George Barker and Oscar Williams at a poetry meeting.

Every so often we get to glimpse deeply into the life of another. We each have conflicts from time to time with another human being that seems to stir the soul. It is nice, then, to sit back once in awhile and view a conflict a couple of other human beings are having besides ourselves. Such is the following between Oscar Williams and George Barker. I find that this letter exchange between the two shows well the difficulties of being a poetry anthologist like my father.

First, your find a really good poem and poet. You want your collection of poems to be the very best. However, between you and the poem stands the poet, his or her agent, maybe, and then also the poet's regular publisher. A poet is not usually a business man, and so almost dependable. A poet is not an ordinary human being and therefore unpredictable. A poet is not even a human being but a poet. A poet is an artistic personality and so chaos is at the very foundation of their poetic personality. Over against this, Oscar Williams is trying to play the role of hardheaded business person with a little bit of God thrown in, and other roles of friend, poetry lover, or is it disgusted lover, and worshiper of the gods. And because you devote your life to poetry you have to earn a good buck at it as well, don't you? The following is a chapter from the book in progress, The Life and Death of Oscar Williams, a Memoir by his Son, Strephon Kaplan-Williams.

Oscar Writes George Some Letters
Here follows excerpts of letters between my father and George Barker. They stand for themselves. Behind the high diction of exalted poetry is the low diction of unexalted, more desperate, letter prose.
The toilet paper has been used up and someone is crying out to somebody to bring more. Only the well to do can afford nobility and the exalted word. For the needy and the deprived their world is grubbing for money in almost any way they can get it. As these letters indicate, Oscar Williams is in love with poetry, and this means he is in love with George Barker as a 'great poet'.

How then does the Great Poet treat Oscar Williams? Like shit, as these letters indicate. Are we amazed? Are we flabbergasted? Are we morally indignant, even a little disgusted at the relationship? Or should we take it a bit philosophically, in the sense that a good look at any two human beings relating will reveal all sorts of foibles and exploitations?

Oscar Williams, out of his own pocket is supplementing George Barker's income, making George think he is a far more important poet than he really is. Does Poetry magazine pay Barker ten cents a word for a poem? Oscar Williams as Barker's agent handles the transaction and gives Barker a dollar a word, claiming that is what Poetry paid him, and sometimes does not even deduct his agent, ten percent fee.
Does not Oscar Williams' little trick increase in Barker's mind his reputation as a poet by one thousand percent? But Barker is not reliable. Oscar works hard to get first rights publication for a new Barker poem and Barker lets the poem be published first elsewhere, even when asked not to. Barker does not always reply on time, does not respect Oscar Williams. Oscar Williams works very hard to relate to George Barker, despite obstacles, and for what reward?

I have to learn from this. I have to try and understand why my father preferred relating to such difficult personalities while not relating to his own son. Why do I have to find out? To attack the world of poetry back? This has occurred to me! Yet, what I later find out, is that the seeds of rejection created an emotional cancer in me, a self-defeating personality. I love literature and I want to write. But what if I am trying to become a writer, all for the wrong reasons?
What if I fail at writing after the apprentice years because I am writing for deep emotional reasons that are much better dealt with in personal therapy? Thus understanding my father, even after his death, is really understanding myself and thus freeing myself from the traumas of the past, whoever caused them.

Let us let Oscar speak for himself in these letter excerpts and surmise what kind of man he was.

A DEAREST GEORGE LETTER
35 Water St., New York, 4 NY, August 8, 1960 (Oscar is 60 years old)

Dearest, overworked and underpaid, but DEAREST George,
Well, I've sold your article "The Face Behind the Poem" ... for the round sum of $500.00. As your literary agent I've signed an agreement to this effect, but you must sign the three copies of the exemption form (on lines with green checks) and return them to me right away by the airmail envelope I have enclosed if you wish the money by RETURN MAIL. Remember, please send three copies signed in your immortal holograph.
Sorry, this is all so business like, but I'd have to write a really long letter to send my true true and real Love, Love. Hope you are well enough to spend this ....
Take care of yourself you fallen angel, - Oscar -
P.S. Don't think I didn't have to fight to get the figure raised to $500. He wanted to get it for $300, BUT he gave in before I gave in.

THE BRILLIANT INITIATIVE LETTER
November 27, 1960

Dear Whip poor will of Wyoming and G.B. (Gr Br.),
Your SPARROW'S FEATHER has been accepted by The New Yorker but it or they insists or insist that it is a condition it or they print it first: so please let me know who in England is likely to accept this poem, too, so that I can arrange to request that the poem be printed in Great Britain after it has appeared in THE NEW YORKER. I want to get you the large cheque implicit in a New Yorker acceptance.
Your other poems are in the works and digging up (I hope) shekels for my beloved George.
I'm sending you on my own brilliant initiative an advance check for $25 which I expect to withhold from either the Poetry or The New Yorker check, whichever comes first.
Your three roman odes are beautiful and so is Yucca flats, all of which will bring you a million.
In the meantime please write me a more extensive letter, about anything. If you run out of subjects or objects, why not write me what you once told me in the presence of Adolescent Emily: that is, that you thought or think that I am the best poet writing in America. I know that this is not a compliment, but other people may not agree with me.
Love forever, - Oscar -

Note how my father loves to use words to make things interesting. Of course, George Barker, or any poet, making a million is a laugh. None of Oscar's poet friends could understand why they got paid so little while executives of car making companies got paid so much. True, cars contribute to society. But so does poetry. How often have I heard this argument from them?

We note also that Williams is really an anthologist fighting hard to get recognition for his poets. On the side he has not given up yet on the idea of being the best poet in America. Groveling in the dirt, I call it. Don't waste your time on what is not reality.

The most telling is the abject humor of Oscar trying to get positive comment for his reputation as a poet: "that you thought or think that I am the best poet writing in America. I know that this is not a compliment, but other people may not agree with me."

While I admire the wit here, the pit of my stomach, even now, grips in on itself tightly, indicating a great sadness, even despair, that my father had to stoop so low. Now I add rage to these other feelings, but still, mostly the deep sadness at his life is what makes the tears surface behind my eyes and my gut wrench.

THE UNBEDDED MAID LETTER
December 10, 1960

Dear Romen George,
........ (what follows is a lot of detailing on Oscar negotiating with The New Yorker to get Sparrow's Feather (a weighty feather) published, and Oscar taking his ten percent as agent. Other projects and poems mentioned also.)
Alas, Gloria is around, but vagely, not an unmade bed, but an unbedded maid, alas, for you and me, n everyone.
Will you or wont you write me? But sign the enclosed if you're interested in yerself, and return air-mail.
A whopping Xmas for you, by Crias sake.
Love, - Oscar -

Note the humor. This was Oscar's wit, to keep turning things around for new and unusual meanings. It formed part of his literary persona. I was always amazed by how well he could entertain others at literary gatherings. Was he a happy man? Absurd question. He never joked at home during my Christmas, two-week vacations. Or should I say, too-weak vacations, in the style of Oscar Williams?

THE DARLING GEORGE LETTER
May 2, 1962

Darling George,
I've been both sick and away, and they're both sad states of ununitedness. But I'm back at this damned typewriter which has asthma, as you can see. I've just had lunch with Victor Weybright, the pink literary Walrus who once bought one of your plays for New World Writings.
In the meantime I'm including a great many of your poems in THE MENTOR BOOK OF MAJOR BRITISH POETS, From William Blake to George Barker, and I find that while I include Eliot, D. Thomas and yourself, I have to omit See Night Lewis, Louis MacNephew and the Big Spender.
And here's more News. I went to austin Texas, and in addition to reading some of my poems and yours too by god, I gave Em a George Barker Collection, including the large painting of you, framed, which was done by Gene, the one in which you are feeding catholic wafers to Pegassus, who looks hungry. I hope you don't mind being immortal while alive, a fate, apparently, worse than life in these stringent stringy times. Write me soon, Carol sends her love, I send mine.
Love again, - Oscar -

This changing of poets' names seems to fail as wit: "I have to omit See Night Lewis, Louis MacNephew and the Big Spender". Wit is not made by contrivance but by a genuine and original switching of meanings.

We don't include complete letters here. Just interesting parts for style and character of Oscar Williams. Gene, is Gene Derwood, my mother, his wife, now dead for eight years.

Note that IMMORTALITY is a big theme with Oscar Williams. It found its way into the title of another of his anthologies: THE IMMORTAL POEMS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, which is still in print these fifty years later, used as a college text. But what did Williams mean by immortality, and why was it so important to him? Only after emotional struggle following the revelations after my father's death did I learn the significance of his 'lust for immortality'.

THE MOCKING BIRD LETTER
35 Water St. New York, NY , August, what the hell

Dear George,
Pritee, Sir Mocking Bird, why the sullen silence? I haven't heard in a short-lived dog's age from you. Are you sick of feigning or drying or what? And prithee again, this time for the h in hell, don't you know you've an agent if not agent-friend, in me? Why do you sell your things to Poetry and Contact for a shittance/ Do you want to die in your overcoat?
And have you heard from The New Yorker: they're mad as anything you can find in the dictionary, selling the poem you sold them to X minus nothing: you've closed, dried and deadned that peeriodical. Don't you ever attend to elementals? Do you have a WC? What, for god's cake, is the matter with you? Your little betrayals, really mere negligences, not negligee-ances, are gratuitous and just harm yourself? Is that kind of a trip necessary?
I send you a picture of three naive, loveley, desirable people whom you know, and who, with me, send you the love you don't deserve. I want a real letter from you, and not a bad dirty verse. Are you in Rome?
Please write and tell me the things bottled up in your arteries.
You've a very few friends, and I'm still on the chosen list.
All the love in the world and please write hou you are. - Oscar -

Here my father is pissed! The excluded parts of the letters are full of boring details of George Barker's betrayals. The question is, why did Oscar Williams put up with such unkind behavior from George? What was it about Oscar Williams that caused such a reaction from an obviously wretched personality as George Barker was? Barker, the poet, could write verse with nobility, but Barker the personality? Oscar even questions if he uses the toilet correctly, as I would also.

So Oscar is mad, and if I am not careful I will be pissed myself.