William Carlos Williams [Williams - In the American Grain (Second Edition) (New Directions Paperbook)

Christopher Columbus

Cortez and Montezuma

Juan Ponce de Leon

Samuel de Champlain

Thomas Morton

Daniel Boone

Benjamin Franklin

John Paul Jones

Aaron Burr

In The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, the author gives usa few tantalizing clues about the genesis of In the American Grain. It was, Williams says, a study to try to find out formyself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify. A veryambitious undertaking! In a mere 250 pages! Perhaps the urgency of such a studyresults in part from Williams international origins (his father was British, andhis mother was from Puerto Rico). Perhaps Williams felt he had a unique vantagepoint on the binding myths of our North American legacy.

The plan was to try to get inside theheads of some of the American founders or heroes, if you will, by examiningtheir original records. I wanted nothing to get between me and what they themselveshad recorded...

Like the epic Paterson, therefore, the work would require a mix, sometimes acollage, of registers: of imagination, point of view, voice.

The time of composition was the teens andearly twenties of the twentieth century. Its worth noting, meanwhile, that a goodportion of the work was composed on a trip to Europe, undertaken by Williams and hiswife, Flossie, in 1922. Because of Williams demanding medical practice, theyd beenmarried ten years without a proper vacation. Before setting off, Williams workedbriefly on the manuscript in the American History room at the New York PublicLibrary, during which period the following occurred:

One day the De Soto chapter was burning inmy head. So I took out my paper, sat down at a table and, not waiting to take out abook, began to write furiously. Id been going for five or ten minutes, I guess,when the attendant, a stupid ass with a British accent, came up behind me and,tapping me on the shoulder, said I couldnt write in that room. I wasfurious.

Apparently, you absolutely had tobe researching there: So I had to get up, go out to thedesk, get out a book, put it on the table before I could go on. My day was ruined.We learn later in the same passage that Williams didnt exclusively perform thepreliminary work himself. Inthe American Grain was a teameffort: Floss did all the reading on the AaronBurr, Alexander Hamilton theme and what with her notes and what she told me, I wasso stirred that I completed the chapter at one sitting.

Later, in Europe: We did walk thereabout Villefranche; we talked, we ate, drank and played otherwise as saw fit and didconsiderable writing besides during those weeks. I finished the De Soto piecefrom In the American Grain and one or two others.It cant all be told.

Of the layout of the whole, Williamsremarks:

The Tenochtitlan chapter was written inbig, square paragraphs like Inca masonry. Raleigh was written in what I conceived tobe Elizabethan style; the Eric the Red chapter in the style of the Icelandic saga;Boone in the style of Daniels autobiography; Franklin was in Franklins words; andJohn Paul Jones I gave verbatim. Thus I tried to make each chapter not only incontent but in the style itself a close study of the theme.

Indeed, the lovely, warm plain speech ofthe later Williams, of Williams the poet and Williams the occasional prose writer,is rarely to be found in Inthe American Grain. Some ofthis may have to do with the historical moment in which these pages were composed,amid the cross-currents of high modernism, the modernism of Pound, Eliot, Woolf,Joyce, and Stein. But more likely the rationale for the competing voices has much todo with American colonial history itself. If In the American Grain amounts to the search for organic psychological,emotional, and historical certainties in the momentous discovery of the NewWorld, etc., its voices were, originally, European, coming from the violentlydisparate nations of the old continent.

Was this profusion of voices and stylesthe reason the book didnt find much of an audience upon its first publication?Williams account of publication is, for any author, such as to arouse paroxysms ofsympathy:

It was my first book by a commercialpublisher and I was dancing on airbecause to that point nothing I had written hadany market: I either paid for it myself or had it accepted, for the most part,without pay. The Bonis [his publishers] made a beautiful book of it, for which Ishall be forever grateful, but, as far as marketing it, they did next tonothing.

As a book, it fell flat. I made trip aftertrip to the publishers offices until they got so sick of seeing me that all of themwould give me a nod and walk by, talking together, and close themselves in beforeme, leaving me sitting there: a beautiful brushoff.... I had to see my high hopesof success go skittering out the window. In no time at all the thing was remainderedand I began to pick up copies wherever I could.

Its one of the great mysteries ofpublishing how some titles (Moby Dick is a fineexample) fail initially to secure an audience, but then go on to have vigorous liveslater. A writer requires a champion, an Edmund Wilson or a Tim Page, to be rescuedfrom oblivion. Although, Williams remarks, as others have, In the American Grain did, from the first, fall into the handsof some very influential readers, among them Martha Graham, Alfred Stieglitz, andHart Crane.

Still, Williams America, as depictedhere, is by no means for the faint of heart, and this may have repelled tenderersensibilities. From the initial chapter, concerning the murderous Eric the Red, wefind ourselves in a blood-dappled and unforgiving New World: Rather the ice thantheir way: to take what is mine by single strength, theirs by the crookedness oftheir law. But they have marked meeven to myself. Because I am not like them, Iam evil.

The American explorer sketched out in thischapter, in the elevated and somewhat comical imitation of an Icelandic saga, is noadmirable character (Manslaughter had driven me there), and neither are thosewho follow him in the early chapters of In the American Grain. We have Columbus, penurious, neglected by his patrons, indanger of mutiny (With its archaic smile, America found Columbus its firstvictim); Cortez, who assassinates Montezuma and destroys all that he built(only