Forms of Need: William Carlos Williams in the Radical Thirties Little Journals

I. "During a Time Like This:"¹ Framing a Thirties Modernist

In the fall of 1933, William Carlos Williams's short story "Jean Beicke" headlines the first issue of Blast: A Magazine of Proletarian Short Stories, a little magazine that became a forerunner to a wave of independent radical journals that sprang up in surprising numbers across the United States during the following years. A gritty hospital tale of an eleven-month-old girl narrated by a loosely autobiographical doctor, "Jean Beicke" becomes much more than a medical case-study of misdiagnosis. Beginning from a direct consideration of the Depression, building through the medical profession's inability to address social problems, and ending with a call for a political response, the story fits comfortably with the publication. The vivid, unsentimental economy of the tale, one of Williams's best, marks his substantial involvement both in the decade's politically radicalized literary communities and in one of the thirties' most important genres, an involvement that served in part to define the form of the proletarian story.

Williams's influence on the publications of the thirties balances with their effect on his writing. The thirties little journals questioned established modernist forms and projects; in them we find experimental writers responding to engaged critiques, at times dismissively or defensively, but more often with reflective or even enthusiastic reevaluation. More than a distraction from the revolution of the word with the word of revolution, the lively discussions where Williams was one critical vector can be seen reviving an increasingly moribund modernist project (Johnson 188). For Williams's poetry, the thirties seem to be a point of crisis as he attempts to develop a form that responds to the social need that frames the decade, a moment stranded between his early exuberance and the late, omnivorous success of Paterson. However, in his short stories, Williams begins to work with forms that expand what he came to see as the limitations of his earlier poetry by embracing history as more than inserting a low content into his already established verse. Williams's short fiction of the thirties has been far too easily overlooked by scholars, poets, and critics or far too blandly annexed by medical professionals. The stories and the vibrant thirties little journals demand and reward much more attention than they have received, as Williams's writing from the decade is central to his opus, not only at a temporal midpoint in his long career, but also an aesthetic turning point.

From the 1926 publication of Williams's "The Five Dollar Guy" in the first issue of The New Masses through the headline billing of his "The Paid Nurse" in the 1939 first issue of The New Anvil, Williams is strikingly involved in radical publications with a left political bent. The consistency and breadth of his contributions, including translations of a miner's story from the French and republican ballads from the Spanish, mark this as much more than a phase of moonlighting. Reading this canonical figure, most known for his early imagism and improvisations or for his modernist epic, in this relatively marginalized decade places him centrally in a quite different context. A recovery of the thirties little magazines forces a reconsideration of Williams as "one of the best known writers in the 'leftwing' camp of American literature" (qtd. in Denning 213) as he was hailed by a 1934 issue of The Magazine.

Through the thirties, Williams was most productive as a writer of fiction, publishing four books of prose: A Novelette and Other Prose 1921–1931; two volumes of short stories, The Knife of the Times (1932) and Life Along the Passaic River (1938); and the novel White Mule (1937); while publishing only two books of poetry: An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935) and Adam & Eve & The City (1936). Looking at his stories, we can see that they are much more than a matter of exploring a popular form that could land Williams In the Money, as his second novel in the Stecher trilogy was titled. In part, his short fiction provides contact between modernism...