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5. William Carlos Williams: Proletarian versus Marxist
- The University of Alabama Press
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5 William Carlos Williams Proletarian versus Marxist Of the four poets considered in this book,William Carlos Williams presents the most paradoxical case in his relations with the Left.Throughout the 1930s he asserted repeatedly his disagreements with the communists and argued that they were thoroughly out of touch with the bedrock American temper. That did not stop him, however, from coediting left-wing magazines like Contact and Blast, or from joining (and subsequently leaving ) several leftist political groups and causes,1 or from sending his poems and essays to left-wing magazines like The New Republic,New Masses,Nation , and Partisan Review, or from writing poems, translations, and essays (and organizing medical aid) in support of the Spanish Loyalists once the Spanish Civil War broke out. Though he was hostile to communist ideology , Williams was drawn inexorably to the left by the pressures of the times. But more than just responding to the powerful pull of literary politics , Williams could be considered a genuinely proletarian writer whose experience with the working class and the poor in the Passaic area came not from theoretical doctrine but from his daily rounds as a doctor, which brought him into continual contact with their struggles to survive the Depression , as well as with their speech and personalities.That experience— tempered by empathy, keen perception, and a poet’s ear for diction and rhythms—went into the fiction he wrote in this decade (two novels and two books of short stories) and into a number of excellent poems beginning in the mid-thirties. And it partly explains why Williams kept joining and participating in a panoply of leftist actions,despite frequently embarrassing outcomes and his constant grumbling about them. He came by his radical sympathies naturally, not from a book. Ironically, but not surprisingly, leftist critics did not recognize his proletarian sympathies or literary skill until well into the 1930s, beginning with the publication of the poetry collection An Early Martyr (1935), but taking hold with the novel White Mule (1937),the collection of short sto- William CarlosWilliams 149 ries Life along the Passaic River (1938), and The Complete Collected Poems (1938).Partly,this delay derived fromWilliams’s difficulty in finding publishers for his work—it was not widely accessible until the late thirties. Two small books of the mid-thirties containing some of his best proletarian poems, for example, had a combined run of about 332 copies and were priced far beyond what ordinary readers in the Depression could afford .Another reason for the Left’s delay in recognizing him was his refusal to conform his writing—fiction and poetry both—to the proletarian formulas demanded by Mike Gold and company. He was certainly not “proletarian ” as far as New Masses and Partisan Review were concerned. And Williams’s brusque honesty in criticizing the strategies of American Communists antagonized major wallahs in the leftist critical establishment;the editors of Partisan Review, for instance, roundly condemned and ridiculed him on several occasions. He had a knack, moreover, for stumbling into factional disputes, such as the bitter rivalry between New Masses and Partisan Review, and for joining leftist groups and signing petitions whose hidden agendas he did not initially grasp. All of this gaucherie also factored into his rocky relations with the Left.Yet, by the end of the decade, even as his own proletarian sympathies were shifting from direct expression to subordination into the epic of Paterson, he could claim what Frost, Stevens, and Cummings could not: both general recognition from critics across the political spectrum (with a few exceptions, of course) and the particular approbation of the Left. WILLIAMS IN THE EARLY 1930S Both in his medical practice and his poetry,Williams suffered in the worst years of the Depression.His practice declined sharply as the working class of Rutherford had little or no money to spend on doctors. In the winter of 1933, Williams wrote Louis Zukofsky that his practice was “plumb shot to hell,” and Williams’s biographer Paul Mariani describes that practice a half-year later as “almost at a standstill.”2 That Williams often refused to send bills to hard-up patients and would not raise his fees meant that he had to work longer hours—when work was available (NewWorld 297). Because it often was not, he found himself with more free time to write, but with less motivation. Here, too, Williams experienced what so many other poets did in the Depression: the drying up of publishers...