RIPOSTES
The Temptation of Dr. Williams
As our readers know, the Communist
Party seems to consider the destruction
of PARTISANREVIEW as important an
effort as the destruction of Franco--
perhaps a bit more important. The cam-
paign seems to have two aspects: (1 )
open denunciations in the Party press;
(2) a whispering campaign of slander
supplemented by backstairs intrigue.
Last month we gave some examples of
the press attacks. And now we are able
to present amateurs of literary politics
with the interesting case of Dr. William
Carlos Williams.
PARTISANREVIEW regards Dr. Wil·
liams as an extremely accomplished
poet. Consequently, when we set about
reviving the magazine, we asked him to
contribute. He replied:
Sept. 8.
four note of Aug. 20 rec'd. I shall
have a poem for the
PARTISANREVIEW
in
a week or ten days. Thank you for
4Sking me to contribute ....
Sincerely
,ours, W.
C.
Williams.
A few days later we received a poem
from him. We kept it in our files, but
wrote him again asking to see others.
"O.K.," he wrote back, "Try this on
your victrola!" and he enclosed a poem
called "The Defective Record." On the
strength of all this, we announced Dr.
Williams as a future contributor. After
consideration, we decided that neither
of the poems in our possession re-
presented his work at its best, and so
we returned them,
explaining our
reasonsand asking him to submit others.
In reply he sent a postcard:
"Your
patience will make the flowers bloom."
This was cryptic but seemed friendly
enough.
We were, therefore,
astonished to
read in the
New Masses
of November
16last:
Watch for these articles next week
or
later: ...
(2)
a study of the writ-
ill,s of contributor H. H. Lewis, '6y
William Carlos Williams, author of
In
the American Grain
and other works.
Incidentally,
some of our readers may
have seen an advance notice of the
Trotskyist
PARTISANREVIEW,
announc-
ing the anti-Soviet,
anti-Communist
contents of the first issue. William
Carlos Williams is listed as a contribu-
tor, but he writes to the
NEW MASSES
that "the
PARTISANREVIEW
has no con-
tribution of mine nor will I send them
any."
So it-appeared that PARTISANREVIEW
was using Dr. Williams'
name without
any license! And the
New Masses
liked
this idea so well that they repeated it
in their next number. Now it happened
that at this time PARTISANREVIEWhad
not appeared; we knew of nothing that
might have prompted Dr. Williams to
make such a statement.
So we wrote
him asking for confirmation.
He re-
plied:
Tour letter of yesterday calling at-
tention to a quotation from a letter of
mine which appeared
in
the current
issue of New Masses reached me this
morning. I hasten to reply-not
that
there is any need for haste but out of
courtesy to all concerned.
Tou know, of course, that I have
no
reason for liking the
PARTISANREVIEW.
I have, at the same time,
no
partisan
interest
in
the New Masses. I had oc-
casion to appear as a writer, for a
special reason,
in
the New Masses and
it looked as though I might appear also
in
the
PARTISANREVIEW.
As my con-
tribution to the New Masses was of
longer nanding and of more import-
ance to me than the other and since I
found the New Masses violently opposed
to you on political grounds, so much
so that they refused to print me if I
remained a contributor to
PARTISAN
REVIEW,
I made my choice
in
their
favor.
Their quotation from my letter was
correct.
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