Modernists in Conversation

In 1922, Ulysses was published for the first time in its entirety by Sylvia Beach. Prior to that release, the novel had been serialized in the American journal The Little Review between 1918 and 1920. When the Nausicaa chapter was published, serialization ended because of an obscenity charge.

One year after the publication of Joyce's novel in Paris, William Carlos Williams released a novella titled The Great American Novel, a 125-page experiment in prose-writing outside the traditional conventions of the form. Also first published in Paris, Williams' piece is a gem: the plot is centered around a love affair between a female Ford car & a Mack truck. Novel was published the same year as Spring and All, which was, until Paterson, Williams' masterwork (it contained, among others, the iconic untitled poem now referred to as "The Red Wheelbarrow").

Williams and Joyce were literary contemporaries, linked by a shared relationship with Ezra Pound, whose clout in the publishing world aided in the dissemination of the work of both writers. It's arguable that without Pound, neither Williams nor Joyce would have ascended to the levels of fame that both men achieved. For a long time, I've been intrigued by the thematic parallels in Williams' and Joyce's work, specifically the centrality of the river, with its multiple metaphorical meanings. The possibility for a collaborative study of Finnegans Wake and Paterson has been raised between a friend and I, and its realization is an event I'm looking forward to.

Aside from that ambition, I've always been interested in drawing ties between Irish and American literature, both of which, in their most powerful incarnations, work along parallel tracks in their exploration of new forms & the philosophical problems of self & nation (which are major preoccupations of mine). The Irish/American aspect is especially interesting to me because of the decidedly post- (and sometimes anti-) British voice that is exhibited, particularly in the early to mid-20th century. (See, for explication, Williams' brilliant 1939 essay "Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist," which served as the core text in my undergraduate study.)

Despite their ties to Pound, it's my belief that Williams and Joyce managed to sever ties to the British voice in their respective contexts more successfully than their comrade. This may be due, in part, to their simultaneous dedication to cosmpolitanism and locality, while Pound's work was, in my reading, strictly cosmopolitan. The treatment of locality, in my opinion, is the key to the creation of a truly original and universal work. Before generalization comes specificity. More on that in another blog.

Today, my task is to explore a parallel drawn by none other than Pound in a 1928 essay called "Dr. Williams' Position," which is chiefly concerned with an analysis of Williams' novel A Voyage to Pagany, and the 'American' nature of the Williamsian voice. The most interesting aspect of the essay, however, is a brief comment made by Pound, drawing a direct connection between Novel and Ulysses:

In the genealogy of writing it [Pagany] stems from Ulysses, or rather we would say better: Williams' The Great American Novel...was [his] first and strongest derivation from Ulysses, an 'inner monologue' stronger and more gnarled, or stronger because more gnarled at least as I see it, than the Pagany.

The Great American Novel is simply the application of Joycean method to the American circumjacence... if one read it often enough, the element of form emerges in The Great American Novel, not probably governing the whole, but in the shaping of at least some of the chapters, notably chapter VII, the one beginning 'Nuevo Mundo'.

My first grievance with Pound is that he labels Williams' work as Joycean, rather than simply identifying parallels in the texts. Yes, Williams appreciated the work of Joyce, and was inspired (as many were) by his approach to prose. To imply, however, that Williams' prose is derivative of the Irish writer's, is to negate the originality of the American's product.

The "Joycean" label, in fact, appears to be assigned to any writer who explores an alternate form of prose writing that's even slightly rooted in stream of consciousness, that challenges the traditional conventions of form. Some writers are derivative of Joyce. Williams is not one of them. This becomes especially clear when we consider Spring and All, a long book of prose and verse which exhibits much of the experimental quality that appears in Novel. Pound's assertion implies that Williams read Ulysses & followed Joyce's lead. The fact was, however, that the two writers were writing & publishing extracts of these major works simultaneously. Aside from this, Williams' style is decidedly un-Joycean, and indicative of a very clear departure from any literary precedent. His work from the early 1920s shows the birth of a new American voice, somewhat rooted in Whitmanesque investments in the natural world, tied to European/American imagism & anomalously minimalistic. It's this short-lined, free-verse style that opens the door to Olsonian postmodernism, the experimentation of the Beats & the experiential experimentation of the New York School. I assert that Williams is responsible for the birth of American poetics as we know it, and Spring and All is the Mother-text. From its Chapter VI:

Now, in the imagination, all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth for ten million, billion years. The bird has turned into a stone within whose heart an egg, unlaid, remained hidden.

It is spring! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place during these seemingly wasted eons. Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

Good God!

and from the first poem in the sequence:

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

[see, for 2nd-generation echoes & expansions upon this sentiment, George Oppen's Of Being Numerous]


What Joyce managed with Ulysses was the revolutionization of the long novel as a form, the creation of the Modern Epic. Not until Paterson did Williams attempt the epic, and his work from the early 20th century was entirely unconcerned with that sort of large-scale production. In fact, Novel and Spring and All are both texts of precise locality. Williamsian prose is direct & meticulous in its execution, focused closely upon the minutiae of human experience. While Ulysses masterfully employs the exploration of such minutiae to create a broad & expansive narrative of experience, Williams creates a mosaic of specificity that illuminates a broader world as a whole made up of pieces. Ulysses is a text that looks out & away from itself. Williams' work is unflinchingly introspective.

My other problem with Pound's assertion is his reluctance to acknowledge Novel as a text that's governed by form. The point to The Great American Novel was (1) to make a satirical comment on the eponymous idea (2) to violate the conventions of traditional prose-writing (3) explore the idea of American "Greatness" in a short, unorthodox textual format, thereby formally contradicting the very idea with which the novella was concerned.

If, in his assertion, Pound meant to say that Williams is not guided by the form of his outdated predecessors, then, by all means, hats off to Ezra. I doubt this is the case, however, because Pound harbored barely-secret resentments toward Williams after the latter's admission of a partially-Jewish lineage. An earlier section of the essay makes reference to the impurity of Williams' voice, as though distant Jewishness somehow undercuts Americanness:

Dr Williams has laid claim to a somewhat remote Hebrew connexion, possibly a rabbi in Saragossa, at the time of the siege. He claims American birth, but I strongly suspect that he emerged on shipboard just off Bedloe's Island and that his dark and serious eyes gazed up in their first sober contemplation at the Statue and its brazen and monstrous nightshirt

At any rate he has not in his ancestral endocrines the arid curse of our nation.

Because Pound is reluctant to celebrate Williams as truly American, because he actually goes so far as to claim the American identity is a cursèd one, any praise given to the Dr's work is necessarily backhanded. (Let us not forget Williams' lifelong dedication to the establishment of a voice that is American, rooted in American experience, & dependent upon the rhythmic curiosities of American speech.) This is classic Pound, the same bigoted pettiness that pushed Olson away some twenty years later. There's also an arrogance in Pound's critical essays that leaves a funny taste in my mouth. While I have admitted biases toward Williams and against Pound, my most objective self tells me that Pound's assertions about Williams as a formal writer are entirely unfounded. Like it or not, Williams was a writer of form. As early as 1923, formal changes occur in Williams' writing that signal a movement toward the American voice that takes precedence throughout the second half of his career. From The Great American Novel:

O America! Turn your head a little to the left please. So. Now are you ready? Watch my hand.

... And this is romance: to believe that which is unbelievable. This is faith: to desire that which is never to be obtained, to ride like a swallow on the wind -- apparently for the pleasure of flight.

Leave it to the good Doctor from Rutherford to do these things with language. We receive nothing but clarity from Williams, a philosophical directness & formal containment that will go on to define several decades of American poetics & influence American voices emerging at this very moment.

To close, my favorite poem from Spring and All:

No that is not it
nothing that I have done
nothing
I have done

is made up of
nothing
and the diphthong

ae

together with
the first person
singular
indicative

of the auxiliary
verb
to have

everything
I have done
is the same

if to do
is capable
of an
infinity of
combinations

involving the
moral
physical
and religious

codes

for everyting
and nothing
are synonymous
when

energy in vacuo
has the power
of confusion

which only to
have done nothing
can make
perfect