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A Fearful Resilience

The letters of the poets Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams begin as those of an admirer to an icon, and end as a dance of equals. Levertov was a young, married poet developing her powers while the legendary Williams had just suffered his first stroke when Levertov wrote to him for the first time. Their connection surpasses all limitations of gender and age to quickly become one of the most engaged and profitable literary correspondences of their century.

This is the first letter Denise ever wrote to Bill:

Dear William Carlos Williams,

I stopped myself from writing to you for a long time because of a self-conscious idea that it might seem my motive was to draw attention to myself, collect your autograph, or something like that. But I've decided this is silly. If a man is a force in one's life, as you are in mine & my husband's, if his work has given not only great pleasure & excitement but is felt to enter the fabric of one's thinking and feeling & one's way of trying to work, he certainly ought to know it. So, thank you.

I got the address from Bob Creeley.

yours sincerely,

Denise Levertov Goodman

October 1951

My dear Denise Goodman,

A man should be able to react "big" to his admirers, it's due them, they do not throw their praise around carelessly. And so I always feel mean when I look into the back of my own head and see what a small figure I make to myself. I am not what they think. I am not the man I should be for THEIR sakes, they deserve something more. It is in fact the duty of the artist to assume greatness. I cannot. What a fool.

I can't believe even what I know be the truth of my own worth. When an individual says he or she "lives" by what I exhibit I get a sudden fright. But at the same time if I myself live by certain deeds why should not others do the same? But we are so weak, what we do seems the worst futility. I am willing to go down to nothing but I don't want to feel I'm dragging anyone down with me.

Here I sit in my little hole like a toad. Thank you for your letter.

Faithfully yours,

W.C. Williams

November 13th 1951

By 1953, Levertov was regularly sending Williams her poetry, including what appears to be a version of her classic poem, "A Story, A Play," which he goes on to quote at length in his response letter.

Dear Denise:

There is something wrong, but easily cured, with the beginning of your first poem. Omit the first line. That aside I am as much as ever impressed with you. There's something indescribably appealing to me in what you write and I think appealing to anyone who reads you with attention. I'd like to be able to indicate more clearly what it is but so far it has escaped collaring. That I suspect is exactly what you want. It is a problem that eludes me.

You need a book of your closely chosen work. I think, if you thought out and selected your choice very carefully, it would be one of the most worthwhile books of the generation. It would have to be a small book squeezed up to get the gists alone of what you have to say. Much would have to be omitted. You may not be old enough yet to know your own mind for it would have to be a thoughtful, adult book of deep feeling that would reveal you in what may not want to be revealed. I am curious to know what you are thinking — you never say. But you reveal more by your poems than can be easily deciphered and that is what draws a reader on. Perhaps you will never be able to say what you want to say. In that case you make me feel that the loss will be great.

levertov

A small closely chosen book is what I want to see packed with the power of your self-denials, your repressions — which would be revealed in the beauty of whatever it is a lover and a poet discovers in his heart. Things that cannot from the necessary reticenses of a sensitive person, cannot be expressed but in a poem. It is the tension within ourselves that drive us to confess what is wrung from us.

Sappho must have been a powerful wench to stand what would have torn a woman apart otherwise. The tensions she must have withstood without yielding have made her poems forever memorable. You can say it was her fine ear that did it but she would not have been as voluble as she appears to have been without the other. Hers must have been a sound constitution in the first place. She was probably worn thin with the intensity of her longings which she refused to have beaten.

The dread word has been spoken.

Cut and cut again whatever you write — while you leave by your art no trace of your cutting — and the final utterance will remain packed with what you have to say. The stream does not ripple or at best go wild save by the swiftness of its flow as well as by the obstruction it encounters. But in the end you must say whatever you have to say, without honesty completely outspoken you will not succeed in moving yourself or the world.

'And the Minotaur will devour.
it's life against death, and
                       death wins
and will uproot the rocks, too, for pastime.'

'Deformed life, rather:
the maskfaced buyers of bric-a-brac
are the detritus only - of a
ferocious energy -'

                      'A monster.
Greed, is it? Alive, yes - '

'Whose victims
multiply quicker than it eats
& stubbornly
            flourish in the shadow of it.'

Whoever wrote that, for it is only quoted, knew what he was doing. It can stand alone, without explanation and no matter what the connotation, and it will constitute a poem.

Pardon this screed, something set me off as it does whenever I have a letter from you. Chuck it away when you have done reading it.

Regards to your husband. Love from Floss and myself.

Yours

Bill

August 23rd 1953

Denise wrote the following letter after a visit with Bill and his wife Florence Williams. Denise and her husband Mitch Goodman were in Guadalajara at the time. After WCW passed in 1963, Denise continued to write to his widow until Florence's death in 1976.

Dear Bill,

That was a wonderful afternoon I had with you. I've thought of it very often in the confused weeks since then — almost 2 months. Now I'm beginning to feel clearer in the head. I was in a daze at first; partly because of the new country - so different from any place in Europe. And partly because not very long before leaving N.Y.  I had fallen in love - with someone who loved me - & though I knew I was going away and would very likely never see him again, & that had to be so because of Mitch and Niki, it wasn't until I was in the plane, and thereafter, that I really did know it.

But I have a fearful resilience; and a good marriage; so here I am, alive & kicking. (More or less.) It's sunny all day every day, there's a wonderful luxuriance of delicate flowers with an iron will to grow out of the dusty cracked ground, & we have a brand-new house on the edge of town, where the prairie begins; & cowboys and cattle & donkeys & Indians, on foot or sometimes on bicycles, with huge loads on their heads, pass by all day. Guadalajara is rather Americanized - has glossy super-markets, etc., & is growing like mad — but it has old houses too, & beautiful jumbled-up markets full of strange smells and bright colours.

We have to pay much more rent than we expected - older houses we looked at didn't have a place for Nik to play, or were too small. But we like the house, and the lower cost of food, schooling etc will make it come out alright I think.

We heard that John Herrmann was living just outside of town in a place called Thaquepaque. I'd never been able to get hold of a copy of "What Happens" but remembering your praise in the autobiography we thought we'd go & pay our respects. We finally tracked down the house but he was out. We'll try again another day - though someone afterwards told us that he's in pretty bad shape, has been ill. We saw his little blond son, about 2 1/2 years old, or 3 maybe.

Nik has started at the American school here. It's not a good school, but we tried out a Mexican private school first & that was worse, & at least he feels a little less strange in this one, & likes his teacher. Most of the children are Mexican & so is the teacher but the tuition is in English (of sorts). In the afternoon he digs up the yard here with a friend he's made — they're making a system of canals (there's a convenient faucet on the garden wall, meant for a hose, which we don't yet have).

I don't speak much Spanish yet but have been reading some, with a dictionary.

I have a table by a window, and a view. In the foreground workmen are building a house - one of the workmen is about ten years old, & has trouble getting up a ladder with a bucket of cement on his head & the grown men tease him, & he answers back in a little treble voice — but he seems to have a pretty good time too. In the distance are mountains.

I wish you were here in the sunshine. I love you dearly. The most.

I reread the Fall of Tenochtitlan in Mexico City where we spent a few days before coming here. We brought all our copies of your books along, except A Voyage to Pagany which got put away by mistake. Aside from you, we have Stevens' collected poems, a good deal of D.H. Lawrence, the Viking 5 vol. poetry anthology, The Golden Bough, Don Quixote — & not much else. Oh, the Cantos & the "A.B.C. of Reading." And some books by Paul Goodman, pretty wild.

I'll put in a few poems. I feel as if I could work well here — started right in. Mitch has had to finish off a travel article so he hasn't got back to any real work yet but he mailed it yesterday &  thinks he'll be able to settle down to work now; he needs to get his breath and stop worrying about money.

I did write to Marianne Moore, but she couldn't see me — wasn't well. Do you remember, you wanted me to go?

With love from

Denise

March 12th 1956

in 1906 with a donkey

WCW wrote back with the following:

Dear Denise:

Maybe it's just as well that you have — saved yourself to go on writing verse though you may regret it. There's no way to know what that beast of love may not do to one. Without the drive to write, and write, and write against all that may occur to stop you nothing matters. Regret is as good a goad as anything else. If you had been overwhelmed by love nothing may have come of it but satiety - unless you had gone on from love to love. Writing always better and better, more pointedly, with your eyes wider and wider poen and words cleaner, more stripped of the inessential, cleared of every redundancy alone will give you any lasting satisfaction. It may be that women are different from nen in that, they have to strip themselves barer than men do, the history of Sappho seems to indicate it - nothing held back, absolutely nothing, complete incontinence, but the cost is exorbitant. Women can rarely do it, they are physically ruined.

Not that they should not be but the cost is more than they can endure. And nothing less than completely laying themselves bare is any good. They frequently do as Sappho did, is reported to have done, turn to love of individuals of their sex — though Sappho turned to a sailor at the end — presumably a young sailor. What could she do, men apparently proved impossible to her. They only wanted the one thing soon exhausted. But she was to be satisfied with only the greatest subtleties which existed only in herself. Only the putting down of the deeply felt poem in its infinite and resourceful variety could relieve her. No man could give her what she required. The poet that is not in essence a woman as well as a man can know the  divisions of the words can amount to anything.

But the physical satisfaction of indulging yourself or herself to the ultimate implies so many dangers that most women fail to indulge themselves enough. Better to be a writer with the imagination taking on the load.

Hope you met John Herrmann, sorry to hear he is not well. So he has a child. Good for him. I'm glad you like Guadalajara, they say it is a beautiful city. The poems are not as good as the ones you read to us the last time you were here — what can we expect. Keep writing.

Yours,

Bill

Denise Levertov died in 1997. You can purchase the collected correspondence of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, edited by Christopher MacGowan, here. You can find more photos of Williams here and listen to him reading here.

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photo by maxyme g. delisle 

"Ensemble" - Coeur de Pirate (mp3)

"Intermission" - Coeur de Pirate (mp3)

"Comme des Enfants" - Coeur de Pirate (mp3)

Comments

[A]

fuck those shoes.

everyone should write fucking letters.

I mean that sincerely

where else will I be exposed to such things? no where else. TR 4--->.