114
PA~TISAN
REVIEW
which he ranks first, and which he wants, above all, to be identified
with. Sometimes it gets away from him and becomes an object in itself.
Then the stories, some of which are slight, seem little more than a pre–
text to win admiration for this image of the author. But when the self–
love is absorbed in a love of life and the image of the man is left to
establish itself, you find something which is rare at all times and
practically extinct in our own: a simple but enormous vitality that
dis–
charges itself in celebration of the good things-love, sex, the healthy
animality of women and their well-shaped bodies; a turn of phrase or
event brings into momentary focus some happy occasion, charged
with life. Or the sad things-unwanted children, children dying of
sickness or neglect, ruined marriages, the suffering of the poor. In
his
best stories, "The Colored Girls of Passenack," "An Old Fashioned
Raid," "A Descendant of Kings," "Old Doc Rivers," "The Girl with
a Pimply Face," "Jean Beicke," "To Fall Asleep," he makes his point
with a charm, ease, force and bite which, for all their directness, are even
a little old-fashioned: the assumptions of this humanity have not yet
been worn away by modern experience, as they have for almost all other
writers. It is precisely this which makes Williams avant-garde.
Isaac Rosenfeld
GYROSCOPE AND RADAR
THE LONELY CROWD.
By
.oovid Riesmon. Yale University Press. $4.00.
Mr. Riesman's subject is the changing character of the
American people (more particularly, of the urban middle class who may
be regarded as its most typical members) , and his main argument
is
that they are becoming more gregarious. Formerly the middle-class
American was "inner-directed"; he was guided by inner values, initially
implanted by parental discipline, of which the most important were
those of Puritan morality and of economic success. Today he is more
likely to be "other-directed," being primarily concerned with keeping
the approval of the group to which he belongs and hence with avoiding
any overt expression of attitudes (such as moral severity and personal
ambition) that might provoke antagonism. The inner-directed person,
Mr. Riesman suggests, was guided by a kind of psychic gyroscope set
going by his parents, so that getting off course would provoke a feeling
of guilt. The modern other-directed person, on the other hand, has a
diffuse anxiety which makes him responsive to a wider range of signals,
