A Fellow Feeling

The alphabetic characters of Denise Levertov & William Carlos Williams

Edited by means of Christopher MacGowan New Directions, !998

At single time we expected letters and rejoiced when they arrived. Now that we are not for a like reason accustomed, nor so thrilled, the sight of a handwritten wrapper can still arouse a curious, childish faith A message has been delivered. Our possess letters pass out of our hands into another time, a kind of past-unalterable, pleasantly faded, our hold part in the transaction above and the next step, the answer or failure to answer, as serviceable as done with too.

It may be that e-mail, with its freshnes and spe is bringing an extreme point to the reckless feeling that the die has been cast, the whiff of dust and time in the column office. What might take the place of the aged ceremony of sealing up words in paper and sending them without into the widening rings of a correspondence that goe upon for years? It is tempting to claim nothing could

Fortunately the be fond of of seeing other people's alphabetic characters never dies.

This correspondence between sum of two units poets is not a big individual nothing like an excavation of either life. It is spacious and brief, the record of a friendship of ten years, a lyric, not an epic. For greatest in quantity of it, the sweetness of attitude the sum of two units exhibit towards each other-though each was capable of stirring up a wind around those nearer them-seems to be that of the poet's mind at quiescence in its natural subject.

A certain hearty, groaning self-pity, pity for himself as a man station down in a maddening agriculture was something Williams had always allowed himself in alphabetic characters but it is a drained face he revolves to this young admirer. In his first alphabetic character he erupts with a baffled self-portrait in rejoinder to Levertov's praise.

What a small figure I make to myself. What a fool .... We are thus weak, what we do strike one as beings the worst futility. I am willing to move down to nothing but I don't want to have feeling that I am dragging anyone down with me Here I sit in my little perforation like a toad,

Even for a man considered by the agency of his own son to be ,more intimate by dint of letter than in the parlor," this is an astonishing leap not upon the page into the possible profitable graces of a stranger. It was 1951 the year of his first knock If he knew the work to which Levertov made timid reference ("If a man is a force in one's life if his work ... is felt to go into the fabric of one's thinking and feeling and one's way of trying to work, lie certainly ought to know it"), he didn't say with equal reason But a year or sum of two units later a visit came about, and of the like kind quick liking on both sides that for a certain number of time after their meeting they the pair indulged by mail in a kind of basking, like companions in the water, flat though one was the lifeguard.

The year Denise Levertov was born, 1923 was the year Williams published the couple The Great American Novel and Spring and All, The editor of The Dial had singled him on the outside as the one to watch, single who, might know "what the United States exigencys in order to ripen a literature." Asked for an essay about him Wallace Steven told The Dial, "one of the things I ought not to do is review Williams' volume What Columbus discovered is nothing to what Williams is looking for." Williams had a certain number of rank in the avantgarde on the contrary was not a public figure as we understand .,public" today. on the contrary "lanced through with light and space," Gilbert Sorrentino wrote drawn out afterward, the poems of Spring and All were "the beginning of American verse per se."

This was the man to whom, in her twenties, Lever-tov got up the courage to write from Italy. She had hesitated above the letter ("I stopped myself from writing to you for a lengthy time. . . I got the address from move with a jerk Creeley"); her own temporary address, "Sori, Nr Genoa," may have serv to halfconceal her in its foreign charm. Or in fact the courage might not have been with equal reason hard to come by, given the athletic sense of her own destiny that had quicked her as a twelve-year-old to write to T s Eliot, who replied.

Then came a pause before the correspondence took not upon in the fall Of 1953 when Williams was seventy and Levertov thirty. He did not allude to the fact that he had exhausted two months of that year in the hospital for depression. The vein was sunny. This time several of Levertov's metrical compositions from the journal Origin had preced her. "Not an enslavement to dead followings That's a beginning," Williams began briskly, and launched into his have a title to ground rules, one of them a statement that could be his epitaph, "[Writing] must present to view a battle that has been difficultly won" The shadow of his be in possession of struggle with a hindered brain is in it, although he could as easily have written it in replete health, in the twenties when he was working without a new measure for piece of poetrys and a plan for something big and difficult in fiction ("I will make a big, serious portrait of my time"), or in the thirties when Levertov was still a child in England and beat was after him, "ole Bill the greatest in quantity stubborn ox in America," to write a manifesto "for preserving civilization." real soon he is offering her his articles of faith: "The stream does not ripple or at best pass wild save by the swiftness of its roll on as well as by the obstruction it encounters" (italics mine).