The Great American Novel

by William Carlos Williams

His brother was ill. He must go home. The sun will soon be on the Pacific coast. To bed, to bed—take off the clothes beginning on the outside and working in. How would it be to take off the underwear first, then the shirt—

Progress is dam foolishness.—It is a game. Either I have or—a thieves' game. Hold me close, closer, close as you can. I can't hold you any closer. I have been stealing. I should never touch anything. I should never think of anything but you. I love another. It is a word. I have left you alone to run wild with a girl. I would be tame. Lies flicker in the sun. Visions beset noonday. Through the back window of the shoe-shine parlor a mass of golden glow flashes in the heat. Come into my heart while I am running—jumping from airplane to plane in mid-air. I cannot stop: the word I am seeking is in your mouth—I cannot stop. Hold me against—

You are wrong, wrong Alva N. Turner. It is deeper than you imagine. I perceive that it may be permissible for a poet to write about a poetic sweet-heart but never about a wife—should have said possible. It is not possible. All men do the same. Dante be damned. Knew nothing at all. Lied to himself all his life. Profited by his luck and never said thanks. God pulled the lady up by the roots. Never even said thank you. Quite wrong. Look what he produced. Page after page. Helped the world to bread. Have another slice of bread Mr. Helseth. No thank you—Not hungry tonight? Something on his mind.

The word. Who.

Liberate the words. You tie them. Poetic sweet-heart. Ugh. Poetic sweet-heart. My dear Miss Word let me hold your W. I love you. Of all the girls in school you alone are the one—

Dramatise myself make it sing together as if the world were a bird who married to the same mate five years understood in the end transmigration of souls.

Nonsense. I am a writer and will never be anything else. In which case it is impossible to find the word. But to have a novel one must progress with the words. The words must become real, they must take the place of wife and sweet-heart. They must be church—Wife. It must be your wife. It must be a thing of adamant with the texture of wind. Wife.

Am I a word? Words, words, words—

And approaching the end of the novel in his mind as he sat there with his wife sleeping alone in the next room he could feel that something unusual had happened. Something had grown up in his life dearer than—It, as the end. The words from long practice had come to be leaves, trees, the corners of his house—such was the end. He had progressed leaving the others far behind him. Alone in that air with the words of his brain he had breathed again the pure mountain air of joy—there night after night in his poor room. And now he must leave her. She the—He had written the last word and getting up he understood the fog as it billowed before the lights.

That which had been impossible for him at first had become possible. Everything had been removed that other men had tied to the words to secure them to themselves. Clean, clean he had taken each word and made it new for himself so that at last it was new, free from the world for himself—never to touch it—dreams of his babyhood—poetic sweet-heart. No. He went in to his wife with exalted mind, his breath coming in pleasant surges. I come to tell you that the book is finished.