"His infidelities gave Williams a bad case of the jitters”

James Logenbach, for The Nation, wrote a lengthy review of Herbert Leibowitz's William Carlos Williams biography, “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams.

After discussing the International Exhibition of Modern Art that Williams' thought he attended, Logenbach focuses on Williams', a champion of "American"-speak, rather worldly upbringing. He frames this in a jab from Pound to Williams:

“And America?” asked Ezra Pound of his good friend Williams, “What the hell do you a bloomin foreigner know about the place?” William George Williams, the poet’s father, never renounced his British citizenship. As a child, he had sailed with his mother from England first to New York City and then, after she remarried, to the Caribbean, where they ultimately settled in Puerto Plata, a port city in the Dominican Republic. After William George married the daughter of a Dutch businessman, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb, who had grown up in Puerto Rico and studied painting in Paris, he moved the family to Rutherford, New Jersey. There, the young William Carlos grew up speaking English and Spanish, and he was sent along with his brother, Edgar, to the Horace Mann School in Manhattan; for a year, while their father was traveling on business in South America, the boys attended an international school in Switzerland. Williams would send his own sons to this school, the Château de Lancy, thirty years later.

No other American modernist poet—not Pound, not Wallace Stevens, not T.S. Eliot—was so worldly by the age of 18. No other American writer’s declaration that “Europe is nothing to us” is so self-dramatizing. As Pound understood, Williams nurtured a first-generation American’s obsession with the idea of an indigenously American art; and in contrast to Eliot, whose family had lived in Massachusetts for centuries, Williams needed to acquire the New World, not escape it. Andrew Eliot, who arrived in Salem around 1670, hanged witches.

And, not surprisingly, it took Williams time to find his "everyday" speech mastery:

Williams’s great gift to future poets is his prosody, but he worked long and hard to hear the immense sonic possibilities that even the simplest sentences afforded him. In 1909, just before leaving for another extended stay in Europe, where he studied pediatrics in Leipzig and hung out in London with Pound, Williams published at his own expense his first book of poems, called simply Poems. Not one of its sentences sounds anything like the mature Williams, who refused ever to reprint the volume.

There enters no thing scatheless from the womb;
But imperfection clings all forms about.
Nor leaf, nor flower, nor pod, nor seeding plume,
But some regard shall find, than this, less stout.

Writing about lines like these, Leibowitz maintains that Williams’s earliest efforts were “derivative, mawkish, and written as a retrograde Victorian lyric that would have fit snugly into Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.” What exactly does he mean?

Where he could have further explored the development of Williams' style, Leibowitz instead focuses on his sex life:

The second reason Williams’s artistic development is occluded in “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You” is that, while maintaining that the biography of a poet must discuss poems in detail, Leibowitz seems finally more interested in Williams’s sexual escapades than in his prosody. At the conclusion of a chapter called “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” Leibowitz recalls how he once visited Williams’s son, William Eric Williams, who until he died in 1995 lived in the house at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, New Jersey, where his parents had lived and his father had practiced medicine. When William Eric opened the door, his first words to Leibowitz were, “If you’re a bloodhound come to sniff out my father’s affairs, well, there weren’t any.” There were affairs. But in defense of William Eric Williams I must say that I, too, visited him at 
9 Ridge Road. He was courtly in an old-world way that made me imagine that his behavior resembled his father’s. He showed me his father’s consulting rooms, which he (also a physician) had used as well. We talked about the poems. He said nothing about his father’s sex life one way or another.

At issue here is not that Leibowitz discusses Williams’s sex life; it is a potent aspect of the biography, and it is sometimes reflected crucially in the poems—poems which, when it comes to women’s bodies, careen between startling sensitivity and boyish vulgarity. Famously, Williams confessed the affairs to his wife when he thought he was dying, only to live for many more years—years in which his wife was doomed to take care of his failing body. Leibowitz tells this story several times over the course of his biography, relishing the details. So when he asks, “Was Floss merely a drab, if competent, suburban wife and mother?” the question answers itself. And when he attempts to account for the triadic, stepped-down line in which Williams wrote some of his most beautiful later poems—

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
   like a buttercup
      upon its branching stem—

—the results fall well outside the bounds of any credible discussion of prosody: the poems “sprawled and skittered,” says Leibowitz, “as if having to apologize to 
his wife, Floss, for his infidelities gave Williams a bad case of the jitters.”

Fascinating. Go read the rest.