from Notre Dame Review, Winter / Spring 2008
In 1951 and 1952, William Carlos Williams suffered incapacitating strokes, what neurologists call insults to the brain. The first occurred on March 28, 1951 at home in 9 Ridge Road. Williams had been caught up in a whirligig of work, keeping office hours, pushing himself to complete and revise his Autobiography, giving a series of readings along the Northeast Corridor from The New School to Yale to Wellesley College, including a benefit for an ailing Kenneth Patchen, a New Directions poet too poor to afford insurance. Such a schedule might have fazed a man half his age. The stroke that left his speech slurred and his eyesight askew sent Williams in critical condition to the Intensive Care Unit at Passaic General Hospital. Floss reported to Laughlin that Bill had to remain in the hospital for three weeks and then take a "long rest"—a regimen Bill balked at. "The energy that burns in this guy is too much for one human to burn up! He's rarin' to go now—and is anything but a good patient. Thank God he's in the Hospital!—I'd go mad if he were at home. He resents the situation and tries to minimize it out of all proportion!—" After the worst danger passed and he could survey the wreckage that nearly had done him in, he would write Wallace Stevens that it "caught him by complete surprise," though in a telephone call from the hospital to poet Theodore Weiss at Bard College where Williams was supposed to preside at a tribute to Stevens, his old friend and sometimes rival, he stammered the word "hemorrhage" as the reason for his absence. Very likely the carotid artery to the brain had become occluded. The apoplectic stroke caused extensive damage. It "disabled my right side and knocked out my speech—for a time," he told Robert Lowell. His heart attack was scary, he could have "croaked" from it, as he put it, but a stroke was an assassin's dagger aimed at his creative life as a poet. If he could barely peck away at a typewriter or set down a line of verse shakily by hand, he would be condemned to a barren internal exile more terrible than Ovid's in far-off Romania. Who would lighten his mood and share—or rebut—his enthusiasms and obiter dicta about the future of American poetry? What would befall his cherished Paterson? Williams put the best smiling face on his ordeal he could, bowing to the undeniable fact that he would have to curtail his medical practice or even give it up altogether—and wait for signs his imagination would resume its play. To his relief—he counted it "pure good fortune"—he rapidly regained the functioning of his mental faculties. He resumed editing his Autobiography, a charming, discursive, backward glance over traveled roads, which he described, imprecisely, as a "history of my books and what brought them on." That definition best fits I Wanted to Write a Poem. His original working title Root, Branch & Flower, more accurately captures his intention in composing a memoir. His childhood was a network of roots so important to him that he returned to it at the beginning of Part III, as if his faulty memory had left out key events and people and he needed to fill out the story of his formative years.
Although the stroke left him jittery and looking over his shoulder lest death be stalking him, he carried on, delivering the Phi Beta Kappa poem, "The Desert Music," the only poem of consequence he wrote in this period, at the Harvard Commencement. According to Williams, it got a mixed reception: "From the faces of some (not all) of the faces on the platform," he joked to Lowell, "I think they must have fumigated Memorial Hall after I left. The student body was, on the other hand, delighted and showed it by their tumultuous applause after I had finished my '15 minute' poem." Thinking about poetry was the best anodyne for the "nervous instability" the stroke brought, which, he explained to David McDowell, "saps your marrow, it really does. It's a terrific drain on the forbearance of a devoted wife and friends."
Concerned by Bill's nervous condition, Floss decided to seek the advice of Dr. Merrill Moore, a psychoanalyst and a prolific, if banal sonneteer. At Floss's urging, in June 1952 during a trip to Boston where he lectured at Brandeis University and read his poems at Harvard, Williams consulted with Moore several times. In a terse comment buried in a letter of June 24, 1952 to David McDowell, Williams remarked: "He was of considerable help to me, quite a guy." Moore was sympathetic to Bill's plight—he told Floss that Williams was "my favorite American poet"—and wrote to her often in a cordial, gallant tone, evaluating Bill's neurological condition frankly and presciently:
That episode when he lost his speech means another vascular accident. There isn't anything we can do. I see this sort of thing. He is going to have a series of them and he will have one great big one and won't get out of bed after that.
In the postscript to a letter of September 17, 1952, a month after Williams' second stroke, Moore speculated: "And the remarkable thing is that it does not seem to interfere much with the creative art of his mind which I think is deeply in the brain and has a better blood supply." One doubts that Moore would have proposed this theory to a convention of neurologists—there's little scientific basis for it—but it did reassure Floss and probably Williams as well for whom the withdrawal of his poetic powers was akin to the gods abandoning Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium. The courtly Moore was sensitive to Floss's anxieties over Bill's medical problems—he addresses her as "my dear Florence" and clearly wants to retain her trust in his judgment. Throughout his involvement with Bill's case he takes a commonsensical approach to all courses of therapy: Williams should hold offices hours no more than four hours a day, reduce the emotional strain from seeing too many people and booking too many readings, should not drive by himself, should go off to Florida "far from the madding crowd" and do what his doctors tell him to do and not overdo"; if he doesn't obey them, "hit him over the head with a baseball bat."
Williams' second stroke smote him in August 1952, at the end of a six-week holiday at Gratwick Farm. He and Floss had visited the Abbotts and Gratwicks several summers. This idyllic spot always had a restorative effect on Williams: it was consecrated ground. One evening on his first visit, enthroned on the hood of a tractor Bill Gratwick was driving, Williams was led on a solemn procession to an arbor where Harriet Gratwick, whom he adored, crowned him Poet Laureate of the Tree Peonies. To mark the occasion, he delivered an oration, freely adapted from Valery's speech to the French Academy, "letting fly" like a Caesar or a "demigod come to earth." The company of old friends, like vintage wine, warmed him—"absolute friendship," Williams called it. Charles Abbott, a librarian at the university in Buffalo, had confided to Bill and Floss one lambent evening in Rutherford that he wanted to "collect manuscripts of the living poets, material that as often was thrown away or lost that could be used later to piece out an understanding of their lives and methods of work." Abbott solicited a donation from Williams, who generously shipped several boxes of poems and manuscripts that formed the nucleus of the extensive Williams archive at the Lockwood Library in Buffalo.
Bliss was it therefore in July 1952 to stroll the sheep paths and gardens of the farm again. Williams remembered everything: the vines climbing the massive walls, the bird song so loud and contrapuntal that "I had never in my life experienced such a luxury of sound and rustic profusion." But near the end of this six-week sojourn in Arcadia, disaster felled him like a bolt of lightning: a stroke damaged the left hemisphere of his brain so severely that he started speaking gibberish and couldn't move his right arm (it never regained full motion). Because his vision was "seriously affected," he was prevented from reading. His grave condition did not permit his being moved to Rutherford, so at the insistence of the Abbotts and Gratwicks, the Williams apartment over the garage was converted to a sickroom. Doctors shuffled in and out and Floss shared nursing duties with a local woman whose able care gladdened Williams' spirits. Nurses had always played significant roles in Williams' adult life. As an intern and resident he appraised them as potential sexual partners or became pals with the nuns whose care and compassion for the population of rowdy whores and battered women treated at the hospital he admired. In the Autobiography, he muses at length on the often luckless fate of these talented, competent, intelligent, beautiful women who, though intimate with the body in health and decay, "have caught a glimpse of love, have been offered endless opportunities for its physical fulfillment but, in the end, come away, ignorant, their fine bodies wasted and their minds unsatisfied." Williams diagnoses with sympathetic accuracy the culture of medicine that patronizes these young women and is indifferent to their plight, although a few nurses escape by marrying interns or older doctors.
This motif is a skein in the last play Williams wrote, titled "The Cure," which was prompted by his experience of dependency at Gratwick during his slow recovery. This tepid drama takes a sidelong look at a nurse's desire to exercise her disciplined talents. The plot is creaky: a young motorcyclist crashes into a rural upstate home, killing him and injuring his passenger, a Princeton dropout with the implausible name Prospero—he's a wiseacre and a wastrel and a petty criminal, not a sage; trying to hide his identity from the law, he slyly calls himself John Keats—who has robbed a bank. Rather than turning him over to the police, Connie hides him. A model of brisk competence, she injects morphine into her captive so his leg can be straightened out and warns him that he'll suffer from vertigo if he tries to walk before he's ready to put weight on his foot. She eventually nurses him back to health. Mildly attracted to her macho patient, she kisses him once, but keeps him at arms length, remaining faithful to her miner husband.
Most germane to Williams' own condition is the opening scene of "The Cure:" a jumble of impressions and noises. The stage is crowded with firemen debating how to free the body from the wreckage, ambulance drivers seeking to remove the body to the morgue, a flippant State Trooper writing up an accident report, curiosity seekers gossiping in low voices, and the bewildered couple whose farm house has been wrecked trying to quell their panic and make sense of the confusion. During his career Williams was familiar with similar accidents and crime scenes. He would be rousted out of sleep to sign the death certificates of a man shot in a barroom brawl or killed in a head-on collision, or of an old woman who suffered a fatal heart attack. Now he was the patient who could be the corpse in "The Cure" toted off in a body bag to the autopsy table.
At the end of the play, Prospero's gimpy leg heals rapidly and he leaves, whether to a life of crime or something more useful the play does not clarify; the ailing poet, however, knows there's no chance of curing his condition, just a hope it won't worsen. In "The City of the Hospital," he mockingly likens cures to a home run, "Cure to a physician is a pure accident, to the pathologist in his laboratory almost a disappointment." He doesn't deny that medical knowledge has increased a thousand-fold during his years as a doctor—he now has effective pills in his black bag to use in emergencies—but he's skeptical of miracles. Though not impossible, they belong to "the realm of necromancy"; he has no faith that he is Lazarus to be raised from the dead by Dr. Jesus, or that the drugs peddled by the pharmaceutical companies will clear his clogged carotid arteries. Still, there's great comfort in the nurse's hands ministering to his failing body with expert art. Eros has become caritas.
When Williams' health improved enough to travel, he took a train to Hoboken, under the watchful eye of William Eric, thence home by ambulance. This trip reenacted the one Williams took as a young doctor forty years earlier when he escorted a rich, terminally ill Mexican to his village home south of the border. Williams' task was to keep his patient alive so that he could die in his own bed. Luckily, he succeeded and was paid handsomely in gold. He, too, reached home alive, but the second stroke left him a semi-invalid, facing a long, dicey convalescence. Feeling dejected, he was unprepared for the agonizing blow from another quarter that soon followed and crushed him further. Ironically, when the Gratwicks had asked Bill to write "a libretto for an operetta for them," and he was mulling over potential topics, he hit upon "the witch-hunt trials." It was natural to draw a parallel between the Salem trials and the McCarthy and House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in Washington—Arthur Miller was writing "The Crucible" on that very subject—but little did Williams suspect that the poisonous cloud would soon envelop him. To backtrack for a moment: in late April Williams met with Conrad Aiken to discuss assuming the duties of Poetry Consultant in September 1952. A week before Bill's second stroke, the newspapers announced his appointment. Almost immediately the harpies roosted outside 9 Ridge Road. The first attack came from Mrs. Virginia Kent Cummins, a poetaster and editor of "The Lyric" in Roanoke, Virginia. She denounced Williams as a Communist sympathizer, not a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party, though such a scholastic distinction was virtually meaningless in the noxious atmosphere of the McCarthy era. Williams was too much of a maverick to join political organizations, instinctively shunning all herd dogmas; he was never duped by the Party's propaganda that glorified the proletariat—he knew the working class close up, not abstractly; for decades, he had entered their homes to treat their illnesses and deliver their babies, had observed how a father might squander a week's wages, meant for rent, food, and clothing, on drink, how children were doted on, disciplined, and abused, how wives were cherished, ignored, or battered. He had walked on the scuffed linoleum of their kitchens to enter a sickroom and glanced at the effigies of the crucified Jesus nailed to a wall or a makeshift altar in a niche with a photograph of the Virgin Mary displayed prominently. The Communists, he knew, would never make headway recruiting American workers in such homes.
Still, from time to time, Williams dipped into his pocket and sent small sums to a group set up to aid the unemployed or to protest injustices like the hangings of Sacco and Vanzetti. A sort of fitful fellow traveler, he had in fact in the late 1930s signed petitions circulated by Popular Front organizations. But he saw that the Communist party, in the politics of America, was discredited and marginal. The time was ripe, he told Pound, "for redirecting sane minds toward the need for an actual radicalism." Williams is vague about specifics, but in a letter to The Partisan Review in April 1936, he shrewdly noted that Marxism was an outmoded "static" philosophy that would fail because the American "democracy of feeling" was opposed to "attempts at regimentation of thought and action." However corrupt the "ruling moneyed class" was, Americans believed that economic woes and malfeasance, though worrisome, were temporary; democracy would muddle through its periodic crises. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Williams passionately supported the Republican side—he gave money for medical supplies—and was deeply offended when Pound applauded the massacre of Republicans by Franco's army as nothing more than squashing flies.
If Williams lacked an FBI dossier, one of Pound's broadcast rants for Mussolini's government in 1939 created one instantly. Pound mentioned that his friend Bill Williams of Rutherford, New Jersey, agreed with his theories about money. This gained the FBI's attention. Two days later, two agents knocked on Williams' door armed with questions. How explain his old friend's flighty, bossy, narcissistic character—it would never occur to Pound that his words could land Bill in trouble—and half-lucid, half-harebrained ideas to the agents? He couldn't—nobody could, not even a philosopher who combined the genius of Freud, William James, and Charlie Chaplin. With Pound's arrest for treason in 1945 Williams could only be further tainted by their long association. Hardly renowned for nuanced thinking, government bureaucrats would be inclined to view him as at best a gull and at worst a security risk.
Williams had inherited his left-leaning politics from his father, who had been a Socialist and an adherent of Henry George's Single Tax theory. In the poems of the 1920s, Williams' fascination with the new Soviet regime and its revolutionary ethos surfaced now and then, probably because anything that promised experiment and change, the overthrow of entrenched ideologies, appealed to the poetic renegade in Williams. In the early years of Bolshevik rule, Soviet art and poetry—the Constructivists, Mayakovsky, Tsvetayeva, Akhmatova, Shostakovich, Prokofiev—were indeed brash, sophisticated pioneers on the frontier of Modernism, daringly breaking formal molds, their improvisations more surefooted than Williams' in Kora in Hell. In 1925, Bill met the charismatic Mayakovsky at a party in Lola Ridge's apartment in Greenwich Village and was moved by the Russian poet's declamation of his poem "Willie the Havana Street Cleaner:"
A big man, he rested one foot on top of the studio table as he read. It was the perfect gesture. He had a good voice, and though no one understood a word he said, we were all impressed by the rumbling sounds and his intense seriousness.... For myself it sounded as might The Odyssey from the mouth of some impassioned Greek.
[A, p. 163]
When, on Stalin's orders, the Soviet government crushed the spirit of innovation and imposed a dreary program of Socialist Realism, while imprisoning artists in Siberian gulags and murdering iconoclastic voices like Osip Mandelstam's, Williams was angry and appalled. When Stalin's reign of terror, the party's brutal machinery cannibalizing its own people, became known and Stalin cynically signed a pact with Hitler, Williams condemned both policies as a horrific betrayal of ideals. Russia had become the behemoth run amok he had foreseen in 1923, in the opening pages of Spring and All. He was never an apologist for the Communist regime.
Mrs. Cummins' charge of treasonous behavior on Williams' part was picked up by Fulton Lewis, Jr., a reactionary journalist and radio commentator, who added his voice to those slandering Williams. As with the Salem witch trials, mass hysteria and reckless accusations drove out reason and the calm search for truth: a miasma of intimidation and mistrust hovered over the Congressional hearings; witnesses were hounded and interrupted by harangues and political posturing; some committed suicide: it was the Palmer Era redux. Despite the uproar, Williams continued believing he would be able to take up the Consultancy post. Merrill Moore advised Aiken that Bill could work four hours a day, an arrangement that seemed to be satisfactory, though because of Williams weakened condition—his recovery was progressing slowly—it was agreed he could safely begin his duties on December 15. But a few days before Bill and Floss were to board the train to Washington, Floss received a stiff, officious letter from Verner Clapp, who held the dual posts at the Library of Congress as Deputy to Chief Librarian Luther Evans and Chairman of its Loyalty Board. Williams, he wrote, would have to undergo an investigation by the Civil Service Commission and the FBI because a preliminary inquiry had not cleared him of suspicious activities. Puzzled by Clapp's cryptic message, Floss sought clarification, She phoned him for specific details. The conversation would qualify as theater of the absurd, if it weren't so hurtful. Clapp cited Williams' trips to Germany in 1909 and to Paris and Austria in 1924, as if the poet's real purpose wasn't to study pediatrics or to hobnob with the avant-garde writers and artists at the hub of modernism, but to hatch clandestine plots with foreign agents against the United States government. Clapp's explanations only deepened the mystery of what incriminating evidence the government thought tarnished Williams' patriotism and loyalty. Accustomed to taking action, Floss set up a meeting with Clapp and his staff on December 8. (Bill was there, but Floss spoke for them both.) It did not take her long to see that Clapp presumed Williams guilty until proven innocent. Clapp let slip out some of the other charges: Williams had contributed poems and articles to such "subversive organs" as Partisan Review and New Masses; he had allegedly called for the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee (founded in 1938, under its first chairman, Rep. Martin Dies of Texas, it became noted for its sweeping accusations of disloyalty, its badgering of witnesses, and its trampling of civil liberties; it was finally abolished in 1975). More ludicrously, he remarked that Bill had written a disgraceful poem, "Russia," lauding the Communist government. Clapp or whoever leafed through Williams' poems for evidence of Communist sympathies was obviously out of his depth as a reader of poetry, since the poem castigates Russia as "idiot of the world, blind idiot" for persecuting its own citizens. Atheistic Russia was, for Bill, just another hierarchical religion gone wrong: he was definitely anti-clerical, but that "heresy" wasn't what disturbed Clapp and those who denounced him, it was the belief that he was a "pinko," a shade slightly less terrible than the color "red." (In I Wanted to Write a Poem, many years after the sickening battle, Williams eagerly sought to set the record straight, declaring that he always "hated today's version of communism"). At the meeting, Clapp seemed to enjoy his role as middle-echelon Inquisitor, shaking his fist repeatedly in Bill's face, as if to cow him into confessing his "guilt." Astutely assessing Clapp's character, Floss informed Conrad Aiken after the meeting, "I came away convinced that the Deputy was either terribly antagonistic to Bill or terribly scared of something."
Why Clapp was so hostile to Williams is hard to say. A career librarian, Clapp rose through the ranks to become in 1947 Chief Associate Director of the Library of Congress. He set up what was to become the Congressional Research Service and, in Nicholson Baker's words, was "the chief apostle of microfilming." (Clapp had friends and contacts in the CIA, which for security purposes had been in the forefront of those crusading for microfilm as a tool to store information and save space.) Indeed, technology rather than literature mattered to Clapp. After visiting a small public library, he remarked alliteratively and with no irony, "Books are dingy, dreary, dog-eared and dead." Yet after World War II, Clapp had established an important library in Japan, where colleagues remembered him as a man with a sense of humor who treated people respectfully. His behavior toward Williams displayed none of that respect. As a venerable institution, the Library of Congress was supposed to be immune to the political rancor that periodically spread like a plague in Washington, but in the violently irrational climate of the McCarthy Era, civil servants worried that they could come under attack for even inadvertently aiding and abetting a suspected subversive who advocated "dangerous" ideas. First Amendment rights were no shield against the capricious power wielded by the McCarthys, Eastlands, and McCarrans, who without the slightest scruple would destroy a government employee's—or witness'—reputation and life, or cut the budgets of agencies they cavalierly accused of harboring Communists. Clapp's primary loyalty was to the Library of Congress; his was a company man's dread of upsetting the status quo. Perhaps that was the fear Floss read in Clapp's eyes.
Floss enlisted the help of Norman Holmes Pearson, a Yale professor of English and a friend who had served with distinction in wartime CounterIntelligence and was well connected in Washington. Indignantly, she recited the accusers' habitual mantra: Bill had signed petitions for humane causes that the Communists also happened to support The FBI had adduced from Bill's poem "The Pink Church" that he was a Communist sympathizer. Clearly the FBI training curriculum omitted a course in the New Criticism, else the agents would have deduced that Williams' target in the poem was the church, that he identified with Michael Servitus who was burned at the stake for the heresy of denying original sin. Curiously, in the last lines of the poem, Williams labels John Milton, never one of his favorite poets, as a proto-Communist, presumably because Milton championed the fanatical seventeenth-century dictator Oliver Cromwell, a sort of forerunner of Stalin.
Williams had sat through the highly fraught meeting in silence, but fuming. He lacked the confidence to speak coherently in his own defense. Both Bill and Floss worried that the building tension over his Library of Congress appointment would raise his blood pressure to a dangerous level and put him at risk for a fatal stroke. So he tried to restrain himself from boiling over in anger. But after a series of perverse moves, Williams' appointment continued to unravel. Although he was not famous enough to be grilled under klieg lights at one of the showcase Congressional Hearings, he could not escape an appearance before the Library of Congress' own Loyalty Committee headed by Clapp. When a flustered Williams could not recall having signed petitions or written checks for such causes as the Scottsboro Boys Defense Fund, Clapp construed his answers as proof of stonewalling, if not outright lies. Williams' memory had been affected by his stroke, so it was not surprising he could not recall such details. (Williams was always absentminded about money transactions. Floss, his office manager, kept track of bills and checks.) Favoring liberal principles, as Williams did, was enough proof for Clapp of guilt.
Williams decided to hire his lawyer, James Murray, to defend his interests. The December 15 date had passed by without any resolution of the impasse, so just before Christmas Murray wrote a blunt letter to Luther Evans, declaring that Williams fully intended to take up the post and would fight to receive his salary. Evans took his time to reply, leaving Williams to twist in the wind. Some solace arrived with the announcement that Williams (and Archibald MacLeish) had won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for 1953.
However, the Bollingen, too, was born into a firestorm of controversy in 1949 when Pound, incarcerated at St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., was named its first winner. In the inflammatory polemics that greeted Pound's selection, the relation of poetry to politics sparked a bitter debate. Because World War II had ended a short four years before, feelings understandably ran high. Was it possible to separate the poet with his exquisite musical ear and undeniable accomplishments from the anti-Semite and strident propagandist for Fascist ideas? Yes, his admirers, a roster of nearly every major poet, including Williams, argued. The Pisan Cantos (1948), Pound's latest volume of poems, offered irrefutable proof of his consummate artistry. Pound wrote movingly about his internment in a ramshackle army prison in Pisa, and from that cage roamed the worlds of history, economics, arts and letters like an indefatigable eagle. In technique and lyric invention he eclipsed the competition. For those rallying behind Pound, it was as if modernism itself was on trial. Led by the poetaster Robert Hillyer, the opponents vilified Pound the man and poet as both traitor and obscurantist, but they were soon routed from the field. In 1953, during Williams' political tribulations, no chorus of detractors condemned the award to him or called for its revocation. But neither did poets rush to his defense as they had to Pound's. This may have reflected residual doubts about Williams' standing as a poet or, more likely, a weary reluctance to take up arms against the philistines and mistrustful public opinion once more.
Peeved that Williams had retained an aggressive legal counsel, and interpreting the tactic as a challenge of his authority, the highhanded Evans unilaterally terminated Williams' appointment. His decision relied on specious reasoning. Evans denied that it was due to any doubts about Bill's loyalty. That, he claimed, was a red herring. Rather, Williams' shattered health rendered him unfit to fulfill the duties of the Poetry Consultant. Evans' language was vague and hypocritical: "After full consideration, I have determined that the condition no longer exists which at an earlier date made your appointment appear desirable and profitable." Murray protested that Evans lacked the credentials to pronounce on Williams' health; he also pressed for the FBI to clear Bill's name, but in a Catch 22 argument, the FBI countered that since Williams was no longer employed by the government, they could not investigate his loyalty. Apart from what had dribbled out—the charges and innuendoes about left-wing causes Clapp rehearsed by rote—Williams and Murray had no idea what other information his dossier contained. Given what we now know of J. Edgar Hoover's notorious appetite for salacious gossip about the sexual activities of people under investigation, some informant might have told stories, made up or real, about Williams' romantic affairs. Clapp, however, did not dredge up these private matters.
The case dragged on. Leonie Adams and Cleanth Brooks, two Fellows at the Library, took up cudgels for Williams and met with Evans to persuade him he should restore Bill's appointment as Poetry Consultant. Evans softened his hard line a little, offering a solution more Byzantine than Solomonic. If Williams presented a certificate from a doctor that guaranteed he was physically able to carry out his duties, he would be allowed to finish out his term until September 14, 1953. But he must first renounce all legal rights to the position. Only if both provisos were followed would the Library's Loyalty Board convene and the FBI investigate and decide whether to clear his name. This amounted to emotionally blackmailing a disarmed man. In no condition to fight anymore, Williams consented to Evans' demands, but he never served a day as Poetry Consultant.
The toll exacted on Williams by the stress of the Consultancy fiasco was terrible: from being bound on a wheel of fire, he toppled into a pit of depression so deep that his doctor, Roy Black, advised Floss that Bill would benefit from a stay at a mental asylum.
He recommended Hillside Hospital, a private facility in Queens. It was a sign of Floss's alarm at Bill's precarious mental state that she agreed to this momentous step. Husband and wife had been physically separated by an ocean and estranged by periods of marital discord. But after 1948, despite occasional discord, the two had grown closer. Williams leaned on Floss for support and for hope as a child would on his mother's care; she dutifully supplied both. In his gratitude he wrote to her about his love with a chaste eloquence and urgency one might expect from a man on his deathbed. (This unequivocal tenderness rarely surfaced in his poems):
...I despair of ever again feeling well. But when I think of having another stroke which will leave me bedridden, perhaps blind, it is too much to think of. You, of all people, should know what that means. I might not even be able to communicate as I am doing now. And when I see you growing tired, as you confessed to me that you were already growing tired, desperate,—allow for all exaggeration and false emphasis that you know to be me. Tear this paper up and throw it away as the record of a man who, in spite of everything, loved you and my children to the end.... I've been a fool for reasons that are not clear to even me, but, believe me, I truly love [you] and believe with all my heart that you love me. Nothing can change that.
The passage exhibits an exceptional concern for Floss's burdens, and in his vulnerable state a moving honesty about the riddles and defects of his own character, not just his series of infidelities that mortified her, but the "exaggeration and false emphasis that you know to be me." This is the soul's language; he is too desperate to resort to rhetorical evasions. How reticent, steely-willed Floss interpreted this ardent avowal of devotion she does not reveal. She concentrated on the crisis at hand. How would Williams, obviously in extreme distress, adjust to a separation and a confinement so awful in prospect? Would he feel shattered, think he was being forced to become a resident of hell? Her misgivings, grounded in a deep knowledge of his temperament, told her that he was ill prepared for this descent. Williams was not a particularly introspective man. Throughout his adult life, he disdained psychoanalysis—Freud was not a hero of his—and he never speculated that the unconscious might be the lair of the imagination. When he visited Pound at St. Elizabeths, he was disquieted by even the relatively mild restrictions Pound lived with daily (Ezra was allowed a stream of visitors and all the books and paper he asked for and carried on a voluminous correspondence as when he was a free man; Williams could not fathom Pound's apparent indifference to his surroundings). In the Autobiography Williams frankly admits that "the disturbed mind has always been a territory from which I shrank instinctively as before the unknown." One time, upon leaving the hospital grounds, he was transfixed by the sight of a naked inmate "spread-eagled against a glass window, immobile as a great sea slug." Despite his many years as a doctor intimate with the diseased body in hundreds of guises, he was so shocked by the man's exposed genitals that like a Victorian gentleman he looked around to see if any women were present. Moved by the inmate's "posture of despair," Williams could only steal furtive glances at the image of a wrecked mind.
Now he was to be institutionalized and join the ranks of those certified as mentally disturbed. On the frigid night of February 18, 1953, Paul drove his father and Floss to Hillside Hospital. When the gates clanged shut, Bill was subject to rules and routines almost as stringent as those at a prison: he was locked up in a ward and even when walking the grounds he was kept under close supervision. He underwent individual and group therapy and possibly a few shock treatments to jar him out of his "deep depression." He was allowed to write to Floss, his lifeline to the world of the normal, and to receive letters from her. Once a week she was permitted to visit him. But if Williams originally feared that Hillside would be a hell for the emotionally damned, he soon came to think of it as more like Purgatory, a place where infirm souls go to be healed and eventually redeemed. And so it happened. As he became friendly with both medical staff and patients, his native gregariousness slowly returned. Spring worked its magic on him once more in the hospital garden, where the strolling poet, who hadn't lost his naturalistic and botanizing skills, was alert to the first signs of birds nesting or preparing to "build anew" (always an augury of benign vitality in his poems) "and early salmon-pink/ clusters of Rowers."
This rejuvenation prompted him to write, in a style of profound simplicity and empathy, "The Mental Hospital Garden," one of Williams' loveliest poems. Presiding over the garden and its troubled residents is St. Francis, a figure of ineffable pity and selfless love who helps the afflicted, including Williams, overcome their despair. One sign of Williams' recuperation and his Franciscan discipleship is his gentle avuncular concern for the young inmates who are sequestered as he is, "divided/ from their fellows" outside the hospital walls, and confused and entranced by sexual stirrings and love as he once was. Williams likens them to the young couples in Boccaccio's Decameron who took refuge from the plague in a country house and whiled away the days telling mostly licentious tales. The young couples at Hillside lack the confidence of their Tuscan counterparts; they continually struggle to master in themselves the conflict between freedom and repression (symbolized by the enclosed walls of the hospital). They wander the lawn and shyly embrace, yet feel they "have nothing." Touched by their plight, Williams prays to Saint Francis to bless the couples who, despite their darkened, bereft minds, "have seen/ a great light, it/ springs from their own bawdy foreheads." Eros, he pleads to the celibate saint, is a bountiful version of "the Holy light of love."
Halfway through the poem the stage direction reads, "Time passes." It is summer, and the lovers, acolytes of Cupid, are now "Blinded by the light," not sure whether they're cured "and half minded/ to escape/ into the dark again." The lovers are in fact terrified by the idea of being discharged from Hillside and negotiating the world beyond the hospital gates. Though the sun shines brightly, their imagination falters; they seek a "familiar flower" to warm them; ashamed "before that bounty," "They hide their eyes... peering through their fingers timidly." Williams' own emotional shakiness is mirrored in their intense vacillation between doubt and hope of a cure; there is no clear-cut arc from blindness through averted eyes to insight to action. St. Francis' unflinching gaze radiates a steadfast compassion, but as summer progresses, the mood darkens. The young, Williams observes, "resemble children/ roused from a long sleep." When St. Francis "tactfully" withdraws from the garden, the question looms, for Williams as well as for the young disordered by "love's first folly," how can I safely rejoin the perilous life outside without regressing to the psychic misery that brought me there in the first place? Williams offers no glib answers to the question. Before the curtain lowers on the poem, the reader is left with a poignant image of one mental patient's anxious wish and reluctance to chance the existential struggle awaiting her. Her look of "wild surmise" speaks volumes:
One
emboldened,
parting the leaves before her,
stands in the full sunlight,
alone
shading her eyes
as her heart
beats wildly
and her mind .
.... drinks up
the full meaning
of it
all!
Although the angelic choir did not sing Hallelujah when Williams left Hillside Hospital on April 18, 1953 after two months, he came home in a markedly more hopeful mood, though he harbored no illusions that his troubles were over. He had not regained Paradise. "The crackle/ of death's stinking certainty," as he put it synesthetically in the 1942 poem "The Yellow Season," sounded in his ears and assaulted his nostrils. Williams realized he might yet be tested further, might succumb to a worse despair. Nor was there any assurance that his imagination would function in the robust fashion to which he was accustomed. The poems of The Desert Music (1954) chart the fluctuations of Williams' mind as he grapples with final questions and the nearness of death. Three themes are braided together in The Desert Music: love and sex, death, and, most surprisingly, since Williams professed himself an agnostic, religious faith.
In October 1958, Williams suffered a third crippling stroke that severely circumscribed his activities and plunged him into a black depression and paralysis of the will. He had difficulty speaking, concentrating, walking, and writing; the doctors ordered that he give up poetry readings as too stressful. His reliance on Floss grew exponentially. She became, as in earlier medical crises, indispensable nurse and scribe, rationing visits, consulting doctors, and watching over him so as to conserve his depleted strength. She was not willing to relinquish him to the Grim Reaper without a fight. In "The Loving Dexterity," like a gardener with a magical green thumb, she sees an intact pink petal fallen off a flower and "deftly/ placed it // on/ its stem/ again." She may not have been able to restore his health with such magic, but with humble grace Williams acknowledged in his final poem, aptly titled "The Rewaking," that her love, like a force of nature, sought to extend his time on earth indefinitely "until a whole/ spring/ rekindle/ the violet to the very// lady's-slipper// and so by/ your love the very sun/ itself is revived." The poem, like most of the verse in Pictures from Brueghel, refuses a closing period; four verbs begin with the prefix "Re," as if her faithful love could warm him and revive his dormant belief in new beginnings; the cadence of his last words sounds with subdued gratitude.
Ever the realist on medical questions, however, Williams did not view his illness through rose-tinted lenses. He knew, as he put it in one of the Nahuatl poems he translated, "we vanish once only." The "harsh cry" of a woodpecker in the ruined choir of a bare tree reminds him of a song of death. "Beauty," he remarks in the no-nonsense "Song," "is no more than a sop/ when our time/ is spent and infirmities/ bring us to / eat out of the same bowl!" After a brief hospital stay in August of 1959, Williams wrote a two-quatrain poem titled "The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image." All his injured mind could cling to, like a fly on the wall, was an "idiotic" Japanese print. Who would liberate him from this mental prison? Although he rallied and proved his doctors' direst prognoses wrong, and harvested a sparse crop of poems, that fear shadowed him to the grave: he was subject to a series of TIAs (Transient Ischemic Attacks) or little strokes that blurred his vision, slurred his speech, and numbed feeling in his limbs. He mostly endured these infirmities stoically, but his extreme frustration at his body's and mind's betrayals could without warning bring on an unshakable gloom and drive him to self-destructive acts: preparing the order of poems for Pictures from Brueghel, he tore the manuscript to pieces and dumped them in the trash. Fortunately, Floss alertly retrieved them and sent them to Laughlin at New Directions who put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. A cerebral incident in June 1961 sent him to the hospital for an extended stay. "I have poor hopes for his making a good recovery this time, alas," Denise Levertov reported to Robert Duncan. Her foreboding proved right. Williams could not type even with one finger and his handwriting was illegible, as aphasics' calligraphy commonly is. Still, against insuperable odds, he stubbornly persisted, as if relying on some secret reservoir of habit and will, to write a handful of poems. These were collected in Pictures from Brueghel, Williams' last book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1963. An honor that had eluded Williams throughout his career arrived posthumously, when he could not savor the acclaim. (He also was given the Gold Medal for Poetry by The National Institute of Arts and Letters) In a sense, the Pulitzer was a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award or a belated recognition of Williams' underappreciated late poetry. Laughlin shrewdly decided to add The Desert Music and Journey to Love to Pictures ftom Brueghel and issue the triptych in paperback, thus highlighting equally Williams' limited experiments with the American idiom and rapprochement with the English lyrical tradition he had taken as a model of excellence and a stumbling block to be overthrown.
* * *
Williams died in his own bed on March 4, 1963 of a coronary thrombosis. Death had no reason to be proud of his conquest. Williams' health had deteriorated steadily over the last fifteen years of his life, so that the final collapse of his system came as no surprise. That he had survived heart disease, a barrage of strokes, and an operation for sigmoid (colono-rectal) cancer bordered on the miraculous. In his last years, he could be a cranky, restless, even mutinous patient at times, his primary physician remembered, and not without cause: despair at the diminished thing he had become held him in its grip. His creative spark was nearly extinguished. He might go to the typewriter, bang the keys, and scratch out a line or two, but what mostly came out was illegible; even Floss could not decipher the scrambled letters. His mind was a black hole with light trapped inside. He had no alternative but to curtail and shut down his voluminous correspondence with poets and friends that had served so well as an agora in which he debated issues of poetics with skeptical opponents and allies, or, thinking out loud, offered a running commentary—inspired, hasty, provocative, charming, generous—on the raucous poetry scene and the fault lines in American culture he had observed for half a century. Williams at his least guarded and self-conscious, these letters were a rich archive of friendships and a gallery of caricatures: Williams might skewer Pound in one letter and thank him for a perceptive review in the next, argue with Marianne Moore over her highhanded editing of a poem he submitted to The Dial, then speak of the burdens and satisfactions of being a doctor. Now when his brain functioned sporadically or broke down entirely—he processed information at an excruciatingly lumbering rate—he could not jot down two sentences or even dictate replies to Floss.
Poor eyesight and diminished comprehension made reading impossible. When he slumped in a chair, gazing blankly into space like a dead soul, Floss could not bear the sight, so she spent long hours reading to him. (They had read to each other constantly throughout their marriage.) One book they shared was the classic young adult novel, The Yearling. In Pictures from Brueghel, Williams wrote a formally controlled elegy, "To the Ghost of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings." The young writer had been thrown from a horse and broken her neck. "You lived nerves drawn/ tense," he addresses her, linking her desperation and valiant struggle to his. "Tapiola," an elegy for Jean Sibelius, dredges up a more personal memory. In paying tribute to the Finnish composer's "placing of sounds together,/ edge against edge," Williams might be recalling his own late night solitary hours in his attic atelier writing poems:
You stayed up half
the night in your attic room under the eaves, composing
secretly, setting it down, period after period,
as the wind whistled. Lightning flashed! The roof
creaked about your ears threatening to give
way! But you had a composition to finish that could
not wait. The Storm entered your mind where all
good things are secured, written down, for love's
sake and to defy the devil of emptiness.
The "devil of emptiness" did not hollow out Williams' memory entirely. The past returned in fragments, and sometimes, as in "Tapiola," surprisingly whole. And the present brought its garland of pleasures: his children and grandchildren's visits lifted him temporarily out of his morose mood, as did the times young poets knocked on the door of 9 Ridge Road to pay their respects to the veteran general of the poetry wars they so admired. Williams would greet them warmly, and Floss set out tea and cookies, but it was poignantly awkward: Williams could barely hold up his end of a conversation. A few weeks before Williams' death, Denise Levertov paid him a visit, which she described to Robert Duncan: "He just can't say what he feels or thinks any more & the sad way he gives up in the midst of a stammering sentence now—"O well"—& the slow shake of his head—it's a slow ending to a life so quick & quickening." Floss translated his jumbled thoughts as best she could. Nonetheless, even these nearly wordless communions seemed like sacramental moments.
As a doctor who had stood vigil at the bedside of thousands of dying patients, Williams knew the myriad ways people coped with their exit from life. Some received extreme unction and shuffled off this mortal coil benignly; some screamed or hallucinated or spoke final gnomic words, while others maintained a stony silence. Some died in isolation, others surrounded by their family. "I'm not sorry for myself," Williams told an interviewer, "for I think I can lie down in my bed and die as uncomplaining as any man," Williams clung to no religious illusions that his soul would migrate to some glorious afterlife. Practical to the end, he debated with himself whether to be buried in the Rutherford cemetery or cremated. Floss and he discussed the pros and cons of each, and after some temporizing he decided on burial. He had purchased a plot in Hillside Cemetery, near where his parents and Floss's mother, father, and brother were interred, that would serve as his final resting place. The funeral took place on a cold, rainy day. Williams had always loved March because it was nature's month of gestation before Kora returned from the underworld and brought fecund renewal and spring to the earth. Now he was to be buried in that ground. The service was held in a windowless chapel at Collins' Funeral Home, not in a church; Williams had instructed Floss that he didn't want the incense of "religious stuff" perfuming the air. Since he had written more poems about flowers than any other American poet, sprigs of blossoms, not the "hothouse flowers" he jeers at in "Tract," appropriately draped his coffin. The chapel was filled with family and friends and a large crowd of townspeople, from a policeman whom he had delivered into the world to neighbors, patients, shopkeepers, and a smattering of boyhood friends. In that turnout, his devotion to the local was honored and vindicated (few artists die in the town of their birth, as Williams did). A Unitarian minister presided over the service and read, predictably, "Tract," Williams' harangue against pretentious funerals. The family squelched a suggestion that the cortege walk to the cemetery, as the poem recommended. That would have travestied Williams' profound conviction that life should not copy art.
As the mourners filed out of the funeral parlor, the rain stopped and when everybody reached the cemetery, Levertov remembers, "incredible bright sunshine & blue sky & the wind blowing in the trees," were a meteorological omen, as if Williams was vouchsafed one last glance at a familiar landmark, "the City standing clear to the northeast beyond the swamps, beyond the unseen River—." At the gravesite, as the service was winding down, a jalopy drove up carrying poets Gilbert Sorrentino, Joel Oppenheimer, LeRoi Jones, and other literary disciples—Williams had many by that time, of all denominations—come from New York to bid farewell to the master of American verse whose voice was stilled but whose poems and precepts would live on. Dressed in ill-fitting black suits like Mafia foot soldiers and clutching flowers to toss into the grave (Greenwich Village's deference to suburban customs), they added a touch of comic sentiment to the solemn occasion that Williams would have chuckled over and been moved by. "When you're through with sex, with ambition, what can an old man create?" he asked in I Wanted to Write a Poem. "Art, of course," he answered, "a piece of art that will go beyond him into the lives of young people,... The old man meets the young people and lives on." In this goal, Williams had wholly succeeded. The list of poets who cited him as an important influence on their work is impressively long and diverse: Ginsberg, Lowell, Roethke, Levertov, Rexroth, O'Hara, Wilbur, Creeley.
Condolence letters and telegrams poured in. Floss, according to Levertov's account, read Pound's moving words of praise, with a crack in her voice, shedding one or two small tears: "He put up a great fight for you & he bore with me for 60 years. I shall never have another poet friend like him." For Floss, donning widow's weeds was probably a relief: the immense burden of caring for Williams, physically and emotionally, for fifteen years, had been lifted. Her constancy and her scrupulous nursing left her free of guilt. In the long nights stretching ahead of her, she would, like a Jamesean character, mull over the erratic course of her marriage and evaluate the character and deeds of the man she had lived with for over half a century. Responding to a condolence letter from Marianne Moore, Floss summed up that marriage in her homespun, level-headed way: discounting the ordeal of the last years when he fell mute, "[they were] years to treasure—full of companionship—partnership—ups & downs—in fact a life." Conspicuously missing from this judgment is, of course, the word love, as hard for her to say as it was for her husband. Floss would not compromise her emotional honesty.
Floss was not one of those dragon-like literary widows who guard the hearth where their husband-poet's eternal flame burns. She continued living modestly at 9 Ridge Road until her death on May 19, 1976. Growing royalties from Williams' books ensured that her last years would be comfortable. The storms that punctuated her life with the volatile Williams no longer passed over her. Her days were eventful in commonplace ways: her sons and grandchildren lived nearby offering company and filial love; she followed their successes and travails with interest, and she didn't lose the pleasurable habit of reading. Then there was the heavy traffic of literary pilgrims who came to the shrine at 9 Ridge Road, hoping for permission to climb the stairs to the attic where the poet wrote so many of his poems, or to glimpse the room where he examined patients or to stare at the chair Pound sat in when he read a poem to a critical William George, while sipping his host's best Goldwasser: the poet's artifacts had quickly become icons.
Biographers and readers of poetry who had fallen under Williams' spell, their ranks increasing by leaps and bounds, were curious to meet and appraise Floss, Williams' helpmate, and to tap her memories about his formidable mother (the other Mrs. Williams), the year in Paris and Vienna, the doctor's practice, anecdotal scraps about the legendary modernist poets like Pound, H.D., Moore, and Stevens with whom Williams clashed or forged alliances. To most visitors, an hour at 9 Ridge Road was a ticket of entry to a charmed circle, whose magic could be conjured by the courteous, plain woman who doubled as the high priestess of the Rutherford Oracle; they believed that she could clear up mysteries—or darken them. Did she? Both, I would contend. At her core, Floss remained a private woman, capable of keeping a secret or two of her own from the world's prying eyes. She chose, for example, to be cremated, rather than to be buried next to Williams. How should we interpret this decision? Is it a symbolic expression of the return of a violently repressed anger at his numerous infidelities, an ex-post-facto repudiation of her husband's character? In The Double Flame, Octavio Paz's elegant study of love and eroticism, he notes that "If practiced by only one partner, it [infidelity] causes the other suffering and humiliation. The unfaithful party is insensitive, cruel, incapable of love." But he adds, this expression of weakness "can and should be forgiven, because we are imperfect beings." Paz's analysis sums up in a few judicious words Williams' character when he was in thrall to Venus ("imperfect" was a byword for him) and Floss's quandary and gamut of responses to his serial unfaithfulness. Few would challenge the view that Floss lacked the sultry eroticism of, say, Nora Barnacle, James Joyce's wife; though Williams compared Floss to Helen of Troy in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," she did not mesmerize him sexually, fire his imagination, and reconcile him to monogamy. It is a mistake, however, to view her, as I did at first, as a patient Griselda type, colorless, dutiful, competent, and masochistic. We're not privy to Floss and Bill's pillow talk, but we know from the poems and plays that when he flaunted his affairs and taunted her for her lack of sexual charisma (the poet's good grey wife!), she did not endure these slights meekly: he felt the lash of her sarcasm and outrage, which left welts. That his torturous defense and rationale of his inconstancy as absolutely necessary to his poetry and to the refreshment of their marriage infuriated her one cannot doubt. But one suspects that part of her conceded that there were a few grains of truth in his argument: he probably did not understand the compulsion that periodically drove him away from and then back to her. For fifty years she weighed the costs and benefits of remaining in an imperfect marriage. At her funeral service, the Presbyterian minister, at the behest of William Eric and Paul, read the Twenty-Third Psalm and "Asphodel." Why on that occasion of grief and remembrance did the sons choose a poem that touched a chronically inflamed nerve in Floss? To relieve their embarrassment at their father's womanizing is the logical answer. Floss's ashes were scattered, as she wished. No sibyl collected them and revealed what in her heart Floss felt about the handsome poet-doctor she wed for better or for worse.
About the Author
Herbert Leibowitz is the Editor and Publisher of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He received the Poetry Foundation's Randall Jarrell Prize for Criticism in 2007. He is the author of Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography. He is finishing a critical biography of William Carlos Williams.
University of Notre Dame
Editors: John Matthias, William O'Rourke
Senior Editor: Steve Tomasula
Managing Editor: Brenna Casey
Executive Editor: Kathleen J. Canavan
Copyright © 2008 by the University of Notre Dame
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
