Excerpt page 98: (1931) It was Ezra's custom to spend late summer and early fall with Olga and Mary in Venice, while Dorothy was in England with her mother and Omar.* Mary recorded her first impressions of those visits in her autobiography, Discretions.....
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Mary had memories of afternoon walks with her father or going for swimming with him and her mother practicing her violin in Rapallo, setting the table for lunches and collecting flowers, as a child. But when these weeks were over, she was sent back to her foster home. Mary was raised in that German home.
As the Great Depression deepened Olga sought some other ways to earn income, taking a steno class and seeking work as a translator of written work in French. Though many of their contemporaries thought this work was beneath her, they were pragmatic too.
George Antheil had work for her in New York - a tour that included travel expenses. Ezra continued to work on his Canto's. Eventually the economic conditions improved. In 1939 Ezra went back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years. Olga would also have cause to go back to the United States eventually, but they ended their lives in Italy, and together.
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Page 137 Excerpt:
While in the United States, he (Ezra) had consulted an attorney to explore the possibility of legally adopting Mary to legitimize her status and secure a U.S. Passport for her, in case they had to leave Italy suddenly. (because World War II was brewing.) When Olga heard the news, for the first time in their fifteen year relationship she 'put her cards on the table' and stated her position in strong language that could not be misunderstood. "He has put her off every time she tries to get H to consider the subject of the present triangle, she wrote (The couple wrote to each other in third person as if this might keep their communications private.) There was no reason to maintain a "marital front" out of respect for Dorothy's parents, since both were gone. "He has told her He did not believe in marriage ... certainly no church would consider a marriage entered into as He did her. His was, as sacred or binding." On the brink if war with its possible dislocations, it might be a good time to reconsider legitimize her own - as well as her child's status...
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Olga was worried that if Ezra adopted Mary she might loose her A the war began Mary was already in her mid-teens. When in 1944 Rapallo was bombed, deprivation and hunger set in. Mary, at eighteen took a secretarial job and was on her own. When in May of that year, Dorothy and Ezra Pound were forced to move, along with all their furnishings and possessions, Olga invited them to live with her. The three of them lived together for a year. They attempted to be mature about the situation and Dorothy gave the impression she was not hurt by her husband's relationship with Olga.
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During the war, Ezra went on Italian radio and made some pro-fascist remarks, which got him charged with treason by the United States.
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Excerpt page 155:
Later, after the triangular living arrangement had abruptly ended, Olga recorded her true feelings" "One solid year, Dorothy made use of me to the fullest, shared my house (while) I worked like a slave - cooking, cleaning, finding food - which I only undertook owing to her incapacity, so that E. should not suffer. I cannot understand the incredible meanness of the way she was behaving... in terror lest I have some advantage over her, considering our respective positions: she, with the war year's income saved up, a family legal advisor to fall back on and right to appeal to any of E's friends for help, a child provided for with no trouble on her part. I with no rights of any kind - income completely knocked out by war - high and dry in a country I never would have lived in by choice except to be near E, having to improvise a living with Mary...:
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Dorothy Pound would prevail as the wife of Ezra Pound for the rest of her life. Ezra may have also withdrawn from Olga as he aged and their daughter, Mary, married and had children, making Olga a grandmother with a family of her own. At one point the poet and the violinist did not see each other for seven years nor had Mary seen her father in as long. As Ezra aged and his physical and mental health declined, Olga wanted to be there for him. In particular she wanted to get him out of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, in the United States near Washington, D.C., a mental hospital which she was shut out from, when he was there in the early 1950's. Olga battled with depression again but managed to make it back to the United States where she got to visit with Ezra, where he was housed in the part of the hospital that housed those with senile dementia. She asked certain literary friends of his to lobby for his release from the hospital. His legal problems did not make it any easier but his friend Ernest Hemingway suggested it was mental illness that had influenced his behavior and that was the legal path his lawyers took.
In these passages of Anne Conover Carson's book, we learn that Olga paid the price of not being married to the father of her child, a man she long loved, because he would not divorce.
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*Omar was the son of Dorothy and Ezra Pound, who Dorothy had as a first and only child not long after Olga had her daughter with Ezra, Mary.
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