White Mule (Williams)
William Carlos
Williams’ novel, the first of a trilogy (followed by In the Money and The
Build-Up), is a beautiful example of the power of clarity and
straightforwardness in narrative.
Williams plays a good deal with point of view, and some of the early
passages from the infant’s perspective may remind readers of Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, but, for the most part, the novel is closer to the
proletarian realism of the thirties than to the experimentalism of the
twenties. Valuing descriptive vignettes
over plot lines, Williams records several varieties of convincingly real speech
and wholly plausible events in the life of an American immigrant family clearly
modeled on his wife’s. His willful
neglect of reader expectations can be obtrusive as when, for example one sees a
horrifying glimpse of the abusive Carmody home which is never again mentioned. Worse, in the antepenultimate chapter Joe is
being set up as front man in a dubious business venture, yet this theme
vanishes. Even if Williams had a
multi-volume plan in mind, raising such significant issues only to drop them in
this volume is annoying. The reader
feels played like the viewer of a movie serial, left with a cliff-hanger.
The baby Flossie
becomes the unlikely center of the book, though she is barely talking by its
conclusion. Her stubborn élan vital
in the face of an inattentive mother, physical frailty, and all the
imperfections of the world becomes a sort of mute heroism. While all the adults bumble on, each
handicapped by prejudices, habits, and vices, the baby makes her own way, sometimes
by screaming, sometimes by repeatedly falling only to rise again
undeterred. Everyone who has raised a
child will recognize the faithfulness of the good doctor’s account of the
earliest and most significant stage of life, so rarely documented.
Scottish Journey (Muir)
I was prejudiced
in favor of this account remembering the German translations (some,
provocatively done in Scots dialect) I had seen attributed to Muir (though I
understand his wife Willa played a larger role in these than he) and I am
receptive to writing about travel. This
particular journey proved, I am afraid, disappointing. Borne down by the Great Depression visible on
every side, Muir cannot prevent his righteous Socialist lamentations from
intruding on nearly every page. As he
concedes more times than once, his descriptions are hardly specific to
Scotland. Legitimate enough, had he not
defined his goal as setting down something of the national character. His extended comments on the Scottish
National Party reflect the tensions between nationalism and socialism, but are
of primarily historical interest at this point.
I did relish
Muir’s down-at-heel persona (reminiscent of other road books by London, Orwell,
Miller, and Kerouac). He portrays
himself as somewhat disreputable-looking with a car challenged by every hill,
forcing its driver on the mercy of strangers, and this is wholly consistent
with his picture of a land depressed by chronic unemployment on top of
centuries of subjugation by England, with industrial centers filled with
street-corner loiterers, drinking even more than usual.
For Muir the
sentimental alternative is the pastoral dream of his memories of a childhood in
the Orkneys in spite of the fact that his own father’s fortunes steadily
declined there, leading him to move the family to Glasgow when Edwin was
fourteen. The description if the trauma
of this sudden descent into a sordid urban scene is perhaps the finest passage
in the book. For the most part, however,
his prose brings few rewards. Muir has a
sharp eye, and a serviceable pen, but this book is too hasty-seeming to
reinforce the reader’s impression of his poetic skills. Perhaps his wife should have taken a greater
share in its composition.
When the Going Was Good (Waugh)
I ordinarily
avoid anything like an abridgement, but I make an exception for this collection
of long excerpts from four travel books written between 1929 and 1935. It is,
at least, Waugh’s own editing here of what he jauntily assures us were a series
of books written, he assures us, as no more than a means of supporting
himself. Charming and self-deprecating,
he describes these as “pedestrian,” “commonplace,” and, at times, callow. Perhaps others may discern, as he must, the
“vernal scent” of his youth in these pages covering trips through Egypt, Palestine,
Ethiopia, Guiana, and Brazil. Like the
great off-hand observations of Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin, he conveys with
humor and humanity the bizarre and often inexplicable experiences of the
traveler who ventures off the beaten track.
If all travel
encourages receptive senses, the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s
eyes are likely to open. One ordinarily
thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, knowledge
about the variety of ways to be human, allowing at once new insights about both
others and one’s own habitual attitudes, but, as there so often is, a
complementary view is equally true. The
strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs
and taste and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part
of both foreigner and native. This lack
of understanding only magnifies the distance between one consciousness and
another and even more between the individual and the world. The tolerance and acceptance of a drifter
stranded in a tropical village where the road ends, as Waugh was more than
once, are perhaps a workable attitude toward life. They are sometimes all that one has.
