So Much Depends

William CARLOS WILLIAMS was a furious poetic revolutionary — furiously working over a lifetime to reinvent American poetry, furious at poetry he considered backward, and at critics and editors who didn’t get it. To many, including me, he was the greatest poet of the 20th century. Unlike Eliot and Pound, two of his rivals in importance, he refused to be an expatriate. When Pound wrote him from overseas, urging Williams to leave America, Williams incorporated the advice into a brutally terse and powerful poem in praise of staying home. He spent virtually all his life in Rutherford, N.J., close to the American voices that enthralled him. He was determined to make them the basis of a new poetic diction, one that has hugely influenced American poets and poetries since. It’s not too much to say he was our Dante, making a distinctively American language out of slang, jokes, complaints and rants. Williams did this by endlessly reworking heavily enjambed line breaks and stanza breaks in exquisitely casual and deceptively ordinary poems — a red wheelbarrow shining after a rainstorm, a fire engine tearing through city streets, a woman whose body is covered with moles. He did this alone, and largely ignored by the mediocre stars of American literary life. His capacious, rigorously humane work has a delicacy of ear that hasn’t yet been surpassed. All this, and poetry was his night job — his days were spent as hardworking Dr. Williams of North Jersey.

 

Left-liberal where Eliot was establishment reactionary and Pound openly supportive of Fascism, Williams remained unaligned with any political party. He rubbed shoulders in nearby New York City with many of the major and minor avant-gardists of the time. He lived mostly quietly, staying married to the same woman his whole adult life. Like many other artists, male, female, gay and straight, he also found time for lots of extramarital sex. He told his own story in his autobiography — a story also recounted in minute detail in Paul Mariani’s magisterial 1981 biography, “William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked.”

 

Now comes Herbert Leibowitz’s cranky, unapologetically self-assertive, infidelity-obsessed, interesting and idiosyncratic book, “ ‘Something Urgent I Have to Say to You’: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams.” Leibowitz, the editor and a co-founder of the venerable journal Parnassus: Poetry in Review, considers Williams’s life and work partly thematically, in chapters on family origins, marriage and love affairs, six months abroad, the writing of “Paterson.” Many biographies treat artistic creation as a kind of bloodless version of a Caesarian birth, but Leibo­witz is terrific at conveying the confusion, uncertainty and doggedness of the life of the artist intent on discoveries. He can also be elegant in characterizing the cross-over between Williams the doctor and Williams the poet, as when, commenting on the splendid untitled poem from “Spring and All” that begins “By the road to the contagious hospital,” Leibo­witz notes that Williams was, by this point in his workhorse writing life, listening “to the acoustic properties of words with the same care and skill he devoted to the beating of a patient’s heart.” That’s a comparison entirely enclosed in metaphor — and a useful way of understanding Williams: Medicine wasn’t a fallback position, but a serious calling not subordinate to writing.

 

Leibowitz admires Williams’s prose, calling “In the American Grain,” a series of prose portraits of the country’s founders, “his masterpiece.” But he doesn’t communicate special empathy for the poetry or the man, carping at individual poems another critic might treat more holistically as part of working toward discovery. one senses he wishes he’d been around to fix Williams’s poems as they emerged. He’s entertainingly pugnacious, especially when he knows he’s writing against popular opinion, calling “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” a late love poem to Williams’s wife, “so clumsy that one wonders what was blocking his ear and his critical faculty,” or finding “Tract” — mock advice on how to conduct a funeral — to be a harangue full of platitudes.

Leibowitz is fascinated by the poet’s sex life, bizarrely devoting a chapter to a non-affair with the flamboyant minor-Dadaist poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-­Loringhoven. (Williams never actually slept with her — she had syphilis, and he knew it.) Williams certainly wrote often about love and sex, in and outside marriage. But Leibowitz seems to scold the poet for his failure to conform to bourgeois standards of morality. This leads him to tin-eared readings of poems like the 10-line “Arrival,” which describes the poet-speaker “loosening the hooks” of a woman’s dress, from which “the tawdry veined body emerges / twisted upon itself / like a winter wind.” This is an erotic moment that includes the mortal body’s reality, with sex and death rolled up together. It’s certainly not reducible to a poem about “guilt and disappointment” wherein, says Leibowitz, Williams “behaves like a censorious moralist.” Biographers should avoid using poems as mirrors.

 

Leibowitz knows his way around sonics and syntax. But he frequently treats poems merely as windows through which a poet’s life can be viewed. In a chapter called “Poetry as Biographical Evidence,” Leibowitz writes, “The biographer can’t overlook the examples, sometimes blatant and sometimes disguised, of poets projecting their unconscious feelings on personae.” Elsewhere, he says Williams “routinely played slyboots with the reader or squirreled away embarrassing items about his conduct in obscure hiding places.” Leibowitz seems to think that poets deploy their poems primarily as evidence for biography.

For example, Williams wrote two versions of a poem about his grandmother’s death. “The Last Words of My Grandmother,” from 1924, is half a description of a callow young cousin staying with the grandmother, and half an account of the grandmother’s dying furies and querulous last words, also the last words of the poem: “What are all those / fuzzy looking things out there? / Trees? Well, I’m / tired of them.” In the 1939 revision, “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” Williams cuts out the cousin, who, as Leibowitz notes, is easy to read as a self-portrait-by-proxy. The new version focuses entirely on the grandmother and, as Leibowitz also notes, “Williams’s role shrinks to interjection, remonstrance or the reading of stage directions.”

 

The key question is why: “Perhaps,” Leibowitz says, “he wished to distance himself from his early impudence. Perhaps he realized that by upstaging his dying grandmother in the 1924 version he had distracted the reader.” In fact, serious poets write and revise their poems according to the necessities of art, not life. Leibowitz ignores this, and ignores a small, important change to the later version’s ending. After the grandmother has rasped out, “I’m tired of them,” Williams adds, “and rolled her head away.” This gives the poet, not the grandmother, the last word, and lets him upstage her all over again. This economical, enriching gesture suggests Williams changed the poem not for extratextual reasons, but because his interests in relation to narrative technique had shifted. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand — at least partly — the life.

 

Finally, a technical complaint: A number of poems quoted in “ ‘Something Urgent I Have to Say to You’ ” are laid out incorrectly — poems whose typographical arrangement were a major Williams innovation. This must be a computer formatting error. It’s shocking, especially coming from a publishing house as renowned as Farrar, Straus & Giroux, that nobody caught it. Is there really no one in the proofreading department — as Williams writes about America in his great poem “To Elsie” — “to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car”? 

 

[NY Times Sunday Book Review, November 27 2011: "So Much Depends"]