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Axiomatics

The Mask by John Cournos. George H. Doran Company

The Dial 68, April 1920, 496–499

There are dreadful people I have met who think that to be of any value, a work of art must have magnitude. They appraise art by its bulk and its momentum if hurled, while a symphony for eighty pieces would, in their scheme of judgment s, be eighty times as important as a sonata. To have concocted Big Moments, to have dealt in everybody’s heart-throbs, to have approached some sort of exaltation, is to have merited their ultimate benediction. They have waded through Dreiser, wallowed in English trilogies, and gulped great waves of 1850 Russian epilepticism. But it never occurs to them that a horn tooting away for dear life might be ridiculous. . . . Over against their almost universal trombonism, if one is to plead that the world still has taste, can be mentioned a scraggly number of tinkerers with the harpsichord. The harpsichord was a frail instrument, somewhat glib, although not more so than the Moralités Légendaires of Laforgue, or some of de Gourmont’s excursions. We are in sad need of a trombone here in America to toot the value of the harpsichordists.

But the harpsichordists do not belong in a discussion of The Mask. I mention them simply because Up induces the thought of Down, and systole is accompanied by diastole; because I couldn’t read Cannan without remembering Les Chevaux de Diomede. Mr. Cournos, that is to say, plays the trombone; and for a comparative beginner, he plays it well.

Mr. Cournos is very seriously immersed in the floods of life. In a novel that is evidently the redoing of a vivid personal experience—d’Aurevilly said that we all had two or three of such plots in our sack—he writes with all the fervour of a Dostoevsky. For like Dostoevsky, he is manipulating the throbbing realities. Life is a struggle for adjustment, a painful attempt to resolve things. These efforts begin when the newborn sees blurred movings with unfocused eyes, and end, I suppose, with death. All of which is a banal outlook on life, and has produced masterpieces.

The objection to misery and struggle as an impetus to art is that it takes the caution out of a man. The violent surge of things to be said pushes one recklessly on, so that he has no time for questioning his aesthetics. Standards have to be taken for granted; if the house is to be erected hastily, we must grab the hammer and nails nearest at hand. By this I do not necessarily mean that the book is dashed off at top speed. Samuel Butler spent years with his Way of All Flesh, and yet whenever he came to it, he came not as an artist but as one of the immersed-in-lifers. He may have talked technique from night till morning, but his book was always bigger than he was, like life itself. There is not a single trial of skill in the whole volume. Earnest things were to be expressed adequately, and he expressed them as adequately as his earnestness could enable him. The same might be said of the author of The Mask.

The fault with this earnest adequateness shows most noticeably in the disturbing breaks of the narrative, frequent in both books. The reader is lugged ten or twenty years ahead of the story for a few pages, and then just as suddenly dumped back again. Autobiographical associations have proved stronger than the demands of the medium, so that for the sake of a full truth the author will snatch at anything. This makes it impossible to develop concomitantly with the hero of the novel. A reader’s receptivity is a very frailly built mechanism which is always disrupted by such rough handling. If the opening sentence of a book prognosticates one kind of story, the reader unconsciously adapts himself to whatever kind it promises to be. But if the story does not abide by the laws of its kind, it cannot be entirely satisfactory, even though we theoretically approve of its transgressions. There are many sorts of writing in which any kind of a break is possible—I can think of no happier example of this than Gide’s Nourritures Terrestres—but if one is setting out at this late date to do something compelling, something drastically true to life, something vibrant with human interest, he must recognize that the medium is already pretty thoroughly established for that sort of thing; and that if he is after verisimilitude with heart and soul, he must have a better reason than mere convenience for breaking the steady march of his narrative.

The embarrassing predicament of The Mask is that it is a reasonably good book. Now a reasonably good book is peculiarly elusive. One cannot tumble all over himself with praise of it, nor can he object to it without a futile qualification of every statement. Mr. Cournos, like so many of our present-day writers, goes about his work with intelligence, an impeccable keenness of vision, and some thoroughly arrived attitudes. It is safe to suppose that he has read Freud, a couple of essays on zoology, and a weekly with some shade of radical politics. Consequently, one cannot get at him. He is impregnably aware. Such people are skilled in the art of giving just as much as can be endured, and no more. John Gombarov’s stepfather Suffers in Silence for so many pages, but is always discretely muddied with some domestic detail as he is on the verge of becoming a hero. Occasionally a pompous train of oratory is organized, only to be rained on at the last moment. Whereas in the old code comedy was introduced to keep us from suffering too strongly, it is wisely inserted here to forestall our protests. And as I say, the enraging thing is that such subterfuges are successful. Writers of reasonably good books are preeminently slippery; they are not to be walked on with comfort. When their book is completed, they can lie back and observe us moving nervously along on ice-creepers.

Heaven alone knows what is to become of the novel. As early as 1884 Huysmans was sick of it, and began his series of compilations with A Rebours. But on the whole, although it is so short-lived, it has become astonishingly autocratic. Keen minds have accepted it as naïvely as the infallibility of a pope. In spite of the hemorrhage of verse that is splattering about the earth, I suppose there is still one novel published for every poem. Huysmans, Gide, de Gourmont, Joyce, Lewis—I can think of no others who have showed any interest in even stretching the novel, unless Romains be added for safety’s sake. The French Academy goes on with its sterile coronations, and across the Channel ten (10) established reputations still heave their annual mountain. Yet if perfection can kill a thing, the novel should have died at the end of the century, since Mann had already written his Buddenbrooks. However, most people have easily avoided this dilemma by not knowing Mann.

The novel is too rigid a form to express an age like the present. We need something that admits easily of interruption, digression, and the mounting of hippogriffs. Perhaps we shall develop a form, or a formlessness, after the fashion of Petronius’ escapades. Indeed, our kinship with late Latin is continually becoming more evident. We are squarely in one of the Dark Ages, a period of transition and uncertainty, or perhaps better, a period of marked transition, since Goethe says we are always in transition: der Uebergang, der Uebergang zum Uebergang, des Uebergangs Uebergang zum Uebergang, and des Uebergangs Uebergang zu des Uebergangs Uebergang. We, like them, are essentially Orphic rather than Olympic. Without their Christianity, we have their Christian retreatism. We have their love of the catalogue, their joy in vituperation, their interest in broad, ugly words. Some of the most notable writers of the last decades have drawn from late Latin. Of all these, perhaps the most representative is Léon Bloy, with his polysyllabic spew, his tetanic disgust, and his crushing in of the heads of the bourgeois.

Practically all of these men, of course, are French. This is to be expected, for although we northern barbarians have been assuming for three hundred years that we are quite in the flow of things, the fact is that Rome has only now reached as far as Paris. In all probability this Romanization will continue; let us trust that Latin is still more permanent than correspondence courses. And in the meantime, if a Russian temperament chooses to write under English influences, we can expect interesting books, intelligently and honestly written, with perhaps such pearls of style as this:

And, having caught with all this a sense of inevitable fatality which attends upon those born to incur the steady displeasure of the gods, he felt that now he could go on with the tragi-comic play with keen interest, even amusement, that indeed, to some degree he could assist, if need be supplant, the demoniac prompter.