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

69 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
leone.’’ In a year-end letter to the senior Pounds, he wrote that he was
‘‘doing some wild telegraphing to get [Olga] to Budapest in time for a
concert next fortnight . . . possibly Vienna and Berlin,’’ adding that ‘‘life is
stranger than fiction, and imagination always gets left behind’’—a statement
of the complicated turn his life was taking.
Olga spent Christmas with her daughter. In midlife, Mary wrote in her
autobiography: ‘‘Over the chaos, hovers one certainty. I, the child, was
wanted. The rest is music and poetry. The young violinist stands beside
the poet’s chair, playing arie from Le Nozze . . . and from now on, whenever
the scrupulous biographer will report a concert in Budapest, a performance
in Vienna, a trip to Frankfurt, Salzburg, it may be assumed that the
journey was interrupted for a few hours or a few days in Bruneck.’’