By JUDITH HARRIS [The Montserrat Review] – Importance is defined as something of weight or value; of being significant and noteworthy; the emphasis on something being important is how it is consequential, with respect to what comes after it as an outcome or development. Reed Whittemore has always been important, and surprising. In fact Whittemore begins his own biography of William Carlos Williams, Poet from Jersey, by writing about the geography, albeit a winding one:
The Passaic River, which this book is to be about, shares with the Hackensack River lightly to its east the responsibility for having created the Jersey meadows.
Through the grim, trashy, industrial coastline of towns like Paterson pervaded by stench that could peel away the paint of houses, the reader, the traveler is led to a secret treasure—there in the middle of Paterson, pocketed away, The Great Passaic Falls. So, for Whittemore, the river itself — with its degraded stench — huddled away in the soupy towns — until you eventually overcome it by the beauty of the self-resuscitating falls — became a metaphor for Williams’ pastoral, poetic spirit lurking there, in the sporadic river, hidden within the industrial shell of the town. “It was the hiddeness that appealed to him [Williams] . . . like finding beauty in a weed,” Whittemore writes. He then goes on to quote his biographical subject as he considers the ambiance of the weed—rescuing it from it fate as yet another matter for the dung heap. “The acanthus is a weed that signified for the Greeks neither fruit nor flower but was prized for another reason. Because of that they raised it to the head of their temple column.”
As a biographer, Whittemore manages to capture Williams’s life-long aesthetic of “no ideas, but in things” through merely a page or two of looking at the ugly, hum drum river and its humble surroundings — appearing to be one way, but having a surprising, almost mythic and Wordsworthian beauty underneath. Much of the same humility and surprise (the “beauty of the weed”) characterizes Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet. For Whittemore, selecting Williams as a biographical subject, set a tone for his own memoir.
Continued at The Montserrat Review | More Chronicle & Notices.
