[In the following excerpt, Gish elucidates the thematic, stylistic, and technical characteristics of Williams's short fiction.]

Williams's first two volumes of short stones, The Knife of the Times (1932) and Life Along the Passaic River (1938), represent the kinds of "rare presences" he found as a doctor in his various encounters with his patients and with people in general; in listening to what they said and how they said it—with the ear not just of a physician formulating a diagnosis or prescription but of a poet tuned in for the music and dance of their words and voicings. Williams's stories are records of those times, those meetings, those places, and of his remembering of them; they are his attempt to turn case history into story and back again through writing. His stories become their own kind of rare presences both as things in and of themselves and in relation to each other. Williams's own rare presence permeates all of the stories—a "new meaning beginning to intervene," the "poetry" under the language that represents the lives of the people who are his characters, his life and his character as author-narrator.

Outside of two or three of the eleven stories in The Knife of the Times—namely "Old Doc Rivers," "The Colored Girls of Passenack—Old and New," and the titular story, "The Knife of the Times"—the eight other stories are relatively neglected by critics, as is the volume as a whole, which has been overlooked in favor of Life Along the Passaic River and, most certainly, In the American Grain. Knife, admittedly, includes only about one quarter of his stories, and early ones at that. But the stories in this first volume are some of Williams's finest, and reveal some of the techniques—style, structure, point of view, and theme—that he carried through and developed in his later stories and that mark the "presence" of a Williams story.

Much of what characterizes his stories must be demonstrated by analyzing individual stories, and by noting comparisons between them. Williams would be the first to admit that different readers find different things to see in a story: "So, let's look at short stories and see what CAN be done with them. How many ways they CAN be written, torturing the material in every way we can think of—from which YOU are to draw what you want." There are, however, a few general traits that bear mention as well as more extensive comment in the discussions below. Williams's stories, it must be reiterated, gain much of their motive and nature from the process of storytelling itself, from the oral tradition and the ancient native voice; he was preoccupied with the native voice, the American idiom, and dedicated himself to finding and experiencing it in daily life. By transferring the voice and the experiences to writing, Williams made a lasting thing out of those experiences for himself and for readers.

Given Williams's interest in storytelling, it is not surprising that his stories thus often take the form of stories within stories, making for multiple narrators and for a succession of linked stories rather than for predictable and formulaic frame narratives. The stories are often recounted in series or layers, much as an event might be related by various individuals, from various perspectives, to one central inquisitor or listener trying to make sense of it all, or trying to find the truth of the matter and then to relate that through the larger telling, which is the frame or "container" identifiable by title as the Williams story.

Significantly, this is the method and form of the case study, written by the scientist or investigator who knows that there are many sides to any story, many versions of character or action or setting that may appear as "truth." This method is also reminiscent of gossip, of hearing and telling about a person and what happened or did not happen to that person, from people who knew, each in their own way, portions of the story, who may have added to the story or even fabricated portions of it. These case stories or reports, or gossipy stories told to an inquisitor-listener who then relates incidents—often in retrospect—give an abiding anecdotal quality to a Williams story. This is not to say that his stories are completely without plot, or without sequenced events. Rather, even in stories that utilize sequenced events and motives, plot takes a decidedly anecdotal and digressive turn. Given an implied listener, Williams's stories seem like a prose variant of the dramatic monologue.

In keeping with their "oral," anecdotal, conversational, reportorial quality, his stories offer some fascinating examples of dialogue that is not really dialogue so much as it is, again, reporting, partially because the reporting is reported as it was reported. Moreover, the narrator does not pronounce judgment on the significance of these conversations. There is, however, more editorializing, more political and moral judgment, more overall value judgment in a Williams story than is commonly pointed out. There are, too, implicit judgments to be drawn, but by and large Williams's stories are not explicitly didactic in the sense that they draw a heavy-handed moral, unless the point is not to draw a moral, certainly not a "puritanical" moral. This is not to say that there is no moral center in his stories, at times even moral indignation. Williams's moral center, his "opinions" are decidedly not bourgeois, at least not overtly. His middle-classness, such as it is—physician, family man, citizen—is subservient to a more radical, left-of-center posturing and self-dramatization.

Because Williams is writing his stories quickly, with a brush stroke here and a fling of paint there (as he describes the process), the spontaneity, as technique, determines some of the form of the story; exposition blends with dialogue, the present of the story proper blends with the present (now the past) of the story related to the principal narrator (for example, the narrator closest in time, place, and psyche to Williams the man, but oftentimes a persona, variously close to or distanced from Williams himself). As a result, there is limited use of quotation and transition, unlike the more traditional short stories of Williams's day.

In terms of personae, point of view, and tone, Williams's stories are, like his other prose fiction, highly autobiographical. A doctor very much like Williams, with a wife like Flossie, with two sons like Williams's, with friends like Williams's, with a philosophy like Williams's, and so on, is quite often the principal narrator. Despite these similarities, the stories are ultimately fiction and not autobiography. At a minimum all characters' names are changed—a need Williams learned with a vengeance when he was used for not doing so in "The Five Dollar Guy," a story he had tucked away in a drawer and later submitted to the New Masses (in 1926) without changing the names as he had intended. The evolution of case history into story, however, goes much beyond mere cosmetic name changes. The vernacular voicings, especially of the narrator, but also of the characters; the finely pared and crafted structures—patterns, rhythms, openings and closures; the usually ironic and oftentimes cynical tonalities; the minimalist "style" and "presence" that is uniquely Williams—all of these ingredients work the marvelous transformations of art.

The case study as source and foundational form notwithstanding, the narrator in these stories, particularly in the early stories, is not always a doctor. Roughly half of the stories in Knife are not stories told by a doctor, nor are they, strictly speaking, about a doctor—though the overall attitude of the narrator and/or persona behind the narrator is keenly aware—as a writer and chronicler of humanity and mortality must be aware—of the miseries, "la tristeza,", of the human condition as a doctor stereotypically is thought to be. When Williams's stories are about neither physicians nor writers as such, they are nevertheless, invariably (albeit oftentimes obliquely) about the writing process, and most expressly about the storytelling process.

Williams's diction is for the most part decidedly casual and, in keeping with whatever character is speaking, utterly colloquial. The common language of ordinary working class, not particularly well-educated Americans—the "American idiom"—pervades each story. There are also, however, instances in which highly technical language, usually medical language, intervenes. "Profanity" occurs, but there is never "obscene" language as such, for as iconoclastic and "shocking" as he is, Williams makes an attempt to tone down, for the sake of literary presentation or public reception, the blue hues of the people's language and his own language. In his letters and notes to friends and other writers his use of the vernacular illustrates just how fully he toned down his own eloquent use of profanity for the more public, artistically crafted stories—texts especially susceptible to public standards of taste or editorial censorship in the 1920s and 1930s.

Certainly the places Williams writes about and the kind of people he writes about (including himself as dramatized by his narrators and characters) give his stories the stamp of local color. In Knife he echoes local colorists of Rahv's "Red Skin" variety, such as Mark Twain and company. Somewhat more refined voicings are also heard—Hardy, T. F. Powys (in his village sketches), and behind these the austere voice of George Crabb. And ever so seldom, in a story like "Hands Across the Sea," even Henry James is heard—he is present in the writing to the extent that he is being rejected and replaced by what Williams considered his better ear for American place and people. In more general terms, perhaps part of Williams's voice is the voicing of the modern, an Arnoldian "plangent threnody" of recognition of the "buried life," the Sophoclean tragic "turbid ebb and flow of human misery," flowing mysteriously from the Aegean to the English Channel to the Passaic River, turning, anxious and forlorn, not so much on the intruding forces of naturalism as on the anguish met firsthand by a physician working with disease, illness, and death in the cutting and killing times of the American depression.

The stories in Knife are not all depression stories in any all-encompassing sense, in the sense that all the characters depicted are not suffering as a direct result of poverty or economic reversal caused by the failure of the economy. The "knife" and the "times" in the title may well be seen as metaphors for cuts in and cutbacks to the amenities otherwise available in more solvent, stable times. The "knife," however, as it appears literally and figuratively in these stories, takes on many different meanings. In one sense the knife is the stress, the neurosis, the anxiety caused by modern living—separations caused by city/country, love/hate, health/sickness, and other lesions associated with family and self, husband and wife, parent and child, individual and others, home and homelessness, youth and age, or, more uniformly in these stories, of middle age set against youth and old age. Not only are many of these stories "couples" stories or "love" stories that deal with the battle of the sexes, they also deal with the crises of middle age, and appropriately so, given that Williams himself was facing the personal and artistic crossroads of middle age when he turned to writing stories. In certain instances the "knife" is a cutting tongue of verbal insults and abuses; in other instances it is the looming threat of insanity and nervous breakdown, of losing control of one's life, one's job, one's mental as well as physical health. In some instances it is the "knife" of drug addiction and alcoholism; of homosexual rather than heterosexual yearnings; of racism and rape and violence in real and imagined forms; of apprehension about and recognition of infidelity—the "knife" that cuts the knot of marriage, of human emotional and sexual solidarity, whether of lovers, friends, or fellow human beings. In some instances the knife is one of jealousy, of real and metaphorical back stabs and gut stabs and violent assault. As a backdrop to some of the stories, World War I presents one version of the metaphorical "knife." In rare instances it is a literal scalpel, used to remove surgically a major disease or tumor or to perform something as minor as circumcision, tonsillectomy, or appendectomy. And in a somewhat more far-fetched sense the knife is not just the tongue but the pen, the stories themselves that bring to the reader short, close cuts of "realism," slices of life. There are then many ramifications of the title in these early stories, ramifications of theme and character and form, of style and technique, which though capable of being isolated in these stories also carry over to Williams's other stories, to his other prose works, and to his longer poetry.

In The Knife of the Times, Williams is in a real sense not just involved in a literary experiment or a literary creation for its own sake; he is working through, in writing as healing, his own doubts and despairs as a man who is compelled—like Coleridge's Mariner or the poet persona of Wordsworth—to give relief through a timely utterance and thereby avoid the despondency and madness that comes from an inability to express something akin to "emotion recollected in tranquility" in the face of the observable. There is a certain dimension of the romantic crisis lyric, as well as the conversation poem, in these stories, which also owe something of their form, as well as their impulse, to the tradition of the biographical sketch or life telling, the autobiographical confessional.

"Hands across the Sea" is particularly revealing of Williams's autobiography; however, in "Mind and Body," "The Colored Girls of Passenack," and "Old Doc Rivers," Williams also makes appearances as narrator/character that place him as close as possible to his actual self. This quartet of stories does not represent his best stories (except, perhaps, "Doc Rivers"), only some of his most characteristically autobiographical. These four stories provide Williams with the means and ways of looking at some of the knives of his own disturbing middle age as his autobiographical presence (who he was able to become as a good, productive male and human, and who he might have been, in the fashion of Conrad's Kurtz in the potential of his own and humanity's darker self) shuttles back and forth, in and out of the stories. If one recognizes Williams's presence in these four stories, his already very much felt presence in companion stories is made yet more easily identifiable if we compare "Hands" (to mention just one of the most directly autobiographical quartet) with "The Knife of the Times" and "The Sailor's Son" (where the psychic and physical unions and splits involve more bizarre sexuality), and with "A Visit to the Fair," "An Old Time Raid," "Pink and Blue," "The Buffalos," and "A Descendant of Kings" (where the unions and separations run the gamut of age, friendship, marriage and parentage). . . .

In "Mind and Body" Williams's fictional counterpart is the unnamed doctor and friend who listens to and examines an unnamed woman patient. Only the patient's husband, Yates, and the doctor's wife, Emily, are known by name. The main characters—doctor and patient—are not named, and effectively so, since they know each other well, both as friends and as patient/doctor. The woman patient and Yates are, moreover, family friends. Because of the relative anonymity of the characters Williams achieves a kind of authenticity about the confidentiality obligatory between doctor and patient. Names seem to be changed or not given to protect Williams's actual patients and friends.

The setting for this story, the doctor's home with an office upstairs, is very similar to Williams's own residence at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford. The place is in the northeast—for all practical purposes, New Jersey—and the ambiance is urban. Much of the story involves the doctor's attempts to diagnose what ails the woman, her attempts to explain her symptoms, and in the process her beliefs and opinions on a number of subjects. The knife that is whittling down this patient is anxiety concerning just what is wrong with her and how it relates to what has been wrong with her in the past: her operation some eighteen years ago, and her nervous breakdown, which placed her in a hospital for a time, a hospital where she met Yates, a man with his own kind of problems.

Their conversation is followed by the doctor's physical examination of the woman. Both the mind and the body of the patient are thus considered and ministered to by a physician who offers advice on sexual matters and marriage in a most matter-of-fact way—especially since the physician goes to the extent of telling the woman that perhaps she needs a woman to love rather than a man. The woman's husband, Yates, seems much more the friend than the lover; but there is no real evidence in the story that the woman actually would prefer a female lover in place of Yates. Maybe she prefers a more masculine one—like the doctor, for their "appointment," has its erotic overtones. (This same kind of acceptance of lesbianism and homosexuality as either a biological or a psychological fact pervades Williams's other stories that address the subject, including "The Knife of the Times" and "The Sailor's Son.")

"Mind and Body" has a convincing air of reality about it: the physician knows his stuff and demonstrates wide past experience as well as familiarity with the latest research found in professional journals. From the attitudes and methods demonstrated one can infer some of the techniques Williams no doubt approved of and demonstrated in his own methods and bedside, examining room manner as a physician. To a certain extent the physician acts more like a psychoanalyst than a general practitioner.

What is impressive about the story, and unusual by today's impersonal clinical standards, is the extent to which the physician talks to the woman as a friend and even escorts her to the bus stop, insisting that she and her husband return for a visit. The basis for this relationship only partially resides in the fact that the doctor and woman are friends. They discuss religion, education, culture, medicine—many subjects all of which ultimately have a bearing on the woman's condition—and on her relationship to her husband. One infers that in Williams's assumptions of what a doctor does, both "mind and body" are important, and society is both part of the ailment and the cure. As in the prototypical portrait of the physician of an earlier era, this doctor, like a writer, listens and counsels, proving very much a human being and not a sterile, faultless scientist detached from the humanity he serves.

As in "Hands Across the Sea," couples—the woman and Yates, the doctor and Emily—again provide a pattern that Williams uses to great effect to describe the patient-doctor/husband-wife types here. Both marriages are vulnerable to being cut asunder given the numerous pressures of the time, such as the selfishness or narcissism announced in the woman's half-believed assertion, which is the first sentence of the story: "For ourselves are we not each of us the center of the universe?" Williams both gives evidence of egocentrism as a true and almost instinctive aspect of life and attempts, through the words and actions of the physician and his wife, to disprove this view. Not only mind and body but minds and bodies need contact, need to converse, need to care reciprocally about each other.

Williams fuses the woman's narrations with the doctor's narrations, her past and her present, in such a way—without the use of quotation marks or paragraphing, for example—to underscore visually on the page the story's need for greater fusing and welding of hitherto disparate architectonic parts. The woman, as well as the doctor, is quite opinionated about literature, art, and cultural issues, and yet they are both listening to each other and in key instances conceding points of argument to each other. It is no happenstance that the woman is trained in logic and very intelligent and that the doctor is operating throughout by means of the logical processes taught him.

As intelligent and intellectual and reasonable as the doctor and the patient are, they both hold out for a certain pragmatic primitivism, a superstitious belief in what works over what is explainable in their culture's logic about mind and body. She believes in intuition and "second sight," or animal knowledge. And the doctor does not refute her—he even agrees. Although people view the woman as a "nut" and an eccentric, and conjecture that much of her problem is imagined, she knows, as does the doctor, that natural remedies and nostrums, even superstitious religious ceremonials, can be effective—if there is belief. The doctor/narrator advises that everyone should avoid priests with only one answer, one way to be saved, saying that a ceremonial dance by a medicine man "with beating of torn toms to conduct. . . [him] into the other world" would be more comforting "than the formula of some kindly priest." Williams himself preferred the "poetry" of the satyrs, as he says in Paterson. And his analogue Evans in "The Venus" carries the emblematic arrowhead in his pocket, ready to express its secrets to those who care. But the arrowhead is emblematic of much more than words—as are the satyrs. A similar "no one has all the answers" attitude is also found in "Doc Rivers."

Williams's own individualism as a writer, his iconoclasm in the face of traditions of one kind or another, carry over to his characterizations found here in the woman and in the characters of other stories: the story asserts the implicit value of individualism, even quirky individualism. Intellectually, the woman sets herself above many of her former doctors who, she thinks, do not even understand her charts and the terminology on them to the extent that she does. As she tells the doctor her history, offers him her biography, the doctor is simultaneously drawing conclusions based on what he hears and what he is observing—and these processes, too, are blended with the woman's narrative in such a way as to make the disparate pieces whole, and his thinking process organic to the woman's "storytelling," which is her case, her life. The doctor, in coming finally to what he believes is the right diagnosis—attributes her symptoms not so much to a pathological condition ("mucous colitis" or intestinal spasms) as to an anatomical basis (her "short more inert [capillary] loops which account for [her] more lethargic demeanor")—offers an explanation of first causes: "apparently [it] was laid down in the germ plasm when you were created." The diagnosis tends to have a calming effect on the woman, because it helps her to accept who she is, how she came to be herself. As simple and all-inclusive as the explanation is, it does give her a better sense of what is wrong with her. It seems as good an explanation as any for her anxiety, reconciling in a way that other doctors had yet to do, her "mind and body."

At the end of the story, what the woman tells Emily—whose place in life is as a housekeeper, looking after her husband—is contrary to what she says as the story opens. Now she asserts that "we must live for others, that we are not alone in the world and we cannot live alone." In part she knows this before she visits the doctor; but the doctor, in his actions and in his listening to her case history, and in his willingness to talk with her and express his own views, has had a healing effect on the woman. One also knows, and can infer from the telling, that the doctor has benefited from the rather bizarre (yet natural) visit from this woman and her nervous, rare presence as a person. . . .

The other stories in Knife have little to do directly with physicians or with Williams's autobiography, at least his life as a doctor. Williams is not as present—at least some of the more prominent and documented aspects of his life as a physician or husband are not as present—in these relatively lesser-known stories. They do, however, reveal a physician's (and a writer's) caring involvement with the miseries of humanity. Furthermore, most of these stories share with the other stories in the volume a concern with couples, their fidelities and infidelities, their bondings and their separations—all set against the cutting tensions of individual and social hard times: homosexual psychic and physical unions and splits; young and old; longtime friends and cronies; mail-order bride and crazed husband; would-be patriarch and liberated wife; mother and son; sons and lovers.

"The Knife of the Times" and "The Sailor's Son" have received more critical attention than "A Visit to the Fair," "An Old Time Raid," "The Buffalos," "A Descendant of Kings," and "Pink and Blue." But Williams's stylistic presence is so successful in all of these stories that one can only wish he had written fewer stories about the physician's life and more stories like these, which go about their business outside of the more focused world of doctors and medicine. This is not to say that these stories are not autobiographical, for they still deal with the crises of middle age that Williams faced, and they allow him a way to objectify some of these crises, empathetically, through self-as-other portrayals. . . .

In "An Old Time Raid," and "The Sailor's Son," the two sets of male friends try to survive the pressures against their mutual personal commitment. In the former story that commitment is rowdy friendship; in the latter story the commitment is rowdy homosexual love. Moreover, in the latter story the male companionship is set against the complications of two women—one a disapproving employer of young Manuel, the other an assenting fiancée who is not bothered in the least by his carousing in the haystack with the wild motorcycler and bad influence from the city: uthe Kid."

"An Old Time Raid" is one of Williams's most colloquial stories. Another retrospective accounting of a friend's life, the narrator here relates some of the wild times of his youth with a crazy prankster of a fellow—a good but wild old buddy, Dago Schultz. As such, the story functions as a eulogy of sorts both to the memory of Schultz and to the good old days when a fellow could carouse through the town with a friend. Prank follows prank, mischief follows mischief as the narrator confesses to some meanness carried out with Schultz one day in New York City. They raid restaurants, fruit stands, theaters, businesses and disturb the civic peace and order, hastening a police raid or two.

Williams's expert handling of the opening and the ending of the story makes it clear that Dago's days are surely numbered. In the opening paragraph (which deals with events some three years later) he is presumably clipped by "a freight coming from nowhere in the opposite direction." But that destiny is not known for sure until the ending, and the ending of the story is nicely reflexive to the opening as the reader learns conclusively from the narrator and crony, "Well, whether he was drunk or not or just didn't see, as he swung out after getting a grip on the rail, a freight coming from nowhere . . . , just clipped him—." It is a fitting outcome for Dago's life, another aspiring roamer, a free-spirited hobo whose freedom and daring lead to death. The consolation, and another ironic, ambivalent one, is that he literally did not know what hit him and thus went out in his own kind of style and gory glory.

Schultz's kindred spirit in "The Sailor's Son" is "the Kid," a free spirit who leads a gang of motorcycle rebels lawlessly through the city streets, and every now and again goes out to the country for a sexual tryst with young Manuel, who is employed by Mrs. Cuthbertson. Once she is aware of what she considers outrageous goings on, Mrs. Cuthbertson orders a stop to it and fires Manuel. Manuel's lovesick and lonesome attitude, his longings for both the Kid's attentions and for letters and visits from his fiancée, Margy, and Mrs. Cuthbertson's overall outrage, are all ironically undercut by Margy's arrival on the scene and her berating of the older woman: "I am engaged to marry him, I don't care what he does. Why should you worry?" Here again, the narrator takes no puritanical stand on so-called aberrant sexual liaisons. Although Margy seems rather too nonchalant, it is her opinion that rings beyond the story—another commentary on Williams's live and let live physician's acceptance of the human condition in all its forms and manifestations. The Kid provides yet another instance of Williams's alterego, the wild and free rebel ready to live beyond the pale of society's approvals and conventions in an urban counterpart of America's former frontier. Part delinquent, part hero, he is the stuff not just of stereotype but of an American archetype that fascinated Williams—whether as aborigine, frontiersman, mountain man, cowboy, or biker.

In the much-talked-about title story, "The Knife of the Times," the narrator takes a similar live-and-let-live attitude in recounting the long-pent-up lesbian love of Ethel for her old friend, "dark-eyed" Maura. Long married and the mother of six children, Ethel takes to writing passionate, seductive letters to Maura. She finally arranges a reunion in New York where she lures Maura to some pay toilets in Penn Station and makes her desires known in a passionate release of physical fondling and kissing. Maura is awakened to her own repressed love for Ethel and when asked if she would spend at least a week with her, "sleep with her," Maura decides, lucidly, carelessly, "Why not?" One "knife" in the story is the knife of long-repressed sexual desire and a desire to be free (another instance of this common proclivity) of society's expectations and conventions. "Why not?" as Maura announces it, is at once a cry of liberation and a leveling of self-restraint in the face of larger instincts. The actual descriptions of physical contact between the two women seem tame if not quaint by today's no-holds-barred erotic accounts. But in the context of the story, the passion seems anything but silly and allows the reader insights into just how far in the history of the short story the freedom to deal with issues of homosexuality has extended. In this sense Williams needs as much recognition as E. M. Forster and others whose homosexual stories were by and large only published posthumously. Whether his homosexual stories were intended by Williams as a kind of apology for those of homosexual persuasion among his painter and poet friends, or a working out of his own feelings for others of the same sex, as is suggested by Reed Whittemore about Williams and Robert McAlmon, is perhaps beside the point.

The homosexual stories in Knife hold forth the possibility—most especially to readers of more conventional (Williams would say puritanical) persuasion and those contemporary with the era in which these stories were written—that male-male friendship or love may be a kind of shield against female barbs and other kinds of knives of the times. Moreover, lesbian or homosexual love, if that is the person's inclination, is presented—more shockingly for Williams's time, and somewhat more ironically in the 1980s given the hysteria over AIDS—as something to be accepted without inhibitions if that is the nature of those involved. All three gender combinations—male-male, female-female, and female-male are accepted throughout Williams's early stories as ways of attempting to get through life, as observed by an author who sees human sexuality and behavior for what it is, diverse as it may be, and vulnerable as it may be, both in fidelity and infidelity, and set against the social and psychological, mental and emotional slicings of the "knife of the times."

The nineteen stories in Life Along the Passaic River continue some of the same themes and techniques Williams develops in Knife. A half dozen of these stories are among Williams's best, and at least two of them, "The Girl with a Pimply Face," and "Jean Beicke*" are among Williams's own favorites. In Passaic subject and tone turn darker, tending more than in Knife to the cynical, the grotesque, and the tragic. Part of the darkness of these stories is attributable to the familiar "knife" of the times: the worries, fears, and miseries of humanity, now focused more on children than on adults of middle age. Although the crises and conflicts in Passaic do involve adults peripherally, children's presences are closer to the center of things. Place (setting, locale, ambiance—Williams regarded "place" broadly) also assumes greater importance, reflecting Williams's belief that "In a work of art place is everything." In these stories, the Passaic River itself gives a nodality to Williams's portrayal of character and action.

Williams appears again, quite autobiographically, as the physician-writer, the narrator, the overarching persona who, in watching the Passaic and describing the urban liabilities of lives whose rare presences captivate him, is so moved to empathy that he passes beyond voyeur to participant through the telling and retelling of their lives. Few of these stories involve country interludes, retreats, farms, or the summer cottages on the shore known to the more affluent middle-class protagonists who appeared as the "employers" in Knife. Here there is only a provisional escape from the city squalor in which the working-class, proletarian families portrayed in Passaic live. Part of the cynicism and part of the hostility expressed here by Williams and his personae is due to the inequalities in class, education, income, intelligence and sensibilities between those who see and those who are seen, those who are told about and those who tell. Here, too, hard times are recorded on more than one level. Williams's own middle-class respectability and security adds to the poignancy of the disparities between class and economic status of the individuals living along the Passaic.

One thing is felt by the author and shared by the reader vividly in story after story: Williams feels the "hard history" of the people, the society, the country. And he takes his job as physician and as chronicler seriously. It is that feeling, again, that turns ordinary presences into rare ones. Williams empathizes with these individuals, with their predicament, with their humanity in a caring, far from condescending way, even though his own status in life could easily distance him from them, and cause him to be disparaging rather than empathetic.

In Passaic more than in any other collection of his stories, memorable characters come to the forefront as living people, people with names and desires that at once typify and transcend their kind. For example, the title story, "Life Along the Passaic River," is a wonderfully tough but impassioned overview of the place and the people. Both the river and the local inhabitants of the valley virtually compel Williams and his narrator(s) to pay attention to them, to speak up for them, to say in various ventriloquisms that they matter very much in spite of the larger world's indifference, in spite, to some degree, of their own indifference. The stories could be, and usually are, capable of their own individual meanings, but read together, they gain a special rhythm and structure. As a whole, the volume personalizes the human "swarm," bringing moment and distinction to the larger, generational and historical process that Williams tried to define throughout his career, from "The Wanderer" to Paterson, from In the American Grain to Pictures from Brueghel. He credited James Laughlin with saying that the form of Passaic, with its attention to the river as a metaphor for history, might also be well suited to a long poem—a poem that turned out to be Paterson. Similar presuppositions about history as process, the flowing of events and persons along time's river also infuse the organic and nature metaphors of In the American Grain.

In Life Along the Passaic River the point of view shifts and blends (now limited, then omniscient); specific scene merges with limited editorializing; vignette dissolves into vignette; showing and telling mix and separate as styles of story; the story proper is reinforced by smaller, internalized stories; the river is knowable first as place and then as idea; the historical past alternates with the present; the language, the vocabulary, the diction, the intonations not only reflect but help define the nature of these lives and their riverscape, or, conversely, the riverscape and its lives. The resultant effect is that of a large canvas done in hasty but impassioned brush strokes. The stones are all essentially Williams—person, physician, narrator, character all combined—teller and technique shaping and being shaped by subject.

As Williams the physician well knew, life is defined ultimately in terms of death and in these stories about life along the Passaic, death is always ready to intrude. This irony of death threatening life is made part of the rhythmic structure of the story in one anecdote after another. The "Polacks" in the city try to cope, like the narrator, with the predicament they are born into, generation after generation. Some, like the young anonymous male hitchhiker in one of the vignettes, possess the saving ambition of wanderlust—the gumption to leave the hometown, like Boone, and travel to "the coast." The hitchhiker at least has the story of his traveling to tell when he gets in the narrator's car. He has been to one geographical limit, found no work there or anywhere else during his journey "back again through the whole country," and now his glorious westering comes down to a ride to "Westover" just "up here a way."

The small canoe, in the summer-hot, dye-waste, polluted water of the river, which the narrator watches and describes intermittently in the story, is not really going any place very far either. The boy who made the canoe and now floats in it has fashioned hope more than anything else. Others of the youths described are resourceful, if not successful, in their schemes. The intentions of the girls are presented with an air of tragic indulgence and sympathy for their attempts to get their oversized feet into undersized shoes. The narrator's conversation with some listener other than the reader clarifies the attitude: "If your shoes fit you and they're made of good leather, if you know what good leather is, . . . you're getting somewhere. What did you say? The girls' feet look like flat tires in most of the things they don't know enough not to buy and to wear."

And in another vignette, Williams makes clear that the teenage girl lying on the autopsy slab in the hospital never went very far at all. Neither did her aborted twins. Not just children and youths but young girls especially have Williams's feeling about their hard, rare presences. The pimply-faced girl; Jean Beicke; the young Olson girl in "The Use of Force"; this girl long gone on the slab—all of them face dead-end lives with precious few like the narrator/physician caring to help even if it is only for the sake of helping more than for wondrous "results."

The narrator does not know for sure what the dead girl's story is. She is dead, he sees, a suicide whose death was gruesome, as evidenced by the burn down her throat caused by some concoction she drank. Indignation at the probable motive and the waste of it all, and yet the possible, painful blessing of it, is heard in the narrator's Greek chorus-like judgment: "Good legs. A fine pair of breasts. Well-shaped arms. She's dead all right, and if you get what I mean, that's not such a bad thing either. But good God, what for?" Trying to deduce the details of her story is not worth it, finally, for the narrator/observer. A woman, a mother, a worker—a waste. But Williams at least makes that point. The reader is convinced that the details would be ghastly whatever they are.

Death in the form of murder along the Passaic cuts short these lives too, as the two bodies fished up out of the river testify—one of them without a head, arms, or feet. And the narrator of this vignette with his "ain'ts" and "gonnas" and "wannas" puts the case plain and hard about those who kill and are killed, "punks," and "suckers" and "gorillas" and "mugs" who as kids grow up to be either cops or criminals. All are still there—". . . they ain't moved away none; that's what I'm saying. They're still here. Still as dumb as ever."

In addition to presenting the narrator's flinging of words and throwing of voice, his impersonations of these peoples' voices and views, Williams paints heart-rending and soul-tearing verbal descriptions of the river. Two bridges, one upstream by the new Third Street Bridge between Passaic and Wallington, and the other downstream at the Country Bridge, frame the story's opening and closing. Above the Country Bridge the "Polacks" walk looking for, of all things, gold coins out of some rumored, softer past. And Williams watches them in their looking—for coins, at a diver, at each other; watches one turn up an 1864 copper coin; watches one sit amidst the roots of an upturned tree; watches young, muscular men; watches them want to see "The Babe knock it, just once, out of the lot"—laughs and says, "good luck to you." . . .

In Williams's most popular story, "The Use of Force," the reader is taken again into the house of another such Passaic River family, where a strange, intimate presence is played out, a battle of wills, of love and hate, cool reason and mindless rage. A relatively simple challenge faces the physician in the story: to examine the girl's throat for infection and signs of possible diphtheria. But out of fear or defiance, the girl, Mathilda Olson, refuses to open her mouth, violently scratches at the doctor's glasses, bites a tongue depressor into splinters, and generally behaves—while in her father's lap—as if the doctor were the embodiment of the disease itself, rather than the means to a cure.

Irony compounds irony and Mathilda's mother and father make matters worse with each word they say to the child. And Williams uses the implications of the semantics in the "argument" at hand to great effectiveness. "He won't hurt you," says the mother. "Hurt" is the wrong word to use and irritates the doctor—and the doctor (also the first-person narrator) makes this clear to the reader although he restrains himself in his "professional" dialogue with the parents and girl. "You bad girl . . . , The nice man You'll have to go the hospital" the mother continues, and Williams, again through the first-person point of view, calls attention to the words and the wrong psychology behind them. Finally he blurts out a remonstrance to the mother with her "bad girl"/"nice man [doctor]" designations: "For heaven's sake, I broke in. Don't call me a nice man to her."

Since the doctor/narrator (and behind him, Williams) is so keenly tuned to these loaded words in context, it is significant to note that he describes his own persistence toward the end of the struggle with Mathilda as "a final unreasoning assault," by which he "overpowers the child's neck and jaw" (my italics).

Williams utilizes his familiar undertones of violent eroticism in "The Use of Force" as well. The doctor's admiration for the girl's beauty (that is, he speaks of her as "an unusually attractive little thing"), which is met by devouring him with her eyes, combined with his hostility to her whimpering mother, become a kind of "rape of the girl's will." The doctor's confessed feeling of "adult shame" notwithstanding, the end justifies the means—the use of force (also exerted by the father) is necessary because Mathilda's tonsils are seriously infected. She cares nothing of such matters, however, and the story ends in her tear-blinded, furious attempt to brutalize the doctor—force returned for force—her own kind of violent attempted "rape of his will." Neither Williams nor his narrator is naive about the sexual implications of the episode. And even if the narrator says, "I had to smile to myself. After all, I had already fallen in love with the savage brat . . ." in an essentially nonliteral way, the adequacy and inadequacy of words in relation to action become a theme of the story.

"Love," "bad," "nice," "savage"—all of the words to which Williams and the narrator call attention, are useless in the face of the infection threatening the girl's very life. The doctor knows the infection is the most powerful force in the equation of forces at work in the small, squalid room. Even the word "diphtheria" with all of its forceful connotations is just a word. The force lies behind the word in the disease and in the will and anger and beauty of the girl's presence, her human essence. But words, inadequate as they are, do have a certain limited, albeit primitive, magical, incantatory persuasive force that will enable the doctor to see, to know the truth of the ailment once he can convince the girl to relinquish her stubbornness. He sees his need to open her mouth, to examine her, as stupidly but admirably thwarted by the girl's resoluteness. Does she hate him? Does he love her? The word "love," as used—perhaps intended figuratively but revealing a more subconscious literalness—and the psychology of the emotion(s) expressed, make for intriguing speculation. Life along the Passaic, like the river itself and the aborigine in Williams's psyche, has its violent, savage aspect. . . .

Although not all of the stories in Passaic, beautiful and significant as they all are, can be discussed here, two other stories do bear mentioning. "Danse Pseudomacabre" and "The Accident" (two of Williams's earliest stories, first published in 1920 and 1921, respectively) raise the general/specific, specific/general rhythm of Williams's narration to further heights of the abstract and the philosophical. For Williams was desperately trying not just to report and describe, but to piece together some meaning to the misery he witnessed, some self-reflexive, word-way of coping with it, of solacing the people, the situation and himself—of reconciling life being born unto death.

In "Danse" a man meditates, in a Kafkaesque way, about life and death, health and illness, time and historical process, self and others—all the metaphysical queries about being and awareness. That process, the living of life, the "doctoring" becomes "la danse" as Williams suggests. The premise from which the man's ruminations radiate is a paradox: "That which is possible is inevitable," he thinks, the "normality of every distortion to which the flesh is susceptible, every disease, every amputation." It is the paradox of death in life, of morbidity in health, of the reversals of every kind that physicians see in their training and in their daily practice as it accumulates over the years.

Much of his anxiety is personal as well as professional. He is awakened with an overwhelming sense of death. His wife, sleeping next to him, might die, he thinks. How could he bear such separation, his "boon companion annihilated"? He hears a taxi leave; hears the "finality" of the clock strike three. Other thoughts come—of death, of a will in need of endorsement, of sickroom talk, a wife's fear of her husband dying, of an unconscious baby with meningitis, presumably, infected at the baptismal font of all places, from "holy" water, a baby, who, if it lives will be an idiot. The moon and street lamps imagistically provide a funereal backdrop to his meditations. The moon's movements, the lighting, are part of the dance and the repetitious visitations of a physician, and the writings and rememberings that grow out of those visits: "And do I repeat the trouble of writing that which I have already written, and so drag another human being from oblivion to serve my music." Such an imagistic "dance" is confirmation in plotless but still "story" form of the significance, the meaning that writing stories such as this one brought to Williams, "Satyr-like," in counting out the tempos and rhythms heard against his music and giving form to his music, the dance of the river, the place where he happened to find himself, the compulsion to write out an accompaniment to the words, the sounds, "the tragic foot," the dance of life—to death.

In "The Accident" the vignettes that dramatize the event point out that "Death is difficult for the senses to alight on." For twelve days the speaker struggles to keep a girl alive, but death comes, finally, vividly, grotesquely: "She lies gasping her last: eyes rolled up till only the whites show, lids half open, mouth agape, skin a cold bluish white, pasty, hard to the touch—as the body temperature drops the tissues congeal."

Which is the accident, Williams seems to say, life or death? The girl's final moments are juxtaposed with another lesser accident, experienced by the narrator/physician, a minor cataclysm on a serendipitous "out-of-doors" trip in spring (a beginning, an "accident") to see four goats "down a red dirt path." The physician now becomes a man who wants to stop to show his son the goats. As in e. e. cummings's "Just Spring," the spring, the boy, the goats, the sexual urges felt by the man toward the woman in the car seat, "hips beside him," or in Williams's "Spring and All," out of all the lustful longing for life and its utter mystery of "death, a sign of life," the child must instinctively touch one of the goats. He does so. Then, walking back along the path, the child stumbles, falls full face into the dirt.

The child's falling is an accident of another kind than the girl's gasping and dying, which opens the account. Death is an accident and spring is an accident. The goats where they are, doing what they are doing as "goats," are an accident. The child's fall is an accident. The story is a kind of accident. Experience is an accident, life, the rarest presence of all, and the rarest absence, in death—all such "accidents" are the stuff of storytelling.

In Knife and Passaic Williams first tries his hand at doing all of it—the "danse," the "accidents)," the poetry, the words of it—in short story form. And readers who happen across them, like the six wonderful, sun-drenched women who stop their work and stare, concerned, and finally laugh and wave at the child recovering from his fall, can be thankful Williams cared to tell each and every one of these hard histories, these beautiful stories.