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

58 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
because her uncle’s dead, the animal man. . . . My father saw it in the paper,
and that’s all I know,’’ she wrote, enclosing the obituary notice so ‘‘he can
see how respectable and God-fearing her family iz.’’ Baynes, in one of his
articles, had written: ‘‘Usually full-grown birds, like thoroughbred people,
take their troubles, their dangers, even death itself, with quiet courage
and without any fuss.’’
With the same letter, she enclosed a newspaper clipping about Il Duce
(whom she would later meet, and play for, at his private residence):
‘‘Muss[olini] is surely a nice man,’’ an impression not unusual for that
time, when the majority of Italians approved of the new government.
Mussolini’s black-shirted Fascists had captured Rome in the bloodless
coup of 1922, selected a new cabinet, and presented the list of cabinet
members to King Victor Emmanuel III. Ezra’s early appraisal of the new
premier: ‘‘I think extremely well of Mussolini . . . if one compares him to
American presidents (the last three) or British premiers, etc. . . . If the
intelligentsia don’t think well of him, it is because they know nothing
about ‘the state’ and government.’’
For Ezra, the practical concerns of his daily life always came first. He
was moving to an apartment ‘‘plumb on [the] roof on [the] sea front’’ at
12, via Marsala. He warned Olga not to send intimate details about her
approaching confinement and, for the sake of appearances, ‘‘maybe she’d
better have an ‘alliance’ [wedding ring]. . . . don’t know why I had a
phobia against getting one in Roma . . . if there isn’t one in Salò, do you
want me to send?’’
Back at the Albergo, Olga had purchased a new pen and black ink to
pass the time copying music for future concerts with young ‘‘Jawg’’ (Antheil).
She was trying to avoid accidental meetings with acquaintances
who might recognize her and gossip about her condition: ‘‘This life of an
escaping criminal is too dull. She hasn’t been so bored since she was in her
teens and nothing ever seemed to happen.’’
While Olga impatiently awaited the baby’s arrival, Ezra continued his
daily activities in the new setting: work, work, work at the typewriter,
punctuated by energetic afternoons on the tennis courts and dinners with
Dorothy and members of the British colony. He was attempting to sign up