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

56 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
not exactly habitable.’’ If Dorothy’s aim had been to put more miles
between Olga and her husband, she was too late. Olga had conceived a
child by him.
In the twilight of her life, Olga confided in her notebook: ‘‘OR, as early
as 1923, said she would like a child by EP. I would not have made the
suggestion except that after ten years of marriage, his wife did not want a
child, had never wanted a child, and at her age [forty] it did not seem likely
that she would have one.’’
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), the friend from Ezra’s youth who visited the
Pounds in London, said of his marriage: ‘‘Yes, Ez is ‘married,’ but there
seems to be a pretty general consensus of opinion that Mrs. E. has not been
‘awakened.’ . . . She is very English and ‘cold’ . . . she loathes (she says)
children!’’ Even if one allows for the bias of Ezra’s former sweetheart, her
words have the ring of truth.
In Olga’s view, Ezra should not be deprived of the privilege of having a
child, a torchbearer. They had a daughter ‘‘by mutual consent,’’ Olga
wrote, ‘‘but it was I who wanted the child, and saw no reason to make him
responsible. . . . EP could not have undertaken the child’s upbringing, and
OR was not counting on it.’’ When she first mentioned the subject, Ezra
had turned down the suggestion: the world was no place to bring a child
into, he said, especially without economic security.
In studying the New Freewoman, Ezra had drawn the distinction between
the woman who wanted a child for the experience (with indifference
about the sire of said child), and the woman who wanted a child by
a particular man—that is, his child. Olga was obviously one of the latter.
But she did not mention the subject again until an unidentified patron of
the arts, a friend of both, suggested to Ezra that she would supervise the
upbringing of Olga’s child and support it financially. With this commitment,
Ezra changed his mind and asked Olga if she might change hers.
Though Olga held the mutual friend in high regard, she ‘‘did not
consider the milieu of the art patron [Natalie Barney?] suitable.’’ With the
allowance from her father supplemented by subletting her mother’s Paris
apartment at a higher rent, she was prepared to assume full responsibility
for the child. Whatever the complex motives, she recorded some fifty