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

59 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
singers for a performance of Le Testament de Villon, and facetiously
suggested that Olga ‘‘fish a basso and a contralto out of the lake for him.
Ought to be bass in lake.’’ He inquired about birthing customs in that
former outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: ‘‘I suppose Brixen still
has German method?’’
In June, as the time for the birth drew near, Olga wrote: ‘‘The cappellano
came to call again, lent me a book, an English ‘sunshine’ novel.’’ She
sent a series of postcards from the Pia Opera dell’Infanzia, a home for
abandoned babies. In the first, bambini are lined up for adoption in front of
the church; in the second, adoptive mammes pose for portraits; in the
third, a newborn is received into the waiting arms of a nun. ‘‘Caro,’’ the
message read, ‘‘the R[oman] C[atholic]s don’t put them in petticoats as
the Wesleyans would have done.’’
Olga was planning to register the birth with the name of Arthur Rudge,
her deceased brother, listed as the child’s father. She asked Ezra’s advice
about the penalty for falsifying a birth certificate. ‘‘All you appear to have
done is to have declared a marriage that didn’t happen . . . that can’t be a
hanging o√ense,’’ he replied. Her daughter later resented Olga’s having
given her ‘‘a dead man’s name,’’ but Olga insisted she had done it to spare
her child the ‘‘N.N.’’ (anonymous) in the blank for the father’s name on
school registrations and other legal documents; to give her real father’s
name would have been an embarrassment to Ezra.
Olga also was concerned about excuses to be made to Antheil, whose
inquiries she could no longer ignore. Why, Antheil wrote Pound, was
Olga reluctant to commit herself to the concert tours he organized at
considerable expense of time and e√ort? ‘‘Am writing to Olga in this same
post about three concerts in America which ought to net her $1,500 and a
contract for next year enhancing our reputations.’’
On Thursday, July 9, a baby girl was delivered prematurely after fortyeight
hours of di≈cult labor. At 4 a.m. the doctor had asked Olga if she
would allow a ‘‘cut’’ to remove (as she thought) a son, and she said yes, if
it would not injure the child. ‘‘It wasn’t the Caesarian operation, but a
taglio of the peri [taglio del perineo]—something-or-other—with forceps,’’
she informed Pound. The child was o≈cially registered on the birth