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

63 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
sta benissimo . . . holds its head up for itself, nearly bald, needs bigger
clothes—country very fine up there with autumn coloring.’’
She had received ‘‘a vague letter from parent, who speaks of coming
over to Italy in February! . . . sends check.’’ She did not confide in her
father that she was the mother of a baby girl, and to the end of her life she
regretted deceiving him in the matter of Maria’s birth, although she still
accepted his allowance.
By November, Olga was practicing daily to improve her technique for
the first performance since her confinement. Ezra sent a selection of his
Cantos that Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead were planning to publish in
This Quarter. The correspondence reveals how often he relied on Olga’s
critical judgment: ‘‘if she has any strong ideas as to which poems he shd.
and shd. not put in his collected edtn., she speak.’’
He was still acting as impresario in the Antheil-Rudge collaboration:
‘‘No sense of Olga’s going to America at her own expense,’’ he wrote
Antheil. ‘‘If they pay her, I shall then advise her to go.’’ To Olga, regarding
dates that Antheil had booked for her: ‘‘She is probably x-cited about
concerts in Paris on 30th November . . . in Vienner, Prague, etc.’’
Olga was in Paris chez Madame Spicer on the rue George Sand through
November and early December; the rue Chamfort apartment was sublet
for the season. Ezra applauded a November 30 performance from Rapallo:
‘‘Natalie [Barney] was under the impression your concert wuz . . .
crowded and successful.’’
In a Christmas letter to his parents in Wyncote, he announced that
‘‘D[orothy] is in Cairo; sailed from Genoa Thursday December 17, arrived
in Cairo Monday December 21. . . . When last heard from she had
been there ‘24 hours without a flea,’ but didn’t expect it to last.’’ He added
that T. S. Eliot had been in Rapallo for four days, ‘‘at last escaped from
Lloyd’s Bank and more alive than might have been expected from the
circumstances and from the damn magazine he edits [The Criterion].’’ He
failed to mention that Olga was in Rapallo taking Dorothy’s place during
one of the rare Christmas holidays the couple spent together, while their
child assumed the role of the cherished Baby Jesus in the mountain crèche
of the Marchers.