“Betwixt and Between”: Duchamp and Williams on Words and Things

“Painting Took the Lead”

The relationship of the “sister arts” (painting and poetry, literature and art) in the twentieth century is complex and variable. Painters are influenced by literature; writers are inspired by the visual arts; single artists produce hybrid works; generic and disciplinary categories merge, blur, and combine in unique and provocative ways. What follows is an attempt to trace out one thread of these interconnecting and interwoven relations between the verbal and visual arts of the modern period. We begin with William Carlos Williams’s reaction to the art of Marcel Duchamp, and the poet’s sense that in this case, “painting took the lead.”

The profound influence of Duchamp upon Williams surfaces in the famous passage from the poet’s autobiography. In the chapter titled “Painters and Parties,” Williams describes the impact of two innovative works by the already famous artist:

New York was seething with it. Painting took the lead. It came to a head for us in the famous “Armory Show” of 1913. I went to it and gaped along with the rest [ . . . ] at Duchamp’s sculpture (by “Mott and Co.”), a magnificent cast-iron urinal, glistening of its white enamel. The story then current of this extraordinary and popular young man was that he walked daily into whatever store struck his fancy and purchased whatever pleased him—something new—something American. Whatever it might be, that was his “construction” for the day. The silly committee threw out the urinal, asses that they were. The “Nude Descending a Staircase” is too hackneyed for me to remember anything clearly about it now. But I do remember how I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief.

(A 134)

A number of different issues and ideas underlie this description, expressing as much about Williams’s aesthetic as Duchamp’s. First there is the sense of revolution and rebellion at the heart of Duchamp’s work, which the “silly committee” does not recognize but which Williams admires so much. Second, Williams “laughs out loud,” responding to an art in which humor is central and important. Further, Williams notes the Americanness of the Readymades, linking Duchamp’s work to themes central to Williams’s own, namely the sense of the local and the uniquely American experience and idiom. Finally, according to Williams, the Readymades were “new” and demanded a comparable creativity and newness on the part of modern poets. In a conversation with Walter Arensberg, Williams comments on man’s creative potential for “making it new” (to borrow a phrase from Pound), which was certainly a pervasive modernist theme:

Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Arensberg [ . . . ] I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were about, those roughly classified at that time as “cubists”: Gleizes, Man Ray, Demuth, Duchamp—all of whom were then in the city. He replied by saying that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise novelty and, since the pictorial artist was under discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation, is good art.

(I 8)

Elsewhere Williams also discussed the importance of the “new”: “It is the NEW! [ . . . ] the NEW, the everlasting NEW, the everlasting defiance” (“Belly Music” 25).

Yet there are even more connections between this artist and this writer. The movement of Dada in general, in addition to celebrating playfulness and chance procedures, also extolled the irrational and the alogical. Thus Duchamp famously chose the Readymades through chance procedures, employed chance as a creative process for works such as Three Standard Stoppages, and embraced the chance event that cracked but did not destroy The Large Glass. The nonlinear and alogical aspect of the visual arts found expression in Williams’s playful irrationality in Spring and All (1923), which mixed prose and poetry in a seemingly irrational way, and in which chapter headings are nonchronological and sometimes even upside down and backward.

Most central to this discussion is the fact that both Duchamp and Williams employed a readymade aesthetic. In his effort to put “painting once again...