BOOKS
49
being covetous not at all, I enjoy for the seclusion and primitive air of it.
But that is all-unless I must add an attraction in all the inanimate asso-
ciations of my youth, shapes, foliage, trees to which I am used-and
a love of place and the characteristics of place-good or bad, rich or
poor."
The little girl, both of whose tonsils are covered with membrane,
fights furiously to keep him from knowing her secret. Another one, a
lank-haired girl of fifteen, is a "powerful little animal" upon whom you
can stumble on the roof, behind the stairs "any time at all." A dozen
wise guys are on her trail. Cured of her pimples, how will this tenacious
creature ever slash her way to the bliss recited on the radio? "The pure
products of America go crazy," Williams once wrote in a poem. And
these stories are familiar images of the same, released by that active
faculty of sympathy which Henry James prized above all else in the
equipment of an artist. But this writer has no hankering for consistent
explanations, for the constancy of reason; he seldom permits himself to
ask why. "What are you going to do with a guy like that. Or why want
to do anything with him.
Except not miss him."
This last is the point.
He is content with grasping the fact, with creating a phenomenology;
but the relations, social and historic, that might unify these facts and
significate them on a plane beyond sensation or nostalgia he has no mind
for. And this absence of what one might call, in his terms, ideological
presumptuousness, while admirable in its stoicism, also constitutes his
defeat. However much of value there is in these facts of "hard history"
and in the scrupulous gathering of their detail, the larger implications
are systematically neglected. Thought is proscribed as anti-esthetic. Habi-
tually confined to the suggestive and purely descriptive, this prose never-
theless holds within iself some of the raw elements of a materialist con-
sciousness.
But Williams does think about America, if only to sketch it in
psychic outline. He is under the spell of its
mystique
and strains to en-
compass it in a vision. This need in him provides a contrast and relief
to the phenomenological principle informing his work; and much of his
charm flows from the interaction of his precise facts with his American
mysticism. In his novel,
White Mule,
the fusion of these two qualities
allowed a visible direction to emerge. "What then is it like, America?"
asks Fraulein Von
J.
in "The Venus" (which seems to me the best story
in the book). This German girl is a genuine post-war object. She has a
genius for formulating the most complex modern problems in the simplest
terms. The daughter of a general, she comes to Italy to become a nun.
But perhaps America-she questions the American, Evans, who carries
a flint arrowhead in his pocket-could prove a satisfactory alternative to
the Church? Evans speaks of the old pioneer houses of his ancestors, and
of that "early phase" of America whose peculiar significance has been
forgotten or misunderstood. The German girl holds the arrowhead in her
hand, feeling its point and edge. "It must be even more lonesome and
frightening in America than in Germany," she finally said. The story
