Paterson

v

William Carlos Williams

Paterson

edited by Christopher MacGowan

CARCANET CLASSICS

vii

Contents

Title Page

Preface

a statement by william carlos williams about the poem paterson

author’s note

BOOK I

Paterson: Book I

The Delineaments of the Giants

I.

II.

III.

BOOK II

Sunday in the Park

I.

II.

III.

BOOK III

The Library

I.

II.

III.

BOOK IV

The Run to the Sea

I.

II.

III.

BOOK V

I.

II.

III.

Appendix A

book vi

Appendix B

a note on the text

Appendix C

annotations and textual notes

BOOK I (1946)

BOOK II (1948)

BOOK III (1949)

BOOK IV (1951)

BOOK V (1958)

BOOK VI (c. 1961)

acknowledgments

by william carlos williams

copyrightviii

ix

Preface

This volume completes the new editions of William Carlos Williams’ poetry begun with the Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939 (1986), and Col­lected Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962 (1988).

When Williams’ plans for Paterson began to take final shape in the early 1940s, he conceived of the poem as having four books, although he eventually published five, and in the last years of his life even started preliminary work on a sixth. The five books of Paterson were originally published in separate vol­umes, in limited editions, in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958, and as they sold out they were reprinted, starting with Books I and II in 1949, in the publisher’s popularly priced New Classics series. For this reprint the text was entirely reset. Book III was added in 1950 and Book IV in 1951. The five books of Paterson were first published together, with the fragments of the sixth, in 1963, and this edition was itself rearranged with the fifth printing in 1969 for a reprint that reduced the total pagination by forty pages.

Throughout the printing history of the reprints, changes were made to various parts of the text, sometimes through error, sometimes apparently in response to directions by the poet, and in the case of the fifth book—for which the reprint appeared posthumously—in response to the large number of dif­ferences noticed between the poem’s transcription of its prose sources and the language of those sources themselves, many of which had become available in research collections.

In preparing this edition I have studied the known manuscripts, galleys, and page proofs of the poem, as well as its various printings, and detail the general editorial procedures guiding my decisions in Appendix B, A Note on the Text. I outline the principles governing the annotations at the head of Ap­pendix C. I have provided information on the sources of the prose and some xof the other allusions in the poem, where these are known to me, and my in­debtedness to earlier scholars and annotators of the poem is recorded in the acknowledgments.

In general, I have avoided citing Williams’ comments on particular lines and passages in the poem since, unlike his observations on the shorter poems, these remarks were numerous and many have been widely published in interviews with the poet and in other sources. John Thirlwall, the assiduous recorder of many of Williams’ comments on his work in the 1950s, published an extended essay on Paterson reproducing material from his meetings with the poet, in New Directions 17 (1961): 252–310. However, I have in­cluded some of Williams’ comments on his sources where these seemed par­ticularly helpful, contributed to the background information on the poem’s composition, or had not previously, to my knowledge, been published. I have included the introductory material on the poem that Williams published with the first editions. In addition, at the conclusion of this Preface I repro­duce some extended comments by the poet on Books I–IV, and some subse­quent remarks he made concerning Book V.

My hope for the annotations and textual notes is that they illustrate the relationship of the poem to its sources, provide a sense of the later stages of the poem’s evolution, and demonstrate the ways in which its text reflects the intentions, the circumstances, and the mechanics of its composition. The reader interested in the evolution of Paterson as recorded in the poems that Williams published outside of his long poem needs to consult the Collected volumes. In a number of his comments on Paterson Williams noted as some of its ante­cedents his early poem The Wanderer (Collected Poems: Volume I, 27–36 and 108–117), which contains a section on Paterson, and his 1927 prose/ poetry sequence A Folded Skyscraper (pp. 273–277). In 1927 Williams published in The Dial an 85-line poem titled Paterson (pp. 263–266), parts of which were subsequently reworked into the published Book I. In the New Directions 2 anthology of 1937 Williams published "Patterson [sic]: Episode 17 (pp. 439–443), which contains many lines incorporated into the finished Book III, and includes the oppressed but vital negro wom­an, the gang rape, and the beautiful thing" refrain that are three central features of that book.

But much of Williams’ work on Paterson in the late 1930s and early 1940s went into a concept of the poem that he eventually rejected, a long xiseries of short lyrics many of which were gathered into the manuscript De­tail & Parody for the poem Paterson that Williams sent to his friend and publisher James Laughlin in March 1939. A version of this arrangement is now in the SUNY Buffalo collection (D4). During these years Williams published some of the poems arising from this conception of Paterson in maga­zines, and did not subsequently reprint some of them. These poems can be found among the first ninety-five pages of the Collected Poems, Volume II. In 1941 Williams published a fifteen-poem sequence titled "For the poem Paterson" in his pamphlet The Broken Span (see Volume II, pp. 14–22), but only the three lines serving as a headnote to the poems, beginning A man like a city and a woman like a flower, appeared in Paterson as he finally con­ceived it.

Despite his struggles, Williams seems to have always felt close to the point of solving his formal difficulties. He told James Laughlin in 1942 that he would have the poem ready for the Spring 1943 list, but the book that he then did offer Laughlin was The Wedge (1944), which contains many poems pulled from the now-abandoned Detail & Parody concept. In April 1943 Williams published a short poem titled Paterson: The Falls (Vol­ume II, 57–58), which outlined a work in 4 sections and detailed a num­ber of the central themes and features that subsequently appeared in the poem. But he wrote to Laughlin on December 27, 1943, "That God damned and I mean God damned poem Paterson has me down. I am burned up to do it but don’t quite know how. I write and destroy, write and destroy. It’s all shaped up in outline and intent, the body of the thinking is finished but the technique, the manner and the method are unresolvable to date. I flounder and flunk. In April 1944 he told Laughlin the poem was near finished, and nine months later that it was nearing completion. By May 1945 Book I was at the printer, but in September, on receiving the galleys, Wil­liams was so dissatisfied he felt he must slash it unmercifully … I wish I had the guts to say to burn the whole Paterson script." Book I, delayed by the extensive galley revisions, finally appeared the following June.

Even while working on Book IV Williams began to consider a fifth book, noting to himself on a typescript now filed at the Beinecke Library (Za 189) maybe even a 5th Book of facts—Recollections. In October 1952, just over a year after the publication of Book IV, he published a twenty-four-line poem Paterson, Book V: The River of Heaven, but reported to Laughlin xiiin 1954 that the poem had got side-tracked. It turned into something else—that something else being his well-known poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. Paterson V eventually appeared in 1958, on Williams’ seventy-fifth birthday. Writing to Laughlin within the week to thank him for the publication party, Williams hinted at a possible Paterson VI, but the in­creasing handicaps produced by his periodic strokes left the four sheets Wil­liams typed out in late 1960 and early 1961 as all there was to be of a sixth book.

With the fourth (1968) and subsequent printings of the collected Paterson New Directions printed the first three pages of Chapter 58 from Williams’ Autobiography by way of an introduction to the first four books of the poem. The interested reader will find in that chapter a helpful supplement to the comments by Williams following this Preface. I reproduce below a state­ment by the poet from a New Directions press release marking the publication of Book IV in June 1951 that appeared two weeks before the publication date. Following the statement is the Author’s Note that introduced the poem in all the New Classics and subsequent printings of the collected Pater­son. (For the substantially similar version that appeared with Book I in 1946 see page 253.) Williams’ comment on Book V that follows the Author’s Note is part of a letter he wrote to Robert MacGregor, vice-president of New Directions, on May 16, 1958 (New Directions archives), that was reprinted on the dust jacket of the first, 1958, edition of Book V. A shorter version was printed when Book V was reset and joined the collected Paterson in 1963. I reprint the version on the dust jacket of the first edition.

C. M.   

xiii

A STATEMENT BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS ABOUT THE POEM PATERSON

May 31, 1951

I have no recollection when it was that I first began thinking of writing a long poem upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city. From something Vivienne Koch discovered among my notes it may be that 1925 was the year when I first made any record of the notion. Cer­tainly by 1927 when I was given The Dial’s award following their pub­lication of the poem Paterson my thoughts on the general theme I wanted to treat were well along.

Having decided what I wanted to do I took my time deciding how I should go about the task. The thing was to use the multiple facets which a city presented as representatives for comparable facets of contemporary thought thus to be able to objectify the man himself as we know him and love him and hate him. This seemed to me to be what a poem was for, to speak for us in a language we can understand. But first before we can understand it the language must be recognizable. We must know it as our own, we must be satisfied that it speaks for us. And yet it must remain a language like all languages, a symbol of communication.

Thus the city I wanted as my object had to be one that I knew in its most intimate details. New York was too big, too much a congeries of the entire world’s facets. I wanted something nearer home, something knowable. I deliberately selected Paterson as my reality. My own suburb was not dis­tinguished or varied enough for my purpose. There were other possibilities but Paterson topped them.

Paterson has a definite history associated with the beginnings of the United States. It has besides a central feature, the Passaic Falls which as I began to think about it became more and more the lucky burden of what I wanted to say. I began to read all I could about the history of the Falls, the park on the little hill beyond it and the early inhabitants. From the be­ginning I decided there would be four books following the course of the river whose life seemed more and more to resemble my own life as I more and more thought of it: the river above the Falls, the catastrophe of the Falls itself, the river below the Falls and the entrance at the end into the great sea.

There were a hundred modifications of this general plan as, following xivthe theme rather than the river itself, I allowed myself to be drawn on. The noise of the Falls seemed to me to be a language which we were and are seeking and my search, as I looked about, became to struggle to interpret and use this language. This is the substance of the poem. But the poem is also the search of the poet for his language, his own language which I, quite apart from the material theme had to use to write at all. I had to write in a certain way to gain a verisimilitude with the object I had in mind.

So the objective became complex. It fascinated me, it instructed me besides. I had to think and write, I had to invent the means to get said, in the pattern of the terms I employed, what appeared as called for. And I had to think hard as to how I was going to end the poem. It wouldn’t do to have a grand and soul satisfying conclusion because I didn’t see any in my sub­ject. Nor was I going to be confused or depressed or evangelical about it. It didn’t belong to the subject. It would have been easy to make a great smash up with a ‘beautiful’ sunset at sea, or a flight of pigeons, love’s end and the welter of man’s fate.

Instead, after the little girl gets herself mixed up at last in the pathetic sophisticate of the great city, no less defeated and understandable, even lov­able, than she is herself, we come to the sea at last. Odysseus swims in as man must always do, he doesn’t drown, he is too able but, accompanied by his dog, strikes inland again (toward Camden) to begin again.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Paterson is a long poem in four parts—that a man in himself is a city, begin­ning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions. Part One introduces the elemental character of the place. The Second Part com­prises the modern replicas. Three will seek a language to make them vocal, and Four, the river below the falls, will be reminiscent of episodes—all that any one man may achieve in a lifetime.xv

In a letter to New Directions, Dr. Williams, now 75, commented on the making of Paterson, Five, as follows: "Were I younger, needless to say, it would have been a different poem. But then it would not have been writ­ten at all. After Patterson, Four ten years have elapsed. In that period I have come to understand not only that many changes have occurred in me and the world, but I have been forced to recognize that there can be no end to such a story I have envisioned with the terms which I had laid down for myself. I had to take the world of Paterson into a new dimension if I wanted to give it imaginative validity. Yet I wanted to keep it whole, as it is to me. As I mulled the thing over in my mind the composition began to assume a form which you see in the present poem, keeping, I fondly hope, a unity directly continuous with the Paterson of Pat. 1 to 4. Let’s hope I have succeeded in doing so." xvi

1

BOOK ONE

(1946)

2

: a local pride; spring, summery, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration;

in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause;

hard put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.

3

Paterson: Book I

PREFACE

Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?

To make a start,

out of particulars

and make them general, rolling

up the sum, by defective means—

Sniffing the trees,

just another dog

among a lot of dogs. What

else is there? And to do?

The rest have run out—

after the rabbits.

Only the lame stands—on

three legs. Scratch front and back.

Deceive and eat. Dig

a musty bone

For the beginning is assuredly

the end—since we know nothing, pure

and simple, beyond

our own complexities.4

Yet there is

no return: rolling up out of chaos,

a nine months’ wonder, the city

the man, an identity—it can’t be

otherwise—an

interpenetration, both ways. Rolling

up! obverse, reverse;

the drunk the sober; the illustrious

the gross; one. In ignorance

a certain knowledge and knowledge,

undispersed, its own undoing.

(The multiple seed,

packed tight with detail, soured,

is lost in the flux and the mind,

distracted, floats off in the same

scum)

Rolling up, rolling up heavy with

numbers.

It is the ignorant sun

rising in the slot of

hollow suns risen, so that never in this

world will a man live well in his body

save dying—and not know himself

dying; yet that is

the design. Renews himself

thereby, in addition and subtraction,

walking up and down.

and the craft,

subverted by thought, rolling up, let

him beware lest he turn to no more than

the writing of stale poems …5

Minds like beds always made up,

(more stony than a shore)

unwilling or unable.

Rolling in, top up,

under, thrust and recoil, a great clatter:

lifted as air, boated, multicolored, a

wash of seas —

from mathematics to particulars—

divided as the dew,

floating mists, to be rained down and

regathered into a river that flows

and encircles:

shells and animalcules

generally and so to man,

to Paterson.

6

The Delineaments of the Giants

I.

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls

its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He

lies on his right side, head near the thunder

of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,

his dreams walk about the city where he persists

incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.

Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom

seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations

drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river

animate a thousand automatons. Who because they

neither know their sources nor the sills of their

disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part,

locked and forgot in their desires—unroused.

—Say it, no ideas but in things—

nothing but the blank faces of the houses

and cylindrical trees 7

bent, forked by preconception and accident—

split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—

secret—into the body of the light!

From above, higher than the spires, higher

even than the office towers, from oozy fields

abandoned to grey beds of dead grass,

black sumac, withered weed-stalks,

mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves—

the river comes pouring in above the city

and crashes from the edge of the gorge

in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists—

(What common language to unravel?

.     .     combed into straight lines

from that rafter of a rock’s

lip.)

A man like a city and a woman like a flower

—who are in love. Two women. Three women.

Innumerable women, each like a flower.

But

only one man—like a city.

In regard to the poems I left with you; will you be so kind as to return them to me at my new address? And without bothering to comment upon them if you should find that embarrassing—for it was the human situation and not the literary one that motivated my phone call and visit.

Besides, I know myself to be more the woman than the poet; and to concern myself less with the publishers of poetry than with … living …

But they set up an investigation … and my doors are bolted forever (I hope forever) against all public welfare workers, professional do-gooders and the like.

Jostled as are the waters approaching

the brink, his thoughts

interlace, repel and cut under,8

rise rock-thwarted and turn aside

but forever strain forward—or strike

an eddy and whirl, marked by a

leaf or curdy spume, seeming

to forget    .

Retake later the advance and

are replaced by succeeding hordes

pushing forward—they coalesce now

glass-smooth with their swiftness,

quiet or seem to quiet as at the close

they leap to the conclusion and

fall, fall in air! as if

floating, relieved of their weight,

split apart, ribbons; dazed, drunk

with the catastrophe of the descent

floating unsupported

to hit the rocks: to a thunder,

as if lightning had struck

All lightness lost, weight regained in

the repulse, a fury of

escape driving them to rebound

upon those coming after—

keeping nevertheless to the stream, they

retake their course, the air full

of the tumult and of spray

connotative of the equal air, coeval,

filling the void

And there, against him, stretches the low mountain.

The Park’s her head, carved, above the Falls, by the quiet

river; Colored crystals the secret of those rocks;

farms and ponds, laurel and the temperate wild cactus,

yellow flowered    .    .    facing him, his

arm supporting her, by the Valley of the Rocks, asleep. 9

Pearls at her ankles, her monstrous hair

spangled with apple-blossoms is scattered about into

the back country, waking their dreams—where the deer run

and the wood-duck nests protecting his gallant plumage.

In February 1857, David Hower, a poor shoemaker with a large family, out of work and money, collected a lot of mussels from Notch Brook near the City of Paterson. He found in eating them many hard substances. At first he threw them away but at last submitted some of them to a jeweler who gave him twenty-five to thirty dollars for the lot. Later he found others. One pearl of fine lustre was sold to Tiffany for $900 and later to the Empress Eugenie for $2,000 to be known thenceforth as the Queen Pearl, the finest of its sort in the world today.

News of this sale created such excitement that search for the pearls was started throughout the country. The Unios (mussels) at Notch Brook and elsewhere were gathered by the millions and destroyed often with little or no result. A large round pearl, weighing 400 grains which would have been the finest pearl of modern times, was ruined by boiling open the shell.

Twice a month Paterson receives

communications from the Pope and Jacques Barzun

(Isocrates). His works

have been done into French

and Portuguese. And clerks in the post-

office ungum rare stamps from

his packages and steal them for their

childrens’ albums    .

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.

Paterson has gone away

to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees

his thoughts sitting and standing. His

thoughts alight and scatter—

Who are these people (how complex

the mathematic) among whom I see myself

in the regularly ordered plateglass of

his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?10

They walk incommunicado, the

equation is beyond solution, yet

its sense is clear—that they may live

his thought is listed in the Telephone

Directory—

And derivatively, for the Great Falls,

PISS-AGH! the giant lets fly! good Muncie, too

They craved the miraculous!

A gentleman of the Revolutionary Army, after describing the Falls, thus de­scribes another natural