The Baroness is wonderful. She does count in all
kinds of ways. I’ve read somewhere that she was sexually abused as a child
and always lived her live “from the outside looking in.” The sad thing is
that she became the Ready Maid of so many of the gentlemen of the avant-garde of
the time in ways that Mina Loy and other women of the new did not. From my
reading of Wm. Carlos Williams he appears to have been smitten by the Baroness
or perhaps by her availability. I’m glad to see that her work—some of
which I was privileged to view in manuscript at the Little Review archives at
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee—is now being recovered from what had been
up to the early 1990’s a more forensically inclined investigation
(patho-nympho-psycho) and tranformed into a real exploration and appreciation of
what she did before she turned the gas on or the gas was turned on her (that
final fact is still ambiguous).
I recommend this form of web archaeology to one and
all.
Jesse