[In the excerpt below, Whitaker gives a thematic overview of Williams's short fiction.]

Though Williams had written short stories during the previous decade or so, not until the 1930's did this form become of major importance to him. In the people among whom he worked, the Depression was now revealing qualities that demanded a brief narrative form: "brokenness and heterogeneity—isolation, color." Temporary uncertainty about his direction in poetry also led him to prose—as a "laboratory for metrics" in which he could listen to live speech, hoping to discover the new. And behind these immediate reasons there was, I think, his increasing need to explore more intensively the minute particulars of that ground to which Dev Evans had returned—that ground on which Williams walked daily. Indeed, the primary stylistic meaning of these stories results from their movement beyond what he had called in 1927 "my formerly important irritability, diffuseness," toward annihilation of the self-regarding ego and a clearer acquaintance with the ground. This movement required a difficult honesty: "In order to be plain myself I must be assured that I am speaking true. That is the style, true to the sharpest, firmest present vision of which I am capable."

The stories collected in The Knife of the Times (1932) sometimes recall Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and D. H. Lawrence, for Williams employs an oral style that relies heavily upon rapid and generalized narration and upon strategic focus on a few banal but authentic details. In understated sketches ("The Knife of the Times," "The Sailor's Son") characters reach blindly toward some fulfillment, their need answered half-comprehendingly perhaps by another. More extended studies ("A Descendant of Kings," "Pink and Blue") balance pathos and comedy as they move toward a grotesque inflation made possible by their anecdotal mode.

The accurately heard speaking voice is a key to greater intensity in "An Old Time Raid," where the first-person narration stylistically renders the theme—a vacuous violence, without self-comprehension, born of hidden frustration. In this instance, an anecdote widens to become a character study and a study of an entire deformed milieu. A similar intensity charges "Mind and Body," in which a neurotic patient reveals her complex rhythm of being through her own lengthy utterances. Here too appears another device of great importance in later stories: Williams focuses upon a human predicament through the doctor-patient relationship, allowing the shadowily present doctor to serve as explicit or implicit locus of observation. The deepest meaning of such stories may be found less in the predicaments observed than in the difficult but unself-conscious openness of the doctor's attention. The conclusion of "Mind and Body" itself points ironically to that fact: pressing for a somatic diagnosis, the woman invites from her doctor a drastic reduction of that total human interpretation implicit in his arrangement of the story's details.

The major piece in this volume is the long story "Old Doc Rivers." In it, a doctor-narrator's inquiries combine with related anecodotes in a progression d'effet which leads into a complex awareness of both Old Doc Rivers and his provincial environment, with its walling-in and its limited releases. The opening paragraph plunges us into the rhythm of the narrator's repeated drama of sudden discovery and ruminative assessment: "Horses. These definitely should be taken into consideration in estimating Rivers position, along with the bad roads, the difficult means of communication of those times." As the story proceeds through neatly fitted blocks of material, the meanings of "horses" and "bad roads" widen to include Rivers' pride in occupation, his dashing readiness and fevered rush, his isolation and need for release—and, with a sardonic modulation, his final doped decline amid changing times. We last see him as owner of "two cars always ready for service," riding out on calls with one of his wife's Blue Pomeranians on his lap; "for in those days he himself never sat at the wheel."

Between that opening and that close, the story follows a seemingly devious but subtly direct line of understanding. First, there are glimpses of Rivers' practice and of his drive across the County Bridge toward some release in the "dark spring night." Then follows the narrator's inquiry into hospital record books, where he characteristically finds at first "something other than the thing desired" but with unexpected relevance: data about the human occupations, misery, and fatalities of the time, among which he slips new information for us about Rivers, "dead surely of the effects of his addiction." The story then moves (by way of alcoholism as a ledger entry) through exploration of Rivers' use of dope, inquiries of surgeons who had assisted him, and the narrator's own memory of the two occasions on which he had helped Rivers with an operation.

By now our distance from the narrator has decreased—as has his own distance from the past that he is exploring. We may thus join him in searching the meaning of Rivers' tenderness and cruelty, carelessness and painstaking attention. Then, with the outlines of a character and a predicament before us, we can actually follow Rivers on those drives away from town: toward the Jeannette Mansion, toward the Maine woods and the North Jersey mountains, and (after another "digression," telling of his stays in the Insane Asylum and his marriage, and locating us in the consciousness of a youthful eye-witness) toward that most important of "favorite places," the isolated farm where a woman provided—in her own abandonment—a more necessary asylum.

As the friend tells of those visits (appropriately beginning with the inclusive phrase, "You know how it used to be," and incorporating a running account of his own youth), it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish his voice from that of the narrator. And in a sudden detail—"Killy-fish rippled the road ditch, a diminutive tempest, as the carriage and the hoof beats of the horses slightly shook the ground in passing"—we are momentarily swept through the minds of narrator and informant into that of Rivers himself, as we now fully sense the meaning of that drive across the County Bridge. Williams has led us back into what James called a "visitable past," a past that is also ours.

In doing so, Williams has given the larger meaning of Rivers' predicament: a complex nature hemmed in by a "crude environment," a "refinement of the sensibilities that made him, though able, the victim of the very things he best served." Rivers was "by natural endowment the ablest individual of our environment"; and—unlike most in the cities who "have lost touch" with themselves, "have become indeed not authentic persons, but fantastic shapes in some gigantic fever dream"—he had "the courage to break with it and to go."

As the story tails off with anecdotes of decline and of legendary competence (rendering the despairing faith of a population which, as in Paterson, seeks a "marvel"), we find two summary statements casually included among other data. The first: "A cure for disease? He knew what that amounted to. For of what shall one be cured? Work, in this case, through sheer intuitive ability flooded him under." Ironically enough, Rivers' own amazing diagnostic ability makes him a focus for the ills of his time, which take in him a peculiarly revelatory form. And the second statement: "He was one of the few that ever in these parts knew the meaning of all, to give himself completely." We suddenly recognize—in and through the distortions of temperament and time—a spiritual descendant of Rasles and Boone—and a true colleague of the writer himself.

Life Along the Passaic River (1938) continues the double interest in people and place, and also focuses on that overwhelming question: "Of what shall one be cured?" Through the panoramic sketch ("Life Along the Passaic River"), the neatly plotted episode ("The Dawn of Another Day"), the series of vignettes ("World's End"), and the character drawing ("Under the Greenwood Tree"), Williams explores the blockages and perversions of the time and implies a cure: attentive acceptance. One of several earlier pieces collected here—"Danse Pseudomacabre" (1920)—presents a rather strident version of such acceptance. But other stories, relating encounters of doctors and patients, more firmly realize both disease and cure.

In "The Girl with a Pimply Face" the "hard, straight thing" that the doctor-narrator admires in the girl appears also, complicated and refracted, in his own attention to her warping milieu. We accept his compassion for the alcoholic mother partly because it is one genuine emotion among others—puzzlement, irritation, inarticulate rage, enthusiasm. Hence in its closing dialogue the story can accomplish the very difficult task of allowing both narrator and fifteen-year-old girl to emerge as implicit signs of life in a venal and oppressive environment.

In "The Use of Force" the same frank acknowledgment of what is allows the doctor to move from impatience to love, to pleasure in his own fury, and on to self-recognition: "The damned little brat must be protected against her own idiocy, one says to one's self at such times. Others must be protected against her. It is social necessity. And all these things are true. But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives. One goes on to the end." This doctor's curative insight is, among other things, an awareness of how he shares in those desires which, uncomprehended, make for conflict and tyranny.

In "A Night in June" the burden of self-knowledge for such a doctor emerges unobtrusively in the midst of an early morning delivery of a child to an Italian immigrant woman. The first sentences of the story establish an ironic point of reference by alluding to the delivery of her first baby (eighteen years earlier) when the narrator was "a young man . . . full of information and tenderness." The story has about six pages of detail concerning the routine preparations for the present delivery in order to render the quality of experience of a man honestly aware of his own sources of gratification—a man for whom the self-conscious imparting of "information and tenderness" are signs of youth.

After this preparation we can approach a statement that would otherwise be quite misleading: "With my left hand steering the child's head, I used my ungloved right hand outside on her bare abdomen to press upon the fundus. The woman and I then got to work. Her two hands grabbed me at first a little timidly about the right wrist and forearm. Go ahead, I said. Pull hard. I welcomed the feel of her hands and the strong pull. It quieted me in the way the whole house had quieted me all night." He recognizes that it is he who is "being comforted and soothed." But the story must continue even beyond this climax for another page—through a variety of medical concerns and family reactions to the final question from the sister-in-law: "What shall I do? Put a little boric acid powder on the belly button to help dry it up?" Only amid equal attention to details of this kind can such gratification or release be of another order than Rivers' dope or the use of force.

The very different doctor-narrator of "Jean Beicke" projects in his rambling discourse a mask of callousness, verve, curiosity, and wry humor through which tenderness emerges only obliquely or in disguise. The story's most striking device is its limiting of the baby Jean's hospital life to a three-page block in the middle of some eight pages. The long introduction establishes the tonal complexity of the narrator's voice against a background of human deprivation and a range of simpler attitudes toward it: the "doctor who has given the parents a ride," parents who were habitual drunkards ("No fault of theirs maybe"), and nurses who "break their hearts over those kinds, many times, when I, for one, wish they'd never get well."

But why should Williams inform us of Jean's mastoiditis and death and then go back through the details of the autopsy that had revealed the nature of her illness? By eliminating suspense, he enables us to join the narrator in focussing with equanimity upon the medical details—against a background, once more, of simpler and more extreme human responses: the mother's sorrow and her sister's sense of relief. Sharing both impulses, the narrator yet proceeds with what needs to be done. However, the final interchange with the "ear man" points beyond the narrator for the full meaning of a normative awareness:

A clear miss, he said. I think if we'd gone in there earlier, we'd have saved her.

For what? said I. Vote the straight Communist ticket.

Would it make us any dumber? said the ear man.

The human condition requires a more delicately vulnerable witnessing than the narrator's own armor of defensive abstraction and sardonic solutions may allow. But the difficulty of such witnessing is also part of the meaning of little Jean herself: "She was just skin and bones but her eyes were good and she looked straight at you. Only if you touched her anywhere, she started to whine and then cry with a shrieking, distressing sort of cry that no one wanted to hear." In Jean, as in all the adults of the story, potential awareness has been crippled as a raw sensitivity defends itself.

The use of a doctor-narrator is most striking in "A Face of Stone." There the narrator himself begins with responses to experience that are habitual and self-enclosing. In the opening description of the couple who seek his help, his irritation and prejudice are manifest: "He was one of these fresh Jewish types you want to kill at sight, the presuming poor whose looks change the minute cash is mentioned. But they're insistent, trying to force attention, taking advantage of good nature at the first crack. You come when I call you, that type." The tone is convincing: this narrator is a man whom the author thoroughly understands.

Turning from one half-projected mode of defensiveness to another, the doctor describes the woman, who "stood beside her smiling husband and looked at me with no expression at all on her pointed face, unless no expression is an expression. A face of stone. It was an animal distrust, not shyness. She wasn't shy but seemed as if sensing danger, as though she were on guard against it." There is danger, of course, which the narrator does not see because it is in himself.

Toward the end of the story, as he realizes the woman's suffering and the nature of the husband's devotion to her, his view of the couple begins to alter: "suddenly I understood his half shameful love for the woman and at the same time the extent of her reliance on him. I was touched." His own stoniness is explicitly dissolved; but the fuller meanings of that process are only implied by the woman's response as he explains the medicine she is to take: "Then for the first time since I had known her a broad smile spread all over her face. Yeah, she said, I swallow him." What the narrator does not know, or at least cannot say, is the fact that his own new condition has enabled in the woman a comparable opening, of which her words are symptom and symbol. "Of what shall one be cured?" This story dramatizes with firm and tactful detail the narrator's movement toward re-acquaintance with not merely a local but a spiritual ground.

Williams' awareness of this meaning is evident from a canceled preface, written during a moment of doubt over the clarity of the story's structure:

What shall I say? The truth only, of a life tortured, but no more than others, and unfeeling. It is even somewhat shameful to speak of these things. . . . Of what is there to confess? Loss of love? Why pretend a love that doubtless never quite existed? . . .

How shall I say it? I who have wished to embrace the world with love have succeeded only in binding to myself a wife and children . . . ? I who wished, in a general way, to die for love have suffered only the small accidents of fatigue, bewilderment and loss? . . .

Who feels enough confidence to say anything? All I know is that no matter what we have dreamed or desired it slips away unless by a supreme effort we struggle to detain it. And often, in spite of all that we can do, it is to someone else we owe the little we can hold. . . . I want to explain, for once, not only the story, but to go besides outside it and stress what it means to me—returning to a life as I had planned it.

It is only a story, good enough, and there is a desperation in the very triviality of situations, since we know well what they signify but being unable to quite convince ourselves of their importance we allow them to pile up . . .

And in this earlier draft, Williams included a more explicit account of the narrator's feeling toward the husband:

There is in a defenseless thing something that infuriates us. . . . We find ourselves beaten by the meanness of our own lives, the squalor of it, the grossness, the moral weakness. And not daring, out of cowardice, to attack the real enemy, ourselves, we wreak our vengeance on the meanest thing before us.

Even knowing I was cruel, cowardly, I couldn't stop myself. There was a pleasure in it. . . . That pity, even tenderness could at the same time be alive seems impossible, yet it is so. But once the attack is launched, even against reason, against desire, the object of our hatred becomes fixed and we go on to the bitter end. Only a deeper power, as I will show, can wake us finally to all that life can mean—and save us.

Though, as autobiographical statements, these are moving in their tortured honesty, Williams was right to omit them. His narrator enacts a process that he cannot (without self-contradiction) fully articulate. "A Face of Stone" stands firmly as it is: a rendering of that "deeper power" and that "waking."

Make Light of It (1950) includes many brief sketches that are important mainly as reflecting Williams' search for the illuminating detail and the cadences of live speech. But several stories are more difficult contrapuntal structures, rendering a hitherto unrecognized order. In "The Burden of Loveliness" a central anecdote appears in a seemingly digressive context that is really "conversation as design." The result is a subtle exploration, through interlocking trivial situations and obliquely symbolic detail, of what happens to esthetic appreciation and sexuality in a market economy. No doctrinaire diatribe, it is a sympathetic presentation of the human costs borne by those who buy or sell or try to do neither.

In "Country Rain" the meaning expands mainly through symbolic details and characters. The relationship of Helen and her friend Ruth, who have left city and men for an unconventional new start as operators of a country inn, is counterpointed by that of two lady school teachers and that of the narrator and his wife. Early drafts treated at some length the repressed school teachers' obsession with grammar, their conservatism and prejudice, and their readiness to discover political subversion. But Williams reduced such material to brief hints and to a closing symbolic comment, which juxtaposes "their situation among the dones, the aints and the seens" and an "ungrammatical rock." The richly regenerative details of that rock summarize what we have seen beneath the neat surfaces of Helen's and Ruth's life together. The story ends with another counterpoint—Floss' question, "Do you think Ruth will every marry?" and the narrator's counterquestion: "Why?" Growth here does not result from insistence upon some grammar—linguistic, political, or sexual.

The most successful story of this kind, however, is "Comedy Entombed." Central in it is the doctor's response to the woman and the mode of life in the house: "There was nothing properly recognizable, nothing straight, nothing in what might have been called its predictable relationships. Complete disorder." But he comes to see it as an "unrecognizable order" and implicitly discerns the meaning of its resemblance to the woman, with her smiling ease amid fifth-month contractions. The final page, through conversation alone, subtly rounds off a double pattern: the comedy entombed alive in the woman herself (by oppressive environment and unwanted child) and the further entombing which results from it:

It was alive when it was born though, she said. I looked and I could see it open its mouth like it wanted to breathe. What is it, Doc, . . . a boy or a girl?

Oh, boy! said the husband, have I got a bellyache tonight. She laughed. Guss he's having a baby. He's worse than I am. . . . Say, Doc, she continued, you haven't told me. What was it? . . .

I looked. Yes, it would have been a girl.

There, she said, you see! Now you've got your girl. I hope you're satisfied.

I haven't got any girl, he answered quietly.

I'm hungry, yelled a sleepy voice from the other room.

Shut up! said the father.

The narrator's attention has focused a family pattern of conflicting "hungers" or desires to "breathe" which lead to frustration, shutting up, entombment. . . .

A late story, "The Farmers' Daughters" (1957), may remind us where Williams' strengths lie; for it avoids the dangers that attend dramatic action and also those of the writer's egocentric involvement. Though the story may seem a random sequence of glimpses, it is really a firm composition of selected narrative blocks. The narrator, an anonymous member of the community, is little more than a voice. Through him we share the story's real point of view: that of the doctor who is friend and confidant of the two lonely women, Helen and Margaret. The doctor, however, is no center of conflict, nor does he search into the meaning of the events he witnesses. Often no more than implicitly present, he is at most a shadowy figure. Yet for that reason he gradually focuses the story's most important meanings.

The first seven narrative blocks suggest the frustration and violence in the women's past and their continuing loneliness and self-destructiveness. We see, however, that, while Margaret is still victim of a compulsive sexuality, Helen is pulling out of her similarly compulsive drinking. We also see that the doctor's mere attention to Helen—his good-humored, sympathetic, and honest response—has been an important curative force. After brief description of the developing friendship between the two women, the next five blocks bring the story to its first climax. We see Helen's home situation more fully—including her intense yet obliquely expressed love for the doctor. The doctor's response appears in his reaction to the photograph she gives him: "The trees blossoming with ice seemed to them both a triumphant thing; it made their hearts sing, therefore he was grateful to her for the picture, wanted to keep it where he could see it when he was depressed." We then follow corresponding material concerning Margaret—including her growing desperation and her imperfectly acknowledged affection for the doctor. Here too we find hints of his own fascination. The last block of material, spanning several years, moves with stark swiftness from the symbolic Thanksgiving celebration with the doctor ("a love feast, . . . a despairing avowal and celebration") into the first major crisis: Margaret's drunken fracas, her attempt to kill herself and her children, and her flight with boyfriend Mac.

In the next section—another twelve blocks—this established rhythm is expanded. With minor variations, we move through Helen's situation and then through Margaret's. Again the last block moves swiftly from a kind of domestic felicity into catastrophe: the shooting of Margaret by her new husband. Two other blocks provide a coda on the meaning of human relatedness. First, Helen's hysterical reconstruction of the murder, concluding with her plea to the doctor: "Take good care of yourself 'cause I can't afford to lose you. When she [Margaret] died, I died too, you're the only one I have left." Second, the dry account—after the inquest—of the trajectory of the bullet.

Many details in this half of the story have developed its central triangular relationship. There are little parallels: Helen yearns toward her china doll as the doctor implicitly does toward Helen—with her "Dresden china blue eyes blinking at him above a house-coat of mixed colors and faded blue slacks." Yet such pathetic attempts to overcome isolation have their beauty: "You're not the one to judge: when you talk about that doll you're beautiful." There is even something curative and pastoral in the doctor's relation to Helen, as there is not in the visit made by the Episcopal minister or in the baptism which she recalls. Their mutual need is doomed, however, to imperfect manifestations—even as the doctor says "all the great dramas with love as their theme are tragedies."

Indeed, the murder of Margaret itself arises from a more frenzied acting out of this very need to love and be loved, as the doctor's comments on her vulnerability to exploitation may suggest: "You'll do it all over again and nobody can stop you. You've done things to us which are inexcusable. And yet . . . I don't blame you. That's a trait that people like you exhibit—to our envy—and despair—a sort of power that you have over us. I still believe in you, that you are not guilty. . . . Not only that, but in many ways you are the best of us, the most direct, the most honest—yes, and in the end, the most virtuous." Each of these three persons is partly mirrored in the others, and in the trees blooming in ice, the roses, and the jonquils. Yet each sums up one facet of their common predicament: in Margaret, the most desperate and naked loneliness; in Helen, a more vigorous if precarious thriving despite that loneliness; and, in the doctor—imperfectly manifest through his own need—that non-possessive love which might cure the alienation from which all suffer.

Emphasizing the doctor's role in this way, I have necessarily shifted the apparent focus of the story. Its own narrative tact makes the doctor hardly more than a mode of relating. ("Nothing like careful snipping," advised Williams, "for the bringing out of the profile.") The story thus avoids the pitfall of self-indulgence that awaits any fuller attempt to dramatize such a figure. And that tact also requires that the doctor not search for meaning but merely be attentive to what unfolds—and vulnerable to it. The narrative structure causes us then not to look at him so much as to see with his eyes. We find ourselves not driving toward some goal of understanding but merely paying attention—now to Helen, now to Margaret. But "attention" is a pale word to describe what is happening as we share in the partial failure of love—the story's tragic burden.