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I wander the streets - poor streets - and in poor quarters. I'm always alone and thinking of the United States, and thinking I've got to go somewhere. I've got to go back and resume my practice of medicine. I meet people, but no sex, no friendship, just disappointment. I want to go back but I don't want to go back. I can't kid myself that I'm doing anything. I'm worried about bills which I don't pay.

"When I was in Leipzig I was lonely and used to wander the streets. But I spent a lot of time at the theater - all of Schiller, a lot of Ibsen, Strauss's Elektra, where I completely forgot the American gal I had taken.

"Just as I was leaving Leipzig my German was very good, and I was elected to the Philosophisch Verein. A Kittermbummel, the party which follows the big formal dance I went to. If I'd stayed another year I'd have gotten into Leipzig society.

"On my morning work to the Kinderklinik I remember a big, husky, scowling medical student, a little older than I. I was walking fast as I could, and the German thought I was trying to pass him, and he speeded up. I was laughing, but he was some as hell."

(3/22/50) ("Final break with J. Laughlin, who offered me $250 a month for three years -- $9000, which I refused in a letter of May 4, '50" It's all very well for you to treat me as a long term的投资ment, but that has no interest for me. For myself I'm a short-term investment, and during that term I've got to be satisfied. That's why I'm making my fight now. I've got to have it that way. So you'll find your check enclosed."

10/7/55

"There's an awful lot of crud in modern painting, but you can't reject Picasso easily. There's a lot of duplication, but his best work is wonderful. I'm writing of Brancusi - I went to the Guggenheim to see his one-man show."

10/22/55

"Last night some boys from Yale came to get my reminiscences of Ezra Pound.

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10/22/55

""'My cock in crimson panoply,' roared Ez one night in the dorms, but
the boys can't use that.

"I tried the sonnet abba, cbbc, acca. I wrote one of them in Germany, 'Alone
today I mounted that steep hill.'

"I had a lot of fun with the Yale boys, who listened for two hours. I felt
my precordial pain, which you get when you get excited. I was amazed that I
could remember all the things I did about Eza. The story that F.M. Ford told
me about arriving in a town in Provence. There was a procession with Eza
wreathed in laurel for winning the tennis match. Ez was playing up to it.
You couldn't laugh, for it was very serious to him; he had to have his due, even
in a fifth rate tennis match."

"I got taken royalty by a couple of guys who were supposed to clean the
chimney . . . I hate to be rooked. I don't mind the money, for I've thrown money
away in my time. But I'm soft, I've always been soft, but I usually recover.
I've fought my battles in the hospital - and won them too."

12/17/55

"I've always had a sympathy for sexually aberrant types. I realized they
were psychopathic, and I was interested as a physician. It's not sympathetic
when a dictator is aberrant and wants to kill people wholesale.

Talking of the three-stres line in 'Of Asphodel' "My main aim is to break
up the usual metrical pattern. In order to get away from the conventional
thing, dividing it by breath, by inflection. I wanted to get away from everything
that is English."

/7/56

"There was a group of young poets who submitted their poems to me... I
selected a poem of Harold Norse on the coal mines of Scranton , , , and he was

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1/7/56

grateful.

These young poets have to get up against it before they learn to write. This
is true of, e.g., Norse too; he's written a long philosophical poem, but who wants to
read it? It's a hard thing to succeed in anything literary until you've con-
centrated your life into a focus, and then it starts to go. The poet doesn't have
to suffer - and yet he does have to suffer - to find out what he's up against.
That's what inspired Villon, who developed a wonderful talent - so direct and vivid
in Le Petit Testament. He's a landmark to be and full of the most poignant
feeling.

"I've gained about 8 or 9 pounds in the last 2 years. I weigh 143 now. I've always been built like my mother -skinny in the legs - good shoulders, a good baseball pitcher. I used to love football, but I couldn't make the grade at 135 pounds in college. I was the first alternate on the fencing team at U. of P. I just wasn't good enough. I'll never forget a big bruiser on the Annapolis team. My forearm was just tired out. I'd done pretty well against the captain of Navy, who beat me, but when I faced this bruiser he soon found he could knock the foil out of my hand by superior strength and get the point. I was completely dis-couraged and gave up fencing after the Columbia meet. When I started to write *In the American Grain* joined the N. Y. Fencing Club to keep in shape. But I was neither strong enough or good enough. I never fenced after the trp to Europe (1924) The timing and the attention must be perfect."

2/15/56

"I utterly reject the metaphysical. * No ideas but in things! I reproved Marcia Nardi for using the term God without defining God in terms which can be understood by human beings. Look at the parables of Jesus - he didn't talk much of God, but he used simple examples - sheer poems!"

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3/17/56

"The figure of my grandmother in _The Wanderer_ was semi-mythical. You must remember that I had been reading Keats' _Hyperion_ and Aucassin & Nicolette. It must have started with the long poem, a romance, during medical school. Bocklin's _Insel des Todes_ started that when I was in Germany. A fantastic story of a prince who at a wedding feast had been duced so that he was dragged out by his nurse. He was to have been married to a beautiful girl. Half-unconscious he had been transported to a foreign country. His whole desire was to get home. That is the poem I took to Avlo Bates, whose comments sent me home to destroy the poem.

"In _The Wanderer_ I identified my grandmother with my poetic unconscious. She was the personification of poetry. I wanted to identify myself with something good and Philosophical - with a perfect knowledge of the world. I thought of myself as all-good and all-wise. So the grandmother, who was the spirit of the river, led to the Passaic. The Wanderer was a disappointed, a defeated person - myself. Then came _Paterson_, a greater realization of immediate surroundings. I rejected _The Wanderer_ because it was too stilted, too romantic. I read Byron's _Don Juan_ with the cleverness of which I was fascinated. I was also full of Pound and his classical attempts. But he identified with Provence and the old world, whereas I wanted to do my own country. Keats I found beautiful, but he was not for me. I wanted to do it my way and be beautiful at the same time."

5/26/71

"Someday I've got to sit down and figure out why Ford Madox Ford liked me. Perhaps it was because he resembled my father. Of course, he was half German and never felt quite at home in England. He lived in the U.S.A. for long and became a citizen. He was a thorough English gentleman, knew Latin well and Greek and all the continent. He looked like an Englishman dressed like an Englishman, but he hated English cooking. But he picked on me.

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5/26/56

J.C.T. "Did you like his verse?"

W.C.W. "All his poetry was classic. His relations with women were fantastic - he couldn't get them. He would take anything from a woman, like Tietjens, who is F.M.F. absolutely - just a conception of King Arthur, a gentleman and a scholar, the ideal of an Englishman. He was awkward, like the jokes in Punch, crazy about Gilbert and Sullivan, like my father."

"Pap would practically build the stage in our own cellar and mark out in chalk the places of the chorus. He was the star stage manager of Rutherford. Ed and I acted in them as nine-year-olds in Pinafore. I had a baritone - not very good, but I could make 'em hear. I was not at all shy, quite at home on the stage."

"When I wrote To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven/side from the first two abortive lines, I showed them to Louis Zukofsky, and Louis cut out the first two lines."

"I was amazed to see Eliot's Hippotomus taken with little change from de Gourmont's poem, Le Hippo."

"'Untitled' is a literary poem. It doesn't come to anything; it's a dream. He doesn't decide anything; he goes along more or less musically. He reminds me of the Germans when they begin to dream about impossible things. Sometimes he invents a phrase to give the literary feeling of detachment from life - of hopelessness. The construction is academically sound. It reminds me of Boklin's *Insel des Todes* - What of it? It might be accepted by the Atlantic Monthly for it is very polite."

7/28/56

"Thelma Wood, the Rbin of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Djuna, Floss and I went to Monte Carlo, where Djuna lost her money and some of Floss'. I had a nervous habit of pulling out the hairs on the back of my hand, and Djuna told me to stop, yet Thelma Wood was still dominating her. The Irish doctor in Nightwood might have been Gogarty."

"I piakced up Longinus On the Sublime, and that's going to be the next book (Floss and I) re'd together."

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10/8/56

"I am particularly interested in the sound of the words in Sappho, for
the beauty must inhere in the words. I'm going to exhaust every possible way
of knowing how she got her effects. If it turns out that the Vatican Library
has suppressed a volume of Sappho, it will put the Church in its place for me.
As you know, I'm not even a heathen. If there is any possibility of reproduc-
tion in another world, it must consist in refinement, as of a poet. The
conventional terms of heaven and hell don't mean a damn thing. That's why I
want to diground and find the concentration of everything that Sappho had to
give. If we can recover one complete poem, it will be worth while. I'm al-
ways looking for a concentrate in one poem."

1/5/57

from Puerto Rico,
(WCW received a note of congratulations from Pablo Casals/where WCW's mother
and Casals lived across the street, on WCW's election to the Academy of Amer-
ican Poets on December 17, 1956. The Board of Chancellors then consisted of:
Prof. Fred. Apottle, J. Donald Adams, W.H. Auden, Witter Binner, Henry Seidel
Canby, Max Eastman, Robert Hillyer, Randall Jarrell, Marlene Moore,
Robert Nathan, Prof. John G. Neihardt and John Hill Wheelock.)

4/8/57

(Talking of a trip to Cold Spring Institute on Ap. 1st & 2nd)

"I've always been touched by the position of the old lady, for I was
brought up by one (Grandmother Wellcome), and there are a lot of them there. I
read the first night, but the next day I talked for two hours. They were
quite excited. I wasn't an actor and I didn't know how to talk. I raced
through my lines on the records for the Library of Congress - and they are
rotten. But when I learned to slow up it came out better. I can always talk
easier to women than to men, whom I always want to tell "Go to Hell!",
because they don't understand poetry. I kissed all the women in the audience
at the end."

(Speaking of his dislike of Longfellow) "I was never interested in
poetry as a kid at Horace Mann until my heart threw me out of sports. I
liked hiking through the woods with Jim Hyslop. Uncle Billy Abbott was one

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of my minor gods, and he interested me in reading poetry: *L'Allegro*, *Il Pensiero* and *Lycidas*. I was thrilled with *The Ancient Mariner*.

"I was crazy about forestry, and if Forestry had hot been graduate work at yale or Cornell, I might have majored in it. My father could not afford to send us to Horace Mann any more, so Ed took a job in an engineering office in the city.

"I'll never forget Dorothy Norman, when I was called in to consult about *Twice a Year*. She was beautiful. I hadn't seen her between that time and two or three months ago, at Jim Laughlin's, where I didn't even remember her."

"Longfellow's rhyme forced upon him a foreign language - that and bowdlerization. My language forced upon me a vulgar language, my own language. Morals had nothing to do with art. When Sappho was sweating for a woman, she put it down. The whole New England bunch were liars. 'You mustn't use that word.'"

"The suppressions of my youth drove me to free and frank expression. But you can go too far in the other direction. It's the organization of the thing that counts - the importance of sex was exaggerated in the Victorian Era."

6/22/57
(Talking of a trip down the Mississippi on the "Delta Queen", a stern-wheeler, in May, led him to think that "Man is not made to go as fast as he is. The leisurely speed of the Delta Queen said to men and women who got on: 'Go to hell! Slow down!' It changed the motion of our lives, and suddenly we were at ease. All day long you go by these banks covered with trees."

"On our return in June we went to the Spring Festival of Poetry and Music in my honor. Robert Frost was not among the New England poets there. Cal Lowell, Richard Eberhardt were. Each poet read three poems. I was asked to write a poem for the occasion. I wrote about twenty verses, slaving over the birth of an Italian baby from my own past. I sent it to Bottegha Oscura."

8/3/57
"The mood that runs through *Voyage to Pagany* is in the Man Ray picture. Pound gave me the original lesson: Never use two words where one will do."

XXXXXXXX -19-

11/7/59

"I feel like a has-been today. No one comes to see me."

7/9/60

(After weeks of depression WCW has bounced back to a manic state, the result of a visit from Jim Laughlin, who is to publish a volume of new poems, reprinting the short stories and a collection of plays. Bill gave me unconditional approval of my analysis of *Paterson*, which Jim wants for N.D. 17. Bill has split finally with Mc Dowell and plans to stay with Jim L. until death. Floss came down and mixed us all a Tom Collins and approved of the new Jim Laughlin, whom she believes to be a changed character. . . Bill calls me his closest personal friend now.)

9/60

(On his release from St. Elizabeth Hospital, Ezra Pound stayed two nights and a day at 9 Ridge Road, with the every-adoring Dorothy and three other adorers. Heconced himself on the couch and let the adorers "do their stuff." This "last Supper" infuriated Bill, who roamed in the garden.)

9/2/60

(When out on Bill's enthusiastic invitation, but he was in A depressed mood, out of which even reading his poems did not lift. On my way out Floss caught up and said: "Bill is failing more and more, particularly in memory, but not in his writing. When Bill was going to see Dr. Merrill Moore after his first stroke, Merrill told me: 'This confirms my observation that superficial strokes like thus can paralyze a man's memory and his muscles, but it cannot touch the deeper springs of artistic creativity.'"

Earlier Bill had talked of Ezra Pound: "I've always loved that guy. He was and is one of the most sympathetic human beings. I've just written him that he was one of the first to write in the American language an idiom. He couldn't get away from it."

Bill was quite clearly failing through 1961. On 9/30/61 I read him and Floss part of my work in progress on WCW. As I left Bill said, "Goodbye," and not "Aurevoir."

On 10/3 Bill phoned to say: "I don't want to talk about poetry this Sat..

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I want to watch the World Series (Yankees vs. Cincinnati Reds) probably my last.

0/18/61

Jim Laughlin talking about Rapallo in 1935 with Pound's "Ezruversity" to educate the young. Jim would read and they'd talk. IN the afternoon Dorothy Pound would read from Henry James to give him the accent and prose style. Then tea and talk. In the evening Jim would take Ezra to the movie. It was E.P. who interested Jim in publishing things like *White Mule* to assassinate R. Sidel Canby and Nicholas M. Butler.)

11/18/61

"I've given up writing completely," He told me. I asked Floss about the stuff he was typing in the Spring. "He never showed it to me - probablyA threw it away," she replied." (These are probably the fragments of a projected Paterson VI found among WCW's papers after his death and published as an appendix to the N.D. paper--back in 1963)

12/2/62

J.C.T. I read my article on Bill's Measure, when he declared "The best piece of exegesis on my Measure I have seen."

(A pleasant visit with both, who are grateful for the $50 you Laughlin sent them as their share of my N. D. 17 article. Bibl firm about writing no more. Floss is puzzled by his attitude: "He ought to write but he won't. He just putters around."

The visits in 1962 were few and far between, as Bill sank to the end, but on one occasion as I was leaving he murmured, "Don't desert me now!" On the phone 10/13/62, he said "I'm fast coming along- to the end."

He was right for in March '63 he died in his sleep. Floss going to wake him with Stormy, their dog, at 8:30 noticed that Stormy would not enter the room - lay down and whined. (This, by the way, paralleled the behavior of Thomas Mann's dog, a German shepherd, who used to waken his master, but refused to enter his room with Frau Katja.)

Bill's face was peaceful, and he was buried in a closed coffin, where the clergyman read from "Tract."