Paterson (Revised Edition) (25 page)

Guided by my attempt to try to remain sensitive to the way the poem’s compositional history, its author’s own history, and his concerns and attitudes, arc built into the fabric of the text, I have sought a compromise for the prose of Book V that I hope comes closer to these aims than the 1963 solution, and I have included that compromise within my larger general treatment of the poem’s typescripts and printed versions. If Book V’s prose were to be returned to the language of its sources, then the same treatment would need to be applied to the other four books, and this would clearly be far too much editorial intrusion. James Laughlin voiced a similar concern as coming from Mrs. Williams, when writing to Mike Weaver in January 1967: “Correcting Bill’s texts is a rather tricky business. I always consult with Mrs. Williams when a correction is suggested, and generally speaking, unless it is an obvious ‘typo,’ she prefers that things should remain as Bill wrote them. She feels, as I understand it, that his idiosyncrasies were very much part of his style, and I can see her point” (carbon in New Directions archives). Of course, with a poem like
Paterson
, the question of what parts of the poem “Bill wrote” is itself an issue, both editorial and critical.

For Book V’s prose I concluded to use as copy text the version as first transcribed and typed by Williams, while accepting later changes that carry evidence of his having authorized them. The result is to bring the prose of Book V in the present edition much closer to the sources than in the first edition, but not as close as in the collected edition printed in 1963 and subsequently. For verbal and spacing issues in the poetry of Book V I have been guided much more by the late typescripts and the first edition.

I have given more authority to the reset editions of Books I and II than to the reset editions of Books III and IV, and as indicated above, still less to the posthumous reset printing of Book V. In a small number of examples in the later books I restore the reading of the printer’s typescript where no evidence exists that Williams directed a change in the printed version (for example “the tame sea” for “the time sea” of all editions, Book IV, iii, and Phyllis’s missed “to” in one of her Book IV letters). I have not interfered, as the posthumous printings did, with such features of the poem as Williams’ reproducing an error that appears in his source (the “Jonatan” of Book IV, iii). I have allowed all Williams’ typescript revisions to stand, even where they are based erroneously on the assumption of a typing error in the retyped script, for example his changing Allen Ginsberg’s “seldom dig exactly what you are doing” to “seldom did exactly what you are doing,” no doubt because he was unfamiliar with the usage. A further example is Williams’ cutting in the prose of Book V a repetition of Gilbert Sorrentino’s included for stylistic purposes.

In cases where the retyping of the prose produces a substitute word, either directly or through Williams’ response to a typing error, I leave the word, but I correct typographical errors that are not words. Mike Weaver drew New Directions’ attention to the “castor hat” of Cornelius Doremus in Book I that became a “Kastor hot,” but the text was not changed. This transformation happened a letter at a time in the typescripts, and could serve as a good example of the changes the prose undergoes. I have given Cornelius back his hat. But I have let “throsh” stand in Alva N. Turner’s letter in Book I, even though the earlier drafts, and probably the missing letter itself, read “thrash.”

The general principles governing the selection of textual and background annotations can be found at the head of Appendix C. Limitations of space and the complexity of recording non-verbal variants have made it impossible to record all differences between printings or all non-verbal corrections to the text. I have generally not recorded the following kinds of variants, unless they appear to have important critical significance:

1) changes in punctuation. I let Williams’ punctuation stand as printed, being guided by the late typescripts, even when—as in some instances from Book I, following the revised galleys—the usage appears to be an unintended result of revision. A common punctuation problem is the dropping in later printings of some of the poem’s periods within or at the end of a line where they occur in Williams’ idiosyncratic usage following or surrounded by a space. A similar fate had met this usage in the reprintings of the shorter poems from the 1940s and 1950s (and continues to plague this editor with the reprintings of Volume II of the
Collected Poems
!).

2) changes of spacing between stanzas, and changes in the positioning of a line or a stanza. The spacing of Book III, as Mrs. Williams noticed, was corrupted the most by the resetting for the collected texts, although the repagination of 1969 added many more examples throughout the poem.

3) changes in hyphenation and spelling variants. I have usually retained the usage of the first edition.

4) corrections to foreign languages made in Williams’ lifetime.

Because of the irregular stanza form that is a central characteristic of Williams’ poetics in
Paterson
it can be difficult to tell whether the end of a page marks the close of a stanza. In this edition the following pages end with a space:

These notes record the verbal variants between the printed versions of
Paterson,
including the extracts from the poem published in journals, and they also present—usually in more general terms—the verbal differences between Williams’ prose sources and the
Paterson
version of the material. I have identified the probable sources where these are known. The annotations are not intended to be “complete,” or to record all of WCW’s comments on the poem or parts of it. Extensive comments by WCW on
Paterson
can be found in John Thirlwall’s “William Carlos Williams’ “Paterson’: The Search for the Redeeming Language—A Personal Epic in Five Parts,”
New Directions 17
(1961): 252–310, and in numerous published interviews with WCW conducted in the 1950s. The pioneer studies by Sankey and Weaver listed below also contain additional comments by WCW, and amplify some of the annotations recorded here. I have reprinted in the “Preface” to this edition WCW’s statement in a 1951 press release on the poem, and also his comments to New Directions on his intentions for the fifth book. I do note the comments by WCW that appeared with the first editions of each book, and provide such additional comments or notes on context as might be particularly helpful to a reader, or that have not hitherto appeared in print.

In keeping with the principles governing the annotations to the two volumes of WCW’s
Collected Poems
, I have usually excluded matters of general cultural knowledge that can be found in standard dictionaries, or the
Encyclopedia Britannica.
I have not repeated full bibliographical information that can be found in Emily Wallace’s
A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams
, and I have kept the bibliographic citations as concise as possible. Annotations are keyed to page numbers throughout.

The following abbreviations are used in the annotations:

A     
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams
(1951)

BH     John Barber and Henry Howe,
Historical Collections of the State of New Jersey
(1844)

BUFFALO     Neil Baldwin and Steven L. Meyers,
The Manuscripts and Letters of William Carlos Williams in the Poetry Collection of the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo: A Descriptive Catalogue
(1978)

CP1     
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I: 1909–1939
(1986)

CP2     
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II: 1939–1962
(1988)

IST     The first, limited printing of
Paterson
, in individual books

HARVARD     The Williams archive at the Houghton Library, Harvard University

HRC     The Williams archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

KH     Kathleen Hoagland, friend, historian, and typist of the
Paterson
drafts now at University of Virginia

KS     The Williams archive at Kent State University

MARIANI     Paul Mariani,
William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked
(1981)

NC     The New Classics reset text of
Paterson
that followed the first editions

ND ARCHIVES     Files of New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York and Norfolk, CT.

NELSON     William Nelson,
History of the City of Paterson and the County of Passaic New Jersey
(1901)

1963     The first, 1963, printing of all five books of
Paterson
in a single volume

NS     William Nelson and Charles A. Shriner,
History of Paterson and its Environs: The Silk City
, 3 vols. (1920)

SANKEY     Benjamin Sankey,
A Companion to William Carlos Williams’s
Paterson (1971)

SL     
The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams
, ed. John C. Thirlwall (1957)

UVA     The Williams archive at the University of Virginia

WCW/JL     
William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin, Selected Letters,
ed. Hugh Witemeyer (1989)

WEAVER     Mike Weaver,
William Carlos Williams: The American Background
(1971)

YALE     The Williams archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

YALE UNCAT     The uncatalogued correspondence to WCW in the collection of the Beinecke Library

The first edition carried an “Author’s Note” following the title page: “This is the first part of a long poem in four parts—that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions. Part One introduces the elemental character of the place. The Second Part will comprise the modern replicas. Three will seek a language to make them vocal, and Four, the river below the falls, will be reminiscent of episodes—all that any one man may achieve in a lifetime.”