William Carlos Williams's Rome: Introduction

Introduction

For Williams at mid-career, violence was the word: writing dragged the known up from the unknown, thrust the self out of the self, ripped freshness and clarity free from dullness. Reciprocally, the word was also contact: writing touched the real, embraced immediate experience, named things. Discontinuity and continuity, explosiveness and in-gathering, destruction and renewal—these qualities informed Williams's books as well as his life. For a respectable man who, according to Robert McAlmon, had been "trained in childhood to staid and tried acceptances and moralities" (Poetry, XVIII, 1), writing itself was a violation—time and energy stolen from his office, wife, and children, from civic and social responsibilities.

But the necessity to write, to live intensely and freely above his own rigidities and conventions, compelled Williams to create willfully, and at times dramatically, the enabling conditions for writing. The approach to his fortieth birthday was one such critical occasion when he broke all the routines of his medical practice and family life in order to write. From the summer of 1923 to the summer of 1924, Williams and Flossie took a year's leave from Rutherford, first to New York City for six months, and then to Europe. This sabbatical did produce significant writing—the major work on In The American Grain, and a manuscript titled Rome, published here for the first time. Three years later Williams wrote A Voyage to Pagany, which describes in fictional terms the European half of that year.

In order to leave Rutherford, Williams and Flossie put the practice in the hands of a young cousin and his wife, both just out of internships; they put the two boys and the house in charge of a friend, the local football coach; and they took up residence in the city, seeing the boys on weekends. Despite Flossie's complicity and encouragement, the break was stressful. The neighbors disapproved, money was tight, and the practice was threatened. Williams also felt guilty enough; his nerves, he wrote, seemed "ragged over leaving the children" (Selected Letters, p. 57). But ragged nerves produced writing, and writing was a form of intense living that seemed impossible in Rutherford at that time.

A poem published in the spring of 1923 called "Cornucopia," later retitled "Flight to the City," reveals how much Williams invested in New York's possibilities. Looking east to the Easter stars over the lights of the city, he dreams of violent consummation and rebirth through writing.

Thither I would carry heramong the lights—

Burst it asunderbreak through to the fifty wordsnecessary—

(Collected Earlier Poems, p. 244)

We know that in the fall of 1923 Williams and Flossie worked hard together on In The American Grain, doing research at the New York Public Library, but very few other details of their activities in the city are known. Besides the theater, restaurants and galleries which must have entertained them, the first half of their sabbatical seems to have been devoted to the work for which they had disrupted their lives. But since Williams was a nervous and resistant man, as well as a daring and compulsive one, he paid dearly for his intensities. In 1921 he had written to Marianne Moore that "each must free himself from the bonds of banality as best he can; you or another may turn into a lively field of intelligent activity quite easily, but I, being perhaps more timid or unstable at heart, must free myself by more violent methods. . . . I am dead when I cannot write and when I am at it I burn with a fever till one would think me mad" (SL, pp. 52-3).

The Williamses sailed from New York City on the Rochambeau on Wednesday, January 9, 1924, landing in France on Friday, January 18, and went directly to Paris to rendezvous with Robert McAlmon. Williams and McAlmon had become close friends in New York in 1920. Their friendship led to collaboration on the magazine Contact; they co-edited its five issues, which appeared between 1920 and 1923. But they had not seen each other in three years—since McAlmon married Hilda...