“It carries the battle forward”: An Unpublished Letter from William Carlos Williams to Edwin J. Becker, prisoner-poet

While many Americans expatriated to Paris or London in the first half of the twentieth century to become writers, Edwin J. Becker waited until he was incarcerated in the New Jersey State Prison at Trenton from 1944 to 1948 for deceptive practices. Becker became a writer of some renown while in prison, writing two pulp fiction novels, freelance articles for men’s magazines such as Field and Stream, and a few short stories in small magazines, including Caresse Crosby’s Portfolio. He also wrote a play which was produced in summer stock, as well as an unpublished collection of poetry titled Chains of Shadow. Several established writers took notice of Becker’s talent, taking up correspondence with him while he was in prison, including Crosby, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and William Carlos Williams.

In the letter below, Williams discusses the little magazine and its relation to American writers, a theme that was a constant concern throughout his lifetime. The idea that the little magazine should be connected to free speech and the health of the nation harkens back twenty-five years earlier to the first Contact manifesto (December 1920) in which Williams states: “We are here because of our faith in the existence of native artists who are capable of having, comprehending and recording extraordinary experience; we possess intellect sufficient to carry over the force of their emotional vigour. . . .” Further, “we still do not intend becoming spokesman for any movement, group or theory, and as thoroughly dislike a modern traditionalism as any manner of perceiving the arts” (1).

Ten years later we see these ideas expressed again in a letter dated January 6, 1930, to Richard Johns, editor of the new literary magazine Pagany, for which Williams was acting as an editor and contributor. Williams says that the little magazine should be “a bulletin of method. It should not grow or be controversial, thoughtful or take on burdens or righteousness or policy. It does what it should: presents an extant practice of the art of writing” (qtd. in Halpert 93). The second incarnation of Contact (1932), edited by Williams and Nathanael West, contains the short editorial titled “The Advance Guard Magazine,” in which Williams says:

In all, the ‘small magazine’ must, in its many phases, be taken as one expression. It represents the originality of our generation thoroughly free of an economic burden. Technically many excellent services to writing have been accomplished. Nothing could be more useful to the present day writer, the alert critic than to read and reread the actual work produced by those who have made the ‘small magazine’ during the past thirty years. The measure of the intelligent citizen is the discretion with which he breaks the law.

(89–90)

A third and final incarnation of Contact related to Williams sprouted up in San Francisco in the late 1950s with the subtitle The San Francisco Journal of New Writing, Art and Ideas. The journal, edited by George Dorsey, Calvin Kentfield, and William H. Ryan, was similar in content and style to the Evergreen Review, which began publication just one year earlier. San Francisco was ripe for the return of Contact, as is seen in Evergreen Review’s instrumental 1957 “San Francisco Scene” issue (vol. 1, no. 2) with Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. Contact’s return reiterates Williams’s influence on Beat writers such as Lew Welch and Alan Watts, who appeared alongside the likes of Ray Bradbury, William Saroyan, and John Updike. Although Williams was not directly responsible for the third resurrection of Contact, he did hold an advisory position, and the first issue, Contact, which was dedicated to him, includes a brief essay by Williams titled “The Contact Story,” as well as the above-mentioned editorial comment from the 1932 issue of Contact (1.1).

The Letter

June 20, 1945

Dear Becker:

It’s hot and the keys of this old machine occasionally gum up and stick—so with that in mind I’ll try to answer your question or questions...