The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams

by William Carlos Williams

New Directions has long published poet William Carlos Williams’ entire body of short fiction as  The Farmers’ Daughters  (1961). This new edition of  The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams  contains all fifty-two stories combining the early collections  The Knife of the Times  (1932),  Life Along the Passaic  (1938) with the later collection  Make Light of It  (1950) and the great long story, “The Farmers’ Daughters” (1956). When these stories first appeared, their vitality and immediacy shocked many readers, as did the blunt, idiosyncratic speech of Williams’ immigrant and working-class characters. But the passage of time has silenced the detractors, and what shines in the best of these stories is the unflinching honesty and deep humanity of Williams’ portraits, burnished by the seeming artlessness which only the greatest masters command.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Poetry, American, Literature

388 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Reviews

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This flight to the woods or something like it, is a thing we most of us have yearned for at one time or another, particularly those of us who live in the big cities. As Rivers did. For in their jumble we have lost touch with ourselves, have become indeed not authentic persons, but fantastic shapes in some gigantic fever dream. He, at least, had the courage to break with it and to go.

I wanted to know all of the time what the people pulling him felt about the doctor. The symbiotic intruder to their soft places, prying into what they would or could be judged. I can't stop thinking about fontanelles in the skulls of babies. Forever vulnerable to the outside.If it is an opening meaning or not, being judged. There's a wildness that makes this. A little monster won't open her throat for him. Their red faced battles, taking place on separate stakes, and a winner and a loser. Her tears of defeat and his shame. They triumph over dignity in going their own ways. It is the hardest thing ever to find that right voice to fit an ache. Self acceptance meets something you can live with for everybody else. Whatever that is. I want something warm, definitely not stupid and doesn't feel like an ending. Fly into your open hand and this time you're good enough to leave that human hand open (I don't think I am). William Carlos Williams has it a lot in these stories. I'm constantly trying to do something with that ache. Restlessly searching for anything that'll do it. That there's always a ghosting off in kinds of rights and wrongs in this is the best. The older than dirt types, were they reincarnated types or were they born the old-young of senility remembering infancy? Patients groveling in their eyes, minds throwing themselves over the money. That happens a lot, actually. I wonder if he got paid most of the time. He's repulsed by them, forgets them. The day to day of resigning to who is going to eat away at faith for future patients who might not be lying about their inability to pay. You could know they would call at three in the morning during a snow storm for a false alarm. The cynicism like not allowing optimism so it will hurt less when it doesn't happen. He is half on the way to honest cynicism and still foot in the sickness of When I was a younger doctor, with enough to feed. You should have seen this one girl. I loved her so much. She was so tough, still kicking and screaming into the world. I can see her not going to school too, just like the baby hiding her sore throat so her parents won't make her see the doctor. I was fascinated by a suspicion that Williams loved their takes no shit when they are babies. Admires it in their hard young flesh as adolescents (he's a bit of a perv, too. I loved that he will not be the untouched witness most of all. It's so fluid how he lives their lives in that way I only know is possible in books. To be another person, to respect what it is like to be them. And he was doing it every day, in his head and in whatever outside his eyes could take). When they are older the wonder in the inate (is it?) human nature falls behind a screen. Are they for real, are they trying to get one over on me?

My favorite stories were not the doctor stories, though. There's this one lady who never forgot about when her brother hid in the grass for hours to catch the blackbirds come in at night. How they frightened him, coming down on the branches like gun shots.

When they pour off the liquor, they've really got something. They say that's the only thing that gives them any satisfaction. Too strong for me.

There's this one of an older married lady in a small town. She's got a bemused pseudo mother role of a not so young man in town. A drunk, and a bachelor. He's been writing to this chick in a personal's section called The Cupid's Club. The woman gives her approval of the slightly heavy sort of washed out woman (attractive enough but the kind that's wasted so much energy waiting on another man that they dreamed away their best dating years already. Desperation and I'll take anyone takes hold). The bemused patronage takes a too close turn as the new wife comes out with secrets. He drinks, beats her, her old protector sniffs around. The tangential alliances change. I loved how the you don't really want to know more. If the Mrs. B is on her death bed will she see the flighty Belle writing her new letters to The Cupid's Club at her desk. I don't have a life other than this constant searching for a peace, some kind of spark. It makes me feel more alive about it, somehow, when it could be as tenuous as Mrs. B's no-place in that rotten marriage. A woman who will live longer than men, most men, most likely, will have to take it tougher. She romances dancing Russian dolls, Renaissance golden heads. In a mass a romance. Alone as worked horse flesh, beasts. Her physician wouldn't really tell her she shouldn't keep on meeting men in the streets. She could have a baby. I loved that it was her weakness for a certain kind of man. Like pulling off a golden strand. Somehow the gaggle of sexuality when people are together, looking really good as an idea, can be a little personal. At least in the moment, when not standing under the windows where flowers mean something. There are a ton of stories in this collection. I think they are the complete books The Knife of the Times, Life Along the Passaic River and Beer and Cold Cuts (I hope so because 'knife' yields a depressing "I'm not made out of gold!" abebooks result). I am plenty disgusted with myself for yammering and hammering on in these things.... But pinning Williams stories in a dumb review is bull shit too. I read these last summer and this is what I've been thinking about them since then, anyway. There's this Doctor Rivers. He's been living by too long with a badly kept secret of dope addiction. Killing patients, though sometimes he's still the looked up to hero. With dash, an overlapping line of madness and sanity. What he won't do to help them. He's written about with love. Williams isn't detached about him at all. Sometimes Rivers fucks up so badly one of his colleagues will be so hot, that's the last straw! And then do nothing. The hero they can't afford to lose (but what about the patients?). It's never quite the end of him either. This is reported with such mixed feelings. He's the I-haven't-been-fucked-over-too-often-yet and it's-too-late at the same time. How does he make them the most real and feel alive as their sleepwalker? Dancing dolls, in side Old Doc Rivers is a smaller man going he's lost his mind, not him. I love that because I feel like that too. It's a moving between them never in one place. At least as long as I'm reading something like this it is. The little stuff made my life. Like going through Rivers trail in medical reports he time travels. The listing of the old jobs like saloonkeeper and buggy driver. Could almost.... I loved that about Paterson too. It annoyed me in the Stetcher trilogy when the doctor character walked on the scene to run the threads of everybody else. I said I don't need that, let it breathe on its own. Don't tell me, you were holding my hand not too tight. Now this time? It felt like the left behind, the woods to run into when the living are too loud to hear. Stone ears and call of the moon. Something moving. I think about that effect a lot, anyway. It's not really so bad when he does talk too much (there's this one story "The Insane" of talking about patients. They aren't there. Somehow knowing their future makes me squirmier than tracing pasts like a train of thought). I can't help but really, really like Williams for wanting to get at something he saw. I half want to know if it was really like that, if the mama of the ninth baby held him as part of their family during birth. If it was ever like that to become real to them. But maybe it is better to go between the loneliness this way.

[GK Stritch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Pulls No Punches and Packs a Wallop. A tough man at a tough time dealing with tough people in a tough place, the stories stand the test of time--and shocked the readers of the day, which were few. As I go deeper into exploration of WCW (which came about through interest in Kerouac and Ginsberg and a local William Paterson University connection, to whom I am grateful) he continues to exceed expectations with the force and clarity of his vision, and, yes, it's apparent how the doctoring and writing compliment each other, "the one [medicine] nourishes the other [writing]." (The Doctor Stories, Intro, p. xi)

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is good. One of the stories has a violent, emotional hospital scene with all of these intense fighting immigrant women. WCW has strong feeling about the other docors' dismissal of patients. Williams seems noble, but not liek he's trying to brag on it. One of the pieces is sexy and it's about WCW carrying around these pictures of a sexy woman in his trunk. I love the one about the compulsive woman and the one about the girl with acne. I also love the way he works all day as a doctor and then writes in the attic. What a patient wife he must have had. What a book!

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew Williams's poems from English classes: the plums in the icebox and the red wheelbarrow and the cat in the flowerpot. I dug deeper and found other poems of his that resonated with me. I was vaguely aware that he also wrote prose, but nobody seemed to say much about it, so I never explored that until I got the urge to give it a try one day. I read this collection and was blown away. Williams was a doctor. His observations of the lives of everyday people, the sounds of their voices, the unsentimental yet compassionate view he took of them...all of that shapes these stories. Apparently, the bluntness of some of the language and the sexuality in many of these stories was shocking to readers at the time.

[Staffan Lingärde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cavefors gav ut en prosamling på 70talet (Medicinen, Amerika och Dikten) som jag kollade då. Tråkig!!
Idag läser jag den med stor behållning. Texter om arbetet som läkare vid 1900talets början.
Om konst, om litteratur, om vänskapen med Ezra Pound.
Rekommenderas!
Cavefors böcker är en guldgruva att gräva i !

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful stories written with an ear towards capturing the vernacular. Many of these brief tales are plotless dialogues exploring a turn of phrase. WCW was a true radical and I don't think we've yet caught up with him.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection includes:

1. The Knife Of The Times, And Other Stories * (1 Star)

2. Life along the Passaic River **** (4 Stars)

3. Beer and Cold Cuts *** (3 Stars)

4. The Farmers' Daughters *** (3 Stars)

[Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

his story writing is much too overlooked.