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PARTISAN REVIEW
death, but Mr. Coles 's book is a ray oflight among them. This spate of critical
attention on the part of the university cannot conceal the fact that it was not
too many years ago that scholars-Americans among them-were heeding
such drivel as:
He has renounced all the pleasures of the English language, so that he is
completely American ; and he says only the dullest things, so he has won
the terrible fight to become completely democratic as well .
William Empson wrote that. Is it the Voice from the Crypt , or a remark by a
character in
Zuleika Dobson?
The implication that one writes badly if one is
"completely American" is typical of a petrified intelligence that was at one
time epidemic throughout academe-and note the phrase "says only the
dullest things." After Williams spent over fifty years trying to show us all that
what literature "says " is unimportant, is secondary, trivial. What work of
Williams , in God's name , could Empson have read? When I was in college in
1950 , a professor told me that Williams was one of the' 'younger Imagists. "
At the time he was 67 , and had published 31 books .
Well, times change, and scholars have belatedly begun to attempt a
critical understanding of this writer-there is at least displayed the awakening
of curiosity among the tribe.
It
is encouraging . Some have done outstanding
work : Kenner, Sister Bernetta, Louis Martz-there are a few others. But
most seem to have taken their bearings from Randall Jarrell, who presents
Williams as a notable curiosity, all heart, inspiration , and beer at the ball–
game , or from Edmund Wilson, from whom-silence . By and large , critics of
Williams are forever rummaging "between the lines " in a search for
"meaning. " Between Williams's lines there is nothing but space. All of his
work has suffered from this sort of poverty ofapproach, but none more so than
the fiction , particularly the Stecher trilogy ,
White Mule, In the Money,
and
The BuzJd- Up.
Delightfully , it is to this trilogy that Coles addresses the
greater portion of his book. Wonderfully free of cant and hot air, Coles's
study is a model of intelligent criticism, trusting completely the surface of
Williams 's work, his words .
I have written elsewhere that the Stecher trilogy is the best treatment of
the immigrant success story in American letters , and I'm happy to see that in
this opinion I have Mr. Coles as an ally. What is most heartening about Coles's
study is that he has seen the work as a whole-he has not concentrated on the
virtuoso performance given us in
White Mule .
To be sure, that book is an
awesome description of the first years of life of the baby , Floss, but it shows
more importantly , the beginning of the striving toward success of the Stecher
family , success bought at the cost of a desolation so subtle as to be hardly
