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:
3 10 11 13 18 19 20 21 23 25 26 27
29 30 31 33 36 37 43 44 45 46 47 50
51 52 54 55 56 57 60 62 63 64 65 67
68 70 71 72 77 78 70 80 81 82 83 86
95 96 99 100 101 103 104 106 109 110 113 115
116 117 120 121 122 123 125 129 131 133 136 140
141 142 149 150 151 153 154 155 156 158 159 160
161 162 165 166 167 168 170 174 175 176 178 179
181 184 190 191 192 195 198 199 201 207 218 228
230 234 235
Appendix C
Annotations and
Textual Notes
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
BOOK I (1946)
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.”
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 [Bloomfiel
d, 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, 387–3
88.
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:
Paterson (Revised Edition) Page 20