He's Dead

He was both poet and physician, each as a profession in itself, and each thanks to the other. He had mastered the knack of treating poems as patients and patients as poems, and both were the better for it. His life was in careful balance.

William Carlos Williams lived a half-mile from his birthplace in Rutherford, N.J. He found ample fascination for both his curiosities in life along the Passaic River--in his little town and in the ugly, faceless towns around it. He practiced medicine there for 40 years, a tough but generous doctor with a humanist's simple notion of his work: "I'm a pediatrician. I take care of babies and try to make them grow. I enjoy it. Nothing is more appropriate to a man than an interest in babies."

Between patients, he wrote poems, but he never had to struggle to keep the poet from wasting the doctor's good time: when patients called, the poet was uninterrupted. "To treat a man as material for a work of art," he once wrote, "makes him somehow come alive to me." In his poems, the patients moved among the hard images of industrial New Jersey and the harder images of brutality the poet found there. His poems were like snapshots--rough, direct, staccato glimpses:

gotta hold your nose

with the appropriate gesture

smiling back of the garbage truck as the complex city passes to the confession or psychiatric couch or both He wrote of the poor and sick and dirty, and in Paterson, his masterpiece, he achieved a Whitmanesque vision of the American myth as he told of the city's dying, thirsty waterfalls and of trees stunted by concrete and grime. In Spring Storm, he saw nature's liberation of the cold earth as a hint of higher human values:

The sky has given over

its bitterness

Still the snow keeps its hold on the ground

But water, water

from a thousand Runnels!

It collects swiftly,

dappled with black

cuts a way for itself

through green ice in the gutters.

He was a hero to abstract painters and to beat generation poets because of his spare, free language and his steady devotion to the American idiom. In the U.S., many considered him the most influential of the poets' poets, but in Europe, he remained a mystery. Verses like

You can do lots if you know

what's around you

No bull are true and satisfying in New Jersey, but in Europe they are baffling in the best translations.

He was uncritically generous--at birth, any little quarterly could count on a blurb and a bouquet of free poems as a present from him. He had no vanity, no avarice, no conceit, but he had strong and angry flashes of pride that described him perfectly in his poet's pose:

Say I am less an artist

than a spadeworker but one

who has no aversion to taking

his spade to the head

of any who would derogate

his performance in the craft.

Last week, at 79, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at home in Rutherford, in his sleep. He had been in frail health since 1950, and his death, his wife said, "was a long time coming." He had a physician's strong resistance to sentimentalizing death, but his poet's resistance was stronger still. Death, to him, was the enemy of experience, more shameful than saddening, and the dead were zeros that "love cannot touch." Having long treated patients as poems, Williams once said farewell with a poem that, in all his rash toughness, he might well have considered his own epitaph:

He's dead the old bastard--he's a bastard because there's nothing legitimate in him any more.

Except for the poems. Except for the babies.

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