CONVERSATION WITH WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

WCW: ... and really I began to be interested at that time. I was sixteen years old. I was not particularly interested in poetry when I was very small because I was interested in very, very common things ... (fade out. Considerable lost here)

JCT: This is better. Now, suppose we try something. You were talking about Ezra and the friend you met Ezra through.

WCW: The friend I met him through -- I've forgotten his first name. His name was Van Cleef (6). I've told this many times, but I may as well tell it again. It was at the University of Pennsylvania. I was a freshman medical student and pretty homesick, I remember. I had just arrived, being there for one or two days, I heard when I awakened the first morning piano music being played in the next room, in a dormitory room which was unusual, because the dormitory rooms were rather small. But here was a student of music, and after standing as much as I could of it, I got out and I --

I was very pleased to hear it, but I didn't know what sort of an

man he was. So, I happened to have my violin with me. I/learned
to play the violin -- not very well. I was not an accomplished
musician, but I thought it was probably the best way to get intro-
duced. So I got my fiddle out and began to play some exercises.

The effect was magic. My neighbor pounded on my door and came in.

He was delighted to see me. He was taking music at the University
professionally with a view to becoming an accomplished musician.

He quickly saw that I was not a musician, but in making excuses
for my ability I happened to mention that I was very much inter-
ested in music and in all artistic matters and that the only thing

2.

I could boast of was some copy books in which I jotted down my
and poems
thoughts/and anything else. And he said, "My golly, just the thing!
In my class there's a very extraordinary fellow whom you'd like very
much to meet. His name is Ezra Pound." He was a freshman studying
Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, where his father
to
had placed him, rather than/send him to some more swanky college, but
he lived at home and he was getting along all right. Well, the young
man came along at once, so far as I remember, and thus I met Ezra
Pound through Van Clee' who was a music student at the University of
Pennsylvania. Van Cleeve (ه) passed out of the picture. He wasn't
particularly interested in poetry so that I didn't hear more about
him. He was a friend I occasionally saw, but the real friend was
Ezra Pound.

Well, he showed me the things that he was writing, and we had
many, many sessions. I was not studying any language, just entirely
on the side, but he was full of his classroom studies. We became
really very intimate friends. He took me out within a month to meet
his parents who lived at Wyncote, Pennsylvania. It's a suburb on
the Main Line. And I got to know Ezra's father, Homer L. Pound, and
his mother who was a very -- well, she was a very peculiar person who
kept by herself and who was very interested in her only son. But
she didn't get along very well with him. There had been some kind
of -- he was young, very young. He was two years younger than I am
and he must have been in his late teens when I first knew him. His
behavior was very extraordinary -- in class and out of it. He talked
up whenever he had anything to say and argued with his profs and al-
ways had opinions that were very important to him. He was not shy
in the least. Well, I got to know Ezra Pound. We would have fre-

3.

quent discussions about poetry, and he read many of the poems that he was composing at the time. That was before **Personae** and **Exaltations**, of course. Well, **A Lume Spento** was the first of his books and those I heard him read as he always read. I remember his accent was always very affected --

**JCT:** Both his American and his foreign accents?

**WCW:** Yes, very affected. He wasn't a regular guy at all. He was a very special case in everything he did. He spoke with a very distinguished accent, unusual, much like he still speaks, but he was not interested in the native language or in speaking like the boys with whom I used to play ball. It was always elevated language. His words were always extraordinary words and he would not talk any of the vulgar language of the people. He would tell dirty stories --

**JCT:** Good ones?

**WCW:** Yeah, pretty good.

**JCT:** Was he a good raconteur?

**WCW:** Not very good. He was too affected, too self-conscious. He could never lose himself. But one story that I remember particularly is one of my brother's stories. Ezra was much impressed with my brother and liked him, but this is a story that my brother originally told about --. It's cast in a Latin country, perhaps Argentina. It's told about an American named Mr. Robinson. The husband of the woman involved is telling the story. The husband tells about coming home at night and finding his bedroom door locked. And the husband went to the door and he said, "Mr. Robinson, Mr. Robinson." I forget whether the man answered or not, but he was in the room with the wife. "I rattle the door, I shake the lock," this is Ezra telling it, "I look and what do I see? I don't see anything at all! Mr. Robinson has piss in my eye." Oh, Ezra Pound! He told that and told that and

4.

told that. He thought that was a great story. He loved it.

**JCT:** Did he show any of this anti-Americanism?

**WCW:** No, but he was just indifferent. He lived in the time of -- well, in the romantic times. He was all absorbed, completely absorbed. After a while his father took him out of the University of Pennsylvania and he went to -- oh what is the name of that college where Elihu Root graduated -- well, up in Utica, New York --

**FW:** Hamilton.

**WCW:** Hamilton College. He went to Hamilton College.

**JCT:** Well, before he went there. How about you two working on your poetry -- did you see --

**WCW:** It was mostly a monologue by Ezra Pound. He liked me, but I was not in his class and he didn't think anything much of what I was writing. I don't remember any discussions, anything much except his reading to me, and then I would make some comment. He would emote tremendously, panting when he read, and I would say, "Listen, Ezra, this is all very well. This sounds fine. But, for God's sake, speak so that I can understand it! I can't even hear what you say, your voice drops so." But, really, as far as being intimate in what we said or any discussions, we didn't communicate much to each other. It was merely that I was present on fairly rare occasions and we were very good friends, but we didn't discuss anything of the intimate make-up of the verse. He always took the attitude that he was glad to have me around. And later on he did have a little book of (my Poems published, but I never heard him read aloud anything that I had written. And he was always talking -- I won't say over my head because it wasn't over my head -- but he was always talking down to me as if, "Well, Bill's pretty good and I'd like to see him get on, but I'm the really big exhibitor," and very definitely so. And I didn't

5.

care to push myself on him. I don't think I ever read anything of
mine to him.

**JCT:** Well, then, how did he happen to come through?

**WCW:** It was as a result of a trip to Italy with his parents. I don't remember very much. I only remember that I had heard most of the things which were practically in a mode of Dante's time and there he lived in that time, completely immersed in it. In all his actions he was personifying with his imagination the characters he was thinking of. He lived so intensely that unless you particularly shared with him the knowledge of his romance characters you were really excluded from his intimate mind. It's peculiar, because I was, in a way, one of his best very dear friends, apparently, at the time.
We used to pal around together, but I never knew anything of his intimate life.

**JCT:** You knew something of his relationship with H. D., didn't you?

**WCW:** Yes, I did know.

**JCT:** Didn't he meet H. D. through you?

**WCW:** No. He met H. D. through the Snivelys. The Reverend Snively was an Episcopal minister who had charge of a school on the outskirts of Philadelphia. It was a very, very beautiful old school and the gang used to go out there on weekends. And H. D. was Marguerite Snively's friend and I was taken out there at just about the time he met her. Sometimes I'd go out alone, sometimes there'd be a gang. But Ezra was the poet, he was known as the poet. He was the outstanding person, but he was always sort of ridiculed. He was always a little bit ridiculous in his pretenses, always posing as the poet. And after a while, if you keep on doing that, you're going to get away with it, especially if you make good with your life as it goes on. He was a blond with beautiful wavy hair -- he has it to this

6.

day -- and he just posed around with his peculiar way of talking,
emphasizing and ridiculing everything he didn't like and thinking
himself superior to everybody else about him; with his self-conscious
laugh ridiculing and thinking he really was superior to the people
he associated with. We were all just kids, but that wouldn't be
popular with an ordinary American crowd who are interested in foot-
ball, so that he wouldn't be popular in an audience where things
that he hadn't chosen were being talked of. He entered into the
life -- but that's about all.

**JCT:** What about those economic notions of his? Where did he run
across Major Douglass' social credit ideas?

**WCW:** Well, in England. Ezra was always thinking he knew more intel-
lectually and radically than anybody else you can name. You couldn't
say anything but that he knew more about it. His grandfather was
the source of most of his ideas of that sort. His grandfather had
peculiar economic notions. He paid his help off in a Michigan lumber
camp -- he was a Governor of Michigan, I think, of Lieutenant Gover-
nor -- but he took the notion of paying his help off at the mill in
a personal script. He made his own money out, and was as a
result of this, he got into trouble. He was just about classed as
a counterfeiter, although he wasn't, but he had the notion, and Ezra
was very partial to it, that money was only a relatively important
thing. And that runs through all of his Major Douglass beliefs.
Anyhow, through his grandfather or great uncle or whatever it was,
Ezra was led, when Major Douglass came along, to fall for it. It
really was a personal belief in peculiar money ideas which showed
his underlying feeling. His father/gold assayor in the Philadelphia
mining.
He was interested in money. His interest in money came from --

7.

it was all in the family. Perhaps, although I've never heard it said,
he might have been a prospector of gold in the old days. But anyway,
he was associated with the coining of money and thinking about money
from his childhood at home. And that sort of thing continued in the
Major Douglass theories. And he believed it thoroughly. And he was
always willing to take a path a little bit out of the ordinary. His
make-up was very definitely inclined that way -- individualistic.

**JCT:** Do you think that his economic theories had any influence on you, specifically in the book of *Paterson*?

**WCW:** Yes, a conscious interest. I had no interest in money, but since I was convinced he was right --. I had read some of Major Douglass' theories and I really believed that there was something to it. I followed Ezra entirely in that. I thought he was my friend and was doing all right and that his opinions were good opinions. The position of money in the world was very --. I didn't like the capitalists and all they stood for. I wanted a better share of the world's goods than I saw was coming to anybody in the world. For that reason I was strongly inclined to follow any radical change which would help the people as much as possible.

**JCT:** And you felt that Pound had part of the answer there?

**WCW:** Yes, I thought he did have an answer. It may have been false, but I was willing to listen. It looked as if -- (tape ends).

June 25, 1953

June 25, 1953 (Part II)

**JCT:** This is the second part of a conversation between Dr. William Carlos, and John C. Thirlwall on the afternoon of June 25, 1953. All right, Doctor, we were beginning to talk about Whitman and I know that you, after Emerson and Poe, really feel that American poetry begins with Whitman.

**WCW:** The final break before the beginning of any really American accent, because it's mainly the accent and the feeling of/accent—which is not very well defined and which I cannot very well define, but it's really the first time that I think what is said in the American language is recognized as poetry at all — that's the thing. Because you have to go into an iambic pentameter or something else before it was recognized to be in the form of poetry. It was the break which Whitman accomplished. Emerson and Poe and others would not consider/the language which was used in its raw form would be capable of poetry. You would have to go into a special attitude toward the language before it could be considered poetry. You would have to do something to it, as Pound did, before it would be recognized as poetry.

Well, the difference between Pound and myself was definitely that he was using ancient modes, in translation largely. He was all for the 12th and 14th centuries in Italy, also Spanish to a great extent, and French very definitely — René de Gourmont and others, beginning with, well, François Villon. It would have to be in that conception of language, the poetic conception of language, before he would accept it. Whereas, elevated, heroic translations of Latin or else in "The Seafarer", but it was not a language

June 25 - Part II -2-

which could be recognized as colloquial, as contemporary. It was always
interest
a literary language which he sought. Whereas my/was all present day,
always the language, accepting the language or finding a way to accept
the language as we speak it as essentially poetic. That required
something else done to it, and that's why I particularly became inter-
ested. Ezra saluted, in some well-known piece of his, Whitman as a
distinguished person, but he let it go at that. He didn't have any
further particular interest. But I am always trying to find in a
language, in the new language which is the one I know, the contempor-
ary language, something which I could build into a form of the poem
which is not accepted by the class men, by those who have studied
English from the point of view of the ancient language, whether
Elizabethan or otherwise. In a way, Ezra's interest in the transla-
tions from the Provençal gave him an opportunity to not to follow
and has avoided,
the teaching of English, which he tried to avoid/and to find -- he
has searched in the old languages for something strangely similar
to what I was after. It was very different, a very different ap-
proach. He approached from the Romance languages, but he was not
particularly interested in the English -- Surrey or Donne, or even
Shakespeare. He was not particularly interested in Shakespeare.

I never saw any particular interest in Shakespeare at all, but he
was always approaching language, the language, which was not acknowl-
edged to be the American language, but always trying to approach it
from a new angle, accentual. But in his Cantos you will see very
little iambic pentameter. It's always dactyllic or something dif-
ferent from the ordinary acceptance of English forms. Well, that
was his approach -- through the Romance languages. But I was try-
ing to get at it, being not as well informed perhaps, not as

June 25, Part II -3-

schooled as he was -- although he was never a scholar. In my opinion he couldn't ever stick to any problem, any abstract problem of language of anything else, long enough. His egotism would lead him astray to want to do things in his own way so that he would not follow any person at all. He was interested sporadically in what his problem was and therefore he would learn, but his radical ideas were also part of it, as in his work with William Loess (?) and some others.

But I was feeling always for a language which was approached not satisfactorily by Whitman. Whitman broke with the common language of the poem, and a new concept of the poem was presented -- a much looser line -- but he was full of such things as "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed," which is absolutely against everything which I believe in, not everything which I believe in, but the inversions of the phrase and not being able to use -- he had the necessity to deform the language, as I say, and not use the language which is necessary for me. So that I paid attention to him and I enjoy reading Whitman, but I could see that he had already departed from his own principles of the spoken language.

**JCT:** Now do you think, for example, that "Song of Myself" follows the spoken language?

**WCW:** I do. I think he almost came to flower and from that time on, for the rest of his life, went back. That is for me the greatest poem he ever wrote -- not the most successful, there are some poems that I can't even remember -- but he was most himself when he spoke of himself. That was the one *WH* poem that was inspired, we'll say. It's inspiring to read it. It incorporates everything he had to say for the rest of his life and no more of himself. That's the most

June 25, Part II -4-

shall shall
important thing: what I/assume, you *should* assume, and so forth.
That's perfectly straight and rhythmic at the same time. And he
discovered freedom, for God's sake, and freedom in the use of the
language is not, as I remember it, *is not* iambic pentameter -- far
from it! It is the first break from the accepted poems of the Eng-
lish language. Call it a poem, because just to call it a poem re-
quires tremendous nerve. But he made it a poem by his sheer inten-
sity, and when he became intense, the language flowed in a certain
way which was convincing and could be called poetic. There are no
no +replス
particular outstanding metaphors or/particular truths (?) of any
sort, but it's impassioned language and it convinces that it is po-
etic.

**JCT:** Just by the quality of impassioned language? What about the
rhythm? Would you call this blank verse?

**WCW:** No, Good Lord, no! I thought it was very definitely not blank
verse.

**JCT:** Excuse me, free verse.

**WCW:** Yes, free verse. It is free verse. He had something to say and
he said it in the way that most appealed to him. And by God it had
to conform. If there was no mode for it to conform to, then he would
invent his own mode! And that was the thing that impressed me. I
was intent on speaking a language. I didn't know how to use it, but
which would be close to a source -- well, which would be local, with-
out talking about *n* "people's language." I didn't believe in the
people's language. I believed in the language of poems, but I didn't
see why if I wanted to speak as Whitman had spoken, with sufficient
intensity, whatever language it happened to be would be poetic. I

June 25, Part II -5-

insisted on calling it poetic. I had no interest in rhyme and never
had had any interest in it, but when I did try to write with it, it
forced my hand so that I wasn't comfortable with it at all and I
would not conform. What is the use of rhyming? What does it mean
to rhyme? The essence of poetry is not rhyme. It's a purely acci-
dental thing. The greatest poems in the world have not been rhyme
poems. The Greeks and Romans did not rhyme at all. It was only in
the
 languages that rhyme, because it was musical, because it wanted to
stop at certain places, came along, and it was pleasant and exhibited
a certain skill which I didn't feel that I wanted. I didn't want
to work at it sufficiently to develop an ability which, when I had
acquired it, would not interest me in any way. It would just force
me to be more artificial than before the rhyme was taken up.

Beg. Re: C. I thought, I've always thought, that the rhythm, the basic
rhythm of the thing, is what made it poetic and it is also the thing
which made it essentially American, local, conforming with the con-
ditions which pertain to my own day. Because I would not acknowledge
that what would be written in my day would be less musical, if a way
could be found to govern it, than the writings of any age. And it
is essential to conquer, whatever you're going to conquer of an art,
in terms of your own day, To acknowledge that men writing in another
day were greater artists than we are is to acknowledge that you're
secondary to everything that is excellent in the world. You must,
to be first rate, invent in a new way forms which are vital because
you come to the belief in what is real in the world. Inventions
should be, in any day, sup prior to all that has gone before. That's

June 25, Part II -6-

why I differed from Ezra Pound. He took was much more skillful in adapting his rhythmic beat, but I always felt as if I was not more of a discoverer but more intent on discovering the meters that would be valid in my day. It always obsessed me to create a meter which would be part of the day so that any intelligent person reading it would find something of his own day in it which would make it outstanding. To discover in the day, in the day's work itself, what was important. That is why I have adapted as my own a theoretical, perhaps, American language which is, as Mencken would say, the language of the street which is not the language of the classroom. And we are taught, our ears are educated, to hear only the classroom exercises, so that when Whitman came along with no vestige of the classroom, I was thrilled. I acknowledge that he only made a start. To develop this accent -- accent, accent, accent -- was always precu-
lia r. I didn't find it even in his work except in isolated spots.

**JCT:** Remember your poem, "The Yachts," which has been very frequently anthologized? Mind taking a look at that and telling me what you meant by it? Do you feel that you got the rhythms --

**WCW:** Well, I started to write -- I was interested in the feeling of the terza rima. It isn't rhyme.

**JCT:** Well, there is some rhyme in it. You've got those, nose --

**WCW:** The terza rima was in my mind very definitely when I wrote that.

**JCT:** It comes out more, I guess, in the form of assonance.

**WCW:** Well, I wouldn't be capable of rhyming or interested in rhyming. I wrote that off without stopping and not a word of it has been changed. It was written down.

June 25, Part II -7-

**JCT:** Where were you when you wrote it? Near the seashore?

**WCW:** No. I was here. I was there in my room, but I was thinking of the yacht races that were taking place at the time. I was very much interested in the newspaper account of the what took place. And I've been to yacht races. I remember once --

**JCT:** I know you've been down to the Jersey shore. Did you ever see any of them in the Matawan Inlet there?

**WCW:** No. I have a definite scene in mind: out toward the end of Long Island on some bay. It's Shelter Island perhaps -- Shelter Island I think it was. I went out there on a trip to see a girl and her sister had been out racing, and I was very much impressed at that time how sunburned she was and so forth -- her lips and face looking up at the sun. I was thinking more or less of Shelter Island and the race that is depicted in the scene of what I speak of. But it was just written down. As far as mode of procedure, in making a poem I was always seized with a rhythmic form which preceded the form of the poem itself. I may have been even tiresomely repetitious, but in making any poem it's always what seized me first was rhythm and I couldn't care for anything, for any rhyme. I felt that I was speaking my own language, with certain restrictions maybe, but it was a language which seemed natural to me. It was not at all a copy of a classroom exercise or anything that I heard. It was my own language which was not in iambic pentameter, not as far as I know. Certainly I always thought of Whitman as sharing with me a certain rhythmic beat which I use --

**JCT:** The American beat?

**WCW:** Well, I think so. Someone from Johns Hopkins wanted to meet

June 25, Part II -8-

certainly

me. He thought he discovered in my poems a/beat that is characteristic.

But I never met him and I never heard him develop the point. I don't

even remember his name. I think, at least, that it is an American

beat -- an escape from the old forms of the past.

June 25, 1953 - Part III

Tape
Records: Dpt II) F-F-G

JCT: This is the third part of the conversation between William Carlos Williams and John C. Thirlwall on the afternoon of June 25, 1953. Now, Doctor, you said that you were thinking about Hilda Doolittle. You told me a very interesting story about her almost-engagement to Ezra Pound last week.

WCW: It was quite an engagement. She wrote to me immediately afterward and told me in a letter that she was going to marry Ezra Pound within, I think, days. She said that it had been cancelled. I told you the story of how Ezra went to ask for her hand -- did I tell you that?

JCT: I've heard it, but I'd like to hear it again.

WCW: Her father was the professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. A very tall, thin, stooped man, past middle age, quite old in fact. He had a number of children and when I went out to visit Hilda sometimes we would be invited to supper. There would be maybe ten at supper. The professor would be at the meal but no attention would be paid to him. We were always conscious that he was an important figure. He would eat supper and go about his business. He had the reputation of focussing on no object nearer than the moon. He would look over your head into the distance while he was sitting across the table from you. Nothing more intimate would take place. At the time that I was going there he was measuring the oscillations of the moon on its axis (?). That was his sole occupation and you can imagine that that was a rather difficult subject for a young man. He had the reputation of sitting all night long at a small telescope. Sometimes during winter his whiskers would be frozen to the eyepiece and they used to say that his wife would go out in the morning with a kettle full of hot water to free his whiskers from where they were frozen to the eyepiece. Well, such was the man Ezra Pound had to face when he decided to ask for Hilda's hand and he told me exactly what happened. He came into the presence of Professor Doolittle and asked if he could marry Hilda. And the professor looked at him for a while and then he said, "Why, you're no better than a nomad." That was all. In other words, he wouldn't consider or have anything to do with it. He was told he couldn't marry Hilda. Shortly afterward he went to Europe and after a while Hilda followed him with probably the expectation of marrying him, maybe not. Apparently it was broken off long before that. Ezra Pound probably had his present wife in tow -- in tow is a very vulgar term to use for such a/dignified occasion -- but he didn't want to marry Hilda. She married Richard Aldington, Ezra's best friend. This is scandalous -- he wrote me that he had been to church and seen Richard safely married to Hilda. It didn't last long, but that was his attitude.

JCT: What sort of a fellow was Aldington?

WCW: I don't know. I just met him. He looked like a pretty good businessman to my way of thinking. He didn't look like a poet at all. But in the romantic days when I would go out there alone perhaps, so much so that Ezra Pound was quite jealous and I had to say to

June 25, Part III -2-

him, "Listen, Ez, don't make any mistake about it. Hilda is your girl. I acknowledge it and I like her very much, but that's all. I'm not interfering with you and I have no intention of interfering with you. We're friends and we're going to continue friends."

**JCT:** Well, you have remained as friends and certainly in continuous correspondence.

**WCW:** Yeah -

**JCT:** But God, you've had some good fights in your letters.

**WCW:** Yes, well, well. He was always taking the attitude that he was a little better. He liked people, as he liked my brother, but he wanted to be the boss. Ed tells the story that Ezra always wanted to walk a little ahead of him along the sidewalk, wanting to be the boss. And Ed didn't like it. And so Ez was walking along and Ed took the notion -- ah, to hell with it -- and so he turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Well, Ezra continued to walk along. He didn't pay any more attention to him, he just went on. Ed didn't pay any more attention to him and Ezra went on, as he would being rather short-sighted, and then he found out that he was alone.

Well, two things that I recall right now that will make interesting stories. In Church Walk in Kensington, I think; I don't know, it's a little bit of a street in the business district where Ezra had a room that I shared with him; he shared it with me, rather. He was living on nothing at all, he didn't have any money at all.

**JCT:** When was this?

**WCW:** 1910. It may have been earlier, but I think it was 1910. It was early spring and Ezra had a famous coat and a big straw hat that was like nothing in the world that you'd ever see. He always wanted to be prominent. It was a fur coat that covered him from the neck to the heels and he slept in it at night if necessary -- anything to be warm enough. Well, we were walking along Church Walk and he was swaggering around, always looking at everything and every woman that he was attracted by. And there was a bunch of violets that some woman must have dropped lying on the sidewalk. We came along and he passed it and looked at it. Finally he went up to it and picked it up and placed it on the railing of the church fence, prominently.

Once we went to *our* church supper, a cheap supper consisting of risotto, at some restaurant where he was very prominent with his fur coat and big straw hat. Everybody looked at him and sort of snickered. He was sort of ridiculous, but he was not conscious of that. Well, at the finish of our meal I instinctively picked up his overcoat and held it for him to put on. Whew! he was furious, "Let the servant do that!" And he gave it to the waiter to hold. He wouldn't let me do such a thing. That was very important to him.

Well, I went to see W. B. Yeats give a lecture on the Irish poets and Lionel Johnson. That was a wonderful occasion. The

June 25, Part III -3-

chairman was W. - something - B. Goss, the great Goss-- Edmund Goss. Oh, it was packed with society people who had paid rather high prices. It was probably mostly to make money for Yeats. At the end of the lecture Yeats was saying that, well, if they transgressed morally or any other way, what the devil! These poets had to do something with themselves. They couldn't not rebel to a certain extent. That was at the end of the lecture. Edmund Goss pounded with his gavel to stop him from saying such things. Oh, he was very much upset. Yeats looked at him and then continued talking. Goss pounded again with the gavel, and after the third time the lecture was interrupted and discontinued. That was the end of it. It was quite a party. I didn't have the nerve to get up and object and nobody else did. I wanted to, but I didn't. Ezra was in the back of the room and he didn't object either. He just had to take it, swaggering around as he usually did.

Well, before I went over in 1910 I used to go out whenever I had occasion -- I didn't have any money. I even went to church one day without any carfare. I was invited to take lunch at the Mendices (?) residence. Mr. Ecob -- wonderful guy

**JCT:** Was this back in Philadelphia?

**WCW:** Yeah, back in Philadelphia. And I went without even a nickel. I walked to church across the Chestnut Street bridge and was invited to have supper --perhaps I had money. Ezra Pound several times borrowed my last dollar, but he always paid it back. I didn't have much, but maybe I had $5.00 or something. He borrowed it and I never knew what he did. He never told me anything, anything at all, what he was doing, what his friends were doing. We were that sort of --

**JCT:** Did you ever talk to Pound about this business of his -- what was it out in Wabash, his first teaching job?

**WCW:** Yeah, yeah, I talked to him about it. A girl with a traveling circus was taken sick and had no place to go. I don't know, maybe she was severely ill, maybe she had typhoid. And Ezra Pound just invited her to come to his room at the College and let her sleep in the bed. Gosh, that was a terrific thing. I don't think it was more complex than that because he was so absorbed with the romantic aspect of such an occasion that he wouldn't-- as far as I know there would be no possibility of his approaching her as a woman and wanting to go to bed with her. I don't think it ever entered his head. He would pose -- a whole semester at Hamilton College he posed as Cyrano de Bergerac and his whole bearing was Cyrano de Bergerac. He thought of nothing else and he was Cyrano de Bergerac. So when he offered his bed to a lady in distress, it was just that. It was a lady in distress in a romantic setting of his own imagination. And he perhaps slept on the floor to give her his bed, and that's all. It was all part of his imagination. Perhaps one of the things that drew us together was -- perhaps we were drawn together by our shyness, lack of experience, more than anything else. Ezra once said to me, "Come on, Bill, come with me. I've got something I want you to see." Well, it was after classes. It was late in the afternoon. We got to a certain part of Chestnut St. perhaps, or Market St, up near the University on

June 25, Part III -5-

maybe she was impressed, but I got no reward for it but for her to take it and preserve it. I was proud. By God, I worked like hell on that thing.

JCT: Did you ever see her in London?

WCW: No, no.

JCT: Have you seen anything of her in the last --

WCW: I have seen something of her, something very important of her. When she came over she called me up, when she came over with her companion, Bryher. It's not very wise to talk about it, but --

JCT: Well, you've given some intimations of that -- Bob McAlmon who married her, Bryher --

WCW: Yeah, yeah. But she was very nice at the time. But Bryher -- by gosh, if it weren't for Norman Holmes Pearson I might have been sued by Bryher who is a millionaire. She was hot. He told me that she was furious at what I implied and she was going to bring suit against me for what I had said or implied.

JCT: Well, did she feel that you were separating her from H. D.?

WCW: No, it's not that I had separated her from H. D., but the implications of her behavior with H. D. Obviously, they were pretty intimate and

(tape goes dead)

... once we were walking in the country and a thunder storm came up. And she was talking -- she used to take Aiken's (?) stuff to make her careless -- and she said, "Welcome, beautiful rain!" with her arms out wide, and let the thing come down on us.

Well, I remember a story of once in Rutherford when Ezra Pound was walking around -- he had jaundice which was the only reason he came to America

JCT: He had jaundice?

WCW: Jaundice. He finally got over it, but he had a sweater -- one of my brother's which he used -- and we were walking around the streets of Rutherford. I said to him, "The new wheat" -- the winter wheat was coming up -- I said to him, "Well, Ezra, the wheat is coming up to greet you." And he said, "Well, it's the only intelligent wheat I've ever seen!"

JCT: Well, was that about his last visit to this country?

WCW: Yes.

JCT: Until 1945.

WCW: Yeah. Well, we've drifted apart. I've heard many stories of

July 23, 1953

**JCT:** This is William Carlos Williams reading THE UNISON, a poem inspired by time spent in Wilmington, Vermont. Would you and Mrs. Williams like to talk about the poem and how it came about?

**WCW:** Well, it had rained during the night and we took a little walk down this pasture.

**WCW:** Yes it had rained. There was absolutely no one about us at the time. It was on the camp site where the boys have gone for years. It's very romantic and very impressive. It's pure Vermont -- on and old farm. We know the place so well. In the middle of it is a gravestone.

**FW:** Apparently in this pasture was a family graveyard.

**WCW:** And they left it untouched.

**FW:** The only thing that's left was this little stone of a child.

**WCW:** Who had died perhaps of diptheria or something of that sort.

It's very pathetic and very impressive in surroundings that are very lovely, the surroundings that are described in the poem -- the old farm that's practically ready to cave in.

**FW:** Which, by the way, was burned down by lightning last year, remember?

**WCW:** Well, not that farm. Will you stop it just a minute? I want to read this through

**JCT:** Now, Dr. Williams reading --

**WCW:** THE QUALITY OF HEAVEN. (Dr. Williams reads the poem).