New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

feeble. Our hands shake. We need a

  transfusion. No one will give it to us,

  they are afraid of infection. I do not

  blame them. We have paid heavily. But we

  have gotten—touch. The eyes and the ears

  down on it. Close.

  The whole people is convalescent from the convulsions of revolution. The transfusion they need is not forthcoming—seen historically, this would have meant international support for their experiment instead of an economic and psychological blockade. But other nations, other governments, were scared. The protagonist, like a true Chekhovian character, says he can’t blame them; he sees what scares them, and why—he is not doctrinaire. And he recognizes that a great price has been paid and will perhaps be further exacted. But what has been gained is precisely what he has desired: touch itself. Williams the doctor knew how the touch of hand could diagnose, cure, bring to birth; his fictive Russian knows the imagination as an intimate form of touch without which all is dull, hopeless, ashen. What he celebrates here, at the end of the poem—returning to its opening, when earth and sky are close, known, touched with the imagination—is the sun rising in his heart.

  The prose which immediately follows the poem and is dated four days later, begins with the words, “Russia is every country, here he must live….” And a few pages further on Williams breaks off from diverse topics to return to the protagonist of the poem, in these sentences: "—He feels the richness, but a distressing feeling of loss is close upon it. He knows he must coordinate the villages for effectivenes in a flood, a famine.” I see two ways of reading that, and they are complementary, not conflicting. If, as I’ve been doing, one reads the poem without disregard for its narrative reality, the truth of its fiction, and thus the universality of the poem’s Russia—“every country; here he must live”—then the richness that “he,” the protagonist, feels is the richness of new beginnings, the reassertion of the “very old” past and also the democratic “everything” of human experience. The “distressing feeling of loss” that comes close upon it concerns the equally real subtleties, nuances, desirable complexities—that “scattered wealth” he earlier felt “beating at his wrists”—which as yet we have not figured out how to attain in any social system without a sacrifice of justice and mercy. But one can also read “A Morning Imagination of Russia” somewhat as Webster Schott chose to do, that is, as a parable of Williams’ poetic struggle in the 1920s (it was written in 1927). According to the first reading, the hero’s recognition of the need to “coordinate the villages for effectiveness in a flood, a famine,” reminds one of Chekhov’s letters in the early 1890s when he was an unpaid local medical inspector during the cholera epidemic. If one looks beyond the Russian scene (set just a few years before the writing of Tht Descent of Winter) to an analogy in Williams’ own struggles to establish a new sense of poetry and the imagination in the American 1920s, we may see in those words about coordinating the villages an almost Pbundian missionary spirit; then one takes the “villages” to be outposts of intelligent poetry and the flood or famine as aspects of the hostile or uncomprehending world of readers, critics, other poets, and the public at large.

  Webster Schott, reintroducing The Descent of Winter in 1970, saw it entirely as Williams’ struggle “to verbalize a theory of contemporary poetry” and “to realize a clear conception of himself as an artist.” That is partially true; but when Williams wrote the words, “We have paid heavily. But we/have gotten—touch,” he was not speaking in a vacuum, as if from an airtight aesthetic island: the political images with which, in “A Morning Imagination,” he had chosen to work, do not only have meaning as metaphor, as figurative ways to speak about literature. Those images work as Chekhovian narrative description; they work as implications of political ideas; and they work as analogies for the poet’s need to act in society, humbly and with an understanding that in trying to serve the commonweal he will serve also his own need for intimate experience of the living mystery. Ideas without Things are vaporous, mere irritants of the detached and insensate intellect; but Things abound and are chockablock with the Ideas that, thus incorporate, dance and stumble, groan or sing, calling and beckoning to one another, throughout the decades of his poetry.

  Williams and Eliot

  (1989)

  In England when I was growing up, Eliot was complacently counted as an English poet. Though I knew he was born in America, it was quite a jolt to discover, when I first came over here, that in the States he was claimed without qualification as an American. Although I learned to acknowledge this many years ago, I have nevertheless continued to think of him as in full possession of a kind of European urbanity that could take the cultural palimpsest for granted. But perhaps in fact he suffered in some degree from a lack of confidence under that urbane shell, a self-consciousness detectable also in the even more urbane Henry James (who analyzed it so beautifully in others that one tends not to suspect it in him). I used to notice, when I was new to America, how frequently the topic of conversation was what it meant to be American, and what America was. This constant need for self-definition astonished me; in England—or in France, Italy, Holland—I had never encountered a similar preoccupation. Now I have come to see that not only Williams’s overt concern for how to be a specifically American artist, but also Eliot’s emphasis on the need to deliberately learn a tradition, manifests that peculiarly American need.

  This idea is of special interest to me, because it helps me understand my own feeling, which increases as I grow older, of being substantially “out of sync” with American culture even though I’ve spent nearly four decades here, and was so strongly—and I believe beneficially—influenced by William Carlos Williams. I’m “out of sync” because I have never related to European, or specifically English, literary tradition with that poignant concern and discomfort, that sting of self-consciousness. I don’t say this smugly, for it seems to me that this sting can often be turned to advantage by individual artists. It can become the subject, if not the very ground, of a life’s work. It’s something which I’ve had to manage without, just as I’ve had to manage without the deep sense of roots in a particular town or countryside which is so valuable to many writers.

  It has been suggested that if Williams had read Eliot without prejudice he might have seen in him a "comrade-in-arms” engaged in a process parallel to his own, impelled by as personal a need. If Williams and Eliot had simply been writing poems, without manifestoes, might they have learned to appreciate one another? Did the intellectual and aesthetic theories of each obstruct any mutual perception of their art itself? I don’t think one can sweep away the grounds for conflict between them so easily, though one certainly wishes that open and fruitful engagement had occurred in place of sterile antagonism.

  In a transcribed interview published in Quarterly West in 1976 my response to the question of what it was about Eliot that annoyed Williams so much was that I thought it had to do:

  less with Eliot’s diction than with his rhythmic structures. It was that lack of rhythmic energy, that sort of slump of the line that has to drag itself wearily up into the next one; I think that was probably the thing about Eliot that Williams felt was setting back American poetry. He was talking about the structure of the poems, about language, and I think that that was the basic thing … not concepts, attitudes toward life, philosophy, ethics, politics, but what was actually happening from word to word and line to line in the language of Eliot’s poems….

  Fifteen years later I see it as a more complex and less conscious matter. (I have also, in the meantime, been able to return to a more positive personal response to Eliot’s poems, particularly the “Four Quartets.” But that is because I can relate to Eliot’s adopted Englishness in a way impossible for Williams.)

  What Steven Friedman, in a paper given at the MLA in 1988, characterized as anxiety, even desperation, in Eliot’s plea for the immolation of individuality on the altar of tradition, does indeed find an echo in Williams’ lifelong, and
perhaps no less anxious, search for an indigenous and modern set of formal principles: standards that would act as a preventative to just that formless “self-expressive” flow which too often, alas, has been taken as “Williams influence” in poets who have misunderstood what he was after, and who (like his antagonists) fail to see how principled his own prosody was.

  But an inescapable contrast between Williams and Eliot is apparent in Eliot’s insistence on the necessity for a poet to absorb “the whole literary history of Europe,” while Williams, though also emphasizing the need to comprehend history, focuses on what happened on this continent, and therefore (despite the Eric the Red chapter of In the American Grain, which might be considered a somewhat irrelevant prelude) on relatively modern, post-Columbian history. For Eliot, the writer’s education must begin with Homer. For Williams, it is not even literary history that the writer must know, but the story of the body politic in relation to the American continent. Both sought, in these contrasting ways, to avoid the fatal feebleness of a colonial culture’s dependence on a distant mother-country; they recognized that every artist, or at least every Western or modern artist, must establish his or her own ground, must “prove upon the pulses,” in Keats’ phrase, the principles of poetic action. If this is not achieved, a debilitating provincialism will ensue.

  Not only in In the American Grain but throughout his work Williams struggles with this: how to grasp (and the tragedy of not grasping) the newness of the New World—how to make of it a sovereign ground and not a cultural colony. In “Against the Weather” he instances the naming by English Puritans of a large redbreasted thrush: robin, they called it, not really looking—just because the sparrow-sized European robin, so utterly different in personality, also is redbreasted. What he deplored was a lack of attention—and it is attention, fearless and objective, that he applauds in his idealized Daniel Boone. Williams’ depiction of Daniel Boone (while I’m sure it bears little resemblance to the historical truth) exemplifies the determining characteristic for membership in his personal pantheon, which transcends both national and merely personal significance because it points to an essential quality: what he imagined in Boone was that Boone, with that intense attention, took what he saw for what it was, a pristine phenomenon, not imposing preconceptions formed upon another continent. Such attentiveness, with the respect for otherness which it implies, is essential to poets; but Williams sought, found, and valued it also in others. It was bound up with his idea of “how to be American,” a personal variation of the myth of “the fresh start.”

  Here I’ll digress for a moment to mention that I’ve come to feel a certain element is regrettably lacking in this program of Williams’: whether in the chapters on Spanish conquistadores, on English Puritans and counter-Puritans, on a Pére Sebastien Risles or a Daniel Boone, Native Americans are evoked by Williams in a role subsidiary to that of the White main characters he chose to examine. Pocahontas remains as exotic as the Aztec empire. He never, unfortunately, attempted some respectful appropriation of Native American culture as a possible element of the ground for his art; and in failing to do so he committed the same error that he deplored in the colonists. Such appropriation can be offensive if it lacks humility—but if Williams were alive now he might empathize with the recognition that there is a wisdom in Native American spiritual traditions which Americans of any ethnic origin would do well to learn from, in the same way that a few Australians of European origin have begun to try and learn from Aboriginal culture. To fault Williams for not including some focus on African-American experience or on women would be unhistorical; In the American Grain was, after all, written in 1925, not the 1980s. But to have explored the Native American experience would have been in line with his thesis and his studies, and such minor writers as Mary Austin (in The American Rhythm) were already trying to undertake such an exploration.

  How wide the distance was between the cultural concerns of Williams and Eliot is brought home by the fact that while one may regret that Williams did not go deeper into the indigenous life of the continent, such a concern would not even occur to one in relation to Eliot, to whom Amerindian spirituality would have seemed irrelevant precisely because it had not been absorbed into Western art and culture.

  But other kinds of loyalties also were a factor in their mutual lack of regard—Williams’ disdain so explicit, Eliot’s implicit in his silence. Surely Williams’ negative attitude came in part from simple jealousy of Ezra Pound’s friendship with Eliot. Ezra’s decision to live in Europe did not seriously undermine the warm personal affection Williams had for him as the preeminently stimulating friend of his youth. Instead, the resentment Williams felt at Pound’s chosen exile was displaced onto Eliot, all the more so because of Pound’s enthusiastic view of Eliot, whom he characterized to Harriet Monroe as “the only contemporary poet who is adequately prepared for his task.” Williams may never have seen that particular remark, but the spirit of it surely reached and stung him.

  Then, too, even aside from intellectual disagreements, can one discount temperamental differences which in themselves might have made the two men dislike each other if they had met? In contrast to Williams’ gusto, at which he himself pokes fun in “Smell” (“must you have a part in everything?” he says to his nose), Eliot describes himself, in his essay on “Goethe as the Sage,” as combining “a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinistic heritage, and a Puritanical temperament.” He was by nature fastidious and patrician. There was a deeply felt ethical and emotional disharmony in the contrast between Williams’ love for the courage and ingenuity he perceived in the poor and disenfranchised, his love for the untutored but vivid turns of phrase he heard among his patients (at a time when the originalities of folk speech were not yet eroded by the media), and the distaste with which the uneducated masses are presented in Eliot’s poems. Williams was by temperament democratically expansive, and he relished the ingenuity of anyone who, having little or nothing, makes do and contrives solutions. “It’s the anarchy of poverty / delights me,” he wrote, and “I never tire of the mystery/of these streets …/… I never tire of these sights / but refresh myself there / always, for there is small holiness/to be found in braver things.”

  I recently heard Robert Giroux and others reminiscing about Eliot at a celebration of his centenary, and it is clear he was a man of great honor and urbane charm; I myself experienced this kindness when he took the trouble to write me quite a long letter of advice when I was only twelve. Williams could be charming too but not urbane. He would have found Eliot’s smooth, scholarly, aristocratic ways pompous; and in all probability Eliot would have been equally irritated by some quality in Williams—perhaps by his enthusiasm and spontaneity, his very lack of urbanity. Williams was not a wild man, not a Bohemian; but he was rough, craggy in comparison with Eliot’s polished surface, which is palpable not only in his recorded voice but in the rhythms of his prose—even if, as has been recorded, he did know the lyrics of pop songs by heart. Eliot was polished even at his most lighthearted, and his practical cats are surely denizens of a rather Edwardian London, where class differences are both important and accepted.

  I dislike a too biographical approach to literature, the approach Proust criticized for subjecting the visions of creative imagination to impertinent analysis as mere reflections of personal psychology. But to talk about Eliot and Williams’ lack of appreciation for each other as if it were exclusively a matter of intellect, of reasoned stance, is to ignore the reality of that lack of sympathy’s social and emotional context. It may be true, as Michael Davidson has suggested, that if an Eliot had not existed Williams would have had to invent one; but the actual Eliot not only provided him with opposing ideas on which to test his own, but presented a personality I believe he would not have found congenial even in an intellectual ally.

  To the temperamental predispositions of each was added the contrast of their youthful experiences. Eliot was a Harvard student at a period when that involved, to a much greater degree than tod
ay, a formative reenforcement of unquestioned privilege. Such an education causes a person to take certain conditions for granted, as if they were universal: an allusion to childhood, if made by economically and socially privileged person, may, for example, refer to “the nursery bedroom” as if all children were brought up with a night nursery and a daytime nursery and a nanny. Uneducated people who live in furnished rooms and spend their evenings in pubs will seem to them to be of another species. In a world of class privilege it is easy to indulge a temperamental reserve. This does not imply that Eliot was some kind of monster of insensitivity—only that he was much more representative of, and formed by, a well-defined background than Williams. While Williams was never poor, the contrasting backgrounds of his parents and, early and late, his close contact with the lives of those who were poor, freed his work from those tell-tale allusions and unconscious assumptions which occur in the writings of people who live within the limits of a defined class. Williams, going straight from Horace Mann to medical school, did not obtain a thorough classical, scholarly education like Eliot and Pound, but, following his nose, his lively and robust curiosity about people, plunged straight from medical school into the blood and guts of Hell’s Kitchen and then to the years of GP and obstetric practice in New Jersey. All of this brought him into constant contact with a world unknown to Eliot. The ideas and aesthetics of each, then, existed in differing social contexts which each sometimes reflected and sometimes transcended. When we fail to take into account such contexts in examining works of literature, we are reflecting a similar failure prevalent in other spheres of life—a kind of parochialism which addresses symptoms not causes, or isolates a single cause from its interrelation with other causes. We can see this in medicine, in education, in the way social problems are addressed, and most of all in the way ecological disasters result from the disregard of the complex interdependence of all things.