The Great American Novel

by William Carlos Williams

I wonder if he'll recognise me in my Greenwich Village honkie-tonk bobbed hair. The hairdresser said: Don't you do it, when I said I'd like mine bobbed too. So many of the girls had theirs done a year ago and now its just at that impossible stage where you can't do a thing with it. Better go to Europe or California until it grows again. There's a reason for travel: As the hair progresses the days grow fewer.

But is South Africa after all the country of the future?

Over the great spaces of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana he sped in the Pullman car. City after city swept up to him, paused awhile at his elbow and plunged away to the rear with the motion of a wheel whose hub was hidden in infinity. And such indeed was exactly the case. He was being ground between two wheels, one on either side of the car and it was their turning that thrust him forward at such speed. The wheat was up in the fields but a fellow passenger assured him that in Kansas, only two days before, he had seen wheat twice as high—which explains the cause of so many abandoned farms in Vermont, he remembered, and settled back to another hour of idle staring. A new country he kept saying to himself. On a siding were cars loaded with emigrants from Holland booked through to San Francisco.

Into the elevator stepped the young man in a petty officer's uniform. His Spanish was exquisite to hear. The first battleship since the Spanish-American war was anchored in New York harbor. How well he bears himself. The Spanish are the only people in Europe whom civilization has not ruined. Savage men, big bearded chins—but shaved clean. They know how to treat their women—better than the French for the French—after all are blagueurs to a man. The Spanish stand still. What an ass a man will make of himself in a strange country! In armor De Soto wandering haphazard over Alabama. The Seminoles for guides. Buried him in the Mississippi. It is my river, he said. Roll Jordan roll. It is my river for I discovered it and into it let my body, in full armor, be put to rest. The cat-fish ate it. So roll Jordan roll. Diada Daughter of Discord: read it.

In Illinois, far in the west, over that trackless waste of forest and mountain and river and lake they came at last to a valley that pleased them and there they determined to build. So they fell to hewing trees and building their houses, work to which they had been bred and trained for two generations since Plymouth and Salem days. Cornwallis had been beaten fifty years before and Pitt had rushed to see the King crying: All is lost. A new world had been born. Here in the primeval forest the little colony of New Englanders hoped to realize success and plenty.

In Bonnie, Illinois, the Presbyterian minister is a very good man. He is as good a preacher as Bonnie can afford and if anybody said that Bonnie is made up of mad-men—He would be shot. Nuevo Mundo, shouted the sailors. But their cry was by now almost extinct.

In polite stories the world had been made acquainted with the picturesque lives of these commonplace but worthy people. In detail their story had been told. Over the precipice in Yosemite the Bridal Veil Falls had been launching its water for a thousand years and ignorance was fattening his belly apace.

Bonnie, Ill., October 22. Dear Bill: Am up to my ears in painting, and am preparing to go to Alton, Ill., to work in the State Hospital, if I get a call, so am too busy now to read your book but think I'm going to like it and will devour it later. Sincerely. A. N. Turner.

And the little boy crept into the great chest like Peppo into the Cardinal's tomb and began to pick up the mothballs that had been left there when the winter things were removed.

An Indian would sense the facts as he wished. A tree would speak to him with a definite identity. It would not at least seem endowed with human characteristics: a voice, that would be all.