THE ARRANGEMENT : EZRA POUND and OLGA RUDGE : WORLD WAR II FORCED EZRA, DOROTHY, and OLGA to LIVE TOGETHER FOR A YEAR

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.....

***

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.

***

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...

***

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.

***

During the war, Ezra went on Italian radio and made some pro-fascist remarks, which got him charged with treason by the United States.

***

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...:

***

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.

EZRA, OLGA, and DOROTHY : EZRA BECOMES A FATHER AGAIN, THIS TIME WITH HIS WIFE and EGERTON DID NOT GIVE UP

Reading Anne Conover Carson's book, I sought information on what Dorothy Pound knew and what her relationship with her husband, Ezra, was really like.

***

Olga Rudge, who hid her pregnancy, gave birth to her daughter and left her in the care of a villager, so that she could continue her music career and earn a living. She also experienced depression after the birth for some time. She kept that she had a daughter a secret from her father for the rest of her life. 

Meanwhile Dorothy Pound, Ezra's wife, sometimes traveled with him or alone. The movement of these people for work and pleasure created obstacles but also opportunities for them to reunite. In Rapallo, a hill town in Southern Italy, known for it's Mediterranean produce and wine making. Ezra and Olga spent Christmas of 1925 there, one of the rare times they would be able to spend the holiday together, because Dorothy was traveling. In 1926, in Paris, Olga's financials were good enough to renew the lease on the apartment her mother had first rented for the family for another four years. Her father remarried, much to Olga's approval, and visited her in Paris with his new wife.

What was attractive to Olga about Ezra?  It would seem his literary accomplishments and acceptance of her as a woman of intelligence, of her having a 'fine mind,' as well as his allegiance with her to further her career as a concert violinist. Certainly she had to learn that he would not meet all her needs nor could be commanded to see her. Ezra came up with reasons or excuses to cancel plans with her but no doubt he was proud of her and attended her performances when possible. Olga performed in George Antheil's unconventional masterpiece Ballet Mecanique and Ezra created an avant-guard opera Le Testement de Villon in 1926.

But then Dorothy, nearing forty, as Ezra was also, became pregnant with her first child and gave birth in September of 1926. It was American ex pat writer Earnest Hemingway who took her to the hospital in Paris, a friend of the couple but where was Ezra?. One wonders if Dorothy had a child competitively with Olga. Omar, a son, would live with Dorothy's parents. Ezra Pound himself checked into the hospital, some thought due to the stress of "divided loyalties." He now had two children, a daughter and a son, with a mistress and a wife, and both children were being raised by others, and possibly his in-laws also provided the finances for their garndchild. For as esteemed as he was as a creative person of achievement, he was not financially independent enough to be capable of supporting children. Olga and Ezra saw their daughter between concerts. Mary reported mostly seeing her parents a day or two here and there as they made side trips to visit with her. 

Mary was about four years old when Ezra told his father that he was the father of a daughter. His parents were not rich but he was suggesting this be considered when they were writing their will. However, his father may have not told his mother.

But Egerton Grey, who had married and divorced again, also paid Olga a visit, as if he were in competition with Ezra for her.  He proposed marriage again.  Olga was unable to bring herself to tell him about Ezra or that she had a daughter. She was keeping important secrets from those closest to her. Perhaps she feared becoming infamous because she had become a public person as a performer but Egerton's love for her seemed to be unconditional.

Late in the summer of 1928 came the shock that Egerton Grey was dead.  He had been a student at the Biochemical Institute and working on his book. It was said that he was 'ill from overwork." Olga was thirty three. As her life went on, being with Ezra, she became sentimental about Egerton. While Ezra was away, she had the attention of many men, and he even encouraged her to entertain being with a younger man.  Did she ever? We don't know.  It's assumed that Ezra always managed to keep her for himself, even if she did mention the flirtations to make him jealous.

***

I have to admit to my readers that I have a suspicion that Egerton might have been struggling with his sexuality, that he might have been homosexual at a time when he would not have had an easy time of it in society if he were out.  His love for Olga outstanding, I wonder how he could have had two quick marriages.  What had gone wrong?  Perhaps Olga knew that she could always have his love if they did not marry.  The reason for his death also sounds suspicious to me.   --- Missy

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VIOLINIST OLGA RUDGE : CONTEMPORARY VIOLINISTS and THE NEW MUSIC EXPERIMENTS OF PARIS IN THE 1920's : OLGA RUDGE, EZRA POUND.

Alas!  Research Ezra and much comes up.  Olga  - not so much.  But musical compositions that she did play as a violinist in Paris do come up, and this series from Arizona State University circa 2015 in which violinist Hannah Leland did her final performance as a Doctoral Candidate, is exciting. Aimee Fincher is the pianist.  According to the information about this video, George Antheil wrote three sonatas between 1923 and 1924 as commissioned by Ezra Pound for Olga Rudge to perform. Here is the musical innovations that happened a hundred years ago.  (On another such video it says that Ezra played drums on a composition that Olga also played on.)

From the book by Anne Conover Carson :  pages 6-7 (circa 1923)   Ezra soon introduced Olga to Margaret Anderson's protege, George Antheil, a young pianist and composer from New Jersey who had arrived in Paris to attend the premier of Igor Stravinsky's  Les Noces on June 13.  With his Romanian belle amie Boski 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 honoring Anderson and the actress Georgette Leblanc.

Ezra began to take Antheil to Olga's flat to practice. ....  Antheil soon set to composing a violin sonata for Olga, determined to make the music, he wrote for Ezra, "as wildly strange as she looked, tailored to her special appearance and technique.  It is wild, the fiddle of the Tziganes ...totally new written music...barbaric, But I think Olga will like it... it gives her more to do ad show off with than other sonata.

... The Antheil-Rudge collaboration at Olga's flat continued on an almost daily schedule in the all.  Antheil praised Olga's mastery of the violin:"I noticed when we commenced playing a Mozart sonata ...  (she) was the consummate violinists.... 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 Theatre des Champs-Elysees, the three short Antheil sonatas that premiered as the curtain raiser fr opening night of the Ballet Suedois became the most controversial musical event of the season.  A corespondent of the New York Herald compared the evening the the premier of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printempts: "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 that Stravinsky."

OLGA RUDGE VIOLINIST MISTRESS OF POET EZRA POUND : WRITING LETTERS TO EACH OTHER BEGAN AND PRESERVED THEIR LONG RELATIONSHIP

WHAT THOU LOVEST WELL by Anne Conover Carson is a primary reference for this month's posts.

OLGA RUDGE

(Olga Ludovica (Louise) Rudge)

1895-1996  (one hundred and one years old!)

EZRA POUND  

(Ezra Weston Loomis Pound)

1885-1972

Olga outlived the love of her life by twenty-four years. She did not consider herself to be his mistress because, she said, he never supported her. That's attitude is of interest here at Mistress Manifesto as we attempt to define and understand unconventional and alternative relationships. Does being a Mistress require being Kept?  I don't think so! Both Olga and Ezra earned some money but also depended on money from family - in his case from his wife's - and patrons of the arts.

Ezra's grave is at San Michele cemetery in Venice, Italy. Olga was taken in my their daughter Mary when she could not longer live alone, but she was buried next to decades-long love.

***

Anne Conover Carson's book is about the love story of an accomplished poet and his accomplished violinist mistress, both American ex patriots, his fame enduring, her's not as well known. He was a married man who never divorced. She never married but when it came to their daughter, saw the positives in him divorcing and marrying her. Early in their relationship, but when she was closer to thirty than twenty, Olga made the exceptional choice to bear a child by Ezra and had a daughter they named Mary Rudge. Mary would have children and Olga, who lived to be 101, became a grandmother and great-grandmother.  

Olga Rudge experienced conflict with Ezra, who may have had narcissistic personality disorder and clearly had episodes of mental illness. He may have wavered in his intentions or may have keenly felt himself between his wife and mistress.  No doubt the women had to share him.

Ezra and Olga met in Paris at the famous salon held by Natalie Clifford Barney.   

Excerpt: page 3

Barney was some twenty years Olga's senior and was the leader of a freedom-loving and bohemian group of intellectual women in the early 1900's - Collete,  Anna de Noailles, and the spy Mata Hari. Another generation, Olga's contemporaries, succeeded them : English suffragettes, militant feminists and lesbians, tolerant heterosexuals and asexual androgyns. .......  Musical reputations were established at Barneys; salon, and Renata Borgatti, Olga's accompanist, incited her there after the two women returned from a sun-filled action on the Isle of Capri.  Olga recognized Ezra, the tall American wearing a signature brown velvet jacket, as someone she had seen at concerts in London the year before.  

***

In 1895 when Olga Ludovica (Louise) Rudge was born in Youngstown, Ohio, of Irish heritage, it was a polluted mill town but boasted an opera house. Her mother, Julia, studied voice in London and Paris and had aspirations to have an operatic career but married at twenty-nine, then considered to be spinsterhood, to one of the most eligible bachelors in town. Olga's father's family traced their origins to 17th century England and had been Anglicans but had converted to Catholicism in Youngstown. In Olga's early childhood her mother was on tour. 

Olga didn't think of marriage as a career and hated Ohio. From an early age, perhaps influenced by her mother's attitude, despite her parents obviously traditional marriage, she had other ideas. In 1904, when she was nine, her mother sent her to boarding school in England. Olga saw the voyage and all else as a great adventure and was not resentful of being sent away to the convent. She was already learning to play the violin. In 1910 her mother moved the family to Paris and they began to vacation in Italy. Olga's was an advantaged upbringing, though the assumptions about her family's wealth was exaggerated.  Olga did need to earn a living and was able to do so as a violinist playing recitals and converts primarily in Europe.

Olga's first love began in Florence, where she fell for a young man named Egerton Grey, a friend of the family, who also lived an international life.  He went to one of Olga's concerts and then began to pursue her with romantic ardor but after he married and then annulled his marriage, she was left conflicted. Egerton was slow to give up on marrying Olga.

In 1910 Olga's mother decided it was time to send her to the Paris Conservatoire to study under Maestro Leon Carambat who was the 1st violinist at the Opera Comique. She moved the family - sans her husband who remained doing business -  into an exclusive and beautiful six story apartment building.  It could be said that Olga's had the perfect mother for her own aspirations.  Julia Rudge was perceptive, she honored her daughter's talent and sought her development as a musician, and she was a companion to her daughter who furthered their acceptance by society where important patrons could afford to support the arts and the artist. Olga started performing at afternoon teas, gaining experience in front of small audiences, and the patronage of important hostesses.   

Ezra Pound was married to Dorothy Shakespear, and English woman who was reportedly austere.  In January 1921, Ezra and Dorothy were living in Paris, though they also traveled to and lived in London and would move to Italy. Though he was 36, he and his wife rented and lived humbly, almost impoverished, on stipends from his publications, his wife's money, and contributions from his parents. Ezra had respect as a poet, musician, and all around creative.  American ex-patriots writer Ernest Hemingway and his then wife were visitors, the influential Gertrude Stein (who also ran a salon) was negative, but Ezra Pound was welcomed and admired at Barney's.  He and Barney had been writing to each other about literature and poetry for over a decade. Ezra wrote the score for an opera, his contribution to the new music trends of Paris just as there were new poetic rhythms. He was a pianist and also played drums. Olga was a violinist of talent and skill and her work in the new music of Paris in the 1920's composed by another American ex-patriot, George Antheil, was remarkable.

Pound met many important and famous artists and writers at the Barney salon. He had long been seen socializing around town without his wife and what must be assumed is that she was dedicated to their marriage but left alone quite a bit. They were childless when Ezra met Olga and there was speculation that Dorothy had never warmed up to sex. 

Ezra and Olga began a correspondence in 1923, which is known, but exactly when and how their love first bloomed or they began to have a sexual relationship or if continued one, or for how long is not. The evidence of it is the birth of their only child, Mary. (Mary de Rachewiltz was her married name.)

Please check in again here at Mistress Manifesto as I continue the story of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge!  Can you understand their unconventional love?  

Here is a question I have, which ties into our exploration of defining Mistress. I've heard of this relationship called a 'menage a trois' but I think that is incorrect, unless there is evidence that Dorothy and Ezra and Olga went around together, and perhaps included sexuality in the relationship.  Yes, at one point the three of them lived uncomfortably together, but only out of necessity.

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The introduction of this book mentioned the names of people who have already appeared here at Mistress Manifesto. I just knew this was my kind of book, and the kind of book that my loyal readers would want to read. If any of the books I've read and featured here at Mistress Manifesto appeal to you, please do the authors the honor and get a copy!

These archived subjects may be of interest to you. Living in Italy, Olga Rudge played her violin for Mussolini.  At Barney's salon, Mata Hari was one of the people she socialized with.  Isadora Duncan was a contemporary in Paris who mixed with some of the same artists.

November 2014
MATA HARI

Tantalizing Courtesan and Spy Who Got the Death Penalty

September 2015
NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY : Lesbian in Paris who Kept Other Women

You might also be interested in: 

February 2016

ISADORA DUNCAN

Mother of Modern Dance and Mistress of Paris Singer; She Did Positive Affirmations to Attract a Wealthy Patron

March  2011   

CLARETTA PETACCI

Mistress who Died By Hanging With Her Man, Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini