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

82 The Hidden Nest
was gone. She would appreciate his devotion even more with the passage
of time.
Masking the full extent of her grief, she wrote to Ezra: ‘‘He not expect
her to be very brilliant when He arrives. She has heard news that her primo
amore is dead, and is feeling molto giù [down]. . . . She feels that she ought
to go and yowl over [his] grave. He seems to have dropped all his ridiculosities—just
as my mother dropped her unreasonableness—on dying,
and [they] became martyrs.’’
Olga’s father sent a typed letter of condolence under the letterhead of
the Commercial Union Assurance Company: ‘‘I was very sorry to hear of
Egerton Grey’s death. The young die as well as the old, so it behooves us
to try and be prepared.’’ To raise Olga’s spirits (or to lure her home) the
elder Rudge o√ered to finance a professional appearance in the United
States. ‘‘I expect to get some money in the near future, and am willing to
help you if it would do you any good.’’ Aware of the passage of years—
Olga was then thirty-three—her father continued: ‘‘It is time now for you
to be doing something. Think it over and give me an idea of the amount of
money you would require.’’ He enclosed an allowance of two thousand
francs, a generous sum at the time, and signed the letter as always, ‘‘Your
a√ectionate father, J. Edgar Rudge.’’
As one chapter in Olga’s life ended with the death of her primo amore,
she was considering finding a place where she and Ezra could spend time
together with their child, away from the curious eyes of Rapallo and Paris.
They both shared fond memories of Venice: Pound had lived near the
Ponte San Vio in 1908, when acting as impresario for Katherine Ruth
Heymann. Olga first went there to perform at the Conservatorio Benedetto
Marcello and became enamored with the historic old city where time
seemed to stand still.
In Paris she met Gretchen Green, a former secretary to the Nobel
Prize–winning poet Rabindranath Tagore in India. (Ezra also had known
Green through the Bengali poet, whose works had been published in
English translation with an introduction by W. B. Yeats.) The owner of a
tearoom in Venice that o√ered home-baked mu≈ns and English-language
newspapers, Gretchen lived in a charming little house belonging to an