Splendidly Discordant : LETTERS : POUND / WILLIAMS: Selected Correspondence of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, <i> Edited by Hugh Witemeyer (New Directions: $39.95; 480 pp.)</i>

Dear Ez,” William Carlos Williams wrote on a 1947 postcard, “Sez you. On the other hand, sez I. Between us lies the sea.”

More than one kind of sea lay between Williams, practicing medicine in Rutherford, N.J., and becoming widely recognized as a master poet, and Ezra Pound, the master’s master, incarcerated in the mental ward of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Maryland as an alternative to execution for high treason during World War II. It was 45 years into a friendship that would only end, marvelously worn out, with Williams’ death 15 years later in 1963.

The friendship was remarkable for fierce argument, deathly silences--for Williams a postcard was all but silence--and a tussling schoolboy loyalty that began when they were at college together at the University of Pennsylvania and persisted right on into their 80s. Most of all, it was remarkable as 60 years of collaboration-by-quarrel, in whose heat much of the American modernist tradition was forged.

The sea lay between. Once out of college, Pound was a lifelong expatriate in England, France and Italy--his 14 years in St. Elizabeth’s were another expatriation--and drew much of his matter and voice from his idiosyncratic readings of European and Chinese literature. Williams resolutely stayed in New Jersey and sought consciously to develop an American voice, albeit a new one.

Pound gibed wickedly at Williams’ choice; Williams, less agile and less secure--oddly, considering that his friend was disgraced, confined and partly mad--thundered at Pound’s. Pound held that to be an American poet you had to be universal, Williams that to be universal you had to be an American poet. Splendidly discordant, both were not only right but, in some complicated way, they were agreed.

Splendid discord and remarkable agreement are on view in this massive selection, about a third of the Pound-Williams correspondence, edited and annotated by Hugh Witemeyer. James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, not only published Pound, Williams and many other modernist figures but corresponded extensively with them as well. In recent years he has been issuing his holdings in what amounts to a national literary archive; these letters are a precious part of it.

One of the first letters was written in 1908, when Pound had set off to transform the London literary world. He did not quite manage to but dazzled Yeats and others and left T.S. Eliot as his modernist agent-in-place. Pound’s letter is a fiery, world-beating manifesto containing, among other things, a scornful numbered list of the poetic themes of the time. Among them: “1. Spring is a pleasant season. . . . 4. Trees, hills, etc. are by a provident nature arranged diversely in diverse places. . . . 5. Winds, clouds, rains, etc. flop thru & over ‘em.”

Pound’s fierce promotional and didactic energies are there from the start. He gets Williams’ early poems printed in London; as “foreign editor” of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, he boosts Eliot, Joyce and himself and derides the stultifying effect of the United States on those who stay there, although he makes an exception for Williams.

Pound writes heavily in “Ezspeak,” a punning, bawdy, irreverent pastiche of “Amurrican” lingo (“Waal ole Wokunkus the wombat” is one of his salutations to Williams; “Ladies Ham Choinul” is his coinage for the then-popular women’s magazine). It is an extravagant boys’ code--locker-room talk on Olympus--that becomes tedious but also illuminating. For Pound it was power; it allowed him his peculiar combination of fierce literary attack and personal evasiveness.

Williams does his best to imitate it, though with less conviction. He is at first the junior locker-room partner; later, counterattacking (can adapting Provencal love poetry really be the cutting edge for an American poet? he demands), he uses plainer English. But he reverts--it is a stylistic loyalty to the writer who was his old companion, and more than that.

Apart from writing his own poetry, Pound helped Williams find his particular taut and brilliant voice; just as he had helped Eliot, in “The Waste Land,” find his. Through the 1920s, at least, he also provided the sometimes depressive New Jersey obstetrician a sense that a larger world knew and admired him.

In the ‘30s, Pound’s praise of Hitler and Mussolini and his vitriolic denunciations of capitalism and “Jewish” money put an added strain on Williams’ feelings. Already irked by Pound’s autocratic didacticism, he was outraged by its use in such loathsome causes. “You can’t even smell the stink you’re in,” he wrote Pound shortly before the war, urging him to return to the United States. In an essay, to which he attached one of Pound’s rants, he called him “Lord Ga-ga.” After the war and Pound’s arrest for pro-Axis broadcasts on Italian radio, Williams rallied to help his disgraced friend but wrote nonetheless:

“If you’re shot as a traitor what the hell difference should that make to you? All it should mean is that you go down to the future, on which you seem to count so much, intact, your argument undamaged.” And he adds: “There is a point in all controversy beyond which man’s life (his last word) is necessarily forfeit.”

It is harsh but lucid, and in that lucidity lay Williams’ deep loyalty to Pound. Condemning him, he refused to treat him as mad. “Your life weighed, to your everlasting glory, no more than your poetic genius--had you known it. You wanted more. You still want more.” He added this extraordinary line: “No one forgives you for what you did, everyone forgives you for what you are.”

Part of Pound’s mind was entirely darkened, but only part. Amid the lingo and the ranting, a singularly perceptive and delicate sensibility keeps declaring itself. His “Pisan Cantos,” considered by many his finest poems, were written from his confinement, at first in a “cage” in Italy and later at St. Elizabeth’s.

One of the many fascinations in the correspondence is the wit and understanding that emerge, almost offhandedly, among Pound’s diatribes. To take one example, he breaks off his loyal defense of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism (Williams, out-Pounding his friend, calls Eliot “that addled pot of ewe’s snot”) with a devastating comparison of the lofty “Four Quartets” to the high-mindedness of Robert Browning.

After Williams’ death (the big, sturdy, respectable poet was outlived by the frail, tormented and tormenting one, who was much the stronger), Pound wrote an utterly unshadowed line to Dorothy, the widow:

“A magnificent fight he made of it for you. He bore with me for 60 years and I shall never find a poet friend like him.”