Paterson by William Carlos Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Riverrun Black & Thick

Paramus, Passaic... indeed Paterson: to New Yorkers these are names evoking suburban decline and decay, even when Williams wrote his poem in the late 1940’s. To commemorate a place like Paterson in a work which he knew would be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake - the poetic story of the River Liffey as it makes its way through Dublin to the sea - is a bold artistic move, especially since Williams had no personal connection to force his hand. It just seemed to him a place in some way typical of America. And perhaps he was right. Paterson does seem an apt microcosm of the country.

Paterson was essentially founded by Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. His intention was to launch an industrial revolution, an antidote for the agrarian romanticism of people like Thomas Jefferson. And he succeeded. The old mill towns of Northern New Jersey blossomed in the early nineteenth century because he wanted them to. As did the later foundries, factories, refineries, and ports that one can see under a more or less permanent haze of pollution from the financial towers of downtown Manhattan.

More than being the genesis of American industrialism, Paterson is also the germ of corporate America. Prior to the American Revolution incorporation was a privilege granted only by parliament, and only for endeavours which were demonstrably in the public (read Crown) interests. Existing American law had no experience with corporations, their establishment, or their control. Thanks largely to Hamilton and his Society for the Employment of Useful Manufactures in Paterson, New Jersey became the go-to place for free-wheeling corporate entrepreneurs to get their bona fides for the asking from the state legislature. The subsequent history of governmental corruption in New Jersey is not an accidental or incidental consequence.

Paterson has always been a city of immigrants. In the nineteenth century they came from Northern Europe. In the twentieth, they came from the American South, and Latin America. More lately, they have arrived in what is a de-industrialised wasteland from Southern Asia and the Middle East. The place now has the largest Muslim community in America (And among other notable demographics, the largest Peruvian community as well). Hamilton’s original plan depended on a continuous flow of immigration for its execution. No one apparently gave much thought to the day that the tap might want to be turned off. The price of ambition is rarely paid by the ambitious.

So I think Williams’s intuition was correct. The name of the place itself suggests some sort of inter-generational continuity that Joyce would likely have made much of. Without the Patersons of America, the New York Cities, centres of finance and commerce not greasy toil, would never had been created. The fact that New Yorkers, or for that matter the rest of America, could care less could be part of his motivation for writing about it (unless I have missed some subtle parody). In any case, Williams’s concern and fondness for the place can only be considered quaint in a country whose obsession seems to be to forget its past lest the past make it look foolish. This is a country where...

“The language, the language
fails them
They do not know the words
or have not
the courage to use them   .”

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