Modernism the Morning After Perelman, Bob
Published by The University of Alabama Press
Perelman, Bob. Modernism the Morning After. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2017. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/51284
Access provided by University Of Pennsylvania (13 Aug 2018 16:15 GMT) 7 Familiar Williams
“But that sounds just like my husband! . . . You mean to stand there and tell me that that’s a poem?’’—a teacher enrolled in a poetry workshop in the 1970s has just been introduced to what many readers will recognize as the erstwhile kitchen- table note William Carlos Williams scrawled to his wife, Flossie. It has become one of Williams’s most familiar poems. First, the confession:
This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox (WCW I, 372)
The second stanza displays a bit of sympathy for the wronged party, who was “probably / saving” the plums “for breakfast.” The final stanza starts with a bare- bones apology: “Forgive me,” but then shifts to a recollection of the guilty plea- sure: “they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold.”1 The teacher’s reaction to the poem is a small moment situated well outside the circles of critical expertise, but it makes a telling emblem of the current situa- tion of Williams in the twenty-first century. The anecdote appears in an essay concerned with teaching poetry in the schools (Zavatsky); it involves a reader who is neither poet nor critic, and her reaction is out of sync with the standard criti cal histories. But this is appropriate for Williams, who himself was out of sync with the reigning paradigms of his day. He remains anomalous with regard to contemporary poetic expectations, though this is masked by his ubiquitous influence on poets and his presence in anthologies and on syllabi. In accounts of American poetry Williams is a basic marker of the development of mod- ernism, of the avant-ga rde, and of a democratic art of everyday speech. How- 70 • Chapter 7 ever, while he has become important to each of these literary chronologies, he fits awkwardly into them all. The imagery from one of his own typically off-the- cuff critic al remarks can be applied to his current reception: “Forcing twentieth- century America into a sonnet—gosh, how I hate sonnets—is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs off to make him fit” (Wagner, 30). The teacher in our opening anecdote is not thinking in terms of literary- histori cal categories, but she is, in a way, reinventing them, reinscribed in a demo- cratic (unprofessional) context: to her, the poem seems scandalously unpoetic, simply a scrap of real life masquerading as art. Such a reaction could put us in mind of earlier, more notable shocks. Time magazine, reviewing The Waste Land (1922) in its initial issue, quoted the last eight lines as if they were self-e vident nonsense and concluded, “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax.”2 If we emphasize the origin of “This Is Just To Say” as a kitchen-table note, the closer parallel might be a Duchamp readymade, where a snow shovel, bottle rack, or, most famously and provocatively in the case of Fountain (1917), an upside-down urinal was exhibited as art. A strict chronological perspective would disallow such comparisons. The mini malism and undisguised everydayness of “This Is Just To Say” might, in 1970, have surprised a neophyte like the teacher, but even at its publication in 1934 it would have looked, to a knowledgeable reader of the day, merely “mod ern” (unrhymed, unpunctuated vers libre). By 1970, the poem had become a lit- erary chestnut. Kenneth Koch’s affectionate parody, “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams,” published ten years before in The New American Po- etry (1960), assumes the Williams poem as an obvious reference, otherwise Koch’s violent humor loses much of its bite: “We laughed at the hollyhocks together / and then I sprayed them with lye. / Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing” (Koch, 135). The poem is currently being used as a writing prompt for eighth-graders.3 Naive as the teacher’s reaction must seem from an informed perspective, it shows us a quality of Williams’s work that has affected its reception for many decades: its unstable mix of the ordinary and the new. If we attend carefully to what the teacher says—and Williams is the poet who has been crucial in show- ing how everyday speech can be a primary material for poetry—we will find more than some dim echo of avant-garde or modernist impacts. In fact, what first strikes her about the poem is its utter familiarity: “But that sounds just like my husband!” For her, the shock of the new arises reflexively from what we might term the shock of the familiar. In the pedagogical context in which the anecdote appears, the teacher is no longer a half century behind the times. Rather, she becomes a figure of the ex- pansive future of Williams’s work: her reaction in the 1970 workshop remains a teachable moment on the twenty-fir st-century website of the Academy of Ameri Familiar Williams • 71 can Poets. A myriad of similar events has enabled Williams to outflank the larger reputations that, during his writing life, were always ahead of him. A laggard according to modernist calendars, Williams’s staying power is better measured in terms of social breadth rather than via tropes of aesthetic advance. It par- ticipates in multiple chronologies, making its relation to literary history labile. That “It Is Just To Say” can be a writing prompt for eighth-graders is not a sign of backwardness. Far from it: eighth-graders are not easy to reach. This does not make the work, in any sense, timeless. Often the ever-w idening gap of actual years is quite clear: as in the widely taught “The Young House- wife” (1916). The questions that poem raises about male voyeurism are vivid in the twenty-first century, but the following lines, which present the object of the doctor’s fantasy coming into actual view, also present a puzzle to the contempo- rary reader: “Then again she comes to the curb / to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands / shy, uncorseted” (WCW I, 57). What were corsets, ice-m en, and fish- men at the moment the doctor-p oet was driving by? Many things, clearly; but contemporary readers will have only a fuzzy sense of them. Williams’s suc- cess in addressing his present with appropriate poetic quickness remains appar- ent, but it is also clear that the poem is a century old. The poetic horizon that Williams fo ten evokes—a primal opposition between a young United States and an adult Europe, pitting a jejune chaos against a cul- ture of varied sophistication—is now a dated trope twice over, since it is prior to both American midcentury hegemony and the post-Vietnam phase of Ameri can decline. And for all of Williams’s complaints about being stuck in New Jersey, we should remember that New York City was close, and that Williams kept up assiduously with the artists and poets, from Stieglitz and Duchamp to Pollock, Loy, Freytag-L oringhoven, and Ginsberg. In addition, as a doctor with a full- time general practice, he had access to a greater variety of people, classes, and types of events than any other American poet. One example: “The girl who comes to me breathless, staggering into my office, in her underwear a still living -in fant, making me lock her mother out of the room” (Autobiography, 361). This is not meant as a dramatic climax; it is mentioned as part of the daily routine. Williams’s combination of wide social experience and artistic sophistication is, in hindsight, remarkable. But the narrative that mattered to Williams involved a frustrating pursuit of those who, he felt, were ahead of him: Pound and Eliot, primarily—though Duchamp merits mention here as well. Late in life Williams said, “Before meet- ing Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D.” (IW, 5). From their meeting as teenagers, Pound—younger, confident, and knowledgeable—assumed the role of teacher, a pattern which was to continue for half a century. Williams soon saw through some of Pound’s intellectual pretentions: in Kora Williams outs Pound, so to speak, by quoting him as saying, “It is not necessary . . . to read everything in a 72 • Chapter 7 book in order to speak intelligently of it. Don’t tell everyone I said so” (IM, 10). Nevertheless, Williams remained daunted. Three decades later inPaterson he quotes pedagogic letters that he was still receiving from Pound: “Read all the Gk tragedies in / Loeb.—plus Frobenius, plus Gesell” (138). Williams made irregular progress toward emancipating himself, declaring in one of his last poems, “To My Friend Ezra Pound” (1956), “Your English / is not specific enough / As a writer of poems you show yourself to be inept not to say / usurious” (WCW II, 434)—the last word a knowing thrust naming the cardinal sin in Pound’s po- etic politico-theology. Williams was not a figur e like Eliot, Pound, or Duchamp, who could declare, authoritatively, what mattered and what did not. This authority was effected by their creative work but just as significantly by their critical dicta: Duchamp’s re- jection of what he termed “retinal art”; Pound’s division of poetry into melo- poeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia (Pound, ABC, 63); Eliot’s pronouncement that Joyce’s “mythical method” was something that “others must pursue after him” (Eliot, Selected Prose, 178–80), or that “poetry in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult” (65). Such statements, regardless of how accurate or prophetic they turned out to be, were powerful in setting the terms for inexo- rably forward-moving aesthetic chronologies. Williams’s despair at the publication of The Waste Land is well known: “It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it. . . . I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years” (Autobiography, 174). A less re- marked encounter with Duchamp produces a similar result. “I finally came face to face with him as we walked about the room and I said, ‘I like your picture’ . . . . He looked at me and said, ‘Do you?’ That was all. He had me beat all right, if that was the objective. I could have sunk through the floor, ground my teeth, turned my back on him and spat” (137). Williams did not react to these defeats in similar fashion. He paid the most serious attention to Duchamp, whose radi- cally playful senses of art stayed with Williams throughout his career.4 His aver- sion to Eliot, on the other hand, was unnuanced and unchanging. Williams assembled the manuscript of Spring and All in reaction to The Waste Land. The two works are now, of course, widely considered of the most signal importance to the history of American poetry. But at the time, in contrast to the impact of The Waste Land, the publication of Spring was a non-event: most of the three hundred copies printed in Dijon were destroyed by US customs (Mari ani, 209). The single meeting between the two poets, in 1948, furnishes a fitting conclusion to Williams’s inverse trajectory vis-à- vis Eliot. By this point, Eliot ruled poetry in English stylistically, critic ally, and, as senior editor at Faber and Faber, logistically; he would receive the Nobel Prize a month later. Williams’s omission from Conrad Aiken’s 1945 anthology of American poetry makes a suit- able counter-emblem. 5 Eliot’s one recorded remark was: “Williams, you’ve given Familiar Williams • 73 us some good characters in your work, let’s have more of them” (Mariani, 831 n.7). By pointedly praising the short stories (faintly, to be sure), Eliot was con- firming Williams’s status as a non-poet. Eliot’s triumph set the terms for Williams’s critic al reception during his life- time and for decades afterward. To parse the battle schematically: on the victor’s side there would be the major poem (The Waste Land, The Cantos), authorita- tive criticism, and established protocols of knowledge requiring the dissemina- tive services of professional academics. Eventually, Williams could approximate these accomplishments: Paterson was crucial to his wider acceptance; Marjorie Perloff calls it his “major work, the poem that finally made him famous” (The Po- etics of Indeterminacy, 148). To match the critical terms of Pound and Eliot there would be Williams’s variable foot.6 But where Eliot and Pound had spawned criti cal industries devoted to explication, Williams’s work was always open to charges of confusion, even simple-min dedness. Randall Jarrell’s rave review of the first book ofPaterson had been most responsible for Williams’s success; but when Williams concluded Book Two with eight pages of a Marcia Nardi letter, Jarrell’s reaction was incredulousness: “What has been done to them to make it possible for us to respond to [Nardi’s letters] as art and not as raw reality? . . . I can think of no answer except: They have been copied out on the typewriter [em- phasis in original]” (Doyle, 239).7 As for the variable foot, despite some smart and generous attempts to grapple with what Williams meant,8 the term has al- ways been vulnerable to commonsense dismissal. If the variable foot is taken as referring to syllables heard in real time, a skeptic would ask if the following units from one of Williams’ stair-s tep lines were really intended to be similar in dura- tion: (1) “even,” and (2) “an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places” (WCW II, 245).9 The editor of the current Oxford Anthology of American Poetry writes, affectionately but dismissively, “One of the secrets of modern American poetry is that no one knows what ‘the variable foot’ really is” (Lehman, 277). In a letter that Williams quotes in the Preface to Kora, Pound gives Williams the left-handed compliment of “opacity,” which for Pound is due to Williams’s mixed ancestry. It is not far from calling Williams dense: “And America? What the h—l do you a blooming foreigner know about the place. . . . You thank your bloomin gawd you’ve got enough Spanish blood to muddy up your mind. . . . The thing that saves your work is opacity, and don’t forget it” (IM, 11). Pound’s perception of Williams hardly changed: in 1930 he again praises Williams’s “opa city”; Kora, for Pound, is “Rimbaud forty years late” (Pound, “Doctor Williams’ Position,” 392).10 Such condescension carries through to Charles Olson, who complained to Robert Creeley that “Bill, with all due respect, don’t know fr nothing abt what a city is.” 11 In a private letter, he was harsher: “Bill’s own lack of intel- lect is sabotaging . . . all our positions” (Correspondence, 84). One might ascribe such swipes to the contentiousness of poetic rivals. But 74 • Chapter 7 senses of Williams as an untutored bumpkin are not hard to come by: through out his work, one finds moments of naïveté, pugnaciousness, clowning, cru- dity, foregrounded gaps, and mistakes—all manifestations of his aversion to au- thority and prestige. In Kora Williams quotes a letter from H.D. deploring his lack of seriousness, “the hey-ding-ding touch . . . as if you mocked at your own song,” and then seems to prove her right by declaring, “There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other” (IM, 13). While Book Five of Paterson (1958) contains much valedictory lyrical seriousness, the lines likeliest to lodge in memory are, “Paterson, / keep your pecker up, / whatever the detail!” (P, 231). Such moments can’t be separated out from what is most serious in his work. The foregrounded silliness of the opening of Spring and the brokenness of the prose throughout are not an avoidance of the challenge that Eliot’s poetics posed: they are part of Williams’s answer. However, Williams’s turn away from cultured language does not always guarantee vivid liveliness. One of his most fa- mous poems, “To Elsie,”12 begins memorably: “The pure products of America / go crazy —” (WCW I, 217), but is soon full of cliché: “devil-m ay-care-men who have taken / to railroading / out of sheer lust of adventure.” “The Black Winds” (poem V) in Spring begins with imagery that can only be called hackneyed: “Black winds from the north / enter black hearts. Barred from / / seclusion in lilies they strike / to destroy—” (WCW I, 189–90). Yet the poem ends with the crisp modernist credo: “How easy to slip / into the old mode, how hard to / cling firmly to the advance—” (191). For all his own complaints about belatedness and all the accusations about his obtuseness, Williams has been frequently invoked at the beginning of lit- erary initiatives as a talisman of the new. Donald Allen’s introduction to The New American Poetry (1960) begins its list of notable modernist ancestors with Williams—Eliot is omitted. Robert Grenier’s “On Speech” (1971) is often cited as a key opening articulation of the poetics of Language writing, attacking the presumed naturalism of everyday language. There, Williams is invoked as a prior limit to be superceded, with Grenier looking for “the progression from Williams”; but Williams is also used as the model for what is to come next. “To me, all speeches say the same thing, or: why not exaggerate, as Williams did, for our time proclaim an abhorrence of ‘speech’ designed as was his castigation of ‘the sonnet.’ ”13 Charles Bernstein’s polemic “The Academy in Peril” makes Williams’s ca- reer emblematic of a century-long division between innovative and conserva- tive writing: “Williams, more than almost any other Americ an poet of his time, took an activist position . . .—his work is an intervention . . . against static forms of knowledge. . . . Official verse culture is no more hospitable to Williams’s liter- ary politics now [1983] than it was fifty years ago” (Bernstein, 243–51). Ten years Familiar Williams • 75 later, Hank Lazer gives a succinct rundown of “the two Doctor Williamses,” pos- ing Bernstein’s textual poet against Williams as “the poet of common objects, immediate description, and common life” (Lazer, 21). This is where things stand in the twenty-fir st century; but the larger point is that Williams does not fit into such a binary struggle. To give a less abstract sense of what this means, I will turn back to “This Is Just To Say.” The poem’s simple vocabulary, narrative economy, and realism—in the sense that Williams actually ate those plums and then scrawled those lines—make it suitable for eighth-g rade pedagogy. However, referentiality was problematized by deconstructive critics in the 1970s. As Jonathan Culler put it: “A note left on a kitchen table which read ‘This is just to say I have eaten the plums which were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious: so sweet and so cold’ would be a nice gesture; but when it is set down on the page as a poem the convention of significance comes into play. . . . The value affirmed by the eating of the plums . . . transcends language and -can not be captured . . . except negatively (as apparent insignificance), which is why the poem must be so sparse and superficially banal” (Culler, 175–76). Readers with more sensitivity to nuances of erotic relations have not found the poem to be (even superficially) banal. (In an interview in his old age, Wil- liams himself called it “practically a rape of the icebox!” [Wagner, 17].) But first, note Culler’s transcription: not his elimination of the lineation (which is his point), but his addition of normative punctuation. When Culler writes, “For- give me, they were delicious: so sweet and so cold,” the apology and the memory of the transgression are kept apart by punctuation; there is no punctuation in Williams’s quatrain. While the scribbling of the actual note may well have taken no more than one minute, it had taken Williams more than a decade to establish a form that was clearly syntactic but did not use punctuation. It does not appear in his work until the poems of Spring. In “To Elsie,” while there are no periods, new sen- tences begin with capital letters:
while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off 76 • Chapter 7
No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car (WCW I, 218–19)
If we read the final quatrain from “This Is Just To Say” with this template in mind, we get the following: “Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.” This run-on does not distinguish between atonement and vivid restate- ment of the crime; this in turn expresses a complex of possible emotions, from narcissism to sadism to intimacy. Readings of such a complex will vary widely: the fact that the poem is an artifact of address embedded in real life adds as much to the lability of poetic sense as any of the formal devices. One more compositional element should be mentioned: the title, which is not a caption but the beginning of the poem. “This is just to say I have eaten”: the title is both part of the poem and outside it. Williams was one of the first to use this specific form, though he does not use it all that fo ten. But the aes- thetic implications of being able to gesture both inside and outside the frame of the poem are important throughout his work, especially in Paterson. In re- gard to “This Is Just To Say,” the effect is the opposite of the run-on, “Forgive me they were delicious”: it bespeaks a detachment on the part of the author. This is not jejune confusion; it is a sophisticated registration of the vicissitudes of human relations. There are two Williamses currently being used as emblems for opposing po- etries: his own work, if cited judiciously, can prove him a textualist or a realist. But as we have seen repeatedly, Williams does not fit easily into such dichoto- mies. The interview with Mike Wallace inPaterson V shows the two approaches superimposed. Wallace, rather like our teacher in the opening anecdote, is upset by modern poetry, which is both obscure and too close to real life. He confronts Williams with an e. e. cummings poem as an example of obscurity:
(im)c-a- t(mo) b,i;l:e FallleA ps!
The contemporary reader can strip away the typographic hijinks to produce the rather cute “I’m cat-mobile. Fall leaps!” But Williams admits to Wallace that he can make nothing of cummings’s lines. Wallace stays on the attack, quot- ing some of Williams’s own lines—“a Dungeness crab / 24 hours out / of the Pacific / and a live-frozen / trout / from Denmark”—and exclaiming, “Now, that Familiar Williams • 77 sounds just like a fashionable grocery list!” At first Williams simply agrees, “It is a fashionable grocery list,” but then continues, “Rhythmically it’s organized as a sample of the American idiom. . . . [I]f you treat that rhythmically, ignor- ing the practical sense it forms a jagged pattern. It is, to my mind, poetry.” But then, undoing the opposition he has just made between linguistic pattern and practical sense, he says that both are to be perceived: “In poetry, you’re listening to two things . . . [ellipses in original] you’re listening to the sense, the common sense of what it says. But it says more” (P, 222). Williams, as the writer being interviewed (a character within the poem Pa- terson), offers a synthesis of reading for sense and music. But the author of Pa- terson is posing a still more complex framing. We are reading, as part of Pater son, a quoted interview, a conversation between a poet and a reader, and an example of a poem narrating its own reception—as Mike Wallace, reporter for the New York Post, expresses the public’s incredulity. Williams is showing him- self as much object of history as subject. And there is one more layer: the “fashionable” excerpt comes from one of the most emotional poems Williams ever wrote, “Two Pendants: For the Ears,” an account of Williams tending to his dying mother. One of the many strands of the poem involves coaxing the dying mother to eat. She has little appetite, but occasionally eats an eccentric assortment of items: oysters, a banana, ice cream. Thus when Williams lists what someone brought home from the mar- ket, “2 partridges / 2 Mallard ducks,” it reads as a moving attempt on Williams’s part to amuse his mother and to pique her desire for the particulars of the world she is about to quit (WCW II, 208). When Williams admits to Wallace that “It is a fashionable grocery list,” he is admitting to the problem that has plagued—and piqued—his readers. What he allows into his writing is too obviously real. But patterning, framing, and re- framing make it art. This is like the paradox of the Duchamp ready-made, which is how Henry M. Sayer reads “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But Sayre wants art to be uncontaminated: “It is crucial that Williams’s material is banal, trivial: by plac- ing this material in the poem, Williams underscores the distance the material has traveled, and the poem defines a radical split between the world of art and the world of barnyards” (Sayre, 12). It is just such a split that Williams never accepted. For him, art could not begin without the artist’s attention to, involvement with, and affection for every day life. “Comedy Entombed,” a short story centered around a woman having a slow- moving miscarriage, will furnish a final example. The quotidian details— discussions with the husband, interactions with the children—are not marshaled for narrative drama. Yet at the end, when the husband asks about the sex of the dead fetus and is told it would have been the girl he was hoping for, his sadness and his wife’s odd callousness create a powerful tableau. 78 • Chapter 7
At one nondramatic juncture (and at 4:30 in the morning) the doctor has a revelation:
The whole place had a curious excitement about it for me. . . . There was nothing properly recognizable, nothing straight . . . Tables, chairs, worn- out shoes piled in one corner. . . .—such a mass of unrelated parts . . . . That’s it! I concluded to myself. An unrecognizable order! Actually— the new! And so good-n atured and calm. So definitely the thing! And so compact. Excellent. And with such patina of use. Everything definitely “painty.” Even the table, pushed off from the center of the room. (FD, 327)
One could call this a democratic readymade, if that term can encompass everyday use along with its commitment to perfected abstraction. Note how Williams’s recognition of “the new!” does not end things: his aesthetic elation extends into effervescent commonalities: “So definitely the thing!” etc. The room looks like an exciting painting due to its “patina of use”: the use adds to the new- ness. Williams is no demiurge: he didn’t make this new order, he merely recog- nized it. This openness to the everyday is “the new” for the doctor in the story, new for Williams as he wrote the story, and new for readers today.