William Carlos Williams' "Paterson": Language and Landscape [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512801361

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W I L L I A M CARLOS WILLIAMS'

Ρ atcrson Language and Landscape

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS'

Paterson Language and Landscape

by

JOEL CONARROE

UNIVERSITY

OF PENNSYLVANIA Philadelphia

PRESS

Copyright ©

1 9 7 0 by the Trustees of the University of

Pennsylvania

A l l rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card N u m b e r :

73-92854

M r s . W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s and N e w Directions P u b l i s h i n g Corporation have kindly granted permission to quote passages by D r . W i l l i a m s . Material in copyright is used as f o l l o w s : W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s , Palerson. Copyright © 1 9 4 6 , 1 9 4 8 , 1 9 4 9 , 1 9 5 1 , 1 9 5 8 by W . C. W i l l i a m s . C o p y r i g h t © 1 9 6 3 by Florence W i l l i a m s . Reprinted by permission of N e w Directions Publishing Corporation; W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s , Selected Leiters. Copyright © 1957 by W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s . Reprinted by permission of M r s . W i l l i a m C a r l o s W i l l i a m s ; Collected Earlier Poems. C o p y r i g h t 1 9 2 8 , 1 9 5 1 by W i l l i a m C a r l o s W i l l i a m s . Reprinted by permission of N e w Directions P u b l i s h i n g Corporation; Collected Later Poems. Copyright 1 9 4 4 , Г948, 1 9 5 0 , © 1 9 6 3 by W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s . Reprinted by permission of N e w Directions P u b l i s h i n g Corporation; Selected Essays. C o p y r i g h t 1 9 3 1 . 1936, 1938, 1940, 1942, 1946. 1 9 4 8 , 1 9 4 9 , 1 9 5 1 , 1 9 5 4 by W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s ( w o r l d rights g r a n t e d ) . Reprinted by permission of N e w Directions Publishing Corporation; Picturej from Brueghel and other poems. C o p y r i g h t 1 9 4 9 , 1 9 5 1 , 1 9 5 3 , 1 9 5 4 , 1 9 5 5 , 1 9 5 6 . © 1 9 5 7 , 1 9 5 9 , i 9 6 0 , 1 9 6 1 , 1 9 6 2 by W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s . Reprinted by Permission of N e w Directions Publishing C o r p o r a t i o n ; Previously unpublished a n d / o r uncollected material, Copyright © 1 9 6 9 by Florence H . W i l l i a m s . Reprinted by permission of N e w Directions P u b l i s h i n g Corporation f o r M r s . W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s . Paterson, Collected Earlier Poems, and Collected Later Poems were published in Great Britain by M a c G i b b o n & K e e Ltd., and passages are reprinted by permission. T h e quotation f r o m Collected Poems, 1908-1962 © Г963 by T h o m a s Stearns Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace & W o r l d . T h e passage f r o m Essays and Introductions by W i l l i a m Butler Y e a t s reprinted by permission of T h e M a c m i l l a n C o m p a n y . Material from this book appeared, in somewhat different f o r m , in several journals: Part of chapter one appeared as " A Local Pride: T h e Poetry of Paterson," in PMLA, and is reprinted by permission of T h e M o d e r n Lang u a g e Association of A m e r i c a f r o m V o l . 84 ( 1 9 6 9 ) , © 1 9 6 9 . pp. 5 4 7 - 5 5 8 . A section of chapter two was published as " T h e ' P r e f a c e ' to Paterson" in Contemporary Literature, V o l . 10, N o . 1 ( © 1 9 6 9 by the Regents of the University of W i s c o n s i n ) . A version of chapter six appeared in the Journal of American Studies, V o l . II, N o . 1 ( A p r i l 1 9 6 8 ) . Other brief passages w e r e published in the American Quarterly and in " W i t h o u t Invention N o t h ing Is W e l l Spaced," The Explicator ( © 1 9 6 9 , The Explicator). ISBN

0-8122-7612-4

Printed in the United States of

America

For

Harriet

and

Janey

Remembering it As the bole expands He counts the rings of his self Collects the years, like bark Lives here, lives Here, giving this wood his name Calling it home. — F r o m "His Third Decade" —Dabney Stuart

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

this book I have received help and encouragement from many people. I am especially grateful to Mr. Donald Gallup, Director of the Yale University Library, and to Miss Anna Russell and Mr. David Posner, who assisted me at the Lockwood Memorial Library Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. I am also grateful to Emily Wallace Harvey, Peter Conn, Kathleen Swaim, Jim Marshall, Mark Sagor, Jane Beever, and Gerald Weales for their suggestions, and to Mrs. William Carlos Williams, for her interest and friendship. Elizabeth Ames and Pauline Hanson were wonderfully gracious during my stay at Yaddo, where I wrote part of this book, and where Dr. Williams wrote part of Paterson. I am also much indebted to Dr. M. L. Rosenthal of New York University, who started me on the process of discovering Williams and who provided invaluable assistance during my work on this project. IN COMPLETING

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1

1.

The Poetry of Paterson

9

2.

The Road to Paterson

45

3·

The

6?

4·

The River

5·

The

6.

"You Can't Steal Credit": The Economic

7·

The Redeeming Language: A Summary

Ч

Notes

!5!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

163

INDEX

Man/City

81

Mountain

99

Motif

117 1

X73

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS'

Patcrson Language and Landscape

LIST OF

ABBREVIATIONS

A

The Autobiography of William York: Random House, 1951.

Carlos

AG

In the American Grain. Introduction by Horace Gregorv. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1956.

CEP

The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951.

Ε

Selected Essays of William Random House, 1954.

IW

I Wanted to Write Beacon Press, 1958.

L

The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall. New York: McDowell, Obolenskv, 1957.

Carlos

a Poem,

Williams.

Williams.

New

Williams.

New York:

ed. Edith Heal. Boston:

INTRODUCTION

It is difficult to get the n e w s f r o m

poems

yet men die m i s e r a b l y e v e r y for of w h a t is f o u n d —From

day

lack

there.

"Asphodel, That Greeny

IN A LETTER to Horace Gregor), written in

1939,

Flower"

William

Carlos Williams describes the sources of In the American

Grain,

that remarkable attempt to discover—or recover—a usable past: "Of mixed ancestry, I felt from earliest childhood 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 first business in life to possess it; that only bv making it my own from the beginning to my own day, in detail, should I ever have a basis for knowing where I stood." excerpt actually describes Williams' entire literary

1

This

career, for

at the center of all his work, in whatever genre, is a robust delight in the possibility of possessing America, past and present, as a means of perpetually renewing himself and of discovering his own potential humanity. Only by living in a place, lie believed, could one imaginatively possess it. And at a time when many writers were turning their backs 011 the New W orld, opting for older, richer cultures, he chose to dig in what his friend Ezra Pound called "the bloody loam," chose to remain in "murica" in order to lift his own environment, by use of the imagination and the vernacular language, to the sphere of the

2

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

intelligence. His life-long dream was to discover a culture as "locally related" as a tree in the earth. "Ezra is one of a well recognized group of Americans," he wrote, " w h o can't take the democratic virus and stand up under it, very distinguished men most of t h e m w h o owe their distinction largely to their American origins."

2

P o u n d , for his part,

referred to this Daniel B o o n e of letters as " t h e observant foreigner,

perceiving

American

vegetation

and

landscape

directly, as s o m e t h i n g put there for him to look at. . . . "

quite 5

The

description is persuasive, for there is a marvellously clear eyed directness in W i l l i a m s ' tendency to see things as if for the first time, and to give fresh names to t h e m . A n d he was indeed a " f o r e i g n e r " — h i s mother was predominantly French and Spanish (hence

the C a r l o s ) , and

his father, w h o

never gave up

his

British citizenship, did not w a n t his son to b e c o m e an American. Like

many

second-generation

citizens, t h o u g h ,

put down deep roots. F o l l o w i n g his education School in N e w Philadelphia)

Y o r k , and the University of

and

his

medical

internship

in

the

(Horace

poet Mann

Pennsylvania New

York,

in he

travelled m u c h in Rutherford, the small industrial town in N e w Jersey where he was born in 1883 and where, seventy-nine years later, he died. Disagreeing vigorously with T . S. Eliot's statement that "place is only place," he asserted over and over that only

through an exhaustive c o m m i t m e n t

to a locale and

its

language can one begin to discover the universal. His life was testimony to his belief. His life was also a n u m b e r of other things. As a full-time general practitioner he carried on an exhausting practice

and

delivered over two thousand babies, and yet s o m e h o w managed to be perhaps the most influential and

original poet of

century. H e also f o u n d the time and energy to write

this

novels,

stories, plays, and essays. In spite of the breadth and excellence of this work, however, and in spite of his astonishing staying power, his reputation never really caught u p with him during his lifetime. Intensely and outspokenly anti-academic, he o n c e

INTRODUCTION

3

said he would rather crawl away and die like a sick dog than be a well-known literary figure, and since being well known invariably involves having one's life and work thoroughly illumined by critical searchlights, he had little cause for any such figurative death. When he did die, on March 4, 1963, his public was small, and onlv one book had been written about him, Vivienne Koch's William Carlos Williams (1950), commissioned by New Directions, his publisher. In the years since 1963, however, his reputation, popular and critical, has risen dramatically. As a result New Directions has published paperback editions of the stories ( T h e Farmers Daughters), plays (Many Loves), essays, and novels (White Mule, In the Money), as well as The Autobiography, Paterson, and Pictures from Brueghel and other poems. In the American Grain and Selected Poems remain in print, and are widely used in college courses. The William Carlos Williams Reader ap peared in 1966, in "response to the widening and deepening interest" in the poet. Furthermore, Williams has finally been published in Great Britain (by MacGibbon & Kee), and even the staid Times Literary Supplement (April 13, 1967) admitted that at this point he "is decidedly 'in' and, for good or ill, has replaced Eliot in the affections of younger readers." 4 (This is a far cry from William Empson's Olympian pronouncement of several years ago that Williams had "renounced all the pleasures of the English language, so that he is completely American; and he only says the dullest things, so that he has won the terrible fight to become completely democratic as well.") 5 Furthermore, the "trickle" of critical material mentioned by Alan Ostrom in his 1966 study (The Poetic World of William Carlos Williams) has become a river, and there is no indication that the waters are likely to recede soon. Given the number of critical and biographical studies presently in the works, it seems possible that within ten years of his death the books about this once-neglected giant may reach the flood stage. My principal reason for adding to the rising tide of criticism

4

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

(and I herewith abandon the metaphor) lies in mv strong eon viction that Paterson

is Williams' major achievement, and that

it is one of the great works of American literature.

Written

during a period of more than twenty years, the sequence is his exhaustive attempt to find a language capable of giving ade quate

expression

Crane's The Land

to

Bridge,

the

America

he

Pound's Cantos,

and F o u r Quartets,

knew

intimately.

and Eliot's The

Like Waste

it is the account of a poet's ambitious

journey into the depths of his own sensibility and across the landscape of contemporary civilization. In this work, I think, and in Journey and Pictures

to Love,

from

The

Brueghel,

Desert

Music

and Other

Poems,

the other major achievements of

his old age, Williams made his most enduring contribution. I undertook this study, thus, in the conviction that because of its magnitude, influence, complexity, and overall worth

Paterson

should be studied in detail. I can now state that the sequence seems to be virtually inexhaustible, that each successive reading reveals new relationships from section to section, formerly unnoticed rhythmical modulations, fresh tonalities, a richly varied poetic landscape. By this I do not mean that the book represents 284 pages of sustained poetic brilliance. It does not. Like other very long poems it is an uneven work, containing both peaks and valleys, with even less poetic consistency than Quartets,

Four

itself a very unequable work. N o one, however favor-

ably disposed to Paterson

as a whole, could make a very strong

case for rather large chunks of Books III and I V . B u t at its best—in the development of its major themes, in the shifts of rhythm and tone, in the patterning of image and symbol—the book achieves a high level of excellence. M y primary function is to explore this inner abundance that makes the sequence a work worthy to be placed beside the best literature produced in America. Another reason for this book is that the existing work on the poem is not, for the most part, adequate. G o o d as some of the scattered work on the poem is, in the books on W i l l i a m s

INTRODUCTION

5

and in broader-ranging studies, there is no single study that provides a satisfactory detailed analysis. 6 In responding to the need for such a book I have discovered that manv roads lead to Paterson, and have tried to suggest several approaches to the poem rather than just one. My major thesis involves the cen trality of the language theme in the sequence, but this subject cannot be treated in isolation, since everything in Paterson

is

related to everything else. One cannot talk adequately about language without simultaneously discussing "divorce," marriage, the river, the man/city, the sense of place, economics, and the other subjects that,

cumulatively,

make

up this vast

work.

Adopting the approach of simultaneity, however, one is apt to end up simply quoting the entire poem. T h a t is, I suspect, an ideal form of criticism, but it is one not likely to provide much help to the reader in need of a guide. My solution to this possibly insoluble problem is to provide not one chronological reading of the work, but several, each one exploring in detail a single symbol, theme, or image cluster. T h e reader, having seen these things in isolation, will then be in a better position to put the poem back together, to see the relationships of the multiple coordinate parts, to see the poem as a whole. I know from teaching Paterson

that feeling of dis-

orientation experienced by students who find themselves wandering through Williams' city for the first time, as well as by those who have visited often and know their way around some major areas, but who get lost in the outlying parts of town. My function, then, is to be a kind of cicerone, describing and interpreting different landmarks on successive tours within the city limits. Thus (and here I leave the image of Paterson the city and return to Paterson

the poem) the first chapter, general in na-

ture, attempts to give an overview of the sequence as a whole, to "place" it in relation to other long American poems, to analyze some representative passages, and to describe various aspects of the technique. T h e next chapter explores the work's

6

W I L L I A M CARLOS WILLIAMS' PATERSON

sources, and gives a close reading of the "Preface." Then, the stage having been set, each of the next four chapters provides a sequential reading that focuses on a major symbol and on details that relate to it. Chapter Three discusses the man/city, and traces the movement of the protean hero, Mr. Paterson, from book to book. The next chapters deal with water imagery and the mountain respectively, the first following the course of the Passaic River as it moves toward the sea, and the latter discussing the series of women, daughters to the mountain, whose failures echo from book to book. Chapter Six discusses the strategic and important economic motif. T h e final chapter focuses on Noah Paterson's quest for a redeeming language. Since everything in the poem relates to language, either direct!} or obliquely, this section, in addition to introducing new material (the "marriage" and "divorce" themes, for example), attempts to show the relevance of the various motifs and symbols to each other and to the central question of communication. This final chapter, thus, is a summary and resolution, or, in the words of one of the phrases preceding the "Preface," "bymultiplication a reduction to one." I use the word "resolution" with some misgiving, because I do not want to suggest that my book resolves, or answers even tentatively, all of the myriad questions raised by the poem. There are passages in Paterson that do not yield to logical analysis, that remain obscure even after several conscientious readings, and the best thing a reader can do, it seems to me, is to let the words wash over him, to respond as openly as possible without demanding absolute coherence. In a letter to Sister M . Bernetta Quinn in which he praises her insight and scholarship, Williams rather gently suggests that she leave a part for the irrational: " T h e truly great heart includes what it does not at once grasp, just as the great artist includes things which go beyond him." 7 What he is asking for is something like a willing suspension of disbelief, and it is well, I think, for the reader to keep this in mind.

INTRODUCTION

η

A word more before I approach the text. I have found, as I am certain others have, that anyone who writes about this poet always has a quietly intractable censor looking over his shoulder. I have already mentioned Williams' somewhat jaundiced view of the academies, and I add now that he cut into academicians, particularly those in English departments (which he thought should be "American," not " E n g l i s h " ) , with such epithets as "knowledgeable idiots," "conformists of all colors," and "roasting hogs." Bearing this in mind, I have made a special effort to describe what is actually in Paterson,

and to

resist the occasional temptation to discuss what I would have liked to find there. An annotator has his scruples, too.

1 THE POETRY OF PATER SON

N o defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since the world it opens is always a place formerly unsuspected.

A

world lost, a world unsuspected beckons to new places and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness —Paterson,

p. 96

D E N I S D O N O G H U E has referred to Paterson as "a humanist manifesto enacted in five Books, a grammar to help us to live." 1 This is an appealing attempt to characterize a work that has been variously described as "our Leaves of Grass" (Robert Lowell), Williams' "high point" (Roy Harvey Pearce), "an unpretentious and yet a noble search" (M. L. Rosenthal), and "nonsequential babble" (Joseph Bennett). 2 T h e term "grammar," however, implies that the importance of Dr. Williams' book derives from what it prescribes. Paterson does, it is true, involve a quest for a "redeeming" language that will cure modern ills and prevent man from the necessity of dying incommunicado. The value of Mr. Paterson's search, however, does not lie in some truth that he finally discovers after a tortuous pilgrimage —in some clinching answer that will help us live. T h e truth, rather, lies in the quest itself: " T h e dream / is in pursuit!" 3 It is the manner in which the poet shapes his experience, not the

ΙΟ

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

discoveries he makes (or fails to make), that establishes the poem's essential movement and gives it permanence. My point is that Paterson is a major work of art by virtue of what it is, and not primarily because of what it says or means. Just as Williams' best short poems have an existence, a "texture," re lated to but not dependent upon the ideas they contain or the things they illuminate (the poems are themselves things, not mirrors), so Paterson, on a much vaster scale, exists as a complete entity with its own special reality. It is important to recognize this distinctiveness, for although the book has traits and characteristics found in other works of art, it should not be classified with traditional labels. It is often useful to call its individual characteristics by their family names, since many of these derive from the conventions of traditional genres. It is also important to recognize those tendencies the work shares with other contemporary long poems. My purpose in this opening chapter, thus, is to indicate Paterson s relation ship to certain conventional forms and to other modern se quences, and then to discuss those aspects of the book's poetry that contribute to its value and that make it sui generis. In subsequent chapters I shall deal in more detail with specific themes and structural principles. It seems appropriate at this point, however, before relating Paterson to other works, to suggest an overall view of the work, and to establish in a very general way the central movement of the poem as a whole, and of each of the five books individually. Assuming the risks any such simplification entails, I would say that Paterson, more than anything else, is an attempt to gain some understanding of contemporary American life by means of a thorough examination of a specific place, including its history and the people who make it up. Using the city as a microcosm of the United States, Williams attempts to discover, in specifically American terms, the nature of the American experience, attempts to embody the whole knowable world about him. The poet-protagonist wanders over the landscape of his mind and of

THE

POETRY

OF

PATERSON

11

his city, brooding on what he sees, and expressing his most intimate convictions. The poem, moreover, is a quest for a language that will free men from paralyzing ignorance and from the necessity of dying incommunicado—an uninhibited attempt to come to grips with a culture divorced from knowledge of its traditions, strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities. In choosing to use local settings and local subject matter Williams demonstrates his affinity with another profoundly American writer, Henry David Thoreau. Paterson has much in common with Waiden. Each has at its core the specific American place from which its title derives, and each examines ideas that radiate from this place and that are inextricably related to it. Each is a call for greater awareness of place—an attempt to offset shortsightedness and indifference. In each the narrator examines in painstaking detail his particular locale, describing its natural features, documenting its history, relating its myths, and analyzing the morbid poverty of the mass of men who are divorced from its life-giving richness. Each writer focuses on the familiar landscape with the illuminating vision of that rare man who is awake, and causes the reader to notice, for the first time, what he has often looked at but has never actually seen. Moreover, each book represents a conscious attempt by an American sensibility to create an intrinsically American book—to re awaken a local consciousness and thereby reunite man with those sources from which he is so disastrously separated. Williams thus, like Thoreau, suggests Emerson's American scholar, tellingly influenced by "Nature," the "Past," and "Action," and notably unresponsive to the courtly muses of Europe. Each learns about the great world by a process of susstained intimacy with the local world. Each casts his lot with America, attempting to discover the uniquely American culture and to translate this discovery into American art. For to Williams, as to Thoreau, home is not, as T . S. Eliot has said, "where one starts from" ("East Coker"), nor is place "always and only place" ("Ash-Wednesday"). Home is, rather,

12

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

where m a n has his experience, therebv shaping his life and thus contributing to the source of a m creative act, of any writing that is good. Place, more than just place, is the only source of the universal: " O n e has to learn what the meaning of the local is, for universal purposes. T h e local is the only thing that is universal. . . . T h e classic is the local fullv realized, words marked by a place." 4 It is only through place that one can achieve any kind of freedom: "Place then ceases to be place or a restriction," for only by a sufficient awareness of place can one "join with others in other places." 5 O n e of Eliot's faults, Williams asserts, a fault he shares with other "intellectual heads," is his failure to recognize the workadav culture of the United States. This failure assumes immense proportions if one believes, as Williams does, that there can be no general culture unless it is bedded in a locality. Each of the poem's five books can be characterized in terms of the specific locations and subject matter that dominate it. Each book has its own unique internal order, but each also functions organically in the total work, bearing a relationship to the overall conccrns and structure. T h u s the first book, called " T h e Delineaments of the Giants," while describing the giantcity, the vallev, the Passaic Falls, and the mountain, introduces details that are repeated, with variations, throughout the poem. (In the Author's Note, Williams states that "Part O n e intro duces the elemental character of the place.") Local legends and curiosities are touched on, and some fragments from local his tory books are quoted. Mr. Paterson, the myth and maker of myth, is shown to be both a procreator of the citizens he de scribes and the child of his own imaginings. In Book II, which the N o t e says "comprises the modern replicas," the focus is on a "Sunday in the Park." This section is basically a narrative, dealing with Paterson's ascent and de scent of the m o u n t a i n in the park, with what he sees and hears, and with his responses. T h e park, in Williams' words, is "feminine to the city," and there is considerable attention paid to

THE

POETRY

OF

PATERSON

13

the failure of the relationship between man and woman—to divorce and dispersal. In addition, a large portion of the book is devoted to the windv sermon of Klaus Ehrens, an itinerant evangelist. Book I I I , set in " T h e Library," has as its central concerns the fire, flood, and typhoon that ravaged Paterson early in the twentieth c e n t u n . T h e poet-protagonist searches through

old

books, seeking the means by which to make vocal the "elemental character" and "modern replicas" described in the first two books. T h e natural disasters are thematically fused with the "search for the redeeming language by which a man's premature death . . . might have been prevented" (dust j a c k e t ) , and with the poet's failure in love. T h e hero is frustrated in his quest, discovering only that the language is dead, and that one cannot find a satisfactory meaning by looking only into the past. In Book I V , referred to in the Note as the "river below the falls," Williams introduces new motifs and restates others. T h e setting for section i is an expensive apartment above the East River in New York City. This section of " T h e Run to the Sea" is, like Book II, a narrative, most of the action being in the form of a dialogue between an aging woman and a young nurse. Dr. Paterson also plays a role, as the painfully

unsuccessful

"lover" of the young virgin. Section ii focuses principally on economics, relating Madame Curie's discovery of uranium to the need for the discovery of a new credit system, credit being " t h e radiant gist" against

the economic cancer that destroys

our

lives. T h e third section returns to Paterson, the city, and is "reminiscent of episodes." It introduces personal details, repeats motifs of the earlier books, and ties up several of the thematic threads. Book V adds a new dimension to the poem: it has little surface relation to the material that precedes it. This final section is an attempt to give the world of Paterson "imaginative validity," and its primary

subject is "the world of art

that

through the years has survived!" Its unifying symbol is the series

14

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S *

PATERSON

of unicorn tapestries in T h e Cloisters, a museum on the Hudson River in N e w York City. Dr. Paterson, grown older, contem plates the world of art and flowers, and ends with the assertion that we "can know nothing . / but / the dance, to dance to a measure / contrapuntally, / Satyrically, the tragic foot." This is the final, and only, answer to the quest. Turning from this brief description to the question of traditional labels, it seems appropriate to begin with a term that appears in many of the commentaries on Paterson—"epic."

The

reasons for such a classification are fairly obvious. In view, for example, of W i l l i a m s ' assumption that the local gives rise to the universal ("here is e v e r y w h e r e " ) , M r . Paterson is a hero of almost mythical stature on whose action the fate of his people depends. T h e setting, though

neither worldwide nor cosmic,

gives the illusion of being ample in scale: " T h e province of the poem is the world" (p. 1 2 2 ) . T h e hero, in his arduous quest for a new language, engages in exploits that might be called heroic. Sam Patch's daring leap, in Book I, is a case in point. T h e r e are other epic characteristics as well: the poem opens with a question, the answer to which begins the narrative, and there is a visit to "Persephone / gone to hell" and a descent "toward Acheron" ( 1 5 9 ) · If these individual aspects of the poem derive from epic conventions, however, the poem as a whole is not an epic, however plastic the genre may be. Like its hero, it is too protean,

unpredictable,

and

multifaceted

to

fit

any

neatly

ordered category. Moreover, its style is not ceremonial, is not the lofty vehicle of a great subject, as that of even a modern epic should be. N o r is the work a long narrative poem.

Paterson

does have a narrative thread, but this does not always, or even often, stand out from the total fabric of the work. It submerges for pages at a time, only to resurface greatly altered. T h e poem also has characteristics of the picaresque. Paterson, moving through a series of adventures on the road, is a spiritual heir of D o n Quixote, D o n Juan, and Huck Finn. Here again, however, the absence of a satirical focus and of a side-

THE POETRY OF PATERSON

15

kick makes picaresque too restricting a label. For Paterson, roguish and exuberant as he is, has also much in common with the somber Christian of Pilgrim's Progress, with the noble El Cid, with the wide-eyed Gulliver, with the democratic Whitman of "Song of Myself," and with the prophetic Tiresias in The Waste Land. He is a man and a city, and his "population," the men beneath the skin, comprises a representative cross-section of the human family. The book has other literary forebears and counterparts as well. The pilgrimage or quest motif, for example, relates it to The Canterbury Tales, to Endymion (Williams' first long poem was imitation Keats), and to Shelley's Alastor. In its handling of the awakening sensibility of the poet and the treatment of landscape as "a kind of emotional topography" 6 it claims kinship with Wordsworth's The Prelude. The use of an overture, thematic development, and leitmotiv suggests Wagner's Ring Cycle. 7 The city of Paterson, in the manner of Joyce's Dublin and Thoreau's Waiden, is created, or presented, piece by piece. The handling of time (compressing the material within the framework of a single year) also shows a debt to Waiden. And the fusion of poetry and prose possibly derives from Aucassin and Nicolette, or perhaps from Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor, "a picaresque novel in verse and prose, much of it in dialogue full of laughter, full of movement and full of color, a vast satirical panorama of medieval society" (E, 222). The poem, too, was profoundly influenced by the American sequences that preceded it, and some analysis of the relationships is essential to an appreciation of its originality. Wbile sharing significant traits with The Bridge, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, it is to "Song of Myself" and to the Cantos that the debt is deepest—Williams derives about equally from Whitman and Pound without slavishly imitating either. His debt to Whitman is shared by Crane, Eliot, and Pound as well, for it was Whitman who conceived of the long poem not as a closed form but as a work in progress, a work with the capacity

l6

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

to develop and expand. "Song of Myself" does not fit itself to some predetermined structure, but develops with the unpredictable freedom of the poet's mind. 8 Following

Whitman's

lead, the creators of the modern sequence rejected traditional logical and dramatic forms (including the structure and subject matter of the epic), working out their own forms in an attempt to approximate modern conceptions of an incrediblv complex civilization. One of the most significant characteristics of this search for form has been the inward turning: the action of the poem has moved from the external to the internal world, and its point of view becomes a voyaging central consciousness in dialogue with its universe. As M. L. Rosenthal put it, in an analysis of Robert Lowell's Life Studies:

" T o build a great poem

out of the predicament and horror of the lost Self has been the recurrent effort of the most ambitious poetry of the last century."

9

Whitman showed the way for the later selves.

It is Whitman, moreover, who is at least partially responsible for the open form that characterizes both Paterson.

the Cantos

and

In "Song of Myself," as Pearce incisively points out, he

redefined the sensible self by putting it into direct contact with the world in which it could develop freedom, creativity, and wholeness, traits suited to the American democrat. T h e goal of such poetry is release and reintegration: "Totally process, it could, as Whitman himself said, have no proper beginning or ending. It could have no form bound by necessities of any sort."

10

Williams' sequence does have form, but it is one bound

by necessities of his own choosing. Like Pound, again following Whitman, he resisted the rigid conventions that he felt were fatal both to man and to the poetry emerging from a chaotic and complex world. "American poetry," Hugh Kenner has written, "groups itself around twin peaks, Williams and W h i t m a n . "

11

T h e peaks are

anything but unrelated, for the two poets have much in common. Any tradition in which Williams might be placed (which would involve Chaucer, Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Law-

THE

POETRY

OF PATERSON

17

rence, Chekhov, and Pound), would certainly include Whitman. As Kenneth Burke wrote, commenting on his inveterate lustiness, "Williams knows Walt Whitman's smile down to the last wrinkle." 12 Both are grandsons of Brueghel, celebrating the common man and finding vitality in the landscape of their native scene. Both devoted much of their creative lives to discovering new ways to break away from the stultifying domination of copied forms in order to record the unique American experience in American language. "Whitman's proposals," Williams said, "are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative understanding of life." 1 3 Both were poets of things and of contact. Whitman's statement, in A Backward Glance O'er Travell'd Roads, about the function of his poetry, could have been made by Williams: it is "to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to common lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things only." 14 "Song of Myself" and Paterson are intensely personal records of an empathic sensibility's confrontations with all living things. "The largeness which [Whitman] interprets as his identity with the least and the greatest about him," Williams wrote, "his 'democracy,' represents the vigor of his imaginative life." 1 5 As much as he learned from "Song of Myself," however, the poem represented not a goal but a bridge for Williams. His language, themes, line, and structure are his own. Working his way beyond the bard, he came to regard him as a magnificent failure: "Whitman to me is one broom stroke and that is all. He could not go on. . . . His invention ended where it began" (L, 135-136). Whitman broke the old line, but Williams could not rest until he had found a new one. Pound also recognized the importance—and the limitations —of the barbaric yawp: "Mentaly [sic] I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a colar [sic] and a dress shirt (although at times inimical to both)." 16 And, in " A Pact": "It was you that broke the new wood, / Now is a time for carving." 17 The

l8

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATTERSON

carving is evidenced in the sophistication of the Cantos, for where Whitman's song is intensely personal, even confessional, the Cantos is a kind of history of culture, an effort to discover an intelligible balance of values in an essentially Manichean universe. As Pearce put it, "Song of Myself is phased according to the movement of a creative, expressive sensibility; the Cantos are constellated according to the ordering of a precision-grinding exacting sensibility." 18 The influence of this exacting sensibility on Williams is plainly evident. The two works have major qualities in common, and it is clear that Paterson would be significantly different had not portions of Pound's magnum opus preceded its maturation and creation. An important shared trait, for example, is the publication by installment. Each work, in the Romantic tradition, records the growth of a poet's mind. In each case, however, the growth is not a fait accompli, but is recorded, in time, as it occurs. Both poets (Williams following Pound's example) sought an open-ended structure, and the poems, each a work in progress (the Cantos for over forty years, Paterson for over twenty), grow and change not with the inevitability of a preconceived form, but with the unstructured, unpredictable freedom of a developing sensibility. Furthermore, each poet has among his main tasks the restoration of economic order in his homeland, and the discovery of a language by which this can be done. T h e money passages in Paterson (especially in the last six pages of Book IV, section ii), in which the failure of language is related to the absence of "Social Credit," often derive nearly verbatim from Pound and represent a major area of Williams' indebtedness to his old friend. It is important, though, to note that the influence seems to decrease toward the end of Paterson. Williams, the secondgeneration American, early in his life made the decision to remain in America and explore a distinctly provincial culture. T h e influence of the erudite, cosmopolitan Pound was profound, however, and seems to have been especially pervasive during

THE POETRY OF PATERSON

ig

the planning and composition of Book I V . But since the sequence does record the growth of Williams' mind over a long period of change, one can recognize the ways in which, as he grew older, he achieved a greater degree of independence from the Pound interference in his thinking. By 1954 he was able to write: "Ain't it enuf that you so deeply influenced my formative years without your wanting to influence also my later ones?" (L, 324). Williams was bullied by his old friend in print (and undoubtedly in conversation) for years. It was not until Pound's disastrous decline, leading to St. Elizabeth's (mental) Hospital, that the more provincial poet was able to get the upper hand and to free himself from feelings of academic and literary subservience. That Williams did overcome the interference is demonstrated in the final section of Book I V , in all of Book V , and in Pictures from Brueghel and other poems (1962), in which Pound's voice is less and less evident. T h e echoes are still occasionally there, but they no longer take precedence. Another brief excerpt, this one written in 1956, is representative of Williams' liberation: "Learn to write an understandable letter before you begin to sound off. You don't even know the terms you're using and have never known them" (L, 338). T o return to the similarities in the works, there are other mutual influences as well; if Paterson and the Cantos derive from each other in subject matter and purpose, they also show some resemblance in matters of technique. In each case the organization, based on principles of association, variation, and recurrence, suggests a relationship to music. T h e Cantos, developed in a loose pattern of counterpoint and repetition, resembles the fugal form, with its subject, response, and repeat. Paterson also suggests this form, relying as it does on variation and repetition of basic motifs. Rosenthal's description of the Cantos is applicable to Paterson as well: "As each unit is developed, it recapitulates the root-themes in a new context; ordinarily the refocusing is not at first clear to the reader, but the pattern does emerge." 1 9 There are also small-scale simi-

20

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS' PATERSON

larities: in both works the lyrical is juxtaposed with the prosaiiic, the highly charged with the flat, the formal with the colloquiaal, the personal with the economic or social, the rational with thhe emotional. If Paterson and the Cantos share certain significant traitits, however, they are nonetheless very different in both structuure and substance. Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, and Williams all went t to school to Pound, but each of them rejected his ideas. Annd none of them, as Babette Deutsch puts it, followed "his priro tean changes" or exerted his "Pygmalion touch on the cobld figures of history and mythology." 20 Pearce takes a slightly dilif ferent view, suggesting that the greatest achievement of Poundd's work "was perhaps not itself but The Waste Land." Willianms and Crane, he asserts, drawing back from the Poundian vortctex and insisting that Eliot had plunged all the way into it and WA'as lost forever, discovered that they were as a consequence fallinng under Whitman's spell. "The) struggled to break free, to estalablish not only their own identities but those of their modenrn readers. . . . T h e record of that struggle is in The Bridge (19340) and Paterson ( 1 9 4 6 - 1 9 5 1 ) , in which Whitman's hero—tlrhc simple separate person, yet democratic, en masse—tries to coirme of age." 21 Williams' version of this democratic hero is strikingly ddifferent from the Poundian hero. Where the Cantos is a stuady of international culture as known by a man of the world wlvho is perfectly at home in a number of countries, languages, cnultures, and ages, 22 Paterson is a study of America as known t b y an essentially American sensibility. In Williams' world the locical gives rise to the universal. Pound begins with the universasal, taking in both past and present. His work is academic, scholarlrly, and thickly allusive. Where Williams tells stories—brutal annd often scandalous—drawn from Paterson's history, Pound relatttes ancient myths and legends. T h e Cantos range over centuricies and continents, involving Malatesta, Sordello, Confuciuus,

THE POETRY OF PATERSON

21

Varchi; Williams' cast of characters is largely American: Hamilton, Washington, Audubon, and others. " T h e great difference," Miss Deutsch writes, "is that for Williams the time is not antiquity or the renaissance, but now (he sees its old roots); the scene is no foreign country, but is the provincial factory town on the Passaic in all the sordidness of its abused beauty and energy." 23 Paterson, in short, rather than being modeled on Pound, is actually a kind of antiCantos, an anti-exile poem finding its material and the sources of its vitality in the local present that Pound (and Eliot) found inadequate. (In the "Preface," Mr. Paterson, likening himself to an old dog, refers to the rest who "have run out—/ after the rabbits." T h e rest unquestionably refers to those poets who left their native land and culture to live abroad.) The sequence, Williams writes, is "the debasing, the keg-cracking assault upon the cults and the kind of thought that destroyed Pound and made what it has made of Eliot" (L, 2 1 4 ) . And again: " I have maintained from the first that Eliot and Pound by virtue of their hypersensitivty [sic] (which is their greatness) were too quick to find a culture (the English continental) ready made for their assertions. They ran from something else, something cruder but, at the same time, newer, more dangerous but heavy with rewards for the sensibility that could reap them. They couldn't. Or didn't. But they both ended by avoiding not only the possibilities offered but, at the same time, the deeper implications intellectually which our nascent culture accented" (L, 226-227). T h e points stressed in this statement go far in gauging the differences between Paterson and Eliot's long poems. Again, although there are interesting similarities in content and technique, it is the contrasts—between local and European, present and past—that are most striking. It is worth noting that The Waste Land is organized by means of thematic variations within the mind of Tiresias, just as Paterson takes place largely within

22

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

the mind of the poet. Also, like Mr. Paterson, the "heroes" em that the proposed four books became, in fact, five. T h e publication of the final book, several years after the first four had b e e n neatlv bound into a "completed"

volume, exasperated

soime

critics whose judgments were rendered obsolete by the additiion. T h e eighteen phrases, which serve as a kind of epigraph (aind which, the Buffalo notes indicate, were probably written beftore

THE ROAD TO PATERSON

the p o e m ) ,

survived

a

careful

pruning.

The

following

53

are

among those deleted prior to publication: a summary of poetic devices; a river; from then to now; rock and water, he; one; a city; a man and woman; the defects of conscience; plague, cyclone, fire, flood; rain again; the clouds . . . ; " I can't always be right." It is probable that these phrases are too specific for Williams' purposes. T h e images ultimately used, as Sister Bernetta points out, suggest a possible way of looking at the poem as a whole— a definition. Here is the list as published: : a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration; in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause; hard put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis. (p. 1 0 ) As in Finnegans

Wake,

the book begins in mid-sentence,

the colon suggesting the sense of

unbroken

continuity

and

movement documented in the poem. ( T h e final image in Book I V is, appropriately, a spiral.) T h e phrases emphasize action: "confession"; "reply"; "gathering";

"multiplication";

"daring";

"action"; "taking up." T h e y also introduce the theme of cycles —of change and rebirth—that pervades the poem: "a reduction to one"; "clouds resolved into a sandy sluice," and, on other hand, "dispersal and metamorphosis."

the

Several refer to

events in the poem, i.e., "daring; a fall," which describes Sam Patch's heroic leap, in Book I. (In his Sam Patch phase, M r . Paterson, who does dare, is a sort of anti-Prufrock.)

Others,

such as a "reply to Greek and Latin," are more implicitly related. T h e "reply" introduces the poem's anti-academic theme. It is significant, too, that the first words of this anti-exile work

54

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

are "a local pride." A n d "spring, summer, fall and the sea" announces the time scheme of the poem. The

"Preface,"

which

follows

the

phrases,

is

a

highly

wrought piece of writing with an unusually dense texture. It is one of the most carefully compressed and revised sections of the work. As it stands, it contains a series of birth images (similar to those in the beginning of White

Mule)

that move finally

into the birth of Paterson, and of the poem itself. In several very early drafts, however, Book I emerged, much like a Canterbury tale, out of a narrative frame that served as introduction. In these drafts, " D o c " and " W i l l i e , " apparently two aspects of the same sensibility, are introduced sitting together, enjoying an inebriating cup. Their talk is about the history of Paterson, and eventually W i l l i e opens a leather portfolio, which turns out to be Barber and Howe's Historical

Collection

of the State of

New Jersey, and reads from it: " I n February 1 8 5 7 David Hower, a poor shoemaker with a large family, out of work and money, there's your economic thesis, collected a lot of mussels from Notch Brook. . . ." W i l l i a m s rejected the idea of the dialogue, possibly because it would have imposed rigid structural require ments not compatible with the form he wanted to discover. T h e passage on the poor shoemaker, however, was later incorporated into Book I. H e also salvaged, from these early drafts, the two sentences of prose that begin the " P r e f a c e . " Early in his work W i l i a m s charged himself to "Begin in the middle of some trenchant speech / some well gathered phrase; picked for that place." T h e " p h r a s e " he " p i c k e d " is one written by himself. It asks the question to which the poem attempts to suggest some answers: " 'Rigor of beauty is the quest. But h o w will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?'" (p. 1 1 ) . T h e quest is for an inflexible b e a u t y , and the language must be found that will give it life. T h e key word in the quotation

is "locked," which creates an

image

found elsewhere in his writing, e.g., " W o r d s are the keys that unlock the m i n d "

( E , 2 8 2 ) , and " T h a t which locks up

the

THE ROAD TO PATERSON

55

mind is vicious" ( E , 7 1 ) . W h a t the "trenchant speech" implies is that only through the adequate use of language can

this

beauty be freed. W i l l i a m s ' general tendency in cutting awav material during revision is to move from fairlv overt "statements" to what W a l lace Stevens calls " t h e ambiguity produced by bareness."

9

The

idea implied in these two sentences was more explicitly stated in a longer early draft, which contains a possible answer to the question posed and thus throws some light on the later version: " B e a u t y is the quest, and how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind? It is not in the things about us unless transposed there by our employment. M a k e it free then, by the art you have, to enter these starved and broken pieces." This suggests the idea of invention stressed later in the poem: without invention, without the transposing sensibility, the beauty remains captive. T h e poet holds the key ( " t h e art you h a v e " ) by which it can be unlocked, and this is Williams' goal. T h e " P r e f a c e " shifts abruptly from the prose into lines that suggest a sense of starting from scratch and that announce the poet's

inductive

process

of

moving

gradually

things to general ideas: T o make a start, out of particulars and make them general, rolling up the sum, by defective means— Sniffing the trees, just another dog among a lot of dogs. What else is there? And to do? T h e rest have run out— after the rabbits. Only the lame stands—on three legs. Scratch front and back. Deceive and eat. Dig a musty bone (p. n )

from

specific

56

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

This first use of "rolling up," suggesting birth and creation, refers to the process of this particular poem whereby things, when connected with one another, become ideas. T h e "defec tive means" refers to language, and to the poet's imperfect skill. It introduces a note of humility sustained throughout the rather whimsical lines. Thus the poet likens himself to an old dog, particularly in his use of "lame," which suggests both age and infirmity. T h e dog remains at home sniffing the trees— getting to know the particulars well—in order to know the forest, or the general. Those who have "run out after the rab bits" almost certainly refers to the poets (particularly Pound and Eliot) who left their native grounds. In one of his essays Williams wrote that "Pound ran to Europe in a hurry" (E, 35), and in his Autobiography he says that to have Eliot "run out that way drove me mad" (A, 1 7 5 ) . (Later in the poem Paterson speaks of his envy for "the men that ran / and could run off / toward the peripheries.") There is a sense in these lines in the "Preface" not only of his not running off, but of not being able to. Thus, instead of running after the rabbits, the dog, leading the simple life of scratching and eating, has to "dig a musty bone" here. He must, in short, dig into what Pound called "the bloody loam" (50), the local soil the others left. In the early drafts this passage emerged from several lines that expressed more directly the poet's sense of being nearly overwhelmed by the project before him: One of the dogs: That this head should be faced by such a task seems out of plan—chaos the mother of knowledge and knowledge chaotic: To make a start, out of particulars . . . It is in keeping with Williams' usual method of revision that these lines were dropped. They are too explicit for his purposes.

T H E ROAD T O PATERSON

57

The reference to "such a task" would have begun the poem on a self-indulgent note; it expresses the sort of anxiety a writer is likely to feel when beginning a book, but it adds nothing to the work itself. The references to chaos and knowledge (a variation on Stevens' "Death is the mother of beauty") also find their source in the writer's anxietv. Out of the chaotic mass of notes, plans, and images the poet is to "roll up" his poem ("knowledge") which is itself likely to be chaotic. It is typical of Williams that even though he rejected the lines he did not reject the idea, for throughout the "Preface" the images of potential birth refer implicitly to the embryogeny of the poem. To return to the published text, the fusion of whimsy and seriousness in the "lame dog" passage is abandoned in the next lines. These assume the quiet, philosophical tone sustained throughout the remainder of the "Preface": For the beginning is assuredly the end—since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities. The appropriately "chaotic" shift from passage to passage (even the margin changes) is possibly accounted for by the deletion of fifteen lines, dealing with past and present, which originally provided a more gradual transition. In these four surviving lines Williams rephrases an idea expressed in The Great American Novel, that "Everything exists from the beginning." 10 At the end we know no more than at the beginning, and therefore the only knowledge lies in understanding one's origins and roots. Hence also the efficacy of starting with particulars and with a "musty bone." Vivienne Koch provides an interesting gloss: "The last four lines will inevitably recall the leitmotif of Eliot's Four Quartets, 'In my beginning is my end.' But the clause 'since we know nothing' reverses the philosophical implications of the assertion that 'the beginning is assuredly the end' and reduces it to an ironical tautology. W e do know something but

58

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

only

those

things

complexities."

which

can

PATERSON

be

known

through

our

own

11

Since the source of " k n o w i n g " lies in one's origin, the logical m o v e m e n t would seem to be a return to the beginning, with what exists destroyed and everything done over. T h e next lines, however, assert categorically that this is impossible: Yet there is no return: rolling up out of chaos, a nine months' wonder, the citv the man, an identity—it can't be otherwise—-an interpenetration, both ways. Rolling up! obverse, reverse; the drunk the sober; the illustrious the gross; one. In ignorance a certain knowledge and knowledge, undispersed, its own undoing. The

phrase

"rolling

up o u t "

suggests

the

birth

(out

of

c h a o s ) of a " n i n e m o n t h s ' wonder," be it the m a n , the city, or the poem about a man-city. T h e m a n is identified wilh his citv and the interpenetration

is mutually beneficial. T h e

following

"rolling u p " suggests t h e many m e n existing in o n e : t h e sober m a n is also the drunk, the illustrious is also the gross. It is never clear cut, never "pure and simple." In Pascal's words, there is no man who differs more from a n o t h e r than he does from himself at another time. T h i s prepares the way for M r . who in the course of t h e poem constantly changes

Paterson, roles—and

even sexes. T h e man is a city, and his population, the men beneath

his skin, include such diverse types as t h e doctor,

the

poet, the nurse, the old m a n . Any m a n is all m e n , just as any place is even' place. ( T h i s idea was expressed less subtly in an early draft: " A man old and young, ten thousand / m e n , in the present phase, / o n e m a n . H e . " ) In addition to introducing the protean aspect of the hero, the linking of apparent

opposites

T H E ROAD TO P A T E R S O N

59

also foreshadows other yokings, such as male-female, poetryprose, and virgin-whore, which appear later in the poem. T h e next passage is a concrete illustration of the idea that immediately precedes it, i.e., that knowledge, undispersed, is its own undoing: (The multiple seed, packed tight with detail, soured, is lost in the flux and the mind, distracted, floats off in the same scum) Rolling up, rolling up heavy with numbers. These lines suggest both a kind of physical miscarriage and its mental equivalent. ( T h e focus is still on the embryonic poem.) In each case there is the failure of a seed to meet a proper end —the knowledge is undispersed. This theme is restated throughout the poem in the references to the academies, the " b u d forever green, / tight-curled"

( 2 8 ) , which is divorced from its

fellows, thereby "lost in the flux." Unlike the seed spit out by "Odysseus" at the end of Book I V , the seed lost in the scum fails to float to shore. T h e reference to "rolling up heavy with numbers" clearly has to do with the poem itself. T h e mind, "packed tight with detail," is the " m o t h e r " of the poem

("a

certain knowledge") provided it is not distracted. T h e "rolling up"

also suggests

(knowledge

the

dispersed)

mists

rolling

up to be rained

and, as we see, images

renewal: It is the ignorant sun rising in the slot of hollow suns risen, so that never in this world will a man live well in his body save dying—and not know himself

of

sun

down and

6О

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

dying; yet that is the design. Renews himself thereby, in addition and subtraction, walking up and down. In several early drafts the phrase "live well in his body save dying"

read

"save

the

city

acknowledge

him."

The

change

gives the lines a more universal significance: man lives well if he knows himself to be dying, for death, in this case, is t h e m o t h e r of invention. T h e

" i g n o r a n t " sun

rising

in the slot is

t h e first of many dawns in the p o e m . It is also a n o t h e r image of man's birth, relating to the "rolling up out of c h a o s . " "slot"

is the opening through

which

The

man emerges from

the

w o m b — a s all men have done before him. T h e r e is an apparent pun on the word " s u n , " and the "ignorant s u n " suggests the emerging Paterson. In fact, this pattern of cyclical documented

throughout

the

"Preface"

possibly

movement

derives

from

the idea of pater-son ( B o o k I V introduces the hero's s o n ) , and from the sense of constant renewal, " i n addition and subtract i o n . " T h i s last idea, of never standing still, is related to the "rolling u p " of poeins which, implied throughout the preceding lines, finally b e c o m e s explicit in the next passage: and the craft, subverted by thought, rolling up, let him beware lest he turn to no more than the writing of stale poems . . . Minds like beds always made up, (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable. T h e s e lines suggest a n o t h e r kind of miscarriage, which about

no new life b u t

only

thrust is in the direction

of

"stale

poems."

Here

the a c a d e m i e s — a t

brings

again

those

the

whose

minds, in the near-zeugma, are like unused beds, and are more stony than a shore. S u c h

minds

( a n d beds)

are capable

of

nurturing no seed. T h e phrase "subverted by t h o u g h t " demon

THE ROAD TO PATERSON

6l

strates the extent of Williams' energetic distaste for those who subordinate art to metaphysics. Such a "marriage," which he called "the prime intellectual offense of my day" ( L , 239), can only destroy (subvert) that in art which cannot be reduced to logical

statement.

Williams' Thus

(And

"detailed

minds

replv"

Paterson

is,

among

other

to these dissecters of

that are "made

up,"

things,

the craft.)

like those that are

"dis

tracted" and those that are "locked," are unwilling or unable to find rigor of beauty. Like Cummings' "prurient

philosophers"

who "pinched and poked," the metaphysicians of art are either living in the past or are dealing with something other than art. They are thus unable to procreate fresh poems. T h e final birth image shifts from "rolling u p " to "Rolling in" as it describes the birth of the river and the birth of the poem itself: Rolling in, top up, under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter: lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a wash of seas — from mathematics to particulars— divided as the dew, floating mists, to be rained down and regathered into a river that flows and encircles: shells and animalcules generally and so to man, to Paterson. (P· These

final

lines

remain

virtually

intact

4) from

the

early

drafts. T h e reference to a stony shore in the previous section leads logically to the image of the waves rolling in from the sea with a great clatter. T h e whole cycle of water and mist is described in the next lines. T h e water is lifted, by evaporation,

02

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

into the air, b e c o m e s a wash of seas in the skv, or a rainbow, and then is rained down and regathered into the river that flows back toward the sea where it all b e g a n — a n d where it all begins again. T h i s sense of renewal and regathering brought about by the rain pouring down is a svmbol of knowledge dispersed. It stands against the image of the seed lost in the flux. T h e river gives birth to shells and animalcules, t h e simplest forms of life from which evolve t h e more complex. And the river ( t h e Pas saic, which actually does " e n c i r c l e " the city of P a t e r s o n )

flows

" t o m a n , to P a t e r s o n . " T h i s restates the identity of the city and the m a n . It also suggests, by a logical extension, the birth of the p o e m , for at this point the reader, having been introduced

to

the poet's m a j o r concern, the freeing of the h u m a n spirit, and having b e e n maneuvered through a c o m p l e x pattern of birth images, is moved,

final!},

into the p o e m itself.

3 THE MAN/CITY

Doctor, do you believe in "the people," the Democracy? you still believe—in this swill-hole of corrupt cities? D o you, Doctor? N o w ? —Paterson,

THE VARIOUS PARTS of Paterson

Do

p. 1 3 2

are fused into a comprehensible

whole primarily by three major symbols—man-city, river, and mountain, or feminine principle. T h i s chapter deals with the first of these; later I will examine the other major and minor " p l o t " lines by which the books are joined. T h e man-city is actually the multi-faceted protean hero who wanders, in almost picaresque fashion, over the landscape of the poem, successively "beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody." Since so much of Paterson

centers on the theme of man "achieving his l i f e "

(an inelegant but accurate phrase), the hero's significance does not necessarily depend on the successful fusion of man and city into a dramatically coherent image. W i l l i a m s makes no attempt to sustain this identification very far into the poem since it is not possible to keep the multiple coordinate aspects of

man

and city related in a dynamically continuous pattern. T h u s as the poem evolves, the man and the city tend to become unique entities, increasingly separate from each other, with the hero identified with aspects

of the city, but not with the city itself.

T h e basic idea, " t h e city / the man, an identity," is a con-

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

ceit t h a t c a n b e a p p r e h e n d e d i n t u i t i v e l y , b u t t h a t does n o t l e n d itself to c o n c r e t e d e v e l o p m e n t . A n d so, a f t e r t h e first few pages, t h e m e t a p h o r b e c o m e s a simile. P a t e r s o n , t h e city, is d e s c r i b e d as a " g i a n t , " b u t a m a n is seen t o b e like a city. T h e f u n c t i o n of t h e n u m e r o u s

metamorphoses

that

the narrator

undergoes

in t h e c o u r s e of t h e p o e m is, as Sister B e r n e t t a wisely suggests, t o " c o m p e l a n e w a w a r e n e s s in citizens of t h e W a s t e L a n d . " It is also, h o w e v e r , a m e a n s of c o m p e l l i n g a n a w a r e n e s s of

the

W a s t e L a n d a n d of its p o p u l a t i o n . P a t e r s o n b e c o m e s i d e n t i f i e d w i t h various f a c e t s a n d c i t i z e n s of t h e city. T h e s e various iden t i f i c a t i o n s , w h e n t a k e n as a w h o l e , c o m p o s e s o m e t h i n g like a city. T h e m a n , c h a n g i n g his n a m e , his role, a n d , like T i r e s i a s , his sex, c o n t a i n s a m e t r o p o l i s w i t h i n h i m s e l f . B u t it is t h e indiv i d u a l p e r s o n a e t h a t c r e a t e t h e w h o l e . I n n o n e of his roles is Paterson

ever identified with

t h e city itself. I t is he,

rather,

t h r o u g h w h o s e eyes t h e r e a d e r is m a d e a w a r e of t h e l a n d s c a p e a n d its i n h a b i t a n t s , w h i c h , a f t e r t h e first f e w pages, are d i f f e r e n t from him. A t t h e o p e n i n g of B o o k I, h a v i n g b e e n " b o r n , " h e is i n t r o d u c e d as a g i a n t , e t e r n a l l y a s l e e p : Paterson lies in t h e valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters f o r m i n g the outline of his back. H e lies on his right side, head near the t h u n d e r of t h e waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk a b o u t the city where h e persists incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear. I m m o r t a l he neither moves nor rouses a n d is seldom seen, though he breathes and t h e subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance f r o m t h e noise of t h e pouring river a n i m a t e a thousand

automatons.

(p· ч) In t h e s e lines t h e h e r o is a sleeper, like F i n n e g a n , w h o s e d r e a m s p e o p l e a w o r l d q u i t e r e m o v e d f r o m t h e i r s o u r c e in his d o r m a n t

THE

brain. H e and

inhabits

anonymous

his e n v i r o n s

fashion.

Almost

only

in

the

MAN/CITY

most

immediate!},

65

fragmented

however,

d e s c r i b e d as a m a n , " o n e m a n — l i k e a c i t v , " a n d t h e

he

is

metaphor

b e g i n s to c r a c k . F o l l o w i n g a d e s c r i p t i o n of t h e river's s o u r c e , t h e c h a n g e c o n t i n u e s , as P a t e r s o n ' s m i n d is d e s c r i b e d as a l i v e

and

awake:

Jostled as are the waters

approaching

the brink, his thoughts interlace, repel a n d cut u n d e r . . .

(p. 16) It is significant, since it separates the protagonist and his setting, that the thoughts are differentiated from the Falls; the waters approach " t h e " brink, not " h i s " brink. T h e giant image has not yet disappeared, however, for the next passage describes the mountain (the feminine principle in the p o e m ) , which lies "against him," "facing him, his / arm supporting her"

(17).

Thus the city, river, Falls, and mountain are all described in relation to the "giant," slumbering and incognito. Immediately following the description of the mountain a n d the prose passage bearing on the "Pearls at her ankles," however, the hero evolves from the giant into a specific man, the poet "Paterson" who "receives / communications from the Pope and Jacques / Barzun" ( 1 7 ) , and then into " M r . Paterson" who has "gone away / to rest and write" ( 1 8 ) . T h e movement has been from giant to man, and, topographically, from above the city to the city itself. Paterson's thoughts, which had been likened to the waters approaching the brink, are now identified with the city dwellers: "Inside the bus one sees / his thoughts sitting and standing. His /

thoughts alight and scatter — "

(18).

The

townspeople, no longer the progeny of an unnamed mythical creature, are now clearly identified with the poet's

solipsistic

perceptions and with his ability, through his craft, to give their lives meaning.

66

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

T h e narrator then introduces the personal pronoun, which he retains throughout the remainder of the poem: Who are these people (how complex the mathematic) among whom I see mvself in the regularly ordered plateglass of his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles? (p.'iS) The " I " and "his," distinct entities at this point, soon merge into one: " I remember / a Geographic

picture" ( 2 2 ) . Before

thej do, however, there is a further reference fusing Paterson and landscape. T h e giant was seen as the animator of a "thousand automatons." Following a passage describing Mr. Paterson as the mover of "these people"

("that they may live / his

thought is listed in the Telephone / Directory")

comes this

obscure reference: And derivatively, for the Great Falls, PISS-AGH! the giant lets flv! (p. 18) This abruptly shifts the poem back to the sleeping giant, who adds to the rush of the Passaic ( P I S S - A G H )

Falls by letting

fly, or urinating. T h e falling water thus derives from the giant just as "these people" derive from Mr. Paterson's thought and can thereby be listed in the Directory. This use of the giant's excretion to reconnect the poem with the river has been described by one critic as "arbitrary, flippant, and in bad taste."

1

T h e transition is hardly arbitrary, but it

does represent the kind of uninhibited mental process that dis courages readers who require absolute logic. T h a t

Williams

insists on leaving room for the irrational is clearly seen by the fact that he deleted several lines that gave the passage fairly explicit meaning. In an earl)· draft, the following conversation takes place between " D o c " and " W i l l i e " just after the refer ence to the Directory:

THE

MAN/CITY

6"

Know anv of these people personally, Willie? Yep, Singac, the backbone: buried in the ground where the Little Falls runs o\er him cropping up there. Is that so? And derivatively, for the Great Falls. PISS-AGH! the giant lets fly! good Muncie, too. Full of answers tonight, Willie, ain't vou? (Buffalo) The narrator moves out of the picture in the next few passages, which center around the Falls, and reappears in the first person with the description of the Geographic picture. His final transformation in section i comes following the description of Mrs. Cumming's death when one of his earlier embodiments is introduced, "the old time Jersey Patriot" Noah Faitoute Paterson, otherwise known as Sam Patch, who leaped to his death at the Genesee Falls, cut off from his sources, when language failed him. The Patch material centers on language, and introduces phrases and themes that reappear throughout the remainder of the poem. The short passage of poetry that interrupts the prose narrative relates to all of the lines fusing language and the Falls, and serves as a kind of restatement of the exhaustive quest: The water pouring still from the edge of the rocks, filling his ears with its sound, hard to interpret. A wonder! (p.

26)

In his constant symbolic plunges into the torrent of language Paterson himself is a man who, like Patch, "dives from cliffs

68

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

and the edges of waterfalls, to his death—finally" ( L ,

XIV).

This verse passage (above) provides the transition between the first two parts. Section ii finds the poet "with the roar of the river / forever in our ears (arrears) / inducing sleep and silence . . ." ( 2 8 ) . This section, which contains only two passages of prose, represents a fresh start in the quest for meaning. T h e protagonist is Paterson, the poet, and he comments openly on his task: " T h e r e is no direction. Whither? I / cannot say. I cannot say / more than h o w "

( 2 8 ) . T h e writing becomes at

times intensely personal ( " W h y have I not / but for imagined beaut\ where there is none / or none available, long since / put myself deliberately in the way of death?" 3 0 - 3 1 ) , and one passage describes a trip Williams

himself

made to Port au

Prince, Haiti, and mentions his grandparents ( 3 7 ) · T h e section ends with an allusive letter on literature from " E . D . "

(Edward

Dahlberg). In section iii the protagonist continues in the role of poet, brooding on the partial master}' of language and on his own inadequacies. Medical themes are introduced, and it soon be comes evident that the narrator is a physician as well as a writer. Toward the end of the section, however, he becomes merely one "among the rest," driving out to the suburbs "where the convent of the Little Sisters of / St. A n n pretends a mystery" ( 5 0 ) . Following the description of the convent comes the unexpected line " H e shifts his change," which refocuses atten tion on the doctor-poet. In Miss Koch's words, it points to the sudden acceleration of the poem through the prose description of an earthquake. " T h e abrupt shifting of the soliloquy back to narrative permits the poet to fuse into a new configuration the complex features of the poem, just as an earthquake, through violence, may re-order topography."

2

T h e book ends with an

extended metaphor describing the birth and death of thought, thereby closing in on the crucial problem of the adequate use of language. In Book II the scene is the Park, " f e m a l e to the city,"

THE M A N / C I T Y

69

which is subject to the poet's incursions, and "upon whose body Paterson instructs his thoughts / (concretely)" ( 5 7 ) . Paterson climbs the cliff, and as he walks from place to place, looking and listening, his thoughts move in a kind of free association, transforming what he sees into a series of male-female images. Everything he encounters indicates a pervasive failure in love. As he walks past the "man-high" cedars and "antlered" sumac, hearing the indeterminate voices, he is startled by the flight of a grasshopper. This reminds him of a carved, red-basalt grasshopper, which triggers an interior monologue on the question of art versus life ( " T h e stone lives, the flesh d i e s " — 6 4 ) , which in tum leads to the eloquent passage on the necessity for invention: " W i t h o u t invention nothing is well spaced . . ." ( 6 5 ) . He then describes a couple under a bush, a man combing a collie bitch, a young man playing a guitar "dead pan," old Mary dancing and raising her skirts, and some bored lovers. As section i ends, the crowd strains to "catch the movement of one voice"

( 7 6 ) . Throughout this section the various images

are tied together by the word " W a l k i n g — " which appears in six different places, and which moves Paterson over the surface of the poem. T h e external events serve mainly to trigger his thought processes; the focus never shifts from his receptive, inventing sensibility. In section ii the emphasis is on the sermon of the evangelist, Maus Ehrens, but Paterson, now called " F a i t o u t e , " continues to walk "into emptiness" and to observe. H e describes the paltry congregation and quotes the preacher, whose naive views on money are interspersed with prose passages on the Federal Reserve System and on Hamilton's plans for the Great Falls. Faitoute's final thoughts in the section, evoked by the evangelist's words, are an eloquent prayer to a humanistic " G o d . " T h i s prayer employs the sexual imagery that permeates Book II, i.e., " T h e Himalayas and prairies / of your features amaze delight"

and

(93).

In section iii, evening falls and the "great beast" departs.

W I L L I A M CARLOS WILLIAMS'

•jo

PATERSON

F a i t o u t e is left alone, watching the M a y m o o n . H e on the sermon, and then launches into an angry of

modern

poets, w h o

borrow

meditates

denunciation

from erudition. T h e y

are de-

scribed as " c o n g e a l e d , " lodged under the flow of language. He listens at the Falls, b u t discovers " n o syllable in the confused / uproar." H e is c o m f o r t e d onlv bv the t h o u g h t of the stream, "its terrifying plunge, inviting marriage"

( 1 0 0 ) . As his anger

m o u n t s he loses t o u c h with reality, the roots under the foliage of his m i n d having been trampled by the " h o l i d a y / crowds as by the feet of the straining / minister" ( 1 0 2 ) . H e sees a hideously

deformed

metamorphosis,

dwarf,

then

undergoes

his ears b e c o m i n g

a

drastic,

toadstools

and

Dantesque his

fingers

sprouting leaves. H e is exhorted, simultaneously, by the dwarf ( w h o symbolizes the artist neglected by an insensitive p o p u l a c e ) —"Poet,

poet!

Compose."—and

sing by

your song, quickly!" "She,"

the

feminine

"Go

home.

Write.

principle—"Marry

us! M a r r y us!" " Y o u have abandoned m e ! " H e flees, pursued by the roar, and then regains his footing on solid earth, grinding "his heel / hard d o w n on the s t o n e " ( 1 0 4 ) . H e has succeeded in overcoming his paralyzing anger and despair, and has thus won a kind of victory. H a v i n g

regained

" t h e sun kissed s u m m i t s of love," and having a c c e p t e d his role as an obscure scribbler, he ends bv singing to himself "a song written previously," the lovelv lyric b e g i n n i n g

"On

this

most

voluptuous night of the year" ( 1 0 5 ) . T h e focus, however, shifts f r o m this partial victory with the introduction of the long letter f r o m M i s s Cress d o c u m e n t i n g her own stasis and the indigna tion she feels toward the poet ( 1 0 5 - 1 1 3 ) . T h u s the revelation that seemed i m m i n e n t following Faitoute's m e n t a l reawakening never takes place. Instead the book ends w i t h page after page of tedious, neurotic complaint. A n d so the quest must continue. B o o k III takes the protagonist to the library to continue his search. R o y

Harvey

Pearce suggests that by calling the book

" T h e L i b r a r y " W i l l i a m s is "indicating that it is academicism of all sorts w h i c h is at the root of modern man's t r o u b l e s — t h e

THE M A N / C I T Y

71

ultimate expression of his divorce from his world and of that split between

writing and living upon which

poetess-correspondent

harps so neurotically."

3

Dr.

Paterson's

That

Williams

has strong feelings about the abuses of scholarship is certainly true. Pearce is mistaken, however, in supposing that the main purpose of this section is to point out academicism as the

bete

noir of modern life. T h e book actually documents the validity of such a search—a rich mine of material is unearthed by Dr. Paterson—though it does place very serious reservations on the long-range value of such an approach. A t the end of the book the narrator says " I cannot stay here / to spend my life looking into the past" ( 1 7 3 ) · It is, however, because of the historical sense of place and the understanding of the past he has gained from his immersion that he can make the final, positive assertion—"this rhetoric / is real!" ( 1 7 3 ) . Williams' ideas in Paterson of

on the function of tradition and

the usable past are similar to those of

both

Eliot

and

Pound. H e is not rejecting scholarship and historical research per se. He is, rather, making a discriminating rejection of mere academic

learning—of learning that has no relationship to the

local present or to human concerns. Such an attitude—recalling Whitman's " I do not reject you, proud libraries"—is directed at the bud forever green, tightcurled, i.e., the University, which is often separated by an impenetrable barrier of

"Scholarship"

from anv sort of vital participation in the present. T h e past is for those who lived in the past, Paterson is reminded. It is also, however, for those who live well in the present, provided it is part of a living tradition and not merely a sump. T o use the Falls image, it is from the past, above, that the river

(time)

pours down over the present and into " t h e future below" ( 1 7 2 ) . Returning more specifically now to the protagonist, there is only the slightest narrative movement in the first part of Book III. W h a t

does evolve is that Faitoute has sought

through

books to lead the mind away, to find rest against the uproar of the park with all of its reverberation. H e finds old newspaper

72

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

clippings about the cyclone, fire, and flood in " H e l l "

(Pater-

son), New Jersey. A t one point his mind reels, and as he turns, possibly not heeding the imperative S I L E N C E ! , he sees over his right shoulder a vague outline, speaking: " G e n t l v ! G e n t l y ! " ( 1 2 1 ) . T h e row of books oppresses him and his mind drifts, constantly returning to a girl, " B e a u t i f u l T i l i n g , " whose face is "a quietness, real / out of no book." He meditates on love, marriage, and death, and introduces the theme of the "radiant gist," which is developed later. He exhorts himself to "quit this place," but as the section ends he is still "Searching among books; the mind elsewhere / looking down / Seeking" In section ii he speaks in an excited, evangelical

(136). manner,

fusing "cost" with the fire, flood, and cyclone. T h e

central

symbol in the section is fire, destroying, mutilating, and purifying. Faitoute repeats the distinction between the silent library, which "contains / nothing of you," and Beautiful T h i n g : Let them explain you and you will be the heart of the explanation. Nameless, you will appear Beautiful thing the flame's lover — (p. 148) T h e digressions continue, and he exhorts himself: " R e a d . Bring the mind back (attendant upon / the page) to the day's heat" (152).

Again, however, his thoughts

return

to the girl, the

Beautiful T h i n g , attacked by the boys from Newark, to whom he cannot be half loving enough. T h e section ends, as it begins, with a reference to fire. Section iii opens with the poet charging himself to "write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive"

(155).

M u c h of the imager}· in this section is related to the

flood.

T h e r e is a careful parallelism worked out between the gradual inundation in the city and the waterfall that pours

through

Paterson's mind. As he sits in the library the reading begins to

THE M A N / C I T Y

73

overwhelm him, just as the leaden flood overwhelms the city. There are short reminiscences and snatches of nightmare dialogue as the flood "lifts to recognition in a / rachitic brain" ( 1 6 2 ) . At the point where the water is "undermining the railroad e m b a n k m e n t " a page of phrases appears printed crisscross ( 1 6 4 ) , showing the words breaking apart as language cracks to pieces. The brain is undermined. This is followed by a page of advice from Pound, written in St. Elizabeth's hospital. Composed in his peculiar slang, the letter insists on Williams' lack of an adequate literary background. T h e letter is followed by a page showing the substratum of an artesian well in Paterson ( 1 6 6 ) , a sort of answer to Greek and Latin with the bare hands. ( C f . the phrases preceding Book

I.)

T h e book comes to a

F U L L S T O P , and the remaining pages deal with the landscape of the city following the water's recession—with the shapeless ness of things. This also is related to the shape of the mind, and the quest is restated: How to begin to find a shape—to begin to begin again, turning the inside out to find one phrase that will lie married beside another for delight . ? —seems beyond attainment (p. 167) The mind, like the city, must be reformed: " T h e words will have to be rebricked u p " ( 1 7 0 ) . Throughout the passage the speaker's precise persona remains relatively obscure, but in the closing lines it again becomes clear that he is the poet, seeking, in the library, for the language appropriate to

contemporary

culture: T h e past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— is, of necessity, my sole concern (P·

Ч2)

74

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

As the book ends the poet rejects the library as the sole answer to his quest, while at the same time reaffirming the value of the quest: I cannot stay here to spend my life looking into the past: the future's no answer. 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- ^ з ) L i k e his namesake, N o a h Paterson survives the

flood.

T h e break between Books I I I and I V is abrupt. W h a t little transition there is derives not f r o m the narrator, w h o metamorphoses drastically into "his y o u n g f e m a l e p h a s e " ( L , 3 0 5 ) , b u t f r o m the m o v e m e n t of the river. In the course of the first books the Passaic flows through the state, m o v i n g toward the sea. In Book

IV

it approaches

its

with the E a s t R i v e r . W i t h

mouth,

which

this approach

eventually

merges

"international

char-

acter begins to enter the innocent river and pervert it; sexual perversions, such things that ever}' metropolis w h e n you get to know it houses"

( / W , 7 9 ) . T h e first part of the book

deals

with this perversion, with an unqualified failure in love, a t h e m e that runs through the entire p o e m . Part i is called, ironically, " A n I d y l , " and is rich in pastoral images. 4 T h e section has a tighter narrative f r a m e w o r k than any other in the p o e m . It consists primarily during

six

of

conversations, which

separate

days.

The

talkers

apparently are

the

take

young

place nurse-

masseuse f r o m R a m a p o , N e w Jersey, n a m e d " P h y l l i s , " and the wealthy, cultured old poetess w h o calls herself, with nods to the pastoral tradition a n d to G i d e , " C o r y d o n . " T h i s w o m a n

intro-

THE M A N / C I T Y

75

duces a new dimension to the poem, and is not, as Pearce suggests, "Dr. Paterson's earlier correspondent." The individual speaker is never indicated in the text, but there is no question about who says what. The older woman asks Phyllis about her personal life, quotes her own poems (mostly parodies of Pound and Eliot), and makes a pathetic attempt at seduction. Phyllis's replies are earthy and unimaginative, revealing both her vitality and the utter paucity of her linguistic resources. The section also contains Phyllis's comic, ungrammatical letters to her father, and records her conversations with Paterson, with whom she carries on a frustrating, unconsummated affair. The onlyother persona in the section is " T h e Poet," a sort of Eliotic Chorus: "Oh Paterson! Oh married man! / He is the city of cheap hotels and private / entrances . . ." ( 1 8 3 ) . The question of the metamorphosing protagonist is particularly complex in this dramatic section since Paterson is, Williams said, the female Paterson, and thus two distinct facets of the protean hero are brought to bear on each other in the confrontations involving girl and Doctor. (In the Author's Note to First Act, Williams wrote, "Any individual is twenty persons of all ages and sexes.") 5 Each is incomplete without the other, and yet the inability (or unwillingness)) to consummate their relationship provides a vivid symbol of the sterility and divorce documented throughout the poem. Like Tiresias in The Waste Land, Paterson has foresuffered all, and Phyllis remains "Something I shall always / desire, you've seen to that" (199). In a large sense, the book concerns Paterson's attempts to escape his roots, to enter the world of Manhattan and inter national culture, symbolized by the poetess in her Sutton Place apartment. The attempt fails, however, and in the succeeding sections he returns "home." In section ii the protagonist hardly appears at all, except in the opening lines in which he mentions taking "my son" to a lecture on atomic fission. The mention of the son is inevitable in view of the emphasis on cycles and birth throughout the

j6

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

poem. There is also a personal reference to the poem itself: " W h a t I miss, said your mother, is the poetry, the pure poem of the first parts" ( 2 0 2 ) , and all in all the identification between Williams and Paterson, which has become closer as the poem progresses, is nearly completed. In highly charged language the poet introduces the story of M a d a m e Curie's successful quest for the " g i s t " that will cure cancer, describing the discover}' in terms of a physical birth. In the section's radium

pivotal

passage, equations are set

and credit, and between

money

and

up

between

uranium.

(See

Chapter V I . ) T h e main burden of this Curie section is to document the discovery by the "little nurse"

(who differs signifi-

cantly from Phyllis, also a nurse) and to show its bearing on Williams' own quest for the radiant gist in language—for that which will stand against "all that scants our lives." In a notebook in the B u f f a l o collection W i l l i a m s wrote: " T h e splitting of the atom (first time explained to me)

has a literary

meaning

in the splitting of the foot (sprung rhythm of Hopkins?) and correspondingly

is connected

thereby

to human

life as life.

Love is the sledge that smashes the atom." T h u s , as Pearce puts it, love is a word for the modus

operandi

of language, and

language is that which, as it is properly used, "signifies the degree to which man has lived according to his own deepest and truest image of himself and Iiis possibilities."

6

T h e final section of Book I V begins with another personal reference to the poem itself: Haven't you forgot your virgin purpose, the language? What language? " T h e past is for those who lived in the past," is all she told me. (p. 219) T h e " S h e , " as always, evokes the mountain, or feminine principle. She recenters the poem on the general area of the city,

THE M A N / C I T Y

77

and even though "the ocean yawns!" and the river has reached its source, much of the section reintroduces themes relating to the specific location of Paterson. The protagonist remains virtually anonymous as he quotes an old woman, reminisces about girls he has known, makes a kind of farewell to the river, and recounts, at length, historical details about the city. With the introduction of the "sea is not our home" theme (which is discussed in the next chapter), his personal involvement becomes increasingly intense: Listen! Thalassa! Thalassa! Drink of it, be drunk! (p. 236) In the final passage, however, he is seen as an anonymous swimmer (Williams has referred to him as "Odysseus") who walks out of the waves, and, followed by his dog, climbs the bank, spits out a beach plum seed, and "turns inland toward Camden" (A, 392) to begin again.7 After a short prose paragraph dealing with the hanging of John Johnson, the book closes: This is the blast the eternal close the spiral the final somersault the end. (p. 238) The "spiral" and "somersault" derive from the "rolling up" of the "Preface," and represent the closing of a circle. This is not only "the end," however, but a beginning as well. As Williams said, the protagonist, at the end of I V , identifies himself with America. "He finally will die but it can't be categorically stated that death ends anything" ( I W , 22). It is thus the old man's job to create art that will go beyond him into the lives of those who haven't had time to create. And thus out of the seeming

j8

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

end of the p o e m a completely new;

new section emerges, with its

focus and dimensions.

In Book V the protagonist makes it clear that he is now in "old a g e " ( 2 4 1 ) . H e has "grown older" (268), is "the old m a n " (269) with an " a g i n g b o d y " ( 2 7 0 ) . T h e world of Paterson reawakens, and he remembers w h a t he thought he had forgotten. H e returns to old scenes to find out w h a t has happened since that time w h e n Soupault gave him The

Last Nights

of Paris to

translate: " W h a t has happened to Paris since that time? and to myself"? A W O R L D OF ART T H A T T H R O U G H T H E Y E A R S HAS SURVIVED! ( p p . 243-244) It is this world of art that now holds his attention. T h e book is

dedicated

Painter."

The

"To

the

memory

of

unifying themes—the

Henri

Toulouse

Lautrec,

unicorn tapestries,

Audu-

b o n , the virgin and the whore, the flowers, the artists and their paintings, and the approach of d e a t h — a r e all involved with the relationship b e t w e e n nature and art, and with the world of the imagination, w h i c h endures. Paterson has moved away from the life of the senses, and now, detached, he observes this life and pronounces a cure for all the ills that plague it. T h e answer lies in the

transforming

power

of the imagination, w h i c h

" h o l e / in the b o t t o m of the b a g "

( 2 4 7 ) , the hole

is

the

through

w h i c h escape is possible. T h r o u g h o u t the book Paterson "casts o f f " to the past, looks sharply on the present, and peers with increasing intensity into the u n k n o w n

future. T h e world of art brings these three to-

gether. As the old m a n moves toward death he becomes preo c c u p i e d w i t h the need for creation and procreation. O n l y the

THE man/city

79

creator survives. The world within the tapestries has endured. Audubon and Shahn survive, and Pollock, Klee, Durer, Bosch, Freud, Picasso, Gris, Beethoven, and Brueghel. "Nothing else / is real" (24g). This is the legacy Paterson would leave behind. He constantly juxtaposes youth and age, setting both against art, which alone is immutable. By now Paterson has assumed the role of sage, introducing the book of a young poet and instructing youth out of his age and wisdom: " ' L o o s e your love to flow' / while you are vet voung / male and female" (252). And he speaks of trying to get the young to foreshorten their efforts in the use of words which he had found so difficult, the errors he had made in the use of the poetic line: (p. 268) Throughout most of the book Paterson retains the role of poet, but he is more obviously William Carlos Williams than in any of the other four books. There is, as mentioned, the reference to his translation of The Last Nights of Paris. There is a letter from "Josie" addressed to "Bill," and another (from Allen Ginsberg) addressed to "Dr. Williams." T h e book also contains a section from a Mike Wallace interview in which the poet is called "Dr. Williams." Section iii contains another letter to "Bill," and mentions "Godwin," who "knew everything / or nothing / and died insane / when he was still a young man" ( 2 7 1 ) . Godwin was Williams' uncle—his father's brother. The protagonist assumes a dramatically different mask toward the end of the poem, however, when he refers to himself as "I, Paterson, the King-self" (272), a figure of heroic size, who "saw the lady / through the rough woods / outside the palace walls." Here he is projecting himself into "the living fiction / a tapestry," making life imitate art. He remains,

8θ

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

though, the contemporary man who can tell himself, with appealing pluckiness, "Paterson, / keep your pecker up" (273). And his final appearance is in the role of the aging man, learning with age to sleep his life away. He now understands that we are able to know nothing but "the measured dance." This is the last closing of the circle, since it is "measure," finally, that serves as a key bv which rigor of beauty can be unlocked. Poetry began with the dance, and only by returning to the dance for a new measure can man be spared the stifling paralysis of old modes of behavior and freed, wholly, to rule himself.

4 THE RIVER

B o o k s w i l l g i v e rest sometimes

against

the uproar of water f a l l i n g and righting itself to r e f i l l

filling

the mind with its reverberation shaking stone. —Paterson,

NEARLY EQUAL IN IMPORTANCE to t h e w a n d e r i n g h e r o in

together the various parts of Paterson

p.

119

tying

is the river. Introduced

(or rained d o w n ) in the " P r e f a c e , " it flows throughout the five books. T h e proximity of the Passaic to Paterson was one of Williams' main reasons for choosing this city as the site of his poem. Following a course from above the Falls down to the sea, the industrially vital waterway was, he realized, a readymade symbol: " T h i s was mv river and I was going to use it. I had grown up on its banks, seen the filth that polluted it . . . all I had to do was follow it and I had a p o e m " ( I W , 7 3 ) . T h e movement downstream is carefully worked out from book to book: " E a c h part of the poem was planned as a unit complete in itself, reporting the progress of the river." This progress as documented in the poem is very close to the actual progress of the Passaic, and the places mentioned— Notch Brook, R a m a p o s V a l l e y , and Singac, for example—are New Jersey landmarks. A m a p of the state shows the river's source in the southern W a t c h u n g Range, from which it moves north.

Joined

by

the

Whippany

River

(which

previously

merged with the R o c k a w a y ) , it arcs through the Big

Piece

Meadows, then meanders to T w o Bridges. There it merges with

82

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

the P o m p t o n , itself m a d e up of the P e q u a n n o c k , W a n a q u e , and Ramapo

rivers.

Moving

to the b e n d at " S i n g a c , "

it

tumbles

over L i t t l e F a l l s , and then flows toward Paterson and over the Passaic

(or G r e a t )

Falls. B e n d i n g around

the city, it

moves

south, past the D u n d e e s D a m , past C l i f t o n , Passaic, and R u t h erford. A f t e r N e w a r k it enters N e w a r k B a y , m e r g i n g there with salt water. 1 T h e only m a j o r piece of geographic license W i l l i a m s p e r m i t t e d himself in reconstructing this progression lies in making

the cataract

one of

the poem's

central symbols.

Except

w h e n the river is in flood or s n o w is melting, the Falls is actually n o t h i n g m o r e than a dry cleft in the rock, the water

having

b e e n diverted, f o r hydroelectric power, by a d a m just above the c l e f t . W h a t was once a fine tourist attraction is now likely to b e of interest only to dedicated W i l l i a m s b u f f s , or, if there are such things, to hydroelectric power b u f f s . T h e p o e m ' s river, as I pointed out earlier, has its source in the

"Preface"

with

the words,

" f l o a t i n g mists, to be

rained

d o w n a n d / regathered into a river that flows / a n d encircles" ( 1 3 ) . T h i s genesis, W i l l i a m s said, is a symbol of all beginnings. B o o k I opens and closes with descriptions of the Falls, w h i c h crash d o w n in the hills a b o v e the city, producing the t h u n d e r that fills Paterson's dreams. It is the noise of this pouring river that gives substance thereby

animating

of

river

the

from

to " t h e subtleties

"a its

of his

thousand a u t o m a t o n s . " source

(designated

machinations," The

simply

movement as

"From

a b o v e " ) to the gorge, which forms the F a l l s , is pictured graphically in the opening descriptive sequence: From above, higher than the spires, higher even than the office towers, from oozy fields abandoned to grey beds of dead grass, black sumac, withered weed-stalks, mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves— the river comes pouring in above the city and crashes from the edge of the gorge in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists— (P- 1 5 )

T H E RIVER

83

W illiams evokes a sense of violent movement and power by m a k i n g a sharp break betw een the static "grev . . . dead . . . black . . . withered . . . d e a d " and the intense "comes pouring . . . and crashes . . .

in a recoil." T h i s is of considerable

importance:

throughout the poem the Falls quicken the action and give a sense of dramatic chaos, invariably related to the chaotic attempt to comb out the language. T h e lines following the description just quoted sketch this relationship between the Falls and the language-falls within the m i n d : (What common language to unravel? . . combed into straight lines from the rafter of a rock's lip.) (P- 1 5 ) T h e connections between the flow of thought and the flow of water are then fully analyzed in a long, intricate passage. T h i s relationship

is reintroduced,

with

variations,

throughout

the

poem. Its unusual importance in Book I lies in the passages dealing with Mrs. C u m m i n g ' s

" s u i c i d e " j u m p into the

Falls,

and with the death leap of Sam Patch. E a c h of these unnatural deaths is related to a failure of speech, and each is frequently invoked, in the manner of a leitmotiv, to contrast the free flow of the river with the stasis in the mind. T h e r e are also other strategic and important descriptions of the river in this opening book. T h e spent waters of the Falls, for example, form the outline of Paterson's back ( 1 4 ) , and the "quiet river" has carved out the Park ( 1 7 ) . T h e Falls are cen tral in the prose descriptions of the "monster in h u m a n f o r m " (18-19),

an

d

Hamilton's visit to Paterson ( 1 9 ) . T h e

ster" bass is captured just below the Falls basin

"roar of the river" induces eternal sleep ( 2 8 ) . T h e juniper trembles " O n body is

fished

the e m b a n k m e n t "

" f r o m the m u d d y swirl"

"шоп

(19).

The

compact

( 3 0 ) , and a frozen (31).

Following

the

description of another body, this one caught between t w o logs

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

h a n g i n g over t h e p r e c i p i c e of t h e Falls, t h e river is related t o t h e industry of

Paterson:

Half the river red, half steaming purple from the factory vents, spewed out hot, swirling, bubbling. T h e dead bank, shining mud (pp. 48-49) And

in

the

final

image

in

the

book,

thought,

personified,

c l a m b e r s u p the w e t rocks b e n e a t h t h e p o u r i n g torrent, h a v i n g its birth a n d d e a t h The

importance

mense.

In a d d i t i o n

river are described derive from the

there. of t h e w a t e r i m a g e r y

in this b o o k

t o t h o s e passages in w h i c h

is im

Falls

and

e x p l i c i t l y , there are n u m e r o u s i m a g e s

that

river

symbolism

and

that

can

the be

understood

o n l y in relation t o it. T h e s e c o n d prose passage, for

example,

describes t h e pearls discovered bv t h e p o o r s h o e m a k e r in N o t c h B r o o k , w h i c h is a tributary of t h e river

(17). The

girls f r o m

d e c a y e d families " m a y look at t h e t o r r e n t in / their m i n d s a n d it is foreign to t h e m " hail

Easter are d e s c r i b e d

as " d i s p a r a t e

waters of their hair in w h i c h When

among

the

pouring

n o t h i n g is / m o l t e n

—"

Paterson e x p e r i e n c e s a s u d d e n revulsion at t h e

of his i m a g i n a t i o n whale's

breath"

he draws o n a m a r i n e

(31).

/

( 2 1 ) . T h e t w o h a l f - g r o w n girls w h o

Jesus'

parable

of

image: the

/

(29). poverty

" S t a l e as a

seeds

thrown

a m o n g the g o o d a n d stonv earth is t r a n s f o r m e d i n t o " t h e snow f a l l i n g i n t o t h e w a t e r , / part u p o n t h e rock . . ." ( 3 3 - 3 4 ) . A n d in t h e description of t h e c o n s p i c u o u s w a s t e t h a t existed d u r i n g a t i m e of general pool,

(emptv!)"

ficial a n d e m p t y

privation, the poet

mentions

"a

swimming

( 4 5 ) , providing a contrast b e t w e e n pool and the natural

flow

of

the

arti-

t h e river.

The

prose description of t h e s l a u g h t e r of t h e eels a n d

fish

drained lake also suggests a p e r p e t u a t i o n of stasis in

in

the

dramatic

contrast to t h e crash of t h e F a l l s . T h u s f r o m t h e b e g i n n i n g t o t h e e n d t h e Passaic is in evi

THE RIVER

85

dence, fusing all the parts much as the word " W a l k i n g " does in Book II. W a t e r is clearlv the controlling element in this book, as " e a r t h " is in Book II, fire in Book I I I , and air in Book I V . As the source of life, of "shells and animalcules" and of man, it is appropriately exploited in the section that "introduces the elemental character of the place." T h e river flows throughout the entire poem, but only in Book I is its relationship to the action so completely central. Until section iii, when the Falls serves as the setting for a strong and complex sequence centering on marriage and language, the Passaic remains in the background in Book II. A "Plan for I I , " in the B u f f a l o papers, projects this book as a "loose association looking toward the 'language,' the Falls obsessing the m i n d . " It is after the evangelist's sermon, as evening descends, that " F a i t o u t e " strolls off to the Falls. Until

this

point they are mentioned only as a background detail. In section i, for example, the phrase "over-riding / the risks: / pouring down!" (58) suggests both the Falls and the rush of Paterson's thought. Later, as the poet stands at the rampart observing the steeples and ball-park, he looks "beyond the gap where the river / plunges into the narrow gorge, unseen" ( 7 1 ) . T h e river remains unseen throughout this section. In part ii, a prose passage dealing with Hamilton's enthusi astic response to the Great Falls and to " t h e navigable river to carry manufactured goods to the market centers"

(87)

leads

into a description of the evangelist's sermon: Give up my money! —with monotonous insistence the falls of his harangue hung featureless upon the ear, yet with a certain strangeness as if arrested in space (P- 8 7 )

Here the linguistic and the economic connotations of the Falls are merged. Williams' own comment on the evangelist's speech

86

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

is the simple assertion that " H e does not have it (the language) though his leap is just" ( B u f f a l o ) . By now it is evident that Williams has set up an equation between the Falls and man's language, and that this equation involves man's svmbolic leap in an attempt to wrest some meaning from the language of the Falls. If his speech fails, as in the case of Mrs. Cumming and Sam Patch, then death is unavoidable. In the evangelist's case there is neither destruction nor revelation, but simply a featureless suspension, a state of arrest. W i t h section iii, the Falls becomes the center of attention. T h e lines beginning "the descent beckons" suggest the descent of night, of memory, and of the Falls, as well as the more obvious descent down the mountain. W i t h evening, love wakens, and Paterson listens to "the pouring water!" He strolls to the Falls. T h e passages that follow, as indicated in the preceding chapter, all center on the role of the poet, on the divorce from learning within the universities, and on the urgent need for invention and "marriage." First of all, the poem is described in a splendid falls image: " T h a t the poem, / the most perfect rock and temple, the highest / falls, in clouds of gauzy spray, should be / so rivaled" (99). This passage laments that the poet, in disgrace, must borrow from erudition. T h e scholars of the word are described as "dangling, about whom / the water weaves its strands encasing them / in a sort of thick lacquer, lodged / under its

flow"

( 1 0 0 ) . These servants of tradition, like the

evangelist, remain under the flow of language, with no chance to comb out its meaning. But Paterson, the poet, "untaught but listening," strains in an intense effort to decipher the meaning of the roar: Caught (in mind) beside the water he looks down, listens! But discovers, still, no syllable in the confused uproar: missing the sense (though he tries) untaught but listening, shakes with the intensity of his listening . (p. 100)

THE RIVER

87

This attempt is integrally related to the awakening of love and to the realization of the need for marriage. 2 T h e passage is followed by the introduction of the marriage theme, which is related to the use of language and to the contradictory demands made on the creative sensibility. Only the thought of the stream comforts him, its terrifying plunge, inviting marriage —and a wreath of fur And She — Stones invent nothing, only a man invents. What answer the waterfall? filling the basin by the snag-toothed stones? And He — Clearly, it is the new, uninterpreted, that remoulds the old, pouring down And she — It has not been enacted in our day! Le pauvre petit ministre, swinging his arms, drowns under the indifferent fragrance of the bass-wood trees (pp. 100-101) The "She," or feminine principle, questions the validity of the waterfall, preferring the actual

marriage

between

man

and

woman to the figurative union suggested by the plunge into a quest for language. " I t has not been enacted in our day!" is an echo of " N o poet has come." And the "Pauvre

petit

ministre"

refers to the evangelist who drowns, not within the crashing torrent of the Falls, but under the indifferent fragrance. This image foreshadows the idea of "indifferent m e n " that emerges as a major theme in Book I V . T h e "debate" is followed by a fragment of a letter from

88

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

Paterson's correspondent, the rejected Miss Cress who, hurt and angry, speaks without her "usual tongue-tied round-aboutness" (101).

Following this, Paterson's own anger mounts, and he

sees the dwarf who warns, "Poet, poet! sing vour song, quicklv!" This is followed bv He all but falls . . And She — Marry us! Marry us! Or! be dragged down, dragged under and lost (p. 1 0 2 ) T h e next passage is a reference to Mrs. C u m m i n g , who "leaped (or fell) without a / language, tongue-tied"

(my italics), and

is composed as an ideogram, resembling a waterfall: She was married with empty words: better to stumble at the edge to fall fall and be —divorced (p. 1 0 2 ) This is followed by more words from the dwarf Write.

Compose"). The

passage ends with

( " G o home.

Faitoute

fleeing,

"pursued by the roar" ( 1 0 4 ) . T h e failure to understand the im plications of the roar and to realize fully the love inherent in it is further documented, as I suggested in the last chapter, by the shrill, neurotic letter that makes up the final eight pages of the book. It should be noted here, however, that the attempt to decipher the language of the Falls does not cease with this retreat. Rather, as W i l l i a m s wrote in his plan for the book, " H e flees to the library" ( B u f f a l o ) . T h e r e his quest continues on an altogether different level.

THE RIVER

89

In " T h e Library," Book III, the river serves two specific functions, the lesser of which is to advance the movement of the poem ever closer to the sea, therebv continuing the symbolic flow of man's life from his original source outward toward the "world." As the book begins, the river whirls and eddies "below the cataract," and a few pages later, "the river / passes" ( 1 3 1 ) . T h e sea is mentioned for the first time ( " O Thalassa, Thalassa! . . . Soon!"—124) to show its proximity, and then mentioned, with variations, again ("the long, long / sea, swept by winds, the 'wine-dark s e a ' " — 1 4 0 ) . T h e last phrase provides another dark foreshadowing, this time for the sea of trailing guts, "the blood dark sea" of Book I V . The major function of the river in this book, however, lies in the sustained use of the roar of the Falls as a symbol of the torrent of language within the poet's mind. From this chaos some meaning must be wrested if Paterson is to escape destruction. He goes to the library to find what was missing at the Falls themselves, seeking—in books, in the language of others —an interpretation. As a note in the Yale collection states, however, he "finds it not in the books but in his mind that wanders as he reads." He searches in the printed page, but his mind is "elsewhere / looking down / Seeking" ( 1 3 6 ) . T h e parallelism of the mind and Falls is continued, but with variations, since the library is in the city and the focus is off the river itself. T h e Falls now tumble and refall "unseen," and the roar in his mind, unabated, is "not of the falls but of its rumor / unabated" ( 1 1 9 ) . T h e tumult is only a roar of books, and at one point Paterson exhorts himself to go back to the actual river for an answer, "for relief from 'meaning'" ( 1 3 5 ) , back where all mouths are rinsed. T h e image of the Falls' "heavy plaits" is repeated twice (136, 1 6 1 ) , thus setting up Paterson's final resolution to "comb out the language — or succumb" ( 1 7 3 ) . And the image of the Falls is given an unusual twist, in the fire passage, in the description of the "waterfall of the / flames, a cataract reversed, shooting / upward" ( 1 4 6 ) . This description of the cataract reversed is the only refer-

go

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

e n c e to the F a l l s in section ii, in w h i c h fire is t h e c o n t r o l l i n g e l e m e n t . I n section iii, h o w e v e r , w h e r e i n t h e

flood

dominates,

t h e w a t e r i m a g e r y is rich a n d suggestive. T h e passages on t h e 1 9 0 2 disaster are also a d e t a i l e d expression of t h e flood of words w i t h i n P a t e r s o n ' s b r a i n . J u s t as t h e w a t e r w i p e s o u t the s l u m s , making purges

rebuilding the m i n d

essential, and

so

makes

also

way

the

mental

for a new

inundation

language:

"The

words will h a v e to b e r e b r i c k e d u p , t h e / — w h a t ? W h a t a m I coming

to . / p o u r i n g

pressed

following

destruction

is

the

the

down?" burning

new

(170). of

creation

(A

similar idea

the library.) possible,

Only

the

is ex

through

phoenix

rising

w h i l e t h e nest is c o n s u m e d . S e c t i o n iii b e g i n s w i t h a p a s s a g e of q u i e t , d r e a m like m a r i n e images, " a d r u m m i n g of s u b m e r g e d / e n g i n e s , a b e a t of pellers"

(155).

( W i l l i a m s w a s a w a r e that t h e city of

has a l o n g history of s u b m a r i n e e x p e r i m e n t a t i o n . )

pro

Paterson

T h i s is fol-

l o w e d b y " W e w a l k i n t o a d r e a m , f r o m c e r t a i n t y to t h e unas certained"

(155),

suggesting

the movement

f r o m the

present

into t h e c l o u d e d p a s t . T h e t e n s i o n b e t w e e n p a s t , p r e s e n t , a n d f u t u r e is of t h e u t m o s t i m p o r t a n c e in this section. It poses o n e of

channel

his

e n e r g i e s ? — t h a t P a t e r s o n has to a n s w e r . T h e d e s c r i p t i o n of

the

important

questions—where

is

one

to

the

flood begins w i t h t h e f a l l i n g of t h e rain, s u r f e i t i n g t h e upper

reaches.

Things

begin

to

break

apart.

sullied, a n d t h e lilies d r o w n in t h e m u d d y

flux.

The

T h e stream grows leaden within him, his lilies drag. So be it. T e x t s m o u n t and complicate themselves, lead to further texts and those to synopses, digests and emendations. So be it. Until the words break loose or—sadly hold, unshaken. . . . (p.

water

A t the

time,

156)

river's is

same

T H E RIVER

It is essential to the rejuvenation

of

the language that

91

the

words break loose. Before there can be a new measure the old, confining one must be destroyed. If the words "hold," the language, "sadly," will not be renewed. T h e floods, within the eitv and within man ( " t o the teeth / to the very e y e s " ) , continue parallel courses. T h e description of the dead dog in the river, descending "toward Acheron," adds a new dimension, suggesting Paterson's own descent into the dark night of his soul. T h e flood slowly "lifts to recognition in a / rachitic brain" ( 1 6 2 ) at the same time that the water is " t w o feet now on the turnpike / and still rising" ( 1 6 2 ) . T h e flood

reaches its peak as the water, a "piston, /

scouring the stones"

cohabitous,

( 1 6 3 ) , undermines the railroad embank-

ment. A t this point the mind too is undermined. T h e language breaks completely apart, and the words, splattered all over the page, are arbitrarily chosen. T h e y have broken loose. T h e

flood

then recedes, leaving things formless: How to begin to find a shape—to begin to begin again, turning the inside out to find one phrase that will lie married beside another for delight ? —seems beyond attainment . (p. 167) This recognition of the possibilities (and terrific difficulties) of starting from scratch heightens the belief that there can be no return to the past. " T h e r e is no recurrence. / T h e past is dead" ( 1 6 9 ) . T h e final passage in the book returns to the symbol of the Falls: The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— is, of necessity, my sole concern . (P· ! 7 2 )

92

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

A t this p o i n t , P a t e i s o n does not speak of leaping into the F a l l s . T h e cataract is the " v i s i b l e p a r t " of the cascading language, a n d onlv bv m a k i n g of it a replica will his disease be cured. T h i s can be a c c o m p l i s h e d not by r e m a i n i n g in the library, " t o spend my life looking into the p a s t . " R a t h e r , he must find his m e a n i n g in the present " a n d lay it, w h i t e , / beside the sliding w a t e r : myself — cumb"

/ c o m b out the l a n g u a g e — or sue

( 1 7 3 ) . T h i s i m a g e of c o m b i n g the l a n g u a g e is related

to the earlier descriptions of the F a l l s ' " h e a v y plaits." It also evokes the vignette in B o o k I I of the m a n deliberately c o m b i n g the long hair of a new-washed collie b i t c h , " u n t i l it lies, as he designs, like ripples in w h i t e sand giving off its clean-dog o d o r " ( 6 9 ) . Paterson has not yet f o u n d his m e a n i n g , b u t he has esc a p e d the tyranny of an e x h a u s t e d language. H e has also been purged a n d renewed f o r greater seeking. In discussing the river as s y m b o l in B o o k I V it is essential to note that this section is described, in the A u t h o r ' s N o t e , as " t h e river b e l o w the f a l l s , " a n d that it is titled " T h e R u n

to

the S e a . " T h e river mingles with the ocean a n d carries the protagonist a w a y f r o m his city into the " w o r l d . " I n a note in the Yale

papers,

Williams

projected

the b o o k

as an a t t e m p t

to

" s h o w the perverse c o n f u s i o n s that c o m e of a f a i l u r e to untangle the l a n g u a g e a n d m a k e it our o w n as b o t h m a n w o m a n are carried helplessly toward the sea (of b l o o d )

and

which,

by their failures of speech, await t h e m . T h e poet alone in this world holds the key to their final rescue." T h e ideas of perverse c o n f u s i o n s a n d of m o v e m e n t

toward

the sea are m e s h e d in section i, in the words of the " p o e t e s s " who

lives

in

an

apartment

high

above

the

East

River

Manhattan: T h a t is the East River. T h e sun rises there. And beyond, is Blackwell's Island. W e l f a r e Island, City Island . whatever they call it now where the city's petty criminals, the poor the superannuated and the insane are housed (p.

180)

in

THE RIVER

93

This is a different scene from the richly natural one through which the river runs in New Jersey, and all that is left of "the elemental, the primitive" (180) are three rocks tapering into the water, which the woman, witli her romantic bent, and in her loneliness, calls "my sheep," and which Phyllis, the prosaic realist, admits are "white all right but it's from the gulls that crap them up all day long" ( 1 8 1 ) . These gulls, which are less in evidence in the inland river above the Falls, give an unclean, predatory mood to the book. They are introduced as impersonal scavengers in the passage describing the search for the body of the young girl suicide (possibly a parody of Eliot's "Death by W a t e r " ) . Phyllis' description, with its reference to the "hellicopter [sic], "some student," and "the papers," contrasts strikingly, in its clinical detachment, with the sentimental language used to describe Mrs. Cumming's suicide leap. Her response is a vivid demonstration of the irrevocable movement toward the sea of blood, of indifferent men. The older woman's interpretation of the same scene, in keeping with her literary pretensions, is more evocative. And yet here too an utter detachment and indifference come through: . a whirring pterodactyl of a contrivance, to remind one of Da Vinci, searches the Hellgate current for some corpse, lest the gulls feed on it and its identity and its sex, as its hopes, and its despairs and its moles and its marks and its teeth and its nails be no longer decipherable and so lost (pp. 190-191) The corpse is simply an "It," unnamed, unknown, unlamented (save by the gulls, "vortices of despair"), another river-muted victim of the failure of speech. And the idea of Hellgate, suggesting a mental journey to the dregs of despair, is repeated in the Poundian description of the 45th Street tunnel entrance:

94

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

But who has been condemned . where the tunnel under the river starts? Voi ch'entrate revisited! Under ground, under rock, under river under gulls . under the insane the traffic is engulfed and disappears to emerge never T h e suicide theme is repeated (and completed) in the passage describing the lunch hour, as the expressionless faces " ( c a n n e d fish)"

read in the papers "of some student, come / waterlogged

to the surface following / last night's thunderstorm . the flesh a / flesh of tears and fighting gulls ." ( 1 9 6 ) . T o point up the horror of this unnatural, impersonal death by water, Williams has " C o r y d o n " comment, in a Yeatsian manner, on the fertile waters of Anticosti, "where the salmon / lie spawning in the sun in the shallow water" ( 1 9 7 ) . T h e flow of the water remains in the background of section ii, which deals largely with economics. There is just one explicit reference to the river. T h i s echoes the passages in " T h e

Li

brary" tracing the parallel courses of the flood and man's mind: Smash the wide world a fetid womb, a sump! No river! no river but bog, a swale sinks into the mind or the mind into it, a ? (p. 201) In section iii, however, the river again comes into the foreground,

finally

running into the " s e a "

moved throughout the poem. W i l l i a m s

toward which

it has

described the

move-

ment in the book as " t h e river of blood (escape or

attempted

escape to N e w York. His return ' h o m e ' ) " ( B u f f a l o ) . T h u s the scene shifts from N e w

York

back

to the area

surrounding

Paterson, where one again hears the constant roar of the water.

T H E RIVER

95

T h e return to the Falls seems structurally inevitable since, as has been emphasized, it is the noise of the Falls that symbolizes the language "which we were and are seeking." T h e movement, however, is irresistibly

in the direction

of the sea—not

the

actual sea, but rather the "sea of blood." T h u s , section iii begins with a few lines of verse, including the statements that "all but for the tides, there is no river" ( 2 1 9 ) , and " T h e ocean yawns!" ( 2 1 9 ) , and then plunges immediately into a description of the bloody slaying, in 1779, of Jonathan

Hopper:

. . . His two infant children who were wont to sleep in bed beneath his, were horrified spectators of their father's After the murderers were gone, his wife and a neighbor blood out of the bed in double handfuls. T h e murdered received nineteen or twenty cruel bayonette thrusts.

a trundle massacre. took the man had (p. 220)

This passage is followed by the phrase " C o m e on, get going. T h e tide's in." It is evident, by the other passages following, which deal with violence, that the tide is one of blood. T h e s e passages do not appear, however, until after Paterson has bid his farewell to the river, his "adored one," which he personifies in a manner reminiscent of Thoreau and W a i d e n Pond: My serpent, my river! genius of the fields, Kra, my adored one, unspoiled by the mind, observer of pigeons, rememberer of cataracts, voluptuary of gulls! Knower of tides, counter of hours, wanings and waxings, enumerator of snowflakes, starer through thin ice, whose corpuscles are minnows, whose drink, sand (p. 226) This valedictory is followed by some loose lines on the Falls and the Paterson countryside, a letter from Allen

Ginsberg

about River Street, and a quiet description of a sunset. Again

96

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

the calm is shattered, however, this time by a newspaper clip ping about the murder of a baby girl by her twenty-two-year-old father. More slack description follows, and again it is interrupted, this time by the description of the violent knife and hatchet murder, in 1850, of old John V a n W i n k l e and his wife. T h e supposed killer was John Johnson. T h e remaining pages are written in a violent, choppy verse, which vividly evokes the sea of blood that slowly rises: —you cannot believe that it can begin again, again, here again here Waken from a dream, this dream of the whole poem sea-bound, rises, a sea of blood —the sea that sucks in all rivers, dazzled, led by the salmon and the shad Turn back I warn you (October 10, 1950) from the shark, that snaps at his own trailing guts, makes a sunset of the green water But lullaby, they say, the time sea is no more than sleep is afloat with weed, bearing seeds Ah! float wrack, float words, snaring the seeds I warn you, the sea is not our home. the sea is not our home

THE RIVER

97

T h e sea is our h o m e whither all rivers (wither) run the nostalgic sea sopped with our cries Thalassa! Thalassa! calling us h o m e I say to you, Put wax rather in vour ears against the hungry sea it is not our h o m e ! (pp. 2 3 4 - 2 3 5 )

Again, the reference here is not to the actual ocean, but rather "the 'sea' of Book I V is a sea of objectively (Chaucer) indifferent men: bring it finally back to that" (Buffalo). It is toward this sea (and the date mentioned suggests the Korean conflict) that men and women, by their failures in speech, are carried to their deaths. Thus in planning this section Williams wrote: "begin with the first murder and end with the spectators on the Park Cliff watching the hanging" (Buffalo). And so it is that the book ends with the image of John Johnson hanging in full view of the "thousands who had gathered"—the sea of indifferent men. Ths hungry ocean, with its siren song evoking man's death wish, this ocean of savage lusts in which the wounded shark gnashes at his own tail, dominates the entire section. The despair generated by the reminders of the "blood dark sea" is softened, however, by the vignette that precedes the words on Johnson's hanging, the image of the swimmer who walks from the true ocean, sleeps, gets dressed, spits out the seed of a beach plum, and heads inland, followed by his dog. It is in this passage that hope for a future lies: "It is the seed that floats to shore, one word, one tiny, even microscopic word, . . . which can alone save us" (L, 292). The book ends, thus, with alternating visions of life and death, "the spiral / the final somersault / the end," as the river mingles with the ocean.

98

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

This image of

PATERSON

the spiral, which suggests a beginning as

much as an end, is reiterated in one of the few river passages in Book V . A f t e r mentioning the serpent with its tail in its mouth, W i l l i a m s adds, quoting from his early " T h e Wanderer," "the river has returned to its beginnings" and backward (and forward) it tortures itself within me until time has been washed finally under: (Ρ· 2 7 1 ) O n e other marine image, the mention of Bosch's "fish / swallowing / their own entrails" ( 2 5 9 ) , evokes the description of the shark snapping at his own guts. T h e setting for V is T h e Cloisters, "Across the river / on a rock-ridge," and this is in keeping with the flow into the sea since the Hudson, like the East River above which Corydon lives, is joined to Newark Bay. Except for these few scattered references to water, however, Book V has no particular bearing on the parallel flow of a river with man's life. As W i l l i a m s said, " W h e n the river ended in the sea I had no place to go but back in life. I had to take the spirit of the River up in the air."

3

A n d so at the end of the

five books the "rained d o w n " river, having started above the Falls, crashed downward, and wandered toward its source in the ocean, is finally drawn back up, ending, however, not where it began, in the air, but rather in the boundless world of the imagination.

5 THE MOUNTAIN

W h a t end but love, that stares death in the eye? A city, a m a r r i a g e — t h a t stares death in the eye T h e riddle of a man and a woman —Paterson,

p. 1 3 0

UNLIKE THE OTHER MAJOR u n i f y i n g s y m b o l s , t h e m o u n t a i n , con-

stituting the feminine and maternal principle

(Mr.

Paterson

being the procreative m a l e ) , is not presented in a single chartable series of images, but proliferates in several directions at once. T h e complexity lies in its being structurally related to a series of women, young and old, whose failures echo from book to book, and whose lives intertwine in rather complicated configurations.

These

women

are introduced

at strategic

places

throughout the work, and their meanings (including their failures) contribute significantly to the major themes of the sequence. By focusing on the individual personae as well as on the

more

general

"feminine

poet's assumptions about

sensibility,"

the failure of

discovers

the

communication

one

and

about the inevitability of divorce in modern life. 1 Garrett Mountain actually looms above the southwest section of the city of Paterson; it contains a 570 acre recreation area (the setting for Book I I ) , the Garrett Mountain Reservation. Specific details mentioned in relation to this area include "the footpath to the c l i f f " ( 5 7 ) , the "observation tower" standing up prominently from its public grove ( 6 9 ) , the escarpment,

lOO

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

the

old

road,

stanchions which

and

along

the

PATERSON

"binoculars

t h e east w a l l "

chained

(71). The

/

to

anchored

observation

tower,

m a r k s t h e g o a l of M r . P a t e r s o n ' s a s c e n t , in B o o k

at t h e h i g h e s t p o i n t of t h e m o u n t a i n , n e a r " L a m b e r t

II, is

Castle."

It t o o w a s b u i l t b y L a m b e r t , a n E n g l i s h i m m i g r a n t w h o b e c a m e an

industrial

millionaire

and

was

later

ruined

by

the

unions.

G i v e n W i l l i a m s ' t e n d e n c v t o p e r s o n i f v A m e r i c a as a w o m a n , it is n o t s u r p r i s i n g t h a t t h e m o u n t a i n is i n t r o d u c e d as a g i a n t ess, s t r e t c h i n g a g a i n s t t h e m a n - c i t y , w h o , it will b e r e m e m b e r e d , is first d e s c r i b e d as l v i n g a s l e e p in t h e v a l l e v u n d e r t h e Passaic Falls: T h e Park's her head, carved, above the Falls, by the quiet river; C o l o r e d crystals the secret of those rocks; farms and ponds, laurel and the temperate wild cactus, yellow

flowered

facing h i m , his

arm supporting her, by the Valley

of the Rocks,

asleep.

Pearls at her ankles, her monstrous hair spangled with apple-blossoms is scattered about into the back

country, w a k i n g their dreams

. . . (P- »7)

T h e " p e a r l s at h e r a n k l e s " is l a t e r e x p l a i n e d in a prose passage d e s c r i b i n g t h e discover}

of m u s s e l s in N o t c h B r o o k . T h e

spoil-

i n g of t h e s e pearls as d e s c r i b e d in this passage is t v p i c a l of

the

d e s t r u c t i v e " c l u m s i n e s s of address, /' senseless r a p e s "

suf-

(51)

f e r e d b y t h e m a t e r n a l p r i n c i p l e . O t h e r e x a m p l e s of this sort of senseless brutality are seen in t h e d e s c r i p t i o n s of t h e t w a a l f t , or s t r i p e d bass, w h i c h

is v i o l e n t l y

a n d of t h e eels, w h i c h lake

f r o m her river f r o m her

(19),

drained

(47).

The sort of

y o u n g girls of t h e area, for w h o m protective

presence,

w o m e n likens t h e m to a

wrenched

are g r e e d i l v r e m o v e d

flower"

also

flowers:

the m o u n t a i n

suffer. T h e

first

is a

reference

to

" I n n u m e r a b l e w o m e n , e a c h like

( 1 5 ) . In a s u b s e q u e n t p a s s a g e , h o w e v e r , t h e t r a d i t i o n

ally a f f i r m a t i v e i m a g e t a k e s o n d i s t u r b i n g

connotations:

THE MOUNTAIN

ΙΟΙ

The flower spreads its colored petals wide in the sun But the tongue of the bee misses them Thev sink back into the loam crying out (p. 20) This new image suggests the lack of fructifying communication between the sexes (the girls miss out on sexual experience alto gether), and the failure of marriage (a major theme in the poem), which has "come to have a shuddering / implication" (20). A few of the girls go to the Coast, but they "die also / incommunicado" since they "do not know the words / or have not / the courage to use them" (20). This idea of the failure of language resulting in the death of the girls is significantly related to the poem's major function—to find a redeeming lan guage whereby man's premature death might be prevented. In opposition to these frustrated girls from decayed families and to the Irish women who were sent to the Barbadoes "to be sold as slaves" (22), stand, or rather sit, nine women in a Geographic

picture, "women / of some African chief

semi-

naked / astraddle a log" (22). These proud women of a fecund primitive society

provide a sharp contrast

with

the

barren

American girls. T h e contrast is made vivid when one compares them, astraddle their phallic log, with Phyllis, the nurse of Book IV, approaching Paterson as he lies upon the couch: She came, half dressed, and straddled him. My thighs are sore from riding Oh let me breathe! (p. 200) Phyllis, not "semi-naked," is simply "half dressed." T h e distinc tion is significant. T h e women contrast also with Mrs. Cumming, another "failure," who leaves her husband's side, when

102

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

l a n g u a g e proves i n a d e q u a t e , a n d leaps into the Falls

(2324).

T h e s e A f r i c a n s h a v e a vitality a n d p o w e r altogether foreign to the w o m e n w h o "fail" and " l i m p " m o u t h s /' E a s t e r is born —

( 3 8 ) , or " f r o m w h o s e open

crying aloud, ,

Divorce!"

( 3 2 ) , or

w h o ask " W i l l y o u give m e a b a b y ? " a n d are refused ( 4 4 ) . Among

the individuals w h o embody

specific

characteristics

of this t h w a r t e d f e m i n i n e p r i n c i p l e the m o s t i m p o r t a n t is M i s s Cress, w h o

is, a f t e r P a t e r s o n , t h e m o s t

fully delineated

char

acter in the p o e m . H e r letters play a m a j o r part in B o o k s I a n d II. A n o t e at B u f f a l o i n d i c a t e s t h a t W i l l i a m s originally

meant

to h a v e this m a t e r i a l c o n s t i t u t e o n e l o n g " M S I n t e r l u d e . " L a t e r , h o w e v e r , h e b r o k e it u p into short passages, w h i c h were

then

inserted in a p p r o p r i a t e places. S i n c e the) s y m b o l i z e exhaustively ( a n d , critics h a v e s u g g e s t e d , e x h a u s t i n g l y ) the p l i g h t of w o m a n d i v o r c e d f r o m all t h a t c o u l d give her life m e a n i n g , s o m e analysis seems to b e called for. T h e s e are t h e a c t u a l letters ( e d i t e d slightly b y W i l l i a m s )

of

a p o e t w h o felt r e b u f f e d in her efforts to establish a personal relationship with repeated

with

an

" P a t e r s o n . " T h i s f e e l i n g of b e i n g rejected is almost

compulsive

insistence:

"You

were

i g n o r i n g the real c o n t e n t s of m y last letters to y o u " ( 5 9 ) ; " y o u r ignoring those particular letters"

( 6 3 ) ; " m y failure with

( 8 1 ) ; " y o u r i n d i f f e r e n t evasion of m y l e t t e r s "

(93); "the

you" cool-

ing of y o u r f r i e n d l i n e s s " ( 1 0 7 ) , e t c . T h e letters, as a w h o l e , arc depressingly

hysterical o u t p o u r i n g s of a n u n h a p p y w o m a n

who

sees herself as a social a n d e c o n o m i c o u t c a s t . H a v i n g failed in her a t t e m p t

to c o m m u n i c a t e

with

another human

being,

she

n o w sees herself as h a v i n g suffered "a serious p s y c h o l o g i c a l injury"

( 6 0 ) ; as p s y c h o l o g i c a l l y

"maimed"

( 6 3 ) ; as

"misunder-

s t o o d a n d m i s j u d g e d " ( 8 0 ) ; as " d y i n g of l o n e l i n e s s " ( 1 0 7 ) ; and as " A c o m p l e t e l y d o w n a n d o u t p e r s o n "

(108). These

descrip-

tions suggest r e j e c t i o n , a sense of failure, a d e v a s t a t i n g loneliness a n d sense of d e s o l a t i o n , a n d an a l m o s t p s y c h o t i c splitting

of

p e r s o n a l i t y . D i v o r c e d n o t o n l y f r o m society a n d literature, she is also split w i t h i n herself. T h e crust t h a t " g a t h e r e d so fatally b e t w e e n m y true self a n d t h a t w h i c h c a n m a k e o n l y m e c h a n i c a l

T H E MOUNTAIN

103

gestures of living" has blocked anv creative impulses. A b l e to express only despair and indignation, she is a spokesman for all the speechless women in the poem for w h o m life is a process of sustained

frustration

because

fruitful

communication

is

impossible. It is obvious that much of Miss Cress's anxiety and energy have been channeled toward Paterson, w h o is a source of hope to her. Pouring out her most intimate feelings, she turns him into a sort of long-distance psychiatrist. It is also obvious that the wailing often seems to be in excess of the actual situation. T h e clue to this may lie in the letter in which she speaks of " h a v i n g heaped these confidences upon y o u "

( 8 0 ) . In an ap-

parent attempt to let his correspondent personify the condition of w o m e n generally, W i l l i a m s did not include any passages that would more explicitly show the sources of her emotional breakdown. H e obviously wished her to e m b o d y more than the plight of, say, another deserted w i f e or unwed m o t h e r , a n d thus deleted f r o m the letter details relating to an illegitimate

child,

including only the vaguely suggestive " B u t they set up an investigation . . . and my doors are bolted forever ( I hope forever) against all public welfare workers, professional do-gooders a n d the like" ( 1 6 ) . H e also retained the " t y p i c a l " postscript to the letter, which deals with sister " B i l l y , " w h o has been " c h o p p e d on by the surgical chopper and has gone through the menopause and . . . had a stroke of facial paralysis" ( 3 7 - 3 8 ) . T h i s excerpt is followed by the poetic passage beginning " T h e y

fail, they

limp with corns," which expands the perspective f r o m

"Billy"

to defeated w o m a n h o o d generally. T h e letters in B o o k II are also logically related to the poetic passages they deflect. T h e paragraphs dealing with the

"dam-

ming up of all my creative capacities," for e x a m p l e , follow a scientific word-diagram on h o w to walk, a n d are f o l l o w e d by the ironic Elizabeth Barrett echo, " H o w

do I love you?

These!"

(59-60). T h e paragraph l a m e n t i n g the d a m a g e done to

"my

sense of personal identity" ( 6 3 ) provides an ironic contrast to the soaring love poetry it interrupts; and the passage

dealing

104

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

with people "who can speak only to one person" (80) is inserted in the section describing the ecstasy of Klaus Ehrens as he calls to the birds and trees and winds. Book II closes with Miss Cress's eight page letter, which serves as a general commentary on the frustration and defeat of woman and on the divorce in modern life, the controlling ideas in this particular book. The letter follows the section of dialogue in which "She" (the mountain) cries out "Marry us! Marry us!" ( 1 0 2 ) . This dialogue ends with what seems an incipient consummation, between " M a n " and " W o m a n , " in the words "Her belly . her belly is like a white cloud . a / white cloud at evening . Before the shuddering night!" ( 1 0 5 ) . If this image ended the book some sort of fusion would certainly be sug gested. But, as Williams wrote in the margin of a rough draft, "She has the last word" (Buffalo), and so the music is immediately lost with the words " M y attitude toward woman's wretched position in society . . ." (105). One is thus reminded of the earlier use of "shuddering," i.e., "Marriage come to have a shuddering / implication" (20). Williams wrote that his purpose in including this long letter was partly ironic, and partly to show that "there's a logical continuity in the art, prose, verse: an identity" (L, 265). He also indicated (in the same letter) its psychological relation to the text by likening it to the notes following The Waste Land, the difference being that in this case the note is "subtly relevant to the matter and not merely a load for the mule's back." The long letter is indeed relevant to Book II, which Robert Lowell has aptly described as a study of a marriage (that never takes place) between Paterson, the masculine principle, and America, the feminine principle. "Everything in the poem is masculine or feminine, everything strains toward marriage, but the marriages never come off, except in the imagination, and there, attenuated, fragmentary, and uncertain." 2 It is Miss Cress who embodies and comments on this thwarted feminine principle that pervades "Sunday in the Park."

THE MOUNTAIN

10J

In her abortive relationship with Paterson she is, as I sug gested earlier, a kind of daughter to the Park, which itself is " f e m a l e to the city." Her plight adds dark implications to the brief sketches, associated with the mountain, that punctuate the book: of the voung girls with "ugl\ legs" (58); the " 3 colored girls . . . dissociated / from the fixed scene"

(66); the girl,

"lean as a goat," who moves, desiring (and drunk) against her lover who is "flagrantly bored and sleeping"

( 7 6 ) ; old

Mary

who feels the regenerative delight of spring but can induce no partner to join in her exuberant dance ( 7 3 ) ; the women who reflect no beaut} "Unless it is beauty / to be, anywhere, / so flagrant

in desire"

(88); and " S h e "

(Mrs. C u m m i n g ) ,

who

"was married with empty words" ( 1 0 2 ) . It is perhaps overly academic to suggest that Williams' purpose in having a policeman point to " A sign nailed / to a tree: W o m e n " (79) is to suggest that the modern divorce between the sexes has resulted in a kind of crucifixion of the feminine sensibility. Because of the frequent variations on this theme of ungratified

desire,

however, the interpretation seems unavoidable. In contrast to Book II, with its numerous references to de feated womanhood, the feminine principle is suggested in Book III only in a few vignettes and in one extended love lyric. T h e short sketches include a passage that foreshadows the introduction of Phyllis and Corydon in I V : Say I am the locus where two women meet One from the backwoods a touch of the savage and of T . B . (a scar on the thigh) the other •— wanting, from an old culture (P· 4 4 ) Also included are an illiterate letter from a Negro girl who has

1θ6

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

been " t e a e d " (under the influence of narcotics) for some time ( 1 5 0 ) , and

mention

of

a woman

whose

cancerous

jaw

was

broken by her husband because she was too sick to " w o r k in the field for him as he / thought she s h o u l d " ( 1 6 8 ) . T h e lyric "Beautiful

Thing"

(this was C o l u m b u s '

phrase

for the

new

world after his first walk ashore, cf. Book I V ) , weaves in and out of the book. It is Paterson's praise for a y o u n g girl w h o lies sick in a squalid basement after having been socked

in

the

nose and " m a l e d / and femaled . . . T h r e e days in the same dress / up and d o w n "

( 1 5 4 ) . W i l l i a m s alludes to

Persephone

here, and there is a parallel to the Kora m y t h implicit in his questioning the " L a d y of the H o u s e "

(Demeter), who

points

h i m to the basement where the girl lies, amid the furnace odor, "waiting for / the

fire"

( 1 5 1 ) . T h i s magnificent lyric

comes

closer than any other passage in the poem to suggesting a satis fying relationship, but here again the marriage riddle is l e f t unanswered and the consummation

unobtained.

In B o o k I V the feminine sensibility is most significantly symbolized by the " c h a r m i n g old Lesbian and the little nurse (the female P a t e r s o n ) "

(L,

301), and by the Polish

M a d a m e Curie. C o r y d o n is the e m b o d i m e n t of character"

that enters the poem

baby

nurse,

"international

with the approach

York. She is a thoroughly defeated person, w i t h

no

to

New

illusions

about her future and apparently 110 dreams of the past. C u l tured, articulate, and wealthy, she has a strong b e n t

for ro

manticism, as evidenced by her pastoral make-believe and the

language

in her poetry, but

she

has

no

by

misconceptions

about herself or about her relation to others. S h e knows

she

cannot " h a v e " Phyllis; her pursuit results from a kind of a u t o matic energy tempered by her sense of irony a n d ment. W i l l i a m s

self-amuse-

said that he started writing a b o u t her in a

satiric m o o d , " b u t she won me quite over. I e n d e d by feeling admiration for her and real regret at her d e f e a t " ( L , 302). H e apparently did not feel the same sort of admiration for Phyllis, whose sullen, monosyllabic answers give the impression

THE MOUNTAIN

10~

of a shrewd but altogether unimaginative woman who is distinguished only bv her youth and good looks. She provides a vivid contrast to M a d a m e Curie, who, with Columbus, symbolizes the successful completion

of

an important quest.

The

images used to describe the scientist all relate to pregnancy, and only she, of all the women in the poem, is able to give birth to " 'the radiant gist' against all that / scants our lives." She alone has her search consummated when she returns in the night, to find it LUMINOUS! (p. 209) Thus while M a d a m e Curie represents fulfillment and procrea tion, the two American women are the embodiment of unful filled desire, the failure of communication, and the perversions inherent in a complex, chaotic civilization. In the last two sections of Book I V the focus shifts sharply from N e w York back to the mountain and to another series of defeated girls who are described as "staring / out of dirty windows, hopeless, indifferent": All these and more — shining, struggling flies caught in the meshes of Her hair, of whom there can be no complaint, fast in the invisible net — from the back country, half awakened — all desiring. Not one to escape, not one . (P· 225) T h e " H e r " is the Mountain whose "monstrous hair," it will be remembered, is described in Book I as "scattered about into / the back country, waking their dreams"

(17).

(And one re-

members Paterson's words, also in Book I, " W h a t do I care for the flies, shit with them"—49.)

Thus for the final image of

womanhood in the penultimate book Williams returns to the

1θ8

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

girls f r o m d e c a y e d f a m i l i e s w h o h a v e t a k e n to t h e f r u s t r a t e d girls w h o are d o o m e d

backwoods,

to defeat, d o o m e d

t o die in-

c o m m u n i c a d o w i t h n o a w a r e n e s s of t h e r a d i a n t gist t h a t m i g h t h a v e g i v e n their desires f u l f i l l m e n t . In B o o k V

t h e idea of t h e f e m i n i n e sensibility is c o n t r o l l e d

b y t h e t h e m e of " t h e w h o r e a n d t h e virgin, an i d e n t i t y , " w h i c h p e r v a d e s nearly every

p a g e . T h i s m o t i f , h o w e v e r , is t w i c e inter-

spersed w i t h r e f e r e n c e s t h a t e v o k e passages f r o m earlier b o o k s . The

letter

woman

from

"Edward"

author w h o

(Edward

Dahlberg)

lives in C o p e n h a g e n

with

concerns

an

a

illegitimate

son, a n d w h o , w h e n q u e s t i o n e d by t h e p o l i c e a b o u t a b o t t l e of w i n e she b o u g h t ( s h e h a d n o t p a i d her t a x e s ) , answers, " Ί a m so p o o r , a n d so driven to despair b y it t h a t I h a d t o h a v e a b o t t l e of w i n e to relieve m e of m v m e l a n c h o l i a ' " unrelieved

despair,

coupled

with

illegitimacy,

(267).

This

inevitably

sug

gests M i s s C r e s s , a n d in t h e p o e t r y t h a t f o l l o w s P a t e r s o n speaks of t h e d o g of his t h o u g h t s as h a v i n g s h r u n k t o " 'a p a s s i o n a t e letter' / t o a w o m a n , a w o m a n h e h a d n e g l e c t e d /' to p u t to b e d in t h e p a s t "

(268).

T h i s allusion

is very

possibly

to his

c o r r e s p o n d e n t . T h e r e is a n o t h e r r e f e r e n c e to an u n w e d

old

mother,

this t i m e in t h e d e s c r i p t i o n of t h e o l d w o m a n w h o s e first l o v e r " n e v e r l e f t her till h e l e f t her / w i t h c h i l d " There

is also a s u g g e s t i o n

dealing with

of

illegitimacy

t h e virgin b i r t h , b o t h

(277). in

the

in t h e s e l e c t i o n

passages of

verses

f r o m M a t t h e w a n d in t h e w o r d s "a b a b y / b o r n to an o l d m a n / o u t of a girl a n d a pretty girl / at t h a t "

( 2 6 5 ) . In B o o k

P a t e r s o n remarks " P o o r J o s e p h , " a n d in t h e passage

III

describing

t h e B r u e g h e l n a t i v i t y , in V , h e a g a i n takes a r a t h e r u n i d e a l i s t i c view, suggesting that

the " 3 m e n "

were possibly

highwaymen

a n d their gifts stolen ( 2 6 4 ) . T h e idea of a y o u n g girl a n d o l d e r man The

is f o r e s h a d o w e d Love

her a g e d

of Don

b y allusions

Perlimplin,

to Beatrice

and

to

Lorea's

w h i c h concerns a child bride and

bridegroom.

T h e m o t i f of t h e w h o r e a n d virgin as o n e

(repeated,

with

variations, five t i m e s ) , is a c o n t i n u a t i o n of t h e series of i d e n t i t i e s

THE MOUNTAIN

ICK)

enumerated in the Preface: "obverse, reverse; / the drunk the sober; the illustrious / the gross; one" ( 1 2 ) , and of the poetry prose fusion documented bv the letters. Williams is suggesting that the virgin has "a price 011 her head, /' her maidenhead!" ( 2 4 3 ) just as surely as the whore has on her body. Each is "for sale" to the highest bidder. Furthermore, there is no virtue in virginity since "no woman is virtuous / who does not give her self to her lover / — forthwith" (266). T h e virgin and whore ( M a r y and M a n

Magdalene) assume various disguises, which

would seem to set them at odds with each other, "but will not succeed in breaking free : / an identity" ( 2 4 5 ) . Thus in the letter from G . S. (Gary

Snyder?)

describing the brothel in

Mexico, with the "whores grasping for your genitals," one of the girls is described as "a smooth faced girl against a door . . . the virgin, О bride" ( 2 5 0 ) . B . G . , who innocently goes in swimming naked with the boys, later "turned whore and got syphilis" ( 2 5 1 ) . And every married man "carries in his head / the beloved and sacred image / of a virgin / whom he has whored" ( 2 7 2 ) . Even the odd-looking young woman in the tapestry, listening, in her courtly dress, among the leaves, is both virgin and "whore," for sale to the highest bidder: " a n d who bids higher / than a lover? C o m e / out of it if you call yourself a w o m a n " ( 2 7 6 ) . This is Williams the sage, love's aged evangelist, exhorting youth to "Loose your love to

flow."

There is an important vignette of a woman (in section ii), one of the finest passages in the poem, which is related by contrast to the virgin-whore theme and to the defeated-girl motif. Following shortly after the Sappho translation (Pound's "obskewer" letter separates t h e m ) , it is a portrait of a woman the poet saw on the streets who "stopped / me in my tracks" (255256). This woman is not distinguished in any ordinary way, and the sole concession to her own femininity (she is dressed in male attire) is an inconspicuous decoration, "meant / I think to be a flower," pinned to her breast. T h e cloth flower is intended as a "warning" of her mood. She is related, again by

110

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

contrast, to "Corydon"

PATERSON

(and the proximity to Sappho is cer-

tainly intentional) and to Miss Cress. Unlike these frustrated women, however, she remains a complete mystery, nameless and unknown, and herein lies much of her beauty. For the poet gives her the characteristics he wants her to possess—"such a lonely and / intelligent woman" (257). She is "lonely" because, as the source (and subject) of his creativity, she has been, the poet likes to believe, seeking him. And it is for her that all his words are written, so she must be "intelligent." T h e woman, thus, seems to represent a combination

of

Muse and ideal audience. Like the fisherman for whom Yeats hoped to write a poem as cold and passionate as the dawn, she is both Paterson's inspiration and the reader who gives his craft its raison

d'etre.

T h e relationship between poet and reader is

thus mutually exhilarating while also, paradoxically, completely impersonal. There is no possibility of face-to-face confrontation, no necessity for dialogue. Because the fisherman and the woman exist, however, the poems must be made that will speak of them, and that will speak to them. T h e audience, seen but un heard, gives the artist his meaning: "It is all for you." And the artist, in return, gives what he is able. O n a less symbolic plane, this unknown woman has an effect on Paterson similar to that of "Beautiful Thing" in Book III. Now, however, the poet is an old man, and his love lyric is no longer a passionate assertion of lust. It is, rather, a quiet, un answered monologue to a woman who is more essence than woman, and who he will continue to seek, but will probably never see again. T h e lyric, thus, fits logically in Book V , in which Paterson has moved away from the world of palpable reality into a world of art and of the imagination. Throughout the poem the "female-centered" moments are strategically lo cated; in this book it is appropriate that the aesthetic dimensions of the previous motifs are projected in a vignette of pure and abstracted femininity. T h e lyric represents an important facet of the distancing provided by this final book. And as such,

THE M O U N T A I N

111

predictably, it also contrasts tellingly with the sense of defeated womanhood that pervades the poem. l l i i s is so because in the course of Paterson the girls to whom the mountain, or feminine principle, gives more typical expression include the suicides and defeated girls who die incommunicado (Book I ) , Miss Cress and the other frustrated women ( I I ) , the battered "Beautiful Thing" ( I I I ) , the Lesbian and the virgin ( I V ) , and the virgin-whores ( V ) . These women are all related thematically, joined either by their divorce from language (they are no audience, ideal or otherwise), or by their inability, unlike Madame Curie, fully to release their love to flow. They provide striking evidence of Williams' profound despair over the failure of communication. They also represent a devastating commentary on an America grown tragic, brutalized by inequality, and disorganized by industrial chaos.5 And, finally, they serve an important structural function in forming one of the strands by which the five books are joined into an organic whole. There are, in addition to the major symbolic patterns by which the various parts are joined together (man-city, river, feminine sensibility), other subordinate structural motifs in Paterson. In its "movement," for example, the sequence is structured rather like chapters five through eleven of Waiden, in which Thoreau moves from "Solitude" through "Visitors" and "The Bean-Field" in an ever widening circle until he gets to "Higher Laws." In Paterson all of the action takes place in specific locations, and the direction is from the city outward to the "world," and finally to "art," Williams' own version of Higher Laws. Book I is set in Paterson; II in the park; III in the library, which encompasses both city and park and extends the horizon even further; I V in New York, and at the entrance to the ocean; and V in The Cloisters, but more exactly in the world of the imagination, which has no bounds. This is, of course, a broad outline, which ignores the shifts and "returns," but it does characterize the underlying direction

112

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

of the poem. It also suggests another implicit movement within the five books, that is, the cycle of a man's life from childhood to old age. In such a scheme, the "Preface" would represent his birth and Book I his childhood in the city; II Iiis young man hood, with its religious phase and an unsuccessful love affair; III his education, another love affair, and the decision to write; I V his life in the world, marriage, and fatherhood; and V his old age with its impotence, wisdom, memories of the past, and involvement in the world of art. Such a pattern

("beginning,

seeking, achieving, and ending") is not, of course, without its inconsistencies, and I am not suggesting that it adds a great deal to the texture of the poem, but only that it is one of the several levels on which Paterson

can be read.

T h e time scheme is also carefully worked out from book to book, and again the pattern suggests Waiden.

Thoreau com

pressed his experience of twenty-six months into a year bv ar ranging

his

chapters

according

to

a

single

seasonal

cycle,

beginning with summer, moving through fall and winter, and ending with spring. W i t h i n this larger framework he constantly gives images of the smaller cycle of day (and of the seasons of each day), of the sun setting and rising as man sleeps and half awakens. Williams' use of a one-year cycle is very much like this (even to the recurring sun and dawn images), but differs in that the book begins in April, moves through late spring, summer, fall, and winter, and then, with the "reawakening" of the poem in Book V , returns again to spring, in March, with images of rebirth. This scheme is announced in one of the phrases in the "epigraph": "a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea." In Book I there are numerous references to spring and to those things indigenous to it, and these create a rich atmosphere of the season. There are butterflies in the air, the park is spangled with apple blossoms, the flowers spread their petals, the bud falls on the pavement, and the two young girls inarticulately

THE MOUNTAIN

1 1 3

hail Piaster, thus pinpointing the month as April (or, possibly, M a r c h ) . T h e r e is also mention of " s u m m e r ! if it should / ever c o m e " ( 3 0 ) , and of the red-breast (or r o b i n ) , which speaks his behest ( 3 1 ) . A n d finallv there is a reference to those men who run o f f , to "a sort of springtime / toward which their minds aspired"

(48).

W illiams is more explicit in II, stating outright that it is " — l a t e spring, / a Sunday a f t e r n o o n ! " T h e evidences of both setting and season

nesting birds, the churring

grass-

hoppers, " o f f e n d i n g s u n , " a n d a scampering chipmunk.

include

Since

the book is limited to one S u n d a y , he has no need to describe the passing season, but instead casually indicates the passing of day into night. T h u s in section i, there are two references to "early

afternoon"

light—"

(70,

72),

and

a

mention

of

"declining

( 7 4 ) . In ii, the evangelist " b e a m s / into the empty

blue, eastward" ( 8 0 ) , and it is clear that the sun is falling in the west. In iii, the descent down the m o u n t a i n is paralleled by the descent of day, and " W i t h evening, love w a k e n s "

(96).

Soon Paterson is alone beneath the " M a y m o o n . " It is after nine

o'clock,

and

the

crowds

are

all

removed.

"Before

plunging night, the crickets' / black wings a n d hylas

the

wake"

( 9 8 ) . T h e final lyric is the evocative " O n this most voluptuous night of the year"

(titled, in an early draft, " T o

Spring"),

which mentions the " n i g h t b i r d " and the sleeping insects. T h e final

image is of

"shuddering

night."

Thus

the narrative

is

traced through a S u n d a y in M a y , beginning in a f t e r n o o n and slowly, almost imperceptibly, moving

through

late a f t e r n o o n ,

evening, and into moonlit night. Book I I I , " T h e L i b r a r y , " begins while the locust tree is in full bloom, "in J u n e "

( 1 1 7 ) . T h e r e are references to s u m m e r

( 1 1 9 ) , and to "stinking s u m m e r " ( 1 2 6 ) , but w h i l e there is no other evidence of time passing, it is safe to assume that the book, the period of library research, covers the s u m m e r m o n t h s of June, July, and A u g u s t .

114

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

It is not possible to say outright that the three rather grim sections of I V span the months from September to March, but there are reasons for such an assumption. T h e fact that it is not the bass season ( 1 8 5 ) , and the fact that Phyllis has an " a w f u l cold / It's the first / this year" ( 1 8 5 ) , seem to indicate that the " I d y l , " including the month in Anticosti, takes place during the fall, though one cannot be any more precise than this. T h e passages on M a d a m e

Curie in section ii make reference to

" W i n t e r . Snow through the cracks"

( 2 0 8 ) , and although

iii

ends with the swimmer emerging from the ocean, there are indications that the season is still winter: " t h e thermometer was / down to 1 3 degrees below on the old bell / post"

(230);

"January 9, 1 8 5 0 : — T h e murder last night . . ." ( 2 3 2 ) . In a note in the Y a l e collection W i l l i a m s wrote, " I V , Winter, T h e River. Summer Imagined."

Thus

it seems that the book is set in

winter and that the swimmer is a projection of the narrator's thought. W h a t should be said is that Williams, who composed much of this book during June and July, 1950, does not make the same conscious effort to pinpoint the season in I V that he makes in the first three Books. He does so again, however, in Book V . In this "continuation," the world awakens from the long winter sleep (which suggests, too, the seven-year Books

IV

and

V),

and

lapse between it is M a r c h ,

the

publication

which, Williams

of has

written elsewhere, " h a d always been my favorite month, the month of the first robin's songs signaling the return of the sun to these latitudes. . . . "

4

Everything about the poem suggests

rebirth and renewal: the song of the fox sparrow; the spring flowers; and even the emphasis on the world of art. T i m e passes throughout the book, and it is apparent that by section iii the month has shifted to April. This is indicated both by the mention of the small birds " ' T h a t slep al the night with open Y e ' " (which they do in "Aprill with his shoures soote"), and by the explicit reference to the unicorn being penned "by a low

/

THE MOUNTAIN

wooden fence ,/ in April!"

115

(270). Thus the river has indeed

returned to its beginnings, and, the circle now complete, the poem ends, in time, where it started. T h e implications of this cyclical movement are suggested, appropriately, by the closing words of Waiden. a morning star."

"There is more day to dawn. T h e sun is but

6 "YOU CAN'T STEAL CREDIT": THE ECONOMIC MOTIF One must recognize the fact that we have now a modern tradition of poetry that makes certain assumptions concerning American capitalism and its eroding effect, from the days of the mercantilism and "nascent capitalism" of the early seventeenth century . . . to the "corporative murder" . . . of our own day. T h e nativist emphasis, brought into the foreground especially by Williams, but in fact powerful in American poetry for a century and a half, is equally an established tradition. After Masters and Williams, one might even call it a "set theme." — M . L. Rosenthal, The New

Poets, p. 1 6 9

of the second, third, and fourth Books, Randall Jarrell, who had previously expressed almost boundless admiration for Book I, lamented the introduction of material on Credit and Usury, "those enemies of man, God, and contemporary long poems." 1 It is true that the economic theories worked into parts of the sequence often sound very much like Pound at his most dispensable. As Miss Koch put it, "One serious weakness . . . got like a contagion from Pound's Cantos, is the introduction of an explicit pseudoscientific diagnosis of our present economic ills, relying on the Poundian demonstration of Usura and the Poundian salvation of Social Credit." 2 The least impressive passages in Paterson are those (particularly the final six pages of Book I V section ii) in which a passionate promulgation of money theories comes perilously close to being mere harangue. Jarrell was mistaken, however, in going on to assert that the economic anecdotes and political I N A RATHER SEVERE CRITIQUE

118

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

remarks are where they are only "because Dr. Williams chose —happened

to

choose—for

them

to be

there."5

Williams'

ideas on money and credit, as digressive and presumptuous as they sometimes seem to be, are actually tied in with the other major themes in the poem. Furthermore, they represent

the

culmination of a long and energetic protest against a system that sanctions private use of public money. C h a n c e is never the sole arbiter:

Williams

did not just

"happen to choose" to let these ideas assume a substantial role in the later books. Rather, he recognized the importance of what he called " t h e economic dominance in his time,"

and

consciously and carefully worked into the texture of his poem a vigorous refutation. In G u y

Davenport's words, where

the

poem speaks against usury it is not relinquishing any of its more "poetic themes," but is making sharp and fit for inspection a conviction springing naturally from the entire poem. 4 It is important to note that while Williams believed a poet must serve as a social regenerator by giving new life to a dead language (the "quest" for the "redeeming" language), he also felt that it is the peculiar responsibility of the artist to attack this economic dominance that nearly suppresses him, but that never converts him. " T h e economic imbecilities of the age," he wrote in 193g in " A Study of the Artist," are reflected in everything save the artist's judgments" ( E , 2 1 4 ) . Moreover, even though he disagreed strenuously with many of Pound's political theories and did not share his anti-Semitism, he saw justice in his old friend's views "regarding the criminal abuse of the functions of money, as well as the place of the poem in our attack; it is a basic agent in putting pressure on the blackguards who compel servitude, abetted by the various English Departments of 'the university' with their 'sacred' regard for a debased precedent" (A, 3 4 1 ) . T h e poem, then, is a weapon in the war against cor ruption, and the poet's task is to reveal the evil of

modern

economic policy: " T h e poet sees, links together and discloses in the symmetry of his work this bastardy of all ages. He gives

T H E ECONOMIC M O T I F

the names ( £ , 167).

and

the

manner

of

that

murderous

119

business"

These last words were written in 1934, in a review of eleven "Cantos." In " T h e American Background," also written in 1934, Williams expressed other theories about the economic dominance against which the poet must fight. Wealth, he wrote, by its influence, was the chief cause of American stagnation, creating as it did a culture of purchase, a culture of effigy. A colossal appetite for wealth came to be known as "the law." It was just such an appetite that could manipulate "an occasional war for profit." 5 As early as 1925 he wrote how much that had been envisioned during the early years of the Revolution was sacrificed to "financial stability" as brought about by "Alexander Hamilton, the industrialist" (E, 49). These are but a few of the opinions on the uses of money that punctuate Williams' poetry and prose from his earliest books. His interest in economics, like his intensely personal commitment to the problem of language, is not something that developed during the writing of Paterson. As it does with so many other themes, the sequence represents a compendium of economic ideas that had filled his writing for decades, but that previously had appeared only in fragments. Nor is the introduction in Book II of those enemies of contemporary long poems, credit and usury, either illogical, in terms of the development of the poem as a whole, or unprepared for. From the very beginning of his work on the sequence Williams planned an important role for economic considerations. In the early drafts of the "Preface," " D o c " and " W i l l y " talk about the history of Paterson, and Willy, after reading about David Hower, the poor shoemaker with a large family, out of work and money, interjects the comment "There's your economic thesis" (Buffalo). Even though this preface was rejected, the thesis was retained. It is introduced, early in Book I, with this passage on the shoemaker, quoted, with some changes, from the Historical Collections of the State of New fersey by

120

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS' PATERSON

John Barber and Henry Howe. M a d e up of two short para graphs, the passage describes Hower's discover), in Februar)·, 1857, of pearls in mussels he was eating, and recounts how millions of mussels were subsequently destroyed by those excitedly looking for wealth. This is the first of man ν passages document ing greed and the ruthless destruction of the natural and beau tiful by those motivated by a lust for money. T h e passage is presented without editorial comment (as are most of the prose selections), but the final sentence, about a large round pearl of four-hundred grains which was "ruined by boiling open the shell" ( 1 7 ) , leaves no doubt as to the poet's reasons for including this description of wholesale destruction. T h e boiling of the pearl suggests the poem's recurrent theme of abortion, and thus stands as the first of several variations on the image, introduced in the " P r e f a c e , " of the seed "lost in the

flux."

This fusion of violence and greed comes into play again in the prose passage (46-47) describing the wholesale capture of eels and fish on the floor of a drained lake. T h e six paragraphs serve as a commentary on the poetry just preceding them. This has

to do with

the universities, which,

instead

of

devising

means to cure economic ills, perpetuate the stasis and make it profitable. " T h e y block the release / that should cleanse and assume / prerogatives as a private recompense" ( 4 6 ) . T h e prose describes how throughout an entire night men and boys took fish and eels from the drained lake bottom. It was not those with nets who got the most. " I t was the hoodlums and men who leaped into the mud and water where the nets could not work that rescued from the mud and water the finest load of fish"

( 4 7 ) . T h e men and boys splashing around in the mud,

benumbing the eels as they glide past, vividly symbolize those who perpetuate the stasis and make it profitable. O n the page just preceding this description of the drained lake stand nineteen lines of poetry that also suggest the per petuation of the stasis. T h e y

describe a scene of

incredible

conspicuous waste during a time of general privation: an empty

THE ECONOMIC MOTIF

pool, orchids left to droop, a special F r e n c h

121

maid, "her sole

duty to groom / the pet P o m e r a n i a n s — w h o sleep" ( 4 5 ) . Like so many other passages in the poem this section describes what has happened in an area brutalized bv industrialization, for the prose that follows these lines is about Cornelius D o r e m u s who, when he died at 89 in 1 8 0 3 , owned 110 more than he needed for his personal c o m f o r t , and l e f t " g o o d s and chattels appraised at $ 4 1 9 . 5 8 ^ " ( 4 5 ) . T h e contrast speaks for itself. T h e themes of the effect of great wealth and of exploitation of the m a n v by the few are developed a n d expanded in B o o k II. T h r o u g h o u t the last two sections W i l l i a m s sets up an counterpoint between

those w h o c o m m i t anti-human

ironic acts

in

order to fill their own wallets, and K l a u s , the evangelist, w h o interprets Christ's words literally and thus gives a w a y his m o n e y (which kept h i m f r o m being h a p p y ) , gaining thereby, he as sumes, spiritual resources. Klaus is a voice crying in the wilderness, but if his e c o n o m i c views are naive in the extreme they nevertheless provide a h u m a n e alternative to the other extreme approach, which

has as its main

purpose

the " b l o c k i n g "

of

humanity's rights and security. T h e sermon, written as poetry, is broken up by prose passages on H a m i l t o n ' s plan for " A s sumption," on the F e d e r a l Reserve System, on the Society for Useful M a n u f a c t u r e s , and on the N a t i o n a l D e b t . T h u s as the poetry describes h o w K l a u s gradually b e c a m e happy by ridding himself of m o n e y , the prose ( a n d the transitions between sermon and prose nearly all provide ironic contrast) moves deeper and deeper into a vigorous attack on e c o n o m i c

exploitation.

Klaus a n d his e c o n o m i c antitype, H a m i l t o n , b o t h

"discover"

America, and the response of each serves to highlight by con trast that of the other. In addition to the passages on " A s s u m p t i o n , " on H a m i l t o n ' s desire to tax the "great beast," there are other references to the exploitation that is pervasive in a country brutalized by lust f o r wealth. Section ii begins with the word " B l o c k e d , " and then, following the c o m m e n t on the church (which is all "those poor

122

W I L L I A M CARLOS WILLIAMS' PATERSON

souls" have in the w o r l d ) , the poet asserts " C a s h is mulct of t h e m that others may live / secure" ( 7 8 ) . T h i s is followed by " a n d k n o w l e d g e restricted," thus i d e n t i f y i n g the church and the university as sources of the stasis. T h i s linking of these institutions echoes the strong words in B o o k I: T h e temple upon the rock is its brother, whose majesty lies in jungles—made to spring, at the rifle-shot of learning: to kill and grind those bones: (P- 33) (It also parallels an idea written

on a slip of paper in

the

B u f f a l o notes: " N o church has a n y t h i n g to do with religion; all are institutions for the regulation of m e n in w h o m

religious

qualities exist.") T h e n , after labelling church and university as perpetuators of e c o n o m i c

confusion, the poet quotes from a

letter that sounds like P o u n d : " I see t h e y — t h e Senate, is trying to

block

Lilienthal

and

deliver

'the

bomb'

over

to

a

few

industrialists" ( 7 8 ) . T h i s reference to the "guilty bastards trying in that way to u n d e r m i n e us" foreshadows the bitter song that

follows Klaus's assertion

that his m o n e y

him good: America the golden! with trick and money damned like Altgeld sick and molden we love thee bitter land Like Altgeld on the corner seeing the mourners pass

did not

make

THE ECONOMIC M O T I F

123

we bow our heads before thee and take our hats in hand (P- 85) John

Peter Altgeld, Governor of Illinois from

1892-1896, re

opened the Haymarket case and pardoned three men who had been accused of the crime. It is uncertain whether the mourn ing in this poem is for those killed in the Haymarket blast or for those who were accused and put to death. In either case, W i l l i a m s is likening himself (and " u s " ) to a man sickened by death brought about by economic chaos in a "money-grubbing society such as I knew and violently wrote against" (A, 1 5 8 ) . It was this same chaos that killed old John V a n

Winkle

and his wife. A f t e r hearing Klaus describe how he threw away his money with both hands, Paterson leans on the parapet and realizes that from where he stands one could see that "cold blooded murderer," who was hanged on the mountain. " O n e kills / for money but doesn't always get it" ( 8 9 ) . This man (we learn in Book I V that his name was John Johnson, and that he was hanged in 1 8 5 0 ) is called a murderer. It is obvious, however, that W i l l i a m s finds him no more guilty than those who

restrict

knowledge,

mulct

cash,

or batten

off

interest

charges, for these things too rob man of his life. Book III opens with the question:

"How

much does it

cost / to love the locust tree / in b l o o m ? " ( 1 1 7 ) , and the cost here is figurative, referring not to a fortune in money but to the expense of spirit and energy in libraries on hot June after noons. T h e theme of the cost, this time with explicit economic meaning, reappears later in the book, however,

first

in the

lines uniting money and language: Certainly there is no mystery to the fact t h a t COSTS S P I R A L ACCORDING TO A R E B U S : — k n o w n

or unknown, plotted or automatic. T h e fact of poverty is not a matter of argument. Language

12j

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

is not a vague province. There is a poetry of the movements of cost, known or unknown The cost. The cost (P· 4 3 ) These final words are related to "the language! the language!" the recurring lament in the passage, in Book I, describing the girls who die without speech. In this case it is poverty that destroys, and through this very language, which alone can prevent death, the "poetry" of cost can be discovered and therebv help prevent poverty. T h e theme of the labor difficulties in Paterson is also intro duced in Book III. T h e section on Lambert, the "poor English b o y " who opposed the unions and was broken by them, is divided by a brief excerpt from a letter touching briefly on both the Paterson strike and the N e w York Pageant. This letter, and the references to Billy Sunday and the Factory Owners' Association in Book II, are the only explicit passages on the strikes that

played

such

an

important

role

in

Paterson's

history.

Williams was asked by Babette Deutsch why the labor problem receives so little documentation in the poem. H e replied:

"I

have found little I wanted to say about the labor violence which has had Paterson as its scene during the last thirty or, perhaps, hundred years. . . . T h e r e will be much more . . . relating to the economic distress occasioned by human greed and blindness— aided, as always, by the church, all churches in the broadest sense of that designation—but still, there will be little treating directly of the rise of labor as a named force. I am not a M a r x i a n " (L, 258-259). Williams was more interested in eco nomic problems in a broader sense—with questions of interest and credit—than with specific labor grievances. T h e

sort of

exploitation suggested by the Dutch digging up the bodies of dead Indians and stealing the buried wealth and furs

(125)

symbolizes, better than do the labor struggles, the kind of greed responsible for contemporary economic chaos. And in Book I V ,

THE ECONOMIC MOTIF

12 ζ

no longer talking vaguely about "cost" or "greed," he launches into a robust attack on the misuse of money. Book I V section ii is divided into two distinct units. The first centers on the discovery by Madame Curie of the radiant gist that will cure the cancer. The second, comprising the final six pages of the section (a direct imitation, possibly a parody, of some of Pound's diatribes on usury), deals exclusively with the misuse of money. T h e section on the Curies does contain some references to the economic theme. In a particularly dense page, for example, there is one more fusion of exploitative religion and economics in the description of Billy Sunday, who was paid by the United Factory Owners' Association to break the strike "and put those S.O.Bs in their places, be / Geezus, by calling them to G o d ! " (203). Sunday is identified with Judas, in that he gets his "27 Grand" (thirty pieces of silver) "after the last supper," which, ironically, is held at the Hamilton. This entire page, which separates the description of the little Polish baby-nurse and the notably unmaterialistic letter from Allen Ginsberg, employs the jargon of evangelism. T h e actual words of a camp-meeting hymn ("Brighten the corner where you are!") are used with fine irony, since it is money that is the object of the rhythmical intensity. When the evangelist roars "All together now, give it everything you got!" it is obvious what he is talking about. And the hymn gains an added ironic meaning when one remembers that it was these same words ("Brighten the corner . . .") that Paterson spoke, gently and with love, to the young girl, the "Beautiful Thing" of Book III. This girl, like Columbus' "Beautiful Thing" and like the nurse's discovery, has no connection whatsoever with the economic exploitation. If the section on radium touches only tangentially on economics, the six pages of anti-interest outpourings derive much of their meaning from a carefully worked-out equation between radium and credit. In this pairing, money is related to uranium, the base metal that can be of no good to any man, and credit

120

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

is the radium, the radiant gist, which has the power to heal and save. "Release the Gamma rays that cure the cancer" ( 2 1 5 ) , the poet pleads, and the cancer is apparently usury. Money makes for wealth for the few and poverty for the many: money represents, in Williams' formula, the "squalor of spreading slums," and credit the "splendor of renaissance cities." Credit is the gist—" 'the radiant gist' against all that / scants our lives" ( 2 1 8 ) . This six-page unit begins with the paid advertisement, written by "August Walters, Newark, N. J." Opting as it does for a reform of the national finance system brought about by a structured system of national credit for the building of airplanes, the page, in content and in tone, sets the stage for the angry poetry that follows it. Williams' reason for reproducing this advertisement was partly, as Davenport has suggested, to imply that such ideas are "in the air." 6 It also serves, however, as an appropriately eccentric introduction to his rather eccentric ideas. The poetry that follows begins with the words " M O N E Y : J O K E " a bald, Poundian assertion that is repeated with variations throughout the remainder of the section. In two places (215, 217) the point is made that a stroke of a pen (apparently creating credit) could wipe money out completely. For it is money, in turn breeding avarice, that is "the direct cause of disaster." Only when credit is let out from "the bars / before the bank windows" will the money "put aside for private pur poses" be saved. " Y o u can't steal credit" ( 2 1 6 ) . In the Paris Review interview, Mrs. Williams commented on "the social credit business . . . that Bill got involved in in the thirties. They wanted to give a kind of dividend to people to increase purchasing power. There were large meetings in New York and down at the University of Virginia. But that was about the end of it." 7 Williams' interest in Major Douglas' theories is demonstrated by the reviews and article he contributed in 1935 and 1936 to New Democracy, the Social Credit movement's American journal. 8 One of the pieces, " A Social Diagnosis for Surgery,"

THE ECONOMIC MOTIF

presents

the

opinions

of

"A

Poet-Physician

on

the

12J

Money-

Cancer." A t two different points in the p o e m W i l l i a m s refers to the effect on the art world of the absence of credit and the pervasiveness of usury. T h e jailing of credit "thwarts art or buys it ( w i t h o u t / u n d e r s t a n d i n g ) , out of poverty of wit, to /

win,

vicariously, the blue r i b b o n " ( 2 1 5 ) . T h i s P o u n d i a n reference to m o n e y buying art echoes W i l l i a m s ' ironic assertion, in a letter to R o b e r t M c A l m o n , that " A r t has at last achieved its objective, it has served in A m e r i c a as an occasion for the rich to c o m e out and root for it . . ."

(L,

1 8 1 ) . It also suggests his damning

statement, in an essay, that " W e a l t h established museums, but it could not tell, it had to be told, w h a t was good in t h e m " ( E , 1 5 3 ) . A r t is not created to endure and to live with, but rather to sell, and sell quickly. T h e

contrast is between

the

Parthenon and the gold entrusted to Phideas. A n d the reference to B e n Shahn ( 2 1 7 ) seems a m u t e d e c h o of P o u n d ' s " D u c c i o came not by Usura

. . ." except that W i l l i a m s ,

predictably,

chooses his e x a m p l e f r o m the world of A m e r i c a n art. Pound's voice ( w h i c h underlies t h e entire section) is heard again in the lines: IN venshun. O.KAY In

venshun (p. 218)

T h i s word fuses the ideas on credit a n d radium w i t h the t h e m e of the redeeming language. It is through invention, through the new line, that the deadly repetition of the old is prevented, just as through credit b o t h poverty and avarice are balked. It is for such a "radiant gist" in the language that the p o e t seeks. T h e s e pages on usury comprise, it seems to m e , the least successful poetic unit in t h e book. T h e ideas are unconvincing, the tone o f t e n offensive, and the treatment of themes distract-

128

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

ingly

repetitious.

approach

Here

that Joseph

Williams

does use the

sledgehammer

B e n n e t t insists spoils the entire

poem.

T h e ideas are structurally related to the sequence as a whole, and

the

credit-radium

relationship

is carefully

led

into

and

worked out, but the lines are too irrational to be taken seriously, and a kind of self-conscious nastiness pervades m a n y of them, for e x a m p l e : — y u h wanna be killed with your face in the dirt and a son-of-a-bitch of a Guardia Civil giving you the coup de (dis)grace right in the puss Selahl

.

?

Selahl

Credit! I hope you have a long credit and a dirty one (p.

216)

It is true that W i l l i a m s ' ideas are clarified s o m e w h a t by reading in

the sources

that partly

influenced his e c o n o m i c

Alexander D e l M a r ' s Barbara Villiers, Crimes;

or a History

E u s t a c e C l a r e n c e M u l l i n s ' A Study

serve; and P o u n d ' s Cantos,

his Guide

of

thought: Monetary

of the Federal

to Kulchur,

Re-

a n d his series

of six p a m p h l e t s on m o n e y . 8 B u t even w i t h some awareness of w h y he felt so passionately a b o u t the abuses of m o n e y a n d the pressing need for credit it is fairly clear that in m a k i n g these themes o c c u p y six pages of his major work he was

seriously

endangering its artistic coherence. T h e final section of B o o k I V virtually ignores the question of m o n e y a n d credit. It begins with the words " H a v e n ' t

you

forgot your virgin purpose, / the l a n g u a g e ? " ( 2 1 9 ) , w h i c h shifts the p o e m away f r o m its financial emphasis. T h e r e is an implicit reference to the i n h u m a n i t y of avarice in the description of the brutal murder of t h e elderly V a n W i n k l e c o u p l e : " H i s o b j e c t was doubtless m o n e y ( w h i c h , however, h e seemed n o t to have

THE ECONOMIC M O T I F

129

obtained)" (232). Except for this one slight rein traduction of the money theme, however (and it has no bearing whatever on usury or credit), the book ends without a trace of the obsessive ideas that so dominate section ii. It is as if the poet, having indulged in a frenzy of unsubtle harangue, had been purged of any need to exhort further. Also, it is probable that by the time he worked out this section Williams had managed to escape the dominance of Pound's theories. It is completely in keeping with the nature of Book V , however, that it should resurrect the economic motif (in a minor way), and put it in a new perspective. This book, I have already suggested, differs in mood and setting from the four that precede it. It does, however, develop many of the themes and images that loom large in the earlier sections. Thus it is quite logical for the old poet, in looking back at his world from the vantage point of art and age, to refocus on the economic chaos that had previously occupied so much of his thought. He is, in this final book, giving the world of the poem imaginative validity. He has not, however, lost sight of the hard realities of an imperfect civilization. There are two brief passages on money, and both refer directly to the themes introduced in Books III and I V . T h e first, contained in a letter from Pound, equates economics with banditry, asserts that " W a r s are made to make debt," 9 and on the whole evokes the arrogant tone that permeates the final six pages of I V : "treasury reports . . . show that . . . you suckers had paid ten billion for gold that cd/ have been bought for SIX billion" (254). T h e second passage refers to "this featureless tribe that has the money now—staring into the atom, completely blind—without grace or pity, as if they were so many shellfish" (265). T h e passage goes on to lament an "age of shoddy," in which men are driven by their bosses to acquire profit. This relates to the passage in Book I V asserting that credit is "related directly to the effort, / work: value created and received" ( 2 1 8 ) . Where the value is not received, the work

13О

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S ' PATERSON

will be shoddy, and the men, in the words of the Portuguese mason, "no care what they turn out" (266). This is Williams' way of reintroducing the theme of economic chaos which, like the linguistic chaos, robs man of his true meaning and worth. The tone is comparatively subdued, but the poet leaves no doubt that what he felt was a disastrous financial system con tinued, even in his relatively mellow older age, to obsess him. Even in the few fragments of the projected sixth book the economic theme looms large. T h e first of these is about a man, shot to death, who had "wanted to organize the country so that we should all stick together and make a little money" ( 2 8 1 ) . The third returns to the much-maligned Hamilton, and refers to an unnamed " h e " who used an unnamed " i t " in his "schemes." The last fragment is about "Lucy," who had been sold to a man "for 3 hundred dollars," reintroducing the theme of Book V that any woman, virgin or whore, is for sale to the highest bidder. Thus throughout the tapestry of Paterson, and particularly in the third and fourth books, the economic motif moves in and out like a frayed green thread. It is a motif peculiarly unsuited to poetry, even for a writer with the habit of finding poems in the most unlikely places. It is, however, a subject about which Williams felt strongly, and since the sequence reveals the man and his world so thoroughly, containing evidences of his most passionately held convictions, it would be incomplete without this material. It is not that he included it at all, but that he did not manage to give it more coherence and precision that is regrettable. For as it stands, the economic presentation, as important as it is for the poem as a whole, is the least distinguished aspect of Paterson. Williams is weakest when he states, strongest when he shows.

7 THE REDEEMING LANGUAGE: A SUMMARY 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 but song but deathless song

? —Pat er son, p. 1 3 1

to the economic motif makes it clear that the search for a new measure, the dominant theme in the poem, is not only an attempt to discover a fresh language and newfoot out of which poems can be constructed. It is also a quest for a new way of measuring value, of assigning priorities, that will be commensurate with the present world. T h e past was adequately measured by a kind of verse that is now outmoded: lives were measured in ways that are no longer applicable. Only through the discovery of a new measure for the poem can there be any meaningful expression of contemporary life. For the poet, as Williams saw his role, is more than a maker of memorable songs. He is also a social regenerator. It is his vital 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" ( E , 1 0 3 ) . T h e poet generates, in his craft, some order on the continuous confusion and barrenness of existence. If one breaks through old customs in verse he appreciably alters the structure of man's life all along the line. Thus, in saying that Noah Paterson seeks a lanW I L L I A M S ' APPROACH

J 32

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

guage by which man's prematuie death might be prevented, W i l l i a m s is stressing that it is through words that our lives are ordered. Also, only by the discovery of a measure consonant with our times can our times be ordered (and recorded) intelli gently. There must be measure in poetry and in life, and these measures must borrow from each other. T h e search for this measure involves, among other things, a process of recovery through invention. T h e poetic line must be recovered " f r o m stodginess" in much the way "that one recovers a salt from solution by chemical action" (A, 1 4 8 ) . Stodginess, in Williams' view, is invariably equated with the academic failure to recognize (and exploit) the new. It is symbolized by a form such as the sonnet, by a strained device like poetic inversion, and by any other worn-out approach to language. Since a poem focuses the world, it must be the product of an un fettered imagination; the sonnet and other conventional-forms are the products of imaginations trained by rote, written taught)

(and

by "pimps to tradition." These forms are no longer

pertinent to the economic and social fabric of today. It is only by a new language that new currency can be given to the world that exists now: " A work of art is important only as evidence, in its structure, of a new world which it has been created to affirm" ( E , 1 9 6 ) . T o fall back on the old world—on "poetic" inversion, or on the sonnet, or rhyme, or the iambic

foot,

thereby perpetuating tradition—is to confess that one has not come to grips with things as they exist. Before one can discover the new he must break away

from the domination

of

the

outmoded. Whitman

went far in recovering poetry

from

stodginess,

Williams felt, but he was unable to recognize the significance of his structural innovations, and so fell back on a looseness that actually demonstrated not true freedom but a complete absence

of

measure.

His

poetry

lacked

structural

selection.

" F r e e " verse, Williams said over and over, does not exist, because poetry requires measure of some sort. By "freeing" the verse the

THE REDEEMING LANGUAGE

133

poet makes the poem formally non-existent. Verse must be governed by measure, but it must avoid the old measure: " W e have to return to some measure but a measure consonant with our time and not a mode so rotten that it stinks" (Ε, 339). Whitman helped "recover" the poem by breaking the dominance of the iambic pentameter, but it is now the poet's task to continue this process "by a new construction upon the syllables"

(A,

392). " A f t e r him there has been for us no line. There will be none until we invent it" ( L , 2 8 7 ) . And so destruction and creation are related and continuous —the phoenix rising while the nest is consumed—and in the process of recovery it is invention

that brings about the new

modes to replace those that are rejected: " W i t h o u t invention nothing is well spaced." Invention gives birth to art. Lacking this birth, or rebirth, the old will keep repeating itself with recurring

deadliness.

The

word

"invention"

is

crucial

Williams because it stresses that the artist's job is not to

to copy,

but to find and to imitate, actions that involve the active play of the imagination. This is expressed early in " T h e

Desert

Music": How shall we get said what must be said? Only the poem. Only the counted poem, to an exact measure: to imitate, not to copy nature, not to copy nature N O T , prostrate, to copy nature but a dance! to dance two and two with him— (Pictures from Brueghel and other poems, 108-109) It is through invention—through the mind's power of mutation —that one is able to discover a measure and hence recover the truth. Only the poet holds the key to the rescue of those who,

134

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

like M r s . C u m m i n g , are carried t o w a r d t h e sea of b l o o d , only through i n v e n t i o n — t h r o u g h

recover)' a n d

and

rediscoverv—can

t h e key b e used. T h e k e y , t h e n , is a n e w - m e a s u r e d l a n g u a g e . T h i s c o n c e p t of " m e a s u r e , " as it a p p e a r s in W i l l i a m s ' w r i t i n g , is elusive, s i n c e the

measure

is literally

beyond

definition,

rendering

measure-

m e n t , or a n y sort of r e s t r i c t i o n , a c o n t r a d i c t i o n in t e r m s .

The

idea of m e a s u r e d verse c a n best b e u n d e r s t o o d in terms of t h e "relatively tivity,"

stable

Williams

foot,"

which

wrote, "gives

derives

from

us t h e c u e .

Einstein.

"Rela-

. . . Measure,

an

a n c i e n t w o r d in p o e t r y , s o m e t h i n g w e h a v e a l m o s t f o r g o t t e n in its literal s i g n i f i c a n c e as s o m e t h i n g m e a s u r e d , b e c o m e s

related

again w i t h t h e p o e t i c . W e h a v e t o d a y t o d o w i t h t h e p o e t i c , as a l w a y s , b u t a relatively

s t a b l e f o o t , n o t a rigid o n e . T h a t is all

t h e d i f f e r e n c e . It is t h a t w h i c h m u s t b e c o m e t h e o b j e c t of our search . . ." ( E , 3 4 0 ) . W i l l i a m s has r e c o v e r e d t h e

relationship

b e t w e e n p o e t r y a n d t h e m e a s u r e d d a n c e , f r o m w h i c h it d e r i v e d , b u t h e leaves u n a n s w e r e d

many

questions about the

of this relatively s t a b l e f o o t . H e p r o v i d e d a f u l l e r in a l e t t e r t o R i c h a r d

meaning

explanation

Eberhart:

I have never been one to write by rule, even by my own rules. Let's begin with the rule of counted syllables, in which all poems have been written hitherto. T h a t has b e c o m e tiresome to my ear. Finally, the stated syllables, as in the best of present-day free verse, h a v e b e c o m e e n t i r e l y d i v o r c e d f r o m t h e b e a t , t h a t is t h e measure. T h e musical pace proceeds without t h e m . T h e r e f o r e the measure, that is to say, the count, having got rid of the words, which held it down, is returned to the

music.

T h e words, having been freed, have been allowed to run all over the map, " f r e e , " as we have mistakenly thought. T h i s has amounted to no more (in W h i t m a n and others) than no discipline at all. B u t if we keep in mind the tune w h i c h the lines (not necessarily the words) make in our ears, w e are ready to proceed. B y measure I mean musical pace. N o w , with music in our ears the words need only be taught to keep as distinguished an order, as

THE REDEEMING LANGUAGE

1 35

chosen a character, as regular, according to the music, as in the best of prose. By its music shall the best of modern verse be known and the resources of the music. The refinement of the poem, its subtlety, is not to be known by the elevation of the words but—the words don't so much matter — by the resources of the music. To give you an example from my own work — not that I know anything about what I have myself written: (count): — not that I ever count when writing but, at best, the lines must be capable of being counted, that is to say, measured — (believe it or not). — At that I may, half consciously, even count the measure under my breath as I write. — (approximate example) ( 1 ) The smell of the heat is boxwood (2) when rousing us (3) a movement of the air (4) stirs our thoughts (5) that had no life in them (6) to a life, a life in which (or) ( 1 ) Mother of God! Our Lady! (2) the heart (3) is an unruly master: (4) Forgive us our sins (5) as we (6) forgive (7) those who have sinned against Count a single beat to each numeral. You may not agree with my ear, but that is the way I count the line. Over the whole poem it gives a pattern to the meter that can be felt as a new measure. It gives resources to the ear which result in a language which we hear spoken about us every day. 1 This explanation is helpful, particularly in its assertion that each of the lines, in the staggered tercet, diverse as they are,

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

should b e given equal stress. Nevertheless, as John

Malcolm

Brinnin has pointed out, W i l l i a m s actually provides little more than a statement of intention here. W h a t is authentic music in his ear may give evidence of a completely

different

measure,

and consequently will register a different music, in the ear of another. " I f

it is to work for a n y o n e else, its pretensions as

theory and m e t h o d must b e put aside in favor of the unique pragmatic

ingenuity

which

gives

his

poetry

its

character."2

W i l l i a m s ' line, literally, is inimitable. M u c h more explicit, in regard to this concept of measure, are W i l l i a m s ' ideas on the way language is to be used, and on the kind of language the poet is to use, on the individual notes that comprise the music. C o n v e n t i o n a l language, like traditional prosody, is static and worn out, no longer capable of c o m m u n i cating the fresh perception. A n y a t t e m p t at precision of t h o u g h t is b l o c k e d by calcified g r a m m a t i c a l constructions and by subtle

brainlessness :

"the

of our meter a n d favorite prose rhythms.

A n d since in searching for the measure the poet must return to the syllable, so in recovering the language he must focus on the individual word, the individual note in the w h o l e

"tune,"

since it is through words that w e are able to smell, hear, and see afresh. W o r d s h a v e b e c o m e soiled, he felt, and must w i p e d clean. T h e y

must b e m a i m e d , as Joyce maims

" m e a n i n g s have b e e n dulled, then lost, then perverted by connotations

( w h i c h have g r o w n over t h e m )

be

them: the

until their effect

on the m i n d is no longer w h a t it was w h e n they were fresh, but grows rotten as poi . . ." ( E , 89-90). T h e words must be freed to b e understood in their original, fresh sense. T h e y must b e new-minted b e f o r e there can b e p o w e r of t h o u g h t . A n d this is not merely a technical question, but a moral one as well. It involves the w h o l e realm of man's activities, since the names by w h i c h w e call things defines our attitudes toward t h e m . A means toward this artistic regeneration of words is to b e f o u n d in the use of the A m e r i c a n

language as it is actually

spoken. Such a language, spontaneous, strong, and free of those

THE R E D E E M I N G LANGUAGE

2 3"

deformations of speech perpetuated by tradition, will embody the colors and movements of the day. Where else, Williams asks, can what we are seeking arise but from speech? "From speech, from American speech as distinct from English speecli . . . from what we hear in America. . . . A language full of those hints toward newness of which I have been speaking" (E, 289290). Only by listening to the language can one hope to discover its resources. For the language as spoken is full of hints toward the newness the poet seeks. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, " T h e poet's job is to find examples of the American measure, newborn in all their purity, and put them in his poems for all to hear" (Poets of Reality, p. 294). It is his task to find in this language that which will enable him to give it new currency. He must find in speech the speech. There can be no meaningful spoken language until there is a line, a measure, until a poet has come. At this point a troublesome, and possibly unanswerable question presents itself: How is one to know when he is confronted with an example of true invention, or a new measure in language actually appropriate to contemporary America? W h a t is Williams' test of validity? One answer seems to be that for the poet, as for the reader, it is largely a matter of discovering in the great morass of experience and language that which is truly authentic—which is the product of a particular place, and expresses the nature of the life of that place in fresh and vigorous terms. This authentic language is always present, in the same way that the pearl is present in the mussel or the language present in the chaos of the Falls, and it is the poet's (and reader's) task to separate it from the dross. This involves a constant process of discrimination, of acceptance and rejection. And it presupposes a capacity for immersion, a willingness to break open the rock, to leap into the Falls, to rescue the authentic from its state of potentiality and make it actual. This is why the poet must explore, discover, and invent. Like Columbus he must find the "Beautiful thing," like Freud

W I L L I A M CARLOS WILLIAMS' PATERSON

he must search and unlock, like Mine Curie he must crack the rock that releases an energy which, before the words have been joined to each other (a kind of marriage), has been only po tential. T h e reader, in distinguishing the authentic from the artificial or conventional, becomes himself a kind of discoverer, participating in a process by which the craft of writing

(and

hence language generally) is both enriched and purified. This obviously requires a sharp eye, a subtle ear, and a willingness and ability to discriminate. And, of course, there are bound to be substantial differences of opinion from reader to

reader.

Since measure cannot be legislated, the source of one man's epiphany

is

destined

to

cause

another

man's

depression.

Williams, though, makes his own position clear. In his use of the local language, at once natural and resonant, he provides the touchstones by which to separate the gold from the dross. This is a service that only the poet can perform, but that clearly requires

the

collaboration

of

an

active

(even

aggressive)

audience. "No

poet has come!" chant the trees in the park, and

throughout Paterson self)

as Williams seeks (through the quest it

to discover this language appropriate

to

contemporary

culture he demonstrates, with hammering repetition, the decay of language, the failure of communication, and the urgent need for a new language. There are over one hundred passages in the poem that deal directly with communication, and most of these concern a failure of speech. These are generally related to those aspects of the United States Williams referred to in one of his essays: the unmitigated stupidity, the drab tediousness of the democracy, the overwhelming number of the offensively igno rant, the dull nerve (E, 1 1 9 ) . But these passages also relate to the inoffensively, unavoidably ignorant—those who "walk communicado"

(18)

and who

"die also /

in

incommunicado"

(20) because the language fails them and they have no words: Mrs. C u m m i n g , married with empty words, who

"misunder

stood" the pouring language; Patch, whom speech failed; the

THE REDEEMING LANGUAGE

139

two girls for whom the fact of Easter so far outdistances the available language, who are capable only of "ain't they beautiful!" (29); the widow with a vile tongue but laborious ways (49); the minister, whose harangue is featureless; the child burned, lacking language ( 1 2 0 ) ; the children drowned, wordless ( 1 2 0 ) ; Phyllis, whose letters demonstrate the failure of language—and the many others. It is to save these, to find the words by which their premature deaths might be prevented, that is, by which they might be alive, that the poet, attempting to unlock the mind, seeks the redeeming language. T h e poem, thus, begins with an assertion of the quest—the need to unlock the mind—and ends with the recognition that the measured dance (and hence, measured verse) offers a pos sible solution to the quest. In moving from the question to this answer, Paterson constantly agonizes over the gulf that separates facts from the speech needed to describe them, over the worn-out language, and over the failure of any ear to hear what is said. There is a sense of urgency about everything he does, and about his constant movement as he searches, listens, observes. This importunity is fused with an underlying despair that alternately goads and paralyzes him. In his "prayer" he ends with the words, "in your / composition and decomposition / I find my . . . / despair!" (93). 3 This final word, placed where one would expect either "hope" or "meaning," emerges from a deep-rooted sense of the inability of language to express this composition and decomposition. For the language, worn-out, has become "words without style!" Invention is lacking, and hence the words are lacking. And the talk of language that does take place is useless, because "there are no / ears" (129). There is some hope, however, and this is what sustains Noah Paterson in his exhaustive search. Following the description of the flood and the wiping out of the slums, the poet returns to the problem of language with the phrase, "The words will have to be rebricked up" ( 1 7 0 ) . This is followed by a prose passage

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

140

PATERSON

on the death of an African warrior (which leads to the section on the nine wives of the chief). It describes the married women waving young branches over his genital organs to extract the spirit of fertility into the leaves. (In the short lyric "A Note," Williams also describes "old women with their rites of green twigs / Bending over the remains.") This description of the perpetuation of life in a primitive society is followed by poetry suggesting the perpetuation of language, and the possibility

of

extracting the spirit of the language from its now-dead corpse: —in a hundred years, perhaps— the syllables (with genius) or perhaps two lifetimes Sometimes it takes longer (Ρ· Ϊ 7 1 ) T h e emphasis here is on "the syllables," for it is by using syl lables as notes in the musical pattern that the language can be recovered from the crust that has grown around it. T h e "per haps" qualifies the hope, but the potentiality is there, and it is this possibility, the world unsuspected, that beckons to new places. Since everything in the poem is related, either directly or obliquely, to the quest for a redeeming language, there are a great many symbols and image patterns that contribute to the total presentation of this theme. T h e single most

important

symbol, however, as I pointed out in the chapter on the river, is the Falls, representing the tangled rush of language, which the poet must comb out much as the man combed out the tangled hair of his collie, if he is to discover the secret of the roar.

"What

common

language

to

unravel?"

Paterson

asks

after the first description of the Falls, and this image, the ur-

T H E R E D E E M I N G LANGUAGE

ljl

gency of its solution obsessing his mind, recurs over and over. For the Falls, in addition to objectifying the confused torrent of an imprecise language, also graph the rush of

Paterson's

thoughts as they strain forward, coalesce, leap to a conclusion, and split apart, dazed with "the catastrophe of the descent" ( 1 6 ) . It is the poet's task to order the flow of his thoughts, and thus to find order in the chaos of the pouring language. T h e girls from decayed families look at the torrent in their minds, " a n d it is foreign to t h e m " ( 2 1 ) . Paterson can save them only by making the torrent intelligible. Mrs. C u m m i n g was unable to decipher the "false language pouring,"

"crashing upon a

stone ear" ( 2 4 ) , and perished in its confused rush. And Patch drowned in the stream when speech failed him. T h e scholars— " ( t h e r e are n o n e ) " — p r o v i d e no aid in the quest, since they are encased in the strands of water, lodged, impotent, under the flow

of language. T h e

evangelist, too, offers no clue as he

shouts with his "useless voice"

(76)

to the birds and trees.

" T h e falls of his harangue hung featureless / upon the ear" ( 8 7 ) . T h e poet, unaided by the University and the church, must seek alone, and as a result the roar of the Falls, the torrent of language, is never out of his thought. T h e water "does not cease, falling / and refalling with a roar" ( 1 1 9 ) , drowning the sense with its reiteration. T h e chaos is unrelenting. This confused sound

Paterson

emphasizes in the

pivotal

passage of Book I I I , " t h e roar of the present, a speech — / is, of necessity, my sole concern." T h e roar is further related to the present in the next passage, which evokes those doomed by their failure to communicate: They plunged, they fell in a swoon or by intention, to make an end—the roar, unrelenting, witnessing Neither the past nor the future Neither to stare, amnesic—forgetting. The language cascades into the

1-f2

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

invisible, beyond and above : the falls of which it is t h e visible part — J

(P· Paterson

then

focuses sharply on

his o w n

72)

task, relating

the

r e d e m p t i o n desired n o t only to o t h e r s , b u t t o himself as well: N o t until I have made of it a replica will my sins be forgiven and my disease cured—in wax: la capella di S. Rocco on the sandstone crest above the old copper mines. . . (P· *7 2 ) T h e poet m u s t save a n d cure himself t h r o u g h a k i n d of martyrd o m , like t h a t of St. R o q u e w h o w o r k e d miracles with

the

plague-stricken while h e himself was suffering f r o m t h e disease. H e m u s t heal himself by finding t h e m i r a c u l o u s m e d i c i n e — t h e redemptive

language—that

will

cure

those

who

"fell

in

a

s w o o n . " H a v i n g achieved this insight, h e repeats t h e task t h a t has b e e n set for h i m : I must find my meaning and lay it, white beside the sliding water: myself — comb out the language—or succumb —whatever the complexion. (P·

1

73)

C o m b or s u c c u m b : in t h e s e words lie t h e h o p e a n d t h e danger of t h e q u e s t . F o r only by r i d d i n g t h e l a n g u a g e of its knots, by laying it w h i t e beside t h e sliding waters, can r e d e m p t i o n

be

found. T h e r e are, in a d d i t i o n t o t h e cluster of m o t i f s s u r r o u n d i n g t h e Falls, t w o i m a g e p a t t e r n s related t o t h e d o m i n a n t language t h e m e t h a t are of i m p o r t a n c e in d o c u m e n t i n g b o t h t h e failure

T H E R E D E E M I N G LANGUAGE

143

of language and the need for a new one. The first of these is what might be called the "marriage syndrome," encompassing passages relating to marriage, divorce, birth, rebirth, and miscarriage or abortion. From the beginning of the poem (see Chapter I) to the end, Williams works in images of cyclical movement, of decay and rebirth, of fusion generating new life, and of divorce generating impotence. These images carry a heavy load in documenting the chaos induced by failure of communication. Everything in the poem strains toward marriage—between park and city, man and woman, language and deed. But the deed is always far in advance of the language available to record it, and hence divorce is the controlling theme of the time. Hence also the "perverse confusions," such as the Corydon-Phyllis relationship, which result from a "failure to untangle the language and make it our own." 4 The language of love is missing. This marriage theme is introduced and expanded in Book I in the variations on the idea of "Marriage come to have a shuddering / implication" (20). T h e tongue of the bee misses the flower, and instead of marriage the girls, divorced from language, take a lesser satisfaction. W h a t marriage does exist, in contrast to that of the primitive chief and his nine women, is "Forced," as in the case of the Irish women sent to the Bar badoes (22), or short-lived and unsuccessful, as with Mrs. Cumming, or terrifying, as in the woman who cries out " I / am afraid!" (38). There is no marriage because there is no language by which it could acquire meaning. There is no communication between man and woman. Instead, divorce is "the sign of knowledge in our time, / divorce! divorce!" (28). It is clear that in the frequent references to divorce Williams is referring not only to the dissolution of marriage, but to any significant turning away or separation of one thing from another that would fruitfully complement it. The reference to knowledge and divorce is preceded by the image of the bud forever green, "perfect / in juice and substance but di-

144

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

vorced, divorced / from its fellows, fallen low — "

(28). The

next mention of this bud relates it explicitly to the university, which is out of touch with life, cloistered and narcissistic, and hence ultimately useless, "a green bud fallen upon the pavement its

/

sweet

breath

suppressed:

Divorce

(the

/

language

stutters)" ( 3 2 ) . T h e r e is an echo of Keats in this image: After reaching the altar, the poet, in " T h e Fall of Hyperion," is told that the height is achieved only by those in whom an awareness of the suffering of man precludes any complacency. T h e others find a haven in the world, and if they do attempt to reach the altar, " R o t on the pavement where thou rotted'st h a l f . "

5

The

fact that the true nature of the poet involves unselfish dedica tion relates by contrast to the university, which lacks this humanity and self-knowledge. T h e academic failure is once again referred to in Book I (and here the image becomes more severe) in the words "clerks / got out of hand forgetting for the most part / to w h o m they are beholden" ( 4 4 ) . This theme, of the university as anathema to true knowledge, runs through the poem—and, predictably, throughout W i l l i a m s ' writing. M e n who occupy teaching positions, he wrote, "attempt to criticize new work, work created by conditions with which they do not have an opportunity to come inexorably into contact" ( L , 1 2 7 ) . Again, poetry is " t h e very antithesis of the a c a d e m y " ( L , 1 9 4 ) . As mentioned earlier, Robert Lowell has described Book II in terms of a movement toward a marriage that never takes place, a movement that further expands the theme of divorce in modern life. T h e section is filled with male and female sym bols—park, flowers, city, tower, grove, trees, roots—but though there is a constant possibility of union, it never occurs. Instead the separation—between man and woman, man and man, lan guage and event, art and nature, life and literature—is widened. Miss Cress sets the tone with her repeated laments about feel ing separated

from life and split within herself. T h e

lovers

under the bush "seem to talk," and "their pitiful thoughts do

THE R E D E E M I N G LANGUAGE

145

meet / in the flesh" (67), but she is distraught and he, "flagrantly bored," sleeps, "a beer bottle still grasped spear-like / in his hand" ( 7 5 ) . In the comic letter to " B , " the writer explains that " M u s t v " is pregnant, even though "I took sticks and stones after the dog . . . I started praying that I had frightened the other dog so much that nothing had happened" (69). The dogs in the poem, like the Africans, are fertile and healthy. They contrast sharply with the majority of the inhabitants of the "city" for whom a satisfactory consummation is virtually unattainable. A different view is expressed by Walter Scott Peterson who suggests that Paterson is actually a celebration of the power of love, and that the poem can best be understood in terms of the tension existing between two American attitudes defined in In the American Grain—the "Puritan," and the anti-Puritan. In Paterson these attitudes are given the corresponding terms "divorce" and "marriage": "But however he may describe them, the two contrasting states of mind defined in In the American Grain loom behind both Paterson as a whole and the individual details of which it is composed. And the poem's argument . . . is that man's loving and imaginative 'marriage' to the particulars of his local world can ultimately save him from the death-in-life of 'Puritan divorce'" ( 1 0 - 1 1 ) . This general idea, if not used as a catch-all, often provides insight. T h e section on the cry of the stream (100-105), for example, points out that marriage is no answer unless it is the product of a language whose words are not empty, that is, are capable of communicating sensory experience and rooted in the local ground. If they are empty, then divorce cannot be avoided. Thus while Paterson escapes the insistent plea for marriage and regains his equilibrium through song, " S h e " has the last word, and the book ends with the eight-page letter, painfully turned in on itself, documenting a woman's loneliness, anger, and feeling of exile; in short, with the triumph of divorce. Book III introduces the "marriage riddle," which relates

1^6

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S * PATERSON

both to language and to the union of the sexes. It is first presented as " S o much talk of the language — when there are no / ears" ( 1 2 9 ) . T h e answer to the riddle, thus, is not only a new language, but the new men who will actually understand it. T h e focus then shifts to " t h e riddle of a man and a w o m a n , " and on the possibility of victory over death through love, a logical

continuation

of

the

immortality

achieved

through

language: —and marry only to destroy, in private, in their privacy only to destroy, to hide (in marriage) that they may destroy and not be perceived in it — the destroying Death will be too late to bring us aid What end but love, that stares death in the eye? A city, a marriage — that stares death in the eye The riddle of a man and a woman For what is there but love, that stares death in the eye, love, begetting marriage — not infamy, not death (p. 130) T h e marriage riddle is answered, and the themes of birth and language given a new dimension, in the passages describing the discovery by M a d a m e

Curie of the radiant gist.

Unlike

Corydon, who is permanently divorced from any life with man, and Phyllis, who is unable to give herself to her lover, the French nurse, always described in images of pregnancy, works with her husband to find that which stands against all that

T H E R E D E E M I N G LANGUAGE

147

slights our lives. Madame Curie's triumph, like that of Columbus in discovering the Beautiful Thing (America), stands as a powerful force against divorce—against all that divides man from his fellow, language from deed, against all that is anti-life. It is just such a triumphant discover)·, to learn to measure well, "to find one phrase that will lie married beside another for delight," that the poet seeks. This imagery of marriage, divorce, rebirth, and miscarriage is closely related to images of stasis and flow, which also recur throughout the poem. Both of these image patterns, on their most significant level, are related to language and to the freeing of the imagination. T h e quest is for a key that will unlock the mind, and this image of being locked, or blocked, characterizing modern society, is worked into the fabric of the poem in a variety of ways. Each time it emphasizes the stasis that clogs any free flow of language or thought. "Blocked," says Paterson as he walks through the park, and the word relates to a multitude of details: to knowledge undispersed ( 1 2 ) ; to the body found "frozen in an ice-cake" ( 3 1 ) ; to the "special interests / that perpetuate the stasis" and "block the release" (46); to the drained lake (46); to Miss Cress, who feels "dammed up," "congealed," "blocked" (59), and unable to break through the crust (93); to the Senate, "trying to block Lilienthal" (78); to the scholars "lodged under" the flow of the language ( 1 0 0 ) ; to the dead writers "battering against glass / at the high windows" ( 1 2 3 ) ; to the dry waters ( 1 3 0 ) ; and other details as well. All of these references to blockage, though not on the surface related to one another, work cumulatively to create an atmosphere of frustration, a feeling of being balked, appropriate to the plight of the poet. Especially in Book III, in the description of the clogged landscape following the flood, the imagery of stasis serves as a commentary on the poet's mind and on the state of society in general. Mud covers everything—

1^8

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

. . . a sort of muck, a detritus, in this case—a pustular scum, a decay, a choking lifelessness—that leaves the soil clogged after it, that glues the sand}· bottom and blackens stones—so that they have to be scoured three times when, because of an attractive brokenness, we take them up for garden uses. An acrid, a revolting stench comes out of them, almost one might say a granular stench—fouls the mind (p. 167) This description of choking lifelessness documents not only the landscape and the utter impossibility of new birth, but

the

language, as well. T h e words are soiled and decayed. T h e y must be wiped clean; like the blackened stones, "they have to be scoured three times. . . ." T h e fossil conch, described shortly after this passage, is a symbol of the past, of a language calcined and quaint, but ultimately useless: Here's a fossil conch (a paper weight of sufficient quaintness) mud and shells baked by a near eternity into a melange, hard as stone, full of tiny shells —baked by endless desiccations into a shelly rime—-turned up in an old pasture whose history— even whose partial history, is death itself (p. 170) O n e does not need to know that Williams spelled " r i m e " as " r h y m e " in his early drafts to relate this melange to poetry that finds

its raison

d'etre

in

the

resurrection

of

the past.

For

Williams, the past is dead. " W h o is it spoke of April?" he asks. And the answer: " S o m e / insane engineer. T h e r e is no recur renee"

( 1 6 9 ) . There

is nothing to be gained by rescuing a

calcined reticulum of the past and filling it with hone). " T h e seepage has / rotted out the curtain," and the netlike structure

THE R E D E E M I N G LANGUAGE

149

can serve as no structure at all. The mesh is decayed. Rather, 011c must "Let the words / fall any way at all — that they may hit love aslant" ( 1 6 9 ) . T h e insane engineer who spoke of April irresistibly suggests Eliot who is, for Williams, the archenemy of invention, a man content with the connotations of his masters, "a subtle conformist." As such, he gets the brunt of an attack on those who have "run off." Eliot, Williams wrote to Horace Gregory, "should be branded for the worst possible influence in American letters — simplv because he more than anyone I know has blocked the interchange of fertilizing ideas between American and English letters" (L, 2 2 1 ) . "In conjunction with the universities," he wrote in his Autobiography, "Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself — rooted in the locality which should give it fruit" (A, 1 7 4 ) . Williams asserted that Eliot (like Pound) was not so much running toward the ready-made con tinental culture as away from the "deeper implications intellectually which our nascent culture accented" (L, 2 2 7 ) ® He refused to differentiate between two prosodies, and so turned unhesitatingly to the past.7 The thrust at Eliot in Paterson is made up of oblique refer ences, echoes, and some outright parody. Corydon, who has poetic pretensions, recites verse that provides comment on what Williams sees as a pompous, sexless, and world-weary stance, distorting in the process such Eliot lines as "At the violet hour," " H U R R Y U P P L E A S E I T S T I M E " and "This is the way the world ends": At the sanitary lunch hour packed woman to woman (or man to woman, what's the difference?) the flesh of their faces gone to fat or gristle, without recognizable outline, fixed in rigors, adipose or sclerosis

150

W I L L I A M CARLOS W I L L I A M S '

PATERSON

expressionless, facing one another, a mould for all faces (canned fish) this . Move toward the back, please, and face the door! is how the money's made, money's made pressed together talking excitedly . of the next sandwich (p. 196) This kind of work, depressing, restricting, and lacking any sort of imaginative validity, provides no clues to the regeneration either of man or of his language. The parody, of course, is heavily weighted, focusing attention on the trivial and pretentious. Eliot is a magnificent poet who cannot be reduced to patter of this sort. And yet the points are made that in spite of his disinguished craft and mind, his substance often looks resolutely to the past, and that man will not be saved through an attenuated intellectuality. The redemption, rather is to be found in the vernacular language and in a new measure by which both our poems and our lives may be measured. The clues do not lie in a resurrected past. " T h e past is for those that lived in the past" (277). T h e crucial clue lies in the dis cover\, in the present, of a language commensurate with the present world. This is the burden, and the triumph, of Paterson.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION ι. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York, 1957), p. 185. 2. The Case of Ezra Pound, ed. Charles Norman (New York, 1948), pp. 47-54. 3. "Dr. Williams' Position," in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 29. 4. "The Williams Grain," p. 305. The anonymous reviewer would have been justified in adding "and younger writers." In The Influence of Ezra Pound (New York, 1966), K. L. Goodwin suggests that Williams' influence has not been appreciably smaller than that of Pound. I would suggest that, if anything, it has been greater. This is the result of his restless experimentation with measure, his untamed insistence on using the "American idiom," and his personal courtesy and generosity—he introduced and encouraged many writers. Among the large number who derive from him in one way or another, George Oppen, Robert Lowell, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukovsky, A. R. Ammons, Charles Tomlinson, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov are representative debtors. 5. "Two More Cultures," New Statesman and Nation, L X V I I (January 24, 1964), 130. 6. The one book devoted to the poem, Walter Scott Peterson's An Approach to Paterson (New Haven, Conn., 1966), an undergraduate thesis, provides a rather good running summary of the first four books, but the consistent emphasis on Williams' optimism and affirmation of love tends to obscure his tragic vision. Moreover, Book V is dismissed as "at most a kind of coda," and this reinforces the pervasive misconception that the poem is an airtight

1$2

NOTES

structure rather than an open-ended sequence. There are several other books specifically about Williams: Linda Wagner, in The Poems of William Carlos Williams (Middletown, Conn., 1 9 6 4 ) , devotes a chapter to Paterson, focusing primarily on "svmbolic and transitional metaphor," counterpoint, juxtaposition, and the use of prose. Alan Ostrom's The Poetic World of William Carlos Williams (Carbondale, 111., 1 9 6 6 ) makes only scattered reference to the sequence, as does John Malcolm Brinnin's pamphlet, William Carlos Williams (Minneapolis, Minn., 1 9 6 3 ) . Sherman Paul's The Music of Survival (Urbana, 111., 1 9 6 8 ) deals exclusively with " T h e Desert Music." In The Art of William Carlos Williams (Urbana, 111., 1 9 6 8 ) , James Guimond does an especially good job of relating Paterson to the shorter poems and to the novels and plays. In William Carlos Williams (New York, 1968) Thomas R. Whitaker lucidly describes the poem's "way of language" as a means of seeking "a more authentic saying." Other helpful analyses are in chapters from broader studies. In The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (New Brunswick, N.J., 1 9 5 5 ) Sister M . Bernetta Quinn, one of the first to recognize the poem's importance, devotes an incisive chapter to Williams' method of interchanging man and "certain aspects of his environment . . . to compel a new awareness in citizens of the W a s t e Land." M . L. Rosenthal, in The Modern Poets (New York, i 9 6 0 ) , as well as in his useful introduction to the Williams Reader (New York, 1 9 6 6 ) , gives a persuasive account of the poet's principal intentions, and of the shape of the poem as a whole. In The City as Metaphor (New York, 1 9 6 6 ) , David R . Weimer discusses "two Patersons . . . one suggestive and the other severely prosaic." L. S. Dembo, in Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1 9 6 6 ) , throws light on several important aspects of the poem, including the quest for a redeeming language, the failure of love, and the economic motif. Roy Harvey Pearce, in The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J., 1 9 6 1 ) , helps relate the poem to other long American "epics," though the analysis is weakened by his assumption that Book V is not really a part of the poem proper, a theory he shares with Glauco Cambon, author of The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., 1 9 6 3 ) . T h e excellent Williams chapter in J. Hillis Miller's Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 6 5 ) concentrates on the shorter poems, but many of his trenchant observations can be applied to Paterson. Mr. Miller awards Williams a very high position in the galaxy of modern poets. 7. Letters,

p. 309.

NOTES

NOTES

TO CHAPTER

153

ι: The Poetry of Paterson

ι . " T h e Long Poem," The New York Review of Books (April 14, 1966), 18. 2. Lowell, "William Carlos Williams," in William Carlos Williams, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), p. 158; Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J., 1 9 6 1 ) , p. 1 1 2 ; Rosenthal, "Speaking of Books: William Carlos Williams," The New York Times Book Review (August 29, 1 9 6 5 ) , 30. Bennett, " T h e Lyre and the Sledgehammer," The Hudson Review, V (Summer 1 9 5 2 ) , 303. 3. Paterson (Norfolk, Conn., 1 9 6 3 ) , p. 259. Page numbers for subsequent quotations will be given in the text. 4. Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1 9 5 4 ) , p. 1 3 2 . Page numbers hereafter given in text, following abbreviation " E . " In The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1 9 5 1 ) , he wrote: " I took the city as my 'case' to work up, really to work it up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought.' To make a poem, fulfilling the requirements of the art, and yet new, in the sense that in the very lay of the syllables Paterson as Paterson would be discovered, perfect, perfect in the special sense of the poem, to have it—if it rose to flutter into life awhile—it would be as itself, locally, and so like every other place in the world. For it is in that, that it be particular to its own idiom, that it lives" (p. 392). Subsequent citations from the Autobiography will be given in the text, following "A." 5. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York, 1 9 5 7 ) , p. xiv. Citations hereafter given in text, following " L . " 6. Brinnin, William Carlos Williams, p. 37. 7. In describing Book I, Randall Jarrell wrote: "the organization of Paterson is musical to an almost unprecedented degree: Dr. Williams introduces a theme that stands for an idea, repeats it over and over in varied forms, develops it side by side with two or three other themes that are being developed, recurs to it time and time again thoughout the poem, and echoes it for ironic or grotesque effects in thoroughly incongruous contexts" ( " T h e Poet and His Public," Partisan Review, X I I I [September-October 1946], 493). Vivienne Koch commented on the relationship between Book I and a "symphonic overture" (William Carlos Williams, p. 1 3 5 ) . Μ. K. Spears noted the musical structure in Book II ( " T h e Failure

154

NOTES

of Language," Poetry, L X X V I [April 1950], 40), and Babette Deutsch suggested that the structure of Book IV—and of the poem as a whole—is musical in "presentation and recapitulation of themes" (Poetry in Our Time [New York, 1956], p. 1 0 8 ) . 8. Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 73. 9. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets, pp. 236-237. 10. Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 75. For additional material on the "open sequence," the following books by M . L. Rosenthal are especially valuable: A Primer of Ezra Pound (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1 9 6 6 ) , The New Poets (New York, 1 9 6 7 ) , and The Modern Poets. 1 1 . "William Carlos Williams: In Memoriam," National Review, X I V (March 26, 1 9 6 3 ) , 237. 1 2 . "William Carlos Williams: Two Judgments," in Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams, p. 48. See also two articles by James E. Breslin, "Whitman and the Earlv Development of William Carlos Williams," P M L A , L X X X I I (December, 1 9 6 7 ) , 6 1 3 - 6 2 1 , and "William Carlos Williams and the Whitman Tradition," in Literature and Historical Understanding, English Institute Essays, ed. Phillip Damon (New York, 1 9 6 7 ) . 1 3 . "Prose from Spring and All," in Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams, p. 20. 14. Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. John Kouwenhoven (New York, 1 9 5 0 ) , p. 548. Williams' fundamental premise, Rosenthal asserts, "is that the meanest of experiential data have their transcendent aesthetic potentiality, and hence that experience is the key to realization." Reader, p. xxvi. 1 5. "Prose from Spring and All," p. 20. 16. Herbert Bergman, "Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman," American Literature, X X V I I ( 1 9 5 5 ) , p. 60. The quotation is from an unpublished essay in the Yale University Library. 17. Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York, 1 9 5 0 ) , p. 89. 18. Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 90. 19. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets, p. 7 1 . 20. Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time, p. 1 0 1 . 2 1 . Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 1 0 1 . 22. Deutsch, Poetry in Our Time, p. 1 3 7 . 23. Ibid., p. 108. 24. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets, p. 89. 25. Gunn, "William Carlos Williams," in Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams, p. 1 7 2 .

NOTES 26. Т . S. Eliot, The Complete 1

155

Poems and Plays (New York,

9 ) ' P· 3927. I Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Edith Heal (Boston, 1 9 5 8 ) , p. 74. This book is a narrative bibliography, containing reminiscences about each of his books, reported and edited by Miss Heal. The poet provides information about purposes, methods, and publishing problems. Subsequent citations will be given in the text, following the abbreviation "IW." 28. Miller, Poets of Reality, p. 303. 29. Brinnin, William Carlos Williams, p. 39. 30. William Carlos Williams manuscripts and letters. Collection of American Literature, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn. In seeking these "unfinished pieces," Williams went to a great many sources, but relied most heavily on two books, William Nelson's History of the City of Paterson and the County of Passaic New Jersey (Paterson, 1 9 0 1 ) , and John W . Barber and Henry Howe's Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey (New York, 1 8 4 4 ) . Since Nelson himself relied on Barber and Howe, it is sometimes not immediately evident which source Williams used, but a careful comparison often supplies the answer. For example, the description of Peter the Dwarf ( 1 8 - 1 9 ) ' s apparently taken from Barber and Howe, since the length of his face is given as "twenty-seven inches," whereas in Nelson it is given as twenty inches. Williams' use of this passage is fairly typical of his general practice in that he makes only very minor alterations, leaving the extract almost exactly as he found it. His only changes were the addition of capitals in "Revolutionary Army," the deletion of an " a " before "human form," and the substitution of "neighborhood" for "vicinity." The description of the death of Mrs. Cumming is also quoted from Barber and Howe, and this time Williams did not change so much as a letter. He quotes almost to the letter from Nelson, too. T h e passage on the witch-cat, for example ( 1 5 9 ) , is quoted verbatim from Nelson's chapter on the Van Giesens. Williams preferred not to include the date, June 29, 1797, on which Mersilles (from whom Williams steals an " 1 " ) and his wife were married, probably because he wanted to show that superstitions are not limited to the past. His own interpolations, such as "Are we any better off?" ( 1 6 0 ) , are aimed at giving the passage contemporary application. The passage on the murder of Jonathan Hopper (219220) is quoted from a footnote on the Hopper family (Nelson, p. 345), and again Williams' only change is in the names, "Jonatan" and "Grietie" becoming "Jonathan" and "Gritie." Nelson himself

1 ζ6

NOTES

obtained

the

information

about

this

murder

from

"the

late

ex-

J u d g e H e n r y P . S i m m o n s , of P a s s a i c , w h o s e m o t h e r , a c h i l d at t h e t i m e , w a s in the r o o m a n d s a w t h e m u r d e r . " The

substratum

of

the

artesian

well

(166)

also c o m e s

from

N e l s o n , a n d again t h e r e are n o c h a n g e s . T h e r e p e t i t i o n of

"1,830

f e e t . . . L i g h t red s a n d s t o n e , " w h i c h s e e m s to b e a m i s t a k e in t h e p o e m , is c o p i e d d i r e c t l y Book IV

(233)

from

the source. T h e

Dutch

Lullaby

is c o p i e d f r o m N e l s o n ' s c h a p t e r titled

About Dutch Babies"

( 3 9 5 ) · It is o b v i o u s t h a t W i l l i a m s w a s m o r e

i n t e r e s t e d in s u g g e s t i n g s o m e t h i n g of t h e l o c a l

flavor

of t h e D u t c h

d i a l e c t a n d in p r o v i d i n g a k i n d of

sing-song c o u n t e r p o i n t

Goffle murder

of

and

in

"Something

to the strewing

corpses

to

the

that surround

the

n u r s e r y r h y m e t h a n in b r i n g i n g a t t e n t i o n to t h e w o r d s of t h e s o n g . H e did

not include Nelson's

description-translation,

which

would

h a v e p r o v i d e d e x p l i c i t m e a n i n g f o r t h o s e w h o d o n o t read "Even

before he would

comprehend

the

words,

Dutch:

t h e little

fellow

. . . e n j o y e d t h e p r e t e n d e d a l a r m w i t h w h i c h h e was i n f o r m e d that t h e pigs w e r e r o o t i n g a m o n g t h e b e a n s , a n d t h e c o w s w e r e in the c l o v e r , a n d t h e horses in t h e oats . . . " ( N e l s o n , p.

395)·

W i l l i a m s w a s c o n t e n t to use t h e passages f r o m history b o o k s a n d old newspapers

pretty

"without

f o r their

fuss"

much

as h e f o u n d

immediacy

of

them,

to p u t

expression.

He

them did

in

make

c h a n g e s , h o w e v e r , s i m i l a r to t h o s e in t h e letters f r o m " M i s s C r e s s , " A l l e n G i n s b e r g , P o u n d , a n d o t h e r s , in t h e m o r e c o n t e m p o r a r y , nonh i s t o r i c a l d o c u m e n t s h e u s e d . T h e t w o p a r a g r a p h s on t h e F e d e r a l Reserve System

(90)

a n d t h e o n e on t h e F e d e r a l

(91),

f o r e x a m p l e , are f r o m a m i m e o g r a p h e d

falo)

f r o m A l f r e d o and Clara Studa,

hurst, L.I., dated January use of (92)

ellipsis, a n d d e l e t e d

the second

t h a t f o l l o w s t h e last p a r a g r a p h

but from

"Tom

Teaching Truth

Edison

5124

1947· Williams

on

Banks

( n o w at B u f -

Simonson Street, shortened

paragraph.

(91)

the M o n e y

Reserve

letter

Elm-

t h e letter by

And

the

prose

is n o t f r o m t h e letter,

Subject,"

Leaflet

A b o u t M o n e y , printed by M O N E Y ,

#1

1165

for

Broad-

w a y . W i l l i a m s r e a r r a n g e d t h e o r d e r of this l e a f l e t c o n s i d e r a b l y , putting together sentences f r o m diverse paragraphs, and ending with a sentence

that

actually

precedes by

nine paragraphs

the

sentences

h e h a s it f o l l o w . H i s sole c o n c e r n h e r e w a s to p r e s e n t E d i s o n ' s ideas in t h e m o s t logical order, a n d h e n c e t h e c h a n g e s . F i n a l l y , in the advertisement

(213)

w r i t t e n b y A u g u s t W a l t e r s , N e w a r k , N . J . , the

final p h r a s e , " E N F O R C E T H E C O N S T I T U T I O N O N is n o t p a r t of t h e o r i g i n a l

MONEY,"

( n o w in t h e Y a l e c o l l e c t i o n ) , b u t was

a d d e d , a p p a r e n t l y to b r i n g t o g e t h e r i n t o a c o h e r e n t p l e a the angry charges m a d e by W a l t e r s .

NOTES

157

These passages on economics were incorporated primarily because of the information they provide. The majority of the "unfinished pieces," however, are first-hand reports, which, written under stress, are without any satisfactory form. It is just this formlessness, this rough immediacy, that Williams sought. Hence his willingness to let them stand, unimproved, as written, for as they stand these passages, like the letters, constantly provide, as Ralph Nash has suggested, a kind of logical extension of that drive toward direct, undecorated fact, that single stubborn thing so important to Williams. 3 1 . Miller, Poets of Reality, p. 319. 32. "Poetry of Feeling," in Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams, p. 69. 33. Winters, Primitivism and Decadence (New York, 1 9 3 7 ) , p. 82. 34. Bennett, " T h e Lyre and the Sledgehammer," 305. 35. Jarrell, " A View of Three Poets," Partisan Review, X V I I I (November-December 1 9 5 1 ) , 698. 36. The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (Norfolk, Conn., 1 9 5 1 ) , p. 353, henceforth referred to as C E P . 37. Miller, Poets of Reality, p. 301. For an illuminating discussion of the influence of Williams' prosodic theory, see the chapter on " T h e 'Projectivist' Movement" in Rosenthal's The New Poets. 38. More significant are the more than forty textual changes. Several of these consist merely of adding punctuation, altering ellipsis, changing capitalization, or correcting spelling. Others, however, especially in the letters, affect, in a small way, the tone and meaning. In Allen Ginsberg's letter (248), for example, "Whitmanesque mania" becomes "Whitmanic mania," " A d i o " is changed to "Adios," and " P L E A S E R E A D T H E E N C L O S E D " is altered to "PLEASE READ T H E ENCLOSED S U N F L O W E R SUTRA." The changes in Pound's letter on economics are more significant, since they clarify his ideas and fill in deleted material. There are several minor alterations, such as " B i l B i l " (i.e., William Williams) to "BilBill," "power" to " P O W E R , " and " S H I T T A daaabul" to "shittad aaabull." One section is changed significantly. T h e passage reading W a r s are made to make debt, and the late one started by the ambulating . . . has been amply successful, still emits a smell

becomes

158

NOTES Wars are made to make debt, and the late one started by the ambulating dunghill F D R . . . has been amply successful. and the stink that elevated him still emits a smell.

(p· 254) The added words give specific reference to the otherwise general statement, put the meaningless fragment "still emits a smell" into context, and make the letter even more vindictive. And just as " F D R " is mentioned directly in this later version, so also the "ten vols / treasury reports sent me" now reads "sent me to Rapallo." These changes make the letter more specific and more personal. Passages from the Bible are also changed in the altered version, and an editor's note is added (266) to explain why Williams says " M i r i a m " instead of " M a r y . " Two other noteworthy changes are found in the letter from Mezz Mezzrow: "why any white man" to "that any white man," and "Bessie's mournful stories" to "Bessie's moanful stories." Finally, it is significant that not a word of the poetry is changed in the later version. 39. Lowell, "William Carlos Williams," 1 57. 40. Stanley Koehler, " T h e Art of Poetry V I ; William Carlos Williams" (interview), The Paris Review, X X X I I (Summer-Fall 1964), 1 1 7 . 4 1 . Martz, " T h e Unicom in Paterson: William Carlos Williams," in Miller, ed., 'William Carlos Williams, p. 77. 42. Bennett, " T h e Lyre and the Sledgehammer," 302. 43. Jarrell, Poetry and the Age (New York, 1 9 5 5 ) , p· 212.

NOTES

TO CHAPTER

2: The Road to Paterson

1 . John C . Thirlwall, " T h e Genesis of the Epic Paterson," Today's Japan, I V (March 1 9 5 9 ) , 65. For a fuller account of the sources of the poem, see Mr. Thirlwall's "William Carlos Williams's Paterson," New Directions 17 ( 1 9 6 1 ) , 252-310. 2. In the American Grain (Norfolk, Conn., 1 9 5 6 ) . Subsequent references in the text will follow " A G . " See Alan Holder's " I n the American Grain: William Carlos Williams on the American Past," American Quarterly, X I X (Fall 1 9 6 7 ) , 499-515. 3. Included in The Farmers' Daughters (Norfolk, Conn., 1 9 6 1 ) , pp. 109-242. 4. All three quotations from " A Statement by William Carlos

NOTES

159

Williams About the Poem Paterson," in "News from New Direction," a news release, May 31, 1 9 5 1 · 5. For additional material on the city's history, see New Jersey: A Guide to Its Present and Past, Federal Writers Project (New York: The Viking Press, 1939). 6. Koch, William Carlos Williams, p. 122. 7. Unpublished material in the Williams papers, Lockwood Memorial Library Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. All subsequent quotations fom early drafts in this chapter are from these papers. 8. L, 236. "Sometimes a chance hint, such as that about avoiding footnotes in the 'Paterson' thing, completely resolves my nerves. . . . It doesn't seem much but—it is in fact everything in the relationship between composition and criticism." Williams later contrasted his approach (incorporating the notes into the text) with Eliot's: "The difference being that in this case the 'note' is subtly relevant to the matter and not merely a load for the mule's back" (L, 265). 9. Stevens, Preface to Williams' Collected Poems, 1921-1931 (New York, 1934), p. 4. 10. Williams, The Great American Novel (Paris, 1923), p. 9. 1 1 . Koch, William Carlos Williams, p. 1 1 8 . Williams had more than the usual amount of difficulty in getting this passage to satisfy him. He experimented with a great many lines dealing with "the beginning and the end," past and present, simplicity and complexity. His conscious echoing of Eliot, mentioned by Sister Bernetta, as well as by Miss Koch, is also seen in some rejected lines reminiscent of "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future," i.e., "Today is tomorrow, is yesterday, is / time reversed circuitously in its rage."

NOTES

TO C H A P T E R 3: The

Man/City

1. Lillian E. Massie, "Narrative and Symbol in Paterson," unpub. diss. (Arkansas, 1955), p. 32. 2. Koch, William Carlos Williams, p. 134. 3. Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 123. 4. In The New Poets (pp. 149-154), Rosenthal discusses the mock-pastoral exchanges, suggesting that Williams' methods of "intermingling racy, natural speech and poetic effects of the casual introspective sort" has had a strong influence on his followers.

l6o

NOTES

5. First Act (Norfolk, Conn., 1 9 4 6 ) , note on jacket. 6. Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, p. 128. 7. Pearce mistakenly describes Dr. Paterson watching his dog swim in the sea, and also suggests that the two walk home toward "the distant waterfall" (p. 1 2 8 ) . The description in the poem of the man emerging from the water, clearly suggesting a kind of new birth, makes no mention of the dog going beyond the water's edge: " W h e n he came out, lifting his knees / through the waves she went to him frisking / her rump awkwardly"—237. And they do not walk toward the waterfall. After dressing the man turns again "to the water's steady roar, as of a distant / waterfall"—237. He heads "inland" but there is no reason to suppose he is moving toward the Falls.

N O T E S T O C H A P T E R 4: The

River

1. For additional information on this subject see George Zabriskie, " T h e Geography of Paterson," Perspective, V I (Autumn 1 9 5 3 ) , 201-216. 2. A Buffalo note describes the section in this way: "3rd part— mulls it over, hears the roar, the tumbling power (of unfettered love) unrealized." 3. Thirlwali, " T h e Genesis of the Epic Paterson," p. 70.

NOTES

TO CHAPTER

5: The

Mountain

1 . Williams' ideas on women in America are found in scattered references throughout his work. As Rosenthal points out in his introduction to the Reader, "he is in love with the female principle in all its bewildering variations" (p. xi). T h e single place, other than Paterson, in which the various attitudes are brought together is the "Jacataqua" chapter of In the American Grain. In this essay he examines, among other things, the result of the Puritan heritage: "It is the women above all—there never have been women, save pioneer Katies; not one in flower save some moonflower Poe mayhave seen, or an unripe child. Poets? Where? They are the test. But a true woman in flower, never . . . At best they want to be men, sit and be a pal. It's all right. How could they do anything else with the men brutally beaten by the l i f e — " (pp. 1 7 8 - 1 7 9 ) .

NOTES

l6l

2. Lowell, "Paterson II, The Nation, C L X V I (June 19, 1948), 693. 3. Ibid. 4. Williams, Prologue to Kora in Hell (San Francisco, 1960), p. 5.

NOTES TO C H A P T E R 6: " Y o u Can't Steal Credit": Economic Motif

The

1. Jarrell, " A View of Three Poets," Partisan Review, X V I I I (November-December 1 9 5 1 ) , 699. 2. Koch, "William Carlos Williams, the Man and the Poet," The Kenyon Review, X I V (Summer 1 9 5 2 ) , 507. 3. Jarrell, " A View of Three Poets," 699. 4. Davenport, " T h e Nuclear Venus: Dr. Williams' Attack upon Usura," Perspective, V I (Autumn 1 9 5 3 ) , 190. 5. E, p. 158. In his novel In the Money, Williams follows Joe Stether's thoughts: "Anybody could solve the troubles of the world in fifteen minutes—if people had good will—and somebody wasn't preventing it, for a profit" (p. 1 8 1 ) . 6. Davenport, " T h e Nuclear Venus," 185. 7. Koehler, ed., " T h e Art of Poetry V I ; William Carlos Williams," 140. 8. Guimond, The Art of William Carlos Williams, p. 127. Cf. New Democracy V (October 1 9 3 5 ) , 61-62; V (November 1 9 3 5 ) , 81-83; V I (April 1 9 3 6 ) , 26-27. Guimond suggests that Williams adopted something of a Greenback position, seeing Social Credit as a local and "Democratic" approach to economics: "Williams' Social Credit theories are simply an economic application of his theory of the local culture which he developed in the 1920's." 9. Pound's idea of the economic causes of war is shared, to a degree, by Williams. In an essay he wrote: "Love versus usury, the living hell-stink of today: time-fuses sold in Germany to blow Germans into manure, French cannon to Turkey to blast Frenchmen to scrapple . . ." E , p. 168.

102

NOTES

NOTES TO CHAPTER A Summary

7: The Redeeming

Language:

1 . L, pp. 325-327. See also " O n Measure—Statement for Cid Corman," E, pp. 337-340. 2. Brinnin, William Carlos Williams, pp. 34-35. 3. A 1934 letter to Marianne Moore throws light on Williams' use of "despair": " T h e inner security . . . is something which occurred once when I was about twenty, a sudden resignation to existence, a despair—if you wish to call it that, but a despair which made everything a unit and at the same time a part of myself. I suppose it might be called a sort of nameless religious experience" (L, 4 7 ) · 4. Jacket, Book II. The phrase is Williams'. 5. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Keats, ed. Harold E. Briggs (New York, 1 9 5 1 ) , p. 373. 6. Walter Allen, writing in The New York Times Book Review (January 7, 1968) on campus tastes, comments: "Eliot, incidentally seems well and truly out, belonging to another age, a dead master who, as contrasted with William Carlos Williams, took the wrong turn." ("Speaking of Books: Report from the Campus," p. 2.) 7. J. B. Priestley has said essentially the same things in asserting that Eliot would have been a better poet had he stayed at home, since in America he might have created a framework, a world within the world, for his poetry, as Yeats did in Ireland. "But remaining in England, becoming a British citizen, turning Anglo-Catholic, royalist, and the rest, meant in actual effect that Eliot rejected creation for mere acceptance" (Literature and Western Man [New York, i960], p. 408).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. PRIMARY

SOURCES A. U N P U B L I S H E D

MATERIAL

Williams, William Carlos. Unpublished manuscripts. Lockwood Memorial Library Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York. . William Carlos Williams manuscripts and letters. Collection of American Literature, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn.

B. P U B L I S H E D

MATERIAL

Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1 9 5 1 . . The Build-Up. New York: Random House, 1952. . The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 5 1 . . The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963. . Collected Poems 1 9 2 1 - 1 9 3 1 . Preface by Wallace Stevens. New York: Objectivist Press, 1934. . The Desert Music. New York: Random House, 1954. . "An Essay on Leaves of Grass," in Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years After, ed. Milton Hindus. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1 9 5 5 , pp. 22-31. . "Experimental and Formal Verse: Some Hints Toward the Enjoyment of Modern Verse," Quarterly Review of Literature, VII (1953), 171-175. . The Farmers' Daughters. Introduction by Van Wyck Brooks. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 6 1 .

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— . Introduction to Allen Ginsberg's Howl San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1 9 5 6 . —. The Great American 1

2

Novel.

and Other

Poems.

Paris: Three Mountains Press,

9 3· —. In the American Grain. Introduction bv Horace Gregory. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 5 6 . —. In the Money. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1940. —. I Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Edith Heal. Boston: Beacon Press, 1 9 5 8 . —. Journey to Love. New York: Random House, 1 9 5 5 . —. Kora in Hell: Improvisations. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1 9 5 7 . —. Many Loves and Other Plays. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 6 1 . — . " A New Line Is a New Measure," The New Quarterly of Poetry, I, No. 2 (Winter 1 9 4 7 - 4 8 ) , 8-16. — . " T h e New Poetical Economy," Poetry, X L I V (July 1 9 3 4 ) , 220-225. — . A Novelette and Other Prose, 1921-1931. Toulon, France: Imprimerie F . Cabasson, 1 9 3 2 . —. Paterson. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963. (The five books were originally published in single volumes by New Directions in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1 9 5 1 , and 1958.) —. Pictures from Brueghel and other poems. New York: New Directions, 1962. — . "Review of 95 Poems," Evergreen Review, II (Winter 1959), 214-217. —. Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1 9 5 4 · —. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C . Thirlwall. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1 9 5 7 . —. Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, ed. Randall Jarrell. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1949. — . A Voyage to Pagany. New York: Macaulay Co., 1928. —. White Mule. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 3 7 . —. Yes, Mrs. Williams. A Personal Record of My Mother. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959·

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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165

SOURCES

Aiken, Conrad Potter. Skepticisms. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919. Aldington, Richard. Life for Life's Sake. New York: Viking Press, 1941. Allen, Donald M . , ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, i960. Allen, Walter. "Speaking of Books: Report from the Campus," in The New York Times Book Review (January 8, 1 9 6 8 ) , 2, 42-43. Anderson, Margaret. My Thirty Years' War. London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1 9 3 0 . Angoff, Charles. " 3 Towering Figures," The Literary Review, VI (Summer 1 9 6 3 ) , 423-429. Arnheim, Rudolf, W . H. Auden, Karl Shapiro, and Donald A. Stauffer. Poets at Work. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948. Barber, John W . , and Henry Howe. Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey. N e w York: S. Tuttle, 1894. Bennett, Joseph. " T h e Lyre and the Sledgehammer," The Hudson Review, V (Summer 1 9 5 2 ) , 295-307. Beum, Robert Lawrence. " T h e Baby Glove of a Pharaoh," Perspective, V I (Autumn 1 9 5 3 ) , 2 1 7 - 2 2 3 . . " T h e Neglect of Williams," Poetry, L X X X (August 1 9 5 2 ) , 291-293. Blackmur, Richard P. Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1 9 5 2 . . The Expense of Greatness. New York: Arrow Editions, 1940. Bogan, Louise. Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950. Chicago: Henry Regnery C o . , 1 9 5 1 . Breslin, James E . " W h i t m a n and the Early Development of William Carlos W i l l i a m s , " P M L A , L X X X I I (December 1 9 6 7 ) , 6 1 3 621. . " W i l l i a m Carlos Williams and the W h i t m a n Tradition," in Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding, ed. Phillip Damon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Brinnin, John Malcolm. William Carlos Williams. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers Series, N o . 24. Minneapolis, Minn., 1963.

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Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman). The Heart to Artemis: A Writer's Memoirs. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962. Burke, Kenneth. "Heaven's First Law," The Dial, L X X I I (February 1 9 2 2 ) , 197-200. . " T h e Methods of William Carlos Williams," The Dial, L X X X I I (February 1 9 2 7 ) , 94-98. — . "William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963," The New York Review of Books, I (Spring-Summer 1 9 6 3 ) , 45-47. Cambon, Glauco. The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American Poetry. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1963. Carruth, Hayden. " D r . Williams's Paterson," The Nation, C L X X (April 8, 1 9 5 0 ) , 331-333. Ciardi, John. " T h e Epic of a Place," Saturday Review, X L I (October 1 1 , 1 9 5 8 ) , 37-39. Coffman, Stanley K., Jr. Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951. Cook, Albert. "Modern Verse: Diffusion as a Principle of Composition," The Kenyon Review, X X I (Spring 1 9 5 9 ) , 208-212. Crane, Hart. The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. Garden City, N . Y . : Doubleday, 1958. Davenport, Guy. " T h e Nuclear Venus: Dr. Williams' Attack Upon Usura," Perspective, V I (Autumn 1 9 5 3 ) , 183-190. Dembo, Lawrence S. Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1966. Deutsch, Babette. Poetry in Our Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956. . This Modern Poetry. New York: W . W . Norton, 1935. Donoghue, Denis. " F o r a Redeeming Language," Twentieth Century, C L X I I I (June 1 9 5 8 ) , 532-542. Edelstein, Sanford. "William Carlos Williams: Essential Speech," Perspective, V I (Autumn 1 9 5 3 ) , 224-228. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. Ellmann, Richard. " T h e Doctor in Search of Himself," The Kenyon Review, X I V (Summer 1 9 5 2 ) , 5 1 0 - 5 1 2 . Engel, Bernard F. " D r . Williams as Exhorter: The Meaning of Americanism," Publications of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, X L V I I ( 1 9 6 2 ) , 579-586. . " T h e Verse Line of Dr. Williams: A Fact of the Thing Itself," P M A S A L , X L V I ( 1 9 6 1 ) , 665-670.

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Flint, R. W . " Ί Will Teach You My Townspeople,' " The Kenyon Review, XII (Autumn 1950), 537-543. Foster, John Lawrence. " T h e Modern American Long Poem," unpublished dissertation, University of Michigan, 1961. Frankenberg, Lloyd. Pleasure Dome: On Reading Modern Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Garrigue, Jean. "America Revisited," Poetry, XC (August 1 9 5 7 ) , 315-320. Goodwin, K. L. The Influence of Ezra Pound. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Graves, Robert, and Laura Riding. A Survey of Modernist Poetry. London: William Heinemann, 1927. Gregory, Horace, and Marya Zaturenska. A History of American Poetry: 1900-1940. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946. Gregory, Horace. The Shield of Achilles. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944. . "William Carlos Williams," Life and Utters Today, X X I V (February 1940), 164-176. — . "William Carlos Williams and the C o m m o n Reader," Briarcliff Quarterly, III (October 1946), 187-188. Grigsby, Gordon Kay. " T h e Modern Long Poem: Studies in Thematic Form," unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin, i960. Guimond, James. The Art of William Carlos 'Williams. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1968. Gustafson, Richard. "William Carlos Williams' Paterson: A M a p and Opinion," College English, X X V I (April 1 9 6 5 ) , 532-539. Härtung, Charles. "A Poetry of Experience," University of Kansas City Review, X X V (Autumn 1 9 5 8 ) , 65-69. Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich. The Little Magazine. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946. Holder, Alan. "In the American Grain: William Carlos Williams on the American Past," American Quarterly, X I X (Fall 1 9 6 7 ) , 499~5 1 5· Honig, Edward. "City of M a n . " Poetry, L X I X (February 1949), 277-284. . " T h e Paterson Impasse," Poetry, L X X I V (Apnl 1949), 37Ч1· Howard, Leon. Literature and the American Tradition. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, i960.

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Jarrell, Randall. " A View of Three Poets," Partisan Review, X V I I I (November-December 1 9 5 1 ) , 691-700. . Poetry and the Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. . " T h e Poet and His Public," Partisan Review, X I I I (September-October 1946), 488-500. , ed. The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963. Jones, David. In Parenthesis. New York: Viking Press, 1 9 6 1 . Keats, John. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Keats, ed. Harold E. Briggs. New York: Modern Library, 1 9 5 1 . Kenner, Hugh. " T o Measure Is All W e Know," Poetry, X C I V (May 1 9 5 9 ) , 1 2 7 - 1 3 2 . . "William Carlos Williams: In Memoriam," National Review (March 26, 1 9 6 3 ) , 237. Knoll, Robert E. Robert McAlmon, Expatriate Publisher and Writer. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1959. Koch, Vivienne. William Carlos Williams. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1950. . "William Carlos Williams, The Man and the Poet," The Kenyon Review, X I V (Summer 1 9 5 2 ) , 502-510. Koehler, Stanley. " T h e Art of Poetry V I ; William Carlos Williams" (interview), The Paris Review, X X X I I (Summer-Fall 1964), 110-151. Kreymborg, Alfred. A History of American Poetry: Our Singing Strength. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1934. Kunitz, Stanley. "Frost, Williams, and Company," Harpers, C C X X V (October 1 9 6 2 ) , 100-103. Levertov, Denise. "William Carlos Williams," The Nation, C X C V I (March 16, 1 9 6 3 ) , 230. Lowell, Robert. "Thomas, Bishop and Williams," The Sewanee Review, L V (Summer 1 9 4 7 ) , 493-504. . "Paterson II," The Nation, C L X V I (June 19, 1 9 4 8 ) , 692694. . "William Carlos Williams," The Hudson Review, X I V (Winter 1 9 6 1 - 6 2 ) , 530-536. Martz, Louis. "Recent Poetry," The Yale Review, X X X V I I I (Autumn 1 9 4 8 ) , 1 4 4 - 1 5 1 . . " T h e Unicorn in Paterson: William Carlos Williams," Thought, X X X V (Winter i960), 537-554. Included in Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams. Massie, Lillian. "Narrative and Symbol in Paterson," unpublished dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1955·

BIBLIOCRAPHY

l6 9

McAlmon, Robert. Being Geniuses Together. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1938. Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. , ed., William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Monroe, Harriet. A Poet's Life. New York: Macniillan, 1938. Moore, Marianne. "Things Others Never Notice," Poetry, X L I V (May 1 9 3 4 ) , 103-106. Morgan, Frederic. "William Carlos Williams: Imagery, Rhythm, and Form," The Sewanee Review, L V (October-December »947). 675-691. Munson, Gorham B. Destinations: A Canvass of American Literature Since 1900. New York: J. H. Sears, 1928. Myers, Neil. "Sentimentalism in the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams," American Literature, X X X V I I (January 1 9 6 6 ) , 458-470. Nash, Ralph. " T h e Use of Prose in Paterson," Perspective, VI (Autumn 1 9 5 3 ) , 191-199. Nelson, William, and Charles A. Shriner. History of Paterson and Its Environs. 3 Vols. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1920. Nelson, William. History of the City of Paterson and the County of Passaic New Jersey. Paterson: Press Printing and Publishing Co., 1 9 0 1 . . Records of Township of Paterson, N.J., 1 8 3 1 - 1 8 5 1 . Paterson: Press Printing and Publishing Co., 1895. Noland, Richard W . " A Failure of Contact: William Carlos Williams on America," Emory University Quarterly, X X (Winter 1 9 6 4 ) , 248-260. Norman, Charles. Ezra Pound. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969. Ostrom, Alan B. The Poetic World of William Carlos Williams. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966. Paul, Sherman. The Music of Survival: A Biography of a Poem By William Carlos Williams. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1968. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1 9 6 1 . . " T h e Poet as Person," The Yale Review, X L I (March 1 9 5 2 ) , 421-440. Pearson, Norman Holmes. "Williams, New Jersey," The Literary Review, I (Autumn 1 9 5 7 ) , 29-36.

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Peterson, Walter Scott. An Approach to Paterson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1948. . "Dr. Williams's Position," The Dial, L X X V (November 1 9 2 8 ) , 395-404. Included in Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams. . Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1950. Priestley, John Boynton. Literature and Western Man. New York: Harper, i960. Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta. The Metamorphic Tradition in Modem Poetry. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Rakosi, Carl. "William Carlos Williams," The Symposium, IV (October 1 9 3 3 ) , 439-447· Rosenfeld, Isaac. " T h e Poetry and Wisdom of Paterson," The Nation, C L X I I (August 24, 1946), 216-217. Rosenfeld, Paul. Port of New York. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. Rosenthal, Macha L. "In the Roar of the Present," New Republic, C X X V (August 27, 1 9 5 1 ) , 18. . The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York. Oxford University Press, i960. . The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. . "Salvo for William Carlos Williams," The Nation, C L X X X V I (May 3, 1958), 497, 500. , ed., The William Carlos Williams Reader. New York: New Directions, 1966. . "Speaking of Books: William Carlos Williams," The New York Times Book Review (August 29, 1965), 1, 30. Roth, Russell, "In the American Grain," Western Review, X V I I (Summer 1 9 5 3 ) , 277-286. Secmon, Roger. "ТЪе Bottle in the Fire: Resistance as Creation in William Carlos Williams's Paterson," Twentieth Century Literature, X L (April 1 9 6 5 ) , 16-24. Siegel, Eli. " T . S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams: A Distinction," University of Kansas City Review, X X I I (October 1 9 5 5 ) , 4 1 "43· Slate, Joseph E. "William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and 'The Virtue of History,' " Texas Studies in Literature and Language, V I (Winter 1 9 6 5 ) , 486-511.

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1J1

Smith, Grover. "On Poets and Poetry," New Mexico Quarterly, X X I I I (Autumn 1952), 321-324. Solt, Mary Ellen. "William Carlos Williams: Idiom and Structure," The Massachusetts Review, III (Winter 1 9 6 2 ) , 304-318. Spears, Monroe K. "The Failure of Language," Poetry, L X X V I (April 1 9 5 0 ) , 39-44. Stevens, Wallace. Preface to Williams' Collected Poems 19211931. New York: Objectivist Press, 1934. . "Rubbings of Reality," Briarcliff Quarterly, III (October 1946), 201-202. Sutton, Walter. "Dr. Williams's Paterson and the Quest for Form," Criticism, II (Summer i960), 242-259. Teale, Edwin, ed. The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1948. Thirlwall, John C. "The Genesis of the Epic Paterson," Today's Japan, IV (March 1 9 5 9 ) , 65-70. . " T h e Lost Poems of William Carlos Williams," New Directions 16. New York: New Directions, 1957. . William Carlos Williams as Correspondent," The Literary Review, I (Autumn 1 9 5 7 ) , 13-28. . "William Carlos Williams's Paterson," New Directions 17. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1961. Thompson, Frank. "The Symbolic Structure of Paterson," Western Review, X I X (Summer 1 9 5 5 ) , 2 ^5" 2 93· Thorp, Willard. American Writing in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, i960. Thoreau, Henry David. Waiden. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964. Tyler, Parker. "The Poet of Paterson Book One," Briarcliff Quarterly, III (October 1946), 168-175. Wagner, Linda. The Poems of William Carlos Williams. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. Wallace, Emily Mitchell. A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. . "Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams at Penn," Pennsylvania Review (Spring 1 9 6 7 ) , 40-53. — . "William Carlos Williams' Bibliography," The Literary Review, I X (Summer 1966), 501-512. Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. "William Carlos Williams: Poetic Invention and the World Beyond," English Literary History, X X X I I (March 1 9 6 5 ) , 126-138. . The Edge of the Image: Marianne Moore, William Carlos

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John World

(January

1950),

130-143. Willard,

N. M.

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Poetry

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. Primitivism

and

of T h i n g s :

Williams,

Rilke,

Ponge,"

X V I I (Fall 1 9 6 5 ) , 311-324. of Reason. N e w Y o r k : Swallow

Decadence.

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INDEX

A Abbott, Charles, 51 Allen, Walter, 162 n. 6 Altgeld, John Peter, 1 2 3 Ammons, A. R., 1 5 1 n. 4 Aucassin and Nicolette, 15 Audubon, John James, 2 1 , 7879 В Barber, John W . , Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey, 53, 1 1 9 - 1 2 0 , 1 5 5 n. 30 Barrett, Elizabeth, 4 1 , 1 0 3 Barzun, Jacques, 42, 65 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 79 Bennett, Joseph, 8, 33, 1 2 8 Blake, William, 42-43 Bosch, Hieronymus, 42, 79, 98 Breslin, James E., 1 5 4 n. 1 2 Brinnin, John Malcolm, William Carlos Williams, 136, Browning, Robert, 16 Brueghel, Pieter, 1 7 , 42, 79, 108 Burke, Kenneth, 1 7

С Cambon, Glauco, The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American Poetry, 1 5 2 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 16, 97; The Canterbury Tales, 15, 404 b 54' " 4 Chekhov, Anton, 1 7 Cocteau, Jean, 42 Colt, Christopher, 50 Columbus, Christopher,

107,

47> 47 Crane, Hart, 1 5 , 20, 23, 42; The Bridge, 4, 15, 20, 23 Creeley, Robert, 1 5 1 n. 4 Cummings, Ε. E., 38, 41-42, 61 Curie, Madame, 1 3 , 4 1 , 76, 106-107, J 1 1 > 1 4 - 1 2 5 > 1 3 7 , 146-47

D Dahlberg, Edward, 68, 108 Davenport, Guy, 1 1 8 , 126 Del Mar, Alexander, Barbara Villiers, or a History of Monetary Crimes, 128

174

INDEX

Dembo, L. S., Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry, 152 Deutsch, Babette, 20-21, 124; Poetry in Our Time, 154 n. 7 Donoghue, Denis, 8 Dos Passos, John, Manhattan Transfer, 38 Douglas, Norman, 41 Durer, Albrecht, 79 Ε Einstein, Albert, 134 Eliot, T. S., 2, 12, 15, 20-23, 56, 71, 75, 93, 149-150, 159 n. 8, 162 n. 6-7; "AshWednesday," 11; Four Quartets, 4, 10, 15, 22, 30, 41, 57; The Waste Land, 4, 15, 20-24, 4 b 75' 93104 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10 Empson, William, 3 F Freud, Sigmund, 42, 79, 137 G Gide, Andr6, 74 Ginsberg, Allen, 25, 37, 79, 95, 125, 1 5 1 n. 4, 156, 157 n. 38 Goodwin, K. L., The Influence of Ezra Pound, 1 5 1 n. 4

Gray, Thomas, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 42 Gregory, Horace, 1, 45, 52, 149 Gris, Juan, 79 Guimond, James, The Art of William Carlos Williams, Gunn, Thorn, 22 Η Hamilton, Alexander, 21, 49, 69, 83, 85, 119, 1 2 1 , 130 Holder, Alan, 158 n. 2 Holland, John Philip, 50 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 76 Howe, Henry, See Nelson, William

/ Jarrell, Randall,

36, 43,

117,

n

153. 7 Jeffers, Robinson, 42 Jones, David, In Parenthesis, 24 Joyce, James, 15, 20, 33, 136; Dubliners, 22; Finnegans Wake, 53, 64 К Keats, John, 16; Εndymion, 15; "The Fall of Hyperion," 144 Kenner, Hugh, 16 Kierkegaard, Soren, 43 Klee, Paul, 42, 79

INDEX Koch, Vivienne, William Carlos Williams, 3, 51, 57, 68, 1 1 7 , 1 5 3 , n. 7, 1 5 9 n. 1 1

L

Jersey,

of

Passaic

New

1 5 5 - 1 5 6 n. 30

New Directions, 3

О

Laughlin, James, 45, 48 Lawrence, D. H., 16 L'Enfant, Pierre Charles, 50 Levertov, Denise, 1 2 2 , 1 5 1 n. 4 Lilienthal, David, 1 4 7 Lorca, Federico Carcia, 41; The Love of Don Perlimplin, 108 Lowell, Robert, 9, 40, 104, 144, 1 5 1 η. 4; Life Studies, 16

Μ McAlmon,

County

175

Robert,

127

MacGibbon & Kee, 3 Martz, Louis, 41 Metastasio, Pietro, Varie

Poesie,

47 Mezzrow, Mezz, 1 5 8 n. 38 Miller, J. Hillis, 24, 32, 38-39; Poets of Reality, 1 3 7 , 1 5 2 Moore, Marianne, 38, 40, 42, 162 n. 3 Mullins, Eustace Clarence, A Study of the Federal Reserve, 1 2 8 N Nash, Ralph, 1 5 7 n. 30 Nelson, William, History of the City of Paterson and the

Oppen, George, 1 5 1 η. 4 Ostrom, Alan, The Poetic World of William Carlos Williams, 3, 1 5 2

Ρ Pascal, Blaise, 58 Paterson, William, 49 Paul, Sherman, The Music of Survival, 1 5 2 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 8, 16, 18, 20, 70-71, 75-767 160 n. 7; The Continuity of American Poetry, 1 5 2 Peterson, Walter Scott, An Approach to Paterson, 145, 1 5 1 - 5 2 n. 6 Picasso, Pablo, 79 Poe, Edgar Allan, 47 Pollock, Jackson, 42, 79 Pound, Ezra, 1-2, 1 5 - 2 1 , 23, 25, 35, 38, 44, 56, 7 1 , 73, 75, 93, 109, 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 122, 12527, 129, 149, 156, 1 5 7 n. 38, 161 n. 9; A Draft of XXX Cantos, 32; " A Pact," 17; Cantos, 4, 15-16, 1821, 4 1 , 1 1 7 , 1 1 9 , 128; Guide to Kulchur, 1 2 8 Priestley, J. В., 1 6 2 η. η

1ηβ

INDEX

2 Quinn, Sister Μ . Bernetta, 6, 53, 63, 159 η. i i ; The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry, 1 5 2 R Reuther, Walter, 42 Rodgers, Thomas, 50 Rosenthal, Macha L., 8, 16, 19; A Primer of Ezra Pound, 154 n. 10; The Modern Poets, 1 5 4 n. 10; The New Poets, 1 1 7 , 1 5 2 , 1 5 4 n. 10, 1 5 7 n. 37, 159 n. 4; The William Carlos Williams Reader, 3, 29, 1 5 2 , 1 5 4 n. 14, 160 n. 1 Ruiz, Juan, Libro de Buen Amor, 15 Rutherford, New Jersey, 2 S Sappho, 1 1 0 Shahn, Ben, 42, 79, 1 2 7 Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice, 32 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Alastor, Snyder, Gary, 109 Soupault, Philippe, 4 1 ; The Last Nights of Paris, 78-79 Spears, Μ . K., 1 5 3 n. 7 Stein, Gertrude, 41 Stevens, Wallace, 25, 33, 45,

5 1 ' 55. 57

Studa, Alfredo, 156 Sunday, Billy, 124-25 Τ Thirlwall, John C., 158 n. 1 Thoreau, Henry David, 10, 15, 95; Waiden, 10, 15, 1 1 1 12, 1 1 5 Times Literary Supplement (London), 3 Tiresias, 1 5 , 2 1 , 75 Tomlinson, Charles, 1 5 1 n. 4 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 42, 78 W Wagner, Linda Welshimer, The Poems of William Carlos Williams, 152 Wagner, Richard, 1 5 Wallace, Mike, 79 Walters, August, 126, 1 5 6 Washington, George, 21, 49 Weimer, David R., The City as Metaphor, 152 Whitaker, Thomas R., William Carlos Williams, 152 η 6 Whitman, Walt, 1 5 - 1 7 , 20, 23, 43, 7 1 , 132-34; A Backward Glance O'er Travell'd Roads, 17; Leaves of Grass, 8; "Song of Myself," 15-18 Williams, Mrs. William Carlos, 48, 126 Williams, William Carlos, " A Note," 140; "At the Bar,"

INDEX 47; The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 3, 56, 149, 1 5 3 n. 4; The Broken Span, 47; The Build-up, 48; " T h e Desert Music," 133; The Desert Music and Other Poems, 4; The Farmers' Daughters, 3; First Act, 75; The Great American Novel, 57; In the American Grain, 1, 3, 23, 47, 145, 160 n. 1; In the Money, 3, 48, 1 6 1 n. 5; "January: A Novelette," 44; Journey to Love, 4; Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 47; Life Along the Passaic River, 48; Many Loves, 3; "Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," 26; "Paterson, Episode 1 7 , " 47;

177

Pictures from Brueghel and other poems, 3-4, 19, 1 3 3 ; Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 3; Spring and All, 47; " T h e Wanderer," 45; White Mule, 3, 48, 54; " T h e Wind Increases," 47 Winters, Yvor, 32 Wordsworth, William, 16, 40; The Prelude, 15

Y Yeats, William Butler, 20, 4 1 , 94, 1 1 0 , 1 6 2 n. 7

Ζ Zukovsky, Louis, 1 5 1 n. 4