Carlos Williams, Actor

As Edith Heal reports, “The author used the signature William C. Williams in this first book; all others are signed William Carlos Williams. He explained that he deliberated over this for some time, thought first of using W. C. Williams, realized the William and Williams should stay together, decided on William C. Williams, later felt that he wanted to use his full name” (IWWP 9). As the printed heading on his professional letterheads and prescription slips reads, he identified himself as “William C. Williams,” though he sometimes signed individual prescriptions “W. C. Williams,” while in the literary world the physician who became a renowned poet would be known as “William Carlos Williams.” But the actor who played in Alfred Kreymborg’s play “Lima Beans,” staged by Greenwich Village’s Province-town Players in 1916, was identified in the playbill as “Carlos Williams.”¹

Many years later Williams recalled his experience with the Provincetown Players:

Kreymborg was writing his verse plays for Poet Mimes. The Province-town Players had opened in MacDougal Street with some of the earlier O’Neill works and, shortly after, Kreymborg told us that they had offered to put on his Lima Beans. It had three parts: the soubrette, to be played by Mina Loy; the huckster, to be undertaken by the promising young sculptor, Bill Zorach; and I was to play the lover. . . . It was tough, but I somehow got in to rehearsals from Rutherford three nights a week after office hours. It fascinated me. I had had some minor experience on the stage at college and, who could tell? there, perhaps, lay the future. . . . We played it three nights. A qualified success.

(A 138–39)²

As a gloss on the “Carlos Williams” the poet called himself when acting in “Lima Beans,” consider his friend Charles Demuth’s famous 1928 painting, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. An imaginative recreation of Williams’s poem, “The Great Figure,” it includes the poet’s three names: “W.C.W.,” “Bill,” and “Carlo[s].” Significantly, the “Carlo” (it is clear that the final s has disappeared behind another plane in the painting) is expressed in light bulbs, much like those surrounding the typical dressing-room mirror used by a performer. “The painter,” as Dickran Tashjian writes, “wittily comments on his friend’s relative obscurity as a poet. Williams’ name is in lights, the poet is seen as a glamorous star in Times Square” (72). Robin Jaffee Frank agrees: “Demuth put BILL punningly at the top of a billboard on the left and CARLO[S] up in lights on a theater marquee on the right . . .” (73). What has gone unrecognized is that separating out the name CAR-LOS (the S is hidden) calls attention to Williams’s early adventures in the theatre. For in displaying three of Williams’s names, Demuth pays homage to the poet (W.C.W.), the friend (Bill), and—in show-biz “lights”—the actor (Carlos).