BOOKS
467
Postscnpt:
Years ago, when I was a boy, I passed each summer over the
Jersey flats on my way
to
vacation in the western part of the state. The train on
which I journeyed was the old Delaware Lackawanna and Western . The
Passaic , over which the train passed was, one day, a fantastic rainbow of reds,
yellows, purples , and pinks-breathtaking . The colors were, I learned, dyes
from the chemical plants and silk mills along the river 's banks. Though the
waters seemed beautiful
to
my eye, the river was dead-poisoned by indus–
trial wastes. The men who worked in those plants and the men who owned
them were, I am sure, neither devils nor monsters. More than a few of them
might have been aJoe Stecher.
It
is Williams's understanding that success in
America presupposes loss and misery and destruction that makes his work so
valuable , not only as a self-enclosed and isolated demonstration of his artistry,
but as a diagram
to
show us exactly why America is as it is-not happy, not
really sad, certainly not tragic , but desolate.
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to
hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
Gilbert Sorrentino
