Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound Anne Conover Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound ‘‘What Thou Lovest Well . .’’ Yale University Press New Haven & London Excerpt from Shakespeare and Company, ∫ 1959 by Sylvia Beach and renewed 1987 by Frederic Beach Dennis, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Excerpts from A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound by Humphrey Carpenter, ∫ 1988 by Humphrey Carpenter, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mi∆in Company. Excerpts from Discretions by Mary de Rachewiltz, ∫ 1971, reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company. Copyright ∫ 2001 by Anne Conover Carson. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Rebecca Gibb. Set in Fournier type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc., Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley & Sons, Harrisonburg, Virginia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carson, Anne Conover, 1937– Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound : ‘‘What thou lovest well— ’’ / Anne Conover. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 0-300-08703-9 (alk. paper) 1. Rudge, Olga, 1895–1996. 2. Violinists—Biography. 3. Pound, Ezra, 1885–1972. I. Title. ml418.r83 c37 2001 811%.52–dc21 2001001527 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10987654321 What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage —Canto LXXXI Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi 1 Olga and Ezra in Paris 1 ‘‘Where everything in my life happened’’ 2 Julia and Her Daughter 10 ‘‘One had the best, or one went without’’ 3 Halcyon Days No More: Between the Turn of the Century and the Great War 24 4 Lost Loves 41 ‘‘We make our own tragedies’’ 5 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen 50 ‘‘The past is forgotten, the future is ominous’’ 6 The Hidden Nest 70 ‘‘The house that changed my life’’ viii Contents 7 The Breaking Point 86 ‘‘She wants her god incarnate’’ 8 Rare and Unforgettable Little Concerts 103 ‘‘The real artist in the family’’ 9 The Red Priest of Venice 126 ‘‘Scraper of catgut and reviver of Vivaldi’’ 10 Overture to War 135 ‘‘Waitin’ for one or other cat to jump’’ 11 The Subject Is—Wartime 143 ‘‘Two di√erent consorts of one god’’ 12 The Road to Hell 157 ‘‘Four days . the happiest of my life’’ 13 What Thou Lovest Well Remains 170 ‘‘J’aime, donc je suis’’ 14 A Visitor to St. Elizabeth’s 192 ‘‘Sitting on His lawn is paradise’’ 15 A Piece of Ginger 213 ‘‘Between presumption and despair’’ 16 The Last Ten Years 227 ‘‘The sea in which he floated’’ 17 Olga Triumphant 258 A Prize in the Campidoglio Coda: It All Coheres 288 ‘‘The dross falls away’’ Notes 291 Secondary Sources 329 Index 335 That her acts Olga’s acts of beauty be remembered. Preface Her name was Courage & is written Olga. These lines are for the ultimate canto Whatever I may write in the interim. —Ezra Pound The Cantos (fragment 1966) In his seventy-first year, Ezra Pound wrote this tribute to his companion of half a century: ‘‘There is more courage in Olga’s little finger than in the whole of my carcass . she kept me alive for ten years, for which no-one will thank her. The true story will not be told until her version is known.’’ Olga Rudge’s commitment to the poet may be viewed as the sacrifice of her considerable talents on the altar of his genius, since Pound incorpo- rated the persona of the ‘‘trim-coi√ed goddess’’ into his early Cantos, and Olga was the muse who inspired him to finish his epic work. Olga was a distinguished concert violinist before she met Pound, and her legacy to the world of music was considerable, for she researched and brought to light many works of the long-neglected early-eighteenth- century composer Antonio Vivaldi. Her life is worth recording, not only in the supporting role of companion to a literary titan, but as a brilliant woman on her own, a woman ahead of her time who measured values by her own yardstick and defied conventions to concentrate on the two ele- ments most important to her—music, and the man she loved. She accepted the challenge of maintaining a lasting relationship with di≈cult, highly creative Ezra Pound—an American original. William ix x Preface Cody, a psychiatrist who studied Pound, observed that Ezra acted like his own definition of the Vortex, ‘‘sucking everything and everyone into his omnivorous intellect. He used people . but the manipulation was some- times unperceived by either side in the drama.’’ The evidence suggests that Olga would not have been sucked into Ezra’s Vortex had she not wanted to be. In her eighties, Rudge wrote to Faber & Faber, Pound’s British pub- lisher, to propose ‘‘A Story of the Days,’’ a collage of family records, letters, and memorabilia—in her words, ‘‘all very Henry Jamesy.’’ But she never completed the project, and she refused to consider herself a proper subject for biography when cornered in her mountain retreat. ‘‘Write about Pound,’’ she said. In art as in life, Pound was a Victorian struggling to become a modern. As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, he immersed himself in medieval and Renaissance poetry, later writing The Spirit of Romance about the troubadours and courtly love. In the first years of the new century, he was indisputably a moving force in the creation of the Modern- ist movement. The Great War hastened the transition to a new age. ‘‘Make it new,’’ Pound said, and his influence on the next generation of poets and writers was both far-reaching and lasting. T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to Pound, ‘‘il miglior fabbro.’’ ‘‘But for him,’’ wrote James Joyce, ‘‘I should still be the unknown drudge he discovered.’’ Thomas Carlyle has said, ‘‘Next to possessing genius one’s self is the power of appreciating it in others.’’ Olga was the keeper of the flame who preserved Pound’s legacy for posterity. In this work, I have let Olga and Ezra speak for themselves through their correspondence and her diaries, without correcting errors of style and syntax. Some are written in the imperfect Italian of two people whose mother tongue was English. All reveal a spirited battle of the sexes be- tween two highly intelligent and articulate human beings. Acknowledgments Poet Desmond O’Grady of County Cork, Ireland, suggested Olga Rudge—the woman who had the last word in The Cantos and in Pound’s personal life—as a subject worthy of a biography. I first met Olga at the Fourteenth International Ezra Pound Conference at Schloss Brunnen- burg, surrounded by grand- and great-grandchildren and the memo- rabilia of a fascinating life: programs of concerts in the leading halls of Europe; photos of world figures such as Pablo Casals, Adlai Stevenson, even the belligerent Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, playing with two lion cubs; a small silver bird studded with bright stones, the gift of World War I poet- hero Gabriele d’Annunzio. Her long-term memory was still sharp, o√er- ing glimpses of early childhood and her outstanding career as a concert violinist. Her daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, allowed me to sort through memorabilia stored in old steamer trunks; Mary’s son Siegfried Walter de Rachewiltz shared memories of his grandparents. Later, Mary visited my home in Washington and assured me of her family’s cooperation. In May 1993, de Rachewiltz lifted the restriction on the Olga Rudge Papers held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Rudge, who early believed in Pound’s genius, had saved every scrap of paper, from the first xi xii Acknowledgments blue pneumatique messages in Paris in the 1920s to the almost daily (some- times twice daily) correspondence of half a century. After Pound’s death, Olga continued to record her memories, thoughts, and activities in daily notebooks. I was the first scholar to gain access to these treasures. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, for permission to publish excerpts from the Olga Rudge–Ezra Pound correspondence and manu- script materials, and other materials cited as ‘‘1996 addition,’’ the Ezra Pound Collection, and EPAnnex. I especially wish to thank Patricia C. Willis, Curator of American Literature at the Beinecke Library, and her accommodating assistants at the reference desk, Stephen C. Jones, Al Mueller, Rick Hart, Lori Misura, Dorothea Reading, and William Hemmig. Diane J. Ducharme, who sorted and cataloged, guided me through the maze of the Olga Rudge Papers. Also at Yale, Pound’s bibliographer, the late Donald Gallup, was support- ive of my work, as was Dr. Leonard Doob, professor of anthropology, a friend of Mary and the de Rachewiltz family. Charles Grench, then editor- in-chief of Yale University Press, recognized the contribution of the Olga Rudge Papers to the study of Pound and the Modernist poets, encouraged me to write the biography, and shepherded the manuscript through the Committee on Publications. Lawrence Rainey of the University of York reviewed the manuscript for the Press and o√ered many very helpful suggestions.