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Five Sex/Gender Contradictions in Olson and Boldereff All of a woman’s troubles proceed from the fact that she never admits to herself her fundamental inequality. Frances Boldereff to Charles Olson, ca. 16 April 1949 [B]ut somewhere I must say how strongly I protest the accepted version of woman’s character [. . .] I only desire to drop a hint as to how the life was lived, the life wherein God set one woman free. Frances Boldereff to Charles Olson, ca. April 16, 1949 1. Bigmans Consolidating, analyzing, and deploying maleness in writing are self-­ conscious, visceral activities for Charles Olson, a “gender project” central to his poetic career (Connell 2005, 72; see also Mossin 2007). Olson’s self creation from about 1949 to 1956 (focusing here on 1949– 1952) produced a mythically invested protean masculinity, to become influential within the ideologies, affiliations, and practices of contemporary poetry. His efflorescence was achieved in relationships (tracked in matching chapters) with Frances Motz Boldereff (1905–2003), a typo­ graphical designer and self-­ taught scholar; and with Robert Creeley (1926–2005), a fellow poet.1 Olson struggled with his responsibilities to Boldereff, whose intellectual, sexual, and emotional enthusiasms were vital to his vocation, and to Constance Wilcock, his common-­law spouse and support (Clark 1991, 157). However magnetic the biography is, I am treating this relationship as an event in the cultural structuring of gender in poetic communities. It is a working relationship in which the passages back and forth between the filiative (familial/sexual bonds) and affiliative (social/professional bonds) were volatile and metamorphic. At clearly identifiable moments, Olson approaches a critique of contemporary gender, particularly of male-­ female relations, but he resolves the contradictions that he faces by choosing and rechoosing the normative , genius-­ oriented, relatively privileged masculinities of the time. This solution was not unique to him. The immediate postwar period saw a 118 part two retreat from the modernist debates and activities that had started toward gender-­ equality, civic and professional status for women, increasing tolerance of sexual minorities, and the inquiry into difference without hierarchic outcomes. By “establishing an extreme return to bourgeois notions of a totally segregated masculinity and femininity,” the late 1940s and early 1950s “interrupted the historical struggle for a modernization” of sex-­ gender regimes, a struggle that was, as my Pound, Eliot, Loy materials illustrate, serious and fraught in earlier modernism (Pollock in Orton and Pollock 1996, 223–224, 223). This conservatism is of a piece with contemporaneous psychology—the move, as traced by R. W. Connell , from the complexities of Freud to the simplicities of Theodor Reik. What Freud had seen as a “complex and fragile construction”—sexuality and gender—was codified by Reik into “gender orthodoxy” and “conventional heterosexuality” (Connell 2005, 11). Consequently, even Jung looked radical in the 1950s, although his key argument that creative men were infused with a female aspect depended on an ahistorical, binarist worldview (Connell 2005, 12–13). Olson’s specific choices and ideas made him—as Robert Duncan later said—“patristic” in his actions but richly multiple in his imaginary (Duncan 1995, 26). That is, he became both a patriarch in power terms and (in my use of the term) patriarchal, deploying multiple, imperially ranging subject positions as part of that power and its charms. Olson selected his gender modes and regimes, which included an intense mysticism about women propelled and supported by Frances Boldereff.2 Although Boldereff (see the epigraphs at the beginning of the chapter) insists on her “fundamental inequality” as a woman, she also protests loudly and clearly, torn about the self-­ abnegation and self-­ effacement that historically have been strategies of muting female ambition. Her protest is full of a strange pride, as if she were the one woman chosen by the universe to suffer the political contradictions of sexuality and gender in the most acute and painful way. At the same time, she wants to compel the world to acknowledge that women do have a soul—it is a measure of her despair that she felt this was in question—and that female achievement is possible. Her sexual freedom, intellectual panache, inabilities to reconcile herself to secondary status, and manic emotional-­ intellectual force belie that “inequality” to which she has constantly to re-­ reconcile herself. When she claims and reclaims that “essential inequality,” Charles Olson’s response is a terse “((SHIT)),” but his conflicts on this very matter are also powerful and formative (Olson/Boldereff, 28). They are formative Sex/Gender...

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