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

by Anne Conover

A loving and admiring companion for half a century to literary titan Ezra Pound, concert violinist Olga Rudge was the muse who inspired the poet to complete his epic poem, The Cantos , and the mother of his only daughter, Mary. Strong-minded and defiant of conventions, Rudge knew the best and worst of times with Pound. With him, she coped with the wrenching dislocations brought about by two catastrophic world wars and experienced modernism’s radical transformation of the arts.

In this enlightening biography, Anne Conover offers a full portrait of Olga Rudge (1895–1996), drawing for the first time on Rudge’s extensive unpublished personal notebooks and correspondence. Conover explores Rudge’s relationship with Pound, her influence on his life and career, and her perspective on many details of his controversial life, as well as her own musical career as a violinist and musicologist and a key figure in the revival of Vivaldi’s music in the 1930s. In addition to mining documentary sources, the author interviewed Rudge and family members and friends. The result is a vivid account of a highly intelligent and talented woman and the controversial poet whose flame she tended to the end of her long life.

The book quotes extensively from the Rudge–Pound letters--an almost daily correspondence that began in the 1920s and continued until Pound’s death in 1972. These letters shed light on many aspects of Pound’s disturbing personality; the complicated and delicate balance he maintained between the two most significant women in his life, Olga and his wife Dorothy, for fifty years; the birth of Olga and Ezra’s daughter Mary de Rachewiltz; Pound’s alleged anti-Semitism and Fascist sympathies; his wartime broadcasts over Rome radio and indictment for treason; and his twelve-year incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the mentally ill.

Genres: Poetry

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Mary Lou]

Read this book after _The City of Falling Angels_. That book referred to the controversy in Olga Rudge's later years over what happened with Pound's papers, and it got me interested in their lives in Venice.

The book is an academic biography, a bit dense in places. But I felt it was an accurate portrayal of two people who lived through very trying times (World War II, Pound being placed in a mental hospital for years for treason for his radio broadcasts critical of America made in Mussolini's Italy). Through it all, Rudge stood up for him, rallied support for his cause, and stood by him through years of illness and infirmity. They were not a conventional couple (Pound never divorced his wife Dorothy, and Rudge raised their daughter partly through foster parents, but they were two people with strong wills who decided to love each other and stay together despite all odds.

It is worth reading for anyone with an interest in Italy during the war years, for anyone interested in Pound, or for anyone interested in the society of American expatriates from the 20s through the 40s. Lots of eminent personages made their way through the Rudge-Pound home at some point along the journey.

Fascinating read.

[Harold Rhenisch]

We are all in Anne Conover's debt, for she has assembled a vast amount of new material about Ezra, has brought Olga halfways into the light, and has shone a bit of candlelight on their relationship. The book, however, plods once Ezra has died, not because of his absence (Olga is well able to hold our attention in her own right), but because the sources go unchallenged by his ripostes and the whole thing becomes a bit adulatory. In other words, too much attention has been paid to Olga's diaries, and not enough done to flesh them out with corroborating or contextual research. Dorothy, the third in their triangle, is inadequately present. Their context in an expat world crossing American-British-Italian tensions goes unremarked. Olga's work is treated in detail, but never adequately fleshed out. The treatment is, instead, almost purely laudatory, in a not-yet-fully-three-dimensional way. Their daughter Mary is used as a foil, without the research to give her a full narrative of her own. As fouor examples. Still, the book is a huge step forward from anything we had before and has done much to rescue Olga from obscurity.

[Janette Schafer]

A detailed look at a complex artistic and interpersonal relationship. Ezra and Olga were an atypical couple living in tumuluous times. While much has been written about Pound's writing, this goes in depth into his life with lover and muse, Olga Rudge. While the reading can be a bit academic at times, his relationship with Olga is fascinating and was clearly the foundation for the expression of his literary genius.

[David]

Exemplary biography primarily focused on Olga but very good on EP, also, scholarly where it needs to be but successful in telling a very good story which scarcely would be believable if it hadn't actually happened.