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IN ‘EXCERPTS from a Critical Sketch’, his 1931 essay on Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams said ‘the principal movement in imaginative writing today’ was that away from the word as a symbol towards the word as reality’. In itself the idea was not new: ‘The ridiculous and amazing mistake people make’, wrote Novalis in 1799, is to believe they use words in relation to things. They are unaware of the nature of language — which is to be its own and only concern.’ It took over a hundred years for literature to catch on. Looking back on that period of ‘transition’ in the Autobiography Williams began in 1948 at the age of 64, he emphasised how much the writers had owed to the painters who thought of a picture less as an imitation of ‘nature’ than as ‘a matter of pigments on a piece of cloth . . . It was the work of the painters following Cézanne and the Impressionists that, critically, opened up the age of Stein, Joyce and a good many others.’

     It’s harder for words than for pigments to refer only to themselves, but describing Gertrude Stein in another 1931 essay he said ‘The feeling is of words themselves, a curious immediate quality quite apart from their meaning, much as in music different notes are dropped, so to speak, into repeated chords one at a time, one after another — for themselves alone. In ‘The Influence of Painting on William Carlos Williams’ Ruth Grogan said that after he had ‘adopted Dadaist allusions and tone in the Prologue to Kora in Hell’ (1920), his 1923 collection Spring and All was ‘unprecedented in its poetic encounter with the basic structural tenets of Cubism’.

     Between 1908 and 1909 Picasso had been approaching the underlying geometry in nature through Cézanne’s disruption of perspective, articulating forms and volumes very clearly by crowding them democratically into the foreground. As in the best poems of Spring and All, there is no unoccupied space. Traditional patterns and relationships are fragmented to show unfamiliar close-ups of familiar things, while Williams, like the painters, was simultaneously making revelations about our way of perceiving structures.

The universality of things
draws me toward the candy
with melon flowers that open

about the edge of refuse
proclaiming without accent
the quality of the farmer’s

shoulders and his daughter’s
accidental skin, so sweet
with clover and the small

yellow cinquefoil in the
parched places. It is
this that engages the favorable

distortion of eyeglasses
that see everything and remain
related to mathematics —

     Drama is always the last of the arts to catch up with new movements. Ionesco was arguably the first writer to harvest a major theatrical crop out of the Surrealism of the twenties, and despite Picasso’s ventures into playwriting, Cubism has had to wait even longer for its theatrical correlative to be discovered. But the young Austrian, Peter Handke described his first full-length play Kaspar (1968) as consisting

. . . primarily of sentence games and sentence models dealing with the impossibility of expressing anything in language — in other words, of saying something that goes beyond the particular sentence into the realm of significance, meaning. I think a sentence doesn’t mean something else: it means itself.

Like Werner Herzog’s most recent film Every Man for Himself and God against All, Handke’s play centres on the 19th century foundling Kaspar Hauser, who spent the first 16 years of his life in a cellar. On emerging he could speak only one sentence, without understanding what it meant. The play makes phrases and meanings into a series of impacts which he suffers.

     Not that Williams could possibly have brought the theatre single-handed to a point it reached over 20 years after he stopped writing for it, but his plays are oddly disappointing. Talking about writing in his Autobiography, he said ‘the difficulty is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight’. The better of his novels and stories are rich in passages that do just this; the plays are not, and the verse in them is among the flabbiest he wrote.

     His interest in theatre developed early. In his late twenties and early thirties he wrote several plays, some in verse, some not, but these have not survived. The four plays he published in 1961 were written between 1935 and 1960. The volume also contains the libretto he wrote in 1936 for an opera about George Washington, and there is more verse in this than in any of the plays.

     ‘There is no poetic drama today’, he asserts categorically in the ‘Introduction tbr the Composer, an Occasion for Music’, implicitly dismissing Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He would have hated the idea of looking back to Greek tragedy as a model, but he was unrealistic in his hopes that music, poetry and plot could be combined in a new way to make the statement that needed to be made about Washington, whose taciturnity posed one problem, while Williams’s equation of him with the country provided another. In the American Grain (1925) contains the sentence: ‘There must have been within him a great country whose wild paths he alone knew and explored in secret and at his leisure.’ This prefigures the equation of man and city that was to be central to Paterson 21 years later, but he was relying too heavily on the music to articulate these secret explorations. His plot scarcely attempts to, and his lack of faith in the ‘externally dramatic’ is revealed when he explains why a movie would miss the tragedy. ‘The photographic reality of the scenes would be constantly in the way. The tragedy is not for the most part in what the protagonist is doing; it is over all he does, it encloses him, it trips and turns him about. . . No life as great as his had as little of the externally dramatic about it.’ Nor does he try to capture the evasive life of the man in the verse, which is banal and sometimes embarrassing, especially when he attempts rhyme:

     In the American Grain would have suggested that Williams had most of the talents a playwright needs. He could empathise with characters as unlike himself as Eric the Red and Christopher Columbus. First he brought them to life in his mind by recreating their language, and then on the page by talking through their mouths. In his short stories he applied the same powers of empathy and mimicry to 20th century characters, spanning a wide social gamut. In the best of them and in his novel White Mule (1937) he drew heavily on his own experience as a doctor, even incorporating verbatim chunks of what his patients had said, without letting his own shadow enter damagingly into the picture. It ought to have been possible for him to do this in his plays.

     The first of the four, Many Loves or Trial Horse No. 1, was obviously put together too hastily, splicing old material together with new. While he was in his middle fifties he was writing one-act plays which were being published in New Directions. Seeing Noël Coward’s triple bill Tonight at 8.30 gave him the idea of packaging three of his own one-act plays together, and this he did in 1939 or 1940 when he was asked by a local amateur theatre for a full-length play. The three plays all dealt with male failures to bring a heterosexual relationship to a happy fruition and linked them together with a story about a writer-director who wants to put on a triple bill with backing from a homosexual who is in love with him. Many Loves finally received a professional production from the Living Theatre in 1959 with Julian Beck directing and Judith Malina as the actress who arouses the homosexual’s jealousy and plays the girl in each of the three playlets.

     Within each one, Williams succeeds in launching an action which acquires considerable momentum. We can engage with the predicament of Serafina, abandoned by her lover, bullied by her husband and offered love — too late — by a sensitive but timid boy. We can believe in the incipient Lesbian relationship in the second playlet between the business-like young woman who wants to buy the farm and the persecuted daughter of the man who wants to sell it. In the third we can get caught up in the flirtation between the fiftyish doctor and the attractive young mother. Like many of the short stories, each of these situations has a solid enough core of reality to seem capable of more development than Williams cared to give it.

     The three playlets are written in prose; the counter-play, which links and sometimes interrupts them is in verse, which never convinces us that it is a living language coming from the mouths of Hubert, the writer-director, Alise, the actress and Peter, the rich backer. Instead of trying to flesh out the relationships between them, Williams devotes much of the dialogue to an argument in verse about the possibility of a new verse drama.

     With its un-Williamslike abstraction, its ineffectual reaching after paradox, and its bumpy transition from the leisurely style of the lecture-hall to the terseness of streetcorner chat, this is strangely like an ungainly imitation of what T. S. Eliot — that traitor to the grass roots — had been doing in The Family Reunion (1939). His first play for the theatre, it is less theatrical than Murder in the Cathedral and less dramatic than the unfinished Sweeney Agonistes, but all three come closer than Williams did to making verse theatrically viable. What is particularly odd is that he had already published a fragment of Paterson in a style which could have served extremely well for verse drama, if only he could have crossed the bridge between reflective conversation with himself and thoughtful dialogue. Why can the characters in his plays never talk either to each other or to the audience with the quiet, intimate, non-logical truthfulness of the characters in his much earlier collection Al Que Quiere (1917)? Portrait of a Woman in Bed’ ends

Try to help me
if you want trouble
or leave inc alone —
that ends trouble.
The country physician
is a damned fool
and you
can go to hell!
You could have closed the door
when you came in;
do it when you go out.
I’m tired.

     Most of the verse argument in Many Loves is irrelevant to the three playlets. It may help, marginally, to characterise Hubert as a writer who believes in verse drama but it could help much more if the three playlets were samples of his attempts at it. And when Peter magnanimously decides to continue his financial support but to withdraw from any emotional claim he may have on Hubert, he is transparently doing what needs to be done to give the play a happy ending. We don’t know enough about Peter or about what has happened between the two men to be at all moved by his sacrifice.

     The subtlest part of Williams’s overall design lies in the suggestion that Hubert is using the playlets he has written to make statements to Peter about their personal relationship. Implicitly the frustrations of Hubert’s dependence on Peter are compared first with those of Serafina’s financial dependence on the husband who doesn’t even try to understand her; next with the emotional starvation which Annie suffers at the hands of her family and her boyfriend and which drives her into the arms of the Lesbian; and finally with the frustration of Clara, the young mother who can’t talk to anyone except the philandering doctor.

God! I haven’t felt so relaxed in months. It’s marvelous to find someone you can say anything to — anything at all, and he’ll understand it. I can’t open my mouth except to a couple of girls — and I can’t tell them everything. I can’t tell my mother, I can’t tell my husband . . .

We never learn enough about the relationship between Hubert and Peter to judge whether it could be affected by Hubert’s experience of writing the three plays or by Peter’s experience of watching them in rehearsal.

     A Dream of Love (1948) is more satisfying — though structurally less ambitious — but it does not quite succeed in sustaining the tension it creates in the first act through the second and third. Most of the dialogue is in prose but the doctor-hero is a poet and the love poem which he wrote to his wife when they were first married is used rather like a theme song. (Williams uses ‘Love Song’ and ‘First Version: 1915’ from Al Que Quiere.)

     The doctor, who is in his middle forties, has a slim, attractive wife in her late thirties. Myra is still very much in love with him, but he is less instinctively monogamous than she is, and he takes advantage of an opportunity of sleeping with an attractive patient in her late twenties, whose needs are rather reminiscent of Clara’s in Many Loves. Both women feel that no one understands them except the doctor, though this time the doctor does more of the talking. But before even half the play is over, he has died in her arms while making love to her in a hotel bedroom. His wife goes to pieces and the Dream of Love is a dream she has. In it the dead doctor comes back to explain that he needed to be unfaithful in order to renew the love he felt for her, and the hotel bedroom scene is re-enacted in a kind of flashback.

     There are also several non-dream scenes. The adulterous patient comes to ask Myra for her forgiveness. A self-confident milkman talks to the coloured maid about his intention of marrying Myra, and the coloured maid has a scene with an elderly coloured friend whom she asks for advice about how to help her distracted mistress.

     These sequences are all fairly well written, but once the doctor is dead there can be little theatrical suspense. Williams engages our sympathy for Myra but she plays a mainly passive role after the death. The scenes with the milkman and the two coloured women both seem padded out beyond their natural length, and the trouble with Myra’s dream is that the doctor’s apologia is presented very much as he would argue it, not as she would dream about it, while the hotel bedroom flashback is written as if it were what actually happened, not as her subjective reconstruction of the scene.

     There is also something slightly uncomfortable about the impression we get that Williams is dramatising his own misgivings about monogamy. Of course, even if he were incorporating into the dialogue arguments that he actually had with his wife, he would only be doing what Strindberg did, but failing to get away with it so well, mainly because the sex-war is not fought fiercely enough. Both in the real-life argument in Act One and in the dream argument in Act Three, too many holds are barred. Whereas Strindberg’s women are very strong in their speech and their silences, in their actions and reactions, Myra comes much more compellingly to life in her scenes without the doctor than in her scenes with him.

     In the American Grain contains a chapter about the witchcraft trials in 17th century Salem, and Williams hit on the idea of drawing a theatrical parallel between them and Senator McCarthy s Communist witch-hunting about three years before Arthur Miller did. But though Williams had by far the subtler mind, Tituba’s Children is a much cruder play than The Crucible. Instead of shuttling between the 17th and the 20th centuries, Miller had the tact to let the audience draw its own conclusions about the play’s relevance to the contemporary situation. He also created an incomparably more solid dramatic structure than Williams, whose story-line would be confusing to an audience that didn’t already know the Salem story. What is more remarkable (after the achievement of In the American Grain) is that Williams’s imitation of 17th century dialogue is both thinner in texture and less convincing than Miller’s.

     Williams’s 20th century scenes, set in an exclusive Washington nightclub, are more in the mainstream of contemporary verse drama than any of his previous work. With a public and political theme, his private indignation tuned to a high moral pitch, he collapses into devices that English-language playwrights had culled out of continental Expressionism. He even uses a chorus. Waitresses moralise in unison, and a sympathetic nightclub hostess sings didactically. The chorus of spectators echoes both the rhythms and the idea of fatality that T. S. Eliot had introduced into his verse drama:

Strophe
Must this terror be repeated? is this
the horror of Giles Cory’s doom
come to destroy us? The old fate which
we thought to have lived down seems
to have roused again.
We are fearful of the outcome.

Antistrophe
It is late. We thought that crime
had been expiated, that the devil days
would not come again. ‘Progress’, we
said hopefully. But we have been
corrupt, we have fouled our own beds —
a list of our corrupt mayors and
even justices would fill a large book.

We also get a group of Senators with names like Yokell, Pipeline and Gasser, whose dialogue assorts with their names. The 17th century scenes are much better, especially the one in which the girls egg each other on into hysteria. But here too the songs are disastrous. Instead of showing dramatically how one false accusation leads to the next, Williams tries to make his points didactically from outside.

     The Cure (1960) is the slightest of the four plays, a story about an ex-nurse, starved of useful activity since her marriage. She takes the opportunity of nursing a young criminal who has been catapulted off a motor-bike into her cellar. It is the only play of the four to tell a single story with a straightforward chronology but, as in the other three plays, we see that Williams, though well able to set up a situation interestingly, was unable to sustain the interest over three acts. In the earlier plays, consciously or unconsciously aware of his limitations as a playwright, he invented a structure which would camouflage them; in his last play, too ill to do that, he exposes them.

     In Paterson, as Charles Tomlinson has put it, ‘Williams seeks to express Lawrence’s “spirit of place” both in terms of Paterson’s contemporary industrial squalor and of the geographic and historic presences that underlie the city’. It’s a fairly obvious flaw in the plays that they fail to evoke any strong impression of locale. (The modern playwrights to do this best may have been writing in prose but they have all been essentially poets — Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, D. H. Lawrence, Brecht, Arden.) Unlike The First President, Williams’s four plays are set mainly indoors, while Paterson, like a Hardy novel, makes all its main points through outdoor sequences. Characters have relationships with the Passaic River as they do with Egdon Heath, dying in its elemental embrace. Sam Patch, the great jumper, makes his last leap into the Genesee River to emerge the following spring in an ice-cake; in The Return of the Native Wildeve and Eustacia are reunited when they drown together in Shadwater Weir.

     If the theatre, during the first quarter of the century, hadn’t been too hard-skinned for Lawrence’s plays (ca 1909-26) to make any impact on it, it would have benefited enormously, and so could Williams, who most likely knew them, if at all, only as printed scripts. They bring off something that Williams was as nervous of attempting in his plays as in his opera libretto: using the photographic reality of the scenes to locate a tragedy which not only surrounds the characters but also expresses itself in what they do and what they say. Lawrence did not make the mistake of equating the ‘externally dramatic’ with the superficially dramatic; Williams did, baulking at both, not only in the plays but also in Paterson, which fails to maintain the standard it set for itself in Book One. Robert Lowell and Edward Dahlberg have both made the point that in Book One the human beings who populate the prose interruptions are not admitted into the verse. Williams took note of the criticism and in the later, less successful books they are, but the dramatic structure becomes much weaker. In Book One it had depended partly on the electrifying alternations between the verse, which is reflective and descriptive, and the glaringly non-poetic material — anecdotes, extracts from newspapers, and conversations, letters, descriptions of how a lake is drained. Much of the material is personal, but the autobiographical element is contained firmly within the objectifying structure. This cannot be said of the later books, although it was only in the second (1948) that he happened on his most important rhythmical discovery — the three-part line. Its effect has been well described by A. Kingsley Weatherhead: ‘it is the actual movement of the meditating mind, pursuing its disjunctive course between images as it looks with hesitation for the metaphoric relationships by means of which the outside world might be made into poetry’. (Both Ruth Grogan’s and Kingsley Weatherhead’s essays are reprinted in the extremely useful William Carlos Williams volume edited by Charles Tomlinson in the Penguin Critical Anthologies series.) After using the new line very little either in the third book (1949) or the fourth (1951) he puts it to good use in the fifth (1958), but he was then 74 and had moved, understandably, into a subjectivism fairly remote from his Objectivist concerns. In a 1941 lecture he had attacked Imagism because it ‘completely lacked structural necessity’. The Objectivist tried ‘to remedy this fault by fusing with each image a form in its own right’.

     Neither Book Five of Paterson nor Pictures from Brueghel (1962) do this, but the soliloquising voice is oddly reminiscent of the continuous present tense in Samuel Beckett:

And so
               with fear in my heart
                              I drag it out

and keep on talking
               for I dare not stop.
                              Listen while I talk on

against time.
               It will not be
                              for long.

This comes disappointingly close to solipsism after the brave extravert Objectivism of the 1939 pronouncement: ‘A work of art is important only as evidence, in its structure, of a new world which it has been created to affirm.’ Considered in the light of Williams’s subsequent development, this seems both romantic and idealist in sidestepping the problem of the relationship between the new world and the old one.

     Like Joyce (the other great writer to equate a city and a river with individual consciousness) Williams became committed to the quest for a new language, an alternative to the English associated with the old world of English culture. In both cases the impulse was healthy and useful, but after language and landscape have been stirred into the same soupy consciousness, how are digestible portions to be ladled out for the reader?