Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff: A Modern Correspondence

by Sharon Thesen

The highly influential yet undisclosed relationship between modern American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) and Frances Boldereff comes to light in this first collection of their extensive, often impassioned, correspondence. What starts with a fan letter from the idiosyncratic intellectual Boldereff soon surges to an exchange numbering hundreds of pages. In these letters, one views the early stages of the "Maximus" poems and the developing poetics embodied in Olson's 1950 essay on "Projective Verse." While this correspondence reveals much about the work and life of a man who became the dominant figure among the Black Mountain poets, Boldereff herself stands out as an extraordinary collaborator, occasional lover, and intellectual rival to Olson. Here are two great minds and creative spirits caught up in an exchange every bit as riveting as the letters of de Beauvoir and Sartre.

Unknown Binding

First published June 1, 1999

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are love letters. Late in 1947, moved and inspired by Charles Olson's critical study of Moby-Dick, Call Me Ishmael, Frances Boldereff wrote him a letter in appreciation of his insight. From that seed grew an enormous correspondence and intense love between two lofty literary minds.

Boldereff was an independent book designer then living in Woodward, Pennsylvania. She was well-read and knowledgeable about literature, especially her favorites, such as Joyce and Lawrence. Just as important, she possessed a sense of fine critical perception. She's been described as physically bird-like but with a towering intellect and understanding, as well as an ability to articulate that understanding. Olson was a big man with an equally big mind and talent. He was based in Washington at the time of their beginning, working for the government. Though he was known as a Melville scholar, he felt his future to be in poetry and was steadily writing.

Liking each other, realizing they were of like minds, their correspondence quickly moved through stages of friendship, flirtatiousness, and declarations of love which floated like rafts down their torrent of discourse about art and writing. In these letters Boldereff easily held her own by expressing philosophical ideas. At the same time, her letters are more romantic. She showed her vulnerability and was willing to take more risks than the married Olson. Of the two, her writing and her love were the more lyrical. She quickly became muse. Olson also thought of her as sibyl. Through his letters to her, often following her encouragement, he talked himself through his developing poetry and poetics. Including in his letters to her were many poems, some not published until his Collected Poems in 1987, the beginnings of his most important achievement, The Maximus Poems, and the thinking behind his influential essay, "Projective Verse." Even in his correspondence Olson wrote in a big, expansive style. He was the embodiment of Maximus, and his letters carried ideas, the paragraphs great stuffed boxcars loaded with the freight of his learning. Until near the end of the correspondence collected here, he expressed love and passion less freely than Boldereff. She could easily tease it out of him, though, inspiring an affecting tenderness from the bear-like, myth-like Olson. It was even he who initiated the physical side of the relationship. They met several times, though never as often as Boldereff desired. Olson became the most passionate near the end of this collection when Boldereff began to express dissatisfaction.

This is a fine complement to Olson's poetry and his ideas on poetics. For me these letters are introduction to a major influence on that work. This is correspondence as satisfying in its intellectual discourse as it is in intense expressions of love.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm in the minority, I think, in not finding this correspondence especially exciting to read. The relationship was certainly significant, and the story it tells is fascinating, but the letters themselves do not live up to their billing, in my opinion. This surprises me because I'm much more drawn to the ancient Near East side of Olson than to his New Englandism, and Boldereff was without question responsible for Olson's archaic turn. One illuminating aspect of these letters, however, is the light they shed on Olson's resistance to an anti-Judaic reading of that material, which Boldereff was certainly pushing.

Olson is in so many ways a post-Holocaust poet, one of the first in America to come to terms with the discovery of the death camps, and his one great advantage over Pound as a poet of history was his attention to historiography, his appreciation of how much ideology is involved in the presentation of so-called facts. God knows, he had his own ideological blind spots (his shabby treatment of Boldereff as a collaborator marks one of them), but when it came to ethnocentrism in history writing, he could be very sharp. Moreover, although he was an unabashed "presentist" in his reading of the past, this kept him from describing the past in ways that would be invidious if applied to the present. It simply wasn't possible for Olson to talk about ancient "Semites" in ignorance of the modern fate of the Jews in Europe, however inexact that parallel might be. This is why I have elsewhere compared Olson's project to Martin Bernal's in Black Athena.

I should add that the work of the editors in preparing this edition is exemplary.