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

64 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
Olga remembered that she went down to ‘‘rubberneck’’ at the arrival of
Mussolini in Rapallo. ‘‘E.P., who had never seen Muss[olini] or had any
contact [with him], was not interested enough to leave his desk and go
down to see the procession,’’ she jotted in her notebook in later years, no
doubt to camouflage Ezra’s alleged support of the Fascist government.
Olga was at Natalie Barney’s on New Year’s Day, 1926, for the premiere
of George Antheil’s innovative First String Quartet; she then left for
Katherine Dalliba-John’s villa—a quiet time, ‘‘early to bed with Napoleon,
the Last Phase by Lord Mosebury, and a hot water bottle.’’ When the lease
on the rue Chamfort apartment came up for renewal, she was able to
continue for another four years with a generous contribution from her
father.
In early March, Edgar Rudge traveled to Europe for a second honeymoon,
stopping o√ in Florence to introduce his wife, Katherine, to Olga.
After Julia’s death, he had waited six years to marry a young woman from
Youngstown, his secretary in the insurance o≈ce. Olga had not seen her
father since 1921, and she was pleased that he had found a suitable companion.
She met the couple at the dock in Naples and hired a carrozza to
take them along the seafront drive to their hotel.
One incident marred the happy reunion. Her father had urged Julia to
return to Ohio with the children before the war, but the submarine menace
prevented him from insisting. In retrospect, he blamed Olga for their
failure to return and greeted her with the ‘‘outrageous’’ remark: ‘‘You
should have come back. If you had, Arthur would not have been killed,
and your poor mother would have been here today.’’ As Olga recalled the
incident: ‘‘not given to crying as a rule, I was shocked to tears, and sobbed
in the open carriage all along the via Carraciole to the hotel, where I
rushed to my room.’’
Katherine gained Olga’s respect by the way she ignored this cri de
coeur, and the incident was never referred to again. The three went to
Capri for a week and appeared to enjoy the rest of the holiday. The only
objection her father, a devout Catholic, voiced about Italy and the Italians
was that they ate meat on Friday. This was Olga’s last visit with her father;
he died in Youngstown in 1935.