48
PARTISAN REVIEW
HARD HISTORY
LIFE ALONG THE PASSAIC RIVER.
By William Carlos Williams.
New Directions. $1.75.
In this collection of nineteen short stories not one imitates in any
way the accepted patetrns of the genre. The directness of this writer's
approach to his material excludes its subjection to the researches of plot
and objective form. What Williams tells us is much too close to him to
lend itself to the alienation of design; none of his perceptions can be
communicated through the agency of invented equivalents. The pheno-
mena he observes and their meanmgs are so intimately involved with
each other, the cohabitation of language and object is so harmonious, that
formal means of expression would not only be superfluous but might
actually nullify the incentive to creation. These notations in a doctor's
notebook, these fragments salvaged from grime and squalor, these insights
gained during the routines of humble labor-such would only be given
the lie by the professional mannerisms of authorship, its pomposities and
braggadocio. Where usually a writer takes the attitude of an impresario
to his themes, calculating each entrance and each exit, Williams will
begin or end his story as the spirit moves him; pausing to face his reader,
he will take !tim into his confidence and speak his mind without recourse
to stratagems of ingratiation. Elliptical in some passages and naturalistic
in others, Williams is perfectly conscious of writing, but hostile to "litera-
ture." Out of "a straight impulse, without borrowing, without lie, or
complaint" he puts down on paper that which stirs him. His subjects
are few and often minute, their scope is sharply circumscribed by his
personal experience and by his voluntary seclusion within the local and
immediate, he repeats himself frequently-yet
these stories are exceptional
for their authenticity and told not to provoke but to record. It it pain
which is the source of values here. The dread of annihilation is ever
present-"Christ,
Christ! ...
How can a man live in the face of this
daily uncertainty? How can a man not go mad with grief, with appre-
hension?" No grand conceits, no gratuitous excitements, no melodrama.
There is no doing away with the staples of existence; no gallivanting on
the banks of the Passaic River.
For what could be more dismal than life in these small industrial
towns of New Jersey? The mills are worked by immigrant laborers, and
their youngsters are "all over the city as soon as they can walk and say,
Paper!" The doctor visits these deracinated households, often angry
at himself because of the tenderness in him that reaches out to these
people, quite as often resigned to doing his job, to immersing himself in
the finalities of human life. "To me," he writes, "it is a hard, barren
life, where I am alone and unmolested (work as I do in thick of it)
though in constant danger lest some slip send me to perdition but which,
