Part 1

Produced by Meredith Bach and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

Transcriber’s Note: Following the author’s intent, this e-text preserves the original’s spelling and stylistic features, including extra spacing between words (created using the U+2003 EM SPACE character ( ) three times in a row).

IMPROVISATIONS

By William Carlos Williams

The Tempers Al Que Quiere! Kora in Hell

KORA IN HELL: IMPROVISATIONS

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

BOSTON THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY 1920

_Copyright, 1920, by_ THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY

The Four Seas Press Boston, Mass., U. S. A.

TO FLOSSIE

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

THE RETURN OF THE SUN

Her voice was like rose-fragrance waltzing in the wind. She seemed a shadow, stained with shadow colors, Swimming through waves of sunlight.…

The sole precedent I can find for the broken style of my prologue is Longinus on the Sublime and that one far-fetched.

When my mother was in Rome on that rare journey forever to be remembered, she lived in a small pension near the Pincio gardens. The place had been chosen by my brother as one notably easy of access, being in a quarter free from confusion of traffic, on a street close to the park and furthermore the tram to the American Academy passed at the corner. Yet never did my mother go out but she was in fear of being lost. By turning to the left when she should have turned right, actually she did once manage to go so far astray that it was nearly an hour before she extricated herself from the strangeness of every new vista and found a landmark.

There has always been a disreputable man of picturesque personality associated with this lady. Their relations have been marked by the most rollicking spirit of comradeship. Now it has been William, former sailor in Admiral Dewey’s fleet at Manila, then Tom O’Rourck who has come to her to do odd jobs and to be cared for more or less when drunk or ill, their Penelope. William would fall from the grapearbor much to my mother’s amusement and delight and to his blustering discomfiture or he would stagger to the back door nearly unconscious from bad whiskey. There she would serve him with very hot and very strong coffee, then put him to scrubbing the kitchen floor into his suddy-pail pouring half a bottle of ammonia which would make the man gasp and water at the eyes as he worked and became sober.

She has always been incapable of learning from benefit or disaster. If a man cheat her she will remember that man with a violence that I have seldom seen equaled but so far as that could have an influence on her judgment of the next man or woman, she might be living in Eden. And indeed she is, an impoverished, ravished Eden but one indestructible as the imagination itself. Whatever is before her is sufficient to itself and so to be valued. Her meat though more delicate in fiber is of a kind with that of Villon and La Grosse Margot:

Vente, gresle, gelle, j’ai mon pain cuit!

Carl Sandburg sings a negro cotton picker’s song of the bol weevil. Verse after verse tells what they would do to the insect. They propose to place it in the sand, in hot ashes, in the river, and other unlikely places but the bol weevil’s refrain is always: “That’ll be ma HOME! That’ll be ma HOOME!”

My mother is given over to frequent periods of great depression being as I believe by nature the most light-hearted thing in the world. But there comes a grotesque turn to her talk, a macabre anecdote concerning some dream, a passionate statement about death, which elevates her mood without marring it, sometimes in a most startling way.

Looking out at our parlor window one day I said to her: “We see all the shows from here, don’t we, all the weddings and funerals?” (They had been preparing a funeral across the street, the undertaker was just putting on his overcoat.) She replied: “Funny profession that, burying the dead people. I should think they wouldn’t have any delusions of life left.” W.—Oh yes, it’s merely a profession. M.—Hm. And how they study it! They say sometimes people look terrible and they come and make them look fine. They push things into their mouths! (Realistic gesture) W.—Mama! M.—Yes, when they haven’t any teeth.

By some such dark turn at the end she raises her story out of the commonplace: “Look at that chair, look at it! (The plasterers had just left) If Mrs. J. or Mrs. D. saw that they would have a fit.” W.—Call them in, maybe it will kill them. M.—But they’re not near as bad as that woman, you know, her husband was in the chorus,—has a little daughter Helen. Mrs. B. yes. She once wanted to take rooms here. I didn’t want her. They told me: ‘Mrs. Williams, I heard you’re going to have Mrs. B. _She_ is particular.’ She said so herself. Oh no! Once she burnt all her face painting under the sink.

Thus seeing the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but with great intensity of perception my mother loses her bearings or associates with some disreputable person or translates a dark mood. She is a creature of great imagination. I might say this is her sole remaining quality. She is a despoiled, moulted castaway but by this power she still breaks life between her fingers.

* * * * *

Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Arensberg at a small place on 63rd St. I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were about, those roughly classed at that time as “cubists”: Gleisze, Man Ray, Demuth, Du Champs—all of whom were then in the city. He replied by saying that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise novelty and, since the pictorial artist was under discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation is good art. Thus according to Du Champs, who was Arensberg’s champion at the time, a stained glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed _in situ_.

We returned to Arensberg’s sumptuous studio where he gave further point to his remarks by showing me what appeared to be the original of Du Champs’ famous, Nude Descending a Staircase. But this, he went on to say, is a full-sized photographic print of the first picture with many new touches by Du Champs himself and so by the technique of its manufacture as by other means it is a novelty!

Led on by these enthusiasms Arensberg has been an indefatigable worker for the yearly salon of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. I remember the warmth of his description of a pilgrimage to the home of that old Boston hermit who watched over by a forbidding landlady (evidently in his pay) paints the cigar-box-cover-like nudes upon whose fingers he presses actual rings with glass jewels from the five and ten cent store.

I wish Arensberg had my opportunity for prying into jaded households where the paintings of Mama’s and Papa’s flowertime still hang on the walls. I propose that Arensberg be commissioned by the Independent Artists to scour the country for the abortive paintings of those men and women who without master or method have evolved perhaps two or three unusual creations in their early years. I would start the collection with a painting I have by a little English woman, A. E. Kerr, 1906, that in its unearthly gaiety of flowers and sobriety of design possesses exactly that strange freshness a spring day approaches without attaining, an expansion of April, a thing this poor woman found too costly for her possession—she could not swallow it as the niggers do diamonds in the mines. Carefully selected these queer products might be housed to good effect in some unpretentious exhibition chamber across the city from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the anteroom could be hung perhaps photographs of prehistoric rock-paintings and etchings on horn: galloping bisons and stags, the hind feet of which have been caught by the artist in such a position that from that time until the invention of the camera obscura, a matter of 6000 years or more, no one on earth had again depicted that most delicate and expressive posture of running.

The amusing controversy between Arensberg and Du Champs on one side, and the rest of the hanging committee on the other as to whether the porcelain urinal was to be admitted to the Palace Exhibition of 1917 as a representative piece of American Sculpture should not be allowed to slide into oblivion.

One day Du Champs decided that his composition for that day would be the first thing that struck his eye in the first hardware store he should enter. It turned out to be a pickaxe which he bought and set up in his studio. This was his composition. Together with Mina Loy and a few others Du Champs and Arensberg brought out the paper, The Blind Man, to which Robert Carlton Brown with his vision of suicide by diving from a high window of the Singer Building contributed a few poems.

In contradistinction to their south, Marianne Moore’s statement to me at the Chatham parsonage one afternoon—my wife and I were just on the point of leaving—sets up a north: My work has come to have just one quality of value in it: I will not touch or have to do with those things which I detest. In this austerity of mood she finds sufficient freedom for the play she chooses.

Of all those writing poetry in America at the time she was here Marianne Moore was the only one Mina Loy feared. By divergent virtues these two women have achieved freshness of presentation, novelty, freedom, break with banality.

* * * * *

When Margaret Anderson published my first improvisations Ezra Pound wrote me one of his hurried letters in which he urged me to give some hint by which the reader of good will might come at my intention.

Before Ezra’s permanent residence in London, on one of his trips to America—brought on I think by an attack of jaundice—he was glancing through some book of my father’s. “It is not necessary,” he said, “to read everything in a book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everybody I said so,” he added.

During this same visit my father and he had been reading and discussing poetry together. Pound has always liked my father. “I of course like your Old Man and I have drunk his Goldwasser.” They were hot for an argument that day. My parent had been holding forth in downright sentences upon my own “idle nonsense” when he turned and became equally vehement concerning something Ezra had written: what in heaven’s name Ezra meant by “jewels” in a verse that had come between them. These jewels,—rubies, sapphires, amethysts and what not, Pound went on to explain with great determination and care, were the backs of books as they stood on a man’s shelf. “But why in heaven’s name don’t you say so then?” was my father’s triumphant and crushing rejoinder.

The letter: … God knows I have to work hard enough to escape, not _propagande_, but getting centered in _propagande_. And America? What the h—l do you a blooming foreigner know about the place. Your _père_ only penetrated the edge, and you’ve never been west of Upper Darby, or the Maunchunk switchback.

Would H., with the swirl of the prairie wind in her underwear, or the Virile Sandburg recognize you, an effete easterner as a REAL American? INCONCEIVABLE!!!!!

My dear boy you have never felt the woop of the PEEraries. You have never seen the projecting and protuberant Mts. of the SIerra Nevada. WOT can you know of the country?

You have the naive credulity of a Co. Claire emigrant. But I (der grosse Ich) have the virus, the bacillus of the land in my blood, for nearly three bleating centuries.

(Bloody snob. ’eave a brick at ’im!!!).…

I was very glad to see your wholly incoherent unamerican poems in the L. R.

Of course Sandburg will tell you that you miss the “big drifts,” and Bodenheim will object to your not being sufficiently decadent.

You thank your bloomin gawd you’ve got enough Spanish blood to muddy up your mind, and prevent the current American ideation from going through it like a blighted collander.

The thing that saves your work is opacity, and don’t forget it. Opacity is NOT an American quality. Fizz, swish, gabble, and verbiage, these are _echt Americanisch_.

And alas, alas, poor old Masters. Look at Oct. Poetry.

Let me indulge the American habit of quotation:

* * * * *

“Si le cosmopolitisme littéraire gagnait encore et qu’il réussit à étaindre ce que les differénce de race ont allumé de haine de sang parmi les hommes, j’y verrais un gain pour la civilization et pour l’humanité tout entière”.…

“L’amour excessif d’une patrie a pour immédiat corollair l’horreur des patries étrangères. Non seulment on craint de quitter la jupe de sa maman, d’aller voir comment vivent les autres hommes, de se mêler à leur luttes, de partager leur travaux, non seulment on reste chez soi, mais on finit par fermer sa porte.”

“Cette folie gagne certains littérateurs et le même professeur, en sortant d’expliquer le Cid ou Don Juan, rédige de gracieuses injures contre Ibsen et l’influence, hélas, trop illusoire, de son oevre, pourtant toute de lumière et de beauté.” et cetera. Lie down and compose yourself.

I like to think of the Greeks as setting out for the colonies in Sicily and the Italian Peninsula. The Greek temperament lent itself to a certain symmetrical sculptural phase and to a fat poetical balance of line that produced important work but I like better the Greeks setting their backs to Athens. The ferment was always richer in Rome, the dispersive explosion was always nearer, the influence carried further and remained hot longer. Hellenism, especially the modern sort, is too staid, too chilly, too little fecundative to impregnate my world.

Hilda Doolittle before she began to write poetry or at least before she began to show it to anyone would say: “You’re not satisfied with me, are you Billy? There’s something lacking, isn’t there?” When I was with her my feet always seemed to be sticking to the ground while she would be walking on the tips of the grass stems.

Ten years later as assistant editor of the Egoist she refers to my long poem, March, which thanks to her own and her husband’s friendly attentions finally appeared there in a purified form:

_14 Aug. 1916_

Dear Bill:—

I trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the flippancies. The reason I want to do this is that the beautiful lines are so very beautiful—so in the tone and spirit of your _Postlude_—(which to me stands, a Nike, supreme among your poems). I think there is _real_ beauty—and real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in all the pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the wind at the very last.

I don’t know what you think but I consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!—I think you have the “spark”—am sure of it, and when you speak _direct_ are a poet. I feel in the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivitive tendency which, to me, is not _you_—-not your very self. It is as if you were _ashamed_ of your Spirit, ashamed of your inspiration!—as if you mocked at your own song. It’s very well to _mock_ at yourself—it is a spiritual sin to mock at your inspiration—

_Hilda._

Oh well, all this might be very disquieting were it not that “sacred” has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past the time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

But in any case H. D. misses the entire intent of what I am doing no matter how just her remarks concerning that particular poem happen to have been. The hey-ding-ding touch _was_ derivitive but it filled a gap that I did not know how better to fill at the time. It might be said that that touch is the prototype of the improvisations.

It is to the inventive imagination we look for deliverance from every other misfortune as from the desolation of a flat Hellenic perfection of style. What good then to turn to art from the atavistic religionists, from a science doing slavey service upon gas engines, from a philosophy tangled in a miserable sort of dialect that means nothing if the full power of initiative be denied at the beginning by a lot of baying and snapping scholiasts? If the inventive imagination must look, as I think, to the field of art for its richest discoveries today it will best make its way by compass and follow no path.

But before any material progress can be accomplished there must be someone to draw a discriminating line between true and false values.

The true value is that peculiarity which gives an object a character by itself. The associational or sentimental value is the false. Its imposition is due to lack of imagination, to an easy lateral sliding. The attention has been held too rigid on the one plane instead of following a more flexible, jagged resort. It is to loosen the attention, my attention since I occupy part of the field, that I write these improvisations. Here I clash with Wallace Stevens.

The imagination goes from one thing to another. Given many things of nearly totally divergent natures but possessing one-thousandth part of a quality in common, provided that be new, distinguished, these things belong in an imaginative category and not in a gross natural array. To me this is the gist of the whole matter. It is easy to fall under the spell of a certain mode, especially if it be remote of origin, leaving thus certain of its members essential to a reconstruction of its significance permanently lost in an impenetrable mist of time. But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. He who even nicks the solidity of this apparition does a piece of work superior to that of Hercules when he cleaned the Augean stables.

Stevens’ letter applies really to my book of poems, “Al Que Quiere” (which means, by the way, To Him Who Wants It) but the criticism he makes of that holds good for each of the improvisations if not for the _oevre_ as a whole.

It begins with a postscript in the upper left hand corner: “I think, after all, I should rather send this than not, although it is quarrelsomely full of my own ideas of discipline.

_April 9_

My dear Williams:

…

What strikes me most about the poems themselves is their casual character.… Personally I have a distaste for miscellany. It is one of the reasons I do not bother about a book myself.

(Wallace Stevens is a fine gentleman whom Cannell likened to a Pennsylvania Dutchman who has suddenly become aware of his habits and taken to “society” in self defence. He is always immaculately dressed. I don’t know why I should always associate him in my mind with an imaginary image I have of Ford Madox Hueffer.)

…My idea is that in order to carry a thing to the extreme necessity to convey it one has to stick to it;… Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic or what you will, everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and the process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for a poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility.

(This sounds like Sir Roger de Coverly)

A single manner or mood thoroughly matured and exploited is that fresh thing … etc.

One has to keep looking for poetry as Renoir looked for colors in old walls, wood-work and so on.

Your place is

—among children Leaping around a dead dog.

A book of that would feed the hungry.…

Well a book of poems is a damned serious affair. I am only objecting that a book that contains your particular quality should contain anything else and suggesting that if the quality were carried to a communicable extreme, in intensity and volume, etc.… I see it all over the book, in your landscapes and portraits, but dissipated and obscured. Bouquets for brides and Spencerian compliments for poets.… There are a very few men who have anything native in them or for whose work I’d give a Bolshevic ruble.… But I think your tantrums not half mad enough.

(I am not quite clear about the last sentence but I presume he means that I do not push my advantage through to an overwhelming decision. What would you have me do with my Circe, Stevens, now that I have doublecrossed her game, marry her? It is not what Odysseus did).

I return Pound’s letter … observe how in everything he does he proceeds with the greatest positiveness etc.

_Wallace Stevens._

I wish that I might here set down my “Vortex” after the fashion of London, 1913, stating how little it means to me whether I live here, there or elsewhere or succeed in this, that or the other so long as I can keep my mind free from the trammels of literature, beating down every attack of its _retiarii_ with my _mirmillones_. But the time is past.

I thought at first to adjoin to each improvisation a more or less opaque commentary. But the mechanical interference that would result makes this inadvisable. Instead I have placed some of them in the preface where without losing their original intention (see reference numerals at the beginning of each) they relieve the later text and also add their weight to my present fragmentary argument.

* * * * *

V. No. 2. By the brokeness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way. The speed of the emotions is sometimes such that thrashing about in a thin exaltation or despair many matters are touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.

* * * * *

II. No. 3. The instability of these improvisations would seem such that they must inevitably crumble under the attention and become particles of a wind that falters. It would appear to the unready that the fiber of the thing is a thin jelly. It would be these same fools who would deny touch cords to the wind because they cannot split a storm endwise and wrap it upon spools. The virtue of strength lies not in the grossness of the fiber but in the fiber itself. Thus a poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.

* * * * *