`The Permanence of These Bound Words'

William Faulkner wrote poetry and had the good sense to stop. Joyce, too, wrote poems, some of them modestly affecting (“Ecce Puer”), but they would be long forgotten without Dubliners and Ulysses. John Williams, the author of Stoner, published two slender volumes of verse – The Broken Landscape (1949) and The Necessary Lie (1965, the same year as Stoner). He also edited an anthology, English Renaissance Poetry, published in 1963, that suggests the sources of Williams’ poetic method and the reasons prose fiction, not poetry, was his rightful medium.

The Broken Landscape is 36 pages long and was published by Alan Swallow in Denver. The book is the size and shape of a birthday card and has cardboard covers. It contains only 19 poems, and yet is long enough to have an erratum page. The poems are traditional – metered, rhymed – and, I regret, quite dull. They’re reminiscent of the poems Williams anthologized, especially Ben Jonson’s, and also those of another poet published by Alan Swallow, J.V. Cunningham, but without their hardness, concision, wit and technical deftness. They often deal with the travails of love – a subject he returned to masterfully in Stoner. One poem, “Knowledge is Power,” from a series called “Five Epigraphs,” offers early insight into Williams’ evolving aesthetic:

“The permanence of these bound words is goad,
We say: they whip us to formulable ends.
From fixed penumbras we grub glinting fact;
Wrought truth is winter-brittle, yet it bends,
To our flat need conforms. We say and act
What we can never know: to act, our code.”

William Stoner, too, adopts a code of action, with the twist that he turns inaction into a mode of action. He resigns himself to the hell of a loveless marriage. He never sets out to have an affair with a younger woman but it happens. In an interview, Williams maintained Stoner was “a real hero,” and said, “I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly.”

The Necessary Lie is a more substantial work, put out by Verb Publications of Denver. The book is 48 pages long, with paper covers and blurry type, and recycles some poems (including “Five Epigraphs”) from the earlier volume. The theme of tormented love returns, as do insights into Stoner. Here’s “The Measure of Violence”:

“Passive within the heart
Our primal anger lies
And waits, secure, apart
From what it shall despise.

“Mirrored upon the brain,
It is what it has lacked:
Inversion of disdain,
Equivalent to act,

“It is the self’s assent
Beyond the active will.
Beyond self’s vanquishment
We feed upon our kill.”

Again, Williams toys with action vs. paralysis vs. acceptance – “the self’s assent.” One poem, “An Old Actor, to His Audience,” is subtitled “Ford Madox Ford: 1873-1939,” and amounts to a statement of artistic purpose masking as a monologue by the aging novelist. Here’s an excerpt:

“Out of these creaking boards
I once created worlds that you could not conceive
And peopled them with what you might have been,
Showing a fairer image of yourself
Than you would dare to dream, and given you
Some instant plucked from time that was your own.
From your deep heart’s most lonely need, I have
Dissembled shadows that become your selves
And let them stroll as if they were alive
In the Roman ruins of your northern fields.”

The poem is lovelier than anything in the earlier volume and reads like a prophecy of Williams’ accomplishment in Stoner. It’s significant that Williams channels his voice through Ford, for clearly he was a writer who needed the distance, the buffering, offered by characters manifestly not himself. The poems often fail, like many poems, because the poet and the speaker are one. The first-person singular appears effortless and yet nothing could be more difficult to do well. In an interview, John McGahern said of Williams: “His method is to go as far as possible from the self and towards the other, and then find his way back through the self.” Only through the rigors of prose fiction could Williams overcome the trap of self posed by the lyric. In his introduction to English Renaissance Poetry, Williams wrote of Ben Jonson:

“It is, finally, a language that has passed from the starkness and bareness of outer reality through the dark, luxuriant jungle of the self, and has emerged from that journey entire and powerful.”