The Doctor Stories

by William Carlos Williams

  Writing to his mother in the spring of 1916, my father sounds like anything but a struggling young physician, three years married, father of one, still being judged by the established physicians of the town, as well as a school doctor and physician to the county orphanage, serving gratis. In his freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he had established in his own mind that his love lay in the arts, but he would persist with his medical education for the income it would bring, thus making possible the pursuit of his muse. And his practice of medicine, like all things he would undertake, would be a full-time job, conscientiously pursued, the need of his patient always receiving first priority. As if to apologize to the art of medicine for placing it second to poetry in his favor, he would go to the front lines, the trenches where the truly needy were, taking with him his knowledge and skill. He would become what we now know as a family practitioner.

  This double commitment, to poetry and to medicine, would dictate his manner of living for the rest of his life. It demanded time and energy, and he would supply both bountifully, often at the expense of his family. Here at home we experienced a daily countdown and “blast off.” By the time we assembled for breakfast, he had probably already done an hour’s stint on the typewriter. There was no physicians’ exchange—the phone was at his elbow at mealtimes, brought to the table on an extension cord. Another interruption was the mailman’s whistle, announcing the morning delivery of mail. (A second delivery would come at one o’clock.) The list of calls having been compiled, he was out the door to the garage before we kids had swallowed our cod-liver oil and lit out for school. First stop probably the post office, mailing manuscripts and personal correspondence to maintain communication with his fellow poets, and in later years to advise the young ones aspiring to recognition. Then house calls, working his way to the hospital for rounds, clinics, committee meetings, whatnot. Finally home for lunch, a sit-down meal, hopefully twenty to thirty minutes allowed for nourishment and conversation with Floss. Often a quick nap on the couch in the living room, then one o’clock office hours, conducted for forty years without nurse or secretary assistance—a small attached lab for basic blood and urine analyses—one to three p.m., or until the last patient was seen. House calls again, particularly in winter, with perhaps fifteen minutes swiped to get down a fragment of verse on the machine folded away beneath the office desk. Evening and supper waiting. Mom frequently telling Lucy, the maid, to put it on the table for herself and us two boys and a plate in the oven for the doctor. Home to eat. Napkin folded, rolled and tucked in its ring before the retreat through the kitchen to the office again. Once more hours seven to nine, or until the last patient was seen, hating this ultimate drain on his time and energy, as he would confess years later to Ezra Pound. “I am now engaged in cutting out much of my medical work under the guise of becoming a ‘specialist.’ Within a few months I will have done with evening office hours, that hellish drag.”

  Where in this hectic daily routine was there time for poetry? Where would he find energy and peace of mind to give “a free outpouring of everything I feel”? Where would he find “the unknown perfection—not a religious, heavenly perfection but a full-blooded earthly perfection that is fragile as all life is and as sweet”? Part of the answer lies in his great opportunism—the talent for grasping, creating precious moments stolen from that alter ego, the doctor, and used to unburden himself of poetic images. Perhaps on the road to the hospital, the car would be drawn to the curb and a fragment jotted awkwardly in pencil in a little red notebook which started life as a record of his doings as school doctor, and latterly became a catchall for images, phrases, and poems, such as:

  When I glance

  from the

  colored ad of

  Min’s

  corsets to the

  healthy

  creature sitting

  below it

  then I realize

  at last the

  sacredness of art

  But then

  continuing home

  from the opera

  I enjoy the

  walk under

  the trees in the

  cool more—

  which proves

  art to be

  futile.

  Alternating notes concerning school business and writing continue page after page:

  Sept. 10 Visited all schools

  Sept. 14 Visited all schools and began exam. Wash, and Union.

  Meany-Mumps

  tel. Thomas

  Sept. 15 Excl. L———’s 3 children

  Sylvan impetigo till Monday.

  31 in Wash. Kindergart.—Too many

  This is obviously the notebook of a conscientious school physician, and for the first four pages all entries concern school matters. Suddenly on page 4:

  what is it that is so excellent in the Japanese artist? but that they have seen their fish, their fowls, their horses in intimate completeness.

  Then more pages of school business.

  Sept. 29 6th grade Pierrepont School

  exam for pediculosis

  One exclud. Marie D———

  Lincoln

  No way to turn off room

  —Pipes in Kind, covered c asbestos

  Interjections irrelevant to school business increase. Finally the little notebook has been reversed, and the rear pages used exclusively for images, sketches, and quotations from the speech of patients.

  The little red notebook will record the details of the nitpicking daily drudgery of the school doctor and help him make his report to the Board of Health. But it will also catch and hold like a Breughel canvas the human parade, the chips and flakes that fly about for the sensitive mind to appreciate and harvest. Here is a handwritten record of the workings of the mind of a poet-physician on his daily rounds, including, further along, this prescription for himself:

  If I did not have

  verse

  I would have died

  or been

  a thief

  But even larger chunks of time were available while the rest of the world slept. It was at night that he would call on apparently endless stores of energy, the tattoo of his typewriter providing a reassuring lullaby to which my brother Paul and I slept and awoke throughout childhood. I can recall the projection of his mood brought to me by the cadence of the keys—the smooth andante when all was happy and serene, and the interrupted staccato when the going got rough, the carriage slamming, and the paper ripped from the roller, balled, and heaved in the direction of the waste-basket. Night was his time to roar. Here was happiness, his love, Poetry, but apparently in insufficient quantity or quality to completely satisfy. Further along in his letter to his mother he will say: “I must do something … some high deed of spiritual happiness, nothing cowardly, nothing low, nothing small—some deed of great love for humanity perhaps, some venture for the sake of poetry, the art I love.” And in another paragraph, “I must dare higher. It is only the (?) fire we ourselves put into our lives that gives strength to our imaginations, it is the power of love that makes us live and do. Just as at Penn I gave up dentistry for medicine—just as a little later I really gave up medicine for poetry—and a little later I gave up a personal disappointment and its bitterness for dearest Flossie’s love and the care of it so now I feel on the brink of a new change.”

  Here is a man making his living at medicine who has given up medicine for poetry. One wonders how he originally became involved in the medical process. Being an inexact science, medicine would certainly be no medium for this man of strongly idealistic philosophy to employ in his search for the “unknown perfection,” whatever that might be. Undoubtedly there were parental forces that determined what his role in life would be. The strongest influence in his home environment was his mother, if only because she was continually present while his traveling papa was elsewhere for the greatest part of the formative years of both Will and his brother, Ed. His mother’s brother Carlos, a Paris-educated physician
, was the apple of Elena’s eye, and her total support after the death of her parents. He had returned from France to their home in Puerto Rico, later moving to Santo Domingo, and finally with his sister safely married to my grandfather, migrated to the mainland, first to Panama and later to Ecuador. Young Will was impressed by Mama, with whom as man and boy he always maintained a very close spiritual relationship, to continue the “tradition” and become a physician. “Pop” the wandering agent, on the other hand, having a very fuzzy familial anlage which his mother, Grandma Welcome, would never divulge, certainly could bring no pressure based on family precedent. He was, however, a drug salesman on a grand scale. Apparently his whole professional life was devoted to one concern, a wholesale supplier and importer of medicinals, Lanman and Kemp, 137 Water Street, New York City, founded A.D. 1808. This required travel to cities as widely separated and disparate as Geneva and Guayaquil, which was no small accomplishment and kept him away from home for months at a time. (There was very little express air travel to Europe and South America between 1880 and 1918, when he died.) What type of agent he was, and how familiar with medical terminology he was, I don’t know, but as an indicator of some of the literature he was familiar with, I quote from a letter he wrote to my father on April 27, 1906. “I mailed you yesterday what I think you will find a good book, consisting of extracts from Dr. Osier’s writings. … I read an article lately, from the London Lancet I think, in which it said that it is a fallacy to suppose that an unlimited amount of menial work can be done if an equal excess of physical exercise is performed.”

  So we have an English gentleman papa (he never became an American citizen), who is to some extent conversant with medical literature, apparently for business purposes. Somehow I doubt this was ever a factor in my father’s decision to become a physician. On the other hand I feel Mama leaned heavily on her son Will to emulate his Uncle Carlos. She got her wish and thereby initiated a dichotomy in his life which persisted until in late years a series of cerebral and neoplastic illnesses made it impossible for him to continue either as artist or physician.

  During his productive years he had frequently flirted with the idea of giving up medicine and seeking his living as a writer. His friend Ezra Pound had urged him to pull up stakes and go to Europe, where the action was, and he and Floss made two trips to France, Austria, and Italy in the twenties, sampling the Bohemian life of the artists in Paris and living for a while on the Riviera. On their first trip just after World War I they went to Vienna, where Dad studied in the clinics of what were then some of the leading lights in the beginning specialty of pediatrics. It was on his return to the States after this experience that he began to limit his practice more and more to the diseases of children. However, the dream of the artist’s life never materialized. It must have been obvious to him that the public was not ready for his work: “Gee Doc, your poetry is very interesting, but what does it mean?” For which he had no answer, maintaining that if the poem had no significance to the reader on first reading, there was little hope that interpretation by the author would give any more profound enlightenment.

  I recall a reading one evening at the home of a local physician, the audience consisting entirely of fellow doctors from his hospital. Gentlemen all. Fond of old Doctor Bill. Polite and attentive, aware of his reputation as a poet, anxious to get the word, i.e. the key to the code that would make it all clear. … His closing lines were much in the form and mood of an orison.

  O clemens! O pia! O dolcis!

  Maria!

  There was an appropriate silence at the conclusion, broken after ten or fifteen seconds by the host, who inquired, “Are you a Catholic, Bill?” To which Dad replied in the negative, adding that so far as formal religion went, he was brought up a Unitarian, though his parents had been Catholic and Church of England. It was immediately apparent to me that he was perturbed about something, although it wasn’t until later driving home that he could explain his annoyance to me, i.e., the inference that his spontaneous expression of love and respect for some power beyond our understanding must stem from some formal catechism dictating his thoughts and emotions. However, there was nothing vindictive in his reaction, for by this stage in his life he had grown to accept his eccentricity and his designation as a revolutionary in the arts.

  It was a more painful experience to be rebuffed by his brother Ed. The two boys were born within a year of each other. They had always been pals, commuted together to Horace Mann for years, played on the same teams (Dad the pitcher and Ed the catcher), dated the same girls (later each had his proposal of marriage turned down by the same girl), were classmates in Switzerland and Paris, corresponded regularly when Dad was at Penn and Ed at M.I.T., traveled together through Italy in 1910 when Ed was enjoying his reward (studying in Rome) for winning the prestigious Prix de Rome and Dad was returning to his fiancée in Rutherford after a year of postgraduate study in Leipzig. Our home always featured paintings that Ed gave Dad for Christmas. He was a very good watercolorist, and his works didn’t suffer by being exhibited on the same walls with Demuth, Sheeler, Hartley, and Shahn. But Ed was a conservative, a student of classical architecture, with no patience for the radical and the outré. His attitude toward his brother’s work had always been one of smiling understanding and tolerance—give the boy plenty of rope and he’ll hang himself sort of thing. But one morning a volume of Dad’s poems that he had been at pains to deliver to Ed’s home appeared in our mailbox, apparently placed there by Edgar on his daily trip by the house en route to the 7:52 to New York on the Erie. There was an accompanying letter describing the book’s contents as vulgar and immoral, incomprehensible balderdash, and something that he, Ed, would not tolerate in his home.

  To quote from Chapter 4 of Dad’s autobiography, “I’ll never forget the dream I had a few days after he [his father] died, after a wasting illness, on Christmas Day 1918. I saw him coming down a peculiar flight of exposed steps, steps I have since identified as those before the dais of Pontius Pilate in some well-known painting. But this was in a New York office building, Pop’s office. He was bareheaded and had some business letters in his hand on which he was concentrating as he descended. I noticed him and with joy cried out, Top! so, you’re not dead!’ But he only looked up at me over his right shoulder and commented severely, ‘You know all that poetry you’re writing. Well, it’s no good.’ I was left speechless and woke trembling. I have never dreamed of him since.”

  Misunderstood by the man in the street (whom he dearly loved), an enigma to his peers in the medical profession, condemned as a blasphemer by his closest pal, his brother, and finally as they say in the vernacular “wiped out” by his father, it becomes fairly obvious why he could never convince himself that there was a living for him to be made in writing. Fortunately there was medicine, his entrée into the homes and minds of his neighbors, which qualified him to explore, as he himself put it, the ischio-rectal abcesses of mankind, and incidentally thereby earn a living. The “art” of medicine would be his crutch, supporting him and his family while he was “absent” on his crusade. How successful was his assault on the citadel only he would be qualified to say. Recognition by his contemporaries of a “good try” would come posthumously as the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel.

  William Eric Williams, M.D.

  February 1983

  Rutherford, New Jersey

  Copyright © 1932, 1933, 1934, 1937, 1938, 1941, 1943, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1962 by William Carlos Williams

  Introduction copyright © 1984 by Robert Coles

  Afterword copyright © 1983 by William Eric Williams

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  William Eric Williams’s essay, “My Father,
the Doctor,” first appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 47 and in the William Carlos Williams Commemorative Issue of the Journal of the Medical Society of New Jersey. A different version of the poem, “The Birth,” was first published in the Winter 1962 issue of the Massachusetts Review but neither variant appears in any collection of Williams’s poems.

  First published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 585 in 1984

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Williams, William Carlos, 1883–1963.

  The doctor stories.

  (A New Directions Book)

  1. Physicians—Fiction. I. Coles, Robert. II. Title.

  PS3545.1544A6 1984 813'.52 84-8372

  eISBN 978-0-8112-2015-6

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation,

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  Asphodel and Other Love Poems

  The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

  The Build-up

  The Collected Poems, Volume I

  The Collected Poems, Volume II

  The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams

  The Doctor Stories

  The Embodiment of Knowledge

  Imaginations

  In the American Grain

  In the Money

  I Wanted to Write a Poem