Return to Paterson

I spent a little time in Paterson last week, while participating in the William Carlos Williams Society's Annual Conference. The talks happened some remove from the chaos of the city in the more bucolic satellite campus of William Paterson College, mostly dead for the summer, although the focus was particularly on the relation of the poem to the city. As hoped, I unearthed some bits of knowledge not easily dislodged from academic books or internet searches. For example, my hunch that the Kevin McCarthy involved with a dramatic reading of Paterson at the Lexington Ave. Y was the Kevin McCarthy of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (thus, through pure hunch setting off the continuing series of Body Snatcher hacks) was given credence since someone pointed out that he was Mary McCarthy's brother, and thus would share her literary circles. I met the almost-allegorically named Dr. Peterson, distinguished for having written the first book-length study of Paterson, and whose collection of Williamsiana includes a manuscript with a mole Williams removed from Floss taped to it. He also had some David Lyle manuscripts and gave me some insight into Lyle's personality. While I couldn't get her to say anything on tape, one scholar mysteriously said something during a question and answer session something to the effect of "Marcia Nardi ruined my career!" So, some juicy bits from long-time travelers in the Patersphere. I took a few of the "greener" critics--including someone writing on ecocrit and Paterson--out to the more off-limits places, where the dead factories seem to have sagged and mulched a little bit more since my last visit. I wonder what will happen to these mysterious and historical abandoned spaces now that the falls area will become a National Park. I almost fear the worst, but hopefully they can get people who are smart about maintaining "preserved ruins" in the spirit of a place like the Eastern State Pen, rather than turn it into a tacky tourist phantasmagoria. Already they have painted the Looms-Warpers-Winders-Quillers-Coppers- Jacquards-&Supplies on the side of the old Paterson Silk Machinery Exchange. Ugh!

Body Snatchers!

While the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers has multiple remakes and half-mutant cousins, we forget, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1884 “The Body Snatcher” as well as a more significant and overlooked precursor . . . Paterson. Now hear me out.
Some of the data I’ve strewn along the blog-lines of time go unnarrated either because they sing for themselves, or there’s nothing yet to say. The last piece of data, a 1960 announcement for a reading of Paterson at the world’s most literary gym—the Y at 92 and Lexington in NYC—became striking precisely for what was not immediately striking. The names “Robert Lowell” and “Kenneth Koch” were perhaps the most immediately recognizable, the more boring aspects of this notice. A Google search for “Arthur Luce Klein” shows that he was the director of spoken word LPs, and that “Talley Beatty” danced in Maya Deren films, among other things. Beatty’s name was one which, as an experimental film buff, I should have had in my brainpan, but luckily it is a name that Google searches shine their grace upon. The name “Kevin McCarthy” is another matter. There must have been a deep sigh that accompanied my typing his name into the search engine, knowing I’d get all matter of Facebook pages from 17-year-olds in Illinois, and track and field stats from La Jolla. You cannot be famous with a name like Kevin McCarthy—you are doomed to be usurped by your doubles at all turns. Which is probably why the most famous Kevin McCarthy, and perhaps our man, played Dr. Miles Bennell in the 1956 Body Snatchers. Who better to play out the drama of more perfect alien bodies replacing yours than someone with a name which is as empty a repository as is “John Smith”?
What, then, was going on in this performance of Paterson? It may be that McCarthy was brought on board merely for the imprimatur that celebrities tend to give avant-garde works. Or was there a more pointed connection to his most famous role? Because one can imagine the poets reading and the dancer dancing (creating, it must be said—if I imagine correctly—a racialist division between the white poets’ work of words and the “natural” inaccessible beauty of the Falls as a black man). But the B movie actor? What was he doing? What else? B-movie-ing: with paranoiac intensity, he must have performed the body-snatching confusion of “who speaks?” in Paterson. Does the man inhabit the place or the place the man, his thoughts sitting and standing on the bus, animated automatons abounding, “They walk incommunicado . . . . They begin!” It’s like a blob and robot movie rolled up in one. Now that I think of it, you could subtitle all of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with random lines from Paterson, and it would make sense, especially given Paterson’s talk of fertility, gamma rays, and sleep (if you remember, you become one of them if you go to sleep . . .).
Compare, then, if you will, the following representative passages:

Listen to me,
Please listen.
If you don’t, if you won’t
If you fail to understand
Then the same incredible terror
That’s menacing me
Will strike at you!
--Invasion of the Body Snatchers

A false language. A true. A false language pouring—a language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without dignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear.
--Paterson

. . . and decide for yourself!

Paterson Datum no. 36