TITULO VIII. DE LA RAMA JUDICIAL
DE LA JURISDICCIÓN CONSTITUCIONAL
Williams had been planning a prose project since as early as 1928. Indeed, one of the main reasons why it took so long for Williams to start Paterson was that from 1928 to 1930 he considered writing it as a novel. The notes for this unfinished prose novel, despite being scattered and unfinished, are nevertheless worth examining, since they point to a completely different and unexpected side of Williams.
The initial fragmented notes of the plot outline show two different strands to the projected story. The first strand is centred on the figure of Dolores Marie Pischak, who Williams also wrote about in The Descent of Winter.111 Her story (focusing on ideas of ‘religion and crime’) is tragic; her first lover is found dead in a river, she is raped and gets pregnant, subsequently refusing to have an abortion. It is unclear how much of this
111This name is a variation of the name of a girl that tried to seduce Williams. See Mariani, William
derives from real people that Williams met, but certainly there are some very clear similarities with the short stories that Williams wrote in the early 1930s. Her baby, for instance, in a sketch that is reminiscent of ‘Jean Beicke,’ is taken to the hospital and abandoned: ‘They put it there to die - but it didn’t.’ The notes hint toward an attempted suicide followed by the family reuniting at the end.
The other main strand of the plot focuses on a male figure (most probably the father). He is offered money by ‘Big Frank’ and the mob but refuses to take it and consequently gets involved in a shoot-out. Another clear similarity to the short stories of
The Knife of the Times is in the use of the ‘house call’ as a plot device for observing and
recording ordinary lives. But instead of the figure of the doctor making house calls, which we find in his short stories, Williams planned to cast the hero as Detective Gus.112 Williams also hints at plans to add a political layer to the plot through the Mayoral elections.
If the plot elements are a cliché of The Black Mask Boys and other 1920s gangster comics, then the same is also true of the style. Words like ‘jack’ (money), ‘boob’ (simpleton), and ‘Giney’ (wimp), pervade the imitation New York gangster dialect. There can be no doubt that Williams wanted to write something populist, a prose masterpiece of low-down America, with the city of Paterson at its center,113 but from his notes it is clear he never finalized the plot. In the end, he rejected the crime novel as a vessel for his Paterson project, and abandoned the story.
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112Gus also has a secret, that he has an illegitimate child which he is raising in the back of a speakeasy.
Was Williams making a confession? At the William Carlos Williams Society Conference 2012 evidence was put forward that Williams had an illegitimate child.
113 Yale, Series 2. Writings, Box54, Folder 1227. The various notes are dated from July 1928 through to
During the summer of 1930, however, Johns began encouraging Williams to turn his attentions once more to the novel form, and offered to pay to serialized his fiction in
Pagany. Williams therefore began to work on a new project. He had decided that he
wanted to write a work of art in which the hero was a baby. Rather than using the clichéd plot elements of crime fiction he would base his novel on the true story of his wife Floss and her family, from birth to adulthood (IWWP, 61). The resulting work,
White Mule, became the exemplar of the kind of realist prose that Pagany was disposed
towards publishing, a compromise between low down and high brow America.
The catalyst for beginning the project was most likely the death of Floss’ father on 27th March 1930. Floss’ father, Paul Hermann, had shot himself whilst hunting, leaving the family deeply in grief. Although the protagonist of the trilogy overall is Floss herself, in many ways the real protagonist of this first novel was actually Paul Hermann, or ‘Joe Stetcher.’ White Mule can in many ways be seen as a tribute to his father-in-law and his ideals. Joe Stetcher, like Williams himself, is a working professional, caught between the left and right. His hatred for the profiteering capitalist bosses is matched only by his hatred of the similarly profiteering unions and the saboteurs who needlessly threaten the business and livelihoods that depend on it. Like Williams, Stetcher has to navigate his own middle path through this minefield. Stetcher is very much a representative of the old America. He carries an almost religious fervour for the value of hard work, skill and craftsmanship, and an equally potent dislike for the corrupting influence of money.114 In his 1937 review of White Mule, Philip Rahv describes Stetcher as a ‘pure artisan, a man who has not yet been alienated from the product of his
labor.’115 Rahv correctly sees ‘a correspondence’ between Stetcher and Williams, particularly in his ‘philosophy of workmanship,’ his dislike of political ‘automatism,’ and in his search for a satisfactory resolution between the competing claims of labor and capital.116
The first chapter, published in the third issue of Pagany, July 1930, begins, as do so many of his short stories of the period, with a birth. Apart from his connection with paediatrics there is another reason why it was natural for Williams to make a baby the hero of the novel. There is a theme running throughout much of Williams’ work that can be traced back directly to Emerson’s writings on the wisdom of children, of trusting to your ‘natural’ or childish self, and refusing to conform to the pressures of adult society.117 In one sense, the new consciousness of America had always been associated with the consciousness of children. This also is the theme of The Embodiment of
Knowledge, written for his two sons, in which Williams deplores the American school
system for turning children into automatons. The novel therefore begins by celebrating the wild freedom of its new born hero:
She entered, as Venus from the sea, dripping... If Venus did not cry aloud after release from the pressures of that sea-womb, feeling the new and lighter flood springing in her chest, flinging out her arms – this one did.’118
115
Philip Rahv, ‘Torrents of Spring,’ Nation (26 June 1937), p. 733; reprinted in William Carlos Williams: The Critical Heritage, ed. Charles Doyle (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p.144.
116 Ibid, p.145. 117
In ‘Self-Reliance’ Emerson writes that great men have always ‘confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age... Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.’ See Essays and Lectures, p.260.
George Monteiro argues convincingly that this opening is an attack on the pristine and dignified Botticellian Venus, and at the same time a criticism of American Puritanism.119 Instead of emerging full grown with flowing golden hair, Williams’ Venus is covered with a lard-like slime, urinating, and defecating. On top of this he refuses to desexualize the baby, ‘Open your legs now till I rub some of this oil in there’ the midwife says.
You’ll open them glad enough one of these days – if you’re not sorry for it... In the folds of the groin, the crotch where the genitals all budding and angry red seemed presages of some future growth – she rubbed the warm oil.120
The reaction to this first chapter gives some measure of the artistic climate into which it was launched. The New York World described it as a ‘most disgusting tale. Williams is a physician and in literature a man of taste, but you won’t believe either when you read this story of a new born baby and its behavior.’121 A fellow doctor writing to Williams after reading the first chapter appears to treat it as a kind of manual, as ‘excellent education for prospective young mothers,’ designed to help them get over any ‘illusions concerning the beauty of childbirth.’122 Erskine Caldwell, a Blues writer who had recently gained a reputation for good writing on the little magazines circuit wrote to Johns:
Williams gives me an inelegant puke with his White Mule but he’s got something (God knows I don’t know what it is) that nobody else ever had. He’s as creative as a bull jumping a fence but I don’t like the windward smell.123
119
George Monteiro, ‘The Existence of an American Venus: William Carlos Williams versus Henry Adams,’ Journal of Modern Literature, 20:2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 248-253.
120 Williams, ‘White Mule,’ Pagany, 1:3 p.5. 121
The New York World, 12th June, 1930.
122 Letter from Walter L. Liefield to WCW, 25th May, 1931. WCW forwarded the letter to RJ and it now
resides in the Pagany archives at Delaware with the rest of the WCW/RJ correspondence.
Despite the general trend towards realism, even writers on the left such as Caldwell found this confrontation with the realities of birth overwhelming. Williams had always felt that rather than attempting to get to grips with the realities of proletarian life, the left had indoctrinated itself too thoroughly in stereotypes and standard plot devices: the selfish capitalist boss, the hero’s Damascene conversion to the left, the poor mother-figure who still finds the heart to be generous in the hero’s moment of need. In one sense then, White Mule is a reply to the left, a raw expression of untamed reality.
In his classic study, The radical novel in the United States, 1900-1954, Walter B. Rideout outlines four main types or plots for the radical novel during the 1930s: conversion novels (in which the protagonist is converted to Marxism), strike novels, novels of middle-class decay, and ‘bottom dog’ novels (named after Dahlberg's eponymous work of fiction) about the down-and-out. White Mule is deeply concerned with middle class life, but not as a picture of decay, rather as a picture of middle class aspiration and striving. It might also be considered a strike novel, but unlike typical strike novels it doesn’t venerate the strike breakers. Indeed, during the course of the novel Stetcher actually betrays the AFL and uses scabs to break a strike. He treats the bosses and the unions with identical disdain, seeing them both as money making enterprises, and refusing to be held ransom by either. In this respect, White Mule might also be considered a ‘conversion novel,’ but rather than a conversion to Marxism, it would be a conversion from Marxism into something else entirely – what Williams calls an ‘open shop’ policy.
Like the majority of his stories, Williams based the general outline of the novel, on a true story – that of his father-in-law, Pa Herman. Breslin notes that in The Great
American Novel and Voyage to Pagany Williams had shunned ‘plots’ for their ability to
‘smooth over the jagged edges of raw experience.’124
In White Mule, Williams moved closer to mainstream fiction than he had at any time in his career, but he attempted to do so in a way that would preserve those ‘jagged edges.’ The archives at Buffalo detail the extensive research Williams did into his father-in-law's history. His father-in-law Paul Herman had previously been the manager of a print-shop, whose primary business was a government contract for printing money orders. The print-shop was always awarded the contract, and there was a hint of corruption, stemming from the fact that the superintendant of the money order system had a son who worked for the same company. In 1903, Herman left the company in order to start his own print-shop, and he put in his own bid for the money orders, with the backing of New York financers and the support of a New York union. The superintendant of the money order system awarded Herman’s former employer the contract as usual, and ignored Herman’s bid, despite being legally obligated to award it to the lowest bidder. Herman took the matter to court. His former employer struck back arguing that Herman himself had prepared their bid whilst in their employ and thus had ‘knowledge of its terms.’ The matter went all the way up to the White House, with Theodore Roosevelt even becoming embroiled in the affair. Eventually Herman won the legal action and the entire business became something of a scandal.125 One newspaper article collected by Williams describes the case as symptomatic of government corruption and nepotism:
124 Breslin, An American Artist, p.127. 125 Buffalo, WCW Papers, B51.
The case of James T. Metcalf, the superintendant of the money order system, who was summarily dismissed yesterday by Postmaster-General Payne for endeavouring to divert a contract for manufacturing money order blanks from the lowest to a high bidder, with a resulting loss to the Government of $45,000 a year, is considered to be but a flash in the pan.126
One can see why Williams decided the story was worth re-telling during the 1930s, particularly in its exploration of corruption and nepotism. In essence, Herman’s move in starting his own print-shop was to cut out the capitalist boss. Williams carries this anti-capitalist feeling into White Mule, suggesting that there is ‘something fundamentally wrong with the capitalistic system itself’ (WM, 245), a feeling that is embodied in the figure of Wynnewood and his son, Lester. Stetcher arranges the bid for the money contract in such a way as to give Wynnewood an honest 10% profit-margin. Wynewood, however, rewrites the bid to inflate the figures, and then goes to ‘the club’ where he puts in a word (or a bribe) with the right people: ‘any bid under Wynnewood Crossman co. goes in the waste basket’ (WM, 54). Stetcher evidently despises the way that the real business, the actual profit, is kept within ‘the club,’ and passed down from father to son. There appears to be an unbridgeable gap between the Joe Stetchers, who have worked their way up with effort and talent, and the Wynnewoods who are born into the right social circles. Stetcher is therefore a kind of revolutionary, and after stealing Wynnewood’s business he himself becomes a new kind of working-boss, sharing the profits more evenly with his employees. Stetcher describes this as an ‘open shop’ policy,127 whereby the distribution of company profits would be publically
126 ‘New Yorker Indicted for Postal Frauds,’ The New York Times, 6th October, 1903. See Buffalo, WCW
Papers, B51.
127 Stetcher describes his policy towards his new workers as being to pay them ‘as much as the business
can stand’ and to ‘stick to them as long as they stick to me,’ but to quickly fire those who fail to deliver what he wants. (WM, 244).
available information, giving the workers complete transparency as to how company profits were being spent and to make their voice in the running of the company heard.
The novel explores typical 1930s themes: nepotism, corruption, big business, union sabotage, profiteering etc. But the true story of Pa Herman allows Williams to explore these themes in a way that was less politically one-sided, and less morally high- minded than his contemporaries. As such White Mule offers an interesting alternative to books such as Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike! (1930), Fielding Burke’s Call Home the
Heart (1932) or Robert Cantwell’s Land of Plenty (1934).
Despite writing to Johns in June 1930 that he already had the next two chapters drafted,128 Williams was utterly unable to progress any further with it. The fact was that he was suffering from depression and writer’s block. He wrote to Zukofsky in May 1930 that he had never been ‘so hellishly distraught’ in his life and that even he did not fully understand why.129 Mariani attributes this writer’s block to an unfortunate incident which befell Williams’ mother when she slipped on ice and cracked her hip, with the result that she would never walk again, as well as the death of Floss’ father.130 Certainly these were significant factors. Yet there are a number of other convincing factors too. There can be no doubt that Williams was feeling the strain of living a double life. His 1929 poem ‘Birds and Flowers’ which subsequently became part of his 1930 work ‘Della Primavera Transportata Morale’ expresses his feelings very nicely:
I plan one thing – that I could press
128
WCW to RJ, 5th June, 1930.
129 WCW to LZ, 9th May 1930, p.64.
130 Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
buttons to do the curing of and caring for the sick that I do laboriously now by hand for cash, to have the time
when I am fresh, in the morning, when
my mind is clear and burning – to write (CPI, 324-5)
Indeed in 1930, Williams began cutting back on his practice ‘under the guise of becoming a “specialist.”’ (SL, 108). Nevertheless, whilst we commonly assume that Williams was already an established writer by this point in his career, it is clear to those who read his correspondence of this period, that Williams was starting to doubt if he would ever secure a place for himself in literary history. It is this general feeling of powerlessness, political and economic, that the poem captures, and his alienation from a society that did not care for poetry. As a result, Williams was feeling uncertain as to which direction his writing career was moving in, if indeed it was going anywhere at all. The result of this was that he was beginning to doubt the relevance of poetry as a form. In May 1930, he received word that Nancy Cunard’s The Hours Press had rejected his ‘Novelette’ as well as ‘Primavera.’131
The fact was that poetry (and here I count the ‘Novelette’ as being much closer to poetry than prose) was quietly and gradually slipping away from him.
It was Pagany itself and the influence of Richard Johns, however, that ultimately enabled Williams to break through this impasse and to give him the new lease of life that he needed to write the most successful prose work of his career. Even as early as January 1930 Williams had written to Johns that it was ‘a pleasure to find so many short
stories in Pagany’ and that it was the prose works that ‘held the interest and carry the other less attractive though perhaps more weighty writings.’132The other ‘more weighty writings,’ refer of course to poetry, which now Williams finds less appealing. Perhaps because of the demands of his practice, Williams just did not have the time to dedicate to the obscure writings of modernist writers. Although Pagany did publish a lot of poetry in this vein, Williams is correct that it is the short stories that characterize the magazine, a fact that became evident when Johns found himself caught in a controversy