Critical Portraits: Working-Class Corporeality in Williams's Poems of the 1930s

Abstract

Critical Portraits:Working-Class Corporeality in Williams's Poems of the 1930s Brian Brodhead Glaser Recent studies of William Carlos Williams have begun to present us with what can be called a sociological Williams. Not since Mike Weaver's (1971) discussion of Williams's involvement with the American Social Credit Movement and the Committee of Cultural Freedom has there been a scholarly emphasis on his engagement with socio-economic issues like the one emerging in Alec Marsh's Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (1998), John Beck's Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (2001), Astrid Franke's Habilitationsschrift, Pursue the Illusion (2005), and Gary Lenhart's The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry & Social Class (2006). A 1937 criticism of Williams by William Philips and Philip Rahv—reproduced in Alan Filreis's Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism—charging that Williams "merely added the proletariat to his store of American objects" during his most explicitly political decade of work can no longer stand (140). As Beck points out in his opening discussion of a 1939 essay, "Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist," in which Williams asks how the artist is "affected" by "the economic, the sociological," we increasingly recognize how "questions Williams asks concerning art and the artist are . . . closely related to the conditions of American democracy, to the 'economic, the sociological' forces that shape this democracy, and therefore impinge upon the consciousness of its citizens" (2).1 I would like in this essay to contribute to this emerging picture of Williams what I take to be an important distinction for appreciating his work of the 1930s.2 His fiction of the period has been called proletarian by Cary Nelson and others—and indeed it is in many ways aligned with the life circumstances and interests of the working class, a group that Williams, as a Rutherford, New Jersey physician, knew [End Page 119] well. But his poems of the period most engaged with the working class, his "proletarian portraits," are in a remarkable way removed from and critical of their subjects. Discussion of Williams's political, or sociological, writing of this period should acknowledge the difference Williams himself emphasized between poetry and fiction. In contrast with his fiction, Williams's poems of the 1930s represent working-class subjects predominantly in terms of corporeality, as active bodies, and this is a signal of both his identification with and critical perspective towards that class—a combination of attitudes that poetry was uniquely useful for him in expressing. In what follows, I make this argument first by re-situating his 1930s representations of the working class outside of what I take to be a reductive set of terms, then pointing out how his proletarian portraits combine admiration and critical distance, and finally discussing the contribution such an understanding of Williams's work of the 1930s might make to the emerging picture of his sociological eye. Reference to a recently published, somewhat polemical study of the American literary scene of the 1930s, John Lowney's History, Memory and the Literary Left, can let me make clear what I'd like the following discussion to do. Early in his book, Lowney considers the introduction Wallace Stevens wrote in 1934 for a volume of a decade of Williams's work. He summarizes Stevens's comments this way: "Williams's most successful poetry results from a process of 'hybridization' of . . . opposites, so that the 'anti-poetic' images of the dump are transformed by the poet's act of imagination" (25). Lowney points out that Williams was "disturbed" by this description, for "he saw his poetry not in terms of such antitheses but in terms of a democratic inclusiveness" (25). Lowney is no doubt accurate. But there is a critical bent to Williams's poetry about the working class that should incline us to see this "democratic inclusiveness" as not indiscriminate. Stevens mentions this aspect of the work by noting in Williams "not sentiment but the reaction from sentiment, or, rather, a little sentiment, very little, together with acute reaction" (213). For a variety of reasons—the most...