Edible Slice-of-Life

IN THE MONEY--William Carlos Williams--New Directions ($2.50).

Ever since Zola, writers have tried to commit to paper the daily living of average families. "Naturalism" had a notion that an account of how such a family struggles through its oatmeal, breeds another generation to do likewise, could present all human life fearlessly and whole. The result of this literary theory has been some good amateur anthropology, a titanic amount of dullness, little art.

Part of that little is the work of William Carlos Williams. A Rutherford, N. J. baby specialist and poet, Williams in his best verse gives the simple objects of existence the glistening integrity of pebbles in a quick stream. In White Mule, three years ago, he trained his poet-doctor's eye on the ordinary living of a U. S. middle-class family, set down their record in noiseless, antiseptic prose. In the Money is a continuation of White Mule. It is also a broad advance on the naturalist front.

The materials of In the Money are so simple that, judged even by the flattest traditions of Naturalism, they scarcely exist. Joe Stecher is a German-American, his wife Gurlie is Norwegian, his daughters are Lottie, 5, and Flossie, 2. They live in Manhattan, on 104th Street, and the year is 1901. Joe has quit his job (he is a printer) and is trying against stiff, not to say dirty, opposition to set up in business for himself. He lacks the proper piratical zest; but Gurlie is hell-bent to get him--and herself--In the Money. In the long run he succeeds, they get a house in the suburbs. Meanwhile Gurlie has snubbed her neighbors and fought bitterly with her mother; Joe has had a personal interview with President Theodore Roosevelt and has not been impressed; Flossie, her parents blandly unaware of it, has acquired the neurosis which will give her whole life shape; the children have been vaccinated and have visited aunts in Vermont; and Gurlie, at the end, is beginning to show a sourness toward Joe which suggests unhappy events for a few volumes to come.

It could be, as such things always have been, as dull as dipsomania. But In the Money is as fully fleshed, as complex, and as curiously beautiful as daily life. So Williams lifts his material clear of the stodgy fog banks of Naturalism. To this central ability he brings an impressive set of spare tools. Joyce himself has scarcely greater precision with dialogue, and only Richard Hughes has written so well of the behavior of children. Without one line of comment, Williams makes clear "social significances" which the authors of Middletown can only bumble over. With scarcely a skid into deliberate lyricism, whole chapters become lyric. Dickens without gush, Dreiser without fat, Lardner without cynicism, might combine to approximate it. On his subtle, flexible, nonliterary monotone, Dr. Williams seems to carry, without gasp or gesture, the whole load of daily living in the U. S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.