The Way the Land Lies

...I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor, defeated body into those gulfs and grottos...

...World War II counts for a lot in this mood of dour hanging on among our contemporary poets...

...He hated fixity, the crust of habit and routine...

...Why zest and ebullience should be the distinguishing feature of poets as dissimilar as Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams is too complicated a question to unravel in a brief column...

...Poe had to struggle against the encompassing void...

...M. L. Rosenthal's preface to this anthology, which gives us a fine sample of Williams' work in the poem, short story, essay, novel and play, can stand as a model of sobriety, intelligence and concision...

...but there it is????the whole notion of revelation and discovery that energizes the forward thrust of experimentation in the modern movement has petered out, become a technique, almost a technology, instead of the enthusiastic faith it was...

...Here are his own words: "This immediacy, the thing, as I went on writing, living as I could, thinking a secret life I wanted to tell openly????if only I could????how it lives, secretly about us as much now as ever...

...It is the history, the anatomy of this, not subject to surgery, plumbing or cures, that I wanted to tell...

...The reader leafing through this anthology will be struck by his peculiar attitude, so foreign to literature today, toward the people: almost aristocratic in its delicate mixture of disdain, crisp judgment and compassion...

...And besides many of the poems about women, he includes two "improvisations," Kora in Hell and The Great American Novel, which have baffled sexuality as their theme, a baffled, delicate but powerful sexuality that comes through all the more piercingly because of the restraint with which it is expressed...

...and I have always held to the idea that it must have hit William Carlos Williams too, accounting more than anything else for his long poem, "Paterson," with its esthetic of surprise and its broad flowing elegiac movement...

...It lay there, another world, in the self...

...He will also be struck, as I was, by the parallel which immediately presents itself between his attitude to Poe, the first American poet in Williams' view, and the "pure products of America [that] go crazy"????the wrecks of our factories and urban centers who figure so frequently in his pages...

...But I saw that when I was successful in portraying something, by accident of that secret world of perfection, that they did not want to listen...

...But William Carlos Williams put it more brilliantly than I ever could...

...That is why I call him the last of a great line...

...Another lament for the land that had gone undiscovered...

...Against this background, William Carlos Williams' life and work assume an exemplary character...

...The last patient would leave and the typewriter would be flipped up: He was at work...

...Definitely...

...That experience instilled in him a life-long hatred of money power and the rigid patterns it imposes on our social existence...

...But also crucial is the fact that the myths which goaded or inspired the founders have become fossilized into dogmas out of which poems are often too effortlessly written...

...Compassion is an important ingredient, but also there is a curious bafflement at once challenging and discouraging, and perhaps a sense of the entrapment of the demonic male in a kind of maze of domesticities characteristic of the whole modern relationship between men and women...

...He was a tough optimist, with a backbone of pride and dignity...

...The original modernists felt they could save the world...

...but I would claim that real modernism died with the concentration camps and the defeat of the Socialist movement...

...He felt that poetry was our one sure weapon against them...

...Williams' ability to see all of the banal, stupid, violent, upthrusting and acquiescent aspects of the life around him from that special historical and poetic perspective explains a great deal about his tone and essential outlook...

...If you climb up to a place called Garret's Rock, a massive escarpment with a wind-flattened plateau of grassy soil on its brow, you suddenly see the magnificent geological ribs of the land and the Passaic river looking pristine and lovely as it flows through the broad gorge in which the grey city huddles...

...Trained as a doctor, he went to practice in Rutherford, New Jersey, after having clashed, as an intern, with big money and bureaucracy in New York...

...The upshot of this wholeness is a rich, modulated prose that appears so rarely in American writing simply because American writers generally refuse to be wholly themselves or to use their professions as ballasts and jump-ing-off places...

...Good poems can still be written out of a loss of hope, a grim moiling around in a futile situation...

...Above all I liked his physical world...

...And the astonishing thing is that at such times and places????foul as they may be with the stinking ischiorectal abcesses of our comings and goings????just there, the thing, in all its greatest beauty, may for a moment be freed to fly for a moment guiltily about the room...

...He, the narrator, is Doc Williams, poet and doctor, carrying into every situation his delicacy, his shrewdness, his moral judgment, energy and even ruthlessness...

...Down the years I can remember many young writers and poets in my acquaintance who must have had the same fellow feeling toward him, for they naturally sent him their poems, asked for his advice and help...

...That childhood link with Williams has always inclined me to liking his poems...

...He surpasses them because he has invented a way of being completely spontaneous and immediate without turning his narrator into a simple-minded dummy or mouthpiece...

...poets today are happy to be able to save themselves...

...It also made him a determined improviser...

...and in Williams' stories and poems, the girls looking for sexual tenderness, the brats dying miserably in the foundling ward, the tough kids who refuse treatment and are defiant in the face of authority????all of these must have appeared to him new exemplars and embodiments of Poe's tragic struggle with a raw and tragic land...

...But these off-scourings and hasty sketches, in their finest examples, can be included among the best short stories written by an American...

...And they were always forthcoming...

...his ideas and predilections were defiantly American yet they naturally reach out and embrace Brancusi's sculpture, Matisse's nudes, Stravinsky's brusque and energetic rhythms...

...in fact, optimism is a feeble word for all the beliefs he somehow managed to uphold...

...Williams was a busy man, a practicing doctor, but he believed, as M. L. Rosenthal says in the preface to the new anthology, The William Carlos Williams Reader (New Directions, 412 pp., $7.50), that the personal relationship was sacred...

...I don't know why...

...Why tell that which no one wants to hear...

...Among other things, he points to the centrality of women in Williams' universe, his sensitivity to them, the mystery they meant for him...

...What is astonishing about all this is how Williams' life lilted so fully into the modern idiom and its basic tenets: His writing, with its fits and starts, its openings that sound like a motor being revved up, its sudden, overpowering upsurges and beauties, takes on the jagged, uncertain...

...How-like quality that the modern movement prized above all...

...In stories like The Venus, Jean Biecke, The Burden of Loveliness and The Use of Force, Williams surpasses both Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson at their own game of getting it down sharp and clean...

...What we now have is post-modernism, an Alexandrian effort to maintain a corpse in life by injections of borrowed myths and self-indulgent solipsism...

...his flowers, trees, girls, human wrecks and Bohemian nuts were all for me parts of a familiar landscape...

...Williams was a provincial and determinedly so, yet his province lay athwart not only metropolitan New York but also Paris, Germany and Italy...

...He also believed that the poem, imagination as he called it, was our only hope for living in and even saving the world, and whenever he saw the slightest flicker of energy or gusto he did all he could to nurse it along, help it to grow and flourish...

...It sometimes appears," he says, "that the more gross or brutal the details, the more the mystery is heightened for Williams, and the more he is in love with the female principle in all its bewildering variations...

...Up into the hills exploring, I used to go, and down the valleys fishing in the streams...

...Williams goes on to speak of these diabolical, sordid events which were so revelatory for him...

...It hit me, as we used to say, like a ton of bricks...

...In a scant 28 pages he illuminates the whole rugged and sensitive nature of Williams' mind and talent, not once descending to academic cliche or pat evaluation...

...And my 'medicine' was the thing which gained me entrance to these secret gardens of the self...

...It is," he says about Poe, "especially in the poetry where 'death looked gigantically down' that the horror of the formless resistance which opposed, maddened, destroyed him has forced its character into the air, the wind, the blessed galleries of paradise, above a morose, dead world, peopled by shadows and silence, despair????it is the compelling force of his isolation...

...His was a proud stance, full of professional briskness and dignity, yet also dependent on a hard-eyed optimism that has gone completely out of our poetry...

...Looking back now, only four years after his death, he seems an incredible survivor????the last full native outpouring of that ebullience and zest we now label the modern movement...

...Williams' prose, as Rosenthal explains, was always a by-product of his poetry...