I suppose you must tell your father, but if you do, be sure that he promises to tell no one else. Philip lives on 10th St. and William on 9th, Fred is nearby, the Zolotows go back and forth, and on 8th Street you will certainly meet some of the boys all of the time. The only thing to say when you meet them is that you have just come to New York in order to visit your mother in New Jersey several times a week. I told them you were at Morristown when they asked for you, and Nancy took the address because she wanted to write to you. It might be best for you to pay a state or official visit to the Macdonalds and Phillipses, to maintain the deception. Besides, you will be lonely and it is better to see them than to be at the mercy of the abysses of loneliness, as you know.
//Dwight liked your review very much, and Richard liked it very much, but felt that there was not enough of the lenience in you and you were a woman with a woman with Kay Boyle. But it reads very well, it reads as if you had written literary criticism for ten years. I will send the copies today.
I was told by Dwight no sooner had I crossed the doorstep that Paul Goodman was going to attack Genesis, and from William I heard that Frank Jones, which might as well be Clement Greenberg, would review it for The Nation, and that there had been a row at Time about reviewing it at all.6 Matthiessen had not written his review, although Philip asked for it several times, and Richard had not written his, and spoke of putting it off, and when I looked dismayed, consoled me by a description of how Allen Tate had praised the book. Meanwhile Jay has written all over to say that he does not like the book, but thinks it deserves a serious review.
My last classes ended with surprising delightful prolonged applause, especially from the girls, and made me think I had perhaps not been as poor a teacher this year as I supposed. I boarded the train with Gogol’s Dead Souls, determined hereafter to read a masterpiece on each trip, and when an RAF officer sat next to me after Providence, and seemed to want to hold a conversation, I was divided in half by Gogol delightful [sic] and the feeling that I ought as a matter of conscience to hear what this instance of a great historical reality had to say. But Gogol was too profoundly farcical and I let the great historical reality go.
Dwight was speechless with a sore throat and nothing if not annoying, which made me go to Princeton where Richard and Nela were in their own ways annoying, Richard with his class which I went to and with his detailed activities, Nela with her stories of Richard, Helen, and Nela. But I stayed for two days and came back with Nela who had to come to see Christine, and then went to the Wilsons, asked there because I had been answering Dwight’s phone during his speechlessness, to find Lionel Abel, Dawn Powell, and Rolfe Humphries there, but also [Roberto] Matta [Echaurren] the painter, an effervescent soul who had brought Lionel, and Lionel’s girl friend, and his own wife pregnant and from Ohio. Matta wanted all to take off their clothes. This would be truth and consequences, he declared. No one spoke to Lionel, because he had not been asked to come, and finally I spoke with him and heard him prove that Sidney Hook believed in God. Consequently the next day Lionel went about to tell everyone what a fine fellow I was. Wilson was very attentive to me for several hours and called me Mr. Schwartz when I came in, Schwartz after the second highball, Delmore after the fifth, and Mr. Schwartz once more when we arrived at the eighth refreshing. Now I will never know what would have happened at the tenth and twelfth, although I was tempted to stay just to find out. //
The next night there was a foolish party at William’s, and Diana Trilling asked me if I thought I looked like her? to which I said after a stunned silence, it is very kind of you to ask me. Later William and I tried to decide what it could possibly have meant, and we went to see Meyer Schapiro and asked him, and he had several interpretations, but he was not sure. He looked worn out and old, and he said foolish things, and he told Philip Rahv that he did not know what he was harping about as they discussed the war. He had just written a piece for the magazine entitled “The Nerve of Sidney Hook,” making Hook look like a fool and maintaining that if Hitler won the war, there would nevertheless be the possibility of a revolution in Europe.
But I see that this must sound as if it were a happy trip, but it was not. I felt immense depression to see everyone paralyzed, unable to go forward with their work, not different or better than in 1938, and having nothing to say or foolish things to say, most of all Schapiro who lost his temper with Philip as if he were Dwight, and reported himself unable to read The Ambassadors from beginning to end, and remarked that Joyce hated the English language, part of a typical theory that only an Irishman could have written Finnegans Wake.
Your little pictures make me remember how you were beautiful then as you are now.
Except for your letters, there was no mail that was interesting when I came back last night. //
I dreamed about your room last night, and I did not like the way it looked. But in your letter it sounds like a fine room, and the fireplace must please you.
I will write you more and more, but I went to get this off right now to end this silence and waiting, which I should have thought of, except that I did not think of your difficulty with your father. If my mother hears anything, she will come here again and refuse to go, and maintain that she wants to take care of me, and then there will really be a scene.
Very much,
Delmore
To William Carlos Williams
20 Ellery St.
Cambridge, Mass.
August 20, 1943
Dear Williams:
I like your little poem, “These Purists,” very much, and we will use it soon, with Miller’s “It’s Not What You See, But How You See It.” I’d like to take several more of Miller’s pieces, but we’re full of too many unused accepted verse right now. At some later date, I hope you will send us not just one poem, but a group, for I’ve noticed that readers tune in on what you write when they look at several poems, one after another.
I don’t have your last letter here because I sent it to N.Y. to show the boys that there ought to be no more delays, about answering anyone (but they’ve been preoccupied with the business end of the review for the last two months). So, without your letter, I risk being told again that I did not read what you said. I risk it, anyway, letter or not.
However, the gist of the reply to your essay will be as follows, so far as I am in on it: Dr. Williams is an important poet and author of fiction. This essay is significant for that reason. In it, he maintains that the best kind of statesmen have been boobs, or at least none too bright. Intellectuals are too smart. They are smart to such an extent that they ought to be used very carefully, like any dangerous thing. They are by nature only “superficially colored by democracy.” Jump. Maybe then they are fascists. They don’t like to see a whitewashing of the totalitarianism of Soviet Russia (where two million peasants were deliberately starved in 1932) because such a whitewash has no military value whatever. Jump. Hence intellectuals, or at least [John] Dewey and Eastman, are aligning themselves with those who bombed Guernica. Mission to Moscow not only distorts the truth about Russia, but it also distorts the book on which it is based. Jump. This shows that intellectuals are too smart, and Russia may have its faults, but the fifth columnists (and, as you may know, the best living Russian poet, Pasternak) are behind barbed wire, unable to do any harm.