THREE POETS
699
should there
be
so much of the evangelist and his sermon? Should so
much of this book consist of what are-the reader
is
forced to conclude
-real letters from a real woman? One reads these letters with in–
volved, embarrassed pity, quite as
if
she had walked into the room
and handed them to one. What has been done to them to make it
possible for us to respond to them as art and not as raw reality? to
make them part of the poem
Pat erson?
I can think of no answer except:
They have been copied out on the typewriter.
Anyone can object,
But
the context makes them part of the poem;
and anyone can reply to this
objection,
It takes a lot of context to make somebody else's eight-page
letter the conclusion to a book of a poem.
Book II introduces-how one's heart sinks!-Credit and Usury,
those enemies of man, God, and contemporary long poems. Dr. Williams
has always put up a sturdy resistance to Pound when Pound has recom–
mended to him St. Sophia or the Parthenon, rhyme or metre, European
things like that; yet he takes Credit and Usury over from Pound and
gives them a good home and maintains them in practically the style to
which they have been accustomed-his motto seems to be,
I'll adopt
your child if only he's ugly enough.
It
is interesting to see how much
some later parts of
Paterson
resemble in their structure some middle
and later parts of the
Cantos:
the Organization of Irrelevance (or,
perhaps, the Irrelevance of Organization) suggests itself as a name
for this category of structure. Such organization is
ex post facto
organiza–
tion:
if
something is somewhere, one can always find Some Good Reason
for its being there, but if it had not been there would one reader have
missed it? if it had been put somewhere else, would one reader have
guessed where it should have "really" gone? Sometimes these anecdotes,
political remarks, random comments seem to be where they are for one
reason: because Dr. Williams chose-happened to choose-for them to
be there. One is reminded of that other world in which Milton found
Chance "sole arbiter."
Book
III
is helped very much by the inclusion of "Beautiful Thing,"
that long, extremely effective lyric that was always intended for
Pater–
son;
and Book III, though neither so homogeneous nor so close to Book
I, is in some respects superior to Book II. But all three later books are
worse organized, more eccentric and idiosyncratic, more self-indulgent,
than the first. And yet that is not the point, the real point: the
poetry,
the lyric rightness, the queer wit, the improbable and dazzling perfection
of so much of Book I have disappeared--or at least, reappear only fit–
fully. Early in Book IV, while talking to his son, Dr. Williams quotes
