Distorting Command: William Carlos Williams's Use of Marcia Nardi's Letters in Paterson"To possess woman is to be possessed by her, and that, despite the intoxicating scent of danger, brings the threat of self-extinction."Critics have had a good time commenting on the usefulness of Marcia Nardi's letters in the body of William Carlos Williams's epic Paterson, Much has been made of that female voice conveniently serving the poem's drama of representing disparate characters' struggle. The transformation of the letters and hence, the actual letter writer into the character of Cress, sets up some ironic problems. Firstly, Williams creates a parallel with Chaucer by affixing the closing "La votre / C." to Nardi's letter at the end of Book II. This refers to the signature in Chaucer's Troylus and Criseyde which Criseyde uses in her letter to her lover, Troylus. This is a useful parallel for Williams in the structure of his own poem for, as Gale C. Schricker points out, his advocacy of Chaucer's use of local language emphasizes his own attempts to steer poetry to the local. Also, the conflict and difficulties of the star-crossed lovers, Troylus and Criseyde, attempting to merge despite differing social positions serves Williams's own intention with his "sexually polarized thematic structure." (Schricker, Gale C., "The Case of Cress: Implications of Allusion in Paterson, William Carlos Williams Review, Volume XI, Number 2, Fall 1985, p. 21) Schricker documents other references to Chaucer's work in Paterson and raises the problem of why Williams would make these allusions at the same time as he advocated poetry becoming modern away from the "affectation of authority" (referring to Eliot in a letter to Horace Gregory, 1944, quoted in Schricker). "What enraged Williams," Schricker says, "was what he saw to be Eliot's defection—his choice to use his considerable talents in reviving and celebrating old forms from past cultures rather than in discovering the form inherent in his native, American culture." (Schricker, p. 17) Cress and Criseyde are life-bound characters as distinct from Troylus and the Dr. P of Paterson who are abstract and literary. Schricker explains how Williams's use of the letter's strong female voice is a refutation of Eliot: "Cress is not just an allusion; she is an embodiment of the difficult empirical world that Williams always courted and felt that Eliot neglected." (Schricker, p. 23) Schricker believes by "including in Paterson the real conflicts between himself and Nardi and between their opposing realms of experience, Williams presents himself as an active participant" as opposed to Eliot, the "archbishop of procurers." (Schricker, p. 25) If the strategy works to refute Eliot the referencing of classical works is still a retaining of modernist appreciation for the achievements of the past and an endorsement of a value system that looks back to the traditional canon for models to validate its perpetuation. Williams, by including such a long letter into Paterson, certainly allows a strong female presence, but it is in his re-presentation of the letters that problems arise. While Williams's appropriation of "found" material into his poem signals a modernist's championing of actual speech, an art made up of the stuff of everyday life rather than the traditional elevation of a refined language of poetry, by appropriating. Williams assumes a command that deflates the source. By his taking authority in using the letters, he sets himself up as being in control. Certainly he violates the trust of the personal relationship by using the personal correspondence in his public art. The problem here is Williams going farther than his predecessors and contemporaries in representing by allowing his "characters" their actual speech; however, in the context of that source material functioning as exegesis of the various themes in the book, the truth of the actual becomes imprisoned, held hostage to the plan of Williams. As well-intentioned as the poet may have been in declaring the letters valid as a new component of art, his use of them retains an old order of power relation: the author as vampire, putting to his use the ingredients of other people's lives. His enthusiasm in forging new territory for art disrespects the boundaries of privacy the letter writer had every right to expect. The fact is Williams did discuss with Nardi his intention to use her first letters to him in the fabric of his emerging poem. But he and publisher James Laughlin did not have her permission to use the much longer segment, at the end of Book II, because they'd lost contact with her at that time. At the time of their first meeting, on March 29, 1942, Nardi, 38, was a single mother living in the village. She'd published poems in Measure, New York Herald Tribune Book Review, The Nation, and had reviewed H.D.'s Heliodora and Babette Deutsch's Honey Out of the Rock for the New Republic between 1924 and 1928 (Nardi also mentions reviewing Cummings in her Cress letter but I can't locate it). Their meeting had been arranged to procure Williams's help in having Nardi's 15-year-old son released from the Bellevue psychiatric ward. However, Nardi's trip to that first meeting in Rutherford must also have been intended to reinvigorate her stalled writing career as she brought a group of poems along with her which she left with Williams. This initiated a year-long correspondence—from April 9, 1942 through March 1943—that stalled for several years and then resumed in 1946 (when Nardi discovered Paterson, Book II in a bookstore in Woodstock, NY where she'd moved) and continued over the next decade. Elizabeth O'Neil claims that of the more than fifty letters Nardi wrote to Williams over that time, "the excerpts Williams used in Paterson were taken from just three of the letters Nardi wrote during the first year of their correspondence." (O'Neil, Elizabeth, "Marcia Nardi: Woman of Letters," in Oliphant, Dave, editor, Rossetti to Sexton: Six Woman Poets at Texas, University of Texas at Austin, 1992, p. 74) When Williams met with Nardi for the second time, for dinner on June 16, 1942, at a restaurant across from Bryant Park, he informed her that he planned to use excerpts from one of her letters in his introduction to Paterson. Paul Mariani, in his biography of Williams, cites a letter by Williams to Nardi (of July 13, 1942) where Williams informs her of this. (Mariani, Paul, Willaims Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, McGraw-Hill, NY, 1981, p. 819, [footnote 26]) It turned out that Williams used three brief excerpts from her letter of April 9, 1942 in Book I and segments of two other letters in Book II. They are on pages 7, 45, 48, 64, 75–76, 82, and 86–92 of the New Directions editions of the complete epic. Mariani gives a probable date of late December 1942 for the long Nardi letter which ends Book II. (Mariani, p. 820, [footnote 42]) O'Neil gives the date of a draft of the undated letter as "ca. spring 1943." (O'Neil, p. 83) Theodora R. Graham, looking at sheets in the Poetry Collection of the Lockwood Memorial Library, SUNY, Buffalo, a major repository of Williams material, finds a "revised version of a third letter Nardi sent," [after February 22, 1943], of which she states: "In the published text [of Paterson], the first two paragraphs appear in Part III (p. 82); the remainder with certain notable changes became the long letter that ends the book." (Graham, Theodora R., "Her Heigh Compleynte": The Cress Letters of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, in Hoffman, Daniel, editor, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams: The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1983, p. 178) Whatever their dates, Williams's placement of Nardi's letters in the poem demeans the letter writer as the letters are removed from their primary place as correspondence and forced into service as a "character" in an allegory. It's precisely this issue of having herself transformed into literature that Nardi addresses in her long letter beginning on page 86 that concludes "Paterson, Book II," and which, according to Mariani, accounts for one fifth of the book's words. (Mariani, p. 535) She complains that Williams recognizing the seriousness of her thoughts yet detaching himself at that point by safely shielding himself within the territory of art where he can be master of impressions and fabrications away from the stubbed toes of felt experience. It's an intense letter, to say the least, displaying a very high quality of writing that suits the impassioned feelings. The writer never loses control of her expression, even as an almost feverish degree of passion pulsates from every sentence. She maintains a lucidity in her grammatically proper sentences that prevent the effusive flow of her thoughts from spilling into incoherence. The fineness of the writing, its sophisticated command of long sentences with frequent parentheses, seems to hold in check the obsessive nature of its focus. Williams recognized the fine writing and that has to be why so much of the contribution was admitted entry into his accumulative poem. In fact, the letter is the most cohesive and longest sustained moment in the collage-like epic's entirety. Paul Mariani calls the letter "deranged." (Mariani, p. 497) I believe in doing that, in making that judgment, he does precisely what Williams had done previously to so disappoint and infuriate Nardi: assuming an authority that allows them to consign people to a convenient distance. Williams, interested in Nardi's ideas "in so far as they made for literature" (Paterson, p. 86), and Mariani, invalidating the letter by consigning it to a dismissable status, sets up the all too familiar relationship in modernism of "otherness" where a (usually) white Euro-American male digs his feet in to protect a turf his ancestors have staked out for him. To protect his privilege, "others" (women, other ethnicities) must be feared as they threaten to intrude. Since the white male is already filled with guilt over all the blood spilled and all the destruction ravaged in his provenance, and since this cling to power is tenuous in its being constructed of external symbols and not internal justification, the hold is all the more determined. This disparity is what Nardi recognizes and repeatedly rails against. In Williams, who'd already validated her by taking her seriously, responding to her previous letters, and, in the ultimate alliance, discussed with her his incorporation of her writing into his "man of letters" poetry, Nardi must have felt she'd found a place willing to receive her thoughts. There's no doubt that Williams's attention to her and his belief in her poetry and letters inspired and moved Nardi to compose the very long letter which would find its way into Paterson. She'd already written him a 25-page letter. All her repressed feelings about her anger at society for her situation as a woman and at Williams for his compliance with those values, find release in this correspondence with the one correspondent she most desires to hear her. But Mariani, in discussing the letter, also avoids the details of Nardi's direct plea by explaining how the letter would serve Williams's poem: How accurate the woman was, Williams saw. How very close she had come to the deep truth of the matter. How many men and women, including Floss, had made similar accusations over the years, either to him or about him? And now he felt the need to let the woman in him have her say. At the same time, however, his sharp diagnostician's eye saw that Nardi's letter would serve to recapitulate nearly all the major themes with which his autobiographical poem had been concerned: the woman as victim, complaining, accusing, crying out in pain; the divorce between the two sexes and the danger that the woman would turn to other woman for solace; the woman as the energy and the flower of a man's life; the poem itself as a confession of inadequacy; the socioeconomic ills that had created so many of the tensions between men and women, making of the man a false nurturer and forcing the woman into an unnatural dependency on the man. Contrast that patronizing, paranoid system of ordering everything with Nardi's own delineation that's more willing to include, rather than exclude: But in writing (as in all forms of creative art) one derives one's unity of being and one's freedom to be one's self, from one's relationship to those particular externals (language, clay, paints, et cetera) over which one has complete control and the shaping of which lies entirely in one's own power; whereas in living, one's shaping of the externals involved there (of one's friendships, the structure of society, et cetera) is no longer entirely within one's own power but requires the cooperation and the understanding and the humanity of others in order to bring out what is best and most real in one's self.Perhaps Mariani feels the letter is deranged because Nardi doesn't keep to the place in society white males would rather she be. Her mistake, for Mariani, is that she speaks up, transgressing the boundaries of politeness and passivity society has ordained for her. Her "particular emotional orientation, in wrenching myself free from patterned standardized feminine feelings" (Paterson, p. 86) is too much of an assault for a system that depends on rigid identification in order to maintain hierarchies and enforce a behavior that keeps the power relations running smoothly. Her power is in seeing through the "empty rhetoric" of Williams's words and confronting him for his failure to behave in a way that proves he believes what he's saying. Sandra M. Gilbert goes farther in recognizing Williams's usurption and "voracious consumption" of the letters as an avoidance of the direct contact with him Nardi pleads for in the letters themselves. Presenting precedents of male authors appropriating female words (William Wordsworth using Dorothy's, Yeats using his wife George's, D.H. Lawrence using Jessie Chambers') she develops the analysis that: Williams appeared to have wanted to defuse anxiety about Nardi as paradigmatic woman of letters by transforming her into a character and thus into a creature he could control, a creation of his own imagination. (Gilbert, Sandra M., "Purloined Letters: William Carlos Williams and 'Cress'," William Carlos Williams Review, Vol. XI, Number 2, Fall 1985, p. 8) She compares Williams's use of the letters to Poe's Minister D—, who: "conceal[ed] the threat implied by the dangerous letters he had 'purloined' by placing them so frankly in the open that no one would ever suspect their power." (Gilbert, p. 8) By admitting this woman's words into his epic, Williams believes he represents the female principle in a way closer than every portrayed, but in fact the incorporation is a distortion. It's true that there's a bravery in his revealing to the world this "attack" as evidence of both his own fallibilities and also as a direct representation of a female viewpoint. But the distortion occurs in Williams's ambivalent attitude to this female force he pretends to set up as coexisting on equal terms with male characters in the poem. Despite Williams's often lavish praise of women authors, Gilbert presents evidence to reveal that "[his] apparent supportiveness [is] subtextually ambivalent." (Gilbert, p. 10) In the case of Paterson, she gives credit to Williams's liberalness, especially in contrast to other modernist achievements, in allowing "the 'strong' reply of 'the female side'." (Gilbert, p. 11) However, she points out that: even a superficial glance at the structure of this epic of Pater/Son—"father/son"—suggests the ways in which Williams's long narrative of the man/city and the woman/flower(s) struggles, despite its author's avowedly avant-garde aspirations, to reinforce traditional gender hierarchies. (Gilbert, p. 11) Williams's use of this particular female correspondent's words also makes the case, for Gilbert, that Williams deliberately wished to portray Woman as "frantic and passionate." Other "stronger" female voices regularly corresponded with Williams—Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Kay Boyle, Anais Nin, Marianne Moore—yet he chose this representation to stand in contrast to the "intellectual seriousness and self-confident lyric passion" of the Man voices within the poem. (Gilbert, p. 11) The problem of having femaleness portrayed by a male author, Gilbert concludes, can only be alleviated by the "integrity and validity" of women's own words becoming further acknowledged and women's complaints to these hostilities listened to." (Gilbert, p. 13) The problem is evident in the way Williams uses the letters to represent female voices in the completeness of his epic as complementary to the male voices. It serves his purpose as a stark contrast to his more authoritative male qualities to have this woman displaying those characteristics that suit his defining of what a woman should be. Cress is a renegade who has chosen a route away from the domestic and away from the civic roles Williams determined himself to be situated within. He's drawn to her rebelliousness at departing from the confinements of "polite society" and he's fascinated with her attempt to survive as a passionate person within a society that has little use for self-expression. The doctor/science-self makes of the writer-self a detached observer able to safely place his subject within his field of study. While the person Marcia Nardi pleads for his engagement with her, for his emotional support, for his friendship, Williams experiences this as suitable stuff for his fiction, stepping away from the personal contact Nardi so definitely desires. Williams, of course, has every right to avoid the intrusion into his personal life and one can sympathize with his becoming defensive at so ardent an imposition on his time and emotional life. However, it is what he chooses to do with this contact, how he chooses to represent this woman, and what that says of his relationship to her, that transgresses the spirit of what Nardi initiated and implicates Williams in abusing both his power as a care-giver and what he assumes as his male privilege. Ironically, he does this all the while believing he is championing the female cause. For example, he offered Nardi real help in his occasional donations of money, encouragement with his effusive enthusiasm for her poetry, emotional support in his friendly correspondence, and his sincere and repeated efforts to get James Laughlin (his publisher at New Directions) and others to publish her work. It is in Williams's regard of her outside of their relationship, what he does with her in public, that's troubling. In 1942, at Williams's instigation, Laughlin published a large selection of Nardi's poems in New Directions Number 7. Williams provided an introduction. His need to contrast the achievement of her poetry with the hardships of her personal life emphasizes the ambivalent terms with which he attempts to praise her: Marcia Nardi, here and there in her work, produces a line or two as fine as anything that anyone, man or woman, writing today can boast of...There are lines...in that rubble that can have come from nothing other than a fine mind, courage and an emotional force of exceptional power. (Williams, William Carlos, introduction to "A Group of Poems," by Marcia Nardi in New Directions Number 7, James Laughlin, editor, NYC, 1942, p. 413)It seems he can't avoid allowing the intrusion of his phrases "Here and there," "a line or two," and "in that rubble" to qualify his praise. Williams's championing of her work began in a letter to James Laughlin on June 17, 1942 where he began by comparing her to what she wasn't: "she ain't Auden or Eliot," he begins the letter defensively but then admits, "She has something else." (in Witemeyer, Hugh, editor, Williams Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, WW Norton and Company, NY, 1989, p. 72) It is that compulsion to compare and that failure to define what that "something else" is that points out the limitations of Williams's sympathy, or even his cognizance of her experience. He can only assemble clues that he can gauge against models he's familiar with. He chooses Auden and Eliot as his yardstick at the same time he expresses his disgust at the "smell of such swine." (Witemeyer, p. 72) This is not to condemn Williams to the point of advocating his removal from bookshelves. It is intended to point out one aspect of his work that's a serious problem: his attitude towards women. "If women get mad at Williams they can't dismiss him, they're engaged with him & call him You man, you! Now you ... you got to read Williams from the very first face to face..." (Notley, Alice, Doctor Williams' Heiresses, TUUMBA PRESS, San Francisco, 1980, unpaginated) Art critic Linda Nochlin, in this month's Art in America, placing Matisse's nudes in the context of their time, further illustrates this point of the limit of Williams's perspective: Theodora R. Graham begins her investigation into this issue by providing a clue pulled from Williams's Autobiography: "The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets." (in Graham, p. 166) Secrets produce shame. It is perhaps exactly here that marks the limit of Williams's probing and forces him to assume a position of mastery in order to detach himself from the shame he experiences in his approach to intimacy. While Nardi is open enough to reveal her deepest feelings to him, Williams can only respond by praising her (in his letters to her) or by letting her expressions into his poem as his voice is inadequate. It's a voice he approaches himself only much later in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," a voice of tenderness less hindered by an assumption of command (several strokes by this time must have alerted him that time was running out on his pretense of mastery). With Nardi his strategy was to retreat to roles—those of mentor, patron, artist—in a dance away from the friendship based on mutual respect that Nardi is quite direct in trying to instigate. Bibliography Gilbert, Sandra M., "Purloined Letters: Williams Carlos Williams and 'Cress'," Williams Carlos Williams Review, Vol. XI, Number 2, Fall 1985, pp. 5–15 Graham, Theodora R., "Her Heigh Compleynte": The Cress Letters of William Carlos Williams's Paterson, in Hoffman, Daniel, editor, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams: The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1983, pp. 164–193 Laughlin, James, editor, New Directions Number Eleven, NYC, 1949, pp. 309–312 ——, New Directions Number Seven, NYC, 1942, pp. 413–428 Mariani, Paul, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, McGraw-Hill, NY, 1981 Nardi, Marcia, Poems, Alan Swallow [publisher], Denver, 1956 Nochlin, Linda, "'Matisse' and Its Other", Art in America, May 1993 Notley, Alice, Doctor Williams' Heiresses, TUUMBA PRESS, San Francisco, 1980, unpaginated O'Neil, Elizabeth, "Marcia Nardi: Woman of Letters," in Oliphant, Dave, editor, Rossetti to Sexton: Six Woman Poets at Texas, University of Texas at Austin, 1992, pp. 73–111 Schricker, Gale C., "The Case of Cress: Implications of Allusion in Paterson, Williams Carlos Williams Review, Volume XI, Number 2, Fall 1985, pp. 16–29 Thirlwall, John C., editor, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, New Directions, NYC, 1957, p. 265 Wagner, Linda Welshimer, editor, Interviews with William Carlos Williams, New Directions, NYC, 1976, pp. 86–87 Williams, William Carlos, Paterson, New Directions, NYC, 1963 Witemeyer, Hugh, editor, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, WW Norton and Company, NY, 1989, pp. 72–73, 78–79, 169 |