THE CUMMINGTON PRESS ✤ CUMMINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS

October 13, 1943

Dear Dr. Williams,

The changes you made in the manuscript were clear and have been put there, a couple with regret. The book will be copyrighted in your name, as you wish, but we'd like to reserve the right to publish a second edition, if one is called for. An acknowledgement-page is not apt to be pretty or useful, but it's customary to make them. One needn't make much of them, though. In R. P. Blackmur's The Second World we simply printed a single line under the copyright line: it reads, "Some of these poems have previously appeared in The Nation, Twentieth Century Verse, and The Kenyon Review." I should think some such arrangement would suit The Wedge, since the back of the title-page is usually the emptiest and least conspicuous place in a book.

We've got coal, nine tons of it. I put a wantad in The Nation, so far have had two replies, one, from a Vermont pacifist, promising. If I get somebody to help me, the whole program will be speeded up considerably and maybe the Wedge can be out before March--but that's not to be counted on, since binders are having so much trouble. Maybe some woman, but the baby would be a problem, though not an unpleasant one--have to be a husky, though.

I don't like run-over lines much, and so far none of our books have had them. In yours, I'm afraid, they'll be necessary, at least for the Ford poem. How about the text for the title-page? is the copy in the ms. as you want it? I'd rather leave out, if I may, the words "Recent and other verse heretofore unpublished in book form"; and I'd like to have your full name there, not initials or monogram. Is the dedication to "L. Z."?

Glad you'll give the book a boost already at the New York Library. Laughlin's mailing list would be a God-send. Thanks for offering the $100 in advance. We don't need it now, and probably shan't, but you never can tell, at least I can't, about money.

Yours,
Hary Duncan

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS ✠ CUMMINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS

May 11, 1944

Dear Bill,

Here are some proofs at last. They aren't even all the poems, just all we had type enough to set; these will have to be printed, the type distributed, and then the rest set. Of course you'll get proofs when that much is done. The introduction will be in 12 point, and that's what we'll work on now.

We've been upset here by the death of Katharine Frazier who was, very really, our only begetter and our leading spirit. And there have been other things, a complete breakdown of the press (now welded), that were remediable. I'm sorry these are so late. But printing will be apple-pie compared to the hand-setting, and if the binder co-operates, June publication is still possible. I haven't had time to read these back from copy, and I remember of couple of letters upside down. But I send them lest you think we've disappeared up here altogether.

There were perhaps two days of spring. Now it's summer. Why don't you come to see us some time? The laurel will bloom soon.

Yours,

You see we ran out of space for the titles. They'll be replaced.

THE CUMMINGTON PRESS • CUMMINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS

June 2, 1944

Dear Bill,

Here are some more proofs, with To All Gentleness revised--I'm damned sorry that page got lost in the shuffle. You see the same thing happened with the 12 pt. type for the Introduction, we ran out of sorts before the thing was all set; so again we'll have to print this much before the rest can be set up and all proof sent to you. For the record: The Province is out, The Monstrous Marriage is back in, and the changes indicated by you in the proofs are done, "carved" in The Semblances for "graved."

Certainly by July 13 (excepting fire, flood, or other acts of God) The Wedge will be all printed and either being bound or bound. So you can either read from the finished book or from its unbound sheets when you go to Bennington--and I hope it'll be from the book. And believe me I hope you will visit us here. Seems to me we're almost directly in your way to Bennington; Cummington's on the Berkshire Trail half-way between Pittsfield and Northampton. We could put you up over-night or anyway give you a meal--though I can't promise what kind, since now I'm doing the cooking and learning as I go along. Let me know.

And here is another drawing Paul Williams has made for the title, since I think you were right about the goose and he says he can't draw a hawk and that bird he had before looked too much like one in a painting by Paul Klee anyway. This new drawing is the cosine, the cylinder, and the rose, of course--but he's turned the cylinder into a Greek column when it would suit me better as a piston shaft. You say what you think.

All best,

August 22, 1944

Dear Bill,

We've had a hell of a time finding a binder: J. J. Little & Ives told me somewhat scornfully over the phone that they weren't interested in handling an edition of less than 5000 copies, and then I called up binderies all over, some extinct. No go. Yesterday I went to Springfield and persuaded the National Library Bindery there to do the work, to be finished the last week in September. I'm sorry it'll take so long, but guess, after being turned down completely by so many, that we're lucky to get this. And too it's nearby, which will save on delivery-time.

Here's the ms. of The Dog & the Fever. I hope somehow the progress of the narrative can be cleared up for the reader. Maybe illustrations could be really functional for that. What do you think? They would have to be carefully done, of course, with a real understanding of the book. If you like the idea, I'll see what can be done.

Are you especially eager about getting the book out soon? I feel we've disappointed you so often on The Wedge that you might properly have reservations about The Dog. I'd certainly not blame you for wanting to try it on other publishers first, since we've bitten off quite a mouthful already--the Tate poems, the South American anthology (even though I've heard nothing more from those people) would have to be done before we get to The Dog. Of course if The Wedge sells well, and the other books now done, we might have enough money to get The Dog set by machine, which would save considerable time and make it possible for next winter's publication. But that's only a chance. And it's going to be an expensive book to make anyhow, for I see it large format, large type, which indicates hand-printing. Oh, yes, we've got a pamphlet by Marianne Moore too to be done, but that won't take long.

Furthermore, I think you and your mother should have some monetary reward for your labors, and I can't now indicate what we could afford. Of course, percentage royalties would solve that, and the price of the book increased to take care of it.

But we're going to be permitted to continue, at least, for another year; and would certainly like to print the Dog.

Yours,

The Cummington Press

Cummington, Mass.¹⁵

3 January 1946

Dear Bill,

It's been too long since I wrote you or talked to you,
and now these things, the reviews of Paterson and this
Briarcliff in your honor, seem to encase you. It even seems
that your poems themselves might lie wrapped in cloth of
gold if I'd let them. But of course they don't lie at all
anywhere, and Paterson's much more marvelous than anything
Jarrell could say about it and the three poems and The Build-
Up seem to be thumbing your nose at the eulogies-elegies.
And I want to argue some of the things in the Letter to an
Australian Editor, as you could predict I would.

I don't like what you write _because_ it's American or _because_ it's full of objects--any more than I like Shakespeare _because_ he's English and has all those images that Caroline Spurgeon (I think) catalogued. I like it because as a whole reality it's full of subject, a true mirror up to nature, that allows the tensions in me some play and release, because it's full of joy. For instance: "The bird alighting, that pushes its feet forward to take up the impetus and falls forward nevertheless among the twigs": I can imagine coming upon that elsewhere (I really can't, of course, but to make the point:), say in Thoreau, and because it's context has changed it would have, while retaining excellence of statement and precision of observation, a different movement (and emotion and movement are the same in poetry) and a different meaning. But what you have made of the whole thing is a particular reality, a concrete joy in its place, a communication that couldn't otherwise be made. It gathers for itself meanings from the common language and from certain keen observation--you don't know all the sources yourself, although you know more than I. But once it's made it has the density and intensity of a thing bound and articulate to Paterson Book One.

All right. Anything at all that has an identity is necessarily new--and we can't talk about nothing. The only things possible to recognise are identities, and any recognition is a discovery. The only art is contemporary, if it exists at all. When I was "taught" Pope's poetry in college, it didn't exist for me; partly the teacher killed it, partly my own distractions. But if it had had life for me, it would have been a discovery; the order or the "form" there would have been something new, new to me and new to the world for no mind exactly like mine (insofar as I had any identity at all) would have read it before. The virtue of poetry is that while remaining as solid, as "projected" as a statue, being held most in general, nobody can see this enduring form without "seeing himself in the mirror of the Word," without giving a new identity to that changeless object. And in true poetry a reader cannot possess the fixed, the "old," without ringing his particular change upon it.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "forms" in writing about Pound and your difference from him. You don't, I take it, mean the fixed forms, like the sonnet or blank verse. But even those, if they are perceived (and all perception has got to be fresh, otherwise it's nothing), can become new reality, an identity. There have never been two good sonnets alike; all rang some change upon the "ideal" sonnet which, like Plato's chair, never existed. There's no such thing, if you want to say so, as the sonnet-form: there are particular sonnets. Form and matter can be separated only for academic discussion, in which identities are avoided. (Of course, there are a lot of poems, even good ones, in three quatrains and a couplet or in two quatrains and two tercets; there are a lot of good poems in twelve lines, too.)

All right, or maybe not all. What you seem to be doing in making Pound out as even a bigger fool than we'd thought is denying reality to poems. We live, you say, out of manure heaps. Poetry, you imply, is "finer" than manure heaps. The female stinks, the male is fragrant--what poets need to do is deodorize an unpleasant life (women), or rather to make perfume, as they do, from sewage. What can I do but protest that this view is as vulgar as the Maxfield Parrish that hangs in my neighbor's diningroom--a hideous falsification, as a single glance out the diningroom window at the hills will reveal any day, even, you might say, when there's a heavy fog. The Maxfield Parrish is certainly the stinker here, while the hills, the barnyard, even the manure heap are fragrant, at least by comparison. What can I do but protest that your own work denies this argument you make. And the Maxfield Parrish exists, a concession to "beauty" from my neighbors. If it does, then how much more do greater works, how much more do your poems that don't try to beautify the hills! That Maxfield Parrish is saying the opposite of what your poems do: it says, Look how pretty! and your poems say, This is the way it is. I think your poems aren't likely to become "triumphant forms of the past," except as they are already past, that is accomplished--they'll remain very much present. If Pound, in his great reading (it's all a lie that you've "not read enough," the point is how new a form you've brought to what you have read), hasn't recognized the presence, the identity of whatever he professed to admire or find useful or instructive, then it's a miracle he's written so well--but of course, since he translates so marvelously, he has found contemporaneity. The mind has no existence except a physical existence. There's no such thing as androgynetical development in poetry. Poems exist, the greater the more fertile and lively. They exist in the hurly-burly, as my own mother read me rhyme of the Ancient Mariner along with nursery rhymes, as the conduct of most people refers positively or negatively to Christian values that are in the grain. Do you think poetry's not part of "the turmoils of today"? of course not, or you'd not write it. Erato is a woman, or a goddess. Do you think any poet worth a second thought can escape bringing to poetry "a direct expression of the turmoils of today"? It's a question, though, whether he doesn't have to form this, anew, not "from the form society itself takes in its struggles"--and it's a question too whether society has a form in the same sense: I'm sure you

don't advocate a state art, as recently we saw in Germany
means a dead art. If you mean that a poet "expresses his time
and place," any academician will agree. The point is that
a poet worth his salt can't help it, for he brings to form
in his terms which necessarily have much in common with the
terms of his fellows whether he will or no. The arts, including
painting, sculpture, music, architecture, have no subject-
matter except human relations. They are all about people.
But I don't see any point in laboring this: a bird doesn't
spread wings or preen itself in order to display its genus,
but in order to fly or catch lice. The academicians have made
a great business of showing how poets relate to their periods.
But their theses aren't really much help with the poetry itself,
with the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation. But graduate
students are provided something to occupy themselves.

It's surely a mark of great disorder for artists to be
so self-conscious about their relation to their time. Unless
some other interest over-rides that in what they make, they
make a dull hash. You always do, in your poetry and your
stories, over-ride that sick concern. Maybe that's because
in your ephemera you carry it like a chip, nay, a veritable
log on your shoulder. But I'd not like future readers to judge
you by the dicta expressed in this Australian letter, for in-
stance. Perhaps you will think my objections come up because
I see an implied attack on myself as homosexual, or at any rate
as one who has chosen a homosexual love. But I don't see that,
but the contrary. A fairy is apt to overvalue the manure heap,
woman, precisely because he's unable with her and must feel
that inability as a wound. What nineteenth century poet glor-
ified marriage so much as Hopkins, bugger and Jesuit?

Bill, I hope this doesn't seem ungrateful for your very
great achievements. It's because I value your imagination so
highly that I protest when you seem to me to misrepresent the
position your poems and stories win. Maybe these ephemera,
this letter and others, reviews I've read &ca, represent a
fecund preoccupation for you, a purging perhaps that lets you
come to your imaginative work clean. But they get published,
Bill, and could be used against you by your bitterest enemies.

I think you're writing the best poetry and stories of
your life. The Build-Up is a wonder, the three poems are
wonders (especially For a Low Voice). I wish you'd come back
that day, or any time. We were very happy to meet your wife.
We think of you often, it gives us heart.

Affectionately,

Williams

The Aurora Inn
Aurora, New York
11 may 1948

Dear Bill,

Thanks for the drawing-it is astonishing how
close it is to one I did (I did some light in all).

Yours is very good-in fact you've been too neat
with it. But be sure your drawing came both Harry
& I wasted two days trying to make one of mine
sit in the book-& the fact is that the book
just won't take one. The poems are put down
so simply that any decoration is an intrusion.
I'm sure you will agree when you see the finished
book. But your drawing isn't in vain: I think
that I'll have it specially bound in with one of
my copies & so preserved. (I write this without
a table, & so it's so bad.)

The book is going to be lovely-yours your poems
are anyway & will carry wherever our vision has
failed. They are the most passionate poems you've ever done
& some of them-Lear for one- are among the great things
in the language.

Paul

Paul

The Cummington Press

Craftsmen Printers and Publishers at Cummington School of the Arts
Telephone number 2612: Frazier House: Cummington, Massachusetts

Till May 28th: Aurora Inn
Aurora, N. Y.
11 May 1948

Dear Bill,

Here are some more proofs--also a spoiled sheet to show you
what we did with Two Deliberate Exercises. The proofs will puzzle
you because they don't include The Lion or At Kenneth Burke's Place.
But this is offered as a suggestion because this way, with those
two poems omitted, the book fits into eight 8-page signatures, 64
pages altogether, which means eight runs on the press. But it isn't
mainly to save the extra run that we suggest it, but for the sake
of a sturdier binding--for this 64-page plan allows us to put a
four-leaf blank signature front and back. Those blank signatures
serve the binder for end-leaves; and so, because they are sewn to-
gether with the rest of the book, the binding is much stronger;
besides which the three blank leaves help to protect the printed
ones, since it's always the first few or last few leaves of a book
that are most apt to be damaged. The other way we can't have the
blank end-signatures because we don't have the paper, just can't
get it. The German paper was made circa 1935 and certainly is made
no longer; and the English Highclere isn't yet being imported again.
When we first started the book, we figured on 64 pages and the blanks,
but your new poems were too attractive to resist.

There's that side of the matter. The other side is that this is,
first and foremost, your book; and that The Lion and At Kenneth Burke's
are both good poems. We'd neither dare nor care to suggest leaving
them out if we weren't assured that they'd be included in the book
which Harcourt Brace is going to do later. So we leave it to you.