BOOKS
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story but begetting serious distortions and privations as It IS repeated
and begins to form an image of an environment. In "Joshua," however,
the story of a twelve-year-old boy and his companion fishing in a
lonely bayou, Miss Grau's perspective and style are exactly right, creat–
ing a continuous enchantment of mood and atmosphere that is am–
plified rather than shut out by the juvenile consciousness.
At their best Miss Grau's stories bend sharply toward the values
of painting or poetry. By a natural reaction to a society so little
uni–
fied by any moral scheme that writers like Miss Hardwick and Swados
who make any effort at evaluation have to steer laboriously past the
splintering wrecks of a score of sunken ideologies, Miss Grau has de–
veloped a personal narrative method that never discloses any emo–
tional or intellectual relation between the author and society at all.
Her talent is new and striking but there is considerable ambivalence
about its development and all that has had to be ignored to permit it
to function so freely.
One Arm
is a re-issue of a volume of Mr. Williams' short stories
originally published in an expensive, limited edition in 1948. The interval
has only emphasized the fundamentally Victorian nature of the au–
thor's temperament and outlook. The influences, assimilated and un–
assimilated, in Mr. Williams' work are legion: Wilde, Forster, Law–
rence, Saroyan and first, last and foremost, Maugham. It is from
Maugham that he seems to have inherited the simple, dualistic view of
society as a kind of petrified crust of money, sham morality and total
repression underneath which, boiling and bubbling, are the wild un–
socialized forces of Life, Sex, Art, Passion, Poverty, Immorality and
Truth.
The Maugham story, with rare exceptions, is based on an absolutely
mechanical, invariant formula. Move quietly about on the social crust
and then let a grotesque passion break out of such an unlikely quarter
that it seems like the most ghastly, super-potent kind of atavism. Once
you get the swing of it and if you have the genteel adolescent's lurid
view of sex and passion, the possibilities are endless. Using the same
formula, Williams, where Maugham brings you face to face with
Neanderthal man, prefers to rub your head gently in the primeval
slime.
The title story, for example, is about a young, one-armed male,
who was the delight of a large section of homosexual America before
he got arrested for murder. A Lutheran minister sees his picture and
is drawn to visit him by what he thinks is a divinely fostered, over–
powering urge. There are some complications but anyone who has heard
