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

68 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
today. . . . She has been obliged to run the risk of damaging her classical
technique, acquired by so many years of earnest e√ort.’’
Antheil viewed her e√orts in a di√erent light. After he escaped to Tunis,
he wrote Pound: ‘‘Olga is the seventh gate of violin playing, [but] she
doesn’t take the trouble . . . with my violin music that she did onct. . . . no
use telling people they’re doing swell when they’re so cockeyed sure they
know an old piece that they forget it. . . . you gotta snap ’em back into
shape. But don’t kid yourself, I know I won’t find another fiddler like
Olga.’’
The Pounds stayed on in Paris after the controversial performances.
Dorothy, now almost forty, was expecting her first child and wanted to be
near the American Hospital for her confinement. When her time came on
September 10, 1926, Ernest Hemingway, not Ezra, accompanied her to the
hospital. Ezra wrote to the elder Pounds for the first time in six weeks:
‘‘next generation (male) arrived. Both D. and it appear to be doing well.’’
They named the boy Omar Pound (four years earlier Ezra had written that
‘‘Fitzgerald’s trans[lation] of Omar [Khayyam] is the only good poem of
[the] Vict[orian] era’’).
Shortly after Omar’s birth, William Butler Yeats wrote to his friend
Olivia Shakespear: ‘‘I divine that you have already adopted the grandchild.’’
Omar’s parents had agreed that he should live with his maternal
grandmother, with Dorothy returning from Italy for visits every summer.
Pound met the boy for the first time in London after Olivia’s death. Omar
was then twelve years old.
On September 27, 1926, Pound himself checked into the American
Hospital for a week of ‘‘taps, tests, analyses, etc . . . completely exhausted,’’
a stress-related illness no doubt aggravated by divided loyalties.
(Fifty years later Olga wrote, ‘‘I did not appreciate then . . . the physical
strain He was under.’’)
Frau Marcher kept the parents informed about Mary. She wrote in
German to Ezra, who forwarded the letters to Olga with his often inaccurate
translations. He visited his daughter in late November, when the frau
was clipping the child’s blond hair, and sent one of the ‘‘gee-lorious’’ curls
to Olga with a sprig of mountain edelweiss and a check for the ‘‘piccolo