Part-Time Poet

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (402 pp.]--Random House ($3.75).

A German baroness once told Poet William Carlos Williams that what he needed to make him great "was to contract syphilis from her and so free my mind for serious art." Williams, a busy physician in suburban Rutherford, N.J., turned the invitation down; he had only a doctor's interest in the disease. In 40 years of practice, he was never able to free his mind entirely for "serious art." But between calls (1,500,000 of them, he estimates), he did somehow manage to produce 34 uneven books of verse and prose that have given him a reputation out of all proportion to their sales.

At 68, and still practicing, Williams shows in his Autobiography that he still writes in a hurry. Like the best parts of his Paterson poetry (TIME, July 16), the book crinkles with unpremeditated kindness, an uncomplicated acceptance of ordinary humanity. But, like Paterson, it is oddly erratic, even pointless at times, with commonplace anecdotes and trailing reminiscences. It is the kind of book a man might have written for himself and his friends, random recollections never meant for a critical eye. But "Doc" Williams has always written for himself. Of a critic who once doubted the worth of his poetry, he wrote: "To hell with him . . . Tell him to go wipe his nose."

According to the Autobiography, smalltown Dr. Williams and Poet Williams with his arty New York friends never got in each other's way. The doctor insists that he fed raw material to the writer, but the proof is plain that the writer (yanking out his typewriter to slap down a few sentences before the doctor's phone rang again) never got the material into satisfying shape. Williams' first books were privately printed, sold not at all and were usually bought up by Writer Williams with the money Dr. Williams passed him. A nonintellectual, he says, he made close friends with the little magazine intellectuals of the '20s, who respected his stubborn old-fashioned radicalism.

Even now, in what sounds like an echo from an old Greenwich Village bull session, he believes that "the whole aim of the gang that runs Russia, U.S.A., Britain and France is to destroy the contemplative life altogether." Short on formal education (he went to medical school straight from high school), he has tried to make a virtue of the literary amateurism that still keeps cropping up in the careless writing of Autobiography.

No one can fairly say that Writer Williams has wasted Dr. Williams' time. The essays of In the American Grain, the novels White Mule and In the Money, and dozens of sudden flashes of warmth and light from his poetry are likely to be still valued when the last baby he delivers has reached Williams' age.

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