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This volume explains a lot of what the author went through to create the great historical works he produced. Unfortunately other lesser writers, I believe, received the plaudits that Roberts should have gotten.

by the conventional standard, which he partly defined himself.

What I mean by this, is you can read into them and they say things about sex and marriage.

I didn't find the anecdotes about his family and writing completely fascinating.

But it's well written. I treasure it for the reason that it is well written. But that's the only reason.

Hard to explain. It means poetry to me. I don't consider it to be good reading, but I do sample it sometimes, more than I expected, when I'm looking for a little sample to compare with my own work.

A writer's book, of sorts. But not the best in that category.

A better choice would be Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

When he was 73 years old, William Carlos Williams held a series of "informal conversations" with a university student working on her degree. She sorted the transcripts chronologically according to the works to which they refer and compiled them in this small volume. The result is a collection of trivia, charming chatter and gossip related to the poems, stories, plays and novels written by Williams between 1909 and 1957.
The subtitle of the book is quite misleading, though. An autobiography (at least in my opinion) tries to impose a certain order or direction or "meaning" on a life. This book never tries to do any such thing for the poems or the other works. Williams does not say much about how he wrote his poems or what their "meaning" should be or in which context they stand. That was rather disappointing. But then again, I should not have expected Williams to be an interpreter of his poems in the first place. As a writer he is pragmatic and straightforward, not inclined to introspection, speculation or interpretation.
Williams seems to work by instinct, and this method works fine for him. In one interesting example in the book, used by Williams to illustrate a point, he deletes just one line from a nine-line poem - and it is an amazing improvement. His explanation for the deletion, however, is typically bland and uninformative: "See how much better it conforms to the page, how much better is looks?"
What the book conveys quite successfully it Williams's unpretentious way of communicating, his often self-deprecating humor and the ease and pleasure with which he looks back over his almost 50 years of writing. Williams has a mischievous streak in him, too. He enjoys risking a small scandal by putting on the record his thoughts at a poetry reading in Wellesley where the college girls "stood on their heels and yelled ... the girls ... my god I was breathless, but I said do you really want more and they said yes so I read what Floss [his wife] knew they would like. They were so adorable. I could have raped them all!"
"I Wanted to Write a Poem" is definitely not a must-have book. I have picked out some (but not all) of the raisins I have found in a book that was, overall, quite plain and trite. And it left me with a feeling that the 73-year old Williams is simply a nice, elder gentleman with a sense of humor, a bit of unobtrusive posturing and an easygoing, mostly sanguine temperament. At a certain point in time he must have reached that desirable and pleasant state in which he decided to take himself not too serious anymore. My favorite quote in this context comes from his wife: "Psychiatry? He used to say, 'I'm nuts and everybody knows it,' and let it go at that."

My favorite authors of the twentieth century are Ayn Rand and Kenneth Roberts, and I have always been conscious of the similarities between them. Both started publishing huge, richly plotted, classically written novels in the 1930s. Both had an almost religious reverence for America, with Rand's being more abstract and systematic, and Roberts' stemming more from his sense of life. Both were fascinated by larger-than-life heroes: Rand's were literary creations, while Roberts' were recreations of such figures as Major Robert Rogers and Benedict Arnold. And both were self-taught geniuses in their own field (Rand in philosophy, Roberts in history) who heaped impatient, acerbic remarks on their professionally trained counterparts. Who could tell which of them wrote the following statement, for instance: "Can't *any* American historian write anything but dull facts with all the essentials left out?". (Hint: it wasn't Rand.)
As I started reading *I Wanted to Write*, I was therefore curious whether I would discover more similarities between them, or whether those I had observed would prove to be isolated and purely superficial. The two areas I was most intrigued by were Roberts' politics and his literary likes and dislikes.
In politics, Roberts turned out to be just as fervent an anticommunist as Rand was, and just as early on. Of course, his personal experience with the communists in Siberia during WWI was much less extensive than Rand's prolonged endurance of them. But it was conclusive enough for him to say that "Communism was an aristocracy of superboobs, determined to impose their own murderous and destructive beliefs on the whole world." He even wrote a play ironically entitled *The Brotherhood of Man* about the brutal murder of the imperial family by the bolsheviks.
Of course, I wasn't much surprised by this, Roberts being generally a man of good sense (though he did fall for dowsing in his later life.) More unusual were Roberts' remarks about welfare statism.
There are several references to Franklin Roosevelt, one of the four horsemen of the welfare-state apocalypse in the U.S. (with JFK, Johnson and Clinton), and all of them are highly derogatory. Sent to the capital by the Post, Roberts described Roosevelt as "amusing himself at the expense of the Washington correspondents, contemptuously ignoring their questions, or urging them to don dunce caps and stand in a corner." Roosevelt is also included in Roberts' list of "prominent corner cutters who have botched foreign relations for the United States"- "corner cutters" meaning compromisers, another type Rand abhorred. Roosevelt's 1920 statements on the League of Nations and communism were also characterized by Roberts as "ludicrously incorrect".
More to the point, when Roberts was sent to England to write an article about "Sir Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists", he found them "annoyed at President Roosevelt because he had, they insisted, stolen Moseley's ideas for his New Deal without making acknowledgment".
Regarding Roosevelt's 1937 attack on the Supreme Court, Roberts had this to say: "In the Paris Herald, read Mark Sullivan's account of Roosevelt's announcement that he proposed to retire all Supreme Court justices at seventy, and have a fifteen-man court which would make him a virtual dictator. It was the best character news story I ever read, describing the 'voluptuous pleasure' with which Roosevelt read his plans to the press, and the 'cruelty' of his attacks on the Old Men of the Supreme Court." (I must get a copy of this article!)
Finally, Roberts recounts that his wife read a book about a certain Italian island, Giglio, the residents of which "were among the laziest people on earth because of the ease with which they obtained relief from the Dukes of Florence." Roberts' 1937 comment on this is most enlightening: "Anybody who thinks that history doesn't repeat itself needs only to watch what will happen to those who are going to get government relief for the next fifty years or so- or until intolerable taxes bring about another revolution in America."
As far as literature was concerned, Roberts was also strikingly similar to Rand. Hugo, who was to Rand's literary pantheon what Aristotle was to her philosophical one, is one of the few authors whose books Roberts read "straight through" on discovering them, together with such other Randian favorites as Kipling, Dumas and Sienkiewicz. Rand considered the latter's *Quo Vadis* as "technically one of the best-constructed novels every written" (*The Art of Fiction*), while the literary work which is mentioned most favourably by Roberts is Sienkiewicz's *Fire and Sword* trilogy. Rand also admired *Gone With the Wind* as "an example of the skillful integration of plot to theme" while Roberts said it was "a bully book: one that well deserved to sell the 1,300,000 copies it's already sold."
Just as convergent is their opinion of fashionable naturalist authors. Roberts read a few of their novels, and concluded: "They are all about sex and syphillis: all grimness and starkness: not a ray of humor or insight: two unclothed authors committing nuisances in a public park". He also favourably quoted Booth Tarkington's ironical description of Faulkner as "satisfactorily confusing in ways that demonstrate greatness."
Such a remarkable convergence of literary opinion can only be explained by the sharing of esthetic standards. This is most clearly illustrated by Roberts' comments on a naturalistic film he once saw, which he described as "a movie abortion... laid in a brothel, though supposedly depicting the cloak-and-suit trade- a story dirty, false, meaningless, plotless and without virtue": a scathing review which could have been extracted from Rand's journals.
There are many more parallels between the two authors. Roberts' excellent article on "sophisticated girls" echoes what Rand had to say about the second-handers, though Roberts always remained at a lower level of abstraction than Rand. But I don't want completely to spoil the pleasure of potential readers of *I Want to Write*. I just hope that if you admire Rand, this review will make you more than a little eager to discover Kenneth Roberts.