August 3, 1949

Dear Dr. Williams,

(Or may I take the cue from your signature and call you Bill?) Now I have the pleasant chance to answer your thank-you note about the party, since I am in "retreat" in the deep country where the hours are longer than in town.

Anent the people at the party: apparently the man from Bali was De Groot (?), Elyse Asher's husband. I'm not too sure of the spelling of either name. The "rather dark middleaged man" (I'd say youngish -- with a crew haircut and a lame leg) with the pretty blond wife was Garrett Oppenheim, the son of James Oppenheim the poet. I believe that is the one you had reference to, and I take the hint from your saying that he seemed more balanced than some of the others. He's a grand person and one of the most poised, verbally and temperamentally, of the people I know. He's kind and good-natured, too, without being insincere and cloying. It's a tricky combination. The "older lady" (she'd squirm to hear that) was one of my Brooklyn college colleagues, Dr. Nutley. Her husband is an artist of sorts. The "interesting" Legman made my skin crawl with his flagrant and illbred excitement, and his arms flagging everybody's attention. No doubt he had juicy items and perhaps even facts to give, but his voice was hard to take and he hogged the conversation -- when most of us wanted to hear you. Of course I missed most of it, but that was inevitable with all the drinks to pass around and saying hello and saying goodby. Also, at least one person had

There was a review of my French book in the April issue of College English; short but flattering -- which helps the pinched ego of small fry like me. I'm cleaning up my thesis ms. for the Press these days.

too much, viz. Norman. I wondered how it was at his apartment. So much for those present.

Do you know Henry W. Wells of Columbia U. and several books on poetry: Elizabethan and contemporary? I asked him to come, but he was in Maine by then. Next day I received a nice letter from him, with regrets. He had delightful things to say about you, and I am taking the liberty to quote from his note. "If the occasion should arise, give him my unfailing regards. As it happens in five minutes I shall be typing off a chapter about him in what I hope to be my next book -- on the development of language in modern poetry, swinging between the translucent and the opaque. He is in many ways the most sympathetic to my own ideals of any of our poets now writing....He is the prince of explorers where the language of poetry is concerned... He's wonderful at his best, and no one on earth is less of a snob -- which, unhappily, is a pertinent remark in the field of poetry-criticism.... our cottage by the ocean. The ocean sparkles and is salty -- like Williams."

I am living in a sea of green and blue, with a river near by. It's flat and unimaginative but it's country. There is relief for the body and the psyche to be islanded here, miles and memories away from city tensions. Here it's important how soon and long the rooster remembers morning, whether the river is right for fishing, how close the storm comes, whose car wheels spin on the sand road. Major and minor matters change places for a time. And that's refreshing.

Please give my regards to your family -- if they recall my name at all. And best wishes to you.

Yellow and Blue

( for Jamini Roy )

Yellow and blue
is a way of flight.
The apple is true
and the arm a night
long sadness. Her eye
a white fish of form
and her lip a lie
that the worm
forgot to chew;
for the apple became
an egg and the two
eyes being the same.

It is a question of earth ever:
of the fluted pieces of clay.
A question of love.
Of the devotion of the eye
to the object, of old
rains and young lovers
A question of humility.
Of time's suspect blue
of the yellow spread
of the sun in the throat.

Yellow and blue
is a colorless silence.
The bird is new
and the brown fence
does not surround
her ever white eyes;
a green round
of her thighs
breaks on the yellow
of the egg as it must.
The earth being slow
in turning to dust.

A question of earth ever.
The formless most beautiful
form of death. Of clay
of trees, of old women;
of affinities between the earth
and her hair like wasp's nest.
A question of earth ever.
And the air that blows
yellow and blue
around our perplexities.

......

["2", "And the thought is lost, or atleast lost for good verbal expression\nand another thought enters like a cold breeze. So", "A manner like women\n( For the rose on the rose-\nTree smells,\nAs of arm-pits,\nA special love,\nThe delicate distaste\nOf pleasures lost\nBetween the body )", "And then again,", "And a manner not like women\nGold in their mouth, glaze\nIn their eyes ( the same glitter )\nOf an illusion of the past\nThat was not the real past,\nBut a remembered self-blinded one\nYesterday\nConcupiscent as the moon\nOn Flat white faces\nBehind plate glass windows", "Lost again,", "Not shedding like a tree\nIn age, its gaudy acquisitions", "A manner of growing old\nLike trees\nLike women.", "And then finally,", "Men in old countires seem to have it.", "So then, tell me how can I piece it all together to make a coherent\npoem, for the playboys of Poetry to dissect and explore for the\nhidden craft in the poem. Perhaps I am not a poet afterall. At any\nrate this frustration of a few words is most painful . . . . . . . . . . . . .

# Old Rains

Simply say
The mute clown yonder
And the sufficient singer there
Are the living ghosts
At the eye's concupiscent remove
The private part played
For the public eye
Which is always the self.

For the laugh we stopped
And the tear that never broke
Its eye, the impotent
Excitement
Of our lives
Lies in the seeking
For them elsewhere.

......

Letter to Ezra Pound

( for Wm Carlos Wms... )

1

Not the shadow filled tomorrow
Nor the last night's hesitant recede
But the present.
Always the immigrant now
In the heart
Where dissatisfaction builds
Like sea tangle:
Break a branch without
The window and flower
It within this room
In the precise bottle of prussic acid
And if the rose does bloom
Is it but an old man's old mind?

5

2

Ah, dear Ezra, how your head
Burns in the grate, beside
The flower that beds slowly -
And Bill, moist-eyed, old-shaken
Sings of your cruel jests
Your swollen head and your utter
Lack of consideration.

Sing William Sing
For a lost playmate
Now cheery-eyed, now-stubborn, now-
Unbelieving behind bars
Conjuring chinese rhyme and ancient myth
Sing William Sing
Sing a sudden tear
For the only fish
In the only pond
Lonely, lonely
Ezra Pound.

..................

6

5 /16/ 54.

44 Marredpally
Secunderabad, India.

Dear Bill:

How the time flies. Your letter was of Oct. 26, and here I am some six months later trying to reply you. You, from whom I could hard hardly wait for a reply from. But not from any indifference let me assure you. Circumstances and the busyness of my present day living conspire to dim the fondest of memories that when the thought does come on a sudden like a storm, the sad reaction stays on for days like a numb pain.

Why should I write a poem
that most of me is dead
in the act of living

That the long fingered trees which reached
the snow to my early bed
stand now rooted to the earth......

So I started the other day. Yes Bill most of me is now dead. I am leading the sober, unexciting life of an Engineer in Govt service; and trying of course to be as good in it as I am equipped with. I am making a good husband, a good friend, a good citizen; Call me Mr. K.

But that is only the skin of me. Scratch it and you will find me self-conscious and overfull of humility, sensitive to the point of pain, intellectual and uneasy. My present living seems something false, a fixed period of slavery which I am serving, and from which when I am liberated, I will fly me off to the Eiffell Tower or the Empire State. There to be part of the million perversions and million excitations which my self is really constituted of.

Ah nuts Bill, I am lonesome for the place by the fireplace at 9 Ridge Road, where I'd discovered my self-decided parent. And so on a loneley cold night at 9 Ridge Road when Mrs Williams brought me an extra blanket. I remember most what I must need to foregt.

After having got a poem of mine in the Indian Supplement of the Atlantic I have become sort of known in my own country and editors have started asking me for some little contribution. And looking for same in my papers I find one or two letters of mine written to you but never posted, in the USA, which I find so so flattering to my ego and fascinating reading from the point of view of an Hindu discovering the syphilisation of the Twentieth Century Western World. One of them written after an Easter eve party at the Cosgriffes in Denver, one after a visit to a Klee exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Which makes me want to publish them. You often wrote to me that you'd like to include one or two of my letters in your AB and finally I couldn't due to lack of space.

Tell me Bill, would you, could you, please, edit my
letters to you, which are with you, for publication. Do
you think people would be interested in reading them. Do
you think they make the grade all right. I am interested
in getting them in Botteghe Oscure or New World Writing
published by the New American Library of World Literature
or in the New Directions Annuals... something under the
title ' Letters to an American Poet '. Perhaps you wouldnt
be able to spare the time or the energy. Please let me
know....... I have started writing again, mostly prose
though, and meanwhile I am trying to get together a taut
small volume of verse.

Tell me Bill, do you think it's worth while my living as
long as you. And what have you written lately. And have you
fallen in love lately. My last love was the snow in NYcity
or the narrow stone bridges on the Seine, cant just make
up my mind.

Else why dont you adopt me so I can some and see you both

First fold here

Sender's name and address--

BY AIR MAIL

AIR LETTER

IF ANYTHING IS ENCLOSED
THIS LETTER WILL BE SENT
BY ORDINARY MAIL

Third fold here

10

August 25, 1955

Dear Bill:

I feel quite ashamed to be writing to you like this almost after an year or so. It is not that you have been out of my mind for that is not true. It is not that I have been too busy. For, while the daily problems of being a public servant, and of taking care of nine month old daughter which we now have, do occupy me, I could have always sat down and typed out a letter to you. Somehow I just couldn't do it. Perhaps you understand. I do not think I have been particularly happy these few years of my life in India after America. I have not been particularly creative either, for I have not written anything considerable lately though of course I am publishing all my old, rejected stuff, which strangely is being accepted these days. But I have taken on myself to bring out a magazine called EAST & WEST sometime before the end of this year. If you read a magazine called TRACE, which a James Boyer May brings out from HOLLYWOOD by way of a little directory of little magazines all over the world, you'd have known about it for TRACE, of some issues back, contained a small advert. re: my EAST & WEST. Anyway I have decided to bring out this thing, and though the response has not been at all satisfactory as yet, I have hopes that it will come out by Christmastime. I am getting stuff from Australia and England, and the West Coast U.S., and the East, for this issue, will be represented by a few translations from the Indian languages. I know that if this thing comes out it will open the eyes of quite a few people all over the world. So far it is only my singlehanded effort, and I am even going to sink the money needed to bring out the first number. Will you, can you, please send me something for this. A couple of poems perhaps, or a short story. And can you persuade Ezra Pound, and any of the other names you know well enough, so you can ask them without embarrassment, to send me some thing for the magazine. The reason why I want a few ' names ' in the first number is quite obvious. I can assure you that I will not do you any discredit, for if it is to come out at all I know it will be worth all this effort of mine. I know you have your own affairs to take care of, and that what I am asking of you is not a very small thing, but I hope you can understand what it will do for the magazine, and for my effort. Please try.

Karl Shapiro was heretofore the other day but I was away a hundred miles in the forest building a power house, and we missed each other. And I hear that those whom he met talking of nothing else but dollar aid for publishing Indian writings, Ford Foundation blah blah blah. He must have felt pretty bad and I wished that I knew earlier that he was here, so I could have gone over and met him, and atleast tried to repay some part of the kindness which his country showed me while I was there. He was here trying to collect translations for an International number of POETRY, and what these people discussed was not poetry but handouts. Anyway I have written him a letter trying to apollogise for the bad deal which my fellow-citizens gave him.

Did you read the obituary which TIME magazine gave

Dear Bill:

I have just read in TIME that you have been awarded the $5000.00 fellowship award of the Academy of American Poets, and hasten to congratulate. It should have been a happy New Year gift.

I have sent you the Autumn number of East and West with your poem Sappho, be comforted in it. Hope you like the magazine.

Its funny though that I have brought out two issues of the magazines
solely through my own efforts and money, and though several people
have had great praise for it etc I have not been able to make it
even remotely a go-able proposition. My money is limited, and if I
had any more I'd rather get a book of my own poems printed, as are
my energies and enthusiasm. So I am getting to despair again. I have
interested enough of the younger writers in the US so that their
work keeps flooding in. I have interested the US people in India,
for them to invite me to a literary seminar recently held in
Bombay wherein Allen Tate was the distinguished pundit-invitee. I
had an interesting time talking to him, about several things incl-
uding you and modern American poetry etc etc.

But James Laughlin I have not seen here nor heard of his movements.
If as you say he is actively connected with the Ford Foundation, he
is who I should be able to contact. But him I can't. Perhaps in a
sense he is too big and I am too remotely placed in India, even
geographically placed, I am in a place which is like Denver in
the US, for us to get together. Of course I have sent him
copies of the magazine. Could you, would you do something
about it please. I am looking for a sponsor so to say, or at
least an assurance that a certain fixed number of copies will
be bought. For my part I cannot handle the commercial
aspects of the magazine, its distribution etc for several
extraneous reasons, on account of my being in Government
service etc. Would you be able to help in any manner whatsoever?

I have still not received any of your latest books which you
promised to have the publishers send. Nor that Sheeler
photography which you promised a long while back.

I am alright. We have two girls now. I cannot say that I am
at peace with the world or myself, but I have accepted the
situation. Several of my dreams have come true, but as usual
not as one would expect them. I still dream of course, impossible ones.

Our very best to you both. This is just to say that I do think
of you every now and then and I would be happy to hear from
you. Have you anything which you could send for the next
number. And could you have any of the others whom you would be
knowing well enough to send some of their stuff to me. For
instance Ezra Pound. I hear he was favourable impressed with
the first number... What of the Letters which Thirlwall
was collecting. I hope I get a copy when they are published

2

so familiar to my ears".. at 23 I too thought I cd eat on Chopin.."

And yet he too was xkaringxhix doing his share of good in this world. Was he not the best disc jockey this side of the Rockies? Was he not very much liked the people? and was he not, in his small way, sneaking in a little bit of culture to the people whenever he could?

And all I had done was to rake up his old wounds and hurt him a little!!!!

Take David for instance. He is in financial straits and his immediate problem would be to win a thousand dollar prize on some radio programme. And as if things were not bad already his tooth should come out.

"I swear I am going to commit suicide. Where can I get $ 90 at this moment? And if tomorrow he does commit suicide can I write to his parents in India" He did not have ninety dollars to replace a tooth?"

And I am really afraid for his sake. But what can I do? laugh it as a joke or lend him ninety dollars which I cannot afford. Such is life, I suppose.

I saw your picture in the NY Times Bk Review. I did not like it or any of the others there. There is something about American newwriting and publi-city that reduces life to the insignificant size of newsprint, precise and relative to something else.

Am reading Beethoven's life. What can I say about it? One is so awed by distance and greatness that one cannot conceive of the littleness of great men. And when they say that he was petty and inordinately haughty, that he was a million small things, how can I picture its truth. All within my experience is his music, which clouds over all else in its scope.........

Am spending a very sterile month, working forty hours a week, visiting national parks etc etc. While ifx one is alive, one lives inspite of all else. That is what baffles me. To live because one has to and knows no other state of being, is that all matters really? I will not believe it.

That's all for now. Let me invest my dullness on you.........

Scena

Saturday.

Dear Bill:

Here are three poems. Each could have been written by a different person. But I wrote all three of them. I want you to comment on them, especially the ' grandmother poem '. Can it be anything more than a clever, amusing and heartless poem, and is it those at all? I have attempted at a certain new imagery but am not sure if I have succeeded. Stanza 6 bothers me. I have included both versions. I like 1) better but how can thighs be compared to roof? besides the ripeness of Summer wheat is a cliche wh. may be sayed only by the word' belly'. 2) is more exact but less poetic' to me. Which do you think should stay? There are moments when I like the poem. At others I feel that the only thing worth saying is the proverb wh. I have used. But this poem is the latest I wrote and it has not stopped bothering me....... I expected your letter on Friday, I have come to be able to rather correctly guess at when you would write etc. But this time I was off..

I have been reading some of the ballads of Bertolt Brecht.
Do you know his work? However much I dislike the ballad form, I feel
that he is the only fully social poet that I like. I feel that he is
a better poet than Mayakovsky and both wrote shamelessly about their
own times of stress and political despair. Eg. Brecht's " Children's
Crusade 1939 " demands the emotional weakness of the audience as much
as any of the present-day Italian movies. Yet for all its weakly
sentimental content there is a certain feeling created in the poem
itself which gives it its great beauty..... Am re-reading Rilke. He
was my first discovery in great modern poetry. But there have been so
many imitations of Rilke in the present day, that Rilke himself seems
to take on some of the dross of his imitators... Rilke, Kafka, Klee
and Berg people who seemed to think pretty similiarly and yet in each
the expression was through a different medium. Each so brilliantly..
An old woman in a black cape walking, and an automobile in a black

for John Everyman, Poet

( d. 1950......... )

Nobody thought
this was how poor John would go
One friend at the funeral was heard
to say:
" All these thirty years
I'd never known it'd be so".

Was one, I'm told, much given to silence
and a few drunken gusts of bri lliant talk
Had a number of friends, poets, painters
and the pavement-people, as he'd say
Had on occasion been seen at the galleries
with the wife of Consolidated Chemicals.

Adolescence, my boy, is a funny thing.
I was in Paris, penniless, didn't own a thing
( and what a time of it!.... )
Paris is so prone to pornography --
was a favorite saying.

At thirty his voice was milder
and the critics said" Marriage
has mellowed his tastes." " Best
love poetry since Donne
raved the ecstatic one.

( And to the museum of arts
they drove in herds
to hear him recite
his latest verse......... )

In his fortieth year he started to write
his autobiography. Friends said" It's only right
you should be the one
to record our fun."
All my friends are geniuses, he began.........

That year they predicted
he'd surely be
in the Yeats Anthology.

Fifty years closed round him a new
fear, but not of death.
You know my friends, he'd say
I've had visions too.........
" Someday emerging atlast
from this terrifying vision"
I must write or I'll burst
God give me time, he'd pray.

Under the Bo-tree

It is said:
ant formed an anthill round his head
white loads fell from sky on his winter body
yellow leaves spread sunfull desires on his skin
A green arm descended, branchlike to earth
Like sucking cobwebs navels blinded his eye.

And the BO-tree rustled a leaf of sound
and said : This love, this incident will repeat
for other men and other trees. Why, my friend
for Time will soon eat us out?

And he:
Not against Time
for I contain that within this beaten body
Not against you
for the green that shouts through you shoots
through these of flesh and bone
Neither against water
( these eyes are two fishes
within this unwilling sea )
Nor the white horse that drops
its rider to earth.
Not against death ........
I am the man tomorrow and you
are the tree.

Not a struggle this,
no conspiracy this that rustles your leaves
trembles this body of mine
The green arm will swell again
and white will be the white-long snow
No, not an un-being, my friend.
The bird is not deaf
that does not speak to you its song
The stones know their waters too
No, not a silence this

Put a light within my head that revolves
which I must, above all, repeat for you.

.........