DR. WILLIAMS TO MR. FORD

The Overturned Lake by Charles Henri Ford (The Little Man Press, Cincinnati, O. $2)

Oct. 23, 1941

Dear Ford:

I'm tired of praising books that no one else enjoys. After all I like something in every book written by a friend, otherwise I'd say nothing. Very soon, tonight perhaps, I'm going to stop writing anything more about others' work, no more hours spent commenting on anything. If I don't quit it I'll shortly be doing nothing else because someone I like is always asking me to write and tell him what I think of his new book he has written. I don't give a God damn about letting him know what I think. If he sends me a book I look at it and if I enjoy it that's all anyone should expect of me. I don't ask anyone to tell me what he thinks of what I do. Especially I detest people who say they "like" my work. Geezus H. Christ! It's all right from innocent people, like nurses and doctors but not from writers. What we want is to have our books, not sell, that isn't it, but work. That's it. And how few of them show they work.

With that preamble, probably meaningless - the poem that gives your book its name deserves all credit - quite outside of any "school" or classification. I can't go into critical evaluation - not, especially, in my present mood of fatigue and thick headedness. It's an effective poem in anybody's world and should be valued as such. It turns the mind over, cuts under the muck and shows the "lake" in us all. I enjoy it and expect to go on enjoying it whenever I turn it up as time goes on.

Some of the ABCs are effective also, all of a piece with the imagination: they stick together because they are of one thrust and not pastiche - they do "make" and do "go" - some are trite. Stupid remark. You know that as well as or better than I do.

All this to say that the more coherent poems are my favorites - metrically coherent as well as in the images whether inverted or not - that makes no difference to me.

Sometimes, though, you become metrically incoherent. The line crumbles to so much rubble and sand. It is a modern tendency. In an effort to get over some conformation of ideas or words the line is completely lost. I am still unable to see any reason for this. Maybe I'm wrong in this. You may only be making that ideal line of variable, normal language that I most enjoy. I leave it to you. You do use language as I like to see it used, flexibly - with contempt for conventional measures - as an ear for conventional measures augmented.