Books: The Turns of Art

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IMAGINATIONS by William Carlos Williams. Edited by Webster Schott. 363 pages. New Directions. $10.

Like a man frantically trying to establish double identity, William Carlos Williams scrambled through two careers side by side. A poet, novelist and playwright coexisted somewhat hectically with a small-town Rutherford, N.J., physician. Beside the little black bag in the front seat of the doctor's car lay the writer's yellow pad. Both got used incessantly.

Before he died in 1963 at the age of 79, Williams had treated, by his own count, a million and a half patients and delivered 2,000 babies, while delivering himself of 49 books. These included his five-volume industrial-age epic poem Paterson—along with 600-odd other poems, 52 short stories, four novels, four full-length plays and a brilliant, curiously neglected impression of American history (In the American Grain), not to mention an opera libretto and the translation of a medieval Spanish novel.

Call the black bag Reality. Call the yellow pad Imagination. In Williams' art, as in his life, they jostled and rubbed against each other—equally powerful in their imperatives. His life was one long attempt to reconcile the two by converting the smog of New Jersey factory chimneys and the smudged drabness of slum lives into the stuff of grittily passionate art.

In Imaginations, Critic Webster Schott has collected and perceptively introduced five experimental works that reveal Williams struggling for what he called an "intense vision of the facts" —a style and form that would do justice to both his imagination and his reality. Scribbled between patients or late at night, these pages have the fascinating openness and vulnerability of a writer's notebook. In these five works, produced between the ages of 34 and 48, he took on the calculated gamble of nearly automatic writing: all or nothing. "I let the imagination have its own way to see if it could save itself."

"Kora in Hell" contains much literary criticism. "Spring and All" is partly inverse—and often in prose-poetry. The Great American Novel was one of the first of the anti-novels. Perversely antic, it mixes all sorts of oddments, including furniture-store ads and letters to the Board of Public Utility Commissioners of the State of New Jersey. It has everything except a plot, though Williams claimed a narrative line "in which a little (female) Ford car falls more or less in love with a Mack truck." The Descent of Winter is the most multiform of the experiments, including poetry, narrative, criticism and autobiography. It is dense with the texture of Williams' America. Empty lots of dead grass with cinders gnawing at the borders. Children making mud dams in the gutters. Old women with seamed faces leaning over crooked front gates.

Fellow Poets. Stretches of Imaginations seem as long, as desolate and as inexplicable as the New Jersey Turnpike. But many passages simply leap to life. As Williams puts it, "Up surges the good zest and the game's on."