PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

June 20, 1942

Dear Louis:

The plot's a good one, I think, for a carefully written
philosophic novel. It would have to be too well written to be
popular, to make it a success. As it is, as a short story, though
for a person like myself it has the charm of compression and occasion-
al sharp sentence or paragraph, it would take a doughty reader to stick
it. Floss couldn't. No soap as a short story. Too sketchy.

Thus I'd say it's only chance is as a novel, full length.
There there would have to be an enormous elaboration of scenes,
with reams of dialogue - each bit to be carefully worked, with
verisimilitude in locale and dialect. Boy! it would take you five
years. Maybe not, if you had a fellowship.

There isn't much dramatic action in spite of a few scenes
of violence.

I like your characters, all of them. I think they are
well imagined and stand up pretty well - as far as I can see from
your descriptions. I'm sure it would take the strength of a Heracles
to do the job as it should be done.

I'm returning the script herewith. I'm keeping the other
story which I have not read.

Returning to the story as it now exists, you write better
in some parts then in others. Occasionally you get stalled and
fumble around without anything happening. For instance, after the
first 6 pages there are several pages about the gardener which
stop the mind completely. If you're going to jump as you do in other
places you should have jumped there also.

Best luck. If you ever do the book as it should be done
let me see it again - if you want to. I might be of some assistance
technically here and there. I doubt that the Creeping Charlie
is the same as the Wandering Jew. I# think the Creeping Charlie is
a true vine, in fact I know it is. But you are right in saying that
the Wandering Jew and Comelina Virginia are the same.

Best luck

Sept. 15, 1942

Dear Louis:

Where in hell that other story of yours has got to be more
than I can say. I've looked for it in all the likely places but so
far it hasn't turned up. It isn't lost, probably in the attic some-
where but I wanted to finish it before writing. Had to give that up.

I started to read it when you first sent it to me but didn't
get very far, it seemed to me you were borrowing a style from the
newspapers, quite consciously of course, and I didn't approve. Hell,
I'll catch up with it after another search I am sure then I'll try to
say something intelligent. Hope this wasn't a unique script.

Floss and I have remained home all summer. The only break
occured when we went to Ohio to see the grandson. Yes, Paul has
produced another boy, not a very big one but he'll grow if he has
the authentic toxin in him. He was born August 3, Floss and I made
the trip when he was two weeks old. It was marvellous to travel on
a railroad train again, soldiers, sailors and everything. Sat up all
night in a coach, around the Horseshoe Curve, through# Pittsburg
at night with the blast furnaces sending up infernal flames and
sulphurous fumes, orange and brown. It's a hell of a world all right.

Bill is on some island south of the Equator and west of the
Date Line, that's all we know. We haven't heard from him now in two
weeks. I try not to think of it.

The summer, apart from those four days, meant only work to
me. It has been bad enough but will get much worse soon. Many of the
younger men in the profession are being called. Haven't written a
line - aside from a blurb for Chas. Henri Ford, not one poem. I did
though do some work on the Paterson thing but quit even that finally.
Wish I could go on. I dreamed a play one night and jotted down the
plot, the name and made sketches of one or two scenes. Someday,
perhaps. A play in verse in one scene - but three acts for all that,
a modern tragedy of the spirit.

I've been crowling under my office today collecting scrap,
a hell of a dirty place to look for old pieces of iron pipe, old
wire, anything at all. I got a throat full of muck - but what is that
to what the kids are getting? I take a masochistic pleasure in
whatever I can force myself to do.

Best to Celia. Floss is doing all right. My mother is just
pooping along in the same sad way. If only she had her eyes so she
could READ! Geezus what a fate.

Yours

THIS SIDE OF CARD IS FOR ADDRESS

Foris 2 uls of lsly
202 Columbia Sts
Brooklyn . b . y

May 11, 1943

### Dear Louis:

I'm glad Maria Leiper followed up my suggestion as she did. May something come of it.

The work closed down on me again after my last communication so that for several weeks there was nothing for me to do but follow my practice. The book slumped and I had several changes of heart concerning it.

After considerable thought and the discovery of several poems which I had forgotten about, a decision to include several which I had rejected and a final determination to cut out the prose bits entirely the collection has been finally made up - after considerable effort. This was the sort of thing I wanted to avoid but I couldn't escape. If it doesn't involve heart searching and hard work nothing evolves satisfactorily. After I have made sure that I have a copy of everything I'll ship the book to Simon & Schuster. They'll probably reject it and then the game will be on.

I may want to ask your advice about the book as it has finally showed itself to be but that will some later. That is, if it is to be published I'll want to fine comb it before it goes to print and that is when I may ask you to look over it again. It's quite a different thing from the first huggle muggle I sent you.

I will now read your play. It's the first time I've felt that I wanted to read anything recently and return it with any comments I find I can make in a day or two.

I know Celia will appreciate and perhaps demonstrate the truth of a comment made by one of my older patients the other day to the effect that " the younger generation is putting up quite a front nowadays". I hope she keeps feeling fit.

May 19, 1943

Dear Louis:

I tell you merely what I myself am attempting to learn,
partly from you :

There is something exceptionally beautiful and fine about
the play, which I am returning under separate cover, but it's
almost lost in the lumber. Instead of moving in a lithe, spare and
accomplished sequence of poetic episodes it stumbles and is lost
among prosaic details of mechanism in which you have no aptitude and
which have no place in a composition of this sort.

The good of the play lies only in certain speeches scattered
through it and in the general poetic unfolding of the total conception
which in the reading is only rescued by an analytic effort on the
part of the reader which is not to be counted on.

Two thirds of the composition should be blue penciled. I'll
tell you the same Virgil Thompson said to me when I showed him the
libretto of the Geo. Washington piece, "What the hell do you know
about the stage?" I confessed, "Nothing." And in your case I might
add, What the hell do you know about music? I think, very little. You
know something of the effects music achieves but that's all. Don't
for God's sake imitate the Poundian stupidity in that Pound who can't
know music and therefore keeps dragging it in.

In short, as Virgil Thompson said, "What are you writing?"
"A poem." Then for God's sake stick to that. Make it a poem pure and
simple". If you must make musical notes that seem to you to be
applicable and which, by the way, mean absolutely nothing to the
reader, nothing unless heard, then keep them on a separate sheet for
the possible stage production.

Omit all specific references to particular music, omit all
but the barest stage directions, references to curtains and even
costuming. Omit them all - except on separate notes for possible
production. You will then, as you yourself said to me recently, have
a poem which, perhaps, someone familiar with the stage and music may
be able to prepare for the stage. You will then be able to see what
to cut, what should be in and what out; dull speeches without a single
distinguishing word in them, by the doctor by the nurse and others, no
point other than for the mechanical hitching up of a sequence which
is false.

Read over what the Mother says, you will then get the cue
to the rest.

The Attendants are not in character as negroes, not to me.
Abd there is too much of them, too much of their speeches. They should
be truly "attendants" almost completely silent or else really niggers.
They belong all right but should be, as you suggest, dancers.

W. C. WILLIAMS, M. D.

9 RIDGE ROAD
RUTHERFORD, NEW JERSEY

May 29, 1943

Dear Louis:

The best you have every written, in my calm opinion. Most important for that, nearly as important because it seems to me to inaugurate a more explicit style in you. I refuse to criticise any man drastically until I can say something good about his work. But now I've got to say that much that you have written in the past, graphic as it might be, has been too broken, too unexplicit to bridge the gap between the writer and the reader, myself the reader. Not that I am a measuring rod or than anyone needs to approach me in his own mind. I believe, for all that that it was a fault. You were overimpressed by the theories of the objectivist approach. It was paralyzing, starving you, it made jerky, "hysterical" reading.

This piece flows as much of your poems do not flow. It has organic organization, word sequence that is modled after speech. The mind may jerk from point to point, as may the eye, but speech is only as strong as its weakest link.

A specific criticism of the poem remains. To bring in the toes and the details of the morning toilet is excellent, full of proper pathos and justly in place. But I don't like the word "grouchy". That is not serious, not important and out of key. In fact even the "Okay, poet etc I don't like. In fact I don't like the sentence as a question. I'd be inclined to cut out both those stanzas. The rest of the poem is so very serious to moving, so correctly "placed" that those two stanzas stick out worse than a sore thumb.

A book of poems in that style and you'd be where you rightly deserve to be, at the top in recognition as well as merit. You have chopped yourself up for some reason, from starvation, from finikiness (at times) from a false arrogance which comes from weakness and nothing else. With a flow as of blood in the arteries that may have a pulse but isn't jerky and intermittent but steady and uninterrupted - you will produce a body of verse that a man of judgement and feeling will want to own.

Duell, Sloane & Pierce have the script ( of my poems) now. There are encouraging signs. My best to Celia.

DR. W. C. WILLIAMS

9 RIDGE ROAD
RUTHERFORD, N. J.

Sept. 11, 1944

Dear Louis:

Your note just arrived, I'll answer it at once, the only way for me. I note the new address, and I will definitely run out to see you within the next few weeks. I note the phone address also, I'll call you first.

I go on writing though not what I'd most like to do i.e. work on *Paterson*, I haven't felt up to that. I did do some filing, to give it a name, even on that during my vacation in Connecticut early in July. That vacation was Paradise, pure and simple. I did nothing but move stones on the beach, chop wood and bathe. The bathing in salt water has always been my delight and my cure.

But summer back here in the office was Purgatory. I have felt exhausted; beginning to do better of late.

We are altering our second floor to make an apartment for Paul's wife, Jinny, and her two children. We have a one month old girl on the premises together with the two year old boy now. It is as it is, we enjoy the children - and Jinny also but it takes energy.

Bill is in the States as you may know, in a camp in Maryland. Paul is at sea.

As I said, I occasionally write a thing or two. A Cuban magazine, *Origines*, is printing one

Pico

piece and *Quarterly Review of Literature* Chapel Hill, is doing another. And, now that I think of it, some Canadian Literary Journal will probably bring out a third. Then a "new magazine" to be called *Et Cetera*, from Cleveland, Ohio, a mag whose policy is to select the personalities wanted and then give the selectee free rein - has asked me for a group which I have been scrambling to get together - about 8 poems, a year's work !

Most important along this direction is that the small book *The Wedge* will be out tomorrow. It has been plain hell to get it printed and bound. It was promised for last March. Finally a binder was dug up ( by me ) so that the infant will be born - or may be born. I'll send you a copy within a week, I hope - it has to go back to Cummington and from there be shipped back to me - then to you .

So there you are. Our best to Celia and the infant. We're really going to make it this time. We've had little inclination to go anywhere during the hot weather.

Yours
Bice

Sept. 27, 1944

Dear Louis :

Not this weekend but the 6th looks all right,
we'll take a run over there that day come hell or
highwater. We ought to be able to leave here
early in the afternoon to get there after four or
so. Glad to stay for supper, thanks, but please
don't go to any unusual pains. Can't you open a
can of sardines? Jezus! I forgot. No sardines to
be had I suppose. All right, caviare, sour cream
and champagne.

The Wedge : Again, Jezus ! It's lost ! Never has
arrived at the publishers from the binders. I
don't know what jinx is on that book but it's a
beaut. If it really has disappeared permanently
we'll have just 6 copies left of the whole edition.
Here's hoping. But it's been over two weeks now and
no word of it. I'll let you know by card if
they find it.

Add to that that the combined White Mule-In the
Monzy volume which Laughlin was bringing out is
stalled at the binders by reason of the sheets
having been lost in transit. Time marches ON !

DR. W. C. WILLIAMS

May 8, 1945

Dear Louis :

Have been away for a few days. When I returned I found your letter with the poem enclosed, "the best he has ever written" says Floss with which I thoroughly agree. It moves, it is.

Our best to Celia. In spite of many difficulties there will still be a life for us in the days to come.

I wonder whether or not you have heard of the death of Joe Hecht. The poor Kid was in camp in Texas when, last January, he contracted Scarlet Fever. In spite of the best of care, as verified by Ted's brother who flew there to look into the case, things went wrong. The kid died last week. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery in Washington with full military honors. An interesting touch was that Rabbi Silverman of East Rutherford assisted at the ceremonies.

Almost at the very moment of the funeral I was recording a reading of my poems at the Library of Congress. More of that another time.

Aug. 31, 1945

Dear Louis :

Don't tell me you're going into the
Real Estate business ! Jayzus ! 's the best news
I've heard in a long time.

We'll be seeing you this fall sometime
or other but as yet we're hardly more at liberty
to move than we've been for the past three# years.
Bill and Paul are both in the Pacific area and
are like to be there for a good many months to
come. Jinny and her kids are here with us as you
know, lively as ever. But we'll manage. At the
moment I'm planning to take my sensation starved
daughter-in-law to Joe Gould's Birthday Party,
Sept. 12th somewhere in Greenwitch Village. It's
a more or less open affair, why don't you come ?
It'll be advertised somewhere or other before long.

I disagree with you on there being little
beside my scribbles in the recent Literary Quarterly.
I very much admired Rene Taupin's article. But
where is that guy ? Do you have his address. Or
do you disagree with me ? And why ? I think what
he said was important.

Jan 13, 1946

Dear Louis :

I have made the copy, thanks. Letter enclosed.

Enclosed also is a line from Gummington in reply to
a letter from me asking about your script. Keep it or toss
it into the discard.

Here's something new : Paul has found himself a
job with Abraham-Strauss in Brooklyn ! It's what he has
always wanted to do, sell thing to people, give them what they
want at a reasonable price - or know why it can't be done.
AS - or A.S. has , apparently, a top reputation in the trade.
Paul went after the job and won it on his own merits - got
the highest IQ ever found among the store's applicants by
the way. How he did that is more than I know.

But where in hell is he going to live with his
wife and two children ? He may stay here for a while but Floss
has to have a break soon, the sooner the better . Shall he
buy a house in Rutherford ?

At about this stage I thought of you. When you
leave the place you are now in ( in June?) will it be avail-
able for rerenting to Paul ? Or, better, will you not have
in June an apartment in your own building for rent ?

These questions are perhaps somewhat academic
today but I shouldn't feel satisfied if I hadn't asked them
of you.

Regarding PATERSON, no use my sending you the
messy script since the book itself will be out so soon - so
Laughlin tells me. It'll be a rather handsome affair
according to Laughlin, he says the press will be running it
this week. If that is true you'll have your copy shortly.

The play is in process of being copyrighted. I
have resolved not to let it go out of my hands until I know
where I stand - probably a senseless gesture but it has
been set down as a rule at the moment so forgive me. You'll
see the damned thing as soon as anybody if you're still
interested.

Glad your printer has come again to life.

Best luck

Louis 2 ulsofsky
30 Willou 85
Broolseyn
N. J.

To Paris 2 ulsolsky
30 willow 4 Old Lynne
Brooklyn 2 Connections
N.Y.