Paterson (Revised Edition)

by William Carlos Williams

  Mrs. Cumming had complained of a dizziness early in the morning; and, as her eyes had been some time fixed upon the uncommon objects before her, when she moved with the view to retrace her steps, it is probable she was seized with the same malady, tottered, and in a moment fell, a distance of 74 feet, into the frightful gulf!

  Following “caught him once more” the text omits from BH “and held him till reason had resumed her throne. He then left him, to call the neighboring people to the place.”

  The omitted final paragraph reads:

  On Wednesday, her funeral was attended by a numerous concourse of people. Her remains were carried into the church, where a pathetic and impressive discourse, happily adapted to the mournful occasion, was delivered by the Rev. James Richards. Solemn indeed was the scene. A profound silence pervaded the vast assembly. Every one seemed to hang upon the lips of the speaker. In every quarter, the sigh of sympathy and regret echoed to the tender and affecting address.

  Other differences:

  two months Original and typescripts read 2 months.

  Rev. Cumming rode/Mr. Cumming rode

  event to/event which was to

  flight/flights

  stairs (the Hundred Steps)/stairs

  view of/view of most of

  length of time/time

  The apparently early Yale Za186 typescript contains all the verbal differences and omissions in the final text except the sentences following “and his wife was gone!” which WCW cut on the 1945 galley. The Rev./Mr. difference occurs because the Yale and subsequent typescripts read “1812, rode,” and WCW added “Rev. Cumming” on Buffalo E14.

  15 Some things can be done as well as others On the UVA typescripts KH notes the source for this, and for “There’s no mistake in Sam Patch” (p. 16), as the Dictionary of American Biography. Patch’s entry in Volume 14 (1934) records: “He was generally taciturn but when in his cups would parrot his two apothegems, There’s no mistake in Sam Patch’ and ‘Some things can be done as well as others’.” These details are not in the Longwell source, see below.

  15 Noah … Faitoute In 1938 WCW started corresponding with David Lyle, a resident of Paterson interested in communication systems. In going over some of Lyle’s letters for possible inclusion in Paterson, WCW changed Lyle’s opening salutation, “Dr. Williams,” and his closing signature, variously to “Noah” and “Faitoute” (Yale uncat.). See Mariani 468–71 and Weaver 122–27.

  15–16 So far everything … he jumped Adapted with omissions and some rearrangement from Charles P. Longwell’s A Little Story of Old Paterson as Told by an Old Man (Paterson, 1901), 37–41 (see Weaver 203–204). As Weaver notes, in Longwell’s account the “robust” Tim Crane is compared to “the large, rugged stature of Sam Pope”—not Sam Patch.

  The omitted material amounts to about twenty-eight lines of the original, and no further excisions from Longwell are made on the KS galley. Following the fourth paragraph—“The shows exhibited on the Falls grounds from 1825, and continued from time to time until 1835. They also exhibited in the old trangle [sic] square called Passaic Garden, except in winter, when they used the old wigwam, after that famous structure of the war times was built.” The “to get to…. Crane” ellipsis omits “But any one wanting to go to Tim’s had to go over to Manchester and make a roundabout tour through the Red woods. So old Tim conceived the idea of putting a bridge across the chasm at his own expense. It was the first bridge put across the chasm, but it was a good investment, as every one who crossed the bridge paid a penny toll until Tim Crane was repaid for his trouble. This penny toll continued for some years before the residents of the town could get on the Falls ground free. The Crane tavern was a very old style house, and after he left it it stood vacant for many years until torn down.” Following the comparison of Crane to Patch/Pope, a new paragraph begins: “‘After leaving the tavern and grounds, which he sold to Peter Archdeacon, he built himself, about the year 1837, a log-cabin in the woods nearby. Now I have drifted away from my subject a little,’ he said, ‘but it is best that you should know this, so I told you. Now I will go back to my story of the first bridge.’” What follows in Longwell, from “So far everything …” to “placed in position” WCW moves to the beginning of the account, and Longwell’s text then continues with “When the word….”

  Other differences:

  for old Paterson/in old Paterson

  so to give/so it gave

  resident in/resident of

  various times/different times

  in the basement under the bank Not in Longwell

  in the town/in town

  the “hundred steps” … the river Not in Longwell

  over six/and over six

  other citizens/older citizens

  his manner/this manner

  were the words/are the words

  16 After this start … down stream Largely WCW’s own prose, adapted from details and language in the Dictionary of American Biography.

  16 1829 /1826 (IST, NC) Corrected in the fourth printing of the 1963 text, 1968, as a result of Weaver’s correspondence with James Laughlin, January 1967 (ND Archives). The dating error stems from the earliest typescripts.

  25–26 While at 10,000 feet… end of the street.) WCW’s first trip by air, traveling to Puerto Rico in 1941. See A 313–14, which also gives the story of “Uncle Carlos.”

  26 I was over … T. The postscript of a letter to WCW from Alva N. Turner (1878–1963). WCW originally intended to use the letter itself as well as the postscript, but cut the material on the 1945 galleys.

  The anthology Poetry Out of Wisconsin (New York, 1937), edited by August Derleth and Raymond Larsson, included a one-paragraph biographical note on Turner which he copied out and sent to WCW with a letter in 1937: “Alva Turner was born in Spring Garden township, Illinois, in 1878. He spent from 1921 to 1923 in Wisconsin. He has been a minister, a school teacher, a laborer. His celebrity, as a poet, is due chiefly to Harriet Monroe and William Carlos Williams. He has contributed to Poetry, The Editor, Judge, etc. etc. was represented in Others. He now lives in Illinois” (Buffalo F644).

  WCW had published Turner in Others in July 1919, and the two maintained a correspondence for almost forty years. The original letter is missing, and is not filed with Turner’s letters in the Buffalo or Beinecke collections. The version in Yale Za188 appears to be the earliest, although the addressee already reads “Dear Pat:” and it concludes, before the P.S., “Le votre T”—obviously WCW’s language. WCW marked the first paragraph of the letter for omission on the Za188 draft.

  The Za188 version of the material retained until cut on the galleys is printed below.

  Now about the purchase of my home. This home is at the edge of the village. There is a house across the road from me. There is one East—a quarter of a mile that is just inside of the village limits. There is no other house, on this side of the road—southside—from here to the rail-road, a quarter of a mile west. But there are houses on the north side of the road clear over the rail-road. The schoolhouse is one of them, and my mother’s home is near the schoolhouse, north, on the east side of Elm Street.

  For years, my mother, whom I have been caring for for years, has been saying I could not live there, when she is dead, because my absentmindedness might leave an oil stove on and burn the house down. My sister, whom I cared for for two years—until she obtained a job at the school, cooking and canning has been telling me she would not live with me.

  Moreover, my brother and sister in St. Louis, and my dead brother’s daughter, intend to deed their part to my eccentric sister, because she has no heir. This sister has been at me for years to get out—that’s why I went to East St. Louis last year. She didn’t want me to run my typewriter, or do anything but wash dishes three times a day, mow the lawn, tend the garden, sweep the porches and the house and mop, and clean yards, keep up the repairs and pay all the grocery bills, but ten dollars per month, which I did, until I became tired of it. So my mother told me to buy me a
home while I had the money. I did. This three roomed house has been built five years. I have painted it, tarred the kitchen roof, which is not shingled like the other two rooms, and made a lot of improvements. I am not through yet.

  This house was built by an Ina father for his son, on ten acres of land. I bought two lots. This son was run over by the train, near Bonnie, just above Ina, last spring and was cut in two. I bought part of the furniture and curtains and blinds—a heavy library table and a heavy chair to match it. I also bought a kitchen table, cabinet and two rugs. But I have a new rug on the front room. I did not buy that from the widow. I tied the knot between this couple, several years ago.

  The editor of the Ina Observer has given me several write-ups in his paper about me and my new home.

  I am enclosing the poem I promised you. It is the first I have written since I have occupied the hermitage.

  Le votre

  T

  WCW makes some minor editorial changes on the Buffalo E13 typescript. The sentence on the schoolhouse becomes “The schoolhouse, north, on the east side of Elm Street,” probably because the typist skipped a line in retyping. The identifying references to Ina were cut on the early typescripts, and the postscript’s remaining references to St. Louis and East St. Louis and “Skip” changed to “Hartford” and “Billy” at the page proof stage. “Billy” was actually the name of Turner’s cat, about whom he sent WCW a poem that WCW in turn passed on to View, where it appeared in the Feb.-March 1942 issue, p. 5, with a note by WCW.

  Billy/Skip was Turner’s sister Eva Forest Getsbacher (1894–1948). Turner wrote to WCW of her death, enclosing an obituary he had written himself, on June 19, 1948 (Yale uncat.). Turner writes, “Skip is the sister I once wrote you about—the one that forced me to move out…. but in the last few years she had subdued the vixen that was in her and manifested the devotee. I will miss her very much.”

  throsh Turner probably wrote “thrash,” the reading on the earlier Buffalo typescripts.

  On the postscript that remains in the final text, the Buffalo E13 retyping skips a line following “helped wash”; the line reads “and even did it by myself, carried in coal, water, carried out slop,” on Za188.

  obsessed with fire As the April 1957 issue of Poetry reported, in printing Turner’s poem “Unmolested Beauty,” the Ina house “burned down to the ground last summer and he lost everything he owned, including his radio and his typewriter.” And see Weaver 204, who gives a 1954 date.

  28 I positively feel … E. D. From a letter [1943?] to WCW from Edward Dahlberg, the first of two letters from Dahlberg in Paterson (see 226–227). Not filed with Dahlberg’s letters to WCW at HRC or Yale, and not included in his volume of selected letters, Epitaphs of Our Times. As with the Nardi and Turner letters used in Book 1, WCW originally intended to use much more of the letter, but cut the material down on the 1945 KS galleys.

  A version of the letter filed with the Yale Za186 typescripts appears to be the original transcription typescript, although a page of the letter is missing, probably because WCW had never intended to use it. The first fourteen lines of this version are crossed through. The Za186 typescript continues with the paragraphs that are substantially unchanged until they appear on the 1945 galleys, where they are cut:

  I have always abhorred busy people, being too busy to talk, to be able to sit down a few minutes the way the Brahma or the Sacred Cow sits, to put together a letter, which is a way of arranging the pieces of one’s spirit, it is just a hoax, and you ought to know that, and if you don’t you ought to spend some time finding it out, even, if you have to damn me for pointing it out to you.

  Frankly, I don’t know what you are saying when you put the past into a frozen theorem, separate and apart from the present. I know of no such past or present; I only know of Nero, of Abraham sitting underneath the terebinth, or Modigliani painting glandular physiognomies, or Socrates prattling in the Symposium, or Sherwood Anderson walking through one of those blighted and noisesome downtown sections, and answering me, as I said to him, ‘Consider with what malice this city must have been conceived.’ ‘Oh, it just happened,’ as of one kind of human continuum. Time to me is an infant’s conception, which Heraclitus so detested. Time is something you mention when you have sick nerves and cannot stand still or sit in quiet either to paint, or smile or talk or listen to somebody else. It’s an occidental fraud, in the main, and there are no people in the world so concerned as the American, who positively has no time, with the clock. It always appeared to me that it was no accident that the glum little Swiss were clock-makers, and that the inhabitants of Königsberg set their watches soon as they saw the apriori Immanuel Kant. The hatred, by the way, of the past, all human lore and poetry, is best illustrated by the modern state which always commemorates and canonizes its own murder-uses by starting a year one for the people. But enough.

  The paragraphs finally included in the poem differ from the Za186 version only in minor punctuation changes and the spelling of some proper names—the latter changed through various reprintings. The first edition and NC printings read T.J for E.D., the change coming with the 1963 printing.

  Dahlberg wrote to John Thirlwall on Jan 21, 1955: “I knew nothing of the Paterson letter until Charles Olson, a friend of Williams and myself, told me Williams had printed something of mine in his poem. I was not troubled so much because he did this without my knowledge; what disturbed me were the initials T.J. I am not T.J., or am I? Yes, I am a Jew, and Williams’ grandmother was…. The worst antisemites are half-Jews, for they know not which of their origins are more truthful or savory” (uncatalogued correspondence to Thirlwall, Yale). While Dahlberg admired WCW’s In the American Grain, he was no fan of Paterson, writing to Robert McAlmon in 1953: “I think his Paterson … is a fraud. The man is very spongy, and imagines by repeating the word rock about a hundred and thirty-five times that he can become hard or give the effect of having ophidian intellect,” Epitaphs of Our Times, 137.

  32 He was more … anxious parent Noted as WCW’s prose by Thirlwall in his own copy of Paterson. The early Buffalo manuscripts contain many revisions.

  32–33 In time of … who sleep KH notes on the UVA typescript, underlining the lines on the French maid and the pet Pomeranians: “references to the Gould heiress, ref through Musya [and Charles] Sheeler.” Weaver 205 notes that WCW mentions the Tarrytown estate of Princesse de Talleyrand, née Gould, in A 334, where the context is WCW’s close friends the Sheelers.

  33 Cornelius Doremus….50 cents. Nelson 386 and NS 138–139 print this list identically, but the source is almost certainly Nelson. A second list that is cut on the KS typescript, and that is also in both sources, reproduces a raised footnote number when first transcribed on Za186 that is only in Nelson.

  The list suffered some unintended changes of small details in the original transcription and the Buffalo retypings. I have restored the correct spelling of Acquackanonk (Acquackonock in all printings), and corrected the “Kastor hot” of all printings to “castor hat”—both reflecting transcription errors in early typescripts. The source largely omits “cents” after the monetary figure, as does Za186. The change occurs on the Buffalo typescripts.

  Other significant differences from Nelson:

  and died/and who died Word omitted in Za186 transcription

  Following “comfort” WCW cuts “Here is the list of his wardrobe, etc.” on Za186.

  4 pillow cases, $2.12 Nelson reads “4 pairs pillow cases, $2.12½”: transcription error Buffalo E13

  a handkerchief, $1.75 Nelson reads “2 handkerchiefs .75”: transcription errors in Yale 186 and Buff E14

  1 pair andirons, $2.00/Buffalo E14 reads $.00, which is what appeared in IST. For NC and subsequent printings this was changed to $1.00. I have restored the Nelson and Zal86 amount.

  The Calendar of Wills in Documents Relating to the Colonial, Revolutionary, and. Post-Revolutionary History of the State of New Jersey, First Series, Vol. 39, 10 (Trenton, 1946) 134 records that in an
1801 will Doremus left his lands to his seven surviving children and the heirs of his eighth.

  34–35 By nightfall … work went on Taken from a longer article, “Draining the Lake at Lakeview,” that appeared in The Prospector, 28 August 1936, 4. In all printings of the poem the opening date is given as “nightfall of the 28th.” I have restored “the 29th,” the date in the source and in the apparent transcription typescript, Za186. The change occurs in the retypings.

  WCW reproduces about two-thirds of the article, and not all the omissions are marked by an ellipsis. He omits the opening twenty-two lines concerning the contract to drain the lake. A sentence summarizing the details is cut on the galleys.

  Other omissions: between

  drawn off—a black crowd: “Mr. Van Riper had prepared a wire screen and nets and endeavored to rescue the fish in the earlier part of the day and Mr. Regnor and others had nets ready; but they were only moderately successful. The fish did not run into their nets to any extent, although they got all they wanted before they left. But a crowd of men and hoodlums gathered.”

  bottom—some hundred: “It was an exciting scene after 4 o’clock, for the bottom for”

  dam—the whole: “had been drained so that men could wade in the mud, and the fight for the eels began.”

  still there—There seemed: “gleaning the remainder. One man passed the eight o’clock train from Paterson on his way up with a snapping turtle in one hand, three great eels in another and his boys with all they could carry.”

  the eels—Those who: “It was a funny circumstance at the lake on the night of the 29th, that”

  roadway—Little boys: “All Madison Park seemed to be out.”

  and eels—four wagon: “and the heaps everywhere comprised one of the queerest sights to be imagined. Mr. Mace who was present, and had with the others watched the affair, said.”

  carried away—At least: “The man who secured the larger ones gave the smaller ones to little boys to carry away”