‘S’ and ‘M’: The Last and Lost Letters Between Ann Quin and Robert Creeley

Abstract

In her last letter to Robert Creeley, Ann Quin mentions that she has ‘been clearing out a lot of suitcases crammed with letters’. By contrast, Creeley kept this letter and one other inside his own copies of Quin’s novels, Three and Passages, separating them from his main collection of her papers. The filing of Quin’s letter inside Three suggests that the act of retrieving her from an archive could be at odds with her novel’s exploration of a couple’s disastrous attempt to recover ‘a life’ for their missing lodger, ‘S’. Echoing the presentation of ‘S’ in Three, ‘M’ in Creeley’s short prose piece, ‘Mabel’, reiterates Quin’s critique of historical rescue: ‘a sadly endless consequence of [M] shall be trailed through minds of her time like roses’. The echoes between the missing figures in Quin and Creeley’s texts can be read, I argue, as symptoms of the way in which Quin sought to refuse the limited cultural position available to women writers in the 1960s by embracing states of loss and withdrawal.

Keywords:

• Experimental women’s writing
• Ann Quin
• Robert Creeley
• archival ephemera

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Nonia Williams for giving me a copy of the unpublished collection of writings on Ann Quin’s life and writing. I am indebted to Peter Middleton for unearthing the Quin letters kept in Robert Creeley’s personal library, and am grateful for the advice that he and Nicky Marsh have given me on previous versions of this work. Special thanks go to ‘J’ for letting Nonia and me look through what remains of Ann’s books and papers, and for granting me permission to quote from her letters. I would also like to thank Penelope Creeley for allowing me to quote from Creeley’s reflections on Quin.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This essay uses the following abbreviations for in-text citations of archival materials: ‘Papers’ for Creeley, Robert. Robert Creeley Papers, 1950-1997. Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, M0662; and ‘Ephemera’ for Creeley, Robert. Robert Creeley Book Inserts, Ephemera. Department of Special Collections, Hesburgh Libraries of Notre Dame. I reproduce crossings out and other idiosyncrasies of Quin’s letters. The letter ‘x’ in these quotations, for instance, indicates typewritten crossings out.

2 Emphasis in the original.

3 Rereading her own poetic fragment from 1966, DuPlessis asks, ‘Am “I” forbidden to poetry by one – but one key – law of poetry – the cult of the idealized female? Should “Lady” be ditched totally? or examined? both?’ (DuPlessis 1996: 34).

4 Similarly, in ‘Illiterations’, Christine Brooke-Rose proposes that a ‘woman artist needs more withdrawal and less belonging. She needs to withdraw, either from the man she is with who may be consciously or unconsciously punishing her for, or otherwise stifling her creativity, or from society (ditto)’ (Brooke-Rose 1989: 66).

5 Rifkin defines ‘contemporaneity’ as ‘the product of decisions – both individual and collective – to participate in the same set of struggles on the field of culture’ (Rifkin 2000: 7).

6 Similarly, in April 1965, Quin writes, ‘Determined now to be elusive’ (Creeley Papers: 27/4/1965) after an interviewer for ‘the Express’ dismisses her account of her ‘writing’ and ‘education’ (Creeley Papers: 27/4/1965).

7 DuPlessis’ essay critiques how ‘Oedipus has become a set of premises foundational to poetry offering apparently explanatory narratives about the formation of gender and consciousness’ (DuPlessis 1996: 42): ‘Oedipality has taken on a peculiar relevance to the formation of poets because in one version of the history of poetry, poets are all men – oedipal narratives become a way not of explaining that fact but of constituting it over and over in the guise of explanation’ (42).

8 Creeley offers his own version of this notion of an unspoken recognition when he recalls how ‘That wink’, which Quin gave Marion Boyars while threatening to destroy her office, was her ‘dear trademark’ (Creeley 1974: 2).

9 According to Faas, ‘Creeley himself started negotiating [for the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship] on [Quin’s] behalf in early January [1965]’ (Faas 2001: 303).

10 In 1967, Quin ‘exhausted [herself] in finishing the book [Passages], so much so I had a kind of breakdown, when I lost my speech’ (Creeley Papers: 23/11/1967). In 1970, Quin is ‘in hospital resting from a kind of breakdown’, having ended up ‘nearly frozen, weeping, unable to speak near a canal in Stockholm’ (2/3/1970).