These are notes on conversations held in the living room of 9 Ridge Road, Rutherford, between Bill Williams and J.C. Thirlwall.

2/1/54 When Floss and WCW took young Bill to Williams College to look around, they saw Robert Frost advertised that night. They sat in the audience while he made some dirty cracks about "New York poets." When they went up afterwards to speak to Frost, he was flabbergasted. "Williams, where did you come from?" and spent the next morning apologizing. (Larry Thompson said to me: "That's just like the old bastard")

6/25/53 "I'm ashamed of myself, but I've written what I could - that I'm not ashamed of. I stand or fall by my writings."

1/27/54 Talking of the *Versos Sueltos* or 'loose verses' of the Spanish, as compared with the free verse of Walt Whitman, WCW said: "It is the duty of master to control his verse. Whitman made no attempt to control his verse, but he never knew what he was going to do. Not until the present day, when we considered relativity, we were able to control our verse, and all imitations of English verse are dead." The foot can no longer be considered fixed but relative. When we understand it we shall be able to control the line.

Lying on my own couch everything goes beautiful but to get before an audience and say it is different."

3/18/54 "A week ago I went into a tail-spin. I went up to take a nap and didn't come out of it until 2 AM. My nails turned black. Floss and every body thought it was the end. It almost finished me. Floss wrote to Merrill Moore, who mentioned the word, 'Circulatory.'

Floss has developed into a wonderful reader from picking up my recent poems.

-2-

4/1/54

"By writing, writing, writing I did learn something. The approach to IN The AMERICAN GRAIN was my writing apprenticeship - my study period - studying grammar, syntax, spelling. The chapter that gave me the hardest job was the second voyage of Columbus - to tell the whole story and yet end at the end of the first voyage - that was a hard job. Waldo Frank called me up and said that technically, the best thing you did was the construction of the first voyage. He was the only one to make a remark on the good construction of any of my pieces."

"At times, I'm not certain of myself. I don't know what I'm doing."

"I met Yeats in London, but he paid no attention to me. I don't think he addressed one word to me - it was all to Ezra (Pound). When we came in a group we surrounded him, including Mrs. Shakespeare and Dorothy. In the halved atmosphere, the great man was reading "I have been faithful to thee.." He was doing fine; it sounded well, but I wasn't too impressed. I was an American - he an Englishman."

Talking of Floss' and my inability to write poetry, Bill was trying to get at it, asking, "Did you ever like the beat of a drum?" Floss said "No," and so did I. Whereat Bill said "I loved to listen to a drum, but I never played one. Floss and I could never dance together, but what's the point of dancing? All you're doing is getting ready to go to bed with the gal."

I used to see Floss happy with other guys and I was jealous. Floss always wanted to lead.

F.W. "I knew that Bill didn't like to dance, and I got tense."

WCW "You wanted to make up to the other guys."

F.W. "Nonsense! I just liked it."

-3-

4/8/54 Talking about an article on Rutherford: "I make so many mistakes, banging the wrong keys, and so on. Then Floss reads it over, and we keep out tempers. But it's always a trial to work something over."

(pp. 276-7 of N.D. 17 contains Bill's comments of Pat. pp. 66-7. Shall we use again? JCT)

4/15/54 I asked him about the reference to the betrayal of Vercingetorix in the *Autobiog* to wh he replied: "I had thought the world had been going into something wonderful, but I lost faith in what can happen in the world - no specific betrayal. It was pretty obvious that the world wasn't going to right itself after World War I. We kept hoping that something would happen. It is the idealist who is finally thrown for a loss. I was thoroughly disillusioned. I was full of ideals - whatever they are. If you talk of forms of government - they are all *so* opportunistic. I wasn't a Communist, for I knew nothing about it, but I was anti-capitalistic. Government was made up of weak men. I don't think any government is worth much. Nothing doing for a Plato's government by intelligence - it won't work. There's nothing to do but put yourself aside and live your life. *I*ntelligence always has to give way to the masses. Self-effacement, which is a despairing way, is the only way. Get on with your fellow-men ass best you can. If the power of the world, which is always an ignorant power, can be induced to listen to intelligent persons. Stick to what Virginia Woolf wanted - intellectual superiority."

Talking of Auden and Cāl Lowell, "Whom I like but whose poetry I don't like. What the hell are we doing with rimed couplets today? We should write in consonance with out age - that is proper. When I'm convinced that something is right I'll stick with it to my dying day. I believe the characteristics of the age help y;ur writing when you go along with them. I may be pig-headed about that, but I believe that the age should govern what you write. You should be alert to the age."

-4-

5/21/54

"I asked the psychiatrist whether it wouldn't be better for me to give up all thought of poetry, but he said 'why, it's been the major interest of your life! I get excited by poetry that I can't sleep'. My mind can't rest, but I never get hypercritical."

"I feel that the vein of poetry which was welling strong with "Of Asphodel", is petering out, as evidenced by ' View by Color- Photography.' I feel that I'm finished, that I can't write any more, that I'd just as soon die."

9/18/54

"I think every writer is sick to be so conscious of your world as to have it take possession of your life. Why should you be so conscious? It's pathological. But it's the only thing that gives you relief from the overwhelmingness of the world. It's a relief to frame the world and transmit it to others. All of a sudden you can communicate, and after awhile it becomes natural. The absorptive power of which transmutes the world and gives you another world. But why should you be puffed up by it? I don't know."

"Consider the very anonymity of Shakespeare. He was not famous in his own time. Compare Milton's 'native wood notes wild', which is nonsense. Why 'native'? Shakespeare was a great reporter of himself. He didn't know how to lie. He put down exactly what he felt. Something miraculous about the true report he made. He's a freak - unique in his tonguelessness. The only way he could make it work was to write it down."

"What Ezra P. does by 'opacity' I don't quite understand. I came back at /Wallace Stevens 'anti-poetic' in the introduction to Kora in Hell. /There are situations in the world, the conventional form of poetry is tiresome repetitious. If you say 'anti-poetic'. The commonest situations in the world have the very essence of poetry if looked at correctly. If I take a dirty old woman in the street, it is not necessary to put her in the situation of a princess. All poets have a tendency to dress up an ordinary person, as Yeats does. It has to be a special treatment to be poetic, and I don't acknowledge this at all."

2-5-

I'd rather look at an old woman pairing her nails as the essence of the 'anti-poetic'. Rembrandt didn't need to dress his old woman up. It was much more normal to paint the gods, like Veronese. It was the treatment by Rembrandt that made it the 'anti-poetic.' I didn't care about fine ladies, but just because I didn't have admiration for them didn't mean that I wasn't a poet. I didn't care about what they did about their tea tables. I think that what Stevens said was nonsensical. I wanted to get to the real situation, not human nor aesthetic - almost a philosophic truth which can ignore all human categories - the stress on 'categories'.

"Burns'" the man's a man for all that' goes through all poetry. Tennyson is the type of poet I don't like - the very person who put me into reverse. Stevens thought that I was throwing the poetic out, but it is not so.

"I am not a scholar, and Pound always held it against me. I never understood his friendship for me, because I was not his type of man at all. I was not poetic in the sense that he was poetic. But, for God's sake, I always had as good an opinion of myself as of him. I don't need to imitate. I have to make my own way. But I can't be pushed aside. The old beginners had to make their own way. They didn't need to copy any master, and we don't need to copy a master. When the urge to speak comes on a person he does not think of a master.

"Shyness is the very thing that makes you speak. You can't speak with your own voice in a dramatic situation, so you write it."

"I have just completed Paterson V. and sent it off to the stenographer. Jim Laughlin is very anxious to publish it, and Dave (McD) has told me to make a special arrangement. For sentimental reasons I wanted to print it, but Dave is afraid that Jim is going to take me over."

-6-

10/16/54

"The Idylls of Thocritus have always been a dream, an obsession of mine. I love everything that's pastoral. I read of Theocritus in Syracuse and I'd like to translate. I'd always wanted to get a Greek text, which I never had in college. When I had my stroke at Charles Abbotts, I asked Charles for a translation of critus by an Oxford don. While I was lying in bed, unable to talk, I indicate that I'm like to hear the Theocritus, so Harriet Gratwick came to my room and read Thocritus - the first six or seven Idylla. I brought the text back and started working. I was very interested in the divided line. Accidentally in Paterson III I happened to strike on this, and when I went back it seemed an excellent device, a flexible foot - three stresses to a line. If I could do it accidentally in Pat 3, 'The descent beckons,' I was tremendously excited writing this and decided this was what I wanted to do and have used it ever since, as 'A Journey to Love' - almost completed - will show."

11/15/54

While driving back from Montclair, Bill exclaimed: "It seems hard to think that in one year, in five or ten, we won't be driving along together - that someone else will be driving. What about, anyway? Sometimes I think, 'What's the use?'"

J.C.T. "But young Bill or Paul may be driving along in our place. That's a form of immortality."

WCW "Yes, that's right, but it doesn't make me feel much better."

JCT "Don't you ever think of the usefulness you have contributed to the world in your two spheres of activity? After all, you have had a distinguished medical career, and thousands of ex-babies will remember you. As for literature, as long as our language is read you will be remembered."

WCW. "So what? I still feel as if I should have left some plainer mark in the world - for good or bad. I try to talk myself out of this mood - I don't like it, but it wasn't surrender to reason."

-7-

11/15/54 "Yvor Winters was very partial to me, but he turned suddenly against me - much to my amazement. But I didn't care much if so much rigor mortis had set in. We were both interested in the American language, but I can't exactly put my finger on how close we were and how violently we separated. It had something to do with his feeling about free verse. But he always said that one poem, 'On the Road to the Contagious Hospital,' he thought to be a perfect poem. He didn't retreat from that, but he didn't think I stuck enough to regularity, and after that he decided that I went off the trail. He wanted to go after the poem in a more formal way. But I couldn't see it. Twenty years ago I didn't know what I was doing. But all hangs on the measure. I wanted to write in a colloquial way - not English. But he wanted more formality. I felt it was all there to be seized, if I could formally express it. But he'd go into his formal, even lines and quatrains and couplets which he stuck rigidly to. But I couldn't deform my lines to meet a formal pattern. It wasn't my conception of the thing at all.

3/4/55

"I realize now that I said some silly things in my irritation with T.S. Eliot. If he wants to go the way he does, who am I to set him right? As '01 Ex said, he has been playing Possum, not letting the world know what he was sin-terfully thinking. He was pretending, keeping his own mind, while making up his mind. I can never see how he went over to the Church of England, with all its religious forms, when he seemed to have a much broader view of the situation. But I think he was afraid of where his thoughts were leading him - poems like those of Hippopotamus and Mrs. E's Sunday Service. He must have said to himself, I'm going radical, and drew back. He was scared about his feelings about Milton. And then at Columbia he went over for Milton, which shocked everybody. But it didn't shock me. I thought he was making a damn fool of himself for taking that intellectual stand and condoning the whole way of writing that Milton had grown into, because Eliot condoned a standard which Milton had adopted - Latin constructiong inversions, etc, which marred all Milton's writing. I couldn't get over it and was shocked when Eliot came out for Milton. I expressed my sentiments in the

-8-

letter, "With Forced Fingers Rude" That phrase, that's not English!

"Eliot's condensation did not meet my expectation of what American and English writing should be. He went all out English in religion and everything else. 'Ash Wednesday' is a failure. His mind went flat, like a busted tire. His mind sounded flat to me, but all the old ladies and all the old men thought it so beautiful.

"I don't know what brought up all this. I must be disturbed about hin inside. But I think of him as a quitter. It reminds me of my mother's Catholic Religious instruction, of all the fears of a Mc Carthy regime of being thought a Red. Teddy Roosevelt said the most dangerous man in our history was Jefferson. It's all linked up in my mind with Eliot's walk-out on the liberals feelings of America, which I believe in. And in walking out he left modern poetry behind. The Four Quartets are very important to me. I look at them and at the Wasteland with great interest. The Wasteland was a bitter poem: he had not yet changed. When people in this modern world talk of Eliot it is of his ability to compose in English, and of his effectiveness in his poems. He was a very sensitive, clever and intelligent poet. In Prufrock and others he has excellent self-criticism. The lines have definite contours, are witty and carry a punch, which our lines do not carry. But we were breaking the rules, whereas he was conforming to the excellencies of classroom English. He was writing poems as good as 'The Ode to a Nightingale'. They were effective, but we were writing poems from the dungheap- the AshCan School. It is a fundamental difference in the structure of our thought, which was not Eliot's. He didn't want to get singed by getting too close to hell fire, with which we were playing. So he retreated from his position to save himself.

"But I still am unrecognized in any English classroom. I think it's risky to play with that standard of excellence and virtue. Virtue is a good term to use, because, because an unvirtuous woman has lost her virtue in screwing,

-9-

but to my mind that doesn't have anything to do with it. The Mind's the thing. When a woman has to convince herself to go to bed with a man, she can be as virtuous as any other person on earth. She does not need to dirty her mind by the physical act. A sensible man can find virtues in her mind which he couldn't find in a virgin.

"That is why I've been writing so much about Love. It's not accidental. When two people happen to fit together, that's virtuous. But Eliot couldn't accept anything like that, unless he were a possum. I can't believe he believes what he professes to believe and face the modern world. People today believe in a literal Catholic or Baptist Hell. It's not a Hell the mind can do anything about. It's a hopeless Hell. I believe the mind is the dominant force in the world today- the most valuable possession with which to face the world. Many problems are brought up - Murder? We don't mind sending our soldiers out to murder, trapping it out with military badges. (There are) many mental and intellectual problems - not intellectual. But I deny being an anti-intellectual. I was always conscious of my mind. I used to see the boys I played around with as a kid - critical of them on one score- they had no minds. They were behaving differently than I thought they should. How did I get my ideas? Perhaps from books. I was always looking for intelligent behaviour. You can't say Eliot was behaving intelligently. I was convinced that he willingly behaved unintelligently in giving into the Church. To me he was unintelligent, and all the rest of his shift of position was due to that.

"It is something to compare the Gaudens' sculpture in Rock Creek with Greek funerary sculpture. It is not sentimental, but it approaches close to it. It shows the Christian feeling as contrasted with the Greek. The Soul And the Greeks never talked about the soul. Socrates did, but sculptors didn't treat their marbles in the same way. That's a subject I don't know much about."

-10-

"Without intelligence you can't judge any virtue in modern life. You have to make up your mind with your intelligence. When you speak of the intellect that is something not quite acceptable to me. You can see the intelligence of a dog or the intellect of an Oppenheimer, but intelligence goes beyond technical ability. You have to judge intelligence by a man's total view of a situation - a political situation. Intelligence should be able to throw out the irrelevant parts of your life and to find what the particular parts of your life consist."

"It is unintelligent to be taken in by blatant demagoguery. You should be able to size up situations immediately to behave intelligently. It's unintelligent for a man with a tendency to be a drunkard to drink too much. He can't use his intelligence when off balance."

3/9/55

(NOTE: v. to J. Laughlin, Sept 13, 1937. Not in Sel. Let. Do you have it?)

4/8/55

"When a young guy comes to me I generally try to encourage him - sometimes without taking a second reading. That is just what I did with Shapiro - I didn't take time to read again. He hasn't matured much."

"Ben Shah's painting I tremendously admire, and I admire him as a man. He's tremendously attached to the Old Testament story. I met him in the city a few months ago. He was in a relaxed mood, having just finished an Old Testament sequence. He had made drawings, which Ed. Hopper of Down town Gallery had just brought out. He was telling me that when he was a kid he didn't quite place Adam and Eve, but he thought of them as of the generation of his grand-parents. So when he drew the portraits of Adam and Eve they were very close to him - the pictures of his grand-parents. He's a big fellow, very genial."

"My dad was a chain smoker until I was born; then he grew to hate smoking. He asked me not to start until I was 21, which to me was equal to a command. Of course, I thought smoking was manly. So when I went to Europe after my intermission, I bought a pack of cigarettes, put them in my pocket, where they disintegrated."

-11-

After I was married, I would put a cigarette in my mouth and puff at it. I called a synthetic smoker. It was all part of the puritanical background. I did not want to spoil the acuity of my senses in any way, as my mother recommended.

JCTT "Was it the same with liquor?"

WCW "Yes, although Pop always had a cabinet we called the Booze Closet, stocked and would serve us a liquor from time to time."

4/29/55

Mrs. Adlai Stevenson had scheduled me for a talk to the Chicago Art Center on April 15, "but I hadn't been notified, so I just opened my mouth and let it come out - the modern poem, the flexible foot. I don't talk about anything else now. Since I was writing something for St. Louis University, I talked without stopping for an hour. I spilled the beans and read a little."

"The next day I was to talk to the Art Conference of the Univ. Of Chicago in its Cathedral-like building, where were seated 1000 people. Little me! Then, as I read, I became conscious of an exelesiastical echo, but not a sound from the audience - no reaction. I read "Rain" - no reaction. So I said, 'There's no law against a little applause!' Then they loosened up, and things went on pretty well."

"A man has to have some sort of companion who looks up to him. I felt that I needed a companion much as Dante did when he used Virgil as his dog. You don't feel so lonesome when you have a pal. Joyce doesn't use the dog very prominently, but dogs have been always round me since Norma, the English setter."

6/13/55

Speaking of "The dependent backons" in Desert Music, copied from Patersonxkttk
"The variable foot can be built along certain blocks of words. My method of work does not allow me to be didactic. I follow a certain loose pattern of verse, following three lines, following a certain relativistic foot."

"Ask Laughlin about Satire on Paterson Did he do the typing?)

8/10/55

"A recurring dream of frustration I am having is that I'm in Germany and want to get back home - it's Germany, but it's Paris - but I don't have the money