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Alisa Allkins

Wayne State University

William Carlos Williams and the Femininity of Destruction

In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams dedicates a brief chapter to the Baroness

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the chapter “The Baroness,” amidst his larger narrative,

Williams describes how he came in contact with the New York Dada artist. His description of her vacillates between respectful and denigrating—he identifies her as “a protégé of Michel

Duchamp” (Autobiography 165), “a woman who had been perhaps beautiful” (Autobiography

164). He describes a scene wherein “she had an intimate talk with me and advised me that what I needed to make me great was to contract syphilis from her and so free my mind for serious art”

(Autobiography 165). Toward the end of the chapter, he juxtaposes her intellectual capacity with her apparent penchant for violence, writing, “We talked well and I was moved. But when later she went into her act, I put up a fight” (Autobiography 168). He describes how her violence toward him ended with his purchase of a punching bag to prepare for their next meeting, and a square punch to the Baroness‟s jaw on Park Avenue.

While autobiographies should certainly be approached skeptically, Williams‟s discussion of the Baroness in his Autobiography is a helpful starting point to explore the fascination that

Williams had with her, particularly the combination of overt sexuality and violence. While the autobiography seems to have an overall negative attitude toward the Baroness, the relationship between the Baroness and Williams produced fruitful discussions and artistic productions when

Williams was in contact with the Baroness and directly after, during the period following World

War I. The critique of Williams‟s Kora in Hell, written by the Baroness and published in part in

The Little Review, precedes (and seems to inform) Williams‟s seminal poetry/prose hybrid work Allkins 2

Spring and All. Furthermore, the Baroness serves as an exemplary figure of bold feminine sexuality in Williams‟s reconstruction of American history in In the American Grain. The concept of “creative destruction,” which I argue is central to Williams‟s modernist project in

Spring and All, can be tied to an investment in destructive sexuality which emerges from

Williams‟s conflicted relationship with the Baroness. In this way, Williams‟s relationship with the Baroness can be seen as a central shaping force in his theorization of feminine destruction and poetic renewal which penetrates his major hybrid works, from Spring and All to Paterson.

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is an often-forgotten yet central figure in the

New York Dada movement. The editor of The Little Review Jane Heap famously wrote that the

Baroness “„is the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada‟”(Jones 5).

Tales of her public performances in the streets of New York became legend through the works of many modernist artists, including William Carlos Williams. While recent criticism by Amelia

Jones in Irrational Modernism and Irene Gammel in Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and

Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography have brought the Baroness into the discussion of

20th century modernism and the avant-garde, particularly through the Baroness‟s performance artworks, their works have stopped short of examining the Baroness beyond her significance as a cultural studies figure. The recent publication of a collected works by the Baroness, edited by

Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, entitled Body Sweats has made available a large body of the

Baroness‟s poetry, photography (with her as the subject) and reproductions of her ready-mades, allowing for a further examination of the Baroness‟s work beyond her legendary status as a

“living Dada” subject.

It is from this collection of works that I draw the entirety of her prose/poetry hybrid work

“Thee I Call „Hamlet of Wedding-Ring‟: A Critique of „Kora in Hell‟ and Why…”, a lengthy Allkins 3 work that was published in part in The Little Review. The poem, written in 1921, is a pointed critique of the American literary tradition, both through its content and its experimental approach to poetry. It is a significant departure for the Baroness, as many of her poems are in her particular

Dadaist style. She writes in diverse forms, producing column poems, sound poems, parodies of logic, poetry/painting hybrids, and other innovative poetic forms. While “Thee I Call „Hamlet of

Wedding-Ring‟” participates in such a critique of logic and traditional forms of poetry, the

Baroness also lucidly attacks Williams for his seeming lack of direction or respect for words in his experimental work Kora in Hell.

The Baroness‟s poem is chaotic and at times difficult to understand, fluctuating between a critique of the American tradition and Williams‟s writing, and conflating this issues at times.

This conflation is most evident toward the beginning of the poem, when she invokes the recent

World War to critique Williams‟s lack of clarity in his writing. She writes, “Quiet child of brain—logic: European war./Moral strength of scientist—surgeon—physician of degree.

Vision./Brutality: child of denseness—inability to feel, think clean—lack/of vision—vulgar blood-fogged brain—run amuck!” (von Freytag-Loringhoven 293). The Baroness is critiquing logic here, more particularly a critique of enlightenment, as the “child of brain” is the European war, which annihilated much of Europe. She juxtaposes this with Williams—although she doesn‟t use his name, she creates associations between the scientist who created the technology, to the surgeon (perhaps on the battlefield), to Williams, a “physician of degree.” It is Williams who has a lack of vision, whose “blood-fogged brain” runs “amuck.” Although the Baroness has not invoked Williams yet (she will later in the poem, using the scatological “W.C.” to stand in for Williams), she has already drawn connections between Williams and the U.S., most Allkins 4 particularly the traditional structures that are simultaneously non-existent and threatening the

American ability to create art.

The Baroness‟s work goes on to critique the lack of tradition in American writing, and by extension the lack of significance or meaning in Williams‟s works. She writes,

Americans not possessing tradition—not born within truth‟s lofty

echoing walls—born on void—background of barren

nothingness—handle such truth‟s coin—picked up—

flippantly! (von Freytag-Loringhoven 294)

The Baroness argues that Williams is attempting to stand on a foundation of artistic production that does not exist, that has either never existed or no longer exists because of the recent World

War (or, as the Baroness is one to be ambiguous, both). She maps this critique of American tradition onto a pointed argument about his writing—she claims that Williams‟s words have no meaning, and therefore accomplish nothing. She writes,

No rhythm—curves—science—conviction—background—

tradition!

Where your circus?

Where do you stand?

What do your words mean?

Never to point—what point? Allkins 5

There is none—carry no meaning—aimed at blank!” (von Freytag-Loringhoven

295)

Although the Baroness is playing a bit in this poem (after all, she claims that there is no tradition for Williams to stand on, and then critiques him for not standing upon it), she is also engaging in a serious critique of Kora in Hell. The sparseness and ambiguity of her poetry make it difficult to comprehend her meaning, but throughout the poem she interrogates Williams‟s lack of substance and authenticity throughout his work. Even as the Baroness‟s Dadaist poetry and artworks exist to evoke emotion instead of meaning, she pushes Williams to say something meaningful within his art.

Later, she clarifies this critique of Williams and of the failure of American literature, and transitions to a claim about the productivity of creating in such a failed environment. She writes,

“Around us result of family cave: encased legs—brains—in faulty/foundation‟s debris:

America./W.C.‟s “art” faulty foundation—crumbling walls” (von Freytag-Loringhoven 300).

The foundation of America, she claims, has made brains and legs immobile, and Williams is caught in this trap. However, according to the Baroness, it seems that there is an opportunity for escape—through the crumbling of this “faulty foundation”, a destruction which will set him free from the ideal of “tradition” and allow for the creation of better, new art.

Shortly thereafter, the Baroness evokes yet another scene of creative destruction— through the seasons. She writes, “Winter: summer‟s logical successor—killer by necessity— for/advancement—new bloom./Nature sits in nature‟s lap: one two—two one—action—contra—

/action—clash—new life” (von Freytag-Loringhoven 301). Through this passage, it appears that the Baroness does not look negatively upon destruction—instead, it is through this idea of Allkins 6 renewal through destruction that allows for artistic production. By evoking a cyclical system (the seasons), the Baroness advocates for an embracing of violence as a generative process. The emphasis on violence is especially important, as the winter does not only “naturally” follow summer, but the tension between “action” and “contra-action” creates a violent “crash” from which emerges “new life.” Similarly, the often-violent relationship between the Baroness and

Williams bears fruit, as it facilitates the creation of her poetry/prose work, and perhaps stimulates

Williams to create his own.

It is the lines about winter‟s destructive force that most explicitly connects the Baroness‟s critique of Williams in her lengthy poem to Williams‟s own hybrid work published two years later. Spring and All, appearing as a poetry/prose hybrid work in 1923, embraces this concept of creative destruction that the Baroness advocates in her poem. Furthermore, the poetry and prose of Spring and All achieves something which the Baroness had urged Williams to embrace—a sense of meaning or purpose to his work. Although Spring and All was not a commercially successful venture for Williams, and the poetry is often anthologized and divorced from its original prose contexts, I argue that the poetry and prose work together toward a particular purpose—that is, a theorization of modernism through a temporalizing of the poetic experience.

Williams‟s theorizing of modernism through Spring and All is a complex process through which

Williams performs a philosophical critique of traditional concepts of history in prose, while enacting the result of this critique through poetry.

I map this process of critical history using the terms created by Frederich Nietzsche in his essay On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Through the categories of the unhistorical and the superhistorical, as well as the historical categories of monumental, antiquarian, and critical history, Williams‟s Spring and All can be seen as working toward the Allkins 7 unhistorical, creating moments through his poetry in an attempt to disrupt the teleological chain which has defined history in modern times. The unhistorical, fragmentary moments in the poetry and the uneven mixture of the historical and, at times, superhistorical perspective in the prose exemplify the experimental, avant-garde quality of Williams‟s work. Williams‟s manipulation of the temporal in Spring and All serves as a modernist enactment of Nietzsche‟s historical critique, indicating Williams‟s philosophical engagement with history in his desire to create a “new” poetics.

The longer version of this work investigates this line of thinking more deeply, so I don‟t wish to dwell on this particular theorization of Williams through Nietzsche here. However, the project of historical critique can be connected to a gendered critique as well, if Williams‟s investment in creative destruction is influenced in part by the Baroness‟s critique of Williams‟s work. Furthermore, women and the feminine play a profound role within Spring and All as sites of both creation and destruction, at times simultaneously. In this sense, Spring and All seems to be a reaction to two interconnected forces: a modernist project of reevaluating the historical, and the Baroness‟s critique of Williams‟s work.

In my larger project, I seek to read Williams‟s works, including Spring and All, In the

American Grain, and Paterson through feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce

Irigaray. In these works, Williams‟s enthusiasm for creative destruction through the use of feminine voices and narratives seek to break down the established structure of literary construction and allow for the new. While the “new” is an ambiguous and ill-defined concept,

Williams‟s enthusiasm for destruction (through the apocalypse in Spring and All, through the collage-like archival structure of Paterson, and through the rewriting of history in In the

American Grain) would suggest that Williams finds the avenue of the new, in part, through the Allkins 8 feminine. In this paper, I will do a short exploration of the ways in which sexuality and

“gendered destruction” shape the project of Spring and All, and how the Baroness‟s intervention through her critique may have helped shape Williams‟s early work.

Julia Kristeva‟s work in Revolution in Poetic Language is particularly helpful in thinking through Williams‟s desire for destruction of literary forms in Spring and All. In the beginning of the work, Williams writes, “meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the form of existence which have let words empty” (Spring and All 507). Williams desires to destroy the context through which readers have come to understand poetry and language, and reintroduce them through his own imaginative perspective. He wishes to reconnect the reader to language in a way that is denaturalized and removed from their everyday context.

This process mirrors the system of the semiotic and symbolic that Kristeva outlines in her seminal book. Williams seeks to break down the symbolic order through the apocalypse at the beginning of Spring and All, and encourages the reconnection of the semiotic chora through the imagination, which is explicitly gendered female. It is the feminine imagination that leads men forward to the new. Williams writes, “The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of „art,‟ takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm. Let it pass” (Spring and All 505). This is the introduction of the feminine to the scene, and the masculine that is left behind “have much to think of.” While Williams does not elaborate on this relationship between masculine and feminine, he sets up these differences that resonate throughout the poetry and prose.

This sense of the contentious relationship between masculine and feminine is intensified after the “female imagination leads the men out of confusion, in a section entitled “Chapter I.”

Williams writes, “These men who have had the governing of the mob through all the repetitious Allkins 9 years resent the new order” (Spring and All 505). Through the creation of the new order, the hierarchy of tradition is destroyed and those who are invested in the already-existing structure are concerned about their loss of power. While Williams desires to annihilate literary tradition through an enactment of the apocalypse on a general level, he is also invested in creating a gendered element to this contentious and destructive relationship.

While gender and sexuality appears and disappears throughout Spring and All as a touchstone through which Williams critiques the traditional order and affirms the creation of the new, the strongest sense of gendered destruction occurs through the Elsie character in one of the most well-known poems in Spring and All, the poem which is often titled “To Elsie.” Elsie is described in a sexualized and even objectified manner, although her body does not only express an overt sexuality which is meant to be consumed by Williams. Instead, her sexuality is the vehicle that simultaneously destroys Williams while creating his engagement with the imagination.

Williams‟s description of Elsie, like his description of the Baroness in his Autobiography, vacillates between profound respect and objectification. He writes,

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

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addressed to cheap

jewelry (Spring and All 526)

While the poem‟s initial description of her states that her existence reflects “the truth about us,” suggesting that her existence has “meaning” beyond the sexuality assigned to it by the male gaze, the poem quickly shifts into a hyper-sexualized view of Elsie‟s body. It is this hyper-sexuality, in fact, that reveals the truth about man, which is that “we” (men) are

degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us (Spring and All 526)

It is this degradation of man through Elsie‟s sexuality that leads to destruction. In the end of the poem there is a sense of loss of control: he writes, “No one/to witness/and adjust, no one to drive the car” (Spring and All 526). Without the prose, it would seem that Elsie derails the masculine Allkins 11 through her sexuality, and this destructive sexuality creates chaos. However, the larger project embraces loss of control—it is Elsie and her destructive sexuality that engages the imagination and allows for the creation of the new.

Therefore, Spring and All does not only achieve a Nietzschean reevaluation of the historical and the annihilation of traditional literary forms through its innovative and

“ahistorical” approach to poetry, but it seems to be a reply to the Baroness‟s critique in “Thee I

Call „Hamlet of Wedding-Ring.‟” Spring and All seems to feed from the destructive sexuality that the Baroness brought to Williams‟s creative consciousness. While it is impossible to say whether or not Williams read the Baroness‟s critique to shape his theorization of Spring and All, the work seems to answer many of the issues that the Baroness brought up in her critique.

This connection is further strengthened by a letter written by the Baroness to Williams.

Entitled “Spring and All,” it is yet another instance in which the Baroness critiques Williams‟s writing through a chaotic collection of poetry and prose-like lines. However, in this case the

Baroness reacts directly to his newest work, Spring and All, and she seems to praise him for his advancements in literary creativity. Although the letter is not dated, it can be assumed that as she entitled the letter “Spring and All” and addresses the work directly, that this letter was written after her critique of Kora in Hell. Initially she seems to hold on to the same critique that she advanced in “Thee I Call „Hamlet of Wedding-Ring.‟” In the letter she writes, “The longer you search the duller you will get—because you have faith in nothing” (“Spring and All”). In many ways, the letter seems to be a continuation of her earlier work.

However, her opinion of Williams seems to have slightly shifted after she read his latest work. The Baroness writes, “I read Spring and All send me by Djuna—it is your best—because most sincere—least braggardly loutish” (“Spring and All”). While she maintains her critique of Allkins 12

Williams throughout the letter, she seems to recognize Spring and All as a moment in which he is honest about his writing. Although it is not clear whether Williams wrote Spring and All in any response to the Baroness‟s critique, it would seem that she had a response for him.

Until this point, it would seem that although the Baroness and Williams mention each other in respective works, there is no real evidence that Williams‟s relationship with the

Baroness was anything more than a small, darkly humorous anecdote in Williams‟s

Autobiography. In some ways, it would seem that Williams influenced the Baroness artistically more than the other way around. However, the Baroness appears by name in another work by

Williams, shortly after the publication of Spring and All.

In the prose work In the American Grain, the Baroness appears as a character within a historical anecdote. In the American Grain is a reimagining of American history, in part, through a refocus upon the ways in which American society is damaged through rigid adherence to a literally Puritanical attitude toward sexuality. The central feature of the book is a chapter of reproduced sections of Cotton Mathers‟s account of the Salem Witch Trials, Small Wonders of the Invisible World. This proto-conceptual segment of the book seems to be cast by Williams as the foundational moment of feminine sexual indictment in America. This is confirmed in the next chapter, “Pere Sebastian Rasles,” when he continuously argues against his interlocutor who seems to have enjoyed reading Cotton Mathers‟s work. Williams writes,

You know, I asked him, do you not, how other means being denied them, the

Puritans ran madly to OFFICIAL sexual excess—during the long winters? It was

a common thing for men to have had as many as seven wives. Few had less than

three. The women died under the stress of bearing children, they died like flies Allkins 13

under the strains and accidents of childbirth PLUS the rigors of primitive labors.

(In the American Grain 119).

This critique of misogynistic attitudes in the central narratives grounds the overall text in this skeptical attitude toward prudishness and the hypocrisy that tinges the Puritan attitude toward sexuality. Williams sees the Puritanical foundations of United States culture as dangerous, but is being fought against by forces which seek to upend this status quo. He writes, “Already the flower is turning up its petals. It is this to be moral: to be positive, to be peculiar, to be sure, generous, brave—to MARRY, to touch--…to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize—not to sterilize, to draw back, to fear, to dry up, to rot” (In the American Grain 121). This philosophy uses the imagery of spring that Williams evokes through not only Spring and All, but his later work Paterson as well. He emphasizes the emergence of the new and the generative and reproductive nature of renewal.

Later, Williams introduces the Baroness in context of overt and public feminine sexuality, and the way that American society (from the time of the Puritans) will not allow such sexuality to exist. He writes,

Atlanta, Georgia, is far worse than Paris for girls on the streets soliciting, but

there is no good in it,--I don‟t suppose there has ever been an American woman

like Kiki or that delightful Baroness who paraded Fifth Avenue one day with a

coal-scuttle for a chapeau. Naturally they arrested her. Naturally. She would have

been arrested in any city, but not, I imagine, with quite such a sense of duty as in Allkins 14

America. To permit such a thing would cast a very awkward light on us all. (In

the American Grain 178)

Williams‟s tone when discussing the Baroness‟s arrest after her street performance in New York is sarcastic and biting. He is highly critical of the way that American society is quick to condemn and even criminalize feminine sexuality, especially that which is publicly and proudly declared.

The Baroness, who was not only a woman but a performance artist and a German woman, is a vehicle through which Williams and his reader can see the positive possibilities of feminine sexuality. Although in his Autobiography Williams is very critical of the Baroness and her violent actions (actions that had gotten her arrested several times, including the time that

Williams first met her), in In the American Grain Williams uses the Baroness as an example of the ways in which American society cripples feminine sexuality and creativity.

Williams contrasts the Baroness Emily Dickinson, another creative female artist, who he sees as an important feminine literary figure but one which is stymied by her isolation. Williams writes that Dickinson was “starving of passion in her father‟s garden, is the very nearest we have ever been—starving” (In the American Grain 179). Here, Williams draws connection between the poverty of female American literature and the suppression of feminine sexuality in American society. He continues to critique the idea that feminine sexuality is evil, writing “It‟s the central lie!” (In the American Grain 183). Claims like these echo the arguments of later feminists, who see the suppression of female sexuality as part and parcel of a rigidly structured patriarchal society. It is difficult to determine what is behind Williams‟s motivation for advocating feminine sexuality—does he advocate women‟s sexuality for women, or for himself? Regardless of his personal or professional motivations, In the American Grain continues the project which Allkins 15

Williams began in Spring and All, a project that seems to be inspired and instigated by the

Baroness.

While the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is an important, even central, figure in the New York Dada movement, she is often given no more than a brief mention in many works about modernism and the avant-garde. She had relationships with many prominent modernist authors and artists, including Djuna Barnes, Marcel Duchamp, and William Carlos Williams, among others. Her relationship with Williams in particular is important, as their professional and personal contact lead to innovations in both of their works. Although Williams‟s attitude toward the Baroness in his Autobiography is rather skeptical, several of Williams‟s early works echo ideas that the Baroness suggested in her critique of Kora in Hell. It is the feminine destruction in

Spring and All and the celebration of female sexuality in In the American Grain, elements that were introduced to Williams in part by the often violent and overtly sexual Baroness, that are foundational to understanding Williams‟s theorization of modernism.

The relationship between the Baroness and Williams, and the system of influences and allusions that can be drawn between their works, are especially helpful in the larger conversation about women and modernism that is ongoing in modernist studies. Some theorists such as Julia

Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Toril Moi argue for the capacity of modernism to further a feminist agenda, arguing that modernist forms such as fragmentation allow for the deconstruction of patriarchal structures. However, other theorists such as Andreas Huyssen in

After the Great Divide maintain the division between modernism and mass culture, in particular the gendering of modernism as masculine and mass culture as feminine. These divisions are important in the theorization of modernism, and it is important to be mindful of the ways in which gender politics shape the modernist canon. Still, these points of contact between male and Allkins 16 female authors during the modernist period are key to understanding the complex contexts in which modernist works were created. By extension, these points of contact can refocus the canon of modernist literature while calling for a reevaluation of masculine attitudes toward female modernists and avant-garde artists during the early 20th century. While some male authors may have felt anxiety about the advent of the feminine during the modernist period, William Carlos

Williams embraces the possibilities in the destruction of the already-existing patriarchal structure, as this destruction will allow for the emergence of new literary forms.

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Works Cited

Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography.

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Jones, Amelia. Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge:

The MIT Press, 2004.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1984.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 2002. von Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa. Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-

Loringhoven. Ed. Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011.

------“William Carlos Williams.” Series 2: Correspondence and Personal Papers. Elsa von

Freytag-Loringhoven Papers. Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries,

Hornbake Library: College Park, MD.

Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1956.

------Spring and All. Modernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Malden: Blackwell

Publishing, 2005.

------The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1967.