SS8
PARTISAN REVIEW
Here, then, is the sense in which distance is essential to Tomlinson's
process and even serves as its stimulus. When most purely a spectator,
however, studying the random patterns of
decalcomania,
Tomlinson
cannot organize, by selection and collage, on a level as specific as that in
his poems; one sometimes misses in his visual works the accuracy and
economy of his verse, which achieves a fuller penetration of the
phenomenal world. Birds added to a cloudscape, for example, seem
contrived; their anecdotal specificity constricts the fantasy Stokes defines,
which demands an unfolding in time, a process rather than a static image.
The graphics are most successful when suggesting the material qualities of
water or stone, when elements interpenetrate, stopping just short of a
literal image ("Between Sea and Shore"). Here, Tomlinson's detachment
sustains a balance of analytical attention and desire. These works achieve
the visual authority of photographs, but with an elusiveness that elicits
closer scrutiny, and they share with the best of his poems a deeply felt
animation of the physical world, that "new inventiveness" he discerned in
Cezanne.
Firmly based in perception, such an art appeals to a deep impulse in
the American spirit, but American poets and artists have not moved easily
from their romance with nature to Tomlinson's intimate reconciliation
with the physical world. Underlying Williams's enthusiasm for the
material qualities of words and things is a deeper, at times almost violent,
impulse for synthesis, a lust for experience he shares with Walt Whitman.
In
In the American Grain
Williams portrays the American as estranged
from his surroundings and traces this alienation to the Puritanical heritage
of restrictions on touching. Williams articulates the concerns of artists in
the circle of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, for whom it seemed
necessary to learn to see America with new eyes, uninfluenced by Euro–
pean conventions, and to build emotional bonds to the new world and
its local idioms. Linked as he is through Cubism to the starkly formal
paintings of Demuth and Sheeler, Williams can also admit to a frank
admiration for Matisse, who, as he wrote to Marianne Moore, "lifts me
up superbly." For all his exoticism and decorative exuberance - suspect in
light of the new art's rigorous objectivity - Matisse is an artist supremely
at home in his surroundings, capable of the full emotional response
which Williams deems the key to distilling their essence.
Tomlinson, on the other hand, seeks in painting not sensuality but
muteness and objective distance; in his rejection of color and mistrust of
emotional identification he has much in common with the Puritans.
Tomlinson, though, begins in a situation of intimate f:1miliarity with his
surroundings and his language. His resistance to fusion establishes a
tension by which he redefines the separation of outer and inner worlds,
animating his subject with the freshness of renewed desire. This rational
