"Lines Converging and Crossing": The "French" Phase of William Carlos Williams

Marjorie Perloff 89 "LINES CONVERGING AND CROSSING": THE "FRENCH" PHASE OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS / Marjorie Perloff — By form is meant everything in a work which relates to structural unity rather than to "meanings" dragged over from former associations . Contad, June 1923 —There is no need to explain or compare. Make it, and it is a poem. The Descent of Winter, 1928 In the spring of 1922, thelittle Review published a special number devoted to Francis Picabia. Aside from Picabia's own Dada compositions (poems, paintings, the manifesto "Anticoq"), the issue included such items as two Cocteau poems ("Saluant Picabia" and "Saluant Tzara"), Gertrude Stein's "Vacation in Brittany," Sherwood Anderson 's essay, "The Work of Gertrude Stein," and the first installment of a translation of Apollinaire's Les Peintres Cubistes, Meditations Esthéüques (1913). One of the most enthusiastic readers of the Picabia number was William Carlos Williams. "It gives me," he wrote in a letter to the editor, "the sense of being arrived, as of any efficient engine in motion." "I enjoyed thoroughly, absorbedly, Apollinaire's article."2 Not surprisingly, Spring and All, published the following year in Paris by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, pays homage to Apollinaire's famous essay. Indeed, Spring and All, a book of twenty-seven lyrics dispersed among passages of prose of varying length and tone, is Williams' most "French" composition. It bears the imprint not only of Apollinaire's aesthetic but also of Dada improvisation, of Gertrude Stein's poetry and fiction, and of Rimbaud's Season in Hell and Illuminations, portions of which had appeared for the first time in English translation in the 1920 Dial, side by side with six of Williams' own shorter lyrics.3 Spring and All is, I think, Williams' most remarkable poetic sequence, a work so far ahead of its time that it was safely ignored until the sixties. "Nobody ever saw it," Williams recalled some thirty-five years after its publication, "it had no circulation at all—But I had a lot of fun with it."4 90 THE MISSOURI REVIEW In assessing Williams' debt to the Apollinaire essay he had read so "absorbedly," we must remember that The Cubist Painters was not, despite its title, primarily a defense of Cubism. Indeed, the original title was Meditations Esthétiques, with the subtitle Les Peintres Cubistes. It was the publisher who transposed the two titles, evidently in order to increase sales since Cubism was the fashionable topic of the day.5 But in the book itself, Apollinaire's aesthetic accomodates a wide variety of painters: Picabia and Duchamp (here called "Orphic Cubists") and the Douanier Rousseau, whose work is sui generis, as well as such "Scientific Cubists" as Braque and Gris. Picasso's painting was considered to be the meeting ground of these different schools, ranging as it does from the neo-Romanticism of the Blue Period to the severities of Analytic Cubism to Surrealist fantasy. What all these painters had in common—and this is Apollinaire's point about "l'esprit nouveau"—was a rejection of mimesis, of representational art. The modem painters, he insists, "while they still look at nature, no longer imitate it, and carefully avoid any representation of natural scenes which they may have observed. . . . Real resemblance no longer has any importance, since everything is sacrificed by the artist to truth." Or again, "Cubism differs from the old schools of painting in that it aims, not at an art of imitation, but an art of conception, which tends to rise to the height of creation."6 In Spring and All, Williams echoes Apollinaire in his insistence on "the falseness of attempting to 'copy' nature" (SAA, 107): Such painting as that of Juan Gris, coming after the impressionists, the expressionists, Cézanne . . . points forward to what will prove the greatest painting yet produced. —the illusion once dispensed with, painting has this problem before it: to replace not the forms but the reality of experience with its own— up to now shapes and meanings but always the illusion relying on composition to give likeness to "nature ". . . . —It is not a matter of "representation"— —which may be represented actually, but of separate existence, enlargement—revivification...