Editing Ezra Pound (section)

===Birth of the children===
The Pounds were unhappy in Paris. Dorothy complained about the winters and Ezra's health was poor.<ref name=Tytell191>Tytell (1987), 191–192</ref> At one dinner in the [[Rue de l'Odéon|Place de l'Odéon]], a [[Surrealist]] guest high on drugs had tried to stab Pound in the back; [[Robert McAlmon]] had wrestled with the attacker, and the guests had managed to leave before the police arrived.<ref>Putnam (1947), 89–90; Tytell (1987), 193</ref> For Pound the event underlined that their time in France was over.<ref name=Tytell1987p193>Tytell (1987), 193</ref> They decided to move to a quieter place, leaving in October 1924 for the seaside town of [[Rapallo]] in northern Italy.<ref>Tytell (1987), 197–198; Nadel (2007), 13</ref> Hemingway wrote in a letter that Pound had "indulged in a small nervous breakdown" during the packing, leading to two days at the [[American Hospital of Paris]] in [[Neuilly-sur-Seine|Neuilly]].<ref>Baker (1981), 127</ref> During this period the Pounds lived on Dorothy's income, supplemented by dividends from stock she had invested in.<ref>Tytell (1987), 225</ref>

[[File:Home of Olga Rudge, Venice.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.9|[[Olga Rudge]]'s home in Venice, from 1928, at Calle Querini 252. The plaque can be translated as: Without ever stopping loving Venice, Ezra Pound, titan of poetry, lived in this house for half a century.]]
Pregnant by Pound, Olga Rudge followed the couple to Italy, and in July 1925 she gave birth to a daughter, [[Mary de Rachewiltz|Maria]], in a hospital in [[Brixen]] (Italian : Bressanone). Rudge and Pound placed the baby with a German-speaking peasant woman in [[Gais, South Tyrol]], whose own child had died and who agreed to raise Maria for 200 lire a month.<ref>Tytell (1987), 198; Carpenter (1988), 448</ref> Pound reportedly believed that artists ought not to have children, because in his view motherhood ruined women. According to [[Hadley Richardson]], he took her aside before she and Hemingway left Paris for Toronto to have their child, telling her: "Well, I might as well say goodbye to you here and now because [the baby] is going to change you completely."<ref>Cohassey (2014), 48</ref>

At the end of December 1925 Dorothy went on holiday to Egypt, returning on 1 March,<ref>Carpenter (1988), 449–450</ref> and in May the Pounds and Olga Rudge left Rapallo for Paris to attend a semi-private concert performance at the [[Salle Pleyel]] of ''Le Testament de Villon'', a one-act opera Pound had composed ("nearly tuneless", according to Carpenter) with the musicians Agnes Bedford and [[George Antheil]].<ref>Carpenter (1988), 450–451; Moody (2014), 18, 23, 69</ref>{{efn|[[Richard Taruskin]] (2003): "Pound's musicking, like Wagner's, mainly took the form of idiosyncratic operas. The first, after [[François Villon|Villon]], was finished in 1923 and performed both in public and over the radio during Pound's lifetime. Two others, after [[Guido Cavalcanti|Cavalcanti]] and [[Catullus]], were planned and partly realized. But calling them operas was as idiosyncratic as everything else about them. They are medleys of poems tenuously connected by action, or by mere narration, based on events in the lives of the poets."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Taruskin |first1=Richard |author1-link=Richard Taruskin |title=Ezra Pound, Musical Crackpot |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/arts/music-ezra-pound-musical-crackpot.html |work=The New York Times |date=27 July 2003 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20090823152643/https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/arts/music-ezra-pound-musical-crackpot.html |archive-date=23 August 2009 |url-status=live}}</ref>}} Pound had hired two singers for the performance; Rudge was on violin, Pound played percussion, and Joyce, Eliot and Hemingway were in the audience.<ref>Carpenter (1988), 450–451; Moody (2014), 23</ref>

The couple stayed on in Paris after the performance; Dorothy was pregnant and wanted the baby to be born at the American hospital. Hemingway accompanied her there in a taxi for the birth of a son, [[Omar Pound]], on 10 September 1926.<ref name=Carpenter1988p452/> (Ezra was an admirer of [[Edward FitzGerald (poet)|Fitzgerald]]'s translation of [[Omar Khayyam]].)<ref>Conover, (2001), 68</ref> Ezra signed the birth certificate the following day at Neuilly town hall and wrote to his father, "next generation (male) arrived. Both D & it appear to be doing well."<ref name=Carpenter1988p452>Carpenter (1988), 452–453</ref> Ezra ended up in the American hospital himself for tests and, he told Olga, a "small operation".<ref>Moody (2014), 69</ref> Dorothy took Omar to England, where she stayed for a year and thereafter visited him every summer. He was sent to live at first in [[Felpham]], Sussex, with a former superintendent of [[Norland College]], which trains nannies,<ref>Carpenter (1988), 455–456</ref> and later became a boarder at [[Charterhouse School|Charterhouse]].<ref>Carpenter (1988), 554</ref> When Dorothy was in England with Omar during the summers, Ezra would spend the time with Olga.<ref>Tytell (1987), 198; [https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/19/nyregion/olga-rudge-101-ezra-pound-s-companion-dies.html Van Gelder (1996)] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150526165511/http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/19/nyregion/olga-rudge-101-ezra-pound-s-companion-dies.html |date=26 May 2015 }}</ref> Olga's father helped her buy a house in Venice in 1928,<ref name=Conover2001p83>Conover (2001), 83</ref> and from 1930 she also rented the top floor of a house in Sant'Ambrogio, Caso 60, near the Pounds in Rapallo.<ref>Marsh (2011), 102</ref>