SEARCH FOR A LANGUAGE
WEISS, NEIL
WRITERS AND WRITING THE NEW LEADER LITERARY SECTION Search for a Language WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS. By Vivienne Koch. New Directions. $2.00. PATERSON, BOOKS 1 and 2. By William Carlos Williams....
...Williams' poetic...
...Nor, for that matter, of all the massive limbed, wide-hipped, amazon women who captured his fancy, and who in turn were captured on his canvas, had any of them fired the imagination of Gulley Jimson, the artist, more than the same Sara Monday...
...Like an orange in a fried fish shop...
...3.00...
...Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud...
...Halfpast morning on an autumn day...
...Can these discoveries be assimilated into the tradition—as Yvor Winter seems to think, in Primitivism and Decadence, where he invents a system of scansion for them ftheegh scansion, is not, now, a test for the value of Williams' work...
...Burnett, who are at best excellent novelists' novelists, Joyce Cary is writing on a major scale...
...Sing me a song to make death tolerable, a~*OnQ~ of a man and a womat*^ the riddle of a man and a woman...
...In fact, everything Gulley Jimson seea, in this self-told narrative, is wonderfully exaggerated, colored and shaped to the artist's eye: "I was walking on the Thames...
...It was only natural that people should come from all over to the Tate Gallery in London, mainly to look at his famous painting of Sara in her bath...
...Williams "full praise in this/half cold half season" for some of the most tender and gracious love poetry to adorn our time: it is astounding to see it rise in the third book of Paterson—Beautiful thing...
...Here Faitoute, the Paterson-poet-doctor protagonist, immured in his library, among the "stale" books, invokes the "Beautiful thing: a dark flame," the thing that informs his language: a vision of a woman, on her back, apparently ill, bat really "touched by the Are/and unable...
...The old serpent, symbol of nature and love...
...They don't live in the world we know, composed of individual creatures, fields and moons and trees and stars and cats and flowers and women and saucepans and bicycles and men...
...In her treatment of Williams' prose...
...1.50...
...with which she, too, gripped life that made Gulley believe, at times, that together they could lick "that old dirty dog, the world...
...A Major British Novelist THE HORSE'S MOUTH...
...Reviewed by NEIL WEISS WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS is an American poet who has gone so far in his search for a genuine American language, that he has come out, so to speak, on the other side — positively human...
...Reviewed by RICHARD McLAUGHLIN THE THIRD VOLUME in a trilogy about the manners and morals of the English lower middle-class, The Horse's Mouth continues the rambling adventures and roisterings of the irrepressible Gulley Jimson and that voluptuous "man-eater", Sara Monday, right up to their deaths...
...At sixty-seven, he has no regrets...
...He would do it all over gain, break Sara's nose, threaten Hickson, steal paint pots, abuse the hospitality of some well-intentioned art lovers, if it stood between him and his epic paintings...
...PATERSON, a long poem in four books, is a final test and irrefutable proof, I believe, of Dr...
...For her book, immensely valuable as an exceptionally knowing guide to this most important poet's forty years of work, is not so mash a "study," with all the labor of meticulous analysis and judgment that that would entail, as it is an exposition, a prose paraphrase that succinctly deals With the themes and actions of the peesse and prose—* kind of running gloss that trots alongside holding a handy light...
...They frighten me...
...And then the whole of this book, beautifully linked with the themes of Books 1 and 2, seems to bring it all to a precipitate, and a knowledge of the "redeeming language" breaks out in a lyric song to the poor beat-up whore, with a busted nose, flat on her back, "touched by the fire," in the basement, lying by the laundry tubs...
...His work deserves, indeed demands, the very biggest audience...
...You never know what they'll do next They're always fit for rape and murder, and why not, because they don't look upon you as human...
...Gulley has his "works of imagination" to keep him warm...
...3.00...
...Perhaps Gulley Jimson's whole tragedy and comedy4rolled into one, more than Sara's, was that he was always trying to bite the world back...
...they're phantoms, spectres . And they wander screaming and gnashing their teeth, that is, murmuring to themselves and uttering faint sighs, in a spectrous world of abstractions, gibbering and melting into each other like a lot Of political systems and religious creeds," * * * FANCYING HIMSELF ft sort of modern day William Blake, and often referring to himself as "Rahdypole*Billy," and paraphrasing Blake's poems, Gulley Jimson cuts an absurdly comicfigure in conventional eyes...
...Harper & Bros...
...311 pp...
...Perhaps it is this unique poetic accomplishment that has fashioned Miss Koch's book on Williams...
...He despises the law and the "blackcoated men" who uphold it...
...Williams, the poet is, or should be, at least as sensitive, and invents, as "the dogs and trees conspire to invent/a world...
...Until we have a kind of spell around us, as we read the poem, a certainty of the Tightness of Dr...
...This is why readers are puzzled by Williams...
...By Joyce Cary...
...They're not normal...
...We meet him the day he has been released from jail for having uttered menaces over the telephone at a former rich art patron named Hickson, for whom Gulley secretly has a soft spot, just as he has for all millionaires who have only their cash in- a cold world...
...She may have cheated, nagged him, even tried to rob him of his most valuable canvases, but there was something about the gusto, the sensual joy...
...New Directions is to be congratulated for making, Books I and 2 of Patersov available in their inexpensive New Classic Series...
...Miss Koch leaves little to be desired...
...Writing of the projected Book 4 of Paterson, Williams says: "Book 4 will show the perverse confusions that come of a failure to untangle the language and make it our own as both man and woman are carried helplessly toward the sea (of blood) which, by their failure of speech, awaits them...
...Like a viper swimming in skim milk...
...Her discussion of the play, A Dream of Love, is positively brilliant—there is where the gloss is most at home...
...divorce...
...PATERSON, BOOK 3. By William Carlos Williams...
...And Gulley Jimson is the prime anarchist in nearly every artist...
...They had become two battered old ships tossed by the rough seas of trouble but, as Gulley Jimson gleefully observed, there was still a spark in their old hulks...
...Williams' vision by the laundry tubs—we can taste it on our tongue and feel it on our face (to Dr...
...All bright below...
...For Dr...
...Books 1 and 2, dealing with Divorce...
...Still...
...Alongside of those other British writers popular here now, Henry Green and Ivy Compter...
...Later we learn that the fire (part 2 of this Book is a Fire Sermon) is also the "Beautiful thing," or rather its principal, and central, like the fire at the earth's core, and must maul all things and glaze them to a renewed perfection (if we could only see it...
...and the various institutions and failures that block us: "Blocked (make a song of that: concretely)"—and all in the working-class milieu of Paterson and the park above it—are succeeded by Book ' 3, The Library...
...You're a Lost Soul, or a Bad Husband, or a Modern Artist, or a Good Citizen, or a Suspicious Character, or an Income Tax Payer...
...Miss Koch does not deal with these matters—her book, apparently was not intended to—but her book does perform the great service of robbing the noses of the literate in Williams' words, words that are beautifully planned to "fall any way at all—that they may hit love aslant...
...It is not every day that we can expect to find life portrayed in the raw, add such a big slice of it...
...Besides how could a man let "old Mother Necessity" do him in when he has the sky, the trees, the great broadside of a woman's thigh, the splendid, unexpected cufve of a shoulder or arm, in other words, the universe for his canvas...
...like "a bottle mauled/by the flames, belly-bent with laughter...
...And under and on the surface of these poems are Williams' "ideas" ("no ideas but in things...
...But her exposition of what Williams is saying in the poems produces a critical monotony, and we would like to get inside the poem, feel the structure with our hands, And out how he does it, and place it somewhere in the stream' of modern work—evaluate the discoveries in form, in syllable and line, in texture and feeling that have made Williams perhaps our most significant modern American poet...
...Joyce Cary's reproduction, not only of this delightfully bawdy, jestfal Noll Weiss it e young poet who has contributed to Partisan Review pesteateaca, Richard McLaughlin contributes to the Saturday Review Of Literature and many other periodicals...
...Sara may have passed through the lives of many men, husbands and lodgers, but none had left their mark on her like Gulley...
...If poets do hold the key to our final rescue, it certainly is not wise to publish them in expensive limited editions...
...he has worked through complication to tarings, and this unrehearsed response, breaking through the poet's educated accretions, and our own, must come as a shock...
...The poet alone in this world holds the key to their final rescue...
...On rereading the first two books of this poem and then reading, twice, the newly-published Book 3, it seems to me that Williams' large design, the struggle to achieve a "redeeming language" that "might have prevented the death of Paterson" (the world and the poet, to each other), is the most powerful statement of the modern predicament that I have read...
...They didn't make women like his Sara anymroe...
...What language could allay our thirsts, what winds li/t us, what floods bear us past defeats 'but song but deathless song...
...simple, in the most difficult way: the swing and stand of the American "thing" caught, as immediately and as truly as he can get it, in a fresh vision...
...For four decades he has been stubbornly digging in to his Jersey (the world) landscape and emerging with hard spare -poems of the objects all around us, poems which in their purity seem to hang on the page with the validity of a fully' realized picture on the wall -the placement of words and lines, as the placement of objects and colors in a painting, conveying in rhythm and form what we know about these objects and ourselves, when our minds are not cluttered with literary "ideas" and conventional associations...
...pair, but all their cronies and usual derelicts, crack-pots, doadbeats that congregate where misfortune, poverty and defiance of authority prevail (in this instance, Greenbank, a run down London district along the Thames in 1939) owes most of its persuasive power to the fact that he deals here with a segment of life where anarchy breeds...
...Sun in a mist...
...Perhaps this kind of book Is what is necessary now, when most of u» have to be convinced that Williams is writing about "something...
...Divorce is/the sign of knowledge in our time, divorce...
Vol. 33 • March 1950 • No. 9
