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William Carlos Williams, 1964.

 

Rutherford, New Jersey: Number nine stands on a terrace at the foot of Ridge Road, just where it angles into Park Avenue and the stores along the main street. For fifty years the sign beside the walk read William C. Williams, M. D. Now it carries the name of his son, with an arrow pointing to the side entrance and the new office wing. In his last years, Dr. Williams's health suffered from a series of strokes that made it difficult for him to speak and impaired his physical vigor, so that there would often be a delay before he appeared, pushing out the aluminum storm door and retreating a step or two, extending welcome with a kind of hesitant warmth. On the occasion of the interview, he moved more deliberately than ever, but his greeting was still at pains to be personal. A leisurely progress brought us upstairs past a huge, two-story painting of Williamsburg Bridge filling the stairwell, to the study, a room at the back of the house, overlooking the yard. An electric typewriter, which Dr. Williams could no longer use, was at the desk, and, though he could scarcely read, a copy of The Desert Music and Other Poems, opened to “The Descent,” was propped up in the open drawer. In a corner of the room, over a metal filing cabinet, was an oil painting hung against a wallpaper of geometric simplicity. We sat a little away from the desk, toward the window, with the microphone lying on a stack of small magazines between us.

At the time of these talks, in April 1962, William Carlos Williams was in his seventy-ninth year, author of forty published volumes from Poems, 1909, a collection so rare that Mrs. Williams has had trouble holding on to a copy, down through various collected editions and the successive books of Paterson to The Desert Music and Journey to Love. Both of these last volumes were written in an unusual recovery of creative power after Dr. Williams's first serious illness in 1952. Now, with customary impatience, he was fretting to see his latest collection, Pictures from Brueghel, scheduled for publication in June. The doorbell never rang but he expected some word from New Directions, though it was still early in spring.

Because it was so hard for Dr. Williams to talk, there was no question of discoursing on topics suggested in advance, and the conversation went on informally, for an hour or two at a time, over several days. The effort it took the poet to find and pronounce words can hardly be indicated here. Many of the sentences ended in no more than a wave of the hand when Mrs. Williams was not present to finish them. But whatever the topic, the poet's mind kept coming back to the technical matters that interested him in his later years. One of these was his concern with “idiom,” the movements of speech that he felt to be especially American, as opposed to English. A rival interest was the “variable foot,” a metrical device that was to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse. The question whether one had not to assume a fixed element in the foot as the basis for meter drew only a typical Williams negative, slightly profane, and no effort was made to pursue this much further. As a result, the notion of some mysterious “measure” runs through the interview like an unlaid ghost, promising enough pattern for shapeliness, enough flexibility for all the subtleties of idiom. No wonder a copy of “The Descent” was in evidence as we began; for however much one may argue over the theory of this verse, it is hard to resist the performance.

On March 4, 1963, William Carlos Williams died in his sleep, at home, of a cerebral hemorrhage that was not unexpected. Two months later, Pictures from Brueghel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and Mrs. Williams accepted, in his name, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Though he did not see this interview in print, he approved it in its final stages. Mrs. Williams reports him as having been much entertained by her part in the second half of it.

 

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Well, what's to be done?  

INTERVIEWER

I would like to ask you about this new measure that I see here—  

WILLIAMS

If I could only talk.  

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps we might begin with Rutherford, whether you thought it was a good environment for you.  

WILLIAMS

A very bad environment for poets. We didn't take anything seriously—in Ruth—in Rutherford. We didn't take poetry very seriously. As far as recording my voice in Rutherford—I read before the ladies, mostly.  

INTERVIEWER

You mean the Women's Club? How did they like it?  

WILLIAMS

Very much: they applauded. I was quite a hero. [Picking up a volume] I remember “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital” was one of the ones I read. The hospital was up in Clifton. I was always intent on saying what I had to say in the accents that were native to me. But I didn't know what I was doing. I knew that the measure was intended to record—something. But I didn't know what the measure was. I stumbled all over the place in these earlier poems. For instance, in this one here [“Queen-Ann's Lace”]. I would divide those lines differently now. It's just like the later line, only not opened up in the same way.  

INTERVIEWER

You were saying that Rutherford was a bad environment for poets.  

WILLIAMS

Yes. But except for my casual conversations about the town, I didn't think anything of it at all. I had a great amount of patience with artisans.  

INTERVIEWER

Did you mean it when you said medicine was an interference which you resented?  

WILLIAMS

I didn't resent it at all. I just wanted to go straight ahead.  

INTERVIEWER

And medicine was not on the way?  

WILLIAMS

I don't know whether it would be. I used to give readings at the high school and Fairleigh Dickinson. I was sympathetic with these audiences. I was talking about the same people that I had to do with as patients, and trying to interest them. I was not pretending: I was speaking to them as if they were interested in the same sort of thing.  

INTERVIEWER

But were they? Perhaps they felt the double nature of your role, as both poet and doctor, was something of a barrier.  

WILLIAMS

No, no. The language itself was what intrigued me. I thought that we were on common territory there.  

INTERVIEWER

Did you write the short stories on a different “level” than the poems—as a kind of interlude to them?  

WILLIAMS

No, as an alternative. They were written in the form of a conversation which I was partaking in. We were in it together.