Paterson (Revised Edition) by William Carlos Williams Page A

unity of being and one’s freedom to be one’s self, from one’s relationship to those particular externals (language, clay, paints, et cetera) over which one has complete control and the shaping of which lies entirely in one’s own power; whereas in living, one’s shaping of the externals involved there (of one’s friendships, the structure of society, et cetera) is no longer entirely within one’s own power but requires the cooperation and the understanding and the humanity of others in order to bring out what is best and most real in one’s self.
    That’s why all that fine talk of yours about woman’s need to “sail free in her own element” as a
poet
, becomes nothing but empty rhetoric in the light of your behavior towards me. No woman will ever be able to do that, completely, until she is able
first
to “sail free in her own element” in living itself—which means in her relationships with men even before she can do so in her relationships with other women. The members of any underprivileged class distrust and hate the “outsider” who is
one of them
, and women therefore—women in general—will never be content with their lot until the light seeps down to them, not from one of their own, but from the eyes of changed male attitudes toward them—so that in the mean time, the problems and the awareness of a woman like myself are looked upon even more unsympathetically by other women than by men.
    And that, my dear doctor, is another reason why I needed of you a very different kind of friendship from the one you offered me.
    I still don’t know of course the specific thing that caused the cooling of your friendliness toward me. But I do know that if you were going to bother with me
at all
, there were only two things for you to have considered: (1) that I was, as I still am, a woman dying of loneliness—yes, really dying of it almost in the same way that people die slowly of cancer or consumption or any other such disease (and with all my efficiency in the practical world continually undermined by that loneliness); and (2) that I needed desperately, and still do, some ways and means of leading a
writer’s
life, either by securing some sort of writer’s job (or any other job having to do with my cultural interests) or else through some kind of literary journalism such as the book reviews—because only in work and jobs of that kind, can I turn into assets what are liabilities for me in jobs of a different kind.
    Those were the two problems of mine that you continually and almost deliberately placed in the background of your attempts to help me. And yet they were, and remain, much greater than whether or not I get my poetry published. I didn’t need the
publication
of my poetry with your name lent to it, in order to go on writing poetry, half as much as I needed your friendship in other ways (the very ways you ignored) in order to write it. I couldn’t, for that reason, have brought the kind of responsiveness and appreciation that you expected of me (not with any real honesty) to the kind of help from you which I needed so much less than the kind you withheld.
    Your whole relationship with me amounted to pretty much the same thing as your trying to come to the aid of a patient suffering from pneumonia by handing her a box of aspirin or Grove’s cold pills and a glass of hot lemonade. I couldn’t tell you that outright. And how were you, a man of letters, to have realized it when the imagination, so quick to assert itself most powerfully in the creation of a piece of literature, seems to have no power at all in enabling writers in your circumstances to fully understand the maladjustment and impotencies of a woman in my position?
    When you wrote to me up in W. about that possible censor job, it seemed a very simple matter to you, didn’t it, for me to make all the necessary inquiries about the job, arrange for the necessary interviews, start work (if I was hired) with all the necessary living