"In Thicket": Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff, Robert Creeley and the Crisis of Masculinity at Mid-Century

Abstract

In Thicket":Charles Olson, Frances Boldereff, Robert Creeley and the Crisis of Masculinity at Mid-Century1 Andrew Mossin you see, you sld know what you do, delivering to me up clean out of the delicate sure fingers of yr mind, such things, & Blake, &, for as much as I can take, crist Charles Olson to Frances Boldereff, 18 January 1950 I. In 1947, Charles Olson, then 39 years old, encountered two individuals who would quickly become two of the three central figures of his "defining company," to use Robert Creeley's apt phrase. He met the first, Robert Duncan, while on a trip to California researching a projected book on the American West. Duncan, who had recently completed writing a collection of poems titled Medieval Scenes with fellow San Francisco poet, Jack Spicer, was then at the forefront of the Bay Area poetry scene, now known as the first Berkeley renaissance. Olson wouldn't actually meet the second, Frances Boldereff, in person until the fall of 1949. But in 1947, he and Boldereff, a book designer then living in Woodward, PA, began an exchange of letters that would lead two years later to their becoming lovers. Olson, then living with his common-law wife, Connie Wilcock, courted Boldereff with an extraordinarily active and passionate correspondence (sometimes three letters a day) that nearly rivaled [End Page 13] the similarly decisive correspondence Olson began the following year with a third key individual. In April 1950, Olson started corresponding with Creeley, who had dropped out of Harvard in his final year to pursue a career as a writer. Creeley, then living on a farm in New Hampshire and earning a subsistence level income raising chickens, had been working hard to establish a mode for the early prose work that would go into his 1954 collection, The Gold Diggers. Olson's letters to Creeley demonstrate the range and impact of a relationship that, along with the bond with Boldereff, would absorb his emotional and intellectual energies and become vital aspects of his production as a poet and scholar. We know of both the Creeley and the Boldereff relationships through two indispensable collections of letters. The first and most voluminous is that between Olson and Robert Creeley, at ten volumes surely one of the preeminent and most intensively "personal" documents of post-war American poetry and poetics. These are the letters of which Olson has said, "Creeley and I have engaged in perhaps the most important correspondence of my life" (CORC V.1 ix). These letters, written between 1950 and 1952 (where Volume 10 of the correspondence ends) trace Olson and Creeley's early efforts as they sought to establish their footing as writers. These letters served as an extraordinary prelude to the face-to-face encounter between the two men that finally took place in 1954 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—four years after Olson's initial April letter. The second collection, between Olson and Frances (Motz) Boldereff and dating from late 1947 through the summer of 1950, sharpens in pivotal ways our understanding of the period that Olson termed "a riot in my soul" and that saw a paradigmatic shift in his thinking about poetry, the practice of his craft, and the feminine principle as both ideal and fact of consciousness. The Boldereff letters were not published until 1999; the first volume of the Olson-Creeley letters appeared in 1980, with the final, tenth volume published in 1996. The gap in publication history and reception is telling, for it suggests the ways in which the former collection, shielded from public view until recently, has remained very much an unwritten part of the history of this time—and of Olson's development as a writer and thinker. Olson's letters to Creeley are vital in their own right as documents of post-war American poetry and cultural thought. Yet at the same time, the letters to Boldereff suggest another, in certain ways more complicated (though no less culturally saturated) relationship: that of the lover and brother cum suitor, the poet as passionate admirer and mentor, working in collaboration with his muse under the sign of Eros. "I want some day to see...