William Carlos Williams is about a hundred times more likely to show up in textbooks and anthologies for poetry than for his short stories, but the chasm is not one produced on the merit of quality. Williams consistently proves to be one of the more creative and imaginative producers of short fiction within his generation; it’s just that his poetry is better. Or, put another way, perhaps Williams is proof that poets and short story writers are born as well as made and he just so happened to be a born poet who made himself a quality writer of short stories. Regardless, the denial of Williams into the academic canon of the American curriculum as a short story writer who consistently proves to be a talent at the very least on part with Ernest Hemingway (and, let’s be frank, his talent is well above that most overrated of all American writer is yet more proof that one can only appreciate one what has access to. Given the choice of reading Hemingway or Williams in the short form of fictional, the result of the majority might well surprise those who crafted school curricula to further the myth of Ernest.
Just take “Verbal transcription 6am” as one example. One of the elements which make Hemingway a writer whose works pretty much define the American literary canon is so-called economy of words. Untold millions of would-be writers of fiction have had it drilled into their heads that less is more and have attempted to replicate the stripped-down prose of Hemingway rather than adopting the more creative flexibility afforded by William Faulkner’s opposite approach. If Faulkner and Hemingway were charged with telling the exact same story and Faulkner’s final result number two-thousand words, one would expect Hemingway’s version of the very same events to clock in well under half that. Together, these two dominant figures of American literature represent polar extremes. The problem, of course, is that not every story really works as well by paring things down to a bare minimum. Some stories cry out for what may be considered by minimalists as extraneous padding. A story that almost demands to be slice into like a brilliant surgeon during the editing process is “Verbal transcription 6am.” It is just barely over four-hundred words in total and that seems really to be about just right since the entire narrative consists of a transcription of a call made to a doctor at six in the morning by a wife providing details of her husband suffering what appears to be a heart attack.
But the topic of the phone call quickly digresses when pets begin acting up. Before you know, the wife is talking about how their dogs killed an old cat who had gone deaf. Gradually, we also learn of the family’s pet bluejay with a broken wing and a canary. The call ends on a conversational note offering warm coffee. This is a story that demands to be short and devoid of certain details. It is a character study about a desperate woman concerned with her husband’s health who does everything possible to avoid actually discussing her husband’s health. It is revelation of minimalism long before it became popular as well as an example of how to use the Hemingway approach only when necessary.
By contrast, “The Use of Force” is also a rather short short-story, but nevertheless clocks in with a word count more than triple that of “Verbal transcription 6am.” It features more characters who are fleshed out, pursues a broader collection of themes, features a different style and is more conventionally structured as a first-person narrative. One could argue it might benefit from a Faulkner-style addition of language, but it would be difficult to argue on behalf of making it stronger through more Draconian editing. Rather than paring the story down strictly for the purpose of making it as terse as possible, the editing signifies that the final result very likely started out much fatter; certain literary elements contained within strongly hint that Williams put the first draft on a diet, but not a crash one. “The Use of Force” is another example of Williams the short story writer being guided by Williams the poet. Editing is everything in poetry—whether to ensure adherence to rhyme or meter or simply for the sake of specific aesthetics. Knowing how long to extend a single line and where to divide stanzas comes naturally to the poet who has been writing for some time. Many fail to transport this experience into the unique requirements of writing short prose fiction while others, like Williams, seem to have no difficulty at all.
Both these stories also serve to reveal a common threat unifying much of his work in the form of short fiction. As a practicing physician himself, his life experience informs so many of his stories that The Doctor Stories serves as the title for what is probably his most famous collection. These two stories centering around a simple family’s need for medical help also situate the recurrence of simple settings and plain folks as the characters he preferred to write about. Less obvious in “The Use of Force” but present nevertheless is another central aspect common to the author’s preferred methodology of storytelling: he is an innovator and experimenter in form and structure even in those stories that do not appear on the surface to be particularly uncommon to a modern reader. The modern reader, however, has had decades of minimalism and postmodernism to feed upon as a way of more easily digesting what does not appear to be out of the ordinary now, but definitely was at the time of composition.
