Nov. 2, 1931

R. I, Box 363

Palo Alto, Calif.

Dear Dr Williams:

Both of your letters came. Awfully sorry
I didn't answer the first. I have been literally frying in
hell the last couple of months and have done next to nothing
that I should have done. But either my wife or myself will
get the stuff off to you in a day or so.

Angel Flores (Dept. of Rom. Lang., Cornell, Ithaca, N.Y.)
is setting up business with some sort of subsidized press,
and is printing a small book of mine. If you don't find
anybody you like better, you might try him. I'm glad you
have at least got the book together: I trust it contains
Mark Anthony and the other xxxxxx poems never reprinted
from that group. Your sea-elephant I thought one of the best
things you have ever done. White Mule is fine so far. If
you will only make it a novel and not a religious tract or
D.A.R. propaganda it ought to be great stuff.

Your pet bull-pup, Zukofsky, is getting on my nerves; one
of these days I am going to kick his teeth out past his tail.
If I were you -- or Pound -- I think I'd try to tie him up.

We have acquired a daughter since I last wrote you -- now
six months old. For a couple of months she was almost as
much of a problem as the baby in your story, but we seem to
have her about straightened out by now.

Watch out for stories by Achilles Holt. An ex-student of
mine.

Yours,

August 18, 1932

R. 1, Box 363
Palo Alto, Calif.

Dear Dr Williams:

Your night letter came while I was shaving. My reason for sending nothing to Contact was quite simple: I supposed as a matter of course that whatever gentle interest you had felt in my work vanished when I took to using rhyme. I have not seen Contact, and the reports of its contents that I have had have not much aroused my curiosity, but I am only too glad to contribute to anything you are editing if you wish me to contribute. I don't believe, however, that you will feel the slightest interest in the two pieces I enclose. If I am right, I shan't mind at all if you send them back. If you want them, however, please let me know as soon as possible, for I had already offered them to a couple of other magazines and shall have to withdraw them.

Your recent book of stories was very fine, Old Doc Rivers especially. A few of the more purely clinical sketches struck me as merely things that had happened, but most of them seemed to come off very well.

I am, as usual, wholly unable to grasp the significance of your critical and editorial activities. As editor of the H. and H. I recently examined a poem by a person named Reeve, an attempt to do Blake's "Into the dangerous world I leapt" (I quote from memory) in imagery that was a stale imitation of Bateau Ivre, and in a stale and bumpy blank verse. The poem was accompanied by a letter from Reeve, sloppy sales talk, and quoted at length a letter from yourself praising the poem in the most astonishing and fantastic terms. You really ought to know better than to write that kind of a letter about that kind of a poem to that kind of a person. You ought to know better than to let an ass like Zukofsky revise your best poems in public.

I have read Zukofsky's anthology. It was a good idea to get together so many of your best poems from obscure sources, but Full Moon, a very lovely poem, is ruined by the ampulation. Eliot's poem is mild, but has a few nice lines. The rest of the book seems to me bullshit -- in the pejorative sense, I mean. That goes for Pound, who is about as funny

August 27, 1932

Dear Dr. Williams:

I am glad you liked my story, but it ~~was~~ is the first and only story I have written in 12 years and the last I am likely to write for 12 more, so I can't send you another. The thing is a little too tenuous for my own taste, however: I have been revising it and trying to toughen it up a little, but ~~the theme admits of very little~~ improvement.

As to Reeve's poem, it **was** in blank verse of the most abominably jog-trot kind. There were not half a dozen irregular rhymes in the whole damned thing. If you'll obtain another copy and send it on to me, I'll mark it for you. You have been reading your young hopefuls for so long that I don't believe you would recognize a triolet.

Further, the corpses in the Hound and Horn are not laid out neatly. Would to God they were. I can't see the difference between them and the stuff you are cheering for. I am gradually getting a little good stuff in, but I don't think you'll like it.

What the devil is a willful formlessness? Formlessness is what one achieves without being willful. It is the state of Natural Man, the pristine sophomore. Do you honestly think that the Widow's Lament and your sea elephant are formless? Willfully or otherwise? If you do, you are nutty. They are as formless as Herrick. You haven't the genius for willful formlessness and cantalk about it with impunity. But your talk probably does a good deal of damage to the young nit-wits whose indolence and incompetence it flatters. If you think you are turning up (or out) geniuses, you ought to teach college comp for a while. You'd get the thrill of your life.

Anyway, I'll be glad to subscribe to four issues of Contact if you or somebody will tell me what it costs.

P.S. The questions in this letter are purely rhetorical. No answer is necessary.