THE IMPORTANCE OF RITUAL
IN THE POETRY AND PROSE 0F
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Dissertation In; the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
RONA GRIMES FOX
1975.

 

  
 
 

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THE IMPORTANCE OF RITUAL IN THE POETRY AND
PROSE OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

presented by
Nona Grimes Fox

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ABSTRACT

THE IMPORTANCE OF RITUAL IN THE POETRY AND
PROSE OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

By

Nona Grimes Fox

Between 1909, when his first volume of poetry was
published, and his death in 1963, William Carlos Williams
produced a body of work singularly cohesive in the world
of letters. From his earliest writing to the writing in
the decade preceding his death, Williams' work focuses on
several basic themes, which, in turn, revolve around
Williams' central belief in the importance of language
as ritual.

Williams' concern with language as ritual was merely
a natural outgrowth of his perceptions about modern man,
especially modern man in America. Williams looked around
him and saw men floundering in what he considered a mire
of confusing communication, communication that was failing
because it was not based on the actuality it was trying to
describe. Eventually Williams came to believe that the
only answer to modern man's dilemma of struggling in the
concrete world without a means of getting in touch with

the world of the imaginative was language.

Nona Grimes Fox

Williams strove for many years, then, to produce just
such a language. His search was motivated by an even firmer
belief that man had to be in touch with both the "actual"
world and the world of the imagination in order to be fully
alive. Such a union, of the actual and the imaginative,
had to come about, Williams believed, through the means of
poetry, of art. Language, then, was never merely words
used for the conveyance of abstract thoughts. Language
was, to Williams, the unifier, the link between the two
worlds, the worlds of the senses and of spirit, the ritual
by which men could be in touch with both realities at the
same time.

By the time of his death, Williams had achieved to
some degree what he had been trying to achieve for years.
Having discovered in the triadic line what he considered
to be the native speech rhythms of the American people,
Williams (by the time he died) believed himself to be
producing a language that could be considered ritual.
Whether his last poems are truly redemptive is, of course,
a subjective matter. Williams' convictions about language,
however, can be read time and again throughout his career.
He saw men "dying" for want of what could be found in
poetry, and he strove all his life to somehow "make" a
language that could speak to the people and begin to heal

their wounds of divorce (see Paterson, Book One).

THE IMPORTANCE OF RITUAL IN THE POETRY AND

PROSE OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

By

Nona Grimes Fox

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1975

For Margaret and Alexandra

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
CHAPTER III .... . . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . 44
CHAPTER IV. . . . .'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
CHAPTER v . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
CHAPTER v1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
CHAPTER VII . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
CHAPTER VIII. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
BIBLIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

iii

CHAPTER I

Since 1950, when the first book about William Carlos
Williams appeared,1 various methods have been used to
uncover and analyze his techniques and major themes. The
early criticism was, understandably, of a general nature
and was devoted to broad statements of Williams' themes
and rather thorough ”readings" of his work. The early
critics2 (Koch, Wagner, Quinn, and Thirlwall, among
others)3 were the ground breakers, the ones who had to
do much of the primary digging. Since the early 19605,
however, many Williams scholars have emerged whose focus
has narrowed to mOre subtle aspects of his "canon."4
And recently, scholars such as James Breslin, Joel Conarroe,
and James Guimond, using the earlier work as a foundation,
have been more particular in their concerns. James Breslin's
book, William Carlos Williams: An American Artist (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970), though general in
that he deals with the whole of Williams' work, is specific
in his concentration on Williams as an American writing an
American speech. Joel Conarroe, in William Carlos Williams'
Paterson: Language and Landscape (University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1970), more particular yet, concentrates on Williams'
Paterson as a highly structured work dealing with language

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as an outgrowth of a certain locale. James Guimond's
book, The Art of William Carlos Williams: A Discovery
and Possession of America (University of Illinois Press,
1968), clarifies Williams' concern with America, the land,
in relation to American speech. Benjamin Sankey's A
Companion to William Carlos Williams' Paterson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1971), follows the lead
taken by the earlier scholars in doing a very thorough
"reading" of Paterson.i Sankey's book is valuable as a
resource-book for the first reading of Paterson.

Others, such as Bram Dijkstra, have chosen to work
with Williams as part of a larger movement within art.
Dijkstra's The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism,
Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,

1969) attempts to place Williams within the framework of
what was going on in "sister" arts during the early part
of this century. Dijkstra's book suffers, however, from
extrapolating too much from Williams' work without dealing
with it more as an internally consistent creation. The
Inverted Bell, a recent work by Joseph N. Riddel (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), follows
even less successfully in the same vein. Riddel, more so
even than Dijkstra, tends to drift far afield from
Williams in his attempt to build a case for his own ideas

about language. Wading through the verbiage reveals

3

little about Williams, much more about Riddel's own
theories.5

Working from the general to the particular (the
opposite of Williams' own method), the scholars have
given us a thorough overview of Williams, the artist.
He was a doctor, and his writing reflects the physician's
concern and detachment.S He was a member, however
tangentially, of the major artistic movements of the first
half of the twentieth century, and the imprint of these
movements is there. He was an American, too, and his
Americanism worked in combination with his artistic genius
to produce an American poetics, something which had been
attempted but never quite accomplished to such an extent
before.6 He was, more than any of these, however, a poet,
a genius with words and rhythm who did with the words and
rhythm what no other writer had done in the same way.
Williams was passionately interested in words and the
various combinations he could make with them. In short,
he was devoted to language; and language became the major
theme of most of his writing.7

Williams' concern with language was extraordinary.
He did not view language as merely a writer's tool neces-
sary for the conveyance of abstract thought. For Williams,
language had to actualize the concrete world if it were
to have any ultimate value. Language had to go beyond
imitation or mere description. It had to somehow capture

the essence of the thing being spoken of and raise it to

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a new level of understanding in the listener's mind. All
other themes in Williams--his belief that the poor are
the best indicators of the state of any nation's culture,
his concern with the young as free spirits,8 his convic-
tion (borne out in such major works as Paterson, The Desert
Music, and Asphodel, That Greeny Flower) that the artist
is the major transmitter of culture-—must be subordinated
to his interest in language. Considering Williams' con-
viction that language is more than words used to describe
reality, the belief of his mature years that language is
somehow redeeming is not surprising. Increasingly Williams
came to view language as a possible means to achieving
unity with ultimate truth. And what emerges from Williams'
beliefs is a canon or credo based upon the idea of a
redeeming language, a language employed ritually to that,
according to Williams, can bring men closer to truth.10

Language as ritual is a major theme in Williams' work
from the beginning, though he was not to label it as such.11
I have chosen the term ritual because it is the closest
word in English that corresponds to the idea Williams was
trying to convey. If we borrow from the sociologists,
anthropologists and theologians to get a clearer idea of
what ritual is commonly held to mean, what Williams does
with language throughout his career could properly be fit
into this category. If, like Edward Fischer, we perceive

all ritual as communication,12 and if we share the view

held by Robert Bocock that "Rituals relate people to their

S
bodies" and "aid integration of body and mind, intellect

13 then we can see, by studying

and unconscious symbols,"
Williams' writings carefully, that language as ritual was
of prime importance to Williams for a long time. His
characterization of the general populace of Paterson in
Paterson Book One is merely a natural outgrowth of what
he had been concerned with since he had begun writing.
In describing Paterson, Williams reveals that the
"subtleties of his machinations...animate a thousand
automatons" who
...because they
neither know their sources nor the sills of their
disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly

for the most part
locked and forgot in their desires--unroused.

(P- 6)

Ritual is commonly perceived as a rigid, formal
religious event, highly structured and devoid of spon-
taneity, a "fixed matric into which generations were
poured."14 Ritual, as I intend to use the term, does not
presuppose such rigidity. It does, of course, have
religious connotations, but only in a broad sense.
Williams had no intention of institutionalizing his
"redeeming language." To institutionalize it would have
been to kill it, as so much of his writing tries to show.
He was always interested in what could be called an on-
going reality, constantly and at once both traditional
and fresh. Language, like any art, must continually

borrow from the past, yet remain new and vital by adopting

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the rhythms and peculiarities of the age in which it is
used. Williams' concept of ritual (and hence, of a ritual
language) was evolutionary,* and even in this respect he
is in line with current sociological and anthropological
thinking. Fischer, for example, stresses that most
rituals have become dead through senseless "repetition

"15 Further,

rather than through changing creative effort.
he states what Williams was to insist on time and again--
"that communication is effective only if it fits its

16 Williams would have added that communication

times."
must fit its place as well.

Margaret Mead also stresses the idea that repetition
"undercuts our capacity to ritualize" since ritual depends

17 "We tend,” she states,

upon continuity for its efficacy.
"to underestimate the extent to which ritual, as it becomes
increasingly archaic, alienates people from their religion,

"18 Williams

from their society, and from their family.
said the same thing in a different way. Like Fischer's

and Mead's concepts of ritual, Williams' concept was related
to an interest in cultural roots. Williams saw clearly

what could be called the American predicament for what it

was and still is--a case of what might be called "psychic

split." He claimed that from the earliest days of our

 

*

See "To Mark Anthony in Heaven" for a poetic treat-
ment of Williams' belief. Though he never used the term
ritual as I am using it here, it was, in fact, what he
meant when he strove continually to unite the two worlds
of the senses and of intellect.

..-'

 

7
history through the tortured days of the twentieth century
an ugly "fact" of our heritage stands out amidst the
strife, the inventions, and the courage that make up the
American past. We are, Williams insists in much of his
writing, a people divided against ourselves in a most pro-
found way, a division brought about, in part, by following
and living out traditions for which we have no feeling.
Williams was certain that we have outgrown the alien
symbol systems of the past and have, through our lack of
discernment and understanding, never replaced them with a
modern symbol system of our own. Americans are, therefore,
according to Williams, fragmented people without a myth
to live by. Since Americans have no symbol system, no
myth, they also have no ritual, no "expression of a
primordial existential urge for integration with the

19 Much of

whole that transcends and transfigures it."
Williams' writing was an attempt to reach that trans-
figuring integration through an artistic and religious

use of language, a ritual language peculiarly suited to
the American culture.

Such a language, Williams was convinced, could be
fashioned only after he had reached a thorough understand-
ing of the heritage which he and other Americans had grown
from. It is not surprising, then, that much of Williams'
writing deals with reaching for an understanding of the

American past and where it has led us. Though Williams

claimed in Paterson that he couldn't spend his life

hub

 

8
"looking into the past," and that "There is no recurrence/
The past is dead," he was very aware that any "redeeming
language" would have to form a bridge linking past to
present if it were to actually be redeeming. The ritual,
the redeeming language, could be archaic, but must be

;)art of a continuum that blends the past with the present

- . 20
111 an almost unconscious way.

Writing in In the American Grain about Ponce de
Léon, Williams had said, "Men who do not know what lives,

are themselves dead. In the heart there are living Indians

"21

c>11<2e slaughtered and defrauded... A little earlier in

the same chapter he had said:

No, we are not Indians but we are men of their
world. The blood means nothing; the spirit, the
ghost of the land moves in the blood, moves the
blood. It is we who ran to the shore naked, we
who cried, "Heavenly Man!"

(P- 39)

VVi.JLfi]_iams' contention was that if we don't recognize what
IVE: (zome from, it is very unlikely we will know where we
317€3 (or where we are going. It is not surprising, then,

t}léifit: he spent so much time delving into the past in order

tc> (:IPeate a present ritual. Writing to Horace Gregory in

1939, Williams says:

Of mixed ancestry, I felt from earliest child-
hood that America was the only home I could
ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was
expressly founded for me, personally, and that
it must be my business in life to possess it;
that only by making it my own from the begin-
ning to my own day, in detail, should I ever
have a basis for orienting myself formally in

the beliefs which activated me from day to day.22

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Williams' art reflects this childhood attitude pre-
cisely, Paterson, like ITAG, and most of Williams'
earlier work can and should be read as one artist's
search for a ritual (in this case, language) that will
"fit" the beliefs which he had heretofore acted out
unconsciously. It is Mead who points out that actions
are not ritual unless the participants are aware of what
they are doing. "For an act to be ritual... ," she
writes, "one must be conscious that it is ritual, and
yet, at the same time, one must not be too conscious...."23
If one is too conscious, what Mead calls the "blend
between the past and the present", the continuity, the
very reason for ritual, "is lost."24 Writing in an age
Whi ch not only expects but demands continuous change,
Ni 1 liams was working with a large handicap.

Williams was not, of course, a sociologist or cultural
anthropologist. Williams was a poet, a creative artist;
and Paterson, like all his work, must be viewed as art.

Wi thin the context of the poem, however, Williams reveals
What he considers to be some important characteristics of
I)e(>131e in general and Americans in particular. He describes
Americans as a people bereft of any unifying myth (and,
thus , devoid of a meaningful ritual), a mass of people made
up Of individuals who are "automatons", automatic creatures
with no past they are wholly aware of and no future to look
forWard to. The America that emerges from Paterson is an

1ndJulstrial, technological, capitalistic society whose

10
citizens have no faith, no symbol system, no way to express
their desires if they happen to realize what their desires
are. Americans, as revealed in Paterson, have never had
an identity but have remained confused, empty people who
"may look at the torrent in/their minds" and find it
"foreign" (p. 12). Having no words which give any kind

()f meaning or structure to their thoughts--"the language/
ins divorced from their minds," (p. 12)--like Eliot's
"Iiollow Men", they "grope together and avoid speech."25
I311t if this is Williams' "statement", what is his solu-

t ion? As James Guimond says in The Art of William Carlos
W7: Zliams, Williams believed there was only one way to
b ridge the gap in the modern American's mentality and
Fleazijl the divorce which "is the sign of knowledge in our
time" (p. 18):

Men must devote their whole powers to the crea—

tion of a 'language,' a valid culture which

will produce communication between the male and

the female, the mind and the flesh, the human

and his environment.26
‘ifi: ‘vas devoted to an attempt at what Webster Schott calls
breakingthe "barrier to penetrating the imagination."27
‘A11<i ‘ultimately, after breaking the word barrier, at least
to Some extent, Williams' aim was to soar via the imagina-_
tion into realms of understanding and insight heretofore
urla1Ztainable. By viewing language as a means of escape,
a. ‘Nfly out of the hole of death he speaks of in Paterson,28

Wllliams ritualizes it and uses it as an instrument of

enlightenment. From the local to the universal—~that was

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always his way. From concrete reality to realms of the
imagination by means of a living, ritual language.
Considering Williams' great concern with what must
be considered language as ritual, it is surprising that
Inore scholars have not studied this particular aspect of
lVilliams' writing more thoroughly. To be sure, many have
CLealt with Williams' concern with language, but few have
seen that when he spoke of the "redeeming language" he
:nieaant exactly that--a language which redeems, a ritual in

t:}1e true sense of the word.

12

Chapter One-Notes

1. Vivienne Koch, William Carlos Williams (New York:
New Directions, 1950).

.2. By early critics I mean here the critics writing
between roughly 1950-1964. There were earlier
critics, of course, Ezra Pound among them; but
no major work was done on the whole body of
Williams' work until 1950 when Ms Koch's book
appeared.

15.. Koch, William Carlos Williams; Linda Wagner, The
Poems of William Carlos Williams (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963); Sister
M. Bernetta Quinn, The Metamorphic Tradition in
Modern Poetry (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1955); John Thirlwall, "William
Carlos Williams' Paterson: The Search for the
Redeeming Language--A Personal Epic in Five Parts",
New Directions 17 (New Directions, 1961), pp.
252-310.

‘1 - Paul Mariani, in his essay, "Towards a Canonization
of William Carlos Williams" (Massachusetts Review,
13, 66—75), gives a critique of the critics and
devotes a lot of space to summarizing what Williams'
critics have and haven't done. He is, however,
shortsighted, I think, in his view of some of
the earlier critics. He claims that some (Koch
and Wagner, among others) have gotten at "the
strand rather than the core, and the result is that
the major unifying design is left insufficiently
attended to" (p. 67). Without this early, general
criticism, however, much of the more narrowly
focused criticism of later years could not have
been written.

- Many critics continue to contribute helpful articles
to the growing library of Williams criticism.
John C. Davies' excellent essay, "'Which Is the
American?': Themes, Techniques, and Meaning in
William Carlos Williams' Three Novels" (American
Studies 6, 2, 189-200) was particularly helpful
in understanding Williams' major fiction. Davies

13

also helps us understand Williams' stance towards
America more clearly. Neil Myers' "Decreation in
Williams' 'The Descent'" (Criticism 14, 315-327)
adds greatly to the understanding of Williams'
concept of the descent, a concept central to all
his major works; and J. E. Slate's excellent
study, "William Carlos Williams and the Modern
Short Story" (The Southern Review, n.x. IV, 649-
664, Summer 1968), was particularly helpful in
sorting out the major themes and emphases in
Williams' shorter fiction. Of course, such
classic articles on Williams as Joel Conarroe's
"'You Can't Steal Credit': The Economic Motif

in Paterson" (Journal of American Studies, II
(April 1968), 105-115) and Louis Martz's "The
Unicorn in Paterson" (Thought, XXXV (Winter 1960),
537—554) continue to be helpful and enlightening
at their particular points.

As new scholars emerge, the criticism of
Williams and his art will, no doubt, continue to
grow abundantly. For, whatever else may be said
of him, William Carlos Williams can no longer be
left on the shelf as an interesting but minor
American writer. There is in Williams' art, as
M. L. Rosenthal so aptly put it, "...More Than
Meets the Eye" (Introduction to The William
Carlos Reader (New York: New Directions, 1966,
pp. ix-xxxvi).

- Williams was keenly aware of the influence his medi-
cal profession had on his writing. He notes in
his Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1951)
that "...as a writer I have never felt that
medicine interfered with me but rather that it
was my very food and drink, the very thing which
made it possible for me to write. Was I not
interested in man? There the thing was, right
in front of me....it was giving me terms, basic
terms with which I could spell out matters as
profound as I cared to think of." (p. 357).

- Whitman, of course, comes to mind immediately when
one says "American poetry", and in some of his
poems he does, I think, achieve an "Americanness"
not since surpassed. Williams was aware of
Whitman's influence on him (see the Autobiography,
. 107, and I Wanted to Write a Poem (Reported and
edited by Edith Heal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961),
. 8. What Williams wanted to accomplish, however,
extended beyond Whitman's aims. Whitman was pri-
marily concerned with being an American poet;
Williams was always most concerned with being a
POET, who, since he was of America, had better be

 

 

 

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American. Since Williams' eye was always first
on the poetry, he was able to develop a poetics
(which was, of necessity, American) whereas
Whitman, whose eye was on America first, was not.

8. IWTWAP, p. 65.

9. Williams' interest in children and babies was for-
tunate since his medical career was devoted
largely to their care. His interest, however,
went beyond their bodies; he was fascinated by
their toughness (see "The Pimply Faced Girl",
"Jean Bieke", and "The Use of Force", all in
The Farmers' Daughters (New York: New Directions,
1961). Williams said at one time that he loved
babies for their fierce independence and their
care-less attitude towards the adult world (see
IWTWAP, pp. 60-61).

1.(). The themes of the artist as priest and language as
ritual of necessity become intertwined in Williams'
work. Nonetheless, the real focus is on the
language itself. As in the Catholic Mass, the
priest is rather superfluous without God and the
ritual that binds him to God.

.1§1.- Others, such as Denis Donoghue in his early essay,
"For a Redeeming Language" (Twentieth Century
CLXIII (June, 1958), 532-542), and Bram Djikstra
in his Hieroglyphics of a New Speech, have dealt
witthilliams' concern with a redeeming language,
but no one has devoted a whole study to this par-
ticular aspect of Williams' work.

12 - Williams does not talk of a ritual language, but he
does speak about a redeeming language and often
stresses the idea that language is the medium
through which his sins will be forgiven and his
disease cured. As he said in Paterson, Book
Three:

The language cascades into the
invisible, beyond and above : the falls
of which it is the visible part--

Not until I have made of it a replica
will my sins be forgiven and my
disease cured....

1:5'- Edward Fischer, "Ritual as Communication", in The
Roots of Ritual, ed. by James D. Shaughnessy
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Errdmans
Publishing Co.), 1973, p. 161.

 

14.

15.
16.

17.
18.

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24-
25-
26-
27-

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15

Robert Bocock, Ritual in Industrial Society (London:
George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1974), p. 22.

Fischer, pp. 161-162.
Fischer, p. 162.
Fischer, pp. 164-165.

Margaret Mead, "Ritual and Social Crisis", in The
Roots of Ritual, pp. 97-98.

Mead, p. 95.

S. P. Nagendra, The Concept of Ritual in Modern
Sociological Theory (New Delhi: The Academic
Journals of India, 1971).

Mead, pp. 92, 93, 95.

Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1956), p. 42.

Williams, The Selected Letters of William Carlos
Williams (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957),
p. 185.

Mead, pp. 91 and 92.

Mead, p. 93.

T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men."

James Guimond, The Art of William Carlos Williams A
Discovery and Possession of America (Urbana,

Illinois, 1968), p. 167.

Webster Schott, Imaginations (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1971), p. xv.

Williams, Paterson, p. 211.

 

CHAPTER I I

Williams' earliest poetry gives little indication of
the originality and freshness that distinguishes the bulk
of his writing. Somewhat "cute" and not a little romantic,
the poems appearing before 1915 are full of the kinds of

c liches, both of image and rhythm, that Ezra Pound had
warned against in his "Imagiste Manifesto."1 Williams'
"Lady of dusk wood fastnesses" in his early poem "First
Pluralise",2 and his "clear radiance" that made "all vain
souls/Candles where noon is" in the poem "Homage" (CCP,
P - 5) would no doubt have had the Imagists and many other
Of his contemporaries groaning in dismay. "What are
'dusk wood fastnesses'? What is a 'clear radiance' that
makes 'vain souls/Candles where noon is'? What are 'vain
$01,115:?" they might have asked. Williams' earliest poems,
unlike most of his later writing, reflect an earlier
rot“antic era of poetry, an era in which ladies, temples,
archers, the Greek gods, truth and beauty were almost the
only acceptable themes that a poet could write about.
Williams' greatest concerns of later years, language as
ritual and the poet as priest, are hardly discernible at
all among the gods and the ladies in his early work. As
he noted in the preface to his Selected Essays, as a youth

16

 

17

he "...had not yet come to the conviction: It is not what

you say that matters but the manner in which you say it;

there lies the secret of the ages." He was still very much

caught up in the idea on its own, somewhat divorced from

the language which presented it. Later, Williams would

declare time and again that it is the measure that is

important, that without the form, the correct ritual
language, the idea will remain unfinished, devoid of life.4

As he was to say later in The Simplicity of Disorder,

"Language, which is the hope of man, is by this enslaved,

 

forced raped, made a whore by the idea venders."
In retrospect, Williams himself made no claim for the

Value of his earliest poetry. Writing in his Autobiography6

about the 1909 poems,7 he declares:

The poems were bad Keats, nothing else--
oh well, bad Whitman, too. But I sure loved
them. Where does a man get the courage for
such abortions? I can tell you my need must
have been great. There is not one thing of the
slightest value in the whole thin booklet--

except the intent.
(Autobiography, p. 107)

pe‘5‘}‘laps his claim is true for the 1909 poems, but amidst
tkle’ (:1iches and outworn rhymes of the rest of his early
Poetry can be found a trace, at least, of the more familiar,
ierVerent poet of later years (CCP, p. 7). The idea of
ljir‘igllage as ritual had not really been formulated yet, but

W‘ - . . .
1111ams was trying at least to direct and control hIS

material a little more than he had in his first poems.

i:

any
QpNv

C.
.x.

v.0“
.\.

n\~

.I‘

.\L
ad

31"

al‘.’

"ET

G u r).
r . II
p It I IL

18

"Immortal", an early poem which appeared in Williams'

The Tempers (1913), indicates the type of work Williams

was doing as a neophyte. At first glance "Immortal" seems

to be rather hackneyed with all the standard cliches found

in the poems of praise. "Immortal" is replete with flowers,

gems, "reason, love and sanityl", Juno and "Heaven's King!"

Not even the rhyme scheme is impressive. All in all, it

seems to be a thoroughly outworn theme done up in a thor-

oughly outworn package--until the last word in the poem

j 01 ts the reader into a greater appreciation of the poet's

SK 3'. 11 and imagination. The object of praise, we learn,

.15; "Ignorance", addressed by Williams earlier in the poem
A strange object of

as both "beloved" and "lovely One."
9

Praise but very typical of the later poet of Paterson

who addresses a sick drunken woman as "Beautiful Thing!"
10

and who sees birth in the midst of destructive flames
Another early poem which shows a glimpse of the poet
to Come is "Hic Jacet" (CCP, p. 13). a seemingly light-
hea~7l3‘ted poem about a rather grim subject. "The coroner's
merry little children/Have such twinkling brown eyes,"
Wri‘l:es Williams, and they "Laugh 50 88511Y-" Why? "They
laugh because they prosper," And, of course, their pros-
perity is someone else's loss, a loss perpetrated by a
“Kind heaven" that "fills their little paunches!" The same
grim humor was to appear many times in Williams' later

poetry and prose, particularly in the short story collec-

tion, Life Along the Passaic River (reprinted in The

 

19

Farmers' Daughters [Norf01k, Conn.: New Directions, 1961,

pp . 109-244]). Williams' ability to see beauty where most

see ugliness, to sense unity where most see only disunity,

to see humor where most see tragedy, already was apparent

a very early stage in his writing career, as "Immortal"

and "Hic Jacet" show.11

at

"Mezzo Forte" (CCP, p. 7), another short poem from
The Tempers, shows a further glimpse of the poet-to-be
and gives an indication of Williams' desire to have
language, even "poetic language", speak to the whole man.
[In]. ike "Immortal", "Mezzo Forte" displays no romantic
tendencies and contains no romantic language. Instead,
Wi lliams jolts the reader in the first line, this time
"i th "Take that, damn you; and that!" and then injects a
bit of cynical humor as he offers a "rose/To make it
right again!" The last three lines, though part of the
0V6 ran rhyme pattern, show Williams' skillful way of
making poetry and prose merge and also finish the idea of
the poem with the characteristic Williams straightfor-
wal‘tlness. "God knows", writes Williams, "I'm sorry,
Grace, but then,/It's not my fault if you will be a cat."
This poem shows that Williams was beginning to trim off the
useless and unsuitable verbiage; he was beginning to "make
1anguage."
"Fire Spirit" (CCP, p. 9), a very short poem from the

Same collection, is also characteristically Williams in

t"Nit its theme is one he was to pursue in various ways

 

20

throughout most of his career. Though not nearly so

complete an idea, "Fire Spirit" explores briefly the role

of ritual and tradition developed much later in Paterson

(see pp. 158-168). Once viable as a source of meaning in

the society he serves, the Fire Spirit no longer has the

1 ife in him necessary to sustain warmth for others. "I

am old", claims the Spirit, and asks in amazement, "You

warm yourselves at these fires?" "I sit, my teeth

chatterl", he declares, then queries, "Where shall I turn
fo r comfort?" The implication is that the Spirit has not

be en fed enough fuel, i.e., wood, to keep the fire hot.

I f the worshippers no longer follow the ritual of bringing

WOOd to the flames, then the Spirit will die because it

is sustained both literally and symbolically by the culture's
be 1 ief in it. When Williams develops the same idea in
Pa ‘13 erson he describes an elaborate Indian ritual which has
1° 8 1: its meaning and has become a parody, but the essential

Idea is the same.8 And it is an idea which is to permeate

W1 1 1 iams' work increasingly as he grows as a poet.
Though not directly concerned with ritual, the poems
- *
whlch appear in Transitional (1915) reflect Williams'

s
e1"'lse of the past as part of the present and are much more

\

 

*In CCP, Williams didn't call these poems "Transi-
10nal" except in this collection but the term fits. Thomas

thLtaker, in his book, William Carlos Williams ('l‘wayne
Publishers, Inc. , New Yo,rk 1968), notes that these poems
on several occasions have been erroneously placed prior to

AZ Que Quiere as to time of publication.

In

’L-‘

If"

21

representative of Williams' work as a whole than the poems

from The Tempers. ”To Mark Anthony In Heaven" (CCP, p.

1 7) is a fascinating poem in which Williams' present and
MarkAnthony's present (the past for Williams) mingle in
such a way that it is difficult to distinguish between

them. The "grass and trees and clouds" that serve as an

axi 5 around which the rest of the poem gravitates are

symbolic of the timelessness of human emotions that allows

Ni 1 liams to participate in Anthony's reality. And at one

point in the poem Williams addresses Antony himself as
"trees and grass and clouds", a further extension of the

idea that human action and spirit are unified even though

separated by centuries of chronological time. Williams

is careful to emphasize, however, that he identified with
Anthony only on condition, that condition being that

Al'l‘til‘umy followed Cleopatra for the reasons that Williams

1ali—l'llcs are important. If he followed her because he

"kn .3“ her inch by inch/from slanting feet upward/to the
r00 ts of her hair/and down again" and if he "saw her/above

the battle's fury--", then he and Williams share the same

3 - . . . .
p1 rit and are "listening in heaven." In thlS poem the

foQUS of worship is Cleopatra's body, but the idea is the
Same as in "Fire Spirit." If the worshil‘IPer worships
C01“rectly, then he is elevated and his object of worship
survives as a meaningful link between the past and the
present. If Anthonyworshipped Cleopatra correctly, ritually,

then he is in heaven, Cleopatra remains a viable symbol of

 

qJ»

Pt

V l

1‘

22
beauty and power, and Williams can mingle with Antony in
feeling though separated by hundreds of years of earthly
time. Though this idea of correctness in love does not

seemingly share much in common with a ritual idea of language,

the connection does exist. Williams' preoccupation with

form is beginning to become evident and is but one of the
first of many in his search for a ritual language.

"A Coronal" (CCP, p. 20) and "The Revelation" (CCP,
p - 21), also poems from Transitional, give further evidence
of Williams' concern with the intermingling of past and

present. "A Coronal", a poem that muses about the place

035 poetry in the everyday world of man and nature, goes
in time from supposition about the future to the present,
baCk to the past, and again to the future. By turning
from one chronological time to another, Williams empha-
si Zes the timelessness of the "New books and unheard of
maIllmscripts." Furthermore, the "new books of poetry"
"hi Ch will be written are "leather colored oakleaves",
eve 1‘ changing with each generation and ever different
with each poet, yet always ostensibly the same. By
Cht)Osing oakleaves as an image, Williams also emphasizes
the endurance and strength of poetry in a culture which
goes beyond the "other men's business" that the postman
thumbs over each day. The poet runs "ahead of it all"
and yet is part of a tradition which, like the oak, renews

1tSelf "many and many a time." As Williams was to write

1filter in "Caviar and Bread Again", though the poet seems

23

to invent a technique, he really "has been the fortunate
one who has gathered all the threads together that have

been spun for many centuries before him and woven them

into his design."12

"The Revelation", though not so complex as "The
Coronal" nor so directly related to the issues of ritual
and the poet, also deals with the idea of the unity of
past and present. And in this poem Williams' unity
stretches beyond chronological time into yet another
realm--the subconscious, or dream, state. Awaking happy
in a strange house, the poet is suspended temporarily
be tween sleep and wakefulness before he remembers his
dream and thereby enters the waking state. His dream was
of a girl he had known for some time. In the dream the
908 t says she "Leaned on the door of my car/And stroked
my hand--." Musing about the dream and projecting into
the future, the poet knows he will "pass her on the
StI‘eet" and share "trivial things" with her and yet will
"never cease/To search her eyes/For that quiet look--."
Again, Williams has managed within a very short poem to
uni te huge stretches of time and reality, but of this
union comes an experience meaningful to the poet. And
Titllaal, in Williams' sense of the word, serves the same

fullfiltion in society for the mass of peOple as the dream

24

serves the individual in this poem. In the early poem

the poet comes to his "Revelation" by means of the blend-
ing of states of time and consciousness into an image,

the girl, which can evoke awareness of the past, the

present, and the future.

AZ Que Quiere,13 published in 1917, reveals an even

more mature poet whose interests were becoming more
narrowly defined and whose poetic forms, though varied,
were developing into an original style. By this time in

hi 5 career, Williams has abandoned the gods and ladies of
hi 5 early poetry and in their place appear his "towns-
PeOP1e", a collection of people ranging from a "murderer's

li ttle daughter" (CCP, pp. 52-53), to a whore (CCP, pp.

48 -— so), to the poet himself.14 Present also in AZ Que

Q34 iere are the animals which surround him, especially
bi Tli‘cis,15 and the varied nature which Williams describes
so carefully and which plays an increasingly greater role

17

1n his work.16 There are also some "city poems" which

r ~ . . .
e‘real that W1111ams was already aware of the importance

\

 

*
So Paterson opens.with the "giant" "dreaming" the poem.
111011 Paterson rouses himself and goes out among the people
Or opes of awakening in them a sense of their own dreams
Pa Subconscious desires and needs (see Book Two). When
trt§rson takes his stroll.through the city, what he is
any 1ng to discover 15 a ritual that will link the desires
§} the reality together so as to release the spirits
nelng held captive in the automatons. He is unsuccessful
but-:11 he realizes that it is he who must be the fire-
I'lnger, the ritual server (see Book Three, Section 3)
Sentence on p. 7). In Paterson, the poet hopes to
ac—Complish the same type of blending by, means of a ritual

1aIlguage .

25

and varied richness of the physical attributes of his

"local." The most significant aspect of the poems in

A 2 Que Quiere from the standpoint of ritual, however,
1 ies not in their variety; it lies rather in the stress

Williams places on "correctness" as a means to growth,

both physical and spiritual. In "Tract" (CCP, p. 33),

the poet teaches his "townspeople" how to conduct a
funeral; in "To a Solitary Disciple" (CCP, pp. 61-62),

teaches his follower how to observe the reality around

he
him; in "January Morning" (CCP, pp. 57-60), he teaches
the significance of details in a grand whole; and in

"Good Night" (CCP, pp. 45-46), he teaches the almost

automatic progression from material order to a flight

of the imagination. By assuming the stance of teacher,

Ni 1 liams is beginning to develop his idea of the poet as

pri est, an idea which grows over the years to culminate

1n Paterson and the later poems.
"Tract", one of the longer poems in this collection,

dea 15 with the correct way to "perform a funeral" (p. 33)
And ,. the poet insists, his townspeople "have it over a

trc>(3p/of artists--" because they "have the ground sense

heQdessary" (p. 33). Not only is it necessary that the

ceremony or ritual come from the townspeople themselves,

but it is also necessary that they strip themselves of

all pretension and get down to their innate good sense.
And the teacher/poet is very explicit in his idea of how

a Correctly performed funeral should be conducted. First,

26

the hearse design is dealt with, and the teacher demands

that it remain simple:

For Christ's sake not black--
nor white either--and not polished!

Let it be weathered--like a farm wagon-—
(p. 33)

lit can't be black or white or polished because that would
t><e following a convention that doesn't fit the townspeople
(Dir the deceased. The hearse, like everything else in the

artitual, must conform to the reality it represents if the

1r2itual is to be successful. Otherwise, the ritual will

be merely a hollow show put on for the benefit of out-

s;:iders. And a mark of any ritual is that it be a unique

1€=)cpression of those who are performing it. A borrowed

Jr ixtual, unless its underlying myth is incorporated into

1:}1£3 culture performing it, soon loses its meaning for the

p e rformers . 18

As he continues to describe the way the hearse

5311(3u1d be, the teacher/poet emphasizes the functional

asSpect of the hearse and insists that "there be no glass--/

Elllci no upholstery phewl/and no little brass rollers/and

SI“all easy wheels on the bottom--" (p. 34). Like poetry

(’1‘ religion or anything else significant in life, it is

‘ltrt the covering or ostentation which is important but

Hthe thing itself." If "the thing itself" is really sig-

Ilificant, then it, like the coffin, can lie "by its own

‘Neight" (p. 34). The idea of "the thing itself" is similar

to the idea that the Imagists had developed in relation to

27

the image in poetry, and it was an idea that Williams was
to expand later, both in his Objectivist poetry and in
Paterson. Essentially the idea was that a poet, if suc-
cessful, would be able to lift "to the imagination those
things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses
close to the nose" (SE, Prologue to KIH, p. 11). Williams
realized the "virtual impossibility" of accomplishing such
an illumination, but it was to be his goal throughout his
life. At this point, in "Tract", even though the idea of
"the thing itself" was merely a germ of an idea, as with
most of Williams' ideas, it took root and blossomed later.

"To a Solitary Disciple", though not a treatise on
how to conduct a ritual, also reveals the poet as teacher
teaching his "disciple" how to observe. Observation,
after all, is the first and most important step in any
undertaking. A false observation leads to false action,
action which does not correspond to a situation's needs
and is therefore meaningless action, exactly what Williams
consistently tries to avoid. "To a Solitary Disciple",
however, deals solely with observing and is, as most of the
poems in AZ Que Quiere, only a step along the way to
Williams' final statements. It is similar to "Tract",
though, in that Williams repeatedly stresses the actuality,
the "thingness", of what is being observed. It is more
important to "notice..../that the moon is/tilted above/the
point of the steeple/than that its color/is shell pink"

(p. 61). It is more significant to "observe/that it is

(n

'-

*-

v“

‘ ,

‘l

L1)
1 f)

28
early morning/than that the sky/is smooth/as a turquoise"
(p. 61). It is more important, Williams is saying, to
see what is actually "out there" than to put our interpre-
tations, our colorings, on it. It is more important to
know that it is morning than to romantically link the
color of the sky with the color of a stone. And, even
though he goes on to say that
' It is true:
in the light colors
of morning

brown-stone and slate
shine orange and dark blue.

(p. 62)

he adds quickly that his disciple should
....observe
the oppressive weight
of the squat edifice!
Observe
the jasmine lightness
of the moon.

In "January Morning" Williams follows his own teach-
ings. More than anything else "January Morning" is a
study in observation. In this poem early morning Ruther-
ford is portrayed through Williams' eyes as they rest
first on one "beauty" and then on another. And these
"beauties" Williams insists "are due to/the strange hours
we keep to see them." Again, it is not only the seeing
or doing that is important but also the way the seeing or
doing is approached and accomplished. The "domes of the
Church of/the Paulist Fathers in Weehawken" if viewed at

the right time ("against a smoky dawn") are as "beautiful

as Saint Peters/approached after years of anticipation"

"n-

1
J

 

29
(p. 57). The implication is that it is not so much the
concrete reality that is important but the way in which
that reality is perceived and incorporated into a person's
being. If perceived and incorporated correctly, meaning-
fully, then the person's heart is "stirred" and he becomes
like "The young doctor" who dances "with happiness/in the
sparkling wind, alone/at the prow of the ferry!" (p. 59).
If the reality is not perceived correctly, then it cannot
function meaningfully in the perceiver's life and he
remains like the old woman (Williams' mother) to whom the
poem is addressed, a person who Williams evidently felt
didn't "try hard" enough to understand his poetry correctly.
He claims:
All this—-
was for you, old woman.
I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me

if you can't understand it?
But you got to try hard--

(p. 60)

Williams goes on to confess that he shares a bond with "the
young girls" who "run giggling/on Park Avenue after dark/
when they ought to be home in bed" (p. 60). "That's the
way it is with me somehow", he admits, and implies that

a correct understanding of his poetry is difficult. None-
theless, the whole gist of "January Morning" is that
beauty, truth, meaning can be found in even very obscure
places if only the perceivers are able to perceive in the

proper way. A common work horse becomes

30
...a young horse with a green bed-quilt

on his withers shaking his head:
bared teeth and nozzle high in the air!

(p. 58)

Some hoboes become

...a semicircle of dirt colored men
about a fire bursting from an old

ash can.
(13. 58)

And "curdy barnacles and broken ice crusts" are trans-
formed by the young doctor's imagination into "summer and
green/shell-crusted ledges among/the emerald eel-grass!"
(p. 59). With the proper perception and internalization
of that perception, even Manhattan, that jungle of con-
crete and steel, takes on a different shade of meaning
and becomes a place of "moody/water-loving giants..."
(p. 59). What Williams was stressing in this early poem
was what he would continue to stress repeatedly through
the years: that the imagination, if properly fed by a
meaningful ritual (in this case proper observation), can
take flight and give splendor to even the most everyday
scenes and situations. The spires of Manhattan will not
of course, actually change into "moody...giants", but the
quality of the perceiver's life will improve for having
seen them as such.

Williams' growing concern with the poet as priest is
also apparent in "January Morning"--why else would he
admonish the "old woman" to "try hard" to break through
the word barrier into the realm of the imagination? As

one of the worshippers, the old woman had to do her part

31

to make the ritual complete. By this time in his career
the poem itself was becoming a ritual for Williams, and
he was eventually going to believe that words were the
only sure way to individual "salvation." Words were not
the only ritual yet, however, as a look at another poem,
"Good Night", reveals. In "Good Night" we find the poet
performing one of his nightly oblations--getting a drink
of water before going to bed. As he stands at the sink
he observes and records the scene before him in minute
detail, from the water's "plash into the clean white
sink" to "a glass filled with parsley-—/crisped green"
(p. 45). After glancing "at the spotless floor" and
noting that "all is in order for the night", he waits
"with a glass in his hand." His reward for cleanliness,
order, and patience soon appears:

--three girls in crimson satin

pass close before me on

the murmurous background of

the crowded opera--

it is

memory playing the clown--

three vague, meaningless girls

full of smells and

the rustling sound of

cloth rubbing on cloth and

little slippers on carpet--

high-school French
spoken in a loud voice!

(pp. 45-46)
The vision is fleeting and soon "Parsley in a glass,/still
and shining", brings him "back." The small, rewarding
ritual complete, he performs his "Final Prayers", yawns

"deliciously" and is "ready for bed" (p. 46).

32
Sour Grapes (1921),19 Williams' next book of poetry,
was his third published by the Four Seas Company in Boston
and was, along with Al Que Quiere and Kora in HeZZZO
(which had come earlier), a real triumph for Williams.
He had had to pay Four Seas "something in the neighborhood

of $250.00"21

for each of the three books published; and,
he relates in his Autobiography, "I never received a
penny, so far as I remember on sales" (p. 159). Nonethe-
less, Williams was elated:
To get a book published! What a marvelous thing it
was to me. My own spillings.
(Autobiography, p. 159)
He wasn't too elated, however, at the literary world's
reaction to Sour Grapes. This title, he says, "brought
the psychiatrists about my head, if not the Freudian
analysts" (Auto., p. 157). Sour Grapes, they insisted,
meant "regret", meant that Williams was "frustrated",
that he was "afraid." Williams' reply to all this is
characteristic:
But all I meant was that sour grapes
are just the same shape as sweet
ones: .
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
(Auto., p. 158)
Whether his critics were right and Williams was "covering
up" in his reply is difficult to assess and has little to
do with the quality of the poems themselves. However, in
any discussion of Williams' development as a poet and

thinker, especially in his concern about ritual, Sour

Grapes is important. And a close look at the collection

33
indicates more than a message that "sour grapes are just
the same shape as sweet ones." The trend his career was
taking during the early 19205 was not completely satisfying
to him, and the events in the world beyond his office and
typewriter were definitely influencing his attitude. In
his discussion of Kora in Hell (a book published four
years before Sour Grapes) in his Autobiography Williams
tells how he felt during the years preceding and after
the First World War:
The third book was Kora in Hell. Damn it,

the freshness, the newness of a springtime which

I had sensed among the others, a reawakening of

letters, all that delight which in making a

world to match the supremacies of the past could

mean was being blotted out by the war. The

stupidity, the calculated viciousness of a

money-grubbing society such as I knew and vio-

lently wrote against; everything I wanted to

see live and thrive was being deliberately

murdered in the name of church and state.

(Aut0., p. 158)

The plan he had to make his "world to match the supremacies
of the past" was not clear at this time. He was still
searching for the ritual to illuminate the reality sur-
rounding him. However, it is evident that his hope in
the "reawakening of letters", in making the world new,
was being destroyed. And his disillusionment, though
more pronounced in Kora in Hell, is also readily apparent
in Sour Grapes. This was definitely a "down" period for
Williams, a period of disenchantment with all existing

rituals and the society that spawned them. These diffi-

cult times would be over in a few years, and Williams would

34
regain faith and start to rebuild his world and search
for new rituals. But for now, at least, his concerns
centered on destruction, aging, and decay. Perhaps such
disenchantment was one reason for Williams' turn to
prose. With such little hope in his heart, he could
hardly be the poet/priest of a new religion.*

In this period of disenchantment Williams writes
mostly of the dark and bitter side of life. Perhaps the
critics exaggerated in arguing that the poems reflected
Williams' sense of defeat and frustration, but a careful
look at some of the poems from this collection reveals
a man who seems to be saying that ”sour grapes" are life's
real harvest.

"The Late Singer" (CCP, p. 69), the poem that opens
the collection, sets the mood for the entire book. "Here
it is spring again/and I still a young man!" proclaims
the poet in what seems to be a cheerful mood. This tone
is deceptive, however, as the next few lines reveal:

I am late at my singing.
The sparrow with the black rain on his breast

has been at his cadenzas for two weeks past!
What is it that is dragging at my heart?

(p. 69)
What is "dragging" at his heart is not revealed, and he

ends the poem by restating the earlier line, "I am late

 

*

In the preface to his Selected Essays, Williams
declares that for him "all writing starts and ends with
the poem" and that when he writes a short story, "it
might better have been a poem...." (p. xiv).

35
at my singing." Whatever was bothering him continues to
assert itself in the next poem, "Celebration" (CCP, pp.
69-71). In this poem, after taking a fanciful trip
through the months using flowers as symbols of each
month, the poet returns to March, where he began, and
claims:
Ah, March--
Flowers are a tiresome pastime.
One has a wish to shake them from their pots
root and stem, for the sun to gnaw.
(p. 71)
What exactly is bothering him is still not revealed, but
in "At Night" (CCP, p. 72), a very short poem, we learn,
at least, that stars are a relief and comfort to him
because they are "foreign/uninterfering, like nothing/in
my life--."*
"A Goodnight" (CCP, pp. 73-74) gives further evidence

that the Williams of Sour Grapes is not the Williams of

Al Que Quiere, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

 

*

In his Autobiography, Williams speaks of these
years very cynically. Aside from a flu epidemic and the
war, Williams had his own personal problems:

...What else did I have? Nothing but a wife,

two sons, a father dying of cancer, a mother

who was, unquestionably, a foreigner to me.

One evening when Pop was still on his

feet but knew he was doomed, he turned to me

at the door of my office and said, "The one

thing I regret in going is that I have to leave

her to you. You'll find her difficult.”

(Aut0., p. 159)

Williams, evidently, felt very "interfered" with.

 

 

 

 

 

36
"A Goodnight" is a striking contrast to ”Good Night", the
poem from Al Que Quiere which revealed Williams' world as
warmly and comfortably ritualistic. In "A Goodnight"
that world seems to have fallen apart. Where in "Good
Night" there was calm, cleanliness, and order, in "A
Goodnight" there is turbulence, filth, and chaos. There
is no "Parsley in a glass,/still and shining" (Goodnight,
CCP, pp. 45-46) in this later poem; rather, there is "the
cold, greenish, split grapefruit", the ”sting of snow,
the burning liquor of/the moonlight, the rush of rain in
the gutters packed/with dead leaves" (p. 74). Hardly the
serenity evoked in the earlier poem. "Go to sleep--"
the poet says as he opens the poem, but then immediately
claims "though of course you will not--" (p. 73). And
why not? Because life has become a series of ”tideless
waves thundering slantwise against/strong embankments"
(p. 73), a state of existence in which people must live
like gulls, scavenging "between foam-crests,/refuse churned
in the recoil." for "Food! FoodE/Offal! Offal! that holds
them in the air,...the wild/chill in their eyes, the
hoarseness in their voices--" (p. 73). The sweet sleep
prepared for in "Goodnight" is unknown in this poem.
Sleep, rather than being a time of refreshing rest, becomes
an escape during the day. Night itself takes on human or
demonic characteristics and becomes "a crackbrained mes-
senger" whose purpose is to awaken and torment rather than

put to sleep and comfort:

 

n\~ r .
.Mv
r4

37

...wild-fowl police whistles,
the enraged roar of the traffic, machine shrieks:
it is all to put you to sleep,
to soften your limbs in relaxed postures,
and that your head slip sidewise, and your hair loosen
and fall over your eyes and over your mouth,
brushing your lips wistfully that you may dream,
sleep and dream--
A black fungus springs out about lonely church doors--
sleep, sleep. The Night, coming down upon
the wet boulevard, would start you awake with his
message, to have in at your window. Pay no
heed to him. He storms at your sill with
cooings, with gesticulations, curses!
You will not let him in. He would keep you from

sleeping.

(p- 73)

"It is late, it is nineteen-nineteen--" and the world,
like night and day in this poem, is turned upside down.
The "same tune" greets Williams wherever he goes, whatever
he is doing; "...the toast odors say it over and over",
he says. And the message is always the same: "go to
sleep, go to sleep"; but Williams' claim as he ends the
poem is that "the night passes--and never passes--" (p.
74). So sleep, like eating, or dressing, becomes a per-
verted ritual robbed of its original purpose by events
intruding upon the individual from the larger outside
world. Whatever significance Williams' private rituals
used to possess is lost in the chaotic turbulence of 1919.
Something more than private rituals is needed, something
unchanging in the face of outer turbulence; and that some-
thing for Williams is words, words correctly put down so
that they will survive through all the chaos of physical

reality.

38

Williams is still too caught up in the drama of life,
however, to infuse words with the light-brining magic he
knew was necessary.

"The Dark Day" (CCP, p. 80), a short poem in the
collection, contains essentially the same language as "A
Goodnight" with perhaps an even more dour conclusion.
While time stands still in "A Goodnight" ("the night
passes--and never passes--") in "The Dark Day" the move-
ment is backward. Ostensibly about a three-day rainfall,
"The Dark Day" is one of Williams' most negative state-
ments about life. In this poem language is no more than
"interminable talking, talking/of no consequence--patter,
patter, patter." Any ritual significance language could
have is lost because all are "drawn in upon themselves"
hurring "from one place to another." But they are getting
nowhere because "there is no escape!--" A11 if that
"interminable talking, talking,/talking" and "...it has
happened before" with the implication that it was just as
meaningless then. The poem's last line gives a good indi-
cation of Williams' conclusion:

Backward, backward, backward.
(p. 80)

"Overture to a Dance of Locomotives" (CCP, pp. 74-76)
continues the same idea, but in this poem the emphasis
is on the more positive continuity and stability in life.
It is significant, however, that Williams finds positive

continuity only in the abstract and non-personal world.

39
'The individual is scarcely mentioned at all, except as
one of a type, such as the porters or cooks on the trains.
.And, even in the mass, humanity doesn't fare very well:
"the shuffling/of all ants [would] be done forever",
claims Williams, if "the hands of a great clock" were to
"move quickly and at once" (p. 75). Human beings, like
ants, endure, Williams implies, but they are not indi-
vidual and imaginative; and their actions mean no more
than the scurrying actions of ants in a colony.

In contrast, he likens the continuity and stability
of the non-human, non-animal world to a dance. The hands
of a clock become "discordant hands straining out from/a
center: inevitable postures infinitely/repeated--" (p.
75), while the trains' wheels "remain relatively/sta-
tionary" on "rails forever parallel" that "return on
themselves infinitely" (p. 76). "The dance is sure",
Williams concludes, as sure as the time passing ("In
timeu twofour!/In time: twoeight!) relentlessly by.

Time plays an even greater part in several other
Poems. In "Time the Hangman" (CCP, p. 82), Williams'
message is very clear: whatever man may try to do to
himself is nothing compared with what the natural process
Of aging will do. Abner, a "poor old white-haired nigger",
had tried when he was young to beat the "faker" in the
local circus by hanging himself by "a rope round the
neck." Though that didn't kill him, time has worked on

him over the years so that he sits now with his face in

{fifi

40

liis hands, a "silent and broken" man. In "Epitaph"
(CCP, p. 88) time's effect on nature is portrayed as an
"old willow with hollow branches" that sings "Love is a
young green willow/shimmering at the bare wood's edge."
And in "The Hunter" (CCP, p. 89) Williams declares that
there is no victory for anyone because the hunter and
the hunted alike grow older:

Both sides grow older.

And you may be sure

not one leaf will lift itself

from the ground
and become fast to a twig again.

(p. 89)
Williams' dream of "making a world to match the
supremacies of the past"22 seems to have gotten lost in

the face of his observations about the reality which sur-
rounded him. Later he would begin to see hope in a more
meaningful existence via the adoption of a new ritual
language, but for now, at least, most of his message is
disnml. Not all of it, however; Sour Grapes does have its
lighter moments, especially in the flower poems. And
traces of the more "actualistic"* Williams of the later
Years appear at times without the overlay of doom that
Characterizes most of the poems in the book. Williams

had yet to go down into hell, be reborn as an artist, and

k

*Williams felt that the term "realistic" was delud-
ing and gave too much the idea that a copying of nature was
taking place. He claimed that the artist had to get beyond
"realism" into the "actual"; "actualistic" fits his idea
better. See Imaginations, ed. by Webster Schott (New York:
New Directions, 1971), pp. 110-117.

41

rise again to be a priest before he would become the man
‘who could write Paterson, but he was discarding some
illusions without becoming totally bitter. He was not
optimistic at this time, but he was not totally negative
either. "Thursday" (CCP, p. 81) illustrates Williams'
somewhat tentative stand very well. It is not a positive
poem, nor a happy one; but neither is it a poem of despair.
It is a statement of a man who has suffered disillusion—
ment and is slightly bitter but who has decided that what
is is almost as good as what he had wished for:

I have had my dream--like others--

and it has come to nothing, so that

I remain now carelessly

with feet planted on the ground

and look up at the sky--

feeling my clothes about me,

the weight of my body in my shoes,

the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose--and decide to dream no more.

(p. 81)

Of course, Williams, not being a static persona in a poem,
did.continue to dream; and he kept trying to realize his
dream in his poetry and prose. In the early twenties the
dream of a ritual language was still far in the future and

he had many years of struggle ahead, but the search had

begun.

10.

11.

12.

42

Chapter Two-Notes

Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagists", Poetry,
I, 1913, p. 201.

William Carlos Williams, The Complete Collected
Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938
(Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938), p. 4.
Hereafter cited in the text as CCP.

Williams, Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
(New York: Random House, 1954), p. vii.

See particularly Paterson, Book V, for a poetic
treatment of this conviction. The edition of
Paterson I have used throughout is the New
Directions edition which appeared in 1963.
Hereafter all references to Paterson will refer
to this edition and will be noted simply by page
number.

SE, p. 96.

Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
(New York: Random House, 1951). Hereafter cited
in the text as Autobiography.

Poems (Rutherford, N.J.: privately printed by Reid
Howell, 1909).

Reprinted in CCP (originally published by Elkin
Mathews: London, 1913).

Paterson, see pp. 124-128.

See Paterson, Book III, for a complete mature treat-
ment of this theme.

Williams_was to claim much later in IWTWAP when speak-
ing of Sour Grapes that "Sour grapes are just as
beautiful as other grapes." (p. 33). He made no
distinction where most would.

SE, p. 103.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.
22.

43

Reprinted in CCP (originally published by the Four
Seas Company in Boston, 1917).

Williams appears as himself in several poems. Per-
haps the best known of this group is "Dance Russe",
CCP, p. 47.

See especially "Gulls", CCP, p. 31; "Dawn", CCP, p.
40; "Spring Strains", CCP, p. 55; and "Ballet",
CCP, pp. 62-63.

Very numerous in this collection. Perhaps the most
representative are "Love Song", CCP, p. 30;
"Winter Quiet", CCP, p. 42; and "Trees", CCP, p.
43.

See "Pastoral", CCP, pp. 27-28; "January Morning",
CCP, pp. 57-60; and "Conquest", CCP, p. 65.

See Margaret Mead, "Ritual and Social Crisis", in
The Roots of Ritual, p. 95.

Reprinted in CCP (originally published by the Four
Seas Company, Boston, 1921).

Reprinted in CCP (originally published by the Four
Seas Company, Boston, 1920).

Autobiography, pp. 158, 159.

Autobiography, p. 158.

solu

1917

 

CHAPTER III

What Williams' early poetry lacked in originality,

his early prose doubly compensated for. As a prose writer,

Williams was an innovator from the first. Called Williams'

"books of primary belief" by Webster Schott, the editor of

Imaginations,1 the early prose works are filled with the

struggles, both private and professional, that beset the

young writer and doctor. The earliest prose reveals that

he didn't know the answers yet to the problems that con-
fronted him at every turn, but that he was driven to find

solutions. Kora in Hell,2 the first major work, came in

1917 at a time when Williams felt that not only the world
knit also he as an individual was being "slaughtered."

lie was to reiterate this point in Spring and All, which

came a little later.5

So most of my life has been lived in hell--
a hell of repression lit by flashes of inspira-
tion, when a poem such as this or that would

appear.
' What would have happened in a world simi-

larly lit by the imagination.
(p. 116)
Though his hell was neither deep nor very long lasting,
he Suffered nonetheless. In I Wanted to Write a Poem he
53953 that he considered himself "as Springtime" and felt
he ‘”\vas on his way to Hell (but didn't go very far).4

44

and a

his ,

 

45

Spring and All is, in a sense, the second stage of
emerging from his hell, with all the turbulence and strife
that such an emergence would cause. A mixture of prose
and poetry, it is a book that Williams himself called a
"travesty on the idea" of typographical variation, and
"a mixture of philosophy and nonsense."6 He also said
that he doubted "if it made any sense to anyone else"

7

even though it made sense to his "disturbed mind." By

the time The Great American Novel (1923),8 In the American

10

Grain (1925),9 and A Voyage to Pagany (1928) had appeared,

Williams had sifted through the ideas he had been dealing
with; he began to develop the themes that would later
become his mature "statements" about reality. He had,
during this period, become primarily an actor rather than
the reactor he had been before; and the change is signifi-
cant. Rather than simply bemoaning the increasingly
"ritualess" society with which he was surrounded, he set

Iiimself the task of building a really "New World" of the

jJnagination. This "New World" was eventually to be based
(n1 a meaningful language that would describe it and no
otflier, but that would come later. In the meantime, the
task was difficult and would employ him for the rest of
Ibis life. But these three early works, along with Kora
in [Yell and Spring and All, were at least a beginning,
anti £1 rather formidable beginning at that.

In the Prologue to Kora in Hell Williams talks about

h1§5 Inother and in doing so leads into a description of what

he

The
incc
time

he 5'

depr«

 

46
he himself had attempted to do in the body of the work:

This, seeing the thing itself without
forethought or afterthought but with great
intensity of perception, my mother loses her
bearings or associates with some disreputable
person or translates a dark mood. She is a
creature of great imagination. I might say
this is her sole remaining quality. She is
a despoiled, molted castaway but by this
power she still breaks life between her
fingers.

(Imaginations, p. 8)

Williams' hope as he wrote Kora in Hell had been to lose
his bearings and thereby somehow break life between his
fingers. His method, as described in the Autobiography,
seems simple enough:

I decided that I would write something
every day, without missing one day, for a
year. I'd write nothing planned but take up
a pencil, put the paper before me, and write
anything that came into my head. Be it nine
in the evening or three in the morning, return-
ing from some delivery on Guinea Hill, I'd
write it down.

(p. 158)

The trouble was that what came into his head was often
*
.incomprehensible to anyone else, but his aim at this

time was not to gain an audience. By his own admission

11

he was "disturbed", but instead of giving in to his

{ depression he wrote:

It was Persephone gone into Hades, into
hell. Kora was the Springtime of the year;
my year, my self was being slaughtered. What
was the use of denying it? For relief, to

t
W‘ The book does not contain all 365 entries because
1lliams felt that some were entirely too incomprehensible.

47

keep myself from planning and thinking at all,

I began to write in earnest.
(Autobiography, p. 158)

And what he wrote "in earnest" was a mixture of fact and

fancy, prose and a kind of prose poetry, sense and non-

sense. Most significantly, however, it was a "workbook"

of sorts, a book in which Williams finally gave expression

to both the form and substance that were to be the marks

of his mature writing.

Williams also had a literary purpose in mind. In
the Improvisations, he hoped to begin to draw the "dis-
criminating line between true and false values" (Prologue,
p. 14). The "true value", Williams goes on to say, is
"that peculiarity which gives an object a character by
itself" (p. 14). The "false value" is anything which is
"associational or sentimental." And the poet merely
exhibits a lack of imagination by writing in such a way.
Iiis writing becomes no more than "an easy lateral slid-
ing" (p. 14). "The attention has been held too rigid
cum one plane", insists Williams, "instead of following

a Inore flexible, jagged resort." His purpose, then, in

tflie Inprovisations was to "loosen the attention" and let

hi4; imagination go "from one thing to another." It was

his; hope to get beyond what he calls the "solidarity" of

tbs: "natural or scientific array" of things which "lie

under the direct scrutiny of the senses." The solidarity

thilti appears to be there in front of the senses Williams

Calls the "walking devil of modern life" because it is

48

this solidarity that prevents man from reaching either
forward or backward in any attempt to get beyond himself.
Modern man, therefore, is stuck in a mire of "finality"
from which only the imagination can rescue him. If a
writer or artist is able somehow to lift man, even for
a moment, beyond this finality, then in Williams' eyes
he has accomplished a "work superior to that of Hercules
when he cleaned the Augean stables" (p. 14). But lift
man he must, if the poet is to fulfill his priestly task.
As Fischer says:

If ritual is communication, the develop-

ment of new ritual is a task for the artist,

....To deveIOp a ritual that is genuine for

a certain time and place requires all of the

talents of great artists.

Williams was growing more aware of his responsi-
bility, and what he was saying in the Prologue was only
a forerunner to what he would say in many ways throughout
the rest of his writing career. It is evident, however,
that by the time he wrote Kora in Hell he was already
conceiving the artist as a priest and the processes of
art as the ritual. By focusing onthe peculiarities of
things and then by joining them somehow in a "duet", the
artist, according to Williams, is able to lift the par-
ticipants (the things, the artist, the beholders) into a
realm of perfection only sensed by most men:

On this level of the imagination all

things and ages meet in fellowship. Thus
only can they, peculiar and perfect, find

49

their release. This is the beneficent power

of the imagination.
(Prologue, p. 19--explanation for
section IV, No. 2)

The realm of perfection that Williams hoped to attain
through his art was still long in coming when he wrote
Kora in Hell. "The birth of the imagination", he noted,
"is like waking from a nightmare"; and the "barriers which
keep the feet from the dance are the same which in a dream
paralyze the effort to escape" (p. 21). But escape a man
must, claimed Williams, if he is going to live to his
fullest capabilities. And, to Williams, living to the
fullest meant living in the moment while at the same time
sharing with the ancients, a feat that can only be accom-
plished if the artificial barriers of "reality" are broken
so that "actuality" can be sensed. By his method of
switching very quickly from one impression to another and
by juxtaposing seemingly very different "realities" he
illustrates that what appears to be real is often not real
at all, but a trick played by a faulty or lazy imagination.
That is why in so much of Williams' writing whores, virgins,
the "beautiful" and the "ugly" are often indistinguishable
from each other. A good example of the way Williams'
method works can be seen in Section IV, Number 3, of Kora
in Hell (pp. 37, 38). In this short selection Williams
describes the death of two peOple who normally would be
considered almost totally divorced from each other.

Williams' message is that in actuality the "young woman

50
who had excelled at intellectual pursuits" and the murdered
man of "very gross behavior" share a great many things.
For one, they have both died, and whatever apparent dif-
ferences divided them in life become unimportant in the
actuality of their shared deaths. Williams notes that they
died on the same night and that he had taken "advantage of
this to send them on their way side by side without making
the usual unhappy moral distinctions" (p. 38). To Williams,
the "moral distinctions" are merely inventions of an
increasingly sophisticated society that has become blind
to the actual facts of life and death. It is easy for
men to pretend and delude themselves as to what is actual
as long as the status quo is maintained, but life has a
way of intruding upon man's inventions thereby reducing
or elevating all to the same level. Williams' stance
here and later is that life is the "principle of self
renewal" that goes beyond any man's attempt to define and
label. The poet can invent, if he has imagination, but
his invention must be grounded in the actual world if it
is to have any validity.

Another theme of Williams' that was to play an impor-
tant part in all of his later work also appears for the
first time in Kora. This theme could be called "the idea
of the beneficent descent." Actually, it is not separable
from his main idea of commonality but, rather, is an out-
growth of it. What appears to be different to most men

is often essentially alike to Williams; his theory of the

 

51

"beneficent descent" is an extension of this idea into
the realm of action. What appears to be down becomes
merely a vantage point from which up can be seen and
attained more readily. The whole idea of Kora in Hell
is based on this premise--Spring has to go into a hell
of winter before emerging again as a vital force. The
young girl Williams portrays in XV, Number 1, has to go
"through the vulgarities of a cupiscent girlhood" before
the "quasi-maidenly distinction" of womanhood is reached
(p. 58). And in the note following this section, Williams
reinforces his point:

Often when the descent seems well marked

there will be a subtle ascent over-ruling it

so that in the end when the degradation is

fully anticipated the person will be found to

have emerged upon a hilltop.

(p. 58)

Williams stresses this idea of descent again and
again in his later work, and it becomes an integral part
of his "religion." If the imagination is to be served,
the poet (the priest of the imagination) must go through
a ritual fire that will destroy any illusions or miscon-
ceptions about the reality into which he must emerge again.
J. E. Slate touches on this theme in Williams' work when
he notes that Kora in Hell reveals a "commitment to
violence" in the shape of "deformity, insanity, wounds,
amputation, disease." These conditions may, according to

13

Slate, "be clues to the shape of new forms." To delve

into the twisted world of disease and pain is a necessary

 

 

52

forerunner of invention. Once the poet emerges, his task
is to "set down" the language "as heard" so that "the
imagination of the listener and of the poet are left free
to mingle in the dance" (p. 59). The language Williams is
talking about is the language "fabricated" out of the words
and scenes that pass before a person eaCh day. It is the
language of the imagination, the language a few, those
who are poets, are capable of hearing. Most men, Williams
is convinced, are not "tuned" to this language and there-
fore cannot really use their imaginations. The poet/priest's
function, then, is to open the doors of the imagination to
those incapable of opening them themselves. As Joseph
Riddel notes in his book, The Inverted Bell, Williams had
a clear idea of what he was attempting:

Williams' descent becomes a process of decon-

struction, an attempt to get back through writing

”to the "place where the world begins," to

"shoot a clarity through the oppressing, obses-

sing murk of the world." 14

(Voyage to Pagany, 16)

The "old poets" served much the same purpose but were
Inore exclusive. They "would translate this hidden language
into a kind of replica of the speech of the world with
certain distinctions of rhyme and meter to show that it
was not really that speech" (p. 59). What they created,
then, was another "hidden language", a language twice
removed from the actuality. Williams' struggle, begun

herw: early in his career, was to get to the essential

language, the mingling of sounds and sights, and thereby

In ’-!L

 

53
be the bridge over which all could pass from a mortality
to a kind of immortality.

Williams' view of man is an Optimistic one in that
he believed that once the language was found, once the
ritual was performed correctly, then a return to the
legendary golden days would occur. He saw men as "Giants
in the dirt", as "the Greek gods, smothered in filth and
ignorance" (p. 60), and it was "the language that failed

.15 Furthermore, these "gods"

them" (Paterson, p. 11)
were all that were "worth writing of" (p. 61). "They are
the same men they always were-~but fallen", Williams
insists (p. 61), and it is the poet's function to raise
them again. "They dance much as they did then", he notes,
but "few have an eye for it, through the dirt and fumes"
(p. 61). Modern men are no different to Williams; they
still participate in the dance of life. It is the rituals
that have failed. Men don't know they're alive; they see
themselves as little more than the dirt they walk on. It
is up to a poet/priest to breathe life into men again so
they can dance as they "danced beside Helicon" (p. 61).

If Kora in Hell was Williams' book of despair, then

Spring and All is his book of violence,16 a book filled

with the urgency of getting started after a period of

being stuck in doubt and pessimism. More than anything

 

54
else, however, Spring and All is a book celebrating the
*
imagination. Convinced by this time that men were not
capable of reaching each other via the old routes of
religion and everyday language, Williams insists repeatedly
throughout Spring and All that the imagination is the key
that will open the doors to a new and more meaningful life.
But it will be a life of the "moment", a life of "right
now", not a life beyond this one, or a life looking back
to a more golden age. Accused by his contemporaries of
robbing poetry of its "deeper", more fanciful meanings,
Williams emphasizes that it is not his intention to "seek
refuge in fantasy":
The reader knows himself as he was twenty

years ago and he has also in mind a vision of

what he would be, some day. Oh, some day!

But the thing he never knows and never dares

to know is what he is at the exact moment that

he is. And this moment is the only that in

which I am at all interested.

(p. 89)

Williams also makes clear that it is the imagination
alone that will enable him to realize and appreciate the
moment. "To whom then am I addressed?", he asks. "To
the imagination"--because it is the imagination that will
enable him to break down "the barrier between sense and

the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its

agonized approaches to the moment" (p. 89). All writing

 

*
Webster Schott's claim that Spring and All contains
"pleas" on the behalf of the imagination is too defensive.
Ln Spring and All Williams definitely celebrates the imagi-
natixni. See Imaginations, p. 85, for Schott's discussion.

55

up to "the present", Williams insists, has always been "a
search for 'the beautiful illusion'." He is not interested
in the illusion, and all who think that the imagination
leads to illusion are wrong. In Williams' theory the
imagination leads to the actual by seizing the threads
that each separate thing has in common and then weaving
them together to form a real, actual whole:

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that

eternal moment in which we alone live there

is but a single force--the imagination.

(p. 89)

To get to that "eternal moment" the force of the imagina-
tion must first destroy; and the destruction must be
complete. Although Williams doesn't use the term "ritual"
here, this is what he is describing. What seems to be,
what most people consider the real, must be destroyed
before the only important "real" can be experienced. He
describes the ritual conflagration, the "final and self
inflicted holocaust" that "has been all for love, for
sweetest love"* (p. 91), and then goes on to describe
what has actually taken place. Art, he explains, is not
the illusion or the escape that so many believe it to be.
True art, Williams would say, is the actuality discovered
by a ritual destruction of surface reality. When the

surface reality is exploded so that "in the imagination,

 

*
Note the similarity to "Asphodel that Greeny
Flower", written thirty-two years later in 1955.

 

56
all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth
for ten million, billion years", a "miracle of miracles
a miraculous miracle" takes place (p. 93). This "miracu-
lous miracle" is the repetition of evolution within the
imagination:
Every step once taken in the first ad-
vance of the human race, from the amoeba to
the highest type of intelligence, has been
duplicated, every step exactly paralleling
the one that preceded in the dead ages gone
by. A perfect plagiarism results. Everything
is and is new. Only the imagination is
undeceived.
(p. 93)
Art, then, to Williams is more than the "perfect plagiarism."
It is that which results from the ritual destruction of
what appears to be real. "For the moment", the eternal
moment, "everything is fresh, perfect, recreated" (p. 93).
Soon everyday reality will intrude and the moment of per-
fection will slip away, but while it is being experienced,
"everything Is new" and is "being evolved from an identical
*
discussion which took place the day before yesterday"
(p. 93):
Yes, the imagination, drunk with prohibi-
tions, has destroyed and recreated everything
afresh in the likeness of that which it was.
Now indeed men look about in amazement at each

other with a full realization of the meaning
of "art."
(1)- 93)

 

* .

This idea follows closely the idea Williams put
forth.about the simultaneity of history which he expressed
syndnalically as the snake with its tail in its mouth. It
is an idea he was to develop more fully in Book Five of

Paterson.

 

 

57

Williams' point in Spring and All is that the whole,
the actual, exists only in the creation of great art
because only in that "moment" is the imagination really
served. And the imagination is the only vehicle that can
take a man, through eons of time, and bring him face to
face with the future. Williams insists that in the imagi-
nation the past, the present, the future all exist simul-
taneously and perfectly. Nothing is new and everything
is new "In that huge and microscopic career of time"

(p. 94) that repeats "move for move every move that it
made in the past" (p. 95). The illumination is reached
by the artist when "the end" and "the beginning" come
together. In that instant "THE WORLD IS NEW" (p. 95),
and it is spring.

In the spring, Williams continues, the man of imagi-
nation no longer looks to past art for release because
looking to past art is like contending-"with the sky
through layers of demoded words and shapes" (p. 100).

Any meanings that might have existed when the art was
created are no longer valid "because meanings have been
lost through laziness or change in the form of existence
which have let words empty" (p. 100). Williams' solution
to this problem of "divorce", this problem of separation
bewteen man and nature, is the one he will continue to
give for the rest of his life:

The word must be put down for itself, not as

a symbol of nature but a part, cognizant of

the whole-~aware--civilized.
(p. 100)

 

58
Williams illustrates very well what he means in the
poetry that is interspersed throughout Spring and All.
The words in these poems speak for themselves so that the
poems are, in a sense, transcriptions from nature. They
are also metaphors for what Williams says in the prose
sections of Spring and All. In "By the Road to the Con-
3':
tagious Hospital", for example, he speaks about the coming
of spring and says that
One by one objects are defined--
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance--Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
(p- 96)
**
And in "Pink confused with white" he illustrates what
he has been saying and what he intends to say about the
past and the future coming together in the moment. He
begins:
Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame

darting it back
into the lamp's horn

(Po 96)

 

*

Later called "Spring and All" when published in
the Selected Poems (New Directions, N.Y., 1962), pp. 24-25.

**

Later called "The Pot of Flowers" when published
in SP. Bram Dijkstra, in his book, The Hieroglyphics of
a New Speech (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, 1969),
claims that this poem is "a literal rendering into poetry
of Demuth's watercolor 'Tuberoses'." See pp. 167-179 for
a thorough discussion of Williams' use of the visual arts
in Spring and All.

 

59
He goes on to describe the flowers and leaves and then
ends:
and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss.
(p. 96)
The prose section directly following this poem begins:
"A terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows
whither to turn....Has life its tail in its mouth or its
mouth in its tail?” (pp. 96-97). The pink is confused
with the white, and what is "wholly dark" is also "gay
with rough moss." The problem of the artist is to take
these "familiar, simple things" and somehow "detach them
from ordinary experience" via the imagination (p. 110).
In the past, Williams contends, such a detachment was
unnecessary since the artist made no attempt to deal with
"reality." Past art was an extension of the society's
religion into the artistic realm-~because the subject was
"related to the 'gods,'....There was no need of the
'illusion'" (p. 111). The "gods" were the reality to
men of the past. What they thought (the imagination) and
what they saw (the world outside the self) coincided in
such a way as to preclude any desire for or need of
illusion.

Modern man, Williams believes, does not have the
unity the ancients possessed. Modern man, therefore,
looks within himself and outside of himself and sees only
confusion. He gropes about in his confusion and tries to

attach himself to what he believes to be real in the world

 

60

outside himself, not realizing that the world is only an
extension of his confused mind. In searching in this
way, modern man, Williams believes, creates phantasies
and illusions that have nothing to do with the modern
imagination. The words he has to work with don't fit
the reality; the old religious rituals (merely an exten-
sion of the words) don't have anything to do with the
imagination--so modern man suffers a split within himself
that necessarily extends into the outer reality and
encompasses every experience. To become whole, like the
men of the past who had no "need of the illusion", modern
man, Williams insists, must "dwell in the modern imagina-
tion if the truth is to be numbered." (p. 112). The modern
artist must, like artists of the past, create art which
will."ESCAPELILLUSION and stand between man and nature as
saints once stood between man and the sky" (p. 112).
According to Williams the great works created by such an
active, vital imagination, one that draws all threads of
life together to form a new unity, are all that "COMPLETE
SCIENCE AND ALLOW INTELLIGENCE TO SURVIVE" (p. 112).

Williams confesses that his own life up to the time
in which he wrote Spring and All had been spent "in seek-
ing to place a value upon experience and the objects of
experience that would satisfy [his] sense of inclusiveness
without redundancy" (p. 116). He himself had not been
able to become whole enough to feel "firm in the position"

which he now takes in Spring and All. Williams explains

II ‘ u—J. IL.

 

61

that in order to become free (to release the imagination)
he had to let "life go completely.". He had done this,
he claims, in the Improvisations. The result had been a
discovery of new values, even though the process of attain-
ing these new values had been a "dislocation of sense,
often complete" (p. 117). Now, in Spring and All, Williams
states that he has found that the values he discovered in
writing the Improvisations "can be extended" in such a way
as to include others' work (p. 117). Discovering these
values was quite a breakthrough for Williams and was very
important in the process of his becoming an actor rather
than the reactor he had been. Like the man, Paterson,
which he was going to create, Williams slowly came alive
in a full sense by first waking to the reality around him
(see Paterson, I and II), then realizing that he would
have to break down the old patterns handed down to him
for centuries in order to create new forms (see Paterson,
Book III). As he notes in Spring and All, once the new
values were discovered, he found that

there is work to be done in the creation of

new forms, new names for experience

and that "beauty" is related not to
"loveliness" but to a state in which reality
plays a part....
now works of art cannot be left in this
category of Frances' "lie" [an allusion made
to the works of the impressionists expres-

sionists, Cézanne] they must be real, not
"realism" but reality itself--"
(p. 117)

He has learned, he says, that to simply replace the

forms of art is not enough. It is the reality of experience

3 .

 

62

that must be replaced so that the reality portrayed is
the reality of the present, not the past, the reality
itself, not the illusion of "realism" (p. 117). The work
of art must be a vital, living thing itself, not merely
a representation of reality. It must have its own
"separate existence" which will lend vitality and a
"revivification of values" to all who share in that
existence (p. 117). That "separate existence", according
to Williams, is what gives men a sense of "exaltation"
when they look at a great work of art:

The exaltation men feel before a work of

art is the feeling of reality they draw from

it. It sets them up, places a value upon

experience--

(p. 129)

To Williams, the work of art, therefore, functions
as a meaningful ritual if it is a great work of art. It
stands between the individual and all that surrounds him
as an interpreter, a bridge over which he can cross to
jpartake more fully of the greater reality outside himself.
Ixike all rituals, the work of art is also the unifier as
‘welJ.as the interpreter. Through participation in a
great work of art, Williams would insist that a man is
ablxe to enter into the unity that the great artist per-
ceives when he is creating. The observer becomes another
Whitman (or another Williams) when he enters into Whitman's
world, a world of "'democracy'" in which the least and

the greatest become a part of his identity (p. 113).

——l

 

“

63

The poem which begins, "The universality of things"
illustrates very well what Williams means when he says
that works of art should give "a sense of completion, of
actuality." The "candy/with melon flowers that open/about
the edge of refuse" becomes merged in the poet's mind with
"the quality of the farmer's/./shoulders and his daughter's
accidental skin" (pp. ll7-118). The poet's eyes (and
hopefully the reader's as he reads the poet's creation)
act as eyeglasses that distort reality "favorably" and
yet "remain related to mathematics" (p. 118)., Williams
wants us to be certain, however, that an artist of great
imagination does not go about purposefully looking for
"apt similes" with which to unify experience. That "sort
of thing", Williams insists, only "blinds him to his
world" and "makes nature an accessory to the particular
theory he is following" (p. 120).

The imaginative writer, Williams would say, should be
like the earth, detached, independent and "sufficient to
itself" so that the art he creates will be "transfused
with the same forces which transfuse the earth" (p. 121).
Otherwise, if the artist is merely a walking recorder
and observer, any art produced will be devoid of life and
will remain simply "like" what the artist tried to depict
(p. 121). Such art, "representative art", because it has
no life of its own, can hardly be expected to give the

sense of renewed life that great art is able to impart.14

 

 

11k

6‘

in!

 

fel
ins
80;.

Pro

act

is

 

64

Of course, the same holds as true for the perceiver
as it does for the creator. If the perceiver lacks imagi-
nation and wants simply to be taught something, as one is
taught arithmetic, then even if the art is great, the
ritual of renewing life will be unsuccessful. Such per-
ceivers, Williams says, "know nothing of the physiology
of the nervous system and have never in their experience
witnessed the larger processes of the imagination" (p.

123). They are like the age in which they live, an age

 

that Williams characterized as stale (p. 134). To be rid
of the staleness the answer is to be "new, immediate",
like the primitives were new and immediate in their age
(p. 134).

The answer, however, is not to copy the primitives
in hopes of attaining the same exaltation they must have
felt when viewing their own works of art. Williams is
insistent about this point. Their art, he insists, meant
something and still means something because it was a
product of their vital imaginations.

The primitives are not back in some remote
age--they are not BEHIND experience. Work

which bridges the gap between the rigidities

of vulgar experience and the imagination are

rare. It is new, immediate--It is so because

it is actual, always real. It is experience

dynamized into reality.

(p. 134)

Williams would contend that modern artists must create

actual, real works of art from their own experience if it

is to lend any meaning and vitality to the artist and

 

65
perceiver alike. However, modern man, including the
artist, faces a serious problem, according to Williams,
in that he has no easily recognizable reference point,
no standard source from which to draw his vitality. He
and his contemporaries have been dulled so that even their
imaginations are locked in prisons of the past. They may FL
be knowledgeable in terms of what Williams calls "compli—
cated facts", but in terms of the "fourth dimension", the

"endlessness of knowledge", they are often lacking. Such

1

 

a state of confusion and insensitivity should "never be

permitted" because if life is "absolutely simple", as

Williams says it is, "everyone should know EVERYTHING

there is to know about life at once and always" (p. 139).
Williams seems to be arguing in a circle with no way

out. Modern artists must create "actual", "real" art

that will act as a unifier of experience for artist and

perceiver alike, but as a modern man, the artist is also

trapped in the aura of confusion which suffuses the whole

age. Williams' answer to his own dilemma is characteristic:

rely on the imagination for on its back alone "reality

*
rides" (p. 139).

 

*
Williams assumes that a true artist in any age,
including this age of "stupidity" (p. 140), will somehow
rise above the mass and become the transfigurer for all
whose imaginations remain mired in the muck of confusion.
The poet and the artist do take on the cloak of high
priest in Williams' religion of the Word. In this sense,
at least, he could be considered something of a Romantic.

66

Williams stresses again as he brings Spring and All
to a close that it is great art that provides the way out
of despair and that anyone who wants to live sensitively
and fully must have an appreciation of what the masters
have to "say." The quality of one's imagination, then,
determines who will be the poet/priests and who will be
the "worshippers." The ones with the greatest imagina-
tions, the poet/priests, must then act as stepping stones,
bridges, for the others who cannot get to reality by
themselves. Ultimately the poet/priests, the artists of
any age, must rely on their own experience as they feel
it if they are to be successful as true communicators.
If the poets and artists can somehow, in Williams' termi-
nology, "liberate" the word "from the fixities which
destroy it", then they will also "liberate the man to
act in whatever direction his disposition leads" (p. 150).

Increasingly Williams has come to see a "liberated"
language as the only answer to the problems of his trapped
and dying culture. Increasingly, too, he has come to see
the artist as the liberator who must focus on facts of
reality and then accurately "tune" the words at his dis-
jposal to that reality so that those words take on new
Imeanings beyond themselves. As Williams says when he
concludes Spring and All:

The word is not liberated, therefore
able to communicate release from the fixities

which destroy it, until it is accurately tuned
to the fact which giving it reality, by its

 

“I“, 1'". '

67

own reality establishes its own freedom from

the necessity of a word, thus freeing it and

dynamizing it at the same time.

(p. 150)

The Great American Novel (1923) was published almost
concurrently with Spring and All,* and the similarity
between the two works is astonishing. The form, of course,
is quite different. In Spring and All, Williams had tried
first one style and then another, had very liberally inter-
spersed poetry between prose passages and in general hadn't
seemed to be concerned about progression at all. The
Great American Novel is another matter. It is straight
prose--no poetry, no typographical variation--is, in fact,
Williams' first extended prose work. In content, however,
The Great American Novel and Spring and All are like oppo-
site sides of the same coin--together they demonstrate
Williams' ability to examine the same questions from
various perspectives. They also together demonstrate and
emphasize his continuing concern with his culture and its
fate. Since the two works were written so closely together,
it is even tempting, though perhaps inaccurate, to say that

The Great American Novel takes up where Spring and All

left off.

 

*

The Great American Novel came out in the summer
of 1923 while Spring and All came out in the fall of that
year. In discussing them I have reversed the order since
the ideas in Spring and All seem in many ways to be a
prelude to the ideas in The Great American Novel.

68

The Great American Novel does sharpen the edges, at
least, of what Williams was trying to say in Spring and
All, and in this sense, if in no other, it is a sequel.
The confusion and lack of direction which purposely
reigned supreme in Spring and All is replaced in The
Great American Novel by a fog which slowly dissipates as
the writer begins to see reality more clearly. As he
allows his imagination the freedom to cut through to the
reality enshrouded in the fog, the theme of the "novel"
becomes more clear. Williams focuses more and more
sharply on what he feels is the central problem in his
society: the lack of a cogent, meaningful language.

What in Spring and All had been a plowing up and mulling
over of the problem becomes in The Great American Novel

an attempt to find solutions. In a sense Kora in Hell

was Williams' "Winter of Discontent", Spring and All his
new beginning, and The Great American Novel his summer of
hard work. In it he sows the seeds that were to ripen

and bloom in In the American Grain, Paterson, and the

late poems. Williams' "summer" begins in a foggy September,
however, and that is where we must begin if we are to
understand what he was attempting to do.

"If there is progress then there is a novel", Williams
begins; "Without progress there is nothing" (p. 158). Or,
at least, what there is seems to be chaotic. Such a
seemingly haphazard jumble of words and ideas are poured

ikyrth in the first chapters of The Great American Novel

 

69
that Williams' "progress" appears to be nothing more than
an illusive wish that he couldn't fulfill. Soon, however,
the words and ideas begin to coalesce into a more tradi-
tional form and "progress" can be seen. Not that The
Great American Novel ever becomes traditional, ordinary,
in any perjorative sense. It merely becomes more easily
understood, more patterned after the literary models which
preceded it. The Great American Novel is Williams'
"exercise" in pulling together and drawing meaning from
all the strands of thought he had been spinning through
the years. It is also a precursor in some ways to what
Williams triedto do later in his Objectivist years. In
The Great American Novel the form is definitely an exten-
sion, a conveyor, of the meaning Williams was trying to
get across. The seemingly muddled form in the opening
pages illustrates very well the muddle in Williams' own
mind in his formative years. The novel's progressive
clarity is an indication of Williams' progressive clarity
as he approaches his very productive middle years. The
form definitely fits the substance. Such a method helps
Williams get his message across uniquely and in a way that
couldn't be done if he had tried to say the same thing in
conventional, straightforward prose. He is, in The Great
American Novel, trying to do what he had been preaching in
‘various ways for years: use the language in such a way
that it takes on a life of its own thereby taking its

readers into the realm of the imagination. He would do the

 

70

same thing more successfully later in his poetry and short
stories, but The Great American Novel is an important
beginning as an informative step along the way to an
understanding of Williams' aesthetic.

A sense of helplessness and frustration dominates
the first chapters of The Great American Novel as Williams
tries to find the words to say what he must. Reminiscent
of "To Mark Antony in Heaven" in its flux from past to

present to past to future, the opening pages convey

 

15:13.5! .-.- 1:

Williams' struggle with the language and the bigger ques-
tions of time and reality. "Words", he says, "are not
permanent unless the graphite be scraped up and put in a
tube or the ink lifted" (p. 158). The problem that con-
fronts him, then, is the question of permanence. He looks
about him and sees only flux. What appears to be stable

is only a trick played by a faulty sense of perception.
"Yesterday was the twenty-second. Today is the twenty-
first", he claims, and then explains it is not "impossible"
if "it was last year" he was talking about (p. 158). What
he is facing is the futility of words in the face of
reality. "Words are words", he says; there is nothing but
a "Fog of words" (p. 159) which only seem to be real.

Words cannot take; they cannot get; "Words cannot progress"
(p. 159). Williams' hasty conclusion is, therefore, that
"There cannot be a novel since to have a novel one must
have progress" (p. 160). Later he will "discover" that

words are merely tools that come to life and "progress"

71
only in the hands of the artist/priest who knows how to
invoke their power. At this early stage, however, all he
can do is decry words and call them simply "the reverse
motion", "the flesh of yesterday" that helps unbelieving
men to "conspire" against others (p. 169). Hans Christian
Andersen was such a man, claims Williams, a man who
"didn't believe", who had "to pretend to believe" in the
"conspiracy against childhood" he perpetrated via his
stories (p. 160). If Andersen had believed, Williams
implies, the words he used would have been alive and
would have lent credulity and meaning to his tales. As
it was, they were lifeless words and could.therefore lead
nowhere or, at best, backward until they disappeared alto-
gether and were replaced by the reality they were supposed
to enhance. Without meaningful words, that is, men are
no further along than Adam was when he trod upon the worm
at his feet (p. 160).

By the time Chapter One draws to a close, however,
Williams has seemed to progress very little. The fog is
,still with him, sometimes in billows, sometimes thinner,
and ends only "in his own bedroom with his wife's head on
the pillow in the perfectly clear electric light" (p.
161). The description he then gives of his wife lying
there reading to him is an indication of what he knows
must be done with words if they are to have life. He
describes very carefully exactly what he sees--he neither

adds nor subtracts. He does choose, however, his eye

72
picking out first one thing, then another, until a full,
living picture begins to breathe and take shape. He
falters again at the end, though, as his wife reads. She
sees through him and taunts him knowingly:

You can't fool me.

He became very angry but understood at

once that she had penetrated his mystery,

that she saw he was stealing in order to

write words. She smiled again knowingly.

He became furious.

(Imaginations, p. 16)
His "mystery", his "power" is not strong enough yet to
withstand the impact of reality's test. He is not a full-
fledged priest as yet. He is still learning his lessons,
fixing reality in his mind so that his imagination can
begin to work on it.

Still searching for THE word (p. 165), Williams con-
tinues to fight his way through the fog in Chapter Two.
By the end, however, he feels he has succeeded somewhat
by simply realizing that to be a writer is not find the
word but to use words meaningfully. Some other men who
have called themselves writers have never discovered
this, Williams insists, but have, rather, found a few
words and have "tied" themselves to them (p. 166).

Their writing, therefore, is little more than a standard
formula to be followed faithfully to produce mediocre
results. To really be a writer (poet/priest), Williams
concludes, is to "Liberate the words", to get away from

‘using such tired expressions as "Poetic sweet-heart",

and "I love you" (p. 1966). "Nonsense", says Williams to

 

73
all of this poetic jargon. He declares:
I am a writer and will never be anything else.
In which case it is impossible to find the
word. But to have a novel one must progress

with the words. The words must become real,
they must take the place of wife and sweet-

heart.
(p. 166)
By the time he has finished his "novel", such a sub-
stitution has taken place. The words have become real
("The words from long practice had come to be leaves,

trees, the corners of his house" (p. 166) and have carried

 

‘I‘l \". '1‘ i! -

him into a new realm "leaving the others far behind him"
(p. 1967).) The new realm is the realm of the imagina-
tion, a realm containing "the pure mountain air of joy"
breathed only by those who are fearless enough to let
words "speak" for themselves. Instead of being the
manipulator, as Williams claims many other writers are,
Williams believes he is becoming the priest, the ritual
performer, the one who finds the right words that form
their own pattern. He no longer attempts to twist the
wrong words into a preconceived pattern. In writing his
first novel he has gone through an initiation from a state
of blindness into a state of new sight. "That which had
been impossible for him at first had become possible",
Williams claims. And "Everything had been removed that
other men had tied to the words to secure them to them-
selves" (p. 167). The fog, then, had been "Everything....
‘that other men had tied to the words", all the worn-out

Imeanings that the words had been dragging on their backs

74
for years, all the nuances that had once been fresh but
were now nothing but cliches. Williams' theory of art,
and of writing in particular, is that a thing can be new
only once. Of course, the topic of art and writing, life
itself, doesn't change. And if the artist is great enough
to capture and portray his topic in a fresh, new way,
Williams believes, it will continue to speak to people
long after the artist has died and been forgotten. If a

man can take a word "clean" and make "it new for himself 5

 

so that at last it is new, free from the world for himself"
(p. 167), then he is "truly a great man and a great poet"
(p. 167). Williams says these last words partly in jest
(since he is making fun of himself) and partly in earnest.
He definitely believes that to be great an artist has to
be new, and at this point in his career he knows he is
learning how to be new--he is learning how to get out of
the fog that has been created by other men's minds into a
clear world newly brought to life by his own imagination.
The remainder of The Great American Novel is largely
an exploration of what is wrong with American literature
and what it would take to make it right. Inherent in
Williams' exploration is the same idea that he is to bring
to fruition in In the American Grain. What Williams
believes has gone wrong in American literature is the
sanmrthing that he is convinced has gone wrong in America:
Inen have never really faced America for what it is—-a new,

:fresh land, pregnant with new possibilities for living.

75
Instead, Williams insists, men in general, writers and
businessmen alike, have simply tried to transfer their
philosophies and habits to new ground hoping they would
take root and prosper there.

What has happened, according to Williams, is quite
the contrary. Men have been left with no philosophy, no
roots from which to drink and survive. In The Great
American Novel, however, his primary focus is on the
artist. Suffering from what Williams might have termed
"Europeanitis", the American writer has never become what
he really is: a "United Stateser" (p. 175). Instead,
he has relied upon European customs and art to pattern
his own work after. All art, all writing "borrowed"
from the Europeans, Williams would insist, is worthless
for Americans. Not that Europeans aren't great artists
and can't be appreciated. Many are great, but if they
are it is because they are Europeans being European.
For American artists and writers to achieve the same
degree of success, they will, Williams insists, have to
be Americans being American. If they aren't, then their
works of art and writing will be simply illegitimate
reproductions of another culture's work.

To achieve this American art, to be new, Williams
is willing to do almost anything artistically. For him
art.is "serious", serious enough to cause revolution,
serious enough to mean the difference between death or

suirvival (p. 170). Death is impermanence, chaos, while

[‘4‘ [I ‘ X‘i‘.

 

76

life, survival, is permanence and what Williams calls the
"cliche of the soul: beauty" (p. 170). But permanence
and beauty are what he is after, nonetheless--not the
"beauty" so carelessly talked about in Romantic and pseudo—
Romantic poetry but the beauty that is "purity" (p. 171).
The beauty he is concerned with is "discovery, a race on
the ground"; and to achieve it he is willing to "smash--...
everything.--To go down into hell" (p. 171). He is to
reiterate this in Paterson, Book Three; and the descent
as a means to resurrection becomes increasingly a part of
his artistic degma. However, he doesn't pursue this point
very far in The Great American Novel but turns instead to
the actual mechanics of writing that he believes must be
put into practice if an American literature is to take
root and grow.

One cardinal rule American writers should follow,
according to Williams, is to write about America:

Speak of old Sun Bow pacing his mesa

instead of Felipe Segundo in the barren halls

of El Escorial--or asleep in his hard bed at

one corner of the griddle.

(p. 173)
American writers must turn their backs on Europe if they
are to have any significance at all. Williams goes so far
as to attack Europe vehemently and its culture because,
he claims, it has absolutely no value for him as a writer
(p. 174):
Take their work. I resent it all. I

hate every symphony, every opera as much as
a Negro should hate Il Travatore. Not perhaps

77

hate it in a purely aesthetic sense but from
under.

And later:
Ugliness is a horror to me but it is less
abhorrent than to be like you even in the most

minute particular. For the moment I hate you,

I hate your orchestras, your libraries....

your finely tuned intelligences of all sorts.

(pp. 175-176)
He goes on to claim that "EurOpe is nothing to us" and
"that we are starving--...lean bellied for words" (p.
175). He implies that up until the present we have gotten
our words totally from Europe, complete with "muck out of
the cities" (p. 175). Since we have no words of our own,
perhaps this must suffice, at least for the moment, but
if so, says Williams, "Every word we get" must be "placed
over again by some delicate hand" (p. 175). That is, we
should "loosen [only] what we want. What we will have"
and nothing more (p. 175).

The job is a monumental one, however, and Williams
stresses his sense of frustration and fatigue at the
thankless task he is undertaking. "Take me to the opera",
he says, and "let me see Nyjinsky dance his Till Eulenspiegel
for I am tired to death with looking for Sense among
American poets" (p. 176). Must we, he asks, be simply
"another bastard country in a world of bastards" or "will
we ever amount to anything" (p. 176). Then he appeals
(iramatically to the "very great men of America" to lend

him a "penny so [he] won't have to go to the opera" (p.

176). What follows is worth more than a penny. After

78
describing a fire which somehow links all citizens together
in a "black thought in the night" (p. 178), Williams goes
on to depict in biblical terminology the symbolic beginning
of a new world in America. "The new project was beginning
to take form", he claims; and "It was the evening of the
second day" (p. 178). "Nuevo Mundo! shouted the sailors....
A new world!" (p. 181).

A new world--but no one, says Williams, ever treated

 

it as such. From the beginning the men from the old world E
had tried to put their mark on it so that Williams wonders '
in the 20th century whether it is "too late" for some

children he sees "to be Eric", the discoverer (p. 182).

What Williams remembers in his own "voyage" of discovery

is all that has been done to this new world, all the

killing, all the waste, in the name of God and the old

country. The picture he paints of what has happened to

this new world is less than optimistic-~it is a picture of

fakery (his presentation of the Mormons, pp. 186-189), of

plunder (his views of the taking of Mexican land, pp. 183-

184), and of hope gone sour (his general view of European

settlers, esp. see pp. 191-193). It is a picture of men

who have lost their bearings, of men who, since they have

no faith of their own, will borrow, steal, kill and plunder

to fill the emptiness in their lives. It is more than

anything else a picture of a people who have lost touch

vwith.themselves and suffer under the illusion that by

possessing things (land, money, power), they will possess

79
sanity and strength. Williams develops this idea later in
In the American Grain when he discusses the Puritans'
false "possession" of the new land. Here in The Great
American Novel his commentary is brief:
An Indian would sense the facts as he

wished. A tree would speak to him with a

definite identity. It would not at least

seem endowed with human characteristics: a

voice, that would be all.

(p. 193)

An Indian would not have to make a tree his in the
Romantic sense; he would not have to "borrow" the tree's
life to fill up a sense of emptiness in his own. He would
simply let the tree be a tree--another part of life with
a separate identity. The new men from an old world, how-
ever, seemed incapable to Williams of letting things be.
Williams was to see them increasingly as rapists at their
worst and voyeurs at their best, either weak men determined
to force all other life into their preconceived notion of
what life should be or empty men seeking an identity at
the expense of all they touched.

After this beginning, this voyage of discovery he
undertook to understand America, Williams concludes that
"The American background is America" and that "If there
is to be a new world Europe must not invade us" (p. 195).
We must remember, he says, that

...the good of the past is the same good of the

present. That the power that lived then lives

today. That we too possess it. That true

novelty is in good work.
(p. 209)

80

We also must remember that "Our enemy is EurOpe, a thing
unrelated to us in any way" just as "Europe's enemy is
the past" (pp. 209-210). If we are to come of age and
achieve any degree of sanity, we must learn from our-
selves alone, even if what we learn about ourselves is
less than awe-inspiring. We must, Williams says, accept
our status as a new world and embrace everything that
goes along with our newness-~both the good and the bad.
Williams is convinced that only by doing this will we
be able to produce anything of value, either as a culture
or as individuals. To accept Europe or any other "superior
civilization" as a reference point from which to judge
ourselves is wrong, he c1aims--"We are only children when
we acknowledge ourselves to be children" (p. 211). What
we must do is "first isolate ourselves. Free ourselves...."
so that we can "learn the essentials of the American situa—
tion" (p. 211). He is talking, he says, "of the one thing
that is permanent: Spirits" (p. 210). And to realize,
to know, what the American Spirit is we must throw off any
influences from without. "I am saying", Williams goes on,

...that America will screw whom it will screw

and when and how it will screw. And that it

will refrain from screwing when it will and

that no amount of infiltration tactics from

"superior civilizations" can possibly make us

anything but bastards.

- (p. 210)

What follows Williams' damnation of anything foreign

(especially anything European) and his assertion that we

must make our "title clear" to our land is a somewhat

81
defensive, yet very persuasive, panorama of that American
situation he says we must learn. From the North Pole to
Patagonia (p. 211) Williams treats us to what he sees as
unique, new, spiritually good (permanent) about this New
World we inhabit. He carries us into a new time dimension,
too, a dimension fitted to the New World where the European
sense of time is "an impertinence" (p. 213). Mostly,
however, he dwells on the immigrants who have, in his
eyes, truly embraced the land and made it their own. The
mountaineers of the South especially intrigue him in their
brave struggle to "wring a livelihood" out of the "treach—
erous and alien" mountains they inhabit (p. 216). A
Cumberland mountain mother is "full of ripe wisdom" (p.
216); "mountain children are as vigorous as baby oaks"
(p. 217); and the land is a land which breeds people who
are "fiercely individualistic" (p. 217), a positive
quality in Williams' mind.

Williams ends The Great American Novel on quite
another key, however, by portraying some situations that
are obviously negative and which typify to him what has
happened to a culture that has no moral base. A business
in which "a certain minimum of error" must be counted on
(p. 225), a glass works where a mercury bulb sometimes
"breaks in heating so that the floor is full of the
stuff" (p. 225), and a wool "mill" where wool is "BLOWN
IN" the cloth to make cheap shirts are all signs to

Williams of the decadence prevalent in what could have

82
been truly a New World. "10 vida tan dulce!", he exclaims
as he concludes The Great American Novel-~but for Williams,

at least, life was still full of ”sour grapes."

10.

11.

12.

83

Chapter Three—Notes

Webster Schott, Imaginations (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1971), p. xii. Hereafter cited as
Imaginations.

William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell, Imaginations.
William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, p. 158.

William Carlos Williams, I Wanted to Write a Poem,
ed. by Edith Heal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967),
p. 29. Hereafter cited as IWTWAP.

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, Imaginations.
Originally published in 1923 in Dijon, France,
by the Contact Publishing Co.

IWTWAP, p. 36.
IWTWAP, p. 37.

William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel,
Imaginations. Originally published in 1923 in
Paris by the Three Mountains Press. Hereafter
cited as TGAN.

William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New
York: New Directions, 1956). Originally pub-
lished in 1925 in New York by Albert 8 Charles
Boni. Hereafter cited as ITAG.

William Carlos Williams, A Voyage to Pagany (New
York: The Macauley Company, 1928).

IWTWAP, p. 37. How seriously Williams should be
taken when he refers to himself as "disturbed"
is debatable. He probably was, at least,
confused.

Edward Fischer, "Ritual as Communication", in The
Roots of Ritual, ed. by Shaughnessy (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmanns Press, 1974), p. 169.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

84

J. E. Slate, "William Carlos Williams and the Modern
Short Story", The Southern Review, n.s., IV,
(Summer 1968), p. 655.

Joseph E. Riddel, The Inverted Bell (Baton Rouge:
The University of Louisiana Press, 1974), p. 35.

Wallace Stevens, as noted by Riddel in The Inverted
Bell (p. 35), had also seen the same problem.
Williams wrote in a time when, in Stevens' words,
the old gods had been "annihilated", leaving us
"feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude,-
like children without parents." (See Wallace
Stevens' Opus Posthumous, ed. with introduction
by Samuel French Morse (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1957), pp. 206-207.)

Linda Wagner, The Prose of William Carlos Williams
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1970), p. 36.

Paul Mariani, "Towards the Canonization of William
Carlos Williams", Massachusetts Review 13, p. 672.

CHAPTER IV

In the American Grain, published in late 1925, is
largely an extension and amplification of what Williams
had said earlier in The Great American Novel. In The
Great American Novel Williams was, of course, writing a
"novel" and his main focus had been the negative influence
of European ideas on American art. He had dealt secon-
darily, however, with the American culture in general,
and in this respect The Great American Novel is definitely
a precursor of In the American Grain. Published as a
series of essays on "history", In the American Grain is
held very tightly together by the same theme that had run
through The Great American Novel: the American culture
is no culture at all because Americans for the most part
have refused to deal with and face America in all its
grandeur and overpowering beauty. Instead, claims
Williams, they have chosen, through fear, to remain
attached to the mother countries by umbilical cords long
devoid of any beneficial nurturing power.1

Williams had explored the same theme in other earlier
works as well. Between 1920 and 1924 he and another young
writer, Robert McAlmon, had published and edited a little
magazine, Contact, which had dealt largely with the same

85

86
issue. In the Contact essays, as in The Great American
Novel, the focus is primarily on art and artists, but
the basic theme, as set forth in the editorial policy of
the magazine, is the same theme Williams had been dealing
with for several years:
We will be American, because we are of

America; racial or international as the con-

tactual realizations of those whose work we

publish have been these. Particularly we

will adopt no aggressive or inferior attitude

toward "imported thought or art."2
The young editors went on to emphasize that though their
focus was America, they did not "seek to 'transfer the
center of the universe' here" (p. 10). They wished,
instead, to:

...seek only contact with the local conditions

which confront us. We believe that in the

perfection of that contact is the beginning

not only of the concept of art among us but

the key to the technique also.

(p. 10)

In the American Grain is Williams' monument to the
failure of contact in America, the failure of artist and
non-artist alike to confront the local conditions. And
Americans have paid dearly for this failure, according
to Williams. By being unable to make contact with their
immediate conditions Americans have thereby kept them-
selves from making contact with the universal condition.
Williams concludes that they have not truly been alive
in the spiritual sense because they haven't taken the

first step in the process or ritual of enlightenment.

By keeping themselves cloaked in the "safe" folds of

87
mother countries long left behind, Americans, for Williams,
have become a race blind to their own conditions, crippled
in their ability to sense. In the introduction to In the
American Grain Williams states that his intent in "these
studies" has been to
..rename the things seen, now lost in chaos

of borrowed titles...to draw from every source

one thing, the strange phosphorus of the life,

nameless under an old misappellation.

His hope, then, is to help restore life to the men who
came to this new land but were afraid to possess it wholly.
In this attempt Williams traces in twenty-one essays lives
of Americans, some great, some not so great, whom he
believed to be representative of the worst and the best

in America. Sometimes, as with any good argument, it is
difficult to say whether the person or people Williams
writes about are "good" or "bad" in any simple sense.
However, Williams' central message still manages to come
through clearly:

History begins for us with murder and enslave-

ment, not with discovery.

(p. 39)

"Red Eric", the first essay in the book, is a good
case in point. Fiercely individualistic (a characteristic
ordinarily prized by Williams), Eric seemed to carry death
with him wherever he went. It is almost as if Williams
is saying that by simply coming to the New World, a world
of "ORCHIDEAN beauty" (p. 27), the European was the

despoiler. Eric certainly was in any case. "Eric was

88
Greenland", he claims; "I call it Greenland, that men will
go there to colonize it" (p. 1). But what was to be a new
world of discovery, 3 new life in a green land, becomes
for Eric, and for those who followed him, a life of plunder,
greed, and jealous rivalry in a land covered by snow and
ice. Eric's adventure in the new world, then, begun of
necessity when he was driven from Norway, becomes an
adventure based on murder and a lie. The "mistake" of
Columbus' discovery of "India" thus actually began much
earlier and was to continue right into the present time.*
The New World, Williams insists, was a flower that was
ravished by men seeking not a new world of life and dis-
covery but a new world in which to satisfy their greed for
power and wealth. And "a flower once ravished", Williams
claims, can only produce bitter fruit (p. 7).

By the time Columbus reached what he had hOped would
be India, the "flower" that had been a New World was
already bruised and dying. Williams portrays the New
World "flower" as deadly, however; and Columbus, he says,
was America's first "victim" (p. 10). Williams depicts
Columbus' troubles after his discovery of America as being

a part of the Divine Will to block the general knowledge

 

*

In the essay, "The Discovery of the Indies",
Williams dwells on the disparity between Columbus' inten-
tions and his actual discoveries. Having set out to find
a new route to India, Columbus chanced upon the "new"
world. He was sorely disappointed at what would turn out
to be the most famous voyage of discovery since ancient
times.

89
of his discovery. The discoverer, then, becomes in
Williams' eyes, the blasphemer, the one who has disturbed
a universal balance. Williams doesn't develop this theme
too fully, however. His main concern here and in later
essays is the inability of European man, once here, to
adapt to local conditions. And because he couldn't adapt,
or didn't choose to, he destroyed:

Upon the ORCHIDEAN beauty of the New World the
old rushed inevitably to revenge itself...

(p. 27)

Williams stresses again and again his contention
that the New World was beautiful in the sense that a
flower is beautiful. Williams' image of the New World
as a flower is understandable in light of his overall
philosphy of contact and "thingness." Williams saw the
New World and everything in it as balanced. Just as all
parts of a flower work together to produce beauty and
later fruit, so to Williams all the elements of the New
World conspired to produce a natural and cultural scene
in almost perfect harmony.4 All was in tune, though to
European eyes much looked barbaric and blasphemous.
Separated from the ground of their own existence, the
Europeans, the invaders, says Williams, could not any
more comprehend the harmonious workings of the New World
than an invading bug can understand the delicate balance
of a flower. All the Europeans saw was transmitted through
the dark filters of their own prejudices. Williams con-

tends that they didn't really see the New World at all--

90

they saw only something alien, therefore dangerous; some-
thing wildly beautiful, therefore to be contained. Lack-
ing a sense or a feeling for their own reality, they
couldn't at all comprehend the reality of the New World,
or its inhabitants (pp. 33-34). In a passage from the
essay, "The Destruction of Tenochtitlan", describing the
Aztec sacrificial chambers, Williams explains what he
means:

Here it was that the tribe's deep feeling for

a reality that stems back into the permanence

of remote origins had its firm hold. It was

the earthward thrust of their logic; blood

and earth; the realization of their primal

and continuous identity with the ground itself,

where everything is fixed in darkness.

(pp. 33-34)

Although Williams doesn't interpret this fixity in

darkness as bad, the Spanish invaders (a prototype of

all the invaders) did.5

What the Spaniards found when
they came upon the Aztecs was a highly structured,
ritualistic society deeply rooted in their own reality.
The Aztecs had what the Spaniards lacked: "a ceremonial
acknowledgement of the deep sexless urge of life itself,
the hungry animal, underlying all other power" (p. 34).
These ancient Americans had found what modern Americans
are still looking for. As Bellah says, "They were at
home in their land, in the cosmos, in their bodies."6
The Aztecs had the meaningful ritual, the ritual rooted

in reality and practiced faithfully, that the Spaniards

didn't have and couldn't comprehend. As depicted by

91
Williams the Spaniards were products of a society out of
touch with its reality and thus lacking any meaningful
ritual; they could not hope to understand or sympathize
with anything so alien as the Aztecs. What they couldn't
understand was fearful to them so they destroyed it. And
when Cortez tried to rebuild what he and his followers had
pulled down, he found it to be an impossible task--he
didn't have the same spirit Montezuma had, so what he
built had no meaning (p. 35).

In Montezuma had rested the embodiment of the Aztecs'
ideal--he completed his tribe's religious sense (p. 35);
he was the god, the one who brought together all beliefs
the tribe held. All thrusts of the culture, all their
"waking aspirations...seemed to come off in him and in
him alone: the drive upward, toward the sun and the
stars" (p. 35). Williams contends that Christ, the
counterpart for the Spaniards, did not play the same role
in their lives as Montezuma did in the lives of the Aztecs.
The Aztecs' culture was integrated and definite in its
purpose. It had a ritual structure bound inexorably to
its reality, and it had priests in whom was "rooted" the
"black permanence of tribal understanding" (p. 35).
Because the ritual was true and the priests performed it
correctly, it worked and touched the center of Aztec

existence. When Montezuma allowed Cortez to destroy the

92
temples, this center of Aztec existence was also
destroyed,* never to be resurrected again. When a
flower is crushed, it can't be revived, and as Williams
said in ”The Discovery of the Indies", "...the flower
once ravished” produced only an ”acrid and poisonous
apple" later on (p. 7).

"Do these things die?”, Williams asks in "The
Fountain of Eternal Youth" as he goes on to explain why
the "apple” is "acrid and poisonous" (p. 42). The answer
he gives is, of course, a "no." "...We are the slaught-
erers", he claims, even if we don't know it. But if we
don't know it, then we are also dead in a much more than
physical sense (p. 41):

Men who do not know what lives are themselves

dead. In the heart there are living Indians

once slaughtered and defrauded—-Indians that

live also in subtler ways.

(p. 42)

Williams' depiction of De Soto starving in the midst
of a richly vegetative New World underlies what Williams
means when he says that those "who do not know what lives
are themselves dead." The Europeans starved in a horn of
plenty because they had no knowledge of ways to get the

food, either organic food or spiritual food (p. 42).

 

*

Williams explains that perhaps Montezuma really
had no choice but to admit Cortez since what may be
interpreted as "timidity" may have been "no more than
the timidity which is an overwhelming agony of heart
inspired by the sight of a resistless force aimed at our
destruction" (p. 35).

93

Williams, of course, had a deeper meaning in mind as
well. He would later Claim, in In the American Grain as
in Paterson, that Americans have not yet begun to under-
stand what lives within them. Unlike the Aztecs who
killed, understood why, and admitted their killing, the
early and present day transported Americans have no com—
prehension of their killing or even that they killed.
Because they don't admit or understand themselves, Williams
claims, Americans therefore are prisoners bound to mis-
deeds of the past:

Pierce and implacable we kill them but their

souls dominate us. Our men, our blood, but

their spirit is master. It enters us, it

defeats us, it imposes itself.

(p. 40)

Not that we are the murdered Indians, but "we are men of
their world", and we are murderers as well; and, Williams
would say, if we can't admit both things we will never have
a unified culture. Men came to America for gold, a new
way to India, for freedom of religion, but not for the
land itself, not to start fresh in a fresh land. Men
came, but they really never left Europe. And until the
Puritans' arrival,* the invaders had not been strong enough
to face the terrible power of the New World without being
destroyed. Until the Puritans, the destroyers were also

the destroyed. The coming of the Puritans, according to

 

5!

Williams discusses both the Pilgrims and the Puri-
tans under one heading, "The Voyage of the Mayflower", and,
in fact, uses the terms interchangeably.

94
Williams, shifted the balance in the New World so dras-
tically that it has never recovered. What most would say
is strength, he calls weakness; but it was this weakness
nonetheless that according to Williams determined the
character of what was later to become the U.S.

The Pilgrims, says Williams, were the "seed of Tudor
England's lusty blossoming”, but what had been "flamboyant"
in the Tudors had become in the Pilgrims "hard and little"
(p. 63):

In those little pips a nadir, sure as the sun,

was reached, in which lay the character of

beginnings in North America...they were the

perfect sprout for the savage continent God

had driven them to. Puritans...if they were

pure it was more since they had nothing in

them of fulfillment than because of positive

virtues.

(p. 63)

Throughout the essay, Williams continues to be merciless
in his evaluation of the Puritans. No doubt he was
influenced greatly by the tide of anti-Puritanism sweep-
ing the country in the 19205. However, Williams' criti-
cism goes deeper than most and his reasons for disliking
Puritans and Puritanism lie at the core of his artistic
and humanistic philosophies. The Puritans as he under-

*
stood them were the "dreadful" precursors and cause of

the psychic split or "divorce" he talks about so much in

 

*
Williams' understanding of the Puritan phi1050phy

and their everyday life is open to question. His judg-
ment on the Puritan effect on national character is less
questionable since perhaps the effects he talks about can
be demonstrated today.

95

Paterson.7 Afraid to face the wilderness alone, indi-
vidually, the Puritans, Williams claims, pleaded weakness
and banded together to form the first American democracy
and thereby succeeded in making everything like themselves.
Being human, however, no one Puritan was like any other;
what resulted was a grOup of people locked in their sepa-
rate souls while pretending to be like everyone else.
What could have been a glorious democracy of shared
triumphs and tragedies, a democracy of politics and
justice, became instead a democracy based on a moralistic
dictatorship in which no one dared step out of line with-
out suffering severe repurcussions. "They were condemned
to be without flower", claims Williams, because ”Each
shrank from an imagination that would sever him from the
rest" (p. 65). Further, stresses Williams, their effect
has been long lasting:

This stress of the spirit against the flesh has

produced a race incapable of flower.

(p. 66)

What began as a misguided but understandable forcing or
molding of the human spirit has resulted, in Williams'
eyes, in a "race" of people who no longer know what they
feel. They are so used to confining themselves to a
rigid pattern of thought and action, they are incapable
of being imaginative. Yet they suffer, as Williams tries
to show throughout Paterson. Not knowing where to begin,
most stay locked in their little prisons hoping for

release; and, of course, according to Williams, it is

96
the poet/priest's function to release them. Williams
explains that the reason Puritanism prevailed where other
groups faded was that its very weakness appealed to
everyone. Faced with hardship beyond our present-day
imagination, it was very tempting, and perhaps necessary
for survival, to group together as a unified body. And
it is this same temptation in succeeding generations that
has kept the Puritan ethic alive:

It is the weakling in us all that finds this

beautiful.

(p. 66)

Sticking together in stress is natural, and Williams
wouldn't argue that point. What he would argue, and does,
is the necessity of stamping out individualism in order
to achieve unity. And what he particularly dislikes is
the lie the Puritans lived and which he claims is still
prevalent today. The Puritans refused to blend with the
wilderness; instead, they chose to group together in defi-
ance of it and an attempted control of it. "If the
'puritan' in them could have ended with their entry into
the New World and the subtle changes of growth at once
started", claims Williams, "everything would have been
different" (p. 67). The "character of the land" being
what it was, however, prevented such an adaptation.
Instead of growing, the Puritans shrank in terror at the
face of the New World.8 Being terrified, the Puritans
naturally sought the fire, as Williams insists all "primi-

tives" do. Since their seeking was unguided and not based

97
on any religious tenet or inherent ritual, it became
perverted and resulted in the witch-burnings. It is this
same perversion, this same fear, according to Williams,
that drives modern Americans to patrol the world so
zealously:
And it is still to-day the Puritan who keeps

his frightened grip upon the throat of the
world lest it should prove him-—empty.

(p. 68)

This same perversion, he insists, would keep America at
”that low point" of fear and thereby foster violence
and despair:
Here souls perish miserably, or, escaping,
are bent into grotesque designs of violence
and despair....
It has become "the most lawless country
in the civilized world," a panorama of
murders, perversions, a terrific ungoverned
strength, excusable only because of the
horrid beauty of its great machines.
(p. 68)
"Today", continues Williams, "it is a generation of
gross know-nothingism....a generation universally eager
to barter permanent values...in return for opportunist
material advantages..." (p. 68). The pay for such degra-
dation of human values is isolation in the worst degree,
an isolation felt today as acutely as the Puritans felt
it in their day. By forsaking "man-ness" and all it

implies, the Puritans and their successors become

it
automatons incapable of reaching the feelings buried

 

*
Williams uses the term "automatons" frequently
in Paterson. By it he means people who have given up

98
deep beneath the layers of constricting fear. In the end,
says Williams, such people are "unfit" except where stress
exists. They can function only in the "hard, repressive"
way of the pioneer.

Two Frenchmen Williams discusses present quite another
story. Praised by Williams for their great adaptability,
their generous spirit, and their individuality, Samuel de
Champlain and Pere Sebastian Rasles are described as
possible alternatives to the Puritans and condemnations
of them as well. Champlain, declares Williams, was a
"person" who was "unwilling to endure the smallest fracture
of his way of doing" (p. 69). He was, further, "a man
all for himself--but gently, with love with patience" (p.
69). If the Spaniards (who, along with the French and
English, were one of the peoples to settle and, from
Williams' viewpoint, destroy the New World) had possessed
the same love, gentleness, and patience, they too could
have won Williams' praise since they were certainly not
lacking in individuality. Lacking these qualities made
them destroyers instead of builders. The Frenchmen, how-
ever, masters of adaptation, were interested in building.9
Champlain, says Williams, "almost invented...New France...

out of his single brain" (p. 76), while Rasles worked and

 

their separate responses to life in favor of automatic
responses dictated by a misguided fear of life itself.
Such automatons are mere shells of the men they could be.

99

learned among the Indians who trusted him so fully. And it
is the two men, along with Daniel Boone, with whom Williams
identifies the most. Speaking of Champlain, Williams says:
This is the interest I see. It is this man.
This--me; this American; a sort of radio dis-
tributor sending out sparks to us all.
(p. 70)
And of Rasles:
He was a great MAN. Reading his letters,
it is a river that brings sweet water to us
....His sensitive mind. For everything his
fine touch, blossoming, thriving, opening,
reviving--not shutting out--was tuned.
(p. 121)
These men were, to Williams, men of gentleness, under-
standing, sensitivity so that what they touched was not
bruised or crushed out of its own existence.
Conversely, what the Puritans touched, what the
Spaniards touched, was left dirty and poisoned because
the touch was not enlightened by love but was instead
driven by fear. Writing of Benjamin Franklin, Williams
grants that much was accomplished by the Puritans in the
realm of technology but also notes that their desire "To
want to touch, not to wish anything to remain clean,
aloof" came "always of a kind of timidity, from fear"
(p. 157). Champlain and Rasles were not afraid. In a
sense they shed their cloaks of Europeanism when they
reached the New World. They saw what was there and dealt
with it instead of hiding behind "strong walls and thick
shutters" (p. 156) as did the Puritans. "Contrary to the

English", says Williams, "Rasles recognized the New World.

100

It stands out in all he says. It is a living flame com-
pared to their dead ash" (p. 120). Rasles was the means
by which the New World came alive in a new way for
Indians and white men alike. Because he was not divided
in his own emotions, fearfully looking back to Europe,
he was able to see unity in everything around him. The
Indians, the alien, often harsh, were seen as only
parts of a beautiful, whole, new flower that was able to
bloom partly through his ministrations. Rasles was, for
Williams, a true priest, a ritual performer, a shepherd,
because he, as Williams puts it, was "...of those by whom
the head of logic is beautifully relegated to its place--
in heaven" (p. 120). Because Rasles was "Relieved of
dogmatic bitterness", he "with a fresh mind could open
eyes and heart to the New World" (p. 120). All the Puri-
tans and their descendants could "answer to the New World's
offer of a great embrace was THRIFT" (p. 156). They were
thereby immoral, according to Williams, because they '
denied their humanity, their strength, in order to be
secure, both physically and emotionally (see pp. 154-156).
Rasles was not afraid to flower, not afraid to embrace,
and was therefore a moral man:

It is this to be moral: to be positive, to

be peculiar, to be sure, generous brave--To

MARRY, to touch--to give because one HAS, not

because one has nothing. And to give to him

who HAS, who will join, who will make, who

will fertilize....: to create, to hybridize,
to crosspollenize....
(p. 121)

101

Unable themselves to give, the Puritans, claims
Williams, and their descendants, the modern-day Americans,
unlike Rasles, have given nothing and have also honored
those who have given nothing. We have, according to
Williams, shrunk back within ourselves to such a degree
that we are perverted in our appraisal of greatness and
award timidity instead of individuality.

...how nearly all our national heroes have

been driven back--and praised by reason of

their shrewdness in making walls: not in

bursting into flower.

(p. 157)
The Puritans, whose ethic is epitomized in Williams' mind
by Benjamin Franklin, never "attained to a penetrant
gist" because of fear (p. 153). "Nowhere the open, free
assertion save in the Indian"--and in Rasles:

In Rasles one feels THE INDIAN emerging from

within the pod of his isolation from eastern

understanding, he is released AN INDIAN. He

exists, he is--it is an AFFIRMATION, it is

alive.

(p. 121)

What saves Rasles in Williams' eyes is his own recog-
nition of his role in the New World. Unafraid, Rasles
melted into America and became one with it. The Puritans
were incapable of "melting" into anything, and their effect
lives on. "Damned" by our Puritan forefathers so that "we
are forced within ourselves upon an emptiness which cannot

be supplied" (p. 128), we Americans can't even recognize

that we too are Indians:

102
...I do believe the average American to be an

Indian, but an Indian robbed of his world--
unless we call machines a forest in themselves.

(p. 128)

Williams sees the effect of this "psychic" but very real
split to be a demoralization of the entire culture. "From
lack of touch, lack of belief", he claims. And from "lack
of belief", the spiral is rapidly downward so that "the
individual loses caste", the "local government loses its
authority; the head is more and more removed" until "the
center is reached--totally dehumanized, like a Protestant
heaven" (p. 128).

Williams' later emphasis in Paterson on the divorce
in our culture is merely an extenuation of what he is
saying here. In Paterson he is to expand his thesis that
men in America are automatons who "walk outside their
bodies aimlessly/for the most part,/locked and forgot in
their desires--unroused" (Paterson, p. 6). Williams
traced the disease of divorce to what he was certain was
the source in the almost total lack of commitment made by
sojourners to the New World. In ITAG he shows us the root
of the problem; in Paterson he makes the problem immediate,
almost tangible.

The end result of such a split, a cultural schizophrenia
of a sort, is a Federal system in which "all laws become
prohibitive in essence" (p. 128). Instead of looking to
the sun and personifying him in the real, living person of

Montezuma, the Puritans and their descendants have chosen

103
out of fear to look within themselves. In a true sense,
we are cut off from reality, says Williams, and can there-
fore no longer bloom. Intead of turning to the particulars
of the real world that surrounded them and expanding upon
those particulars in order to create, the Puritans chose
to be so greatly "enamored of the gospel" that reality
became pale in comparison. Since their enamorment had
no reference points in their reality, no sun or moon or
man which they invested With power, the Puritans had no
rock or piece of earth on which to stand and claim an
existence. The "Puritans in a wild New World by that
pure stare into the center of their souls excluded terrors
each for himself." In doing so, however, they also "in
effect, blocked all ingress and all egress (in theory)
to the tenderer humanities" (p. 129). By doing so, they
rendered "their lives hard, unproductive of that open-
ness which would have been to them as a flower to the
stalk" (p. 129).

Williams is careful to point out that Catholicism as
practiced by Rasles and others like him was not exactly the
best answer to the New World's power. "Certain it is", he
says, "that the New World suffered greatly from both Puri-
tans and Catholics" (p. 129). But it was an alternative,
at least, that offered "ALLEVIATION from the dullness, the
lack of touch incident upon the steady withdrawal of our
liberty" (p. 129). Williams' own answer to the problem of

the psychic split in our culture would come later and

104
would be the rise of a language endowed with the power of
healing and regenerative ritual. ‘

In 1923 he had not yet reached this conclusion; he
was, however, formulating it in books like The Great
American Novel and In the American Grain. He did know
at this early date that there were some few people whose
inner and outer realities were fused so that they func-
tioned as whole people. These few people he discusses,
Rasles, Daniel Boone, John Paul Jones, Aaron Burr, Edgar
Allen Poe and Abraham Lincoln, are people who lived as
much as possible in their own time and place. The fault
in not reaching the ultimate fullness in some cases was
not theirs, says Williams, but the society's. America
was not and is not a fertile soil; even the best plants
have trouble growing in it. Such was the case with these
people. Daniel Boone had to keep moving to escape the
creeping dullness of the surrounding culture. Williams
writes about Boone's dilemma and consequent actions in
his essay, "The American Background." He notes that
Boone's significance was that he "abandoned touch with
those along the coast...and made contact with the intrinsic
elements of an as yet unrealized material of which the
:new country was made." Williams goes on to say that it is
"the actuality" of Boone's life (and the lives of others

"10 John Paul Jones,

like him)"...which is illuminating.
lacking support when he needed it most, went "to Russia,

for release" (p. 155). Aaron Burr, humane, full of life,

105

was destroyed because there was a general dread of Burr's
free spirit. An individual in the highest degree, Burr
thought nothing of public opinion; and he was crucified
for his lack of concern. The love his countrymen felt for
him was intense, but it was overshadowed by the fear:

Burr saw America in his imagination, free.

His spirit leaped to it....But his spark was

not preserved....

Inspired by devil or angel, Burr was a
frightful danger to the young state and needed
to be curbed.
So much the worse for the young state
then.
(p. 197)

So much the worse for all of us now, too, claims Williams,
because our forefathers' fear was so intense that it still
lives in us so that we are willing to distort history to
remain secure. A security so gained is false, however,
for "A country is not free, is not what it pretends to be,
unless it leave a vantage open (in tradition) for that
which Burr possessed in such remarkable degree" (p. 197).

What Edgar Allen Poe possessed was similar to Burr's
intensity and freedom. He was, like Burr, "a genius
intimately shaped by his locality and time” (p. 216). Poe,
like Burr, was assertive through the "new locality" in which
he found himself. According to Williams, what was being
asserted was "America, the first great burst through to
expression of a re-awakened genius of place? (p. 216).
Williams saw Poe as a "frontiersman who survived by refusing

to trust 'the great natural beauty of the New World,’ by

relying on his murderous skill as Boone had done and by

106
losing his alien ways in the violence of our new world."11
"Poe gives", says Williams, "the sense for the first time
in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of
*

courtesy but of truth" (p. 216). In a culture used to
distorting history, a literature based on courtesy (another
form of distortion) is not surprising. But Williams' whole
thrust, his whole desire, was to rid literature of this
distortion and to create a living literature in its place.
Poe, he believes, was the first American writer trying to
be American:

Poe "saw the end"; unhappily he saw his own

despair at the same time, yet he continued to

attack,....Either the New World must be mine

as I will have it, or it is a worthless bog

....His attack was from the center out.

Either I exist or I do not exist and no amount

of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull

me to the loss.

(p. 219)

Such a doctrine was clearly out of step with the times in
which Poe found himself. It was a doctrine that hit at the
fearful core of a fearful people. To be shown to be small,
to be imitators, to be murderers was "To such men...",
says Williams, ”the most terrible experience in the world"
(p. 220). Because of what Williams sees as his honesty

in seeing and saying what he was as an American, Poe found

few followers in America. Like so many potential national

 

*

Later, in I Wanted to Write a Poem, Williams would
say of Poe that he "was a poet of his period, a genius but
too restricted in his style" (p. 44). Nonetheless, in
1958 he still maintained that Poe had the "particulariza—
tion of the image and the perfection of form which we hear
about in connection with Sappho" (p. 44).

107

heroes, he found his audience elsewhere, particularly
among the French. "Poe", says Williams, "concerned poetry
with the soul", a dangerous practice if the soul is lack-
ing in humanity (p. 221). For him "words were not hung

by usage with associations."; they were, instead, "figures,
an old language truly but one from which he carried over
only the most elemental qualities to his new purpose;
which was, to find a way to tell his soul" (p. 221). It
is this desire of his to "get from sentiment to form"
which Williams admires so much. Because Williams' thrust
as a writer was also to "get from sentiment to form", it
is not difficult to see why Williams admired Poe so much.

Poe practiced early what Williams was to preach
later. He was "thoroughly local in origin", and so had
"some chance of being universal in application" (p. 222).
Williams' doctrine of emphasizing "the thing itself" was
still being formulated, but he could recognize what he
was after in Poe's work. The most important thing to
Williams at this time in his career was to find with whom
he, as an artist, could identify. In Poe Williams thought
he had found his man.

It is interesting to note that not one twentieth-
century American found his way into Williams' book. True,
Williams wrote In the American Grain in the early 19205
and he did plan to write a second book like ITAG, but
there had been some opportunity to choose representatives

of the more recent American culture. That he should

108
choose, instead, to stop in 1865 with Abraham Lincoln
gives an indication of Williams' disillusionment with
his culture.* It is as if he were saying that American
history culminated as it began, in murder and despair.
Lincoln's murderer is the murderer of Indians, and in
the murderer's ”trinity is reflected", claims Williams,
"the brutalizing desolation of life in America up to that
time" (p. 234):

The age-old torture reached a disastrous cli-

max in Lincoln. Failing of relief or expres-

sion, the place tormented itself into a con-

vulsion of bewilderment and pain....It was

the end of THAT period.

(p. 234)

In the sixty or so years that had elapsed since
Lincoln's death, Williams evidently saw little to change
his estimation of the American culture. Had he written
In the American Grain in the 18905 or very early 19005,
perhaps he would have been a bit more optimistic; the
War, however, had successfully alienated most intelligent
and sensitive Americans, and Williams was no exception.
In 1923 he looked about him and saw no relief. He was
increasingly convinced that there would be no relief,
either, unless he found it himself. His writing up to

this time had been tentative, searching, doubtful, some-

times despairing. With the completion and publication of

 

*

Originally Williams had left Lincoln out alto-
gether. He was persuaded by his publisher, Charles Boni,
11) add the Lincoln Chapter. See pp. 43—44 in IWTWAP.

V
\
r.
l

 

109
In the American Grain, however, Williams seems to have
reached a place from which he would work. The next forty
years, until his death in 1963, were to be extremely crea-
tive and innovative, unmarked to any great degree by the
cynicism and despair seen in his early work. It is as
if in writing his Great American Novel and his undistorted
history, Williams himself was freed from the curse of fear
he had inherited as an American. Any looking back from
now on (and he does an excessive amount of looking back
in Paterson and in the last poems) would be from the stand-
point of knower and priest. He would turn increasingly
from description and analysis to prescription and creation.
After 1923 his work takes on the character of certainty
that it had not possessed before, and Williams himself
becomes, to a great extent, the kind of writer and
"handler of language" that he had ever despaired of

finding in America.

10.

110

Chapter Four-Notes

James E. Breslin, William Carlos Williams, An
American Artist, pp. 95, 96.

Contact, New York (No. 1), December, 1920, 1.

Robert N. Bellah, in his essay, "Liturgy and
Experience" (in The Roots of Ritual, pp. 217-
234), emphasizes from an anthropological stand-
point the seriousness of what he calls the
"homelessness" of the transplanted Europeans
and their descendants who now populate America.
"Our condition", claims Bellah, "...is home—
lessness, or...landlessness" (p. 231).

Breslin stresses Williams' use of the unfolding
flower as the image of a growing culture. See
p. 94.

Breslin notes that Williams began "with the ritual
acceptance of man's darker side, his wilder
instincts and moods." Page 94.

Bellah, p. 220.
Breslin, p. 87.

William Carlos Williams, "The American Background",
Selected Essays, p. 140.

Walter Scott Peterson, in his book, An Approach to
Paterson (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1967), has an excellent summary of Williams'
concern about the split in the American conscious-
ness as revealed in ITAG; see pp. 2-11.

In his essay, "The American Background", Williams
comments on the "Incredible, fairy-tale-like,
even offensively perverse....fear...before the
new, which in America whipped the destructive
false current on like a forest fire." Though not
easy to believe, continues Williams, "it is a
sense of their inferior position which drove the
early fortunes on to their exorbitant excesses."
Page 152.

111

11. J. E. Slate, "William Carlos Williams and the Modern
Short Story", The Southern Review, n.s., IV, 647-
664 (Summer 1968).

CHAPTER V

The years from 1923 to 1946, between the publication
of In the American Grain and the publication of Paterson,

were busy years for Williams, as they were for American

artists in general. The 19205 saw a spurt of creativity

and innovation in all forms of literature that has yet

to be equaled. And Williams, for one, was capable of

sustaining and carrying this spirit of innovation through

the bleak times of depression and the Second World War.

He was truly a poet and writer of his age. The depression

and the war that followed it provided the background for
Williams' work at this time, writing which dealt with par—
ticulars of the times so that the individuals living through
the "roaring" 205, the gray 305, and war-torn 405 take on

a universal character that can lend instruction and pleasure

No doubt Williams' medical practice

to men of any age.
*
but

kept his mind from straying too far from particulars;
:it is particulars, and not abstract theories, that comprise

any reality. And if the particulars are raised by the skill

of'zui imaginative writer to heights beyond the ordinary,

the picture that emerges becomes the real picture of the

 

*
In his Autobiography Williams talks often about the
influence of medicine on his work. See particularly pp.

48-55, 286-297.
112

r...

du‘l .'.' 9' ‘

 

E:

113
age. It is the poet's function "to help recreate society

in times of stress, 'in a new mode, fresh in every part,

 

and so set the world working or dancing or murdering each
other again, as it may be'" (P, 103).1 If the poet is
successful, society can get about its business renewed;
for this to happen the poet's language must be true to
the external reality. Anything short of truth is not

ritual language but merely words arranged in verse form.

 

Of course, as soon as the poet has completed his task,

 

he must begin again. Though his work may last to inform
and enlighten men for years to come, the poet himself,
like all priests, must continually renew the ritual.
To have to renew again and again is what Williams calls
the "artist's purgatory." The artist lives in this
purgatory by "losing his life, in a brutal sense, and.
losing it by making 'plays,' objects, realities which he
has to abandon to make another, and another--perfectly
plank to him as soon as they are completed.2
These years between the wars were also largely prose
ears. Not that Williams gave up writing poetry; "verse",
always, was his major concern.” A large share of his
[ting from 1923 to 1946 was prose, however, and his main

me in the prose was still the relationship of Americans

America. In A Voyage to Pagany,4 following the habit

 

If

*
During these years Williams was indeed to formulate

1018 new theory of poetry. These were also the years
vhich this theory and the poems he wrote were combining
shape Paterson. The theory and the poems will be dis-
sed in Chapter V.

 

114

 

of so many American writers,* Williams wrote of what
happened when one young American confronted Europe. In

A Novelette and Other Prose4 Williams' focus was even more
specific as he struggled somehow to portray the difficulty
of fusing all the elements in his own life. And in the

Stecher TrilogyS Williams attempted to show the effect of F
immigration on both the immigrants and the new country,

America, to which they came. Williams also wrote many

:-
Add“,

short stores during these years, but his focus in them

 

't".I-J‘N-V'
“--.

was more specific than in the novels. His stories deal

primarily with the relationship of an individual to his

particular surroundings rather than his relationship to

the country as a whole. By the time Williams wrote most

of the stories, he had "solved" the greater abstract
problems that were his concern in A Voyage to Pagany and

A Novelette and Other Prose. In the Stecher Trilogy, par-
ticularly White Mule, the first book of the three, Williams
was able to combine concern with theory and his talent as

l writer. On the whole, however, Williams the novelist

ended to be primarily an analyst searching for answers.
illiams the short story writer, like Williams the mature

et, was the artist, the manipulator of words who had

nehow found the answers.

 

* .
Williams claimed he hadn't read much of Henry
es but that "possibly he influenced" him. IWTWAP,

47.

 

115

Alquw to Pagany, Williams' first formal novel,

revolves around the protagonist's search for a cultural

The question of Europe versus America, to

identity.

return or not to return, is the question which plagues

Dev Evans throughout the course of the novel. This is
6

the same question which plagued Williams as well.
Almost all the other important American writers of his

Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, and

 

time were in Europe.
Fitzgerald are the most famous ones, but a good many not

so famous ones were there as well; and Williams suffered

for his voluntary "exile" from the artist colony. The

theory of the "local" which was taking root in his mind

could not, of course, allow him to simply take off and

leave what he felt to be the base of his strength. As

many have noted in the past, Williams' relationship to

his region and to his profession were inseparable from

his relationship to his art.8 Knowing this, it is no
surprise that he "had" to remain in Rutherford instead of
taking flight to Europe as so many had done. It is also

10 wonder that he would feel somewhat obliged to defend

is stand. If all the top creative minds were taking

efuge in Mother Europe, why was he being rebellious
loosing to remain behind in America? .4 Voyage to Pagany

y be read as Williams' answer to his own and others'

On one level it is definitely a defense of his

ubts.
On another level,

:alism, and it is important as such.

ever, it transcends being merely a defense and becomes

116

a philosophical statement on art and the artist in the

contemporary world.
As a defense of Williams' own position, A Voyage to

Pagany is weak unless the reader already agrees with the

premise that a man must always return to his own culture
in the end. Calling Europe (Pagany) "home" on several
occasions, Dev Evans nonetheless stresses that he must

return to America. When asked why, his only answer is

that in Europe he feels like "a great zero" (p. 240).
Whatever Europe may be, it is not his milieu and he knows

it. Unlike his sister and the other women he meets and,
by implication, the American artists who have fled to

Europe, Dev makes the journey because he knows he needs
to go back to his sources in order to live better in the

present. He was not running away from America as were
the others. He was, instead, returning to something in

the hope of attaining a better understanding of himself
in his own time. In order to do this, Dev believes (as
did his creator, Williams) that he had to somehow come

to terms with the sources before he could function fully

n the now. Since his source, as for most Americans, lay
Setting out

n Europe, that is the place he had to go.

r‘om New York, he prepares himself and muses about the
’ip and is transported into a realm beyond time:

Time too went by the board.--On such a
day. . .the first Coracles put out from the bot-
tom of the red cliff there...--and the wind
blew them over to England. I am among them....

 

, .. .13

 

 

117

lhenawe go by the prow of this mythical ship,
invhfible to us just as to them we, too, are
invhfible. For there is the land and here is
thesma, exactly as then; and this is I, the
Now am I come home to old Pagany.

(pp- 7-8)

same.
WilLRmm had dealt with time in the same way before (see
Eu

'Wb MaflcAntony in Heaven", CCP, p. 17) and for the same

reasons. Dev is the hero, the fire bringer, the light

giver,wmo must go on a journey of discovery before his
It is definitely a journey of .
5

He is not going to

 

powers become meaningful.

discovery, and not one of flight.
His mission would

Europe to escape but to renew himself.

be meaningless, then, if he didn't return to his own land
since a priest's powers work only for his own people. For

the Europeans, Dev is just another American. For the

Americans, though they may not realize it, he is, or will

be, the artistic and, therefore, spiritual leader who will

lead them beyond the surface reality into a fuller under-
standing of themselves and their culture. Dev's wish is

to be like the Austrian doctors who he calls the "light

bringers" because of their ability to transform what
appears to be ugly work into acts of creation (p. 152).

This ability, he realizes, comes from clarity, which, in
cxnnes from a thorough knowledge of their art. Their

turn,
to achieve beauty, can only be realized after

intention,
they have become so skilled in their work that they can

love beyond technique to art:

118

And all this demonstrated on the cadaver,
incmrefully preserved specimens--for the sake

of beauty.
For beauty was the leader, he felt it at
cmce,a clarity. Evans had always known that

hithe chaos of pedagogy the greatest genius
oftme future would be he who would give in
tmiwords, ten illuminating words, the limits

ofldmwledge--permitting classification.
(p. 152)

naffind those "ten illuminating words" is Evans' aim,
though:U:is not realized within the limits of the novel.

Ifinding'Uueright words was most certainly Williams' aim

as well. Ins whole attention as a writer had been tuned

to finding those "ten illuminating words" that would open

the doors to beauty and order. He had not found them so

far, and, as he tried to convince us in In the American
Grain, none of his countrymen had found them either. In

the Viennese doctors, however, he seems to have found the

ritual idea he had been searching for:

There was a strong sense of the priest in all
these men, a priest presiding over a world of
the maimed, living in the hospital, pondering

.and dreaming--a great sense of beauty over
this sordid world.
(p. 155)

Of course, these were Viennese priests ministering to

Viennese people, but the knowledge they imparted could be
easily adopted by healers everywhere. The spirit they had

vas what Williams (through Dev) was most concerned with,

Lowever, and the spirit was not a commodity so easily
"There was no feeling but the presence of the

mported.
155).

rutfli", -clJaims Dev, and "It hurt an American" (p.

r the presence of so much beauty and truth, Dev felt his

 

119

own starvation even more keenly. In searching for the

difference between the priestly healers in Vienna and the

docuns hiAmerica, Dev realizes that:

Inlmmrica we save men, without too much curi-

Here they are lustful for knowledge,
These priests of

osity.

fin‘completeness of living.

bemflw'save men, but keep aloof. That was it.
- (p. 156)

WLHiams had dealt with the idea of aloofness before

in In the American Grain when he had discussed Benjamin
Franklin could not

Franklin (see ITAG, pp. 144-157).
He "itched to be med-

stand aloof and still be helpful.
dling, to do the little concrete thing" in order to keep

the "flood of lightning that would inundate him" in check
It is this same meddling that Williams

(ITAG, p. 155).
is referring to in A Voyage to Pagany when he talks about
American doctors. They are doubly damned-~at least
Franklin had curiosity, even if it was "fear that drove"
The American doctors don't have even

him (ITAG, p. 155).
Williams believed that they were not only meddling

that.
It is the idea of aloofness that is most

but also dull.
significant, however, in tracing Williams' concern with

ritual. The fact of saving men was, by itself, of course,
important to Williams; but his real interest was in the
In this respect he was certainly

vays they were saved.
Or, perhaps, he was a pragmatist to a high

[0 pragmatist.
the believed that in any endeavor, whether it be

egree.
33), writing

erforming a funeral (see "Tract", CCP, p.
(Jr saving a life, the quality of the performance

story,

 

120

was directly linked to the overall degree of accomplish-
ment. Quality being linked to accomplishment is obvious,
of course, when story writing is the concern; it is not so

obvious when saving a life is the concern. After all, a

life saved is a life saved. Williams, however, was never

concerned simply with isolated facts (see "The Virtue of

History", ITAG, pp. 188-191), and one life saved is a

fact. Even the worst doctor would no doubt save a life

sometime in his career. What he was concerned with was

the way in which the life was saved. If it were saved

because a doctor was extremely knowledgeable and capable

regardless of his own feelings toward the particular

patient, then the saving of the one life has significance

for all men who are cared for by that doctor. Such an

attitude is what Williams means by aloofness, and the

lack of aloofness is what he had criticized before and

would criticize again in Americans. Williams was con-

vinced that a lack of aloofness had driven men to America
to exploit it; evidently he believed a similar motive

drove men to careers in medicine and other fields. Cer-

tainly he felt such a lack was true of governments.

Through Miss Black in A Voyage to Pagany he calls all

governments "a great kindergarten diversion" and then

‘eiterates his idea of aloofness again:

Some few, some gist, must be able to be quiet
above it and to live-—be, conscious and ruling

somehow--ru1ing enough to get a minimum of
sense into the situations which concern us,

 

 

121

andrmwerful enough, devoted enough, to see

to it that some light continues from antiquity.
(p. 163)

Thnnmhmnzthe rest of his own career, Williams would be

concerned primarily with this one idea--of the gist,

the'kndet" above the crowd. How to achieve his goal
5.

would be his problenu

next novel, White Mule, the first of the

Williams'
Stecherlhdlogy, seems to be concerned not with the gist
Dealing with

 

{Jr—,1.-

E

but with the most ordinary of ordinaries.
ordinariness was, however, one of Williams' ways to reach

the gist. It was one of the necessary steps along the
way.
White Mule deals ostensibly with the babyhood of

Williams' wife, Florence Herman. Superficially it seems

to be a rather charming story of what it's like to be a

baby. Told from an infant's point of view (or, at least,
.a point of View very sympathetic to the infant mentality),
Whitezfihrle captures excellently the uncertainty, isola-

'tion auni yet fierce egocentrism that are so characteristic

of tJu3;first.years of life. On this one level alone it

However, Williams' designs were not

deserves attenthnh

so simple as they appear to be from a first reading. In

iealing so carefully with the often obvious, seemingly
uperficial, events in an infant's life, Williams was

earching for the gist here as definitely as he had in A

oyage to Pagany. He had, he says in IWTWAP, always been

zterested in babies because of their fierce independence

 

122
and care-less attitude toward the adult world (p. 61)

Unhampered by adult social amenities, babies would,

observes Williams, let go at any time with the most

He loved them for this. After

disturbing of behaviors .

all, babies are totally and magnificently babies; they
are the most honest of all human beings. They are their

natures without any compunction to be anything else.

Whatever restraint begins to appear is put there by the

 

surrounding "civilized" world, often in a most uncivilized

It is this civilization (what the Gesell Institute

way.
of Child Behavior would call "humanization") process com-

bined with the individual baby's own determination to be

main concern. By correctly

distinct that is Williams'
portraying what often amounts to a struggle between the

world and the baby's own nature, Williams hoped to dis-
cover the elements that determine whether a man will stand

aloof, part and yet apart, or stand as merely an extension
of a rather lifeless mass. 1 Of course, the determinants
are many, and Williams was aware of this complexity. No

two infants are alike; no two families are alike; no two
cities are alike. Yet Williams believed that by cohcen-
trating on the one and by isolating the characteristics

that the one shared with all others, an understanding of
:he many could be reached. The baby he chose was Flossie
ecause, as he says in I Wanted to Write A Poem (p. 60),
e had heard a lot about Flossie's babyhood from her

"thought it was a good true picture of a baby",

1min and

123

and he had, of course, a special interest in her. She
also represented in a very special yet totally ordinary

12 Of German and

way what it means to be an American.
Swedish ancestry, Flossie represents, and in her small

way is, the American dilemma. Born of parents just

recently arrived from the Old World, Flossie is the American
experiment in miniature, the American hope and dream.
Flossie's growth is definitely the "American flowing from

..13

diverse materials. How this flower is raised, how

 

this hope and dream are fulfilled, is Williams' concern.
What goes right or wrong with one baby in America is likely
to be what goes right or wrong with other babies if the
novelist is true to his reality.

What went right with Flossie was almost entirely due
to her own natural inclinations. Luckily, they were good,
healthy inclinations because if her character had been
left totally to the mercies of the gods (her usually well-
intentioned parents), it would have suffered more than it
did. Flossie was born an American and would, if she had
been born anywhere else, have grown up an integrated part
of a unified culture. All of her baby mentality strained
to be a part of her reality, a reality at once both
frightening and marvelous from her baby standpoint.
Flossie did, of course, become one with her culture and
land; she did merge with the reality that surrounded her.
But in America, as Williams had attempted to illustrate

before in In the American Grain and The Great American

124
Novel, to become part of the reality is to become less
than one's potential will allow. It is to become in part,
at least, a divided human being whose mind is stretched
thinly across the Atlantic in an unfruitful backward
gaze. Lottie, Flossie's older sister, portrays this
aspect of Williams' concern much better than Flossie ih
throughout the trilogy. Always part and yet definitely

separated from her family and culture, always somehow f

 

lacking the ability to remain completely detached, Lottie

‘ . d' n.‘
JFQ‘

eventually gives up the struggle entirely and runs off

to Europe to marry an artist. Flossie, always more inde-
pendent, doesn't need to flee to Europe to get away from
her family; she manages in the process of growing up to
remain distinctly apart from them even while living in
the same house.

The reasons for the girls' need to detach themselves
illustrate Williams' long-held contention that Americans
are a people without a central morality. Joe and Gurlie,
bright enough and well-intentioned enough, themselves
shared no common set of values by which they could rear
3 family. Joe, from Germany, and Gurlie, from Norway,
were both in a new land; and though they didn't want to
go back to the old countries, their reasons for staying
did not grow out of any desire to form a new strong cul-

ture. Like so many others before them, Joe and Curlie had

125

it
come seeking their fortunes. They were not part of the

"oltlzfamilies" of America and had little in common with

these families who had settled the new land. Not that

snuflu a connection would have made them necessarily any

nobler--Williams' ideas on the founders and settlers of

pa
.Amerdxna were explored carefully in In the American Grain :

and wererless than complimentary. A connection to a more

distant American past would have, however, given Joe and

 

Gurlie a more culturally integrated foundation from which

to draw strength.

VG“...- m'v- "an

As it was, they were not really a part

of their new culture, yet they were no longer a part of

their old cultures. They were glad to be in America, yet

always yearning after the lands they had left (see pp.

14-15 and p. 25). Their dilemma was, of course, not

unique to them--Americans are made of just such stuff.
Williams shows well, however, how such conditions lead to

a moral vacuum in which money and status take the place of

tradition and culture. Joe's belief in hard and careful

work, even with low pay, somehow gets lost in his and

Gurlie's push for the top.14 Not that he ever becomes

dishonest, at least not in any real sense. He does become

Opportunistic, however, until in the end he is a bitter,
self-hating older man whose main joy in life is a faint

nmmory of a German youth.15 Gurlie, superficially undaunted

 

*
See pp. 14—20 for Joe's feelings on America and

Davies gives a very clear and accurate analysis

oflxnh the social themes and Joe's problems in the three
novels.

money.

 

126

by her life in a new land, becomes harder and more con-
tentious as years pass and it becomes apparent that Joe's
increasing wealth and status are not the panaceas she had
thought they would be. All the money and status in the

world become useless in the face of their young son's

 

death (see The Build-Up, pp. 325-335). Theirs is a classic E‘
story of hopes dashed, of greed leading to self— i
destruction.16 Theirs is also the story that Williams I
saw as too typically American. Later in Paterson he would E

chronicle case after case of families perverted by the
chase after wealth and status, a national disease as far
as Williams was concerned, made doubly tragic by the
inability of those involved to grasp what was happening.
Furthermore, they seemed unable to avert the outcome.
This inability was the "divorce" Williams was to write
about so often in Paterson, and it is certainly evident
in the Trilogy. Joe and Gurlie had no concept of what
the consequences of their actions would be; cut off from
their own cultures and yet not a part of any new one, they
stand as perfect examples of immigrant exploiters. They
came to the new land, all right, but not to merge with it
and build a new morality. They came, instead, to get
money, to drain what could be drained off the surface of
America without ever delving deep into the rich veins of
gold that Williams was convinced existed. Unaware of
their dilemma, as people living out divorced lives in an

unintegrated culture, the Stechers stand as early examples

127
of the automatons of Paterson. They may know their sources,
but they don't know the "sills of their/disappointment"
(Paterson, p. 6). They are, in effect, living ritualess
lives in a ritual-starved country, a country whose pace
seems contrived to make certain no rituals will be formed.17
The Stechers are homeless sojourners who seem to be at the
mercy of forces beyond their comprehension. They are,
according to Williams, like most Americans and "have never

been at home in this land."18

 

w
“1‘,

.l

{in PLEA

 

128

Chapter V-Notes

Joel Conarroe, William Carlos Williams' Paterson
Language and Landscape, p. 131.

William Carlos Williams, "Shakespeare", SE, p. 56.

In the preface to his SE Williams claimed that for
him "...all writing starts and ends with the
poem. When I write a short story it might better
have been a poem..." (p. xiv).

William Carlos Williams, A Novelette and Other Prose.
(1921-1931) (Toulon: TO Publishers, 1932).

William Carlos Williams, White Mule (Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1937); In the Money (Norfolk,
Conn.: New Directions, 1940); The Build-Up (New
York: Random House, 1952).

In IWTWAP Williams confesses that the "protagonist
was, of course, myself" and notes that it was
important to him in his education as a writer.

He also writes that though he hadn't read much

of James' work, he had "possibly" been influenced
by him (see pp. 45-47). Davies, in his article,
"'Which is the American?': Themes, Techniques,
and Meaning in William Carlos Williams' Three
Novels", notes that Ezra Pound, Williams' close
friend, claims in one of his essays that Williams
was determined to sit or stand as an American
(see Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S.
Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), p. 390). Not that
such a determination was easy for Williams. He
was to agonize over his decision for a long time.
Pound, in a letter to Williams dated November 10,
1917, goes so far as to say that if Williams "had
any confidence in America" he "wouldn't be so
touchy about it" (see The Letters of Ezra Pound,
ed. by D. D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace 8
Co., 1950), pp. 23-24).

 

129

7. In describing Shakespeare in his essay, "Shakespeare"
(SE), Williams could have been describing himself:
This is the sort of person who lives
in one place, having no need to move his
carcass in order to keep alive. It is
the imagination that travels: Pattern
of the more serious interval between the
serious travel of being born and dying."
(p. 55)
Almost everyone who has written about Williams has
made note of the importance of Williams' "local",
but he himself describes the concept best in the
Contact essay that appeared as the editorial
policy of the magazine in the first issue in
1920. See Contact, New York [No. 1] (Dec. 1920) l.

8. The excellent essay by J. E. Slate, "William Carlos
Williams and the Modern Short Story", explores
in great detail Williams' ideas on the relation-
ship between his art and his profession.

9. Riddel sees Williams' search for sources as a search
for the "original site, where pre-tragic steps
into the tragic, where the primordial dance of
form and power...broke off." Riddel notes that
Dev "calls it the 'place of my birth...the place
where the word begins'" (VP, 116). (The Inverted
Bell, p. 35).

10. Frances L. Ilg, M.D., and Louis Bates Ames, Ph.D.,
The Gesell Institute's Child Behavior. Perennial
Library (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).

11. John C. Davies, in his essay, "'Which is the American?':
Themes, Techniques, and Meaning in William Carlos
Williams' Three Novels", says that Williams was
trying in White Mule to imitate the "experience
of a human, represented by Florence Stecher" (p.
98). This is true, but I think Williams intended
to be more specific. Florence is an American
becoming aculturated into a ritualess society,
and the reason Williams uses her (beyond what he
claims in IWTWAP, p. 60) is that she represents
one who is able to flower above the weeds that
would choke her. She is, by the time she's grown,
a true "United Stateser", not merely a transplanted
European.

12. fSlate claims that in all Williams' fiction, especially
in White Mule, it was "children and childish adults
[who] represent modern or American man" (see Slate,
p. 651).

 

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

Davies, p. 198.
Davies, p. 191.
Davies, p. 194.
Davies, p. 193.

Margaret Mead,

Bellah, p. 218.

130

"Ritual and Social Crisis", p.

97.

 

 

g, I.‘
m'm‘

CHAPTER VI

With the publication in 1932 of The Knife of the

- “1...!”

Times,1 Williams' work took a different turn. Not that

:K '1

his main concerns changed--he was still primarily interested

in the artist as priest and in the fabric of the ritualess

 

American culture. With The Knife of the Times, however,
Williams' perspective changed. Until these short stories
appeared, Williams' prose had dealt largely with ages
already past. A Voyage to Pagany is an exception, but it
is set in Europe, a feature which distinguishes it among
Williams' books. The Great American Novel, Kora in Hell
and Spring and All are also contemporaneous in a sense,
but their form, their great scope in time, and their intro-
spective quality give more of a picture of the inside of
one contemporary mind than the flavor of a whole age. The
Knife of the Times gives not so much a picture of Williams
as of the people in his world. In this collection of
short stories he is not concerned with the colonizers,

the Founding Fathers or the late 19th century immigrants.
He is concerned with the people he sees every day on the
streets and in his office. In a sense he had done his
"homework" in studying and writing about the roots of his

cultural heritage, and The Knife of the Times is the

131

132

finished research paper. The issues he deals with and the
people he treats are the natural extensions of those whom
he considered to be invaders and exploiters of our culture,
those he had written about in all his previous works. The
perversions and disorder that prevail in The Knife of the
Times are natural if seen in relation to the society which
Williams pictures. Williams presents the true meaning of
the times, as he saw it, the general rule, the core, not

the exceptional or the strange. Like Joyce, he tries to

 

W

look with "the x-ray eyes of the confessional" in his
effort to disclose as did Joyce, "truth through the breakup
of beautiful words."2
The first story, "The Knife of the Times", sets the
tone for the whole collection. The two girls, leading
superficially stable and "normal" lives, are actually
split apart and divorced from what is generally considered
normal. They are perfect examples, Williams implies, of
the society in which they live. On the surface, each girl
seems to be following a "normal" path in life. Ethel and
Maura both marry, they both have children, they both seem
happy. There is always an undertone, however, and it
eventually prevails. What had appeared to be real and
stable was only a thin veil over the reality under the
surface. At first the girls themselves don't know of
their sexual attachment for each other, and even after

years Maura won't admit it to herself. When the girls

finally meet after twenty years, and Ethel professes her

133

love for Maura, Maura goes along with Ethel but still
doesn't seem to comprehend that she shares the feelings.
Maura is doubly unaware, and seems to be acting not from
within but as an "automaton."

It is easy to see this story as both an extension of
Williams' themes in earlier works and also as a preview
of what is to come. The appearance of normality, the
split both within the relationship and within each person,
and the perverted reality just under the surface brings
to mind Williams' contention in In the American Grain that
the surface beauty of America hides a rotten core, and his
later insistence in Paterson that America and its citizens
are profoundly split.

The other stories in The Knife of the Times illustrate
the same theme in various ways. In "A Visit to the Fair",
a husband's illness and resulting inCapacity to perform
any family functions causes a woman to accept the invita-
tion of a neighboring farmer to accompany him to the fair.
Seemingly innocent enough on Bess's part, the date and
resulting invitation from the farmer for her to come live
with him are atypical of rural life in any age. Of course,
Williams casts no b1ame--he merely presents a situation
which in itself is ripe with allusions that invite specula-
tion. "Hands Across the Sea" presents a similar dilemma
except that Mrs. Andrews seems to be a little more aware
of her situation in befriending another man who himself is

about to be married. At least, she is more aggressive than

134
Maura or Bess. All three women, however, are to a great
extent unaware of what drives them to feel and act as
they do. They are definitely out of touch with the
sources of their being. They act, but they act as if
they had no will of their own; they move into realms of
thought and action before they are ever aware (Williams
does not illustrate that they ever do become aware) of
the reasons behind or implications of those thoughts or
deeds. They are, in a true sense, ritualess, since ritual
always presupposes a conscious awareness of what is being
done.3 They are definitely more fine examples of the
"automatons" of Paterson.

"The Sailor's Son" and "An Old Time Raid" do for
Williams' men what the previous stories did for his women.
Manuel is a good, if exaggerated, example of a modern
youth whose identity seems lost in a maze of complicated
relationships. He certainly is aware of his homosexuality
as well as his heterosexuality but sees nothing wrong with
it. His fiancé is also aware and also has no complaints.
The only one who even questions the homosexuality or the
idea of having both a male love and a female fiancé is
Mrs. Cuthberson, the older woman. Her world is the only
one in which an old order prevails. Again, Williams
doesn't judge overtly. He presents a situation in such a
way as to make the reader see that the order that underlies
most societies is lacking in this one. Mrs. Cuthberson

has entirely different rules than Manuel and his fiance

135
even though both are members of the same society. They
could just as well be citizens of different foreign coun-
tries considering the gulf that separates them, for in
fact they do live in different social and psychological
realms.

"Mind and Body" and "A Descendant of Kings" go even
further in illustrating Williams' contention that our people
are split within themselves as well as divorced from any
ritual heritage. The woman in "Mind and Body" is a per-
fect example of the heritage of insanity Williams always
implies. A member of a family ravaged by mental illness,
she is by her own admission a "manic depressive" (p. 38),
but insists that her illness is real and not merely from
nerves. The doctor is also convinced her illness is real
and that it has been caused by the genetic heritage she
received. The woman, however, is also nervous and one who
most would consider "a nut" (p. 38); and she never gets
herself together enough to work out anything. Hers is a
good case of a bad physiological heritage doing damage in
succeeding generations. The emphasis, however, is not on
genetic disorder. Williams is implying throughout that
the woman has nowhere to turn. Neither her family nor her

culture give her strength.

Stuart, in "A Descendant of Kings", is another good

case of psychological and cultural weakness being passed

136
on from father to son.* Stuart, the motherless son of a
"real gentleman" who was "charming but useless" (p. 58),
is "yanked up...by his paternal grandmother", a woman
good enough in her own way but entirely outside the norms
of the society in which she lived. As a result, Stuart
grows up outside society as well and is unable as an
adult to fit in anywhere. Considering Williams' insistence
that our culture is diseased at best, perhaps this would
be considered a virtue. However, Williams never argues
for rulelessness but rather for unity in rules and the
social expression of those rules. Williams desires unity
in whatever the culture draws upon as its philosophy.
Stuart's case is hardly an example of any unity or order.
His grandmother, evidently a first-generation English-
woman, takes Stuart far outside the already diffuse culture
of which he should rightly be a part. Stuart, as a result,
becomes a cultural anachronism, becomes in fact a culture
all to himself. He manages to gain the superficial trap-
pings of the larger culture, the music and the dance, but
can somehow never "make it" with his fellow countrymen.
He stands as a perverted symbol of the rugged individual.
Daniel Boone went to the forest himself in order to make
his own way with the land. Stuart is dragged to the

"wilderness" before he has any chance to determine or find

 

*

From what Williams says about his father in Yes,
Mrs. Williams, it would seem that Stuart is a portrait of
his father as a youth. See Yes, Mrs. Williams (New York:
McDowell, Ovolensky, 1959), p. 3).

137

his own path. Boone acted out of inner need; Stuart acts
out of a habit established by someone else's need. The
two men are worlds apart. The "Descendant of Kings" is
not a prince after all.

"Old Doc Rivers", the last and longest story of the
collection, is perhaps Williams' best illustration of
his theme. Doc Rivers doesn't fit anywhere in his culture
except as a doctor. His patients respond to him and pre-
fer him over the younger, perhaps more knowledgeable
doctors but, aside from the patient-doctor relationship,
he has no ties with the larger society he lives in. His
ties are to the others who don't fit, the French settlers
of the region, who keep apart from the majority of the
citizenry. The Jeanette Mansion was his sanctuary, a
place where he could "play cards...laugh, talk and partake
with the Frenchman of his imported wines and liquors" (p.
89). "It was", says Williams, "a quaint situation, too,
in that crude environment of those days, so altogether
foreign, incongruous and delightfully aloof" (p. 89).
The Frenchman was the only one of the region who could
accept "the complexities and contradictions of a nature
such as Rivers'" (p. 89). No one else was capable of
understanding or appreciating the total man. He was,
Williams notes, "at the height of his popularity and
power", but his pepularity didn't come from the refined
"sensibilities" that made him prey to drugs. What popu-

larity he had came from that part of him that was usable

138

by the townspeople. He was literally dying for want of
companionship and understanding, but he was not to find it
among his fellow citizens. "He was", claims the narrator,

...by natural endowment the ablest individual

of our environment, a serious indictment against

all the evangelism of American life which I most

hated--at the same time a man trying to fill his

place among those lacking the power to grasp his

innate capabilities.

(pp. 89-90)

His innate capabilities combined with his nervous tempera-
ment, and the inability of his townspeople to understand
a man like him, drove Rivers mad in the end. At one point
in his life he simply "gave up" and cultivated the finer
sensibilities that would have been an asset in any other
culture. His assets, then, become his weakness so that
time and again after some months of living "straight",
he would begin taking drugs again. Eventually he would
"feel himself slipping and he'd head off...for the woods"
(p. 90) in order to regain touch with himself. Williams,
via the narrator, praises Rivers here for having the
courage that most of us lack. In the "jumble" of our
cities, he claims, "we have lost touch with ourselves,
have become indeed not authentic persons, but fantastic
shapes in some gigantic fever dream" (p. 90). Rivers in
his courage could lift himself out of his fever dream for
some time, "But that, too, ended pretty badly" when he
shot his best friend in the woods due to the poor eyesight

he had sustained from "abuse and illness." Like the

"Descendant of Kings", Rivers was no Daniel Boone--on1y a

139
wrung out, modern-day would-be Boone who no longer had the
moral base from which Boone drew sustenance to sustain
him.

The picture that emerges from The Knife of the Times
is bleak indeed, although many of the people depicted are
strong and realistic men and women. Williams' prognosis
for American culture at this time in his career was cer-
tainly not positive. He sees men and women all about him
who, he implies, could have been great people had they
had strong cultural and moral support. Williams' people,
however, are pictured as lonely travelers in a strange
land, people unknown to others and largely unaware of
themselves. They are the automatons, the people divorced
from each other and split within themselves, the people
Williams devotes so much time to in Paterson.

Life Along the Passaic River,4 the next collection
of stories to appear, is very different in tone and con-
tent. In these stories Williams is primarily concerned
with the "ordinary" people of his town, not necessarily
the ones of finer sensibilities. If the people in Life
Along the Passaic River had finer sensibilities, they had
not had the opportunity to indulge them. They are largely
the poor people who Williams saw every day in his office.
In these stories there is a minor concentration on the
children he saw, the tough "Girl with the Pimply Face",
the stubborn child of "The Use of Force", the poor little

"Jean Beicke", and the dying infant of "Danse Pseudomacabre."

140

But children are not his only interest.5 He concentrates
in these stories on all the "little" men and women who
make up the conglomerate along the river in New Jersey
which he was to later make famous. As always Williams is
concerned with toughness, not the toughness that implies
violence or nastiness, but the toughness that has to do
with strength in the living out of each day's hunger and
pain or loneliness.6

The poor and the children definitely fare well in
Williams' eyes, the children because they are innately
strong and have not been demoralized, and the poor because
they have to deal in particulars and have not the luxury
of nervous breakdowns. It is interesting to note, also,
that the strong, tough adults in these stories, as often
in Williams' work, are the foreigners or recently naturalized
Americans.* The woman in "A Night in June" is Italian;
the woman in "A Face of Stone" is Polish, as is the woman
in "Four Bottles of Beer." Of course, not all the strong
people are recently immigrants. Certainly the man in
"Under the Greenwood Tree" is strong in the way that
Williams admires most. "What is this virtue?", asks
Williams. "Chiefly it is", he says, "that he is down on
it here, now; living--not throwing himself out of a window
at a slump in the stock market--a straight impulse, without

borrowing, without lie, or complaint" (p. 225). The old

 

*
See the section on the old man in the Eisenstein
film in Paterson, pp. 67-68.

141

man embodies the strength of character to stand on his
own, independent of all the things that most men feel are
necessary but which in Williams' eyes only weaken an indi-
vidual. He is not a split man, not a man divorced from
himself, but a man truly in touch with his basic needs and
emotions. He knows where he came from and he knows what
he wants.

It's the way he rides evenly over the times.

The way he walks unbegging. The way he takes

the weather. The way he faces the encumbrance

of his condition. Lives uncomplaining. Self

respecting, alone.

(p. 231)
And that is much more than Williams seems able to say
about most Americans during these years.

The most obvious contrast, however, between Life
Along the Passaic River and The Knife of the Times is
Williams' humor in the later collection. The Knife of
the Times is pretty serious7 while the stories in Life
Along the Passaic River all possess a degree of humor no
matter how horrible the situation being confronted. As
in Paterson, Williams eyes everything in perspective;
nothing is unimportant but at the same time nothing except
despair itself is all important. Williams "had matured as
a writer" and felt much "freer" (IWTWAP, p. 63). The last
"story" in the collection, "World's End", illustrates very
well Williams' new sense of freedom, which is really little

more than a mature sense of the relative importance of

everyday occurrences. Teenage promiscuity, with its

142

accompanying danger of unwanted pregnancy, becomes a means
by which Williams gets at the adult spectators. Evelyn's
mother is worried only about the "disgrace and scandal"
Evelyn might bring upon the house and is very unconcerned
about any higher standard of right or wrong. And she is
not really concerned about Evelyn either (see p. 232).
A case of nasty cats overrunning a hospital becomes a
background setting to explore the supposed "cruelty" of
the hospital's engineer compared with the "humanity" dis-
played by the interns and doctors. Olaf, the engineer,
killed "with the composure of a man filling and lighting
a pipe" (p. 236). He killed for bounty and "looked at
the cats merely as an accessory source of revenue" (p.
236). The interns and doctors, certainly less violent
in any conventional sense, "dreaded to hurt the animals"
and therefore killed them in a humane way:

...we'd soak a wad of cotton with chloroform

and shove cat and cotton suddenly under the

glass microscope bell....

...scenting the chloroform a sudden con-

vulsion would seize it. Round and round it

would spin in that horrible death chamber in

an incredible agony of motion. Then die. We

were awestruck and fascinated by the scene.

(p. 236)

This small world, like the other small worlds in "World's
End", is an upside-down world for humerous jabs.

What was perverted in The Knife of the Times becomes
somewhat comic in Life Along the Passaic River, but the end

result is the same even if the perspective has changed.

Williams' artistry, his ability to write from very divergent

143

perspectives, in no way lessens the impact of his message.
The world, to Williams' eye, is turned upside down; it is
a world devoid of cohesive structure, a world in which
what is actually cruel becomes humane, what is tragic
becomes funny, what is love becomes hate. The six-year-
old hell cat, the "little bitch" in "World's End" was
really only a lost, hungry child who very much wanted an
adult to protect her with security and discipline. Find-
ing these things in the narrator she became a docile
infant, not at all the little beast everyone believed her
to be. Williams' message prevails: it is the world, not
the child, that is crazy. What the child wants--order,
a strong structure, discipline--are the components of any
sane world (or any great work of art). Lacking these
qualities, the world is no longer a world; the great work
of art is merely some scratches on paper or splotches on
canvas. Williams is coming closer to his final belief
that ritual, whether in the form of chants before an
altar or strokes upon a canvas, is essential to a healthy,
functioning society. For what is ritual other than order,
structure, and discipline? It is the base upon which all
else is built. Without it, all is chaotic and has no
reference point from which to draw strength. Williams
knew this already in the 19305 when Paterson was taking
shape.

Further evidence of Williams' concern with ritual can

be seen in the collection called Beer and Cold Cuts,8

144

which was published as a section in Make Light of It in
1950. The stories were not written in the late '405 or

'505, however. One of them, "Danse Pseudomacabre"9

(The
Little Review VII, 1 (May-June 1920), pp. 46-49), was
poblished as early as 1920 and for some reason was not
published until much later. Interestingly, almost all of
the stories illustrate Williams' concern with ritual more
than previously published works.

"Ancient Gentility", first published in 1939,10

shows
beautifully what Williams thinks is missing in American
society. The gentility of the old Italians shows itself
in almost every movement. As the doctor approaches the
house the old man opens the door and bows "his head several
times out of respect for a physician" (p. 274). "He was
wonderful", Williams continues, "A gentle, kindly creature
....Every movement he made showed a sort of ancient gen-
tility" (p. 274). The old woman impressed the doctor as
well with "the same patient smile" upon her face "as shone
from that of her old husband" (p. 274). What is particu-
larly interesting in this story is that hardly any words
are spoken since neither the doctor nor the old couple
understand each other's language. What passes between
them is beyond any language yet known to Williams. The
communication which takes place is on a ritual level, and
this ritual aspect is emphasized in the little snuff

ceremony at the end of the story. The little ceremony is

to the doctor "one of the most gracious, kindly

145

proceedings" he "had ever taken part in" (p. 275).

In "The Burden of Loveliness", first published in
1943 (Matrix, No. 1 (Fall 1943), pp. 40-17), Williams
explores the pain that is often a partner of great beauty.11
In this "conversation as design" (Whitaker, p. 104), a
lovely girl, used by the local shoe salesman, concludes
finally that "love" under such an arrangement is not love
at all but a perversion of love which ultimately destroys.
Her story, Whitaker notes, is a "subtle exploration...of
what happens to esthetic appreciation and sexuality in a
market economy....It is a sympathetic presentation of the
human costs borne by those who buy or sell or try to do
neither" (Whitaker, pp. 104-105). It is, moreover, another
example of Williams' concern for propriety* in human rela-
tionships. In the end when the girl says, almost pleads,

No, she said. No more. You didn't know

how to take care of me when you had me. Now

it's too late.,
Williams is stressing that any human relationship is built
upon certain moral grounds that must not be denied if the
relationship is to thrive. This young girl is luckier than
the young minister's wife in Paterson (see pp. 14-15), but

Williams' point is the same: there is a proper attitude

towards everything, whether it be taking care of patients,

 

*

"Propriety" as I am using it here does not imply
a prudish overconcern for minute details. It implies,
rather, a correct attitude toward others in any human
relationship, a way to carry on a relationship on firm
ground.

146
as in A Voyage to Pagany, or making love. Each act or
series of acts must be surrounded by a cushion of meaning-
ful, mutually accepted ritual if fulfillment is to be
reached by the actors.

"Above the River", the next story in Beer and Cold
Cuts, concentrates on the American Indians, a favorite
group of Williams' because of their wholeness as human
beings and as a society. "Little divisions like Canada
and the United States don't mean a thing to them. They're
Americans", states one of the characters. The Indians are
whole within themselves so they can "go anywhere" (p. 252).
Such things as national boundaries are artificial to them.
Their reality came before the boundaries and, because it
is strong, survived in spite of the boundaries. The impli-
cation is that the imported Amerians, the English, Germans,
French and so on, cannot "go anywhere" since they are
psychologically nowhere to begin with. The Indians' reac-
tion to attack by one of the linemen on the construction
job illustrates their unity and strength:

His pals came running to help him. But
you couldn't tell where they came from, the

Indians all made a circle around Papoose and

the other guy, a circle facing out. That's all
they did. Just like you read about with

animals....
(p. 254)
Each man was strong both in himself and as a unit in a
larger structure because each knew exactly what his place
was. As in a ritual each man played his part and played

it well so that the outcome was beneficial to all the

147
participants. Such an outcome was Williams' goal both for
America and for the language he hOped to invent.

The picture Williams paints of the new Americans at
work is quite a contrast to the one presented in "Above
the River." "The Paid Nurse" gives a somber picture of
what it's like to be under "attack" in the modern American
world. George, the injured worker, becomes a prey instead
of one to be protected and serves as a strong counterpart
to the attacked Indian in "Above the River." What happens
when George is injured?

Everybody came on the run and rushed me

into the emergency room. Everybody was excited,

but as soon as they saw that I could see and

wasn't going to pass out on them they went back

to their jobs and left me there with the nurse

to fix me up.

(p. 265)
And from then on, George is alone except for Doc Williams.
It's as if he had committed a crime by being injured and
therefore had to be purged from the group. In the end it
is money, or a threatened loss of it, that talks. What-
ever feeling had existed in the society for one of its
own was missing entirely in this case. V

"The Round the World Fliers" illustrates but once
more what Williams has been saying and will continue to
say: America is in trouble--to prove it all one has to do
is look elsewhere. In this story an Englishman from
Montreal points time and again to the "right" way things

are done "down here in the States" but has to admit that

"...we don't have the auto accidents you do and no

148
kidnapping either" (p. 281). And at the end the author
notes that:
As he was standing there speaking the

last words I noticed the material of his

trousers, a heavy red-brown woolen stuff of

a much better quality than any but the wealthy

possess in this country.

(p. 282)

Williams had noted the lack of quality in American
goods before in The Great American Novel (see Imaginations,
pp. 226-227), and he seems to correlate this lack of quality
with a lack of self-identity and pride, characteristics
he explores more carefully in a story called "The Insane"
as well as later in Paterson. "The Insane" deals osten-
sibly with one young doctor's experience in a pediatric
clinic but can be expanded into a full-blown theory in
light of the Williams' work to follow. "Of the twenty-
five children I saw in the clinic this week", claims the
young doctor, "only two can be said to be really free of
psycho-neurotic symptoms" (p. 288). And as he narrows
his discussion to one child, the doctor points to what
has become Williams' major concern--a confusion about what
is real and the effect this has on identity. Speaking of
the child, the doctor says:

Unreality and reality become confused in him.

Finally he loses track. He doesn't know one
from the other and we call him insane.

(p. 290)

Williams would later call the whole American society essen-
tially insane due to its lack of basic beliefs by which to

interpret reality. Lacking these beliefs, which

149

necessarily means lacking a ritual to reinforce the
beliefs, Americans as a group are insane to Williams'
way of thinking.

Not all Americans are insane, however. "Comedy
Entombed: 1930" gives a picture of at least one family
of healthy Americans. At first glance the doctor can't
tell why he is so pleased when entering the house of his
newest patients. His initial response was that all was
in disorder, yet he felt good there. It wasn't until
his second visit that he realizes that what he had seen
as disorder is actually a new order, unrecognizable as
such because Williams is still so much part of the older
"order." After entering the house the second time, the
doctor stands and tries to analyze his reactions:

The whole place had a curious excitement about

it for me....I couldn't precisely tell why.

There was nothing properly recognizable,

nothing straight, nothing in what ordinarily

might have been called its predictable relation-

ships. Complete disorder....

I have seldom seen such disorder and
brokenness--such a mass of unrelated parts of

things lying about. That's it....An unrecog-
nizable order! Actually--the new!....

(p. 327)

And what is the new, what does this order signify? The
new order signifies something "good-natured and calm,"
something "compact. Excellent. And with such patina of
use. Everything definitely 'painty'" (p. 327). The
doctor can't "make it out" himself. He recognizes the
order but can't seem to make contact with it. The order

is unique to the family he's treating, but the order is

150
"catching" in a sense for when the doctor returns the next
time he feels "as though [he] had lived in the place and
had lived there always" (p. 329). The order of the place
and its inhabitants had likewise produced an order in the
visiting doctor, a sense of harmony he had not possessed
before.

This same sense of new order and harmony can be seen
in a poem called "Between Walls" (SP, 84). Though "nothing/
will grow among cinders", normally a very negative word
connoting dirt, poverty, mess, the cinders Williams speaks
of "shine" with "the broken/lpieces of a green/bottle."

An ordinary imagination would not have sensed the beauty
much less the order and the renewal that spring even from
bits of broken glass lying in a forgotten bit of earth
"Between Walls." It is unlikely that anyone save a poet
would have thrown more than a token glance towards the
fragments of glass among the cinders. It is Williams'
genius of imagination, however, that sets him apart and
makes him the priest, the one who senses relationships and
order where most see only disjointed fragments unrelated
to the setting in which they lie. The green fragments of
glass among the cinders, like the girl ("Beautiful Thing")
in Paterson, Book Three (see pp. 124-128), "BRIGHTen/the
cor/ner/where they are'(Paterson, p. 128) and, in doing
so, bridge the artificial gaps made by unimaginative men
between beautiful things and the places where they are

found. Williams saw beauty wherever it was, he sensed

151
order where others saw only disorder. His unifying imagina-
tion, his gift, makes him the priest, the ritual performer,
who must unite and elevate the elements of existence for
the rest of us through the use of words.

Williams' concern with order and harmony in society,
manifested in the prose of the '305 and early '405, was to
be given even greater emphasis in Paterson and the later
poems. At the same time, however, Williams' concern with
artistic form had also been developing and became so impor-
tant to him that he, along with a few others, founded a
whole "school" of thought based on this concern. Not so
evident in his prose, what he was to label "Objectivism",
begun as a "movement" in the '205, thoroughly dominated
the poetry of these Depression and war years. Its princi-
ples were even more restrictive than those set down by
the Imagists, and the Objectivist poems presented some
particularly difficult problems for the reader.*

Objectivism, however, had been yet another means
Williams used in his attempt to reach the reality he was
searching for, and it ultimately did form part of the
answer to his dilemma. Some poems in Collected Poems12
and in Adam & Eve and the City13 provide an insight into
what he was attempting and why he failed, at least in

part, to accomplish what he set out to do.

 

*
See my introduction for a more complete discus-

sion of Objectivism and the problems it created.

152
"Poem" (pp. 168-169) illustrates very aptly Williams'
desire to get down to basics:

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jam closet
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

14

It is certainly a poem "depicting a single thing" and

would hardly lead to an inaccurate interpretation by a

15

reader. The problem with the poem, however, lies in

its very simplicity.
leads to a problem of
reader of such a poem
enrich his own life?

to be a preacher; his

in large part a desire to run from any such tendency.

did, however, wish to

would somehow through

to his readers' lives.

Its shape is everything, and this
application. That is, how does the
extract something from it that will
Williams, of course, had no desire
conversion to Objectivism had been
He
be a priest, a light-bringer, who
his poetry give credence and reason

In order to be a true priest, the

ritual performer has to go beyond himself into the realm

between the priest and the worshipper.

Unfortunately,

"Poem", pleasant and beautifully shaped as it is, does not

do this.

Any reader can smile and say "Yes, that's how a

cat walks", and can therefore enjoy the poem on certain

153
levels. To make of the poem anything more than this would
be very difficult and far-fetched. As Wagner points out,
Williams, before turning to an Objectivist theory, had
been "dismayed by inaccurate interpretations of his poems"
and so had "attempted to use words so that only one impres-

sion was possible."16

He was to be equally dismayed with
himself as a poet, however, as he increasingly realized
the limitations an Objectivist method placed on his work.
"This is Just to Say" (p. 179) is another poem like
"Poem", inviting in its simplicity and freshness, yet some-
how lacking in anything beyond the pleasant sensations it
arouses in its readers. Any reader can identify with the
persona who takes "the plums/that were in/the icebox/land
which/you were probably/saving/for breakfast." And a
reader can share the sensation the "thief" felt when he
ate the plums: "they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold."
Beyond this, however, the reader cannot go. The fleeting,
shared meeting of minds and sensations that takes place
between poet and reader in this poem is stretching towards
what Williams hoped to accomplish, but it is not there yet.
Just as he had been dismayed at inaccurate interpretations
of his earlier poems, he was to become increasingly dis-
mayed at the limits the Objectivist theory put on his work.
Even within this early collection, however, signs of change
can be seen. In very few poems did Williams stick to a

truly objective method; he found that it was difficult to

keep himself entirely outside the poem--partly because the

154

17 became increasingly diffi-

poem of the "limited object"
cult for him to write. In order to say what he wanted to
say, Williams found that he would have to interject him-
self, if every so slightly, into his work.

"The Wind Increases", part of the larger work, "Della
Primavera Transportata Al Morale" (pp. 182-203), shows
Williams' slight "intrusion" into an otherwise "perfect"
ObjeCtivist poem. Ostensibly showing the effect of wind
upon the earth, Williams, the poet, becomes the wind
whose injunction is to "Loose your love/to flowl/Blow!"
(p. 192). Then he asks in a very un-Objectivist way,

Good Christ what is

a poet--if any

exists?
a man
whose words will
bite
their way

home-~being actual

having the form
of motion

(p. 192)

It is a brief interjection but a necessary one if the
reader is to gain from the poem what Williams desired.
Without this intrusion of the poet's "self", the poem
would be a rather exciting, however limited, poem about
the wind. With the poet's self intruded into the body
of the poem, the meaning of

At each twigtip

new ‘

upon the tortured
body of thought

155

gripping
the ground

a way
to the last leaftip.

(pp. 192-193)
takes on a broader meaning and energizes the idea of the
poet as creator. Neither the wind nor the poet for whom
the wind stands can remain lifeless or merely interesting.

By 1941 Williams had come to believe that two things

were essential to poetry.18

No longer could he limit
himself to either one or the other. In his Objectivist
years he had come to gain a new respect for the importance
of structure. He had increasingly come to realize, as
well, that the "inclusion of the subjective" which he had
tried assiduously to avoid during his experimentation with-

19 The

Objectivism was equally essential to his end.
structure and his subjective "comment" somehow had to be
welded in order for the correct ritual to be performed.
The remainder of his years would be spent trying to weld
the two elements in such a way as to achieve "the Gist"

(see Paterson, p. 185) that would permit poet and reader

alike to meet on sacred ground beyond the poem's limits.

10.

11.

156

Chapter VI-Notes

William Carlos Williams, The Knife of the Times and
Other Stories, in The Farmers’ Daughters (New
York: New Directions, 1961), orig. published by
Dragon Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1932.

SE, pp. 75, 78.
Mead, pp. 91-93.

William Carlos Williams, Life Along the Passaic
River, in The Farmers' Daughters. Orig. published
by New Directions, Norfolk, Conn., 1938.

Slate thinks that a main theme in all of Williams'
fiction is that "children and childish adults
present modern or American man" (p. 651). My
view is a little more positive. I think Williams
was saying that modern man would do well to be
like children or "childish adults."

As Slate says in his essay, the central theme of
these stories is that "Nobody's gonna teach it
to you; you get to learn it yourself" (p. 650).

Williams says in IWTWAP that he was furious at the
"plight of the poor in a rich country" and so he
"wrote it down" as he said it. It was "The
times...that was killing them" (p. 49).

William Carlos Williams, Make Light of It (New York:
Random House, 1950).

William Carlos Williams, "Danse Pseudomacabre", The
Little Review,VII, 1 (May-June 1920), pp. 46-49.

William Carlos Williams, "Ancient Gentility", Creative
Writing, Chicago, 1, (Summer 1939), pp. 3-4.

Thomas Whitaker, in his study, William Carlos Williams
(New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968), pp.
104-105, notes that "The Burden of Loveliness" is
one of several "difficult contrapuntal structures,

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.
19.

157

rendering a hitherto unrecognized order", a point
which supports my assertion that Williams had a
sense of order and harmony which reached beyond
the ordinary.

William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems in The
Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos
Williams (1906-1938) (Norfolk, Conn.: New
Directions, 1938) (first published as Collected
Poems by the Objectivist Press in 1932). Unless
otherwise noted, page numbers following poems
will refer to poems from this collection.

Adam & Eve & the City in Complete Collected Poems
of William Carlos Williams.

Willard Thorp, American Writing in the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1960), p. 212.

Linda Wagner, The Prose of William Carlos Williams
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1970).

Wagner, The Poems of William Carlos Williams
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1963), p. 17.

Wagner, Poems, p. 17.

Wagner, Prose, p. 178.

Wagner, Prose, p. 178.

CHAPTER VII

In writing Paterson, Williams "made" a poem which
is in part, at least, an attempt to show how modern man,
of whom Paterson is the representative, can become whole.
As examples of people who were whole, whose emotions and
thoughts were unified because they had a means of expres-
sing the structure of beliefs around which their society
revolved, Williams relied primarily on the American Indian,
the African native, and the old Dutch settlers. And though
their part may seem slight due to the few lines actually
devoted to them, what the Indians, the Africans, and the
old Dutch signify is of prime importance to Williams'
total meaning. By using them as examples, however,
Williams didn't mean to imply that Americans of the 20th
century should embrace their beliefs and rituals. He
simply used the Indian, African and Dutch cultures as
examples of unified cultures and then juxtaposed them
with both the past and present American culture to show
what he thought the American culture lacks.

At the same time, on another level, Williams explored
the creative process and the role a poet must play in a
society. And since Williams believed that language is

the "magic" which will forgive his sins and cure his

158

159
disease (p. 145), the conclusion he reached is not sur-
prising. As an individual man (the private person), he
must become aware of his sources in order to live in the
present. As a poet he must also assume the function of
a priest and be like the "Jew/in the pit" who "smiled/
comforting his companions" (p. 223).1 The poet as P

revealed in Paterson is the priest of the imagination,

the "light-bringer" who, by performing the ritual of

 

Wis-pg "

poetry, allows himself and others to escape death through

the "hole/in the bottom of the bag" (p. 212). But now

to Paterson itself since, as Williams said in his Auto-

biography, "The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies

his thought, and that in itself is the profundity. The

thought is Paterson, to be discovered there."

Williams begins Paterson with the idea that he will
pursue throughout the poem when he states at the beginning

of Book One that "Rigor of beauty is the quest", and

then asks, "But how will you find beauty when it is

locked in the mind past all remonstrance?" (p. 3).
Benjamin Sankey emphasizes Williams' problem with his

quest for beauty when he says that the place Williams
treats, "--modern urban civilization in the United States,
'synecdochized,' so to speak, by Paterson of the depres-

;ion and war years--" has been "so damaged" by events

utside the poet's control "that it is difficult for him
3

3 'love' it as he must do in order to make it his theme."

.d make it his theme he must, since by doing so he will

160
find a way to let the "earth's elemental powers enter his

work."4 Book One, as Williams claims in the Author's

note the prefaces the work, is an attempt to go back to

the sources of Paterson in order to show the "elemental

character of the place." By doing so he hepes to find a

way to "unravel" the common language, which, like the
Passaic Falls, should drop in straight lines from the

past into the present as the meeting ground of the intel-

lect and the emotions. Paterson, the man (a version of

Williams, himself),5 walking among the people of the

city, sees them as people who "walk incommunicado",

"automatons" living without ever making contact with

themselves or with one another.

What Paterson sees is a sterile mockery of life

being enacted by people whose "language is missing them"

and who, because they "do not know the words/or have not/

the courage to use them" (p. 11), will "die also/incom-

municado" (p. 11). So the problem is stated in these

first few pages of the poem: the modern society of

Paterson (and, by implication, ‘the United States as a
whole) is sterile; its people wander aimlessly, unaware

of their sources and unable to know themselves individually

or collectivelyas a society. After "stating" the problem,

Williams is quick to begin the unraveling process which

will hopefully bridge the gap between the people's minds

and their language. And it is here that he first intro-

duces the "primitive" ritual element into the poem.

 

“‘“""“‘,A,-.j

 

161

Following a prose section which highlights the mixed char-

 

acter of the new land, America, and the resultant break-
downcfiilanguage and culture, Williams describes a picture
he had seen in the National Geographic which shows the
solidarity and unity of a so-called "primitive" culture

in Africa. The dominant note of the picture is order; F}

the society is a highly structured one, and Williams' way .

 

of describing the picture definitely emphasizes the point 3

he is trying to make: EJ

...the 9 women
of some African chief semi-naked
astraddle a log, an official log to
be presumed, heads left:

Foremost

froze the youngest and latest,
erect, a proud queen, conscious of her power,

mud-caked, her monumental hair
slanted above the brows--violently frowning.

Behind her, packed tight up
in a descending scale of freshness

stiffened the others
and then...

the last, the first wife,
present! supporting all the rest growing

up from her--whose careworn eyes
serious, menacing--but unabashed; breasts

sagging from hard use..

Whereas the uppointed breasts
of that other, tense, charged with

jpressures unrelieved
and the rekindling they bespoke

was evident.
(pp. 13-14)

The first thing to note is that the husband of these nine

women is described by Williams as "some African chief",

the Paterson of Africa. He is the one man among many

162

 

women. But the most important point Williams is making

comes next: the women are straddling an "official log"--

a log that has a specific, ritualistic meaning in their
culture. And what effect does the high degree of structure

have on the people of the society?

The next two stanzas
The women are proud, erect in their 7“

answer this question.
bearing, conscious of their status as wives of the chief.

 

Even the oldest wife, though her eyes are "careworn" and

her breasts are sagging frOm "hard use", has a "serious,
. . F;
menacmg" look on her face and rema1ns unabashed. Her own

culture obviously gives her enough support to face any-
thing, whether it be the duties of first wife to a chief

or the courage to face the camera from a foreign society.
These women, members of a "primitive" African culture, do

not, from Williams' description, exhibit any of the aim-

the anxiety, or the desperation that is the

lessness,
They know their place

tone in the streets of Paterson.
in the society (they are arranged on the log "in a descend-

ing scale of freshness") and they know they are members
of a tradition which has given them a real identity as

human beings and which will continue to give their

descendants an identity. The breasts of the youngest

wife are full of milk, and the "rekindling they bespoke"

is symbolic of the unbroken line of tradition which con-

tinues into each new generation. These people are proud

pembers of a fertile society which, unlike the sterile

aterson, has an element of meaningful ritual (see in the

163

log, the order in which the women are placed, the mud-

 

caked face of the youngest wife); and their ritual,
Williams implies, makes manifest the beliefs of the
society thereby giving the people a solid base upon

which to build a structure that will sustain them.

 

Like the prose section which preceded this African
vignette, the prose section which follows further empha-

sizes the disparity between the fragmented, chaotic

 

Paterson and the unified, orderly African society. This {J

short section on the suicidal death of the young minister's

wife makes the African society appear even more meaningful.
The young Mrs. Cumming, like the African women, is also in

a tradition. She is the one wife that a Christian man of

the western world is allowed; but she obviously did not

feel the pride and sense of personal identity that the

young African wives felt. Married only two months and

supposedly "blessed with a flattering prospect of no

common share of Temporal felicity and usefulness in the

sphere which Providence had assigned her" (p. 14), she

leaps to her death rather than face that "prospect of...

Temporal felicity" with Mr. Cumming. Again, the words

speak for themselves. In this section about Mrs. Cumming

there is no talk of hard-used breasts, proud carriage,

official logs, or mud-caked faces. Instead of the earth/

iature world inhabited by the Africans, we are shown a

'orld in which words are used to mask the realities that

iman beings have to face. The talk here is of "Temporal

164
felicity", "Providence", and "earthly joy"; the little
bit of nature which does creep in is considered "beauti-
ful, wild and romantic." So Mrs. Cumming leaps into the
falls rather than live a life devoid of cohesiveness and

meaning.

Immediately following this section on Mrs. Cumming,

. I?!- .1“:

Williams restates what he has implied in the two prose
sections and the poetry section about the African women:

A false language. A true. A false language pouring--a
language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without

dignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear.
At least

it settled it for her.

 

(p. 15)

Both prose sections, the one concerning the "wild and
cultured life [which] grew up together in the Ramapos"
(p. 12), and the other concerning Mrs. Cummings' death,
testify to the society which has a "false language", to
the American society whose people have little awareness
of their roots. Sandwiched between these two sections,
the picture of the African women shows a culture that has
a "true" language, a "magic" which binds them into a
unified, structured, meaningful society.

In the next section of the poem, which shows Paterson
beginning "to know, to/know clearly (as through clear ice)
whence" he draws his breath (p. 21), Williams returns to
the Africans once more. Paterson, standing at the falls'
edge, begins to make associations which have broad impli-

rations. Watching the "mottled branch" swaying slowly with

 

165
giraffish awkwardness", his thoughts revert to the first
wife who also "with giraffish awkwardness" stands out
among the rest of the women, "her old thighs/gripping
‘the log reverently" (p. 21). She is like the mottled
'branch "that sings", the branch that, though attached
to the tree and drawing sustenance from the same ground

as the other branches, has a dignity of its own.

 

Paterson,

becoming aware of his own roots and his place in the

I
society, begins to identify himself with the branch and

 

“my ~

the African wife. Like them, he is different and will be r

1.

the one who as a poet/priest in his own society will hold
up the others; but his job has just begun. With him "the
book is still one thing, and the man who wrote it another"
(p. 29). However, the two men are beginning to fuse as
the second section of Book One comes to a close.

Section Three of Book One shows Paterson swinging
back and forth, much like the mottled branch (and, by
implication, the first African wife), from the present to
the past in an attempt to find and fix his own place in
the scheme of things. He begins by reminding himself
that things are more substantial than any word which

could be used to describe them:

How strange you are, you idiot!

So, you think because the rose

is red that you shall have the mastery?
The rose is green and will bloom,
overtopping you, green, livid .
green when you shall no more speak, or
taste, or even be....

(p. 30)

 

166

He also reflects that it is not enough to go searching

 

after roots because, after all, "Everybody has roots"

for the sake

(p. 32). Nor is the answer "to continue"

of "the university, what they publish//severally or as
a group" for they are nothing more than "clerks/got out
of hand forgetting for the most part/to whom they are P

beholden.//spitted on fixed concepts like/roasting hogs,

 

sputtering, their drip sizzling/in the fire" (p. 32)
"Something else" is needed, "something else the same" [
in.

(p. 32). What that something else is exactly Paterson
doesn't yet know for sure, or, at least, he doesn't know

He knows that the "language is missing

how to attain it.
He must do more

them", but the cure is not yet evident.

"research" into the problem.
The remainder of the section shows Paterson reflect-

ing on the contrasts between past and present, between
what could have been and what is, between life and anti-

life. The young colored girl who asks, "Will you give
me a baby?" stands for life struggling to survive in an

atmosphere of death, an atmosphere in which "A special

French maid" is retained "to groom/the pet Pomeranians--

who sleep" (p. 33). "Who restricts the knowledge", that
could mean the difference between life and death, between

poverty and plenty? Paterson doesn't know because there
has been so much confusion and clogging of "the avenues

3f information", but he again holds the university some-

'hat responsible for not "devising means/to leap the gap".

167

They block the release
that should cleanse and assume
prerogatives as a private recompense.
Others are also at fault because
they do nothing.
(p. 34)

Paterson begins to realize, however, that blaming

 

others is not the key to his own or others' salvation.

He must, instead, leap "into the mud and water" like the
"hoodlums" after the eels in the drained lake which
Williams describes in a prose passage. After all, "Those

who prepared the nets were not the ones who got the most

 

fish" (p. 35). Neither can Paterson run off after the
others, poets like Pound and Eliot, who go "toward the
peripheries--/to other centers, direct--/for clarity (if/
they found it)/loveliness and/authority in the world--"
(p. 36). He must "clamber up", "snail like, upon the
wet rocks/hidden from sun and sight--", but he must not
die "shut from/the world--and unknown to the world",
cloaked in "mystery" (p. 39). He must survive so that
"the myth/that holds up the rock,/that holds up the
water" can come forth and make known the words of the
"Earth, the chatterer, father of all/speech...." (p. 39).
And if the speech appears deformed, that is only proper
since the subjects made real by the speech are also
deformed. The choliambi, the "lame or limping iambics"
bf the Greeks "displayed their acute aesthetic sense of
ropriety", Paterson reflects. The Greeks recognized "the

lrmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the

168
distorted subjects with which they dealt. . ..Deformed

verse was suited to deformed morality" (p. 40). Paterson

realizes that he must write as he sees, that he must
create a language that reflects the reality around him

if i1: is to take on any significant meaning in the lives

«of the listeners. But he has to know his audience better F1

8.
first; he has to wallow in their "vices'and perversions"

if he is to write verse suitable to them. "A Sunday in

the Park" seems to be the perfect place to witness the

 

‘1 -— E
l .
‘.
w

"deformed morality" he must elevate into verse; and that

is where Book Two finds him.

After beginning to know his sources and the role he
must play as a poet/priest, Paterson decides to turn from

the falls towards the people in a further attempt to sort

out the strands which comprise his identity. He knows

that outside himself "there is a world", a world which he

must "approach concretely" (p. 43). If he is to be the

priest of this world, he has to know it as well as he

knows himself. He has to know what activates its people,

what rituals express the beliefs that bind them together

into a unit. Therefore, Book Two shows Paterson among the

people of Paterson as they act out their Sunday afternoon

rituals in the park. As he begins his walk over "the

ground dry" covered with "--roots, for the most part,

writhing upon the surface" (p. 44), Paterson stirs up a

number of grasshoppers. As they take flight his mind

rummmers "Chapultepec! grasshopper hill!", and he

 

169
immediately thinks of the Aztecs, the ancient people of
Mexico, whose society was unified by a number of meaning-
ful rituals until it was conquered by "insects" from
Spain. He thinks of "a matt stone solicitously instructed/
to bear away some rumor/of the living presence that has
preceded/it" (p. 47), perhaps the site of the Aztec PE
temples where their ceremonies were conducted. Later he
is to identify the poem as "the most perfect rock and

temple" (p. 81), the site at which, through language, his

23111;,

 

VJ:-

own society will be unified. However, as he is to say
towards the end of Book Two, "Stones invent nothing, only
a man invents" (p. 82); his job now is to walk through
the present temple of Paterson, the park, where "Loiterers
in groups straggle/over the bare rock-table...wa1king
indifferent through/each other's privacy" (p. 56). He
must know these people if he is to be their priest and
infuse a new life into their culture. He realizes that
"unless there is/a new mind there cannot be a new/line,
the old will go on/repeating itself with recurring/deadli-
ness" (p. 50). His duty as a poet/priest, therefore, is
to become one with the land and its people. He must see
with new eyes the world which surrounds him so that he

can erect a new temple, the poem, in which the ritual of
language will be performed. Hopefully, the new ritual

will heal the wounds of exile and divorce that infect

the citizens of Paterson.

 

170

"Walking", Paterson sees that the wounds are serious,
and he almost despairs of ever being able to make any
difference to this world he sees around him. At one point
in his walk, after witnessing the sterility of the park
in which only the "dogs and trees/conspire to invent/a
world--gone!" (p. 79), "His anger mounts. He is chilled F?
to the bone"; and he realizes that if he doesn't sing his 6

song quickly, his society, like the Aztecs', will also

 

disappear: é?

Poet, poet! sing your song, quickly! or
not insects but pulpy weeds will blot out
your kind.

He all but fails..

(p. 83)
At this point the female principle, the "She" of the
dialogue which runs through this section of the poem,
intervenes and demands that the poet help his peOple.
"Marry us! Marry us!", she cries, "Or! be dragged down,
dragged/under and lost" (p. 83). Like Mrs. Cumming,
however, who "was married with empty words", Paterson
feels it would be
better to
stumble at
the edge
to fall
fall
and be
--divorced
from the insistence of place--

from knowledge,
from learning--the terms

foreign, conveying no immediacy, pouring down
(p. 83)

 

171

than Unattempt to unravel the mess he sees around him.
"Sh€"is persistent, however; she tells him to "Go home.

Write. Compose", to "Be reconciled, poet, with your

world, it is/the only truth!" (p. 84). At this he flees

like the "scholars, poets and philosophers" who gather

at universities to hide behind words; but later, his mind
reawakened, and armed with the new-found knowledge he
gained in the park, he begins to scribble and "inclines

to believe/he sees, in the structure, something/of

interest" (p. 85). Paterson has reached a point at which

he can begin to build the temple where the rites of the
imagination will be performed with the tools of language.

He is now aware of himself as a person who had, like the

people in the park, been in exile from himself. Part of

a letter from Cress (the female poet whom Williams had

scorned at various times)6 at the beginning of Book Two

points to the state he had been in:

That kind of blockage, exiling one's self
from one's self--have you ever experienced it?
I dare say you have, at moments; and if so, you
can well understand what a serious psychological
injury it amounts to when turned into a permanent

day-to-day condition.
(p. 45)

Another letter from Cress which ends Book Two re-

emphasizes Williams' point. Like the professors and

scholars, he had been unaware of his sources and there-
fore had used words and literature "as something discon-
nected from life" (p. 86). "But in writing", Cress con-

tinues, "(as in all forms of creative art) one derives

 

1"!"

 

172

one's unity of being and one's freedom to be one's self,
from one's relationship to those particular externals
(language, clay, paints, et cetera) over which one has
complete control..." (p. 87). Art cannot be disconnected
from life and still have any meaning. Up to this time
Paterson had not faced the ground of his existence and
had therefore been unable to perform any meaningful ritual
with the language. He has not had "complete control"
over his medium because he has not had complete control
over himself. But now he is ready to "regain/the sun
kissed summits of love" (p. 85) as Book Three begins.

Before regaining the summits, however, Paterson must
"break down the pinnacles of his moods/fearlessly--/to
the bases...to the screaming dregs" (p. 85). Williams
had introduced the descent-assent at the beginning of this
section when he had written

The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind

of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even

an initiation....

The descent
made up of despairs
and without accomplishment

realizes a new awakening:
which is a reversal

of despair.
Believing that a man who wilfully touches bottom, even if

the "water" is "too cold", can "trust forces he didn't

 

 

173

7 . . .
even suspect were there" , W1111ams was conv1nced that a

creative plunge into the depths of his own being (up by
the falls in Passaic) was a prerequisite of the illumina-
tion he was seeking. Paterson/Williams had reached a time
in his life which demanded a creative plunge if he were
to stave off the stagnant wasting away of old age. Myers
suggests that Williams' primary aim in writing "The
Descent" (the same poem published separately) was to
"purge" what Jung had called "'the crucial danger to the
old'", the refusal to "follow the sun", the natural pre-
ference of hypochondria, and niggardliness."8 Perhaps
this is so. At any rate, Paterson/Williams knows surely
that "...Spring shall come and flowers will bloom" and
that if he is to do more than "chatter of his doom" (p.
77), he must rid himself of the "pulpy weeds" that
threaten his very existence (see p. 83). He must go
through a ritualistic purification which will destroy
any remnants of the Puritanism which has kept him out of
touch with his world. Like Oliver in Santayana's The
Last Puritan, Paterson has been out of tune with the
environment in which he lives (p. 94). As a citizen of
the New World, he has not been in touch with his natural
heritage, which is embodied in the Indians. Up to this
time, instead of immersing himself in the people and the
land in which he was born and lives, he has been living in
libraries. He has surrounded himself with books which

reveal the cultures and traditions of lands that have

 

 

174

little to do with America or Americans. Now he realizes,
however, that he can no longer look to the past or to

other cultures except to see what the ancients or the
"primitives" have to offer as models; models, that is, of
societies whose peeple have been bound meaningfully together
through rituals. The masking barrier of books he has F;
erected around himself must be destroyed if he is to

"love the locust tree/the sweet white locust" (p. 95).

And he knows it will cost "A fortune bigger than/Avery

 

could muster/So much/So much" to love "the shelving green/ gJ
locust/whose bright small leaves/in June/lean among flowers/
sweet and white at/heavy cost" (p. 95). He can still read
books for the "wind or ghost of a wind/in all books" which
echoes "the life there" (p. 95); but he can no longer fool
himself with the idea that the wind of the books is "a
wind/actual."

Williams says that we may be drawn into the library
to "break off/our minds' seclusion" and gain some inspira-
tion from the echoes of life in the books; but, like
Paterson, who has to come "back to his own/mind./in which
a falls unseen/tumbles and rights itself/and refalls"
(p. 96), we must not be forever "seeking, seeking,/down
the wind/until we are unaware which is the wind and/
which the wind's power over us" (p. 96). Rather than
let this happen, the library, which is "sanctuary to our
fears" (p. 97), must be ritually consumed by the same

flame which symbolically purifies Paterson, the would-be

 

175

 

poet/priest. And to show how desperately our society,

represented by Paterson, needs this ritual purification
and regeneration, Williams again juxtaposes sketches of

rituabtentered "primitive" cultures with the American

culuue whose rituals, if they can be properly called
F...

that,are almost dead. In Book Three, however, his focus

for Ufis purpose shifts appropriately from African natives

tx>the American Indians, our immediate cultural ancestors.

 

The first significant passage concerning the Indians .
{:3

occurs in Section One of Book Three. There Williams

contrasts the barbarism of the supposedly civilized white

culture with the truly civilized behavior of a culture

assumed by the whites to be savage. The sketch details

an incident in which two Indians were wrongly accused of
killing some pigs. The pigs had, in fact, been killed by
the white men themselves (p. 102). Turned over to a

garrison of white soldiers, the Indians are tortured
inhumanly and then killed while the officer in charge and
his "medicine man", the white physician, stand by and
watxfli the proceedings, "laughing heartily at the fun."
Also watching the cruel scene being enacted are some 24

or'.25 'Efemale savages" who were also prisoners; and, as

in the sketch about the African natives, the real focus

of this scene ison the women. What they have to say

defines the scene as Williams wishes us to understand it:

For shame! for shame! such unheard
of cruelty was never known, or even

thought of, among us.
(p. 102)

176

 

The shame of the white men is not the only important
point Williams wishes to make, however, as the short
paragraph following this episode shows. This paragraph
vividly contrasts the burial customs of the Indians with
those of the whites by showing the real importance ritual
played in the lives of the Indians. The paragraph, like
the ones depicting the torture of the two Indians, also
emphasizes the contention Williams makes in his American

Grain essays when he says that white men came to this

 

It: 5., ’

continent as conquerers who had no respect for either the
land or the people who inhabited it. The Indians, as

these passages clearly show, were in touch with the ground
of their existence; they were not in exile from themselves.
Their culture revolved around a distinct set of beliefs
which were manifested in the rituals with which they con-
ducted their daily life. Even when suffering extreme
pain, the Indian who survived long enough to dance danced
the Kinte Kaye, a "religious use among them before death."
Even in the face of death, the Indians were able to per-
form the ritual dance which evoked the power their beliefs
gave them. And once dead, the Indians were still under
the power of their "magic" and were treated with respect
by the surviving members of the tribe. As the short
paragraph concerning burial customs shows, the Indians
buried the wealth of a man with him, encasing him "with
such wealth as he possessed." What a contrast to the white

culture that, after a man dies, fights over whatever wealth

 

177
helmurleave behind. And the Dutch, who dug up the body
of'Uualndian in question in order to steal the furs, are
Williams' examples of the same white "imported" culture
thatlms no beliefs of its own and respects none of the
beliefs or customs of the natives of the new land. The
picture Williams paints of the white "civilized" society
How-

is a damning one on the basis of this section alone.

ever, he has yet more to say and more comparisons to make

 

as he thinks about "an earlier day, of prismatic colors"

(p. 109).
In the second section of Book Three, Paterson is in

the depths of his own purifying hell and Williams focuses

on the Indians and their rituals for a comparison. The

scene depicted shows a number of tribal elders going through

a ritual sacrifice which involves inhaling the fumes created

by throwing water on burning tobacco. The final paragraph

of this sketch tells of what happens once the tobacco fumes

have been inhaled:

While some are silent during the sacrifice,
certain make a ridiculous speech, while others
imitate the cock, the squirrel and other
animals, and make all kinds of noises. During

the shouting two roast deer are distributed.
(p. 114)

What Williams says in the poetry following the sketch makes

clear the point he is trying to make. He draws an associa-

tion between the Indians who are breathing. the smoke in and
the nflrites who "breathe" the books in. Though it is true

that.IN1th the Indians and the whites in this case are

178
"warping the sense to detect the norm, to break/through the

skull of custom/to a place hidden from/affection, women

 

and offspring", they, instead of achieving their purpose,
"lie/huddled (a huddle of books)/antagonistic,/and dream of/
gentleness-~under the malignity of the hush/they cannot
penetrate and cannot waken, to be again/active but remain--
books/that is, men in hell,/their reign over the living

ended" (p. 115). This ritual of the Indians fails to evoke

 

"1.11 .r‘

anything except imitations of animals and "all kinds of
noises", just as the ritual performed by men who try to
gain inspirations for writing by spending their lives
buried in libraries (analogues to the hut built by the
Indians) produces nothing but incomprehensive "scholarship."
This white man's ritual also gives birth to "all kinds of
noises" which are divorced from life--"Geeze, Doc, I guess
it's all right/but what the hell does it mean?" (p. 114).
To Williams just any ritual is not enough, whether
it is the white man's retreat into the libraries in order
to pay homage to dead ideas, or the Indians' retreat into
a teepee to pay homage to gods which are no longer power-
ful as symbols. The flames of a ritual are "flames with
a requirement, a belly of their/own that destroy--"; they
cannot be simply "fires that/smolder/smolder/a lifetime
and never burst/into flame" (p. 117). In this instance,
at least, the Indians are in no better shape than their
ydrite brothers; they, too, have lost touch with their

sources and have drifted into apathy and empty rituals.

179

Williams again uses the Indians, this time to illus-

trate a people whose rituals held meaning for their

society.9 This next prose sketch comes in a section of

thermmm that shows the doctor/poet/priest in a bad light;
he has had a small dog killed because it nipped him several

times. The section on the Indians tells of another dog

which is killed. A Chieftain has died and is being mourned

The warrior's brother kills his own favorite

by his tribe.
dog, "a much loved animal", during the ritual burial sacri-

fices, and he lays the animal's body beside the body of

his brother. The dog killed by Paterson was killed without

purpose; the dog killed by the Indian was killed out of

The result is the same: both

respect for his brother.

dogs are dead. But one dog died as a meaningful sacrifice

(everyone in the Indian tribe understood and respected
the brother's act) while the other dog was killed without

thought in a very meaningless way. However, meaningless

actions by Paterson are soon to be a thing of the past.
Purified by fire, he is now ready to go over the falls,

make the descent, and hopefully rise again to a new life.

Coming close to the edge of the falls, Paterson knows that

"somehow a man must lift himself again", that "again is

the magic word" (p. 135). Once safely over the falls, he

looks closely at the things around him that have lost their

shape because of the inundating water; he is now seeing
with clear eyes the society which surrounds him. It is a

society covered with mud. He has made the descent and now

180
his;flm is "to begin to find a shape--to begin to begin
agahfk however, "to find one phrase that will/lie married

beshheanother for delight.../seems beyond attainment"

UL 140). But not for long. He is through with the
Lunaries and what they can teach him about either life

(M'language. He has decided that as a poet/priest who

will infuse new life into his people, he must "let the
words/fall any way at all--that they may/hit love aslant"
(p. 142). And he also has come to realize the seriousness

and enormity of his power. Williams had opened section

three with a warning:

It is dangerous to leave written that which
is badly written. A chance word, upon paper,
may destroy the world. Watch carefully and
erase, while the power is still yours, I say to
myself, for all that is put down, once it
escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds,
the corn become a black smut, and all libraries,
of necessity, be burned to the ground as a

consequence.
(p. 129)

He closes it with the truth he had learned in the process

of purification. Knowing that the past offers no answers

beyond a certain point and that "the future's no answer",

ei ther , Paterson thinks:

...I must
find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself--
comb out the language--or succumb

--whatever the complexion. Let
me out! (Well, go!) this rhetoric

is real!
(p. 145)
TTue process of "combing out the language" is not an

easy one, however, as the first section of Book Four shows.

181
Paterson has just gone over the falls; now he has to sort
out the things he sees around him, wash off the mud, and
try to construct a language which will serve, like the
Indian rituals, as the manifestation of his culture's
vision. What he first encounters in his quest for meaning
is decidedly sterile. The affair between the two lesbians,

as well as his "affair" with one of the two girls, will

produce nothing of value. Even if the affair between the

girls could be meaningful on some levels, its meaning is
negated by Phyllis's non-commitment. And Paterson, flirt-
ing with feeling in his affair with Phyllis, is still
married to his past and is afraid to make a full commitment
yet to anything else. The main focus, however, in this
first section of Book Four is not simply two sterile love
affairs. The section is entitled "The Run to the Sea" and

gives a clear indication of what Williams had in mind when

he wrote in the opening passage

3 local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea...

in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to
one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice;

an enforced pause;
(p. 2)

In this section Williams attempts to show how his plan
[of action, his search for a "redeeming language", has been
perverted so that the "river of life" becomes a tunnel

whitfli leads not to a life-giving sea but to a "sea of

bltunl."10 James Thirlwall, in his article,"William Carlos

182

Williams' 'Paterson'",11 quotes Williams' comments "For

thelnwlication of Book III (1949)", which clearly indi-

catelfilliams' design for the whole poem:

...This seemed to me to be what a poem was for,
to speak for us in a language we can understand

if the language must be recognizable. We must
know it as our own, we must be satisfied that

it speaks for us. And yet it must remain a
language like all languages, a symbol of

communication....

...The brunt of the four books is a search for
the redeeming language by which a man's prema-
ture death...might have been prevented. Book
IV shows the perverse confusions that come of
a failure to untangle the language and make it
our own as both man and woman are carried
helplessly toward the sea (of blood) which,
by their failure of speech, awaits them. The
poet alone in this world holds the key to their

final rescue.1

This modern "Idyl" that Opens Book Four, then, is not

simply about what happens when two women and one man get

together in a perverted triangle. It is about "Two silly

women!" (p. 149) and "..Paterson! Oh married man!/...the

city of cheap hotels and private/entrances..." (p. 154)

who are locked in an unrelentless flow toward a "premature

«death." They are the one man and the "Two women. Three

women./Innumerable women..." that Williams speaks of in

Book One (p. 7). The women are the flowers that spread

their "colored petals/wide in the sun" only to have the

"tongue of the bee" miss them (p. 11). And even as early

as Book One their fate is foretold:

183

They sink back into the loam

crying out
--you may call it a cry
that creeps over them, a shiver

as they wilt and disappear:
Marriage come to have a shuddering

implication

(p. 11)

Before they "sink back into the loam", however, they
illustrate by both their actions and speech that "The
language is missing them/....The language, the language/
fails them/They do not know the words/or have not/the
courage to use them" (p. 11). Phyllis is clearly one of
the "--girls from/families that have decayed and/taken to
the hills: no words", one of the girls who "...may look
at the torrent in/their minds" only to "turn their backs/
and grow faint--" because "the language/—-the language/is
divorced from their minds,/the language. .the language!"9
(pp. 11-12). In Book One Williams had made clear that at
one time there had been a kind of "wild and cultured life"
in Phyllis's ancestral area, the Ramapos. By Book Four
he is dealing primarily with the present in the person of
Phyllis, and the contrast is vivid. Phyllis herself is
aware of her problems, as are Cerydon and Paterson, but
she like the others has no comprehension of what to do
about them. Writing to her father Phyllis asserts that
"Maybe your family did once own the whole valley." then
asks, but "Who owns it now?" (p. 150). The answer Williams

has already given, of course, is the theme of the whole

poem. Those who own the valley now are the "distorted

 

184
subjects" one can only write about in "crabbed" and
"Deformed verse" (p. 40). When Corydon asks Phyllis,
"What sort of life can you lead/in that horrid place
Rach-a-mo, did/you say?", she is merely echoing Williams'
own sentiments.

The city, of course, fares no better in Williams'
estimation. Corydon's first description of it leaves
little to be desired. "That is the East River", she says,
"The sun rises there." Two simple statements of fact that
no one can argue with. But she continues

And beyond, is Blackwell's Island. Welfare Island,
City Island . whatever they call it now .
where the city's petty criminals, the poor
the superannuated and the insane are housed
Look at me when I talk to you‘
--and then
the three rocks tapering off into the water
all that's left of the elemental, the primitive
in this environment. I call them my sheep .
(pp. 151-152)
These "docile" sheep have become Corydon's only companions
in the city surrounded by islands of the insane. Phyllis's
reaction to Corydon's "sheep" takes all the romanticism
out of the older woman's game, however; in another letter
to her father Phyllis says of Corydon and her "sheep",
But she's a nut, of the worst kind. Today she
was telling me about some rocks in the river
here she calls her three sheep. If they're sheep,

I'm the Queen of England. They're white all right
but it's from the gulls that crap them up all

day long. ( 152)
p.

185

If Corydon is aware of Phyllis's scorn, however, her

awareness does not cure her romanticism. The poem she
has written and proceeds to read to Phyllis is full of

the same romanticism that allows her to be blind to the

reality of the city in which she lives. Her poem is

important, however, in that it reflects much of what

Williams has come to believe about the American city and

what it stands for. The language of the poem is all that

Williams abhors about what he considers the meaningless

 

speech of Americans, but the sense still comes through,

for the most part. New York is a city of "houses

placarded:/Unfit for human habitation", a city of the

"Condemned ./....where the tunnel/under the river starts...
Under ground, under rock, under river/under gulls . under
the insane ,", a city where ". the traffic is engulfed
and disappears ./to emerge . never" (p. 164). It is a

city where "A voice calling in the hubbub" blares the news

"no wit shall evade, no rhyme/cover" (p. 164). Corydon

claims in an aside that she'd like "to spill the truth,

on that one", that she'd like to tell about the city as

it really is. But when Phyllis asks, "Why don't you?",

her only reply is "This is- a POEM!"

, and a poem in Corydon's
mind does not tell the truth about anything.

Enough of the truth emerges, however, to damn New
York and by implication all cities in America like it.
In "the tall/buildings.. ..where/the money's made..." the

men and women "...stand torpid in cages, in violent motion/

186
unmoved/....predatory...un-/affected/UNINCONVBNIENCBD/
unsexed", a city full of un-people in which the only
sexual symbolism Williams can muster involves the sterile
thrust of elevators through "the greased shafts of the
tall buildings ." (p. 165). Whether the people are packed
"woman to/woman" or "man to woman" is irrelevant because
"their faces gone/...without recognizable/outline.../
expressionless", they are really nothing more than
"canned fish" who talk' "excitedly . of the next sandwich ./
reading, from one hand, of some student, come/waterlogged
to the surface following/last night's thunderstorm . the
flesh a/flesh of tears and fighting gulls" (p. 166). "Oh,
I could cry!", says Corydon, "cry upon your young shoulder
for what I know. I feel so alone ." (p. 166). But alone
she will remain, and all others like her, until the poet,
Paterson, finds a curative language that will free her
from her premature death in the midst of life.

Section Two of Book Four is a continuation of Williams'
search for the redeeming language, and it is a search that
is intensified and more specific than it has been before.
The poet, Paterson, is getting his wits about him and
focusing on the substance of his search. He looks about
him now and doesn't see merely chaos and death; he sees
discovery and the steps that lead to it. As Sankey puts
it, "The second section presents several analogues for

nil-3

what the poet does when he"invents. This section is

in many ways one of the most positive sections of the poem

187

because the emphasis is on discovery. No longer is

Paterson trapped in the city of death he has experienced

in Section One; instead, he is on the sure path to the

discovery of his redeeming language and he knows it. What

he must find now is the "gist", the bond that will fuse

in his mind the various elements he sees as relevant to

his new language. In trying to find this gist, he, as

Sankey suggests, presents analogues to what he is trying

to do.
The key analogue is the discovery of radium by

*
Madame Curie. In Curie's work the poet finds fused all

the elements necessary to produce a great discovery.
Curie, the "nurse-girl" who for years had been "corroding"
as her mind ate "away a rind/of impermanences, through
books/remorseless" (p. 172), is at least able to walk
"solitary/as tho' in a forest.../...(of ideas)/before the
assembly..." to receive "international acclaim..." (p.
172) because she has performed her ritual correctly. Like
the Viennese doctors of A Voyage to Pagany, she is a
"light-bringer", one who was willing to work ". .in the
old shed used/by the medical students for dissection./

Winter. Snow through the cracks/lwith coarsened hands/by

the hour, the day, the week/to get, after months of labor .//

 

*
Sankey claims that Williams is concerned with both

the Curies, but the husband figures so little in his argu-

ment I see no reason to explore his role in any great
Williams, I think, chose Curie because she is a

detail.
woman and thereby illustrates his contention that the mind

is "neutral" (p. 179).

188
a stain at the bottom of the retort/without weight, a
failure, a/nothing. And then, returning in the/night,
to find it/ . / LUMINOUS!" (p. 178). She was able to
combine work "with coarsened hands" and "love, bitterly
contesting", in such a way that the "..dissonance/in the
valence of Uranium" (p. 176) was allowed to reveal itself
as the key to the discovery.

"Dissonance", Williams reminds us, "(if you are
interested)/leads to discovery" (p. 176). It is not
simply love or work "that smashes the atom", but a combi-
nation of the two--"antagonistic/cooperation is the key,
says Levy ." (p. 177). An "act of intellectual love"14
combined with work accomplished at a great cost to the
worker are the keys, then, to any discovery, the gist
Paterson has been searching for since the poem began.
Fused within the mind, "..a bead linking" the two "conti-
nents", "brow and toe" (p. 179), love and work become a
means to "order, perfect and controlled/on which empires,
alas, are built" (p. 179). Sankey explains the "alas" as
Williams' recognition that any discovery can eventually
lead to an empire built upon sterile tradition which no
longer has any relevance to society.15 However, as long
as one is aware of the dangers inherent in any tradition,
the benefits to be derived from the discovery giving birth
to the tradition far outweigh the negative possibilities.
.As Williams says, from any discovery "may issue, a con-

taminant,/some other metal radioactive/a dissonance" (p.

189
l79),that will allow new discoveries to be made, thus
tweaking down any empire built upon previous discoveries.

Another analogue to the poet's creativity is pre-

sented in the "discussion" on credit which dominates a

large part of Section Two. Joel Conarroe, in his book,

William Carlos Williams' Paterson (Philadelphia: Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), considers the passages
on money theories "(particularly the last six pages of
Book IV, sec. ii)" to be the "least impressive passages
in Paterson." As he says, "Williams is weakest when he
states, strongest when he shows" (p. 130).' He rightly
points out, however, that the theme of the misuse of
money is tied very strongly with the other major themes

of the poem and is therefore valid, though presently very

weakly. Furthermore, Conarroe notes that Williams had to

deal with this "cancer" he saw destroying his world con-
sidering his belief that the poem was a "weapon in the
war against corruption" and that it was "the poet's task
to reveal the evil of modern economic policy" (see pp.
117-130). Beginning with an "Advertisement" by one
August Whlters, Newark, N.J., Williams builds a case

against the usury Pound had so often criticized as the

Inain cancer in the society. "MONEY", says Williams, equals

a 'kHJKE (i.e., crime/under the circumstances: value/

chipped away at accelerated pace.)" (p. 182). But it is
IN) joke "when a man is dying/of a brain tumor"; and that

is fun» Williams had come to View the American society.

190
Itis,}w believes, a society in which the poor are
penalized while the rich-get richer, a society that does
not reward the "widow either/long past fertility," a
sochfiw'in which money, like Uranium, "throws out the
fire",'h..sequestered enriches avarice, makes/poverty",

andzhsin general "...the direct cause of/disaster" (p.

182). like the "trade winds that broached a continent"

and.drove the colonists' ships forward, money drives

'2..the wind in the trees, the hurricane in the/palm

trees, the tornado that lifts/oceans ." (p. 182). Williams'

answer to the diastrous situation wrought by the wrong use

of money is like the answer he had in Book Three regarding

the wrong use of knowledge:

Let out the fire, let the wind go!
Release the Gamma rays that cure the cancer

. the cancer, usury. Let credit
out . out from between the bars

before the bank windows
(pp. 182-183)

To understand Williams' position it is necessary to

understand his theory of credit versus money. Conarroe

is of particular help here. As he notes,
...the six pages of anti-interest outpourings
derive much of their meaning from a carefully
worked-out equation between radium and credit.
If! this pairing, money is related to uranium,
the base metal that can be of no good to any
man, and credit is the radium, the radiant l7
gijrt, which has the power to heal and save.

Crtxiit, like radium, must be released before any cure

can take place. Credit is "the Parthenon", and unlike

money, cannot be stolen as Phideas stole the gold entrusted

191

tolum “L 184). Money is "small time/reciprocal action

relhumrecedent to streamlined/turbine" while the regen-

erathm credit is "Uranium basic thought-~leadward/

credit/....THE GIST" (p. 185). The

Fractured : radium

smmagenius employed by Curie, if put to work on the
problem of money, would likewise release "the gist" and

wouldlnejust as much a discovery as radium had been--

'Umvvenshun./O.KAY/In venshun" (p. 185). Credit, which

"makes solid", like any invention, "is related directly

value created and received, 'the

to the effort,/work:
radiant gist' against all that/scants our lives" (p. 186).

It makes the "Difference between squalor of spreading

slums/and splendor of renaissance cities" (p. 186).

Money, then, is not only something that robs the poor but
also a definite factor in the poverty of art in a ritualess

society, or, rather, a society whose only ritual seems to

be the "sequestering" of money to enrich "avarice." Where

"IN venshun" exists, life takes on an importance it

cannot have otherwise. As Conarroe so aptly puts it:

IN
venshun....

...fuses the ideas on credit and radium with

the theme of the redeeming language. It is
tflrrough invention, through the new line, that
the deadly repetition of the old is prevented,
just as through credit both poverty and avarice
arm; balked. It is for such a "radiant gist"

iri the language that the poet seeks.

Sandwiched between and around the two analogues to

the poet's invention are some passages directly related to

192

the poet and his art. Like Williams' young son who stands

as a future Curie in Williams' mind (see pp. 171-172),

the young poet, Allen Ginsberg, whose lengthy letter is
quoted in full towards the beginning of Section Two, stands

as the future poet, the one who will take up where the old

poet (Williams/Paterson) leaves off. Writing as "an

unknown young poet", to Williams, "an unknown old poet",

Ginsberg embodies already what, Williams' goals had been

over the years. "All that I have done has a program",

says Ginsberg, which he hopes will lead "to a renewal of

human objectivity which I take to be ultimately identical

with no ideas but in things" (p. 174). He envisions for

himself "some kind of new speech--different at least from
what I have been writing down-~in that it has to be clear

statement of fact about misery (and not misery itself),

and splendor if there is any out of the subjective wander-

ings through Paterson" (p. 174). Like Williams, Ginsberg

"sees" misery, but he carries within him "mainly the

splendor....which all free men do" (p. 174). And it is

this splendor which he wants to release via the creation
of a new speech, a speech that will, like Curie's work,

sift the radium from among the ashes of everyday life.

Section Three of Book Four, which was supposed to

have been the final section of the poem, sees the poet

swing between the past and the present in his continuing

However, the search is no

search for the new language.

longer a violent one; rather, it is similar to Curie's

 

193

stirring of her cauldrons (p. 177), slow, regular,
determined. The search here in Section Three is also filled
with interspersions of nostalgia. The poet is nearing his
death and it is natural for him to look back over the years
to see where he has come from in preparation for where he
is going. And where he is going, at least temporarily, is
the sea, "a sea of blood/--the sea that sucks in all
rivers" (p. 200), the sea that will mean his true end if
he doesn't leave behind a contribution to all men in the
form of art. 80, aware that "The ocean yawns" close at
hand, the search, though not violent, is still urgent.
If he is not to drown in the sea of "indifferent men"
that surrounds him,19 he must make one last major effort
to pull together all he has learned in order to find the
life-giving "gist"--his new ritual language.

The question that opens the section, "Haven't you
forgot your virgin purpose,/the language?" (p. 187),
refers, no doubt, to the apparent lack of concern for
the language in Section Two. The poet's answer, "What
language? 'The past is for those who lived in the past,...'"19
turns out to be rather flip in the face of what follows.
Paterson/Williams is still vitally concerned with the
language but he is older, wiser, and realizes that whatever
he has done or will do is not the final answer. The ritual
language he has been searching for will be but one step in
nuui's ongoing struggle to rise above any physical limits

imposed upon him. Therefore, the poet is quieter, more

194

assured, less desperate, in his sifting through experience
to find the gist. He has gone over the falls and is making
his "Run to the Sea", carried now by the tides. He is
asleep and "--all but for the tides, there is no river,/
silent/now, twists and turns/in his dreams" (p. 187). It
is almost time for his physical death, and while it may
not be "too late" to make further discoveries, it is not
a time to begin anew--that will be left for a future poet.
To an urgent directive, "Come on, get going. The tide's
in", Paterson's only reply is

Leise, leise! Lentement! Che va piano,

va lontano! Virtue,
my kitten, is a complex reward in all

languages, achieved slowly.
(p. 188),

Williams continues the same tone throughout this sec-
tion using an inscription on an old ash-tray as his "motto":
"Virtue is wholly/in the effort to be virtuous" (p. 189).

The work done by the scientist, by the poet, by anyone in

the act of creation, is as important as the discovery

itself because any search for the gist "...takes connivance,/
takes convoluted forms, takes/time!" (p. 189) and in itself

20 Paterson has not become "reconciled"

becomes a’new form.
with his world as "the only truth!" (p. 84), but he has
come to realize that "No one mind/can do it all..." (p.
191). When "All the professions, all the arts,/idiots,
criminals to the greatest/lack and deformity, the stable

parts/making up a man's mind--fly/after him attacking ears

and eyes" (p. 191), he no longer flees as he did in Book

195

Tho, "pursued by the roar" (p. 84), but rather "runs

smooth/in the effort" realizing that "To bring himself in,/
hold together wives in one wife and/at the same time

scatter it,/the one in all of them" is "...only/a dream

or in a dream" (p. 191).
To realize that his original intent is "...only/a
dream or in a dream", however, doesn't weaken its importance

in Paterson's mind. The obvious answer to the statement,

"--you cannot believe/that it can begin again, again, here/

again . here" (p. 200), is that of course it can, that in

fact the whole message of the poem, the "dream of/the

whole poem..." revolves around the belief that personal,

physical death is unimportant in the face of the art

created by the person who has died. Paterson's death,

therefore, his "Run to the Sea", means little in terms of

Williams' whole intent. Warned to turn back "...from the

shark, that snaps/at his own trailing guts, makes a
sunset/of the green water" (p. 200), Paterson's reply is

that "...the time sea is/no more than sleep is . afloat/

with weeds, bearing seeds ." (p. 200). His life as an

individual is unimportant; what is important is what he
leaves behind (the seeds) that will inspire other men to
‘visions beyond the confines of our physical limitations.

It is wishful thinking that "...the great theatre of
Dionysius/could be aroused by some modern magic/to release/
udurt is bound in it" (p. 201) and it is inapprOpriate as

well.:yince what inspired the ancient Greeks will not serve

196

to inspire modern Americans.21 The "Seed/of Venus", the
new "Paterson" that pulls himself out of the water at the
end of Book Four, however, will hopefully serve the same
function in modern times as Odysseus did in his times.
The "Flotsam of some sort" that emerges from the sea on
the Atlantic shore and heads inland followed by his faith-
ful dog is the poet of the new age who must "...continue....
a new construction upon the syllables"22 in the ongoing
effort to bring light to all men trapped in the dark.

Williams had intended that Paterson would consist of
four Books (see the Author's Note which prefaced the first
edition of Book One in 1946 and which is reprinted in the
New Directions paperback used in this analysis); when Book
Five appeared in 1958, therefore, it created critical havoc
among those who had trusted Williams' original intentions.
Book Four did seem to complete very aptly what Williams
had set forth in the Author's Note as his plan. "...Four",
he had said, "will be reminiscent of episodes--all that
any one man may achieve in a lifetime." So why Book Five?
Thirlwall gives as good an answer as any when he says

In 1953 it was clear that Paterson was not

ended, since Williams' education in life was
not ended....In inscribing a copy of Book IV

to me in 1955, he wrote: "We've reached the
end 3% 'The River'--but not yet if I can make
it." '

Crippled by succeeding strokes, forced to give up his medi-

cal.1xractice, Williams finally had the time to begin "re-

thinking life and love."24 The later poems and Paterson V

are the outcome of that "rethinking."

 

197

Indicated "To the Memory of Henri Toulouse Lautrec,

Ewinunm, Book Five seems at first to have little to do

wiflifmterson One to Four. Paterson himself almost disap-

peansas a person and Williams, the poet, definitely

emerges as the central figure, all of which seems to

reinfinte some critics' view that Book Five was indeed

an.addition and not part of the fabric of the whole poem

as first envisioned by Williams.25 As LOuis L. Martz

notes, however, Williams knew what he was about as his

blurb on the dust jacket of Book Five indicates: "I had

to take the world of Paterson into a new dimension if I

wanted to give it imaginative validity. Yet I wanted to

keep it whole, as it is to me."26 The poet, Paterson, who

lifted himself from the sea in Book Four, headed inland to
begin anew the quest after the language; but his success

or failure was left wholly to the imagination until Book
Five appeared. Book Five, then, more than anything else,
,gives "validity" to the doctrines that Williams had been

espousing for almost fifty years. In Book Five the poet

as Ixriest.emerges in both subject matter and structure,

and the "indirection" so present in all of the Books takes

on a positive meaning as Williams declares that

What but indirection
will get to the end of the Sphere?
Here

is not there, .
and will never be.
The Unicorn

has no match .
. the artist

or mate
has no peer .
(p. 211)

 

198

And'Tmath", which also "has no peer", becomes increasingly

unimportant in the realization that

We shall not get to the bottom:

death is a hole
in which we are all buried

Gentile and Jew.

The flower dies down

and rots away

But there is a hole

in the bottom of the bag.

It is the imagination
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole

we escape
(pp. 211-212)

Book Five is a celebration of the imagination and those

who employ it, a celebration of "A WORLD OF ART/THAT

THROUGH THE YEARS HAS/SURVIVED!" (p. 209), and a reaffir-

mation that "through art alone, male and female, a field

of/flowers, a tapestry", can man find assurance of eternity.
As in all his previous work, Williams insists that it

is "Not prOphecy! NOT prophecyl/but the thing itself!"

that is important, and so as Section One opens he determines

that:"the rocks/the bare rocks/speak!" (p. 207). What they

havra'to say is that what seems important in this world,
whether one is a virgin or a whore ("an identity:/--through

its disguises" [p. 210]), becomes unimportant before what

is real. And what is real is the imagination. In answer

to the question, "--the virgin and the whore, which/most
endures ?", Williams asserts that "the world/of the imagina-

‘ticni nuast endures" (p. 213). And what is real are

 

199

Pollock's blobs of paint squeezed out

with design!
pure from the tube. Nothing else

is real
(p. 213)

The tapestries that hang in the Cloisters, the scenes
depicted there that "draw him imperiously/to witness them"

(pp. 231-232), are real and comfort the poet as he is

approaching death. Whether the girl in the tapestries was

a virgin or whore has become unimportant through the ages

since in reality "The moral/proclaimed by the whorehouse/
could not be better proclaimed/by the virgin, a price on
her head,/her maidenhead!" (p. 208). The "living fiction"
is "a tapestry/silk and wool shot with silver threads/a

milk-white one—horned beast" (p. 234) that has survived

through the centuries to "refresh" the poet, "make him
think/of bus schedules and how to avoid/the irreverent"

(p. 232). The "dream of/the whole poem" dealt with in

Book Four (p. 200) becomes more concrete in the poet's
mind as he further confirms that "The dream/is in pursuit!"
and that "you cannot be/an artist/by mere ineptitude"

(p. 222). He recognizes now that the "cure" that he him-
self has been searching for began "perhaps/with the
abstraction/of Arabic art" and has continued into con-
tenqnirary times in the work of "Freud/Picasso" and "Juan
Grijfl' (p. 222). And the implication is that he (Williams/
Paterson) must be added to the list since he is "Paterson,

thfiajKing-self" (p. 234) who is able to see "love/mounted

naked on a horse/on a swan/the tail of a fish/the blood-

200
thirsty conger eel" (p. 223). Only a great artist would
a
be able to see love in such disparate places or be able,
like the Jew in the pit, to realize what is important even
in the face of imminent death:
I saw love ......
and laughed
recalling the Jew
in the pit
among his fellows
when the indifferent chap
with the machine gun
was spraying the heap
he had not yet been hit
but smiled
comforting his companions

comforting
his companions

(p. 223)

Now as death approaches for him, Paterson, like the
Jew, sees himself as the comforter, the one who, like the
tapestry makers of several centuries ago, must be true to
the world around him if he is to survive to serve others
as they have served him. Like Peter Brueghel, he must
perform the ritual honestly; he must see and present things
"from the two sides" so that "the/imagination" can be served
as it must be served--"dispassionately" (p. 228). As he
performs his final ritual of the poem, the old poet knows
that he should be careful not to invest anything with more

than is contained in it alone if he is to be successful as

 

* .
Williams had dealt with this same phenomenon before
in his short stories (see esp. Life Along the Passaic River)
where he often presented seemingly opposite emotions or
situations as merely two perspectives of the same thing.

201

a life-bringing priest. If he is successful, his work
will, like the tapestries, present "All together, working
together--" in a love "that stares death/in the eye (p.
106). As early as Book Three Paterson had known what the
cure for death was:

Sing me a song to make death tolerable, a song

of a man and a woman: the riddle of a man

and a woman.

What language could allay our thirsts,

what winds lift us, what floods bear us
past defeats

(p. 107)

Now in old age, remembering "when he thought/he had

but song but deathless song?

forgot" (p. 207), long past the descent and despair suf-
fered earlier and having paid the high cost of loving the
locust tree (see p. 95 and p. 237), Paterson sings his
"deathless song" to love and to those who have given
meaning to his life. Having solved "the riddle of a man/
and a woman", by uniting the virgin and the whore with
his imagination,27 and having come to realize that the
river always returns to its beginnings, Paterson listens
once more to the advice given him long ago by his English
grandmother: "The past is for those that lived in the

past. Cessa!" (p. 239). He has done "enough", or at

 

*
A very early poem of Williams', "The Wanderer-~A

Rococo Study", has an old woman who, Williams confesses

in IWTWAP (pp. 25-26), was Williams' grandmother. He had,
he admits, endowed her with "magic qualities." Here, many
years later, she appears in Paterson, the same old woman
"raised to heroic proportions" (IWTWAP, p. 26).

202
least all he can do. "--1earning with age to sleep" his
"life away" (p. 239) in the comfort that "time has been
washed finally under" (p. 233), all he has to say at last
is that
The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know,
a choice among the measures

the measured dance....

We know nothing and can know nothing
but
the dance, to dance to a measure

contrapuntally,
Satyrically, the tragic foot.

(p. 239)

If he has been successful, and Williams thought he
had been with his use of the variable foot here in Book
Five,* the poet/priest (Williams/Paterson) will leave
behind the new ritual language he had dreamed of when
Paterson was first conceived. Unlike the dead rituals of
the library and the scholarship carried on there, the new
ritual focuses (as Paterson does at the end of the poem)
on the present. As Williams said when he began Paterson:

For the beginning is assuredly
the end-~since we know nothing, pure

and simple, beyond
our own complexities.

(p. 3)

 

*

The variable foot is the answer to "free verse" that
Williams had been searching for for many years. In IWTWAP
(pp. 80-83), Williams notes that Paterson II had been a
"milestone" for him, because in it he had introduced "with-
out realizing it at the time of writing" his "final

203
The present is all we can know, and if the poet is true to
his own present, his "music" will survive him to bring

light to future generations.

 

conception of what his own poetry should be. He goes on
to say that his "two leading forces" had been "to know
life" and to try "to find a technique of verse." "Now",
he claims, "I had it-—a sea change. The verse must be
coldly, intellectually considered. Not the emotion, the
heat of life dominating, but the intellectual concept of
the thing itself."

‘10.
11.

12.
13.

204

Chapter VII-Notes

When speaking of Joyce in his essay, "A Note on the
Recent Work of James Joyce" (Transition, 1927),
Williams had called the Irish writer "a priest"
who wrote in "a priestly style" (p. 77). In
Paterson, Williams assumes the same role himself
and, like Joyce, tries to reach "truth through
the breakup of beautiful words" (p. 75).

Williams, Autobiography, from Chapter 58, reprinted
in the New Directions 1963 edition of Paterson.

William Sankey, A Companion to William Carlos Williams's
Paterson (Berkeley, Calif.: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1971), p. 2.

Sankey, p. 2.

Walter Scott Peterson, An Approach to Paterson (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967),

p. 19.

Sankey, p. 35.

Neil Myers, "Decreation in Williams' 'The Descent'."

Myers, p. 327.

The tobacco ritual performed by the Indians was dealt
with in Chapter II. Its implications are fitting
here as well.

Sankey, pp. 167-168.

John C. Thirlwall, "William Carlos Williams' 'Paterson':
The Search for the Redeeming Language--A Personal
Epic in Five Parts", New Directions (1961), 252-

310, p. 254.

Thirlwall, p. 254.

Sankey, p. 179.

14.
15.

l6.
17.
18.
19.
20.

21.

22.
23.
24.
25.
26.

27.

205
Sankey, p. 185.

Sankey, p. 194, a quote from Williams Buffalo Collec-
tion.

Conarroe, pp. 125-126.
Conarroe, p. 127.
Conarroe, p. 127.
Conarroe, p. 127.

Thomas R. Whitaker, William Carlos Williams (New
York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968), see p.
147. Whitaker makes the same point in another
way.

Sankey, see pp. 208-209. Sankey's argument on Book
IV, though convincing for the most part, breaks
down in some places, especially when he discusses
Williams' strong desire to return to past cultures
or have them "speak" to us.

Williams, Autobiography, p. 392.

Thirlwall, p. 282.

Thirlwall, p. 283.

Thirlwall, p. 282.

Louis L. Martz, "The Unicorn in Paterson", Thought,
XXXV (Winter 1960), 537-554. Reprinted in William
Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. by J. Hillis Miller (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1966).

Martz, p. 71, a quote from Williams which appeared on
the dust jacket of Paterson, Book Five.

CHAPTER VIII

"From this dream of retirement the
stroke of death awakened him,
and saved him."

Sherman Paul

The Music of Survival

"Sooner or later", says Williams in "The Rewaking",1
one of his last poems, "We must come to the end/of
striving//to re-establish the image the image of/the rose//
but not yet." The old and very sick man Williams was in
those years between 1950 and his death in 1963, the years
that saw the completion of Paterson and the creation of
his last poems,2 had no intention of slipping quietly out
of life without some final "statements" on the things that
had concerned him for so many years. Williams' writing in
his last decade of life was especially vital, honed to a
fine edge of perfection in both imagery and intent. It
was as if the poem and the man had become one, had merged,
as Williams had always hoped, into a unity that together
produced a very viable ritual for all men, if only they
would listen and respond. As Hugh Kenner says in "William
Carlos Williams: In Memorium",3 "years of tireless

practice" allowed Williams to "write in fifteen minutes

206

207
a poem as durable as the language can conceive"; and
"those were the quarter-hours he lived for."
Increasingly aware of death, aware that

Ripped from the concept of our lives
and from all concept
somehow, and plainly,
the sun will come up
each morning
and sink again
("Shadows", Journey to
Love, p. 151)

Williams strove in these later poems to capture once and
for all the "things the imagination feeds upon,/the scent
of the rose" in order to be startled "anew" ("Shadows",
p. 152). The struggle wasn't an easy one because, as
Williams emphasizes,

...we experience
violently
every day
two worlds
one of which we share with the
rose in bloom
and one,
by far the greater,
with the past,
the world of memory,
the silly world of history,
the world
of the imagination.
("Shadows", p. 151)

The struggle between these "two worlds" was to dominate
almost all of the later poems, including Paterson, Book

Five.4

The world of the "instant", the world of the actual
garden, is continually played against the world of the
image, the world of the image, the world of the garden that
stands for love in all its complexity.5 Unwilling to let

go of the life of the moment, yet knowing that he is soon

208

to die, Williams declares again, as he had in Paterson,
Book Five, that "Only the imagination is real!" and that
if a man dies, "it is because death/has first/possessed
his imagination" ("Asphodel", p. 179). Insisting that
"men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found..."
in poems ("Asphodel", pp. 161-162), Williams reiterates
again and again the importance of the poet, the artist,
as the only one capable of helping us to escape the death
of the imagination, the only death we need worry about.
He asks in one poem, "Come on!", "Do you want to live/
forever?--" and answers, "That/is the essence/of poetry"
(p. 139). Williams did want to live forever through his
art; and he wanted his readers to achieve a like immor-
tality by performing with him the ritual that united the
imagination and words into a life-bringing religious canto.

Williams increasingly, then, sees himself as the
priest and his work as the ritual which must be performed
if life is to have any meaning at all beyond the physical.
In these last years he also came to see himself more than
ever as only one of a long succession of artists whose
art has lived on to serve succeeding generations. Not
that he viewed himself and his poetry as anything less
than unique. He did, however, see himself as one important
artist within a tradition of art that stretched back to
the Middle Ages and beyond.6 This was, no doubt, a comfort

in the face of physical death; if others had survived

209

through their imagination, then he might also survive if
his art accomplished its purpose.

In another poem, "The Host", after describing a
restaurant scene in which all are partaking of the food
put before them, Williams declares that

No one was there
save only for
the food. Which I alone,
being a poet,
could have given them.
But I
had only my eyes
with which to speak.
(p. 94)

In "The Yellow Flower", he speaks of "curing" the sick
and asserts "I have found no cure/for the sick/but this
crooked flower/which only to look upon/all men/are cured"
(p. 89). They are cured, that is, only if the artist is
able to transform the "yellow,/twisted petals" into a
work of art that speaks to all men:

But why the torture
and the escape through
the flower? It is
as if Michelangelo
had conceived the subject
of his Slaves from this
--or might have done so.
And did he not make
the marble bloom? .....

But also
I have eyes
that are made to see and if
they see ruin for myself
and all that I hold
dear, they see
also
through the eyes
and through the lips
and the tongue the power
to free myself

210

and speak of it, as
Michelangelo through his hands
had the same, if greater,
power.

(pp. 90-91)
And as the poet frees himself "through the lips/and the
tongue", so also might he free others.
What anxiety there is in these last poems is the
anxiety of a man who sees clearly and finally the importance
and gravity of his responsibility as an artist and as a

7
man:

There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you .....

And so
with fear in my heart

I drag it out
and keep on talking

for I dare not stop.

_Listen while I talk on
against time.

It will not be
for long.

("Asphodel", p. 154)
What we hear if we listen while he talks "on against time"
is essentially the same artist and man who wrote his first
poems and essays forty or fifty years before; Williams'
themes haven't changed. What is new is the certainty of
his convictions. It is almost as if Williams, through
his illnesses and his brushes with death,had made the
real descent he had spoken of figuratively so many times.

In these last years he is "reborn" and in many ways becomes

a priest of the "redeeming language."

211
When The Desert Music and Other Poems appeared in
1954, Williams had already suffered the first of a series
of strokes that would eventually leave him a virtual
cripple. The knowledge of his illness, though not essen-
tial to an understanding of his poems, helps us place
what he says more accurately within a whole body of work.
"The Descent", which opens the Collection (and which also
appears in a slightly different form as part of Paterson,
Book Two) becomes more than a symbolic study of descent
and rebirth in the abstract. The "Descent" is Williams'
descent, a real descent into the depths of despair brought
on by actual illness. The despair is temporary, however,
if all is given to love8--not the shallow love of youth
but the mature love of old age, a love unmarred by shadows:
With evening, love wakens
though its shadows
which are alive by reason
of the sun shining--
grow sleepy now and drop away
from desire
Love without shadows stirs now
beginning to awaken

as night
advances.

(pp. 73-74)

What is not given to love, what is not "accomplished" as
it should be results in death, "a descent...endless and
indestructible" (p. 74).

Love, then, takes on great importance in Williams'
religious "credo." It is, in fact, that on which all else
hinges.9 This love Williams speaks of, "a love/less than/a

young man's love but,/.../more penetrant, infinitely/more

212
penetrant" ("To Daphne and Virginia", p. 77), becomes
part of the message which must be transmitted via his art.
"Be patient", he insists in the same poem,"that I address
you in a poem,/there is no other/fit medium" (p. 75).
The poem, the language, always supremely important in
Williams' developing credo, is reaffirmed as the key
ritual. But the ritual has been clarified by Williams'
insistence that love provides the sanctification neces-

sary for rebirth.10

It has assumed its great importance
primarily because "the mind/that must be cured/short of
death's/intervention" ("Asphodel", p. 159) "lives there"
("To Daphne and Virginia", p. 75). The mind may be "the
cause of our distresses", but it is necessary because "We/
should be lost/without its wings to/fly off upon" (p. 75).
The "rituals of regeneration", then, are motivated by
Williams' longing for a renewal of experience:11
...A new world
is only a new mind...
And the mind and the poem
Are all apiece.

As Guimond notes in The Art of William Carlos Williams,12
part of the reason for Williams' increased concern with the
mind grew out of old age and illness limiting his "capacity
for finding poetry in his immediate environment." Sherman
Paul disagrees with Guimond when he says that Williams,
being limited in "range of contact by illness", turned to

13

memory as a primary source of poetic material. These are

but partial explanations, however, since Williams always

213
found poetry wherever he was whether it was in a mental
hospital ("The Mental Hospital Garden") or in a restaurant
("The Host").14 No doubt illness and age played a part
in Williams' choice of topic, but to say it had a limiting
effect is to disregard seriously Williams' lifelong themes
and their natural maturation. Williams was probably
speaking of his own work when he said in "The Orchestra"
that
it is a principle of music
to repeat the theme. Repeat
and repeat again,
as the pace mounts, The
theme is difficult
but no more difficult
than the facts to be
resolved. Repeat
and repeat the theme
and all it develops to be

until thought is dissolved
in tears.

(pp. 81-82)

Williams' major concerns in the last decade, then,
were little different than they had been all along. They
emerge more clearly and more forcefully because he has
abandoned almost everything but the main themes. The
themes of love and the intellect combined by means of
the language to produce a healing ritual are repeated
again and again "as the pace mounts" and death draws
nearer. Williams limits himself and perhaps his self-
limitation is due to his awareness of approaching death.
His role of priest has not been perfected yet, so he seems
more anxious than in his earlier poetry. As he claims in

"To a Dog Injured in the Street", he "can do nothing/but

214
sing about" his pain any more, and the singing assuages
him. Like Rene Char, he has suffered so greatly that all
he can speak of is "sedgy rivers,/of daffodils and tulips/
whose roots they water" (pp. 86-87). He no longer wants
to dwell on "The cries of a dying dog" or on the suffering
he had portrayed in so many earlier poems. Nor does he
want to dwell for long on the failings of the age or of
other writers. At times his disgust rings out, as in
"Deep Religious Faith", when he says
Shame on our poets,
they have caught the prevalent fever:
impressed
by the "laboratory,"
they have forgot

the flower!
which goes beyond all

(p. 96)

But his main concern is with the positive; his "litany"

laboratories!

to Rene Char is more than the formal praise of a fellow
poet. It is actually Williams' credo, arrived at after
years of struggling:

Rene Char
you are a poet who believes
in the power of beauty
to right all wrongs.
I believe it also.
With invention and courage
we shall surpass
the pitiful dumb beasts,
let all men believe it,
as you have taught me also
to believe it. 15

(p. 88)
Nowhere is this "credo" more effectively illustrated

than in Williams' great love poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny

215

lenwer"', which appeared in the 1955 collection, Journey

to Love. "The Desert Music"

could also be used to illus-

trate Williams' beliefs but, as Sherman Paul suggests,
'"Fhe Ihesert Music" lays more emphasis on "working through
the terror to the assurance that underwrites composition"16

‘thail it does on the relationship between love, beauty and

the ithellect. The poet of "The Desert Music" is the

{must struggling to assure himself that he is, indeed,

important in the cultural milieu in which he finds him-

self.17 The poet of "Asphodel" seems to have survived the

struggle, risen above it, to realize at last his place as

a saviour in a very real sense. Paul had noted in his

discussion of "The Desert Music" that the poet, though

perhaps not a "culture hero", is still needed to "save

the culture, to lift it up."18 The Williams of "Asphodel"

is that saviour who has learned to say the right words
and, more important for Williams the man, the Williams of
"Asphodel" has come to believe definitely that the right
words, if said in the right way, make the difference
between sterility and productivity, between life and death,
in any culture.

Placing himself among the dead, and choosing the
aqflmflel as his symbol of re-wakened love, Williams opens
hislong love poem by declaring that he was "cheered" to
"know/that there were flowers also/in hell" (p. 153). The

lmlllw speaks of here is the taste of death he had

recmnfly experienced, and it is this brush with death that

 

 

 

 

216
now colors his whole existence so that he begs for time
to recall a "whole flood of...memories."
Working backwards in time through the use of his
memory, his intellect, he hopes thereby to work forward

from near-death to a new life. This working through time

 

toward a new celebration of the light is important for *3
the man, but it is even more important for the poet since .

what he may accomplish for himself may also be accomplished

for others. If he understands life well enough, he can ,j-

re-interpret it for others in such a way as to bring new
meaning to their lives, just as the revitalized memories
bring new meaning to his life.

Beginning with a recollection of the book of pressed
flowers he had kept as a boy, the "asphodel,/forebodingly,/
among them" (p. 155), Williams starts his Journey to Love
and renewed life. Wanting to remind us of the fleeting
quality of life, Williams equates the pressed flowers with
death but adds as well that the flowers "retained/some-
thing of their sweetness/a long time" (p. 155). Though
the color faded quickly, the odor, "a curious odor,/a moral
odor", the same odor that drew Williams to his wife,
lingers to provide a bridge from the past to the future.
It is the secret of this bridge that Williams is searching
for, for by it he thinks he can obtain immortality both
as a man and as an artist.

Williams goes on to explain that words are the only

possible vehicle for crossing this bridge that will unite

 

 

 

217

thetwovmrlds of the past and the future. The poet in

thegnesmu must somehow "make" a poem that will stand

thetmstcfi'time in such a way that future generations can

remiit mulsomehow breathe in the very odor of that long-

The poem, always so complex ("beyond any

 

ago present.
silemxn however complex—-", see pp. 159-160), provides F?
l

a meethugplace in which ageless universal feelings and

truths can mingle in a new setting provided by a poet of

 

the "local."~ Figurative speech, poetry, makes the lis-

tener or reader recall past events and feelings, a pre-

requisite to enlightenment. Without such recollection,

the present remains flat, devoid of imagination, because
imagination, Williams has come to believe, is sparked

best by a full awareness of the past combined with a

"If we are to understand our time"
..death,/if it
And

hope for the future.
and "know, what [we] have to know/about.

be real", we "have to take it apart" (pp. 162-163).

this taking apart must begin with finding the "key" to

"our time"
not in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries,
but in earlier, wilder

and darker epochs...
(p. 162)

"Asphodel", then, is more than a traditional love

poem; it is the model by which Williams hopes to explain
his philosophy of the imagination and his concurrent

belief in the value of words as a bridge between the past

and the future. Living "to breathe above the stench",

 

218

Williams emphasizes that he "was lost/failing the poem"

(p. 164). He concludes, moreover, that "failing the

poem", all would be lost.

is a flower/dedicated/howbeit/to our destruction", Williams

Reminded "that the bomb/also/

reminds us that we can take heart if we can but grasp that
"There is no power/so great as love/which is a sea,/which

is a garden--/as enduring/as the verses/of that blind old

man/destined/to live forever" (p. 166).

Williams knows that few men believe in the power of

the imagination. "They believe rather/in the bomb/and

shall die by/the bomb" for most men are shortsighted and

live only in the moment acting out the avarice and fear

buried in their hearts (p. 167). The minds "kindled",

for example, by the discovery of America and "set dancing/

to a measure, a new measure!" were soon deadened and

overpowered by the greed and resulting death of the orchid

that had been the New World. "The measure itself", claims

Williams, "has been lost/and we suffer for it"; we "come

to our deaths/in silence" (pp. 168-169).
What Williams is attempting in "Asphodel" is to make

clear that the function of poetry is religious, that

without poetry men are as good as dead even if they are

physically alive. Nilsen captures the thrust of Williams'

conviction when he claims that poetry is "the most pro-
foundly satisfying verbal response to reality, indispensable

both for the dying man and for the man who wants to articu-

late his experience of love."19

219
DmMnated by thoughts of death and waste, Williams
faces his own death with a mixture of bitterness and
lume. lfitter because of the bomb and all it says about
nunfisnahne, Williams retains some hope because of the
promhneof spring he sees in cycles of nature:

I have invoked the flower
in that

frail as it is
after winter's harshness
it comes again

to detect us...

So may it be
with the spring of love's year

also
if we can but find

the secret word

to transform it.
(p. 170)

Searching for "the secret word", Williams, as usual,
looks not to the libraries but to the people and things
around him. Several "...pictures of crude force" come
"persistently" to his mind (p. 171) and a man in a subway
to remind him of his father contains "all men/.and all
women too/...in his loins" (p. 174). This same man, from

whom Williams builds "a picture of all men", brings also
to mind the long tradition of art that stretches back to
the "rituals of the hunt" left "in the walls/of prehis-

toric/caves in the pyrenees" (p. 174):

what draftsmen they were--
bison and deer.
Their women had big buttocks.
But what
diuiftsmen they were!
by my father's beard,
what draftsmen.
(p. 174)

220
Williams increasingly sees himself as part of the
tradition begun by the ancient cavemen, those excellent
draftsmen who were, by their artistic rituals, able to

transform experience into something more lasting than the

experience itself. These ancient craftsmen were the

priests of their time; what they left on the walls of

their caves infuses them with life and makes them brothers

not only to succeeding generations of artists but to all

other men as well. The ancient men have not died because

their art remains as a link between them and us. Their

art revives a past to which we can relate, and from which

we can take hope.
Williams, then, has a mission, one he began as a
very young man, which is coming to fruition only now in

his last years. Declaring once again that "only the imagi-

nation is real!" and noting that he has "declared it/time
without end", Williams concludes that

If a man die
it is because death
has first

possessed his imagination.
(p. 179)

"So", says Williams, "let us love/confident as is the
light/.../that there is as much to say/and more/for the

tune side" as for the other, "which John Donne/for instance/

among many men/presents to us" (p. 180).

For Williams, years that began with illness and near

death come to a close with a hymn to the light, to the art

that.}uas survived through the ages. "Medieval pageantry/

 

 

 

221

islummn", says Williams, "...and we enjoy/the rumor of

ij/aszhrour world we enjoy/the reading of Chaucer" (p.

181);ibr we are all human and united in a bond cemented

by Huatreasures wrought in each generation. Great art

in any society is a ritual performed by priests that

enables that art to survive as a link from one genera-

tion to another. The ritual of art raises life beyond

the animal level into a realm of spirit and imagination;
art for Williams makes life more than simply bearable.
"It is all/a celebration of the light", concludes Williams,

whether it be "a priest's raiment/(or that of a savage

Chieftain)" (p. 181).
No wonder that Williams' last poetry, including the

last book of Paterson, concentrates on the artist and his

work. Whether it be a series of poems to a great artist

(Pictures from Brueghel) or a small "set" of poems cele-

brating his granddaughters ("3 Stances", pp. l8, 19, 20),
"the living quality" of Williams' mind, like Brueghel's,

is dedicated to "art, art, art!" (p. 8); and the "melody

line is/everything" (p. 18) to the old man. What Williams

wrote of Sibelius in the last poem, "Tapiola", also stands

as a tribute to Williams himself:

...The power of music,

(If composition, the placing of sounds together,
edge against edge, Musorgski the half-mad Russian
-.had it and Dostoevski who knew the sound. In such

style whistled the winds grateful to be tamed,

we say, by a man...

222

...The storm entered your mind where all
good things are secured, written down, for love's
sake and to defy the devil of emptiness.

(p. 67)

Whether or not Williams was a great poet seems hardly

a necessary question to be considered at this time. Whether

he accomplished his purpose, however, is another matter.
Having set out as a young poet to remake the language so
that it could cure the cancerous imagination of modern men,

Williams arrived at old age not quite satisfied with his

accomplishments. The ritual Williams had hoped to perfect,

the all-pervasive ritual of language, is perhaps imperfec-

tible. Some of the bitterness that creeps into his late

poetry perhaps reflects Williams' own awareness of the
impossibility of making the language all he had hoped to

make it. Nonetheless, Williams clings to his thesis to

the end, convinced beyond any argument that a vital language

is the key to a viable culture.
Williams, of course, never had a rigid structure in
lnind for his religion of the redeeming language. Language,
by inS'very nature, is uniquely suited to Williams' pur-
poses simply because it is a medium instantly available to
all. Unlike painting or music, which are at once more
universal in appeal and moreparticular in taste, language
is a common denominator of a specific cultural entity.
Williams recognized early that for America to become a

viable culture it would have to have a language of its own

Williams spent 50 years of his life trying to make such a

language a reality .

223

By the time Williams' last poems were written, he was

sathfified to some extent with his own work. The "variable

foot", so important in his mature poetic methodology, was

self-satisfaction.

 

to a large degree responsible for Williams'
In it he felt he had found the native speech rhythm of the

Americanpeople;20 and to find this rhythm had been his F?

goal for many years. Almost all of his late poems were

written employing the variable foot, with the lines placed

w“ -
. .-
u“

on the page like this:

 

1‘6. .
i '1

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

like a buttercup
upon its branching stem--

save that it's green and wooden--

I come my sweet,
to sing to you.
(p. 153)

To get too caught up in the line placement, however,

is a perversion of what Williams had in mind when he was

developing the rhythm. As Roy Harvey Pearce notes in his

essay, "Williams and the 'New Mode'", the "mystique" behind

the new line is what is important. "The only measured form

of language...is its poetry", writes Williams, and "There-

fore ineffective as it may appear to be as a weapon, in

the public eye, it is only by attacking there....that our

lactions can have a lasting effect."21 The new line is a

means to an end, not the end itself. The new line com-

bined with the "thing" (where Williams had always insisted

ideas originated) produced the ritual, redeeming language

he luui been searching for all his writing life. Unlike

Icaiwus in "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" (p. 4),

 

224
Wilthmw had learned by the time he wrote Pictures from
Brueghel that he had to work within the rigidly defined.
limits of language to get off the ground and stay there.

Like the farmers he describes in the same poem, Williams

 

has learned that pageantry surrounds us, is available to
us, if only we perform within rather rigidly defined F1
boundaries. Icarus falls because his vehicle is unsuited "

to his task. The farmers will succeed because they are

 

in touch with the soil from which they wish to produce _,
food for their bodies. They don't try to plough with E?
paper. The poet, also, like Brueghel in "Self-Portrait"
(p. 3), must have "no time for any-/thing but his painting",
and he must be "concerned with it all" ("The Hunters in
the Snow", p. 5) if he is to "complete the picture" (p.
5). Williams, like Brueghel, "saw it all/and with his/
grim/humor faithfully/recorded/it" ("Children's Games",
p. 14), for ultimately "It is all/a celebration of the
light" ("Asphodel", p. 181).
Williams was much like the snake with its tail in
its mouth by the end of his life.* As a very young poet
he had begun his search for the life-giving poem, the
ritual language that he hoped would bring him the immor—
tality he was searching for. Throughout the ensuing years

he had maintained that the poem should have first place

in "KHI'S lives. He was so certain of his premises that he

 

*
See Paterson, Book Five, pp. 214-233.

225

His assumptions

aboutjmmtry precluded preaching to his audience.22

hardly ever alluded to them directly.

Always working within the rigid dimensions of the image,

Wianmw hoped that he could breathe life into the words

so as to literally bring the image to life. If he could

accomplish such a vitalization of language, Williams was

certain that life itself could be renewed for all who

would come to his temple of art. Writing, especially

poetry, was virtually a matter of life or death to him.
If the image of the rose cannot "startle us anew"

("Shadows", p. 151), then we are, in Williams' view,

already dead in the only sense that matters. And the

blame for our death would be put largely on the shoulders
of the poet, for it is his duty to provide us with the
"gist", the key, to life in all its dimensions. Like
Madame Curie, who spent countless hours stirring the

cauldron of pitchblende in order to extract the "LUMINOUS"
radium (see Paterson, pp. 175-179), the poet is obliged
to spend his lifetime stirring the cauldron of life so as

to find the luminOus image that can cure the spiritual

cancer of his age.
Williams' whole thrust as a writer was aimed at

extracting the Word from all words. He hoped that with

this Word he could produce an image so actual that the
other participant in the ritual, the reader, would, with

the poet, experience a heightened sense of reality not

sensed before. If the poet was successful, the poem, the

226
words, would become the necessary difference, the link,

between merely existing as isolated individuals and
*

existing forever, both backwards and forwards in time,

as members of a universal band of believers. Believers

of what? Of the beauty that exists beyond the mere super—

ficialities of disease, death, an earth-bound existence.

Believers, like Rene Char and Williams, in the imagination,
in love and in the light that will penetrate, if we let

1t, "all crevices/of [our] world" ("Asphodel", p. 182).

Of course, Williams was not supernatural. He did not

descend from heaven; nor did he easily unlock the doors

that stood between him and the light. The years preceding

the depression, the years of the depression, the Objecti-
vist years, were difficult ones for Williams. His initial

confidence as a writer had been shaken by both the trends
in American poetry, especially the reversion to academia
prompted by Eliot's contribution, and the misunderstanding
of his own poetry, which confronted him at every turn.
Far from being the priest of the imagination during those
years, Williams was more the struggling altar boy, but an
altar boy trying to learn the ritual without the priest

to emulate. Those were the years of Williams' descent,

his private journey to hell, his trial from which he would

emerge either a priest or merely a somewhat sophisticated

versifier. These are Williams' assumptions about himself.

 

*
See "To Mark Antony in Heaven", Selected Poetry,

p. 51.

 

1r. .

 

227
Ikewascflear, though not explicit, about the assumptions
fromlfis earliest days as a poet until his death. Poetry,
art,ums a ritual which required a priest, one who had
been tried by a descent into the depths of his being, his
own hell. .Anything short of a priest is not a true poet.
It is the poet's business "to organize///sounds/and hold
them/to an assembled order/in spite of the/'wrong note'"
("The Orchestra", pp. 80-81). If he can do that, if he
can make music, perform a ritual with images, then he
knows, and can make real to others, "thetruth.../past
all defection" ("The Gift", p. 61).

In‘a poem to his wife, written towards the end of
his life, Williams summarizes his own position and what
he had been trying to achieve through the years:

Let him who may
among the continuing lines
seek out
that tortured constancy
affirms
where I persist
let me say
across cross purposes
that the flower bloomed
struggling to assert itself
simply under
the conflicting lights
("To Be Recited to Flossie
on Her Birthday", p. 35)
Everything Williams wrote was one writing; everything
he said was one speaking. He was, like the pink locust,
'U\:flower]incredibly resilient." And he does "persist--"

in tine "galaxy of poets/a rose" ("The Pink Locust", pp.

141—142).

228

Chapter VIII-Notes

William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel, in
Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New York:
New Directions, 1962), p. 70. All poems referred
to in this chapter will be from this edition
unless otherwise stated and will be noted simply

by page number.

 

1‘ '
u
iams‘

 

The poems contained in Pictures from Brueghel and
Other Poems, which include The Desert Music,
first published in 1954 by Random House; Journey
to Love, first published in 1955 by Random House;

and Pictures from Brueghel.

1.1 '-

In Profile of William Carlos Williams, ed. by Jerome
Mazzaro (Columbus, Ohio: Charles Merrill Publish-
ing Co., 1971), p. 116. First published in
National Review, XIV (1963), p. 237.

Linda Wagner, in The Prose of William Carlos Williams
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press,
1970), notes that "Asphodel" as well as several
other poems were titled "Paterson" in early drafts,

p. 168.

Thomas R. Whitaker, in his book, William Carlos
Williams (New York: Twayne Publishers Inc.,
1968), offers a good discussion of Williams'
concern with the garden and the sea in Journey

to Love. See pp. 156-158.
Edith Heal, I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 22.

lhelge Normann Nilsen, in his article, "Notes on the
Theme of Love in the Later Poetry of William
Carlos Williams" (ES, L (June 1969), pp. 273-283),
contends that in his later work Williams "is in
search of the supreme fiction, a poetic structur—
ing of reality which can give man a sense of mean-
ing and fulfillment at the time when he needs it
most, at the approach of death" (p. 281). Nilsen's
assertion is true, but Williams' interest is not
Inerely a tangent of his later work; the search

229

for "the supreme fiction" had been going on for
decades. As Williams himself had said in 1929

in "A Point for American Criticism" in SE (pre-
viously published in Transition, 1929), "They
[the critics] forget that literature, like all
other effects, by genius transcends the material,
no matter what it is. That it by itself, raises
the thing that is to be observed into a rare
field." Page 86.

8. Sherman Paul claims that "The Descent" marks Williams'
faith in the "unconquerable self" and in the
"irrepressible force of its life." He goes on
to say that "The Descent" also prefaces the action
of "self-recovery" in "The Desert Music", p. 63.

9. Nilsen insists that the poetry of Williams' old age
is dominated by the theme of love. What he calls
the "Objectivist impulse" in Williams gives way
"to a new fascination with the complex intimacy
of the relationship between a man and a woman"
(p. 275). Though this is true, it is certainly
not a complete picture of the poet who ultimately
saw poetry as a means to renewed life.

 

10. Nilsen, p. 281.
ll. Nilsen, p. 275.
12. Guimond, p.

13. Paul, p. 68.

14. Linda Wagner has brought to my attention that many
of these poems had come directly from scenes in
A Voyage to Pagany. Knowing that, however, does
not weaken my point that Williams' mind was always
fresh, even if he used old material in a new way.

15. Nilsen notes that Wallace Stevens believed that "the
function of religion is really the function of
poetry" and that "once we have realized this we
must discard religion and replace it with poetry"
(p. 281). Williams never states his position so
definitely, but, if pressed, would probably have
said the same thing. By his last years he had
certainly come to believe that poetry was the
only way out of the "bottom of the bag" (Paterson,
pp. 246-247).

16. Paul, p. 68.

17.

18.
19.
20.

21.

22.

230

Imul'points out that the problem of "The Desert
Music" is the problem of survival of the artist
and how his survival is linked with the survival
of his culture. In this respect it is central
to an understanding of Williams' whole position
on ritual and art.

Paul, p. 90.
Nilsen, p. 281.

See IWTWAP, p. 82, for Williams' ideas on his
"variable foot." Also see Denis Donoghue's
essay, "For A Redeeming Language", in William
Carlos Williams, A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. by J. Hillis Miller, especially pages 126-130.

Roy Harvey Pearce, "Williams and the 'New Mode'",
in William Carlos Williams, ed. by J. Hillis
Miller, pp. 101-102. The section from Williams
that Pearce quotes is from "The American
Language-~Again", Pound Newsletter, No. 8
(Oct. 1955), pp. 2-7.

In Paterson, Book Four, Williams states what was
the essence of his own poetic practices when
he says:

Kill the explicit sentence, don't you

think? and expand our mean-/

ing--by verbal sequences...

(p. 189)

Anything said explicitly was dead, as far as
Williams was concerned, simply because being
explicit limits the boundaries of both the
writer's and the reader's imaginations.

 

 

 

B I BLI OGRAPHY

 

‘31"!

10.

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‘m.

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"‘mmm!“