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ROBERT B. HEILMAN
mirably held mystery of a town's decay, should make this book
accessible to many readers, and that is to the good; yet if many
things in the book do not engage a mass audience, it is not that
Williams ever slips into preciousness or snob appeal, any more than
he slips into an easy final note of elegy or resolve.
He simply has a mature interest in the interplay between
certain men, between these men and nature, and between the
grandeur of plan and the grossness of fact. However, the West is
not felt primarily as the school of character: the issue is not really
the growth or change of character under the stresses of ambition,
turmoil, and setback. Nor is it precisely the theater of character–
the historic platform on which we see revealed the diversity of
human responses as men seek certain ends and meet the unsought.
True, it is that in part: we see the various motives that bring men
together on a great hunting gamble, and the radically different
impacts of disaster- death, deadness, mania, and new knowledge.
In the most essential narrative the West acts, perhaps, as the mirror
of character: the very novelty of set and action serve to clarify to
Andrews, the newly arrived easterner, the lineaments of his own
nature. What he has seen and has been a part of reflect to him
the insubstantialness of the passions that have mainly determined
his own course. In others he has seen "emptiness," "nothingness,"
"hollow glint," "open despair," and these, held together in an
unobtrusively punning sequence, he identifies with his own "vani–
ty"-literally "emptiness," as we are reminded by the recurrent
terms of vacuity. Yet the futility which mirrors his own futility
teaches him not to return to the East but to move on westward;
if Butcher's Crossing is dust and: ashes, and "nothing beside re–
mains," the very catharsis of an earlier self, we take it, is the para–
doxical beginning of new growth.
In telling the story of Andrews, the easterner who experiences
a self-defining in Kansas and Colorado, Mr. Williams has chosen
a convention quite familiar in our day-the convention of mini–
malized sentience, expressiveness, and reflectiveness. The playing
down of overt feeling and. thought in the protagonist is accom–
panied, in the earlier parts of the book, by a rather sparse use of
sensory images. As a result there is a kind of flatness of texture
that the author evidently intends; he appears to be strongly de-
