William Carlos Williams was a gynecologist. He studied obstetrics at the Perelman School of Medicine and trained in New York and Leipzig before returning to his hometown in New Jersey, where he was named Passaic General Hospital’s chief of pediatrics, a position he held until his death thirty-nine years later. This is just to say, colossal art was a side hustle.
He did not fit the mold of Modernist. Williams was kindly, gregarious. He loved his patients, and the “inarticulate poems” of their rehabilitations and sufferings became his primary influence—“follow[ing] the poor defeated body into those gulfs and grottos.”
At UPenn, he made friends with Ezra Pound, who helped proliferate his work, then later called it “incoherent.” W. C. was threatened and alienated by the success of The Waste Land. “My contemporaries flocked to [Eliot]—away from what I wanted.” Williams saw himself as a kindred of Whitman. He wanted to transcend despair and estrangement. He wanted to “[create] a new object, a play, a dance.” Pound called this “un-American.”
Still, Williams’s profession freed him from café society. He didn’t need to appeal to anyone else’s creed. And upon his magnum opus Paterson’s epic, five-volume publication, Robert Lowell declared it, “our Leaves of Grass.”
Through all setbacks and successes, he remained the humble family physician, and twenty years after his death New Directions published The Doctor Stories. Here, each fiction begins with a patient telephoning, or the door opening on a house call, and ends with the MD’s diagnosis. It’s been regularly assigned to medical students to instruct on holistic patient care. Williams was, after all, as generative as the women he assisted in giving birth, and he met every duty with pure, pastoral largesse. See “Fertility”:
You are a typical American woman
you think men grow on trees—
You want love, only love! rarest
of male fruit! Break it open and
in the white of the crisp flesh
find the symmetrical brown seeds.
-David Fishkind