Image without Idea
The Build-Up.
by William Carlos Williams.
Random House. 335 pp. $3.50.

Dr. Williams’ novels are rarely mentioned in either private or public discussions of American writing; after an ephemeral appearance in the book reviews at the time of their publication, they have usually dropped into that graveyard of silence which is the fate of failures. His latest novel will do little to change all this: The Build-Up is another letdown.

Like white Mule and in the Money, to which it is the sequel, The Build-Up is a chronicle of the life and times of a typical immigrant family in America around the turn of the century. The historical reminders in The Build-Up— which appear, rather gratuitously, for the first time in this volume (“It was a bad time for males [babies] at the beginning of the century” and “These were Gurlie’s best years . . . from 1907 to 1917 . . . .”)—make it obvious that he is now self-consciously trying to define what has gone into the making of America and Americans. For his representative new Americans he has characteristically reached down to the lowest common denominator and chosen commonplace parents, Gurlie (of Norwegian origin) and Joe Stecher (of German origin), and their two even more banal daughters, Lottie and Flossie. One cannot really quarrel with Dr. Williams’ choices (though one may suspect that they were dictated by the dubious belief that the “common people” are automatically closer to “reality”); what is important is how fully his characters embody the central experiences of immigrants and their children: the strong sense of family, the search for status, the conflict of old and new cultures.

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In the past, such themes have been at the center of many great novels. But now, passing through Dr. Williams’ mind and molded by his glassy style, they have become quick-frozen, attenuated, and purified. Take, for example, the book’s main concern, Gurlie’s ambition to be accepted in the town’s best society: in short breathless episodes, she announces her decision to her husband, joins the Literary Club, organizes a successful musicale for the church, is accepted into the Town Improvement Association, impresses one of the oldest and most respected natives by her moral courage in telling off the Catholic priest (she even wins his admiration), and becomes finally a member of the best club in town. This meteoric progress is achieved with a minimum of effort, against scarcely noticeable resistance. Once or twice someone comments on her crudity, and an envious neighbor does send her a malicious valentine, but by and large her easy success seems almost ludicrous alongside what is called her “blind drive” and her “mad dream.”

Facile social triumphs may be a uniquely American experience—although I doubt it—but they cannot be adequately presented in such a rarefied social atmosphere as we find here. The rich texture of society as successfully presented by novelists is woven out of different strands of class and culture. And although much is made of Gurlie’s Norwegian and Joe’s German background, the reader rarely sees their cultural attitudes acting upon or reacting to the old American ones. The social classes that Gurlie romps through in her race to the top are virtually indistinguishable from one another. And the almost total lack of distinctive manners and morals in the people she meets empties scene after scene of any possible reverberations. (At one point Dr. Williams abdicates completely and calls the faceless clubwomen “Mrs. A,” “Mrs. B,” “Mrs. C”) There are no hints in this book of the strains and tensions of social climbing; hardly any indication of the necessity of learning new criteria, new catchwords, new habits— or of the difficulty of abandoning old ones. All those hundreds of things—the buzz and hum of a society rejecting and accepting newcomers— about which Howells, James, and Edith Wharton wrote so brilliantly are here slighted. Indeed, only in the shadowy world of The Build-Up could Gurlie possibly realize her “mad dream.”

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Mingled among the episodes of Gurlie’s progress is the secondary theme: typical adventures in the growth and maturity of her children. As portrayals of children of immigrant parentage, these girls are totally unsuccessful. Dr. Williams is careful to point out that Lottie and Flossie are aware of their foreignness and are thus bound to have their experiences colored by it, but there is scarcely any mention of this essential factor again, much less any exploitation of it. Dr. Williams is also aware that such a feeling of estrangement makes for strong family ties, but again this is mere lip service. For this family as he actually portrays it is noteworthy for the lack of family sentiment rather than for its abundance: in the whole novel Flossie and Lottie do not exchange more than a page of dialogue with each other; after page 25 they do not even share a minor scene; Gurlie’s attitude toward her daughters can be summed up as affectionate sufferance—a far cry from maternal fervor—and her regard for her son Paul is mainly as the redeemer of her ancestral farm; Joe, it is true, does seem to be involved with his children, but even this is played down—“Another would have leaned down and kissed her out of an inner satisfaction and gaiety . . . but he merely took her little shovel. . . .”

If, however, we forget the main intention of the novel and regard only those early chapters about the children in which they are still discovering the world, then we find Dr. Williams’ real virtues, and I, for one, do not regret that he seems also to have forgotten his intention. For his ability to recapture the fresh sensations and the speech of a child is a rare one. And nowhere else do his famed ear for dialogue, his simplicity and directness, serve to such good purpose. The excitement of moving to a new house, the affection for a cat, the incomprehensibility of older people, the feel of rain—when seen through the consciousness of a child, these take on new beauty and glory. But, as Wordsworth knew, the older children become, the less they are able to retain this vision, and Flossie and Lottie, alas, harden and grow old too quickly.

Many of the deficiencies, as well as some of the virtues, of The Build-Up stem from Dr. Williams’ theory of art, which can be summed up by a statement he once made that “. . . all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain; it presents.” The implications of this Imagist principle led many of its followers, including Dr. Williams, to a contempt for ideas and to a magical belief in the power of words and things. Whatever the success of this principle and its implications in other works of art, it is clear that The Build-Up suffers precisely from a lack of ideas, either explicit or implicit. And by ideas I do not necessarily mean abstract formulations but what Lionel Trilling calls literary ideas—an appeal to our minds that stimulates both thinking and feeling. Despite the sharp, hard prose, despite the acutely caught dialogue, and despite the sensitive perceptions of childhood, The Build-Up remains for the most part a pile of frozen Images among which the reader is left to rummage for himself, with little guidance from the artist. It would help if Dr. Williams were more willing to “explain.”

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