The Doctor in Search of Himself

There is no quackery about Dr. Williams, either as physician or poet. His Autobiography is unpretentious and forthright to the point of being maladroit. Dr. Williams has the gift of gaucherie. He portrays himself struggling through the world of life and letters, typewriter in one hand and stethoscope in the other, delivering poems dexterously between triplets. Writing at the age of sixty-eight, he has no intention of playing the patriarch like Frost or the pariah like Pound; instead he is ingenuous and engaging.

Poetry has not interfered with his medical practice, but has helped to justify it. For Dr. Williams finds that treating patients as patients is ultimately uninteresting‍—he has a refreshing skepticism about cures—but that treating them as subjects for a work of art is not. His experiences as a doctor have provided much of the raw material for his writing, and his Autobiography gives a fascinating account of some of them. The book deals chiefly with his patients and his friends, and says little about his own private life. For example, although he speaks of his strong sexual drive, and although he published one of his books with an ovum and some enterprising spermatazoa as cover decoration, he vehemently refuses to talk about his love affairs: “I do not intend to tell the particulars of the women I have been to bed with, or anything about them. Don’t look for it. That has nothing to do with me. What relations I have had with men and women, such encounters as have interested me most profoundly, have not occurred in bed.” This is a welcome iconoclasm, but it is disappointing to discover that his reticence also extends to his literary development, about which he is almost inarticulate until near the end of the book; even then he reports the lectures he has given at writers’ conferences and colleges with pride at their impulsive, improvised air.