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

60 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
certificate as Maria Q. C. Rudge. Olga, who had hoped for a boy in his
father’s image, confessed in her notebook, ‘‘I felt as if the boy had died,’’
but added that she soon became reconciled to a baby girl.
Ezra received an espresso posted on Sunday, then no communication
until Friday the tenth. He was troubled by the news of the di≈cult birth.
‘‘Wot! Feet first through the roof, all same as Hercules and Julius Caesar,
or wot-t-ell?? He hopes she really is OK. How long she expect to take
recovering?’’ The next day: ‘‘He still in dark re/wot sort of operation and
. . . when he ought to come, or ought not to, and where.’’
Olga was accustomed to sparing Ezra unpleasantness, and years later
she wrote: ‘‘I did not want E. to see me until well after. . . . women make
themselves disgusting on these occasions . . . hence my dislike of women in
pregnancy being seen, an old instinct of ‘tribal women’ who went into the
forest alone.’’
In spite of her courage, it was a lonely time for the young mother
without husband, family, or close friend to care for her. The nurses in the
clinic spoke only German; later she recorded that ‘‘all those Tirolese
ganged up against the stranger . . . [they were] suspicious—hard—venal.’’
She was unable to nurse, so the child was removed to a special room with
other premature infants.
Some eight days later (July 18) Olga wrote to Ezra: ‘‘[The] doctor says
I can get up, only . . . I faint all over the place, so it’s not much use. But the
Kind ist besser—no grinning bear look about it—most solemn—it yawns
with an abandon I’ve only seen equaled by one other person [Ezra]! And it
does not make miserable cat wailings—it howls with rage until it gets what
it wants, then it shuts up tight—very reasonable. We live in separate cages,
so don’t see much of it—the little Sister who looks after it is very competent
. . . I think I can leave the kid here. I can’t, or won’t, reappear anywhere
until I can play at least as well as prima.’’
Ezra was still puzzling over the nature of Olga’s operation. While he
was researching the life and works of Sigismundo Malatesta, the fifteenthcentury
military leader and patron of the arts, Manlio Dazzi brought to his
attention a ‘‘pericolosissima operazione . . . con taglio Cesareo classico’’
performed by a Dottore Aldo Walluschnig, ‘‘who, with the force of his
intellect, with art and assiduous care, snatched [the mother] from death by