“The Dissonance is Discovery”: Marie Curie, Social Credit, and the New Measure

Money: Uranium (bound to be lead)throws out the fire—the radium’s the credit—

Money sequestered enriches avarice, makespoverty: the direct cause ofdisaster .while the leak drips

Let out the fire, let the wind go!Release the Gamma rays that cure the cancer. the cancer, usury. Let creditout . out from between the barsbefore the bank windows

(P181–82)

The middle section of Book Four of Paterson—in which Williams praises the curative powers of both radium and Social Credit—has been largely ignored by the critical tradition around the long poem. Hugh Kenner, who reviewed the edition of Books One to Four of Paterson in the August 1952 issue of Poetry, completely effaces the Social Credit material, describing the middle section of Book Four as “devoted to the heroism of the Curies” (282). What attention it has received is almost always negative. Joseph Riddell explains that Book Four has been subject to “the most consistent critical disapprobation” of all the sections of Paterson (237). Joel Conarroe calls the sequence the “least successful poetic unit in the book,” and compares it to “Pound at his most dispensable” (127, 117). Along the same lines, Louis Martz writes that the “highly Poundian diatribe” is “composed in something like Pound’s broken multi-cultural style [. . .] all this ending with an overt echo of Pound’s unmistakable epistolary style” (83).¹ Since these initial readings of Paterson, very few critics have taken up Williams’s use of Social Credit in the poem.

The critical gap in scholarship surrounding Paterson is surprising, because the radium-credit sequence speaks to one of the more important debates surrounding Williams’s work, that is, how the poet understood the relationship between the aesthetic object and the world.² The composition of Paterson, with its collage of documentary materials from histories of the region, newspapers, and letters, raises the question of the poem’s relationship to the world in one way, revealing that the language of the poem need not be rarified; the materials that make the poem may be, to appropriate Williams’s most-hated review, “anti-poetic.”³ But the radiumcredit section of Book Four raises the question differently and perhaps more forcefully, as it seems to endorse a concrete plan for the reformation of the American banking system. That is, Book Four not only borrows from the anti-poetic world, but also seems to want to have a direct effect on it.

More contemporary critics of Williams have approached Book Four with the question of Williams’s intended effects in mind. For example, Brian Bremen’s Williams Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture understands Williams’s interest in and commitment to the American Social Credit Movement as an extension of the democratic principles of his aesthetics: “just as Social Credit would make capital available to everyone, Williams’s writings would make available [to everyone] forms of cultural capital” (158). While Bremen subordinates Williams’s aesthetics to his politics, Alec Marsh presents the relationship conversely, arguing that Social Credit conforms to Williams’s aesthetic commitments. He writes, “[t]he subject matter of Williams’s poem [. . .] is not Social Credit or any other political program, but the invention and effort, that is, poesis, or making” (162). Most recently, Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism’s Other Work makes a compelling case for reading Williams’s poetry and politics together, arguing that Williams both wanted to “enable and support the spectator’s experience” while retaining their “focus [. . .] [on] the poem as a formal object” (81). Her readings, however, are limited to The Great American Novel and Spring and All, and her focus is on Williams’s anti-bureaucratic, libertarian politics, rather than his commitment to Social Credit.⁴ Social Credit appears only in the introduction, where she reads “(Revolutions Revalued): The Attack on Credit Monopoly from a Cultural Viewpoint” as exemplary of his understanding of the relationship between the work of poetry and the work of politics (18–20).

What I offer here is a re-assessment of Book IV in the context of Williams’s [End...