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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.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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)

I n 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

P oet 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. At the Press, editor Lara Heimert saw the manuscript safely
through submission to hardcover publication; and Philip King edited it
with meticulous care and sensitivity.
Carroll F. Terrell, editor of Paideuma, the journal of Pound scholarship
at the University of Maine in Orono, also shared my enthusiasm for Olga
Rudge—‘‘one of the miracle women of all time ’’—and first published
Chapter 2 as ‘‘The Young Olga.’’
Among the many scholars who made pilgrimages to the Pound confer-
ences as far afield as Beijing (where the Eighteenth International Ezra
Pound Conference met in the summer of 1999) and who o√ered their sup-
port and encouragement were William Pratt, Miami University (Ohio);
Zhaoming Qian, University of New Orleans; William McNaughton, City
Polytechnic University of Hong Kong; Walter Baumann, Londonderry,
 xiii Acknowledgments

Northern Ireland; Richard Taylor, University of Bayreuth; Wendy Stal-

lard Flory, Purdue University; Emily Mitchell Wallace of Philadelphia;
Philip Grover, St. Front-sur-Nizonne, France; Hugh Witemeyer, Univer-
sity of New Mexico; Thomas He√ernan, Kagoshima Prefectural College,
Japan; Lesley Hatcher, University of Georgia; Ghayyam Singh, University
of Belfast; Peter Dale Scott, University of California, Berkeley; Timothy
Redman, University of Texas at Dallas, Pound’s next biographer. A. David
Moody of the University of York contributed excerpts from his obituary of
Olga Rudge published in the Manchester Guardian in March 1996. Others
who made significant contributions were James J. Wilhelm, Rutgers Uni-
versity, author of a three-volume biography of Pound; and Daniel Ho√-
man, University of Pennsylvania, who first put me in touch with the
Poundians.
Mary Jane Phillips-Matz of New York and Bussetto, Italy, biographer of
Giuseppe Verdi and Olga’s neighbor on the calle Querini, gave helpful
insights into Olga’s personality and character. Harriet and Lawrence Gay
provided memories of Olga in Venice and San Francisco. Of the many
others who contributed to this work, I would especially like to thank: in
Venice, sculptor Joan Fitzgerald and Christopher and Mary Cooley; in
Rapallo, Giuseppe Bacigalupo, Pound’s friend and tennis partner, son of
his medical doctor, and Giuseppe ’s son, Massimo Bacigalupo, professor at
the University of Genoa; in Rome, John Drummond and Gabriele Stocchi;
in Siena, Dr. Guido Burchi, who provided unpublished Chigi–Rudge
correspondence from the collection of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana;
Simonetta Lippi of Siena and Rome, who o√ered memorabilia and photos
from her private collection. The late James Laughlin, Pound’s publisher
(New Directions), a self-described graduate of the ‘‘Ezuversity,’’ granted a
rare interview at his home in Norfolk, Connecticut. Caroline Smith War-
ren of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, o√ered correspondence of her cousin
Olga with family friends Esther and Priscilla Heacock of Wyncote, Penn-
sylvania. In Youngstown, Ohio, Olga’s birthplace, her cousins Dorothy
Herschel and Sister Isabel Rudge of the Ursuline Mother House provided
valuable footnotes to the Rudge history, as did Dr. Richard Murray,
a friend of the Rudge family. Diane Speis Shagha of the Mahoning Valley
(Ohio) Historical Society was my guide in the museum and library
xiv Acknowledgments

archives there. Peter Rudge, Olga’s only surviving nephew (her brother
Teddy’s son), in Norfolk, England, cooperated through correspondence.
Dr. William Cody, a psychiatrist who observed Pound during his con-
finement at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, provided valuable
clues to Ezra’s relationships with women. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a research
psychiatrist who analyzed Pound’s personality in The Roots of Treason:
Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St. Elizabeth’s, was my guide at the hospital
where Pound was incarcerated for thirteen years after World War II; the
late Julien Cornell, lawyer for the defense and author of The Trial of Ezra
Pound, o√ered helpful suggestions. Transcripts of taped interviews pro-
vided valuable clues to Olga’s character and personality: five full hours of
conversation between Olga and Peter Dale Scott at the University of
California, Berkeley (1985); a three-hour interview with Christopher
Winner in Venice (1977), intended for a Newsweek profile (excerpts of
which were published in Rome in 1992). Ezra Pound: An American Odys-
sey, a documentary directed by Lawrence Pitkethly for the New York
Center for Visual History (1981), captured Olga and Ezra on film in later
years. I am deeply indebted to Robert Hughes, former conductor of the
Oakland Symphony, and to his companion Margaret Fisher for memories
of Olga in San Francisco overseeing the concert version of Pound’s opera,
Le Testament de Villon. Hughes o√ered professional advice on the presen-
tation of the original concert version of Le Testament at the Sixteenth
International Ezra Pound Conference in Brantôme, France (1995).
Among the valuable archival resources are the Ronald Duncan–Olga
Rudge correspondence, held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center at the University of Texas, Austin; the Noel Stock–James Laughlin
correspondence, held by the Ward M. Canaday Center at the University of
Toledo, Ohio; the Caresse Crosby correspondence, held by the Morris
Library, Southern Illinois University; and the materials relating to Olga’s
musical career and Antonio Vivaldi research held by the music division of
the Library of Congress.
During Pound’s lifetime, Olga preferred to keep a low profile; hence
little biographical material about her has been published. Mary de Rache-
wiltz’s Discretions provided a portrait of her mother during the years from
Mary’s birth in 1925 until World War II. Of the many works about Pound,
 xv Acknowledgments

the most useful were J. J. Wilhelm’s Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–
1925; Humphrey Carpenter’s A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound;
Noel Stock’s The Life of Ezra Pound, the first full-length study; John
Tytell’s Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano; The Letters of Ezra Pound,
edited by D. D. Paige; and Ezra Pound and Music, edited with commentary
by R. Murray Schafer.
My grateful acknowledgment for permission to quote heretofore un-
published letters and other writings of Ezra Pound, copyright 1999 by
Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar Pound, used by permission of New Direc-
tions Publishing Corporation, agent for the copyright holders, and for
permission to quote from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright 1989. My
thanks also to: J. Martin Cornell for permission to quote from the un-
published correspondence of Julien Cornell and James Laughlin; the So-
ciety of Authors, as literary representative for the estate of Compton
Mackenzie, for permission to quote a brief extract from Extraordinary
Women; Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, for permission to quote from ‘‘The
Muse Who Was Ezra’s Eyes,’’ published in the Manchester Guardian,
April 6, 1996; the Hemingway Foundation and its vice president, J. Gerald
Kennedy of Louisiana State University, for permission to quote an unpub-
lished letter from Ernest Hemingway to Olga Rudge; Richard Ardinger,
editor of Limberlost Press, for permission to quote brief excerpts from
What Thou Lovest Well Remains: One Hundred Years of Ezra Pound; the
estate of Richard Aldington for permission to quote from Soft Answers;
Noel Stock, for permission to quote from the unpublished correspondence
of James Laughlin and Noel Stock, held by the Ward M. Canaday Center
at the University of Toledo; Deirdre Levi, acting for the Cyril Connolly
estate, for permission to quote unpublished correspondence of Olga
Rudge and Cyril Connolly; Horst Tappe, for permission to reprint the
photo of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge in Venice (1962); Jane S. Sargeant,
for permission to quote excerpts from ‘‘Torna! Torna!’’ Winthrop Sar-
geant’s profile of Count Chigi Saracini in the September 3, 1960, New
Yorker; and Meryle Secrest, for permission to quote brief excerpts from
Between Me and My Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks.
Also, profound gratitude to my early teacher and mentor, Dr. Frances
R. Brown, who inspired me to explore the subtleties of the English lan-
xvi Acknowledgments

guage and directed my early archival research; to Elizabeth Courtner and

her sta√ at the Palisades Branch Public Library of the District of Columbia
for diligently locating local sources, and to the Washington (D.C.) Biog-
raphers, my loyal support group, and our leader, Marc Pachter, who
unfailingly gave guidance and encouragement; to Cathya Wing Ste-
phenson, who introduced me to valuable contacts at Yale and Pound’s
‘‘other’’ family at Brunnenburg and assisted with the French translations;
to her mother, the late Mrs. Charlotte Wing, who sponsored me at the
Graduate Club in New Haven, where Sandra Gervais and her sta√ pro-
vided hospitality (and memorable home-baked mu≈ns); to Moira Byrne,
translator of the Chigi–Rudge correspondence and other materials in
Italian; to my good friend Dottore Liborio Lamagna of the University of
Siena, who corrected inaccuracies in the Italian transcriptions; to the late
Alan D. Williams, who edited the first draft with a keen eye for incon-
sistencies; to Norman MacAfee, who contributed his great insight into
Pound’s poetry, knowledge of music, editorial skills, and good judgment
in shaping and pruning the final manuscript; to Alexandre Manfull, my
mentor in mastering the mysteries of the computer; to my daughter,
Nathalie Ambrose, for encouragement and assistance in ways I cannot
count. Last but by no means least, I am most grateful to Thomas B.
Carson, my husband and companion on many rewarding voyages of
discovery, without whose loyalty, enthusiasm, and support I could never
have undertaken this work, who has lived for too many years in a literary
ménage à trois with Olga and me but never admitted to being bored with
either of us.
 ‘‘Where everything in my life happened’’

1
Olga and Ezra in Paris
1922–1923

O lga Rudge had nothing to gain by an alliance with Ezra Pound. Her
reputation as a concert violinist was firmly established, her social position
secure. She was living in her late mother’s tastefully furnished flat near the
Bois de Boulogne on the fashionable Right Bank; her only contact with
the bohemian side of the Seine was the atelier of the Grande Chaumière,
where her brother Teddy had studied landscape painting before the Great
War. As Olga remembered the Americans on the Left Bank: ‘‘They stayed
to themselves; they did not know the French as we did.’’
Ezra Pound was Left Bank. When he met Olga in the fall of 1922 he was
undertaking a translation of Rémy de Gourmont’s Physique de l’Amour for
the American publisher Boni & Liveright. Gourmont’s theory that ‘‘civi-
lized man endures monogamy only when he can leave it and return at
will’’ was shared by the poet. He was also exploring the connection be-
tween creativity and sexuality, and in the translator’s preface he suggested
‘‘there must be some correlation between complete and profound copula-
tion and cerebral development. . . . The brain itself . . . is a sort of great clot
of genital fluid held in suspense.’’ The woman’s role was to be the passive
receptacle for man’s sperm; a secondary role in the creative process, but
1
2 Olga and Ezra in Paris

an essential one nonetheless. But not just any woman would serve as the
receptacle for this poet’s creativity; only an artistic and accomplished
woman would do for a permanent liaison, and the high-spirited Olga was
an obvious choice—a striking, poised young artist with dark hair bobbed
and parted in the middle in the high fashion of the Twenties. Meeting her
for the first time, one could not forget her fiercely energetic way of talking
and moving about—an ‘‘Irish adrenal personality,’’ as one friend de-
scribed it—that drew into her circle handsome and talented people.
She was wearing a jacket in her preferred shade of red embroidered
with gold Chinese dragons the night she met Ezra. Another of Pound’s
enthusiasms was translating the works of Li Po, a task left unfinished by
the late Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, and the oriental-motif jacket estab-
lished a point of communication. Olga had inherited the jacket from Judith
Gautier, daughter of the esteemed writer and translator of Chinese poetry,
Théophile, whose apartment she visited as a child with her mother. There
was instant attraction between the poet and the young musician with the
violet, or periwinkle blue, eyes he would describe in The Cantos as the eyes
of Botticelli’s Venus. But he left the fête with Mademoiselle Raymonde
Collignon, a blonde singer of ballades, and soon thereafter departed for
the South of France with his wife, Dorothy.
‘‘Paris is where EP and OR met, and everything in my life happened,’’
Olga said later of the chance encounter with Ezra at 20, rue Jacob, in the
salon of Natalie Barney. Like Olga, Barney had arrived in the City of Light
as the child of an expatriate artist. Her historic townhouse near the boule-
vard Saint Germain was a refuge for escapees from Puritan mores, and her
explicitly lesbian novel, Idylle Saphique, contributed to the legend of ‘‘the
wild girl from Cincinnati.’’ In her youth, Barney wore white flowing
gowns by Schiaparelli or Lanvin and presided like a goddess under the
domed, stained-glass ceiling of her drawing room—a rich blend of Turk-
ish hassocks, lavish fur throws, tapestries, portraits, and vast mirrors—
described by one guest as ‘‘hovering between a chapel and a bordello.’’
The grand piano that Wanda Landowska played in an earlier era pre-
miered the contemporary works of Darius Milhaud and George Antheil in
the Twenties. The large hexagonal table in the dining room was always
spread with a feast prepared by Madame Berthe, the housekeeper, confi-
 3 Olga and Ezra in Paris

dante, and amanuensis known for her chocolate cake, harlequin-colored

gateaux, and triangular sandwiches ‘‘folded up like damp handkerchiefs.’’
The Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, a grande dame of impeccable lin-
eage, presided over the tea service, though port, gin, and whiskey were
more popular with American guests. A green half-light from the garden
reflected from the glasses and silver tea urn as from under water. The
garden was an unkempt miniature forest, with rambling paths and iron
chairs balanced precariously near a marble fountain long choked with
weeds and the Temple à l’Amitié, a copy of the Temple of the Vestal
Virgins in Rome.
Barney, some twenty years Olga’s senior, was the leader of a freedom-
loving and bohemian group of intellectual women in the early 1900s:
Colette, Anna de Noailles, and the spy Mata Hari. Another generation,
Olga’s contemporaries, succeeded them: English su√ragettes, militant
feminists and lesbians, tolerant heterosexuals and asexual androgynes.
The expatriate American painter Romaine Brooks and the Princesse de
Polignac (née Winaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune)
were among the favored inner circle.
Musical reputations were established at Barney’s salon, and Renata
Borgatti, Olga’s accompanist, invited her there after the two women re-
turned from a sun-filled vacation on the Isle of Capri. Olga recognized
Ezra, the tall American wearing a signature brown velvet jacket, as some-
one she had seen at a concert in London the year before. He was the last to
leave, and she had asked Renata, ‘‘Who is that? He looks like an artist.’’
In an early photograph, Pound appears in front of Hilaire Hiler’s Jockey
Club wearing the floppy beret, velvet jacket, and flowing tie of artists of an
earlier generation. With him are Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, and the noto-
rious Kiki of Montparnasse. Those who knew Ezra in the prime of life
testify that photos did not do justice to his charismatic appeal. Margaret
Anderson, founder of the Little Review, described the poet’s robustness,
his height, his high color, the mane of wavy red-blond hair. And the eyes:
‘‘Cadmium? amber? no, topaz in Chateau Yquem,’’ another of his contem-
poraries observed.
Anderson remarked that Pound was then somewhat patriarchal in his
attitude toward women. If he liked them, he kissed them on the forehead
4 Olga and Ezra in Paris

or drew them up on his knee. But there was about Ezra an air of someone
confidently living his life in high gear. It was not entirely in jest that he
wrote to Francis Picabia in the summer of 1921 that he had been in Paris
for three months ‘‘without finding a congenial mistress.’’
Pound and his British wife, Dorothy Shakespear, had crossed the Chan-
nel in January 1921 and settled into a pavillon at 70 bis, rue Notre Dame
des Champs, a first-floor apartment facing an alleyway, the bedrooms
above reached by an open stairway. There was a tiny lean-to kitchen, of
little interest to Dorothy (in Canto 81, Ezra would write ‘‘some cook,
some do not cook’’). As he described his digs to the wealthy art patron
John Quinn: ‘‘The rent is much cheaper than the hotel . . . 300 francs a
month [about twelve dollars in 1921] . . . and I have built all the furniture
except the bed and the stove ’’ (sturdy wood and canvas-back chairs, and a
triangular typing table that fit neatly into one corner). The books, manu-
scripts, and a Dolmetsch clavichord were brought over later from Lon-
don, and Pound added a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture and the canvas
by Japanese artist Tami Koumé that covered one wall.
At age thirty-six, Ezra still lived on small stipends from reviews and
other literary endeavors, supplemented by Dorothy’s allowance and con-
tributions from the elder Pounds in Philadelphia. Since the time of Victor
Hugo, Notre Dame des Champs, close by the Luxembourg Gardens and
the charcuteries and bakeries of the rue Vavin, has been home to improvi-
dent writers and artists. Ernest Hemingway, who lived with his wife Had-
ley above the sawmill at No. 13, wrote that Ezra’s studio was ‘‘as poor as
Gertrude Stein’s [on the neighboring rue de Fleurus] was rich.’’ Ezra was
not a welcome guest on the rue de Fleurus; during his first audience with
Stein, he sat down too heavily on one of her fragile chairs, causing it to
collapse. Stein did not find Pound amusing: ‘‘he is a village explainer,’’ she
famously said, ‘‘excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.’’
Pound ignored the Stein circle and joined forces with Barney, another
fierce individualist. He had corresponded with Natalie as early as 1913
about the translation of de Gourmont’s Lettres à l’Amazone, open letters to
Barney then appearing in the Mercure de France, the sensation of Paris.
When Ezra arrived on the scene, Natalie provided introductions to Ana-
tole France, André Gide, Paul Valéry, the distinguished literati of an older
 5 Olga and Ezra in Paris

generation, and his contemporaries, the Dadaist painter Francis Picabia

and the avant-garde poet Jean Cocteau, whom Pound described as ‘‘the
best poet and prose writer in Paris.’’ With such comrades, Ezra often was
observed enjoying Parisian nightlife with women other than his reserved
wife, whose porcelain skin and ice-blue eyes were, in Pound’s words, ‘‘a
beautiful picture that never came to life.’’ It was Ezra’s custom to drop in at
odd hours, often midnight, at bistros on the rue du Lappe or the Deux
Magots, the Dôme, and other Left Bank cafés where artists and intellec-
tuals gathered.
One of the first friends Ezra called on in Paris was composer and
musician Walter Morse Rummel. The son of a German pianist and a
daughter of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegrapher, Rummel crossed over
from London to cut a dashing figure in the Parisian music world. Rummel
discovered and set to music Provençal poetry, also an enthusiasm of
Ezra’s. And it was Rummel who introduced the poet to Raymonde Collig-
non, a young soprano known for her porcelain figure and sleek head set in
a basketwork of braids. Wearing a shimmery gold-yellow frock, Ray-
monde arrived at Barney’s Turkish drawing room on Ezra’s arm the night
that he met Olga.
At their next meeting, Olga recalled that Barney was receiving a select
group of friends in her boudoir, and Ezra was acting as cavaliere servente to
the Marchesa Luisa Casati. (Romaine Brooks’s thinly disguised painting of
Casati rising nude from the rocks at Capri filled one wall of Barney’s
bedroom.) Ernest Walsh, the poet and co-editor with Ethel Moorhead of
This Quarter, later husband to the novelist Kay Boyle, was among the
chosen few that evening. As they were leaving, Ezra suggested to Olga
that she invite Walsh, another visiting American, to her apartment to give
him an insider’s glimpse of the Right Bank.
Ezra had not yet visited the rue Chamfort, and when he came, Olga
assumed he would be accompanied by Walsh. But when she next saw him
Ezra was at her door, alone, holding the score of an opera he had written,
Le Testament de Villon.
Paris was alive with the new music—Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky,
Virgil Thomson, Erik Satie, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud. Ezra, who
was already experimenting with new rhythms in poetry, surprised visitors
6 Olga and Ezra in Paris

who came unannounced to 70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs, in the
throes of composing an opera with the assistance of Agnes Bedford, an
English pianist and voice coach, on the notation.
Pound’s study of music had begun on his mother’s piano in Wyncote,
Pennsylvania. In 1907, he became enamored with the French troubadours
and the works of François Villon, the fifteenth-century vagabond poet, an
interest reinforced by long walking tours in Provence. ‘‘He sang it [Le
Testament] to me, with one finger on the piano,’’ Olga remembered. ‘‘I
discovered the pitch was noted accurately, but not the time. We started to
work correcting the time.’’ Looking over Ezra’s shoulder, Olga inter-
rupted his ‘‘piano whack’’ to protest that the poet was not playing the
written score. But Pound, the creative genius, was not easily instructed; he
continued to play the music he heard with his inner ear, not the notes on
the page before him.
The Rudge–Pound correspondence began on June 21, 1923, with a
brief pneumatique between the Right and Left Bank. These messages on
blue paper transmitted through underground tubes from one post o≈ce to
another and hand delivered by messengers on bicycles were then the most
rapid means of communication. This one was the first of many short notes
to make or break appointments: ‘‘Me scusi tanto, ma impossible per oggi
. . . domani forse da Miss B[arney]?’’ They were often written in Italian
and closed with the pet name he often used for Olga, ‘‘una bella figliuola’’
[beautiful young girl].
Ezra soon introduced Olga to Margaret Anderson’s protégé, George
Antheil, a young pianist and composer from New Jersey who had arrived
in Paris to attend the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces on June 13.
With his Romanian belle amie Böski Marcus, he took rooms above Sylvia
Beach’s landmark Left Bank bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Short
and slight, with clipped blond bangs that made him look even younger
than his twenty-three years, Antheil met avant-garde composer Erik Satie
and ‘‘that Mephistophelian red-bearded gent, Ezra Pound,’’ at a tea honor-
ing Anderson and the actress Georgette Leblanc.
Ezra began to take Antheil to Olga’s flat to practice. Olga suggested
Pound’s initial interest in her was her mother’s piano—for Ezra, she
insisted, work came first. Antheil soon set to composing a violin sonata for
 7 Olga and Ezra in Paris

Olga, determined to make the music, he wrote Ezra, ‘‘as wildly strange as
she looked, tailored to her special appearance and technique. It is wild, the
fiddle of the Tziganes . . . totally new to written music . . . barbaric, but I
think Olga will like it . . . it gives her more to do and show o√ with than the
other sonatas.’’
In late summer, while Dorothy was in London to assist her mother,
Olivia Shakespear, in caring for her husband during a long illness, Ezra
introduced Olga to the land of the troubadours. No written record remains
of that summer holiday, or their itinerary, only a fading black-and-white
photograph album labeled ‘‘August 1923—Dordogne.’’ Olga was the pho-
tographer and Ezra often the subject, appearing under gargoyles of the
cathedrals in Ussel and Ventadour and other unidentifiable French villages.
In her eighties, she reminisced about ‘‘the photos EP and I took on our
walking tour. . . . ‘I sailed never with Cadmus,’ ’’ she recalled, referring
to a line in Canto 27, ‘‘but he took me to Ventadour.’’ On the back of
one snapshot she wrote: ‘‘note how elegant a gentleman could be, walking
25 kilometers a day with a rucksack—in those days, no hitchhiking.’’
The Antheil-Rudge collaboration at Olga’s flat continued on an almost
daily schedule in the fall. Antheil praised Olga’s mastery of the violin: ‘‘I
noticed when we commenced playing a Mozart sonata . . . [she] was a
consummate violinist. . . . I have heard none with the superb lower register
of the D and G strings that was Olga’s exclusively.’’ On October 4 at the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the three short Antheil sonatas that pre-
miered as the curtain raiser for opening night of the Ballets Suédois
became the most controversial musical event of the season. A correspon-
dent of the New York Herald compared the evening to the premiere of
Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps: ‘‘a riot of enormous dimensions occurred
when George Antheil . . . played several piano compositions. . . . Antheil is
a new force in music . . . of a sharper and more breath-taking order than
Stravinsky.’’ In his autobiography, Antheil recalled:

My piano was wheeled out . . . before the huge [Fernand] Léger

cubist curtain, and I commenced playing. . . . Rioting broke out
almost immediately. I remember Man Ray punching somebody in
the nose in the front row, Marcel Duchamp arguing loudly with
8 Olga and Ezra in Paris

somebody in the second. . . . By this time, people in the galleries

were pulling up the seats and dropping them down into the
orchestra; the police entered and arrested the Surrealists who,
liking the music, were punching everybody who objected. . . . Paris
hadn’t had such a good time since the premiere of . . . Sacre du
Printemps.

The riot was used later as a film sequence in L’Inhumaine, starring Geor-
gette Leblanc.
Pound was then undertaking a transcription of a twelfth-century air by
Gaucelm Faidet that he had discovered in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in
Milan, ‘‘Plainte pour la mort du Richard Coeur de Lion,’’ and composing
an original work, Sujet pour Violon, for Olga’s concert on December 11 at
the ancien Salle du Conservatoire. One critic of that concert praised the
young violinist as possessing ‘‘a very pretty sonority bidding fair to de-
velop into virtuosity. . . . We admire this young artist for having enough
courage to sacrifice on the altars of Mr. Antheil’s conceited art, personal
honors which otherwise might have been hers. Both her enterprise and her
playing merit commendation.’’ Pound’s pieces won their share of ap-
plause: ‘‘to those who like to push their musical researches into that kind of
thing [they] were extremely interesting.’’
But the critics’ focus in the December concert was on the controversial
Antheil sonatas for violin and piano. The Paris Tribune: ‘‘Can this really be
denoted music? . . . No, it is a kind of primitive melopoeia . . . like those
bizarre tambourine accompaniments of Arab or Moroccan musicians when
in their drinking dens and cafés.’’ Mozart’s Concerto in A Major was called
a ‘‘a heaven-sent beneficent repose for the ears’’ by one critic, while
another dissented: ‘‘In his own music, Mr. Antheil may try to ‘get away’
with whatever he wants to, but he really should beware of composers so
refined and subtle as Mozart.’’
Ezra advised Olga to ‘‘practice the Mozart and Bach for a couple of days
by themselves. I mean don’t play the Antheil at all, but concentrate on
B[eethoven] and M[ozart], so as to eeeliminate the e√ects of modern
music.’’
In late December, Ezra checked into the American Hospital in Neuilly
 9 Olga and Ezra in Paris

with an appendicitis attack. After a discreet visit to the hospital with

flowers (one of which she pressed and saved with a card from Charlot, the
florist), Olga wrote: ‘‘Dolcezza mia, how happy she was to see him . . . la
bonne tête . . . les mains . . . maigre, bianchi—bella soi!’’ In old age, Olga
confided that the young Ezra possessed the most beautiful head, the most
expressive hands she had ever seen. Her letter reveals a greater degree of
intimacy: ‘‘be good and lie on your back and don’t let the pack slip o√ that
tummy peloso.’’
Whatever Ezra’s complex motivations, soon after the new year of 1924
began he and Dorothy left Paris for Rapallo, a quiet resort on the Riviera
di Levante of Italy.
 ‘‘One had the best, or one went without’’

2
Julia and Her Daughter
1895–1909

M eeting Olga in Paris, Ezra’s friend Ford Madox Ford was astonished
to discover she was an American from Ohio: ‘‘I did not know such beauti-
ful flowers blossomed in that desert!’’
When Olga visited her birthplace of Youngstown for the first time as an
adult, in 1969, it was a pleasant valley town. But in 1895, the year of her
birth, the air was polluted with smoke from the mills. In summer, towns-
folk escaped to Mill Creek Park on the new open-air trolley line, boat and
tub races on the Mahoning River drew large crowds to the water’s edge,
and excursion tickets on the fastest trains to Atlantic City and Cape May,
New Jersey, then cost only twelve dollars. In winter, skating and harvest-
ing ice on the river and Mill Creek were popular activities, and tears would
flow after Giacomo Puccini’s The Bohemian Girl (better known as La
Bohème) was performed at the Youngstown Opera House.
No record exists of the first meeting of Olga’s parents, but we may
assume that Julia O’Connell met her future husband after a performance at
the Youngstown Opera House. Julia was a classical singer from New York
City, and Olga loved to tell a story of the stormy night her mother, dressed
in concert finery and flowing cloak, took the ferry to Brooklyn and was
10
 11 Julia and Her Daughter

late getting to an engagement. When she rushed on stage with her long
dress still hiked up through her belt, wearing heavy rain boots, the im-
presario introduced her as ‘‘that mad Irish girl—but she can sing!’’
Church choirs were Julia’s training grounds: the Collegiate Dutch
Reformed Church on Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street (the oldest
Protestant congregation in North America), and Henry Ward Beecher’s
Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn. She was principal con-
tralto of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church of Dr. Charles Henry
Parkhurst, the distinguished clergyman from Amherst College, who
launched the attack that defeated Tammany Hall from his pulpit. Many
civic leaders and members of society belonged to these congregations, and
Julia carved a solid niche for herself among the grandes dames of Old New
York. Many years later, Ezra would remind Olga that his Aunt Frank
(Frances Weston) had heard O’Connell sing in Dr. Parkhurst’s church.
Early records of the arrival of Olga’s maternal grandparents in the New
World are sketchy. Theirs was a large Irish-Catholic family with many
branches. Julia’s father, James O’Connell, a gentleman of means before
coming to America, wrote a book about the sport of flycasting that Ezra
Pound later quoted in Canto 51:

Hen pheasant’s feather does for a fly,

green tail, the wings flat on the body.

According to Olga, her grandfather ‘‘took my mother to Boston to be

born, but not liking the place, he shook the dust of Boston o√ his feet, and
went up to Quebec to die young.’’ In Montreal, Olga’s grandmother
O’Connell (née Paige) posed for the o≈cial photographer to Her Majesty
Queen Victoria, from which it is safe to deduce that they were ‘‘lace-
curtain Irish.’’ James continued to enjoy sport fishing and thoroughbred
horseracing throughout his short life, returning to County Limerick
every year during the racing season.
Sadly, he had not invested wisely for his family’s future. Music was a
serious career for his daughter Julia, not a casual pursuit to fill the idle
hours of a well-bred Victorian lady. As Olga wrote: ‘‘My mother was a
very capable woman. She had to be. Her father died when she was a small
12 Julia and Her Daughter

child, leaving his wife and three children just enough to exist on. My
mother, the eldest, at eighteen commenced to support the others with her
music. Her piano playing was good enough for her to get accompanying
work, and her voice unusual enough to get a good church position before
she had any lessons.’’
When she could a√ord it, Julia studied singing with two of the leading
vocal coaches in New York. But Europe was the home of classical music.
Determined to study voice in London, she gave ‘‘a grand concert’’ in
Steinway Hall on Friday evening, April 11, 1890, as a benefit to finance her
coaching under Alberto Randegger and Sir George Henschel, renowned
professors of singing at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Julia made her
debut in London in Il Trovatore, and a performance with the celebrated
Lucille Hill of the D’Oyly Carte Opera accompanied by Isidore de Lara
drew praise: ‘‘Miss O’Connell sang so well that she was invited to the
houses of royalty.’’ She was the soloist at another ‘‘grand evening concert’’
at St. James’s Hall under the honorary patronage of Princess Christian of
Schleswig-Holstein and the Honorable William E. Gladstone, the British
prime minister.
In May 1892, Julia returned from two years of study in London and
Paris. She was described then as possessing ‘‘beauty of the brunette type
with large brown eyes. . . . Her greatest charm is a simple, una√ected
manner, which wins friends on every side.’’ At the time of her marriage
she was twenty-nine—considered a spinster in that era—but her voice and
her charm won John Edgar Rudge ’s heart.
Photos of Olga’s father in his thirties show a handsome man of above
average height with impressive gray eyes and a thick handlebar mustache
—one of Youngstown’s most eligible bachelors. He married Julia in New
York’s St. Paul the Apostle Roman Catholic Church on Sixtieth Street and
Columbus Avenue on August 16, 1893. The bride ’s sister, Louise Birt
O’Connell, and J. Edgar’s brother, William Rudge, signed as witnesses.
Their first child, Olga Ludovica (Louise) Rudge, was born two years
later on April 13, a birthdate shared with Thomas Je√erson, a fact she
mentioned often throughout her long and unconventional life. She sat for
a first photo—a plump baby in a lace-trimmed, pu√-sleeved dress—on a
brocade-upholstered parlor chair in the white-frame Victorian home at
 13 Julia and Her Daughter

733 Bryson Street, where her father had brought his talented young bride
to live.
Olga was proud of the Rudge family history dating back to the reign of
King Charles II, in 1664, in the County of Worcestershire, England. Res
non verba (deeds, not words) is the family motto, of great significance to
the young Olga. It was the custom to give the name of the manor house to
all who lived on the property surrounding it, and when the grandson of Sir
William Courten sold ‘‘the rudge ’’ adjoining the Abbey of Kingswood to
Edward, Olga’s great-great ancestor, the family adopted that surname.
Olga’s paternal grandfather, George Rudge of Hereford, married Jane
Stock, the youngest of four unmarried sisters from Lintridge in the nearby
county of Gloucestershire. There was opposition to the match within the
family because the young couple were first cousins, and they soon emi-
grated to America to join George ’s brother, James.
The two brothers purchased a valuable piece of property in Boardman,
a Youngstown suburb, which they homesteaded. George had brought with
him a flock of fine Cotswold sheep, providing the beginning of a profitable
business; he is credited with introducing the Long Wool breed into north-
ern Ohio before expanding from farming and stock-raising into other
ventures. In time, he became a notary public, secretary of the waterworks,
and superintendent of Calvary Cemetery, while earning an ample living in
insurance and real estate.
When the Rudges first arrived in the new community, they were mem-
bers of the Anglican Church of their youth. But their close friendship with
Father E. M. O’Callahan, rector of St. Columba’s Roman Catholic Church,
led them to convert to the Catholic faith. Their union, once considered
‘‘unfortunate,’’ was not only happy but blessed with eight children and
twenty-two grandchildren. Their conversion had long-lasting conse-
quences in the life of their granddaughter, Olga, who was baptized in the
parish of St. Columba’s on April 18, 1895.
Despite his success in America, Grandfather Rudge always looked back
on his English homeland with nostalgia. On Christmas Day 1904, he
wrote to young Olga: ‘‘My home . . . was near Ross-on-Wye in Here-
fordshire. . . . [Alexander] Pope in his poem, ‘The Man of Ross,’ immor-
talized the little country town. . . . I fear you and your brothers will grow
14 Julia and Her Daughter

up and forget.’’ Olga was at a convent school in England when her grand-
father died at age eighty-three, but many in the Mahoning Valley mourned
his passing. His devoted wife Jane died of pneumonia three days later,
after saying: ‘‘Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go, too?’’

In the early years of their marriage, his son John remained in Youngs-
town while Julia toured, returning to Ohio between singing engagements.
Their love match was held together by their strong Catholic faith; divorce
was never contemplated. ‘‘My parents did not quarrel in front of the
children. They married ‘till death us do part,’ ’’ Olga wrote. Edgar Marie
(‘‘Teddy’’) Rudge, the second child, was conceived in Ohio but born in
Paris, followed a year later by another son, Arthur Edgar (nicknamed
‘‘Babs’’ because of his beautiful long curls).
Arthur was a mischievous lad whose acts of derring-do often necessi-
tated an older sister’s rescue and excuses for him. As a very young child,
he fell down the stairs into the dark cellar of the Youngstown house. In this
and other emergencies, Olga exhibited the characteristic that shaped her
life (which Ezra immortalized in the ultimate Canto)—a blind courage.
Olga recalled very little of those early years in Ohio. To her eyes, Julia
appeared ‘‘like a cat dragging kittens by the scru√ of their necks from a
fire . . . we were saved from Youngstown. . . . Even a woman who married
for love and produced three children in three years could not stay put in
Ohio,’’ she wrote in the brief autobiography commenced in midlife but
never completed. Julia had taught a singing class, ‘‘a chorus organized
among the miners, the first orchestral concert Youngstown had ever
known,’’ Olga said. ‘‘[It was] considered a great ‘social progress.’ . . . The
local millionaire got into evening clothes as a great favor to my mother.
These seeming triumphs were not su≈cient to o√set the risks we ran (in
her view) in that atmosphere. I was first dragged away from my birthplace
to Europe at the age of two months. By my ninth year, I was to cross the
ocean seven times.’’
According to Olga, ‘‘Once married, [Julia] saw herself put into the
category of wives, and treated accordingly. . . . Money doled out in dribs
and drabs, secrecy and ignorance of facts . . . the whole situation galling to
 15 Julia and Her Daughter

the pride and to the nerves. . . . My father thought he was behaving in a

usual and proper manner. He was certainly a generous man . . . but such
methods are too tyrannous and antiquated to work successfully under
modern conditions. I realize the influence this had on my life. If one ’s
mother commences dramatically to implore that she will never live to see
you any man’s chattel, it makes some impression. . . . [I] was not brought
up to consider marriage as a career.’’
In 1903, Julia and the children settled in New York on the fifth floor of
336 West Ninety-fifth Street on the Upper West Side. Olga remembered
sledding in winter and rolling her hoops in summer at the foot of Grant’s
Tomb. Olga was the oldest, the leader of the pack and its conscience. She
remembered a plan to build a hut on a vacant lot on West Ninety-fifth
Street for herself and the boys to play house in: ‘‘It is curious my wanting a
home away from home so early . . . ‘castles in Spain.’ ’’
There were quieter pursuits on rainy days. Among Olga’s keepsakes
from that time is an ‘‘advertisement’’ the children composed and designed
for ‘‘Julia Rudge, Contralto, soloist for church concerts.’’ On the program
were ‘‘Olga Rudge, Violinest [sic],’’ and ‘‘T. Rudge, pianest [sic].’’ Look-
ing back, when someone mentioned putting his or her cards on the table, it
reminded Olga of the card game, Patience, she played with her mother.
There were always ‘‘suitable books. . . . I knew my Grimm and Perrault.’’
Julia complained that her daughter would ruin her eyesight with the
‘‘desultory reading’’ that became a lifetime compulsion.
‘‘All of my life, I never lacked any of the good things money cannot
buy. . . . We had such a good time, we never felt the need of it. . . . it was
often thought of, but only when it was not there. Our innocent snobberies
were a great salve to our pride. We had no roller skates, but we could all
speak French . . . my mother sang on the concert stage and got bouquets.
. . . The marvel of it is the courage with which she kept to her standards . . .
one had the best, or one went without—the viewpoint of the artist.’’
Among those memories of New York summers before air-conditioning
were the stifling heat and the smell of melting asphalt through open
windows. In the early 1900s there was still a view and a breath of air from
the Hudson River. But the family had no money to escape to a cooler and
16 Julia and Her Daughter

greener place. On one of the last days of May 1903, Olga observed a well-
to-do gentleman questioning the elevator boy. The stranger was looking
for a furnished apartment for the summer, ‘‘when business calls me to New
York.’’ On impulse, Olga piped up: ‘‘My mother is renting our flat on the
fifth floor.’’
Julia had learned to answer opportunity when it knocked. She sublet the
apartment for a serendipitous sum that allowed the family to escape for the
summer—in Olga’s words, ‘‘three of the most glorious months of my
life ’’—to an old farmhouse in the White Mountains, with an unobstructed
view of Mount Chocorua. In Canto 74, Pound—writing from his ‘‘cage ’’
in Pisa—later compared Mount Chocorua to Tai’chen, the sacred moun-
tain of Confucius, recalling the purity of the air on Chocorua ‘‘in the land
of maple.’’
Among memories of that summer were visits to nearby Meriden, New
Hampshire, where her mother’s sister, Aunt Louise Birt Baynes, lived with
Olga’s beloved Uncle Harold. Baynes, an early conservationist, was a
friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and co-founder of the American
Bison Society and the Long Island Bird Club, which met in the drawing
room of the Roosevelt home at Oyster Bay. After Roosevelt left the White
House, Uncle Harold and his club presented ‘‘Sanctuary, a Bird Masque ’’
(an e√ort to stop the then-widespread use of bird plumage on women’s
headdresses), under the patronage of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. He was
never too busy lecturing and writing to enchant his favorite niece with
stories of Jimmie, the black bear cub, a central character in one of his many
books. Until his premature death in 1925, Baynes was a beloved presence
in Olga’s life.

In September 1904, when Olga was nine, Julia sent the child to England,
to provide her with ‘‘advantages’’ she herself never had. She was to board
at St. Anthony’s Convent, Sherborne, Dorset, under the direction of
Madame Anselm, the British head, and Madame Pharaïlde, a Belgian nun
(whom Olga credited with her fluency in French). She remembered being
left in the charge of the captain of the H.M.S. New York. Every morning, a
stewardess delivered a fresh letter from her mother (from the packet Julia
 17 Julia and Her Daughter

placed in her hands before departure). There is no evidence of psycholog-

ical distress su√ered by the little girl on her first solo voyage away from
home—or she did a very e≈cient job of concealing it. She was seasick for
only one day and one night, and appeared to enjoy the whole adventure.
She wrote her mother that she saw a ‘‘sea-lion or porpoise jumping out of
the water’’ and was playing cross-tag before the first bugle call with a little
girl and her brother from San Francisco: ‘‘It makes an awful noise, that
bugle does.’’
Julia wrote often to ‘‘Dearest Miss Flu√y’’ at the school and Olga
preserved her own letters, giving a glimpse of life inside the convent and
her own developing independent personality: ‘‘I know Madame [Pha-
raïlde] likes me. . . . I am a universal favorite, but I am not vain about it,
because my goodness and reflectiveness are as easily taken o√ as put on,
but I feel I must keep up my reputation.’’ Olga’s mischievous nature erupted
when she played ‘‘witch’’ with a black pinafore over her head to scare the
younger girls.
Madame Pharaïlde reported to Julia that the young Olga was très sym-
pathique: ‘‘Votre fillette est tout à fait charmante . . . vous pouvez être
tranquille, tout marche très bien, santé et travail. Votre jeune fille m’a
même assuré plusieurs fois qu’elle ne s’ennuyait pas. Nous faisons tout ce
qui vous désirez, promenades chaque jour, lecture, etc.’’ [Your little girl is
utterly charming . . . you can be assured that everything is going very
well, health and work. Your daughter has even assured me several times
that she was not bored. We are doing everything that you desire, walks
each day, reading, etc.]
She was preparing for her first Christmas at the convent, perhaps hiding
tears behind a façade of humor, when she wrote to her mother: ‘‘Only
twelve days till the holidays! Yesterday afternoon, Madame Marie-Joseph
asked the little ones to help seed raisins for the Xmas pudding. We asked
riddles and told stories: ‘Do you know the di√erence between the post
o≈ce and a load of hay?’ ‘I do not.’ ‘Then I won’t send you to pick up
letters for me ’.’’
In the dreary days of January and February, Olga’s enthusiasm gave
way to her first complaints. Julia replied with some memorable advice,
18 Julia and Her Daughter

indicating the closeness of their relationship and the major role she played
in Olga’s life.

My darling girlie: Let me tell you out of my own experience that

when you feel inclined to find fault with circumstances, that the
best thing to do is work. I have been through so many years of
ennui and disappointment, and if I had only had someone to show
me how to make my conditions or surroundings, instead of letting them
make me, I should have been saved much su√ering. Make your
music your first duty. Concentrate on it and try to love even the
drudging of it. Then use it (when you can play even a few bars
properly) to drive away the little devils of unrest which are always
trying to upset us.

Olga’s reply indicated that she had recovered her high spirits and was
following her mother’s advice: ‘‘Could you send me some violin strings?
Mine have broken. Madame said I was glad they were broken, but . . . I’m
not spoilt, am I? All the girls say I am.’’
Olga made her First Communion at St. Anthony’s Convent School on
June 29, 1905, and it was of such importance to her that—sometime
after her eightieth birthday—she recreated the events of that day in her
notebook.

My mother had made me a dress and sent it from New York: short,
long-waisted, with a sash, and with insertions and edging of real
lace (she must have bought it in Belgium and treasured it), with
fine tucks. [I wore] a white tulle veil under a wreath of white roses
from the convent garden. . . .
Madame Anselm came into the room . . . to see me get into my
dress, that I was looking forward to with joy—not vanity. [She]
suggested it would be a fitting sacrifice if I did not look at myself in
the long mahogany-framed swinging mirror, and turned it back to
front! So I never enjoyed what my mother had done with such care
for me. I have no idea what I looked like, but I took pleasure . . . in
renouncing vanity.
 19 Julia and Her Daughter

To anyone raised in a convent school of the era, the nun’s action rings of
overzealous piety; to today’s readers, it would seem unduly harsh, even
sadistic. In retrospect, Olga considered it a cultural di√erence: Madame
Anselm was English; ‘‘Madame Pharaïlde [the Belgian nun] would have
enjoyed the dress with me.’’ Some years before her relationship with Pound
began in the 1920s, Olga had fallen away from the strict practices of the
Roman Catholic church, but she saved the First Communion dress for
their daughter, Mary, who wore it again at Gais and passed it down to
Olga’s granddaughter, Patrizia.
Letters to Julia from Olga during her eleventh and twelfth years reveal
the personality of a talented first child, the focus of her mother’s love and
attention. She reassured her mother that she was still practicing to perfect
her talent for the violin and had developed an aptitude for writing. Even at
this early age, her essays were ‘‘mentioned,’’ and her letters in later life
were carefully crafted.
Later, Julia—foreseeing the day when her voice would lose its brilliance
—moved her residence to London to concentrate her hopes and ambitions
on her young daughter. She was invited to assist Gertrude Griswold in
organizing the Delle Sedie School of Singing, inspired by the grand tradi-
tion of her former voice coach, baritone Enrico Delle Sedie, who had died
in Paris in 1907. The opening bulletin noted that ‘‘Mrs. J. Edgar Rudge has
entire charge of the business details connected with the formation of the
School.’’ After praising her fine contralto voice and appearances on the
concert stage, it announced that Julia had come to the school ‘‘after an
early marriage and removal to the West cut short a promising career.’’
Along with her new position came a rent-free ‘‘villa’’ at one of Lon-
don’s most prestigious addresses, 12 Hill Road in St. John’s Wood, to
which the three children came home on weekends from their boarding
schools: Olga from St. Anthony’s, and her young brothers from St.
Leonard-on-Sea, a Catholic preparatory school.
Julia soon established herself in the expatriate community, in the
American Women’s Club founded by Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, the U.S. am-
bassador’s wife, and presided over by Mrs. Curtis Brown, wife of the
publisher. Other activities centered on the Episcopal Church, of which
Julia—a Roman Catholic—was recording secretary.
20 Julia and Her Daughter

It was permanently recorded in the History of Youngstown that ‘‘Mrs.

J. Edgar Rudge is residing in London, superintending the musical educa-
tion of their daughter, Olga, who inherits a large measure of her talented
mother’s gift of song. It is the parents’ intention to give their daughter
every educational advantage. . . . Both Mr. and Mrs. Rudge cross the
Atlantic almost yearly.’’
Olga remembered that their dollars seemed to stretch further because
of the favorable exchange rate. ‘‘The money didn’t come with regularity, it
never was to, but the English system of books and bills seemed to ease the
strain.’’ They could a√ord a cook and a manservant, with enough left over
to take long summer holidays, sometimes at Easter. There are snapshots of
the three (very small) children at St. Helier’s in Jersey, the Channel Is-
lands, La Panne Bains on the Belgian seacoast, and ‘‘the summer that
Teddy fell on the rocks at Lyme Regis.’’ Peace and contentment were the
theme of the years at St. John’s Wood:

The first room I ever had of my own was at 12 Hill Road; it looked
on the back garden, . . . [it was] a lovely house, and my mother had
made it charming. . . . it had a small conservatory, a small front
garden, which was very nice for tea outside, but not big enough for
garden parties. . . . I had a collie pup that cost two guineas and had
a pedigree. Since it howled when kept outside, I once put on
moccasins and sneaked down to the kennel and slept with the pup
’till it fell asleep. After that, the pup was allowed to sleep in the
scullery, but mostly managed to get up to my room.

To her granddaughter Patrizia, who visited the neighborhood in the

1980s, Olga wrote: ‘‘I used to take my pup (though it was really taking me)
to Primrose Hill. . . . it used to have a flock of sheep grazing there when I
knew it.’’
Many leaders in the turn-of-the-century music world lived nearby,
among them the composer Sir Edward Elgar and the conductor Sir
Thomas Beecham (one block down, on Grove End Road). ‘‘In the musical
circles in which I grew up in London in the early 1900s . . . my mother was
‘at home ’ on Sunday afternoons,’’ Olga remembered. ‘‘ ‘Little pitchers
 21 Julia and Her Daughter

have big ears,’ and I used to sit out of sight and watch who came; the
occasion was important if top hats arrived. I could always count on two.’’
Olga’s brother Teddy, who had a beautiful boy-soprano voice, had won a
scholarship to study at the Westminster Cathedral Choir School and was
required to wear the school ‘‘uniform’’ with Eton collar and topper on
Sunday visits home.
Another perennial Sunday guest was ‘‘the little old gentleman with a
grey mustache and cherished top hat,’’ her mother’s Californian friend,
Henry Langdon Flint. Flint had spent the earlier part of his life ‘‘in the
purlieus of La Scala,’’ and was a connoisseur of bel canto opera. He was
always invited to stay to supper (that his worn topper had seen better days
perhaps explains Julia’s special kindness to him). He reported all the
musical gossip and details of the opera diva Maria Felicita Malibran’s life—
a first marriage annulled by the courts in Paris, her child by the violinist
Charles de Beriot—‘‘deplorable,’’ in the eyes of many, but an enlightening
treat for the ‘‘little pitcher’’ listening in.
Among her mother’s close friends were Etta and Halcott Glover, the
latter a nephew and member of the brilliant circle that clustered about the
poet Leigh Hunt. Glover was a cousin of Margaret Morris, known for her
classic Greek profile and for following the fashion of Isadora Duncan with
flowing gowns and bare feet and sandals. Olga also remembered walking
along a London street with the Glovers and Julia, catching a glimpse of
Henry James with a young woman presumed to be his niece.
She had many happy memories of the London years. Whenever she
sipped a cup of tea, she was reminded of Strugnull’s, the ‘‘beautiful little
shop on Duke Street, where Mother used to go for ‘Twinings’.’’ In her
early teens, she enjoyed memorable performances of ‘‘the divine Sarah’’
Bernhardt in Phèdre and Adriana LeCouvrier, and dutifully recorded these
experiences with the music scales and poems she wrote at Sherborne in a
leatherbound diary her father gave her.
With his generous contributions, Julia was able to a√ord more lasting
gifts for Olga, including a ten-volume set of Shakespeare ’s plays pur-
chased at a little bookshop o√ Charing Cross Road. The entire set cost
only ‘‘two-and-six’’ (two pounds, six shillings) but was worth far more,
and Olga always assumed the volumes had been stolen goods. She was
22 Julia and Her Daughter

fascinated by the curious, old-fashioned script (the s’s resembling f ’s), and
kept the cherished volumes through many changes of residence until they
came to rest in the Knights’ Hall at Brunnenburg, her daughter’s castle in
the Tyrol.
The most treasured gift Olga received from her mother in those a∆uent
years was her first important violin, ‘‘a good Klotz.’’ It was on this Klotz
that Olga began to impress audiences with her precocity, which inspired
one London critic to write: ‘‘[Olga Rudge] is of a serious nature and
mature turn of mind, and gifted with much musical feeling and tempera-
ment . . . becoming one more member of the great feminine army of
successful American artists.’’
The children were never allowed to accept gifts from outside the fam-
ily, Olga recalled, gifts they could not repay. ‘‘That genteel, old-fashioned
idea—payer de sa personne—to pay with the marrow of one ’s bones and
with one ’s best gray matter has clung to me throughout life.’’
During this time, a patroness of poets and musicians came into their
lives whom Olga was to payer de sa personne as long as her good friend
lived. Katherine Dalliba-John, mother of the poet Gerda Dalliba, was
herself an author of romance novels. Katherine a√ected the pose of a
Middle Eastern princess, wearing oriental shawls bordered by long fringe,
her dark hair cut short across the forehead in bangs, Twenties style, many
years before it became fashionable. Olga’s a√ectionate name for Dalliba-
John was ‘‘Ramooh’’ (more appropriate than Katherine, in Olga’s view,
for her friend’s adopted persona). The Studio Meeting Society that Mrs.
John established in her home at 9 Langford Place was a short walk from
the Delle Sedie School. She provided food, lodging, and practice rooms
for young protégés beginning their careers, some of whom later achieved
international prominence, Efrem Zimbalist among them. To Olga, she
gave encouragement and financial support during her lifetime and a small
legacy.
At that time, an inheritance from Olga’s father’s side of the family came
in sight. Grandmother Rudge ’s brother, head of the Stock family in Glou-
cestershire, died young and unmarried. His three old-maid sisters sold
their inherited ‘‘moated grange . . . occupied by druids’’ and bought a
small house in Malvern, left to Emma when Mary and Harriet died. Julia
 23 Julia and Her Daughter

and her daughter visited this ‘‘truly Dickensian old maid’’ who, according
to Olga, ‘‘sat in her house like a snail and never went out. . . . A child knew
instinctively to sit upright in straight-backed chairs . . . no games or signs
of a book in the house, the chocolates Mother brought from London put
away until after Lent.’’ There was much talk of leaving the house to
Teddy, but when Emma died everything went to the eldest male of that
generation, Uncle George Rudge of Ohio—for many years a cause of bad
feeling in the family. Olga’s unflattering view of these local descendants of
sheep farmers who came over with William the Conqueror was that they
resembled sheep themselves: ‘‘They grazed where they were and stayed
put.’’ In spite of which, her brother Teddy, after serving in World War I,
‘‘took root in the English Midlands as if Grandfather Rudge had never left
for the New World.’’
Olga and Julia were never inclined to stay put. One constant in their
lives was a cottage at Saint Cécile, Pas de Calais, their vacation home for
many summers. Olga remembered ‘‘only one small hotel and five or six
modest summer villas, with an enormous sandy beach behind the dunes.
No shops, no cafés, no cars, no telephones, no foreigners . . . one railroad
station between the two villages, Donne-Camiers and Saint Cécile. . . . We
were always joined by Father, coming from the States, and sometimes
Auntie Lou Baynes and some English friends invited by Mother.’’ One of
her childhood memories was of ‘‘going to collect driftwood on the beach
for the stove in our chalet.’’ Some twenty years later, Etta Glover would
remember Olga, ‘‘hopping about the Grand Plage, first on one foot then
on the other, then on both together as you used to do.’’
 Between the Turn of the Century and the Great War

3
Halcyon Days No More
1910–1918

S oon Julia decided it was time to send her daughter to the Paris Conser-
vatoire to perfect her technique under Maestro León Carambât, first vio-
linist of the Opéra Comique. She resigned her position at the Delle Sedie
School and, taking the two young brothers with her, signed a lease begin-
ning September 1910—renewable every two, four, or six years—on a
choice apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement.
‘‘Mother always insisted that we live in beautiful places,’’ Olga recalled.
The Rudges were tenants of the prémière étage of 2, rue Chamfort, a
graceful six-story building with iron balustrades designed by the contem-
porary architect M. Blanche. A salon with four large windows faced the
quiet courtyard of an Ursuline convent across the way; the spacious din-
ing room and two bedrooms occupied the rest of the floor, with a maid’s
room above and storage below in the sous-sol. The monthly rent of thirty-
eight hundred francs (plus charges of six hundred francs) included steam
heat, rugs, a lift, and a concierge on duty from 8 a.m. till 10 p.m., amenities
quite rare in pre–World War I Paris. The apartment was furnished with
handsome old English pieces brought over from Hill Road, Julia’s desk
and a lacquered oriental cabinet that held bibelots and jewelry she later
24
 25 Halcyon Days No More

passed on to her daughter. (A ‘‘floating memory’’ recorded in Olga’s

notebook was a ring with divided hearts her father had purchased from a
gypsy at an Ohio state fair and presented to his sweetheart, Julia.) With a
little bit of luck and determination (and the absent father’s remittances),
Julia and her kittens had landed on both feet again in a most genteel and
elegant manner.
Olga spoke fondly of the ‘‘rue Chamfort’s terrain,’’ where the rue de la
Source bordered the avenue Mozart and the rue Jasmin. Even today few
quartiers of Paris rival the cachet of the Seizième, a garden spot between the
place Victor Hugo and the Bois de Boulogne. In an earlier era, Colette fled
there from the crowds and noise of the city. Olga recalled the quiet oasis of
the convent garden with its apple trees heavy with fruit, where young
novices in white habits sunned themselves in fair weather. The convent
has been razed to make way for a Citroën garage, but the stone wall with
an iron cross above the gate remains.
Olga’s brother Teddy was removed from the Westminster Choir and
enrolled in Mr. Denny’s Anglo-Saxon School and painting classes at the
Left Bank atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens on the rue de la Grande Chaumière.
Arthur, the younger boy, entered the Lycée Janson de Sailley to prepare
for the bachot, or baccalauréat examination. Olga recalls the Janson de
Sailley boys sitting on wooden benches on the rue de la Pompe, their
uniform pants protected by small squares of carpet held together with
leather belt straps that doubled as bookbags.
Arthur’s closest friend, two doors down, was Choura Stroumillo, son of
a Russian nobleman who would later lose his estates in the Revolution.
The boys used the attic room as their study, surrounded by books and
reproductions of their favorite paintings. They spent much of their spare
time reading and discussing the classics and poetry, when they were not
attending sports events or exploring museums. In a memoir written in his
late seventies, Choura confided that the close friendship that existed be-
tween the two boys was a precursor of later heterosexual relationships:
‘‘Our love was living proof of the mythical bond that united us in perfect
concord. . . . We did not consider ourselves lovers, yet sex gave an extra
dimension to our friendship. The innocence of our emotions was as chaste
and transparent as the air we breathed.’’
26 Halcyon Days No More

Among Olga’s early memories of this cosmopolitan neighborhood was

a small bookshop on the rue Jasmin where the young girl behind the
counter spoke Russian—one of a dozen languages. A colorful character
who lived nearby was her mother’s friend Martinus Sieveking, a pianist
who transcribed Chopin for Olga’s violin concerts. His hobby was collect-
ing timepieces, and Olga remembered listening to the tick-tock-tick-tock of
the several dozen clocks at his flat, chiming to di√erent rhythms.
Julia contributed a colorful narrative to the Youngstown newspaper
about Paris between the turn-of-the-century Exposition and the begin-
ning of the Great War: ‘‘For the first time in six years, the big lake in the
Bois de Boulogne has been open to skaters . . . up in the thousands daily,’’
she wrote. The Horseshoe, always the first to freeze, was reserved exclu-
sively for members of the Paris skating club, and Julia and Olga went there
‘‘to study the exquisite ‘creations’ of the dressmaker, furrier, and milliner.
. . . no-one can show a beautiful gown to greater perfection than a graceful
skater.’’ Though Mardi Gras was bitterly cold, ‘‘it did not dampen the
ardor of confetti-throwing crowds. . . . Shakespeare ’s ‘seven ages’ were all
represented.’’ Later, at the mid-Lent carnival, there would be processions
and the crowning of the Queen of Queens.
Julia and Olga also saw lively times in the Latin Quarter. At a fair on the
Left Bank, acrobats performed in the open air, ‘‘many living in gypsy
vans . . . spread the table for their noon meal on the street.’’ The buildings
from the Paris Exposition of 1900 were fast disappearing: Belgium’s
model of the Hotel de Ville at Oudenaarde, the most beautiful, was gone,
but the United States’ pavilion was still standing. One of their favorite
walks was to the Place de la Concorde, where the two large fountains were
‘‘in their wintry garb, the water thrown high in the air by the dolphin
has . . . frozen into exquisite draperies.’’
When Olga was not following in her perceptive mother’s wake on the
boulevards or practicing the violin, she was performing at afternoon teas
and soirées, gaining experience before sympathetic audiences. She began
to draw more attention than Julia (who accompanied ‘‘the clever violinist’’
on the piano). Madame de Saussine, an aristocratic patron of the arts
whose daughter also studied violin at the Conservatoire, provided entrée
to the finest drawing rooms of Faubourg Saint-Germain, the realm of
 27 Halcyon Days No More

Marcel Proust. ‘‘Madame thought it important for me to see Isadora Dun-

can and her children dance at the Châtelet Theater, an experience that was
unforgettable bliss,’’ Olga recalled.
In spite of her ample avoirdupois (gossips called the aristocratic doy-
enne ‘‘Mme. de Saucisson’’ [Mrs. Sausage]), Madame exhibited supremely
good taste in her wardrobe. In Paris, a woman’s best-kept secret was her
dressmaker, and as proof of their friendship, she invited Julia and Olga to
the flat of an exclusive modiste in Montmartre. Mme. Laschenez designed
a new wardrobe for her expatriate clients: the indispensable blue tailleur
with full skirt, and a Saxe-blue satin afternoon dress with panier for Julia.
For Olga, a beige tailleur with tucked crepe-de-chine blouse and a green
Empire dress for afternoon; a velours-du-laine red Empire dress, full red
velvet skirt, and sleeveless dress accented with red tassels for evening,
foils for Olga’s dark beauty.
Mabel and Ethel de Courcy Duncan were among friends of Julia’s circle
who asked Olga to play at their apartment on the avenue de La Motte-
Piquet. (Julia was first introduced to their mother, Mrs. Arthur Grey, in
London by the artist Alice Donleavy, a friend of Grandmother Paige.) The
Duncans invited Julia and Olga to the hôtel of the Marquis Charles de
Pomairol on the rue Saint Dominique with one of the most beautiful
gardens in Paris to watch the 14 de juillet parade and fireworks. At recep-
tions in Madame de Pomairol’s salon, young poets recited their works, and
artists from the Comédie Française often appeared. ‘‘I found the poets en
masse tiresome,’’ Olga recalled, ‘‘and was deeply disappointed in Pierre
Loti, the guest-of-honor at one of the evening parties.’’
Olga and her mother were always welcome in Parisian society; they
rated high on guest lists that included barons and baronnes, comtes and
comtesses, and the occasional prince or princess. ‘‘My mother would take
me to the salon for my education, on the condition that I put my hair up,’’
Olga remembered; ‘‘I usually wore it tied back with a large bow.’’ A petite
five feet three inches tall, Olga appeared younger than her years. ‘‘If I
looked too young, other jeunes filles would have to be invited. . . . The
only other young girl at the Pomairols was Marie Volsamachi, who recited
poetry superbly. . . . I was always happy to play after she recited; my
tone seemed better (playing after even fine pianists was to be avoided if
28 Halcyon Days No More

possible).’’ In spite of her self-deprecating manner, Olga was gaining a

reputation for individual, fresh readings of contemporary works: ‘‘Her
really strong point is a flowing cantabile,’’ a contemporary critic noted.
The Duncan sisters also introduced Olga and her mother to members
of the literary establishment in Paris: Paul Souday, Charles Clermont-
Ganneau, Charles Maurras, and Sisley Huddleston (Paris correspondent
for the Observer). At Madame de Pomairol’s they met Judith Gautier,
daughter of the essayist and critic Théophile, and thereafter were invited
to the Gautier flat on the rue Washington. On one of those evenings, an
elderly man—a smallish dark figure to Olga’s eyes—was introduced as the
author Joséphin Péladan. (Unknown to Olga at the time, Péladan’s Le
Secret des Troubadours was a great enthusiasm of Ezra’s.)
Another venue for Olga’s talent was St. Geneviève ’s Club on the rue
Vaugirard in Montparnasse (known to the American colony as Sylvia
Beach’s father’s club). The British group assembled at the Lyceum where
Olga, still in her teens, ‘‘performed with finish’’ before the evening was
brought to a close with impromptu dancing and enthusiastic renditions of
‘‘God Save the King.’’ Through Julia’s contacts, Olga also was invited to
perform at the matinées musicales at the avenue Niel home of Madame
Giulia Valda with American soprano Julia Porter, then the star pupil of
Madame Valda. The Musical Courier applauded the obbligato in the Bach-
Gounod arrangement of Ave Maria ‘‘of that very capable young violinist
whose excellent musicianship has been mentioned before.’’
In that time of peace and prosperity before the Great War, Mabel and
Ethel Duncan joined the family group in Italy for a summer holiday. They
stopped at the Hotel Saturnia in Venice, and Olga became enamored with
that city favored by artists, not knowing that some fifteen years later it
would become her permanent home. Teddy was displaying artistic talent,
sketching the mosaic of Christ on a white donkey in the piazza of St.
Mark’s. The travelers continued on to Florence, where Julia took an
apartment for the summer in an ancient building with high ceilings facing
the tree-shaded Via dei Tintori, a cool refuge in the intense heat. This was
a memorable interlude for the impressionable young girl. She fondly
recalled hearing the great tenor Benjamino Gigli sing La Spagnola (men-
tioned by Pound in Canto 27).
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