FORTY SELECTED POEMS

<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>Portrait of a Lady</td>
      <td>CP, p. 21</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Young Housewife</td>
      <td>CP, p. 39</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Danse Russe</td>
      <td>CP, p. 47</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Spring Strains</td>
      <td>CP, p. 55</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>To Waken an Old Lady</td>
      <td>CP, p. 79</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Queen Anne's Lace</td>
      <td>CP, p. 86</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>On the road to the contagious hospital</td>
      <td>CP, p. 103</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Pink confused with white</td>
      <td>CP, p. 104</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The rose is obsolete</td>
      <td>CP, p. 108</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>So much depends</td>
      <td>CP, p. 127</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>There are no perfect waves</td>
      <td>CP, p. 138</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Thet brilliant field</td>
      <td>CP, p. 140</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>In this strong light</td>
      <td>CP, p. 141</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>All the Fancy Things</td>
      <td>CP, p. 153</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Young Sycamore</td>
      <td>CP, p. 162</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The God Head</td>
      <td>CP, p. 163</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Poem</td>
      <td>CP, p. 168</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Between Walls</td>
      <td>CP, p. 170</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Source</td>
      <td>CP, p. 172</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Birds' Companion</td>
      <td>CP, p. 193</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Death</td>
      <td>CP, p. 200</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Flowers by the Sea</td>
      <td>CP, p. 208</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>To a Poor Old Woman</td>
      <td>CP, p. 213</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Yachts</td>
      <td>CP, p. 218</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Nantucket</td>
      <td>CP, p. 174</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Rein</td>
      <td>CP, p. 197</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Elegy in Memory of D. H. Lawrence</td>
      <td>CP</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Bull</td>
      <td>CP, p. 166</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Sea Elephant</td>
      <td>CP, p. 194</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Botticellian Trees</td>
      <td>CP, p. 203</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Red Lily</td>
      <td>CP, p. 176</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>This is just to say</td>
      <td>CP, p. 179</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Fine Work with Pitch and Copper</td>
      <td>CP, 227</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Love Song</td>
      <td>"Broken Span" version</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>A Marriage Ritual</td>
      <td>"Broken Span" version</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>A Sort of a Song</td>
      <td>Wedge</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>The Semblebles</td>
      <td>Wedge</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Burning the Christmas Greens</td>
      <td>Wedge</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven</td>
      <td>Wedge</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Writer's Prologue to a Play in Verse</td>
      <td>Wedge</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

233 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN · CONN

29 August 1949

Dear Bill:

Have you forgotten by now that a fine play of yours — A DREAM OF LOVE— was put on earlier in the summer? I at least have not, though I should have liked to written my applause weeks ago to you. I had hoped, as you know, to be there on the opening night, and had written for tickets at that time — but I had to go to Pennsylvania on business, returning just before the night, never to have heard from them in reply. I made plans on the following Monday night to be there, and then missed my train at the station, and so had to turn away after having reached the tracks themselves. But I did go on Wednesday, the night before I took a plane to Europe where I was gone for about three weeks—and one could not have spent a better last night in this country except had you yourself by chance also been there. But at least your pleasant Irishwoman-poet-anthologist was there, and she told me that you had gone to holiday with Abbott, from which I daresay you have now long returned. I was much impressed with the troupe of young actors, and their very fine sincerity and loyalty to the theatre. You helped them as much as they helped you. It made an exciting evening. Having had the play put on in my mind a thousand times before, I was a little startled at first to see the new introductory scene which they put on, and for a while thereafter it seemed to me to take something away from the original sense of a dream, groping towards a dream, omni-presence of the dream symbol. But it worked out all right at the end, and I daresay it is as good to have it that way as any other. Being conditioned by the past, I preferred it as it was; but so what! I liked the sets immensely; I thought they did a stunning scene between the two Randalls; I did not care—or was perhaps startled by—the introduction of ballet. But a play is a little like a symphony, I suppose, and each director like conductor has his particular idiom. At any rate it was indeed a thrilling performance. Your dialogue stood up splendidly. I am proud, sir, of you!

I did not have a chance to reply to your suggestions about recipients of a little dough. Macleod, I know; but can you tell me a little more about Marcia Nardi. I like the type; it has its basic honesty. But can you indicate to me a magazine or two where she has had something in print. I don't want to seem piddling, and I certainly take your word for it; but if I can help at all I shall need a little data for my report to the committees of the foundation. Be a nice guy and give me the dope, as well as be sure to keep me in touch with the interesting younger writers who come to your notice in the future, and who have some particular need. I suppose this is really a dangerous thing for me to ask, for I am certain to be unable to help in most cases, and may therefore cause you to think I pay no attention to your suggestions. But if even in a very few cases over the years, we could manage to help them, I at nay rate would be grateful to you, as they would be also in their way.

I was sorry you couldn't get up that weekend early in the summer, when you thought you might get to West Haven. Is there another chance?

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

22 October 1949

Dear Bill:

Simply wanted to tell you that we have had a meeting of the directors of the foundation, and voted to give Marcia Nardi the sum of $250.00 to help her in her work toward the book of poems. I wish it could have been five times that amount, but from what you say I gather that even this will help. What I hope also of course is that the mere recognition of the foundation may be of some encouragement to her in a psychological sense. We don't make any public announcement of the awards; for at this stage of the game we have so little money to give out that I don't want to have to spend it on a clerical staff to process the applications that would pour in from every stray chick and child in the country, who has, or wants to, set pen or typewriter to paper. I say, use the money where it will do the most good and mean the most. So I shall have to continue on relying on tips from men like yourself who do manage so wonderfully to keep in touch with things. You have certainly been The friend to so many, that this is not the least of your remarkable attributes.

Have been up to my head in work, trying to finish off a job for Viking, and preparing lectures on a minute's notice for Yale. Am having much fun however in giving a seminar for graduate students in 20th-century American writing. Granted, the century is half over, but this is the first time Yale has recognized it on the graduate level (tho Brooks does give one on Joyce, Faulkner, Tate, Ransom, Warren, and Hemway, plus Eliot—as bases for the application of his methods of critical analysis). As a matter of fact, I think Yale has stolen a belated march on universities of similar standing, since I know of no others where an intensive seminar is given. Does this enshrine you? I hope not, for I am doing my damndest to keep embalming fluid out of the students' and my pens.

Wish you could get up here some time!

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON
233 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN·CONN

22 December 1950

Dear Bill:

It's a hell of a an academic world in which a man
can't sit down to thank for the gift of a book while anything
one says about it still will mean much to the person who wrote
the book. But I never could have the gall to write a note with
an "I'll look forward immensely to the pleasure ...." Which
means nothing.

So it is obvious that you have had to wait for my
thanks for <u>Make Light of It</u>, until I could actually read it.
Sure, I've read most of the stories before, but it's not much
of a story that you can't read again. So I've read them again,
and found I could, and so say an "I look back immensely to
the pleasure..." which means a lot to me.

They stand up wonderfully well. Which is only to say
that they were good in the first place and are therefore still
good. "Old Doc Rivers" remains a favorite, with "Life Along the
Passaic" and "The Girl with a Pimple Face." For some reason
"Mind and Body" never hit me before with such impact as it did
this time; it is your "Notes from Underground"--a really very
fine piece of writing. "Jean Beiche" gets counted on my fingers
with pleasure, and "The Venus" which is treasurable perception
in its conception and insights. And among the new ones, especially
"Country Rain". But what I like best about the volume is what
the _New Yorker_ once called "all of the whole of the tout ensemble."
For the book as a whole makes up a compact, a work of art as clean
and hard and invigorated as the Wheeler print you once gave me.
The two of you make localism into felt art. It was a good enough
instinct on my part once to describe you as the Wordsworth of
Rutherford (that is Wordsworth at his best). It is the feeling
you have in prose as well as in poetry that there is no such
category as the anti-poetic--that it is simply a matter of artistic
invigoration and felt emotion in common things which makes them,
or anything, into art. That is why you can take conversational
cliches and restore them from death back to the life they once had,
and even have (unrealised) when they are spoken without boredom
in real life, by those for whom the cliche is a tribute to art.
It is what you can do both to the locale (so that Passaic, Rutherford,
and the marshes become everybody's Walden) and to the people in it.
It is a demonstration of what art could do, if it were lucky, as
a social instrument.

"Good boy, I said his father. 'You're all right. Stick to it.'"

233 H G S
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN, CONN

Dr. W. C. Williams
9 Ridge Road
Rutherford
New Jersey

NEW HAVEN, CONN.
DEC. 22, 1950
5:30 AM
YALE STA.

3 February 1951

Dear Bill:

Forgive me for not answering at once. I seem to
have been up to my ears. Naturally I am tickled pink that
you can come. We've been waiting a long time at Yale for
this, and I hope it will be only the first!

On checking the schedule of events at the office
of the secretary of the University I find that the Wednesdays
in March have two of them absorbed by a long series of scientific
lectures, and although it will be a quite different audience,
nevertheless they do have the best hall tied down. For one
other R.P.Warren is lecturing. But here are some possibilities
for you to choose among, if they are convenient. In March:
Thursday the 15th or 22nd, or Tuesday the 20th. In April, May
Wednesday the llth, or Thursday the 12th. "et me know. The
reading is scheduled for 4:30 in the afternoon; and we would
have to appear at the Secretary's office a half hour before to
pick up your check. If you and Mrs Wms can spend that night with
us, we'll have a few people in in the evening if you want, or
spend the time simply to ourselves. As you prefer. Or if you
insist on going back that night, we can have some people in for
cocktails, then the four go out to dinner, and you can catch the
train, or the four of us can be to ourselves as you prefer. This
is really up to you, and what you feel up to.

Good luck with the ms.

16 March 1951

Dear Bill:

I realise that I stupidly forgot to check with you as to whether or not you wanted me to arrange for an amplifying system for you on Tuesday. The auditorium seats about 600, and the acoustics are pretty good. On the other hand there is a balcony, and if one is going to pianissimo any of the lines for the effect they may not carry. Cummings used the amplifier when he was here, and it worked without offense. If you do want one, tell me whether you will read standing behind a lectern, or prefer sitting at table. Either can be arranged. If you do want one, will you wire me so that I can make arrangements. Otherwise I will assume you will not need it.

Second stupid thing on my part, is that I see they have scheduled the lecture in the bulletin as for 4:00 rather than a half-hour later. That will mean we should start for the Secretary's office a little after 3:30. I doubt if this will make any difference in the time you planned to arrive, but am letting you know just in case.

As for the taxi, just ask them to take you to the Hall of Graduate Studies on York Street. I still have the office you once came to.

Glad you like Nones -- a damn good book, with much less archness than sometimes popped up in the past. As Wystan probably told you, the title stands for the three o'clock time of the afternoon. 'Believe in the church there is some sort of devotions held then, but can't be sure of that. Suspect he means it's three o'clock in his life; unless he is pulling a reverse Fitzgerald and saying that the dark night of the soul is three o'clock in the P.M. rather than A.M.; an perhaps he means that if the A.M. is that, the P.M. isn't. But I suspect it's his equivalent for a little later than "the thirtieth year of my life."

15 September 1951

Dear Bill:

This is a salute and an embrace
for the 17th which is your birthday. .
Not for just for that day single and aloof,
but for the marriage of all the sixty-
eight years in it. And for the courage and
the integrity and the powers of will and
the imagination which have been your genius.
Just think what it is to have created, some-
thing, anything! You have created so much
which would simply not have existed if it
had not been for you. It is godlike and
miraculous. When it is beauty and warmth
and wisdom which come into being, as in your
case, then it is a moment for trembling
gratitude. At ordinary moments I don't
think of my friends this way, and I prefer
not to identify them too much with their
artifacts lest I thus confuse the loyalties.
But I can rejoice in both, and be grateful
for both, as I do and as I am now.

22 September 1951

Dear Bill:

It is autumn. In autumn no one ever gets the fit to go anywhere. So don't depress yourself. You've just written an autobiography (which is major surgery on one's vitals), and it would not have been the fine thing it is, with all the understanding of self and outside-self, if you could come through without temporarily being exhausted. It is not like a peasant woman dropping a child in affurrow, and letting it lie while she goes on down the row pulling turnips. All this in itself, which is a big self. But as you and I both now, you can't put this kind of thing on top of a physical disability and not make it two-fold. There has to be a kind of stagnant period, and then life begins again quite miraculously. You've seen it happen so often in your patients, that you and I both know how it will happen to you. That is, with a useful schizophrenia: one side of which is doldrum and the other side antipatatory.

Incidentally, I understand that the first printing of the autobiography is exhausted. Congratulations to the public! I enclose a couple of pages from the TLS which you may not have seen. This is Rutherford making good. "God speaks through the pages of the T.L.S." Just ask any academic!

You were good to the boys on Shenandoah. They are remote proteges of mine. At least I like the way they really struggle to try to do something with the magazine, and try for something which is not just Tate-cum-Ransom-cum-Warren-cum-Brooks; and certainly the South is big enough for both, as Uncle Toby said in *Tristram Shandy* to the fly as he went to the window and put it out. I liked your pomes *very much* indeed. They were sharp.

Kirgo tells me you have decided not to sell the books and mss. I can't help but feel this is a very wise decision on your part. Bill, there is more unrealistic guff passed around, on the part of unknowners, about the market value of both than one could believe possible. I have had bookdealers as friends ever since I was thirteen, and began amateurish collecting which eventually led me into the kind of life I have now. And I have known collectors, and I have known inflated prices from the 20s which have hung on in the public memory. And I saw the Wolfe heirs try to sell Tom's mss (they finally did for 3,000, and that was a break); and Mrs Masters try to sell her husband's; and Mrs Lindsay try to sell Vachel's; and Scotty Fitzgerald try to sell Scott's (Princeton offered 750 for all his books, mss, and correspondence)--and all with no takers. No comparisons are intended; it is just a matter of the market. Yours are the best non-taxable assets you can have, at least better than their equivalent in the two grand you would be lucky to get for the whole kit and kaboodle. And you need them around you, until it's that or the actual poorhouse. Moreover you don't want them pawed over in your time by any Tom Pick and Harry, and no one would buy them without that privilege. Sell a few of the duplicates, if you want; get rid of a painting or two if you actually have to have the spot cash; but otherwise remember that inflationary wise they are better as pictures than as dollar bills tucked away in a bank collection.

Sorry that the novel bothers you; but then shouldn't novels go slowly and be a bother. They can't be just elan. You've never done a bad one. I know this will be good.

As to the painting, I'd love one of course, but wish you'd let me pay for it. Don't bother to express it. I'll pick it up sometime, or Kirgo can bring it back if he continues with the cataloguing (which I would have him do for insurance purposes).

All best, always to you both

2 October 1953

Dear Bill:

The two books have not yet arrived, but this
does not worry me. The average time for anything to come
from New York to New Haven by post is now about a week.
It is sheer folly to think that life has been speeded up
and distened shortened. Pony express would have brought
it more quickly. I'll send the check along to you as
soon as it's here; but first-class mail is somewhat swifter
in reaching its destination.

I should have waited for that, but did not want
to delay in answering your letter. I knew about the single
copy of POEMS; so did Gallup, the curator of the Yale
Collection of American Literature, where your things are if
we have them. And we always hoped that maybe ..., but
couldn't suggest the matter itself. Would you be willing
to take 100.00 for it from the Library? I'll be honest with
you; I think if I peddled it for you to some bookdealers in
N.Y. I might get a few more dollars than the Library can
afford out of its funds, but: if it is at Yale it has not
been peddled, and will not be, and is part of a collection.
for use by everyone in the future if they wish to make use
of it. So it seems to me both dignified and proper. I
hope you think so too.

I had been meaning to write Floss about the Hemingway's,
which are a somewhat different matter, since they are not personal
in the same sense. I asked Gallup first about these in order to
know what the going price was. (Actually we have both, and in
presentation copies, already.) He told me 100 was right for the
Ten Poems and Three Stories and 125 for In Our Time (altho this
was second, the edition was somewhat smaller.) Now if you sell
these to any dealer, he will quite properly give you fifty percent
of what he hopes to sell them for. I'll go into the economics of
this with you sometime, but I can assure you that it is standard,
and from a business point of view less usurious than it seems.
However, I spoke afterwards to Kirgo, and made the suggestion
that he sell one or all of them for you at a 20% commission. That
is, if he did not have to put up the cash, and tie funds up, it
would be profitable for him to get this profit. He might set a
little higher price then, and afford to wait. I would be on hand
to assure that you got paid once he did. I say this assuming
that you too could afford to wait for the higher price. My idea
would be that he could catalogue Ten Poems, and if he got two

two offers he could then sell both; he could catalogue In Our Time also and sell it if he got a response. It would thus be of advantage to both of you to get the highest possible price, and one wouldn't be sore at what seems the injustice of 100% profit to him. What do you think? You could even keep the books meanwhile, or, if you want, send them to me, to hold until he had the actual offer. The advantage of the latter would be that he could see them in orser to catalogue them properly. My only interest is to help you, and really Kirgo feels this way too, though it is an advantage to him not to tie up the money. Since the books are not, I gather, inscribed to you, the ad need not mention your name or tie you publicly or privately in.

As to the other things, the mss and whatever else, we ought to get together on this, and I could drive down some day after things settle down. It would be wonderful if we could work out some way by which there could be a proper collection here too, and I think it would be doubly valuable to the future to have one group more easily available than at Buffalo. But this is nothing against Abbott as you know; it is only a matter of geography.

Did I tell you that we are going to study *Paterson* in my graduate seminar this year. I am very excited about the prospect. I only wish you were coming up to talk to the seminar about it, but I'll do what I can. The poem itself of course will do most.

Affectionate greetings to you both,

3 October 1953

Dear Bill:

I hadn't mailed the enclosed letter before the books did arrive, and for them many thanks indeed. I was particularly glad to see that they were in the roman lettered series. Personally I don't get that'sent'by bibliographical details, but I am determined that the collection here will be _A per se_ and answer every conceivable demand that might be made on it. (By the way I am now trying to dig up a copy of the Picasso preface you showed me, and think perhaps with luck I can get it. If not I'll borrow yours and have it photostatted.)

So thanks and thanks again.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

23 December 1953

Dear Bill:

I am a little late with my Christmas greetings to you and Floss, the I intended my copy of the book not so much as an example of my prose as a tender of my best wishes for now and for the New Year. Perhaps this will amplify them, in the nick of time.

But I did want the book also to serve as an example of the sort of thing this local press is doing. As I told you, it is managed by two men who work in the Yale Library, and they are doing it out of their private funds. They would like to do your translation; I do not quite know what to advise. I am still a little traditionally and conventionally bound to the justified right hand margin, though I admit that it makes no difference whatsoever to me as I read the text; and the designer for the Yale Press says I am a damned-fool in this matter. It is true that composition with justification over doubles the cost of this sort of setting. And I would prefer a type-face of the regular printing size. Yet I admire what they are trying to do in the way of getting out books which would not otherwise be possible to the conventional printer, and in giving them my introduction I was trying to help them. If you want them to do the translation I imagine they would be thinking of an original edition of 500 copies, at a 10% royalty; increasing, I gather, to 15% on subsequent 500s. So there it is, and let me know what you and Floss decide. As I recall the introduction was not finished in the copy you gave me, but that wouldn't take you long to do.

The second point is rather more complicated, and is not so much a fact as a possibility and a proposition. This is the real reason for my delay both in writing you or in coming to see you about the manuscripts. Now I have had a chance to talk to the librarian at Yale, and this is what we would like to try to do, but would need your agreement before we did. That is, or this is, would you consider five thousand dollars for your manuscripts and correspondence, plus a selection from your library, to be paid you at the rate of a thousand a year. There are two reasons for the division of the sum over a period of time: the first that it would be easier for us to try to raise the necessary money on those terms; the second is that it would be easier for you tax-wise. If anything should happen, of course the rest would be paid to your estate. Now as for the selection from your library, this would probably not be very large and would only be for books we did not have, or those books so particularly associated with you as to belong properly to a collection in your

15 January 1954

Dear Bill:

I had delayed writing you until I heard some-
thing definite from the Shoe String Press, and now the
magazine has come from you just as I have heard from
them. First let me thank you for the mag; I subscribe,
but nothing could please me more than to have the copy
I can keep be from you with your name in it. The other
I want for next year to be put on the reserve shelf for
my graduate seminar, when the time comes to do "Paterson"
with a new group. My admiration increased, if possible,
and it worked out beautifully. And most of all of course
I need the stimulus and focus of going over it again and
again with other people. I have not read every article in
the issue yet, but did read and like Davenport's, and had
myself a whirl with the maps and illustrations of Paterson.
Martz, who reviewed the poem as it appeared, came into the
office, and I have promised to send to the mag and get him
a copy. What of course is nicest about the whole thing, is
the tribute it deservedly pays to you. When I think of what
you have achieved I have something solid to hold up for
admiration. I liked the fragment from the new part, and look
forward very much to the whole.

The press--let me hasten to say, lest you think I
have been softening before the blow--is eager to do "The Dog
and the Fever." I have before me the note written by one of
the publishers to the other. "It is a work of marked distinction,
and although it contains extremely puzzling material, the place
it holds in Spanish literature and in Schimpfliteratur / litera-
ture of abuse, to save you looking up that one, as I did, plus
the stature of the translators, makes it a 'must' for us, in my
opinion. It is not a book which will make Dr. Williams or us
rich, but it should be brought out, and I think it is the type
of material we can do a good job on, both of production and
distribution."

So that is that, and I can't tell you how pleased it
makes me. It was a kind of resolve on my part, when you told
me that you hoped to see it in print, but I never realised how
easy it would prove to be.

When I wrote you about the ms., I didn't really mean
that the text was incomplete, for, as you say, the corrections to
that are sufficiently indicated to let us make a copy. In that
respect, the editor's letter said, "With Mr Williams' permission,
I should like to go through it and style it for final typing, after
he approves of any changes I might make. I should try not to injure
the sense of the translation, of course." My suggestion would be

2

to let him go ahead. I will of course look over what he has done, and either he or I will consult with you on the matters.

What I did mean was that the introduction was incomplete, and this by your own note at the end. So I am enclosing it now. But would you like either to have your translation at hand when you do it, or the photostats of the other partial translation? Let me say, too, that the longer your introduction is the better it will be; for the novella itself is not very long, and the book will seem thin. Or let me put it another way, if it can be fattened, so much the better. There might always be, I suppose, the chance to reproduce the Spanish text two--in the best manner of Ezra and his heathen chinee. Even so I'd keep in the material you already have, tho you may wish to re-arrange it in terms of the way you look at it now, and I would add if you feel you can, something about the nature of the book and its meaning or significance. A history of Spanish literature, or the Spanish novel, might give you a few paragraphs which would help to date it in terms of the Spanish novel; but what I was really thinking of was what it might mean to you, had you thought of it in terms of why Ezra was reading it anyhow, and what it would mean to you (similarly) had you stumbled on it in translation. I don't want to clutter it up with prefaces, or I'd say it might be a good idea to get Ezra to do a page or two. Maybe it would be; that would depend on you, and whether you thought it pleasant to tie the connections back together again. If so you'd better write Ezra. However, and perhaps in any case, I thought of adding a page or so (not much more "so") which would precisely and coldly list the history of the book, and its one partial translation, and if you yourself do not work in its relation to Spanish literature, a brief statement locating it initially for those people who buy the book because of you and not because of their interest in Spanish. That could be done here, but only after your introduction was done. The Press hopes to bring out the book in May, which means that they want to start production on it whenever you finish the introduction, and I suppose the sooner they get it the easier it will be for them.

They have been proceeding in a kind of semi-professional way, so I am going to help them draw up a proper contract on the terms I told you last, and will send it on to you then. It's OK tho; you needn't worry about it.

The Librarian was pleased that you were pleased at the project for the general mss and correspondence still with you at Rutherford, as well as for the selection of the books. You know by now the kind of feeling that Yale has for your work, and the honor it would give them to have this material as one of the keys of their collection of 20th-century American writing. And because these things of yours will fit so wonderfully in, helping and being helped by the others, it still seems to me a kind of perfect solution to the matter of their disposition. And least I hope you and Floss will feel so.

Affectionate greetings to you both, as always,

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON
233 H G S
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN • CONN

20 January 1954

Dear Bill:

The introduction is perfect! Couldn't be better. It was a stroke of great luck on all sides to have dug up the earlier pages. I have re-typed the few pages that I thought might have confused the editors, and already passed them on. They have promised to show me any changes they might wish, and I'll take that off your shoulders.

One thing. Altho it goes a little against the highest courtesy, I think it would work best if, on the title page, we put your name first, and followed it by your mother's. This is why. This is the sort of thing, in part, to lead toward your mother, an introduction. So, because catalogues would list it first by your name, it would bring attention otherwise possibly overlooked by the uncertainty of a Helene. This is not a matter of formal precedence; it is because the kindness of an introduction is always made by the person who is already known. But if you don't agree, it will be done as you wish.

Again many thanks. And affectionate greetings to you both, as always.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

233 HGS

3 July 1954

Dear Bill:

I know what you mean about Thirlwall. I do. He's a funny guy, not really of first-class ability, but appealing and rather generous. I am still a little bewildered about his seizing upon you. He knows almost no modern writing, and I don't think knew your work well in any event. There is a touch of opportunism in it, but also a full measure of devotion which comes from an intellectual and, I suspect, even social loneliness. But what he can never seem to understand from me is that I should not always tell him "all" — like the men who insist on a whores explaining the incidents of her past. "But I have to know everything," he says to me, and to people like Kirgo. No, he doesn't; any more than I have to know all about you in order to have you as a friend; or than you know "all" about your sons, or "all" about Floss, or "all" about me. But Thirlwall both in order to show he's in the know, and by the role perhaps to get in the know, tosses around data rather carelessly, and begins to feel he's in possession of the Judge Advocate, Father Confessor, etc. Part of it is because all this is his first introduction behind the scenes of anything, and that's human enough.

Nevertheless, if he would work at getting the letters together, making the necessary checklist of your published work, etc., he would be doing a very useful thing.

By the way I was going to write you to ask if it would be convenient to you and Floss if Gallup and I drove down on the 15th, a Thursday? We'd get there some-time late in the morning, and leave before dinner. That should give us time enough. I have to lecture on Monday, and give a Bastile Day speech on the 14th ('live la France') or I'd make it earlier.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON
233 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN • CONN

20 October 1954

Dear Bill:

I don't normally review books these days, but the publishers of the Quevedo were anxious to have a review of it in the local Sunday newspaper, when it is published, and so I agreed to do one, since I could work from the ms, and there were no advance sheets for reviewers. I thought that you and Floss might be interested in seeing what I said. As you know, I have a particular delight in this book, since you had wanted for so long to see it in print, and I was lucky enough to be able to see that it was done. They have really tried to make a thing of it, at the Shoe String Press, and I hope you'll like the result.

I didn't get my car back from the shop until Yale opened, and since then has been the usual mild hell of the opening of a term. I tried to get Gallup to come down with me to Rutherford this week, so that we could finish up the contract for the papers. But he couldn't, and now it looks as though I should have to put it off until mid-November. Next week I must be in Cambridge to work on the Longfellow papers, in search of Hawthorne material; and the following week I am flying abroad for ten days to do some work there. But as soon as I get home, we shall have a reunion. By God, it will be good to see you and Floss again!

Saw Wallace Stevens on a couple of occasions, at the time of his 75th birthday, in Hartford and in New York; and last Saturday he stopped in while he was in New Haven. He asked after you in particular.

Affectionate greetings to you and to Floss.

15 June 1955

Dear Bill:

We were delighted to have the card from you and Floss.
Many thanks. I gather from Thirlwall who was here yesterday (Flag
Day) that the trip was pleasant but exhausting. Take it easy for
awhile and you'll be OK again. I know how these things are, but
they keep one out of the rut.

Very grateful too for the assortment of goodies which
Thirlwall brought with him for the Library. I had not received your
card, and had forgotten about the trip, when I suggested to him to
bring them up if he saw you before coming here. Would not have done
it had I known of the trip, and only hope it didn't exhaust you to
get the stuff together. The bundle is impressive.

Have been running through the selection of letters assembled
thus far. And like them. There is work to be done in filling in the
curves, but this should not be too difficult; and I have the summer
to mull them before going over them with him in the fall.

I was delighted to learn that you had another volume of
poems coming out in the fall. If they appear before I hibernate, I
can live off them for the winter.

Any chance of West Haven this summer. If you and Floss do,
please, fer Gawd's sake, give me a ring, drop me a card, send me a
telegram, utter a low and penetrating moan alongside the Sound, and in one
way or another alert me so that I can drive you both from there to our
summer cottage for a visit and supper, a quatre. I'll get you back, if
you want, before you can say "Star light, star bright, first star I
see tonight".

Affectionate greetings from us both. And thanks again for
sending up the stuff.

9 July 1955

Dear Bill:

You're cooking with gas! Which is one way of saying
it comes to a boil in the first place of each of the descriptions
of Ezra's old man and his mother, and that the result is OKx.

I really am grateful to you. They are just what I hoped
you would do, and his mother especially emerges as a figure for the
first time. The story about Ez's grandpaw is correct, or at least
I've seen it in print, with pride as from the Saint of St. Elizabeth's.

I had only one query, re your para about the early travel.
You wrote: "There is a trip to England and the Mediterranean countries
during the poet's boyhood, a summer cruise perhaps on which Mr Pound
may not have accompanied the boy and his mother but this is pure
presumption. It occured before my time --the family must have have
had some means to have taken the boy on a junket to Europe but from what
I saw there ### evidence of superabundant cash or desire to travel."

My recollection is that an aunt put up the dough, but that
isn't the point. What I wondered was, because of the "but" in the last
sentence, whether perhaps you had omitted a "no" from just before
"evidence?" The series of # crossed out something at the end of the
line and you might have forgotten it at the beginning of the next.

Do for God's sake go on with it and do Hilda's ma and pa.
She was sure in awe, or fear of the old man, I gather, and as for the
mother, well that's why I want the descriptions for both. These really
can be important for later on, and if you don't do em fully I don't know
who will.

Had a good visit with Thirlwall the day before he left, when
he came up to deliver another box of letters. He brought his wife and
son with him. Both very nice, as you said. By the way I notice that
he still hasn't managed to get Zukofsky's letters, or rather yours to
Louis, which we ought to have. Jack said Louis said they were in the
country at his mother's (?). Is this Old Lyme, and does he still go
there. If you could send me Louis's summer address, perhaps I ought to
write him and try to work while Jack picks up culture abroad. Or L's
winter address; I suppose it could be forwarded. Could I say you would
like to have them included? L might respond to me rather than to Jack,
since I couldn't possibly get any personal benefit out of the collection.

Affectionate greetings to you both, and many many thanks.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

233 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN • CONN

6 October 1955

Dear Bill:

It took a couple of days before I could get my bursary student to go up to the collection and check thru the manuscripts there in search of the one-acter, since the index did not reveal any likely titles. Now he has done it --dont worry about asking me for this sort of info; it makes me feel like an executive -- but with no success. I enclose his jottings written down for my benefit. However it is just possible that you had a section of The First President in mind, although of course you may well have either reworked part of the one-acter into it, or it into the one-acter. If you do want this section let me know, and I can either send it or photostats down to you.

Journey to Love has come, and is a honey! It's W.C.W. all right, writing with new firmness and that maturity (if this is the word) which so few poets can arrive at. There's a paradox in this comparison of late poems with earlier ones, since neither one replaces the other. They are out of altered egos, that's all: two poems with the same name and recognizable manner. Yet one doesn't confuse them: "A Negro Woman" has the same focus as an early poem, but it's different: the eyesight still keen, the temperament quieter. As for "Asphodel" it's sui generis.

By the way, in a paper I gave at the English Institute early in September, in which I gave some general remarks on the usefulness of bibliographical studies to the student of texts, I used as an example of how some future ignorunt might get mixed up, the case of the *Collected Later Poems* with the missing signature, which J-m printed up later, distributed gratis, and bound into a few copies. I gather from a letter written by you to Babette Deutsch that it was she rather than J or yourself who discovered the omission, tho I'm not quite sure how she managed to hit on it, since the table-of-contents of the original doesn't contain the missing poems. I only knew that some had been issued with the signature included, by inquiring from Magregor, and he wants to know (as I would like to know also) how come they were omitted, whether the ms for that section never got sent to the printers, or whether the mistake came later. Just curiosity, but it sure might confuse two guys if one was talking about a volume with em in, and another about a volume without them.

Columbus Day

Dear Bill:

Your letter about Stevens in the late morning mail, and since I have my graduate seminar to get ready for this afternoon, and then at 4 have to jump into my car to go to Amherst, Mass. until Thursday night after dinner (a conference), come back to New Haven that night, to give an exam Friday morning, whereupon I get into car again and drive to Burlington where I give two (as yet unprepared) talks on Saturday, and back Sunday, I had better -- if you have held your breath thus far with this sentence, send you along the few sheets I have out of which you and Floss may be able to dig something. I'll drop you a line first of the week with whatever else pops to mind. There is one study on him by O'Connor, called The Shaping Spirit, but it doesn't have much in it biographically speaking. The criticism you can do better yourself.

Incidentally if you read my little note on Wallace in the Trinity mag in his honor, it is interesting that Stevens admitted to me the influence of Santayana, saying that when WS's first things appeared, he was summoned by Santayana and told to bring his poems to Santayana's rooms, and on the next day GS sent him one of GS's sonnets in ms. I was lucky to have the hunch. The point is the world of words which is our only facsimile, or x number of ways of looking at a balckbid or anything else.

I'll tell you about his funeral sometime. Only four there remotely connected with him as a literary figure: Jack Sweeney, Donald Gallup, Sam French Morse, and myself. And no neighbours, or just a few; the rest were from the Insurance Company. It was very special, but perhaps becoming. I dunno; anyhow I miss him. I recommend one good article on him in the Trinity mag, which gives the best view of his way of life. Let me know if you want the O'Connor book, and I'll send off first of the week.

No, there were <u>no</u> one-actors in your papers at Yale; I sent the boy's list of the only plays there were. So we can't help you unless you want the section of the longer play which deals with Monmouth.

Please return the mags when you are through with them; but why don't you let me present you with the bibliography, since I'll get another from the library, and it might be useful for you as a record. Hope we can get Jack to work on your checklist. He's the obvious one, I should think, even tho he's no bibliographer.

13 February 1956

Dear Bill:

No, I didn't have KAVITA; and, yes, I'm immensely grateful
to you for sending it. All the way through it was interesting, but
no page was more so than "Illegitimate Things," which was new to me, but,
thank God and you, isn't new any longer but something to be hugged.

Thirlwall was up today to take a look at Louis Zukoksi's
letters from you, which Yale has bought. And he is as pleased as I
was when we got the chance to get them. We got the letters from ol'
Ez to him also, so both correspondences are in the right place. Under-
stand you and he paid Viola Jordan a visit recently. She must be quite
a gal.

Do you gather that Mme Ambassadress Luce was behind the LIFE
editorial to spring EP? If so, I presume it was Eyetallian pressure,
or as EP would say, winds from Woptalia.

But the chief reason for this letter, written latish at night
from the office, --in addition to the first task of thanking for the
magazine -- is to quote from a letter in his afternoon's mail, from
Victoria McAlmon:

"I am caring for the correspondence of my late brother, Robert Menzies McAlmon, who passed away in his Desert "ot Springs home on Feb 2. He died of pneumonia. He was fraul and tragically ill from tuberculosis. His one remaining lung was mortally infected and there was no hope of recovery. It is a very sad end to his life."

I wanted you and Floss to know; it isn't just the pneumonia--this sort
of thing had dogged him for the past few years. His last letter was tired;
they had all been tired for years now, really. The whole thing? Well,
you know, and I know. Maybe we don't either of us know the whole thing,
or the same part of the whole; but there it is, and here we are.

Love to you both. I shall think of you tomorrow, on St Valentine's
day, hearts and flowers to the pianola.

Do for us all a poem, and then more poems.

26 May 1956

Dear Bill:

This is literally my first free breath in weeks. I have just finished grading the last of the student papers (at least of those at hand), and the first thing I do is to try to make amends to you for my long silence after your letter of the 7th. No need to go into the demands of the wedding, my father's continued coma since early January, a long and devastating cold, and the usual incredible chores that come at the end of the year.

But they explain too the delay with Jack Thirlwall's letters, since as I told him (and he has been remarkably patient with me) what was now required from me was an unbroken period of several days at the least in which I could go over the letters again, making my own suggestions of selections which would cover the ground without being repetetive. I had delayed it too until he had made his copies of the last group Yale bought, some of which at least should be included. (I mean Zámkofsky's.) I did read them all last summer while Jack was away, but there has been no free interval since then, incredible as it may seem. Everything has been jumbled, but after next year's leave of absence I am cutting down my lecturing load so that it will not happen again in the future.

It seemed to me that he had done a remarkably good job in industriously getting together so much to choose from, and I am enthusiastic about his getting out a volume from them. But they must be chosen with care, and with a sense of the whole; and I know myself to well to trust my interrupted judgment.

I did hear from the middle-western chap about Bob McAlmon's papers. I think he probably wants to know too much, but I wrote him and said I would try to do the chores he asked of me after mid-June when my academic work will have ceased. It seemed happy enough about it. Will let you know how it comes out, and of course I am hoping to see you and Floss either here or in Ruthreford before too many moons roll their course.

What a good trip you both must have had to Puerto Rico. It was a marvelous thing to have been able to do. Won't you write it up? I should think it would make an excellent article, perhaps even an *Atlantic* one, in which you could re-use some of the old ideas as they were reinforced in memory by your perigrination.

Affectionate greetings to you both.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

1 August 1956

Dear Bill:

Back from the cruise. It was a great success, chiefly
because one can't do a damned thing except sit. I did that most
successfully. We got as far as *N*antucket, and took in every
lobster buoy en route. I recommend them as navigational points.

The sketch of Wallace Gould was a pip! Very much some-
thing for the record, and it has filled me with a desire to get
someone to dig around in Virginia and see what happened to the
papers. If any, of course! I suspect he wasn't one to fill his
knapsack with memorabilia. Which makes me happy that you didn't
take to the road, with Floss. I went over the packing case I
brought back with me, keeping in mind names which might be indicated
for Jack to query for letters.

By the way, he has really done a real job in collecting
them. Don't thank me for anything; it has been a privilege to
help, even as little as I have been able to. What I want is to get
the volume out. I had a letter from Dave Macdowell, and I think
he'll let Jack see the letters to him. Random House ought to be
worked in somehow, as a gesture if nothing else. I wrote Fitts,
who said he didn't have any. No word from my letter to Allen Tate,
but the letter may have been bounced around somewhat. Dave says we
ought to make an effort to get your letters to Pep West. I just
had a long letter about his stuff from a guy in England who enquired
from Mrs West's sister. Everything is in the hands of S.J. Perelman,
a hard nut to crack. But perhaps worth it if you really did write
to West more than business about Contact. However it would be worth
getting that mag into the index. I made out a longish list of
suggestions to go over with Jack when he comes up. Won't bother
you with it at this time, for Jack may already have gotten in touch
with some of these, and I have simply forgotten. Easy for me to do,
with my bad memory.

But what about Bill Bullitt? An interesting name to drag
in; though I am anxious to keep the emphasis of the letters "literary."
Whatever *that* is."

It was wonderful to see you both. Affectionate greetings,

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

233 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN, CONN

8 October 1956

Dear Bill:

Good work at Buffalo! I must say I am a little surprised, in that on two occasions (most recently on Jack's last visit to New Haven, which he made because I found he really hadn't finished going through all possibilities in the Yale Collection) I have asked him about Charles' letters to you, which -- for a variety of reasons -- I was anxious to see represented. Jack's a hell of a nice guy, but I think the truth is that he takes life and research a mite easier (and probably more sensibly from the point of view of blood pressure) than your Puerto Rican or my Yankee conscience permit us to do. As you probably will understand, the Abbott kind of thing is what is always tempting me to prod him for the sake of the project -- God alone knows I don't want to get involved in another editing project than that of Hawthorne's letters.

I have similarly tried to get Jack to get in touch with the Mencken estate, as you may remember from my suggesting that angle when the three of us were last together at Ridge Road. I wanted especially that long letter you wrote him about the American language in relation to poetic idiom, and from Mencken's letters to you I could establish the date of yours almost to the day. Better prod him again.

If you don't get anything out of Merrill Moore, I'll write him. Or better, both of us can; since I'll have to drop him a note in a few days. Actually, Bill, the letters from you are always more effective than any from Jack could be. And so probably necessary in this final stage. The trouble is -- but one can't hurt Jack's feelings-- there are so many damned academics making a living off of official projects (which are little more than wishful thoughts) that people shy away from doing the work for them, while to do it for you is another matter. Eberhart is teaching at Dartmouth now, I believe--more or less a permanent job. (Did you reach that Faulkner is going to be writer-on-residence at the University of Virginia? -- Keerist! Jack should be able to take care of Jackson at William and Mary. But the important job for you to do for him and the book is to write yourself to Ted Roethke, now that he is back on the West Coast and get your letters to him. There was an important rapport there, at least for a while.

Glad you liked Hilda's book.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

233 HGS

2 December 1956

Dear Bill:

Having just bought a book from the Motive Press in New Mexico (did Jack Thirlwall show you the vol from there I lent him, with a pome addressed to you?), I asked where Robert Creeley could now be located. Judson Crewe wrote back saying that Creeley could be reached

c/o Imported Motors Inc.
610 Central, S.E.
Albuquerque, N.M.

Apparently taking a leave or something, for Crew says Creeley is usually editor of *Black Mountain Review*, *Black Mountain*, North Carolina. Why don't you drop Creeley a note; only, damn it, he's sure to say the letters are at *Black Mountain*.

We had a superb float down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and spent an undue amount of time simply watching that paddle wheel turn over and over, lifting the river into little sprays of rainbows. One becomes overwhelmed with a sense of the immensity of distance, the long stretches of banks unbroken by homes or industry, as though one could, if one chose to, be any sort of a pioneer all over again, and never hear of Israel or Iraq, or prime ministers or prime anything. But of course one doesn't want to, except for a holiday. Yet I was glad not to have newspapers.

"We spent ten days in and around New Orleans, even going as far as Biloxi to pay our respects to Jeff Davis and the past. "We flew back on election day, and were luckily home, for on the following Friday my father at long last died. It was rather a good show he put up; he had the grip for life. But it is a good thing the chapter is finished, it being what it was.

I see in today's *Times* a little bouquet for Marcia Nardi's poems. Have you seen the volume yet? Not bad. Some gal!

15 December 1956

Dear Bill:

Don't know what the hell this loco-
motive is doing except to being you and Floss
affectionate greetings at Christmas from us both.

A note from Jack says that N.D. 16
will include your uncollected pomes. Why not
get J to run off a few sets privately so that
they can be kept separately, for convenience, as
well as in the big book? Also that Random House
had agreed to do the _Letters_, as I always knew
they would.

Ezra's
than
q
is a

thank
you

for some favor you must have done him. And so
say we all!

Mes Jordan has sent along the first
section of your letters, and will send the others
when Jack has finished with them. Also Hilda's
to her; and Yale bought the ones to her from Ezra,
the money to go to Maria. They make a wonderful
ensemble as a collection. It was really generous
of her. I've never met her, but she is obviously
a very special person.

N O R M A N

H O L M E S

P E A R S O N

2 3 3 H G S

Y A L E U N I V E R S I T Y

N E W H A V E N · C O N N

29 January 1957

Dear Bill,

Thank you for letting us know about the painting, which we will be happy to see. If it should prove to be genuine, it would be an interesting canvass for the Art Gallery, the Library, or for the Elizabethan Club (where you gave a reading). Indeed it might very well be the "real thing," although of course one is always suspicious of these nineteenth-century genre paintings (done in the earlier manner) of which there are a certain number floating around. One was here several years ago; the owner wanted $40,000 dollars, but when it turned out to be signed and dated under the varnish, I believe it was eventually sold elsewhere for $500.00. But the gamble is always worth it, and I'm grateful to you for thinking of us.

I gather all has gone well with you, and enjoyed the Christmas greetings poem very much indeed. Actually I managed to assemble quite a collection of variant imprints for the collection to go to the Library: yours plus Thirlwall, yours plus New Directions, yours plus J. Laughlin, Bob Magregor's -- I guess that was all, unless you had one just for yourself, or Bob had one for him plus New Directions. God knows, however, that I don't want to set myself the problem of establishing the priority of these.

Much more exciting was Thirlwall's news that you had finished the new part of *Paterson* and that it was to come out soon. This is very good news indeed, and I shall be eager to read it. Also the book on you by that gal, which Beacon Press has announced for the spring. How does Jack feel about this?

I have managed to keep my head above water, although life during the past months (really since last summer) has been complicated by the development of what amounted to a complete nervous breakdown of our younger daughter (now 23) which reached its peak over the Christmas season and resulted in her voluntary commitment to the Yale Psychiatric Institute on the 10th of this month, for what will undoubtedly be a prolonged treatment. It is hard to know what the eventual prognosis will be, but at least one has the consolation that she made the important step herself, since there can be no recovery without the will for it.

Ezra seems to be in reasonably good health, although increasingly restless to be "out", anatural enough to urge which the article in *Esquire* heightened. At any event he gets along with the cantos, and has reached 109-10-11 (representing the alternative numbering of the one he sent me).

But what of yourself and Floss? Some time when you have accumulated enough for a carton or two for Yale, let me know and I'll drive down to fetch them. Affectionate greetings to you both,

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

20 July 1957

Dear Bill,

I thought you might be interested in the new selection of Wilda's poems that will come out in September. As the first since her created in 1925, and of course goes far beyond that. It will be in hard covers too, but my idea is that if we could get the price of Boston down, we might be able to have twice the audience. I hope it has been a good summer. I am sure Hudson Bay and the Arctic Circle on the 11th. It should be fun.

Love to you best,

Norman

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

21 September 1957

Dear Bill,

One of the pleasures of returning from Hudson Bay has been to read the fine reviews of Jack's edition of your letters, and to repeat of course the honor I feel in having the two early letters of our friendship included. I should think that both you and Floss must have been pleased at the reception of the letters not only in terms of their innate quality but also because of the warmth that was expressed towards you as poet and person. It is good knowing that all of these qualities continue.

I am in the usual midst of the hurly-burly of a beginning term, somewhat complicated by the fact that I find myself chairman and almost single-handedly in direction of the American Studies Program, though that is a situation which I hope I can correct before not too long a time. At any rate I do have a superb secretary who is shoving me each day how life in the office can be made easier.

Had a pleasant note from the editor of that Fairleigh-Dickinson magazine, saying that my little note on WCW had by a miracle gotten to them on time, and would be in their first issue. Your one consolation is that it need not be read by you, for I gathered from them that what they wanted was an introduction that would be locally appropriate.

The trip north was a great success, though it will take an afternoon together before I could give you much of an idea of myself as a camper among the eskimos. But, the boat never actually coming to Churchill to meet us, we at last flew north to Chesterfield Inlet where we pitched camp on the rocks and tundra, and made ourselves as agreeable as possible to the most possibly agreeable people one could imagine.

You spoke of Norway? Is it a possibility?

Affectionate greetings to Floss and yourself,

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

8 October 1957

Dear Bill,

Your letter cheered a gloomy, rainy day; and with the
dank season soon upon us I hope there will other letters to come.
Now that _The Letters_ are out, correspondence can become private
again: a conversation between friends, "talking" (as you say) "to
someone who is a friend about it" ("it" being anything one wants).

I did have a gust of news about you from your protégé
John Pierce of Seattle, whose devotion and admiration for you is
a thing of sparkle and beauty. He can talk one's head off, and
does, but I like the fact that he likes and seems to understand
poetry and philosophy while keeping up his concern with physics
and medicine. He is what we need: an enthusiastic audience for
verse. I liked him.

Don't, for God's sake, bother to read the article in
the *Fairleigh Dickinson Review*; it was written for others, as
a kind of introduction. My only satisfaction is that I actually
got it done!

Now that I have a neck of the Arctic behind me, I spend
odd moments reading about it, not so much in the many popular
books("Snuggling in an Igloo", "My Friends, the Seals", etc.) but
especially the reports of the Fifth Thule Expedition, which went to
many of the same spots. So I know now that the tattooing on the
chins of the old ladies could be put on only after the eldest son
had killed his first seal, and read learned studies of the clubs
for conking seals over the head, 2½ feet long, made out of the penis
pone of the walrus, one of which was given to me to bring back, and
which I thought I could use as a gavel at Departmental meetings.
Since my specimen stunk a little from remnants of flesh and skin
still on it, I took it to the Peabody Museum here to be cleaned.
The chief preparator in zoology was sympathetic. "I have a friend
who collects penis bones," he said. "What does he do with them?"
"Uses them for muddlers for drinks; the penis bone of the bear is
just the right size for a highball!" Now, there is a hobby.

I missed the pictures in *Esquire*, but will try to get hold
of a copy for the W.C.W. Collection at Yale. I subscribe to the *Hudson*,
so I shall look forward to the story in it. You speak of quitting
soon? Or now? The truth is that all that happens is a change in
procedure. There was a time when every spare moment you had was a
gold mine to be explored and exploited. Now there will be intervals
while things (ideas) or born and then flower in your contemplative
understanding. No siss-boom, but a turning and returning as it takes
shape. No telling, either, when it will be born, for one no longer

Saturday, 5th

Dear John,

There is a sadness here, the facts of which I really
do not know, but I want to tell you about it as well as I
can. Mr. Roethke, it seems, is now hospitalized after
having broken down some time on Wednesday, the first day
of school. I think that this vague much is accurate, but
beyond that, the confusion of the picture and my unwilling-
ness to believe cause me to hesitate. The saddest thing
of all is the sinister glee with which so many people
deliver their stories about him — and the wildness of the
stories!

The worst one is that he went completely berserk in
his first class, and this of course has many grisly em-
bellishments. From there they range in all directions,
including many different settings and degrees of violence.
Most seem to be agreed that he gave the people who took
him away (hospital attendants or policemen) a great deal
of trouble. This would probably please him, since I think
he considered as one of his most valuable credentials the
title of streetfighter extraordinary.

Some of the other incidental intelligence is that he
had been writing twenty hours a day for the last few weeks,
and has been nothing but high for quite a while now. Just
what he's been turning out during this period no one seems
to know. I guess it's reasonable to suppose that he was
continuing in the same direction, which seemed to me to
be toward a sort of self-sufficient intensity, and a fer-
vor in what he liked to think was his religion, the worship
of the life force.

The most current poem of his that I've read had lines like this: "God's in that stone, or I am not a man!"" "Bring me the meek, for I would know their ways." and "I am a connoisseur of midnight eyes." Definite withdrawal tendencies. I'm as bad as the people with their wild stories.

People who knew him are shocked and sad; people who didn't are gleeful because they knew he was a crackpot anyway. And a lecher, of course. It's amazing the variety of sources from which I've heard about this. I didn't come back to school until yesterday and by then it seemed to have gone quite through the whole campus. I feel very left out and confused, since everyone else knew it before I did; my confusion is unnecessary, of course, since all that anyone ever does is to decide to believe the most satisfactory story.

I'd rather not believe any of them. I hope that it wasn't in a large class of people who just came to see the show anyway. Sometimes I wish that I had been there, but most of the time I'm glad I wasn't. I still have an exaggerated idea of my importance to him, and I like to think that I might have been able to help.

All that I have to say now is that I had a crush on him and an emotional and out-of-proportion concept of our relationship, but I think he is a nice man. Nice guys don't make names for themselves any more than they win ball games, though, and I guess the furious gossip is just the way things are. He has a lot of friends, too, in his small audience that made him jealous of the Rexroth bandwagon. That seemed to be the major thing that he wanted and couldn't have. And maybe this is the only way to get it.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

231 HGS

10 May 1958

Dear Bill,

I asked Louis Martz for the right slant on a Campion text, and he responded not only by the news that the Muses Edition contained all the poetry, but said he had two copies and hoped you would accept one of them from him as a gift. You will probably remember him: he has written about Paterson and lectured on your work (most recently a fortnight ago at a big two-day shindig in Albany), and you and I have lunched with him several times when you've been in New Haven. So I sent the book along to you yesterday, and if you want to thank him, address it to

Prof. Louis Martz
Chairman, English Dept
Yale University.

So that, for once, was a matter easily taken care of.

Donald Gallup told me that he had taken care of the notes on your mother, which I am glad arrived safely. All you have to do is ask and we'll send. The one thing we don't want to do is cramp you by an absentee muniment room. Don't hurry about sending the notes back. I can pick them up when I come down to pay my visit. It looks now as though this wouldn't be possible until into June, when Yale closes down. But I hardly have to explain what the end of an academic year is like.

Things go reasonably well with me, except of course for being overloaded. But I take that now as habitual. Our grandson becomes more and more appealing with each month of his life, and we rank each smile and clutch of the hand as a new blue ribbon won.

Not a word from Ezra since his release, although the average weekly mail from him before then brought two or three eager missives. I was in Washington, to give a lecture at Howard, a fortnight before the hearing; and spent three half-days with him and a couple of luncheons with Dorothy. Ezra seemed to be in good spirits and although as of that time "We ain't out yet!" there was an air of optimism and planning. I gather from Truman Arnold that there will not be any hitches in his getting a passport, which was the stumbling block previously. But, oh God! if he goes on giving interviews like the one at Congressman Burdick's, the government will (as one of his locals wrote me) have Ezra shanghaid out of the country! Still and all I cannot help but be pleased that the confinement is over, and that the Paradiso section of The Cantos can be written in Freedom. Whatever was to be paid as penalty (I suppose he thinks he was vindicated) has been paid. Now he can see his grandchildren as a free man. Mary was to have brought two of them over this spring, but he hated having their first sight of him at St. Lizzie's.

Have you heard aught?

Love to you both,

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

231 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN · CONN

9 September 1958

Dr. William C. Williams
9 Ridge Road
Rutherford
New Jersey

Dear Bill:

The plane brought me back again on Sunday to a full desk
and a heavy week, which is the reason why I am not writing you a
full letter about the summer as I shall hope to do. You can address
any communications to the Shoe String Press at 51 Caroline Street,
Hamden. It is run by the Associate Librarian of the Yale Library
from his own home and I have always told him that he was foolish
not to have the address of the Press printed on the jackets of his
books. No wonder that you could not find it! I had a letter also
waiting for me from someone who wanted to buy a copy of "The Dog and
the Fever" and if it was for him that you were enquiring I will have
saved you a letter by my reply to his.

I have a class next Wednesday afternoon, but hope that I
can get away in time to be at your seventy-fifth birthday party.

17 January 1959

Dear Bill,

This has been a hell of a week, or I would have tried to go down for the opening of MANY LOVES, despite the hours-long holdups on the NYNH&H because of the freight wreck at Stamford. But at least I was delighted at Atkinson's review in the *Times* and the fact that all seems to have gone well. I only hope that it will have a decent run so that I can go. I shall tell my beads.

And of course I have wanted too to thank you for the copy of *Paterson V* which was an infinite delight to me. I have just been teaching *Paterson* in my graduate seminar in 20th-century American literature (you see you are a classic already), and my understanding of the whole increases each year. Book IV really does what you wanted it to, much more than some people have thought; and I think this will be increasingly recognized as the basic structure of the whole, and the development of themes and theme become clearer to the pedantic mind. I still round some of the graduate students uncertain as to the precise tone of the Ezriatic sections--some taking it as Guy Davenport did, and others accepting it as somewhat ironic in intention; but this seems to me to be an essential part of disquietude which you want. As for V, I can only say that your handling of the lines is firmer and more crystal-like than ever. It is marvelous to me how you have developed this without really having to turn your back on your metrical line of earlier days. And your sense of art as it comes from life, and must continue to come from it, and pointing out at the conclusion that out of which it can come, is a superb coda to III, which might otherwise have been left as a barn-burning, simply and only.

As a matter of fact it looks as though the time were drawing near when I should have to revise The Oxford Anthology of American Literature, and it seems to me that I ought to have a part in it from *Paterson*. Probably this should either be I or II, simply because they can stand alone better than the later sections if unprecedented by the earlier. I could go for either. It gives the proposition superbly. II is the kind of thing for which there is no parallel in English. The only difficulty if it is used alone is the extreme length of Nardi's letter at the conclusion. Do you think this could be omitted without extreme damage? I really am anxious to know what you think about this, and which you would prefer yourself to see included. And what about the "Note on Poetry" which precedes your selections in the anthology. I rather like it as it is, even after the passage of years, but you might feel that it ought to be modified.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

233 HGS

I don't mean to turn you into a work horse of course. And I still hope that you will have written out that long account of Ezra's visit to you and Floss before he sailed. You really must do this. Write it for keeps, and then give it to Floss to tuck away against the day after tomorrow, if you do not want to publish it now. The whole departure was really an 'event' in American literary history. And no one could ever tell it as you can.

I have had a few letters from him, and judge that Brunnenburg gets cold in the winter, which is not surprising after what was the institutional heating of St Lizzie's. I doubt that he is writing much at the moment, although Laughlin tells me that the next volume of Cantos, 96-109, *Thrones*, will be out later this year.

There is really so much to talk about, and I miss the letters we used to exchange, but these past few years have rather crowded my nose into the mill-wheel. Too much stupid administrative work and too many things to occupy my attention. Our younger daughter is just finishing her first year as a patient in the Yale Psychiatric Clinic, which is a complete focus of attention in itself. But we are at any rate enjoying our eleven months old grandson, who is a charming little toughie.

I have spoken to Donald Gallup in the library about the check, and he told me he had already spoken to the Treasurer's office about it. So if it does not come reasonably soon, will you or Floss please let me know. Naturally we're always glad to have whatever papers you want to get out of the house, simply in order to keep you from being crowded out. But as for the books, don't forget that you were to keep your library intact, and that eventually we would take only what ought to be kept together in your honor for the future. "Owe" us? Dear Bill, we are the ones who owe everything to you.

I saw Thirlwall at the birthday party, and have had a copy of his projected article on early forms of *Paterson* from him. I think he is adjusted to the new terms of relationship, and certainly should be. A man cannot be pumped dry at the head and loins over the years as you were being. I am only sorry that you felt at one time that he and I were being competitors. I am characteristically gauche, but my only resentment was for the way in which he seemed to want to use me as a tool in selecting the letters, being interlocutor, correcting his prose style and the rest. He is a good guy, but my metier is as a friend of yours and Floss, to step in when you needed me. What a rare privilege that has been on occasion, I know. Which is why I can always and only sign myself to Floss and yourself

Norman

1 February 1959

Dear Bill,

Yours was the good letter. I had wanted to answer
it last weekend, but my damned typewriter ribbon got off the
runner and I simply could not get it back. Meanwhile the week
has been too filled with les affaires for me to get time for my
personal mail.

This weekend we are playings grandparents to the little
bby, but I have slipped out for a part of the afternoon. He has
just learned to take four or five steps on his own, and when at
the goal's end he tumbles into one's arms it is with such a look
of delighted triumph that no one first stepping on the moon could
hope to exceed. And indeed why worry about the moon when the
world keeps one busy enough.

It was my car that brought Gallup down to Rutherford
for the things before, not his, but we will come again in mine
perhaps some time during the spring vacation which begins on
March 21st, if that is convenient for you. We can bring library
boxes, and take away however much you want to get rid of.

Obviously you are right about taking Paterson I over
II. It does contain the propositions and it does contain some
damned fine poetry. Meanwhile I shall be mulling over the re-
selection. As I said before, let me know if you prefer not to
have me use the old statement you made as an introduction to
the selections in the first appearance of the Oxford Anthology
of American Literature.

And don't forget to do you piece on Ezra's pre-sailing
overnight with you. I heard over the radio his newest praise
of Mussolini. No distinction between the idea, apparently, and
what the guy in the end did with it. He sent me an interview,
as with the son of F'robenius, in which he said the final number
for the cantos would now be 124. "I never was much for numbers",
he said.

Affection, love, etc. By you both.

Write as often as you wish to.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

231 HGS
YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN • CONN

17 February 1959

Dear Bill,

Congratulations on your
Honorary degree from Fairleigh
Dickinson as of Friday. I like to
think of you trimmed like a
Christmas tree with all of your
multi-colored heads. I was
flattered too, to read that your
play was doing well enough to be
receiving ticket orders up to April 15th.
With a little luck I can get down
to a matinee. I would now, but was
yanked by the scruff of the neck into the
hospital with suspect bronchial pneumonia or
virus fn., plus steelers. latter turned on to
the unsuspected bleeding duodenal ulcer,
and heard bricks etc are now laid to that.
Am now allowed to sit up a little, & have just been
promoted from Bland II & Bland III which is not
so grueling. Will be allowed to leave hospital
when bleeding stops - which should not be too
far off. Except for what Madison Avenue
might call a "sinificant ulcer", I seem

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

231 HGS

25 May 1959

Dear Bill,

Sorry now I have been able to be at
the Academy last Wednesday to see your
inauguration as a member and to congratulate
you on it. Or - hell! - good to see you.
But I look forward to this in mid June when
College is over. I'll have to have an follow-up
course of x-rays and then will be down.
G-1 series of x-rays and then will be done.
Not much to report, alau, except
that I get better all the time, and therefore less
tired.

I wonder then how can anyone tell
at Brunnberg, but no one quite seems to
know the story in detail - except this many
is unhappy and that she and Marcella didn't
lie it off. One note only from Egon in recent
months and then it is all things if he could.
Poor bastard - I think he misses the gang be
had in attendance at Lbiggios.

Rotherford's Allan Genberg certainly
took us on the chin from Deane Druing in
the last Partisan, but he I'm sure really sure
she didn't snoot herself on.

Love to you both -
Norman

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

14 August 1959

Dear Bill,

Polyps ought to stay at the bottom of the sea, and keep
out of any other lower depths. Even the sea anemone sounds better
than it is. Well anyhow the good thing is that they can be scooped
out, and then to hell with them!

What a jerk I am to have my first feeling one of regret
at being cheated out of a visit from you and Floss. So if it works
out, as I should think it might, that 9 Ridge Road provides a more
comfortable shack than West Haven, you'll simply have to let me run
down for another visit sometime in September.

Meanwhile I keep happily at work on the mid-nineteenth
century in Italy: Florence and Rome, with Hawthorne and his friends
like story like Powers, and the other expatriate artists. By now
I'm up to my ears in memoirs and chit-chat, finding now and again
some little tidbit to snip out and tuck away in a footnote. I hope
that before too long I can put an R.I.P. at the end.

This morning's mail brought a nice letter from Dorothy
Pound, Ezra has been silent for some time. He will write when he
has something he wants. She reports a little on his health: "He is
very up & down; his memory fairly uncertain--I believe he is making
some notes for wantos--he goes swimming--& the doctor is giving him
various injections and pills--these are new--E says he feels better."
They had been on a giro: to Pisa (that must have brought back memories),
Firenze, Perugia, Rome. "In all we had old friends of Ezra's--but the
fearful heat in Rome drove us back to napallo." "Lately--the hotel
manager, an old tennis friend of Ezra's & intelligent--I complained
E wouldn't stop writing letters, couldn't rest; all intelligent men
are like that--Gli intelligenti sono tutti così--I think was his simple
explanation."

So I write in the effort to prove myself one of the intelli-
genti!

Ask Floss to drop me a note sometime and tell me how things
go.

Love to you both,

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

231 HGS

22 August 1959

Dear Bill,

I hope your room is at least partially air-conditioned. It should be, for your rank anyhow. I remember when I was in the government during the war one could always tell what status anyone had by the equipment in his office. Particular items were available only to particular salary brackets. One started with a small blotter and a single telephone. (Presumably others started even lower, with nothing but a blotter or no blotter at all.) The next rise in rank was hailed by a second telephone. This was the equivalent of becoming a captain. After this, promotion next ensured an executive size blotter for the desk. This was like being made a major. The next jump (as to a colonelcy) was hard, but when it came it brought an office rug with it. The highest one could go before I left Washington for overseas was the possession of a thermos jug with two glasses. But the war went on and everybody began to rise, and distinctions were still needed. So just as five stars were brought in for generals, the air conditioner became the summum bonum for civilians. When I returned everything was done for me that was possible. It was felt that I deserved an air conditioner, and so although none was found that would work, they installed a broken one anyhow so that the public would have the proper respect for me.

And if I could have one that didn't work; certainly you deserve and can have one which makes life as refreshing as when I sit on an iceberg.

I wish I were on one now.

No great events to relate. At my back, I fear, there are seven or eight manuscripts of hopeful poets which I must read over the weekend. I am not optimistic.

I shall probably have to get down to New York for a Hawthorne checking or two at the Morgan Library and the NYPL. If you want a ten minute caller, tell Floss to let me know.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

231 HGS

29 August 1959

Dear Bill,

Floss's letter came on Wednesday, saying that if I got to New York I might be permitted to stop in to see you. But foolishly I had involved myself otherwise for the rest of the week. Thursday was one of those days of a wintertime schedule of appointments, but at least including one when I was able to hire an instructor for next winter, caused by a pleasant Englishman who resigned a fortnight ago saying he hoped it wouldn't "inconvenience" me.

Yesterday I drove to Worcester, Mass., as long promised, to see the dial exhibition at their Art Gallery. Thayer's collection of paintings is there; the correspondence and manuscripts of the magazine are divided between Worcester and Yale, and we had lent them some for the show. Eventually I hope all the ms& will be in New Haven. There are some superb canvasses too, but since Thayer was a Worcester boy, they will stay. Poor guy, he's still in a sanitarium. The show was spread out all over the gallery, with of course the heavy emphasis on the paintings and drawings. I am sending you a catalogue (to Rutherford) on Monday on the faint chance that you hadn't seen it. A nice bit of nostalgia. If you have it, toss it in the wastebasket.

Today I have been reading poetry manuscripts for the Wesleyan Series. Have been through eight so far today, which is rather like trundling my basket-on-wheels through a supermarket. Sad to say, I have found nothing to interest me, although there are several that are highly competent. Enough so to have won Yaddo fellowships, and the like. Every fellowship of that kind should guarantee publication. "You come. Here's the dough to live on, and here's the dough to publish what you write on the third floor, or the cottage in the woods, or the adobe in the desert."

But I guess enough gets published anyway. The Saturday Review called Susan (or anyhow spoke to her) yesterday while I was away, asking me to review Marianne's new 15-page book, but Susan naturally couldn't say yes, and they wanted the review by next mid-week. Probably just as well. If I ever did write about her I should define her as our best "occasional" poet. In the sense that Holmes would write a pleasant poem about a medical congress, she will write one about Santa Claus or a zebra. And it will be charming and skillful and highly decorative and what a culture should have, but it won't say anything very much, or even feel anything very much. Not even about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Guess it's too hot. The end of a Saturday afternoon when one has been working is hell anyhow, and to be redeemed only by

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

12 September 1959

Dear Bill,

You were good to write. I wanted to think of you
as at Ridge Road again, and now I can.

Autumn chores begin to pile up again: not raking and
burning leaves, or picking up the windfalls from beneath the
apple trees; but just picking up the dried bones of last years
errors and trying to make them into students again. I prefer
roasting chesnuts, but the blight took them away years ago.
How old I get, to think back with a kind of wistfulness on the
wild grapes, hickory nuts, and thousand memories that have gone.
I feel like a Whittier writing *Snow Bound* in retrospect.

We had another editorial meeting of the Wesleyan Poetry
Series on Tuesday, and really think we have picked a winner in
a girl named vassar Miller, from Houston. Bookish and sometimes
corny (which is not a bad thing), but she manages to fill her
lines with an incredible intensity. Some of the best religious
verse anyone has done for a long time; and fortunately she doesn't
seem to relie on calling the name of saint or virgin to get her
effect. I believe she had one small volume published by the New
Orleans Poetry Society. I must get hold of one, and it any good
will send along.

Will you tell Floss that the dope she wants is on the
back page of Miss Boyle's(?) letter. There was only one poem before
in transition under Urquart, but I hadn't known it was by McAlmon.
Tell Miss Boyle that if she wants to see any of Bob's stuff to come
on up. I hope she'll do a real article, and that I'll know where
it comes out. And when.

We are about to have our grandson for a week, without
parents. It may leave him without grandparents before he goes. We
like every minute of it, but are completely exhausted. But the
parents are off for a week's holiday, before he settles back to
his architectural studies, and she settles in to await her second
child in early spring.

Love too you both. Don't forget, if you want
the manuscript of the new book of poems typed, send it up. I'm
anxious to see it anyhow. Pre selfishness, and admiration.

Norman

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

13 December 1959

Dear Bill,

Being lazy, and wanting you to have the answer to
your query correctly and without waiting, I asked Donald Gallup,
the curator of the American Literature Collection, to search
among the manuscripts for what you were interested in. Alas,
he found none of them. Whether this means that they are in
the collection at Buffalo I don't know. I hope so. Anyhow,
don't hesitate to write me whenever you think there is even a
remote possibility of a thing's being here. That kind of ser-
vice is what we're for.

I'm glad all goes at least reasonably well with you,
and especially that Floss is out of her collar. She looked
rather regal in it: like an industrial Queen Elizabeth. But
presumably she likes being one of the people again.

I wish you could have been with me at my last encounter
with the people at large. This was the 25th anniversary "do" of
the American Academy of Poets, at the Waldorf. 1200 of the public
dined on the ballroom floor (figuratively at least) and were
addressed in their minks and diamonds by a politician, a general,
and a scientist, all of whom assured the audience that poetry was
a good thing. The scientist wrote his speach in blank verse--or
so it seemed by his cadenced affirmation. For some curious reason
I was asked to sit on the dais with a few poets (mine was, no doubt,
the papal seal of approval). I felt regal too in a way, and like
Marie Antoinette would have fed them cake if that would not have been
infra dig with mink. So, instead, I tossed down _petit fours_.

Had hoped to be down to see you this fall, by my 86-year old
mother fell just after Labor Day, broke her arm, and has been hospital-
ized ever since. She will not be able to leave until her experience
with life is over. She is not altogether unhappy, since mostly she lives
in a dazed world of fantasy, all of her early decades now jumbled. It
is a little harder for those who watch. I try to go up at least every
fortnight, for often she recognizes me and when she does it seems to
give her pleasure. It looks as though I might not get to Rutherford for
a while yet.

But I think of you both, and send my love,

Do write as you can. a letter always makes me for not
being able to see you

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

27 February 1960

Dear Bill,

Glad Judson Crews places you among the Saints. Fortunately his trio of monkey-girls did not present you with one of the temptations of Saint Anthony! Crews does keep himself going, doesn't he. You'd think the desert and the west coast would have dried him up; maybe he's like a cactus plant--full of juice as well as prickly.

It was good to hear from you. I've wanted like the very devil to get down this past fall and winter, but simply haven't been able to. My 87-year mother (her age in April) fell after a slight embolism last September, fractured her arm and has been hospitalized ever since. She lives now in a world of odd fantasies, but recognizes me and is made happy (for the moment of my visit) whenever I can drive to Gardner, Mass to see her. This means a three-hour drive each way for a fifteen-minute visit. Naturally it pleases me to be able to go, as I try to every fortnight; but it does snatch a day. And keeps me for the moment from Rutherford, solong at least as school holds too. No idea how long her situation will go on.

Have just been looking through Hugh Kenner's new textbook, THE ART OF POETRY. And much struck by his selection from you. The guy does know how to look without borrowing some one else's glasses! One sees the influence of Ezra on him, in the case of Bunting etc., but Kenner does it all in his own way. Put it this way: at least one can read what he does, and read with interest, and learn something too. I'll dig that kind of an academic any day, and they don't hardly come that way any more.

Louis Zukofsky's latest is in, having had the decency to buy it but not the leisure to read it yet. That's the trouble. No time. Yesterday I got hell in a letter from someone who sent me a mimeographed volume of his own poetry, two weeks ago, asking me for criticism, advice on how to get it published etc. "I assumed we lived in a world of common interest," he said. But not in a world of common sense," I suppose I shall have to reply.

I gather as from Buffalo that Charles Abbott has retired from his librarianship. Now they're off on their Joyce binge, and a fortnight ago Oscar Silverman, the new librarian, was in New York to pick up the papers of Robert Graves.

Glad you and Floss are going to Florida, wish we could join you. By the way we count on your coming up this summer, for last year's postponed visit. I'll be down before then however; maybe I can in May on my way to Philadelphia.

Write when you can. Love to you both,

23 May 1960

Dear Bill,

It is absolutely ghastly to see the days slip away, and with
nothing to them of Emerson's solemn processional. It is simply the
time of examinations, dissertations, theses, etc etc etc, coupled with
so many functions celebrating the end of the academic year that I have
scarcely spent a night or dinner rather at home for the last two or three
weeks. And this is what the situation was when your letter came about
the performance of your plays at Wesleyan on the 14th. Only --and this
will slay you--the commitment was to the New York Horticultural Society
whose Friday-Sunday tour of this section of Connecticut, for which we
were acting as hosts, was the reason. After they had left, Susan
collapsed with a wretched cold, and I returned (staggering) to my office
to get on with the papers.

Will try to get down to see you before the summer gets its
worst. Let me know what your plans are. Or maybe I'll see you and
Floss at the Academy on Wednesday.

Love to you both,

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

231 HGS

24 June 1960

Dear Bill,

Sorry to have delayed in acknowledging the polar bear
(a beauty'). I sent it on at once to The New England Galaxy
published at Sturbridge Village, in Massachusetts. I am on their
editorial advisory board, and since they want poetry I said I
would help them get it. Never want a chance like that to slip
by; they might change their minds. The reply came just after
your second letter, saying they were delighted, wanted to use it
in this winter's number, and hoped that fifty dollars would be
O.K. This is hardly magnificent, but the poem is. I'm sending
you a copy of the mag so you can see what it looks like. I needn't
say how grateful I am, but then I am always grateful to you. God
knows I have a lot to be grateful to you for.

You were good to see me that Monday. I really am not
usually so pooped, but the combination of the end of the term,
getting up at a little before five in the morning, and then not
knowing what I was to talk about until the speech previous to mine
was finished, left me a little limp. Tell Floss, there's no pain--
just seasonal fatigue. I haven't had pain for years, not even with
my ulcer. Guess my allotment ran out.

Never did meet up with Bill Bird, but wish I could. Would
like to talk with him about Bob McAlmon. I wonder if he has any letters
from Bob I could copy. Trying to put the whole batch together. Kay
Boyle tells me she is writing a longish introduction to a collection
of Bob's stories that is to be published. And wish his Three Mountains
papers could go with the McAlmon ones. But no chance I suppose. You
might ask him, for me, if you write again.

Do for God's sake drop me a line now and then. I haven't got any
questions to ask, but it is always good to chew the fat with you (eskimo
expression), especially when something rich like the polar bear emerges.
How the hell do you do it?

Love to you both,

Norman

You'll probably get proofs in September.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

20 August 1960

Dear Bill,

Still hoping to hear your voice, or Floss's, on the phone
saying that you were at West Haven. Anyhow it was good to hear the
firm clear tone of the mimeographed "The American Idiom" which was
in yesterday's mail. I wish we had a little book from you, collecting
these affirmations --or perhaps what I mean is why don't you do one
to stand with its own title on the spine. There won't have been any-
thing like it since Lanier. And I'll like its manner and its savoir
better than anything Shapiro shapes.

All in all these last few months have obviously been pro-
ductive. I just picked up a copy of CONTACT #5 and found your first-
rate poem in it. Bob McA is obviously becoming a mythological character
isn't he. Did I tell you Kay Boyle is writing an introduction to a
collection of his short stories? She seems to be getting at it slowly
however.

Also, and most agreeably, was shown a copy of your introduction
to the Bantam *Complete Works of Francois Villon*. Somehow I had missed
this, altho it seems to have been out some time. Others have missed it
too. But it is really something, having the french as well as the american
on opposite pages. I had been toying with the idea of having Wesleyan
Press reissue the translations of Norman Cameron. These are excellent
in metrical approximations, but not everything done. The Bantam literalness
accompanying the original texts, plus the completeness, plus of course the
price, means I bow out.

I seem to have accomplished--on the other hand--absolutely nothing
this summer. Except a little at what had piled up on my desk, and trying to
break in a new secretary. Our younger daughter, at the Psychiatric
Institute, is now engaged, she says, to a young man she has met three times.
The Institute is pissed off; I am scared to death; we are faced with not
knowing what to do --commitments or let it ride. Makes life very complicated
sir.

Love to you both. Write me a sweaty anapaest
some time when the humidity gets too great.

NORMAN
HOLMES
PEARSON

2 February 1961

Dear Bill,

I sure as hell don't know happened to that Christmas card
from you, to make it double back on itself towards Rutherford. For
I was here all the time, and simply assumed because I didn't hear
from you that you were under the weather or under the palms in Florida.
Maybe it was just the dying days of the Eisenhower administration
that sent things astray. I agree that the new wind is refreshing.
One feels life in the country again, one can read the newspapers with
enthusiasm and interest. I like having young people care about things,
instead of sulking. Its even good to make conservatives come out in
the open. Anyhow I'm glad I voted for Kennedy.

I'd have written last weekend but found myself involved both
with the blizzard and the arrival of Susan's nephew from England (the
grandson of old G.M. Trevelyan) who has come here until June, and whom
I persuaded the Yale authorities to admit as a special freshman, living
with the others in a dormitory and taking classes before he goes up to
Cambridge in the fall. He's a nice boy, but never having had sons of my
own I never knew how much red tape and awkward gesturing it took to sign
all the college papers, get a schedule arranged, and settle him in to his
room with bedding etc. Then a post-doctoral Japanese professor who speaks
poor English is bringing his wife here at the end of this week, she following
him who has been here since September. She speaks not a word of English,
and it has meant digging up china, silver, linen, etc so they can boil their
rice.

I liked the poem in the *Galaxy* and trust your copies reached you.
I don't know that the drawing added much, except to focus attention on the
poem and not swallow it up on the page. It's a damned good poem. I hope
there'll be some others some time that you will want to send. And when the
hell are we going to get that new book of poems I've been yammering for?
You've got plenty tucked away.

Much ado and scrapping about the edition of Bob McAlmon's stories
that Knoll wants to put out. It seems Victoria wants to at least reissue
*Being Geniuses* and some sort stories. I hope we can get it straightened out.
Kay Boyle now won't write the introduction for Knoll, but is keen on doing
all she can. Do you have any of Bob's manuscripts in the attic, or did you
send back to Victoria. Do send them to her. She's a nice girl.

Had intended to get down to see you and Floss during the examination
period, but never got the exams done, and anyhow the weather was impossible.
Hope I can get down before too long, however, for I am anxious to see you both.
Do let me know how things are, and keep at the poems. For my sake anyhow.

Love to you both,

Norman

Kaye has been learning from Bird Bid as she came home.