“The poem springs from the half-spoken words of such patients as the physician sees from day to day.  He observes it in the peculiar, actual conformations in which its life is hid.  Humbly he presents himself before it and by long practice he strives as best he can to interpret the manner of its speech.  In that the secret lies.”

—The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

Autobiographies traffic in striking, confessional revelations, but not The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams.  A typically un-dramatic moment occurs when he recalls walking alongside a “high brick wall” in West Philadelphia, on the south side of Locust, just west of 36th Street.  (The details reflect Williams’ fidelity to material fact.) The wall, he imagined in a typical departure from facticity, must conceal “an old garden, long neglected.”  The thought of an old neglected garden hidden behind the high brick wall, he writes, “fascinated” him.  Fascination and obsession denote a crucial mental state for Williams, as important for the doctor as for the poet.  But what exactly is so fascinating here?  His companion on the walk, future modernist painter Charles Demuth, laughed.  “Not many could enjoy such a thing as that,” WCW quotes Demuth as saying, “by merely looking at the outside of the wall” (53).  Why include such an apparently pointless story?

Secrets hold a central place in the Autobiography, for WCW lived a secret life.  Few artist-friends knew he was a pediatrician.  Few medical colleagues knew he was a poet.  His poem “Danse Russe” depicts a figure—is it WCW the poet?—secluded in his upstairs room as his family sleeps—dancing naked before the mirror, singing softly to celebrate his solitude.  The drama of WCW’s work often seems to occur in seclusion, in secret, as if behind a high brick wall.  Separation—or life experienced in ways radically disconnected from business as usual--is the drama.

The Autobiography is full of secrets and hidden life.  While in medical school WCW kept notebooks which, he says, “I don’t think anyone ever saw” (53).  These private explorations were not mere records but constituted what he calls a “precious comfort.”  He calls his wife Flossie “the rock on which I have built”—but his autobiography ignores the sexual affairs that he hid from her.  The artist, for WCW, has no more “respect” (287) for social decencies than death does, so his erotic life may acknowledge a space set-apart, in Neitzsche’s terms, beyond good and evil.  The classmates who “obsess” (287) WCW are certainly not kids who played by the rules, but dropouts, losers, and worse.  Still, he singles out a significant term to indicate the quality they possessed: “perfections” (288).  Their specific perfections, clearly, remained hidden from conventional observers.

WCW’s language grows atypically vague when he describes the “perfections” that he pursues as an artist.  (“The thing, the thing, of which I am in chase.  The thing I cannot quite name was there then” [288].)  He is more articulate when he describes his activity as poet as “thinking a secret life I wanted to tell openly”; when he defines successful writing as portraying the “secret world of perfection”; when he explains that medicine was what permitted his entrance into “these secret gardens of the self” (288).  The garden—secluded, private, secret, if not bricked up by a high wall—is a metaphor for a hidden, crucial quality within the self that the poet is in quest of.

            Williams’ concealments regularly acknowledge a contrast between public and private.  He represents the public realm—with the newspaper as its icon--as trivial and deceptive: inauthentic.  In the privacy of his office or in the patient’s home, he believed, the physician has an opportunity to encounter people unmasked and authentic.  In the Autobiography, WCW recognizes his success in moments that reveal “the inner secrets of another’s private motives” (358).  He knows that some people suspect him as a writer of carrying on “a clandestine, a sort of underhand piece of spying” (359).  The clandestine activities the poet-physician-spy, seek to penetrate the façade of public life.  Sometimes his spying evokes a half-concealed model of surface and depth.  “We are lucky when that underground current can be tapped and the secret spring of all our lives will send up its pure water” (359).  WCW dismisses even writing, like cure for the physician, if it ignores the sub-surface, secret, subterranean, dissident perfections that survive only out of sight:

“Forget writing, it’s a trivial matter.  But day in day out, when the inarticulate patient struggles to lay himself bare for you, or with nothing more than a boil on his back is so caught off balance that he reveals some secret twist of a whole community’s pathetic way of thought, a man is suddenly seized again with a desire to speak of the underground stream which for a moment has come up just under the surface.  It is just a glimpse, an intimation of all that which the daily print misses or deliberately hides, but the excitement is intense and the rush to write is on again” (359-60).

The modern poet pursues a version of what Michel Foucault calls the revolutionary “gaze of the clinic”—which, seeking the cause of illness, penetrates the opaqueness of the body in order to discover the lesion hidden within.

            The poet in WCW’s Autobiography seeks language rather than causation, but the physician is an unexpected ally in this quest.  In the last paragraphs of his chapter “The Practice,” poetry now reveals itself as the access to a secret speech: “under that language to which we have been listening all our lives a new, a more profound language” (361).  This language hidden beneath public discourse resembles gold concealed within rubble: “It is that essence which is hidden in the very words which are going in at our ears and from which we must recover underlying meaning as realistically as we recover metal out of ore” (362).   The everyday act of listening—when elevated to an art—becomes another bond linking poet and physician: “The physician, listening from day to day, catches a hint of it in his preoccupation.  By listening to the minutest variations of the speech we begin to detect that today, as always, the essence is also to be found, hidden under the verbiage, seeking to be realized” (362).

WCW’s fascination with secrets parallels various modernist grand narratives that define truth as hidden.  Freud saw the truth of psychic life as concealed behind screens of repressed desire.  Marx saw the visible superstructure of daily life as constructed upon a hidden economic base.  Yet, while WCW shared a widely-held modernist idea that truth is hidden, he asserted the widely unshared and individual poetic credo no ideas but in things.  The ultimate question is how his poetry and fiction in their resolute thingness correspond with or depart from his view in the Autobiography about the secrecy of perfections.  Put another way: do his poems and stories keep any secrets from the supposedly truth-telling Autobiography?

A fascination with hidden-ness and secrecy in WCW needs to be set beside two features central to the Autobiography: his preoccupation with the everyday and his belief that truths are accessible only in “glimpses.”  We cannot gaze on truth steadily and surely, as perhaps a surgeon gazes at a lesion, but rather for WCW it is available only in moments, obliquely and uncertainly.  Further, the everyday does not hide the profound in a rigid binary false and true, like a mask hiding a face.  In WCW’s poems and stories, profundity is available only within the everyday, and the secret hidden within the everyday does not spin us off to a transcendent, immaterial, eternal realm of poetic truth—irretrievably Other—but brings us back to the everyday with new perception and new knowledge, especially the knowledge that it is only within the everyday, in glimpses and in moments, that worthwhile (in fact, saving) secrets reside. 

The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 362.  All quotations refer to this edition.  The initials WCW are employed as a space-saving shorthand, not with any disrepect.