Dorothy Shakespear - Paris and Italy

Paris and Italy

Dorothy and Pound moved to Paris in 1920 where they first lived in a hotel until renting a studio at 70 bis rue de Notre Dame des Champs, a small street near the Dôme Café. With a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway secured an invitation to tea for himself and his wife Hadley, who found Dorothy's manners to be intimidating, and he considered their apartment to be as "poor as Gertrude Stein's studio was rich". Nonetheless they forged a firm friendship that lasted many years, with Dorothy turning to Hemingway for help in the early 1950s, during Pound's incarceration at St. Elizabeths.

During this period Pound edited and Dorothy worked as business manager for the four volume literary magazine, The Exile, featuring works by Pound himself, Hemingway, and others. In 1923, Pound met classical violinist Olga Rudge, with whom he fell in love and kept as his mistress until his death.

In 1924 Dorothy and Pound left Paris for Italy to allow Ezra time to recuperate after suffering from appendicitis. They stayed in Rapallo briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925. On 9 July 1925 Pound's mistress Olga gave birth to their child Mary, in the Italian Tyrol. Dorothy was separated from Pound for much of that year and the next: she joined her mother in Siena in the autumn; and visited Egypt from December 1925 to March 1926, returning home pregnant. Visiting Paris in June for the opening of Pound's opera Le Testament de Villon, Dorothy decided to stay there for the child to be born at the American Hospital. Pound was away at the time of the birth; Dorothy was brought by Hemingway to the hospital to the hospital where Omar Pound was born in the afternoon of 10 September 1926. A year and half later he was sent to London to be raised by Olivia.

In 1938 Olivia died, leaving Dorothy a substantial income. In 1931 Olivia doubled Dorothy's income, who by that time had additional income in the form of various family bequests and dividends from investments. With her husband earning as little as ₤50 annually, the Pounds lived on Dorothy's income. Olivia set up a stock account for her which was soon depleted because she followed Pound's advice to invest in Italian stock. She inherited ₤16,000 from her mother, but during the war the money was inaccessible with assets from England prohibited from being sent to an Axis country. As a result, during the war years the couple relied solely on Pound's income, for the first time since their marriage.

In 1941 Pound tried on two separate occasions to leave Italy with Dorothy: on the first he was denied passage on by plane, the second time they were refused on a diplomatic train out of the country. In 1944 Pound and Dorothy were again evacuated (during World War I they had been evacuated from Stone Cottage one winter), from their home for being too near the coast. Pound wanted Dorothy to stay in Rapallo and care for his mother, Isabel, while he joined Olga. Dorothy insisted, however, on staying with her husband—for a year the three lived together. Olga took a job in an Ursuline school; Dorothy who had not learned Italian after almost two decades in the country was forced to learn to shop and finally how to cook.