William Carlos Williams and Paris

Many moons ago, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Ezra Pound were students together at the University of Pennsylvania. Like me, Pound never finished his Ph.D. in Romance Languages at Penn. Williams became a doctor. His self-portrait still hangs in the rare book room of the Penn library. Later they all went on to become recognized masters of the poetic craft.

Williams' life, however, diverged from the others. He remained in the United States while the others chose to live in Europe. His poetic choices paralleled that decision. And his relationships were affected as a result. As I read these anecdotes from a recent New York Review of Books article, I couldn't help but think of that dynamic:

The most painful experience of insecurity, Leibowitz shows, came in 1924, when Williams and his wife left Rutherford, New Jersey, for a trip to Paris, then the world capital of modernism. The whole time, Williams was certain he was being scorned by people like Ezra Pound and H.D., his old acquaintances from the University of Pennsylvania, and he reacted with preemptive anger. “I ground my teeth out of resentment,” he wrote, “though I acknowledge their privilege to step on my face if they could.” Invited to a premiere, Williams deliberately wore a ratty tuxedo: “It was intended as a gesture of contempt and received just that.” Told that the writer Valéry Larbaud wanted to meet him, he responded self-abasingly, “Who is this man Larbaud who has so little pride that he wishes to talk with me?”

But the major focus of Williams’s resentment and insecurity was undoubtedly Eliot. A chapter of Williams’s Autobiography is titled “The Waste Land,” but it contains only one paragraph about Eliot’s poem: “Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him.” Williams, who went directly from high school to medical school, was put at a disadvantage by Eliot’s show of erudition. With American avant-garde writers generally, Williams claims, “literary allusions…were unknown to us. Few had the necessary reading.” Late in life, he confessed in an interview that he was “insanely jealous” of Eliot, “who was much more cultured than I was.” (Rather movingly, Leibowitz writes that Williams, invited to share a stage with Eliot’s admirer Allen Tate, “armed himself against possible attack by reading George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prosody, vowing not to be humiliated or viewed as an ignoramus.”)