William Carlos Williams in America

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2008 by Rudman, Mark

Part Two

THE MOST IMPORTANT INDICATOR OF AN artist's effectiveness is how he or she is regarded by other artists apart from the welter of critical response, which almost always lags a quarter century behind what their peers recognized. One form of this is homage. A revealing tribute of this kind occurs in Malcolm Lowry's novella Through the Panama, which derives an entire intertextual substructure from Paterson. Lowry positions a prose narrative in the columns that refers both to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Williams' use of prose for grounding and contrapuntal effect in Paterson. If this sounds like guesswork on my part, I can assure you that it isn't because Lowry's alter ego Sigbjorn Wilderness composes an absurd "poem" consisting of safety instructions and sighs it "Wilderness Carlos Wilderness." Lowry constructs a mischievous narrative of William Paterson-but not the William Paterson who founded Paterson, New Jersey. This incites dizziness in the reader that is similar to the experience of reading some of the stories and letters that Williams intersperses throughout the prose sections of Paterson. Both William Patersons look back at a time when individuals took larger than life risks, America was still a frontier, and the English were still in their big colonial phase such as the Darian expedition in 1698 in which William Paterson participated. One reason I'm drawn to this juxtaposition of Lowry and Williams is how remote the two men were in their approach to the problem of living. Williams' poem and Lowry's novella, read in conjunction, teach you how to read each of them better than a critical exegesis. Both writers, equipped with humor, intensity, and a mastery of many registers of diction, used the local (Paterson), the finite (Lowry's ship)-the bound-in such a way that it becomes cosmological. The rubbing together of the two forms-the high and the low-creates a friction, which is what the reader finds so exhilarating and liberating. Williams is not normally associated with the idea of "fine writing" as was the inveterate reviser Lowry of Under the Volcano, and yet for Williams, it was a matter of deployment; he was always choosing how to wield his instrument. "Rigor of beauty is the quest."

As always with Williams, there's an implied substance that can be transformed in several ways: the American grain can mean ingrained but also includes two other possible transmutations-bread and alcohol. Williams was ignited by D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature. Were two books ever more beautifully aligned than Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature and Williams' In the American Grain? He takes Lawrence's idiosyncratic approach and applies it to actual history and historical figures where Lawrence stayed with the literature. In the American Grain was his first book with a commercial publisher (and his poetry would have to wait another twenty years until James Laughlin and New Directions came to the rescue), and as he describes the experience, "as a book, it fell flat [... he sees] success go skittering out the window." He was reduced to buying remaindered copies wherever he could. Another bust. But what kind of success was Dr. Williams the poet imagining for himself? Well, imagination of this sort knows no bounds. I doubt that the failure of In the American Grain could have been as bitter to Williams as the failure of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee's more titanic, journalistic, yet immediate text, was to him. I find it significant that Williams makes no mention of an ecstatic review of In the American Grain in The Nation by D. H. Lawrence. Williams might have felt anointed by Lawrence's approbation, but you wouldn't know it from his account. I find it curious in another way that the terms Lawrence uses to evaluate "this record of truly American heroes" are congruent with those I've been developing.

[T]he author is seeking out not the ideal achievement of great men of the New World but the men themselves, in all the dynamic explosiveness of their energy. The peculiar dynamic energy, this strange yearning and passion and uncanny explosive quality in men derived from Europe, is American, the American element. seek out this American element, O American!, is the poet's charge.

Might not this form of recognition be ultimately more gratifying than the tally of copies sold? Both men were priests of imperfection, but for different reasons: Lawrence because he knew he wouldn't live long, Williams because his doctor job consumed so much of his time he was forced to write on the run, jotting down notes between house calls. And if Williams was liberated from earlier constraints by Lawrence's essays, he also took Lawrence's impulses to another plane with regard to the elasticity of his prose. Williams, unlike Lawrence, never really had to leave his continent to revive his poetic energies; and his European orientation allowed him to continue to find America exotic.

When I pulled out the record-vinyl-of Steve Reich's composition, The Desert Music, hoping for inspiration in hearing Williams, I looked at the liner notes as the pulsations were beginning. I felt affirmed in the slant I've been taking, and even found Steve Reich using a quotation I had planned to include.