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The Editing of Oneself

The Mystic Warrior by James Oppenheim. Alfred A. Knopf

The Dial, August 1921, 232–235

With the advent of psychoanalysis the literature of confessions enters upon a new phase. Heretofore the confessor has been subject to emotion in such a way that his need to express himself was greater than his discretion; he maintained a wavering battlefront between pride and humility, although above and beyond it all the confessions continued. But now the confession has become an invention, made possible only by the discoveries of modern science and research. If the older confessions were written almost in spite of oneself, the newer confessions burble along like brooks. And when one has been properly “psyched,” he does not even suffer a pudency before his secretly suspected virtues.

As a consequence, it is becoming the custom, when one has reached a certain age, to lay out the stades and parasangs of one’s journey; and, having decided just where one is going, to tell exactly how one got there. Further, it seems there is no longer any essential difference between making a work of literary art and writing an essay on the causes of the Great War. Beginning with the result, one works back into a set of teleological connections, and then starting with the teleological connections, one works up to the result . . . a method which has produced a remarkably interesting volume in Mr. Oppenheim’s The Mystic Warrior.

The Mystic Warrior, working along these lines, is born to find that “the world was a dream of beauty, an ache of loveliness.” But, on the other hand, “everything spoke of death, everything whispered in my ears, ‘James, you will die.’” In the beginning, therefore, Mr. Oppenheim recalls the love of life and the fear of death. “Then, after breakfast, grammar.” He could not concentrate on his studies, however. “Phantasy possessed me . . . And everything was too beautiful . . . Too beautiful the blue of the sky, green of the earth, Too poignant the gleam of wonder in butterfly wings, Too aching lovely the summer fields, the glaze of the morning . . . My throat was clutched with tears . . .” Little James watches the sun go down with terror, since then he will think of death. By way of summing up here, the author passes two judgment s: “O, only one who has felt this terror knows what it is to live!” and later on: “And nobody bothered his head about it!”

With the death of his father—told with an honest homeliness of emotion which makes it one of the finest passages in the book—the boy is thrown into less general preoccupations. “But now I must take his place: I must hurry and be a man . . . Strange task for the dreamy little singer and artist!” Along with this, a period of yearning sets in:

. . . I wanted, not to be my father,

But to be the child encircled by my father’s love . . .

I wanted to go from the hard weary world, the torture of existence,

The clash and dust of my brain,

Into that cell of abnegation and quiet

Where the invisible Beloved hovers,

And I should give birth to the divine child,

My inspired song, my poem, born in love.

But instead:

Sold my love for power, converted religion into livelihood,

And gave the artist in me to be a semi-harlot of the press.

For the next years, life is a hodge-podge of Napoleon, Lincoln, Shakespeare, Wagner, Jesus, and jobs. Above it all was a mixed ambition to conquer or redeem the world, to throw off contemplation for action. However:

I essayed, and failed . . . song lured me again . . .

Again the storm-cloud, again the agony,

Again the triumph of music and vision.

“Not that there was no counter-current.” He tried “To be interested in others, to join good causes, to work among the poor, And last, and greatest, to learn how to love.” This love, although containing much of the metaphysical for “What did I love but the God with whom I became one . . .”—also extended to a marriage, which was not successful and forced him into hack-writing. But finally “New knowledge came . . . My marriage broke open and showed itself for what it was . . .”

. . . I went off to a life of lonely poverty . . .

And in that life, in anguish, listening, brooding,

I heard from far-off the murmur of the divine music coming like a

turning tide back to me . . .

The story ends here, after the author has attained the haven of his first book, Songs for the New Age.

In an appendix, Mr. Oppenheim discusses the problem of form as it applies to his present work. He finds that the tendency of the realistic novel has gradually been leading closer to the material of the author’s life; in other words, gradually becoming a mere “thinly disguised autobiography.” Mr. Oppenheim claims that the natural consequence is that we give over the thin disguise and write frankly of ourselves. It is certainly gratifying to see an author who can examine the basis of his work, although in the present instance one might dispute the cogency of his conclusion on the grounds that the increasing necessity which realism finds in thinly disguising the life of the artist points simply to the imminent bankruptcy of realism. In fact, looking beyond the novel to the realistic movement as a whole, we find that even at the opening of the century intense realism led not to autobiography, but to symbolism. The reason for this is that realism, by putting man face to face with facts per se, awakens over again his primitive need for animism, or correspondences; since man is constitutionally averse to the sterility of mere facts, and when they are placed before him in all their barrenness he must immediately make something else of them. (On the other hand, if realism has gone off into symbolism, it could be claimed for Mr. Oppenheim that he is leading it into teleology, at least giving it the added significance of getting us somewhere.)

The real objection to the frankly autobiographical “fiction” is that the mere editing of one’s accidental experiences offers so little opportunity for an imaginative aggressiveness, a sense of line, mass, organization, and the like. At the very start the emphasis is placed on information rather than presentation, and as such belongs either to journalism or Wednesday prayer meetings, but not to art. Auto-biographical, certainly . . . since the artist employs only that which derives from his experiences; but the gods of Lord Dunsany are as immediately connected with experience as any photograph of an Eleventh Avenue beanery.

Since The Mystic Warrior is dedicated to Whitman, one finds oneself almost automatically ranging the two poets alongside of each other and comparing their methods of attack. Whitman began with a more spontaneous gluttony, a will to devour which was active even before meeting the object to be devoured. Thus, as soon as he came upon it, he could cast it into his belly without so much as a questioning glance. With Mr. Oppenheim these processes have been reversed. He begins by seeing things, examining them very carefully, and all but throwing them away entirely. Then at the last moment he remembers the obligation of gluttony which is part of his ars poetica, and gobbles them down almost as ravenously as the master.

For the fact is that Whitman, the genial voice of an aggressive, an expanding America—the earlier and less tarnished phase of our imperialism, that is—slashed into his material so recklessly that he has left his disciples with nothing but protest for a subject. The elation of the broad axe is gone, although a group of epigons remains which is bent on recovering this elation. While retaining an unmistakably Whitman technique, they have gone over almost as a body to Freud for material, since he seemed to offer some possibilities of new territory, less physical than Whitman’s, of course, though satisfying the same yearning. But I doubt whether we have as yet discovered the formula for making synthetic artists' insight. The psychoanalytic teachings, centering as they do about a set of systematized inhibitions, chain the artist’s attention almost exclusively to the shedding of these inhibitions. In a great measure, therefore, he begins with his interpretations of life prescribed for him, and with a strict education as to what he must look for; it is no wonder that his methods also are frequently adopted. Just how much farther the intrusion of psychology into art will go it is hard to say. There is at least one promising young poet and critic I know of, however, who will no longer allow psychoanalysis to be mentioned in his home.