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Enlarging the Narrow House

Narcissus by Evelyn Scott. Harcourt, Brace and Company

The Dial, September 1922, 346–348

Having read only those portions of Rupert Hughes which are pasted on the sides of newsstands, I can hardly venture to discuss him with authority. Yet, if I were to form a tentative judgment on those summaries and blurbs, I should say that Mr. Hughes is an author who gives us something like a society drama, with characters, plot, and setting all more or less typical of some actual stratum, or condition, in society. In this I may be entirely unjust to Mr. Hughes. But in revenge I am positive that it applies to Mrs. Scott, who wrote The Narrow House, and who has now made that house gratifyingly less narrow in her new novel Narcissus.

But as Mrs. Scott is quite plainly a much more complex writer than Mr. Hughes, one feels at the start that the juxtaposition of the two names is false. To begin with, Mr. Hughes would not write like this, which I take from The Narrow House:

The room closed them like a coffin. Their life was their own. It did not flow in from the street.

No, that is not like Mr. Hughes; it is like Mr. Waldo Frank. There are other passages scattered through Mrs. Scott’s books which show the influence of Ulysses, a strain which it is safe to suppose has never defiled our great cinema novelist. However, Mrs. Scott writes:

I’m suffering deeply, Julia. You are suffering. I see it. It is only the little person who doesn’t suffer. Why do you resent me? Life is always making patterns. It has thrown us three—you and me, and your husband—into a design—a relationship to each other.

And although Mr. Hughes would probably never have stepped so circumspectly around the word “triangle,” it is safe to assume that the situation has occurred to him: Lawrence immersed in his chemical work; Dudley, a young artist, lover of Julia; Julia, the wife of Lawrence, beautiful and idle. But I have spoken of Mrs. Scott’s greater complexity; let us examine just how it affects her treatment of this vexing problem. First going back to The Narrow House.

The Narrow House was part of that astonishing post-war movement of anti-chauvinism among the intellectuals, a movement which attained its greatest expression in the sales of Main Street and the departure of Mr. Harold Stearns for Europe. The Narrow House, then, was what might be termed “professionally depressing.” Like most of 1921’s record, it dipped back into Zola, being somewhat more circumspect and infinitely less powerful. It showed dull, broken lives, American lives which were so weary, so hateful, that even the American sun was discovered to shine with fatigue upon them.

In her second work Mrs. Scott has cut away a great deal of this misery praetor necessitatem. The house is distinctly less narrow. The professional depression is for the most part lightened. Despite her public’s approval of the patent gesture in The Narrow House, Mrs. Scott seems to have developed a distrust of it. But unfortunately, the resultant virtue is only a negative one; the author has gone through the excesses of The Narrow House to attain the neutralization of Narcissus.

At the same time she has attempted to graft upon her style elements of James Joyce and Waldo Frank. There is no objection to them as influences. There is no particular reason why writers should begin over again, when philosophers hand their apparatus from one to the other throughout the ages. Thus, my objection is neither to influences in general nor to these particular influences; but I do question the propriety of the influences as they appear in Narcissus.

For they produce a work which is peculiarly lacking in correlation. One feels this especially in the case of Waldo Frank, since his method is so specifically adapted to his own kind of writing. Narcissus is, as we have said, more or less of a society drama, wherein characters are presented for their objective reality, for their identity as people you see or shake hands with. But Waldo Frank’s characters are meant to be like pebbles dropped into a pool: he tries to draw ever-widening circles around them. His plots are conceived in the same non-temporal, non-spatial tone. It is not to the point to attempt any judgment s on this method at present. But it is to the point to insist that the method is as peculiarly adapted to one set of conditions as were dinosaurs or mastodons. Transferred, it is simply bones in a glass case.

Thus, the novel fluctuates between its strict localization and this lyrical drawing of the ever-widening circles. As a result the book has no consistent drive. Even the blurb is at a loss, for it heralds “A story of a group of people who are hindered by the relaxation of old standards of conduct and don’t know what to do with their new freedom.” There is, to be sure, one adolescent who enters and exits at intervals throughout the book, and who is undecided concerning his future. But even here the element of social transitions is only indirectly touched upon. (For which, by the way, let us be grateful.) I spoke of the opening triangle: Dudley, the artist; Julia, the wife; Lawrence, the husband. Actuated by a set of nuances which is not completely cogent—and the vagueness arises precisely because Mrs. Scott always switches at such times from strict analysis of motives to Waldo Frank’s type of lyrism—she tells Lawrence of their affair. He moves his bed into another room, and starts carrying his life from her bit by bit. She breaks off with Dudley—again by a set of elusive nuances—in the direction of a business man, and has an affair with him. After which she finally pierces Lawrence’s steel on the last two pages, there is a reconciliation, and the book closes with:

Unacknowledged, each kept for himself a pain which the other could not heal. Each pitied the other’s illusion, and was steadied by it into gentleness.

Perhaps, in this fluctuation between the strict localizing of her characters and the drawing of lyrical circles, I have objected to the very thing which Mrs. Scott was aiming for. But, if we are to have two poles of treatment, we must also have their polarity. It is not sufficient to juxtapose them without reconciliation. In the truest sense, significance is lost: the significance of some modus consistently and exclusively pursued.