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‘You Can't Steal Credit’: the Economic Motif in Paterson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
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In a strong attack on the second, third and fourth books of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Randall Jarrell expressed chagrin that Book II introduces the themes of credit and usury, ‘those enemies of man, God, and contemporary long poems’. It is true that the economic theories worked into parts of Williams's major work often sound very much like Ezra Pound at his most dispensable. As Vivienne Koch put it: ‘One serious weakness in Book IV, got like a contagion from Pound's Cantos, is the introduction of an explicit pseudo-scientific diagnosis of our present economic ills, relying on the Poundian demonstration of Usura and the Poundian salvation of Social Credit.’ The least impressive passages in Paterson are those (particularly the final six pages of IV. ii) in which the excited promulgation of money theories comes perilously close to being mere harangue. Jarrell was mistaken, however, in going on to assert that the economic anecdotes and political remarks are where they are only ‘because Dr Williams chose—happened to choose—for them to be there’. Williams's ideas on money and credit, as digressive and presumptuous as they often seem to be, are actually tied in with the other major themes in the poem. Furthermore, they represent the culmination of a long and passionate protest against a system that sanctions private use of public money.
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References
page 105 note 1 Jarrell, Randall, ‘A view of three poets’, Partisan Review, 18 (11–12 1951), 699Google Scholar.
page 105 note 2 ‘William Carlos Williams, the man and the poet’, The Kenyon Review, 14 (Summer 1952), 507Google Scholar.
page 105 note 3 Jarrell, loc. cit. p. 699.
page 105 note 4 Davenport, Guy, ‘The nuclear Venus: Dr Williams's attack upon usura’, Perspective, 4, no. 4 (Autumn 1953), 190Google Scholar.
page 106 note 1 Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1954), p. 214Google Scholar.
page 106 note 2 The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1951), p. 341Google Scholar.
page 106 note 3 Selected Essays, p. 167.
page 106 note 4 Ibid. p. 158.
page 106 note 5 Ibid. p. 49.
page 107 note 1 Unpublished Williams manuscripts. Lockwood Memorial Library Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York.
page 107 note 2 New York, 1894.
page 107 note 3 Williams, William Carlos, Paterson (Norfolk, Conn., 1963; London, 1964), p. 17Google Scholar. The five books were originally published in single volumes by New Directions, 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958. All subsequent page numbers from Paterson will be given in the text.
page 109 note 1 Buffalo manuscripts.
page 109 note 2 The Autobiography, p. 158.
page 110 note 1 The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1957), p. 258Google Scholar.
page 111 note 1 Davenport, loc. cit. p. 185.
page 112 note 1 ‘The Art of Poetry. VI. William Carlos Williams’, Paris Review, 32 (Summer-Fall 1964), 140Google Scholar.
page 112 note 2 Selected Letters, p. 181.
page 112 note 3 Selected Essays, p. 153.
page 113 note 1 Bennett, Joseph, ‘The lyre and the sledgehammer’, The Hudson Review, 5, no. 2 (Summer 1952), 295–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Since the poem is generally regarded as Williams's major achievement, and since it is gradually coming to be regarded as one of the important pieces of modern American literature, Bennett's minority opinion represents an interesting and quirky response. His general view is that Williams avoids poetry by side-stepping it and substituting instead sentimentalism, self-pity, surrealism, raw emotion, gruesome anecdotes, and hammering repetition of grand-sounding phrases.
page 113 note 2 Davenport, loc. cit. p. 185.
page 114 note 1 The influence of Pound seems to have decreased toward the end of the poem. Williams, the second-generation American, early in his life made the decision to remain in America and dig into what Pound called ‘the bloody loam’. The influence of the cosmopolitan Pound was profound, however, and seems to have reached its peak during the composition of the middle section of Book IV. But since Paterson does represent a record of the poet's mind over a long period of change, one can recognize the ways in which, as he grew older, he achieved a greater degree of independence from what M. L. Rosenthal has called (in conversation) ‘the Pound interference’ in his thinking. Williams bullied his old friend in print (and undoubtedly in conversation) for years. It was, however, only after Pound's disastrous decline, leading to St Elizabeth's hospital, that the more ‘provincial’ poet was able to get the upper hand and to free himself from feelings of ‘academic’ and literary subservience. That Williams did overcome the ‘interference’ is demonstrated in the final section of Book IV, in all of Book V, and in Pictures from Brueghel (1962), in which he works through to his own conclusions. The Pound echoes are still occasionally there, but they no longer take precedence. In 1954 Williams wrote to Pound: ‘Ain't it enuf that you so deeply influenced my formative years without your wanting to influence also my later ones?’ (Letters, p. 324.)
page 114 note 2 Pound's idea of the economic causes of war is shared by Williams. In an essay he wrote: ‘love versus usury, the living hell-stink of today: time-fuses sold in Germany to blow Germans into manure, French cannon to Turkey to blast Frenchmen to scrapple…’ (Essays, p. 168).
page 115 note 1 These fragments were found among Williams's papers after his death. They are included as an appendix in the 1963 New Directions edition.