Journal of American Studies
of Turkey
11 (2000) : 63-72
Writing Dialogues, Reading Myths: Ezra Pound,
William Carlos Williams, and the Publication of Kora in Hell
João Paulo Nunes
Between 1909 and 1920, William Carlos Williams
published in many literary magazines and managed to produce three books of poems
despite his busy professional life as a doctor. However, the publication of the
book Kora in Hell in 1920 marked a
turning point in Williams’ career, as the volume, a collection of poetic prose
fragments dedicated to Williams’ wife, Florence Herman, inaugurated a new
creative period for the poet. The texts gathered in Kora in Hell resemble the prose poems written by the French
symbolists, and reflect diverse genres and influences that expand the
boundaries of traditional conceptions of the literary text. The history of Kora in Hell’s writing and publication
shows the influence of literary dialogues exchanged with Ezra Pound, and of
writers such as Arthur Rimbaud, Pietro Metastasio, E.W. Sutton Pickhardt, and
Homer, in whose “Hymn to Demeter” lies the explanation of the myth of Kora, a
disturbing evocation of spring and fertility.
In October 1917, the American literary magazine The Little Review, edited by Margaret
Anderson, published three prose fragments by Williams, under the title
“Improvisations” (IV. 7: 19). By this time, Williams was no stranger to the
literary world. Before the publication of the Improvisations in The Little Review, he had already
published the book Poems in 1909 at
his own expense, The Tempers in 1913,
and Al Que Quiere! in 1917, and
participated actively in poetry readings and theatre performances in Rutherford
(New Jersey), his hometown, where he lived and practised medicine. He was no
stranger to English and American literary periodicals either, as his poems had
been published in the “little magazines” The
Poetry Review, Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse, Rogue, The New Freewoman, The Poetry Journal, The
Egoist, Others, and The Masses.
Three months later, in the January 1918 issue of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson
published some more “Improvisations” by Williams, which occupied the first
seven pages of the magazine (IV. 9: 3-9) and a prologue followed in two parts
in April and May 1919.[1]
In June 1919, The Little Review
published some more Improvisations, but this time with explanatory remarks by
the author (VI. 2: 52-59). To the Improvisations printed in The Little Review between 1917 and 1919,
Williams added unpublished fragments and a revised prologue, and sent the
volume to the Four Seas Company, in Boston, for publication. The book came out
on 1 September 1920, with the title Kora
in Hell. A few years before his death, in an interview given to Edith Heal,
gathered in the volume I Wanted to Write
a Poem (1958), Williams described how the Improvisations were written:
For a year I used
to come home and no matter how late it was before I went to bed I would write something. And I kept writing,
writing, even if it were only a few words, and at the end of the year there
were 365 entries. Even if I had nothing in my mind at all I put something down,
and as may be expected, some of the entries were pure nonsense and were
rejected when the time for publication came. They were a reflection of the
day’s happenings more or less, and what I had had to do with them (Williams
1978, 27).
Unlike the previous poems, written as early as
1906, characterised by strong influences of poets such as John Keats or Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and late romantic imagery and tropes, the Improvisations turned
out to be, as Joseph Riddel described, “exemplary avant garde art, and …
deconstructions of the tradition” (20). Kora
in Hell consisted of twenty-seven sections of mainly three parts (section
XI is the only exception with only two parts) followed usually by a text in
italics. Originally, it was Williams’ intention to write one fragment a day,
and publish the collected texts as such. Later, he decided to write an
explanatory remark on each fragment, a technique shown in the June 1919 issue
of The Little Review. The choice of a
specific structure for the book, as well as broader semantic influences,
stemmed from conversations and epistolary dialogues on things literary with the
poet Ezra Pound, a close friend of Williams’.
Williams and Pound met in 1902 when they were both
students at the University of Pennsylvania, and they developed a friendship
marked by controversy, but one that would last until Williams’ death in 1963.[2]
Although Pound moved to Europe in 1908, the two poets kept in touch, and Pound
played a paramount part in Williams’ initial literary education. In a letter to
Pound dated 22 April 1954, Williams, at seventy-one years of age, acknowledged
the importance of their literary friendship with these words:
Ain’t it enuf that you so deeply influenced my formative
years without your wanting to influence also my later ones?… You are a reader,
a man who has looked into almost every book that exists, while I at best have
been an imperfect reader (Thirlwall 324).
Pound’s advice to Williams was present in
many of Williams’ early writings. Although most critics admit that Kora in Hell seems to initiate a new
period in Williams’ career, at all levels more independent from Pound, it still
shows the influence of the author of the Cantos.
Pound’s reading recommendations influenced the structure the Improvisations
acquired in the book form, as Williams recalls:
I was groping
around to find a way to include the interpretations when I came upon a book
Pound had left in the house, Varie Poesie
dell’ Abate Pietro Metastasio, Venice, 1795. I took the method used by the
Abbot of drawing a line to separate my material. First came the Improvisations,
those more or less incomprehensible statements, then the dividing line and, in
italics, my interpretation of the Improvisations. The book was broken into
chapters, headed by Roman numerals; each Improvisation numbered in Arabic
(Williams 1978, 26-27).
However, the interpretations were not helpful in
reading the Improvisations, as Williams acknowledged in a new prologue to an
edition of the book by the San Francisco publishing house, City Lights,
published on 1 August 1957.[3]
In a letter to Williams, dated 11 September 1920, Pound stated, after reading Kora in Hell, that “[t]he italics at any
rate don’t detract. Not that they, in many cases, much explain the matter
either” (Witemeyer 41). The explanatory commentaries, that sometimes
interrupted the Improvisations, were not necessarily related to the fragments,
and became part of the literary innovation Williams was seeking. The first
fragment of part XI is a good example of the new techniques Williams was
searching for:
Why pretend to remember the weather two
years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just
said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of edelweiss! one
dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five years’ drink!
Having
once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete which a
moment before was alive with malignant rigidities (Williams 1970, 51).
In the Improvisation, the process of evoking
different times and spaces is articulated as an exercise of memory needed for
writing the literary text. The poetic originality does not really exist, as
everything that is written is a way of “repeat[ing] after others what they have
just said,” but the conscious process of drawing from texts written by others
lead to the admiration of individual “vivacity.” By the moment the new text is
published, the one that influenced it (and probably written “five years”
before) becomes “obsolete” as the interpretation suggests. Nevertheless, the
interpretation stands as a comment outside the temporal and spatial dimensions
of critical analysis as it suggests that any literary text becomes obsolete
insofar as it influences a new text by a later writer. The “malignant
rigidities,” which can be interpreted as the commendation of the texts by
critics and poets, are superseded by new interpretations and criticism on a new
text by a new author. In this sense, the conscious articulation of literary
influences, as Williams clearly acknowledged by admitting to the influence of
several writers, is a way to overcome the obsolete concept of literary
originality.
Joseph Riddel describes the process of awareness of
literary expression used in the Improvisations thus:
If Kora progresses by the alternation of
improvisation and commentary, the latter does not clarify or illuminate the
former. On the contrary, the commentary more often complicates than simplifies
the improvisation, by giving it a meaning which distorts its original openness
and opaqueness. As it brings the improvisation to the order of explanation, it
destroys the coherent nonsense of the verbal play, that unity of sense which is
the concealed unity (passion) of expression itself ( 218-19).
When
it comes to the debate about the Improvisations, the writings of Pietro
Metastasio that inspired the division between Improvisation and commentary were
not the only influence in terms of form. The prose poems by the French
symbolists also played a paramount role as influences of what others “have just
said” concerning poetic diction. In the same letter from 11 September 1920,
Pound declares that Kora in Hell was
“more incoherent than Rimbaud’s Saison en Enfer … ” (Witemeyer 41). Similarly,
in 1929, in the book L’Influence du
Symbolisme Français Sur La Poésie Américaine, René Taupin admits that
Williams depended on Pound for news on contemporary French poetry, and that the
Improvisations were written “very much in the manner of the Illuminations of Rimbaud” (240). Williams himself acknowledged
this influence in 1923, in The Great
American Novel, by admitting, once more, the recurrent cycles of literary
influence in terms of form:
Take
the improvisations: What the French reader would say : Oui, ça; j’ai déjà vu ça; ça c’est de Rimbaud. Finis.
Representative
American verse will be that which will appear new to the French … prose the
same (Williams 1970, 167).
This influence would also be acknowledged in
the 1957 prologue, when Williams confirmed that he had been “familiar with the
typically French prose poem … ” (Williams 1970, 29).
It is unquestionable that Williams was
familiar with the descriptions of personal dejection in the prose fragments of Les Illuminations. Rimbaud’s book had
been written between 1873 and 1875 with the significant title of Poèmes en Prose, and was published in
1886 by Publications de la Vogue with a short introduction by Paul Verlaine. It
seems clear that Williams followed Rimbaud’s structure in the first edition of Les Illuminations, as this edition is
also divided into sections of texts that could, in some cases, show
sub-divisions with Roman numerals, comprising different genres, such as prose,
lyrics, and drama.
Williams may have had his first contact with
Rimbaud through Pound, or he might have read the original in French, as English
translations of Rimbaud’s poems were apparently not published until 1920. In
her discussion of Rimbaud’s influence in Williams’ Kora in Hell, in The Poetics
of Indeterminacy, Marjorie Perloff declares, “Rimbaud’s Season in Hell and Illuminations … appeared for the first time in English translation
in the [July] 1920 Dial, side by side
with six of Williams’ own shorter lyrics” (110). Mike Weaver mentions an
English translation of Les Illuminations
by Helen Rootham, but does not offer a date for its publication, and fails to
clarify if Williams had been familiar with such editions (42).
Undoubtedly, the most important text to
influence Kora in Hell was the
Homeric “Hymn to Demeter.” The hymn played a crucial role in the selection of a
title for the volume, and for the ubiquitous images of regeneration of nature.
Joseph Riddel acknowledges that “Homer, the figurative first poet, is central
to Williams’ thematic” (5), and it is most certain that Williams was familiar
with Homer and the story of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Kora, or
Persephone, through his contact with Ezra Pound, who had studied the Greek
myths and used them in his poetry. In 1911, Pound published the book Canzoni, in London, with an epigraph by
Propertius, “Quos ego Persephone maxima dona feram,” and dedicated the volume
to Olivia and Dorothy Shakespeare, his future wife and mother-in-law.
Throughout the “canzoni” of the book, Pound explored the theme of the
connection between mother and daughter as inspired by Demeter and Persephone.
Homer’s hymn had been translated into
English more than once and it was widely available to English and American
readerships. There had been a translation of Homer’s Hymns in 1625 by George
Chapman, and two of the “Hymn to Demeter” in 1781, by Richard Hole, and R.
Lucas. Both Hole and Lucas used a defective edition of the hymn published in
Leiden in 1780 that omitted 21 lines. It was not until 1891 that J. Edgar
published The Homeric Hymns Translated
into English Prose, in Edinburgh, with a new complete version. However, the
most famous translation, and the one that probably Pound and Williams read, was
by Andrew Lang, published in London in 1899.
According to the story told in the Homeric “Hymn to
Demeter,” Kora, Demeter’s daughter by Zeus, was abducted by Hades, her father’s
brother, with the assent of Zeus himself, while picking flowers in a meadow,
and was taken to the Underworld, or Hell, where she was to rule as queen. After
being told by Hecate of the abduction, Demeter searched for Kora but did not succeed
in bringing her back. When Demeter withheld seasons and crops, causing hunger
and thirst to the humans, Zeus sent Hermes to the Underworld, and Hermes
managed to rescue Kora. However, Hades had tricked his wife by making her eat
some sweet pomegranate seeds that would make her stay. After learning from this
situation, the gods decided that Kora was to spend a third part of the year
with him in the Underworld and two third parts of the year with her mother in
the upper world.[4]
The myth of Persephone is an interpretation
of the cycle of the seasons, and of the alternation between life and death. For
the months of winter, when Kora lives in the Underworld, nature lies dead and
fruit is frozen; but when she ascends from the darkness of Hades to keep her mother
company on earth, she brings spring with her, and nature celebrates her arrival
and is reborn. Kora’s abduction and rape by Hades was described in cults
throughout the Greek world, where she also stood as a representation of the
predicaments of marriage from the viewpoint of the young girl. Her marriage to
Hades was worshipped and she was regarded as the protector of marriage and the
woman’s sphere, including the protection of children.
In the prologue to the 1957 edition of Kora in Hell, Williams admitted that the
rape of Persephone or Kora had been familiar to him from an early age, but to
Edith Heal Williams confessed that he was “indebted to Pound for the title. We
had talked about Kora, the Greek parallel of Persephone, the legend of
Springtime captured and taken into Hades” (Williams 1978, 29).
Williams was also familiar with John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the myth of Kora is
mentioned. Milton locates the abduction of Persephone in Enna, Sicily,
resorting to the Roman version of the myth, where Persephone is named
Proserpine, Demeter becomes Ceres, and Hades is Dis:
Not that fair field
Of
Enna, where Proserpine gath’ring flow’rs,
Herself
a fairer flow’r by gloomy Dis
Was
gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world … (86).
Mike Weaver asserts that the conversation
between Pound and Williams that would produce the title took place in March
1910, ten years before the publication of the book, when Williams visited Pound
in London. Weaver adds that Pound’s “source of their discussion of the myth of
Persephone was a long-forgotten poem by E.W. Sutton Pickhardt, ‘Ariadne
Diainomene’“ (6). Pickhardt’s poem, that only briefly (in a dialogue between
Artemis and the Chorus) mentions the myth of Proserpine, the Roman equivalent
of Persephone or Kora, could not have been that “long-forgotten,” as Weaver
claims, as it was published in London in 1908 by Elkin Mathews, the same
publisher of Pound’s books and Williams’ The
Tempers. However, it is more probable that Williams and Pound discussed the
myth bearing in mind the 1899 translation by Lang or Jane Ellen Harrison’s
treatment of the figure of Kora, as Pound was familiar with the studies
conducted by this scholar on Hellenic mythology.
Although Harrison had published the books Myths of the Odissey in Art and Literature
in 1882, and Introductory Studies in
Greek Art in 1885, she became famous with the book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, published by Cambridge
University in 1903. In this study, she analyses the representations of Demeter
and Persephone in Homer’s “Hymn to Demeter” and the importance the text had for
the rites of the Eleusian mysteries.
Williams’ reading of this myth is more
complex than it seems. While discussing Kora
in Hell, Marjorie Perloff declares it “remains a fascinating experiment in
eliminating such traditional features as plot, argument, linear continuity, and
connectives. But Williams still hesitates between artistic alternatives, not
yet certain how to bring his ‘Kora’ out of her hell” (122). Perloff’s use of
pronouns in this last sentence is significant in that it underlines Williams’
personal interpretation and appropriation of the myth, and the concomitant view
of himself as a Kora who has to be defined according to his personal experiences
and literary knowledge. In this sense, the reference to Kora in the title ought
to be read as a way for the poet to describe himself and his role in the world.
Williams interpreted the book as a revelation of his abilities as a writer, and
the writing of the Improvisations as a form of catharsis for his problems. He
recalls the book as “the one book I have enjoyed referring to more than any
others. It reveals myself to me and perhaps that is why I have kept it to
myself” (Williams 1978, 26). In his autobiography, Williams declares that the
book was about “Persephone gone into Hades, into hell. Kora was the springtime
of the year; my year, my self was being slaughtered” (Williams 1961, 158).
Because of Williams’ personal uncertainty in
facing the world, like a Kora thrown into the world out of hell, the actual
myth of Kora or Persephone is not actually developed in the Improvisations.
Nevertheless, the lack of explicit references becomes more than a mere
technique to deconstruct traditional expectations entailed in the process of
reading a literary text. The slaughter of the poet’s self is not only present
in the formal presentation of the Improvisations, but also in the description
of fragmentation of images of femaleness. In the article “William Carlos Williams
and the Singular Woman”, Joan Nay analyses how the image of woman in the
Improvisations is fragmented into diverse depictions:
Kora in Hell
(1920) is a full mixture of daughters, hags, wives, whores, temptresses,
beauty, disease, and ugliness. It is filled with the presence of frightening
women, fantasies of females who are licentious daughters, soiled virgins,
diseased grandmothers or animal-like women who attempt to seduce, control or
make fools of man … But the hell is composed of the females who figuratively
jostle and crowd the searcher’s every step, and the quest is ultimately for the
Kora within himself (51).
The search for the myth of the raped girl within
the male self is significant to understand the way Williams perceived himself
and represented social relations between the sexes. Most studies on Williams’
poetic representation of gender and sexuality fail to pay attention to the
relevance of Williams’ acknowledgement of a feminine side of his personality as
a way to balance the male biological determinism of his body from his first
days as a writer. He admitted to this in several poems and letters addressed to
Hilda Doolittle and Viola Baxter, and regarded femininity as part of his
creative life.[5]
In the poem “Transitional”, published in the magazine
The Egoist in December 1914, the
lines “It is the woman in us / That makes us write: / Let us acknowledge it, /
Men would be silent” (Egoist I. 23:
444) reinforce a feminine side of personality that Williams would claim for the
formation of human psychology. Conversely, the letter he entitled as “The Great
Sex Spiral” (1917) addressed to Dora Marsden, the editor of The Egoist, vouches for a balance
between essentialist conceptions of maleness and femaleness. In it, Williams
acknowledges the importance of the German Otto Weininger’s ideas of male
superiority in the controversial book Sex
and Character (1901) to oppose Marsden’s opinion that women are superior to
men.[6]
By the late 1910s, Williams was becoming a
reasonably known poet, and Kora in Hell
marked the beginning of his awareness of himself as a poet put into writing.
Moreover, the poet started acknowledging his role in the world as a seer,
following on the footsteps of the British romantics and the French Symbolists,
but taking this role one step further by being conscious of his self-reliance.
As he put it to Edith Heal,6
Perhaps this wanting to appear more literary
than I really was, borrowing from the Greek for my title, and borrowing from
the Abbot for the form on the page, was pretentious, but I was proud to be
associated with writers of the past (Williams 1978, 31).
The awareness of himself as a poet and the
text as poem is best seen in the 1919 prologue, where the origin of literature
is discussed. In the comment to the third Improvisation of section XX, Williams
stated, “[a] poem can be made of anything” (Williams 1970, 70), and in the
prologue he admits that,
[t]here is nothing
sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is
nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I
damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if
the authentic spirit of change is on it (Little
Review V. 11: 13).
These words were the first to advance Williams’
opinion that any language is good material for poetry, as he would show
repeatedly. In Book V of the long poem Paterson,
published in 1958, a work characterized by the inclusion of the most diverse
linguistic and literary genres, Williams includes an extract of an interview
with Mike Wallace for The New York Post published
in 18 October 1957, where he reiterates his conviction on this subject:
Q. Well – is it poetry?
A. We poets have to talk in a language which
is not English. It is the American idiom. Rhythmically it’s organized as a
sample of the American idiom. It has as much originality as jazz. If you say “2
partridges, 2 mallard ducks, a Dunganese crab” – if you treat that
rhythmically, ignoring the practical sense, it forms a jagged pattern. It is,
to my mind, poetry.
Q. But if you don’t “ignore the practical
sense” . . . you agree that it is a fashionable grocery
list?
A.
Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything. I’ve said it time and time
again (Williams 1992, 222).
In the prologue to the Improvisations,
Williams also quotes from letters sent to him by Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and
Wallace Stevens, and openly criticises Pound as “the best enemy United States
verse has” (Williams 1970, 26). The fact that Williams starts refuting Pound’s
literary opinion for the first time shows a daring attitude towards traditional
conceptions of literature, and a self-reliant position in the literary canon.
The same can be said for the way he starts regarding the poem as an object to
be freely dismantled and reconstructed, an assumption that he would develop in
the talk “The Poem as Field of Action”, given at the University of Washington,
in 1948. By admitting that his Improvisations had so many influences, Williams
acknowledges his debt to other writers, but proudly, defiantly, and for the
first time establishes his place in the world alongside them.
In a way, with Kora in Hell, Williams was beginning to establish the importance of
imagination in the perception of the poetic text, by both the writer and the
reader. Throughout his subsequent writings, the concept of “imagination” and
its definition would always be present as a way to justify the fragmented
nature of the processes of writing and reading. The return of Kora from Hell,
and the re-establishing of nature and seasons marks the beginning of a career
concerned with poetry from the creative viewpoint, and ubiquitous images of
spring, regeneration, and fertility associated with the female body. As such,
it comes as no surprise that Williams’ next book would be titled Spring and All (1921), and the
posthumous volume that gathered these two books would be published under the
title Imaginations, an adroit tribute
to a writer whose work was mainly concerned with representations of life,
either as doctor who helped giving birth to children, or as a creative writer
of poetry.
Works
Cited
Milton,
John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Christopher
Ricks. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.
Nay,
Joan. “William Carlos Williams and the Singular Woman.” William Carlos Williams Review IX. 2 (Fall 1985).
Perloff,
Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981.
Riddel,
Joseph. Modernism and the Counterpoetics
of William Carlos Williams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1974.
Taupin,
René. The Influence of French Symbolism on
Modern American Poetry. Trans. William and Anne Rich Pratt. New York: AMS
Press, 1985.
Thirlwall,
John, ed. The Selected Letters of
Williams Carlos Williams. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957.
Weaver,
Mike. William Carlos Williams: The
American Background. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971.
Witemeyer, Hugh, ed. Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra
Pound and William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1996.
Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams.
New York: New Directions, 1961.
-----.
I Wanted to Write a Poem: The
Autobiography of the Works of a Poet. Ed. Edith Heal. New York: New
Directions, 1978.
-----. Imaginations.
Ed. Webster Schott. New York: New Directions, 1970.
-----.
“Improvisations.” The Little Review
IV. 7 (October 1917), IV. 9 (November 1918), V. 11 (April 1919), VI. 1 (May
1919), VI. 2 (June 1919).
-----. Paterson. Manchester: Carcanet Press,
1992.
[1] William Carlos Williams, “Prologue”, The Little Review V. 11 (April 1919), 1-10; and VI. 1 (May 1919), pp.74-80. In the two parts of the prologue, Williams discusses diverse subjects, such as the conceptualisation of art (by evoking Marcel Duchamps’ painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” and sculpture “Fountaine”), the role of the artist (namely as defined by Wassily Kandinsky in Über das Geistige in Art), literature (by way of inserting and commenting on a letter by Wallace Stevens on the poems in Williams’ 1917 book Al Que Quiere!, or his opinion on T.S. Eliot, who had recently published “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), relationships with friend poets (Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Alfred Kreymbourg), and with his wife, Florence Herman.
[2] Williams registered in medicine at Penn with the initial intention to specialise in “oral surgery” (i.e., dentistry), but kept a deep interest in the arts throughout his college years. On 30 September 1902, a mutual male friend, Morrison Robb Van Cleve, a music student at Penn, introduced Williams to Pound. Although Pound was two years younger than Williams, he already had a reputation as a fiery poet and womaniser at college that preceded him. The flamboyance that Pound exuded soon had Williams captivated, and the two young men would discover similar interests in discussing poetry and women. For a good biographical account of Williams’ life, see Paul Mariani’s William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981).
[3] “I added notes of explanation, often more dense than the first writing. The whole seemed satisfactory to me when I gathered it together because to explain further what I intended would be tautological, the surface appearance of the whole would please all the ablest I was approaching.” (Williams 1970, 29) The two-page prologue of the 1957 edition replaced the twenty-two-page prologue of 1920.
[4] A thorough study of the hymn can be found in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, edition by N. J. Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
[5]
In a letter to Edgar, dated 12 April 1905, Williams described what he felt for Doolittle
thus,
Oh, Edgar, but she
is a fine girl, no simple nonsense about her, no false modesty and all that,
she is absolutely free and innocent. We talked of the finest things: of
Shakespeare, of flowers, trees, books, & pictures and meanwhile climbed fences
and walked through woods and climbed little hills till it began to grow just
dusky when we arrived at our destination. We had by this time, as you imagine,
gotten pretty well acquainted. She said I was Rosalind in As You Like It, and she was Celia, so I called her that, although
her real name is Hilda (Williams 1961, 9).
The
acceptance of himself as a female character is also seen in letters to Viola
Baxter, years later. Besides the discussion of private matters, the letters
exchanged between Williams and Baxter focused many times on the ongoing public
debate of the woman’s movement. Williams felt much at ease to discuss sex and
gender roles with a woman who seemed to have so much in common with him, as he
would state in a letter from 6 January 1911 to her:
You are quite
right, Viola, quite right, men are not strong enough to “bat air” with women.
That forever proves to me I am not a man; they, men, disgust men and if I must
say it fill me with awe and admiration. I am too much of a woman. (Weaver 22).
[6] Dora Marsden started a series of philosophical, psychological, and sociological editorials in July 1916 (Egoist III. 7), with the essay “Lingual Psychology: A New Conception of the Function of Philosophical Inquiry”. The series of editorials that followed for the next years, published in an anarchic way, entailed irregular sub-divisions, titles, and numbers, and did not seem to captivate readerships. Williams responded to Marsden’s editorials in a letter entitled “The Great Sex Spiral: A Criticism of Miss Marsden’s ‘Lingual Psychology’”, which was published in the “Correspondence” section of the magazine in two parts, in April and August 1917