After
Completion: The Later Letters of Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff, edited by
Sharon Thesen and Ralph Maud, (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014), pp. 294, $24.95
Charles Olson had things to say and he
said them compellingly, but he was also a private person. He compartmentalized his friendships, so that
one friend or group of friends, though aware of the existence of others, was
often kept in the dark about the nature of conversations that passed between
them, either directly or in the form of letters, which Olson favored as much as
the spoken word.
However, none of Olson’s friends
were apparently aware of the poet’s correspondence— or, indeed, his intimate
personal relationship—with the Pennsylvania-born artist, book designer, writer
and independent scholar, Frances Boldereff, until George Butterick, curator of
the poet’s papers at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, discovered their
letters during a preliminary cataloging of Olson’s papers at the poet’s 28 Fort
Square apartment, in Gloucester, two years before his death, in 1970. Tom Clark’s 1991 biography, Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s
Life, disclosed the existence of this crucial relationship. But it was Butterick who initially reached
out to Boldereff, whose letters from Olson he was given permission to photocopy
for the archive at Storrs, where Clark was then allowed to consult them before
meeting personally with Boldereff, in January of 1987 (Boldereff’s papers
subsequently became part of the Archives and Special Collections at Storrs). In 1999, Wesleyan University Press published Charles Olsson and Frances Boldereff: A
Modern Correspondence, a major compilation of letters from 1947 to 1950, edited
by Olson scholars Ralph Maud and Sharon Thesen, followed in 2014 by After Completion: The Later Lettters of
Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff (Talonbooks), which collects the
remainder of the correspondence, from late 1950 to 1969, just before Olson’s death
from liver cancer (Boldereff died in 2003).
It is especially intriguing to
consider that Olson began his two most extensive and important correspondences,
the one with Boldereff and the other with poet Robert Creeley, within three
years, between 1947 and 1950, and though Olson spoke about Creeley to Boldereff,
he appears never to have mentioned Boldereff to Creeley. According to Creeley’s biographer Ekbert
Fass, “Olson never once in his voluminous correspondence with Creeley referred
to his epistolary muse and lover… In turn, he was hesitant to talk to her about
his new male associate with whom, before long, he began to exchange letters at
a rate exceeding those he traded with her.” Such was the extent of Olson’s ability—and
need—to compartmentalize.
Who was Boldereff and precisely what
is the nature of her importance to Olson?
To answer this question, there are
no better authorities than Thesen and Maud, whose two exemplary volumes of this
correspondence add more to our understanding of Olson, especially during his
formative years as a poet, than any biography or previous scholarly work.
According to the editors, Boldereff, who, on November 22, 1947, initiated the
correspondence by writing Olson an enthusiastic response to his first book, Call Me Ishmael, “believed she had found
not only a kindred spirit but a lifeline, a persona, a twin.” And to Olson, who responded with equal
enthusiasm, “Frances became muse, sibling and Sybil.” Thus began a correspondence as intense as it
was to become sizable, interspersed with assignations, missed or postponed trysts
(“stonewalling,” a frequently stood-up Boldereff would call it), and encounters
of equally erotic and frustrating nature.
As the editors write, “This was the voltage that charged Olson’s writing
at the time,” when he had completed “Projective Verse,” but not yet begun work
on the Maximus Poems.” But what this
correspondence “with its responses and challenges” demonstrates, they stress, “is that an intimacy of two strong
minds helped to engender Maximus.” So that, in concert with his sexual desire for
his correspondent, Thesen and Maud contend, “[Olson] desired her insight,
acumen, scholarship, curiosity and canny knowledge of the direction of the underground
stream of his thought,” adding, “there was no one else like Boldereff in
Olson’s life.”
Furthermore, according to Thesen and
Maud, “it was Boldereff who encouraged Olson in the notion of a poem as a “construct
of energy,” and, therefore, Boldereff who stands behind the ideas in
‘Projective Verse.’” Learning of
Boldereff’s inspiration and the impact of her thinking on Olson at the time
does not diminish the poet’s own struggle to come to terms with both a new and
open poetry (“stay OPEN at all costs,” Olson wrote Boldereff on October 5,
1950, “stay OPEN and IN”), and, equally a way out of what Olson called “the old soul,” another term for the “humanism
and its errors” he and Boldereff
believed had been rendered obsolete by the horrors of the war,
ultimately leading to “the deadness of American postwar culture;” not to speak
of the debasement of language through propaganda on the part of both the Allies
and their Axis enemies, manipulations Olson knew well from his work in the
Office of War information.
It is this struggle to achieve new
cultural terms, for “something in poetry,” the editors write, “that [Olson]
believed had either been hidden or taken from it;” indeed, a revolutionary new
world view, that had occupied the correspondents separately before they met and
with renewed engagement as their correspondence and their intimate relationship
progressed. Such is the burden of the
initial volume of letters, as Olson became the poet we would know him to be and
Boldereff continued to elaborate her “utopian feminism” of “joy not possession,”
underpinned by “the gendered gestures that compose an archaic world view,” as
the editors characterize what Boldereff herself referred to as “the task of modern
woman.” It was this, along with her powerfully original scholarship on Joyce,
that resulted in her groundbreaking 1959 study, Reading Finnegans Wake.
By the time we approach the bulk of
the letters in After Completion, much
has happened to the two correspondents, personally and intellectually. Olson and his first common-law wife Constance
had moved from Washington, D.C. to Black Mountain College, where Olson was to
teach and eventually lead the experimental community until the college closed
in 1956. They had a daughter Kate and
then separated. Meanwhile, Olson had
begun a relationship with Betty Kaiser, a Black Mountain music student and the
mother of his son, Charles Peter, moving to Gloucester and then to Buffalo,
where he taught at the state university and where, in 1964, Betty died in an
automobile accident, after which Olson moved back to Gloucester, from where he
traveled to London, Rome, Spoleto, and Berlin as his fame grew. As Olson’s star was in its ascendency,
Boldereff, never affluent, endured serial job loss and excruciating
poverty. While still engaged in major
work on Rimbaud and Joyce, she relocated from Woodward, Pennsylvania to Brooklyn,
back to Pennsylvania then to Lawrenceville, New Jersey and back to Woodward,
re-marrying in the process. During
these years after Olson’s return to Gloucester, the Maximus Poems entered their major phase and Boldereff published
Reading Finnegans Wake, followed by what was to become her masterwork, Hermes to his Son Thoth: Being Joyce’s Use
of Giordano Bruno in Finnegans Wake (1968), both of which books, lovingly
inscribed to Olson, remained in his library.
Reading these letters, which are as
erotically charged as they are intellectually engaged, one might wonder why
Olson and Boldereff never made the move to live together, though they spoke of
it often. In fact, when Boldereff
suggests they have a “closer relationship,” Olson demurs, the editors write,
concerned that “moving it forward…into closeness,” they quote Olson, would
endanger “the depth & power of letters between us, the imaginative wildness
of the communication would be disturbed.”
Trenchantly, Thesen and Maud conclude: “Fearing the consequences of a
domestication of his relationship with Boldereff, Olson is also trying to
protect his marriage—at this point to Connie Olson and then later to Betty Olson—from
his attachment to Boldereff,” adding that “the possibility that they might live
together was broached and rejected later on, by each of them in different ways
and under different circumstances.” And
yet, paradoxically, Olson could write Boldereff in 1958: “I have loved you the
whole time—and have hung myself (not to
speak of Con and now, Bet) believing, the whole time, I would one day live with
you, at least give over to the love, and let it have life to live itself in,
instead of staying bottled up in me, and thus doing the harm such wrong does
do.”
It is possible that Olson, who appeared
to be the least domestic of men, felt safer in his marriages, especially from a
lover like Boldereff, who challenged him intellectually at every point—and may
also have challenged him sexually—a woman who had clearly read as deeply and
extensively as Olson had and wrote with equal brilliance. There were a couple of trysts after Betty’s
death, the editors report, “but it seems the lovers decided it was as it had
always been: that to live apart was the more productive thing.” After one particularly difficult rendezvous in
New York toward the end of Olson’s life, “where he talked all through the
night,” Boldereff remembered to Tom Clark: “He was in terrible psychic
suffering, but I couldn’t respond. There was no contact between us. I felt,
there’s no human being there, just a husk.
He was experiencing a real loss of his own identity, which he was hoping
to get back through me. Alas, it did not work.”
The former lovers and correspondents
of twenty-two years would never see each other again; and yet Olson was to
write Boldereff, on May 28, 1969, seven months before his death: “My dear sweet
Frances—Just in another burst of love for you (they come in such gusts my whole
nature at this moment (as I write) bursts on you) Love, Charles PS I adore you”
With Connie remarried and Bet dead,
a bereft Olson, while assuring Boldereff of his undying love during the final
years of their correspondence, is nevertheless engaged in an intense
correspondence with a much younger scholar and poet, Joyce Benson, enlivened by
assignations with her in Gloucester and
elsewhere, according to Clark. There is
another affair, conducted mostly in London, with an American heiress, who had
important ties to Beat and Black Mountain writers, and a relationship in
Gloucester, his final, it appears, with a young poet, who shared his Fort
Square apartment and continued to live in it after Olson’s death. While having struggled successfully to
integrate his poetic and historical vocations in the Maximus Poems, and his politics through concerted local activism,
Olson appeared never to have been able to achieve a lasting union, remaining,
at best, conflicted and ambivalent about love, though there is no question that
he experienced powerful moments of ecstasy with Boldereff.
By this time Olson’s health was
seriously failing. A year earlier, during
the summer of 1968, after Olson had reported illness, Boldereff had written
with concern: “Please tell me what your doctor says; what can he do; what can’t he do?” Blithely, Olson had replied. “and though I
have still to ‘behave’ (the problem seems simply to be to take care to be taken
care of—food & that stuff; and equally not ‘socialize’ too much!”) But those of us who were close to Olson at
the time, knew it was more than lack of proper nourishment (when he was not
binging late at night in local restaurants, he often ate his food directly from
a can—and even wrote about it in a letter to the editor of the Gloucester Times), or Olson’s heavy drinking, that constituted
the problem. Olson suffered from
emphysema, yet he continued to smoke; and though often surrounded by friends at
home or visitors from many parts of the globe, there was a deep loneliness in
the poet, which is evident from the final Maximus
Poems, in which he describes walking disconsolately up and down the seaside
Boulevard of a community he had once loved and had great hopes for, but which
had become, as he wrote in another letter to the editor, a “city of mediocrity
and cheap ambition,” in its apparent rejection of its marine industrial
heritage, while attempting to chase the tourist dollar: “destroying/ its own shoulders its own back
greedy present persons/stood upon.” The
dejected poet, who left Gloucester for Connecticut in September of 1969, may well
have also been fleeing death, for he was soon to be diagnosed with inoperable
cancer, dying six weeks later in New York.
As much as the drama of this unique
relationship grips the reader—and the letters are as full of the sting and bite
of disappointment as they are of the elation of eroticism—there is something
about them that transcends the merely relational. As writing, they are often incandescent, as
Olson, goaded by Boldereff, challenged equally by her ardent correspondent,
hones his projective, propulsive prose to perfection. His essay on Lawrence, “The Escaped Cock:
Notes on Lawrence and the Present, or, the Real,” developed during their exchanges,
can be taken as a trope for the dialectic at the heart of this correspondence,
just as it proposes a revolutionary view of the narrative.
Olson writes: “I take it that
CONTEST is what puts drama (what they keep harping on still as story, plot)
into the thing; the writer’s contesting with reality—to see it, to SEE; that
climax is not what happens to the characters or things (which is, even at the
finest, a rigged puppet-demonstrandum) but is, instead what another, my peer,
called “a broken stump,” this contest and its issue, the ISSUE of the man who
writes. The issue is what causes CHANGE
(the struggle inside, the contest there, inside, exhibited). At root (or
stump) what is, is no longer THINGS
but WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN THINGS, these are the terms of the reality
contemporary to us—and the terms of what we are.” This,
then, is “no bare incoming of novel abstract form,” as Olson wrote in “Letter
27” of Maximus, but instead what was
powerfully enacted in the letters themselves, what the two lovers grappled with
as they engaged each other to the limit of their abilities, contesting and
thereby changing.
(This review appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of House Organ, edited by Kenneth Warren)
