The Mail

Letters respond to Leo Robson’s analysis of the work of John Williams.

Keeping With Tradition

In Leo Robson’s insightful essay about the American novelist John Williams and the buttoned-down literary traditions he represents, Robson claims that Leslie Fiedler was “the first critic to use the word ‘postmodernism’ in a literary connection” (A Critic at Large, March 18th). Robson is referring to Fiedler’s essay “Cross the Border—Close the Gap,” which was delivered as a speech in 1968, and which many consider to be the début of the term. Nevertheless, one can find Randall Jarrell using the adjectival form of the word in a 1947 essay, “From the Kingdom of Necessity,” when commending Robert Lowell’s work as “essentially a post- or anti-modernist poetry.” A year later, John Berryman wrote that Jarrell had “described Lowell’s poetry as ‘post-modernist’; and one certainly has the sense that some period is drawing to a close.” Jarrell also took the measure of Yvor Winters, one of Williams’s chief influences, quipping, “He writes as if the last three hundred years had occurred, but not to him.” In light of this comment, the “traditionalist” tag that Robson applies to Williams, and, by extension, Winters, seems slippery at best.

Sunil Iyengar

Bethesda, Md.

Robson’s piece is unique among recent considerations of Yvor Winters’s influence on writers, because it deals more with fiction than with poetry. Another novelist worth noting is Richard M. Elman. Elman was one of Winters’s students, in the same group of Stanford Creative Writing Fellows that included Thom Gunn, and was writing mostly poetry in those early days. But, in 1971, he published a novel, “An Education in Blood,” about the murder trial of David Lamson, a Stanford graduate. In Elman’s book, a Winters-esque figure appears as a major character. Winters himself wrote three fine poems about the case and a summary of the briefs for Lamson’s appeal. Elman makes use of the summary, as well as letters written to him by Winters urging him not to publish the book. “An Education in Blood” is far from being the “perfect novel” that “Stoner” is, but Winters greatly influenced both works.

John Matthias

Notre Dame, Ind.

One key piece of Williams’s legacy is missing from Robson’s essay: the man was a teacher. By God was he a teacher. Had his novels been more commercially successful at first, it is unlikely that he would have remained a full-time faculty member of the University of Denver’s creative-writing program until 1985 (thirteen years after winning the National Book Award for “Augustus”). The educations of many graduate students—including my own—would have been the poorer for it.

Doug McReynolds

Cedar Falls, Iowa

I also had Williams as a writing professor in the seventies. His poetry and fiction courses were extremely useful, but he wasn’t my favorite professor. Some of the graduate students resented his dogmatism. I hated that he dismissed Sylvia Plath as a “hysteric,” even though I wasn’t a fan of her work myself. In my naïveté, I once asked him whether it was better to be a Classicist or a Romantic. He said it didn’t matter, which surprised me, given his homage to Yvor Winters. I still remember him sitting in the department office, awaiting the phone call that named him a winner of the National Book Award. It was not like him to linger, but there he was, calmly smoking, and dressed, as usual, in a dark suit.

Elaine Alarcon

Oxnard, Calif.