WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND THE PASTORAL TRADITION James Alexander Good A thesis ...

212 Pages·1998·10.34 MB·English

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND THE PASTORAL TRADITION
James Alexander Good
A thesis submitted in conformity w i t h the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of English
University of Toronto
Copyright by James Alexander Good, 1996
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William C a r l o s Williams and the Pastoral Tradition
by James Alexander Good
Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto
1996
Pastoral is a subject that has historically enjoyed a
great deal of critical attention, and there is nothing
strange in the fact that this interest has continued up to
the present day. Most recent attempts at addressing modern
pastoral, however, have suffered from two major drawbacks:
a failure to ground the definition of pastoral in any kind
of a historical or critical tradition, or, more commonly, a
perverse choice of works or authors for study. In
particular there has been a stunning neglect with regard to
one of the twentieth century's most prolific pastoralists:
William Carlos Williams.
The following thesis seeks to fill this critical gap by
approaching the body of Williams's work from the perspective
of what are, in effect, various pastoral traditions. In the
Introduction I locate the source of Williams's fascination
with pastoral in the divided character of his writing career
and the symbols (or "facts") of his local environment. In
Chapter One I discuss his relation to tradition generally,
and observe how this contributes to his basically unironic
approach to pastoral writing. Chapter Two looks at the
relation between Williams's pastoral and his interest in the
visual arts (but avoids going over ground well-covered by
critics interested in his connections to the Modernist
avant-garde). Chapter Three discusses Williams as a
pastoral uregionalisttl. Chapter Four shows how Williams's
famous line "dissonance leads to discovery", can be
attributed to the discovery of a natural order underlying
reality that Williams associates with pastoral. A brief
Conclusion is followed by an Appendix that looks at a single
poem, Th e Italian Gardentf,i n a way that will provide a
summary as well as demonstrate a useful application of some
of the material covered.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
L i s t of Illustrations .................-...-..-.--..-.-.i
List of Abbreviations for Books by WCW ................i i
Introduction ............................................
Chapter One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . . - . . . . 2 9
Chapter Two ...........................................58
Chapter Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6
Chapter Four . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - - . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 1
Conclusion -....................-.....................l73
Appendix .............................................180
Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - . . . . l g l
Bibliography .......-...-.-..................-...*-.1-9.5
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1: Cover to the first edition of Kora in Hell..-..I91
Fig. 2: The Passaic River ..............................1 92
Fig. 3: A View of the Falls on the Passaic ..........,.. 193
Fig. 4: Seventh tapestry in the Unicorn series .....,... 194
ii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS FOR BOOKS BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAHS
A The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
AG In the American Grain
BU The Build-Up
CPl The Collected Poems, Volume One A. Walton Litz and
Christopher MacGowan, eds .
CP2 The Collected Poems, Volume Two Christopher MacGowan,
ed .
EK The Embodiment of Knowledge Ron Loewinsohn, ed.
FD The Farmers ' Daughters and Other Stories
I Imaginations Webster Schott, ed.
IM In the Money
In t Speaking Straight Ahead: Interviews w i t h W i l l i a m Carlos
Williams Linda Welshimer Wagner, ed.
IWWP I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography o f the Works
of a Poet reported and edited by Edith Heal
ML Many Loves and Other Plays
P Paterson revised edition, Christopher MacGowan, ed.
RI A Recognizable Image: W i l l i a m Carlos Williams on A r t and
A r t i s t s Bram Dijkstra, ed.
L Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams John C .
Thirlwall , ed.
Let Selected Letters [WCW and James Laughlin] Hugh
Witemeyer, ed.
SE Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
SS Something to Say: W i l l i a m Carlos Williams on Younger
Poets James E. B. Breslin, ed.
VP A Voyage to Pagany
WiY W h i t e Mule
Y Yes, M r s . Williams
INTRODUCTION
ABOVE TEE FALLS
The Falls were spectacular; the river
was a symbol handed to me.
-I Wanted to Write a Poem
The myth of a Fall from a harmonious, natural setting
to a modern post-industrial wasteland is essentially a
pastoral theory of history - one where we are aware of being
exiled from a Golden Age or Paradise in our past when life
was simpler and more wholesome. For William Carlos
Williams, "a poet (ridded) from Paradise" (P log), the
Passaic Falls became a symbol for this myth: "the myth/
that holds up the rock,/ that holds up the water" ( P 39) .
What Williams is drawing our attention to is the contrast
between a time and place before the Falls (corresponding, in
Paterson, to Garret Mountain Park) and a fallen, urban
society below. (Above the Falls is also "above the city" (P
7)). As symbol the Falls function on both the concrete
level (their wild romantic beauty corrupted into "the vilest
swillhole in christendom" (AG 195)) and the abstract ("The
past above, the future below" (P 144)).
One can understand why Williams saw the Falls as a
symbol handed to him, one that became "more and more the
l ~ h em odel we choose can be either classical or
Biblical. Marinelli distinguishes between the two in his
chapter on "The Golden Age", but then goes on to speak of
their later "fusion". Williams himself makes nothing of the
difference.
lucky burden of what I wanted to sayw (Px iii) . (In fact,
symbols are almost going to have to be "handed to" a poet
who believes there are "no ideas but in things".) In accord
with Pound's dictum that "the natural object is always the
adequate symbol" (5, emphasis in the original) Williams
allowed the "elemental character" of his environment a
language and meaning of its own, choosing the living world
for text. As has of ten been observed, democracy (and this
is a significantly democratic, if not American program)
makes for strange bedfellows. Auden in his "Bucolics" also
found something in the "water noise" inherently expressive
of the change in man's relationship with nature that signals
our exile from the Garden:
Now here, now there, some loosened element
A fruit in vigour or a dying leaf,
Utters its private idiom for descent,
And late man, listening through his latter grief,
Hears, close or far, the oldest of his joys,
Exactly as it was, the water noise. (258)
In Williams's version of the myth the falling water
only makes a "noise" because it is speaking a kind of ur-
tongue, or unfallen natural language modern man is
"divorced" from. It is the job of the poet to interpret
this " idiom for descent" .
Such a theory of human history - one that tracks the
progress of civilization from the Golden Age to an age of
'~appe xplains that while Williams "loudly declares
himself opposed to symbolism, he does so only because, like
Emerson, he believes that the facts themselves are already
perfectly symbolic, perfectly metaphorical" (88).
iron - has deep psychological roots. We all carry around
with us a personal sense of lost innocence and freedom. As
Freud puts it, "When we look back at this unashamed period
of childhood it seems to us a Paradise; and Paradise itself
is no more than a group phantasy of the childhood of the
individual" (343). The historical myth is thus the
individual myth writ large. Tonkin provides a useful
summary of how this works within the terms of pastoral:
The Golden Age looks back to an ideal
past long ago, when cities were unknown
and nature was kind. In pastoral works,
this collective historical myth becomes
a model for the past of the individual,
and mankind's descent into barbarism is
paralleled by the individual's growth to
manhood. (283-284)
Saying, as Williams does, that "a man in himself is a
city" (P 253) makes explicit an analogy between cultural
progress and the growth and development of the individual.
within such an analogy early agricultural societies are
given a place corresponding to civilization's metaphorical
youth. On the individual level we have what is called the
"pastoral of childhood". Williams pushes this connection
even further, beginning his epic Paterson ab ovo with a
Preface that suggests intercourse and gestation:
Rolling in, top up,
under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter:
lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a
wash of seas - (5)
We may note how Williams weaves the language of
containment throughout these first few pages: beauty is