BOOKS
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graspable.
It
is Williams's triumph that he saw what success in America
means, and to Coles's credit that he sees, with fine precision , Williams' s
painstaking attention to and accretion of details that make us realize finally
that for the Stechers success is an alloy mixed of financial security, loss, de–
struction, and a nameless anomie, a desolation . Coles says :
Williams was saying in his trilogy that no one can ... ignore or forget the
social and economic circumstances they face and once faced and always
will face . Even triumph ,
he
points out in
The Build·Up,
is an obsessive ..
almost maniacal denial of defeat-rather than a refuge or sanctuary
finally obtai ned.
Everything in Williams's trilogy is plain-there is just enough information or
dialogue given in order to make a scene come clear-it all looks simplistic,
naive, "naturalistic." But in order to write of people who are not monsters ,
caricatures, or villains, there was no other way .
It
is the surface that Williams is
concerned with, that surface in which he finds the" isolate flecks" that sud–
denly reveal the quality of an entire family, an entire community. Such an
approach to writing begs to be misunderstood .
The satirist or socially relevant writer, the author of jeremiads must look
at but one aspect of his subject , or invent an aspect that (an be held up to
ridicule or scorn, or assaulted. Williams chose another way , a way so plain, so
candid that it is unbelievably subtle . "Tell them something else," he says in
his
Autobiography,
other than the " lying habits of everyday speech and
thought ."
The Stechers are immigrant Americans, here to escape the misery and
starvation that their parents and grandparents knew-as Coles points out,
they came not
to
something, but
away from
something. In Coles's brilliant
dissection of Gurlie's character he shows how Williams cleanly noted the
particular American blend of love for this country's largesse for those who will
work and struggle in the peculiarly amoral world of business , and hatred for
the very thing that enables the family to become successful-that very busi–
ness world's lying, cheating, and affable ruthlessness .Joe is a wealthy man at
the end of the trilogy, but he has become , by the slowest of degrees, every–
thing that he once loathed. But he doesn't really know it-his imagination ,
thwarted and all but destroyed , can find release only within the boundaries he
himself has set up . He is a thorough success.
Williams, more than any other novelist that I can think of, wrote of
things as they really are for the American middle class, not as what they
"could be" if only-what? If only it were not America. If only this were not
the middle class. If only they could " use the money" to buy beauty and
cu lture . But this is the way that it happens . Nameless defeat . Williams
