Maximus, to himself

I've made it to page 57 of Maximus. Distractions & laziness are partly responsible for the slowness of my progress. Mostly, though, I found myself feeling too close to the text & not quite understanding why. Despite its confusing & fascinating references to history & ancient mythology, there was something beneath the surface that felt familiar to me, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. So I walked away for awhile.

A few days ago, I decided to get back into the swing of things by exploring some of Olson's correspondence, particularly his epistolary relationship with Frances Boldereff, a lover who became his muse & literary confidante. Many of Olson's letters to Frances contained the beginnings of some of the best Maximus poems. It was in my exploration of those letters that I discovered the familiarity that had startled me before.

In Frances & Olson's correspondence, I began to recognize myself in Frances' response to the poet. The two of them, the dynamic of their relationship, appeared allegorical to an epistolary relationship of my own. If I saw myself in Frances, I saw my counterpart in Olson. It was the appearance of echoes of this other person in Olson's poems that gave me pause. The letters between Olson & Frances only magnified this parallel. It was painfully clear in one upsetting exchange between the two, in April 1950:

on April 15, Frances writes:

I am very shocked not to have a note from you...
I have no money
I have no work
I have no companionship
I have no library
And I receive from you in the darkest hours I have lived through one small note.
Do you think it is kind Charles?

...The human thing is made of blood. Sometimes what is needed is not words-- it is the sight of a human eye. I need no sex now -- I am far too torn for that. I do need you.

If you cannot come to me now Charles when I need you not out of weakness...but because I need human-- I need to see the eye -- the words are just like thin odorless water to me--

Two days later, Olson writes:

you have made me cold as ice-- by attacking my words, language, this communication between us which i believe in so deeply, as thin odorless water... you must, because you do have the reach in you, understand that i would understand anything you do-- you must protect yourself, darling...

i don't care who the hell olson is or what the hell he says or does, or does not, you just got to take care of yourself... so you don't get this screwed up...

aw, fuck the whole business: you have made imagery and words wry in my mouth, sound like lie

fuck it, frances, just fuck the whole business

And less than 24 hours later, another letter from Olson:

have nothing to do with poets/ they know nothing about human reality as it is some one else's...

in my mouth this morning like ashes is a phrase: image more than person, more syllable than image...

what, from the start, i suppose i could offer you was, the images you invoked in me, both as they took the form of [poems written for you] and as they took the form of letters written to you with all the solids of verse, if not the final shapings such action would... be love

Frances is filled with need, a desperate desire to feel a human connection that cannot be created with letters alone. But Olson is incapable of providing her with his physical presence. What becomes clear in the other letters is Olson's paralysis. His love is sincere, & his connection with Frances is very real. But the relationship is conducted entirely on his terms. In many cases, in fact, Frances' declarations of love & longing are met with requests for advice on his writing, for an editorial eye. This, it seems, does not indicate an imbalance of affection, but instead an unshakable selfishness on Olson's part. He will never, ever meet Frances halfway, no matter how much he knows he should.

While the connection I felt to this situation initially compelled me to distance myself from Maximus, it's now drawn me back in. Because I deal with an Olsonian character in my life outside the poems, I feel a newer & more powerful connection to the text. Personal identification equals investment.

So today, when I returned to Maximus with a newfound stake in the poet & his alter-ego, imagine my surprise at finding a poem that deals directly with the tensions exposed in Olson's letters to Frances.

I have made dialogues,
have discussed ancient texts,
have thrown what light I could, offered
what pleasures
doceat allows

xxxxxxxxxxxxxBut the known?
This, I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world

xxxxxxxxTokens.
xxxxxxxxBut sitting here
xxxxxxx iI look out as a wind
xxxxxxxxand water man, testing
xxxxxxxxAnd missing
xxxxxxxx some proof

I know the quarters
of the weather, where it comes from,
where it goes. But the stem of me,
this I took from their welcome,
or their rejection, of me

aaaaaaaa lAnd my arrogance
aaaaaaaaawas neither diminished
xxxxxxxxl nor increased
llllllllllllllllby the communication

This is Olson's mea culpa, or the closest thing to it, in the first section of Maximus: the admission of failure, the acknowledgement of his fatal flaw. Olson is, admittedly, a Man of Ideas, incapable of creation outside the realm of verse & philosophy. He's trapped in his seaside cabin-equivalent of an ivory tower, "looking out" only when he is alone with nature. (So disillusioned by academia was the poet that he rejected a much-deserved & hard won Ph.D from Harvard.) The most telling stanza, I think, is the one that begins "But the known?," with its clear admission of paralysis. Love, life, even the world itself, must be given, not found. Olson, eternally in search of the meanings of these three words, admits in 1953 that he cannot find them on his own, that he relies on the generosity of others to aid in his pursuit, while he lies back, static in his "arrogance." If his selfish introspection isn't clear enough in the poem itself, its title gives it away: "Maximus, to himself." The Bigman admits his failure, yes, but only to himself. He laments not the suffering he inflicts (however unintentionally) upon others, but his guilt at such egocentrism.

Little more than halfway through the first of Maximus' three parts, Olson's tragedy has become achingly clear. It's not so much the selfishness that saddens me, but Olson's simultaneous acknowledgement of it & refusal to change. Until he died, people came to him to offer assistance & love, never asking anything in return. When, on those few occasions when someone actually did require some sort of reciprocity, Olson retreated & let them disappear. His first wife, Connie, grew tired of the dance & walked away. His second wife died (in what may have been a suicide) after following him, unquestioningly, to the barren cold of Buffalo, New York. He accepted countless loans that were never repaid. And in the last years of his life, he relied on the kindness of his sister-in-law, without whose help he would have likely starved to death, as he never learned to cook for himself. Olson's life, though filled with occasional adventures & striking accomplishments, was little more than a series of unreturned favors & one-sided relationships. How can a man find love if he isn't willing to express it himself? The poems are beautiful, but as Frances said, sometimes words just aren't enough.