August 1923: Ezra Pound's third walking tour in southern France
This article was first published in Make It New, the Ezra Pound Society Magazine, Volume 5 no. 2-3 (December 2019).
© 2019 Gordon McKechnie
In August 1923 Ezra Pound and Olga
Rudge travelled south from Paris to the lands of the troubadours in southwest
France. Pound had twice previously visited this region - on his 1912 walking
tour and again in 1919 with his wife Dorothy. In 1919 he was joined for some of
the time by T.S. Eliot.
The 1923 trip is covered by a single
sentence in David Moody's biography of Pound - "In August Olga and Ezra
went walking together in the Dordogne, ‘25 kilometers a day with a rucksack’,
and visited Ventadour, Ussel, and villages pictured but not identified in
Olga’s 1923 photograph album." (Moody 54). His source is Anne Conover who
devotes only a little more space to the 1923 walking tour (Conover 7) -
In late
summer, while Dorothy was in London to assist her mother, Olivia Shakespear, in
caring for her husband during a long illness, Ezra introduced Olga to the land
of the troubadours. No written record remains of that summer holiday, or their
itinerary, only a fading black-and-white photograph album labelled "August
1923 - Dordogne ." Olga was the
photographer and Ezra often the subject, appearing under gargoyles of the cathedrals
in Ussel and Ventadour and other unidentifiable French villages.[2] In
her eighties, she reminisced about "the photos EP and I took on our
walking tour... 'I never sailed with Cadmus,' she recalled referring to a line
in Canto 27, "but he took me to Ventadour." On the back of one
snapshot she wrote: "note how elegant a gentleman could be, walking 25
kilometers a day with a rucksack - in those days, no hitchhiking."
This is the most complete description
to date of the 1923 walking tour. Earlier writers do not mention the trip at
all. They were quite possibly unaware of it. The circumstances of the August
1923 tour required a degree of discretion.
In 1923 Ezra and Dorothy Pound were living in Paris. In the
spring of that year Dorothy's father took ill, and on 19 June Dorothy went to
see him and her mother in England London London
Ezra Pound had met Olga Rudge in Paris
The "fading black-and-white photograph album labelled
'August 1923 - Dordogne'" (Conover 7) no longer exists. According to Diane
Ducharme, archivist at the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke
Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Olga Rudge in her later years
rearranged and relabeled many materials, including photograph albums, and she may
well have done this with the “August 1923 - Dordogne” album. Photographs that presumably were
once part of the album are, however, among Olga Rudge's papers in the Beinecke
Library. The folder containing these photographs is labelled “PLACES” and
“Dordogne: Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge’s walking tour snapshots [1922-23?]” .[4] I
have attempted to use these photographs to begin a reconstruction of the August
1923 itinerary.
Unsurprisingly, the correspondence during the summer of 1923
between Ezra in France and Dorothy in England, as kept in the Lilly Library, fails
to shed light on the route of the August 1923 walking tour. But it does help us
with the dates of the trip. Ezra posted a typewritten letter to Dorothy from
Paris on Wednesday 1 August. He typed another letter to Dorothy on Tuesday 7
August. So the trip to Corrèze would seem to have taken place between those two
dates. It would thus have been quite a short tour. He was expecting Dorothy to
return to Paris on Friday 10 August.[5]
The general area of the August 1923 walking tour is indicated
in Olga's handwriting on an airmail envelope. This envelope would appear at
some stage to have held the photographs of places visited on this trip and is
now held at the Beinecke Library in the same folder as the series of
photographs of places. On the envelope Olga wrote "Correze Dordogne Brives
[sic] 1923 or 1922? Walking Tour E.P. & O.R.". There is, however, a
complication. One of the photographs in the folder is of a church in the département of Vienne – in other words,
not in the “Correze Dordogne Brives”
area at all. Other unidentified photographs may also have been taken elsewhere.
Based on the evidence of the envelope, it seems reasonable to
suggest that the 1923 walking tour began in Brive. Brive is the largest town in
the département of Corrèze, and lies
on a main rail line south from Paris. Pound had been to Brive before, both on the
second leg of his 1912 walking tour (WTSF 34-35), and several times in 1919
(McKechnie 59-96). He would pass this way again in the summer of 1924, again
with Olga. Olga would also visit the area, without Pound, in July 1926.
*
In late August 1919 Ezra and Dorothy had been joined in Brive
by T.S. Eliot, who had earlier that month spent time with them in Excideuil. Pound
and Eliot had then walked out to Malemort and Aubazine to the east of town. This
was on the last day before Ezra and Dorothy began their journey back to London
On a 1919 postcard of Brive, Dorothy wrote, "Every corner of the old town is lovely: all in stone, with roofs
at all angles in old coloured slate." (PFP 37). While a number of the old
buildings have been preserved, the old town of Brive has been much modernized
since, and it is unlikely that a 21st century visitor would write of
its every corner and roofscape in such glowing terms.
Pound mentions Brive in Near
Perigord as one of the places surrounding Bertrand de Born in his castle at
Hautefort.
And all the while you sing out
that canzone
Think you that Maent lived at
Montaignac,
One at Chalais, another at
Malemort
Hard over Brive – for every lady
a castle,
Each place strong.
And
How would you live, with
neighbours set about you –
Poictiers and Brive, untaken
Rochechouart,
Spread like the finger-tips of
one frail hand;
Malemort, “hard over Brive”, is today an eastern suburb of
Brive. The Church of St Xantin at Malemort-sur-Corrèze left a sufficient impression
on Pound for it to appear in Canto VI. The background to the relevant lines in
Canto VI is that the troubadour Bernard de Ventadour “had been banished from
his native fief for employing his amorous skills too successfully in praise of
the Countess of Ventadour.” (Kelly 85). The countess herself was being kept
under close guard in the citadel of Ventadour. The exiled poet made his way to
the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, recently separated from Louis VII, King of
France, and remarried to Henri Plantagenêt, soon to become King of England.
In Pound’s Canto VI, Malemort-sur Corrèze became the location
of a speech by Bernard de Ventadour, “seeking the help of Eleanor, by asking
her to certify to Eblis that he, Bernart, is safely distant, so that the lady
may be let out.” (Makin 78).
Eleanor, domna jauzionda, mother
of Richard,
Turning on thirty years (wd. have
been years before this)
By river-marsh, by galleried
church-porch,
Malemorte, Correze, to whom:
"My
lady of Ventadour
"Is shut by Eblis in
"And will not hawk nor hunt
nor
get her free in the air
"Nor watch the fish rise to
bait
"Nor the glare-wing'd flies
alight in the creek's edge
"Save in my absence, Madame.
'Que
la lauzeta mover,'
"Send word, I ask you, to
Eblis,
you
have seen that maker
"And finder of songs, so far
afield as this
"That he may free her
who
sheds such light in the air."[6]
Malemort and its galleried church-porch are some 50
kilometres to the south-west of Ventadour and safely outwith the medieval
fiefdom of Ventadour.
Why does Pound set this scene in Malemort? Was it because of
its name - “a place with so fine & sinister a name”? (WTSF 35). Or because
he identified Eleanor with Audiart of Malemort?[7] Can we ever know? “The detail of the connections that he [Pound] sets up is strictly mythopoeic:
there is no point in trying to prove that Bernart de Ventadour met Eleanor at
Malemort, that Bertran’s ‘Audiart’ was Eleanor...” (Makin 275).
The core of the church of St Xantin dates from the 12th
century, but the galleried church-porch facing the river Corrèze - that
features in Canto VI - is a nineteenth century addition. It was the only church
building in Malemort to survive the Revolution, after which, although St Xantin
is some distance from the centre of Malemort, it became the parish church. The
church suffered a major fire in 1997, but has since been restored.
My hypothesis, based on such of Olga Rudge’s Beinecke
photographs as I have been able to identify, is that Pound’s August 1923
walking tour took him from Brive through the regions to its south and
south-east. While it is possible to identify some of the locations Ezra and
Olga visited, it is not possible to reconstruct an exact itinerary.
Some fifteen kilometres south of Brive by road or rail lies
Turenne. Pound’s 1912 and 1919 travels had seemingly not taken him to Turenne,
although it has associations with at least two of the medieval characters that
feature in his poetry. Maent of Montignac and Maria de Ventadour were two of
the three celebrated sisters of Turenne. The three were daughters of Viscount Raimon
II of Turenne, and – in the words of Bertrand de Born – De tota beltat terrena/ Ant pretz las tres de Torena (Of all
earthly beauty/ The three of Turenne take the prize). (de Born 165).[8]
Today a picturesque village climbing the steep slopes of its
hill and surmounted by two castles, Turenne was once one of the great fiefs of
France, controlling a significant surrounding area stretching from well north
of Brive to south of the Dordogne River. Centuries after the times of the
troubadours and the three beautiful sisters, the Tour d’Auvergne Viscounts of
Turenne and much of the vicomté became
Protestant. The town’s church owes its design to having been built in the time
when the Reformation ruled here. Later still, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne
(1611-1675), one of France’s greatest soldiers, was popularly known as “Grand
Turenne”. Turenne retained its independence from the Kingdom of France, with
French law not applying there and French taxes not collected, until 1738, when
its ruler sold it to the King of France to pay off his gambling debts.
One of Olga’s photographs seems to be of Turenne, looking
north along a road towards the hilltop village and taken from somewhere in the
vicinity of Turenne Gare.
Olga Rudge’s 1923 photo of Turenne
Olga Rudge apparently returned to Turenne three years later,
in July 1926. She was living in Italy by then, as was Pound; but she, Ezra and
Dorothy had all returned to Paris for the summer. Olga sent a postcard of
Turenne, posted on 19 July 1926, to Ezra at the Hotel Foyot in Paris, on which
she wrote only lundi and her initials.
A simple and discreet reminder of their passage through Turenne three years
earlier?
Turenne, September 2019[10]
Other photographs in the Beinecke collection that I have been
able to identify are of places that lie along the valley of the Dordogne. I
present them here beginning with the farthest downstream and working up the
river. This would have been a logical direction of travel for Pound and Rudge
in 1923, but I cannot confirm that it actually was the direction in which they
travelled.
Belcastel sits prominently on a cliff top on the south side
of the Dordogne River some 25 kilometres, as the crow flies, south of Turenne,
and midway between Souillac and Rocamadour. Pound had been in this vicinity in
both 1912 and 1919. In 1912, coming south from Brive, he had turned west from
Souillac towards Sarlat (WTSF 35-39) and so in the opposite direction from
Belcastel. But in 1919, he and Dorothy had walked from Souillac (probably) to
Rocamadour. On a postcard sent from Rocamadour on 5 August 1919 (PFP 2534),
Dorothy wrote in glowing terms of that walk.
Aug 5, 1919
We came over
the hills across gorgeous bare scrub, stirring up 1000s of butterflies, from a
town on the Dordogne . This is a place of
pilgrimage, since all time - and there are a black Virgin & a miraculous
bell & 200 and something steps up the village that they crawl up on their
knees in Sept: full of tourists devout & otherwise, but a really amazing
place all tucked against the huge rock. The Dordogne
is gorgeous scenery & a large river. We struck a dozen or so Russian
soldiers singing magnificently in a café on Sunday evening. train today to
Brive. Have had three long wonderful walks. D.
The three 1919 walks were probably Hautefort to Montignac,
Sarlat to Souillac, and Souillac to Rocamadour. The route of the 1919 walk between
Souillac and Rocamadour would have taken them close to Belcastel. “Gorgeous
bare scrub” is a good description of the limestone hills south of Belcastel.
Belcastel features rather distantly as the centre point in
two of Olga’s 1923 photos.
A more distant snapshot showing Belcastel
along the Dordogne valley
Atop its cliff rising directly from the river, Belcastel is
an obvious site on which to build a stronghold, but the first record of it
being fortified goes back only to the Lords of Turenne in the 10th
century. It later became a monastery – a 14th century chapel remains
on the site – then a fort again, and finally a farm, before being remodelled as
an habitation de plaisance in the 19th
century (Deshouillières 385).
Belcastel, July 2019
Travelling up the river from Belcastel you pass below the
Causse de Martel rising on the north bank. High on this limestone plateau is the town of Martel itself. In 1952,
Freda White wrote “that of all the towns of the Dordogne basin, little Martel,
old, dreaming and untouched by tourist maquillage, is my choice.” (White 50).
Since then the tourists have arrived in abundance, but Martel remains a
charming little town.
There is no positive indication from the photographs that
Ezra and Olga passed through Martel, but its historical associations might well
have interested Pound. It was at Martel
that Henri Court Mantel, the “Young King”, died in 1183. The Young King had
sided with a rebellion against both his father, Henri Plantagenêt, King Henry
II of England, and his brother, Richard Coeur de Lion, Duke of Aquitaine.
Leading the rebels was a coalition of Aquitaine nobility that included Aimar V
of Limoges, Hélie V Talairand (the Count of Périgord) and the Viscounts of
Ventadour, Comborn and Turenne. Among the lesser nobility in rebellion was Bertrand
de Born (“a stirrer-up of strife” as Pound describes him in Sestina: Altaforte).
Plaque on the house in Martel where Henri
Court Mantel died
Bertrand de Born was probably with Henri Court Mantel when he
died at Martel during the rebellion. On the Young King’s death he wrote the
moving Si tuit li dol e·il plor e·il
marrimen, which Ezra Pound translated as Planh for the Young English King –
If all the grief and woe and
bitterness,
All dolour, ill and every evil
chance
That ever came upon this grieving
world
Were set together they would seem
but light
Against the death of the young
English King...
(Kehew 165)
Continuing to follow the curves of the river upstream beyond
Martel will bring you to the riverside town of Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne. There are
two photographs in the Beinecke collection of the building in Beaulieu now
called the “Maison Renaissance”, one with Ezra Pound and one without. The
“Maison Renaissance” stands on medieval foundations, but was rebuilt or
remodelled in the 18th century. It takes its current name from the
Renaissance sculptures that were added to the façade at an unknown date.
Ezra Pound in front of the Maison Renaissance, Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, 1923[11]
Maison Renaissance, July 2019
The “Maison Renaissance” stands across a small square
opposite the west door of the Abbey Church of St Pierre in Beaulieu. Around the
corner is the church’s famous tympanum above the south door. Olga snapped another
picture here.
The town of Beaulieu, controlled like Belcastel and Martel, by
the vicomté of Turenne, grew up
around the abbey of St Pierre and became a major port and boatbuilding town on
the Dordogne River. In Pound’s day it had a reputation as “a dirty derelict
place.” (White 57). Today it owes much of its significant summer tourist trade
to the attractions of the river, running broad and shallow at this point.
The Abbey Church of St Pierre, July 2019
Curiously there is also a postcard of the Beaulieu tympanum
in the Pound Family Postcard Collection – posted to Boston from Montreal in
1960.
A further twenty-five kilometres upstream from
Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, a day’s walk according to Olga, brings you to Argentat. Argentat
is another river port of the old vicomté of
Turenne, and the riverside houses there that Olga photographed in 1923 have
scarcely changed in the past hundred years.
Olga took this picture from the quay on the right bank of the
river, from in front of what is today the Auberge des Gabares, but what in 1923
would have still been a boatman’s house. It shows a range of houses on the left
bank and, from the position of the shadows on the buildings, it appears that
the photograph was taken in late afternoon. Argentat was probably an overnight
stop on the 1923 walking tour.
Houses on the left bank of the Dordogne at
Argentat, July 2019
None of these places to the south and east of Brive and
Malemort – Turenne, Belcastel, Martel, Beaulieu
or Argentat – is referred to in Pound’s Cantos.
Nor are they mentioned by Moody or Conover in their brief descriptions of the
1923 walking tour. Indeed, the only places specifically mentioned by David
Moody and Anne Conover in connection with the 1923 walking tour are Ussel and
Ventadour.
*
As noted above, Conover quotes Olga Rudge as saying that “he
[EP] took me to Ventadour”. Ventadour
and Ussel are both in the département of
Corrèze, but at some distance from Beaulieu and Argentat. Ussel is some 75
kilometres from Argentat and 100 kilometres from Beaulieu. Ussel is, however,
on a direct train line from Brive, a line that passes through Egletons, the
nearest town to the ruined castle of Ventadour. Argentat was then connected to
that railway line by a branch line from Tulle. Ezra and Dorothy used trains to
connect legs of their walking excursions in 1919, and there is no reason why
Ezra and Olga might not have done the same in 1923 - if indeed they actually did
visit those places in 1923 on what was probably quite a short walking tour of
no more than a week. I have not, however, identified any of Olga’s photos as
being of either Ventadour or Ussel.
Part of an early 20th century railway map of southwest
France (Baedeker)
Ventadour was, in both 1919 and 1923, a remote ruin, as
reflected in Canto XXVII (132) -
Where
was the wall of Eblis
At Ventadour, there now are the
bees,
And in that court, wild grass for
their pleasure
That they carry back to the
crevice
Where loose stone hangs upon
stone.
Ventadour, July 2019
Ventadour, of course, was the home of Bernard de Ventadour,
the troubadour whose relationships both with Maria de Ventadour (wife of the Viscount of Ventadour) and with Eleanor of
Aquitaine are referred to in Pound's Canto VI. Located on a long flat-topped promontory, with
steep drops on three sides to the rivers 100 metres below, Ventadour was
virtually impregnable in the Middle Ages. As the Duke of Ventadour said at the
time of Louis XIV, “all the straw of the kingdom” would be insufficient to fill
these natural moats. (quoted in Maison 33).
But with the Revolution and its campaign against the visible vestiges
of feudalism, the castle of Ventadour was abandoned and largely demolished, its
stones being sold for buildings in nearby villages. The farmland that had
surrounded the castle in feudal times was also gradually abandoned. The fields that
had once encircled the castle came to be covered with low-growing heath, and it
was in that state that Pound would have seen them. That relatively open aspect
of the countryside around Ventadour disappeared beginning in the 1950s under a
programme of reforestation, mainly of Douglas firs. The hilltop ruins
themselves, however, are probably now more open and in a better state than when
Pound saw them in the 1920s. An archaeological programme to stabilise the ruins
and to provide easier access for visitors has been underway since the beginning
of the 21st century.
References to Ventadour recur twice in Canto LXXIV (448 and
456) -
el triste pensier si volge
ad Ussel. A Ventadour
va il consire,
el tempo rivolge
and
Past
Malmaison in field by the river the tables
Sirdar,
Armenonville
Or at Ventadour the keys to the
chateau;
rain,
Ussel[13]
In each case Ventadour appears in conjunction with Ussel, and
in the first instance together with memories of other places and people of the
Limousin and Périgord (the young salesman at Limoges, Mme Pujol, the urochs
caverns). Ventadour memories reappear in Canto LXXX (529), yet again with
memories of people and places of south-west France -
and the red-bearded fellow was
mending his
young
daughter’s shoe
“Me Hercule! c’est nôtre commune”
(“ Borr,” not precisely Altaforte)
with such dignity
and at Ventadour and at Aubeterre
or where they set tables down by
small rivers,
and the stream’s edge is lost in
grass
In Canto LXXVI (472), the short comment "rain,
Ussel" of Canto LXXIV is expanded -
and the rain
fell all the night long at Ussel
Justin Smith described Ussel in the late 19th century
as falling into decorative dilapidation – “Very quaint and cozy it looks in the
distance...Cozy and still more quaint when we are there...It seems to matter
little if a few panes of glass are wanting, or a whole window is closed with
storm-worn boards, or one leaf of a door is taller than the other... For Ussel
really is old.” (Smith 26). Some
corners of Ussel’s old town centre remain in a state of decay, but most has
been tastefully restored. Ussel is built of pale grey granite that sparkles in
the midday summer sun. Many of the houses in its narrow winding streets sport a
round tower capped by a conical slate roof. Terrell writes that “Pound had
strong memories of it [Ussel] and its 15th and 16th
century houses. The Hôtel des Ducs de Ventadour has on its façade an
inscription honoring the last troubadours.” (Terrell 367).
Ussel, July 2019
In the times of the troubadours, four troubadours came from
Ussel, three brothers and a cousin, the best known to posterity of the quartet
being Gui d’Ussel. Smith, whom Pound had consulted before his travels on the
trails of the troubadours, relates a tale about Gui d’Ussel and Lady Gidas, who
told the troubadour that “I cannot resist my inclination to do whatever will
please you. I am a rich lady and I wish to marry. So I tell you that you may
have me as you prefer, - as mistress or as wife. Consider which it shall be.”
Gui, steeped as he was in contemporary ideas of marriage and love, “persuaded
himself that a lover was more blessèd than a husband. He announced his decision
to Lady Gidas, and thereupon she cuttingly dismissed him, bestowing her person
and her wealth upon a knight of Catalonia.” (Smith 28). Allegedly in the castle
of Ventadour, Gui d’Ussel was challenged to a tenson by Maria de Ventadour (Audiau 13), the exchange now
preserved as Gui d’Uissel be·m pesa de
vos. (Audiau 73). This tenson is
the only work poetic work by Maria de Ventadour that has come down to the
present time.
If Pound did indeed visit Ventadour and Ussel in 1923, would
that trip with Olga Rudge have been his first or second visit to these places?
Commentators are in general agreement that he did not visit these places on his
1912 walking tour. It has been generally accepted (for example, WTSF 32) that
he first visited them, with Dorothy, in the summer of 1919. Wilhelm sets the
date of the 1919 trip to Ventadour, Clermont and Ussel precisely as 28 July
1919 - "They took a long side trip northeast [from Excideuil] to Clermont
where the First Crusade was announced. Along the way, they passed through
Ussel, the home of at least three troubadours. On a side road that was
difficult to locate, they found the high windswept ruins of
Ventadorn/Ventadour..." (Wilhelm 232). Neither Eloisa Bressan (Bressan 44-55) nor I
(McKechnie 59-96) was, however, able to find direct evidence of the 1919 trip
to Ventadour. Wilhelm seems to have been unaware of the 1923 walking tour and
does not mention it in his chronology.
The night of rain, sufficiently impressive to feature twice
in the Cantos, should be able to provide a clue as to when Pound visited Ussel.
There is no record of rain in the vicinity of Ussel in late July 1919 (though
weather recording was patchy in the immediate aftermath of the War). The summer
of 1923 was a notably hot one, with several references to the heat in
correspondence between Ezra and Dorothy – for example, Dorothy wrote, “Don’t
send more than a p.c. if the heat is 90* in the shade.” (Lilly). On 8 August
1923, in Toulouse, the temperature reached 44*C, the highest temperature
recorded in metropolitan France during the entire twentieth century, surpassed
only on 12 August 2003 by a temperature of 44.1*C in the département du Gard. That record itself was surpassed in 2019.
The first half of August 1923 saw clear settled weather
across all of France and even in the second half of the month there was only
very little rainfall. While localised summer storms occur regularly in the
semi-mountainous area around Ussel, a short article on 19 August 1923 in
"La Montagne corrézienne” would suggest that no local storm accompanied by
a notable night of rain had recently occurred.
Although there does not appear to have been a notably rainy
night in Ussel on appropriate dates in 1923 (or 1919), Pound did make two more
walking tours in south-western France the next year, in the summer of 1924. On
one of these tours he passed through Ussel. Might the night of rain have
occurred then?
*
On 10 July 1924, Dorothy left Paris for England (L/HP 536). In
contrast to the August 1923 trip, Ezra wrote to Dorothy about his plans for the
1924 trips and, at least from the first of the two trips, sent postcards to her.
On 17 July 1924, he wrote to Dorothy from Paris,
Heat here rather oppressive. If I
get my identity book at Equitable today, I shall start tonight . & go up
the other side of Brive[16].
= Eygurande[17] is
marked 2493 ft. = & Chatel-guyon has some intestinal waters. write or
telegraph to Poste Restant. Ussel. Clermont-Ferrand. or write to Riom.
also. Clermont Ferrand. (Lilly)
He seems to have followed his proposed itinerary when he
travelled and to have visited Ventadour on this trip, for he sent Dorothy, a
postcard (PFP 156) of its ruins from nearby Egletons on 21 July, signed with
their customary cat’s “mao” – “Monday. Egletons. one day repose. feeling better
than in Paris. digestion fonctionne. Mao. 21 juillet.”
The post card of Ventadour sent by EP to
Dorothy on 21 July 1924[18]
A week later, on 28 July, Ezra sent another postcard (PFP
248) to Dorothy, still in England. This one was sent from Clermont-Ferrand –
“Clermont Sunday. Shd be in Riom by evening”.[19]
Riom is 10 kilometres to north of Clermont and close to Châtel-Guyon.
Postcard sent by Ezra Pound to Dorothy on 28 July 1924 from Clermont-Ferrand
(PFP 248)
It seems that he also sent a postcard to Dorothy from Bourges
on his return journey north to Paris from the Auvergne. Dorothy acknowledged
receiving it in a letter that she wrote to Ezra on 2 August. (Lilly).
IGN map showing the areas of Pound’s 1924 walking tours – in July “up
the other side of Brive” to Egletons (for Ventadour), Ussel, Eygurande,
Clermont-Ferrand, Riom and Châtel-Guyon; and in August in the vicinity of
Poitiers and Chauvigny.
By 31 July, Ezra was back in Paris, writing to Dorothy – “I
am certainly much better for my walk. Feel much better, and am apparently O.K.
so long as I keep in action. First day I was sickish, next day better,
and then began to eat two large meals daily. am certainly much stronger.” (Lilly).
Dorothy was still in England when Ezra set off for yet another
walking trip in late August. This time his intestinal complaint appears not to
have been such an issue. Not long before setting out on the August 1924 walking
trip, he wrote to his mother, “Hospital reports favourably on my innards.”
(L/HP 538). On 30 August, shortly before Dorothy returned to Paris, he wrote
“am just back from a short walking trip (six days) another one, in the Vienne
(i.e. about Poitiers) found a couple of good towns and a good inn.” (L/HP 539).
Postcard of Poitiers Cathedral (unsent –
PFP 258)
Poitiers, of course, was where troubadour poetry had first
appeared. Pound had symbolically begun his 1912 walking tour here (WTSF 3), and
Canto VI begins with the first troubadour, William (Guillaume) – “Seventh of
Poitiers, Ninth of Aquitain”.
With reference to the August 1924 walking trip in the département of Vienne, Moody writes, “On
this one at least Olga was with him.” (Moody 62). Wilhelm also (Wilhelm 341)
chronicles the August 1924 walking tour – “Circa 27 August. He has just
returned from a six-day walking tour in the Poitiers area. (He did this with
Olga, who says that some days they covered as much as 30 kilometers)”.[20] Olga’s
presence would appear to be confirmed by one of the photographs now in the
Beinecke folder – “Dordogne: Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge’s walking tour snapshots
[1922-23?]”. This photograph is of the apse of the church of St Pierre in
Chauvigny. Chauvigny is in the Vienne département,
approximately 25 kilometres to the east of Poitiers.
Olga Rudge’s 1924 photograph of the apse of the church of St Pierre in
Chauvigny
In writing of the August 1924 trip that “On this one at least
Olga was with him”, David Moody seems to imply that Olga may have been with
Ezra on the July 1924 walking trip in Corrèze and Puy-de-Dôme as well. I
suspect that this may well have been the case, and that it was on her 1924
visit to Ventadour with Pound that Olga Rudge was reflecting in her conversation
with Anne Conover – “ ‘I never sailed with Cadmus,' she recalled referring to a
line in Canto 27, ‘but he took me to Ventadour’." (Conover 7).
In contrast to 1923, the summer of 1924 was mostly cool and
wet in England and France. Dorothy comments regularly on the appalling summer
weather in August in Devon in her letters to Ezra. There were frosts in
Normandy and the Paris region as late as 16 June. After a brief hot spell in
mid July (as noted in Ezra’s letter of 17 July), the weather turned cool and
wet and remained like that through the rest of the summer. A notable night of
rain in Ussel in late July 1924 is not improbable.
If my conclusions are correct, Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge
visited Ventadour and Ussel in late July 1924, rather than in early August
1923. Their 1924 itinerary was probably Paris – Brive – Egletons/Ventadour –
Ussel – Eygurande – Clermont-Ferrand – Riom – Châtel-Guyon – Bourges – Paris. For
Pound this was quite possibly his first visit to Ventadour and Ussel, and his
lines in Cantos LXXIV and LXXVI mentioning Ventadour and Ussel reflect thoughts
turned back, in Italian, to that journey with Olga Rudge in July 1924. Ezra and
Olga often used Italian between themselves.
The precise itinerary of the August 1923 walking tour remains
somewhat more elusive. Pound’s discretion about the trip persisted. My
suggestion – set out in this article and based on the few photographs that I
have been able to identify – is that in early August 1923 he and Olga followed
a route that took in Brive, Turenne, Belcastel, Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne and
Argentat. To establish the route in greater detail we would need, I think, to
look chiefly at the area to the south and south-east of Brive. Except for those
pictures in the Beinecke folder that may have been taken on other trips, such
as the one of the church in Chauvigny, it is in this area that we should find
the locations of the photographs that were once in Olga Rudge’s “August 1923 –
Dordogne” album.
*
Post script
In addition to those that I have been able to identify, there
are a number of other photographs in the Beinecke collection that presumably
once formed part of Olga Rudge’s “fading black-and-white photograph album”
(Conover 7). It is of course possible that some of the photographs in the
folder - and, where Ezra is in the
picture, in YCAL MSS 54 - are actually from other times and places, like the
one of St Pierre de Chauvigny. Some of the more distinct among Olga Rudge’s
snapshots are reproduced below.
This picture of Ezra under gargoyles is reproduced in Anne Conover’s Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound.
There are a number of doorways in the region in this style, but I have
not found this particular one.
This collection of reliefs is quite possibly not in the same place now
as it was when Olga Rudge photographed it in 1923. A similar collection of
reliefs appears in another of the photographs.
Ezra Pound in front of a castle tower.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jacqueline Desthomas-Denivelle, Robin
Dormer, Diane Ducharme, Verena Feola, Marilynne Morgan, Pierre Paillot and
Roxana Preda for their assistance with the research underlying this article. Photographs by Olga Rudge are used courtesy of the Beinecke Library and New Directions.
List of Abbreviations
Lilly – Correspondence
between Ezra and Dorothy Pound, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Pound mss.
III, Box 1.
L/HP - Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound to his Parents: Letters 1895 -
1929. Eds. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody. Oxford
LTSE1 - Eliot, T.
S. The
Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898-1922, Revised Edition. Eds. Valerie
Eliot and Hugh Haughton. London
PFP - Hamilton College
Collection of Pound Family Postcards.
WTSF - Pound, Ezra. A Walking Tour of Southern
France : Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours. Ed. Richard
Sieburth. New York
Other Works Cited
Audiau, Jean. Les Poésies des Quatre
Troubadours d'Ussel. Paris: Delagrave, 1922. Print.
Baedeker, Karl. Southern France including Corsica ,
5th edition. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1907. Print.
de Born, Bertran (ed. William
D. Paden, Jr., Tilde Sankovitch and Patricia H. Stäblein). The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press. 1986. Print.
Bressan, Eloisa. "Regionalism
and Mythmaking: A Map for Ezra Pound's Walking Tour in Southern
France , 1919." Make It
New, 2.4 (2016): 44-55. Digital.
Bush, Ronald L. The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos.
Princeton: Princeton
University
Conover, Anne. Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: "What Thou
Lovest Well...". New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Print
Deshouillières, François. “Le château de Belcastel: commune de Lacave (Lot).”
Bulletin
Monumental, Tome 95, No. 3. 1936 :
385-386. Print.
Kehew, Robert (ed.). Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the
Troubadours. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print.
Kelly, Amy. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950. Print.
McKechnie, Gordon. "Ezra
Pound and TS Eliot at Excideuil." Make
It New, 3.4 (2017): 59 - 96. Digital.
Maison, François. “Ventadour, un site sublime.” In Ventadour, Passé, Présent, Avenir. Moustier-Ventadour :
Cahiers de Carrefour Ventadour, 2006. Print.
Makin, Peter. Provence and Pound. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. Print.
Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound:
Poet. Volume II, The Epic Years, 1921-1939. New York: OUP, 2014. Print.
Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York
Smith, Justin H. The Troubadours at Home: Their lives and
personalities, their songs and their world. Volume II. New York: G.P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1899. Print.
Terrell, C.F. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound.
Berkeley and Los Angeles :
University of California
White, Freda. Three Rivers of France. London: Pavilion
Books. 1989. Print.
Wilhelm, J.J. Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908-1925.
University Park , PA :
The Pennsylvania State University
[1] Source:
Beinecke Library, Olga Rudge Papers, YCAL MSS 54. Photographs by Olga Rudge
used courtesy of the Beinecke Library and New Directions.
[2] Neither
Ventadour nor Ussel has a cathedral.
[3] This is
the first item in the Rudge-Pound correspondence held in the Beinecke Library
at YCAL MSS 54, Box 1, Folder 1.
[4] Olga
Rudge Papers Addition YCAL MSS 241, Box
21, Folder 716. There are also three other photographs in Olga Rudge Papers
YCAL MSS 54, catalogued as 1923, in
which Ezra Pound appears against a backdrop of places that are probably in
southwest France.
[5] The
Rudge-Pound correspondence held at the Beinecke Library (YCAL MSS 54, Box 1,
Folder 1 – Correspondence June- October 1923) does not shed any further light
on the date of the 1923 walking tour.
[6] In a
draft of Canto VI the lines relating to the galleried church-porch were
slightly more expansive -
And
before all this
By Correze, Malemort
A young man walks, at
church with galleried porch
By river-marsh, a sad man, pacing
Come from Ventadorn...
(Bush 316)
[7] In Ezra
Pound’s translation of Bertrand de Born’s Domna,
puois de me no·us chal (“Lady, since you care nothing for me”), the poem
that lies in the background to his own poem Near
Perigord, he renders de Born’s simple N’Audiartz
as “Of Audiart at Malemort”. (Kehew 152). This probably accounts for the
inclusion of Malemort in Near Perigord in the context of “for every lady a castle”.
[8] The
third daughter was Elis de Montfort, the wife of Guillaume de Gourdon. She
features in the vida of Raimon Jordan, Viscount of St Antoni. (See The Cantos Project - http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/overview/sources-three-cantos-ii/93-viscount-st-antoni-vida)
[9] While
the date on the postmark is clear, the place of posting is not. It could be
Capdenac. A railway line runs from Brive, through Turenne, to Capdenac.
[10]
Photograph by Robin Dormer
[11] On the
back of this snapshot, Olga Rudge has written “Walking Tour with E. 192-
Dordogne.” The photograph is in YCAL MSS
241, but not in the folder labelled “PLACES”.
[12] Not
numbered
[13] Sirdar
was a fashionable restaurant in the Champs-Elysées at the time Pound lived in
Paris in the early 1920s. Armenonville was a restaurant in the Bois de
Boulogne, and Malmaison is on the Seine a little farther to the west. The
reference to “the keys to the chateau” seems strange for ruins on a hill in
open countryside. Ventadour was built for defensive reasons on a hill with
steep sides falling away in three directions. Access up those hills remains
difficult. Today access to the ruins is through the old main gate to the
castle. It is quite possible that in the 1920s this gate was kept locked, such
that access was only really possible with the key to the gate. It was, however,
not locked when Justin Smith visited Ventadour a quarter of a century earlier
than Pound – “...the old gateway,
opening into the castle enclosure through a long arched passage, now filled
with debris and guarded only by a great locust tree.” (Smith 153)
[14] Source: Bibliothèque Météo France, Paris
[15] Source: Archives départementales de la
Corrèze, Tulle.
[16] “other
side” presumably means the opposite side of Brive to Excideuil where EP had
stayed with Dorothy in 1919.
[17]
Eygurande lies some 20 km to the NE of Ussel at the far eastern end of Corrèze.
[18] In my 2017
article “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in Excideuil” (McKechnie 59-96) I
unquestioningly followed the Hamilton College cataloguing of PFP 156 and
attributed it to Miss N. Juillet. This is in fact a misinterpretation of the
date 21 juillet in Pound’s hand.
[19] Note
that this is five years to the day after the date on which Wilhelm puts Ezra
and Dorothy in Clermont-Ferrand.
[20] Wilhelm
does not mention the July 1924 walking tour. Neither of the 1924 walking tours
is mentioned by Conover.
[21] Photograph by Jochen Jahnke, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12238820
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