BOOKS
149
It
is remarkable, the riches which Williams lavishes on characters he
loves, and all the more disappointing that he can not find a story for
them. It's not at all surprising that
The< Knightly Quest
drifts off into
a think-piece on the nature of romantics and the state of the nation, or
that Gewinner, for want of any real artistic solution, wipes out "The
Project" and escapes in a ship called the Ark of Space headed for "the
spot marked X on the chart of time without end."
The short story, "Man Bring This Up The Road" is of interest
only because it is a crude outline for the unsuccessful
The Milk Train
Doesn't Stop Here Anymore,
but has no merits of its own. Remembering
the nice early story, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," which was turned into
Streetcar,
it seems careless and presumptuous of Williams to publish this
sort of scratch-pad effort. We expect even a line drawing (from a
master ) to be a finished work of art.
The best piece in the collection is "Grand," a reminiscence of his
grandmother.
It
is short, unambitious and amazingly direct:
I think the keenest regret of my life is one that doesn't concern
myself, not even the failure of any work of mine nor the decline
of creative energy that I am aware of lately. It is the fact that
my grandmother died only a single year before the time when I
could have given her some return for all she had given me.
But Tennessee Williams' reputation will hardly rest on his humility, or
on this honest miniature in which his feelings are scaled down to the
real world.
Reading
The Time of Friendship,
Paul Bowles's new collection of
stories, I was aware of a career honest in its aims but only occasionally
swinging free of a steady performance. Unlike Tennessee Williams' at–
tempts at unmanageable forms, Bowles sticks with what he can do. Here
are the gothic tales with their meaningless violence and seedy Arab
settings which repeat the formula established in
The Delicate Prey
seven–
teen years ago. Here are the macabre Saki endings and the landscapes
beautifully tuned to an indefinable melancholy. The stories are always
carefully written but, for the most part, they are too self-contained and
seldom have anything to match the atmosphere of frenzied desolation
that drives through
The Sheltering Sky
to make it Bowles's masterpiece.
He is still involved with his ideas of twenty years ago but he has lost his
passion for them. The existential experience of
The Sheltering Sky
can
never seem dated, but many of the empty exotic scenes in
The Time of
Friendship
depend upon a bleak modernity which has worn thin even
for Bowles.
This is not true of the story entitled
The Time of Friendship
-
a
wonderful exploration of the limits of love between a Swiss spinster and
