The fate of a friendship: William Jay Smith

But as it sometimes chanceth, from the might

Of joy in minds that can no further go,

As high as we have mounted in delight

In our dejection do we sink as low.

Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence”

My friendship with the American poet William Jay Smith (1918-2015), a soft-spoken Southern gentleman, came to a shocking climax.  Born in Louisiana, he grew up in Missouri.  He was educated at Washington University in St. Louis, where he met Tennessee Williams, and as a Rhodes Scholar at Wadham College, Oxford.  During World War II he was a naval officer in Hawaii, on a coral atoll in the Pacific, and a liaison with the French navy in the South Pacific and North Africa.  He married poet Barbara Howes (born 1914) in 1947, had two sons, one of whom became schizophrenic, and they divorced in the mid-1960s.

Smith had a distinguished career.  He taught poetry at Williams, Columbia and Hollins in Virginia; was elected for a term as a Democrat in the Vermont Legislature in 1961; was Poetry Consultant at Library of Congress from 1968 to 1970; and was a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

A versatile author, he wrote formal poetry in strict rhyme and metre, children’s poems, comic verse, translations, especially of the French poet Jules Laforgue, and a lively memoir, Army Brat, about growing up in a military family between the two world wars.  An accomplished and generous old pro, he knew all the important American writers and how to operate in the literary scene.  Several writers have adopted false ethnic pseudonyms to exaggerate and benefit from their minority origins; Jamaica Kincaid (Elaine Potter), Ntozake Shange (Paulette Williams), Ngugi wa Thiongo (James Ngugi) and William Least Heat Moon (William Trogdon).  Bill didn’t change his name to William Most Heat Sun but, though his Indian origins were dubious, he played the Choctaw card.

I first wrote to Bill Smith in August 1993, when I was working on my life of Edmund Wilson, about Wilson’s poet-lover Léonie Adams.  In November 1993 he sent a helpful response and suggested several sources of information.  Bill was then 75, 21 years older than me.  He had a fading reputation, and was glad of my interest in and recognition of his work.  We often spoke on the phone and exchanged books.  Over the years he sent me 31 letters and postcards, 30 inscribed and sometimes multiple copies of his work, and 12 signed elegant and privately printed poems.  His friendly but unexciting letters described his health, travels, publications and readings.  In January 1995, when Bill was reading in northern California, I interviewed him for my life of Robert Frost.  He had a sagging, gentle face, slow speech and slightly stooped body, and thanked me for showing him around San Francisco.

Bill was a generous friend and always eager to meet.  He spent half the year in his Paris flat and invited me to stay with him.  In early November 1998, he gave readings in northern California, stayed with me in Berkeley and later thanked me enthusiastically for the visit.  In February 1999 he strongly recommended me for a residency at the prestigious Rockefeller Bellagio Center on Lake Como in northern Italy (which I didn’t get).  In March 2005 he nominated me for an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award “to honor exceptional achievement” (which I did get).  In May 2006 he wrote about his serious heart disease, partly provoked by the wrong medication.  After suffering considerable pain and fear, he finally recovered.

Bill’s wife, Sonja Haussmann, was a large, imposing, bosomy warm-hearted French woman, taller than the husband she called “Beel”.  In June 2007 I stayed with them in Cummington, Massachusetts, 125 miles west of Boston.  I was delighted when they invited to dinner their neighbour, the tall, handsome, distinguished poet Richard Wilbur.  His wife, Charlee, had often refused to come to dinner at the Smiths and prevented Wilbur from coming alone, or else had agreed to come and then canceled with a feeble excuse.  Charlee drank heavily, had become a great burden and needed three helpers.  She’d died the previous month after a long and horrible illness.  Wilbur never explained her disease, which may have been fatal alcoholism.  To discourage Charlee from drinking, he didn’t drink while she was alive.  He was now free to enjoy a social drink whenever he wanted one.  He eagerly accepted a martini and said, “I haven’t had one for so long.”

Bill told me he had sold most of his literary manuscripts and correspondence to Washington University and received five yearly payments of $200,000.  Other papers went to the Lilly Library in Indiana for $120,000.  Bill had hired a highly recommended expert to catalogue his library and appraise his papers, but the man stole valuable items and left without finishing the job.  Bill now had to find another expert to complete the work, which would include Bill’s illustrated books and writing about art.  This task had become extremely time-consuming.

We then talked about poets.  Bill regretted the loss of Kipling’s poetic resonance when Indians changed the place names of Bombay, Calcutta and other towns.  Both Bill and Wilbur admired Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and thought James Merrill had written important work. Bill had a low opinion of the overrated John Ashbery, who was endlessly promoted by the misguided critic Helen Vendler.  Bill’s worst literary enemy was the poet and translator Richard Howard, “who’s stabbed me in the back more than once and is getting rather tiresome.”  Bill had met Arthur Miller at the American Academy when he came with Marilyn Monroe and caused a great stir.  Miller, known to the doorman of their Manhattan building as Marilyn’s husband, also came to Bill’s flat in New York without her.  The Irish writer Padraic Colum had never heard of Marilyn.

Miller and Marilyn Monroe tie the knot in Westchester County, New York, June 1956

Sunday evening ended in a comic disaster.  We went to the horrible restaurant at the Golf Club, which had changed chefs while they were in Paris, and Bill was most embarrassed by the poor quality of the food.  But, he explained, there was nowhere else to go in his small town.  Sonja struggled unsuccessfully with a monstrous Mexican taco, which spurted out all over the table when she bit into it.  Bill finally gave her part of his own sandwich.  When I asked for the wine list, the waitress said they had red and white — and finally brought us an undrinkable bottle of plonk.

I planned to dedicate my book The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (2009) to Bill, and he was pleased to accept.  As his quid pro quo, he planned to nominate me—with the support of Richard Wilbur, James Salter and Paul Theroux—as a member of the American Academy.

In October 2008, to celebrate his 90th birthday, Bill asked me to write what became a long, 2000-word, extremely favourable review of his two minor books: his poems Words by the Water and Dancing in the Garden: A Bittersweet Love Affair with France, a prose memoir of his youthful 1938 summer on the Loire in Tours.  I did not mention the many typos and errors that appeared in both books.  My review was published in the New Criterion in January 2009, and reprinted in PN Review in Manchester, England.

I wrote that “his vivid and charming memoir describes his first love during one of the transforming experiences of his life.  His poetry, marked by great technical skill, is witty and satiric, poignant and humane.  Smith is at ease in many cultures and his poems are enriched by the subtle transformation of numerous (and often covert) allusions and quotations.”

I quoted his excellent short poem composed with present participles and rhyming triplets, “The World below the Window”:

The geraniums I left last night on the windowsill,

To the best of my knowledge now, are out there still,

And will be there as long as I think they will.

And will be there as long as I think that I

Can throw the window open on the sky,

A touch of geranium pink in the tail of my eye;

As long as I think I see, past leaves green-growing,

Barges moving down a river, water flowing,

Fulfillment in the thought of thought outgoing,

Fulfillment in the sight of sight replying,

Of sound in the sound of small birds southward flying,

In life life-giving, and in death undying.

I concluded: “This poem displays Smith’s craftsmanship, lyrical response to the natural world and belief in the power of the imagination.  It investigates human knowledge, the way external reality is perceived by the human mind.”

In December 2008 Bill said he was leaving for Paris, would be away from his computer and urged me to send him my review before it was published.  I knew from painful experience that this is always a dangerous mistake.  But since the review was entirely favourable, I agreed, against my better judgment, to send it to him.  On December 4, 2008, I wrote to him, “I reluctantly enclose my review of your books, out next month in the New Criterion.  I must ask you please! not to use it or show it to anyone before January.  If you do, I could get into serious trouble with the editor, who doesn’t know we are friends.”

Bill then phoned and said that he wanted me to change some things and add others.  I had to mention that he also translated from Russian; add the name of the obscure poet Hubert Creekmore, to whom he wrote an elegy; say his work had been praised by his mentor Eudora Welty (one of his idols, whose work I disliked); and advise Johns Hopkins University Press to bring out another volume of his poetry.  All these suggestions were impractical, egoistical, even absurd.  I was surprised that Bill thought I would allow him to dictate what I wrote in the review, and that the New Criterion would allow me to make such radical and inappropriate changes after the proofs had been corrected.

I rang him back and said that it was too late to make any changes, that I’d sent him the admiring review because I thought he’d be pleased by it.  He became furious and irrationally assumed that my review was trying to harm him.  Without giving me the chance to discuss it, he said that if I didn’t make the changes, then “God damn you and fuck you.  I’ll never have anything to do with you again”—and slammed down the phone.  Bill was a courtly and rather old-fashioned Southern gentleman.  I’d never heard him use such vitriolic language and his behavior was entirely out of character.  His unusual scatological language might have been caused by his medication, or been a sign of incipient dementia.

I’d already dedicated The Genius and the Goddess to Bill, but just had time to delete his name from the book.  Though I’d strongly warned him not to show my review to anyone, he asked a friend to intervene with the editor of the New Criterion and make the changes he demanded, which predictably caused problems and made me look unprofessional.  On January 17, 2009, Bill wrote, “There was never any thought of a quid-pro-quo in my nominating you for a membership in the Academy,” but after our dispute he did not do so.

When I asked a mutual friend for an explanation, he perceptively replied: “I’m sad to hear that report.  Bill was always vain and fussy, though also kind and courteous.  As he got older, his vanity became a sort of delusional self-importance.  Among Bill’s late obsessions was the conviction that he was likely to receive the Nobel, a fantasy I’ve noted in several older writers.”

I also asked his old friend Richard Wilbur what he thought, and on January 5, 2010 he sent a kind and humane response:

Your review of Bill’s two books is, as you intended it to be, “entirely favorable,” and it was very wrong of him to request amendments and to lose his temper about the matter.

In my long friendship with Bill, I have generally found him balanced and generous, yet at times have been made aware of a dangerous fragility in him and a capacity for resentment.  The best of his work is indeed praiseworthy, and in view of his sensitivity I have always taken care to praise him.  Latterly, I think there have been two grounds for an increased touchiness.  Like me, Bill is an old man approaching the end of his career, and that has made him more than usually anxious about his reputation, his standing as a poet.  On top of that, he will soon cease to profit, so I understand, from the sale of his archives, and as a result is worried about money.

Bill’s behavior about the review sounds like panic and irrationality to me, and I hope that you will find it possible to forgive him.

Bill had vilified me when I tried to help him.  Even when trying to apologise, he falsely accused me of being rude on the phone and permanently damaged our friendship.  So I was unable to accept Wilbur’s compassionate advice.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-four books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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