In an earlier post,[1]
I went on record saying I am in favor of reading a long poem in radically
abridged form. My example was Asphodel,
That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams. I said the version contained
in the 1968 Selected Poems of William
Carlos Williams,[2]
which entirely omits the second and third ‘books’ of this long poem, retaining
only the first book and the Coda, is more ‘incisive’ and more memorably
‘unique’ than the original which is more than twice as long.
Recently
I have had a similar reading experience, again involving a long poem by
Williams. This past summer at a used-book store in Madison, Wisconsin, I bought
William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems,
published by New Directions in 1985 and edited by Charles Tomlinson. Unlike the
earlier volume, this edition contains an extensive selection from Williams’
book-length poem Paterson.
I am
calling the selection ‘extensive,’ but this does not at all mean it is anything
near the length of the original! The edition of the original I own, the ‘eighth
Paperbook printing,’ is some 240 pages long.[3]
In Tomlinson’s selected version, Paterson
is represented by only 38 pages – less than one-sixth. If we look not at the
total number of pages but at the proportional bulk of each of the five ‘books,’
the reduction is even more striking. The fifth book is represented by no more
than a single page. The fourth book, comprising 56 pages in the original, again
has been cut back to a single page. The third, originally 51 pages, is now two
and a half. In other words, the last three books, which together occupied about
two-thirds of the original, now make up less than one-eighth.
It is
interesting, but also fruitless, to speculate as to why Tomlinson chose to
truncate the later parts so radically. Opinions differ as to whether Williams
did the right thing by adding a fifth book long after the first four had
already been published; what cannot be denied is that the fifth book alters,
re-unifies and refocuses the whole. Williams’ biographer Paul Mariani calls the
fifth book ‘an extended meditation on the woman, the counterpoise of the male
sensibility...’[4]
and goes on to say that its ‘central icon’ is ‘the Virgin holding the Baby.’[5]
Absolutely nothing of the kind can be detected in the tiny shard preserved by
Tomlinson. Nor is there the least remnant of the (to my mind) superb ending of
the original fifth book:
...
We know nothing and can no nothing
but
the dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
the
tragic foot.
– in which the ‘foot,’ bringing together the main
preoccupations of Williams’ later poetry, undoubtedly refers both to a
physiological ‘foot’ involved in a mating ‘dance’ and to a ‘foot’ as the
metrical focus of poetry.
But
if I think it’s a shame that Tomlinson’s selection omits the new emphasis on
the feminine and the imagination, a question arises: are those elements really
prominent in the original text, or have I grown accustomed to seeking and finding
them there because of scholarly books I have read about Paterson? If I had not read books like Jerome Mazzaro’s William Carlos Williams: The Later Poems[6]
and Sherman Paul’s The Music of Survival,[7]
would I naturally have thought the fifth book of Paterson belonged in a group of late contemplative poems which
includes Asphodel and “The Desert
Music”?
I’m
just not sure. What I am prepared to say without hesitation is that cutting out
most of the third book is all to the good. I would say the same for the fourth.
In fact, in thinking of Paterson as a
whole, I can never forget what Samuel Johnson said about Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘none ever wished it
longer than it is.’
I guess what I am actually doing is reading the fifth
book of Paterson not as an integrated
text in itself, but as a collection of ‘links’ or ‘tabs’ evoking echoes of
related words and ideas which actually occur in other late works by Williams.
My interest is not in the continuous text on the printed page, but in these
scattered clues which bring in overtones. To me, those overtones compensate
for, in my appreciation actually supersede, the frankly less interesting or less
good sections of the actual text.
In other words, for a reader like me who prefers
memorably ‘incisive’ to bewilderingly bulky....viewing Williams’ work as a
whole, it is true that Less is More. But in order to know what less to read,
you have to have first read much more...
--Lloyd Haft
December 2015
[1] ‘On Translating Gorter’s
Lyrics’ (1): http://lhaftblog.blogspot.nl/2014/02/on-translating-gorters-lyrics.html
[2] New York: New Directions. This
edition contains an introduction by Randall Jarrell. The selection of the later
poems is said to have been made by ‘Mrs. Williams and a committee of editorial
advisers.’
[3] New York: New Directions.
Though the information given in the front matter on publishing history is
formidably complex, I believe myself to have deciphered that this edition as a
whole was published in 1963.
[4] Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked.
New York etc.: McGraw-Hill, 1981, p. 645.
[5]
Mariani, p. 708.
[6]
Cornell University Press, 1973.
[7]
University of Illinois Press, 1968.
