Paterson (Revised Edition) by William Carlos Williams Page B

conditions for holding down such a job, and thus find my life all straightened out in its practical aspects, at least—as if by magic?
    But it’s never so simple as that to get on one’s feet even in the most ordinary practical ways, for anyone on
my
side of the railway tracks—which isn’t your side, nor the side of your great admirer, Miss Fleming, nor even the side of those well cared for people like S. T. and S. S. who’ve spent most of their lives with some Clara or some Jeanne to look after them even when they themselves have been flat broke.
    A completely down and out person with months of stripped, bare hardship behind him needs all kinds of things to even get himself in shape for looking for a respectable, important white-collar job. And then he needs ample funds for eating and sleeping and keeping up appearances (especially the latter) while going around for various interviews involved. And even if and when a job of that kind is obtained, he still needs the eating and the sleeping and the carfares and the keeping up of appearances and what not, waiting for his first pay check and even perhaps for the second pay check since the first one might have to go almost entirely for back rent or something else of that sort.
    And all that takes a hell of a lot of money (especially for a woman)—a lot more than ten dollars or twenty five dollars. Or else it takes the kind of very close friends at whose apartment one is quite welcome to stay for a month or two, and whose typewriter one can use in getting off some of the required letters asking for interviews, and whose electric iron one can use in keeping one’s clothes pressed, et cetera—the kind of close friends that I don’t have and never have had, for reasons which you know.
    Naturally, I couldn’t turn to
you
, a stranger, for any such practical help on so large a scale; and it was stupid of me to have minimized the extent of help I needed when I asked you for that first money-order that got stolen and later for the second twenty five dollars—stupid because it was misleading. But the different kind of help I asked for,
finally
(and which you placed in the background) would have been an adequate substitute, because I could have carried out
those
plans which I mentioned to you in the late fall (the book reviews, supplemented by almost any kind of part-time job, and later some articles, and maybe a month at Yaddo this summer)
without
what it takes to get on one’s feet in other very different ways. And then, eventually, the very fact that my name had appeared here and there in the book review sections of a few publications (I’d prefer not to
use
poetry that way) would have enabled me to obtain certain kinds of jobs (such as an O. W. I. job for instance) without all that red tape which affects only obscure, unknown people.
    The anger and the indignation which I feel towards you now has served to pierce through the rough ice of that congealment which my creative faculties began to suffer from as a result of that last note from you. I find myself thinking and feeling in terms of poetry again. But over and against that is the fact that I’m even more lacking in anchorage of any kind than when I first got to know you. My loneliness is a million fathoms deeper, and my physical energies even more seriously sapped by it; and my economic situation is naturally worse, with living costs so terribly high now, and with my contact with your friend Miss X having come off so badly.
    However, she may have had another reason for paying no attention to that note of mine—perhaps the reason of having found out that your friendliness toward me had cooled—which would have made a difference to her, I suppose, since she is such a great “admirer” of yours. But I don’t know. That I’m in the dark about, too; and when I went up to the “Times” last week, to try, on my own, to get some of their fiction reviews (the “Times” publishes so many of those), nothing came of