Stumbling into Crossfire: William Carlos Williams, Partisan Review, and the Left in the 1930s

Though actively involved in leftist causes and committees throughout the 1930s, William Carlos Williams had an almost uncanny knack for getting between warring factions and alienating power centers of the Left, particularly Partisan Review. This paper examines three such incidents: two in which PR intentionally humiliated the poet in 1936–37, and one in which Williams joined, signed petitions, then resigned from several leftist splinter groups battling each other in 1939. Among the reasons considered for these mishaps are: Williams’s political naïveté about factionalism and editorial good faith; his skepticism regarding communism; his desire to be published in the leading leftist magazines; and the byzantine political alignments of the late 1930s. Ironically, Williams’s own poetry and fiction in the 1930s show a genuine empathy (without cant or cliché) for the working class — a quality that was more talked about than achieved in leftist circles.