from
A Wild Perfection:
The Selected Letters of James Wright
Edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley
To Donald Hall
Minneapolis
July 25, 1958Dear Don,
According to the schedule you sent me earlier, you're in Ann Arbor now. I hope so. An extremely weird thing has happened, and it has left me as shaken as anything that has happened to me since I started trying to write verses some years ago. Forgive me for having wept on your shoulder sometimes – it's not really what my present subject deals with. It's rather something that crystalizes and clarifies many uncertainties that have been haunting me, not only about myself but also about poetry in These States at the present time. You recall that I mentioned some dissatisfaction concerning the Meridian anthology when we were in Detroit, and that you were interested in hearing my thoughts about it. When I actually came to write my thoughts down, I found myself in a confusion that was not only intellectual – it was deeply and emotionally painful to me to discover that at the very depth of my consciousness I was divided – really divided, as on the blade of a sword – between my loyalty to those of my contemporaries who were trying to write with intellectual grace and to those, far more disturbing and ruthless, who were raising hell and demanding greatness. It is really impossible to describe all of my feelings about this division, but they go so deep as to be almost psychotic. Let me try to suggest what I mean by saying – what is perfectly true – that the two American poets who mean the most to me as an individual human being are, for God's sake, Whitman and Robinson! Now, stylistically they are as far apart as two men could be and still write in the same language. I have never known how to fuse them; and so, as you are undoubtedly aware, having endured the very genuine hysterias of my correspondence for some years, I have helplessly and nauseously swung back and forth terrified by great space on the pendulum from the one to the other. Now, there was nothing wrong with this, and there was a time for me – as there was, inevitably, for every young poet writing in America right now – to commit himself to the traditional syntax and the traditional meters of English verse; for many of the writers who preceded us were so sloppy, that we had to begin not by revolting against competence and restriction, because except for a few writers there was no competence, but rather to begin by creating our own competence. Thus, the next step – the really terrifying one, the appalling one, the one that drags the blood, the real red blood, out of one's veins, is to move through and beyond that necessary competence into individual creation. But I never went through the first step of this process with any really conscious intelligence; for, as I said, I already felt within myself the secret guilt at my denying the darker and wilder side of myself for the sake of subsisting on mere comfort – both academic and poetic. May I use your own work as an example? I said at first, and I say again, that I loved your first book because it was packed with a masterly competence. The key word is "packed," for the size, the variety of subject, and perhaps most of all the humor (gutty humor like Falstaff, not wit like Oscar Wilde) promised powerfully that the competence which you had striven to master, and which is absolutely necessary if the individual breakthrough is to reveal a newly created, coherent and yet uniquely painful and thrillingly beautiful poetry – the unmistakable voice of a man singing to men about the terrible truth of our age – these things revealed, I say, that the very extent of your formal mastery would be one of the powerful forces that would break through it and create the new thing, the unique and yet coherent and illuminating work.
Well, I just read the issue of Robert Bly's The Fifties. You and W. D. Snodgrass are the two young American poets who have broken through in order to create instead of breaking through in order to destroy. I'll come to your poem in a moment: first I want to say how significant it is that Snodgrass, in a very brief poem which is far more original, dense, and forcefully clear in its imagery, far more deeply personal and individual in its rhythm, and almost hilariously more radical (in the real political and social sense) than Ginsberg is even capable of imagining, should thwack the hipsters on the skull, thwack them from the magnificent height of a perfect demonstration of the very vital and original art which, in their ads in The New York Times Book Review, they have been claiming for themselves.
But your own poem: "The Foundations of American Industry." It could not have been written unless two conditions had been fulfilled: 1. the mastery first of a formal technique; 2. a lament, a grief so deeply agonized that I can only call it Greek. Forgive me – this is as delicate a subject as I could possibly mention to you, but I will mention it because I can speak out of the center of my grateful spirit – your poem "The Way to Death," whether or not you yourself are technically satisfied with it, was the most important experience, I believe, that you have ever had as an artist. What makes this fact relevant is that the task of spiritual courage which you set for yourself in the actual subject of the poem was Greek and terrible in the old sense, instead of decadently Christian. Refusing, in your own sense of dignity as a man, to translate your father's pain into a Billy Graham-type commercial, you faced death itself, in the only way in which it can ever be meaningfully faced at all – i.e., in the hurt body of a beloved. Facing this truth made it possible for you to break through the formal competence of your accomplished first book, and in the poem "The Foundations of American Industry" your new style and your unflinching vision of the truth are absolutely inextricable from each other. You know how well I've liked some of your poems. Well, in both technique and vision, "The Foundations" is about ten thousand miles beyond anything in your first book. If you want me to argue this point further, just drop the word, and I stand ready to do so. It is very important to me personally, as I'll try to explain directly. But do I make myself clear about the two necessary steps of creation of a great and original poetry? 1. Mastery of formal competence in one's tradition (there is always tradition, and it is as ruthlessly inescapable as breathing, hunger, and death. Those who deny the existence of the past, said Santayana in a line which makes me shudder with fear, are doomed endlessly to repeat its mistakes). 2. Then the breaking through this formal competence, in order to create a poetry which is unique and all one's own: the truly shaped voice of one's self. Let me try further to clarify this notion by giving two examples which will be, I trust, sufficiently vivid. If a writer leaves out the first step in the process, then he cannot possibly even take the second, for the second consists partly in breaking through the effect of the first. If a writer leaves out the first step, in other words, we get Allen Ginsberg, who does not move from mastery of formal competence to the creation of original art, but rather moves from chaos and sloppiness to their counterparts of commercialism and advertising and back again. On the other hand, if a writer follows both steps in terms of his own intelligence and experience, and if his personal vision and spiritual courage are strong enough to sustain him – especially in an age like ours, when the truths of public irresponsibility and powerful nihilistic sophism among the manipulators of the public language are so hideous – then you get Pablo Neruda.
As we're starting to get Don Hall.
What was wrong with the Meridian anthology, I think, was simply that it appeared too soon. Even the most talented writers in the book were more or less in the first stage described above. I think there are perhaps three or four people in that book who could, if they have the guts to fight for it, for the vision, become great poets, and in this sentence I am not using the word "great" lightly at all. But still, the book gave an overall impression of competence alone. Competence is essential; but when it appears alone, we get critical discussion – maddening, endless, smug, mealy-mouthed – of "mere" competence. The sneer conveyed by the word "mere" actually makes me physically ill.
James Dickey, however, was not sneering. This brings me to "The Follies of Young Worthless: a Farce in two acts," starring James Wright.
His answer, which arrived soon thereafter, was, of course, an angry one. But his anger was stated in sternly dignified words, and he not only insisted upon his integrity as a man and as a critic, but also said (what was perfectly true and unarguable) that my letter – which, as I say, was not criticism but really blatant, aimless, wild hatred, in which I even exploded once into outright obscenity – constituted a considered insult to him and to his family; and that, if I was not willing to consider myself a crank, I would have to see that I was responsible for my action – i.e., a wholly unprovoked and hostile attack on a total stranger. He concluded by assuring me that, if I persisted in distressing him and his family by writing such things to him, he would certainly take steps to see that I was made to desist.
It's useless to describe how I was crushed – not by Dickey, for – whatever you may think of his ideas, Don – imagine how you would feel if you had mentioned some writer's name (he wrote three words about me – three words, one of which was my name)1 and then suddenly received from him a letter such as mine, which I have accurately described. No, Dickey had a right as a man to defend himself and his own. But I was the one who had crushed myself I read his letter, and realized finally that my own message had been written to myself, to that part of myself which had betrayed poetry by complacency. For it seems to me that what he said in his review, harsh as he may have been, was nothing but the undeniable truth without the facing of which no man will be a poet. I looked at this truth, and I knew that I was too weak and cowardly to bear it; and, as a result, I completely lost control of myself, and gave a great wail of terror. I was not, and am not, man enough to behold naked my own emptiness.
In any case, his letter shocked me back into control of myself, and in a mood of self-loathing which it is useless to talk about, I wrote an apology to him and to his wife. I granted the justice of his words (I am not exaggerating – they were indeed just words), and I tried, in a muddled way but as well as I was able, to make some sense out of the reason for my attacking him.
This was on Monday. On about Wednesday (this past week), I received Robert Bly's The Fifties. Now, in spite of certain confusions in terminology and argument, I am sure that Bly is right. And what he said was only what Dickey has been saying for some time, except that Bly is consciously courteous and Dickey is rather unapologetically cold. But these were only theoretical evidences of my own failure and incapacity. The absolute clincher came with your new poem, and with the poems by Snodgrass. So I quit. I have been betraying whatever was true and courageous (how nothing's that!) in myself and in everyone else for so long, that I am still fairly convinced that I have killed it. So I quit. In what I suppose may be the dullest and most numb anguish of which my physical body is capable, I took a day off from working at my book on Dickens, and wrote "His Farewell to Poetry," which is a terrible poem and, as far as I can honestly tell, my last.
I would not like you to think I am depressed about this. As a matter of fact, I am more relieved at facing the truth than I have been for years. Moreover, my one justification for my own existence as a literary operator (and one of the slickest, cleverest, most "charming" concocters of the do-it-yourself New Yorker verse among all current failures) is that I have not reacted, even during what I can honestly call my weeks of insane fear, by hating poetry. Not at all – on the contrary, my love for the art deepens by my recognition that it is, after all, a wholly different kind of experience from that in which I have been flattering myself. Moreover, I continue in prose. I would like to get in on some critical movement in which I can believe. There are not many poets, after all, and most of us must get used to the fact that we are somewhat like Walter Bagehot in relation to Dickens. Bagehot read Dickens sensitively and appreciatively; and yet, of course, for all his intelligence and cleverness, he would not have been capable of imagining even the meanest of Dickens' creations, not if he had studied rule-books about novel-writing for the next ten million years.
What has happened, I think, is that, since there is a natural selection among artists as among sea creatures, I am one of the dripping and daydreaming serpents who roared at his tidal death.
To get on with it: on Thursday of this week, Dickey wrote me a letter which was remarkably generous, full of a fine and manly spirit of pardon which I did not deserve, and which made me grateful. We are going to correspond. He pointed out, among other things, that he is as hard on himself as he has been on me, Booth, Wilbur, Hecht, etc., and I believe him. The authenticity of his feeling was perfectly proved, as far as I am concerned, by his saying that he would "consider it a kindness" if I would look at a new poem he will have in the August Poetry and let him know what I think of it.
What is the meaning of all this? I don't know. For the time being, and quite possibly forever, I am through as a writer of verse. Whatever it was in me that got poems started looks and feels like a large, defenseless, blanket-bombed city. The sewer-rats march with tubas and bass drums through the soccer-field, and the cathedrals are pitched headfirst, like unfrocked saints dizzy with bay rum and canned heat, into the garbage dumps, and the devaluated coins of finance darken the gutters of the black market of my self, and heave like a rain of artificial blood.
People are, by and large, pretty good to me, but I am not a good man. I fought the devils to win that truth. I want to be an honest man. That's all. For me to try to write poetry is in bad taste.
Somebody ought to write something like the argument of this letter to Phil Booth2 but I'm awfully tired. Will you try to write me soon? I would appreciate it.
Love to you and yours,
Jim
1 In a review of New Poets of England and America, Dickey had used Wright's work as an example of one of the ways the poems included "fulfill many of our notions of what poems should be... ploddingly 'sincere' (Wright)."
2 In the margin: "I don’t, for heaven's sake, mean that he ought to quit, but that he ought to be sustained in his struggle."
A Wild Perfection:
The Selected Letters of James Wright
edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Rose Maley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
Copyright © 2005 by Anne Wright.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by James Wright:
Above the River: The Complete Poems — Paperback
