466
PARTISAN REVIEW
understood absolutely the local-it was his laboratory, and for him enclosed
the universal. What he has to tell us of this one family floods with light the
entire American immigrant experience of this century. "A reply to Greek and
Latin with the bare hands ."
He saw it all, completely, these seeds of restlessness, discontent, desic–
cated morality . When Joe , at the conclusion of
The Buzld-Up ,
his children
gone , he and Gurlie alone and aging, with more money than they can ever
possibly spend , shouts to nobody at all, to the sky , that he is going to build a
mansion for Gurlie, " like nothing in the neighborhood ," we know that this is
not a cry of triumph but of pain, frustration : it is the dying imagination
finding an outlet that is meaningless .
It
pierces the heart . There is no help for
it, no help for Joe.
Coles is excellent on this confusion into which the Stechers slide . He sees
that Williams does not mean for us to hate Joe and Gurlie , nor hold them in
contempt . Why should we? They have worked for the rewards that the vast
machine of American business manufactures , they have earned them . Sink or
swim was the trurh they saw as a young couple. They chose success rather than
poverty. Yet Williams has no smeary sentimentalism in his work concerning
the" good " poor and the' 'bad" middle class: at the core of his writing there
is a nucleus of ice. He is, in his quiet and unsensational prose , utterly ruthless
in his vision . There is nothing wonderful about the Stechers-but the poor are
not wonderful either. Both wither emotionally and imaginatively . Coles
remarks :
Willi ams wants us
to
know that the Stechers were beginning
to
" make
it" at a certain stage in their lives: they were "in the money. " There is no
great compliment intended thereby; Williams was not a starry -eyed
apologist for American materialism . But if the Stechers are no Horatio
Algers, or Andrew Carnegies, they are not shown to be decadent , mean,
or vicious, either.
A twist here, a falsification there, a reading' 'between the lines" (which
Williams resists tenaciously throughout the trilogy), could easily allow a
reader to mark this work as no more than a movie with a happy ending, just as
a lazy eye might see Van Gogh's picture of the two crows as a nature painting .
But Williams does not allow this-all the information is given, everything is
on the surface .
It
is placid, mundane, ordinary-and terrible .
Robert Coles has written of all this beautifully, in a plain and serviceable
prose , and with a wit and energy that are remarkable . He has done a first-rate
job with this book, which is, to date, one of the most valuable additions to the
growing body ofWilliams criticism . Let us hope that it will lead readers to this
neglected masterwork.
