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ОглавлениеA Decade of American Fiction
An Omnibus Review.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder. Longmans, Green and Co.
The Cabala by Thorton Wilder. Washington Square Press
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Simon & Schuster
Blue Voyage by Conrad Aiken. Charles Scribner’s Sons
The Dark Mother by Waldo Frank. Boni & Liveright
The Enormous Room by e. e. cummings. Random House
Good-bye Wisconsin by Glenway Wescott. Harper & Brothers
The Apple of the Eye by Glenway Wescott. Harper & Brothers
The Grandmothers by Glenway Wescott. Harper & Brothers
The Time of Man by Elizabeth Madox Roberts. The Viking Press
Cane by Jean Toomer. Liveright
The Boy in the Sun by Paul Rosenfeld. The Macaulay Company
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. Harper & Brothers
The Bookman, August 1929, 561–567
Though we still hear of dissatisfaction with the status of art in America, art is a major industry. Hundreds of thousands of skilled workmen are dependent for their sustenance upon the output of a comparatively negligible band of artists. When we consider how much union labor goes into the reproduction and distribution of some erratic gentleman’s paragraphs, we may conclude that the frailest of esthetic temperaments is providing, thus indirectly, a livelihood for at least ten stalwart heads of families. And though our countrymen are told constantly that they despise art, they go on constantly showing that they love it. Between the hours of five and twelve p.m., the United States of America is devoted exclusively to transit and art, the transit being patronized by the art-goers. In the midst of much talk about working under pressure, we go on augmenting the specified hours of leisure—and for leisure, art is the only alternative to overeating, immorality and suicide.
With good art, the situation is less encouraging. But perhaps good art is merely a by-product of bad art, a notable deviation from the sounder average stock, a sport. I have never understood what would be gained by having the populace prefer Shakespeare to the Broadway school of drama. Good art is for people who cannot be satisfied with bad art. And profusion offers the best likelihood of important deviations, as the many purchasers of cheap records have enabled the perfecting of a mechanism whereby we may, at our pleasure, turn on Stokowsky playing Brahms.
That set of trivial magazines on the counter of the country drug store—do not abhor it, for it is culture. Culture is a state of society wherein one can save for eighteen volumes of Thomas Aquinas, if he will, while his neighbors are studying Hearst. As the world sleeps, with such at its pillow, you may enjoy the extreme prerogative of being left alone. The natural-born marauders are reading bad books, the lions are being milk-fed, while you are at peace to consider “a preserving and amassing of genius such as the world has never known before.” Documents upon any aspect of speculation or sensibility are readily obtainable.
And we rejoice that there have been many bad books in the last ten years, for they constitute our guaranty that there have been some good ones. Yet in singling out the superior, we should not be gentle. A book which merits encouragement for a season may require vilification for a decade, and praise is best sharpened with slander.
Perhaps we should consider first, to dismiss the sooner, Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey can be sacrificed without loss. In its own way it says, “The scroll, my lord.” Its fatalism seems specious, trivial and even dishonest, as though consistency in the Maker’s ways were trumped up to serve the ends of plot. The Cabala is much better, though questionable in that general air of selectness which it has in common with the society novels of writers like Marcel Prévost, Marcelle Tinayre, Henri Bordeaux, Henri de Régnier and Paul Bourget. We find the phrase of music or the line of a painting mentioned with easy familiarity which takes for granted the reader’s deep acquaintance with the fashionable in art. And the work is vitiated at the close by that superficial coquetting with the mystic which mars The Bridge as a whole.
For one gift, Wilder is to be cherished. I refer, in The Cabala, to his succession of essays upon the various characters of his book. A queer, cracked lot, assembled in their oddity with considerable tact, they are described as in the lively letters of some traveller or visitor whose leisure among fountains and avenues leaves many energies unclaimed. “The Princess,” he says, “was astonished to find such quiet mastery in a woman without a de and the Signora was amazed to find the same quality in a noblewoman.” This is parlor talk of distinction, and The Cabala has much of it. Good examples of his characterizations could be chosen almost at random:
So I led her up to Dame Edith Steuert, Mrs. Edith Foster Prichard Steuert, author of Far From Thy Ways, I Strayed, the greatest hymn since Newman’s. Daughter, wife, sister, what not, of clergymen, she lived in the most exciting currents of Anglicanism. Her conversation ran on vacant livings and promising young men from Shropshire, and on the editorials in the latest St. George’s Banner and The Anglican Cry. She sat on platforms and raised subscriptions and got names. She seemed to be forever surrounded by a ballet of curates and widows who at her word, rose and swayed and passed the scones. For she was the author of the greatest hymn of modern times and gazing at her one wondered when the mood could have struck this loud conceited woman, the mood that had prompted those eight verses of despair and humility. The hymn could have been written by Cowper, that gentle soul exposed to the flame of an evangelism too hot even for negroes. For one minute in her troubled girlhood all the intermittent sincerity of generations of clergymen must have combined in her, and late at night, full of dejections she could not understand, she must have committed to her diary that heartbroken confession. Then the fit was over, and over forever.
This is vivacious epitome, and it is a trick which enlivens the whole of The Cabala. Still, the book dies with its plot, after giving us a kind of hypothetical reality which has not gone far enough into fancy to entertain us speculatively (as does a work like Hudson’s A Crystal Age), yet is too inventive for service as a formulation of life. The artist pronounces some number. Giving uniformity to many complex factors, he produces the typifying of an attitude. In the novel this is most often, but not invariably, done with the medium of a character. A posture like that of Childe Harold or a character like Julien Sorel contains a code of conduct beyond the limits of the fiction. Wilder, from this standpoint, does not qualify.
To take apart Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, after having read it with enjoyment, is to be aghast. We find that we have read about people taking baths and getting haircuts, having another drink and giving tips to the coatman. Three people converse negligibly with one another, whereupon we learn without protest that two of them were “in fine form” that day. We watch Americans doing pleasantly in Europe all sorts of low-powered things which chroniclers of the same events in America would detail with venom and despair. We see people, vaguely cultured, whom we know to be cultured by their rigorous avoidance of all cultural topics. Hemingway provides appeal for a kind of idealized, international philandering, the trivialities of selfish and complacent people, a somewhat cut-throat crowd, whose familiarity with one another is founded upon too flimsy a basis. In this Hollywood conception of glory, no difficult thing is advocated, if we except the discipline and refinement required to behold and appraise the bullfight. Here is the “lost generation,” contentedly lost. The book is particularly to be recommended to eager young girls with occasional yearnings, who associate brilliance with a rather sunny and literate form of idleness, who would like to imagine a world in which enjoyment comes easy and who, above all, have not yet been to Europe. For such reasons, I enjoyed it.
Hemingway’s power of continuity in The Sun Also Rises is exceptional. Things follow one another with no suggestion of abruptness, a result rare in a writer whose observations are so keenly stated, since emphasis upon one fact makes for its division from the next. His short, easily riding sentences form a sure succession of narrative statements, a minimum of psychology, a maximum of behavior. Yet the hero can be a thinker. Hear him, on Page 153:
I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy it. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.
Hemingway weeds out much that is pious, or pompous; he is a good corrective, as good a corrective as listening in the street. His enthusiasm is naturally reserved for the bulls. His bullfights are scrupulous in their bloodiness—indeed, his most eager writing is expended upon the display of subtleties in the physical, where subtlety has been least exploited. At such times he is most observant and lyrical. He proves that if rock-crushing had its genius, it could be subdivided into as many gradations of experience as late love.
Of his short stories, we advocate particularly “The Undefeated,” in Men Without Women, the spectacle of a moth-eaten toreador, expending a fiercety of determination, fighting for the recovery of past greatness and being dragged, step by step, to defeat, while the crowd looks on without sympathy. As though under glass, we watch this brutal discrepancy between efforts and results. It is Hemingway’s “starkness” at his best, the employment of strong-arm methods heretofore reserved for a lower order of fiction.
There are some writers who, while the tenor of their work is admirable, manage to produce no one thing in which their best qualities converge. Despite their excellence as artists, they can claim no outstanding book. There are others whose average of attainment is lower, yet who have hit happily upon one anthology number. The Time of Man, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, is far enough beyond My Heart and My Flesh and Jingling in the Wind to have been written by a different person. The Jingling suggests something of Chaucer, Candide and Alice in Wonderland, but remains a book of no great moment despite its distinguished antecedents. It is appealing in its literary sophistication, its incidental sallies into the picturesque. In My Heart and My Flesh, we remain unmoved by the heroine’s aberrations, which are conveyed less by psychological disclosure than by tricks of presentation, particularly the peopling of the brain with altercating voices, conversing as in the dialogue of a play and destroying the illusion of reality by means of a form to which the illusion of reality is essential. But Miss Roberts’s The Time of Man marks a flowering of the local-color novel. Her rustic heroine, necessarily sensitive beyond her station, is followed through a homely tragedy which recovers for us the feel of courage and our rage against injustice. One distinctly participates. Glenway Wescott has commented upon the beauty she distills out of the Kentucky dialect. This diction, though serving the ends of realism, arouses pleasures which are almost those of fantasy. Miss Roberts handles colloquial conversation with a tact undreamed of by Eugene O’Neill. The talk is as some distortion of speech might be if it were undertaken by an inventor with much linguistic subtlety, distortion made in the interests of a future form of beauty. And the heroine’s monologues, as they rise out of a narrative episode to end a chapter in zealous philosophizing, seem to be a personal discovery of the author.
Conrad Aiken is of that class whose level of production is high, while the single outstanding product is still lacking. There is about Aiken some of that interest in death and desiccation which distinguishes Eliot, and which usually coexists with selectness and sparsity of output. Yet Aiken is unloosed—his work, wide in its intellectual range but narrow emotionally, attains profuse embodiment. He can extract a common quality out of varied experiences. Thus, in reading his Blue Voyage, one has the satisfaction of a formula intricately repeated. The formula represents a man who has derived strong moral predispositions from his upbringing, but who has intellectually superimposed upon himself a dismissal of all such emotional investments. The result is a kind of hilarious morbidity; and the hero Demarest, despite his able equipment, is without dignity, unless we can find dignity in vacillation and the willingness to admit anything. Aiken might even be somewhat of a martyr—for I believe that he is striving for a set of post-Freudian moral judgments, trying to uncover what the good might be if we begin with the premise that all our mental processes are trivial. Thus, Blue Voyage sets soberly to work focusing much sensitivity and education upon amatory engrossment’s which could, by another artist, easily be made farcical. Demarest is a Puritan unhorsed. He is quick to confuse the female ankle with meditations upon abstruse metaphysical destinies. The flirtatious wenches on this boat are considered and observed by a protagonist who believes himself an erotomaniac simply because he happens to ponder upon sex for twenty-four hours a day. Yet the content of his thinking might argue a denial of his claim, proving him an observer, an outsider, who has been caught by the sexual symbol owing to its present somewhat arbitrary association with communion. His meditations are in constant deviation from their sexual starting-point, though Demarest chooses to interpret them in terms of their beginnings rather than in terms of their tangential escapes.
Regardless of wide differences, we might note one striking similarity between Blue Voyage and Waldo Frank’s The Dark Mother. Aiken, like Frank, uses the technical subterfuge of projecting his characters beyond themselves. By which I mean that, after each author has shown us his characters in their realistic, more or less unexpressive guise, he transports them hypothetically to a plane of intelligence and eloquence, allows them to discuss the mainsprings of their nature with one another, converts their realism into allegory and gives us an orgiastic fraternization such as the composer of the Choral Symphony might have taken delight in.
In Blue Voyage, Aiken has dispensed with protective dignity. His claim to respect seems to lie, not in reticence, not in such “uncontemporaneous” methods as Racinean elimination, but in the brightness of his disclosures. Here, it is not the form, but the law, that excludes. And the burden of his skepticism, in this book which is built about a transatlantic voyage, is lifted by that feeling of expectancy which is a large element in the psychology of travel. By way of happy ending, the book closes characteristically with Demarest entering for the first time the illicit cabin. It is a dingy homecoming.
Can we, in this review of fiction, include The Enormous Room of e. e. cummings? For, though founded upon the recording of actual events, the author’s incarceration in a French detention camp, it bears the marks of arrant fictionizing, might in fact even be described as the art of fabrication, the romanticizing of the realistic, the documentary lie. This is not reporting, this charitable eye for excrement, this ability to see everything startlingly, these distortions of one who, instructed to hold a mirror up to nature, obediently procured his mirror from a laughing gallery. The one thing we can know of the people in that enormous room is that they are not as Cummings asserts them to be. They have been converted into their super-selves by a freakish imagination necessarily compelled to expatiate upon its environment, pleased to read an event into happenings which, without such interpretive enterprise, would have been uneventful. Even in suffering, this quality of mind forces its owner upon a lark.
Cummings, to depict his object, assails it with a whole broadside of data; he overwhelms it; like a cartoonist, he industriously seeks the distortion of its every particular. He will look at a stomach, and find a belly; at a face and find a mug; at a chin and find three chins. It is the method of Gross. And unlike Frank, he uses the connotations of humor, to which distorting is proper.
His descriptions are often more vigorous than revealing. There is saliency for its own sake. The vigor of description may transcend its object and, even as the picture grows dim, leave us with a tingle of vigorous description. But the haze of the individual characters, which arises despite an exhaustive dwelling upon their details, assists in conveying a mass impression of the enormous room itself. Its occupants are indefinite but, as an aggregate, their swarming identity is established.
Cummings can hate irresponsibly, as in his ferocious attacks upon a non-existent gouvernement français. And he can praise irresponsibly. He can dote upon Jean Le Nègre, the royal beast in this enormous room, without submitting his judgments to the final consistency of permanent companionship. He is, after all, leaving. He can rhetorically pray for their meeting in death (another enormous room, be it observed) without worrying about the fact that they would have little in common for the years intervening. He possesses fortunate irresponsibility—somewhat as adolescents can be absolute in the criticism of their elders, can be uncompromising, through not yet having had to face compromise. We follow him through this freshness, through much joyous misery, ending in a return to prosperity, comfort, assured well-being:
My God, what an ugly island. Hope we don’t stay here long. All the redbloods first-class much excited about land. Damned ugly, I think.
Hullo.
The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upward into hard sunlight leaned a little through octaves of its parallel edges, leaningly strode upward into firm hard snowy sunlight; the noises of America nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men and which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride into immortal sunlight . . .
At times I have wished that all literature were like the music of Bach, never descending below the level of inventiveness. When nothing else is happening, the manipulation of the medium should reward our attention, providing the inarticulate reader with inarticulate delight and the analytic one with material for swift analysis. Cummings in The Enormous Room does meet this requirement. Though, sometimes, he relies upon slang paraphrase—and when he speaks of going through a door haughtily, “using all the perpendicular inches God has given me,” we know that he has drawn himself up to his full height. But there is always ebullience. The author strives that the reader may relax. Should one open the book at random, wherever the eye falls the page comes to life. Granted that the life is not invariably beyond our protest—that it might often be a better quality of life—the buoyancy is to be found throughout and promptly declares itself.
Wescott is a writer of short stories. Good-bye Wisconsin is avowedly a collection of short stories; and his two novels, The Apple of the Eye and The Grandmothers, are sequences of short stories in disguise. Perhaps one of the best examples of his suggestive method is “The Whistling Swan,” the piece which ends Good-bye Wisconsin. We see a young musician, who is in Wisconsin after having been subsidized abroad. There is a young girl, who loves him with a certain disturbing awe. He is trying to decide whether to remain, or to make new plans for a return to Paris. While walking in the woods, with a gun and his indecision, he comes upon a swan, which startles him and which he shoots almost before thinking. Indecision vanishes. He will remain. In the shooting of the bird, felled in a flutter of expert prose, he slays a portion of himself, that portion which was drawing him to Paris. Wescott suggests—we are at liberty to complete the psychology. An aspect of the hero’s self is externalized, and he slays it. The event may be taken, not as the cause of his reversal, but as the paralleling of it. That which occurs within, by the dark and devious channels of decision, he duplicates without as the destruction of a swan. Following this symbolic elimination, he is prepared to remain, to marry, and let our gentle girl become indispensable to him.
There is a sweetly morbid effect in Wescott, as when, in The Grandmothers, he discusses past romance in the presence of old age. “The October afternoon on which she was buried, among her relations and his own, mingled in his memory with the afternoons of her girlhood.” As we read of his pioneers, we feel that this vast continent was peopled in gloom; where there is enthusiasm, it is seen through the despair and envy of another, or in the melancholy of retrospect. He writes of Grandfather Tower: “His beard was parted in the middle, and fell on each side of a large bone button in his shirt collar; his rheumatic hands were clenched; and wherever he went, he seemed to be elbowing aside invisible people on his way.” Similarly, in The Apple of the Eye, he takes a charming character from us, showing her body carrion after we had learned much of her difficult ways of feeling. And his short stories hint vaguely of corruption, corruption which even gains moment by being vaguely hinted.
Wescott gives the impression of one whose written frankness is kept suavely in arrears of his understanding; he diverges from his readers with discretion; determined neither to give offense nor to leave the offensive unsaid, he is necessarily unctuous. Westcott tells old stories. It is part of his success. To the circumambient he adds suavity. His pages, being liquid, flow. They flow through the mind, merging into one another, making perfect conformity. Plot and the statement of an attitude are, by his ways, skillfully interchangeable; neither is a digression from the other; both are aspects of a method essentially lyrical.
Waldo Frank we dare omit. Yet we recognize his great seriousness, recognize him even as a prophetic writer who could view with bitterness the spectacle of his work being incorporated elsewhere, piece by piece, not by plagiarists, but by artists who have in their own manner arrived at his results. Such men as Anderson we dare omit for other reasons: they have been amply appraised.
We regret the silence of Jean Toomer, after his early volume, Cane, a work showing the influence of Frank and Anderson jointly. Toomer takes the business of fiction very earnestly and is, perhaps, hindered temporarily by the desire to incorporate greater complexity into his work. There are many aspects of experience which must undergo a discipline of esthetic trickery before they can serve the purposes of lyric prose. And Toomer, essentially Negro in his inspiration, would surely never be content to let the singing quality depart from his work.
Paul Rosenfeld’s The Boy in the Sun shows to advantage the impressionistic treatment which the author applies with less fitness in his criticism. Perhaps it reflects the influence of Frank in that the metaphor, the image, tends to supplant psychological analysis. Since his adolescent is left at the end, still living, and even walking “through the cold spring evening,” we dare entertain the possibility of a sequel, treating of a treacherous passage from wonder to acceptance.
In Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos abandons his earlier, descriptive style for the methods of a playwright. Out of blunt materials—beaneries, seduction in the slums, low-visioned ambitions, thefts, brawls, dirty tricks—the author accumulates a grimy, but easily recognizable metropolis. Dos Passos contributes a new quickness to narrative, by a succession of pointed episodes, lives glimpsed preferably at moments of change or decision. Each event is thus a kind of miniature peripety, a plot at some culminating stage. His book affords us no new enlightenment, but it rises to the category of excellence through the sheer efficiency by which it represents its genre. The dishes-in-the-sink tradition is here carried to fulfillment.
We should also mention the appearance of Jonathan Leonard’s novel, Back to Stay. Leonard first attracted attention when a long story of his was published in The Second American Caravan. With his love of oddity, his peculiar preciosity in the linking of statement and answer, his pleasant glibness, readers who seek too exclusively in novels the sense of reality might find him disappointing. Dramatic situations are allowed to trickle away, sapped by the author’s and his characters’ perverse gift of loquacity. But by this loss, the flavor of his repartee is more emphasized.
We shall not venture upon the future. There seems little indication of any pronounced change. We might wish for the decease of the gossip novel, as having been written frequently enough. We might plead the obligations of history, maintaining that the accumulations in this medium are sufficient. We might hope to see local color become a less important aspect of fiction, on the grounds that it can hardly be done better than it has been done by many men long since dead. We might prefer to find the greater stressing of fiction as a literary experience, a speculative activity, a method of inquiry, rather than as a form of vicarious living. Meanwhile, there are advantages in the possession of these technicians who can entertain thee, at mealtimes, on the boulevards and by thy pillow, with able and compliant prose.
