THE LAST WORD

Marcia Nardi (1901-90) was the anonymous female Williams quoted in Paterson (1946), using her letters to represent either the deprived misunderstood poet or the isolated unconventional woman. Here, she is resurrected with all her unpleasant attributes, failures, complaints, and self-defeating gestures in full editorial dress. In 1957, after she won a Guggenheim, Williams told Nardi that she was ``gifted and generous,'' but in fact, for most of their acquaintance, he was assaulted with endless letters full of petty grievances, demands, anger, and resentment to the point that this courtly, magnanimous physician-poet reminded her that ``others have difficulties as well'' and asked her to stop writing to him. Born Lillian Massell in Boston, she dropped out of Wellesley and into Greenwich Village, changed her name, and had an illegitimate son. It was her complex of problems as a single mother—financial, emotional, even sexual (as she explains)—that led her to consult Williams, as a physician, who in turn advised her on treatment, lent her money, helped her with her poetry, and arranged to have her published in New Directions. Other poems followed, as did other troubles that she blamed on poverty, being a woman, and being isolated from literary companionship. But Nardi was so abrasive, needy, and demanding that when she did meet literary figures at Yaddo or Macdowell, writers such as Thornton Wilder or Randall Jarrell, she alienated them with her complaining and her resentful sense of entitlement. She published her last poem in 1971 in The New Yorker and died friendless, except for the present editor, in a nursing home in 1990. In all, Nardi's letters are less revealing of the woman or poet than of the dysfunctional personality who brought out the best in some very talented people, including O'Neil.