Paul Mariani's biography of Williams [William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked] first came out in 1981 and was soon recognized as a landmark in literary biography. This Norton paperback edition is, alas, unrevised, so that the (admittedly few) factual errors of the first edition remain. Nevertheless, it provides a good opportunity to see how Mariani's biographical technique—complete empathy with the subject—has stood the test of time. A decade on, Mariani's massive work, in his own proud words the document of a “ten-year obsession with another man's life,” still reads well, although some of the passages where the author's desire to merge with his subject leads to linguistic mimicry (“Art was no effete aesthetic game, damn it …,” “Hell, what could the English show the Americans now?”), seem less palatable today. Mariani himself sensed the potential embarrassment of this approach when he conceded in the book's preface that in his search for “the inner life of Williams himself” he might have infused too much of his own life into that of his subject: the poet's biography had, in some ways, also served the critic's auto-biographical impulses.

If Mariani wanted to unearth the poet's “inner life,” Ann Fisher-Wirth argues in [William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature] that Williams himself had been doing nothing much else most of the time—that, in short, the poet himself had been his own most eager and consistent biographer. “Autobiography,” in the comprehensive sense which Fisher-Wirth gives to the term, marks the “place in which a writer discovers his or her inner standing.” Unsurprising as this definition might seem, Fisher-Wirth's approach to the Williams canon does at first promise some fresh insights, and were it just for the unusual selection and arrangement of the texts she discusses—her argument moves from the elusive Autobiography (1952) back to Williams's play A Dream of Love (1948) and the very early poetic fragment which Fisher-Wirth entitles “Philip and Oradie” and then forward again to poems like “Love Song” (1915) and “The Crimson Cyclamen” (1936) and, finally, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1955).

Yet Fisher-Wirth's text raises serious questions as well, and not only because, unlike Mariani, she never really addresses the problem of her own, the critic's, “standing.” Fisher-Wirth's almost wholesale rejection of Williams's Autobiography in the first two chapters of her book as not satisfyingly “autobiographical” (especially when compared with a work like Paterson) ignores differences of genre and, more importantly, also makes us wonder about Fisher-Wirth's own definition of biographical “truth.” How do we know that some texts are more “true” than others, and is it really the purpose of autobiographical literature to reveal the writer, as Fisher-Wirth seems to believe, in “all the truth of nature”? Williams himself apparently did not always think so and warned the readers of his autobiography: “I was a liar and would always be one, sauve qui peut!” Incidentally, the rather late essay from which Fisher's epigraph is taken (“The artist is always and forever painting only one thing: a self-portrait”), suggests that the artist's truest self-portrait may be the one which is most hidden: “It is his own face in the terms of another face” (“Emanuel Romano: The Portrait,” 1951). According to Fisher's logic, “innocence” is, since nobody can really be “innocent” this side of paradise, bad, mere show, a role, while “nakedness” (one of the most frequently used terms in the book) is good, since it implies, in the biblical sense, knowledge and therefore also forgiveness. The poet who declines to speak about “sin” must, in these terms, be less truthful, believable and “brave” than the one who anguishedly admits it. The important methodological distinction between the author's biographical self and the author-as-textual-subject is, at any rate, ignored throughout the book.

For all Fisher-Wirth's talk about sex and “fornication,” it is clear that her argument, which disparages the “conventionality” of Williams's Autobiography, finally itself subscribes to a rather homely Christian view of autobiography: “pain brings forth joy,” as Fisher-Wirth writes later in the book. Even in the section on “Asphodel,” which might very well be the most detailed explanation we have of the poem, too much of Fisher-Wirth's argument is either just plain statement (“This is what it feels like to be human,”) or poetic paraphrase of extensive quotations (“… the deathless imagination flowers without ceasing …”), and too little of it is grounded in careful analysis. We still lack an adequate comment on Williams's readiness to acknowledge what would count, by the same conventional standards which Fisher-Wirth thinks apply to the Autobiography, as definitely “unpleasant,” as, Fisher-Wirth would say, “surliness,” “bitterness” or “self-hatred.” Passages in which the unrepentant author calls himself a “liar,” in which the doctor repeatedly admits that he would rather treat his patients as “material for a work of art” than as persons to be “cured,” and notably the gruesome account of “Pop Williams's” death, brought about by the son's own “unjustifiable” medical intervention, make The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams a much darker text than Fisher-Wirth realizes. This would also hold true for the doctor stories or a poem like “The Ogre,” presenting as it does the thinly veiled scandalous fantasies of a pediatrician (some important insights on this topic are contained in Marjorie Perloff's 1980 Georgia Review essay). As Williams very well knew, the foregrounding of the mask—in this case, the mask of the doctor who exploits his patients' nakedness for other than medical purposes—can itself turn into a mask. Interestingly enough, right at the beginning of his Autobiography, Williams casts doubt on the validity of the whole project itself: “the hidden core of my life will not easily be deciphered.” Or, as Williams wrote in a little-known but interesting autobiographical text that is not mentioned in Fisher-Wirth's book: “I reserve myself for myself” (“Three Professional Studies,” 1917).

This is not to say that Williams was aloof. Fortified by generous quotations from Williams's unpublished correspondence, Mariani makes a strong case for the sympathy Williams would show towards younger American poets like Robert Creeley or Allen Ginsberg who he felt were carrying on his search for a new idiom in poetry. Thus, Williams also wrote letters of encouragement to Irving Layton, the Canadian poet who was writing in an altogether different tradition, and his “Note on Layton” served as an introduction to the younger writer's The Improved Binoculars (1956). Letters indeed are the very stuff of literary biography, and not surprisingly the more interesting passages in the correspondence of Layton and Creeley, which has now been made available in an edition by Ekbert Faas and Sabrina Reed, [Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978] have already appeared in Elspeth Cameron's 1985 biography of the Canadian poet. The annotations to the present edition are generally helpful, although some readers might want to question the need of pointing out to an audience interested in Layton, a writer notoriously wary of tags, that Mark Twain was an “American,” Kafka an “Austrian writer” and Sigmund Freud a “neurologist”—why not also identify Shakespeare or Mozart, then? (Louis Zukofsky by the way, is consistently misspelled as “Zukovsky”).

Are these letters (the earliest goes back to February 17, 1953; the last hurried note is dated November 14, 1978) auto-biographically relevant or interesting? Creeley and Layton did not meet in person until 1963, so their dialogue for a large part took place on paper only. Technical questions surrounding the publication of Layton's collection In the Midst of My Fever (1954) are thoroughly and sometimes a little cryptically discussed, unless one keeps all the abbreviations in mind (“Some more IMOF came from BMC …”), and Layton and Creeley also exchange criticisms and suggestions for the revision of each other's texts to be published in magazines like Layton's CIV/n or Creeley's The Black Mountain Review. Without a “mag,” Layton points out, Canada, “this huge country of ours,” would be just a literary wasteland, “a derisive epithet.” In a different context, Layton once boasted that he put Canadian poetry on the map by first of all putting himself on it, and the “immediate presence” of the Canadian, which, although he had never seen him, so greatly impressed Creeley, can be felt even in this correspondence. One would look in vain, however, for Fisher-Wirth's “truth of nature” in these exchanges, obsessed as they are with such details as the missing period at the end of a line or the hyphen after the word that ought to have been a dash. As Layton writes to Creeley, “high thinking and deep feeling belong to a bygone age.” Disappointing as these letters may sometimes seem to the literary theorist as well as to the biographer more interested in, say, the juicy details of Layton's tempestuous life, they help us to realize that writing can be a way of life too—from the first, very private idea for a good metaphor all they say through to finding the right publisher, proofreading and, finally, the excitement of seeing one's own text in print. “With careful fragments,” as Layton once put it (“Providence”), do we build lives.”