A Selection of Letters

Blunk, Jonathan

JAMES WRIGHT

A Special APr Supplement

An Introduction to Twelve Letters by James Wright

by Jonathan Blunk

JAMES WRIGHT'S LETTERS CHRONICLE MANY of the major innovations in American poetry in the middle of the twentieth century. They also provide a compelling personal narrative of his life. The following selection is taken from the forthcoming volume entitled A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Nearly every one of Wright's letters exhibits his dedication to craft and passion for literature, and while each can be appreciated on its own, the first of the dozen letters below merits a brief comment.

In 1958, Pablo Neruda published the poem "Fábula de la sirena y los borrachos" in his book Extravagario. At the time, Wright did not translate the poem, but he never forgot it. Seventeen years later, when M. L. Rosenthal's translation appeared in these pages, Wright was moved to respond. In a letter sent in care of the editors at APR, Wright expressed his personal admiration to Rosenthal and his gratitude for the translation. This "Fable," it seems, had come to haunt Wright, and was bound up in his memories of Neruda.

Neruda's work became a touchstone for Wright, an ideal and an extreme. In a number of Wright's letters from the late fifties and early sixties, he places Neruda and Whitman at one pole and Edwin Arlington Robinson at the other, describing the pendulum of his own poetic allegiances. He was enthralled by the magnitude of Neruda's poems, and his memory of this one in particular suggests the tenacity of Wright's imagination.

The impulse to praise the work of others is a quality of his character, part of what prompted Wright's own translations and a proof of his devotion to poetry. His spontaneous letter of gratitude to M. L. Rosenthal has many parallels in Wright's biography. In July of 1958, Wright initiated a lifelong friendship and correspondence with the poet and translator Robert Bly when he wrote to thank him for a gift copy of The Fifties, Ely's new magazine. Almost immediately, the two began collaborating on translations from the German of Georg Trakl. Wright also began an intensive study of Spanish, to read and translate for himself the work of Neruda, César Vallejo and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Wright's own poetry was never the same.

In April of 1972, Wright met Neruda and took part in a reading with him at the 92nd St. Y in New York City. Wright considered this event one of the greatest honors of his life. Eighteen months later, Wright was in Venice and witnessed daily protests against the United States as word spread of the overthrow of Allende's government in Chile. On September 23, 1973, he learned of Neruda's death. Wright and his second wife, Anne, visited the Adriatic fishing town of Grado the following week, where he wrote his "imitation" of Neruda, "A Visit to the Earth." Wright's elegy to him also dates from that time. Both poems appear in the Appendix to A Wild Perfection, which gathers thirty previously uncollected poems, drafts and translations of Wright's that he refers to in his correspondence.

The following letters span the last twenty-two years of James Wright's life. The earliest ones, from 1958, include a detailed account of a manuscript for his second book, Saint Judas, as well as the first two letters of Wright's intense and fascinating exchange with the poet, critic and novelist James Dickey. These are followed by a poignant autobiographical letter written to his high school Latin teacher in 1972. From the summer of 1976 are letters to Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall, as Wright was working on the last book he would see into print, To a Blossoming Pear Tree. The selection concludes with Wright's final letter, written to Galway Kinnell on December 31, 1979.

To M. L. Rosenthal

New York City

September 20, 1975

Dear Mr. Rosenthal:

I hope you won't mind a note from a personal stranger.

A few years ago I read Neruda's "Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks" in Spanish, and it haunted me. You of all people know how you might discover a certain poem and you don't simply "memorize it"; it actually seems to become part of your personality, your very life. I never tried to translate _ the poem.

Then, about a year and a half ago, my wife and I were staying in the small Italian fishing village of Grado, on the Adriatic. A few foreigners visit the village in summer to swim; but mostly it is a laboring place; fishing is the main work; the men go out to sea long before daybreak and come back at twilight; there are people all over the place, wives and husbands and children sitting on their front steps after supper, mending nets. I remember being struck by the special strangeness of fishing as a way of making a living: how real fishermen are plain people, almost always poor, married to stocky and pleasant middle-aged wives, surrounded by many children whose games often get intermingled with the work shared, one way or another, by the whole family, in a way of life that, on shore, is just commonplace; and yet how the men go far out to sea in the darkness and let down lines or nets, wondering surely just what weird creature they might draw into their boats along with all the shrimp and piccolini and sardines and the rest of the usual haul. I vividly remembered Neruda's poem. I didn't have the text with me, and I didn't have the poem literally by heart. And so, just for the fun of it, I wrote a poem on my own. It isn't a translation. It's just an attempt to write about an incident similar to the one in Neruda's poem. You could call it an imitation, maybe; or a poem based on something in Neruda. Well, it doesn't matter what you call it. It gave me pleasure to write it. When I read your translation in the most recent American Poetry Review, I was again struck by Neruda's ability to write a poem of such truly enormous richness and depth, and yet do so in a comparatively few lines. My own poem is a little more than twice as long as Neruda's, and of course it doesn't contain anything even distantly approaching Neruda's great mastery.

I've written you this note to tell you that I am tremendously grateful to you for your translation. I think it is magnificent. Among the many exciting problems involved in translation, one of the most important has to do with what the translator ought to try to accomplish. Of course, he ought to be accurately faithful to the original text. And yet many translations are accurate, and yet they're somehow poetically thin and pale. I don't know Russian, but I have several personal acquaintances whose native language is Russian. They are all admirable, cultivated, highly intelligent people whose taste and judgment I completely trust. They all assure me that Pushkin is an author quite as great as Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy. And I am willing to take their word for it. Nevertheless, all the translations of Pushkin's poems that I have ever seen make him resemble a tenth-rate imitator of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

And yet a great poem can be translated, not only with linguistic accuracy but also with a thrilling poetic radiance. I think that your translation of the Neruda poem, read simply as a poem in the English language, is one of the most beautiful poems I have read in a long time.

I would like to add that, although for some reason I've never been lucky enough to meet you personally, your writings-including your poems, your translations, your anthology, and your longer critical studies-and they have been deeply helpful, instructive, and encouraging to me, in my reading as well as writing. I think that any period of poetry requires, basically, the presence of a literary criticism that is able to discuss poetry as a living art; the best critic of this kind must be intelligent, learned, capable of fine and true distinctions; he must be able to judge the value of the work he's discussing and to explain the reasons for his judgments. I think it is possible-in fact, I think it is necessary-for a critic to do and be all these things and at the same time be motivated by a true and deep love for the art of poetry. Certainly you are such a critic. I think one of our troubles these days is that you are quite possibly the only writer who possesses all of these major talents at once. In the same recent issue of the APR, you are quoted as saying that APR is the magazine "most likely to take over the role once played by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse." It's true that the old Poetry was once the single major American poetry magazine where all viewpoints could be discussed and poems of all kinds could be printed. I scarcely know what to say about the Poetry of today. I will say that I have wished, very strongly and more than once, that the editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse were M. L. Rosenthal. That's just my own opinion; but I'll bet it is an opinion very widely shared. Well, thank you again.

With admiration, James Wright

Neruda

It was one evening

In an autumn

When bells hung in a vast

And yet most intricate design

From the webs of araucaria,

Trees that are not trees easily,

The little leaves

That are trees in secret.

Under one bough,

One vein of one leaf,

One side of the sea

Sang for a thousand inches

Uphill, as though

The tree in the leaf in the sea

Were sorry for being human

And wanted to run back

Across a river

In the center of America

Into the arms of an old beard,

Butterfly of ashes,

Architect of spiders

Climbing up the long

Slag heap to gain

The crumbling pinnacle and spin

One strand of his body to join

The earth to one star anyway,

And maybe save it.

The leaves of the little

Secret trees are fallen,

And where the earth goes on spinning

I don't know.

(September 1973)

As published in Modem Poetry Studies 5 (Spring 1974), together with "A Visit to the Earth."

To Elizabeth Lawrence, Harper & Brothers

Minneapolis

April 7, 1958 Dear Miss Lawrence;

Mr. Russell Lynes has written me a note about his telling you of a manuscript which I have completed. It is a second book of poems, and its tentative title is The Lamentation of Saint Judas. My first book was The Green Wall, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets for 1956 and published by the Yale University Press in March 1957. That was just a year ago; but I had been working on Saint Judas for about a year before The Green Wall was published. The present version of the new book is the result of a series of ruthless excisions and changes which seem to me fantastic. In any case, it is stripped as bare and direct as I can make it, I think.

My request to Mr. Lynes-that he tell me whether or not I might send the book to Harper's-was not quite so naive as it might have sounded. I know that even the most solidly established and distinguished publishers in the United States cannot afford to publish much poetry. I guess this fact is just part of the general democratic struggle toward civilization that we all share, whether we like it or not (I happen to like it-after a year of study in Europe, I got miserably homesick). On the other hand, I was aware that publishers like Harper's are consciously-more acutely than I am, certainlytrying to solve the problem of making poetry available. That awareness gave me the courage at least to ask if I could send the manuscript. I have no illusions about its easy acceptance. (As a matter of fact, I think I should be really shocked by surprise.) But your very willingness to read the manuscript is marvelous, and I am more grateful than I can say. This morning I am sending it by parcel post to Mr. Lynes, who has promised to hand it on to you.

I hope you won't mind if I make a few remarks about the manuscript. They might possibly be helpful:

I've sent you the fair copy. Please excuse the fact that the type on some pages differs from that on others. I had to prepare the final version of the manuscript at different places and different times. It's probably silly to mention this, and yet it's just the kind of thing that, personally, I would find very nerve-racking. Anyway, the whole fair copy is perfectly legible.

At the beginning of the book I've placed a page of acknowledgments. Almost all of the poems contained in the manuscript have been either published or accepted for publication very soon. (For example, Mr. Ransom writes me that four of the poems in the fifth section-"Girls Walking into Shadows"-are going to appear in the Summer issue of the Kenyan Review.) I don't yet have letters of permission from the editors of the various magazines and books in which the poems have appeared, but they are almost all of them people with whom I have friendly correspondence of one kind or another. I'm sure there would be no difficulty whatever in securing permission; so I felt free to include a page of copy in the manuscript, just to suggest what it would look like.

On the page which introduces section VI ("The Lean Ones"), I've written a passage, very brief, from René Char's poem "The Rampart of Twigs." A friendly correspondence with M. Char convinces me that there would be no trouble getting his permission, and that of his publishers (Gallimard, Paris) to quote the line. It is rather an important epigraph for the section of poems: "Dear beings, whom the dawn seems to wash clean of their torments, whom it seems to restore with a new health and a new innocence, beings who will nevertheless shatter and vanish after a couple of hours . . . Dear beings, whose hands I can feel."

The book is constructed in 6 sections. The whole book begins with a prayer to the Muse, and it is both a description of my farm life in Ohio and also an implication of that horrifying old Greek story about the lazy brother's being the blessed one. It is a poem about being loved without deserving it. And the final poem in the whole book-"Saint Judas"-is both a dramatic monologue (though very short, a sonnet in fact) and a statement about the significance of a loving action (i.e., such an action can have moral meaning only if it is performed without hope of reward-and Judas, who was in the perfect position to perform an action without hope of reward, by his performance of hopeless and despairing love attains what I would hope to regard as sanctity). The book is designed to unfold its theme between these two brief poems: the theme of human love as a kind of miraculous agony. One does everything possible in order to escape it, and yet it is everything.

The first section is called "Lunar Changes." It contains seven poems. Each of them deals with some sort of miraculous change, and all have to do with the love that this painful change embodies. Even the comparatively "light" poem about Andrew Marvell's housekeeper-in addition to being a serious parody of Marvell's style, which I admire and envy as much as any English style I know-places the speaker Marvell in a position (that of ghostly death) from which he cannot possibly hope to gain any reward for the poems which, after all, he wrote because he loved them. Incidentally, his housekeeper, Mary Palmer, actually claimed to be his widow after his death, and actually did publish his verses with an introduction signed "Mary Marvell." She wanted to get some of the back rent money, or an equivalent. Think of it! To smirk at her would be blasphemous. Marvell-even Shakespeare himself-would have adored her. What better way to use Marvell's beautiful poems in the world than by selling them in order to pay the back rent after his death-dunned by creditors and evading debtors' prison? And so Marvell's ghost loves her, even if they weren't married after all (he was very young, and I imagine she was a sour old hag-if so, so much the better). Each of the poems in the first section uses some device of transfiguration or other, and most often it is the moon, the sudden emergence of the moon, at once coldly impartial and warmly illuminating.

The second section is called "Midnight Sassafras." The title of the section comes from the penultimate line of the first poem "Complaint," an elegy for my grandmother. This poem, and those that follow it in the section, combines the theme of the defeated and the unrecognized with a further development of the theme of love, the love that I am trying to celebrate in this book-the highest love I can think of, which is given without reserve, whether the beloved "deserve" it or not. I might observe of the poem called "A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack" that it is to be considered a note written by a little boy to the brother of the town drunk-fearful and disturbed at the possibility of the wicked old bastard's drowning drunk in the river; and it is also an attempt to see if I could get away with making the kid hysterically call the frightening older brother a "son of a bitch" without making the reader snicker. American profanities are beautiful, but they have a diminishing effect, they cancel each other out. One curious result of this effect is that, in the Army, where everybody swears as a matter of course, it is almost impossible to create a genuinely original and felt curse; so that soldiers are always being driven, by the exhaustion of their own formal poetic diction, to the invention of new curses. Somebody must study this matter some day.

The third section is called "Fire." The religious theme, I suppose I can call it, rises in this section. The desire for the love (as previously presented) is shocked by the evil and violence of nature, and by the fact that many of the miraculous transfigurations in the natural world seem to have nothing to do with man. I suppose the climax of this section is the last stanza of "At the Slackening of the Tide," in which, after the beautiful and peaceful afternoon at the beach has suddenly been transformed into lamentation and hell by the drowning, the futile drowning, of the small child, the speaker in the poem looks to see if the waters will mourn for man, and hears only the sea itself, far away, innocently washing its hands of man, like Pilate.

The fourth section is called "Surrender." It tries partially to answer the terrified question asked in section three: where does a man find his place in a natural world where the significance of life-life itself-can quite possibly be transfigured into nothingness in a single unpremeditated moment? The answer given in section four is perhaps corny, but it is the only one I know of. The section consists of three love poems to my wife and-I was about to say "children," but I must explain a strange detail. In dedicating the section, I mention "Marcella"; but my wife won't have her second baby till July. If by some off chance you should find the manuscript acceptable, and if by some off chance my own anticipations should be frustrated and the baby should not be "Marcella," then the manuscript would have to be changed. (Can you imagine any arrogance-the arrogance of a cocky young man-greater than that, more profoundly infuriating? It's like commanding the grass to bloom.)

The fifth section is called "Girls Walking into Shadows." All I can say is that these poems are all about the pitiful young. Since I am thirty years old now I must sound like a prematurely old man, as I have no doubt I am, in some ways. The final poem in this fifth section, "On Minding One's Own Business," was completed very recently, and has just been accepted by Harper's Magazine. It occurs to me that it summarized the whole theme of the section very well, so I placed it just yesterday at the very end. All the poems deal with the virtue of our letting one another alone. Thoreau, I guess.

The last section is called "The Lean Ones." The title is a paraphrase of Isaiah, who cried out his leanness in the midst of the world's self-satisfied and ostensible plenty. The poems in this section are religious, I hope; they are certainly not "social," in any recent connotation of that term. The poem called "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," for example, is not an attack on capital punishment. It's simply a lament for a human being. I just don't believe that people ought to kill one another, for any reason whatever. This poem is the real "lamentation of Saint Judas," if there is indeed any at all.

Finally, if and when I get this new book published, I would like to add a page for a general dedication; but this is so personally sacred to me, that I would prefer to omit the page for the time being.

Please forgive this verbal explosion. And thank you so much for consenting to read my manuscript.

Sincerely,

James Wright

To James Dickey

Minneapolis

July 6, 1958

Dear Mr. Dickey:

I have just completed a book review for Sewanee, and tomorrow morning I will send it off. Mr. [Monroe K.] Spears wants it by August 1, so I assume it will appear in the fall issue. Having read your essays with interest and attention for some time (I realize that you will consider this statement a lie), I have added a discussion of your criticism to my review. I am going to tell Mr. Spears that, if the discussion is too long, he can either cut it or remove it altogether. In any case, you have a right to read it beforehand, whether or not you think it is worth answering in print. I wish to say that I realize there are several of its points which are inadequately stated and, more often, inadequately developed. For example, I refer to my discussion of your remarks on Eberhart and Bridges. The issue is a major one, but I was cramped for space, having already exceeded the generous limits suggested by the editor. If you care to bother answering, I will try to elucidate the discussion further.

Before I quote the section of the review: I understand perfectly well that, as far as you are concerned, I am a bad poet, probably not a poet at all in any sense that you would care about or believe in. My reason for writing you this note-in addition to my recognizing your right to see a discussion of your ideas before it appears in print, so that you can answer it as you see fit-is that, unless I utterly misunderstand your writings, the sense in which you care about poetry and believe in it is very similar to the sense in which I care about it and believe in it myself. This is another statement which you will probably consider a lie. However that may be, I would not argue against your adverse judgment of my own work even if it were possible to do so. Since you both think and feel that my verses stink, it is your responsibility as well as your privilege to say so in print. But even if my poems are bad, and even if you do not believe that I care about poetry in the same way that you do, I am asking you to believe, purely on faith, that I do indeed care about it in some sense. There is something else that I want to say: in my discussion of your writings, I refer to Mr. Philip Booth. Perhaps you will immediately conclude that I am merely being protective about one of my friends. I have never met Mr. Booth. I have had a brief correspondence with him about editorial and other business matters; I told him that I enjoyed his book, especially the poem "First Lesson"; and I wrote him a note to thank him for his review of my book, a review which, though sober and courteous, was hardly drunken with enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, I am friends with very, very few current poets, and most of them are students who have never had anything published. I think, however, that generosity is not only a moral virtue. I think that it is also an act of intelligence. Sometimes students have cautiously and tentatively brought verses to me, under that somewhat silly impression of very young people that my having had something in print made me a valid judge; when their verses were sentimental and inept, I believe that I have criticized them honestly and severely; however, I have never greeted a student by telling her to go fuck herself and shove her hideous poems up her ass because they have blotched my soul and insulted the names of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. I believe your attack on Mr. Booth's verses amounted to something similar. I did not like it. It was destructive not only to Booth, but to you, and indeed to everybody who gives a damn about poetry, and who realizes that its best ally right now would be a courteous and judicious criticism. I think the relation of hatred to criticism is the same relation that exists between life and poetry. A good man will not necessarily thereby become a good poet; a good poet, on the other hand, is, I believe, by definition a good man. Sometimes a man tries to write poems and fails. I think the critic has fulfilled his responsibility when he says so and explains what he means. Sometimes good critics explain the standard by which they judge (I said explain, not merely state), and sometimes they go so far as to admit that there may possibly be, somewhere in the universe and in human history, standards different from their own. But if the versifier (like myself, as you well know) fails to achieve a poem, I don't see why the critic has to kick him in the balls.

Nothing that I've said about hatred can in the slightest way disqualify what I've said about my belief in the importance of your writings in Sewanee, but of course this is just one more belief in which you will not believe. The relevant section of my review is enclosed.

Yours,

James Wright

Minneapolis

July 20, 1958

Dear Mr. Dickey:

It is difficult to know how to begin. Perhaps it is best simply to start by asking if you will be kind enough to read my letter, without just throwing it in the waste basket at once, as you would be justified in doing.

I received your letter just a little while ago. Its firm courtesy startled me into an inexcusably belated realization of the extraordinarily ugly thing I had done in writing you, a person who had done me no harm except to tell the truth about me, a letter which-to put the kindest interpretation upon it-was stupid. Just before beginning the present note to you, I wrote air mail to Mr. Spears at Sewanee.

Instead of including my discussion of your criticism in my book-review proper, he had decided, upon receiving it, to print it as a "letter to the editor." I have just written to request-as urgently as possible-that he print the passage in neither place. If he complies with my request, it will, of course, be a favor to me and not to you. I am sure you cannot, and would not, be affected one way or another by being attacked in print. Indeed, it is almost a kind of compliment to be attacked by a fool.

It would afford me some personal relief if you would now permit me to comment on many of the points contained in your letter to me:

1. "Under the influence of God knows what powerful, self-protective compulsion, you have evidently invented a dreadful, irresponsible, arrogant fellow named James Dickey who thinks of you as a person congenitally unable to tell the truth . . . etc." It is true that my letter to you was both paranoid and hysterical, both inaccurate and vicious. As I sit here, I think I know why I was hurt. You simply said that I was not a poet. This remark of yours only confirmed what-obviously enough-is a central fear of mine, and which I have been deeply struggling to face for some time. It is now plain that I am not man enough to face it. I know that an attempt to apologize would only compound an insult which I have already, to put it mildly, carried far enough -too far indeed. But you surely deserve an explanation of the letter itself, and of its genuinely sick-minded tone. My explanation will sound so childish and silly that it is painful to write it down, but somehow I have got to face it: I have always wanted I think as much as I could want anything in the world, to be a poet, because I felt that poets, especially the real poets of the modern world, were great and admirable men. When my first book was published, in spite of the fact that it was reviewed with what I can best describe as intemperate politeness, I looked into it and knew at once that it contained merely competence, and that competence alone is death. This is a bitter truth to face.

2. The passage about the Handbook for Boys1 was such an obvious smirk that to recollect it shames and humiliates me beyond description.

3. ". . . absurd formulations like: 'a good poet is, I believe, by definition a good man . . .'" The formulation is admittedly absurd and confused. You ask, "By what definition? Not by that of literary history, I hope, or reference to real poets." In the phrase "by definition" I wanted to suggest that-well, take the poets whom you mention-men like Baudelaire, Villon, Dylan Thomas simply by the act of writing good poems became good men. I am sure, for example, that my own life is a good deal more regularly ordered, law-abiding, and even sanitary than Villon's life was; and yet, as a great artist he demonstrated something of genuine human goodness and greatness; whereas, as a counterfeit, I demonstrate nothing except the too obvious fact that I have learned, through imitating real artists, how to ape mechanically some of the devices, like meter and rhyme, which they subdued to their own creative, imaginative purposes-a purpose which involves not merely imitating somebody else, but rather illuminating some of the meanings of human life.

4. Your refusal to honor my "ridiculous challenge" is justified, of course, for it was not a challenge at all but rather a squeak of terror from a person frantically incapable of facing his lack of talent.

5. I most nearly approach a state of flinching self-horror when I come to your next remark, and yet somehow I have got to face it: "If you ever have occasion to address any further correspondence to me, do me the courtesy of leaving obscenity out. Childish as your references are, they nevertheless constitute a considered insult to me and to my family. As such, they effectively remove you and me from the plane of literary controversy." I can think of only one single thing to write you that would not make matters worse, and even that one thing exposes itself as a sniveling, whining plea. Nevertheless, I proceed with it, and ask you-out of a kindness which I distinctly do not deserve but of which I stand in terrible need at this moment, to convey my respect and my apology to your wife. Also, in this particular matter of my hysterical and brutal obscenity, I would like to offer my apology to you also, sir. I would consider it a considerable sign of kindness if you would accept the apology.

For in just two days my own wife is due to bear her second child. Perhaps one thing which partly accounts for my going so weirdly haywire (I have had some nervous illness, a fact which I feel sure will not surprise you) is that, in my talentless and therefore quixotic struggle to support my adored family, I have sometimes sustained myself with the illusion that my gifts might after all be genuine, though minor. In any case, my closeness to my own family, sir, makes it possible for me-at this belated moment-to appreciate the honest feeling of revulsion with which you and your family must have received my letter. I flatter myself that I have at least enough human decency to imagine your disgust, and for the sake of my feelings concerning my wife and children-feelings to which I cling with some desperation-I would be grateful if you regarded my request with a sense of forgiveness.

6. You observe, in your concluding paragraph, that "such language addressed to the home of a total stranger must be taken either as the doing of a hopeless crank (which I do not believe you are, quite), or of someone who realizes the implications of his actions, and is prepared to be held responsible for them: i.e. to resolve the differences in personal action, rather than in print."

To confess that I did not realize the implications of my actions would be stupid, even beyond the stupidity of my previous letter to you. I ask you to believe that I am not again groping for the effect of heavy-handed irony which characterized my letter, when I say that it was the letter of a crank. That, indeed, is just what frightens me. To win my personal struggle against becoming a hopeless crank is the secondary reason for my writing you the present letter; the primary reason is to beg your pardon for my unprovoked and hostile letter to you, and for exposing both you and your family to a neurotic display which is indecent and distressing, to say the least. If I understand your reference to "personal action" as the suggestion of physical violence, please let me assure you that such would not be necessary. Feeling as horrified by myself as I do just now, I would certainly just sit on the ground and look at you, and I would not know what to say.

May I add two notes? First, if I win the struggle to know myself as a versifier lacking in any talent, it may be possible for me to be a good teacher and an honest man; so that some kind of human self-regard is possibly available to me. Second, I would like to say that, in spite of the cowardly hysteria to which I so unfortunately exposed you, I have at least not taken out my frustration in hatred of the good poets themselves. It's an idiotically small thing to cling to, but it's all I have. Mr. Dickey, I am ashamed and humiliated. Even this letter is one long adolescent whine. I would take it as a very great, though of course undeserved, personal kindness if you were to accept my apology for insulting your family and you.

Sincerely,

James Wright

To Helen McNeely Sheriff

New York City

June 11, 1972

Dear Miss Sheriff:

I'm sure I don't have to tell you that a letter from you means more to me than any prize could ever mean. Nevertheless, I may as well inform you that the Pulitzer was only one of four prizes won by the Collected Poems during the past year. The others were the Brandeis Award (directed, incidentally, by J. V. Cunningham, himself a beautiful spare poet and-significantly-one of the most brilliant scholars in medieval Latin alive); the Melville Cane citation from the Poetry Society of America; and a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The Fellowship carried a stipend that will allow Annie and me to take good advantage of my sabbatical-an entire year, beginning in February, 1973.

You surely wonder who Annie is, and the name (beloved name) can serve as the occasion for me to account for the past years of silence. You may not be aware that Liberty and I were divorced in 1962. I hasten to add that she has remarried and is living quite well in California with her husband, a Hungarian named Miklos Kovacs, with our younger son Marshall, who is doing quite well in a private school out there, and with a new son of their own. My older son Franz, who was born in Vienna, is now nineteen years old and attending Oberlin College in Ohio. I should add that Franz has turned out to have a gift for languages, which he is pursuing at Oberlin, an excellent school. In fact, he and I collaborated on my most recent volume of translation. It is called Wandering, by Hermann Hesse, a strange and haunting work, a kind of metaphysical travel-book. Everything has turned out fairly enough, and for some curious reason, Lib and I have maintained a clearer and more serene friendship since our divorce than we ever had during the marriage.

However, for me personally, the years between 1962 and 1968 were riddled with a confusing and sometimes harrowing loneliness. I was teaching all the time, first at the University of Minnesota and then for two years at Macalester College in St. Paul, and I was sustained by the faith of my students and by the friendship of a few sympathetic people; but even so, I did a good deal of rootless prowling all around the United States whenever I got the chance. Some amusing things happened. For example, my publisher at Wesleyan got so exasperated in the attempt to locate my whereabouts that they came within an ace of hiring a private investigator to find me and make me sit still long enough for them to send me a royalty check. Then one year-I think it was the academic year 1964-65 -a literary friend in New York urged me to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. I did so, somewhat diffidently, and to my astonishment I received the grant. At first I didn't know what to do with it. My health was none too good, so in May I accepted an invitation to spend the entire summer in Cupertino, California, with Henry and Elizabeth (Willerton) Esterly. During the years since 1962 up to then I had managed to hold myself together by writing a new book of my own and by collaborating with Robert Bly on his magazine and on two or three volumes of translation. Consequently, after leaving the Esterlys', I proceeded to the Blys' farm in western Minnesota right at the edge of the great western prairies where, even during the harsh years in Minneapolis I had been able to go and find some welcome and serenity. All this time, you must understand, I was slowly and tenaciously molding together a new volume of poems that proved painfully difficult to write. (The book eventually appeared, in 1968 I believe, as Shall We Gather at the River.) After spending a while at the Blys' farm, I suddenly found myself afflicted with homesickness, so I traveled on to New Concord, Ohio, to be with my parents, who, by the way, though well into their 70s, are still alive. I must have spent two or three months in that little Ohio town, reading, studying, and above all struggling with the book. During that period I also had a somewhat vague intention of traveling to Europe, perhaps to Vienna, where I had attended the University some years previously, or perhaps to England. I was so uncertain, however, that the nurses at the County Health Office in Zanesville inoculated me against what seemed like everything from beri-beri to bubonic plague.

Finally, sometime in February, I came to New York. After I got settled in a resident hotel, it occurred to me that, since I liked the city so much, and the Eastern United States in general, I might as well go and talk things over with several schools that had offered me a position. The word had got around, as it has a way of doing in academic circles, that I was pretty much decided not to return to the Midwest. I did visit several schools in upstate New York and even in Pennsylvania, particularly Franklin and Marshall in Lancaster, where I used to travel each Tuesday for seven weeks to teach an evening seminar for a friend of mine who had become ill. Then I suddenly received a call from Dr. Allen Mandelbaum, Hunter's great Dante and Virgil scholar. He urged me to visit the chairman of the English department on a given day. When I arrived, the chairman and the Personnel and Budget Committee were waiting for me; and, after a brief interview, they offered me an Associate Professorship on the spot. I accepted with pleasure and, I must say, with some relief. It meant that I had succeeded in establishing myself in the city and that I could count on the stabilizing influence of teaching while I struggled to navigate this enormous, deeply troubled, and magnificent place. For the next two years I taught at the Uptown Branch of Hunter. It is now a separate school, Lehmann College. Those two years were a fantastic experience. I would rise quite early each morning, walk ten blocks, grab a quick breakfast at a hash-joint on Broadway called the Super-Duper (two fried eggs, a minute steak, fried potatoes, and what must surely be the best pickled cucumbers this side of the Hudson River), and then take the subway for something more than an hour way, way up in the Bronx. It was a splendid and, I daresay, restoring experience altogether. And during that time, sitting alone in my single room at the Hotel Regent just about fifteen blocks downtown from Columbia University, I finally completed Shall We Gather at the River. I pruned it to a little more than half of the previous version. What I had in mind, and what I would not abandon no matter what happened, was the idea of making the book spin with utter lucidity in its anguish from the very epigraph under the title to the final period of the final poem. Clarity and a classical rhetoric were everything. It is an unhappy book, and consequently I could not afford to submit to the temptation of the florid and extraneous. "Ars est celare artem," Horace observed, and he has always been the wisest of guides.

After the two years at uptown Hunter, the school became autonomous, and I came to teach undergraduate and graduate courses at Hunter downtown. I am happy to be teaching at Hunter, where I have now become a tenured Full Professor.

The central focus of this sketchy account is of course, my Annie. One evening while I was still teaching uptown, the distinguished Shakespearean scholar David Stevenson, with whom I had struck up a good friendship, invited me to a dinner party at his New York apartment. There were many friendly colleagues there, and also some people whom I did not know. Among these was a lady, somewhat slim and extraordinarily beautiful, who looked to me to be about twenty-five years old. I was sharply aware of her all evening, though we didn't exchange a single word. Some mutual friends, by happy chance, gave both of us a ride home. I stepped out of the car to see her to her door, and suddenly blurted out a request that she let me have her name and address. Miss Edith Anne Runk. Well. Shortly thereafter I returned to Western Minnesota to do some work during the summer. In the Fall, I returned, and a colleague2 mentioned that she had casually asked about me. At about that time I was to read my verses at the auditorium of the 92nd Street Y, and I arranged for a ticket to be provided for her. Lo and behold! She appeared. Thereafter I began to court her, and that in the most old-fashioned manner imaginable. She gave the matter mature consideration, and eventually accepted me. We were married at the chapel of the Riverside Church on April 29, 1967.

It turns out that she graduated from Wheelock College in Boston some twenty years ago, had taught during those years at a school in Paris for a year and at another in Rome for two years. At the time we were married she was the Director of the West Side Community Nursery School. She is now the teacher and Director of an international nursery school in Brooklyn. Each summer during the five years of our marriage, we have left the city. Four times I was teaching summer school at such places as the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Sir George Williams University in Montreal. A couple of years ago we spent the summer mainly in France and Italy, which she knows so well and of which I was totally ignorant. We also had three weeks in Vienna and a week in south-central Yugoslavia where we'd been invited to an international conference of authors. (By the way, Miss Sheriff, could you believe-I scarcely can-that my verses have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Macedonian, and Japanese?)

I can truthfully say that I have never been closer and happier with another human being in my entire life. I have served as a substitute at Annie's nursery school, and she has often lectured my college students on the poetry and painting of children. She has also written some beautifully intelligent and sensitive stories and essays, one of which was a marvelous paper about the experiences of Hawthorne and Henry James in Rome, a paper which she presented to my Honors Seminar. Recently I fell ill because of overwork and other causes, and she was at my side in the hospital from morning till night. (My health is now improved.) If certain complications resolve themselves, we will be leaving for Paris, and then Rome, on June 19.

How in heaven's name did I, of all people, ever find such a person. Over the years I have certainly committed somewhat more than my share of peccadilloes and outright sins. The only rational answer that occurs to me is that I have been touched by some kind of grace. At any rate, that is the way I feel, morning and night [. . .]

Again, it was a delight to hear from you. Annie and I both send our love to you and Nancy.

With abiding devotion,

Jim

To Robert Bly

New York City

March 19, 1973

Dear Robert,

For many days now, I've been brooding about Sleepers Joining Hands, and I have held back again, because I did not want to write you a blurb. During the past few years it was necessary for me to take what strength I discovered in myself through you and your family and go try to find my own life. We have remained in touch from time to time, and surely there has never been any question about my perception of your strange powers, which to my mind have always included the western intellect and have gone beyond it. We haven't shown each other our new groping poems for years, because our friendship-the friendship of the imagination-sometimes provided fools with their delighted occasion to misunderstand. I came to your farm and your family because I needed to discover the life of solitude, and because I was simply unable to bear loneliness, which, as Bill Knott once said in a wonderful letter to me, rots the soul. I never cared all that much about the brevity of my life. What horrified me in those old lonelinesses was that my soul might rot. I'm pretty sure it won't rot now, because I've gone on so many of my own American wanderings, and now it is time for us to survey what has happened when we've left each other in his own solitude.

The relation between solitude and loneliness is a terrible and beautiful thing, maybe the problem we haven't yet solved in America. I still love this country and yet I have to admit that I love [sic] it too. Robert, you are the most solitary human being I have ever met in my life, and yet I have never met any other human being who had such powers of giving. I am not going to pretend (I pretend about other things all the time) that I know what that solitude is, but it is no pretense to say that I have derived from it a good deal of the strength that I have. It would be easy enough prose to say that I derived that strength from the welcome I got every Friday evening, when I caught the bus from Minneapolis and arrived in Madison at twenty minutes before eleven with my cigar and my bottle of booze. What is more difficult to describe is the welcome I felt in the living creation itself.

I had never felt welcome on earth before.

Now I think I am beginning to understand what happened to me. The details are that Carol asked me to be my incomparable Mary's godfather, that I was given the chance to go out in the cold and give David (!) his corn and water at the middle of my night drunk, and that Annie and I arrived to be greeted for our honeymoon (it is the only one I ever had, and after six years it remains a crucial moment, and an eternal moment) in a schoolhouse that floated down the road. What happened to me in all those days was that I learned it was all right to be in solitude.

Your own solitude I will not violate. For these several years now, we have gone our own ways and written our own poems. We've kept in touch all right, but our correspondence has suffered, and not just because I don't like to write letters. I do like to write them. I think I was silent because in a way I was waiting for Sleepers Joining Hands, which is a golden book, your best, and consequently one of the best books we have. The prose essay in the middle of the book is all right with me, because it makes clearer than you have ever done before what poetry, the life of the imagination, has done in our lifetime, brief and damned though that may be, and our share in what matters, the attempt "to right our own spiritual balance."

What I came looking for in those days was not just the chance to be alone, but to learn a little bit about ways to be solitary.

What I've said in this letter is still sketchy. I don't know how to explain it. It seems to me that the poems in Sleepers Joining Hands are beyond explanation or attack or imitation. It is no good talking about political or natural or aesthetic "themes." One of these days I hope to be true enough to my own solitude to be able to offer forth a poem like that. I guess that is what I'm trying to say.

I want to tell Carol that the books arrived just fine, and we appreciate her handling the clutter so clearly. In June, Annie and I are going to Europe again, and in the meantime I have to speak at various places. Have you ever been down in Tucson, Arizona? Shortly I will write you about the beauty of that place.

Love,

James

New York City

March 22, 1973

Dear Robert,

The other day I started to read Dee Brown's book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I started to read even before the current trouble out there got started. What I had in mind was to read something documentary and entertaining, to divert myself while I'm not teaching.

Needless to say, I wanted to put the book aside, because it is not entertaining or diverting. But I made up my mind to read the whole disastrous record, which, as far as I can tell, is historically sound. At any rate, it is thoroughly documented, and the documents are available to anybody who cares to see them, like you and me, when I went with you to the old building (not that new thing) in Minneapolis to find contemporary accounts of the 1862-3 Sioux Rebellion.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is quite enough to confirm any despairing person in his conviction that there is no hope for man on this earth. So I thought. And yet I found a paragraph that maybe calls that old neurotic assumption of mine into serious question. I don't know what to do with it, or really to think about it, but I quote it for you here:

Fora long time Crazy Horse had been waiting for a chance to test himself in battle with the Bluecoats. In all the years since the Fetterman fight at Fort Phil Kearney, he had studied the soldiers and their ways of fighting. Each time he went into the Black Hills to seek visions, he had asked Wakantaka to give him secret powers so that he would know how to lead the Oglalas to victory if the white men ever came again to make war upon his people. Since the time of his youth, Crazy Horse had known that the world men lived in was only a shadow of the real world. To get into the real world, he had to dream, and when he was in the real world everything seemed to float or dance. In this real world his horse danced as if it were wild or crazy, and this was why he called himself Crazy Horse. He had learned that if he dreamed himself into the real world before going into a fight, he could endure anything.

Well, there is abundant evidence of the man's military genius, and his fierce despair so fierce in fact that, faced with the manacles and chains prepared for him at Fort Robinson he ran amuck and got bayoneted in the abdomen by a Federal guard (evidence comes proudly from the Union troops themselves), but what I want to know is, what did he mean by the real world?

And what is going on at Wounded Knee now? All I've been able to find out is that, as usual, the Indians have been trying to muck one another up and manipulate the news media. Those are probably lies, but they are all I can find. What does Fred Manfred think about the mess out there? Have you been in touch with him?

I can assure you that the worst damned place on earth to find out what is going on in America is New York City.

What do you think of Crazy Horse's ideas? What would he have done with those ideas if his country hadn't been assaulted? Wasn't he driven by the physical world into paranoia? No. He found his fears (I share them) justified by the Federal troops.

No wonder this country is sick. I am afraid of many things, but I am not afraid of all things, and maybe it would be good to live where I can trust the things I am not afraid of. But where are they?

I don't have an inkling of the answers to any of these questions, but I wanted especially to send you the paragraph about Crazy Horse. Please write me a good long letter.

Love,

James

Honolulu

July 21, 1976

Dear Robert,

What a joy it is to have your letter! Your suggestions for cutting the poems about the saguaro cactus and about the moor-hen seem to me entirely accurate. The moor-hen doesn't need a great deal in the way of deletion. It's rather a matter of replacing a word here and there in the light of your general remark about it. But the saguaro is a different thing entirely. You know, I had hesitated a good deal about even including that poem in the manuscript I sent you. I felt there was a real poem in it somewhere, but it was so cluttered with deadwood that I couldn't find it. But the cuts that you've indicated not only get rid of such deadwood. By their very nature, these cuts indicate what kind of deadwood it is. Sure enough, it turns out to be of two sorts: irrelevant and actually obstructing intrusions from my personal past; and-this is a hard one-self-pity, and the strange and quite horrible way the language turns to dead mush when self-pity starts to control it.

Anyway, I have been reading and reading the saguaro poem and reliving it, and when the new version is finished, I'll send it to you.

Your whole comment in your letter is in fact very encouraging. What you say-that you'll send "a list of poems that should be dropped out," and that "so far-in the American section-the book is lively and fresh, with not too much deadwood"-suggests that I did send the manuscript to you at the best time. For one thing, you have the time and opportunity to read it and think about it in total freedom and at leisure. For another, I succeeded in working on it myself up to the point where I was more or less able to spare you the necessity of just working through the whole thing and then sending it back with the exhausted suggestion that the entire book is ill-conceived and that, if I want to write a good book, I would have to start all over again. Of course, I have started all over again-several times-but, from what you say, I seem to have got the manuscript to the point where you can work on it profitably.

We're happy to have Mary's summer address. Annie is writing her a wild Hawaiian postcard this morning, I think, and I am going to write her a note directly. It is marvelous to think of her at the National Music Camp, and touching to realize that she is away from home for the first time. Since she is in Michigan, I presume that she-and you-will be seeing Don Hall sometime during the summer. He and I have been exchanging good letters, and he mentioned that he would be back in Ann Arbor for a while, before he undertakes to go back to New Hampshire and make a living as a writer. In general, I have the feeling that Don is happier than he's been in all the years I've known him, and that he has earned a kind of tough wisdom that is bringing into focus his great goodness of heart. I must say that I like his new poems more than I like anything he's ever written before. There is a clarity of feeling that comes into something like his poem on the black-faced sheep that, I think, hasn't shown itself in his previous poems nearly so well as it's shown itself in his prose. I still think that String Too Short to Be Saved reveals the best and truest Don Hall, and he's written some stories that are just like it. Now it seems to be coming alive in his poems.

Annie and I are having a lovely time here in Hawaii. In spite of real-estate developments, etc., in Honolulu, the place still retains its sense of nature's immediacy, and that nature that it reveals is fantastically beautiful. And the people we've met are very sweet. I love my students. Bill Merwin is here, with a stunning and charming Hawaiian girl. He seems more relaxed and happier than I've ever seen him.

This evening I'm going to read poems here at the university. I really don't like to read in public very much, but I feel a little different here in Hawaii, maybe more at home somehow.

I found a marvelous book the other day-I haven't bought it yet-it's a paperback edition of one of those anthropological studies done by the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, and it includes translations of many poems which are supposed to accompany the performance of the many different kind of hula-of all things. If I can find it, I'll get a copy for you.

We got John Logan sent off to San Francisco all right. He was very tired, but he seemed well, except for being troublingly overweight.

It is nice to think of you sitting in the mornings in the cabin under the pine trees. I remember the white sand up there. We haven't been yet to the beach on this island where the sand is black, or to the one where the sand is green. But we will go. Last week we went swimming at night in a bay where I carefully wriggled my way in the dark among some coral reefs where moray eels were sleeping. I'm told that they don't care to be disturbed, and I must have succeeded in leaving them alone, because I wasn't attacked. They aren't deadly, but people hereabouts say that the moray eels can raise merry hell if you go out of your way to bother them. That is all right with me. I don't blame them for feeling that way. And I certainly have no intention of bothering them. I just want them to go on living, and I hope to see them swimming one of these days.

Please write soon. Give our love to Carol and the children.

Love,

Jim

To Galway Kinnell

Honolulu August 10, 1976

Dear Galway,

Yesterday afternoon I received the copy of my manuscript with your wonderful long letter and your careful comments on the individual poems. I had already heard from Robert about the same matter, and I still have to receive Don Hall's detailed remarks. I am fascinated by many things: the attention that both you and Robert gave to the manuscript, and the hard work; but mainly the suggestions about revisions and poems to delete. Your suggestions are more often identical than not. Robert's list of deletions is longer: he wants me to drop 17 poems. So far, I have thought of dropping about 12. But many of the others have to be worked on further.

In general, I feel that I have a fair group of about thirty poems or so, maybe a couple more; that these amount to at least the solid beginning of a real book; and that (I can't quite explain this) the book ought to have at least 40 poems in it.

At any rate, it pleases me to realize that I am letting the book grow into its own life, and that I have shown it at the right time to the right people. What I require is the help of sympathetic and entirely honest intelligence. Encouragement is necessary, but flattery is deadly. I feel all right about the manuscript, and I know that it isn't done yet.

I have to go to class in a couple of minutes. I'm sorry to have to cut this short. One thing I have to tell you-and Annie will elaborate in a forthcoming letter-is that, unhappily, we won't be able to come to Vermont on the Labor Day weekend. Classes start at Hunter almost immediately thereafter, and I have a lot of preparation to do.

I'll be in touch again soon, Galway, and thank you for commenting so carefully and helpfully on the manuscript.

Love to you all.

Love,

Jim

To Donald Hall

New York City

September 21, 1976

Dear Don,

We got back to NYC early in September, and I received your long fine letter. But almost immediately thereafter we stashed our luggage here in the city and moved to the mountains in upstate. We always do this when we return from travelling in the summer. It is our odd way of coming to terms with work in the city.

I had taken your long letter with me up to the mountains. I had half-intended to reply to it up there; but instead I just re-read it, and re-studied it several times. I see that it was necessary for me to do that, for my sake. Because what I want to do with this book is write it as well as I truly can. I can't write any book well without offering the manuscript-at a certain point, the point where I have temporarily done as much as I can with it-to the three friends or so whose intelligence, honesty, and devotion I can completely trust. After I offer a manuscript to such friends, and get their replies, I can study it again, with the replies. (My last book, Two Citizens, was bad, but certainly it wouldn't have been so bad if I had asked you and Robert and Galway-and, probably, Louis Simpson-to read it before I let it be published. I don't know if you have this problem or not, but I have an editor, Michael di Capua, who is a nice and generous and encouraging fellow, but the trouble is that he would publish anything I sent him, even my laundry list, and I don't want to publish my laundry list.)

So you can understand why I haven't written a detailed reply to your great letter. But I should have written you a postcard, for friendship's sake.

And friendship is everything. I think I finally understand: intelligent friendship is everything. It may not be entirely why we write our poems. But it is certainly why we have the courage to give those poems to each other. As far as poetry is concerned, I think this past summer has been the greatest summer of my lifetime. I speak only for myself, but I don't think that's nothing. I didn't write very much that was new during the summer, but I did offer some fifty or so poems to my intelligent friends, and I have now at the front of my manuscript about five fantastic letters. I have your long, detailed one. I have one good general one from Galway, including his whole copy of my manuscript with remarkable marginal comments; and I have three amazing letters from Robert.

If writing a book of poetry isn't that, then it isn't anything, as far as I'm concerned.

Now I want to respond in a little detail:

Robert urged that I delete 17 poems out of the 50 or so. I agree with him in most cases, but there are exceptions: I am trying to save, with revisions, a few such as the following:

Written on a Big Cheap Postcard

Under the Canals

The City of Evenings

With a Sliver of Marble from Carrara

The Lambs on the Boulder

Before I would include these in a manuscript to be published, I wonder if you would mind my sending you the revisions? Your comments, with Robert's, about what went wrong with the prose pieces, and about the differences between prose and poetry, seem to me sound and true.

Galway's letter was fine and pointed. His best comments came on the manuscript itself, which I am slowly revising, often according to his suggestions.

I figure there are about 35 poems that I can imagine being willing to put in, and that is not enough [. . .] Don, I wish you would send me a list of the poems out of my manuscript you think I could save. Maybe that will give me something yet more solid I can work on.

This hasn't turned out to be much of a letter, but I'm going to send it off anyway. I hope your moving chore is over, and that you and Jane [Kenyon] are happily getting settled.

I had a phone conversation with De Snodgrass a few days ago-the first time I'd talked with him in years-and we spoke warmly of you.

Love,

Jim

To Betsy Fogelman

Misquamicut, Rhode Island

August 2, 1978

Dear Bets,

Somewhere in the vastness of Thomas Hardy there's a poem that says in the last line, "The salt fog mops me." Fair enough. I'm sitting on a nice little front porch, surrounded on three sides by the salt mist of the Atlantic Ocean. I don't find it gloomy, though. It tastes just fine. I am hoping that by noon the sun will have reached through. If it does, we'll be here to greet it, by God. Well, we'll probably go swimming anyway, as we did yesterday afternoon, the ocean being just about a half-mile away.

We arrived just a couple of days ago, and there were some other matters to take care of, but now I can sit here in the early morning and write to you with the ease and pleasure I always feel in your company.

We'd been here before at Misquamicut, just a village by the ocean; and, last Spring sometime, I wrote the following' and sent it to David Ignatow, who's going to print it (with another piece about the edge of water) in a series of broadsides he's editing.

I liked the prose piece (I prefer that phrase to "prose poem") that you sent me-very much indeed. Are you trying more of them?

We'll be here through the month of August and a little longer, dear Bets, and I hope you'll write to me soon. The summer in New York was all a-clutter with visitors and commitments of one kind or another. We did get away to see some friends in Buffalo for a week, and guess what I did? Well, a couple of men I know there were baking bread, and all at once I was seized with the inspiration. So I returned to NYC and tried it. My first batch was more or less okay. It was edible. But the second! It was marvelous. The second time, I even cut a slight line along the top of the loaves before I put them in the oven for the next-to-last phase, and sure enough, the tops of the loaves just opened up and breathed. I've begun to accumulate a small library of books about bread. Tomorrow, I believe I'll try out the oven here in this cottage. I'll follow the conventional, old-fashioned plan one more time; and, if it works again, then for my following batch I believe I'll try something a little more baroque: some kind of the so-called quick-bread. You can make it with bananas, a fairly popular cross between bread and cake. But I want honest-to-God bread, and one of my books suggests something with nuts, or water-cress, or even squash. This is a new world to me. During both of my bakings, I had a lovely, lovely time. There is something about it-intimate, graceful, light-hearted, and transcendently strong-a surrender and a kind of attentive strength, indistinguishable from each other. It's hard to say what I mean; but it is lovely.

There are two books which I wish you would find, if you don't know them already. Your words about Nietzsche made me think, in some deep way though not immediately obvious, of the wonderful book by José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses. It is stunning and deep, and has meant a great deal to me over the years. I return to it all the time; I must have read it fifty times. The other is just a novel, a comic novel, but I am thoroughly happy that it is in print again (a Penguin Books paperback): Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons. Come to think of it, dear Betsy, you ought to read the latter at once. It is cheering, no end . . . Mist is still gray outside, but it's not raining. We're going soon to an immense farm-market, for corn, squash, sausage, and all those things that force me to confess what a startlingly sensuous person I am. I can't help it. (Gently sensuous, I hope.) Please write to me soon, dear.

Love,

Jim

To Galway Kinnell

New York City

December 31, 1979

Dear Galway,

I wasn't surprised to get your note, and I think my earlier reluctance to write to you was, of all things, a certain shyness. I had been writing about you in my notebook, about your new poems (the proofs of which I now have, your best and most serious book, I think), and about something I think you and I have always shared, something so deep as to be terribly difficult to welcome into words. How am I ever going to be able to say this? For the truth is there is something terrible, almost unspeakably terrible, in our lives, and it demands respect, and, for some reason that seems to me quite insane, it doesn't hate us. There, you see? Every time I try to write it down it comes out gibberish.

Well, here are my facts: I have a malignant tumor at the base of my tongue. I am having a series of twenty radiation treatments which are to prepare me for surgery toward the end of January. I have been in some pain (of a complex and interesting kind) and nausea, but my various doctors-all of them remarkable men-are tending to me pretty well. The recovery from the operation will be slow and painful and pretty long, but it will not be any worse than what I feel now.

I've been reading Etheridge [Knight]'s new manuscript, and it strikes me with great pleasure that he is such an extraordinarily sophisticated artist. Nobody else going seems to have so much sheer fun with the sound of words in the language.

Please write to me, Galway. We weren't able to come to Hawaii even next Spring because of our complicated professional commitments here. It is a hell of a note, and we will certainly miss being there.

I've been working hard on something, and if it turns out all right, I'll send it to you. Love to Ines and the children and to you from both of us.

Jim

P.S. I haven't yet written to Hayden [Carruth] about my bad news, but I'll try to tomorrow.

Excerpted from A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright edited by Anne Wright and Saundra Maley, with Jonathan Blunk, to be published in August 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright 2005 by Anne Wright. All rights reserved.

JONATHAN BLUNK is the authorized biographer of James Wright and a co-editor, with Anne Wright and Saundra Maley, of A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright.

photograph by Thomas Victor

NOTES

1. From Wright's "A Note on Mr. James Dickey," withdrawn from publication in The Sewanee Review but included in draft with Wright's previous letter.

2. Allen Mandelbaum.

3. Published in This Journey (1982).

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