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

61 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
a most perilous operation . . . at the same time saving her son’’ (Canto 28).
Recalling this, Olga wrote in her notebook, ‘‘no-one has seen any connection!!’’
and then underlined it.
Ezra enclosed thirty-eight hundred lire for her confinement in his next
letter, the first of very few contributions Olga accepted. He was still
avoiding a visit to the clinic, but his conscience prompted him to follow up
with another letter: ‘‘ ’Fraid he hasn’t been vurry xpressive of sympathy.
. . . He is very pleased she didn’t up an’ die on him.’’
In her next letter, Olga asked Ezra to consider possible names to substitute
for the Q. and C. on Maria Rudge’s birth certificate, something
unique, ‘‘hers and nobody else’s.’’ They first considered classical names
from The Cantos, and Ezra’s choice, after consulting the classical dictionary,
was Polyxena (or Polissena), a daughter of Priam and Hecuba, ‘‘who
made a hit with Achilles.’’ (In Canto 9, she was noted as the second wife of
Sigismundo Malatesta.) ‘‘[It] makes a good short name if you take the last
part, Xena. . . . whether the Xena in Polyx- is the same root as the word
meaning ‘foreign’ I don’t abs[olutely] know? or whether it would mean
‘foreign in many ways’ or ‘foreign to the city’? There is also ‘Poluxenos,’
meaning very hospitable . . . [or] Polyxa, a priestess of Apollo.’’ From the
same Canto, Madame Ginevra (a possible form of Geneviève) was discarded
as ‘‘being the patron de Paris, too used.’’ After many deliberations,
the child kept only the name Maria Rudge.
The baby’s survival was still touch and go: ‘‘About His coming—she
had not expected He was going to . . . [but] if you would like to see the
child, you had better—there is very little left of it. It has no definite
illness—it just doesn’t catch on. The doctor says if I had consented to
nurse it, it would be di√erent. I did try the fourth day, but it was too late. It
has been going up and down ever since . . . very sensitive to the weather
. . . two or three thundery days seemed to finish it.’’
Olga knew she was considered an unnatural mother by the nurses in
this remote Tyrolean village, where babies were always put to breast, but
she remembered that she and her two brothers had been bottle fed and all
grew to healthy maturity. She felt the problem was due, in part, to the
baby’s resistance; too late she discovered the wet nurse’s peasant trick of
putting sugar or honey on the nipple.