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Recent community upheavals in the United States support the argument that people whose contributions to a nation’s development have been slighted or distorted by the ruling majority will seek to correct history. Over recent decades, growing Chicano and Latino political awareness has opened wider the gates to academia for more Latinos and led to scholarly research into the Hispanic past of the United States. We have discovered that the origins of many famous people are rooted in Mexican, Caribbean and Latin American heritage, as well as from Spain.
William
Carlos Williams, one of the most influential poets of the 20th century,
is one of those famous Americans whose Hispanic origin has been little
known. He came by his middle name by virtue of his mother, Raquel Hélène
Rose Hoheb, who was born in
Puerto Rico
. From the evidence to be found in his autobiography, his poetry, and
writings about him, his mother and her maternal origins lent more than a middle name to the poet and his works.
Williams’
writings have been thoroughly critiqued and his life minutely detailed
by biographers; I don’t intend to advance such scholarship about him
but simply to revive the significance of his life’s work to the Latino community.
In
Williams’ autobiography, he simply introduces his mother, Elena, as
she was called in the
U.S., by saying she had come to the
U.S.
via
Santo Domingo
“to be married.” (W.C.W., p. 5) The road extended back much farther.
Elena’s
mother, Meline Hurrard (or Jurrard) was of Basque ancestry whose family
had emigrated from
Bordeaux to Martinique
, a French possession in the Caribbean
in the early 1800s. She had married Solomon Hoheb, whose ancestors had
been Sephardic Jews in Holland. (P.M., p. 15) Unfortunately, Williams relates matter-of-factly, the eruption of
Mount Pelée
in
1902 wiped out the Hurrard side of Elena’s family along with the other
28,000 inhabitants of the city of
Saint-Pierre
.
Due
to this mixed heritage, Elena spoke both Spanish and French, the two
languages th
at
were apparently the idioms of Williams’ childhood. “Spanish and
French were the languages I heard habitually while I was growing up,”
Williams tells us. “Mother could talk very little English when I was
born, and Pop spoke Spanish better, in fact, than most Spaniards.” (W.C.W.,
p. 15) Obviously, Spanish was dominant in Williams’ first years.
William
George Williams, or “Pop” as Williams called his father (Elena was always “mother”), had remained an English citizen
despite residing in the
U.S.
throughout his adult years. At the age of five, Pop’s family had migrated from
England
to the
Caribbean
, living first in St. Thomas and then moving to
Santo Domingo. William George thus became
an hispanohablante from
childhood. He and Elena met in Santo Domingo
and later on when the elder Williams had moved to
New York City, he brought Elena over to marry.
No
doubt due to his Spanish fluency, when William George became ad manager
for the manufacturer of a cologne called, Florida Water, the job took him to
South America
on prolonged assignments. When
Pop went to
Buenos Aires
in 1897 to help organize a factory and distribution center there, mother
and the boys, William Carlos, 14, and his brother, Ed, 13, sailed from New York City
to spend a year in Paris. A multi-talented woman, his mother had studied painting for three
years in
Paris
in the l
at
e 1870s, and had also spent a short while in Geneva. The trio lived with an aunt and cousins of their mother’s during
their year-long stay.
Besides
her multilingual skills and painting talents, Elena also played the
piano, accompanying the choir on Sundays
at
the Unitarian
Church where Pop served as superintendent of the Sunday school for 18 years.
In
his autobiography, Williams belittled his own Spanish, but he was
apparently fluent enough to write poetry in Spanish and translate as well. A physician for most of his adult life, he recalls th
at
as an intern, he was relegated to escorting an aged but wealthy Mexicano ranch owner and railroad
executive, from
New York City
back to his n
at
ive
San Luis Potosí, primarily to keep him alive till he got him there. Though, as Williams
says, “My Spanish wasn’t so hot,” (W.C.W., p. 73) he managed to
cope with the situation, and delivered the old man, alive, to his family after a four-day
trip. The man died within a day, but by then Williams was headed back
home, 10 $20 gold pieces in his pockets as payment from the anciano’s
son.
William
Carlos had obtained an internship
at
the French Hospital in Manh
at
tan
at
the suggestion of J. Julio Henna, a senior member of the medical staff
there, and an old friend of his father’s—Henna was one of three physicians (including Ramón Emeterio
Betances) who had fled Puerto Rico in the early 1880s because of their
rebellion against Spanish rule.
The
name that
Williams chose as his pen name, so to speak, is instructive of where his
loyalties and sensibilities lay with regard to his bicultural
background. In 1909, he self-published a thin volume of poems with
“not one thing of the slightest value” in it, he says in his
autobiography, (W.C.W., p. 107) but perhaps using some of the Mexican
gold dollars for the venture. When it came time for him to decide on what
his literary signature would be, he decided on William Carlos Williams: “To me the full
name seemed most revealing and therefore better.” (ibid, p. 108) Wh
at
he meant by most revealing and better, he does not disclose.
Williams’
third book of poems, published in 1917, was titled Al Que Quiere, and included a poem entirely in Spanish. Paul Mariani,
one of his biographers, reports th
at
Pop Williams was “furious” that
the publisher had gone to press with three typos in that
one piece. (P.M., p. 13)
The
Williamses kept close ties with Puerto Rican kin. One Fourth of July,
when Williams was about 9 or 10, he was playing with his cousins Carlito
and Raquel, who were on an extended visit, when a toy cannon they had
filled with gun powder discharged in Williams’ face and nearly blinded
him; for weeks, he had bandages
on his face, but no permanent harm occurred. (W.C.W., p. 18) The cousins
were the offspring of Elena’s brother, Carlos, also a physician.
A
conflict arose early on between his mother and British grandmother,
Emily Dickenson Wellcome, over the rearing of young William. The
grandmother tried to take over his upbringing, Williams recalled, until
one day, “Mother lost her temper and laid the old gal out with a smack
across the puss. … Her Latin blood got the best of her that
day. Nor was she sorry; it did her more good, in fact, than anything that
had happened to her since her coming to the States from Santo Domingo to be married. I think that
one of the most potent forces th
at
kept my mother going to the age of ninety-two was a malign determination to outlive her mother-in-law, who died
at
eighty-three in 1920. I hope I take after my female ancestors.” (W.C.W.,
p. 5)
Perhaps
the most startling influence his mother might have had on Williams was
her spiritualism, a tendency that
often caused her suddenly to lapse into a trance. Close friends and
family knew her as a medium; she often would lose awareness of her
surroundings but continue to communicate as if in another persona. On one occasion, Williams relates, just as the family was
at
supper, Elena began looking around as if lost, and spoke as if she were
someone else. His f
at
her asked her name and she said, “Why I’m Lou Payne.” (W.C.W., pp.
15-16) Pop Williams wrote to Jess Payne, a former neighbor and friend,
who wrote back informing William George that, Lou Payne, the neighbor’s wife, had been near de
at
h from an illness just
at
the time that
Elena had gone into the trance.
How
else explain any number of his poems that
convey a perspective as if from within a mirror, from another dimension?
Here are a few lines from “Portrait of the Author”:
The birches are mad with green points
the wood’s edge is burning with their green,
burning, seething—No, no, no.
The birches are opening their leaves one
by one. Their delicate leaves unfold cold
and separate, one by one. Slender tassels…
CEP, p. 228
In
a later poem, “Eve,” he says, as if vindicating his mother’s terrible gift, “I realize why you wish/to communicate with the dead—/And it is again I/who try to hush you/…It not so
much frightens/as shames me. I want to protect/you, to spare you the
disgrace—/seeing you reach out that
way/to self-inflicted emptiness.” (C.E.P., pp. 376-77)
The
influence of Hispanic roots on Williams has been
thoroughly thrashed out by Julio Marzán, a Puerto Rican born poet and
English professor now living in
Queens
,
New York
. Marzán published The Spanish
American Roots of William Carlos Williams in 1994.
In
seeking to give voice to his Latino persona, Marzán posits, Williams invented a system of expression
which enabled him to convey through English “a nascent writing that
appears to have no roots in this country’s literature.” In other words, Williams’ poetry represents in fact “a major
Latin literary root in Anglo American letters.” (J.M., p xi)
But
Williams must have felt he had to be circumspect. He did not want to be
labeled by critics or fellow poets as less than a real American writer
because he was the son of immigrants. He sought to repel or dispel the
biased notion that
as a “foreigner” he could not write “good” English, and
therefore, he had to write better than anyone else and do so within the
American idiom. It seems that
Williams found his voice by developing an approach to poetry, different
from either th
at
of the European classicist variety or the modernists of that
era such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
Thus,
his primary contribution to American, even world, literature, was to liberate the poet from the oppression of language, that
is, to convey his own worldview through
what
ever influences or informs his personal identity and free of Old World
forms. Dante Alighieri
reflected this consciousness when he broke away from the Church-imposed
L
at
in as the lingua franca to write the Divine Comedy in the vernacular of
the Italian people; by doing so, he freed the Italian language from
bondage and cre
at
ed a new literature.
Part
of or perhaps the underlying genius in Williams’ poetry, Marzán
suggests, is his ability to convey externally the Anglo American
persona, which was necessary to avoid being labeled a Latin immigrant and therefore less than an
adequate or acceptable writer of English, while imbuing through a kind of code
the very cultural essence that
was his true self. Had Williams openly professed his Boricua roots, he
would probably have been
relegated to a second tier as a writer, as the offspring of immigrants trying
to pass himself off as a White Anglo American. In short, he might never
have continued as a writer.
Was
this code, as Marzán calls it, actually a means that
Williams used to suppress his “Spanish American roots,” a rejection
of his Latino origins? Not likely. That
would have meant abandoning his mother, both figuratively and physically. It’s quite clear from his writings that
he cherished his mother, despite her idiosyncrasies. Williams visited
Mayagüez in 1956, apparently on a mission to learn more about his
roots; among other things, he found out the year of his mother’s
birth— for some reason, she had kept the fact hidden from her children
until her death.
Any
writer will tend to convey in his language the ethos that
is derived from his origins. That
doesn’t make it good literature. Most of the writing in the early years of the Chicano movement
would not pass muster today as first class fiction or poetry; it was
heavily nationalistic but its good intent would not redeem it as credible literature.
Learning
about Williams’ experience as a bilingual and bicultural person adds
another dimension to his overall contribution to literature. Williams mastered wh
at
was essentially a second language, English, and obviously wrote beyond
the ordinary—he established a standard. Chicanos writers, I for one,
tend to write with a pronounced ethnic slant. That
does not relieve me of the obligation to write as well as I can in English and when I do so in Spanish, my
mother tongue.
During
Williams’ era, the buzzwords stereotyping or racial profiling with
their present connotation did not exist, but the denigration of foreigners and immigrants did: Williams realized this and, if
Marzán is correct, adjusted to the reality through subterfuge or
subtlety, and even “coding” in his poetry.
But,
much has changed since Williams’ day. We can criticize writing if
it’s just poorly worded or structured, but to demean a poem or story,
let alone a community, because it derives from a “foreign” source,
or communicates through an “inferior” language, can cause immedi
at
e push-back from various social sectors.
Unlike
Williams, I feel very comfortable if some of my writing clearly defines
me as a Chicano writer or poet, because I can also write from the
universal center that
Williams found, which is unrelated, even unconscious, of an ethnicity, a place of birth, or a spiritual
slant. That
underlying impulse in Williams’ poetry of a Latino sub-consciousness empowers all Latino writers. Having set the benchmark in the English idiom, he has
“proven” as it were that
one can be Latino, Chicano, Boricua or whatever, and still exercise a mastery of English. In fact, Williams tells
us, we can enhance the English language because of our bicultural and
bilingual nature.
This
is precisely what
Williams was suggesting in 1940, when he spoke
at
the First Inter-American Writers’ Conference
at
the
University
of
Puerto Rico. According to Mariani, Williams “studded his talk with references to
Spanish liter
at
ure and to the salutary influence that literature had had on the American language,” (P.M., p. 446) going so far as
to compare the Spanish dramatist, Lope de Vega, to Shakespeare. Mariani says it was “a way of
paying tribute to his parents… For the first time in his life,
Williams had returned to his mother’s ancestral home.” (P.M., p.
446)
Of
course, Mariani missed the whole point. Williams had long before
“returned to his mother’s” cultural roots, if he had ever left
them, through language—here was an American writer, who could tell the
difference between the shorter line of four stresses in Spanish drama
and poetry against the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s works, and
dare to urge North American writers to take advantage of the Spanish
idiom.
Mariani
quotes from Williams’ speech: “In many ways, sixteenth and
seventeenth century
Spain
and Spaniards are nearer to us in the United States
today than perhaps,
England
ever was. It is a point worth
at
least taking into consideration. We in the United States
are climactically as by latitude and we
at
her much nearer
Spain
than
England, as also in volatility of our spirits, in racial mixture—much more like Gothic and
Moorish Spain.” P.M., p. 446-47.
This
doesn’t sound like someone who rejects his bicultural roots. Rather it reveals in the “we”
that at
he recognized his origins and found them more vital and organic to his
writing than even English literature. Is it not a tribute to his mother and a profession of his Hispanic
roots that
he claims that
“volatility of spirits” and “racial mixture” as his own?
As
subtle as ever, Marzán would say. Williams again seems to be using code
words for the influence of his mother, the volatile medium, and his own mixed racial and ethnic ancestry. Today, it’s
very likely that at
Williams would have felt quite comfortable to break the code and call
himself a Boricua or Latino poet.
Williams
Carlos died
March 4, 1963
, age 80, after suffering a series of strokes that
left him unable to write. Up until now, few if any Latino have appreciated him as a brother. It must be a final
culmination of complex life that
we can now fully proclaim and esteem William Carlos Williams as a Latino
poet, no half ways about it.
Sources:
The
Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, (W.C.W.) by William Carlos
Williams, New Directions Books, Norfolk,
Conn.
, 1948.
The
Collected Earlier Poems, (C.E.P.) by William Carlos Williams, New
Directions Books, Norfolk
,
Conn., 1938, 1951.
The
Collected Later Poems, (C.L.P.) by William Carlos Williams, New Directions Books,
Norfolk, Conn., 1944, 1948, and 1950.
The
Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams (J.M.), by Julio Marzán,
University
of
Texas
Press, Austin, 1994.
William
Carlos Williams, A
New World
Naked, (P.M.) by Paul Mariani,
McGraw-Hill
,
New York
, 1981.
Armando
Rendón is author of Chicano Manifesto, a long-time writer on Chicano
and
Latino affairs, and in his
later years, having been inspired by the likes of Williams, turning more to
poetry. He is in the midst of reading all of Williams’ poems.
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Mercedes (Mercy) Bautista was born in the city of 
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