The Great American Novel

by William Carlos Williams

Clark had taken a job as clerk at Pocono, and she was a Quakeress. They got to know each other very, very well. And this girl in the steamer chair, it was the cattle men who attracted her. Let her go then, he said tying the cord with a piece of gauze twisted into a rope. When you bathe the baby for the first time do not put him into a tub but sponge him off carefully before the fire with castile soap and warm water. Be careful not to get the soap into his eyes. Is it nitrate of silver they use for a baby's eyes?

I could not tell whether it was a baby or a doll the little girl was coddling. The Italians' babies are often so very small. They dress them up so grotesquely too. It must be a rigid custom with them.

Nothing at all. All at once it seemed that every ill word he had ever heard spoken struck his ear at the same moment. What a horrible roar it made. But there were other things, too many to record. Corners of rooms sacred to so many deeds. Here he had said so and so, done so and so. On that picnic he had dared to be happy. All the older women had watched him. With one girl under each arm he had let his spirit go. They had been closer than anything he could now imagine.

[CHAPTER XIV]

Particles of falling stars, coming to nothing. The air pits them, eating out the softer parts. Sometimes one strikes the earth or falls flaming into Lake Michigan with a great hiss and roar. And if the lawless mob that rules Ireland with its orderly courts and still more orderly minds will not desist it must be crushed by England. So that to realize the futility of American men intent upon that virtue to be found in literature, literature, that is, of the traditional sort as known in France and Prussia—to realize how each serious American writer in turn flares up for a moment and fizzles out, burnt out by the air leaving no literary monument, no Arc de Triomphe behind him, no India subdued—To realize this it is necessary to go back to the T'ang dynasty where responsibility rested solely on the heads of the poets—etc., etc... Or better still why not seek in Aleppo or Jerusalem for the strain to save us.

America is lost. Ah Christ, Ah Christ that night should come so soon.

And the reason is that no American poet, no American man of letters has taken the responsibility upon his own person. The responsibility for what? There is the fire. Rush into it. What is literature anyway but suffering recorded in palpitating syllables? It is the quiet after the attack. Picking a sliver of bone from his mangled and severed leg he dipped it in his own gore and wrote an immortal lyric. Richard Cœur de Lion shot through the chest with an iron bolt wrote the first English—no, French, poem of importance. What of democratic Chaucer? He was only a poet but Richard was a man, an adventurer, a king. The half mad women rush to impregnate themselves against him. And this is literature. This is the great desirable. Soaked in passion, baba au rhum, the sheer proof of the spirit will do the trick and America will be King. Up America. Up Cœur de Lion. Up Countess Wynienski the queen of Ireland.

Polyphemus took first one shape then another but Odysseus, the wise and crafty, held firm. He did not let go but Polyphemus did. In fact the God could not exist without Odysseus to oppose him.

Why man, Europe is YEARNING to see something new come out of America.