Thursdays’.’’
The Marchesa Luisa Casati also appeared on the Capri scene. Romaine
Brooks’s biographer described her as ‘‘legendary and self-invented, like a
D’Annunzio heroine . . . contemptuously accepting and discarding lovers;
living with leopards, monkeys, and snakes; inspiring fads for gold evening
capes and wide-brimmed hats with cascading feathers, giving rise to dozens
of silent screen beauties with cadaverous skins and eyes like searing