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

Abstract

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.