Marking Fifty Years of Williams Scholarship: Linda Wagner-Martin's "William Carlos Williams's The Great American Novel"

Abstract

The Great American Novel,” which the William Carlos Williams Review is reprinting to celebrate fifty years since its first publication, reminds me of one sunny morning in the late 1970s, when I sat in the garage of the fourroom bungalow my first husband and I rented with our two small children, dangling my legs over the arm of my chair, smoking Kents, and trying to make sense of Williams’s strange, brief book. The garage, with its castoff furniture and the $5 motorcycle that didn’t run, was the only place I could work, a bit removed from the house yet still available in case of emergency. I was preparing to write my dissertation at the time—the dissertation that years later became William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature—and was slowly reading and rereading everything Williams had published. To tell the truth, I don’t think I encountered Wagner-Martin’s article back then; mostly, I was focusing on autobiography theory and criticism of Williams’s poetry, and probably the biggest influence on my work was J. Hillis Miller’s 1965 book Poets of Reality. But I wish I had read it. I wish I had had a firmer sense of what’s at stake in The Great American Novel, which Linda Wagner-Martin so beautifully now helps me understand.