Julio Marzán
Williams’ Unsung Tribute to Mayagüez
Tinta regada
1 de octubre de 2024
Mayagüez in Williams’ narrative about his mayagüezana mother Elena Hoheb William is the backdrop of his earliest poems about her in Al Que Quiere, poems that voiced his displeasure with what he perceived as her upbringing romanticized. Her escapism characterized with memories of Mayagüez and Paris and succumbing to spiritualist trances colors The Autobiography, a portrayal he walked back in Yes, Mrs. Williams. This erratic composite makes up the narrative of Williams’ conflicted understanding of Elena.
Williams’s readers– including me–were easily persuaded to concur with his distrust of her nostalgia for her upbringing: given Puerto Rico’s historical poverty and her never returning to the island, Elena had to be exaggerating about having grown up amid refinement in Mayagüez. I never looked at the city in those terms. My extended family’s being from both Old San Juan and its metropolitan area contributed to my disregard of that far-off third city, best known for its academic mill of engineers. I had passed through Mayagüez several times on my way to nearby coastal towns never motivated to stop and appreciate the city unobstructed by my San Juan bias. My tunnel vision expanded when I spoke at The William Carlos Williams Society’s biannual conference in 2024.
It took place at the University of Puerto Rico’s lush, green campus at Mayagüez, where The Society organized a tour led by a guide through whose knowledge one could appreciate this lovely city’s rich past as foundation of its present. The tour began at its manicured, tree-lined main plaza with its central water fountain, overlooked at one end by its City Hall and at the other end by the Cathedral Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, both visited as sources of more history. In the course of walking to those and more sites one gleaned that in modernity Mayagüez retains a historical elegance that shines through the architecture of even its now shuttered houses, many being renovated to restore their original distinction. Among the shuttered was a row of houses along one of the streets that leads to the main plaza. One of those houses, I later learned thanks to research shared by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera as part of the conference, was where Williams’ uncle Carlos lived and conducted his medical practice.
There was more evidence of cultural vitality burgeoning out of an older pedigree at the Museo Casa Pilar Defilló, a museum homage to mayagüezana Pilar Úrsula Defilló, mother of the internationally renown Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973). In 1955 Casals moved to Puerto Rico and in 1956 founded a yearly gathering of the world’s musical talents, Festival Casals,[1] held in San Juan. Black and white photos of the city’s past musical life complement the photos of Casals’ coming to Mayagüez, his mother’s birthplace.
I could not stay long enough in Mayagüez to experience more present cultural life first-hand, but whether dining at a restaurant or recalling posters of events, I took away its harmonizing vibrant modernization with its preservation of the past, a renewed sense of itself that, even though renovated, is not nouveau but patrician. I also could not help processing everything I saw through Williams’ eyes in 1956, and how what he saw must have changed his perception of Elena. Williams had to have arrived conflicted. In 1951 he had published The Autobiography, a product of his personae conflict. In that book, writing as Bill, Williams’ Hispanic background is conceded with irony–Marianne Moore scolded his similarly mocking his inspiration in another writing—and he consistently depicts Elena as either lost in memories or in one of her spiritualist trances. Williams never took seriously her aspiration to paint, a dream that burst when her brother could no longer finance her studies abroad. One characterization device was Williams’ repeatedly sighing, “Oh, Mother.”
That Bill viewpoint was an odd retrofitting at that late date, a decade after he had traveled to Puerto Rico in 1941, an experience that, as I argue in The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, profoundly affected both him and his work. The poetry of Luis Palés Matos gave him a better understanding of Elena’s idiosyncrasy and of himself as Carlos, refreshing as well–one must deduce– his commitment to write what would become Yes, Mrs. Williams. One reason that Williams gave biographer Paul Mariani for accepting the 1956 invitation to read again in Puerto Rico was that this time he would visit the campus at Mayagüez, where he could gather more information on his mother’s earlier years for the book on which he had evidently started working.
Insight into Williams as writer and man of his time requires trafficking in circumstantial evidence because, as he announces in the poem “The Cure,” he intentionally covered tracks he didn’t want readers to pursue: “They will never know my sources,….” Williams’ visit to Mayagüez is all circumstantial evidence. The city did provide Williams with more information, articles and documents pursuant to Elena’s life but as well with valuable intangibles, notably because of the year that he was invited.
In 1941 at the Inter-American Writers Conference, Williams had talked about Spanish literature as a possible liberating enrichment to American poetry. From the Spanish Civil War’s generation of poets, Williams had translated a selection. In other words, even though Williams wrote in English and was invited as the son of the Puerto Rican Elena, Williams was also invited as a defender of the island’s Spanish heritage, in tune with the island intelligentsia’s hispanismo consciousness. Tacitly Williams participated in the ongoing island campaign to reawaken awareness of the island’s Spanish heritage against the U.S. effort to Anglo-Americanize the island.
At that time too exiled Spanish writers and intellectuals were being wooed to live and teach in Puerto Rico, their star status intended to heighten awareness of the island’s Spanish heritage, provoking a nativist resistence to the diminution of Puerto Rico’s national culture. Out of that consciousness emerged Luis Palés Matos’ poesía afroantillana, the more authentically Latin American side of Puerto Rican culture that was a complete discovery for Williams whose American mindset had only known Puerto Rico as “Spanish.”
By the following decade, hispanismo underwritten by exiled Spaniards was being heavily funded by private and public funds to overshadow with haute–meaning Spanish—culture emergent nativist/nationalist consciousness, including the afroantillismo sowed by Luis Palés Matos. In other words hispanismo and not native Puerto Rican culture served as better known motive for that decade’s surge in island cultural life, producing, in 1956, two landmarks that could not be ignored by Williams, notwithstanding his not acknowledging them.
The first is the residency, since 1946, of the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, in Puerto Rico, the land of his wife’s family, where he also taught at the University. Jiménez was a poet Williams refrained from recognizing doubtless for aesthetic and possibly political reasons worthy of another discussion, but it is difficult to imagine that William’s father who had read him El Canto del Mío Cid and the poems of Quevedo and Góngora, did not introduce him to Jiménez’s iconic prose poem Platero y yo (1914). So when Williams arrived in 1956, he was likely already aware or made very much aware of Jiménez’s residency. In October of that same year, Jiménez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (which owing to poor health he could not receive personally, delegating that task to the president of the University of Puerto Rico).
The second landmark of that period was Pablo Casal’s settling in Puerto Rico, where his mother was born, a move well-known in the music world and certainly not unknown to Williams: a letter that he wrote to Pablo Casals is part of William Carlos Williams Research Collection at the University of Pennsylvania.[2]
In the poem “Brilliant Sad Sun” (pun on “sun/son”), Williams chides Elena’s slip into nostalgia, repeating her story of the time her cousin Patty played the violin in Mayagüez. Ironically, Williams’ second trip to Puerto Rico coincided with Casals’ much-hyped presence, which, I posit here, influenced Williams to revisit his younger impatience with Elena’s nostalgia and Patty’s playing the violin. To begin with, his personal parallel with Casals would not have escaped Williams. Casals was born of a Puerto Rican mother in Spain just as he was born of a Puerto Rican mother in the U.S.–and both mothers were from Mayagüez, the city in which the Casals drama surely gestated in Williams as he walked its streets in search of his mother’s history, the city that also connected him to Casals.
If in 1941 Palés Matos’ poetry gave Williams the “Mulata Antilla” controlling metaphor of Elena forYes, Mrs. Williams, Mayagüez immersed him in Elena’s memories of more refined younger years, memories that the younger Williams suggested were expressions of her Hispanic nature to romanticize, suggesting an exaggeration. But against a background of the cultural life in Puerto Rico when he arrived, the connection Williams must have made while in Mayagüez, whether consciously or unconsciously, had to be between Elena’s formation and that of Casals’ mother Pilar, about whose family Williams surely heard some talk among his extended family as they came from the same mayagüezana upper social class. Elena’s family like Pilar’s family had branches that extended to Europe and, like his own extended family, enjoyed a European cultured life on the island.
Williams knew this to be true, as cited in his poems, but treated the fact with intellectual levity, allowing him to deride Elena’s recycled stories. His actually being in Mayagüez, however, must have ended that posturing. By all indications, Williams visited the city in the spring of 1956,[3] the year Casals founded the Festival Casals. The Hoheb line was no longer present and Williams had to invoke his family’s belief in spirits to recreate Elena’s time. Hard to imagine that in his walking around the city Williams didn’t also envision its cultural world in which Elena acquired her ambition to paint and took French lessons while her cousin Patty learned to play the violin. And perhaps in a ghostly unconscious he was reminded of Pilar growing up as cultured as Elena before leaving for Spain, where she married and raised her son Pablo to love music and his Puerto Rican roots.
In other words, in 1956 the cultured spirits of Mayagüez , which Williams originally had imagined as the setting of Elena’s inferior-minded escapism, must have redeemed her from her son’s youthful former skepticism. For a poet who wrote an epic poem about a man as a city, Williams could only have grasped that, while indeed Elena’s more early years provided an escape from the tedium of her lowbrow Rutherford existence, she did embody the refinement of the Mayagüez of her time, the woman as the city, and deserved better than his treatment of her in The Autobiography, explaining the need for the more rounded corrective, published just before his death, Yes, Mrs. Williams.
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[1] Some sources cite the first Festival, held in spring, was actually held in 1957 although agreement of its announced founding is affixed on the year 1956.
[2] I only recently learned of its existence and cannot attest to its content but only cite it here as evidence that Williams was aware of Casals, making plausible the associations that I am claiming he must have made with the renown cellist.
[3] Biographical references to Williams’ trips to Puerto Rico, assumed to be of no literary import, amount to general adverbial phrases that indicate the year and few details.
