Master of Those Who Know

...so did Swinburne...

...Not for nothing were both Chekov and Williams doctors...

...Yvor Winters, a master too—of the rash statement—once said that a chapter of In the American Grain, a collection of evocative essays on American history, was the finest prose written by an American...

...They are two radically different arts...

...Properly performed, they are gripping, practically hallucinatory in their effect, but they are hardly about ordinary folk encountered in the streets of 20th century Dublin...

...Their work is not only dull and undramatic...

...And Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts is not really a play at all...

...William Carlos Williams is not only the finest poet writing in America, the master of those (of us, all of us) who know...

...Like a peasant," says poor Emma, and all the foolish tragedy of that, silly woman hits you like a blow...

...They're in print...

...It is absurd that the doggerel of Christopher Fry or Maxwell Anderson should see thousands of hours of successful production...

...Swinburne's cycle of plays on the career of Mary Stuart also contains some of the finest dramatic writing of the 19th century and certainly could be put on successfully today...

...But it is this tradition pushed to its ultimate of clarity and modesty...

...Katherine Mansfield tried something like it and was awfully barbarous...

...They undoubtedly seem so to Williams, and he has never been able to understand why nobody else agrees with him...

...We may think of the verse of Atalanta in Calydon as on the level of the taste of the hero in This Side of Paradise, but when staged it is a remarkably effective play and more convincingly Greek than Gilbert Murray's translations of Euripedes into pseudo-Swinburnian verse...

...4.50...

...Remember when Emma notices that Charles Bovary takes from his pocket a jack knife...

...Ghastly productions, both of them, though for different reasons...

...As for W. H. Auden, except for his first playlet—the symbolic, mythic Paid on Both Sides—his work seems to have failed as drama...

...Even fewer poets have ever written readable prose fiction...

...The only thing they have in common is words...

...The point is, however, these are archaistic, literary plays, though not really closet dramas...

...So are the Noh plays of William Butler Yeats, the only truly radical innovations in the English theater in our time...

...Somewhere a few copies may survive the holocaust, and comes the Revolution, they may be a great success at the Kropotkin Theater on Luxemburg Avenue—or somewhere in some less naughty world than this...

...I know: I am a poet and I only write prose for money...

...Many people think it is the best thing Shelley ever wrote...

...And when they come to ask, "What were they like...

...His fiction is about real people in real situations, some of them unbearably real—both situations and people...

...Ibsen, don't forget, always thought of himself as a poet...

...Shelley's The Cenci is always being revived somewhere and is a tour de force of deliberate archaism, a genuine Elizabethan tragedy of blood...

...To a Turkish student of contemporary American literature, his plays might look like some of the deeper excursions of the commercial theatre...

...I think it could be called an excruciatingly poignant Imagism, in which the completely realized real has come to symbolize the still more real that hides behind the colored face of phenomena...

...William Carlos Williams is the only major poet I can think of who has written effective, more or less realistic, plays about contemporary people...

...Granted he was rash, but he had something...

...Huysmans, unfortunately, was barbarous past belief, and never came off at all...

...This sounds barbarous...

...In Williams they are the continuous stuff of his art...

...Williams has been fascinated with show business, the real Broadway thing...

...Reviewed by KENNETH REXROTH Author, "Bird in the Bush," "In Defense of the Earth,' "The Signature of All Things" Obviously, some playwrights have been very great poets, but few poets who were not primarily dramatists have ever been good playwrights...

...Remember Chekov's mocking description of his own methods to a bookish girl—the flash of light on a pond on a lonely, seedy Russian estate...

...Even so, when some off-Broadway or university theater does perform a Williams play, it turns out to be successful enough...

...Williams' narrative is a continuous surgical interference with the nervous system, and it is an interference which adds up to meaning on the deepest levels...

...This is not realism, let alone naturalism, although to our Turkish student it might seem so...

...So these 50-odd stories are among the most precious possessions of the 20th century in any language...

...T. S. Eliot managed to force his way into the theater by virtue of his tremendous prestige—in Broadway terms, a hot commodity...

...Williams' stories, now collected in The Farmers' Daughters are even more evocative than those essays, but in a most subtle fashion...

...It is in the tradition of Stendhal and Flaubert as it branches off into Chekov...

...But in Williams it always comes off, as it does not in his special colleagues, whether Pierre Reverdy or Katherine Anne Porter...

...furthermore, they are not very good...

...With few exceptions, poets would be well advised to write prose only for money...

...it was a failure with theater audiences in their own day...

...He is also a consummate master of prose...

...Many Loves, for example, has been running in repertory for more than a year at the Living Theater in New York...

...Theoretically, piercing little fillips to the sensibility of this kind should "enliven" naturalistic narrative like olives in cocktails or cherries on sundaes...

...Meanwhile, let's hope the college drama groups take them up...

...This, incidentally, is what Huysmans, a reformed naturalist, meant when he coined the word surréalisme—not the pseudo-Freudian mish-mash that appropriated the name...

...Of course, his plays are not realistic and not about contemporary people...

...Properly performed, they should knock an uncorrupted audience into the aisles...

...This lack in the English-speaking stage can be laid simply at the door of its arrant commercialism...

...Alas, point by point, these are precisely the virtues Broadway does not want, and any possible commercial audience has been corrupted by decades of absorbing the opposite vices...

...Almost all the great 19th century poets whose portraits decorate the corridors of grammar schools tried their hands at playwrighting...

...we can say, "This is us...

...Curiously, only Swinburne and Shelley, neither of whom we consider as thinking dramatically at all, wrote plays that are still performable...

...Anyway, here are all of Williams' plays except the whimsical poetic one-acters of his youth...

...His plays have an absolutely veridical diction, a sweet ingenuousness, a simple, country doctor kind of morality, and considerable constructive skill...

...Longfellow wrote a novel...

...This is a strange state of affairs...

...He has tried to write in those terms...

...In France, not only Jean Cocteau and Paul Claudel, but even people as unlikely as Francis Jammes or Guillaume Apollinaire, wrote plays and saw them performed...