Paterson (Revised Edition) (26 page)

The note was reprinted, with minor changes for context, in the NC printing of Books I and II in 1949, and in all subsequent printings.

WCW incorporated forty-four lines of his 1927 poem “Paterson” into Book I. In the present edition the material appears on pp. 6–7, 9–10, and 27. For the 1927 poem, which appeared in
The Dial
, see CP1 263–66.

3     Paterson: Book I/Paterson     (5th printing of 1963 text, in 1969, and subsequent printings)

3     “Rigor of beauty … remonstrance?”     WCW’s own prose. On the 1945 KS galleys WCW cut two additional sentences that were also contained within the quotation marks: “It is not in the things nearest us unless transposed there by our employment? Make it free, then, by the art you have, to enter these starved and broken pieces.”

4     the slot of/hollow suns risen     WCW told his friend Fred Miller in 1945 that the lines included a reference to the view from the back window at 9 Ridge Road, WCW’s home. See Weaver 201. The letter Weaver quotes from is at UVA.

4     and the     craft The lower-case “a” is an example of the legacy of the slashed KS galleys (see “A Note on the Text”). WCW cut the first two and a half lines of this stanza—which had begun with a capital.

6     Paterson lies … unroused     “Information from Herb Fisher’s [manuscript] book on Paterson,” note by KH on the UVA typescripts. Herbert Fisher (1907–1977), a local historian and painter, was a prominent figure in nearby Bloomfield, New Jersey, whose interests included the history and legends of the Passaic. See his obituary in
The Independent Press
[Bloomfield, N.J.], January 20, 1977, p. i, and Weaver 118–119. Although Fisher’s manuscript histories are now lost, he published 149 articles on local history and lore in
The Independent Press
from June 1960 to April 1963, including articles on Paterson and on the Passaic. See also “A Note on the Text.”

7     A man like … a city     These lines served as an epigraph to “For the poem
Patterson” [sic]
, a sequence of fifteen numbered poems WCW published in
The Broken Span
in 1941, when his concept of the poem was still close to the
Detail & Parody for the poem Paterson
typescript he prepared in 1939. See CP2 14 and the accompanying note.

7     In regard … the like     Adapted from a four-page handwritten letter from Marcia Nardi to WCW, April 9, [1942], (Yale uncat.). Marcia Nardi (1901–1990), then living in New York, had telephoned and subsequently visited WCW some days before, possibly at the suggestion of Harvey Breit, for advice concerning her son. During her visit she left some of her poems with WCW for his possible comments.

WCW admired Nardi’s work, replying on the following day to the April 9 letter “these poems have in them definitely some of the best writing by a woman (or by anyone else) I have seen in years…. What I’d like to see you do is to copy them all out clean and let me have a copy of
all
of them” (HRC). WCW encouraged the publication of some of Nardi’s poems in
New Directions Number Seven
(1942), and wrote an introduction to the selection that appeared there. Their exchanges over the next ten months included more than thirty letters, but in February 1943 WCW terminated his side of the correspondence, which subsequently resumed from 1949 to 1956. For further details of the correspondence and of MN’s own writing career see Theodora R. Graham, “‘Her Heigh Compleynte’: The Cress Letters of William Carlos Williams’
Paterson
” in
Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams: The University of Pennsylvania Conference Papers
(Philadelphia, 1983), ed. Daniel Hoffman, pp. 164–193, and Elizabeth O’Neil, “Marcia Nardi: Woman of Letters,” in
Rossetti to Sexton: Six Women Poets at Texas
(Austin, 1992), pp. 73–111, a special issue of
The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin
, Vol. 22, 1 & 2.

WCW considered a number of ways of using Nardi’s letters in
Paterson
(see, for example, Buffalo E19, where they were intended at one stage as an “Interlude” ). Eventually he included in Book II parts of two additional letters, dating from 1943, see pp. 45, 48, 64, 76, 82, and 87–91.

As he did with much of the prose in Book I, WCW cut this material considerably on the 1945 KS galleys, which had reproduced much more of the original letter. The paragraphs from which the material in the galleys and final version are taken read as follows in the original letter (with material omitted before the galley stage in square brackets):

But I was, believe me, in a most desperate situation that Sunday. I didn’t know a soul except H.B. (at least no respectable person) outside the world where only standardized conceptions of parenthood prevail; and there I was faced with an investigation of my decidedly irregular private life which would have amounted, for me, to the most ghastly kind of inquisition [—especially since my son, by the way, is illegitimate.]

[Fortunately I was able to stave all that off. I won’t burden you with the details (quite a long story). But that boy of mine is now out of that God forsaken psychopathic ward and up in the mountains with a nice simple wholesome family;] and my [own] doors are bolted forever (I hope forever) against all public welfare workers, professional do-gooders, and the like. [But thank you more than I can express for having let me come. I otherwise might have been completely robbed of my wits, and thus have been unable to straighten out the situation.]

In regard to the poems I left with you: will you be so kind as to return them to me at my new [12th Street] address? And without bothering to comment upon them if you should find that embarrassing—for it was the human situation and not the literary one that motivated my phone call and visit. Besides I know myself to be more the woman than the poet; and to concern myself less with the problems of poetry than with [those of] living; and to have always been prevented [by the latter] from doing any really concentrated and thoughtful work ‘in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice.’ [And] also I think [that with rare exceptions (such as Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore) even] a talented woman writer depends, much more than a man, upon her social environment and her personal relationships, to gain definition for her personality and to develop her own minor creative potentialities. Andre Gide makes this true of most of his women; and the great disillusionment of the male characters in his books is when they find that those qualities of mind and soul which they love in some particular woman have been little more than a couch on which she could lay her thoughts next to theirs. That Gide’s male characters are homosexual enables them of course to understand this [easily—galley reads “desire”] about women, since they thus escape being hoodwinked by desire.

The
Paterson
text’s “publishers of poetry” for MN’s “problems of poetry” runs through all the typescripts and probably stems from a misreading of MN’s difficult handwriting by WCW or his typist in the transcription, and is marked with a query on Buffalo E7.WCW subsequently deleted “those of” and added an ellipsis to make sense of the sentence (one example of many of his correcting the poem’s prose for sense after a retyping, but not against the source).

“But they set up an investigation” is WCW’s own summary.

9     In February 1857 … open the shell     No source found. To judge by an article in the
Bulletin of the Passaic County Historical Society
of November 1956, pp. 38–39, 44, this prose conflates two stories. Jacob and John Quackenbush found and sold to Tiffany what became known as the “Queen Pearl.” The article cites
The Paterson Guardian
of May 1, 1857. The article goes on to tell the story of “a South Paterson citizen … One account names him as a poor shoemaker … one David Hower. Another source names him as Daniel Howell, carpenter.” Hower/Howell brought home mussels for dinner, found them tough and fried them, and while subsequently eating them bit into the 400-grain pearl—which had been ruined by “too much cooking. … it was, by far, the largest pearl ever found in fresh water mussels.” K. H. cites Herbert Fisher (UVA).

10     A gentleman of … on either side”     From BH (1844), 407, with minor differences, noted below. (The passage is replaced by an illustration of Paterson in the 1865 printing.) BH (1844) is specifically cited in an early version of the poem on Buffalo E10, where two characters named “Doc and Willie” read this passage from the book.

Differences from BH wording:

gentleman of the/gentleman with the

the community/this vicinity

in human/in a human

around the upper/round the upper

his voice/and his voice is

body is/body is only

sit up/stand or sit up

on pillows/on large pillows

With two exceptions the BH wording appears in the early Buffalo typescripts E4 and E10, but all the differences appear in later retypings and in the UVA and Yale Za186 versions. None of the changes reflect revisions marked by WCW and are probably accidents of retyping. BH’s “on large pillows” becomes “on pillows” in UVA and Za186, and appears thus on the KS typescript and galleys—but the page proofs and all printings have “in.” I have restored “on.”

A footnote in Nelson, 100, notes that the BH source material, an eighteenth-century military journal, actually records the size of the face as twenty inches.

10     From the ten houses … 170 Swiss     Weaver 202 records “from Herbert A. Fisher’s notes on Paterson census records.” The language of the passage is close to that of W. Clayton’s
History of Bergen and Passaic Counties
(Philadelphia, 1882), 406—in a section written by William Nelson. The numbers in Clayton record 1429 German, and 3347 English. The material is typed as if poetry on the KS typescript.

11     The twaalft … “The Monster Taken”     With a few minor verbal differences, including a revision by WCW (“one seven feet” for “a sturgeon seven feet”) the passage appears in Nelson, 387–388.

12–13     If there was not beauty … region was called     Probably WCW’s own prose.
The Prospector
of 3 July 1936 printed a special Ringwood issue, and the Buffalo El typescripts contain a promotional folder on Ringwood. Some of this passage is in verse in earlier typescripts, and the material is generally much reworked.

13     Cromwell … Irish brogue     
As
Sankey and Weaver note,
from
Seamus MacCall’s
Thomas Moore
(London, 1935), 94. WCW begins in mid-sentence, cutting the “who” that follows “Cromwell” and substituting “others” for Mac-Call’s “negro slaves” on a typescript filed with Yale Za186.

The other differences from MacCall are present in early drafts:

some thousands/thousands

sold/sold there

asserted to/asserted that to

13     a
Geographic
picture     Between pp. 180 and 181 Weaver reproduces and cites the probable source,
The National Geographic Magazine
49: 6 (June 1926), 716. However, the photograph is of six wives, and they are squatting, but not on a log.

14     Mrs. Sarah Cumming … to Newark     From BH 412–413 with slight changes and the omission of fifteen lines. BH, what is probably WCW’s transcription typescript filed with Yale Zai86, and the early Buffalo E4 typescript correctly spell Hooper, which I have restored. Later typescripts and all previous printings read Hopper.

Following “district of Maine” BH has “she was a lady of an amiable disposition, a well-cultivated mind, distinguished intelligence, and most exemplorary piety; and she was much endeared to a large circle of respectable friends and connections.” No source material is omitted between “on the following day” and “On Monday morning” (on a Buffalo E14 typescript WCW added a second period, and this punctuation was reproduced as an ellipsis on the galleys in what is a consistent pattern for this book).

Following “and his wife was gone!” the
Paterson
text omits these lines from the opening of the next paragraph:

Mrs. Cumming had complained of a dizziness early in the morning; and, as her eyes had been some time fixed upon the uncommon objects before her, when she moved with the view to retrace her steps, it is probable she was seized with the same malady, tottered, and in a moment fell, a distance of 74 feet, into the frightful gulf!

Following “caught him once more” the text omits from BH “and held him till reason had resumed her throne. He then left him, to call the neighboring people to the place.”

The omitted final paragraph reads:

On Wednesday, her funeral was attended by a numerous concourse of people. Her remains were carried into the church, where a pathetic and impressive discourse, happily adapted to the mournful occasion, was delivered by the Rev. James Richards. Solemn indeed was the scene. A profound silence pervaded the vast assembly. Every one seemed to hang upon the lips of the speaker. In every quarter, the sigh of sympathy and regret echoed to the tender and affecting address.

Other differences:

two months Original and typescripts read 2 months.

Rev. Cumming rode/Mr. Cumming rode

event to/event which was to

flight/flights

stairs (the Hundred Steps)/stairs

view of/view of most of

length of time/time

The apparently early Yale Za186 typescript contains all the verbal differences and omissions in the final text except the sentences following “and his wife was gone!” which WCW cut on the 1945 galley. The Rev./Mr. difference occurs because the Yale and subsequent typescripts read “1812, rode,” and WCW added “Rev. Cumming” on Buffalo E14.

15     Some things can be done as well as others     On the UVA typescripts KH notes the source for this, and for “There’s no mistake in Sam Patch” (p. 16), as the
Dictionary of American Biography
. Patch’s entry in Volume 14 (1934) records: “He was generally taciturn but when in his cups would parrot his two apothegems, There’s no mistake in Sam Patch’ and ‘Some things can be done as well as others’.” These details are not in the Longwell source, see below.

15     Noah … Faitoute     In 1938 WCW started corresponding with David Lyle, a resident of Paterson interested in communication systems. In going over some of Lyle’s letters for possible inclusion in
Paterson
, WCW changed Lyle’s opening salutation, “Dr. Williams,” and his closing signature, variously to “Noah” and “Faitoute” (Yale uncat.). See Mariani 468–71 and Weaver 122–27.