“The Truth About Us”: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson

Abstract

Set in the depressed New Jersey city where William Carlos Williams lived and practiced medicine, Paterson opens with a pastoral landscape scene. The poem’s protagonist, Dr. Paterson, configured in mythic proportions, lies in the valley below the local falls, stretched alongside the female “mountain,” who is described as having “[p]earls at her ankles, her monstrous hair/spangled with apple-blossoms.”¹ Interspersed with the lyrical descriptions of these sleeping giants is a prose narrative of a nineteenth-century shoemaker who, while eating mussels he had collected for food, discovered “many hard substances” that he initially “threw … away” (Paterson, 9). When he brought these to a jeweler, they were found to be extremely valuable, and upon gathering more he found “[o]ne pearl of fine luster [that] was sold to Tiffany for $900 and later to Empress Eugenie for $2,000 to be known henceforth as the ‘Queen Pearl,’ the finest of its sort in the world today” (Paterson, 9). Typical of the collagelike form of the poem, these first pages juxtapose beautiful and grotesque images and stories, linking art and environment, literature and history, treasure and waste. The mountain scene, seemingly odd piece of historical trivia, and the voices that follow depict the locality of Paterson and its inhabitants, mythical and actual, in a radical reincarnation of the pastoral mode.