A New World Naked, 1981

The most laudable aspect of Paul Mariani's critical biography of William Carlos Williams is that it largely succeeds in placing him, in his biographer's words, as ''the single most important American poet of the twentieth century,'' and though Williams is dead almost 20 years now, there has been no poet in that time to deny him his primacy. Among his American contemporaries, he had but two peers, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, and Mr. Mariani makes a strong case for Williams's being ''more equal'' than they. He rightly considers T.S. Eliot to be more English than American, and he hardly glances at Robert Frost, a sign , perhaps, of the whisperings of sanity in the academic establishment. I agree with Mr. Mariani's judgment and so need no convincing, but for the reader who knows Williams as the author of the handful of poems that are predictably anthologized, this book will come as a revelation.

Paul Mariani is relentless in detailing the shabby critical treatment accorded Williams throughout the whole of his career, a record of intellectual misprision that invented a Williams who was, and still is - with endemic regularity - thought of as a kind of amiable primitive, an unsophisticated scribbler, a simple small-town doctor who wrote on the side, but wrote, mind you, without quite knowing what he was doing: the literary equivalent of Grandma Moses or the New Jersey version of vers libre's gift to the world, Carl Sandburg. Mr. Mariani shatters these idiocies by a careful examination of Williams's work in poetry, fiction and criticism, setting it against the general somnambulism of the time. In a sense, this book may be read as a kind of graph of the reactionary shoddiness of the American critical mind in the face of a modern master, and I half suspect that Mr. Mariani intends us to read it this way because of the attention he has paid to this facet of Williams's career.

Paradoxically, the ''fault'' might be laid at Williams's door. As early as 1917, he wrote: ''Ignorant people use the most idiotic words sometimes with a dignity, a force of feeling that makes them glow and flare. I listen in profound silence ... later I try to imitate. I almost always fail.'' In 1917, no English or American poet made or even thought of poetry this way. Williams's nascent ideas of a vernacular American poetry, which were to flower in the great poems of ''The Desert Music'' and ''Journey to Love'' 40 years later, had sealed his fate. He didn't yet know this -he soon would.

Three years later, Williams published, in The Dial, ''Portrait of a Lady,'' arguably the first absolutely modern American poem , one that locally develops the techniques of European, especially French, modernism, an extension of the Apollinaire of ''Alcools,'' written in those ''idiotic words'' that ''glow and flare.'' It was Williams's first wholly successful demonstration that there was an American idiom, that its rhythms might be formally controlled, and that it could be turned to metrical patterns that are not those of the ''natural'' English iambic. It begins: Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Which sky? The sky where Watteau hung a lady's slipper. Your knees are a southern breeze - or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard? - as if that answered anything.

This miraculous poem, in toto, is a paradigm of Williams's technical concerns. We note a perfectly balanced iambic pentameter, distributed over two lines, suddenly mocked and broken; an elegant alexandrine pulled up short; and a recurrent aborting of causality and logical development. Nothing like it had been seen before in English or American poetry, but Mr. Mariani does not note that it occasioned any comment. Williams was working in the shadow of Eliot's ''The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,'' and would soon be eclipsed by ''The Waste Land,'' the poem that enraged him because it seemed a betrayal of a new American poetry in gestation, as well as a portent of the return of poetry, as he put it, ''to the classroom.'' He was, of course, right.

In 1949, by which time Williams had published, among many other books, ''Spring and All'' and the first two books of ''Paterson'' (which should have been enough to secure his reputation), James Laughlin asked Randall Jarrell to write the introduction to the inexpensive New Directions edition of Williams's ''Selected Poems,'' the book that was to have served to broaden his audience. It was a mistake. Mr. Mariani tells us that ''Williams - noting Jarrell's waverings - had several times confided to Laughlin that perhaps he should have done his own introduction or had someone else do it. But Laughlin's instinct was to go with an introduction by a recognized poet and critic.'' This introduction petrified, for the rest of Williams's lifetime, and well beyond his death in 1963, the general critical attitude toward his work. In effect, what Jarrell's unenthusiastic introduction did for Williams was to present him as unlettered but well-meaning, and lacking in poetic intelligence and craft: in short, a good-hearted rube, not to be mentioned in the same breath as Eliot, Frost or Stevens. Mariani continues, ''the sense one was left with (was) that one was dealing here with a circumscribed and minor talent.''

 

It is tempting to suggest that Jarrell's attitude stemmed, in part, from the kiss of death bestowed upon Williams by Eliot in a 1936 Harvard lecture. In this lecture he referred to Williams as a poet ''of some local interest, perhaps.'' Eliot's dominance of the Anglo-American critical world was already well established by that time, and he easily succeeded in putting Williams in his place. The ranks closed, the New Critics -or, as Kenneth Rexroth trenchantly called them, ''the cornbelt metaphysicals'' - were in the ascendancy, and Jarrell's response was almost predestined. But he had help.

In 1938, after the appearance of the ''Complete Collected Poems,'' Babette Deutsch complained in The Nation that the poetry lacked a central, all-informing myth. Time magazine praised the work, but praised Laura Riding's poetry more. In The New Republic, Philip Horton, Hart Crane's first biographer, argued that Williams could not be called an important poet and that his poems eliminated the visionary plateau. And R.P. Blackmur, writing in the Partisan Review, said that his work was devoid of any tragic dimension and without the deeper significations of human experience that other poets of his generation had offered. We seem to be located in the world of Hermann Hesse, where poetry is made of Serious Ideas.

Mr. Mariani puts it well in his preface when he writes that this biography came out of the work that he did in the early 70's ''in an attempt to determine why the critics had for so long either dismissed or tried actually to destroy Williams's poetic reputation.'' The ''why'' is made explicit throughout this biography. Williams himself gave, unwittingly, one of the reasons when he wrote, early on: ''The goal of writing is to keep a beleaguered line of understanding which has movement from breaking down and becoming a hole into which we sink decoratively to rest.'' Writing is almost always most admired when it is decoratively resting - in our time, the more comatose, the more static a mirror image of ''reality'' the better -and at least three-quarters of the writers of any era employ language and techniques inadequate to deal with that era; they are, in effect, decorators. Williams was a troublesome artist who was always starting anew, and in the despised language that he found, as he said, ''in the mouths of Polish mothers.'' The critics, bemused by ''deep thoughts'' that shuffled along in stale iambics with the occasional tinkle of rhyme to wake them up, were having none of it. What could they have possibly said of a man who wrote, in 1950: ''To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance. What does it matter what the line 'says'? There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention,'' a terse gloss on the classic modernism that has its roots in Flaubert.

Williams's life was outwardly uneventful. Born in 1883 in Rutherford, N.J., he died almost 80 years later a few blocks from his birthplace. At the University of Pennsylvania, where Williams began medical school at age 19, Pound, Hilda Doolittle and Charles Demuth were among his friends. He interned for two years at the old French Hospital in New York and, with a special gift for pediatrics, decided to take another internship at Child's Hospital. Well on his way to a lucrative New York practice, he lost this opportunity because he refused to cooperate with a hospital scheme at Child's involving the misappropriation of funds, and resigned. He began practicing in Rutherford and the grim towns of northern industrial Jersey among the immigrant and black poor, spent almost a year in Europe with Flossie, his wife, where he associated with Pound, Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and most of the other members of the international avant-garde, then returned to the United States for good. He earned little money as a physician because of his unwillingness to press his poverty-stricken patients for payment, and his writing earned him less. Indeed, at the age of 53, in a talk he gave at the University of Virginia, he said: ''For the past thirty years I have never been able to get one first-rate poem published in a commercial magazine ... I have never been able to get a single book of poems, no matter how small, published except by paying or partly paying for it myself.''

Beginning in 1951, he was the victim of a series of increasingly crippling strokes, and in 1953 was hospitalized for severe depression, after terrible ''loyalty process'' difficulties with the Library of Congress over his appointment as Consultant in Poetry, a position he never assumed. He wrote much of his work in whatever time he could spare from his practice and his family - late at night, between patients in his office, even in his car. His wife was the remarkable Flossie Herman, a courageous and intelligent woman whom, we learn, Williams married on the rebound, his first love being her older sister, Charlotte. The marriage was rocky and often troubled because of Williams's countless liaisons with other women, but it endured. His American contemporaries of note - Stevens, Cummings, Moore, Nathanael West - were friends and colleagues, and were balanced by many other writers whose names are not now very well known - Alfred Kreymborg, Emanuel Carnevali and Robert McAlmon, a tragic man whom Pound always insisted was a better prose writer than Hemingway. Williams was, as they say, in the thick of the new movement, part of its cutting edge, but always, and insistently, ''local'' in his concerns. This ''localism'' - in which Williams insisted that one would discover the universal - coupled with his radical disruption of outworn forms and a consistent sabotaging of ''content'' as meaningless was to carry the innovations of the European avant-garde into the American climate. These innovations were seen by most of his readers as provincial and inarticulate. It was Williams's vision of what a true modern American literature could be that was behind his reference (in the 1918 ''Prologue'' to ''Kora in Hell'') to Eliot as a ''subtle conformist,'' a startling remark in the light of that era's view of Eliot, and Mr. Mariani traces the mutual antagonism of the two men to that comment.

  

In the 30's and 40's Williams knew and met with a younger generation of writers - Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Edward Dahlberg, Carl Rakosi and Charles Reznikoff - and in his last years befriended poets as diverse as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. He continued to contribute to the little magazines that had sustained him and provided, often, his only outlet for years. Toward the end of his life, there belatedly came a measure of recognition for his achievement - the Russell Loines Award, the National Book Award, various honorary degrees - yet at the 1951 Dinner Meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, he was booed and heckled throughout a talk he gave on ''The American Spirit in Art,'' in which he championed the work of the Abstract ｅxpressionists. In 1955 he published ''Journey to Love,'' which includes ''Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,'' one of the great poems in the language, of which Robert Lowell wrote, ''he delivered to us what was impossible, something that was both poetry and beyond poetry.'' Yet John Montague, the Irish writer, reported that Williams was ''made fun of'' during a reading he gave that year at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The idea of Williams as barbarian had deep roots; Robert Creeley, referring to the literary climate of the 50's, wrote that its arbiters ''were dominant in their insistence upon an idea of form extrinsic to the given instance ... Auden (was) the measure of competence.''

I have presented this book narrowly, but it may also be read as a record of the ultimate vindication of an artist who worked all his life against the grain of his time. But this sort of grinding combat is not exhilarating to those who are engaged in it. Had Williams found ing to those who are engaged in it. Had Williams found a commercial publisher earlier than 1934, when he first published with Laughlin's just-begun New Directions, his enormously important early books might have remained in print. one of Williams's lifelong problems was that most of his work was always out of print, so that there was little opportunity for the creation of a body of intelligent critical discourse to be built up around this work. He might have been able to give up his medical practice earlier, and thereby find the time to organize and elaborate the scattered notes, remarks and essays that he wrote on ''the variable foot,'' a theory of American prosody that is a kind of modern variant on Thomas Campion's 17th century experiments with, and ideas on, the role of quantity in an accentually stressed poetry. He might have published in easily obtained literary journals instead of having to place so much of his work in fugitive magazines. His life was, as they say, all uphill, and it exhausted him and finally burnt him out.

Mr. Mariani calls his life one of ''complex tragedy and brilliance.'' How complex, how tragic and how brilliant, his biography fully explores. Had he not been a man of such stamina and courage, such stubborna 1917 letter, ''enough Spanish blood to muddy up (his) mind,'' he would have been silent by the mid-30's. As it was, he persisted. He says, in ''The Pink Locust'': ''I'm persistent as the pink locust,/ once admitted/ to the garden,/ you will not easily get rid of it./ Tear it from the ground,/ if one hair-thin rootlet/ remain/ it will come again.''

Yet his persistence cost him. Writing to Zukofsky at 72, he says of a postcard on his desk: ''It shows four old musicians walking poorly clad in the snow. ... They are all scrunched together their instruments in their hands trudging along. I mean to keep the card there a long time as a reminder of our probable fate as artists. I know just what is going on in the minds of those white haired musicians.'' Indeed he did.