Pound and Eliot

This year's scholarship features the first critical edition of The Waste Land. As it is also a Norton Critical Edition, and thus destined for classroom use, it probably will set the tone for thinking and teaching Eliot in the new century. Furthermore, the first biographies of Vivienne Eliot and Pound's longtime companion, Olga Rudge, begin the task of recuperating two important female modernists as well as casting new light on the two poets. Two collections of papers from major conferences on each poet have also appeared. Paideuma, the official organ of Pound studies, has returned to schedule, but with a new mission, a "New Paideuma," which broadens the scope of the journal and actively seeks new perspectives on Pound. The first fruit of this change, an essay collection called Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, has also been published separately as a book. Scholarship on the two modernist masters is bustling and prolific, though we also sense a tendency to rehash and "rediscover" what should already be well known. With both writers there is a great deal to know, of course, but there seems also a great deal that needs to be reread. Alec Marsh is responsible for the Pound section, Ben Lock-erd for Eliot.

i Pound

a. Biography

Anne Conover's eagerly awaited biography of Olga Rudge has finally appeared as Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well . . ." (Yale). It is the first biography of this brilliant modernist musician, Pound's "Aphrodite," collaborator, and indefatigable partisan. As one guesses from the title, the book is concerned mainly with Rudge's relationship with Pound and his with her; its major source is the extensive correspondence between the two lovers now at the Beinecke Library. Conover also covers Rudge's important musical career as a violinist and scholar. It was Rudge who encouraged Pound's own musical compositions, and she was his link to George Antheil, with whom she worked closely. An important musicologist, Rudge is responsible for the recovery of such composers as Vivaldi; she was the first to play many of "the Red Priest's" pieces since his death in the 18th century. It was late in 1922—that crucial modernist year—"that EP and OR met, and everything in my life happened," Olga said later. Taking her cue from OR, this is where Conover's biography begins.

Though born in Ohio, Olga Rudge was brought up in Edwardian London, which puts her in the same milieu as Dorothy Shakespear. Olga's artistic, pushing, Irish mother Julia had been a celebrated singer. She married a dull, decent Ohioan and escaped to Europe. There she gave music lessons and shuttled her children between London and Paris—exactly like a figure in one of Henry James's stories. Olga became an excellent violinist, praised for her exquisite tone, and it was understood in a very Jamesian way that she was to make her way in the world mostly with her fiddle and her tall, slender good looks, though remittances from her staid Ohio father helped. OR had a devoted admirer, Edgerton Grey, who hoped to marry her after the war, but she had promised on her mother's deathbed that she would not. Thus she was saved from happiness, social respectability, and family life—all of the things Olga's mother despised. The young violinist went to Corfu, where she hung with a fast crowd of writers and minor continental nobility of labile sexuality. Conover speculates, as contemporary biographers feel compelled to do, about OR's sex life and possible amours with women.

This angle is only one of the provocative parallels between HD and OR that Conover's biography brings to light. Yet she never considers whether Pound felt some connection between his early girlfriend and his lifelong lover. Both were tall, slender Americans, both were dedicated artists, both were willing to take the social risks of having children outside marriage, both had a strong mystical side—in HD it was obsessive, but OR also paid attention to her horoscope, having "a life long belief in signs of the Zodiac," and she threw...