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The Consequences of Idealism

Rahab by Waldo Frank. Boni and Liveright

City Block by Waldo Frank. Privately printed for subscribers only

The Dial, October 1922, 449–452

Let us imagine a room painted in this wise: there are the walls, a window, chairs, table, food on table, and two humans. These walls are aligned as inexorably as armies; one feels their seclusion and their leaden mass. Light, however, pours through the flood-gates of the window, tumbles and seethes into the room, rolling with sheer commensurable bulk. The chairs fulfill their functions as chairs earnestly, even avidly; in a sense one might say that they are crying out to be chairs; they are more than chairs, by God, they are staunch havens of palliation, they are strong, tender arms to which our failing corporeal fibers may surrender with confidence. As to the table, note how it offers up its contents as profusely, as unstintingly, one might say, as the calyx of a lily. And that man and that woman, leaning, gravitating towards each other . . . they are waterspouts growing up out of the floor. Their arms hang limp, but countless phantom arms interlock in the air. While these two humans stand “silent upon each other, heavily.”

The closing quote is from Waldo Frank, as is fitting. For our painted room is in the truest manner of Rahab, or City Block. I wish mainly to bring out the element of volition behind the author’s eye. He has written elsewhere that when “feet clamber up and over a hill” the hill is already there; “the feet do not create the hill, although they have a tendency to think so.” Yet his own writings are a testimony of feet which, if they do not create the hill, at least recreate it, transforming it from a mere hill, qua hill, to a spiritual problem, an obstacle proclaiming its identity over against the yearnings and necessities of human atoms.

In 1893 Stephane Mallarmé gave the first definite formulation of the poetics which encompasses this attitude in writing. Building on Hegel, he found in idealism the artist’s right to his own universe, a right which extended even to the development of a personal idiom. Mallarmé’s expert mal-writing reached a rare flowering—in such a hothouse product, for instance, as “heureuses deux tétines.” And the peculiar glory of these pursuits is that the artist attains thereby “au-dessus d’autre bien, l’élément de félicités, une doctrine en memo temps qu’une contrée.”

Waldo Frank’s idiom is no less personal. But instead of Mallarmé’s special-case fauns and nymphs with their icy emotions, Mr. Frank gives us the eager, pulsing universe noted above. Still, it cannot be denied that Waldo Frank’s idealism emphasizes a somewhat different aspect. If Mallarmé was striving simply for beautiful possibilities, for intriguing enormities, for likely distortions which would appeal to the connoisseur acquainted with all the rules, Mr. Frank falls in rather with the German expressionists who strive to give us a version of life which shall be alas! only too true. For the last fifty years the world has been pressionistic (read, volitional) first im and then ex. If Mallarmé, looking at a man, goes beyond that man with the direct purpose of distortion, the expressionists take their man, rip off his clothing, observe the sorry nipples of his breasts, look into his viscera, and maintain that here is the real man, the essential man. The subtle difference is that Mallarmé has said, “Here is a distortion,” and has given us one, while the expressionists have said, “Here is the very pulse of truth,” and their distortion has been no less marked.

One goes into a park and sits down, and immediately, if one is an artist, the park becomes a problem. It lies there. The individual feels his edges knocking improperly against it. He is sitting in somebody else’s park. Then, if he is Waldo Frank, he starts remaking that park. Exorbitant characters appear, the skyline begins to churn, mad speeches are ground out. And we have “John the Baptist,” one of the most interesting stories of City Block. But such a park is a personal creation, and is statistically false; it is true as a reflection of Waldo Frank’s temperament, true in a sense that Mallarmé’s fauns are true, but completely erroneous as a gauge of our environment.

My reason for pointing this out is a somewhat complicated one. But first of all, I feel that it provides us with a criterion for approaching Mr. Frank. Thus, we have the two possibilities: a book must be statistically true, a whole and proper valuation of life; or it must be true in the sense that Mallarmé’s fauns are true, must be a beautiful possibility created in the mind of the artist. I have consistently objected that Mr. Frank does not qualify on condition one; life as he presents it is assiduously culled, the volitional clement of the artist is over-emphasized. Or, to borrow from a colleague, M. Cowley, I should say that he has stacked the cards. However, if we admit this cheating, take it as a basis of our calculations, we must next inquire as to whether Mr. Frank cheats dextrously; we shall not ask if he is false, but if he is superbly false. On the whole, I think he is not, for the two books under consideration are not finally beautiful. They lack just that element of cold carving, that bloodless autopsy of the emotions, which allows Mallarmé so near an approach to perfection.

True, these books have many passages of thick beauty such as Mallarmé probably never dreamed of. When Mr. Frank, for instance, undresses one of his women, and opens his throat and sings thereat, the song is full and lovely. Or when, as in Rahab . . . but the situation must be explained more fully: Mrs. Luve is a procuress, but a procuress with her Bible and her refinements, a procuress who needs a great deal of explanation. Mr. Frank takes us through a book to explain her, and at the end we do accept his attitude—we believe that she is a delicate woman whose denigration has an almost Christlike significance. We see her, then, in the midst of her set, politicians, gamblers, crooks, whores. We hear their vulgarly minute conversation, note their unenlightened envelopment in the immediate moment; whereupon, of a sudden, the author gives a projection of each character, or, technically speaking, draws out the song of each character, the lyric surrender to a grand communion of passions. That is, they sit in the room, each aware of his apartness from the others; but each has a purer attitude within him somewhere, a naïve burst of confidence which is suppressed: it is this naïve burst which Mr. Frank gives in his lyrical projections of the characters present. Here passion has justified itself by the discovery of an excellent subterfuge; it is Waldo Frank at his best.

On the whole, however, I must confess that the author’s intensity is too direct, lies too far beyond the subterfuge. Mr. Frank is as serious as Buddha, which is a dangerous thing to be in an age which could produce Ulysses. If we have to choose between an artist who is passionless and clever, and an artist who is tumultuous and non-clever, it is a sad pair to choose from, but the former would be nearer to art. Mr. Frank, as I have noted above, can be clever, but as a rule he is too precipitant. As a result, his works lack edges; one catches an abundance of rich overtones, but they obscure the note itself. What, for instance, is the structural significance of the City Block cycle? What is the inevitable centre about which it revolves? It should force itself upon us from the complexion of the work. Structure is not so priestly a thing that only the elect can glimpse it. Structure is the first principle of a work, not the last.

As to Rahab, the case is simpler. One does, on finishing it, get a definite retrospect. The author starts with Mrs. Luve, a procuress; then he goes back to the beginning, and gives us Mrs. Luve’s career; ending upon Mrs. Luve, exactly where the book began, we now have this procuress with all the qualifications and subtilizations of 250 pages. She emerges, somehow, stationary, like a fireplug on a busy street, like a boat anchored in a fog. There is nothing priestly about this; it is, in fact, startlingly simple. The book is undoubtedly Mr. Frank’s best piece of work up to date. It is the logical culmination of The Dark Mother, representing directly that type of writing which the former book was feeling for. That is, Mr. Frank has found the manner which best carries his burden. . . . The same is true of certain stories in City Block taken as isolated units. In stories like “Under the Dome” and “John the Baptist” Mr. Frank has made just as accurate a junction between the burden and the expression thereof. That is, so far as the untrammeled, direct giving of himself is concerned, the author has attained it. These works go the whole extent of Croceanism: the expression is immediate and full.

But expression is not all of art; the rest is elegance. Mr. Frank has done a valiant task in his fight against the inhibitory baggage which American art has had to lug. His work on this score is as significant as that of Van Wyck Brooks. But both men, under the urge of their evangelism, tend to make the emphasis on expression too exclusive. It is an excellent corrective, which becomes in turn a defect if carried too far.