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Title: The American novel to-day
A social and psychological study
Author: Régis Michaud
Release date: April 16, 2026 [eBook #78461]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78461
Credits: Sean (@parchmentglow)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN NOVEL TO-DAY ***
THE AMERICAN NOVEL
TO-DAY
A Social and Psychological Study
BY RÉGIS MICHAUD
BOSTON ~ 1928
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1928,
By Little, Brown, and Company
All rights reserved
Published January, 1928
Printed in the United States of America
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to express his indebtedness to the publishers who
have so kindly granted him permission to reprint extended quotations
from novels used in the chapters of this book. These include Robert
M. McBride & Company, publishers of “Jurgen,” “Figures of Earth,”
“Domnei” and “The Cream of the Jest” by James Branch Cabell; Houghton
Mifflin Company, publishers of “My Antonia” by Willa Cather; Boni &
Liveright, publishers of “An American Tragedy,” “A Hoosier Holiday,”
“The Genius,” “Sister Carrie,” “The Financier” and “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub”
by Theodore Dreiser and “Dark Laughter” by Sherwood Anderson; The
Viking Press, publishers of “Marching Men,” “The Triumph of the Egg,”
“A Story Teller’s Story,” “Windy McPherson’s Son” and “Many Marriages”
by Sherwood Anderson; and D. Appleton & Company, publishers of “Miss
Lulu Bett” by Zona Gale.
FOREWORD
This book grew out of a series of lectures given by the author at the
Sorbonne during the year 1926. These lectures were later published in
a volume which was awarded the Montyon prize by the French Academy.
The author’s first task is to apologize to the American reader for his
audacity in attempting to transcribe it into English, and to seek his
indulgence by reminding him that this is “an essay from a French pen,”
to quote our former ambassador, M. Jusserand. It is only fair that the
writer should warn his readers that the field of his investigation has
been limited. His purpose was not to write a complete history of the
American novel, although the principal masters of modern fiction have
been included in the book; nor was it his intention that this should be
purely a piece of literary criticism.
No one can open an American novel without being impressed by the
earnestness and the unanimity which the authors display in discussing
moral and social questions. Their books constitute a vast satire of
present-day American civilization, a defense of the rights of man
against the pressure of obsolete ideals and traditions. From this
standpoint, they constitute a homologous group while each retains his
full measure of originality.
Realism is not a new factor in American fiction. From Edward Eggleston
to Theodore Dreiser, the American novel has tended more and more to
become a precise account of American society. However, realism has
never been as prevalent and as outspoken as it is to-day. As the United
States increased in number and in population, the conflict between the
ideals of the individual and those of the mass became more and more
acute. Meanwhile the progress of experimental psychology afforded the
American novelist a new means of explaining and revealing the motives
of the individual.
In my book I have made reference to psychoanalysis in particular.
Current literary criticism cannot afford to ignore Doctor Freud. Some
masters of American literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Henry James, Margaret Fuller and Amy Lowell have lately been
subjected to a successful psychoanalysis. The new psychology permits a
more exact diagnosis of several important phases of our consciousness
which have their origin in the deepest recesses of our soul, and which,
though not literary in themselves, are often manifest in literature.
Freudian psychology is the natural ally of the sociologist. It shifts
the largest part of the responsibility for many of the moral diseases
and idiosyncrasies of the individual upon social institutions. By
presenting Puritanism as a form of moral inhibition it throws a new
light upon it.
Moral and psychological duplicity have been the subjects of several
European investigations before the ascendancy of Doctor Freud. One
of the most suggestive was presented in a book called “Le Bovarysme”
by the French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier. He chose Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary as being the most typical case of romantic inhibition.
He showed that after all romanticism was nothing but a psychological
disease and the attempt of an individual under social pressure to
appear in a double light in his own eyes. A more pathetic example can
scarcely be conceived than that of Flaubert’s heroine, Emma Bovary,
and her attempt to lead an imaginary life as a compensation for her
monotonous environment. It is obvious from a perusal of American
novels of to-day that Emma Bovary has many brothers and sisters in
this country. A normal society cannot exist without normal people and
the latter cannot be imagined without a certain amount of personal
freedom and felicity. Standardization, the tyranny of public opinion
and morals, the leveling of the exceptional to the mass ideal, petty
persecutions, blue laws, Comstockery and so forth, had a part to play
in Emma Bovary’s slow but sure moral and spiritual starvation, and in
her ultimate suicide. Social welfare rests on a harmonious balance of
give and take between the upper and lower classes. An excess of freedom
produces anarchy; an excess of tyranny, inhibitions, despair and crime.
No life is worth living wherein action is not a sister to dreams to
some extent, to use Baudelaire’s saying. The plight of Flaubert’s
heroine and that of Carol Kennicott in “Main Street” are different
aspects of the same social and moral disease--undue moral repression.
The author of this book is not a pessimist and he is well aware that
there are many American virtues; frankness, cordiality, buoyancy,
a love of life and a love of action, a craving for change, the
exaltation of youth, pure and triumphant, and the dynamism of national
life,--these are qualities which the Old World might envy the New. But
an outside observer might also have the right to point to the reverse
side of these qualities. What has become of ethical and intellectual
standards in the United States, a country so unmistakably prosperous
and happy from a material point of view? What is the present condition
of culture which exists behind the display of luxury and comfort? How
has America fared in the conflict of quality _versus_ quantity which
has swept the world?
One thing strikes the European in these United States of to-day; it
is the contrast between the general prosperity and the individual
discontent. The average American, taken out of his natural
surroundings, appears like one who is sacrificed by being harnessed to
some huge task whose importance he cannot grasp with reference to his
personal satisfaction. He has helped to build a colossal structure, but
what has he succeeded in achieving for his own gratification? Has he
not sacrificed his best personal interests to the general welfare? The
average American is an optimist superficially, but many disappointments
lie buried in his heart. There seems to be some ungratified longing
in his life; neither Puritan asceticism nor material prosperity can
satisfy the new generation in America. The newcomers declare themselves
discontented; they have become frankly pessimistic. A proud and wealthy
nation, the proudest and wealthiest of all, the most eager and the
most successful in conquering the means of material welfare, America
does not seem to know how to make her children happy. They are in
revolt, they are questioning the ideals and institutions of their
fathers. In poetry, in drama, in the pulpit and in the press, pessimism
and criticism prevail. Only recently the élite of the American
intelligentsia declared that the civilization of the United States had
been a failure.
What of all that? The author is not dismayed by these complaints. He
holds that art in its largest sense has always had pessimism as its
base and exaltation as its apogee. _Durch Leiden Freude!_ the great
Beethoven proclaimed. Better to have the blues of a Chatterton, an
Edgar Allan Poe, a Francis Thompson, than to have the banal optimism
of a Babbitt after a good meal. The present pessimism of the younger
generation in America is a good omen and an indication of a better
future. Young America is looking forward to more thrilling spiritual
adventures and it certainly will not be deceived in its high
expectations.
RÉGIS MICHAUD
CONTENTS
Foreword vii
I The Case Against the Puritans 3
II How Nathaniel Hawthorne Exorcised Hester Prynne 25
III Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells
and American Society on Parade 47
IV Theodore Dreiser as a Bio-Chemist 71
V Theodore Dreiser and the American Tragedy 102
VI Sinclair Lewis and the Average Man 128
VII Sherwood Anderson or When the Dreamer Awakes 154
VIII Sherwood Anderson on This Side of Freud 181
IX James Branch Cabell and the Escape to Poictesme 200
X James Branch Cabell on the High Place 221
XI Reinforcements: Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Floyd Dell,
Joseph Hergesheimer, Waldo Frank 238
XII Ulysses’ Companions: Robert McAlmon, Ben Hecht,
William Carlos Williams 257
Index 285
THE AMERICAN NOVEL TO-DAY
CHAPTER I
_The Case Against the Puritans_
The last fifteen years have seen a complete revolution in old American
literary ideals. There has been a new efflorescence of poetry known
as the “new poetry” movement. On the stage, after the attempts of
William Vaughn Moody to renew the American drama, by fusing together
realism and symbolism, Eugene O’Neill appeared and showed originality
in his lyric dramatizations. In criticism, talents of the first order
were revealed. The din of battles, the eagerness of controversies
bear witness to the existence of an intensive, intellectual life in
the United States to-day. Romanticism _versus_ classicism, progress
_versus_ tradition, or, to speak the language of the country,
radicalism _versus_ conservatism, waged a strenuous battle for their
respective ideals. Messrs. Mencken, Van Doren, Rosenfeld, Van Wyck
Brooks, Frank Harris, on the left wing, Paul Elmer More, the late
Stuart P. Sherman, Irving Babbitt, W. C. Brownell, on the right, have
made a sport of intellectual polemics and appreciation. American
criticism is not content with gliding on the surface of authors or
problems. It goes straight to moral problems and shows a keen intuition
of technics.
This spiritual effervescence is well worth our attention. The literary
nonconformist is a type not yet extinct in America. A revival of
the protestant spirit and of critical examination has taken place
in American literature. More faith and conviction have been spent
in literary production than in the pulpit of the churches. The late
Randolph Bourne was a typical example of the American literary radical,
and Mr. Henry Mencken continues the tradition among us.
Even from the literary point of view, the American novel in the
nineteenth century envied the rest of the world nothing. It produced
excellent models of all kinds. The novel of adventure, the novel of
manners have been stamped by Cooper and Hawthorne with the authentic
seal of genius. More recently, Henry James showed himself a master
of the psychological novel and an unparalleled artist. The vogue in
America and abroad of the American “movies” could not be explained
without the writings of Jack London. The short story, since Edgar Poe,
had been a product copyrighted in America, while American humorists had
won a worldwide reputation.
When all is told, if we make an inventory of the literary production
in the world, as compared with that of the United States, in prose
and verse, since, let us say, the advent of Baudelaire in France, we
see that America, a so-called utilitarian country, has set, in more
than one way, modern literary standards, with Poe, Whitman, Henry
James. Meanwhile, in the realm of thought, American philosophy and
psychology exerted a capital influence abroad. (A recent novel by M.
Paul Bourget[1] still takes for granted all the doctrines professed by
William James in his “Handbook of Psychology.”)
Let this be said in way of prelude, to make the readers of this
volume well aware of the fact that the author does not accept without
reserve all the criticisms hurled against American literature by
modern American critics. The fertility and originality of American
literature, in a country without literary traditions or institutions,
are facts beyond all doubt. They fill one with optimism regarding the
intellectual future of this great nation.
Yet, criticism is unleashed in the United States nowadays and it spares
nothing. If the French are critical by birth, one would say, judging
from the mass of evidence, that the modern American was born fussy.
In a country where the standards of life change overnight, critical
revaluations in literature are fatal. The American Hall of Fame could
not escape the law of perpetual transformation. Until recently, the
United States was the last country in the world which continued to take
for granted the optimism of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists.
Americans have not yet lost their faith in automatic progress. Despite
the “fundamentalists” they have evolution in their blood. May I
suggest, on the threshold of this book, that a European observer may be
better located, ideally speaking, to render American literature full
justice than even native critics? He has less illusions and also less
prejudices. He views the literary revolution in the recent years in
America as a result of the moral and social advance.
In the last twenty years a new class of writers has invaded American
literature. The spirit of the pioneers never died in America. The
young writers wanted to conquer new fields in an entirely new way.
Their originality was a challenge to the old order. More than any
other country since the War, literary America has struggled to find
a new heaven and a new earth. Modern writers are conscientiously and
deliberately insurgents. They turn a cold shoulder to traditions. In
fact, they belong, socially, to a new class. Few of them are well-to-do
bourgeois educated in expensive colleges and depending for their
writing upon leisure and incomes. American literature is no longer the
monopoly of gentlemen and scholars. The great majority of American
writers to-day are self-made men, born from the people, without any
blue blood and entirely democratic in their lives if not in their
ideals. Most of them wear the chevrons not of the universities but of
journalism. A great many, and the most noted among them, were reporters
before becoming authors. This throws not a little light on their
literary achievements. Most of them adhere to no church. The American
literary “Who’s Who” includes indiscriminately all creeds, Protestants,
Catholics, Jews, and free thinkers. American literature has shunned
respectability. It jumped from the right to the left and even to the
extreme left. From aristocratic or bourgeois it became revolutionary
and proletarian.
Even the geographical positions were altered. American literature had,
up to the most recent years, been largely manufactured in the eastern
States, a country conservative by tradition. As opportunities for
adventure became rare in the East, Boston, Philadelphia and even New
York ceased to be literary Meccas. The new literature developed in the
Middle West. This fact is not without its historical significance.
It marked a return of the American mind to the natural line of American
migration, from frontier to frontier, across the continent. The writers
took the path of the missionaries, the pioneers and the captains of
industry, the path of the covered wagon.
This was a challenge to the ideals of their predecessors. Classic
American writers leaned more on the East than on the West, more on
Europe than on their own country. Their literary taste and ideals,
if not always their programme, were European, or if you prefer,
Victorian. The new literature is strictly indigenous. It is crude and
in many ways primitive. It is no longer manufactured in drawing-rooms
or in studios, but in immediate contact with life. The great American
novel of the nineteenth century was exotic and retrospective. It
was sentimental and romantic. Its ethical and social background
was traditional. Sentimentality and romance, the search after the
picturesque, have gone by the boards. They have passed to the “movies”
or to the popular magazines, the latter almost as backward to-day as
they used to be fifty years ago and as harmless. The novel of adventure
has been extinct, as a _genre littéraire_ in America, since the death
of Jack London. Even the social novel has suffered a radical change.
It is no longer written from the outside, from the point of view of
society, as in the days of Frank Norris or Upton Sinclair. It is now
written from the inside, from the point of view of the individual. It
is more psychological than social. In fact, while the American novel
became more realistic, it also began to be beset by moral problems.
It ceased to be an epic to become a satire. From this point of view,
however, despite their cynicism, the new masters of American fiction
show themselves true to the old ideal. Their books are fraught with
idealism, with the spirit of reform and amelioration. Even when they
fight Puritanism, the American literary insurgents show themselves
more puritanic than the Puritans. They are haunted by the dream of a
better world and of a better humanity.
The fact that the new literature in America is contemporary with the
wave of pessimism which has marked the last twenty years is not a mere
coincidence. The two events stand very much together in a relation
of effect to cause. Pessimism in the United States to-day has not
yet affected the external aspects of American life. It has not made
the average American less buoyant and confident. The sunny side of
American life is still there. And yet, it cannot be denied that the
age of jazz is more gloomy than the age of Roosevelt. There is a great
deal of dissatisfaction in America to-day. The restless trend of life,
the mad pursuit of material ease, the desertion of the home, the
speed mania, the get-rich-quick impulse, are no longer the privilege
of the grown-up. The contagion of material welfare and luxury has
reached the young. It has lured them and led them astray. Educators,
clergymen, sociologists, and, unfortunately too, criminologists,
are much worried by the spread of the new paganism, and the growth
of juvenile delinquency. American homes and colleges are swamped
to-day with precocious supermen and superwomen eager to live their
lives, as the saying is, without knowing how, except by aping their
elders, by procuring expensive motor cars and jewels, or by securing
for themselves road-house privileges. Juvenile criminality is on the
increase. There is an epidemic of suicide among the young and the
standards of morality are not much higher among the mature at large. No
wonder that the American élite should be clamoring for a revaluation of
standards.
How can they win their fight? They are a handful in a mass of more
than one hundred million people, led, the vast majority of them, by
mob psychology and the tyranny of public opinion. This certainly is a
pathetic and vexing problem. For a European observer the fight in the
United States to-day is not so much that of good and evil, right and
wrong. The economic and material standards of the average American
are much higher than those in the Old World. The fight in America
to-day is, at the bottom, that of the élite against the masses, the
fight of quality _versus_ quantity. This problem lies far beyond
the power of statistics. It cannot be coped with by economists or
sociologists. It falls within the pale of the moralist, the mystic and
the philosopher. A big nation, like a big army, cannot exist without a
discipline and a strict subordination of the masses to their leaders.
How can this be possible without setting limits to the rights of
individual development? This problem is complicated in America by that
of standards. How are the demands of the masses going to be gratified
without a leveling down of the standards? Is not material comfort the
most obvious and most accessible value for the greater number? And what
has intellectual growth to do with material welfare?
A type of civilization is not easily changed. Only a Chinese general or
a Nietzschean philosopher would dare to solve the problem of the masses
by applying the remedy suggested, a long time ago, by the benign R. W.
Emerson:
Earth crowded, cries “Too many men.”
My counsel is kill nine in ten.
More than ten millions have been killed, within the last ten years, in
Christian warfare, and _quality_ does not seem to have won yet over
quantity. The polemics around the War have not solved but intensified
the feud between the American élite and the masses. Immediately after
the armistice of 1918, American radicals undertook a revaluation of war
responsibilities. The American intelligentsia had never put its heart
into the struggle. Conscientious objectors swarmed on all sides. The
present economic, political and intellectual chaos through the world
is largely the work of American nonconformists. They spared nothing to
reverse the guilts, to confuse the origin and the issues of the war.
The result of their efforts was an immense disarray of the world’s
conscience. The actual misunderstandings about debts and reparations,
the aloofness of the United States and their retirement within a narrow
and obsolete Monroeism, the Americano-phobia abroad can be credited
mostly to the exertions of American radicals. After they had lost their
temper with Europe they began their intellectual civil war at home.
Their target-practicing became suicidal. The glories of the American
Hall of Fame were lampooned in broad daylight. American institutions
and ideals were challenged. There was an orgy of self-exterminating
criticism. While radical newspapers and magazines wasted much ink to
blacken the lamb and to bleach the wolf, in international relations,
critics at home, like Mr. Mencken, turned their ire against their own
country. The “Magnalia Christi Americana” of Cotton Mather became
the “Americana” of the _American Mercury_. In Mr. Mencken’s amusing
magazine American glories and reputations were mowed down like daisies
on a lawn. The churches, the colleges, the Federal Government were
dealt with, at first hand and without much respect, and then appeared
the indictment of American civilization as a whole by the thirty
intellectuals. The confidence of the world in the United States and
of the United States in themselves must still be very great, if one
judges by the quick and informal dismissal into oblivion of this bulky
indictment.
As a result of all this, there seem to be two United States to-day
warring with each other. On the one hand we still have the “Land
of God,” a nation just as proud of itself to-day as it was in the
best days of the Roosevelt administration. And then there are the
discontented and self-criticizing United States, a land where every
article of the old creed is contradicted by self-disparaging critics.
Between the two, on a sort of No Man’s Land, wander not a few erratic
souls in quest of an ideal. The late Henry Adams was their model.
The upheaval against optimism and conformity is pretty general to-day
among the thinking classes in the United States. Protests, inquiries
and criticisms appear on all sides. If we believe them, American
citizens have been cheated of their rights to happiness as promised in
the American Constitution. But the fight among them is not so much with
the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as with the official
scapegoat, Puritanism.
As a collective and national state of mind, Puritanism can be traced
far back in American traditions and literature. Before indicting it, we
must not fail to see its good points, and it had many. Far from being
in itself adverse to all æsthetics, as its American critics would have
us believe, Puritanism was in the past a literary incentive of the
first order. Its tragic conception of life is much more artistic than
the dull optimism of the masses. No art is possible without pessimism.
Art in its essence is a challenge to life. Puritanism was the only
moral and religious system, outside Catholicism, which invented a
mythology and a symbolism in the modern times. It inspired the immortal
epic of Milton. It gave their quaint flavor even to Jonathan Edwards’
sermons and the “Magnalia” of Cotton Mather. No true road to salvation
can ignore the pits of human wickedness. The fantastic elements in
Hawthorne and Poe were largely borrowed from the demonology of the
Puritan divines. Puritanism believed in the devil. It was a tremendous
source of religious emotions. It fed the sense of the supernatural
which is to-day practically extinct in the American churches. It
favored the growth of mysticism and of the poetic faculties. It
enhanced the love of solitude. It shunned comfort and emphasized the
military and rugged aspects of life. It was friendly to nature and
not adverse to the call of the wild. It pondered over the ominous
problems of life, death, grace and responsibility. It inclined toward
simple life, intimacy with the humble and familiar aspects of life.
This Puritan type of mind has been illustrated by some of the most
intellectual leaders of America, Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson,
William Vaughn Moody, Robert Frost, Robinson. Puritanism was a synonym
for restraint, poverty, abnegation, depth of conscience and thought,
qualities sorely needed in our present state of civilization. We owe
to it the sense of the Infinite in the humblest objects and amidst the
most trivial circumstances of our life, what Maeterlinck called, after
Emerson, the sense of “the familiar sublime.” And let us not forget
those forms of inhibited irony which gave birth to American humor.
On the other hand, it is true, the toll levied by Puritanism on human
happiness has been ominous. For the average mind it meant intellectual
consumption and asphyxiation. Puritan asceticism was an enemy of
everything beautiful. Puritan institutions, the Puritan spirit of
prohibition and constraint, have been justly denounced by modern
critics as the chief obstacle to a rational and acceptable conception
of life. Puritanism showed an admirable knowledge of the truest sides
of existence and of its responsibilities, but it did not see all its
sides. It perceived only and denounced flesh and the devil. It was
suspicious of all the happy instincts and denied some essential human
cravings.
Hence the present revolt against it. The critics of Puritanism in
America to-day are legion. The anti-Puritan spirit forms the substratum
of contemporary American literature. It is only fair to Theodore
Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell and
others to try to show, in way of preamble, that their plea against
Puritan hypocrisy is supported by most of the up-to-date critics who
handle a pen in the United States to-day. To review them all would be a
long task. I shall deal only in this chapter with the most noted, like
Messrs. Waldo Frank, Henry Mencken, Theodore Dreiser and a few others.
Waldo Frank (in “Our America”) views Puritanism as a sort of moral and
mystic utilitarianism based on the repression of natural instincts.
As a religious and a practical expansionist (the one is not to be
separated from the other), the Puritan sacrificed moral growth to
physical hegemony. To conquer the continent and intensify his energies
he surrounded himself on all sides with restraints. Neurosis was the
result, but the Puritan charged it to the account of the Prince of
Darkness and the invisible powers. He wanted to reach salvation by a
short cut and did not hesitate to do violence to human nature. When
they attack Puritanism the new insurgents do not aim at windmills.
They see it as a practical influence still at work in American
society to-day. It gives them the key to American behavior. According
to them, the average American is a victim of puritanic repressions
since childhood. The system of American education is hostile to what
modern psychologists call “wish-fulfillment.” The American is active,
expansive, a progressionist and a doer in regard to matter. He shows
a virile conscience in his conduct toward the physical universe. On
the contrary, in regard to spiritual life, he dodges the facts and
shrinks within himself. His physical courage is undeniable, but he is
mentally and morally a coward. Read an American novel, attend a play
or a “movie.” All begins well. Human problems are not ignored but, at
the end, Puritan cowardice interferes to twist the facts and hide them
in an enforced “happy ending.” The American is a wonderful mechanical
engineer. When he cannot subdue reality by machinery, he resorts
to plots and schemes of his own. He tries to gamble and speculate.
Hence American ideology. When he has confused the issues the American
gives it up and he passes his problems to his church, his lodge, his
newspaper, or, preferably, to his wife, not to forget the mind reader
and the palmist. Optimism at all costs is a necessity for the business
man as well as for the pioneer. Expansion lives on assumptions, on
foregone conclusions and hopes supported by haphazard calculation.
According to Waldo Frank, Puritanism was tantamount to a religious
decadence. It was essentially irreligious. Not the meek in spirit but
the shrewd and the valiant were the elect of Puritanism. From the very
beginnings of colonization in America, Puritan idealism and commercial
imperialism went hand in hand. The decadence began at the epoch of
the Reformation. While all Europe was advancing along intellectual,
artistic and literary paths, the Puritan bartered his soul for earthly
possessions. Spiritual energies turned material. Physical exertions
for power paralyzed higher aspirations. The individual as such no
longer counted. Expansion was all and the building of an empire. Even
the notion of a personal God disappeared. The _genius loci_ replaced
Providence. _Magnalia Christi_ became _Magnalia Christi Americana_.[2]
That one of the most fervent forms of mysticism should have decayed
into being only a craving for material prosperity is the paradox and
the curse of Puritanism. America, we are told, is teeming to-day with
all the riches of this earth. From the top of a mountain the Tempter
would be proud to show it to Him who said that His kingdom did not
belong to this world. From the heights of the ideal, however, America
looks like a desert. Let her confess her sins, her emptiness, her
impurities. Let America repent and convert herself! Let her find a
way to salvation by giving up the Puritan ideals! Thus speaks the new
Zarathustra with an intensity of conviction and a zeal which betrays
the prophet and the idealist. Such an indictment takes us very far
away from the days of optimism, from Emerson, Whitman, William James
and Theodore Roosevelt. American idealism was buried in the grave of
the Transcendentalists. As for American energy it floundered in the
quagmire described by Theodore Dreiser in “An American Tragedy.”
After Waldo Frank let us hear Mr. Henry Mencken, than whom no better
expert for smashing the Puritan can be found (in “Puritanism as a
Literary Force”). According to him, except in the course of brief
escapades, the average American translates all values and even beauty
in terms of right and wrong. He is at the bottom a policeman and a
judge, a fanatic of the law.[3]
Americans do not hesitate to sacrifice beauty and passion to
respectability. If an American writer dared to follow the example of
either Zola or Balzac in their descriptions of American society, they
would be sent to the penitentiary for life. One of the most active
forces at work to keep up American civilization is a belief in the
universal presence of sin and the need of inquisition to uphold the
moral code. Readers familiar with Mr. Mencken’s writings will remember
with what fertility of imagination and keenness of wit he illustrated
his views on the subject. The richer the Puritan became the more
tyrannical he showed himself. His wealth made him intolerant and
oppressive. Now that he was assured of his salvation, he turned his
energies to convert the world outside by campaigns, crusades and so
forth. He tried to make the world safe for righteousness and morality
by compulsion, prohibitions and blue laws.
As a disciple of Zola and Balzac, and an extreme realist in his
descriptions of American society, Theodore Dreiser has not yet been
jailed for life, so far as we know. However, he enjoyed enough
scraps with the censor to have personal reasons for venting his
feelings concerning the Puritan. The author of “Sister Carrie” is
not a professional humorist, and yet he can hardly control himself
when he contemplates the American scene as ordained by Puritanism.
I quote freely from his essay on “Life, Art in America,” in “Hey
Rub-a-Dub-Dub.” Theodore Dreiser cannot refrain from chuckling, he
tells us, when he sees more than one hundred millions of his countrymen
loaded with a wealth which passes the imagination of the most
enthusiastic miser and unable to count among themselves a sculptor, a
poet, a singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician of the first rank.
For two centuries America enjoyed an amazing prosperity. Her land
is stuffed with mines, with oil and coal. It is full of beautiful
mountains, of large valleys and rivers. There are facilities of all
sorts for trade and for travel. And yet, with all her prosperity,
America hardly counts an artist or a thinker of mark. Where are we to
find, leaving aside Emerson and William James,[4] the American Spencer,
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Kant? Has America any historian to compare
with Macaulay, Grote or Gibbon? Has she any novelist like Maupassant
or Flaubert? Where is the American equivalent of Crooks, Roentgen,
Pasteur? Is there an American critic with the depth and forcibleness of
Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the De Goncourts? Has America a playwright like
Ibsen, Tchekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann or Brieux? Where are her Coquelins,
Sonnenthals, Forbes-Robertsons and Bernhardts? America has produced
only one poet since Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters. American painting can
marshal Whistler, Inness and Sargent, but two out of the three migrated
abroad. America has plenty of inventors, some of them remarkable, but
this has nothing to do with art and the freeing of the mind.
Such is Theodore Dreiser’s arraignment of American culture. Puritanism
thwarted intellectual energies. It is its fault if this country of
wonderful technicians remained in a state of childhood in regard
to higher mental achievements. On one hand the American grasps the
physical world with the might of a Titan, on the other he revels in
platitudes about brotherly love, purity, virtue, truth, etc., and
under the cover of these platitudes he unleashes the Comstocks against
independent writers.
There are some professional psychologists among the critics of
Puritanism to-day. In a recent book entitled “The American Mind
in Action” two of them[5] made a methodical study of puritanic
inhibitions. They selected, to illustrate their case, personalities
such as Emerson, Lincoln, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Comstock,
Barnum, Franklin, Longfellow and Margaret Fuller.[6]
According to these authors the Puritan repression of natural instincts
is a danger and a failure. It breeds hypocrisy and poisons the soul.
Puritanism is responsible for most of the mental tortures which have
been dramatized by American novelists in particular. The scientific
name for these tortures is “floating anxiety” or “soul-fear.” They
explain the transformation of Puritanism into imperialistic expansion.
Everything is good for the Puritan if it takes him away from himself,
from his fears, and his remorses. Hence his worship for action, for
prosperity and success at all cost. American energy, viewed from this
angle, is nothing but a substitute for scruples. If we believe this
theory, the darings of the modern business man, his pluck, his boasting
spirit of enterprise are only means to get rid of fright. A business
man’s courage resembles that of the “Chocolate Soldier” in Bernard
Shaw’s comedy. It is a derivative of fear, a _flight_ straight ahead
toward the enemy, because there is no hope left behind. The American
continent was conquered by religious misanthropists who vented their
bad feelings by starting an onslaught on the Indians and other inferior
races. The wrath of Miles Standish when he finds himself rebuked by
Priscilla in his courtship and his subsequent offensive on the Redskin
explains this point of view.[7] How different America would be if
the Virginian Cavalier had won over the Puritan! But the contrary
happened. Natural conditions and economic forces made Puritanism the
sole form of national ethics in the United States. So much the worse!
This state of blind repression and of anxious insecurity have made
Puritanism the only form of thinking in America. Notwithstanding the
diversion of affairs or the relaxation of sports, travel and amusement,
soul-fear cannot be eschewed.
The American worries about health, hygiene. He worries about success.
These are signs that the spiritual life is absent. Angry with himself,
and with others, the disillusioned Puritan becomes a raider and an
inquisitor. He wants to prohibit to others that happiness which is
denied to him. He fears his own fear; he distrusts his emotions. He is
afraid to surrender to nature which he regards as corrupt. And yet,
without emotions there is no art or literature possible. An example
of the Puritan inhibition, and of its effects on art, is Whistler
painting, with all his soul, the portrait of his mother and calling
it informally “Arrangement in black and white” for fear that he would
betray his inner feelings. False pride, _amour-propre_ and bluff are
the ransoms for Puritanism.
Another American complex, if we believe our critics, is the “mother
complex,” the American complex _par excellence_. The sublimation of
instincts in the American woman produced the so-called “motherly
feeling.” It triumphs in American magazines and in the “movies.” The
sentimental appeal to the motherly feeling is the surest and shortest
way to arouse the emotions of the American crowds.[8]
American idealism is largely manufactured by women. It is to women that
the average American owes his ideals and ethical or literary standards.
It is woman who inspires, supervises and censors art and literature in
the United States; it is she who makes them aseptic, consumptive and
tawdry.[9]
In business the American is a real “he-man” but, when he must face
moral issues, he surrenders to his mate. He tamed the physical universe
with machinery and became a leader of material civilization. He can
well solve mechanical problems, but ethics, philosophy and gay science
are beyond his pale. And this is why the typical American to-day is
so idealistic, so practical too, so inventive and so little of a
philosopher and of an artist. He is anxious, restless, assured of
himself on the surface but, in reality, very sensitive to criticism.
Nobody is more able than he to attain the goal of his ambitions and
nobody is more unhappy and helpless when he has reached it.[10]
Such is the survey of American ethics and psychology made by some of
the best-known American critics. In this book it is meant to compare
their views with those of the most noted among American novelists
to-day. Floating anxiety, soul fear, Freudian complexes and inhibitions
throw a great deal of light on the contemporary novel. The case against
the Puritan has been pressed by modern American novelists to the limit
of pathos.
The massive, clumsy, but forcible and convincing Theodore Dreiser, the
genial and yet embittered Sinclair Lewis, the mystic and intuitive
Sherwood Anderson, the ironic and quixotic James Branch Cabell,
accompanied by a galaxy of talented writers like Willa Cather, Zona
Gale, Floyd Dell, Joseph Hergesheimer, Waldo Frank,--all of them,
since Hawthorne, through Henry James, William Dean Howells and
Edith Wharton, show themselves obsessed by the problems of Puritan
inhibitions and their influence on human conduct. More recently still,
a host of younger writers has appeared in American fiction, all of them
fascinated by the question of psychological behavior. The wanderings
of Ulysses, in James Joyce’s Freudian epic, through the mazes of
subconsciousness, had many American followers. Several of them have
been included in this volume.
This book has no pretensions at being complete and it is not ashamed
of being systematic. It deals chiefly with those American writers who
explored the field of psychology and psychoanalysis and it happens to
include most of the greatest. All writers of American fiction to-day
could not be marshaled in line but the most famous are here. The author
is not a professional pessimist, but it is not his fault if the good
half-dozen of original talents to-day, in American literature, are
adepts in disillusion. There is no reason to be dismayed by this fact.
Great art has always been pessimistic; the more pessimistic, it seems,
the greater. The fact that an optimistic country like America has a
gloomy literature to-day must not be a deterrent. Art, in its highest
forms, is not a mere imitation of life. It is rather a reaction and a
protest against it. It lives and works in the sphere of aspirations.
The later generation of American writers is bent toward introspection
and realism. In art these writers want truth. Between them and the
past there is a gap. The time seems past for descriptive and objective
literature. Subjectivism prevails. Novelists to-day want to share the
lives of their characters. This new method of literary expression has
been called in France _monologue intérieur_. The intimacy between
reality and fiction has never been closer than now. The new writers
also are revolutionists and iconoclasts. They swore allegiance to no
master. Among foreign influences the Russian seems to be particularly
prevalent with them. The American novel to-day would not be what it is
without Dostoievski, Andreiev or Tchekhov. Neither does it deny its
debt to Balzac, Flaubert, Zola or Marcel Proust. D. H. Lawrence and
James Joyce also sponsored it.
In ethics and sociology the aloofness of the newcomers is complete.
Psychology, not morals, is their chief interest. They are indifferent
to rhetorics. The questions of style are alien to them. The password
nowadays is spontaneous and original expression. Any means to this end
is style.
Let us now, from Hawthorne to James Branch Cabell and others, begin our
journey through the field of American fiction.
CHAPTER II
_How Nathaniel Hawthorne Exorcised Hester Prynne_
For twenty-five years America has been the classic country of
experimental psychology. The more vague and uncertain metaphysics
and ethics became in America, the more rigorous, exact and precise
became psychology. The Americans carried to the field of experimental
psychology their taste for statistics, formulæ and graphs. They set
about with a singular complacency, measuring and weighing with the
dynameter that human mind which their idealism had pictured, up to that
time, as so transcendental and intangible. Never was science carried
farther. Never was the thinking being submitted to such a test, gauged,
measured, weighed, counted. The results of experimental psychology
have passed into everyday practices. The psychological test and the
intelligence test are a part of the university program, and count
towards admission into the professions, the civil service and the army.
The American universities which are substituting psychological tests
for entrance examinations are becoming more and more numerous.
This development of experimental psychology in America is interesting.
It explains the obsession which the psychological problem has acquired
in the eyes of contemporary novelists. In America, as in Europe, the
novel has abandoned ethics for psychology. One could not form a just
idea of the American novel of to-day without bearing in mind at least
the principal lines of the development of experimental psychology in
America since William James.
* * * * *
James was the great renovator and the pioneer of psychological
studies in the United States. He was in psychology a true realist.
Anti-intellectualist through both education and temperament, he brought
psychology from the clouds to the earth; object and subject into the
world of facts. He eliminated all scholasticism from the study of
the self. He refused to subject the powers of the mind to empirical
classifications. He conceived the spiritual life as a continuous
creation. He condemned the division of the mind into autonomous
faculties. The ego appeared to him to be, not a marquetry of powers,
but a cluster of energy, one living and inseparable force, a current,
a river, a “stream of consciousness.” Nor does James consent to the
separation and classification into distinct _genres_ of the activities
of the mind. Art, mysticism, philosophy, science, ethics were in his
eyes but aspects, different in appearance but in reality identical, of
a single force; a happy confusion which permitted him, in his fine book
on “The Varieties of Religious Experience” to bring into a new light
the mystic phenomena, and which suggested to him an original philosophy
of religions based on a new conception of conscious life. The
importance which he attached to the subconscious and the confidence,
carried even to credulity, which he accorded to psychical researches
are well known.
From James, the contemporary psychologists borrowed a theory which
had a great success. I mean the studies on the dissociation of a
personality. The views on this subject of the author of the “Treatise
on Psychology” have their origin in his pragmatism. Desirous of
assuring to the mind the free and entire use of all its powers, James,
although a strong and confirmed realist, accorded but a representative
and symbolic character to spiritual events. They were epiphenomenal,
means chosen by the conscious activity to reach its ends and without
other than purely symbolic importance. He considered the facts of the
conscience not at all the equivalent of the facts of reality, but as
symbols representing much less things themselves than the interest we
take in them. Nothing can be more original than his hierarchy of the
“Selves.” His mistrust for abstraction had caused him to form a very
curious theory. He distinguished three orders of Self; the material
Self which he reduced to the sensations of our body, of our clothes and
of our surroundings; the social Self; and the spiritual Self. According
to him, every individual possesses several social Selves; in fact,
there are as many as there are groups which recognize them. Each one of
these Selves acts in its group like an independent personality. Each
has its own fashion of acting and reacting. In the same individual the
different Selves may oppose each other, according to the social groups
in which they develop.
There we have the starting point of a theory which is now well known
and which Pirandello, James Joyce and Marcel Proust have illustrated
in literature. It has its origin in this principle: that, in order to
persevere in their being, individuals disguise themselves and present
to the exterior world surrogate creations of their ego. Inspired
by these doctrines, modern psychology has modified its consecrated
terminology. It has recently replaced the word “character,” a classic
and moralizing term, by a newer stamp--that of “personality picture.”
It gives of the Self an interpretation no longer moral but æsthetic.
According to this theory, the events of our inner life are fictions
that we play on ourselves and on others. Each one of us chooses a
personality, a character--or better, a travesty, a representation--and
we pass our life in furthering and defending it. According to the
surroundings and the different groups through which we pass, and in
accordance with the necessities of the moment, we modify this personal
portrait, deforming or attenuating it if we are weak, strengthening
and enriching it if we are strong. The normal individual paints his
personal portrait to suit the background of the external world; the
neurotic, on the contrary, attributes to his fiction an intrinsic value
independent of experience. In any case, we are essentially actors,
mimics and parodists.
This Self of which we take possession is a veritable psychic creation.
It is a character which we spend our life in designing. It is our
personal portrait signed by our self, “a personality picture.”
According to a modern psychologist--Doctor Martin--every one of us
is an artist and spends his life in drawing an original portrait of
himself. Our actions write our autobiography which is, of course, a
fiction. But this fiction is necessary. The success or failure of our
lives depends on the way we draw our imaginary portrait. In other
words, they depend on how we succeed in making our existence a work of
art.
Before approaching psychoanalysis, I shall say a word about a new
school of experimental psychology which is arousing interest at
present in America. It cannot be neglected because of the light which
it throws on the contemporary novel. It is called Behaviorism--the
science of action or conduct. This system is based on the theory of
stimulants and reactions or response. It takes back to empiricism and
to psychophysics (mind-and-body relationship). It makes a clear sweep
of our mental life, conscious or subconscious, and consents to know the
Self only through its relations and reactions to the exterior world.
Behaviorism appears in the form of a vast inquest, a sort of referendum
on the possible motives of human actions. It replaces the interior
observation of classical psychology and the Freudian divination by a
peculiar Socratic-like examination, a tight network of questions which
claim to capture in their meshes the secrets of the Self. Here are a
few examples of this method of investigation. They resemble strongly a
catechism,--what we call in college slang a “quiz.”
This is the questionnaire proposed to diagnose the general emotional
aptitude of a subject.
Does the subject manifest a normal amount of curiosity? Has he
initiative? What are his particular inclinations and hobbies? What is
the history of his sexual initiations; of his liaisons, etc? Are his
emotional reactions well balanced?
To diagnose the disposition towards activity, the questionnaire is
modified as follows. Is the individual lazy or industrious? Is he
loquacious? Is he given to frequent laughter and to loud conversation?
Are his movements effectual or awkward?
For social fitness the following questions are asked:
How many intimate friends has the individual? What is the history of
his family relations? How easily does he form friendships? How much
loyalty has he? How much tact? Is his society sought by others?
This is the method of behavioristic investigation. It appears very
summary. Its critics accuse it, not without reason, of letting escape,
through the gaps in its questions, that which is most worth knowing.
Do not the answers to the questions of the behavioristic catechism
consider already discovered the secret which one expects to obtain
from them, so that all this display of questions is only a _petitio
principii_?
The attempt of behaviorism to construct our personality from without
and to wring from us, by our acts, the secret of our thoughts is,
however, interesting. It will help us to understand better the
psychological realism and the reporting methods of Theodore Dreiser,
for example. We shall bear it in mind for that reason.
* * * * *
I come now to psychoanalysis which is decidedly more attractive.
Psychoanalysis bases its investigations and its definitions on
the duplicity and hypocrisy inherent in individual and social
life. It shows us a psychic world of several degrees; at the top
and at the surface, the conscious universe: underneath, a sort of
semi-darkness--the preconscious; still lower, the unconscious.
Between these spheres the psychoanalyst pictures a moving, a
passing, a continuous rising and descending of expression and
repression, of desires and inhibitions. Between each compartment
he places antechambers, thresholds, turnstiles, wickets, censors,
a perfect clearing house, a central station for the receiving and
sorting of the events of our mental life. There seems to exist a
fore-established harmony between such a representation of conscious
facts and Puritanism; a harmony which has not escaped the critics
of psychoanalysis. According to a critic, “The comparative vogue
(Why _comparative_? Should not one say _excessive_?) of Freudism in
English-speaking countries is partly due to Protestant Puritanism.
The narrow restrictions which Puritan ethics impose upon sexual
satisfactions and the mystery in which they seek to envelop them would
prove, in the eyes of the English and American psychiatrists, certain
hypotheses of Freud and the supposed effect of Anglo-Saxon inhibitions
upon the production of neurosis.”[11]
Freud gives us through his doctrine of complexes, inhibitions,
suppressions and repressions, a striking explanation of Puritanism as I
tried to describe it in the first chapter. He makes us understand very
well the causes of floating anxiety and soul-fear which psychically
characterize the Puritan. Suppression and censorship are certainly the
key to Hawthorne’s Puritan portraits which I shall present shortly.
The important rôle and the analytical descriptions given to sexual
obsession in such Dreiser novels as “The Genius” fit in perfectly
with the Freudian therapeutics, and the methods of Freud’s divination
resemble greatly the main phases of the novel as Sherwood Anderson
conceives it: seclusion, insinuation, confession, day dreams, dream
symbolism, secret symbolic language, all with a basis of pronounced
sexual obsession. Fiction and psychoanalysis agree perfectly in all
this.
We must not forget the disquieting elements of Freudism, the manner in
which it reintroduces into the idea of Self the elementary, primitive,
crude and purely instinctive constituents. There are, on this point,
curious affinities between the “call of the wild” as understood by
Freud and by Jack London, for example. The Anglo-Saxon is, despite his
Puritanism, nearer true nature than the Latin, we are told. He is more
primitive, more elementary. The psychoanalyst would undoubtedly confirm
these views and this new manner of completing the portrait of the
Puritan.
* * * * *
After this introduction, of which, I hope, the readers will feel the
pertinence in the following chapters, I should like, still from the
point of view of psychological research and its influence on the
American novel of to-day, to study certain aspects, which I consider
very modern, of the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is a great artist
and an armed psychologist, an able story-teller and, one might say,
the detective of the Puritan conscience. He is, in many respects,
very Freudian; what attracts him, from the moment he starts writing,
is the inmost life, the enigma in the depths of the conscience. He
feels that the world of appearances is false; that, being false, it
is tragic; that the human being is twofold; that under the outward
Self, the superimposed Self, is hidden a profounder, timid being or,
as one says to-day, repressed. Instead of denouncing moral duplicity,
like Carlyle or Mark Twain, Hawthorne transforms it into art. He loves
enigmas, mysteries, obscurity, secret retreats. He is the explorer of
the subterranean world, the Conan Doyle of the conscience. In that,
Hawthorne is assuredly a compatriot of Edgar Allan Poe.
He lived a narrow existence in a monotonous and dismal New England
town, but one filled with dreams and memories. Solitude and disillusion
were his daily bread. His political ambitions were not fulfilled. He
secluded himself in Concord, in the unfriendly neighborhood of Emerson,
another repressed individual like himself. Heredity weighed heavily
upon him. There is no doubt that one must look into his genealogy for
the secret of his obsessions. All his life, Hawthorne was haunted by
the idea of crime, by the thought of the Inquisition, by dungeons and
tortures. Is not the crime which, in his “Marble Faun,” Donatello
commits because of the averted glance of the unfortunate Miriam, an
unconscious memory of that tragic duel suggested, we are told, to his
friend Cilley, by an involuntary gesture of Hawthorne? Nor could he
forget that one of his ancestors had been a witch burner. All that
explains Hawthorne’s complex, the vague sense of disquietude and the
mental fear which charge the atmosphere of his novels.
One must note however, this said, that there is much more than a
tragic and lugubrious conception of existence in Hawthorne’s books.
The favorite and latent theme of his novels is paganism and the joy of
living, the love of love, the delight in voluptuousness. His characters
would willingly abandon themselves to it if the Evil One did not
prowl so near in the forest, and if the deacon, the alderman and the
constable did not lend a helping hand. It is impossible to be mistaken;
Hawthorne’s imagination was pagan. The two protagonists of “The
Scarlet Letter,” considered his most puritanical book, are thoroughly
immoral. They begin in anguish through the suppression of their desires
and end in happiness through their abandonment to the freed libido.
All of “The Marble Faun”--subject, characters and descriptions--is a
plea for natural and instinctive expansion, a pagan plea. Donatello is
an inspired symbol of this naturalistic conception of life. Donatello
is the Faun, the beast become man, the man of nature, by definition
good and happy until the awakening of his conscience. Hester Prynne,
Miriam and Zenobia of “The Blithedale Romance” are seductive women,
drawn without the slightest touch of hypocrisy or hesitation. Hawthorne
is very susceptible to the qualities of the feminine mind. He has
very sure, very penetrating, very profound intuitions about women, as
his portraits of young girls show--like little Pearl in “The Scarlet
Letter,” Phœbe in “The House of Seven Gables,” Hilda in “The Marble
Faun,” Priscilla in “The Blithedale Romance.” He makes them very naïve,
very sincere, in order, it would seem, to terrify them more by the
discovery of evil, the knowledge of which is brought to them through
the intermediation of one of their elders,--mother, sister or friend.
* * * * *
This man, who aspired so keenly to the joy of living, had a conscience
profoundly sensitive to evil. It is the susceptibility of check, the
Puritan repression of desire. We have no need to recall with what
inflexibility, what morbid obstinacy Hawthorne discussed the problem of
evil. Dostoievski was not more tragically, more persistently haunted by
the idea of crime and punishment than he. “The House of Seven Gables”
might just as well have been entitled “The House of Crime.” It is
composed upon the theme that one does not escape a sin committed; that
a misdeed is fatal in its results; that there is no redemption for
the sinner. There is only immanent justice, as Emerson said, “eternal
return”; according to Nietzsche, Fate, the authentic incarnation of the
Calvinist predestination. It is not the act itself which constitutes
sin, according to Hawthorne; it is the thought, the intention, and,
as there is not a single human being who has not sheltered some
criminal thought during the course of his life, it follows that we
are all criminals. That is what Hawthorne repeated to satiety and
what he wanted to prove in his books. But he went still farther, in a
direction in which his Puritanism, because of its harshness, becomes
sheer amorality. We think of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” when we
read the numerous passages in which Hawthorne sustains the necessity
of evil and consequently of crime. He does not hide it, for example,
in connection with the two leading characters of “The Scarlet Letter.”
He tells us that Reverend Dimmesdale’s remorse was “exquisite” as well
as horrible. In “The Marble Faun” Donatello must commit a crime before
Miriam will love him and utter that stupendous cry, “How beautiful
he is!” Miriam holds that crime has lifted her poor Faun to a level
superior to innocence; that Adam’s sin, repeated by Donatello, has
brought his posterity to a higher, brighter level of happiness. It is
remorse, Miriam tells us, which has awakened and developed in the Faun
a thousand moral and intellectual faculties unknown till then. These
are some of the moral paradoxes of the “Puritan” Hawthorne.
However interesting he may be as a moralist, he is still more so as a
psychologist. His moral sense was not without effect here. He is one
of the few American authors whose ethics are supported by the problem
of evil; he was led to explore the conscience and his diagnoses are
striking. They are in many respects very modern, as I shall try to show
from “The Scarlet Letter.”
Critics and readers have often mistaken the true significance of
this book. It is vaunted as a masterpiece of story-telling, and a
masterpiece it is in its main lines, despite some awkwardness in the
development of the action, and if it is not judged too severely for
repetitions which mar especially the last part of the book. The great
mistake would consist in interpreting “The Scarlet Letter” as a plea
for Puritanism. It is, in my opinion, quite the contrary. Very few
critics have grasped the real viewpoint from which Hawthorne conceived
the characters of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale. (Excepting D. H.
Lawrence, in a chapter of his imaginative but penetrating “Studies in
Classic American Literature.”)[12]
I do not wish to introduce Doctor Freud everywhere, nor do I want to
exaggerate Hawthorne’s immoralism, but if there has ever been a piece
of literature written to prove the dangers of the famous Freudian
inhibition and to try to cure it, that work is certainly “The Scarlet
Letter.”
The wealth of psychological intuition in this novel is remarkable.
It is the most human, the least moralizing (I was about to say the
most personal of Hawthorne’s novels), excepting of course the ending,
edifying and conventional as could be desired, but which is neither
better nor worse than all Hawthorne’s endings. We will remember the
tragic story of Hester Prynne, the beautiful Puritan seduced by the
Reverend Dimmesdale. Hester gave everything to love. She was put in the
stocks and condemned to wear embroidered on her blouse the letter A
(adultery), an ignominious insignia which her heroic coquetry succeeded
in converting into a bit of finery. Note well--Hester Prynne has no
shame, no remorse for her sin. She is proud of it. The world has
condemned her but she does not cease to love, no matter how cowardly
Dimmesdale behaves. From the beginning to the very end of the book,
Hester Prynne saw love only. If this is not the last word as it would
probably be on the screen of the “movies,” especially the American
“movies,” it is not far from being so and is the fault of neither
Hester Prynne nor Dimmesdale but of Hawthorne himself, grown, as often
happens with him, too timorous at the end of the book. Hawthorne is
very canny in attributing to the Puritan Hester a rich, a voluptuous
and almost “oriental” temperament. There does not exist, to my
knowledge, even in Zola’s famous description of the Paradou (in “La
Faute de l’abbé Mouret”) a more impetuous and eloquent burst of passion
than the ending of “The Scarlet Letter,” particularly the scene in the
forest between the spirited Hester and the timid Dimmesdale whom she
rescues from his hysterical inhibitions by her impassioned declarations.
An example of Hawthorne’s psychological realism, still more
characteristic than this case of Freudian evasion so exactly described,
is the method which he used to wring from Hester’s lover his secret.
Dimmesdale’s character is a masterpiece of intuition. He is a hypocrite
but only through timidity, and in all, a tragic and pathetic figure,
one of those weak and incomplete beings who have not even the courage
to lie. Hawthorne dealt several times, and very successfully, with
the study of warped or incompletely developed personalities. Clyfford
Pyncheon in “The House of the Seven Gables,” and Donatello in “The
Marble Faun,” are examples, and one might add to these the young
women--so numerous in his novels--emotionally distressed in the face of
evil. A victim, like Hester, of social conventions, but less courageous
than she, less sure of himself in passion, Dimmesdale lacks very
little to become the American Tartuffe. But he is saved by Hester,
who exorcises him at the end, and rescues him from repression. The
minister’s open confession on the pillory is an admirable scene. It
has its counterpart in “The Marble Faun” in which the candid Hilda,
unable to bear any longer the secret of the crime of which she was
an involuntary witness, enters a confessional at St. Peter’s and,
regardless of her Puritan heritage, reveals everything to a priest.
Dimmesdale’s puritanical confession on the pillory is of the same
nature. It is an explosion of craving and of repressed passion. From
the viewpoint of modern psychology this scene is natural and scientific.
But the most striking is the fashion in which Hawthorne endeavors
to surprise Dimmesdale’s secret. For that purpose he invented a
very curious secondary character, Doctor Chillingworth. He is in
many respects a melodramatic villain worthy of a serial by Eugene
Süe. He is Hester Prynne’s deceived husband. Once acquainted with
Chillingworth, we become very indulgent of poor Hester’s sin. More than
half necromancer, Chillingworth passed a large part of his life among
the Indians, who taught him their magic; that is the fantastic side of
his character. From the psychological point of view Chillingworth is
Suppressed Hatred. The readers of “The Scarlet Letter” will remember
the diabolic plan for vengeance formed by the necromancer-doctor who
suspects Dimmesdale of having been his wife’s lover. Little by little
he attaches himself to the unfortunate minister under the cover of
friendship. He tortures him by besieging him with insidious questions.
During the course of these searching examinations, Hawthorne shows
himself again a very subtle psychologist and a precursor and pioneer
of psychoanalysis. All the conditions in these scenes are so worked
out that Dimmesdale’s resistance takes on a truly Freudian aspect.
Dimmesdale will release his secret for no consideration. In fact, to
the very end, Chillingworth gets no further for all his trouble, but
the cross-examination to which he subjects the Reverend is curious, and
Dimmesdale has a narrow escape.
Here are, for example, a few remarks made by the novelist himself on
these examinations:
A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy
of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a
nameless something more, let us call it intuition; if he show no
intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of
his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to
bring his mind into such affinity with his patient’s that this
last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to
have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and
acknowledged not so often by silence, an inarticulate breath, and
here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if
to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages
afforded by his recognized character as a physician; then, at some
inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved,
and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing all its
mysteries into the daylight.
Dimmesdale’s mind had become so familiar to Chillingworth that,
Hawthorne tells us, his whole “stream of consciousness,” as William
James would say, passed before the physician’s eyes.
Chillingworth became, in his researches, a true adept of Freud.
After having begun the study of Dimmesdale objectively, he ended by
becoming passionately absorbed in his case. Chillingworth experienced a
veritable fascination, we are told:
He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching
for gold; or rather like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in
quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but
likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption.
It is again as a true disciple of Freud that Chillingworth scented
in his victim the hidden _libido_, which he calls a “strong animal
nature,” inherited from his father and mother. Here is another bit
of dialogue which is very modern in the same way. Chillingworth is
speaking,
“He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open knoweth
oftentimes but half the evil which he is called upon to cure.
A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within
itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the
spiritual part. Your pardon once again, good sir, if my speech give
the shadow of offence. You, sir, of all men whom I have known, are
he whose body is the closest conjoined and imbued and identified,
so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”
“Then I need ask no further;” said the clergyman, somewhat hastily
rising from his chair. “You deal not, I take it, in medicine for
the soul.”
Upon which Dimmesdale rebels. He will not unveil his soul to the doctor
of his body. To the suggestions of his enemy he opposes a curious and
optimistic philosophy concerning the discovery of secret thoughts. No
power, according to him, excepting the divine power, could force a
human being to betray his inmost self, whether with words, signs of
writing or emblems.
On Judgment Day it will be otherwise, but that day the reading of the
secret thoughts will be expiatory and, for that reason, not painful but
pleasant. According to Dimmesdale, who is fully aware of his condition,
there are two kinds of repressed individuals, the timid ones whose
weakness forbids confession, and the moralists, the fatalists--we
should say the “pragmatists”--who consider silence, hypocrisy, as
socially more salutary than avowal. Dimmesdale, from this point of
view, is, until his conversion in the forest and at the pillory, what
we should call to-day a complete simulator.
However Freudian these diagnoses may appear in form, they are hardly
so intentionally. The treatment to which Chillingworth submits his
patient is conceived to be a torture and not a cure; Chillingworth, an
able practitioner perhaps, is a very poor psychologist. Without in the
least suspecting it, he works against his own ends. He never suspects
that the day when Dimmesdale will reveal his secret to him will find
him not punished but relieved, and in reality cured, according to
Freud, and that he, Chillingworth, will have lost his time and pains
as a psychoanalyst. This is exactly what happens. Once freed from
repression and anxiety, Dimmesdale reveals himself to be a new man, a
man in the full sense of the word for the first time, and now he cares
neither for his fears nor for Chillingworth who has exploited them. The
true healer of Dimmesdale is not Chillingworth, it is Hester Prynne.
* * * * *
I have already told what admiration I hold for this ending of “The
Scarlet Letter.” Hawthorne reveals himself here to be not only a
profound psychologist and audacious moralist but a great poet. I want
to quote at length the scene in the forest where repressions and
inhibitions are drowned in “a flood of sunshine”:
Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and
anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not
known the weight until she felt the freedom! By another impulse
she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it
fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and
a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to
her features. There played around her mouth and beamed out of her
eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very
heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that
had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness
of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past,
and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope and a happiness
before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if
the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these
two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as
with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring
a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf,
transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the
gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow
hitherto embodied the brightness now. The course of the little
brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart
of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the
forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth--with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly
born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a
sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance that it overflows
upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom it
would have been bright in Hester’s eyes and bright in Arthur
Dimmesdale’s.
This liberation of her passion made of Hester a different woman.
She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness;
as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the
gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide
their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in
desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in
his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point
of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators
had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than
the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the
pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.
Thus, insists Hawthorne, Hester’s misfortunes liberated her. The
scarlet letter (that is, if we judge her sin rightly) served her now
as a passport with which to penetrate into regions where women scarcely
dared go: “Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers--stern
and wild ones--and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
Dimmesdale, too, reaches the same result. The basis of his optimism
since Hester rescued him from his neuroses is amoral (should one say
immoral!) as that of the woman he loves:
His decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon
of his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an
unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region.
At that moment Dimmesdale’s spirit “rose, as it were, with a bound, and
attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery
which had kept him grovelling on the earth.”
It is with good reason that the minister, upon issuing from the forest
hurled a defy at his former parishioners:
I am not the man for whom you take me. I left him yonder in the
forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk and
near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his
emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled
brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off garment.
The transformation, the conversion of Dimmesdale freed from repression,
is complete. It overthrows his whole philosophy of life. It makes of
him an amoralist and a Nietzschean. Listen to Hawthorne:
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In
truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code
in that interior kingdom was adequate to account for the impulses
now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At
every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing
or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and
intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder
self than that which opposed the impulse.
Such I believe to be the basic meaning of this masterpiece, spoiled
again, unfortunately, by an edifying ending. Hawthorne was one of the
novelists best acquainted with man’s conscience.
Less fecund than many, he had the wisdom and talent to concentrate his
genius and thought upon the study of a preëminently human problem, that
of evil and responsibility. Besides the genius of intuition he had that
of symbolism. This realistic psychologist was a marvelous imagist. He
himself has given us a striking formula of his art. Art, according to
him, is the light of thought and imagination shining through what he
called “the opaque substance of days.” Like Emerson, he considered
wonder as an essential human faculty. Intuitive sympathy alone, he
believed, could solve the mysteries of existence. To come to truth one
must possess the innocent and naïve insight of a child.
For the purpose of knowing better the external world, Hawthorne loved
to look at it through the symbols which his prolific imagination
presented to him. One may even find that he carried symbolization
to excess. Two of his novels, in particular “The House of the Seven
Gables” and “The Marble Faun,” are, in certain regards, veritable
allegories. He found everywhere affinities between man and things. He
gave a soul to inanimate objects and made of them a tangible extension
of our personality. In “The House of the Seven Gables,” everything,
from the cellar to the garret, even the chicken yard and the well, is
so imagined as to give us the impression of the curse which weighs on
the old abode. In its antique frame “The Marble Faun” is conceived in
the same manner. Portraits which are alive, human faces which seem
to reincarnate pictures and statues, the strange resemblance, for
instance, between Miriam in “The Marble Faun” and the portrait of
Beatrice Cenci, or the statue of Cleopatra, mirrors in whose depth
float ghost faces, mysteries of dusk and shadow, mysteries of human
voices--the symbolism of Hawthorne is as rich as that of Edgar Poe and
adds another charm to his novels.
CHAPTER III
_Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells and American Society
on Parade_
From Hawthorne to the present time, American fiction numbers many
masters. Preëminent among them stand Henry James, Edith Wharton and
William Dean Howells. They are a group apart. Their philosophy of life
and their æsthetics place them in the past more than in the present.
Each one of them, in his own original way, continued the tradition of
the novel of intrigue, the novel of character and that of manners.
Of the three, Henry James stands foremost as a psychologist and an
artist. His career was marked by a progressive alienation from his
native environment and culminated with a complete desertion of America
for England. James, with Edgar Allan Poe, was the sole example of an
artistic conscience in American letters. He represented in American
literature the longing for the European background. He confessed that
he could not do his work outside of aristocratic surroundings. This he
explicitly avowed in his essay on Hawthorne. He deplored the fact that
the New England novelist had to estrange himself from Europe where he
could have matured his talent and made it bear fruit.
“The flower of art,” wrote he, “blooms only where the soil is deep....
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature ...
it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.” He
pleaded extenuating circumstances for what he called “the modest” and
provincial “nosegay” of Hawthorne:
It takes so many things ... it takes such an accumulation of
history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to
form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.... The negative side of
the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative
saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity,
be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high
civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent
from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder
to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the
word, and indeed, barely a specific national name. No sovereign,
no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no
clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen,
no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country-houses, nor
parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals,
nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor
public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no
novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting
class--no Epson nor Ascot!
For an English or French imagination there is something appalling in
this vast emptiness. The American is well aware that something remains
in his huge country to make up for these deficiencies, but when we
come to the question of knowing what it is that remains--“that is his
secret, his joke, as one might say.”
American humor, according to James, was born from the bareness of the
American scene. It bobbed up in America for reasons analogous to those
which seventeenth-century savants assigned to the rising of the liquid
column in the barometer: “_la nature a horreur de vide_”; nature is
afraid of the vacuum and must find some compensations for it. Such was
the map of the great American desert drawn by Henry James. For Walt
Whitman, the United States were a cornucopia. They were a blank for
Henry James. He fled to Great Britain to forget the great Valley of
Death and the call-of-the-wild. To imagine Henry James and Jack London
as countrymen takes not a little imagination indeed.
As a challenge to this unpatriotic programme, let the reader remember
the sarcasms heaped on European aristocracy, traditions and culture
by Mark Twain, in “Innocents Abroad” and “The Prince and the Pauper,”
which are contemporary with Henry James’ productions. Mark Twain voted
for American philistinism, and American literature to-day has also cast
its suffrage in favor of the democratic ideals. Puritanism was the
last form of aristocratic tradition in the United States. Henry James’
indictment of his native country marked the parting of the ways between
the ancient and the modern, between tradition and evolution, culture
and spontaneity. A character in one of his early novels solved for us
the riddle of James’ exile. He told us that Americans are artistically
disinherited; that they are condemned to be superficial; that they
do not belong to the magic circle; that the substratum of American
perceptions is thin, barren, artificial; that, as follows, Americans
are bound to imperfection. To excel in anything they have ten times
more things to learn than a European. There is a certain deep sense
which they lack. They have neither taste, tact nor strength. How could
they have any? Their climate is harsh and violent, their past silent,
their present dizzying, their environment oppressive and without
charms. There is nothing in America to feed, stir and inspire an
artist. All aspiring souls become exiles.
The pathos of Henry James’ career, the secret of his chiaro-oscuro
and of his twilight effects can be heard ringing in this quotation.
He never became truly reconciled to his solitude at Rye in Sussex.
He remained a Puritan at heart. For a Puritan conscience every ship
across the sea, west or east bound, is still and always will be the
_Mayflower_. He began by surveying the American scene. His first
novels, “The Madonna of the Future,” “Roderick Hudson,” “Daisy Miller,”
were very different in technique from his later productions. They were
straightforward, obvious and simple, with very little psychoanalysis,
and few literary detours or arabesques. They did not go round and
round. Still, James had already managed to force his favorite point
in favor of the American uprooted abroad and he had already procured
the American virgin a passport to European disillusions. As an expert
in the psychology of women, only Hawthorne had shown an equal sense
of innuendoes. Had James been a woman, he would have made an ideal
chaperone. How deftly and delicately he took his angels abroad to
comfort them and guide them in their exile! How he liked to use them as
what he called a reverberator in his stories!
How he grilled them, coaxed them into a sort of psychological trance!
There was something mesmeric and Palladinian[13] in his approach to
women. In his books women are more ghostly than real. Has any one of
them ever had a real body of her own? They are all so pre-Raphaelite!
In place of a body they have a soul. Like Fra Angelico’s seraphs they
are encumbered with wings, “wings of the dove,” a poetic but a most
inefficient apparel for globe-trotters. James’ heroines could not flap
their wings in their crude utilitarian country. (Imagine one of his
angels lost in Dreiser’s “A Hoosier Holiday!”) And neither can they
adapt themselves to the Old World. Their transcendental ethics are so
out of keeping with real life that it unfits them for existence. How
pure they are, how idealistic, how naïve and shy! Daisy Miller, the
representative American virgin abroad, is a martyr added by James to
the Christian calendar. She is the Sainte Blandine of American fiction.
James brought her into the limelight to emphasize the tragic longing
of her sisters for Europe. She embodied the tragic conflict of Puritan
conscience and European paganism, the same conflict which Hawthorne
dramatized in “The Marble Faun.” Una, in Hawthorne’s novel, was a
foster-sister to Daisy in her fear of the flesh and of the devil.
Lured away from their native and more primitive environment by art,
mysticism and culture, there is not enough real red blood in James’
American maidens to follow the call to the last. They soon find
themselves waylaid and they stop midway. Several of them do not survive
their disillusions. They die of despair before reaching the mystic
Grail (the “golden bowl”) unless they are rescued _in extremis_ by some
“ambassadors” from the “land of God.” Soul-fear and floating anxiety
paralyzed their wings. And yet, how ardent and eager they are to
discover the world in an intimate relation to themselves! They take the
soul of the adventurers and the pioneers to the conquest of intuition.
They would fain clasp to their bosom all that is beautiful in the
world, if their Puritan consciences allowed. The art galleries, the
romantic landscapes, the ancient monuments, the old churches are their
familiar hunting ground. How they clutch at spiritual adventures! Their
passion for sentimental expansion, their craving for introspection,
know no limits. As Milly Theale exclaims in “The Wings of the Dove,”
they want to be _abysmal_. They want “something to find out,” something
which calls for “the vigil of searching criticism” through many and
many hundred pages. There is something morbid in this bend toward
self-analysis and always thinking of one’s self. Henry James even took
children to that school of unlimited moral curiosity. “What Maisie
Knew” is a wonderful and almost frightful example of instinctive
detection of grown-up passions by a child.
When all is said, the case of Henry James had much to do with
psychological duplicity. His novels were a first-hand contribution to
the study of inhibitions. As has been justly remarked, the main object
of his books was “emotional starvation.” His psychology revolved around
“the Puritan blindness of the senses or the atrophy of emotions.” James
himself “wrote his fiction under heavy inhibitions, the result both of
personal shyness and of the peculiar timidity of his race and day.” His
chief object in writing novels was to denounce “the undervitality of
Americans.”[14]
In regard to æsthetics, Henry James won the day for the tactics
of the new writers. He anticipated Marcel Proust in his method of
journeying at random, wherever it pleased his fancy, through the
maze of psychology. He substituted what he called _appreciation for_
the old-fashioned process of dramatization. He could not dramatize
and he proved a failure on the stage. He preferred to ramble and to
meander. Modern fiction, thanks to him, cut loose from superficial
realism. He originated the _monologue intérieur_. He did not rely on
episodes to build up a novel. He had enough imagination to do without
reality. Sharp and keen as he was in analysis, he was artistic in a
synthetic way. His ambition was to display beautifully _the whole
thing_ before our eyes. He prospected the depth of our hearts without
ever losing his artistic control and his presence of mind. In this
respect the distance is slight between the disquisitions of “The Wings
of the Dove,” “The Golden Bowl” or “The Ambassadors,” and the modern
effusions of either Sherwood Anderson or James Joyce. Both are the
products of similar intellectual and artistic tactics. Immediate data
of his conscience James projected into the pages of his books through
an original kaleidoscope. His process was oblique and centrifugal. He
composed _from the center outward_, in order to give his writings their
dreamlike effect. At the end of his life he used to rave aloud, Hamlet
fashion, while dictating his novels. With such a method we are not
surprised to hear him condemn the realistic French writers who followed
Flaubert, and whom nevertheless he admired greatly, at a time when he
had not yet been able to make up his mind as to whether he could do
his work in Paris or in London. How could his atavistic Puritanism
allow him to swallow Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Loti, without
qualifications?[15] According to him the French had only “a sensuous
conscience.”
As an artist, Henry James possessed the American taste for prodigality.
He liked flourishes. He needed a superabundance of materials. If
the materials failed him, he made up for them with a prodigality of
disquisitions and arabesques. He could be deep and he could also be
sophisticated. In several of his novels a superfluity of the trimmings
hardly compensates for a thinness of the substance. His writings were
the result of what he called _saturation_. He was creative enough to
be convinced that art was not and cannot be an imitation of reality.
He who writes adds something to what he writes about. He reproached
William Dean Howells for sacrificing creative imagination to reality.
He declared himself unable to observe, even if it were possible for him
to do so, and at the same time to imagine. All perception to him was
a vision, something to soar above after going round and round it. The
transcendentalist and the detective, those two chief attitudes of the
American mind, were innate with him. His father was a Swedenborgian
and his brother William an adept of psychical research. American
undervitality redeemed itself in Henry James’ novels by a flight into
the transcendental and the introspective, along a road discovered and
traveled already by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
* * * * *
Mrs. Wharton specialized in the society novel. The author of “The House
of Mirth,” “The Fruit of the Tree,” “The Reef,” “The Age of Innocence”
is an excellent craftsman. Like Henry James, she draws from and caters
to the élite. She imported the novel of manners to America and gave to
it an original turn. It would have been impossible for her to write
or for us to read them as they are without constant reference to the
aristocratic and cultural background which Henry James insisted upon
in his novels. She draws portraits and studies environments with an
objectivity verging on indifference and even on cruelty. Her field is
limited and even narrow but it is her own and she has conscientiously
explored it. Her writings have a touch of cutting and elegant
precision. She brings everything to the surface. Her Muse is curiosity
for curiosity’s sake. In studying American high life she used about the
same process which Paul Bourget applied in French fiction to the happy
few of the Boulevard Saint Germain, that most aristocratic citadel. She
preserved the fossils of American gentry for posterity.
There is nothing telepathic in her delineations. Her characters live
on the ground floor of consciousness. Her novels are as clear and as
unmysterious as Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning after church. Contrary
to Henry James, she dramatizes more than she appreciates. She is very
deft in constructing a plot. Her method is classical and seems somewhat
old-fashioned to-day. She is a realist in the old sense of the word.
She praised Marcel Proust recently for knowing the art of incidents and
the compliment may be returned to her. At a time when, in America as in
Europe, fiction ceased to be rational to become instinctive, and when
the novelists gave up the plot for introspection, she chose to travel
the old road. Modern critics point to her flimsy psychology. They are
shocked by her indifference to social or political problems. She sticks
to high life at an epoch when historical developments take us back to
primitive and almost paleolithic humanity. Fifth Avenue and “The House
of Mirth,” with their flirts and divorcées, shrink to Lilliputian
dimensions in comparison with our chaotic world since the War. Who
cares about mésalliances or unhappy marriages when the universe looks
like a big city after an earthquake or a flood? What do we care to know
to-day how Mme. de Treymes will reconcile her faith to her unfaithful
French husband with her longing for her American fiancé? In a similar
manner the casuistry in “The Fruit of the Tree,” or “The Reef” seems
almost antediluvian.
In “The Custom of the Country,” “The Age of Innocence” and her four
novelettes on Old New York, we cannot so easily dismiss Mrs. Wharton’s
satire of American life and society at large.[16]
Undine Spragg in “The Custom of the Country” is an impressive type
of American adventuress. She is drawn from life and set against a
suggestive American background. The three successive husbands of Undine
embody the characteristic aspects of American society extremely well.
The old, and now decrepit aristocracy, is represented by Ralph Marvell,
an “undervitalized” scion of the New York gentry. Moffat stands for
the advent of the masses, while Marquis de Chelles voices the protest
of the Old World against the standards of the New. The Spragg family
and Moffat would not be out of place in a novel by Theodore Dreiser or
Sinclair Lewis. As a psychologist Mrs. Wharton made a very impressive
study of a double personality in Ralph Marvell.
“The Age of Innocence” has a much narrower range but it cuts deeper
into life. The book is a direct arraignment of Puritan respectability.
Irene Olenska, the heroine, married a European husband, like Mme. de
Treymes, and found him unfaithful. She returned to her native land to
live, too late. She developed a new soul abroad and she found herself
totally alienated from her native surroundings. Europe made her natural
and instinctive and American respectability rises up in arms against
her. America is no longer a place for her to grow in. So poor Irene
exits and lets the Puritans have the right of way.
Mrs. Wharton’s literary method is far from being Freudian. To pass
from her novels to those of Sherwood Anderson is like traveling to a
different hemisphere. She chose for herself the rule of clearness and
objectivity at any cost. And yet, she contributed a great deal to the
exploration of the American conscience. She was the first to complain
about the spiritual and moral indigence of her own characters. People
in her novels can be divided into two different classes. We meet
the behaviorists and the Freudians, those whose whole life develops
on the surface and those whose secret actions remain buried in the
subconscious. Her books are particularly rich in remarks on the sexual
complex which, according to her, makes women in America superior,
intellectually and morally, to men. She discusses at length the
problem of American happiness. She indicts behaviorism in practice.
She denounces the reduction of American ethics to a mere science of
external actions and reactions. She shows her characters deprived of
foresight or consistency in conduct. Calculation is their only standard
of behavior. _Libido_ and _ambitio_, love and greed, sum up their
elementary psychology. People in her books live without a real moral
background. She tells us that they ignore the divinities which, under
the surface of our passions, forge for the dead fatal weapons. Morally
speaking, they are uprooted. They improvise their life. They make a
quick response to external _stimuli_ and drift on the eddying surface
of existence without knowing where to cling. Of Lily Bart, the heroine
of “The House of Mirth,” we are told that she had grown without having
any tie on earth dearer to her than another. She ignored traditions and
could draw from them neither strength for herself nor tenderness for
others. The past had not crystallized slowly into the very drops of
her blood. No image of an ancient house full of memories lingered in
her eyes. She had no idea of another house, of a _maison_ built not by
hands but by hereditary devotions. She was not aware of the fact that
only the past could broaden and deepen our individual lives by tying
them mysteriously to all the accumulated human efforts.
She never knew true solidarity, outside of the brief and useless
flirtations in which she wasted her energies in an uneven struggle
against her brilliant but flimsy surroundings. All the people she
knew were like her. They resembled some atoms blown away in a frantic
whirlwind.
After all, the characters in Mrs. Wharton’s novels show themselves to
be victims of impulse. They react quickly but superficially to the
challenge of existence. They pride themselves on being practical,
self-reliant and self-controlled. They may be so in business, but not
in ethics. To borrow a practical comparison, they are not _insured_
on life and no agency which knew them well would issue to them an
insurance policy. Mrs. Wharton agrees with the majority of critics on
this point.
* * * * *
Mrs. Wharton’s psychological insight revealed itself principally in
“The House of Mirth.” Lily Bart revives Daisy Miller. She is another
instance of inhibited and repressed womanhood. Endowed with a Freudian
soul and a multiple personality, on the surface she is only a flirt,
the “moth” of Victorian novelists, the “salamander” of the American
satirists. To-day she would appear as a most courted “flapper.” But if
we read her truly, Lily Bart is much more tragic. She is a saint on the
wrong track. Hers is a romantic soul. All her life she has longed for
the knight-errant who would rescue her from herself; he never came,
because she was poor. Despite numerous escapades Lily is as pure as
her name. Suicide, at the end of her short career, is a protection _in
extremis_ against the world and against herself. It is a desperate
means to reconcile by destruction her dual person.
Mrs. Wharton has thrown a great deal of new light on the American
complex regarding the sexes. She made a special study of the ill
adaptation between man and woman in American society. If we believe
her, Americans, and especially women, are the victims of an environment
where all the romantic values of life have been upset and denied. Moral
energies have turned to the outside entirely.
Thus Mrs. Wharton goes relentlessly on. She puts the responsibility
for this lack of balance upon the American man and his ignorance of
the true values of life. Luxury and comfort are the only standards he
can imagine, and he cannot conceive of any other gifts. The American
Lancelot comes to his Guinevere with jewels, dresses or a motor car,
but he ignores the true surrender of himself. Women are too deeply
intuitive; they come too close to nature to be easily deceived by that
elementary form of chivalry. There is a more romantic allurement which
their mate cannot offer because it cannot be procured with money.
Hence the divorce between the sexes. Crystallization, proclaimed
Stendhal-Beyle, is impossible in the United States. According to that
arch cynic and admirable psychologist, attention seems to be entirely
turned toward external agreements in an attempt to do away with
practical inconveniences. When the time comes to cash in (I beg Henri
Beyle’s pardon for this crude American neologism) on so much care, so
much caution and so many reasonable arrangements, “there is not enough
life left to enjoy it.”
“Summer” and “Ethan Frome” are of a much broader human appeal. This
time Mrs. Wharton ventures into almost technical psychoanalysis.
“Summer” is one of the most frankly pagan books written in America
since “The Scarlet Letter.” The gloom in the book is of the very same
brand as that found in Dreiser’s “American Tragedy,” or in Eugene
O’Neill’s drama. North Dormer, the little rotten New England borough,
is a dungeon for all aspiring souls. Lawyer Royall is a _raté_, a
social failure. Charity Royall, his daughter, has gipsy blood in her
veins. She is a fawn and a worthy sister of Hawthorne’s Donatello
(in “The Marble Faun”). Natural desires, passions and instincts
carry everything away in “Summer” as they do in the story of Hester
Prynne, while Mrs. Wharton herself plays the part of Chillingworth,
the Freudian detective. The hereditary complex cancels the censure.
Paganism triumphs on Puritan soil once more. The sensuous symbolism
of the novel adds to its Freudian appeal. It is one of the most
pathetic cases of dramatized inhibition. And so is “Ethan Frome.” This
suggestive tale is written like a piece of classic literature. It is
deliberately objective, and yet it is entirely built on repression. A
jealous woman, two human beings instinctively mated and groping toward
each other through fears and moral anxieties, the surrender of their
whole being to the commands of the _libido_, the tragic sublimation of
their desires and the new climax of inhibition at the end for the three
participants of the drama,--all this gives a Dantesque glamor to “Ethan
Frome.”[17]
* * * * *
There was something truly Balzacian in Howells. He could tell a story;
he was not without ideas of his own; his psychology was superficial,
but not more so than that of the average man or woman whom he
portrayed. He was an expert conversationalist. His novels are spiced
with humor and geniality. How could such a ferocious moralist hide
under such a gentle smile? While American writers, like Henry James and
Jack London, took refuge against the invading dullness by a flight into
“the golden bowl” or the wilds of Alaska, or while they evaded boredom
by sarcasms, like Mark Twain, Howells courted American democracy and
accepted it _en bloc_. He adopted Babbittry. He claimed that fiction
did not need adventure, romanticism or legend, and that Life was
enough. He was a realist and hugged the commonplace to his bosom.
Howells had excellent intentions which, unfortunately, he was unable
to fulfill. As a psychologist and a moralist he does not come up to
Hawthorne’s level. In the first place his realism is limited. The same
man who declared that the artist’s business was to be “a colorless
medium through which the reader clearly sees the right and wrong”
confined himself in the description of what he called the most smiling
aspects of life, _i.e._, the most American.
He tagged as poison the art and literature which flattered the
passions, and, in order not to flatter the passions, he denied to
himself and others the right to describe them. He forced upon the
reader of his books self-appointed ghostly confessors and directors
of conscience,--clergymen, lawyers, professors, artists. He was
impassionate but he was not impartial. His ethics are abominable.
Hawthorne did not ignore the grandeur of sin. He found sinners and
blackguards interesting or made them so. Middle-class morality did
not seem to him poetic. He carefully kept his saints in contact
with evil so that they could be more pathetic and human. Howells’
Puritanism was of a very different brand. It belonged to another
period in the development of American culture. Puritanism had changed
since Hawthorne. It had become permeated with Emersonian optimism.
The worship for respectability evinced the strong convictions of
former days. Hawthorne bowed to the devil. Howells was afraid of him.
Hawthorne saw the duplicity of man himself. Howells needed a rosier
view of life, so he divided society into two entirely opposite classes.
Instead of presenting man double within himself, as he is, and of
using human duplicity as a source of pathos, he put aside the elect,
entirely and hopelessly good, and, in opposition to them, he placed the
wicked--the _a priori_ foredoomed wicked. This was bad psychology and
still worse stagecraft.
* * * * *
Howells kept idealism close to the ground, creeping. He never soared
and his saints were clipped of all wings. The elect in his books showed
very little inclination for leaving their earthly comfort to join Fra
Angelico’s mystic band in Heaven. Virtue for Howells’ happy few was an
insurance on life. They made rich marriages. They were perfect fathers
and mothers, dutiful children, model husbands and wives, prosperous
and respectable business people. Golden mediocrity, if not fortune,
was the reward of their good behavior. The sinners, on the contrary,
were branded from birth by Howells. They went from bad to worse and
were denied all redemption and atonement. The “flood of sunshine,” as
Hawthorne called the scene in the forest between Hester Prynne and
Dimmesdale, and their ecstasy of gratified emotion, must have been a
shock to Howells when he read “The Scarlet Letter.” From the start
his philosophy of life vitiated his novels. It did hide from him the
veritable aspects of existence. It limited his psychology and made
it almost childish. Mr. Firkins, who had the courage to undertake a
sentimental journey with the Puritan novelist through several hundred
pages of a bulky biography, measured his limitations as follows.
Howells never represented adultery. He handled the question of divorce
only once and with utmost caution. Only once did he dare to deal with
the troubles of marital life. Only once, and very cautiously again, did
he approach the problem of crime, which Hawthorne discussed so freely,
before Dostoievski and Theodore Dreiser. Politics, religion, science
were expurgated from his books in order not to disturb the serenity of
the good people whom he chaperoned in literature.
It is impossible to read the novels of Howells and not to feel
the iniquity of his moral system. Puritanism made him hit upon
disconcerting paradoxes and, in particular, upon that of mistaking
ethics for bourgeois respectability. Virtue in his books is the
exclusive monopoly of the well-to-do. Morality is an effort on their
part to secure for themselves the absolute monopoly of a “personality
picture” without blemish. The slightest move to alter their Puritan
identity and to mar the show which they make before the world is
denounced by them as a crime. The saints and the sinners live carefully
apart in his novels, or, if they mix, it is only through the good
offices of some charity monger or preacher of morals. He wraps his
saints in isinglass as carefully as a prophylactic toothbrush.
He protects them from all contacts. He tells us frankly that the
lawlessness of the sinners has no importance, but that the sins of a
gentleman and of a well-educated person fall upon the entire caste and
imperil the whole social order.
Let us hear these strange morals from the mouth of one of Howells’
_raisonneurs_, lawyer Atherton in “A Modern Instance.” Ben Halleck, one
of the characters in the book, has committed a crime which the Puritan
novelist could never forgive him. He loved and coveted platonically
Marcia Hubbard, when Marcia’s husband was still faithful to her. Since
then Hubbard (whom Howells foredoomed to evil) has become a degenerate
and met with a tragic end. Marcia is free. Halleck still loves her. He
can marry her and rescue her at last from her wretched existence. She
deserves it. But Howells forbids it. Between the two lovers he raises
the shadow of Halleck’s platonic aspirations. If he married Marcia, we
are told that the world would come to its end. Halleck must remain a
bachelor and abandon poor Marcia to her fate, in order to soothe the
Puritan conscience of the author. Let us hear lawyer Atherton state Ben
Halleck’s case:
If a man like Ben Halleck goes astray it’s calamitous; it confounds
the human conscience, as Victor Hugo says. All that careful
nurture in the right since he could speak, all that life-long
decency of thought and act, that noble ideal of unselfishness and
respectability to others, trampled under foot and spit upon, it’s
horrible.
We are served after this with reflections upon the true nature of good
and evil according to the code of Puritan respectability:
The natural goodness does not count. The natural man is a wild
beast, and his natural goodness is the amiability of a beast
basking in the sun when his stomach is full.... No, it’s the
implanted goodness that saves--the seed of righteousness treasured
from generation to generation and carefully watched and tended
by disciplined fathers and mothers in the hearts where they have
dropped it, it is what we call civilization.
Meanwhile lawyer Atherton sips a cup of Souchong tea sweetened and
tempered with Jersey cream which William Dean Howells guarantees pure.
(With how many lumps of sugar, however, he does not say.) Atherton’s
wife is also a Puritan and yet she finds the indictment just. How
can one pass judgment upon his fellow mortals when he is so snug and
comfortable at home? Atherton is not taken aback by the rejoinder of
his wife. The fact, he replies, that there are saints and sinners,
Athertons and Hubbards, is a piece of divine ordinance. I am not sure
that Howells ever read Voltaire’s “Candide” and still less that he
enjoyed it, but Atherton speaks exactly like Doctor Pangloss. Effects,
according to him, always follow causes; sinners are responsible for the
consequences of their sins; we have been foreordained by our parents
to go to heaven or hell; hell is an euphemism for the hereditary
disorders in our will; in the long run, even the fate of the wicked
will prove equitable. Such was the moral dungeon in which William Dean
Howells imprisoned his characters and this is what became of Calvin’s
predestination after having been blended in the _chiaro-oscuro_, of
the Puritan conscience, with Emerson’s compensations and scientific
heredity.
* * * * *
Howells tried to confine in a prison of the same sort the chief
character of “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” one of his most interesting
novels, and also one of the most repulsive for its morals. The hero of
the book is also a foredoomed sinner. His name is Jeff Durgin. Jeff
is the son of the innkeeper at Lion’s Head. He is not perfect. He is
a born teaser and has an irritable temper. He likes to play tricks on
people. While a student at Harvard he remains waterproof to “college
spirit.” His personality is too strong. He approaches society but
behaves in it like a bull in a china shop. His conduct is not above
reproach. He does not show himself a perfect gentleman according to
Boston standards. And yet, when all is told, he is not so bad as that.
But Howells needed him to teach a moral lesson and he gave him the
third degree for that. To make Jeff atone he invented one of the most
virtuous villains of his novels, the painter Westover. How Howells
could fail to detect the hypocrisy of such a character is beyond
comprehension. Jeff’s crime consisted of shaking the branches of a New
England apple tree loaded with fruits over the head of vindictive and
priggish Westover. Was it necessary for that to reserve a seat in hell
for Jeff Durgin? Was there any proportion between Jeff’s venial offence
and the wrath of the virtuous Westover in branding Jeff with this
terrible indictment: “What you are you will remain forever”? Howells
seems not to have heeded Westover’s hypocrisy when, at the end of the
book, he wins away by his sermons the girl whom Jeff had loved all
his life. _Summum jus, summa injuria._ Such sophisticated and twisted
notions of right and wrong could enter only a diseased conscience.
* * * * *
Had Howells at least succeeded in making his saints as interesting as
his sinners! But this was not the case. His ideals were those of the
average and banal humanity, of the sentimental middle classes against
which American literature is now in revolt. Babbitt himself would have
proved too modern, too genial, too “peppy” for Howells. Main Street
would be his paradise without Carol Kennicott for a neighbor. Carol
was much too progressive and natural for “the Supreme Court of Appeal
of American Literature,” as Mark Twain liked to call the author of
“The Lady of the Aroostook.” Howells’ ideal people were the Laphams
and the Kentons, the dull couples whose lives were wasted in pursuit
of commonplace felicity and comfort without any higher ambition than
to brood under their wings (if they had any), sons and daughters as
dull as they were themselves. Howells’ characters do not worry much
about subconsciousness. They ran no danger of becoming patients of
Doctor Freud. They were much too “normal” for that. A plunge into
subconsciousness would have made them unhappy. It would have revealed
to them the inanity of their ethics and the lies of their petty
lives. They had better ignore it, and follow Colonel Silas Lapham’s
advice. One day Colonel Lapham had taken the boat to go to his country
residence. He is a typical American bourgeois. According to the legend,
when the ostrich wants to ignore the storm, she buries her head in the
sand. Thus did Colonel Lapham bury his head in the newspapers. When
he was through with the news, he felt an immense boredom. But why not
observe the people around him, and try to find, as a solace, what there
was in their minds? Here is the Colonel’s answer:
“Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose it was meant we should
know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of
his own hands. As long as he is in his own hands, there is some
hopes of his doing something with himself; but, if a fellow has
been found out--even if he has not been found out to be so very
bad--it’s pretty much all up with him. _No, sir, I don’t want to
know people through and through._”
Howells was true to his word. He did not want to be a true realist.
Optimism and respectability made him take the side of hypocrisy
against truth at any cost. To better defend the bourgeois standards
he volunteered, early in his career, as the sponsor and knight in
attendance of the _jeune fille_, as the protector of the unamended
marital institutions and the irreconcilable enemy of divorce. He became
in particular the advocate of the _motherly feeling_ which modern
critics regard justly as the American _complex par excellence_. He
viewed life as a blind alley, and matrimony as a chamber of torture
which reminds one of Edgar Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
_Lasciate ogni speranza voi ché entrate!_
What would Howells have said, if he had read the chapter on “The Virgin
and the Dynamo” in the book of Henry Adams’ education? He regarded love
as a short cut to marriage and marriage as a penitentiary for life. How
disillusioned a moralist the Puritan novelist must have been when he
resorted to a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument in favor of matrimony,
like the following:
The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a strain of wrong and
insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without
lesion; and sometimes (Howells has not counted how often) the
strength that knits society together might appear to the eye of the
faltering faith the curse of those immediately bound by it. Two
people by no means reckless of each other’s rights and feelings,
but even tender of them for the most part, may tear each other’s
heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though if
they were any other two they would not speak or look at each other
again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a curious
spectacle, _and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of the
divinity of the institution_.
It certainly does, and also of the monstrous paradoxes to which Puritan
rigorism lead Howells. The wedding ring, the hoop skirt and the
hearse,--such was his romantic outlook of life. William Dean Howells
was anything but a Greek.
CHAPTER IV
_Theodore Dreiser as a Bio-Chemist_
Few books have been subjected to more discussion and criticism than
those of Theodore Dreiser. As a novelist, a short-story writer, an
essayist and a playwright, he never has coaxed his readers. Far from
this; he has even chosen to tire them out. He impersonates a radical
and an almost trivial realism. Critics in sympathy with his writings
ask us to place him in his own time, in order that we may understand
him. He is the historian of a disillusioned America, of an America
which sits anxious among its heaps of riches, an America which has
lost the romantic faith in itself. It is a country of ever-increasing
material comfort and luxury, of quick gains and of tremendous affairs,
a land where the dollar is as rapidly lost as earned. Philanthropy
abroad and merciless competition at home, “an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth,” sensational criminal trials, scandals and panics,--in
brief, the most stupendous utilitarian civilization that the world has
ever seen, a Babel of towers scraping the sky to make it rain more
money: such is America in Theodore Dreiser’s massive and conscientious
“The Financier,” “The Titan,” “An American Tragedy.” However, it would
be a grave mistake from the start if we catalogued him among the social
novelists, in the same class with Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair or Jack
London. He never tried to reform society by his writings.
His social studies are always viewed from an individual angle. He can
picture the American scene with the matter-of-fact precision of an
expert reporter, a reporter almost entirely devoid of imagination, but
with a love for scrutinizing the human heart. He is less interested
in America at large than in the Americans, and less in the Americans
than in humanity as such. This gives him a large outlook despite his
apparent narrowness. One of his familiar points is the disintegration
of a character under the pressure of the environment. Even when he
stages a social tragedy, as he did in “The Financier” and “The Titan,”
he locates it within an individual conscience.
Let us get at Dreiser’s pedigree by the same biographical method which
he applies to the characters in his books. He was born in a small
Indiana town in 1871. His father was an emigrant from the Rhineland
who came to America to escape conscription. Though a nonconformist in
politics, he was a strict adherent of Roman Catholicism. He did not
make a success of his life and may be taken as a prototype of what his
son calls the “undermen.” He had nothing Nietzschean in him. There were
thirteen children in the family, and Theodore came next to the last,
an offspring of that mysterious biological evolution with which, as
an author, he was going to be so much concerned. One of his brothers,
Paul, had an artistic temperament and was not without literary talent.
Theodore has drawn his portrait in “Twelve Men.” Paul Dreiser, or
Dresser, was a seductive Bohemian, a sort of Rameau’s nephew, several
of whose popular songs are still remembered. Of his sisters Theodore
Dreiser tells us that, like the Jennie Gerhardts and Sister Carries
of his novels, several of them eloped early from home in order to
escape utter poverty. Theodore himself had to set to menial work to
make a living at an early age. He took up odd jobs and after a hurried
flight through college, he began as a reporter wandering from city to
city, from Saint Louis to Chicago and then to Pittsburgh and New York.
He always felt an instinctive craving for living close to everyday
life and for observing things and people around him with a keen and
circumstantiated attention, which never excluded a sort of underground
and subdued pity. Never a sentimentalist, Dreiser was however always
deeply human. He completed his apprenticeship as a writer in the midst
of an intimate contact with life, collecting the material for his books
at first hand. While running errands as a reporter he would brood over
his impressions, in the company of a few enthusiastic friends, after
feverishly reading Balzac and Émile Zola. His friends encouraged him to
write about people just as he found them around him.
In these early days of his career Dreiser applied himself to the task
of hunting for news with the cunning and pluck of a real detective.
He had the gift of finding romance in everyday existence, and when
the time came to apply a meaning and a philosophy to what he saw,
he turned to Herbert Spencer for guidance. In 1900 appeared “Sister
Carrie,” which the censors vetoed immediately after its publication.
Then appeared in slow succession “Jennie Gerhardt,” “The Financier,”
the first volume of an unfinished trilogy, the second part of which
was called “The Titan.” In 1915 Dreiser published “The Genius” and ten
years later “An American Tragedy,” the history of a crime recounted
in two huge volumes. Let us not forget Dreiser’s short stories,
“Twelve Men,” “Free and Other Stories,” and “Chains.” From an artistic
standpoint these are the best things that he has ever written. And then
we have the autobiography of the author, “A Traveller at Forty,” and “A
Book about Myself,” two self-drawn portraits of first importance to the
study of Dreiser as an artist and as a man. His complete philosophy is
to be found in “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub” and also in many pages of “A Hoosier
Holiday.”
It may well be doubted whether any other modern writer has ever
succeeded in carrying the doctrine of realism as far as Dreiser has.
It was a heroic effort on his part. He himself tells that, when he
began to write, it was impossible to write realistic novels in this
country. Around 1900 idealistic America was nestled too snugly in its
mid-Victorian sentimentality, not to show its teeth at an American
Maupassant intent upon depicting life as it is. As Dreiser ironically
puts it, people were not accustomed, in those days, to “calling a
spade a spade.” They wanted shock absorbers and pillows all around
them. Their minds as well as their houses were all painted pink,
and woe to the fanatic who tried to besmirch them with drab hues.
Theoretically Americans pretended to admire Tolstoi, Flaubert, Balzac
and Maupassant from a safe distance, and yet their bookshelves were
loaded with the books of the mid-Victorian writers bound to match the
furniture. Dreiser does not deny that the mid-Victorians had something
to say about life, but they were afraid of saying too much. The great
English writers of the middle nineteenth century were well aware of
the vanities and lies of human existence, but they had pledged their
word of honor to themselves and to the public that they would never
reveal what they knew. Idealism spread a veil over it. The result was
that, like William Dean Howells, American authors displayed existence
only in its most smiling aspects of existence. This was the safest way
not to discourage optimism. Christian people could thus be happy. They
could lead quiet and respectable lives at home, rear their children in
the fear of God, go to church on Sundays and ignore trouble, provided,
adds Dreiser, that thieves, cheats and dogs gave them permission to
do so. In the books of the period men appear only as heroes. If their
daughters met with any mishaps, they were charged to some _ex professo_
scapegoats. Otherwise things in general look as if our first parents
had never committed the original sin. It was the duty of the writer,
the preacher and the politician to confirm people in this optimism and
to promise them felicity in this world and the world hereafter.
As for Dreiser, he was of a different type of mind. He called himself
an independent. He also was in favor of progress but he refused to
believe that it could be achieved without having a scientific view
of things. He refused to stand by any creed. He declared that Truth,
Beauty and Love were only vital lies and capitalized nonentities. Did
he believe in the ideal or did he deny it? One thing he knew, namely,
that man and the world are a fifty-fifty mixture of good and evil. This
was the creed of a realist and Dreiser has never adhered to any other.
He shows a real enthusiasm for facts. He can distil beauty from the
most trivial heap of junk. He himself has told us many times that he
owes his passion for the trivial to his experience as a journalist.
As a true journalist, and as a typical American, he is much more
interested in the news than in the editorials. This explains why
there is a complete absence of ethics and metaphysics in his books.
He rarely comments upon the actual achievements of his heroes. The
editorial rooms of a newspaper, we are told, are an incubator of lies
where ready-made notions are concocted to be swallowed at one gulp.
Humanity, progress, character, morality, the sanctity of the home, and
so forth,--these bribes for the fools come out of the editorial rooms.
A reporter, on the contrary, is only concerned with things and people
as they are. He does not wear gloves to write. He is after what happens
and not what should happen; not after an ideal but after truth. The
rule for the reporter is to get at the news and by the quickest route.
Let him report anything he wants to, provided that he can do it faster
and better than any of his competitors. The public must be served. The
public clamors for news. They must have it.
When he speaks of the reporter, Dreiser gives up all the ethical
standards. Truth alone matters. He knows that a good reporter shows
no scruples. He must get at the facts and to do this all means are
justified, even the trickiest ones.
With all his faults Dreiser prefers journalists to philosophers:
journalists, according to him, are free of what he calls the
“moralistic mush.” After having been through the journalistic mill
for some time they cannot be sentimental, and leave to other people
the ranting about patriotism, justice, truth and the like. They know
the fanatic for what he is, a man ready to make people swallow fairy
tales, and to draw personal profits from his hypocrisy. As for the
politicians, the journalists see them in their true light, selfish
intriguers who gamble with popular ignorance and passions. Even judges
stand to him just for what they are, _i.e._, men lucky enough to secure
good positions and careful to steer their boat in the wind of public
opinion.
Once Dreiser called on an editor and while he was waiting he looked
about him at the suggestive inscriptions which a mysterious hand had
written in unmistakable characters upon the walls. In true American
fashion those characters flashed for the members of the staff the
decalogue of their profession. EXACTITUDE! EXACTITUDE! EXACTITUDE!
WHO? WHAT? WHERE? HOW? THE FACTS! THE COLOR! THE FACTS! But Dreiser
fails to tell us that that day he found the essentials of his literary
programme. Not imagination, but attention--microscopic attention--is
his muse. No realistic writer has been truer to Locke’s aphorism
according to which there is nothing in our minds which has not come to
them through the senses. He owes to journalistic tactics not only his
literary processes, but most of the content of his novels. They are
borrowed in a lump from what the French call _faits divers_, _i.e._,
from the news columns. His great social novels, “The Financier” and
“The Genius,” are dramatized pieces of muck-raking. They leave very
little, if anything, to the imagination. They deal with a then recent
scandal involving a Philadelphia magnate. Dreiser did not have to
invent the story. He went to the spot to gather information and, as a
reporter does, he got his man. To build up his Cowperwood, Dreiser did
not need to use even one tenth of the imagination which Cuvier showed
in reconstructing the dynosaur. Dreiser is not a novelist. He is an
historian. Were it only for his sake, the word fiction as applied to
a presentation of real life under an assumed name and in an anonymous
setting, should be effaced from the English dictionary. Why invent and
imagine when reality is teeming with surprise, and why buy the “Arabian
Nights” when we have the daily paper and the last news? Dreiser never
had any trouble in passing from the composition room to the desk of
the novelist. He never went far for subjects. Let others go to the
South Seas, to Alaska, to Europe or the East, to find their heroes and
heroines. Dreiser sets his camera in the middle of the street. And--by
the way--who is the greatest idealist, the fictitious writer who needs
castles in Spain for romance, or the unflinching and intuitive observer
who can perceive an epic in the most trivial events of every week day?
Dreiser does not hunt for romance; he waits for it at home. The daily
paper brings him more material than he wants. He has listed for us some
of those thrillers that he can buy ready-made for a few cents. Here are
a few of them, fresh from the printing-press.
I. A young girl is in love with a young man whom her father dislikes.
The girl and the boy have been drawn toward each other by that vital
force which acts as a _deus ex machina_ in Dreiser’s novels (Dreiser
calls _bio-chemistry_ what Goethe named _elective affinities_ and G.
B. Shaw the _vital force_). Despite the father’s opposition the young
couple marry in secret. The groom’s parent is furious when he hears of
it. In a fit of drunkenness he kills his son. Only his daughter, by
telling a lie, can save him at court. _What will she do?_ And do we
need to go to Shakespeare or Corneille to find a thrill? What have
capitalized abstractions, like Duty, Law, Justice, to do with this
blunt, brutal and yet highly dramatic alternative?
II. A man is born with a passion for business. If he can make a merger
of several independent firms, he will be able to manufacture and
sell to the public, at low cost, a product which will make him rich.
But, in order to do this, he must face either one of the following
possibilities: (_a_) He can form a stock company with equal rights
for all of its members; (_b_) he can manufacture the article without
personal profit or loss; (_c_) he can share the risks and profits
of the venture with a few associates and strangle the competitors;
(_d_) or stand pat. Attitudes (_b_) and (_c_) are called moral. If,
on the contrary, the business man decides in favor of (_a_) or (_d_)
he declares war on society. What will an intelligent and aggressive
personality do and, once more, what have capitalized abstractions
to do with such a mighty instinct when it is confronted by adverse
circumstances?
III. A young man has committed a crime. His father realizes that the
crime of his son is his own fault since he failed to give the youth the
right sort of education. The law expects the father to surrender his
child, whom he loves with all his heart and for whose crime he feels
responsible. What will the father do?
There is nothing romantic about all this, declares Dreiser. This is not
romance, it is truth such as can be found at any time in the dailies.
Dreiser is satisfied with this kind of material. There is more than a
fortuitous resemblance between story Number II and “The Financier.”
The last-mentioned episode reads very much like “An American Tragedy.”
With his imagination of facts the novelist has been able to unravel in
many hundred pages all the possibilities contained in a few newspaper
headlines. This confession about his sources will save many scholars,
in years to come the trouble they have to face when they try to
identify Père Grandet or Emma Bovary. Only a romantic writer can think
of hiding what he borrows from life. The true realist, Dreiser or
Zola, is not ashamed of being caught, his camera in hand. The closer
the resemblance between the original and the copy, the greater the art
which produced it.
* * * * *
As a philosopher, as well as an artist, Dreiser still remains a
journalist. His novels are no more or no less immoral than a newspaper.
Why should we grant the newspaperman the right to record coolly and
without comment a crime or a scandal, and yet brand the novelist as
immoral when he chooses to do the same? Dreiser does not comment in
his novels; he reports. His philosophy is not ready-made; it has not
been elaborated in a study or in a pulpit. It was born in the realm of
chance and of current events, from incidents and accidents, close to
the morgue, the charnel house, the brothel, the slum, the hospital, the
police station, where Dreiser used to report. There wisdom came to him
as it did to Hamlet in the churchyard. Life is the text and our actions
are the comments. A loyal and sincere seeker of truth, Theodore Dreiser
never interposes his own personality between his characters and the
reader. In this respect he is still more objective than his master,
Balzac. He preaches no sermon. He shows things and people as they are.
If there is somewhere a conscience, it must be in the heart of him or
her who reads through the book.
Dreiser is a moralist, but he preaches his morals outside of his
novels. With one hand he composes his massive, clumsy and realistic
narratives, deliberately objective and amoral. With the other he holds
the pen of the traveler, the philosopher and the essayist. Read, for
instance, his admirable essay on “The Inevitable Equation.” It is
as clear an elucidation of the writer’s mind as could be expected.
This sort of double-dealing with his readers came out of the author’s
loyalty toward others and himself. A conscientious and skilful
journalist will not make the mistake of confusing the news with the
editorial matter. Philosophy and facts belong to two different orders.
The one is the order of the mind, the other that of nature. Better keep
them apart than to see one giving the lie to the other.
_Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas._
Outside of his novels Theodore Dreiser has often shown himself an
original thinker, and, even when his philosophy has lacked originality,
he has made up for it by the strength of his convictions. His outlook
on life is as little cheerful as that of Voltaire in “Candide” or
Anatole France in “Penguin Island.” The true realist, like a true
psychologist, is a born pessimist. Only the ignorant can be blind to
the human tragedy. Let us praise Dreiser for seeing the ugly side of
life without altogether losing faith in it. Experience has taught
him many a bitter lesson as to the place of man in the universe. One
cannot be a reporter and still sing every day Browning’s famous hymn to
optimism:
The year is at the spring,
The day is at the morn,
God’s in his heaven;
All’s right with the world.
Even a self-satisfied poet, at ease under the beautiful Italian sky,
can forget himself now and then and blaspheme. Not so Theodore Dreiser.
This is a sober and gloomy portrait of life, such as Lucretius used to
paint it:
Common dust swept into our atmosphere makes our beautiful sunsets
and blue sky. Sidereal space, as we know it, is said to be one
welter of strangely flowing streams of rock and dust, a wretched
mass made attractive only by some vast compulsory coalition into
a star. Stars clash and blaze, and the whole great complicated
system seems one erosive, chaffering, bickering effort, with
here and there a tendency to stillness and petrification. This
world, as we know it, the human race and the accompanying welter
of animals and insects, do they not, aside from momentary phases
of delight and beauty, often strike you as dull, aimless, cruel,
useless? Are not the processes by which they are produced or those
by which they live (the Chicago slaughter-houses, for instance),
stark, relentless, brutal, shameful even?--life living on life,
the preying of one on another, the compulsory ageing of all, the
hungers, thirsts, destroying losses and pains.[18]
Dreiser’s philosophy may not be very cheerful, but it is genuine and
far more original than could be expected from a writer of fiction.
Spencer and Huxley--not to forget Nietzsche--robbed Dreiser of his
religious beliefs and left him in a quandary of philosophical nihilism.
A summary of his creed may be set forth about as follows: There are
only facts. The moral and religious interpretations of life are
erroneous. They fail to cope with reality. Dreiser is a self-confessed
agnostic. The key to the riddles of human destiny will be found, not
in metaphysics, but in bio-chemistry. Idealism is a lie. Dreiser
has called himself a man longing for poetry and at the same time a
materialist ardently enamored with life. He doubts, on the other
hand--to use his own words--whether a human being, no matter how poetic
of material he may have been, has ever thrown over the scenes of this
world, material or spiritual, a glance more avid and covetous than his
own. His challenge to idealism rests upon the feeling that there exists
a gap between reality as it can be observed and its interpretation
at the hand of the professional philosophers. He is ready to adhere
to principles and to accept interpretations, provided that they be
in accord with facts as scientifically determined. Meanwhile he sees
little proportion between the world such as it is, and the creeds
or systems imagined on its account. Our systems of thought belie
experience. Ethics contradict bio-chemistry. There are people whose
particular interest seems to be to disfigure things as they are, and to
present man to himself as being different from what he is in reality.
This is hypocrisy. Life is not a harmony but a struggle. Our existence
is a tragic conflict of forces, aspirations, passions and energies,
all excellent in themselves, but perverted by irrational repressions.
Let us admire Dreiser’s frankness on this point. Man, to him, is not
a pre-Raphaelite seraph dressed with wings, but a being of blood and
flesh. Like Whitman and Jack London, Dreiser is full of an orgiastic
enthusiasm for the human body. He cannot help reducing the moral to the
physical, the soul to the body, and translating psychology in terms of
bio-chemistry:
In spite of all the so-called laws and prophets, there is
apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right
not to do, if you reach the place where the significance of the
social chain in which you find yourself is not satisfactory. The
murderer has under the written law no right to murder anybody. It
is perfectly plain that he has the right if he is willing to pay
the penalty, or if he can evade it. Conscience, this thing called
conscience, to which people repeatedly appeal, is, as I have
pointed out elsewhere, little more than a built-up net of social
acceptances and agreements in regard to society or the agreed
state of facts in which we all find ourselves when we arrive here;
in other words, all the things which we wish to do and be, or
avoid.[19]
In this unromantic universe Dreiser moves with admiration and delight.
At the bottom of his philosophy there is a calm and serene--but
disenchanted--individualism, very much like that which took Nietzsche
beyond evil and good. Dreiser accepts the struggle for survival like a
convinced Darwinian. He views life as a chaos of blind and amorphous
energies roused by mysterious and ominous ferments. The game of life
is that of the great individuals against the masses. Great men tending
to self-expression and self-expansion find themselves blocked by the
overwhelming numbers of elementary and gregarious humanity. Hence the
war between society and the élite of supermen. Dreiser’s evolutionism,
however, does not in the least imply an idea of progress. Change there
is, eternal change, mutation, compensation, and, in the last analysis
eternal return.
Thus Dreiser’s evolutionism is purely organic and static. It is
strictly realistic. The fact that a few great individuals emerge
from the mass does not justify higher expectations for the future
of mankind. Besides, they do not always emerge. Many dynosaurs and
superhuman giants fail pitifully and are buried alive in the mud.
Geology and anthropology endorse Dreiser’s pessimism on the subject of
man’s fight with the blind forces of nature.
Life is a struggle, but not necessarily a struggle toward the better,
as the idealists imagine. Though a fairly good Darwinian, Dreiser would
fain believe in the survival of the fittest. War does not ever make for
better. It slaughters blindly left and right, and the bravest, the most
daring and courageous are always the first to die, as the World War
proved not long ago. Dreiser’s supermen are a product of change, human
machines moved by vices and passions, greed and lust. They may win over
their fellow mortals, but they have to cope with Nature, Nature without
an Emersonian Oversoul, and all of them surrender finally to its blind
dictates. The man who wrote “The Titan,” “The Financier,” “The Genius”
hit the hardest blow to American idealism. He might well be nicknamed
the Homer of the heroes who fail, the Balzac of moral and physiological
failures. But an artist does not much care to know where the world
goes; he is chiefly concerned with life and motion. Where there is
struggle there is life and motion and rhythm, and this it is which
makes the world artistically interesting and attractive, and it does
this for Dreiser. Even from the utilitarian point of view (when it is
told), there is compensation in the existence of the giants. It would
of course be folly on our part to try to block the way of the lion and
the tiger. We had better carefully keep at a safe distance:
My own guess would be that we, or rather the race, are going on
to a greater individuality, plus a greater weakness as to its
component and clinging atoms, providing it does not suffer an
endless dark age of mass control or total extinction in some form
or other. Nietzsche appeared preaching individuality, greater
individuality for everybody who could achieve it, and to a certain
extent he was right. Greater individuality than the world has
yet seen will certainly be achieved by some.... If to have a
Woolworth Building, a transcontinental railroad, a Panama Canal, a
flying machine, to say nothing of literature and art, means that
we must endure a man who is dull, greedy, vain, ridiculous in
many ways or even an advocate of every conceivable vice in order
to twist his brain into some strange phantasmagorical tendency,
the result of which will be some one of these things, there
are many who would enthusiastically say, “Then let us have him
along with all his lacks or vices, in order that this other may
be.”... For my part I am convinced that so-called vice or crime
and destruction and so-called evil, are as fully a part of the
universal creative process as are all the so-called virtues, and do
as much good--providing, as they do, for one thing, the religionist
and the moralist with their reasons for existing. At best, ethics
and religion are but one face of a shield which is essentially
irreligious and ethical as to its other face, or the first would
not exist.[20]
Imagination has never been Theodore Dreiser’s forte, at least, not
the kind of imagination which soars beyond memory and adds fancy to
experience. Yet the essential of his philosophy will be found in
the first pages of “The Financier,” in the disguise of an allegory.
He tells us how, when still a child, Cowperwood began to doubt the
story of the origins of mankind as it is told in the book of Genesis.
The Bible did not give him a satisfactory interpretation of human
actions, so he turned to a fishmonger near his home. The fishmonger
had tubs full of fish. They gave him his first lesson in philosophy.
I cannot help quoting the whole anecdote as a faithful summary and an
illustration of the struggle for existence. The battle between the
lobster and the squid was indeed a natural prelude to introduce the
readers to the exploits of what is commonly called among mortals a
“shark,” and Cowperwood is one of the first brand:
The lobster lay at the bottom of the clear glass tank on the yellow
sand, apparently seeing nothing. You could not tell in which way
his beady, black button eyes were looking--but apparently they
were never off the body of the squid. The latter, pale and waxy in
texture, looking very much like pork fat or jade, was moving about
in torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently never out of
the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of his body
began to disappear, snapped off by the relentless claws of his
pursuer. The latter, as young Cowperwood was one day a witness,
would leap like a catapult to where the squid was apparently idly
dreaming, and the squid, very alert, would dart away, shooting out
at the same time a cloud of ink, behind which it would disappear.
It was not always completely successful, however. Some small
portions of its body or its tail were frequently left in the claws
of the monster below. Days passed, and, now fascinated by the
drama, young Cowperwood came daily.[21]
The size of the squid’s body decreased day after day and he wasted
all his ink ammunitions. The battle now was too uneven to last. One
evening, when Frank came back to watch it, he saw a crowd around the
tub. The lobster was still squinting in his corner and close to him
lay the squid or, at least the little that was left of him. Young
Cowperwood felt aggrieved. He had come too late to enjoy the most
thrilling part of the fight, but he did not miss its lesson. Such was
life! Lobsters and squids fought and finally one was bound to devour
the other. The lobsters fed on the squids, men fed on the lobsters
and--who fed on men? For days and weeks, says Dreiser, young Cowperwood
could think of nothing but lobsters and squids. This was a true picture
of life and of what it had in store for an ambitious young man ready to
start on his career. It filled him with courage and anxiety.
Dreiser will never forget the tub where the lobster got the best
of the squid, despite its camouflage. There at last you had a true
lesson in behaviorism and on the art of _stimuli_ and responses, an
ethics construed out of automatic actions. Henceforth human beings in
Dreiser’s books will be easily divided into two classes, those which
eat and those which are eaten, the lobsters and the squids. Crude and
elementary as this classification may well seem, it is based upon an
honest attempt to study life at close quarters.
* * * * *
Such an unsophisticated view of this world did not inspire the novelist
with much indulgence in dealing with his own country. Darwinism made
him rather harsh with democratic institutions. He is too fond of the
trivial and the commonplace not to cherish the United States. “A
Hoosier Holiday” is a faithful and, on the whole, an eulogious and
sometimes lyrical survey of America. This masterpiece of indifference
to the laws of literary perspective is, taken altogether, the most
suggestive collection of _Reisebilder_. Here is the American Middle
West photographed from life, an easy-going, happy-go-lucky country,
half modern, half patriarchal with his cornucopias teeming with corn
and cattle, half savage, half civilized, half awake, half vegetative,
more remote from Europe than the cannibals in Typee’s island. Dreiser,
the satirist, the philosopher and the artist, keeps a harmonious copy
all through the book for our delight. “A Hoosier Holiday” is a pleasant
medley of sketches, cartoons, soliloquies and lyrical outbursts. It is
the best book which Dreiser has written.
It is apparent that America is very dear to the heart of Theodore
Dreiser, although he does not spare her his criticisms. He loves her,
pets her and scolds her, as he would a child:
Dear, crude, asinine, illusioned Americans! How I love them! And
the great fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific holding them
all, and their dreams! How they rise, how they hurry, how they run
under the sun! Here they are building a viaduct, there a great
road, yonder plowing fields or sowing grain, their faces lit with
eternal, futile hope of happiness. You can see them religiously
tending store, religiously running a small-town country hotel,
religiously mowing the grass, religiously driving shrewd bargains
or thinking that much praying will carry them to heaven--the dear
things!--and then among them are the bad men, the loafers, the
people who chew tobacco and swear and go to the cities Saturday
nights and “cut up” and don’t save their money!
Dear, dear, darling Yankee land--“my country ’tis”--when I think of
you and all your ills and all your dreams and all your courage and
your faith--I could cry over you, wringing my hands.[22]
And yet he prefers America to Europe:
And why? Well, because of a certain indefinable something--either
of hope or courage or youth or vigor or illusion, what you will,
but the average American, or the average European transplanted to
America, is a better or at least a more dynamic person than the
average European at home, even the Frenchman. He has more grit,
verve, humor, or a lackadaisical slapdash method which is at once
efficient, self-sustaining, comforting. His soul, in spite of all
the chains wherewith the ruling giants are seeking to fetter him,
is free.
As yet, regardless of what is or may be, he does not appear to
realize that he is not free or that he is in any way oppressed.
There are no ruling classes, to him. He sings, whistles, jests,
laughs boisterously; matches everybody for cigars, beers, meals;
chews tobacco, spits freely, smokes, swears, rolls to and fro,
cocks his hat on one side of his head, and altogether by and large
is a regular “hell of a feller.” He does not know anything about
history, or very little, and doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t know
anything about art,--but, my God, who with the eternal hills and
all nature for a background cannot live without representative
art? His food is not extraordinarily good, though plentiful, his
clothes are made by Stein-Bloch, or Hart, Schaffner and Marx, and
altogether he is a noisy, blatant, contented mess--but, oh, the
gay, self-sufficient soul of him! No moans! No tears! Into the
teeth of destiny he marches, whistling “Yankee Doodle” or “Turkey
in the Straw.” In the parlance of his own streets, “Can you beat
him?”[23]
And yet--
At other times, viewing the upstanding middle class American
with his vivid suit, yellow shoes, flaring tie and conspicuous
money roll, I want to compose an ode in praise of the final
enfranchisement of the common soul. How much better these
millions, I ask you, with their derby and fedora hats, their
ready-made suits, their flaring jewelry, automobiles and a general
sense of well-being, and even perfection, if you will, than a race
of slaves or serfs, dominated by grand dukes, barons, beperfumed
and beribboned counts, daimios, and lords and ladies, however
cultivated and artistic these may appear! True, the latter would
act more gracefully, but would they be any the more desirable
for that, actually? I hear a thousand patrician-minded souls
exclaiming, “Yes, of course,” and I hear a million lovers of
democracy insisting “No.” Personally, I would take a few giants in
every field, well curbed, and then a great and comfortable mass
such as I see about me in these restaurants, for instance, well
curbed also. Then I would let them mix and mingle.
Dreiser’s patriotism is not blind. The future of his country fills him
with worry and anxiety. Looking forward as a philosopher, he looks upon
American civilization as upon a brilliant phase, though not a final
one, in the world’s evolution. Bossuet, in his discourse on universal
history, viewed nations and empires as many toys in the hands of a
divine Providence. Dreiser considers them as the playthings of Chance.
A faithful believer in the law of change, he has little illusion left
on the subject of the rights of men, brotherhood, freedom. Life is a
dream, and this great American Commonwealth, whose achievements fill
him with pride and enthusiasm, may well be also another dream:
Happy, happy people! Yet for the dream’s sake, as I told myself
at this time, and as against an illimitable background of natural
chance and craft, I would like to see this and the other sections
with which it is so closely allied, this vast Republic, live on.
It is so splendid, so tireless. Its people, in spite of their
defects and limitations, sing so at their tasks. There are dark
places, but there are splendid points of light, too. One is their
innocence, complete and enduring; another is their faith in ideals
and the Republic. A third is their optimism and buoyancy of soul,
their courage to get up in the morning and go up and down the
world, whistling and singing. Oh, the whistling, singing American,
with his jest and his sound heart and that light of humorous
apprehension in his eyes! How wonderful it all is! It isn’t
English, or French, or German, or Spanish, or Russian, or Swedish,
or Greek. It’s American, “Good Old United States,”--and for that
reason I liked this region and all these other portions of America
that I have ever seen. New England is not so kindly, the South not
so hopeful, the Far West more so, but they have something of these
characteristics which I have been describing.
And for these reasons I would have this tremendous, bubbling
Republic live on, as a protest perhaps against the apparently too
unbreakable rule that democracy, equality, or the illusion of it,
is destined to end in disaster. It cannot survive ultimately, I
think. In the vast, universal sea of motion, where change and decay
are laws, and individual power is almost always uppermost, it must
go under--but until then--
We are all such pathetic victims of chance, anyhow. We are born,
we struggle, we plan, and chance blows all our dreams away. If,
therefore, one country, one State dares to dream the impossible,
why cast it down before its ultimate hour? Why not dream with it?
It is so gloriously, so truly a poetic land. We were conceived in
ecstasy and born in dreams.
And so, were I one of sufficient import to be able to speak to my
native land, the galaxy of States of which it is composed, I would
say: Dream on. Believe. Perhaps it is unwise, foolish, childlike,
but dream anyhow. Disillusionment is destined to appear. You may
vanish as have other great dreams, but even so, what a glorious, an
imperishable memory!
“Once,” will say those historians of far distant nations of times
yet unborn, perchance, “once there was a great republic. And its
domain lay between a sea and a sea--a great continent. In its youth
and strength it dared assert that men were free and equal, endowed
with certain inalienable rights. Then came the black storms of
life--individual passions and envies, treasons, stratagems, spoils.
The very gods, seeing it young, dreamful, of great cheer, were
filled with envy. They smote and it fell. But, oh, the wondrous
memory of it! For in those days men were free, _because they
imagined they were free_.” Of dreams and the memory of them is life
compounded.[24]
This loyal citizen of democratic America is too good a Darwinian to
believe in equality. He sees the United States like the lobster and the
squid in the tub, as a land of bitter conflicts scarcely concealed by
humanitarianism, a land where the strongest coaxes the weak in order
to stifle him more effectively. As a philosopher Dreiser shows little
respect for the masses, although they delight his artistic sense. He
has little or no confidence in them. If any change for the better
happens in human conditions, we must attribute it to the supermen,
who are acting as Providence first for their own profit, but also
indirectly for that of the greater mass of mortals. Great men are the
sole palliation offered by Nature to the average mediocrity of the
human race. Dreiser’s partiality for the supermen has gone as far as
praising as the most wonderful of all books Machiavelli’s “The Prince,”
that bible of crafty and cynical statesmen. He praised Alexander,
Caesar, Hannibal and Napoleon like another Carlyle. These were men of
prey, sharks and vultures, but the energy of Nature was seething within
them with its most virulent ferments. As a masterpiece of bio-chemistry
they stand out preëminently among the _homoculi_. Of course the fight
with the giants and the dwarfs is unequal. The masses do not give the
supermen their chance. Dreiser bemoans that plight. Turning to his
country he waves to the captains of industry as the true reincarnations
of Alexander and Bonaparte. During a visit to the Vatican galleries he
was impressed, he tells us, by a striking air of resemblance between
certain American magnates and the proconsuls or the emperors of Rome!
This hero worship explains to us why Theodore Dreiser cannot refrain
from feeling some admiration even for such authentic villains as his
Frank Cowperwood. Biology and ethics play at the tug-of-war in his
novels. He cannot accept the criminal, but neither can he condemn him
without a mixed feeling of aversion and awe in the presence of his
strength. The call-of-the-wild lures him as strongly as it does Jack
London. He adores sheer force as an athlete does the sight of a perfect
figure, without any admixture of moral responsibility. He adores life
as what may be called the muscular display of passions. Without greed
and lust he gives us to understand that there would be no dramatic
pathos left in existence. So he wrote the epic of appetites unleashed.
In his novels Society arrayed with moral codes, judges, policemen,
jails and executioners plays the part of the Myrmidons in Homer. The
men of pluck and daring, the grafters, the forgers, and the like, stand
out like as many Achilles and Hectors. Passions and appetites, even
those condemned by the code, are the keys to human life. The truest
moments of life, although they may be the most tragic, are those
athrill with a great passion. Life is a perpetually self-renovating
process, the gushing-out of infinite forces hurled against all
barriers.[24]
This love of life as it is, along with Dreiser’s preference for the
bio-chemical point of view, must also account for the treatment of the
sexual problems in his books. Dreiser’s apparent cynicism on this point
is again that of the biologist. To detect the mysteries of sex he does
not need to turn to Doctor Freud. He brings everything to the surface.
Like Whitman, he sings a pæan to life in all its works. His pagan odes
to Life need only rhymes to be formal poems. Here is a hymn to the
Vital Force which betrays the true poet:
Life will not be boxed in boxes. It will not be wrapped and tied
up with strings and set aside on a shelf to await a particular
religious or moral use. As yet we do not understand life, we do not
know what it is, what the laws are that govern it. At best we see
ourselves hobbling along, responding to this dream and that lust
and unable to compel ourselves to gainsay the fires and appetites
and desires of our bodies and minds. Some of these, in some of us,
strangely enough (and purely accidentally, of that I am convinced)
conform to the current needs or beliefs of a given society; and if
we should be so fortunate as to find ourselves in that society,
we are by reason of these ideals, favorites, statesmen, children
of fortune, poets of the race. On the other hand, others of us
who do not and cannot conform (who are left-over phases of ancient
streams, perhaps, or portentous striae of new forces coming into
play) are looked upon as horrific, and to be stabilized, or
standardized, and brought into the normal systole-diastole of
things.[25]
Those of us endowed with these things in mind and blood are truly
terrible to the mass--pariahs, failures, shams, disgraces. Yet life
is no better than its worst elements, no worse than its best. Its
perfections are changing temporalities, illusions of perfection
that will be something very different to-morrow.
Again I say, we do not know what life is--not nearly enough to
set forth a fixed code of any kind, religious or otherwise. But
we do know that it sings and stings, that it has perfections,
entrancements, shames--each according to his blood flux and its
chemical character. Life is rich, gorgeous, an opium-eater’s dream
of something paradisiacal--but it is never the thin thing that thin
blood and a weak, ill-nourished, poorly responding brain would make
it, and that is where the majority of our religions, morals, rules
and safeguards come from. From thin, petered-out blood, and poor,
nervous, non-commanding, weak brains.
Life is greater than anything we know.
It is stronger.
It is wilder.
It is more horrible.
It is more beautiful.
We need not stop and think we have found a solution. We have
not even found a beginning. We do not know. And my patriotic
father wanted us all to believe in the Catholic Church and the
Infallibility of the Pope and confession and communion!
Great Pan of the Greeks, and you, Isis of the Egyptians, save me!
These moderns are all insane![26]
Thus speaks the American Zarathustra.
Theodore Dreiser was not satisfied with lyrical statements of his
philosophy. “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub” is a direct and almost _ex professo_
comment on the subject of life and conduct. Important qualifications
of his pessimism will be found in particular in an important essay
of that book, called “The Inevitable Equation.” Yes, Dreiser is a
moralist; may I say an Emersonian moralist? “The Inevitable Equation”
recalls to our mind Emerson’s famous essay on “Compensation.” Crimes,
monstrosities, lust and greed, the rascalities of Frank Cowperwood or
the crimes of Clyde Griffiths do not disturb the novelist’s serenity.
He does not feel the need, like Zola, of calling society to the rescue,
or like Dostoievski to resort to mysticism to make the world better. He
remains a positivist. Life is Life. _C’est la guerre!_ Call it God, the
Oversoul or the Vital Force, the ruling energies of Nature are blind
and indifferent. Never did Nature listen to a course in philosophy.
What does Dreiser care how the Vital Force will call itself? It is
enough for him that he can wonder daily at its wonderful display.
A volcano or a cyclone are not moral, but they are impressive and
thrilling. A world without dangers would not be an interesting world.
Moreover there is an automatic (or call it, if you like, providential)
Westinghouse brake somewhere in the worst furies of the monster. Nature
is a self-regulated energy. It manages alone to keep a balance in the
midst of its turmoil. The individuals and the masses counterbalance
each other rather harmoniously and this probably explains why the
cosmos has not yet been wrecked. Saints and poets compensate for
the greedy and the lusty. Saint Francis of Assisi atones for Frank
Cowperwood. This belief in compensation, or, as Dreiser prefers to say,
in equation, is the only trace of ethics to be found in his books, but
it was already Emerson’s ethics.[27]
Pity plays no part in Dreiser’s stories. His outlook on life is
entirely devoid of that quality. Yet he is less cruel in his essays.
An unmistakable undercurrent of tenderness and indulgence toward
mankind is present in them. The author of “An American Tragedy” is the
same one who wrote “Twelve Men,” a most touching, human and, yes, a
truly Christian book. Optimism is not absent either from “A Traveller
at Forty” and “A Book About Myself.” Outside the reporter’s office
Theodore Dreiser can be truly human. Then he gives up objectivity
and he does not mind helping his readers solve the riddles of this
world. After all, even in his gloomiest moments he does not deal
with the satanic phases of life with more complacency than, for
instance, Jonathan Edwards used to do. His impartiality does not
exclude convictions; much to the contrary. It is that of a judge who
suspends the sentence until the criminal has been proven guilty. His
indictment is then left to the jury, _i.e._, to the readers of his
books on the conscience of whom he relies. Few writers have known like
him the somber art of penning us in through hundreds or thousands of
pages without one single ray of hope apparent, and few could operate
a guillotine with the _sang-froid_ found in the execution of Clyde
Griffiths. Again, however, Dreiser’s pessimism is not without an appeal.
He has suggested in the same essays two solutions of the ethical
problem. In our fight with Nature there is first the alternative of
complete surrender, abandonment and acceptance. This is the choice of
the saints and the sages. The other alternative is to fight the fight
for its own sake, and to challenge the world on its own ground. If we
refuse to serve Nature we may well try to surpass it, and disprove
it. Dreiser seems very much in favor of those Promethean ethics. The
universal forces may well overtake us and beat us at the game. What
of that? If we cannot win, let us, at least, know that we tried. Here
Dreiser once more points out a moral, not of conscience but of science.
He revives Socrates’ dictum “Know thyself” and the world along with
you. This may be the best road to victory when all is told. Surrounded
on all sides by superhuman energies let us prove ourselves supermen to
meet them, and if we are ominously assailed, let us at least find out
the name of our assailant. If we suffer, let us gladly, proudly confess
it. As for Theodore Dreiser himself, he declares that a nook beside the
giant Prometheus on the rock would please him more than a seat in the
orchestra of Fra Angelico’s winged seraphs. This ethics does not lack
generosity and heroism.
When all is said, Dreiser the philosopher and Dreiser the artist go
hand in hand. He accepts the world as it is. Let it be good or evil,
a means toward an end or an end in itself, a providential purpose
or such stuff as dreams are made of, this huge mystery is in itself
something worth meditating and writing upon. What do evolution,
melioration and progress matter? When Dreiser returns after twenty
years to his native Hoosier village he is concerned with only one
question. Have his countrymen succeeded in enriching their sensuous
experience and developing their perceptive capacity, or shall we admit
that since the days of King Solomon, or Euripides or Shakespeare man’s
faculty to enjoy the world has not made any progress? Euripides’
“Medea,” the “Canticle of Canticles,” “Macbeth,” are just as true and
beautiful to-day as they were centuries ago. Have we moderns found
anything superior to the sensuous delight which these works of the
past allow us to enjoy? Can anything beyond be imagined? What have
time and space to do with the enjoyment of life? No mechanical device
can accelerate spiritual progress. Theodore Dreiser cannot be imposed
upon by the conquest of the air or of the asphalt. The Big Bertha
and the asphyxiating gas are not signs to him of human supremacy. At
present man does not any more understand the tremendous forces which he
commands than he did in his primitive days, although he can conceive of
still more tremendous energies than those which he sees at play around
him. Our response to the stimuli of Nature has improved very little.
There seems to be a maximum limit of sensations beyond which we cannot
pass. Who can quote a writer able to feel more keenly than Homer? When
Medea speaks in Euripides’ tragedy, who can speak better than she,
and who can say that her words are ancient or modern instead of being
simply and beautifully human?
In “A Traveller at Forty,” Dreiser devotes several interesting pages
to the Dutch painters. He recognized himself in these unsophisticated
artists, who found beauty everywhere around them. Nothing, according
to him, is easier than to soar into metaphysics, sentimentality or
mysticism. We ought to be grateful to those who can love life as it is
and make us love it without concealing its imperfections.
He praises the Dutch painters for giving us the most perfect expression
of common and everyday beauty. They were not romantic but human.
Theodore Dreiser envies those unassuming artists who were content to
paint the arrival of a courier, an evening school, a skating party,
a dance of rustics, a flock of wild ducks, the cows at milking time,
a game of backgammon, a woman knitting socks, a cat playing with her
kittens, etc. Still more interesting than the homeliness of the Dutch
masters was the exquisite finesse of their sensations, the marvelous
temperament through which even the commonplace became idealized.[28]
_Life seen through a temperament_,--this is art, according to Dreiser,
who has not forgotten the lesson of Maupassant and Zola. He defines art
as _an emotional and intellectual reflection of intuition through life_.
CHAPTER V
_Theodore Dreiser and the American Tragedy_
In the preceding chapter I presented the general philosophy of Theodore
Dreiser. Let us now survey his novels in their respective order of
publication. The first in date was “Sister Carrie” (1900). We are told
that the author had to curtail a great deal of the material of this
book--a feat very unfamiliar to him--and this very likely explains why
his first novel, one of the most interesting ever written by him, is
the most in keeping with the ordinary canon of literary proportions.
Every reader will remember Sister Carrie’s story. Being a poor American
girl, she left her family to earn a living and started for Chicago with
scarcely a penny. On the train she met a smart “drummer” of flirtatious
disposition. Carrie stopped for a while with her relatives, but she
could not endure the misery very long. She looked vainly for congenial
work and finally sought her drummer again. He rented an apartment for
her and she became his mistress. She soon tired of him and became
acquainted with the manager of a bar, a middle-aged man with wife and
children, who left everything for her sake. This man was honestly
in love with Carrie and devoted to her to the point of committing a
theft, of which Carrie herself knew nothing. They go to Canada and
thence to New York, where Carrie’s lover proves a failure. The book
ends tragically and almost cynically by the man committing suicide
and Carrie going on alone to make a triumphant career on the stage.
The story, like most of Dreiser’s stories, is rather monotonous and
bleak. There is in it, however, an undercurrent of deep human pathos
and an admirable sense of human frailty. The author was clever enough
to make Carrie’s seducer sympathetic. The book is well composed. The
story is consistent throughout, and the plot dramatic from beginning to
end, which is rarely the case with Dreiser. The dialogues are true to
life and the environment very deftly suggested. Drouet, the “drummer”
is a fascinating “booster,” a George Babbitt _avant la lettre_. Like
most of Dreiser’s characters, he is a well balanced mixture of good and
evil. (A true villain does not exist in Dreiser’s novels, because he
does not probably exist in reality. His most monstrous characters show
now and then some good inclination or other. This is true psychology.)
A bluffer, an adventurer and a good fellow at heart, he is drawn
from life. Carrie, the central character, is much less sympathetic.
The heartless way in which she gives up the man who has sacrificed
everything for her is not very chivalrous. Once more we see in her
case Dreiser’s preference of the truly human to the imaginary and
the romantic. The real pathos of the book rests upon Hurstwood, the
“traveler at forty” led to his ruin by sex, as was Eugene Witla, the
hero of “The Genius.” It is Hurstwood who fills the dramatic center of
the book. He is the first specimen of moral disintegration presented by
Theodore Dreiser.
In this first novel of his the author had not yet given himself
entirely up to strict objectivity and he was kind enough to draw for
the reader the moral lesson implied in “Sister Carrie”:
Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward,
onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows. Whether
it be the tinkle of a lone sheep bell o’er some quiet landscape,
or the glimmer of beauty in sylvan places, or the show of soul in
some passing eye, the heart knows and makes answer, following. It
is when the feet weary and hope seems vain that the heartaches and
the longings arise. Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor
content. In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you
long alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream
such happiness as you may never fear.
“Sister Carrie” is the tragedy of the thwarting of human aspirations.
It presents Dreiser’s favorite philosophy concerning the conflict of
society and the individual, the opposition of social and individual
ethics. Our instincts are good of themselves but they may prove harmful
to society.
“Jennie Gerhardt” was published in 1911. This novel follows more
closely than the preceding the rigid standards of objectivity set by
the French realists. Again it tells the tale of an abandoned woman,
but of a woman who does not possess the grit of Sister Carrie. Jennie
Gerhardt is a purely instinctive woman, and she pays dearly for her
surrender to the male. Like most of the women heroines in Dreiser’s
novels, she embodies the mysterious cravings of Nature. Poor Jennie is
not a superwoman, like Carrie, and the survival of the fittest does not
work in her favor. Like Sister Carrie she was born poor, an easy prey
to temptation. Her first lover died and left her alone with a child.
She became the chambermaid of a wealthy family and surrendered to the
entreaties of a young member of the household. The two lovers were
honestly fond of each other. The young man would have married Jennie if
society allowed. But this is not the case and Jennie is the first to
suggest that her lover give her up. He does so against his will, and
marries a woman of his own caste. Jennie remains alone. Her lover dies,
still faithful to her, and she keeps his memory all her life. That is
all. This simple drama is none the less heart-rending in its banality.
It was told by Dreiser with a sort of tragic naïveté like that of
Flaubert in “Un Cœur Simple.”
“Jennie Gerhardt” is a beautiful and most pathetic book. It is cleverly
written in a sort of monochromatic atmosphere, a _grisaille_ admirably
in keeping with the portrait in the center. Jennie’s father is,
psychologically, one of the truest and most human portraits drawn by
the novelist. Bio-chemistry had not yet blurred his critical sense.
In “The Financier” and “The Titan” Dreiser widened the scope of his
vision to a large extent. They both display a _tableau de mœurs_ about
a central character. These books tax the patience of the reader.
They are too long, too clumsy, too detailed, and yet they reveal an
unquestionable master. Cowperwood is a magnificent rascal, one whom
Balzac would have been proud to capture for his gallery of rogues.
It is Vautrin in a Tuxedo and behind a mahogany desk. Cowperwood is
a Spencerian animal of authentic pedigree, a superb plesiosaurus, a
Dreiserian superman _par excellence_. The reader of this book has not
forgotten how his vocation was revealed to him before the tub where
the lobster fought the squid. Cowperwood has no conscience. He is ruled
by tyrannical instincts. He has no more sense of responsibility than
a cyclone. Indeed, he has so little of it that he quickly becomes as
monotonous as an automaton performing on the stage under the disguise
of a real man. He was born to harm as the shark is born with teeth.
From the very first pages of the book until the end, he appears as an
indomitable energy, let loose on this planet. He comes from the same
zoo as most of the heroes of Jack London. Fate lets him be born in
Philadelphia and he mistakes the stock exchange in that city for the
wilds of Alaska or the South Seas. He knows of only one law, that of
the jungle, and in regard to ethics he is a perfect vacuum, the most
completely amoral person in the whole history of the American novel.
“The Financier” starts Frank Cowperwood on his adventurous career.
He wants to get rich quick and by any means. He steals the public
chest of his native city and, in doing so, comments Dreiser, he shows
himself neither better nor worse than the majority of his political and
financial opponents. Unfortunately for him, he is caught with his hand
in the bag, and sentenced to four years in jail. The energy of the man
shows itself in the course of this episode. Cowperwood’s stoicism is
worthy of a better cause, and it is, in his case, not the product of an
excess, but of an entire lack of conscience. He personifies the triumph
of bio-chemistry. We are given to understand that his misfortunes are
the natural lot of all those who revolt against what Nietzsche called
the ethics of the herd. Of course, when society jailed Cowperwood it
acted for its best interests. To cage a tiger is always moral. Prisons
have been providentially designed to give Cowperwood and his like
time to think. He is not at all surprised to find himself behind the
bars. The only thing which worries him is to know how he can get out.
He has lost everything in the fray, but he stands invincible on the
ruins of his own universe, ready to begin all over again without any
redemption or expiation, and certainly without any conversion. In fact,
“The Financier” is only the first volume of an unfinished trilogy, and
several hundred pages in volume number two will hardly suffice Dreiser
to complete the story of his rascalities.
“The Financier” is a powerful book. Dreiser gave free rein in it to his
passion for collecting statistics, and for making an impression on the
reader by arranging a mosaic of characteristic odds and ends. He piles
up evidence as a reporter or a coroner, without wanting to enliven
the testimony by any flare of wit or emotion. As a writer, he abjured
all rhetoric. If most of the time his novels prove indigestible, it
is due to the fact that he never inserts anything in them which can
divert one from facts. He writes in a lump, so to speak. He serves
us a heavy meal without any spices or gravy. His style is entirely
amorphous. It is ponderous and, one might say, elephantine. See how
Zola succeeded in putting zest and interest into his dreariest and most
objective narratives; how Flaubert and Maupassant added the human and
artistic touch even to their most matter-of-fact cartoons. EXACTITUDE!
EXACTITUDE! THE FACTS! THE FACTS! HOW? WHY? WHEN? Has not Dreiser as an
artist been misled by those mechanical suggestions?
And yet, Frank Cowperwood stands alive before our eyes; the whole
society of his time can be felt swarming around him,--politics,
finance, love, art, the criminal court, the prison. They are alike,
not as they would be in Balzac or in Shakespeare, in a great surge of
lyricism or pathos, but in a sort of vacuum ordered for them by the
indifference of the author. They are painted on the surface of the
canvas without any perspective and no play of light to animate them.
William Dean Howells knew better than this.
* * * * *
The second part of the trilogy is called “The Titan,” an ironic
title since, at the end of the book, Cowperwood proves a failure, at
least for the time being. We find him out of jail and established in
Chicago just after the big fire. His energies have not abated and
his financial career begins triumphant. We become involved in his
minutest rascalities. We learn from him how to bribe the politicians,
buy franchises, strangle all competitors, monopolize public utilities
to our own selfish advantage. Meanwhile, as an intermission, we are
lavishly served with the story of Cowperwood’s adulteries and liaisons,
until his boat is shipwrecked on the rock of a municipal election which
takes away from him the profits of his grafts. Cowperwood is now a
wounded giant but not a dead one. The novelist still foresees for him a
brilliant career and like the witches he sends him with his blessing to
a new destiny:
Rushing like a great comet to the zenith, his path a blazing trail,
Cowperwood did for the hour illuminate the terrors and wonders of
individuality. But for him also the eternal equation--the pathos
of the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an
ultimate balance must be struck.... And this giant himself,
rushing on to new struggles and new difficulties in an older land,
forever suffering the goad of a restless heart--for him was no
ultimate peace, no real understanding, but only hunger and thirst
and wonder. Wealth, wealth, wealth! A new grasp of a new great
problem and its eventual solution. Anew the old urgent thirst for
life, and only its partial quenchment. In Dresden one palace for
one woman, in Rome a second for another. In London a third for his
beloved Berenice, the lure of beauty ever in his eye. The lives
of two women wrecked, a score of victims despoiled.... And he
resigned, and yet not--loving, understanding, doubting--caught at
last by the drug of a personality which he could not gainsay.
Cowperwood certainly breaks the record of human endurance and
obduration as a rascal. There must be no break in his career as a
buccaneer of finance, and neither must there be any conversion.
Tolstoi, Dostoievski or Zola would not have waited so long to restore
to Cowperwood at least the semblance of a conscience, were it only to
relieve the strain on the reader. Not so with Theodore Dreiser. None
ever proved more inexorable.
Bio-chemistry proves to be a more inhuman ethics than the ancient
_Fatum_ or Calvinistic predestination. The secret of our destiny is
written in our blood. We can resist neither our temperament nor our
instincts:
Each according to his temperament--that something which he has not
made and cannot always subdue, and which may not always be subdued
by others for him. Who plans the steps that lead lives on to
splendid glories, or twist them into gnarled sacrifices, or make of
them dark, disdainful, contentious tragedies? The soul within? And
whence comes it? Of God?
A dynosaur, we are told, possesses no more conscience than a lobster or
a squid:
That thing _conscience_, which obsesses and rides some people to
destruction, did not trouble him (Cowperwood) at all. He had no
consciousness of what is currently known as sin.[29] He never gave
a thought to the vast palaver concerning evil which is constantly
going on. There were just two faces to the shield of life--strength
and weakness. Right and wrong? He did not know about those. They
were bound up in metaphysical abstrusities about which he did not
care to bother. Good and evil? Those were toys of clerics, by which
they made money. Morality and immorality? He never considered them.
But strength and weakness--oh yes! If you had strength you could
protect yourself always and be something. If you were weak--pass
quickly to the rear and get out of the range of the guns. He was
strong, and he knew it; and somehow he always believed in his star.
This elementary psychology takes us back to that familiar gospel which
we used to hear from Jack London’s sea rovers. It is Nietzsche for
beginners. The human being would be too easy a riddle to decipher if
it were actuated only by lust and greed. Man in this case would not
be more interesting than, let us say, a Robot or a Ford motor car.
_Summum jus, summa injuria._ Dreiser’s psychology falls short. Frank
Cowperwood may be curious as an automaton; he is not interesting, even
as a rascal, despite his amorous adventures. Casanova was an artist in
philandering. Cowperwood was a machine, or, if you prefer, an animal.
Love is once more a branch of bio-chemistry for Dreiser. It is a blind
and purely animal impulse. It is good in itself like all impulses:
Whether we will or no, theory or no theory, the large basic facts
of chemistry and physics remain. Like is drawn to like. Changes
in temperament bring changes in relationship. Dogma may bind
some minds; fear, others. But there are always those in whom the
chemistry and physics of life are large, and in whom neither dogma
nor fear is operative. Society lifts its hands in horror; but
from age to age the Helens, the Messalinas, the Du Barrys, the
Pompadours, the Maintenons, and the Nell Gwynns flourish and point
a subtler basis of relationship than we have yet been able to
square with our lives.
This is outspoken enough and needs no comment. In “Man and Superman,”
G. B. Shaw also tried to sacrifice Don Juan to the Vital Force, but he
did it with a bit of salt and a few flowers. In the case of Dreiser,
this cynical outlook is without any irony, poetry or appeal. It is very
likely erroneous, but much less so than Puritan sophisms, and may serve
as an antidote against the romantic falsifications of sex appeal.
* * * * *
“The Genius,” published in 1915, is the most direct and important
contribution of the author to the study of sex psychology. The reading
of this enormous book is disappointing. The title is evidently
sarcastic, since the hero, Eugene Witla, blunders in life from the
beginning to end. A self-made man, an artist, a business man, and
above all a self-appointed superman and notorious erotomaniac, Eugene
is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of Dreiser’s theories concerning the
irresistible impulses of one’s temperament. Eugene has the soul of
an idealist. He craves for beauty and possesses a fine talent. His
paintings have made a great impression on a French art dealer, M.
Charles, and I cannot help quoting from the catalogue of his exposition
a passage which throws a great deal of light on Dreiser’s own realism.
The following is supposed to be taken from a criticism of Eugene
Witla’s paintings. Somebody had dared to compare Eugene with Millet.
This the alleged critic cannot admit:
The brutal exaggeration of that painter’s art would probably
testify to him of his own merit. He is mistaken. The great
Frenchman was a lover of humanity, a reformer in spirit, a master
of drawing and composition. There was nothing of this cheap desire
to startle and offend by what he did. If we are to have ash cans
and engines and broken-down bus-horses thrust down our throats
as art, Heaven preserve us. We had better turn to commonplace
photography at once, and be done with it. Broken windows, shutters,
dirty pavements, half frozen ash cart drivers, overdrawn, heavily
exaggerated figures of policemen, tenement harridans, beggars,
panhandlers, sandwich-men--of such is Art according to Eugene Witla.
M. Charles, on the contrary, is quite enthusiastic about Eugene. He is
not afraid of his painting of a
great hulking, ungainly negro, a positively animal man, with a
red flannel shawl around his ears, and his arms and legs looking
“as though he might have on two or three pairs of trousers and as
many vests.” What a debauch of color! “Raw reds, raw greens, dirty
grey paving stones--such faces! Why, this thing fairly shouted
its facts. It seemed to say: ‘I’m dirty, I am commonplace, I am
grim, I am shabby, but I am life.’ And there was no apologizing
for anything in it, no glossing anything over. Bang! Smash! Crack!
came the facts one after another, with a bitter, brutal insistence
on their so-ness. Why ... he had seen somewhere a street that
looked like this, and there it was--dirty, sad, slovenly, immoral,
drunken,--anything, everything, but here it was.”
Another critic saw beauty through it all. He found in Eugene’s works
a true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the
ability to endow color--not with its photographic value ...--but
with its higher spiritual significance; the ability to indict life
with its own grossness ... in order that mayhap it may heal itself;
the ability to see wherein is beauty--even in shame and pathos and
degradation.
This passage is important in that it shows us the author himself trying
to draw his own portrait through Eugene Witla, remarkably resembling a
portrait for better or for worse.
To come back to “The Genius,” we follow Eugene Witla along his artistic
career, as we accompany him to Chicago and New York,--and Dreiser
gives us very deft sketches of these cities. Eugene of course is going
to fall in love. After a bio-chemical courtship he marries Angela, a
purely instinctive woman like Jennie Gerhardt and the mistresses of
Frank Cowperwood. He won’t be faithful to her very long. Eugene is a
born polygamist and pretty soon his sexual excesses will jeopardize his
career and seriously threaten his health. Lust is a serious obstacle
to art. Dreiser’s narrative becomes disconcerting at this point. We
took the book so far as a dramatic demonstration of the dangers of sex
experience for an artist. We felt ourselves brought to a climax when
Eugene was going to be shipwrecked on the rocks of eroticism. What was
he going to do between sheer lust and “genius”? The conflict promised
to be truly dramatic and instructive morally and psychologically.
Hurstwood in “Sister Carrie” had fallen into a similar pitfall and
shown Eugene the way to perdition. But no, Eugene does not go to the
dogs. Dreiser is too indifferent to dramatization and too honest an
artist to bring his books to such a climax. “The Genius” is not a
sermon. Eugene recovers and we find him at the dénouement reading
Herbert Spencer and Christian Science in the company of his daughter.
How could the American Comstocks find fault with such a moral and
happy ending, and how could they miss the epical lesson of the book,
as literally emphasized by the author himself? Eugene Witla made a
mistake, we are told, when he failed to see the danger which eroticism
caused his “genius.” Love-making may be a spiritual incentive for an
artist but it can paralyze his physical energies:
He did not realize ... that he was, aside from his art, living a
life which might rob talent of its finest flavor, discolor the
aspect of the world for himself, take scope from imagination and
hamper effort with nervous irritation, and make accomplishment
impossible. He had no knowledge of the effect of one’s sexual
life upon one’s work, nor what such a life, when badly arranged,
can do to a perfect art--how it can distort the sense of color,
weaken that balanced judgment of character which is so essential
to a normal interpretation of life, make all striving hopeless,
take from art its most joyous conception, make life itself seem
unimportant and death a relief.
This sounds like rather commonplace ethics and not worth a thousand
pages of demonstration, but it constitutes on the part of the author a
formal moral commitment. It must again be quoted to show that Theodore
Dreiser is much less amoral than he seems to be. The fact that he
failed once more in dramatizing his point is due to a flaw in his
philosophy. The doctrine of the _inevitable equation_ is, so to speak,
anti-catastrophic, and certainly it is anti-dramatic. Where there is
no place for conscience, remorse and conversion, there is no place for
climax and anticlimax, and consequently none for the drama. Dreiser’s
philosophy of positivism is responsible for this lack of dynamism which
mars his books. His art, like his point of view, can only be strictly
static. Hence the tediousness of his novels and particularly that of
“The Genius.”
* * * * *
This again largely accounts for the qualities and the defects of “An
American Tragedy,” Dreiser’s latest novel. The title of the book
remains enigmatic,--or is it too obvious? What has America to do with
Clyde Griffiths’ murder, and if it has, why not denounce it more
specifically? This last novel is the story of a crime and a criminal
strung out into two volumes. It was not the first contribution of the
author to criminology. The problem of crime had already been on his
mind. He dealt with it in his play called “The Hand of the Potter.”
Crime, we might well say, constitutes an integral part of Dreiser’s
metaphysics. It occurs as a natural episode in the history of the
individual man asserting his will against society. The truth of the
aphorism that “might is right” cannot be proved without it. Crime and
the repressions which accompany it are the fatal results of the revolt
of temperament against its environment. After what we know of Dreiser’s
bio-chemical convictions, we may easily foresee that his philosophy
of crime and the criminal will give no part to responsibility. The
criminal, like the buccaneer of finance, of the “genius,” will be
a machine set in motion by blind and irresistible laws. Dreiser’s
determinism eliminates free will and along with it the criminal
himself. For this reason we must not expect the pathetic appeals
to conscience from him which are found in Victor Hugo, Dostoievski
and Tolstoi. Crime, according to Dreiser, has nothing to do with
conscience, since conscience does not exist, but it may have something
to do with science. In his ethical system there is no room for pity,
expiation and remorse. The days of “The Scarlet Letter” are gone. In
the light of bio-chemistry a criminal has no more or less importance
than a rattlesnake, a shark or the microbe of cancer. This determinism
in regard to crime was arraigned forty years ago in M. Paul Bourget’s
“The Disciple,” and it was cynically illustrated by Julien Sorel in
Stendhal’s “Le rouge et le noir.” Clyde Griffiths, like Robert Greslou
in “The Disciple,” has placed himself beyond evil and good. Let us hear
from Theodore Dreiser himself the story of Clyde Griffiths. It will
save many readers the trouble of plodding tediously along in the morass
of the most instructive and also the most monotonous book ever written
by the novelist.
Clyde Griffiths is the son of more or less abnormal parents. His
father and mother are religious fanatics. Clyde is ambitious and
dreams of a bright future. He begins as a bell boy of a hotel in
Kansas City. An uncle of his, a wealthy manufacturer, gives him a
start. He falls in love with the girl Roberta. He has a bio-chemical
idyll with her. Just at the moment that she becomes pregnant he finds
a new and more promising affinity in the person of a rich heiress.
The world is his if he marries her. But there is Roberta and her
trouble. What will Griffiths do with her? He deliberately plans to
get rid of her. He takes her to a pond and drowns her. He is caught,
tried, convicted and sent to the electric chair. _The Inevitable
Equation_ acts as mathematically and objectively in his case as a
guillotine. Bio-chemical predestination leaves no hope from the start.
The presentation of the case, the climax, the anticlimax, and the
_dénouement_ follow each other as the conclusions of a theorem. Nothing
is left to chance, providence or imagination. Griffiths acts thus and
thus, he wants this and this, and he gets what he deserves.
Dreiser’s matter-of-fact method of reporting helped him to indict Clyde
Griffiths as only an expert criminal lawyer could do it. His technique
in the presentation of the case is perfect. It makes us wonder if he
did not miss his vocation when he bartered the bar for the writing
desk of a novelist. But the psychology of the book is still more
interesting than its knowledge of the code. “An American Tragedy” is a
most original attempt to detect the instillation of a criminal thought
into a man’s brain. Did anybody ever give a more exact, penetrating
and dramatic account of how the idea of crime can invade a mind and
gradually anesthetize the whole moral system of the criminal? Dreiser
shows himself an expert and an explorer of the field of abnormal
psychology by the way he marshals what may be called instinctive
logics, the logics of our blood and flesh, against rational logic, and
by the way he detects the obscure sophistications of the inhibited and
repressed, to find motives which come to their selfish ends. Freud and
the psychoanalysts are beaten at their own game. The scenes of the
book which show us the plan of the crime brewing in Clyde Griffiths’
mind are tantamount to magic divination. Those pages on the function
of the will must be recommended to professional psychologists and
criminologists. If Dreiser’s views on the subject were accepted, our
whole system of criminal legislation ought to be amended.
The criminal for Dreiser is like God for Renan. He is not in the
_esse_ but in the _fieri_. He is not a fact but only a possibility.
Crime for Dreiser is something which cannot be indicted because it
cannot be weighed. The allegory of Justice as a figure bearing a
pair of scales is a lie. To define better, Dreiser dissociates. His
unflinching analysis leaves very little room for fully deliberate
intention on the part of the criminal. According to this new diagnostic
of the criminal mind, a criminal thought operates like a microbe and
it follows an homeopathic process. It never becomes obvious, clear or
exclusive enough to allow the use of the word “responsibility” in its
current acceptance. Responsibility for a crime supposes a conception
of the human mind and will which bio-chemistry contradicts. Such is
Theodore Dreiser’s attitude in regard to the problem of crime. It is
no longer for him, as it was for Hawthorne, a question of conscience
but of nerves; not a problem of psychology but of physiology. He gave a
most dramatic support to these views in several scenes of “An American
Tragedy,” and in particular in the scene of Roberta’s drowning. Was
the drowning the result of premeditation on the part of Griffiths, or
was it not purely accidental? Who can tell? His conduct as a criminal
is a series of gropings through the dark, of hesitations, of advance
and retreat in the half-voluntary direction of an act in way of
accomplishment, without much self-control and still less deliberate
intention. Griffiths lives in a kind of pathological _aura_ which
dulls and poisons one by one his mental powers. There is enough of
this to puzzle jury and judge. Remember, for instance, the episode
when Clyde sits in the boat with Roberta. We had the impression that
he had foreseen everything, and yet, when the time comes to act, his
will power deserts him. The tragedy, none the less, develops itself
automatically, as if he were out of it, were not concerned with it. The
boat capsizes. Roberta’s head is hit by Griffiths’ camera. She falls
into the water and he does not make a move to save her. He is arrested,
tried and condemned. All this happens as automatically as the firing of
a Winchester rifle.
Again in the case of “An American Tragedy” as in that of his other
novels, it would be unfair to take Theodore Dreiser for a cynic.
There is a lesson between the lines if we know how to read it. What
proportion is there between man’s deeds and his judgments? What is
there in common between the dark and mysterious moves of our minds
and the clumsy machinery devised to indict and to punish? Detectives,
judges, lawyers, laws, jails and executioners. Does not the living
mind of a criminal make light of all this, and if so, how can he be
sentenced and electrocuted? I consider the scene at the end of the
book between Clyde Griffiths, the murderer, and Reverend McMillan,
his confessor, as one of the most dramatic in American literature. The
priest has called upon the murderer and he wants him to make “a clean
breast.” Much to his amazement he finds himself confronted with doubts.
Here is this scene worthy of Dostoievski:
The Reverend McMillan, hearing all this--and never in his life
before having heard or having had passed to him so intricate and
elusive and strange a problem--and because of Clyde’s faith in
and regard for him, was enormously impressed. And now sitting
before him quite still and pondering most deeply, sadly and even
nervously--so serious and important was this request for an
opinion--something which, as he knew, Clyde was counting on to give
him earthly and spiritual peace. But, none-the-less, the Reverend
McMillan was himself too puzzled to answer so quickly.
“Up to the time you went in that boat with her, Clyde, you had not
changed in your mood toward her--your intention to--to ...”
The Reverend McMillan’s face was gray and drawn. His eyes were
sad. He had been listening, as he now felt, to a sad and terrible
story--an evil and cruel self-torturing and destroying story. This
young boy--really...! His hot, restless heart which plainly for
the lack of so many things which he, the Reverend McMillan, had
never wanted for, had rebelled. And because of that rebellion had
sinned mortally and was condemned to die. Indeed his reason was as
intensely troubled as his heart was moved.
“No, I had not.”
“You were, as you say, angry with yourself for being so weak as not
to be able to do what you had planned to do.”
“In a way it was like that, yes. But then I was sorry too, you see.
And maybe afraid. I’m not exactly sure now. Maybe not, either.”
The Reverend McMillan shook his head. So strange! So evasive! So
evil! and yet ...
“But at the same time, as you say, you were angry with her for
having driven you to that point.”
“Yes.”
“Where you were compelled to wrestle with so terrible a problem?”
“Yes.”
“Tst! Tst! Tst! And so you thought of striking her.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But you could not.”
“No.”
“Praised be the mercy of God. Yet in the blow that you did
strike--unintentionally, as you say--there was still some anger
against her. That was why the blow was so--so severe. You did not
want her to come near you.”
“No, I didn’t. I think I didn’t, anyhow. I am not quite sure.
It may be that I wasn’t quite right. Anyhow--all worked up, I
guess--sick almost. I--I ...” In his uniform--his hair cropped so
close, Clyde sat there, trying honestly now to think how it really
was (exactly) and greatly troubled by his inability to demonstrate
to himself even--either his guilt or his lack of guilt. Was he--or
was he not? And the Reverend McMillan--himself intensely strained,
muttering: “Wide is the gate and broad the way that leadeth to
destruction.” And yet finally adding: “But you did rise to save
her.”
“Yes, afterwards, I got up. I meant to catch her after she fell
back. That was what upset the boat.”
“And you did really want to catch her?”
“I don’t know. At the moment I guess I did. Anyhow I felt sorry, I
think.”
“But can you say now truly and positively, as your Creator sees
you, that you were sorry--or that you wanted to save her then?”
“It all happened so quick, you see,” began Clyde
nervously--hopelessly, almost, “that I’m not just sure. No, I
don’t know that I was so sorry. No. I really don’t know, you see,
now. Sometimes I think maybe I was, a little, sometimes not,
maybe. But after she was gone and I was on shore, I felt sorry--a
little. But I was sort of glad, too, you know, to be free, and yet
frightened, too ... You see ...”
“Yes, I know. You were going to that Miss X. But out there, when
she was in the water...?”
“No.”
“You did not want to go to her rescue?”
“No.”
“Tst! Tst! Tst! You felt no sorrow? No shame? Then?”
“Yes, shame, maybe. Maybe sorrow, too, a little. I knew it was
terrible. I felt that it was, of course. But still--you see ...”
“Yes, I know. That Miss X. You wanted to get away.”
“Yes--but mostly I was frightened, and I didn’t want to help her.”
“Yes! Yes! Tst! Tst! Tst! If she drowned you could go to that Miss
X. You thought of that?” The Reverend McMillan’s lips were tightly
and sadly compressed.
“Yes.”
“My son! My son! In your heart was murder then.”
“Yes, yes,” Clyde said reflectively. “I have thought since it must
have been that way.”
The Reverend McMillan paused and to hearten himself for this task
began to pray--but silently--and to himself: “Our Father who art
in Heaven--Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be
done--on earth as it is in Heaven.”
This admirable scene is an excellent example of Theodore Dreiser’s
realism at his best. There is enough of suffused emotion in it to make
it human and artistically impressive.
Such is the work of Theodore Dreiser as a novelist. He is harsh and
pessimistic. He takes away from us all our illusions. He makes us pay
for truth at any cost with what we hold most interesting in ordinary
fiction--sentiment, pathos, irony--but he does it in good faith. And
he is quite as often harsh, honest, painstaking, vigorous and often
mighty. Yes, his philosophy is without illusions but it is certainly
not his fault:
It is strange, but life is constantly presenting these pathetic
paradoxes--these astounding blunders which temperament and blood
moods bring about and reason and circumstance and convention
condemn. The dreams of man are one thing--his capacity to realize
them another. At either pole are the accidents of supreme failure
and supreme success--the supreme failure of Abelard for instance,
the supreme success of a Napoleon, enthroned at Paris. But, oh, the
endless failures for one success.
Balzac at least, in the preface to his “Comédie humaine,” did not
completely despair of man. Was he good or bad, he surely did not know,
but he ushered in the priest and the physician to make him better, if
need be. Theodore Dreiser leaves us very little hope of the reformation
of the fallen angel. He writes:
It is a question whether the human will, of itself alone, ever has
cured or ever can cure any human weakness. Tendencies are subtle
things. They are involved in the chemistry of one’s being, and
those who delve in the mysteries of biology frequently find that
curious anomaly, a form of minute animal life--chemically and
physically attracted to its own disaster.
Then we learn, to our delight, the beautiful names of some of the
Cowperwoods, Hurstwoods, Jennie Gerhardts and Eugene Witlas of
biology. They are called the “paramecium,” “the vorticella,” “the
actinobolus” and the “halteria grandinella.”
Biological fatalism is, when all is told, the heart of Theodore
Dreiser’s philosophy and the background of his work as an artist. When
not suffused with some human appeal it opens only a blind alley to an
artist. As a philosophical creed it even tends to exclude art entirely,
because it forbids freedom. Art is the product of mind at play with
the world. Why should the artist enjoy a liberty which he denies
his characters and what is left to beauty in a blind and an absurd
universe? Let us sum up Dreiser’s decalogue:
1. Our will cannot prevail over our temperament.
2. Instinct is the enemy of reason.
3. The law of our instincts is diametrically opposed to the social
code.
4. It is through his instincts that man is most completely and most
dangerously what he really is.
5. Once given a temperament it can never be changed. There is no
moral progress, no conversion possible from evil to good.
6. Biology controls our body and contradicts social ethics.
7. Consequently our social organization, ethics, politics (and
why not the whole of our civilization?) are biologically and
chemically false.
8. All principles and institutions which ignore bio-chemical man
and which are not deeply rooted in instincts and physiological
necessities are false.
_Also spake Zarathustra!_ Auguste Comte, before Dreiser, had given
biology as a required foundation of social ethics but he finally
felt the necessity to build a moral and religious roof upon the
house. All the hounds of materialism and romanticism unleashed can
be heard howling in the decalogue of Dreiser. Rousseau before him,
with Helvetius and _tutti quanti_ among the eighteenth-century
encyclopedists, had raised before him the law of nature against the law
of the mind. The result, as Thomas Carlyle proved, was the guillotine
and Armageddon. Are we going to deny all the efforts of the saints,
the ascetics, the heroes, the philosophers, the artists, to undo the
patient and painful and slow uprising of mankind out of the primitive
slime, to save Clyde Griffiths from the electric chair and restore the
Dinoceras? Society may be wrong in forcing golf upon mankind for a
substitute to the _vie dangereuse_ or in finding a reservation for the
Apaches in prison, but who will seriously complain? Let us bless the
good Providence who gave us a chance to learn football and baseball as
a catharsis to soothe and purge our temperament. To follow Dreiser’s
ethics would be very much like courting cosmic suicide, and let us
wish that the rattlesnake and the shark will last not as a rule but as
exceptions among us, so that we ourselves may also have a chance to
express our temperament and a chance to survive. All of us can safely
enjoy the sight of wild beasts at the zoo or in the “movies.”
It is hardly necessary to point to the difference between Dreiser’s
morals and those of the Puritans. Puritan ethics, like all ethics,
rested upon the preference given to the social over the individual
motives of action. It opposed social and moral man to instinctive
man and it destroyed the Indian because he was too elementary and
bio-chemical. It brought about moral improvement by a system of
restraints, as all Christian, Buddhist and even pagan ethics have done.
One may well criticize the results of those experiments without wishing
to annihilate the whole edifice at one stroke. It seems as unscientific
to give everything to instinct as to deny it all. Is not art, in
defect of religion, the ideal means to harmonize body and mind, the
physical and the spiritual? Art shows a way out of chaos; it dispels
the nightmare of Dreiser’s primitive world. Greed and lust are not yet,
thank God! the only incentives left to man to give a meaning to life.
There certainly exists something better, somewhere.
And yet, comparing Dreiser’s pessimistic portraits of man as he is
realistically to the “most smiling aspects of life” in, let us say,
William Dean Howells, one cannot help finding them at least virile.
Truth above all! And let us have all the truth. Remember the saying
of Pascal that _qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête_. Dreiser’s
dissociations have at least the courage of truth. He wanted to defy
the sentimentalists and restore the carnal man in his rights. As a
hero or as a victim? This is not easy to say. Where Eugene Witla and
Clyde Griffiths flounder, Frank Cowperwood almost succeeds. Dreiser’s
objectivity leaves us in the lurch concerning moral issues. There are
still many among us who prefer life among the mid-Victorians to that
among the plesiosauri. Dreiser’s challenge to our vital lies is too
one-sided. He is not mid-Victorian enough. He atones for Howells’
sentimentalism and at the same time makes us long for the Kentons and
the Laphams. Call it cowardice, if you want, or call it art. Such a
starvation of the best human emotions is dangerous for an artist who
wants to force a lesson upon his readers. It would indeed prove a
mighty stroke of the cosmic irony if the realistic novels of such an
honest seeker after truth as Theodore Dreiser served only to win the
reader to the side of the sentimental writers.
CHAPTER VI
_Sinclair Lewis and the Average Man_
In the novels of Sinclair Lewis the Middle West has made another
contribution to American literature. He was born in 1885 in Minnesota.
It was in this country that he located Gopher Prairie. His father was a
physician like Kennicott, Carol’s husband in “Main Street.” Lewis holds
a degree from Yale and did not forget academic life in his stories.
He too made his début in journalism, where he had a chance to learn
something about the advertising methods which he parodies in his books,
at first hand. Then he became an enthusiastic motorist, traveling
through the different States of the Union. In one of his first novels,
“Free Air,” he recounts an automobile romance, lasting all the way from
New York to Seattle. Many “slices of life” graphically reproduced and
spiced with delightful humor, show already the hand of a master. The
hero, Milton Daggett, is a typical Lewis character, sympathetic and
full of an exuberant vitality. Milton owns a garage. On his way west
he meets a beautiful heiress whom he escorts and, of course, finally
marries.
“Mantrap,” a more recent novel, is the story of a trip through the
Canadian wilds. It shows much the same dynamism. The author, at that
time, had not yet sacrificed the pleasure of telling a story to
characterization and satire. However, he already showed himself a keen
observer of men and women, when he published “Our Mr. Wrenn” in 1916.
The book is intensely alive. It revealed Lewis’ talent to mimic people
and make them talk as if we had overheard them.
The scene is laid in a New York boarding house and the book recalls
Dickens’ descriptions of the life of the bourgeois. Lewis displays
the same humor, the same pathos and a similar deftness in drawing
characters. Wrenn is an elder brother of George Babbitt. He is
good-humored, a trifle sentimental and shows an almost morbid craving
for friendship. Like Babbitt he was born gregarious. He is shy and
almost obsequious with women. He longs to be loved and to tell some one
that he loves her, but he does not know how to conduct a flirtation. We
can very well imagine him playing a minor rôle in Flaubert’s “Bouvard
and Pecuchet,” that epic of commonplace romanticism. The scene where
Our Mr. Wrenn bids farewell to the setting sun reveals an unmistakable
touch of Flaubert’s sympathetic irony. Wrenn is too ignorant and too
modest to vent his feelings by trying to imitate the effusions of the
great romantic writers at twilight. And yet he can hardly control
himself on a fall evening as he sees the sun setting beyond the
Manhattan skyscrapers. He rarely looks at the sky, and prefers not
to, because, when he sees it, he takes it for an impossible road to
Mandalay, and it makes him blue. This particular evening, the sunset
has made Wrenn sad. To comfort himself he goes to a delicatessen store,
and learns a new recipe for cooking eggs. Never mind the setting sun,
after all! Wrenn is going to spend the evening with his friend Nellie,
whom he adores in silence and to whom he reads the newspapers! As he
thinks of it, he forgets the setting sun and he goes home hugging
against his bosom the little tin of potato salad which he bought for
his supper--let the chilly autumn wind moan around him if it wants.
More optimistic and ironic than Theodore Dreiser, Lewis has none the
less devoted himself to the satire of American society. The feeling
of the conflict between social and individual ethics, between the
state of the _mores_ in America and the real needs of the individual
citizen, inspired his work. “Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Arrowsmith”
and “Elmer Gantry” present the same plea. Let it not be said that the
conflict between what the private man would like to do and what the
social standards permit him to do is not peculiar to the United States.
Doubtless there is nowhere a civilization without a society, and a
society without suppression of some sort. But, if the criticisms which
I have attempted to interpret impartially in these studies are true, it
seems evident that the conflict in question is more tragic in America
than anywhere else. Of all current social systems, that of the United
States puts the greatest check on the individual as opposed to social
expansion.[30]
Sinclair Lewis is by far the most optimistic of all contemporary
American novelists, at least in his first novels. And yet the sting
of the bee is there, and, the more he progresses in his career, the
more disillusioned he seems to become concerning the things and people
around him. What sort of United States does he show us? First of all,
an immense country, prosperous, comfortable and self-satisfied on the
surface, and in which more than one hundred million human beings live a
sort of vegetative life. This indeed is surprising to the traveler from
abroad, who visits the American shores. He sees optimism and joy all
around him. Joy is the product of action and the only incentive to it.
Neither action nor joy are possible without optimism. That Puritanism
should permit Americans to remain gay sounds paradoxical, but Americans
are not all Puritans and their joviality as a people is indisputable.
Optimism and contentment are the daily colors of American life. Europe
is a gloomy country in comparison with America. “Smile and be happy!”
could never be a motto for the Old World. How could the average
American help being content? To confine ourselves to “Babbitt” and
“Main Street,” Americans in Sinclair Lewis’ novels are happy people.
They enjoy material comfort, sociability, confidence in what the future
has in store for them. Anybody who has had the privilege of living in
America knows well what that means. Comfort and material ease first.
There is in the United States a striking unanimity of contentment. In
no other country has the average man so many practical reasons for
believing in material success. Success is the rule in America for the
average person with an average intelligence. Not everybody makes a
fortune, many vegetate, a great many fail, but, materially speaking,
the United States is the land of plenty. There are comparatively few
paupers. Nearly every one is assured of a fair minimum of comfort and
ease. Large or small, the average American has a home, a hearth, a
house which is, as a rule, more comfortable than the average European
dwelling. Clean, neat and freshly painted, the American bungalow or
cottage is not necessarily artistic, but it is agreeable. Friendly and
yet distant from the neighbors, it is the image of its owner. Each
house is isolated, and yet sufficiently near another to facilitate
neighborliness. It is surrounded by a lawn carefully and almost
religiously mowed. Inside, there is a furnace heater, one or several
bathrooms, electric lighting, an icebox, not to forget the phonograph
and the radio. And who in America has not a garage, were it only for
a “Ford”? Living is simple, as is the furniture--and in still greater
degree, the cooking.
When the average American deserts his home--and he does it often,
on business or pleasure--innumerable refuges take care of him. He
is never left alone. Every good American is affiliated with one or
more associations. Masonic lodges in particular abound. There, he is
able to create many contacts. The spirit of solidarity, what he calls
“service,” is very strong in him. In his lodge or his club, the average
American (let us call him Babbitt with Sinclair Lewis) finds many
practical advantages. If he wants to borrow, sue somebody, or invest
money, be advanced in politics, he finds there a platform and a market.
Even the welfare of his family is attended to when he dies. A Mystic
Shriner, a Rotarian, an Elk, a Kiwanian, an Odd Fellow, a Forester,
or what not, every average American is subject to sudden mobilization
for a convention or a parade. He is the prisoner--a happy prisoner,
we must believe--of his clan. A quiet, and even a shy person at home,
he is spontaneously transformed into a rather frolicsome person among
his friends. Then he likes noise, demonstrations and escapades. He no
longer conceals his passion for eccentricities of all kinds. The French
proverb that _le ridicule tue_ does not apply to the average American
when he parades, several thousand strong, through the streets of a big
city disguised as a Turk, an admiral or a Spanish bullfighter, among
the din of brass bands. This sociable spirit follows him in business.
Nobody knows better than he how to make friends with a banker, an
insurance agent, a broker and the innumerable agents and peddlers who
continuously besiege him to insure him and to improve his well-being.
Then, if he is in quest of an education for his sons and daughters,
he can find around him a myriad of educational opportunities,
universities, colleges, schools, libraries, agencies of all sorts.
If he must “work his way through college,” the simple and democratic
character of American life is such that he can do so without loss of
self-respect.
From the religious point of view, the American scene is not less
attractive. Spirituality has become so attenuated in the United States
that the most hard-boiled agnostic may go to almost any church. No
sect, outside the Catholic Church, bothers much about the four final
ends of man nowadays, and the churches are too busy with this world to
pay much attention to the hereafter. American theology has exorcized
the devil long ago. Prophylaxy, citizenship and hygiene have just about
replaced the teaching of the Bible. The Church has become an annex to
the home, the university and the club. It is, first of all, a center
of social and moral action.
To explain American optimism the material organization of life
must also be taken into consideration. Basing itself on the use of
a continually improved machinery, this organization is perfect.
American prowess has adjusted machinery to life. Innumerable means
of transportation insure the maximum of comfort. Machines, large and
small, help the American to solve the servant problem. Elevators,
typewriters, telephones, calculating machines, motor cars, steam,
electric or automatic engines have been invented to save human labor
and exemplify the axiom that “time is money.” The Middle Ages expressed
their religious faith in the cathedrals. American comfort displays
itself in the Pullman car and the hotel palace.
In politics the average American has every reason for believing that he
is the best governed citizen in the world. Sovereignty lies entirely
in his hands, for better, for worse. American politics has its defects
and even its vices (incompetence, graft, bossism, etc.), and yet, when
all is told, the system of American government appears as the most
convenient appliance ever invented to answer the direct needs of the
governed. Taxes are paid and furnish a good revenue. Two big parties,
and only two, divide the country about equally and without serious
strife. There are cliques, and, perhaps, more than elsewhere, graft.
But the American voter is an optimist. He looks straight before him
and fulfills his functions as a citizen with an almost sacramental
solemnity. There are politically discontented people in the United
States, and their number is increasing, but they are still a small
minority. In spite of several incidents which cannot be ignored (see
Upton Sinclair’s novels on strikes, bribes and socialistic riots), the
United States is the only country where socialism has a small chance
of succeeding, and the only one where it is not yet in power. The
reason for this is that America is the country where man suffers least
and where he is least exploited. Labor is well paid and it is wisely
regulated. Competition is free and the distance between capital and
labor smaller than in other lands.
And yet Babbitt, the representative average American, is not happy.
Upon his discontent we should make a few reservations. First and above
all, let us remark it, the current pessimism to-day in the United
States is not a pessimism of the masses but of the élite. The case of
Sinclair Lewis and the people he puts on the stage in his novels is
remarkable on this point. To make him a pessimist without qualification
would be inaccurate.
Carol Kennicott represents the average American woman, Babbitt the
average American man. Both of them experience tragic moments, but, all
in all, they never despair, and return to the fold with, seemingly, the
approval and blessing of the author. After this preamble, I come to the
analysis of Sinclair Lewis’ novels.
* * * * *
“Main Street” is the moving picture of a small American town and the
portrait of a representative individual. Gopher Prairie is the typical
American settlement as there are hundreds of them in the United States,
east and west. Yet the difference in longitude has its importance.
As I have already pointed out, it is in the Middle West that one has
a chance to study the purest forms of American life to-day. That is
due to isolation and to the absence of aristocratic or unassimilated
foreign elements. It is there that Lewis studied his typical Americans.
Gopher Prairie is a little burg of about three thousand souls, not
a very large field for observation. Carol, the heroine, belongs to
a good family. She has been well brought up. She holds a University
degree and marries a doctor. Kennicott is an average man and a good
soul. He is neither very refined nor very cultured, but he is a kind
and reliable man, courteous, clean and disinterested. He is strongly
marked psychologically by what Freud calls the “mother complex.” He
has besides, like most Americans, a morbid sense of sociability and an
unqualified respect for public opinion.
In Kennicott the novelist has shown well the conflict of individual
initiative with the tyranny of accepted standards. Individual
initiative in the book is personified by his wife, Carol, a
semi-pathetic character but one whom Lewis was careful enough not to
turn into a Hedda Gabler. Her main virtue is zeal and her pet defect
restlessness. She is pretty, even a bit coquettish within the bounds
of respectability, a “womanly woman” rather than a feminist. She knows
several languages, art and literature, and is not satisfied with
all that. Like most American women she would like to reform society
and make the world better, let the world will it or not. Of course,
Gopher Prairie opposes her plans and refuses to be reformed. Carol is
bitterly disappointed, and so are we. She means so well, she is so
eager and sincere! And yet, when we think it over, we come pretty near
to agreeing with Sinclair Lewis that Carol overdoes it, and that a
reformed Gopher Prairie, with three thousand reformers in petticoats,
would hardly do to keep the place fit to live in. Lewis is certainly
not for the commonplace Gopherprairians. Is he more decidedly for
Carol? This is difficult to say, because he made her half a Joan of Arc
and half a Tartarin in skirts.
Carol stands as a living protest against the morons who surround her
thick as bats in a cellar. And yet when the end comes, she capitulates
and reënters Philistia willingly. It is difficult to know what to make
out of her. Flaubert, at least, was consistent in “Madame Bovary.”
Emma preferred death to capitulation. Suicide was for her the only
dignified solution of her problems. Imagine a Bovary converted to the
standards of her village with Doctor Rouault for her lord, and M.
Homais or Abbé Bournisien for her company until death! Sinclair Lewis’
attitude towards Carol is not clear. One dreams of her and of George
Babbitt as faithful in their revolt; of a Carol who should never return
to her commonplace country doctor or to the stagnant pools of Gopher
Prairie; of a Babbitt who should enlist with the I.W.W. and not leave
the responsibility for a happier future to his son. But this would be
pessimism and bolshevism _à la_ Tolstoi or _à la_ Romain Rolland. This
is an impossibility in America. So “Main Street” ends as quietly and
edifyingly as, let us say, “The Awakening of Helena Ritchie.”
Carol Kennicott, in any case, incarnates two characteristic American
traits,--on one hand the craving for independence, on the other
the almost morbid zeal for reform and apostolicism. She is a born
missionary. When she denounces the pettiness and vulgarity of Gopher
Prairie, it is doubtless Sinclair Lewis who speaks through her. But
when she pretends to destroy the world and to rebuild it in three days,
the novelist turns against her as against a Don Quixote in skirts.
Idealism in America, especially feminine idealism, is too easily turned
into intolerance and witch burning.
* * * * *
The case of Carol Kennicott recalls to mind that of Emma Bovary in
Flaubert’s novel, but there is a difference due to the fact that Carol
was born in America. Carol’s life is much less gloomy than Emma’s.
Doctor Kennicott is a better and more interesting man than Emma’s
husband. Gopher Prairie, in spite of all its shortcomings, is a more
cheerful place to live in than Mme. Bovary’s Normandy village. Who
knows whether Emma, had she migrated to the United States, would not
have ended by getting reconciled to a world where the thrills of the
movies, the automobile and the radio would have cured her of her
blues? As a member of a women’s club, and a social worker, she might
have taken a new interest in existence. Carol and Emma were, in many
respects, twin sisters. Both liked to read fiction and to mistake what
they read for reality. Both were married to commonplace and unromantic
country doctors. Both liked to build castles in Spain. Both shocked the
world around them by their adventures and escapades. As an artist, it
is true, Lewis does not come up to Flaubert’s level. Flaubert’s style
is plastic, something for the eye, as well as for the ear, to enjoy.
Lewis is almost exclusively oral, but he excels Flaubert in making
things and people move, breathe and speak in a lifelike way.
There is, according to the novelist, a double legend concerning the
American small town. The first is sentimental. According to it:
The American village remains the sure abode of friendship, honesty,
and clean, sweet, marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed
in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary
of smart women, return to their native town, assert that cities
are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably,
joyously abide in those towns until death.[31]
Then there is the “roughing it” legend:
The other tradition is that the significant features of all
villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers,
jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as
“hicks” and who ejaculate “Waal, I swan.” This altogether admirable
tradition rules the vaudeville stage, factious illustrators, and
syndicate newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty
years ago. Carol’s small town thinks not in horse-swapping but in
cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa,
kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge
prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of
Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics.[32]
In such a town, we are told, for every two contented people there are
hundreds, especially among the young, who are not. That is why the
intelligent and the well-to-do travel and leave for the big cities from
which they hope never to return. Even in the West the elder people
emigrate. They go to California to die.
The reason of these migrations is told by Carol’s story. It is the
necessity to escape from puritanical and provincial boredom. How dull
the little town in spite of his Morris chairs, his bridge parties and
his phonographs! Nothing left to imagination; heavy speech and heavy
manner; free thinking smothered under respectability:
It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness
of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire
to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of
the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless
walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It
is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery, self-thought and
self-defended. It is dullness made God.
A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward,
coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane
decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical
things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing
themselves as the greatest race in the world.
Carol Kennicott did not lack critical sense. She tried to explain to
herself the triumph of mediocrity around her. She was frightened by its
irresistible contagion. She saw the stupendous effects of the melting
process on the immigrants from Europe who, at that time, still flooded
the Middle West. How quickly they forgot their traditions, their
folklore and picturesque costumes. Take the Norwegian women of Gopher
Prairie. How light-heartedly they exchanged their red tunics, their
pearl necklaces, their black chemisettes lined with blue, their green
and gray aprons, their stiff capes (so well designed to enhance their
fresh little faces) for icy-white American blouses! How quickly their
home cooking was replaced by the national pork cutlets! Americanized,
standardized and commonplace, they lost their identity and charm
within a generation. Their sons, with ready-made clothes and ready-made
college talk, soon assumed a respectable air. The environment made of
these picturesque strangers is a banal replica of the world around them.
Doubtless all small towns are alike, and have always been in all
countries and climes. Isolation causes that. But the worst was that
Gopher Prairie wanted to set standards of mediocrity for the whole
world, or at least for one hundred and more million Americans:
It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and
sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress
the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies
other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby
conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes
over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.
Such a society functions admirably in the large production of
cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is
not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end
of a joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make
advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit
talking, not of love and courage, but of the convenience of safety
razors.
The end of “Main Street” is disappointing. Carol Kennicott’s generous
plans for the reformation of Gopher Prairie failed and she confessed
herself helpless. She lost all hope in social improvement and bowed to
accepted standards without renouncing entirely critical sense. After
all, an intelligent and zealous woman can devote herself to many useful
tasks, even in a retrograde community. There is the home, the church,
the bank, the school. If things cannot be changed, they can at least be
studied. Carol decided to try to understand what she could not reform.
Her career ends in a compromise. She goes “round-about,” like Ibsen’s
button-molder. It is suicide by sociology. This is pathetic when one
remembers the romantic longings of the heroine of “Main Street.” A
poet was asleep in her and tried in vain to flap his wings. She had
a quick imagination and an inborn sense of the beautiful, like all
romantic characters. When, for instance, she presided over the meetings
of the Campfire girls of Gopher Prairie, she could hardly help wishing
to change her “personality picture.” Her imagination soared and she
believed herself among the Indians. Those common-looking girls on Main
Street became transfigured to her eyes, as soon as they had put on
their Sioux costumes. As Carol looked at them dancing and performing
the rites of the Redskin she felt as if she were one herself.[33]
Let him who doubts Carol’s kinship with Emma Bovary read the pages of
the book where she practices landscape gardening at the little station
of Gopher Prairie and Sinclair Lewis’ comments on her experiment:
She felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and
empty even of incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking
from trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness,
incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman heard
her say, “Oh, yes, I do think it will be a good example for the
children”; and all the while she saw herself running garlanded
through the streets of Babylon.
Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than
recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she discovered
Hugh (her son). “What does the buttercup say, mummy?” he cried, his
hands full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She
knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more full; she
was altogether reconciled ... for an hour.
But she woke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the
bump of bedding that was Kennicott, tiptoed into the bathroom and,
by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her
pallid face.
Wasn’t she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper
and younger? Wasn’t her nose sharper? Wasn’t her neck granulated?
She stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years
since her marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly
as though she had been under ether? Would time not slink past till
death? She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub
and raged mutely against the indifference of the gods:
“I don’t care! I won’t endure it! They lie so ..., they tell me I
ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven
nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will
be annihilated, as far as I am concerned. I am I! I am not content
to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for
me! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that
a display of potatoes at Howland and Gould’s is enough beauty and
strangeness?”
The last words of this romantic soliloquy show too well, alas! by their
triviality that Carol is only a Middle Western Bovary, but the tone
and the pathos of the piece are worthy of the best pages in Flaubert.
Salammbô, praying to the moon on her Carthaginian terrace, Emma giving
way to her blues in her boudoir, would have understood the melancholy
Carol dreaming of Babylon in a Gopher Prairie garden.
* * * * *
I now turn to “Babbitt.” The author’s literary tactics have changed
since he wrote “Free Air” and “Our Mr. Wrenn.” Plots have now given
way almost entirely to portraits, anecdotes to characters. Sinclair
Lewis’ tactics consist in heaping together the minutest details which
will help him to put a vital person before us. His first novels were
organic, the latter are merely episodic. “Babbitt” is almost plotless.
It is, at the same time, the picture of a man and that of a profession.
Babbitt is not a fancy. He is the _homo americanus par excellence_,
the representative average American. He recalls Molière’s “tradesman
turned a gentleman.” He makes us think of M. Jourdain as an immigrant
in America, parvenu, with a Packard and an up-to-date house full of the
most modern appliances. How proud M. Jourdain would be to-day of his
motor car, his telephone, his bathroom, his typewriter and his radio!
But M. Jourdain was an exception in seventeenth-century France and
George Babbitt, we are told--though this well may be pure calumny--is
the rule in twentieth-century America. Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt
has a double personality.
First and foremost, he is a very caustic and live person. He is
married, possessed of children belonging to the species _enfants
terribles_. He lives in a rather expensive house in Zenith, a city
as famous to-day as Tarascon or the kingdom of Poictesme. He is very
concrete and very individualistic. On the other hand, taken as a
general type, he may be called _Monsieur tout-le-monde_. He is the man
of the crowds. Sinclair Lewis has gathered with a stroke of genius, and
incarnated in him, all the gestures, all the poses, all the hobbies,
all the colloquialisms of the average American. He likes to work and
do business on a large scale. He is fond of his home, fond of living
in it, and fond of leaving it too, once in a while. There is a dormant
romanticism in him, but it is harmless and unheroic. When Tartarin de
Tarascon had the blues, he went to hunt the lions in the suburbs of
Algiers. The call-of-the-wild takes George Babbitt away for fishing
parties into the wilds of Maine. He loves his wife, he loves his
children, but, oftentimes, civilization bores him and he would rather
love something else. He is a realtor by profession, neither more nor
less honest than his colleagues. For him, as for most of us, “business
is simply other people’s money,” as the French playwright puts it. And
George knows how to make money. He has his flirtations and perhaps
his passions. The imprisonment of a friend who killed his wife hit a
serious blow at his optimism, but his good humor survived. Finally,
like Carol, he makes an edifying end and returns to the fold, wishing
for his son a more cheerful world to live in.
Babbitt, as a representative man, is possible only in America. His
gestures, his foibles, his words and phrases, are explained by the
country where millions of human beings are cut on the same pattern,
made in series like automobiles or harvesters, because it cannot be
done otherwise. Quantity _versus_ quality, the masses against the
individual,--this is the great American problem and George Babbitt
is the half-sarcastic, half-tragic example of it. He is conformism
incarnate. The family, the school, the church, the thousand and one
associations which he must join manufacture for him his thoughts, his
feelings and his speech. They have made him an automaton, leaving him
very little personality. A democracy of more than one million citizens
produces Babbitts naturally, as apple trees their apples. Babbittry is
the inevitable ransom of some of the highest American virtues. A people
ceaselessly active, moving and advancing, needs discipline as much as a
professional army. Before being an individual, Babbitt is a private in
Democracy’s regiment. He wears a uniform; he performs certain duties;
he recites from a drill-book. Never mind if he left the best of himself
behind. Somebody else will pick it up for him. The triumph of the
greater number cannot be insured without the sacrifice of the minority.
Hence the tragedy of exceptional people in America, the agony of Poe,
the isolation of Whitman, the ordeal of Mark Twain, the exile of Henry
James, the sarcasms of Henry Adams. Hence the floating anxiety and
soul-fear of the man in the crowd.
It was advisedly, I believe, that Sinclair Lewis made Babbitt a
real-estate man, or, as he pompously calls him, in Western fashion,
a “realtor.” The profession is typically American. Since the closing
of the frontier the staking out of one’s claim to a “lot” has been
the last romantic adventure left to the pioneer and the conquistador.
Speculation is ingrained in Americans and advertising goes along
with it. The widespread use of publicity in the United States is
interesting, not only to the economist but to the psychologist.
Advertising is second nature with Babbitt. Advertising was born
in America out of industrial growth, market monopolization, the
standardization of products, not to forget competition. In a democratic
country where the market is swamped with goods and with manufacturers
eager to force their products upon the public, the megaphone and
amplifier methods are the only chances of success. But advertising is
not only a way of making a fortune in America. It is the most popular
form of American self-assertion. The average American has a genius for
hyperbole. His country is the land of the superlative. Advertising in
the United States is the safest business method, and everything there
relies more and more on publicity. The churches, the government, the
universities, art, literature and even philanthropy, can no longer do
without it.
The satire of publicity in “Babbitt” was timely. Lewis denounced its
brutal and tragic aspects. He showed it as a dangerous charlatanism,
an invasion of private life, a violation of free choice, an insult to
common sense. Unbridled publicity, as it is sometimes practised in the
United States, presupposes in its victims brains which have been dulled
to the point of apathy. One cannot very well imagine the American
methods of advertising as exposed in “Babbitt” succeeding in a nation
as traditionally ironical and free-minded as France, for instance,
where the average man is imbued with the Cartesian spirit and refuses
to accept as true anything which does not appear evident--even if it
were offered to him in a gold spoon.
Yet the American surrenders to publicity without much ado, with
resignation rather than with enthusiasm. I do not believe that he
is blind to the tricks of the advertisers. But he is busy and he
uses publicity as a convenience. The commercial “ad” is a machine
to simplify existence. “Time is money.” It spares one the bother of
choosing. It leads directly towards a goal. It facilitates shopping
which Americans, especially women, cultivate as one of their favorite
outdoor sports.
Babbitt is publicity personified, and the most curious characters in
the book are inveterate publicity maniacs.
* * * * *
“Arrowsmith” is a bitter and an almost tragic book. It takes up again
the case of advertising and its evil influence in the higher spheres.
In this novel we find the same verve, the same satirical genius,
the same humor of the preceding books. Yet the humor is darker and
decidedly more pessimistic. There is no happy ending and no compromise
in “Arrowsmith.” The equivocal attitude of the author towards his
characters has disappeared. Antagonisms are well defined and Lewis
does not straddle both issues at the same time. On one side stand the
charlatans, on the other the true and disinterested scientists. The
contrast between them is sharply and tragically emphasized. To make it
more so, the author brought reinforcements to the central characters.
Arrowsmith is not alone--like Carol or Babbitt. He has an escort of
devoted friends. Science is represented and defended by two or three
representative men, the Nietzschean Gottlieb, the heroic Sondelius and
the mystical Wicket. In the enemy’s camp there is Doctor Pickerbaugh
and this is enough. He is unique as a mountebank.
Sinclair Lewis has satirized medical fakes with as much gusto as
Molière, that sworn enemy of all quacks. The trail was good. The
charlatan of drugs and patent medicines, the chiropractors and the
mind readers swarm in the United States. The medical profession is
being besieged by counterfeits of all kinds. The sentimental campaigns
against vivisection, the drives against vaccination are parts of the
current events in America. In “Arrowsmith” Lewis avenged the common
sense of the American people. Let me summarize rapidly the plot of the
book.
It tells how young Arrowsmith took up his medical studies in a big
Western university, how he felt inspired by the teaching of his
misunderstood master Gottlieb, how he married and slowly made his way
in the world as a country doctor, then of his career in a drug factory
where he refused to barter his professional honor, how he joined a
great scientific institute, how he discovered antitoxins, how he went
to fight an epidemic of plague in the West Indies where he lost his
wife, how he was tempted to market his growing reputation, how he
married a rich woman and how finally he escaped and gave up everything
for the sake of disinterested science. I have too much respect for
the memory of the great William James to drag him from his grave
among the quacks, and yet, if there is a name well fitted to brand
what the novelist denounces in “Arrowsmith,” it certainly is that of
“pragmatism.” The truth for which Arrowsmith stands heroically to the
end, is the truth “which does not pay.” “Arrowsmith” is the work of an
idealist, a plea for science sought for its own sake. Such a manifesto
does honor to the ideals of the new American literature.
As to Sinclair Lewis as an artist, I have already noted along the
way many of his merits and his defects. He lacks consistency and
balance in composition. His books seem to come not out of a deliberate
and well-matured design, but of a blind and fervid vital impulse.
“Arrowsmith,” like “Elmer Gantry,” is written haphazardly. They are
not plastic, but show a rare gift of verbal effusion. There is a mimic
in every word which Lewis writes. From this point of view his only
rival is Dickens. By what name should we call this peculiar sense of
his which enables him to catch, as by a spontaneous contagion, the
words such as they are spoken, and to reproduce them with the accuracy
of a vitaphone? The average American in his novels may look like an
automaton when he thinks or acts, but, in speech, he is life itself.
Lewis’ facility for verbal invention is prodigious. I have no authority
to comment upon American linguistics. But I have already alluded to Mr.
Mencken’s book “The American Language.” I hope that he will not forget
George Babbitt and his friends as contributors to the next enlarged
edition of his volume. Where could we look for a more spontaneous
and fruitful eloquence? The American vernacular in “Babbitt” is as
nimble, “snappy,” cheerful and nervous as the American himself. Has
anybody ever more skilfully aped the living dynamism of the American
language?[34]
* * * * *
“Elmer Gantry” marks a new progress toward satire and a deepening of
Lewis’ social pessimism. It is still more bitter and more acrimonious
than “Arrowsmith.” It was not written to please. The author has
unmasked his batteries at last and thrown himself in open sedition
against the church. The book is one of the mightiest strokes ever hit
at hypocrisy since the days of “Tartuffe.” Hypocrisy takes a dangerous
and frankly criminal aspect in “Elmer Gantry,” a Barnum of religion.
America is not a country of hypocrites. Everybody there lives in the
open. If hypocrisy exists it is not individual but collective. The
old-fashioned hypocrite in European literature was interesting as an
exception. He might be called a hypocrite by defect. Gantry, on the
contrary, is a hypocrite by excess, and, one might say, by hyperbole.
He is always beyond truth, not under it. He is a hypocrite by ambitions
and anticipation, like Mark Twain’s Colonel Sellers. And yet Gantry
is even more repugnant than Tartuffe. He is a scoundrel, a debauché
and a cheat. Sinclair Lewis has drawn his portrait at length from the
day when he entered the ministry as one joins a baseball team, until
his triumph as an evangelist in his big church at Zenith. The scene
in the beginning of the book, where he abandons the woman whom he has
compromised and passes her to a rival with a lie, is enough to brand
him. Let the reader remember also the raid in the red-light districts,
where Gantry acts as a bully. But the triumph of his venom will be
found in the final prayer where he asks the Lord to make his country as
good and moral as he! Beware of a humorist! There is a sting behind his
smiles.
American critics have been unanimous in finding “Elmer Gantry”
overdone. Tartuffe’s rascality was qualified and it remained
accidental. He broke into M. Orgon’s house, as a thief who steals a
watch and then retires. Elmer Gantry is a hypocrite in broad daylight
and triumphant to the end. Such an obduration in crime and success in
mischief read like impossibilities. By unduly stressing the rascality
of Gantry, it may well be that Lewis intended to kill two birds with
one stone. “Elmer Gantry” is no less an indictment of a hypocrite than
a courageous study of the decline of religious ideals in America.
Religion, as everything else, has become automatic. Mysticism has been
replaced by respectability. The American churches failed to raise the
people to their high level, and, in order to make themselves popular,
they brought their ideals down to earth. To make up for the absence of
the really faithful they relied more and more on the larger number.
They were seized with the spirit of greed and material comfort, and
betrayed the teachings of Him who said that His kingdom was not of
this world. They courted money and, to keep the congregations, they
resorted to the advertising methods of the “realtors.” A display of
riches and material splendor outside, and within the walls everything
except Christianity. Hygiene, sport, eugenics, prophylaxy, domestic and
political economy, entertainments and very little Bible. Churches vied
with one another to see which could present the most gorgeous façade.
Cathedrals were erected, cathedrals of stone and not of faith. The
church became fashionable, a club, a school, a hotel, a parlor. Elmer
Gantry had no difficulty in investing his lust and greed in such a
temple. It repaid him well.
Around Gantry, the novelist has marshalled in complete array the forces
of the Protestant clergy in America. We are told that he managed to
peep through the doors of the temple before he satirized it. No wonder
the clergy rose in arms against him, and there is no doubt that he
did not render full justice to them. A great many noble souls were
not included in the parade. However, in the long run, one sees no
reasons why “Elmer Gantry” should prove more harmful to the clerical
profession than “Arrowsmith” to the medical one. To expose the faker
_manu militari_ now and then may prove after all a profitable operation
for the true servants of the temple.
From a literary point of view, “Elmer Gantry” shows the author in the
process of broadening his scope, while he intensifies the virulence
of his attacks. After the village idealist, the inhibited realtor;
the doctors, and then the clergymen. Who next? And yet through all
these avatars Sinclair Lewis has drawn always the same man. Good or
bad, he is the same. Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry were born the
same day, of the same parent. They all share in what seems to be, on
the part of the novelist, an excess of vitality. The large majority
of the characters in the American novels had been up to then anæmic.
Sinclair Lewis’ characters suffer from high blood pressure. It would
be a great loss to American literature if he should forget art for
muck-raking. Let him remember the lesson of Balzac and Flaubert. Those
great realists never lost sight of human passions, but they contrived
to hold art for its own sake far above the surge of their emotions.
They believed that, after all, our foibles, our defects or vices were
much less interesting and important than the view which the artist can
take of them in cold blood.
CHAPTER VII
_Sherwood Anderson or When the Dreamer Awakes_
Few American authors, since Whitman, have taken literature as seriously
or have conceived it as being on so high a level of mysticism as
Sherwood Anderson. I mention Whitman advisedly in connection with
Anderson. His influence over the younger American writers is manifest.
Was he not the first to emphasize the bio-chemical element, and to find
lyrical inspiration in it? Dreiser’s hymns to the Vital Force, his
pæans to physiology, as well as his tragic sense of everyday life bear
Whitman’s imprint unmistakably. Sherwood Anderson owes him still more.
Sensualism and mysticism blend in his prose as they do in Whitman’s
poems. In the words of both of them we hear simultaneously the whispers
of heavenly death and the somber droning of the _Erdgeist_. Both of
them have given heed to what Emerson called the _demonic_. Both have
brought the soul and the body into magic and sensuous contact. The
poetry of the one and the poetic prose of the other seem to come from
an embrace in which the spiritual and the material still coalesce.
Modern as they are in many respects, the stamp of primitivism is on
them. In Anderson’s novels, man, like the cosmos in “Leaves of Grass,”
has not yet been disengaged from that amorphous clay kneaded by the
gods. He still finds himself in a nebulous state, halfway between
himself and animal.[35]
“Mid-American Chants” are authentic grafts budding from “Leaves of
Grass.”
To call Sherwood Anderson an _ex professo_ writer or an _homme de
lettres_ would be amiss. Fiction and song are only an outlet for his
spiritual longings. Writing is for him a groping toward the Unknown, a
mystic ejaculation of a mind in quest of itself. His works give us a
chance to catch the creative spirit in process of formation.
Like Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson is a product of the Middle West. He was
born in Camden, Ohio, in 1872. He also is an offspring of the prairie.
Taine has long been dead and his theory of _la race, le milieu, le
moment_ is to-day as dead as he. And yet, there is a great temptation
to revive it to help us link Anderson’s primitivism to his environment.
In fact, Anderson saved us that trouble recently when he published
“Tar,” an autobiography redolent with the smack of the crude land where
corn, cattle and people grow together, in torrid atmosphere, over the
huge plains swept by torrents of heat and light. The boy in “Tar” was
not made out of the common clay, but of the tepid dark loam on the
shores of the giant Mississippi. Only amidst the Russian steppes, or in
the valleys of the Ganges, could we find to-day as crude and primitive
a setting for a writer. In this respect “Tar” strikes an almost savage
note. One would wonder how such wild phases of life could appear in a
modern country like the United States, if one ignored the fact that
geography has not kept pace with history in the growth of America. The
land is still, in many parts, as crude as it was in the days of the
Indian. The primitivism of Anderson and Whitman is still written in
the expanse of their country, a country as large and as wild to-day,
here and there, as the African jungle. The real wonder is not the
resemblance between the American people and their surroundings, but the
fact that art of any sort can grow in such primitive parts.
The autobiographical element plays a large rôle in Sherwood Anderson’s
books. If there is anybody who seems to have taken upon himself the
task to prove and justify the theories of the psychoanalysts, it is
certainly he. Day-dreaming, double personality, the comedies which the
individual plays to himself,[36] the defense and enrichment of one’s
“personality picture,”--all those are the essential themes of his
novels. Anderson is the Freudian novelist _par excellence_. Personally,
he is an uprooted man with a complex heredity. He betrayed some of it
in Windy McPherson, an assumed portrait of his own father (in “Windy
McPherson’s Son”). Windy is a Don Quixote with a mania for disguising
himself. He cannot write novels but he lives and enacts them. It is
difficult to say, in his case, where reality ends and fiction begins.
A veteran of the Civil War, Windy McPherson’s imagination has become
hypertrophied. He has been shell-shocked and the trauma has left him
more than half crazy. Windy is a village Tartarin, a drunkard, a loafer
and a megalomaniac. Here is an example of his tragi-comical exploits.
One day, his small town has organized a commemorative pageant. A
trumpeter is in demand. Windy McPherson does not hesitate to offer
himself. For a long time he had been leading fictitious assaults in the
imaginative narrations of his prowess. The Bovaryism in his case is in
an acute stage. The thought of parading through Main Street astride a
fine horse, blowing a bugle before the whole assembly, fills him with
pride. Then the great day arrives. A procession is being formed. All
are waiting for the signal to start. Windy McPherson is there on his
charger as trumpeter. All of a sudden the most lamentable wheeze issues
forth from the cavalry trumpet which he wields. How far the ideal from
the reality! Windy’s son will never forget the pitiful venture, nor how
he blushed before his assembled countrymen.
There is but little filial respect left in Anderson’s tales.[37] One
of the most tragic episodes in his novels is the one in the same book
where Sam’s mother is about to die of ill treatment and misery. Windy
has come home drunk, as usual. He is crouching over a table, fussing
and mumbling. Suddenly Sam gets up. He marches toward his father, takes
him by the collar and throws him out of the room. The scuffle was harsh
and the boy rushes out for help, thinking that he may have killed
his father. Unfortunately for all concerned, such was not the case.
When Sam returns with the neighbors, still trembling lest he may have
strangled his father, he finds Windy comfortably settled in a saloon.
He could no more die of a blow than of shame, nor could he make a good
tragic hero.
On his mother’s side there is some Latin blood in Sherwood Anderson.
He has retained a touching memory of his mother, a native of Italy,
dark-complexioned, imaginative, fiery and herself the daughter of a
spirited woman. Despite his nostalgia for the Italian Renaissance and
his admiration for some of the sixteenth-century supermen, Anderson
shows very little Latinity as a thinker and an artist. He is far too
nebulous for that and refutes Boileau’s aphorism that what is clearly
conceived must needs be clearly expressed.
At the age of twelve or thirteen, young Anderson launched himself
upon the discovery of the world. For many years he had to earn his
bread by the sweat of his brow as a mechanic apprentice, a factory
hand and stable boy; he tramped among “men and horses” without much
discrimination between them. We find him in Chicago, at the age of
seventeen, without a cent in his pocket. The great metropolis of the
Middle West was to be his headquarters until he reached literary fame.
He used it for the background of the stories collected under the title
“Winesburg, Ohio.”
The modest workman of the Chicago docks and yards had a higher ambition
than merely a material livelihood. We recognize him and his dreams in
these sons of proletarians who, in his first novels, suddenly rise
by the strength of their fists to the highest positions and marry
millionaire heiresses, in order to renounce their good fortune suddenly
and go in quest of what they call Truth. This is the theme of his first
two books, “Windy McPherson’s Son” and “Marching Men.” The heroes of
these books are young and ambitious, without any faith or any law, but
not without any ideals. We see in them Anderson himself, incapable of
distinguishing fact from fiction, dream from daily existence, and with
a pathetic longing toward the Unknown.
In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the American
army mobilized against Spain. He was careful himself to strip this
decision of all heroics and to insist upon passing on to posterity
for what he precisely was, a well-meaning “chocolate soldier.” Small,
stout, near-sighted and still more absent-minded, Sherwood Anderson is
modest enough to confess that he never seriously thought of conquering
Cuba or enlisting in the Rough Riders. He was satisfied with regaining
his health in the open air of the camps and in enjoying the big parade
of the marching troops, an enjoyment which he would have shared with
Walt Whitman and which has probably inspired in him both the idea and
the title of “Marching Men.”
* * * * *
Anderson came to literary composition slowly, or perhaps we should
believe him when he says that he was never out of it. The boy Giotto
began to paint while he was still a boy tending his sheep. Sherwood
Anderson never ceased to dream and to write his dreams, and he began
to do so very early. He had dreamt (and imagined things) for a long
while. That, he tells us, was always for him the real, the only way to
live. Before writing his books he had enacted, all alone, magnificent
and tragic novels in a barn, the favorite “hang-out” of his childhood
days. Sprawling among the warm hay, how many times had he given way to
dreaming! Listen to the dreamer:
To the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from
the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections
and, no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two
ends continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.
To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to
give yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.
There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moved with an
ordered purpose through ordered days, or at least through ordered
hours. In the life of fancy there is no such thing as good or bad.
There are no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia
do not come in at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the
fancy. The Puritan, the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the
dry intellectuals, all who desire to uplift, to remake life on some
definite plan conceived within the human brain, die of a disease
of the lungs. They would do better to stay in the world of fact to
spend their energy in catching bootleggers, inventing new machines,
helping humanity--the best they can--in its no doubt laudable
ambition to hurl bodies through the air at the rate of five hundred
miles an hour.
In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow
movements and with many graduations into the ugly and the
beautiful. What is alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of
the room in which we live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned
with weariness? In the end it must become one thing or the other.
All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is
beautiful must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic
sadness and suffering.
Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere
smart-aleck, without humbleness before the possibilities of
life, one sure of himself--and thus one may remain to the end,
blind, deaf and dumb, feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our
intellectuals find this is the more comfortable road to travel.
In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is
ugly in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty![38]
The whole Anderson shows himself in these remarks. With what glee he
lived in dreamland! Was not he himself that shy and frightened youth
whom he describes as stalking through the streets of his native village
with his eyes downcast as if he lived in another world? In a world
deliberately made ugly by utilitarianism, among people who think of
nothing but of getting rich quick, Anderson cast his lot with the
proletarians. The only beings for whom he shows any tender feelings are
the small craftsmen--now a vanishing caste--who used to be possessed
with a sensuous passion for fine surfaces and beautiful materials.
Without this craving for work beautifully done he sees no possible
civilization. Alas! the sense of beauty is gone. Comfort and speed have
replaced refinement and art:
Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap
chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom
floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, the
jazz, the movies.
The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in
the midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed.
Something vibrant in the air about us all.
How is it possible to preserve a sense of the beautiful in a world such
as this? We might still find a new interest in life by learning how to
feel the beautiful finish of a perfect surface, a sensation which used
to bring an æsthetic emotion to the tip of the craftsman’s fingers.
Why not heed John Ruskin’s and William Morris’ advice and, through
the superficial amusements of our modern civilization, revive for the
arts and crafts a passion, since they have been the foundation of
civilization?
To love, to feel, to dream! That is the question. How joyfully Anderson
surrenders himself to fancy!
And what a world that fanciful one--how grotesque, how strange, how
teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that
world?...
There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell
you. I should like to take you with me through the gate into the
land, let you wander there with me. There are people there with
whom I should like you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied
by the gigantic dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day,[39]
the stout man with the gray eyes and with the pack on his back, who
stands talking to the beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage,
the little dark woman with the boyish husband who lives in a small
frame house by a dusty road far out, in the country.
Such was the world to which his imagination gave life, a fictitious
world, of course, but in which art, allied to sympathetic intuition is
rendered beautiful enough to make one wish that it were real. _Kennst
du das Land...?_ And how can we call a writer with this trend of mind a
realist? For him only that is real which has been first imagined.
In his attic the future author of “Dark Laughter” does not only evoke
familiar faces. He opens up wide the gates of fantasy. Soon the walls
of the barn vanish and a pageant passes before his eyes:
A narrow beam of yellow light against the satin surface of purplish
gray wood, wood become soft of texture, touched with these delicate
shades of color. The light from above falls straight down the
face of a great heavy beam of the wood. Or is it marble rather
than wood, marble touched also by the delicate hand of time? I am
perhaps dead in my grave. No, it cannot be a grave. Would it not
be wonderful if I had died and been buried in a marble sepulchre,
say on the summit of a high hill above a city in which live many
beautiful men and women? It is a grand notion and I entertain it
for a time. What have I done to be buried so splendidly? Well,
never mind that. I have always been one who wanted a great deal
of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go
to all the trouble of deserving it. I am buried magnificently in
a marble sepulchre cut into the side of a large hill, near the
top. On a certain day my body was brought hither with great pomp.
Music played, women and children wept and strong men bowed their
heads. Now on feast days young men and women come up the hillside
of my burial place. It must be through the opening the yellow light
comes. The young men who come up the hillside are wishing they
could be like me, and the young and beautiful women are all wishing
I were still alive and that I might be their lover.
And lo! the dream extended. What had this king of yore done to deserve
so much honor? Had he come to the rescue of a beleaguered city? Had he
slain the dragon of Saint George, rid the country of monstrous snakes,
or found the millennium? Imagination soared afield and the little barn,
in the small Middle West town, was magically transfigured. Let the
dreamer take us along in his flight with him. We are now in Chartres
with the Virgin so dear to the heart of sceptical Henry Adams. But this
must be an illusion. He who dreams is an American and there are no
cathedrals in his land. There are no ancient monuments there except the
walls of some Grand Canyon or the towers erected by American finance on
the promontories of Manhattan:
I cannot be in the cathedral at Chartres or buried splendidly in
a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city....
It cannot be I am in the presence of the Virgin. Americans do
not believe in either Virgins or Venuses. Americans believe in
themselves. There is no need of gods now, but if the need arises
Americans will manufacture many millions of them, all alike. They
will label them “Keep Smiling” or “Safety First,” and go on their
way, and as for the woman, the Virgin, she is the enemy of our
race. Her purpose is not our purpose. Away with her!
Whereupon the dreamer awoke. We know now Sherwood Anderson’s _faculté
maitresse_, imagination, and the familiar form which it takes in his
books, _i.e._, evocation through dreams. His characters are so deeply
absorbed in dreaming that the author himself never quite succeeds in
waking them from their hypnotic trance.
* * * * *
If we are to believe the confessions of his autobiography, Anderson
was led to become a writer by a tyrannical impulse. He felt a physical
craving for dotting the white surface of a sheet of paper with ink or
pencil. Like that friend of his who was so fond of cigars that he took
a trunkful of them to Havana, he pleads guilty to not being able to go
to a distant city without taking his stationery along with him. The
sight of a ream of white paper thrills him to the tips of his fingers.
It calls for something to be put on it. The average man crosses the
street and sees houses and people, a child at a window, a woman with a
babe in her arms, a drowsy workman passing by. He wonders what is the
matter with these people. Lo! the white page is there and the writer
will photograph the whole thing for him. “You don’t know, but _I_
know!” exclaims the writer. “Just wait a minute and I shall tell you.
I have felt it. Now I no longer exist by myself. I only live in these
other people.” Then he rushes to his rooms; he lights the lamp and
behold! the pageant passes. Words are to the writer what colors are to
the artist. They each have a color and a taste. They are tangible.[40]
It seems to him that words are something that even his fingers can
touch “as one touches the cheeks of a child.” Here are the white sheets
of paper taunting the author to write. But like a true lover he wants
to postpone his pleasure. He must wait a day or two to take up the
challenge daringly, baldly. His worship of the white sheet is such
that he excuses the manufacturers of writing paper from his general
excommunication of capitalists. Not only does he grant them economic
privileges, but he goes as far as to put them among the saints on the
calendar:
Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped
upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal
dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers.
Let them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy, lying
brutes. Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I
issued a bill, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning
them to burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my
curses, you busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low
price and in vast quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada,
I sainted. There was one man--I invented him--named Saint John P.
Belger, who furnished paper to indigent writers of prose free of
charge. For virtue I put him, in my dream, almost on a level with
Saint Francis of Assisi.
Such was the physical side of Sherwood Anderson’s literary calling. The
son of an artisan, brought up among craftsmen, a craftsman himself,
he went in for writing as others do for book-binding, engraving, or
gilding, out of sheer love for the beautiful materials to be handled
and whose lure he could not resist. He confesses to being unable to
remember a period in his life when he did not have a hankering for
scrawling something in black and white. When he was in business, buying
and selling did not interest him as such. He spent his days in writing
“ads” which were profitable to his patrons. But as soon as he was at
home, the magic spell of the white sheets returned and he could not
resist any longer.[41]
Fiction seems to be nearer to fact in the United States than anywhere
else in the world. America is the land of possibilities. The life of
Sherwood Anderson, self-made man, laborer, tramp, novelist and poet,
reads like a true novel. It recalls to our mind Jack London’s “Martin
Eden.” Like Eden, Anderson attained literary fame by the sweat of his
brow and not without an athletic display of muscles. America has never
spoiled her writers. Murger’s “Vie de Bohême” tells of no hardships
comparable to those which a Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson
(not to mention Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman) had to go through
before they rose to fame. Thanks to this harsh apprenticeship, Anderson
himself has learned to be indifferent to comfort. He can write, he
tells us, anywhere, and at any time, in a factory room, on a tree stump
on the highway, in a railroad station, in the lobby of a hotel and be
perfectly unconscious of what is going on around him. He composed parts
of “Poor White” in a dingy saloon in Mobile, while next to him three
drunken sailors were discussing the divinity of Christ. He wrote the
story of Elsie Leander (included in “The Triumph of the Egg”) in the
station at Detroit. And that day, he tells us that of course he missed
the train.
His inborn absent-mindedness could not make him a very prosperous
business man, and yet he stuck to manufacturing paint for more than ten
years. The way in which he quit his job is characteristic of the man.
One day, he tells us, he was in his office dictating letters. Suddenly,
and quite unconsciously, instead of proceeding with his dictation, he
happened to utter automatically the following words: “And then, he went
into the river bed ..., and then he went into the river bed, and then
...” Thereupon Anderson got up. His stenographer thought him insane.
He went out never to return, except on one occasion, when he wanted to
ascertain what had become of his factory. Even that night he had no
luck, for the night watchman mistook him for a burglar and came very
near shooting him.
Let us not forget Anderson’s escape. There will be many similar flights
in his books. The unpardonable sin, according to the novelist, is
automatism, petrification on the surface, routine. He insists on an
incessant renewal of life, on change and migration as the essential
condition of moral progress. “Leave all and follow me!” says the Voice
which all his heroes obey.
* * * * *
One day Anderson found himself free at last, free to seek Truth.
His literary début dates from his arrival in Chicago in 1910. Since
the World Exposition of 1892, the metropolis of the Middle West had
become a first-rate artistic and literary center. Anderson found
friends, advisers and critics there. In contact with the young writers,
especially Theodore Dreiser, he became self-conscious as an artist. I
shall not go into detail of his works, or what he is pleased to call
his “scribblings” at this period. He found in Chicago materials for
verse and prose, and he began to write short stories and novels. “Windy
McPherson’s Son” appeared in 1916, not without some misfortunes of
its own. The critics were unfair to the book. According to the author
himself it was full of reminiscences of Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack
London and Zola. But the real Sherwood Anderson was there too. It was
invaluable as a piece of autobiography. It tells the pathetic story of
an ill-born youth who is forced to inhibit the best part of himself.
A deep and, at times, lyrical feeling for human miseries pervaded the
novel. It heralded the advent of an American Dostoievski.
The sad idyll of Sam and Mary Underwood, the gloomy atmosphere and the
semi-consciousness through which the protagonists of this book move
and seek themselves, foreshadow his novels of a later date. At the
end of the story, Sam McPherson withdraws himself from the world, he
becomes converted and makes up his mind to seek Truth and not earthly
ambitions. Sam was born of poor parents and had to rise painfully by
his own means.[42]
He tore himself away from his early environment. He got into the good
graces of a wealthy manufacturer in Chicago. Upon getting rich, he
married his employer’s daughter. The plot is developed through episodes
which would seem incredible had we not read similar ones in Upton
Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. Sam begins as a superman, _à la_ Frank
Cowperwood, which means that all the roads to success seem fair ones
to him. He is at first a conscienceless “bounder,” to use Anderson’s
own phraseology. He does not believe in the sweet and Christian ethics
of failure. Then suddenly, at the end, he drops everything to become a
socialist. Up to this point this story reads very much like a book by
Upton Sinclair. But Anderson is more of a mystic than of a socialist.
He does not much trust the proletariat helping moral progress. Sam is
converted. He redeems himself, not by following the path of social
justice but that of Love and Pity. The book is particularly interesting
from the angle of psychoanalysis. It discusses a case of the
dissociation and reunification of the self, a problem which was soon
to become an obsession with the author. The whole story is based upon
Sam McPherson’s efforts to disentangle his true “personality picture”
from his adventures. Later on Anderson refuses to help his characters
out of the depths of the subconscious. He lets them flounder in the
darkness of their conscience. But he had not reached that stage yet, at
the time of which I am now speaking. Then he did not neglect to answer
the S.O.S. of his characters in distress. Here is the portrait of Sam
McPherson as a representative American:
Sam McPherson is a living American. He is a rich man, but his
money, that he spent so many years and so much of his energy
acquiring, does not mean much to him. What is true of him is true
of more wealthy Americans than is commonly believed. Something has
happened to him that has happened to the others also, to how many
of the others? Men of courage, with strong bodies and quick brains,
men who have come of a strong race, have taken up what they had
thought to be the banner of life and carried it forward. Growing
weary, they have stopped in a road that climbs a long hill and have
leaned the banner against a tree. Tight brains have loosened a
little. Strong convictions have become weak. Old gods are dying.
“_It is only when you are torn from your mooring and drift like a
rudderless ship that I am able to come near you._”
The banner has been carried forward by a strong, daring man, filled
with determination.
What is inscribed on it?
It would perhaps be dangerous to inquire too closely. We Americans
have believed that life must have point and purpose. We have
called ourselves Christians but the sweet Christian philosophy
of failure has been unknown among us. To say of one of us that he
has failed, is to take life and courage away. For so long we have
to push blindly forward. Roads had to be cut through our forests,
great towns must be built. What in Europe has been slowly building
itself out of the fibre of the generations we must build now, in a
lifetime.
In our father’s day, at night in the forests of Michigan, Ohio,
Kentucky, and on the wide prairies, wolves howled. There was fear
in our fathers and mothers, pushing their way forward, making the
new land. When the land was conquered fear remained, the fear of
failure. Deep in our American souls the wolves still howl.
Sam McPherson represents the two states of the American conscience,
the Christian and the primitive. Half of his life was spent like that
of Theodore Dreiser’s realistic heroes. He succeeded practically; that
is, he failed morally and spiritually. Finally the angel in him got the
best of the beast. He found salvation in humility and renouncement,
like another Saint Francis. The mystic longings of Sherwood Anderson
have left an unmistakable imprint on this early work. He was not
content to draw his characters in unconsciousness. He counselled them,
comforted them, and acted to them as a good Samaritan.
* * * * *
“Marching Men,” an epic in three parts, is also a fine book, although
sociology and mysticism are blended in it to the point of confusion.
It reads very much like Zola’s “Germinal.” The hero of the book, Beaut
McGregor, is the son of a Pennsylvania miner, who was buried alive in
a mine. The book is full of these soberly drawn and semi-allegorical
portraits in which the author excels: the oculist, the hunchback, the
violin maker, the philosophical barber, the poor milliner. Robert Frost
alone can be a match to Anderson in this kind of telepathic sketches.
Beaut McGregor is searching for the imponderable values of life, yet he
finds drunkenness, sex and hunger as the sole incentives of most men’s
existence.
Anderson’s imagination is pessimistic. He sees the world in black and
white. He is quite veracious in saying that there is something Russian
in him. His artistic sense and his philanthropic Christian heart
connive to comprehend the most pathetic aspects of life with sympathy.
He has cast his lot with the proletarian, the poor, the desperate, the
lonely, in the sooty suburbs of the big cities or the twilight of some
village. He is pessimistic, but his pessimism is religious and moral.
Man does not live by bread alone but by whatever word issues from the
mouth of God. Anderson is a disciple of Tolstoi. The social problem, as
he conceives it, is a moral problem. Social anarchy is but a sign of
the chaos within us. We may, through true insight, arrive at the source
of our troubles:
In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How
to achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of
democracies and monarchies, dreams and endeavors, is the riddle
of the Universe; and the thing that in the artist is called the
passion for form, and for which he also will laugh in the face of
death, is in all men. By grasping that fact, Caesar, Alexander,
Napoleon and our own Grant have made heroes of the dullest clods
that walk, and not a man of all the thousands who marched with
Sherman to the sea, but lived the rest of his life with a something
sweeter, braver and finer, sleeping in his soul than will ever be
produced by the reformer scolding of brotherhood from a soapbox.
The long march, the burning of the throat and the stinging of the
dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder against shoulder, the
quick bond of a common, unquestioned, instinctive passion that
bursts in the orgasm of battle, the forgetting of words and the
doing of the thing, be it winning battles or destroying ugliness,
the passionate massing of men for accomplishment--these are the
signs, if they ever awake in our land, by which you may know you
have come to the days of the making of men.
Anderson is not dazzled by the sumptuous façade of American prosperity.
He sees the reverse of the stage setting, the slums, the mines, the
factories, the jails and the asylums. Listen to Beaut McGregor, the
hero of “Marching Men,” as he stands on the hills above the dark
valleys where the sordid cottages of the miners are nested:
The long, black valley, with its dense shroud of smoke that rose
and fell and formed itself into fantastic shapes in the moonlight,
the poor little houses clinging to the hillside, the occasional cry
of a woman being beaten by a drunken husband, the glare of the coke
fires and the rumble of coal cars being pushed along the railroad
tracks, all of these made a grim and rather inspiring impression on
the young man’s mind, so that although he hated the mines and the
miners, he sometimes paused in his night-wanderings and stood with
his great shoulders lifted, breathing deeply, and feeling things he
had no words in him to express.
Sherwood Anderson entertains no illusions regarding our much
vaunted modern civilization. He sees the modern man in a state of
disintegration and moral collapse, due to greed and lust. The surface
gives an illusion of grandeur, but there is a bog underlying the
structure. To prove his point, the writer bids us accompany him
in a walk around Chicago. We are supposed to escort a well-meaning
American business man through the city. He is a well-balanced and
kindly person, inclined to take a rosy view of life. Let us follow
him in his walk. In front of a house a man is seen mowing the lawn.
There is something pleasant in the screech of the lawn-mower. A little
farther up the street the wanderer peeps through a window and perceives
pictures hanging on a wall. A woman in white plays the piano. How
sweet and quiet life is! The wanderer lights a cigar. Everything seems
so beautiful and fresh, and, lo! by the light of a street lamp he
sees a man staggering against the wall. Never mind! The wanderer has
enjoyed a good dinner at the hotel. He remains optimistic. Drunkards
are prodigal sons. Wine and song are incentives to work. Let us pass
on! The wanderer can have no grudge against his time and country. Let
the I.W.W. howl, if they want. All of a sudden two men come out of
a saloon and palaver on the curb. Now one of them jumps and, with a
rapid thrust forward of his whole body, knocks his friend down in the
gutter. Sinister and smoky buildings all around look like accomplices.
At the end of the street an enormous crane erects its snout against
the sky. The wanderer has thrown away his cigar. Somebody walks in
front of him and raises his fist to heaven. He notices with a start the
movement of the man’s lips, his large and ugly face in the glare of
the street lamp. But he keeps on going, and hurries among pawnshops,
saloons and what not. He has a nightmare.... He sees a burglar looking
over the walls of a garden where children are at play,--the wanderer’s
own garden and own children. It is getting late. A suspicious looking
woman comes down a stair, with bleached face. A police wagon rattles
by. A child kicks dirty newspapers along the street. His piercing
voice dominates the din of the street-cars and the siren of the police
patrol. The wanderer hastens to board a car to return to his hotel.
Life, after all, is not as rosy as he thought. His good humor has
disappeared. He is irritated at having wasted a fine evening. He is
no longer so content with his affairs, as he goes to bed with the din
of the city still in his ears. He sees the head of a red man bending
toward him in his sleep.... This is the way Sherwood Anderson tells his
apologues and dramatizes what he calls the failure of American life.
At the end of the novel Beaut McGregor has become a famous and
militant lawyer. His mother, Nance, is dead and he himself has buried
her upon the hill. The description of Nance’s funeral is truly epic
and resembles the strike in Zola’s “Germinal.” “Marching Men” ends
on a sharp turn. Beaut McGregor courted two women, one poor and the
other rich. He marries a shy, self-effacing milliner, to commemorate,
perhaps, in his own fashion, the wedding of the Saint of Assisi with
the Lady Poverty.
* * * * *
Anderson will not write such books again. The psychoanalyst will soon
win over the mystic, but we know him pretty well now, from these first
books, as a sensual and a mystic lover of Truth, as the detective of
our hidden thoughts and of double hearts, as a man enamoured chiefly
with dreams. There are several scenes in “Marching Men” characteristic
of Sherwood Anderson at his best as an artist. He belongs among the
novelists of the proletariat, nearer Dostoievski and Tolstoi than
Victor Hugo or Émile Zola, because of his mysticism. I select the
narrative of the death of Beaut McGregor’s mother, Nance, as an example
of his talent to blend the here below with the far beyond. Nance dies
of utter misery on a fine evening. She kept a little bakery. Since the
death of her husband in the mine, she lived in complete seclusion,
respected and feared by the miners:
In the middle of the night the conviction came to her that she
would die. Death seemed moving about in the room and waiting for
her. In the street two drunken men stood talking, their voices
concerned with their own human affairs coming in through the window
and making life seem very near and dear to the dying woman. “I’ve
been everywhere,” said one of the men. “I’ve been in towns and
cities I don’t even remember the names of. You ask Alex Fielder who
keeps a saloon in Denver. Ask him if Gus Lamont has been there.”
The other man laughed. “You’ve been in Jake’s drinking too much
beer,” he jeered.
Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller
protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her
that life with all of its color, sound and meaning was running
away from her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine
rang in her ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying
asleep below the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its
mouth open to eat men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung
over the back of a chair, took the shape and outline of a face,
huge and grotesque, staring silently past her into the sky.
Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the
bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did
not think of the place to which she might go after death. She
was trying hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to
fight, not to dream dreams.
Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about,
in the old days before her marriage, of the walks she, as a
young girl, had taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons, and
of the times when they had gone together to sit on the hillside
overlooking the farming country. As in a vision, the dying woman
saw the broad fertile land spread out before her, and blamed
herself that she had not done more toward helping her man in the
fulfillment of the plans she and he had made to go there and live.
Then she thought of the night when her boy came, and of how, when
they went to bring her man from the mine, they found him apparently
dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought life and death
had visited her hand in hand in one night.
Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of
heavy feet on the stairs. “That will be Beaut coming up from the
shop,” she muttered, and fell back upon the pillow, dead.
Sherwood Anderson does not dwell on surfaces. His characters come
out of the Unconscious. They move deep into a region where words can
scarcely penetrate. As an instance of his understatements, I quote
another scene from “Marching Men.” Beaut McGregor has climbed the
hill to dream alone. He likes to go to the high places to pray. Three
women come to him. Beaut has gotten over his timidity and consents to
sit down with one of them, who is looked upon as a coquette. Here is
a suggestive bit of Andersonian dialogue with little said and much
understood:
On the eminence Beaut and the tall woman sat and looked down into
the valley. “I wonder why we don’t go there, mother and I,” he
said. “When I see it I’m filled with the notion. I think I want to
be a farmer and work in the fields. Instead of that, mother and I
sit and plan of the city. I’m going to be a lawyer. That’s all we
talk about. Then I come up here and it seems as though this is the
place for me.”
The tall woman laughed. “I can see you coming home at night from
the fields,” she said. “It might be to that white house there with
the windmill. You would be a big man and would have dust in your
red hair and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman
with a baby in her arms would come out of the kitchen door to stand
leaning on the fence waiting for you. When you came up she would
put her arm around your neck and kiss you on the lips. The beard
would tickle her cheek. Your mouth is so big.”
A strange new feeling shot through Beaut. He wondered why she had
said that, and wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss her then
and there. He got up and looked at the sun going down behind the
hill far away at the other end of the valley. “We’d better be
getting along back,” he said.
The woman remained seated on the log. “Sit down,” she said, “I’ll
tell you something--something it’s good for you to hear. You’re so
big and red you tempt a girl to bother you. First, though, you tell
me why you go along the street looking into the gutter when I stand
in the stairway in the evening.”
Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the
black-haired boy had told him of her. “Then it was true--what he
said about you?” he asked.
“No! No!” she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on
her hat. “Let’s be going.”
Beaut sat stolidly on the log. “What’s the use bothering each
other,” he said. “Let’s sit here until the sun goes down. We can
get home before dark.”
They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had
boasted of his father.
“I’m too old for that boy,” she said; “I’m older than you by a good
many years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about
women. I do pretty well. I don’t have anyone to talk to except
father, and he sits all evening reading a paper and going to sleep
in his chair. If I let boys come and sit with me in the evening or
stand talking with me in the stairway it’s because I’m lonesome.
There isn’t a man in town I’d marry--not one.”
The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his
father were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather
than this pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly
like the women at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again,
as he had thought before, that he preferred the black-faced miners,
drunk and silent, to their pale, talkative wives. On an impulse he
told her that, saying it crudely, so that it hurt.
Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the
hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side, and
again he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the
hill. Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the
town.
Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the roadside.
Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the
sky. “One living up here and never going down there might think it
rather grand and big,” he said. Again the hatred came. “They might
think the men who lived down there knew something instead of being
just a lot of cattle.”
A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look
stole into her eyes. “We get at one another,” she said, “we
can’t let one another alone. I wish we hadn’t quarrelled. We
might be friends if we tried. You have got something in you. You
attract women. I’ve heard others say that. Your father was that
way. Most of the women here would rather have been the wife of
Cracked McGregor, ugly as he was, than to have stayed with their
own husbands. I heard my mother say that to father when he lay
quarrelling in bed at night and I lay listening.”
The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so
frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. “I don’t
like the women,” he said, “but I liked you, seeing you standing
in the stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased.
I thought maybe you amounted to something. I don’t know why you
should be bothered by what I think. I don’t know why any woman
should be bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would
go right on doing what you want to do, like mother and me about my
being a lawyer.”
He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and
watched her go down the hill.
“I’m quite a fellow to have talked to her all afternoon like that,”
he thought, and pride in his growing manhood crept over him.
CHAPTER VIII
_Sherwood Anderson on This Side of Freud_
“Poor White,” published in 1920, marked a new turn in Sherwood
Anderson’s career and the transition toward a new style. It is now
characterized by the obsession of the subconscious and the study
of morbid psychology. “Poor White” tells once more the story of a
proletarian youth struggling against adverse surroundings. Like
“Marching Men” this novel is autobiographical to a large extent. With
Hugh McVey, the poor white, the experiments which Anderson’s previous
books had described start all over again. Uprooted and revolving
against his native environment, he too seeks to find an impossible
felicity in the gratification of his passions. Hugh McVey has grown,
like wild grass, on the shores of the Mississippi once haunted by the
ghost of Huckleberry Finn, in days when boys were more addicted to
“roughing it” than to brooding over their secret thoughts. The huge
river inspires Hugh with a longing for a life of abundance and ease.
Like all the characters in Anderson’s novels, he is the victim of
inhibitions. He vegetates in the sultry atmosphere of his small town.
Automatism and routine are ready to swallow him up. Luckily, he was
born a craftsman and he is saved by work. He is intelligent and wilful,
and turns out to be an inventor. A fortuitous circumstance takes him
beyond his narrow horizon. One day, he sees people busy planting
cabbages by hand. Why not build and patent a cabbage-setting machine?
Hugh carries out his plans successfully and he soon finds himself at
the head of a prosperous stock company; but he is dissatisfied. He
has not fulfilled his spiritual longings. He denounces machinery and
commercialism. He arraigns socialism because it cannot exist without
them. He sees salvation only in self-reliance and in sincerity to
oneself and to others. He thinks and acts, in fact, like a man who has
read and appropriated to himself R. W. Emerson’s essays. Hugh marries a
frigid woman who deserts him. At the end of the book we find him alone
on the road to Truth. All in all, “Poor White” is painfully composed
and rather badly written. Its value resides in the Freudian sketches
aside from the main plot, and in the analysis of the pathological forms
of sensibility.
It did not greatly increase the novelist’s reputation. The previous
year he had published his famous collection of short stories,
“Winesburg, Ohio.” This is a first-rate psychological document.
Anderson has now definitely given up sociology to become a psychologist
and a specialist in the study of dual personalities. “Winesburg, Ohio,”
is entirely in harmony with the most recent contributions of American
literature to psychoanalysis. It is as rich and original in intuition
as the books of Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters and Eugene O’Neill.
Winesburg is a sort of Main Street, not in breadth but in depth. Each
one of these stories is a masterpiece of dramatized insight. They stage
the tragedy of moral failure. The real drama is not enacted in the open
but in the gloom of what the author names “the well,” deep under the
surface of existence. It is the tragedy of evasion. The scene is the
provincial United States of half a century ago, somewhere in and around
Chicago. The novelist ascribes the neurasthenia of his characters,
their errantry and their inconsistency in thought and action to the
shock of too sudden a transition from the old order to the new. Mystic
Anderson once more denounces our times as the most materialistic in
the history of the world, as an epoch where wars are fought without
patriotism, when men substitute their vague ethics to the worship of
the living God, when the will-to-power replaces the will-to-serve,
when beauty has been almost entirely forgotten in the terrible race
for money. But the stories of “Winesburg, Ohio” cannot be limited
to the American scene. Their appeal is broadly human and universal.
Admirable as studies of morbid psychology, they are still more so as
dramatizations of our secret thoughts. Within their limited bounds they
contain the most suggestive portraits.
The eccentrics, the maniacs, the daydreamers and the half-insane
whom, up to now, have been relegated to the background of Anderson’s
books, occupy the center of the stage. The novelist has most skilfully
succeeded in grouping the different anecdotes and in giving to all his
people a family air of resemblance. He has individualized the morbid
states of sensibility, with something akin to genius. His psychology is
utterly pessimistic, as every true psychology must be. It is based on
the observation of distortions and abortions caused by moral restraint.
Anderson introduces us to human beings condemned to intellectual and
moral decrepitude. The surrounding mediocrity has atrophied their
moral life, without killing their elementary instincts. All these
half-insane and these maniacs are dual personalities for themselves and
for others. Winesburg is the city of hypocrites, or, as we prefer to
call them to-day, the city of the inhibited.[43]
As we watch this parade of lunatics of both sexes, we cannot think of a
stranger Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.[44]
Anderson’s rogues’ gallery shelters the most fantastic medley of moral
outcasts, the libidinous, the perverse, the sly, the morbid. All of
them suffer particularly from soul-fear and floating anxiety, as
described by the experimental psychologists. These abnormalities are
caused chiefly by an erotic obsession. As their energy is no longer
able to express itself in acts, it loses itself in nightmares and
incoherent actions. This explains the verbal _psittacism_ upon which
Anderson has made some curious remarks. Let us enter this Musée Grevin
of the psychologically abnormal.
Here is a man whose hands are incessantly shaken by a suspicious
automatism. He is fond of caressing children. One day he is accused
of having taken advantage of one of them and he is expelled from the
village. Here is an hysterical woman who married an old doctor. The
doctor has a mania for stuffing his pockets with slips of paper on
which he has written maxims which he forces everybody to read. Here
comes a professional simulator who has lived a thousand imaginary
lives. He wants to make us believe that he is Christ and that he has
been made to die upon a cross. This rich landowner lost his mind from
brooding over the Bible. One day he went into the woods to kill his
grandson, as Abraham did to Isaac. Another Winesburgher, a woman, was
seized with an erotic fit which made her run out into the streets all
naked on a rainy day. Let us not forget the hypocritical minister who
had seen a naked woman through a crack in the window of his church.
The wretched man had forgotten prayer and could no longer expel the
temptation from his mind. He became half insane and was about to end up
badly. But one day he again saw the naked woman praying in her room and
he conceived a new and happier idea of life. Never has the human mind
been subjected to more crucial dissections and been denounced as such a
mad and dangerous machine.
There is a moral attached to these tales. Anderson’s philosophy, as
well as his mysticism, centers upon what may be called the problem of
deliverance. It is based upon a tragic feeling of the complexities of
the human self, on the necessity and difficulty of extracting from the
subconscious labyrinth our real personality. It slumbers, deep within
us, buried under formalism. A city filled with millions of living
people can be, in reality, a necropolis for the dead.
And quite truly, from the spiritual and moral point of view, the live
are dead in Winesburg. No matter if they do go about their daily tasks,
if they play at being born, at marrying, at having children, at making
money, at voting, at going to church, at talking of the weather or
the approaching elections. This is not life. Spiritually and morally,
the Winesburghers are as dead as the corpses whose epitaphs Edgar Lee
Masters collected in the “Spoon River Anthology.” At most, Sherwood
Anderson accords to the inhabitants of Winesburg a larval existence,
a life of sleepwalkers and daydreamers. Of the various selves which
William James classified in his treatise on psychology, and which he
called the _material_, the _social_ and the _spiritual_ selves, the
living dead of Winesburg possess only the most elementary, _i.e._, the
material. Their social and their spiritual selves are illusory. Instead
of actions they know only manias; instead of ambitions, velleities;
instead of achievements, dreams. Let the professional psychiatrist read
these tales. He will find in them all the forms of psychic degeneracy.
The embryonic and larval life of Winesburg defies even the slow-motion
process of photographic reproduction. Still life and twilight sleep
prevail here as the characteristic phases of existence.
How strange a paradox that the land of the _strenuous life_ should
shelter such moral mummies.[45] In “Winesburg, Ohio,” Sherwood Anderson
closed without hope the gates of the mystic evasion through which the
characters of his early novels used to escape. “Abandon hope, all ye
who enter here!” Dante’s Inferno is an Eden compared to this American
abode of unescapable gloom.
* * * * *
In almost every case the great issue of suppressed sensibilities
in Anderson’s stories is eroticism. This is the central pivot of
the lives of his larvæ. The male wants to be rich quick. He has not
time to love; he simply flirts. The female, on the contrary, is like
Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, in Racine’s tragedy, _toute entière à
sa proie attachée_, all intent upon securing the gratification of her
instinctive impulses. Man makes up for his erotic disillusions by
irony, work or drink.[46] Woman simply surrenders to the _libido_.
Inhibitions and repressions make an agony of her life. Anderson
suggests that she come out of the “well” for the sake of health,
happiness and moral progress. Surrendering to nature and not asceticism
is the cure of morbidity. He sides with Hawthorne on this point, and
he proves it in one of the best tales of “Winesburg, Ohio.” We see the
Reverend Hartman released from the nightmares of his cell by facing
life as it is and discovering that religion and beauty can very well
go together. Evasion, it is true, is not within the reach of every one
in Anderson’s books. It is reserved to the elect. Many try to lift the
lid of the “well” and are drowned. The most pathetic case of evasion
is that of Elsie in “The Triumph of The Egg.” The story is called “The
New Englander.” Elsie is an uprooted girl from the East. She dies
of moral dearth and inhibited desires, somewhere on a lonely farm in
the Middle West. One day homesickness and longing make her run away
in the corn-fields with the same pagan fury which took Hester Prynne
to the primitive forest. The scene is literarily beautiful and almost
technically Freudian:
In the month of August, when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa
fields grows until the corn stalks resemble young trees. The
corn-fields become forests. The time for the cultivating of the
corn has passed and weeds grow thick between the corn rows. The men
with their giant horses have gone away. Over the immense fields
silence broods.
When the time of the laying-by of the crop came that first summer
after Elsie’s arrival in the West, her mind, partially awakened by
the strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened again. She did not
feel like a staid, thin woman with a back like the back of a drill
sergeant, but like something new and as strange as the new land
into which she had come to live. For a time she did not know what
was the matter. In the field the corn had grown so high that she
could not see into the distance. The corn was like a wall and the
little bare spot on which her father’s house stood was like a house
built behind the walls of a prison. For a time she was depressed,
thinking that she had come west into a wide open country, only to
find herself locked up more closely than ever.
An impulse came to her. She arose and going down three or four
steps seated herself almost on a level with the ground.
Immediately she got a sense of release. She could not see over the
corn but she could see under it. The corn had long wide leaves
that met over the rows. The rows became long tunnels running away
into infinity. Out of the black ground grew weeds that made a soft
carpet of green. From above light sifted down. The corn rows were
mysteriously beautiful. They were warm passageways running out
into life. She got up from the steps, and, walking timidly to the
wire fence that separated her from the field, put her hand between
the wires and took hold of one of the corn stalks. For some reason
after she had touched the strong young stalk and had held it for a
moment firmly in her hand, she grew afraid. Running quickly back to
the step she sat down and covered her face with her hands. Her body
trembled. She tried to imagine herself crawling through the fence
and wandering along one of the passageways. The thought of trying
the experiment fascinated, but at the same time terrified. She got
quickly up and went into the house.
But the temptation proved too strong. Elsie could not resist the lure
of the broad fields:
Elsie ran into the vastness of the corn-fields filled with but one
desire. She wanted to get out of her life and into some new and
sweeter life she felt must be hidden away somewhere in the fields.
After she had run a long way she came to a wire fence and crawled
over. Her hair became unloosened and fell down over her shoulders.
Her cheeks became flushed and for the moment she looked like a
young girl. When she climbed over the fence she tore a great hole
in the front of her dress. For a moment her tiny breasts were
exposed, and then her hand clutched and held nervously the sides
of the tear. In the distance she could hear the voices of the boys
and the barking of the dogs. A summer storm had been threatening
for days, and now black clouds had begun to spread themselves over
the sky. As she ran nervously forward, stopping to listen and then
running on again, the dry corn blades brushed against her shoulders
and a fine shower of yellow dust from the corn tassels fell on her
hair. A continued crackling noise accompanied her progress. The
dust made a golden crown about her head. From the sky overhead a
low rumbling sound, like the growling of giant dogs, came to her
ears.
Sharp pains shot through her body. Presently she was compelled to
stop and sit on the ground. For a long time she sat with closed
eyes. Her dress became soiled. Little insects that live in the
ground under the corn, came out of their holes and crawled over her
legs.
Following some obscure impulse the tired woman threw herself on
her back and lay still with closed eyes. Her fright passed. It was
warm and close in the roomlike tunnels. The pain in her side went
away. She opened her eyes and between the wide green corn blades
could see patches of a black threatening sky. She did not want to
be alarmed and so closed her eyes again. Her thin hand no longer
gripped the tear in her dress and her little breasts were exposed.
They expanded and contracted in spasmodic jerks. She threw her
hands back over her head and lay still.
It seemed to Elsie that hours passed as she lay thus, quiet and
passive under the corn. Deep within her there was a feeling that
something was about to happen, something that would lift her out of
herself, that would tear her away from her past and the past of her
people. Her thoughts were not definite. She lay still and waited as
she had waited for days and months by the rock at the back of the
orchard on the Vermont farm when she was a girl. A deep grumbling
noise went on in the sky overhead, but the sky and everything she
had ever known seemed very far away, no part of herself....
Elsie followed, creeping on her hands and knees like a little
animal, and when she had come within sight of the fence surrounding
the house she sat on the ground and put her hands over her face.
Something within herself was being twisted and whirled about as
the tops of the corn stalks were now being twisted and whirled by
the wind. She sat so that she did not look toward the house and
when she opened her eyes, she could again see along the long,
mysterious aisles.... The storm that had been threatening broke
with a roar. Broad sheets of water swept over the corn-fields.
Sheets of water swept over the woman’s body. The storm that had
for years been gathering in her also broke. Sobs arose out of her
throat. She abandoned herself to a storm of grief that was only
partially grief. Tears ran out of her eyes and made little furrows
through the dust on her face. In the lulls that occasionally came
in the storm she raised her head and heard, through the tangled
mass of wet hair that covered her ears and above the sound of
millions of raindrops that alighted on the earthen floor inside the
house of the corn, the thin voices of her mother and father calling
to her out of the Leander house.
The tortures of inhibition have rarely been so dramatically and
scientifically described.
* * * * *
From now on, the problem of sexual inhibition was going to haunt
Sherwood Anderson. He was soon to devote to it a strange and, for
the average reader, a most shocking book which we must examine with
the same candor which the author has shown in writing it. It is
called “Many Marriages.” In order to be entirely just to it, I shall
again warn the reader of what I have already suggested. Eroticism
and mysticism go hand in hand for Anderson. Having discovered sexual
inhibition to be the main cause of social hypocrisy, he preaches the
gospel of absolute sexual sincerity as a _sine qua non_ condition
of moral progress. To understand the author’s point of view, let us
not forget that his stories take place in a Puritan country. Let us
remember Theodore Dreiser’s sayings about the primordial importance of
the sexual question in a pioneer land where the woman remained, for
a long time, as the only luxury allowed to men, and the only object
of art offered to their dreams. “Many Marriages” is a confession, a
soliloquy, which continues uninterrupted for nearly three hundred
pages.[47]
The hero is a lunatic, an erotomaniac who parades naked before a
Madonna and a crucifix surrounded by burning tapers, in order to better
vent his feelings about sex, love and marriage to his daughter. His
name is John Webster. He was born in a small Wisconsin town and began
as a business man. One day, passing in front of his factory, he heard
his workingmen humming a hymn like this:
And before I’d be a slave,
I’d be buried in my grave
And go home to my father and be saved.
As has been already hinted, verbal automatism plays a large part in the
career of Anderson’s characters. The song heard by John Webster loosens
a new stream of consciousness in him. A married man with a grown-up
daughter, in charge of a business concern, John Webster suddenly feels
that he has missed his life. He immediately leaves everything to follow
the call. In fact, he had never been happy as a married man or as an
American citizen. He had never been able to express himself freely.
Above all, he had lived in complete ignorance of his body. Now he has
found the road to Damascus. Let him be erotically sincere. At last,
let him know the “house” of his body which he has inhabited so long as
a stranger, and let him visit what he calls other people’s “houses.”
Thereupon his mystic lubricity is let loose. The most shocking part
of the book is that in which the Wisconsin gymnosophist gives a
demonstration of erotic sincerity to his daughter, she herself being
hardly dressed. The pages where he tells her his misfortunes as a
married man and a lover are indeed amazing. The like can only be found
in Andreiev or Gorki. John Webster is insane, but he is also sincere
and pure, according to the author. More than this, he atones in his
person for all the inhibited inhabitants of Winesburg. This immoral
book is after all pure and candid from the writer’s point of view.
It was composed to keep a wager which Sherwood Anderson was careful
to explain in his preface. John Webster, he tells us, may be crazy,
as anybody would be who tried to act contrary to accepted standards
in public. At any rate courage is also a virtue, and John is not a
coward. Doubtless, a man who seeks love as directly as he does is
abnormal according to present standards, but he may be more moral than
many of us who refrain to follow his tracks only for fear of public
opinion. Better be a De Sade than a Tartuffe. “Many Marriages” is, at
the bottom, a plea in favor of individual renewal. It is the book of a
moralist and of a mystic. John Webster is a saint after a fashion. He
dares to uncover his most secret thoughts before others. The problem of
correlations between our thoughts and our actions has always proved to
be of a great interest to the author. One of the tales in “The Triumph
of The Egg” showed a father who was impelled by his longing for Truth
to reveal his secret life to his daughter, but he was a coward and
stopped short at the last minute. As for the denudation of the body at
the moment of intensive moral or religious crises, and as a symptom of
conversion, it is not unknown to hagiographers. Do not the Scriptures
speak of “shedding the old man?” The biography of Saint Francis of
Assisi tells a similar story with a very different purpose. Nakedness
in “Many Marriages” is ritual. It is equivalent to the white robe which
the neophytes of the primitive church used to don.
This is said, not as a plea in favor of John Webster, but as an
analysis of some of the tortuous and yet well-meaning paths which
Anderson’s mind likes to travel. At any rate, he made no mystery of his
intentions or of the significance of his book. He tells us that, whilst
loving Natalie Schwartz, his mistress, John Webster never intended to
shut himself off from the possibility of loving another woman, or many
other women. Why should not a rich man marry many times? He was certain
that all the potentialities in wedlock had yet been hardly explored. He
wanted to be the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of inter-human
relations. In Webster’s mind something had opposed itself, up to then,
to a broad and human acceptation of life. Before loving one had to
know and accept himself and others. Sexual love is true only when it
comes as an inspiration, a miracle. Happy are those who follow the
call. But they are few. For most people life is a renunciation of their
best self. And that is why John Webster left his wife. She had never
forgiven him his primitive spontaneity and his brusque mode of attack
at their first meeting. “Leave all and follow me,” says the Voice. Love
must not be a bond but a token of freedom. Such was the meaning of the
refrain heard by John Webster one day. Let us break down the walls and
free the prisoners:
If one kept the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let
the well empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts
that came to it, accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one
accepted the flesh of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one
might live a hundred or a thousand lives in one life. Then each one
of us could become “something more than just one individual man and
woman living one narrow circumscribed life.” One could tear down
all walls and fences and walk in and out many people. One might in
oneself become a whole town full of people, a city, a nation.
This may be a generous dream, and one infinitely more attractive than
the inhibitions of Winesburg or Gopher Prairie, and yet one cannot help
seeing in John Webster’s gospel only the last challenge of romanticism
at bay. After Rousseau, Walt Whitman has tried the gospel of sexual
sincerity at all cost. He had attempted to call the universe to him
and hold it in his naked arms. “I Walt Whitman, a cosmos!” and it all
ended in failure. Theodore Dreiser in “The Genius” had answered John
Webster’s queries concerning sexual freedom. Sherwood Anderson himself
noted somewhere that humanism and not pantheism, concentration and not
expansion, could free and feed human hearts. Webster’s mystic orgies
have not only ethics but common sense against them. But Anderson is a
poet. Like Whitman he worships Life and the Vital Force. He wants us
to surrender to all beautiful instincts. Society denies us this right,
Life itself will build a bridge to greater freedom. Life, he proclaims,
will empty the prisons. It will raise the lid of the “well” where the
Freudian monsters are asleep, these monsters which the Puritan felt
groping within himself, and which he carefully and wisely held in
chains. Anderson wants to free the Hairy Ape and make an angel of him:
There was a deep well within every man and woman, and when Life
came in at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached
down and tore the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden
things, festering in the well, came out and found expression for
themselves, and the miracle was that, expressed, they became often
very beautiful. There was a cleansing, a strange sort of renewal
within the house of the man or woman when the god Life had come
in.[48]
Anderson has dedicated himself once more to the task of raising the lid
of the “well.” In “Dark Laughter” it is again the story of a spiritual
evasion and the return to erotic sincerity. Psychological insight
and verbal lyricism are beautifully and musically blended in this
book. In it the author is felt to become more and more conscious and
to have acquired a greater mastery of his instruments of expression.
Lyrical outbursts, soliloquies and descriptions are brought into
perfect harmony. The hero of “Dark Laughter,” Bruce Dudley, alias John
Stockton, is another John Webster. He began his career as a reporter,
got a good position, married and ... ran away. He dropped his wife and
his job to become a tramp. He began anew earning a living by painting
carriage wheels in company with a comrade similar to those celebrated
by Walt Whitman. He then becomes a gardener and falls in love at first
sight with his employer’s wife. It is the inspiration, the miracle so
much looked for by John Webster. So Bruce and Aline wed sincerity and
elope.... But it would be a betrayal of Anderson to reduce the plots
of his books, especially this one, to such trivial incidents. For him
the orchestration is more important than the theme. The main charm of
“Dark Laughter” is its poetry and its music, the curious and clever
blending of thought, dream, color and song. It is a sort of _sotto
voce_ monologue with musical interludes. In several of Anderson’s books
there had already been an undertone of music echoing the thoughts of
the characters. He has perfected the process in “Dark Laughter.”
The scene of the novel is laid upon the shores of the Ohio and of the
Mississippi. These gigantic American waterways, sung to the tune of
a Greek hymn by Monsieur de Chateaubriand and desecrated in modern
times by Mark Twain, become musical again through Sherwood Anderson’s
poetic prose. There is an orchestra of Negro minstrels on the shore
and on the deck of the boat which takes Bruce Dudley to New Orleans.
The writer looks to Negro music as to the symbol of free instinctive
expression. The humming of Negro spirituals accompanies the soliloquies
of Bruce Dudley like the tom-tom in “Emperor Jones.” The black man’s
songs in Anderson’s novels emphasize the return to nature. They are the
last avatars of romanticism in America, the protest of nature against
civilization, a challenge to social hypocrisy.[49] While the white
man broods at home over his woes, real or imaginary, the black sings
naturally in the open and vents his naïve soul in hymns and laughter,
with an occasional strain of melancholy, soothing itself as it is sung.
Anderson finds in these Negro chanteys what he calls “a way of getting
at the ultimate truth of things,” which is tantamount, almost, to a
system of metaphysics.
The pages devoted to New Orleans in “Dark Laughter” are among the most
original ever written by the author. Here is the homecoming of Bruce
Dudley in the old creole city:
The niggers were something for Bruce to look at, think about. So
many black men slowly growing brown. Then would come the light
brown, the velvet-browns, Caucasian features. The brown women
tending up to the job--getting the race lighter and lighter. Soft
Southern nights, warm dusky nights. Shadows flitting at the edge
of cotton fields, in dusky roads by saw-mill towns. Soft voices
laughing, laughing.
Oh, ma banjo dog,
Oh, ho, ma banjo dog.
An’ I ain’t go’na give you
None of ma jelly roll.
Niggers on the docks, niggers in the city streets, niggers
laughing. A slow dance always going on.... Clean ships, dirty tramp
ships, half-naked niggers--a shadow dance.... They dance south--out
of doors--white in a pavilion in one field, blacks, browns, high
browns, velvet-browns in a pavilion in the next field--but one ...
Oh, ma banjo dog!
... Give us a song, Jack--a dance--the gumbo drift. Come, the night
is hot....
Nigger girls in the streets, nigger women, nigger men. There is
a brown cat lurking in the shadow of a building. “Come, brown
puss--come and get your cream.” The men who work on the docks
in New Orleans have slender flanks like running horses, broad
shoulders, loose, heavy lips hanging down--faces like old monkeys
sometimes--bodies like young gods--sometimes. On Sundays--when
they go to church, or to a bayou baptizing, the brown girls do
sure cut loose with the colors--gaudy nigger colors on nigger
women making the streets flame--deep purples, reds, yellows, green
like young corn-shoots coming up. They sweat. The skin colors
brown, golden yellow, reddish brown, purple brown. When the sweat
runs down high brown backs the colors come out and dance before
the eyes. Flash that up, you silly painters, catch it dancing.
Song-tones in words, music in words--in colors, too. Silly American
painters! They chase a Gauguin shadow to the South Seas.
I shall not add any comments to this beautifully colored piece,
recalling, at once, both Gauguin, Matisse and Baudelaire, with the
addition of a jazz band. The man who wrote this is certainly one of the
greatest artists in words of American literature, if not the greatest
and the most modern. If young America succeeds in creating an art of
the New World, as original as that of the old one, she will owe it to
Sherwood Anderson, as to her truest literary pathfinder. He may not
be himself completely emancipated yet from his native loam. He looks
very much like a faun fighting to disentangle himself from his dual
nature, but as a colorist and a musician it is difficult to dispute him
the first rank. Consumptive American fiction owes to him at least real
flesh and blood. That he is a sensuous mystic can be concluded from
his very definition of art. He calls art “a perfume issuing from the
truth of things through the fingers of an humble man filled with love.”
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé, the founders of modern
æsthetics, would certainly have endorsed this programme which gratifies
harmoniously both the body and the soul.
CHAPTER IX
_James Branch Cabell and the Escape to Poictesme_
Amidst the triumph of realism, James Branch Cabell’s romantic works
seem at first almost phenomenal in contemporary American fiction. They
are interesting as an attempt to restore the imaginative element to
the American novel. Although the romantic novel has never been extinct
in America, there had been a very thin line drawn between realism and
fiction. The growth of the realistic novel had been a natural reaction
against sentimentalism.[50]
As the puritanical tyranny became more strict and more imperious, the
distinction between the _genres_ was lost. Puritanism forbade the
painting of life as it is. Why should it be any more indulgent to
fiction? Based on a system of repression, it would seem _a priori_
destined to accord well with romanticism, which is of itself based on
statements contrary to fact and opposed to an exact and scientific
presentation of life--a presentation full of threats for the victims
of scruples, of floating anxiety and soul-fear. As I have shown, it
is mainly in W. D. Howells’ work that this confusion between realism
and fiction occurred. Howells, and the popular novelists after him, so
thoroughly confused the issues that it became impossible to distinguish
between the two. The American novelists, unencumbered with imaginative
powers, and moralists above all, tried to succeed in the impossible
task of giving to reality the semblance of fiction. The result of
their efforts is a bastard _genre_, still triumphant to-day in
countless magazines and in the “movies.” Fictitious realism would be an
appropriate definition for the greater number of writers who pander to
public taste in America.
The nearer we come to the present, the more we notice the inability
of American writers to imitate Hawthorne’s admirable realism in
psychology. It was James Branch Cabell’s ambition to restore
romanticism to its former rights, by ridding it of exaggerated realism
on the one hand, and of Puritanism on the other. From this point of
view his work is most significant. The attempt to give to American
literature a new romantic form of fiction could succeed only if
the ground were cleared. Cabell’s work presents itself in a double
aspect; first as a revolt against realism, secondly as an anti-Puritan
Declaration of Independence.
This effort was doubly heroic and it has been amply compensated for by
its success. On one hand, it was necessary to defend and maintain the
rights of imagination in a period of overflowing realism, and on the
other to claim for that very imagination all the rights usurped by the
realists in a Puritan country. That, then, is what the novelist has
been able to accomplish.
James Branch Cabell is of Southern origin. From an old local stock, he
was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879. He was educated at William and
Mary College, where he taught Greek and French. Like most contemporary
American writers, he went through the journalistic mill and then began
doing literary work. He traveled in France, Ireland and England. Like
Anatole France, he is a genealogist and an antiquarian. His taste
for legends, for folklore and heraldry, turned him into an explorer
of archives. He began with short stories and poems, followed by two
or three novels whose scene is laid in his native land. Though his
first chronologically, these early books have been relegated to the
background by the author. He took them up again and revised them to
make them fit into the cycle of Dom Manuel and Jurgen, the most recent
form of epic cycles.
Here is at last an American novelist with a culture and a style of
his own, a conscious artist and a man of letters. Most of the new
American fiction writers are indifferent to style. They write badly.
They are often incorrect, trivial and obscure. Their last worry is the
attainment of the beautiful in writing.[51] Cabell, on the contrary, is
an adept at artistic writing, the only prose writer in American fiction
who cultivates style for its own sake. That alone would be enough to
make him original and interesting for the reader who has just plodded
drearily through the desert of “An American Tragedy,” for instance. He
was fed on the English classics, especially those of the Renaissance.
At times he is a deft imitator and parodist of Spenser, to whom he
owes much of his flowery and savory style, and a great admirer of
the English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He
likes to call himself a classic, classic in style, though romantic in
inspiration. But, above all, his chief gift is imagination. At last we
are given a holiday from Theodore Dreiser’s triviality, Sinclair Lewis’
truculence and Anderson’s mystic stammering. Cabell’s ideal is harmony,
clearness and grace. He moves within fiction as if it were a natural
element and not as in a quarry where he is painfully hewing out stones.
In an epoch when American writers hitched their wagons more and more to
matter-of-fact subjects, he cut the moorings and gave free play to his
fancy.
Everything in his books is fictitious, the subject, the style, the
characters, the costumes and the settings. He has invented a new
folklore, a new mythology. He has discovered unknown countries, the
land of Poictesme, a fabulous kingdom well devised to puzzle us as it
is located, on a map of Cabell’s making, halfway between reality and
dream. As fictitious as Spenser’s, Shakespeare’s or Honoré d’Urfé’s
cosmography, the land of Poictesme, where Dom Manuel and Jurgen deport
themselves in sadness or glee, is none the less presented to us as a
real country somewhere in Southern France. Its half fictitious, half
real boundaries are, on the north, England of Arthurian times, on
the south, the vague Asia Minor of Guy de Lusignan and Melissinda,
princess of Tripoli. The novelist has been kind enough to design for
the ignorant a map of Dom Manuel’s domains. According to the map,
the land of Poictesme stretches along the Mediterranean, between
Aigues-Mortes and Cette. Its physical frontiers are, to the west, the
city of Nîmes, and to the east, the town of Castres in Languedoc. Let
the professional geographer challenge James Branch Cabell’s topography
if he wants. Poictesme includes under fictitious names the foot-hills
of the Cévennes, where we may recognize the haunts and “high places”
of Florian de Puysange. The author was not content with inventing a
new land. He crowned a dynasty, which until then was little known to
historians. He made up a genealogy which I shall not follow in all of
its ramifications, and which stretches from Sorrisonde in Poictesme to
Lichfield, Virginia (U. S. A.). A genealogist by taste and profession,
the author has taken visible pleasure in linking together all his
novels with the chain of a pedigree beginning with Dom Manuel the Great
and ending with Felix Kennaston. In consequence his work presents
itself like a huge _Comédie humaine_ or a new Rougon-Macquart epic
issuing forth from an ancestry of mixed French, English and American
blood, a startling and most romantic alliance. History and legend are
fused and confused in an amazing manner in Cabell’s books. He revived
medieval chivalry in a modern travesty full of piquant anachronisms.[52]
It took all the erudition of a modern writer and the most refined humor
to brew folklore, legend and history together, and to embroil geography
and history with such an irreverent finesse. In the cycle of Dom Manuel
and Jurgen, the gods of ancient mythology, the saints of the Christian
calendar, the fairies, the magicians and the demons of the Fable, joust
pell-mell as in a masquerade. Cabell went even farther. Not content
with parodying legends he invented new ones to which his erudition
succeeded in giving all the signs of verisimilitude.
* * * * *
The inhabitants of Poictesme are medieval in garb and modern in
psychology. They went to school with Rabelais, Voltaire and Anatole
France. Here is at last an American writer who can think freely and who
does not ignore _gaie science_. Cabell’s philosophy is as attractive
and fanciful as the land of Poictesme but there is an acumen of truth
under his fancy. It is the philosophy of a man of imagination who
cannot digest truth without many bits of salt. It has been propounded
_ex professo_ in two suggestive books, “Beyond Life,” and “Straws and
Prayer-books.” Cabell does not lead a direct attack against Puritanism,
but he uses backhand Parthian arrows which are none the less deadly. He
leaves his visiting card in passing through Philistia and the Kingdom
of Mother Dunce. He speaks freely and little respectfully of Demagogy,
and makes frequent and transparent allusions to current events.
This poet is a satirist. His warfare against Philistinism has taken the
form of a defense of fiction.
He considers fiction as a semi-divine impulse, or what he calls a
_demi-urge_. In the invention of fiction he sees the starting point
of all human activities. According to him, civilization proceeded
from this impulse which makes us wish to dream and to create a world
more beautiful, more just, than, or at least different from, the one
in which we are living. In the name of this romantic instinct, he hit
simultaneously the Puritans and the realists, the former because they
fear and try to suppress fiction and imagination, the latter because
they limit them and their rights. This is an interesting reaction and a
timely one. It should be remembered by all those among us who feel that
realism has almost overdone itself and that a revival of imagination
would best serve the aims of art. Is not the coupling of the words
_realism_ and _fiction_ a contradiction in terms? Cabell suggests
that we take the novel back to its heroic and adventurous origins. He
refuses to believe in realism, in the first place because the romantic
instinct causes men to dislike life as it is, and to dream of it as
being different in an effort to escape from it. Furthermore, according
to him, the essential process of realistic fiction is in obvious
contradiction with facts.
“You assume,” says Cabell to the veritists, “that any literature
worthy of the name must be faithful to reality and reproduce it
without any further increment. Yet you refuse to life one of its most
outstanding characteristics, the taste, the deep need of conceiving
itself different from what it is. Are you being _real_ and scientific
in grasping and reproducing only physical facts, in a world where
everything, even the reception of a letter or the arrangement of a
dinner, is subjective? There are no facts without an emotion around
them, no circumstances without a personal preference expressed on their
account. What is true of life is still truer of literature. Realism
in writing cannot exist and never existed. Take the most hardened and
the most convinced of all realists, Gustave Flaubert. His Emma Bovary
is minutely observed and that is just why she is unreal, as unreal as
was Flaubert’s perception of the outside world. The realists assume
the task of presenting to us, in a so-called objective and detached
manner the incidents of life as seen from the intellectual angle, but
there are no such incidents. Realism as a literary method is unreal.
Whilst trying to present our contemporaries as they are, it is far
from resembling real life. Life is more charitable than the realists.
It presents things and people to us as we wish that they might be.
Fiction is faithful to life because it does not accept it as it is. It
looks upon it with grave misgivings, as an extremely commonplace and
worthless event. Beauty can only be attained by an elimination of the
trivial. Life is such a bore! Imagination alone can give a value to the
world. The solution of the problem of life is not understanding, but
escape, and the more romantic the escape the better. Not to live, but
to dream, is the question. Fiction is the only source of those blessed
illusions which Ibsen called _vital lies_ and which he thought it his
duty as a realist to challenge.”
It would be worth while to dwell on this original defense of fiction.
As I have attempted to show in the different chapters of this book,
romantic evasion plays a primordial part in the American novel to-day.
It is the natural result of the inhibitions which torture the Puritans.
Like the characters of Hawthorne, Dreiser, Anderson and Sinclair
Lewis, those of Cabell are runaways. The escape from moral and social
tyranny forms the chief theme of all his books. They contain a long
list of evasions. Dom Manuel, count of Poictesme, suffered from a fit
of self-conceit which caused him to spend his time giving life to
those figures of earth which he made in his own image. But, little by
little, an obscure instinct took him away from his selfish occupation.
He withdrew from his mistresses, his sorcerers, his family, and
finally tired of the government of his country. He gladly mounted
the black charger of Death and went to see if he could find at last
a true picture of himself in the water of the Styx. Perion de la
Forest, Demetrios and Ashaverus, took a similar flight in “Domnei.”
The three lovers of Melisande lost their faith in love and deserted
their dame to marry Freedom. Florian de Puysange, in “The High Place,”
obtained the favors of Melior, a fairy, at the peril of his life, but
he soon declared that all amorous gratifications were idle and died
disenchanted. The most famous evasion, since the days of Latude, was
that of Jurgen, the pawnbroker turned emperor and pope, and who finally
evades heaven and hell in order to return to his shrew and to his
pawnshop. Evasion through passion, or evasion through dreams, the one
bitter, the other a sham but a peace-bringer,--what else is there in
life, except routine?
In spite of their disillusionments and their romantic failures,
Cabell’s heroes never repented their waking dreams. They would do it
all over again, if they could. They fail in their search but the thrill
was worth the trouble of the journey. They hug only ghosts in the dark,
but they went through the dark, and enjoyed the trip.
The author of “Jurgen” connects this craving for fiction with a
primordial human instinct which he considers as being the same force
which actuates all life. The world in which his people move is not
a world for the Puritans. Everything in it is sensually refined and
steeped in voluptuousness. The Jurgens, the Dom Manuels and the
Florian de Puysanges are little troubled with their consciences. Does
not Jurgen go so far as to make of conscience an attribute of the
damned? Cabell opposes to the grim universe of the Puritans the land
of Courtesy, and what he calls the Utopia of Gallantry. This Cabellian
country resembles Rabelais’ Abbey of Thélème whose door flashed with
the radiant motto “Do just as you please.” In this delectable country,
we are told:
The wisest may well unbend occasionally, to give conscience a
half-holiday, and procure a passport to this delectable land. True,
there are, as always in travel, the custom-house regulations to
be observed: in this realm exist no conscientious scruples, no
probity, no religion, no pompous notions about altruism, not any
sacred tie of any sort, and such impedimenta will be confiscated at
the frontier. We are entering a territory wherein ethics and ideals
are equally contraband.... It is a carefree land, where life,
untrammeled by the restrictions of moral codes, untoward weather,
limited incomes or apprehension of the police, has no legitimate
object save the pursuit of progress and refinement.
Let us now enter Cocaigne.
The suzerain lord of the estate is the great sire Dom Manuel, count
of Poictesme. We find him enthroned on the threshold of the Cabellian
saga, in a book called “Figures of Earth.” It is difficult to summarize
Cabell’s novels. In epic fashion they are composed of a long string of
episodes and cantos. Before he became the lord of Poictesme, Manuel
began life as a plain herder of pigs. In his leisure moments he used
to model little clay figures. One day a stranger passed by and admired
Manuel’s handsome countenance. How could such a fine fellow be a pig
herder? Let him arise and march to adventure. Upon a mountain, guarded
by monsters, the magician Miramon Lluagor holds the princess Gisele
captive. She awaits a Saint George to free her and by loving her to
inherit the treasures of Miramon. So Manuel departs like another
Siegfried. He climbs the mountain, frees Gisele and ... does not marry
her. At the foot of the enchanted castle he had met the mysterious
Niafer who helped him to fight Miramon’s enchantments. He marries
Niafer instead of the beautiful princess. It is not easy to say why,
for Cabell’s allegories are often obscure, and I leave the trouble to
pick their precise meaning to scholars. Did the author want to suggest
that between what Emerson called _first_ and _second_ thoughts, between
_tuitions_ and _intuitions_, a wise man will “think twice” and choose
the latter, and so did Manuel? Whatever may be the case, Dom Manuel has
now started on his crusade.
We follow him in wonderland among the most pleasant gambols of the
writer’s fancy. After being delayed at the foot of the mountain by
Miramon’s enchantments, they come to the magic castle on the top. And
then the tale tells how Manuel freed princess Gisele; how he gave her
up for his good companion Niafer; how selfish Manuel surrendered Niafer
to the rider of the Pale Horse; how he made Figures of Earth; how, in
order to give them life, he conquered the magician Freydis; how he
missed Niafer; how he brought her back to life with the help of the
Head of Misery; how he won back the kingdom of Poictesme; how he had a
daughter named Melisande; how he escaped the witchcraft of Alienor and
Freydis; and how he finally surrendered himself to Grandfather Death
who took him over to the river Styx on his black charger, that he might
see his real image in the water.
The novelist never allows humor and parody to conceal his serious
purpose. Dom Manuel is a most dramatic and suggestive figure, half
fictitious, half real. He impersonates Cabell’s views on the conflict
between life and dreams. The last chapters of “Figures of Earth” recall
some of the most beautiful medieval allegories. I quote as an example
the scene where Grandfather Death calls on Dom Manuel to take him away
to the subterranean world:
“It is strange,” says Dom Manuel, “to think that everything I am
seeing was mine a moment since, and it is queer too to think of
what a famous fellow was this Manuel the Redeemer, and of the fine
things he did, and it is appalling to wonder if all the other
applauded heroes of mankind are like him. Oh, certainly, Count
Manuel’s achievements were notable and such as were not known
anywhere before, and men will talk of them for a long while. Yet,
looking back--now that this famous Count of Poictesme means less
to me--why I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his
tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from
mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, not understanding
anything, greedy in all desires, and always honeycombed with
poltroonery. So in a secret place his youth was put away in
exchange for a prize that was hardly worth the having; and the fine
geas which his mother laid upon him was exchanged for the common
geas of what seems expected.”
“Such notions,” replied Grandfather Death, “are entertained by many
of you humans in the lightheaded time of youth. Then common sense
arises like a light, formless cloud about your doings, and you half
forget these notions. Then I bring darkness.”
“In that quiet dark, my friend, it may be I shall again become
the Manuel whom I remember, and I may get back again my own
undemonstrable ideas, in place of the ideas of other persons, to
entertain me in that darkness. So let us be going thither.”
“Very willingly,” said Grandfather Death; and he started toward the
door.
“Now pardon me,” says Manuel, “but in Poictesme the Count of
Poictesme goes first in any company. It may seem to you an affair
of no importance, but nowadays I concede the strength as well as
the foolishness of my accustomed habits, and all my life long I
have gone first. So do you ride a little way behind me, friend, and
carry this shroud and napkin, till I have need of them.”
Then the Count armed and departed from Storisende, riding on the
black horse, in gold armor, and carrying before him his shield
whereon was blazoned the rampant and bridled stallion of Poictesme
and the motto _Mundus vult decipi_. Behind him was Grandfather
Death on the white horse, carrying the Count’s grave-clothes in a
neat bundle. They rode toward the sunset, and against the yellow
sunset each figure showed jet black.
Dom Manuel is dead, but we shall meet his lineage in every hero of the
cycle. The head of the Poictesme dynasty will outlive himself in his
descendants. His daughter Melicent or Melisande, is the heroine of
the second part of the saga called “Domnei,” or “the Cult of Ladies.”
This is the most perfect collection of stories ever written by the
author. It is once more a fairy tale, a very fine legend embellished
with ironic traits. Rémy de Gourmont would have called it a masterpiece
of dissociation. The American novelist, like Anatole France, has the
talent of being at the same time ironic and naïve, and of dressing a
disillusioned wisdom in fairy garb. “Domnei,” like “Figures of Earth,”
tells of a great love ending in disappointment.
Perion de la Forest is in love with Melisande. Both travel to far-away
countries in pursuit of adventure and they fight many fights in pagan
lands. Are these lands Byzantine or Saracenic; are we in Constantinople
or in Palestine; in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance? Who can
tell? Perion and Melisande recall to mind Geoffroy Rudel and Melissinde
in Edmond Rostand’s “Princesse Lointaine,” but “Domnei” ends in
sarcasms and not in romantic embraces. It is the story of three men,
a Christian, a pagan, and a Jew, all in love with the same woman, or
rather with the idea which they form of her. Each of them voluntarily
wrecks his chances of happiness as soon as he sees that he can attain
it. This again seems paradoxical and a little confusing. Had not the
author decisively taken the side of romance against everything else
in the world? Why should the romantic impulse thus abandon the three
lovers? And why should Cabell weave these beautiful legends just to
take pleasure in ruining them with his own hands? Doubtless evasion
is better than repression, but the artificial heavens created by the
author’s imagination are somewhat too attractive to be rejected with
such light-heartedness. Yet with what zest these heroes of his run away
from them! But let us return to Melisande and Perion de la Forest.
They have been made prisoners by the pagan consul Demetrios. Perion
is free, but Demetrios keeps Melisande. She bought Perion’s freedom
by giving herself to the pagan. She is to be Demetrios’ captive for
many long years. This Demetrios is not an altogether disagreeable
pagan. He really loves Melisande who tries her best to tame him. But
one day he tears himself away from her. Through a sudden intuition
he feels the uselessness of love-making, and goes away. Melisande
had a third lover, the Jew Ashaverus; he too is caught for a while by
the allurement of the Eternal Feminine, and he too, in the end, is
a runaway from love. Perion has won over his rivals. After a bloody
encounter he finds Melisande still faithful to his memory and both
try to love each other according to courtly etiquette. But, alas! how
little reality resembles dreams! Perion has found Melisande, but the
Faraway Princess has vanished to make place for the rather commonplace
woman whom Perion marries, because if you cannot have the entire ideal
you may just as well be content with a few crumbs. “Domnei” preaches
the same lesson that we find in “Jurgen.”
“Domnei” is a book deep with meaning and very artistic in form. The
three lovers of Melisande make a very dramatic group. The narrative
never lags and spread through it are such charming bits of fantasy as
the following, which deals with Melisande’s gardens in a singing style,
mellow as the sound of a lute:
Indeed the Women’s Garden on this morning lacked nothing to delight
each sense. Its hedges were of flowering jessamine; its walkways
were spread with new sawdust tinged with crocus and vermilion,
and with mica beaten into a powder: and the place was rich in
fruit-bearing trees and welling waters. The sun shone, and birds
chaunted merrily to the right hand and to the left. Dog-headed
apes, sacred to the moon, were chattering in the trees. There was
a statue in this place, carved out of black stone, in the likeness
of a woman, having enamelled eyes and three rows of breasts, with
the lower part of her body confined in a sheath; and upon the
glistening pedestal of this statue chameleons sunned themselves
with distended throats. Around about Melicent were nodding
armaments of roses and gillyflowers and narcissi and amaranths,
and many violets and white lilies, and other flowers of all kinds
and colors.
To Melicent the world seemed very lovely. Here was a world created
by Eternal Love that people might serve love in it not at all
unworthily. Here were anguishes to be endured, and time and human
frailty and temporal hardship--all for love to mock at; a sea or
two for love to sever, a man-made law or so for love to override,
a shallow wisdom for love to deny, in exultance that these ills at
most were only corporal hindrance. This done, you have earned the
right to come--come hand-in-hand--to heaven whose liege-lord was
Eternal Love.
Thus Melicent, who knew that Perion loved her.
She sat on a stone bench. She combed her golden hair, not heeding
the more coarse gray hairs which here and there were apparent
nowadays. A peacock came, and watched her with bright, hard, small
eyes; and he craned his glistening neck this way and that way, as
though he were wondering at this other shining and gaily colored
creature, who seemed so happy.
She did not dare to think of seeing Perion again. Instead, she made
because of him a little song, which had not any words, so that it
is not possible here to retail this song.
Thus Melicent, who knew that Perion loved her.
I now come to “Jurgen.” It is Cabell’s great book, published in
1919; it was censored almost immediately and eagerly sought by book
collectors. Jurgen was born in Poictesme in the time of Dom Manuel, but
the scene of the novel is laid in dreamland. It recalls the voyages of
Saint Brendan and Dante. I shall try my best to disentangle the real
from the fanciful in the book. “Jurgen” is the story of a youth of
Poictesme by that name. He was full of ambition. Everybody predicted
for him a career of great deeds and amorous exploits. Instead, Jurgen
settled down; he married dame Lisa, a matter-of-fact woman, and he
opened a pawnshop. One day dame Lisa disappeared and as he missed his
domestic comfort Jurgen made up his mind to go after her. He came to a
cave on Amneran Heath and here the fantastic story begins.
It appears that dame Lisa was a witch, and Jurgen suspected the Devil
as being her kidnaper. Jurgen enters the cave and for several hundred
pages we follow him in the subterranean world. The author’s imagination
winds round and round. It is impossible to follow it in all its
meanderings. Led by the centaur Nessus, Jurgen travels in the nether
world. He is taken back to his heyday and, younger by twenty years,
he soon forgets dame Lisa to explore the land of the dead on his own
account. Loved by witches, vampires and queens, he marries a Hamadryad
and flirts with Helen of Troy. From escapade to escapade he finally
finds himself in hell, where he meets the shadow of his father. He
interviews Koshchei, the master “who made things as they are.” Quiet at
last after so many marvelous adventures, he comes back to his Penelope,
to his slippers and his hearth.
“Jurgen” caused a scandal in America. It reads like the sixth book of
the “Æneid” adapted by Casanova. Eroticism dominates the book, but it
is so mingled with humor that it is inoffensive. There are lengthy
digressions, but the interest never flags. Jurgen is a most sympathetic
rogue. It is hard to see him surrender to the commonplace at the end of
his long journey, like an ordinary Carol Kennicott or a George Babbitt.
From being emperor and pope he descends to a pawnbroker again without
much ado. But let us judge Jurgen on his faith and not on his works.
When he finds dame Lisa he cannot believe that he ever dreamed. But
dream he did for a very long while and he will never forget it. Jurgen
had dreamed enough to find out that, after all, there was not such
great difference between dreaming and staying awake. In wonderland he
met with the same petty passions, cares and prejudices which mark this
world. Why go so far for so little? And yet, romance is better than
routine and who knows if Jurgen will not start again?
The allegories in “Jurgen” are most suggestive, in particular those
which deal with Jurgen’s voyage to hell. Neither Voltaire nor Anatole
France could have surpassed Cabell in conveying a moral lesson through
a piquant anecdote. Jurgen has nothing of the Puritan in him. He is as
heathenish as Don Juan. He never loses his good humor or his temper
amidst his thousand and one adventures. His wit resembles Figaro’s.
The conclusion of the book, where Jurgen interviews both Satan and
Koshchei, is a pert satire on human frailty.
Cabell’s poetic irony displayed itself best in “Jurgen.” As a
representative man, Jurgen embodies in his person both Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza. The romantic instincts are checked by his robust and
plebeian common sense, which he cannot help venting amidst his most
wonderful adventures. A Yankee afoot on Mount Parnassus, he may very
well be introduced, such as he is, in the episode where he launches on
his subterranean expedition astride the centaur Nessus:
The cave stretched straight forward, and downward, and at the
far end was a glow of light. Jurgen went on and on, and so came
presently to a centaur: and this surprised him not a little,
because Jurgen knew that centaurs were imaginary creatures.
Certainly they were curious to look at: for here was the body of a
fine bay horse, and rising from its shoulders, the sunburnt body of
a young fellow who regarded Jurgen with grave and not unfriendly
eyes. The Centaur was lying beside a fire of cedar and juniper
wood: near him was a platter containing a liquid with which he was
anointing his hoofs. This stuff, as the Centaur rubbed it in with
his fingers, turned the appearance of his hoofs to gold.
“Hail, friend,” says Jurgen, “if you be the work of God.”
“Your protasis is not good Greek,” observed the Centaur, “because
in Hellas we did not make such reservations. Besides, it is not so
much my origin as my destination which concerns you.”
“Well, friend, and whither are you going?”
“To the garden between dawn and sunrise, Jurgen.”
“Surely, now, but that is a fine name for a garden! and it is a
place I would take joy in seeing.”
“Up upon my back, Jurgen, and I will take you thither,” says the
Centaur, and heaved to his feet. Then said the Centaur, when the
pawnbroker hesitated: “Because, as you must understand, there is
no other way. For this garden does not exist, and never did exist,
in what men humorously called real life; so that of course only
imaginary creatures such as I can enter it.”
“That sounds very reasonable,” Jurgen estimated: “but as it
happens, I am looking for my wife, whom I suspect to have been
carried off by a devil, poor fellow!”
And Jurgen began to explain to the Centaur what had befallen.
The Centaur laughed. “It may be for that reason I am here. There
is, in any event, only one remedy in this matter. Above all
devils--and above all gods, they tell me, but certainly above all
centaurs--is the power of Koshchei the Deathless, who made things
as they are.”
“It is not always wholesome,” Jurgen submitted, “to speak of
Koshchei. It seems especially undesirable in a dark place like
this.”
“None the less, I suspect it is to him you must go for justice.”
“I would prefer not doing that,” said Jurgen, with unaffected
candor.
“You have my sympathy: but there is no question of preference
where Koshchei is concerned. Do you think, for example, that I am
frowzing in this underground place by my own choice? And knew your
name by accident?”
Jurgen was frightened a little. “Well, well! but it is usually the
deuce and all, this doing of the manly thing. How, then, can I come
to Koshchei?”
“Roundabout,” says the Centaur. “There is never any other way.”
“And is the road to this garden roundabout?”
“Oh, very much so, inasmuch as it circumvents both destiny and
common sense.”
“Needs must, then,” says Jurgen: “at all events, I am willing to
taste any drink once.”
“You will be chilled, though, traveling as you are. For you and I
are going a queer way, in search of justice, over the grave of a
dream and through the malice of time. So you had best put on this
shirt over your other clothing.”
“Indeed it is a fine snug shining garment, with curious figures on
it. I accept such raiment gladly. And whom shall I be thanking for
this kindness, now?”
“My name,” said the Centaur, “is Nessus.”
“Well, then, friend Nessus, I am at your service.” And in a trice
Jurgen was on the Centaur’s back, and the two of them had somehow
come out of the cave, and were crossing Amneran Heath. So they
passed into a wooded place, where the light of sunset yet lingered,
rather unaccountably. Now the Centaur went westward. And now about
the pawnbroker’s shoulders and upon his breast and over his lean
arms glittered like a rainbow the many-colored shirt of Nessus.
James Branch Cabell took a flight into _gaie science_ when he wrote
“Jurgen.” The world, according to him, is shaped by our thoughts. In
the course of his earthly, infernal and celestial pilgrimage, Jurgen
passed through several superimposed spheres: first that of reality from
which he escaped, then that of fancy and dreams, where he lingered a
long while. This upper world is not purely ideal, nor is it entirely
fictitious. It is still human, too human, as Nietzsche said. It is made
of the same stuff as our dreams. Above and below there are heaven and
hell. If I understand “Jurgen” aright, neither the one nor the other
is entirely unreal. Heaven and hell are man-made fictions. Hell is the
creation of our pride and of our scruples. When he meets his father in
the burning pit, Jurgen asks the demons why they torment the old man.
They tell him that they cannot help it because he insists on being
wicked and getting an appropriate punishment for his sins. Heaven also
is filled with our pride. It is the abode of our highest expectations,
a tribute of Koshchei to our high idea of ourselves. The only real
universe is that of Koshchei. It is the world of things as they are,
and Jurgen does not dwell very long in it. He needs his earthly
comfort, his warm flannels and his carefully prepared soup. So he falls
back into the world of common sense, the only one where the majority of
us mortals can live, because _gaie science_ is out of the common reach.
Once more the author seems to deny us the right to enter the land of
fiction, which, however, he shows us as the only interesting one to
live in. Let us see if the rôle which he assigned to art in his general
outlook of things cannot help us to clear the contradiction.
CHAPTER X
_James Branch Cabell on the High Place_
In James Branch Cabell, the genealogist is barely hidden by the
philosopher. The author of “Jurgen” is the only philosophical novelist
in the United States to-day. At first glance, he even seems somewhat
un-American. His fanciful characters dwell in a land as unreal as
themselves, Poictesme, bordering upon the Land of Cocaigne and the
Abbey of Thélème. (Who, previous to Cabell, had ever dared to raise an
Abbey of Thélème in the land of the Puritans?) It is not easy to find
the bonds of connection between the writer and his surroundings. His
work is very close to European and to French models, and evidences at
the same time a great knowledge of booklore as well as of humanity.
It is necessary to have had a long contact with Cabell to realize his
true significance; at first, he seems to be rather fantastic, but,
after some frequentation, one discovers the deeper meaning of his
writings. His ambition was to sketch a sort of epic of human desire.
His characters, under their various masks, are attempts to draw and
depict men as conceived in utter liberty. Dom Manuel, Jurgen, and
their succeeding reincarnations, are not Puritan inventions. This
was not the first time that an inspired American had attempted to
paint a “personality picture” of man as such. A great many novelists
had essayed it and had wasted their efforts in the task. The
Transcendentalists of New England ascribed to the typical man every
attribute of moral perfection. Emerson, in his famous “Representative
Men,” tried to delineate the ideal man. He conceived him as a
contemplative sort of person. Emerson had sallies of “gay science.”
He did not accept the world as it is and tried many times to defeat
reality. He knew man well and was wary of accepting him as he was. Long
before Nietszche, he imagined the superman, whom he called the _homo
novus_, or the _plus-man_. A prudent man, rather shy and inhibited,
but capable of thinking daringly, Emerson had some of Dom Manuel’s and
Jurgen’s characteristics. According to him, the ideal man was much less
the active hero than the thinker climbing up the rarefied summits of
thought and taking his risks with the self-reliance of a conquistador.
Emerson, like Cabell, was a transcendental realist. He would have
sympathized with Koshchei, the God of Things-as-They-Are. But Emerson’s
sensibility was atrophied and suppressed. To a large extent he
conceived the superman in his own image, with a large brain and a very
small heart. On the other hand, he allowed a large place to dreams, to
the subconscious elements, and to what he called demonology. Dreams
played a large part in his philosophy; if there ever was a daydreamer
besides Hawthorne or Alcott in the romantic twilight of Concord, he
was the one. He was not unaware of the phenomena of dual personality,
trances and ecstasies. His philosophy of history and of the heroes
was decidedly “Bovaryistic.” Upon this point again the confidences
of his journals are most curious. He confessed to having experienced
trances of a mystic and orgiastic nature; at times he felt as though
he were being turned into another person. That sort of experience was
not infrequent in the Emerson family. His brother, Charles Emerson,
was also under the influence of such spells and his aunt, Mary Moody,
was a visionary and an authentic _clairvoyante_. The effects caused by
inhibition seem to have been quite prevalent among the Puritan writers
of New England. Take the life of Margaret Fuller, for instance. Was
there ever an example of greater suppression--and more heroic attempt
to evade it? Her desire for expatriation was paid for at the sacrifice
of her life.
The number of Dom Manuels, of Jurgens, in American letters is
countless. Thoreau disguised himself as an Indian. Whitman went through
every possible form of cosmic avatar. Edgar Allan Poe was haunted by
the dead. A Southerner like Cabell, like him fanciful and fantastic,
but sad, obsessed by the memory of a dear, departed one, his whole life
was akin to a nightmare. A daydreamer and a somnambulist, he too lived
in Dreamland, on Fairy Island, and in the domain of Arnheim. Had Jurgen
been more crafty, had Dom Manuel been wiser, had Florian de Puysange
been less of the _roué_, they would all have felt at home in Edgar
Allan Poe’s imaginary fatherland. But Poe did not care for allegory.
He cultivated dreams for their own sake. The fusion between object and
subject, the real and the ideal, life and dreams, was complete in his
writings. He never woke up.
The nearer we get to Cabell’s “Jurgen,” the more we see the
transformation and alteration of the “personality picture” or the ideal
man in America. The Civil War came. The great men of the day were
politicians and soldiers,--Grant, Lincoln. Then came the “dreadful
decade” followed by the advent of the realist, Theodore Roosevelt,
Edison, Carnegie, Wilson and now Henry Ford. Some of these idols were
to be blasted by Mark Twain’s vengeful irony. But Mark Twain himself
was destined to prove, through his books, that the man of dreams was
dead. He buried him himself without much respect, but not without
incidentally damning the whole race of man in his posthumous book, “The
Mysterious Stranger,” which is a veritable challenge to life and to the
impossibility of its ever bearing supermen.
Praise be to the Lord, “Jurgen” was born in 1919, and the rights of
imagination were restored. Chivalry, the troubadours’ _gay saber_ came
back to life in America.
The French eighteenth-century _conteurs_, Voltaire and Anatole France
to-day had somebody to talk to in the United States.
“The High Place” shows unmistakable traces of Anatole France’s
influence. There are curious affinities between M. d’Astarac and
Florian de Puysange. Saint Hoprig seems to have been taken out bodily
from the “Revolt of the Angels,” after having drunk a dram or so in
the company of Jerôme Coignard. At last we have an American novelist
frankly going back to the source of art and free thought.
The ideal man represented by Jurgen and Dom Manuel was reincarnated in
the person of Florian de Puysange. The book which deals with him is
less loaded with allegory than the previous one, and its philosophy
is more superficial. In atmosphere and tone it is very French, with
an eighteenth-century tang. It is a masterpiece of Cabellian irony.
Anglo-Saxon countries are richer in humorists than in ironists. Irony
comes with a certain mobility of the mind, a certain dilettantism, a
display of the ego with which Anglo-Saxons are not very familiar. They
are a practical and realistic race. Socially, and morally speaking,
irony is a dangerous weapon. Humor is amusing, but, even when it is
somber, it remains optimistic. It rests on an ethical background.
Irony comes with skepticism, and skepticism is not popular among
Anglo-Saxons. Add to this the pressure of public opinion and of social
constraint. From a certain point of view, irony is an equivocation and
a game ill tolerated by practical and respectable people; yet it is
irony which is James Branch Cabell’s forte. The story of Florian de
Puysange is a masterpiece on this score.
“The High Place” may be connected with the saga of Dom Manuel and
Jurgen. Like “Jurgen,” it is again the triumph of a dream.
The time is the sunset of the Roi Soleil. The scene is still the
mystical kingdom of Poictesme, located in the forest of Acaire between
the Mediterranean and the Cévennes. One afternoon the hero of the book,
a ten-year-old child, fell asleep in a beautiful garden while reading
the tales of M. Perrault. A vernal breeze was blowing in the park.
Florian de Puysange had a dream. All of Cabell’s novels begin thus with
a plunge into dreamland. The transition from consciousness to dream in
his books is operated through various means, usually magical. In this
case, Florian de Puysange was bewitched by a book, and fell asleep in
a beautiful garden. Florian was a scion of Jurgen’s line. He inherited
dreaming. In his dream he finds himself taken to a “high place.” The
dream is that of a beautiful woman asleep in an enchanted garden.
Florian at this time was only ten years old, but he was to live his
whole life in anticipation. Jurgen’s dreams had been retrospective.
Those of Florian de Puysange took place in the future.
He climbed the slopes of a high mountain, atop of which the beautiful
Melior, guarded by the Saint Hoprig, awaited him. Saint Hoprig, who
would have done honor even to Anatole France, was a rather broad-minded
saint. Of course he accomplished miracles and aided Florian in
conquering Melior. Florian married the fairy. Let us interpret this
as signifying that Florian, freed by sleep from the necessities of
ordinary life, succeeded in marrying the ideal. The story of Florian’s
allegorical nuptials is in the author’s best manner. He goes back in
this to the erotic symbolism of “Jurgen.” Here is the marriage scene:
Acaire was old and it had been a forest since there was a forest
anywhere: and all its denizens came now to do honor to the champion
who had released them from their long sleeping. The elves came in
their blue low-crowned hats; the gnomes, in red woolen clothes;
and the kobolds, in brown coats that were covered with chips and
sawdust. The dryads and other tree spirits of course went verdantly
appareled: and after these came fauns with pointed furry ears,
and the nixies with green teeth and very beautiful waxen hair,
and the duergar, whose loosely swinging arms touched the ground
when they walked, and the queer little rakhna, who were white and
semi-transparent like jelly, and the Bush Gods that were in Acaire
the oldest living creatures and had quite outlived their divinity.
From all times and all mythologies they came, and they made a
tremendous to-do over Florian and the might which had rescued them
from their centuries of sleeping under Melusine’s enchantment.
From the top of the “high place” Florian can see all the country around
him:
He saw the forests lying like dark flung-by scarves upon the paler
green of cleared fields; he saw the rivers as narrow shinings.
In one place, very far beneath them, a thunderstorm was passing
like--of all things of this blissful day,--a drifting bride’s
veil. Florian saw it twinkle with a yellow glow, then it was again
a floating small white veil. And everywhere the lands beneath in
graduations of vaporous indistinction. Poictesme seemed woven
of blue smokes and of green mists. It afforded no sharp outline
anywhere as his gazing passed outward toward the horizon. And there
all melted bafflingly into a pearl-colored sky: the eye might not
judge where, earth ending, heaven began in that bright and placid
radiancy.
We shall leave it to Doctor Freud to translate these Cabellian symbols
literally. They are both erotic and poetic:
First Melior and Florian were given an egg and a quince pear: he
handed her the fruit, which she ate, and the seeds of which she
spat out; he took from her the egg and broke it. Holy Hoprig, who
had tendered his resignation as the high-priest of Llaw Gyffes,
but whose successor had not yet been appointed, then asked the
bridegroom a whispered question.
Florian was astonished, and showed it. But he answered, without
comment, “Well, let us say nine times.”
Hoprig divided a cake into nine slices, and placed these upon
the altar. Afterward Hoprig cut the throat of a white hen, and
put a little of its blood upon the feet of Melior and Florian.
The trumpets sounded then, as King Helmas came forward, and gave
Florian a small key.
I shall not tell all the romantic events which followed the nuptials
of Florian de Puysange with the fairy Melior. Florian was a _roué_.
Born during the reign of Louis XIV, his imaginary life took place by
anticipation during the Regency. No sooner was he married than he
forgot Melior. The only vestige of loyalty remaining in him was that
due to his caste. In order to obtain Melior, he had, like Faust, to
give something to the Devil and he had promised his first-born child.
To the Devil, who in this instance was Mr. Jennicot, he had also
dedicated as a sort of bonus into the bargain, the not very valuable
soul of Cardinal Dubois, but the Cardinal cheated the Devil.
As a compensation the Marquis de Puysange poisoned the Duke of Orleans
in the course of an orgy most dramatically narrated in the book.
Florian now started on his career. A sort of Don Juan with a Bluebeard
complex, he got rid of a long string of women, and would have disposed
of Melior herself had not Saint Hoprig protected her. This protection,
as Florian soon found out, was of so intimate a nature that it allowed
him to forfeit his promise to the Devil without committing perjury.
But all these incidents are merely a pretext. I should do injustice
to the author by dwelling upon the anecdotic side of his book. “The
High Place” is essentially notable for the philosophic fancy playing
through the background of incident. The sub-title, “a comedy of
disenchantement,” tells the moral to be drawn from it. Disenchanted by
reality, disenchanted by dreams, Florian is a typical Cabellian hero.
He is double within himself. No sooner has he satisfied his wishes than
he wishes something else. On this point he is no exception to the rule
of Dom Manuel and Jurgen. And yet he had married a fairy, though one
who had come down to earth to become his wife and was soon to be with
child. How could he help being tired of her?
At the end of his trail, Florian tried to build a moral system based
on the conciliation of contrary elements. Just as there were two gods
in “Jurgen” (Satan and Koshchei), there are two in “The High Place.”
Melior went back to Fairyland whence she had been drawn by Florian’s
courting. Mr. Jennicot, the Devil, and St. Michael give us the key to
the whole story, and it is rather disconcerting. Florian’s two patrons,
the Devil and St. Michael, agree unanimously, in way of conclusion,
that life is worth only what our dreams make of it, and that all dreams
are rather inane. What then? _In vino veritas_, proclaims the Devil,
quoting his Rabelais, and the Archangel Michael does not disapprove.
Finally, Michael and Satan come so close to each other that their faces
are confused and that they end up by becoming one. Let us listen to the
Devil as Professor of Philosophy:
Such men as he (Florian) continue to dream, and I confess such men
are dangerous: for they obstinately aspire toward a perfectibility
that does not exist, they will be content with nothing else; and
when your master and I do not satisfy the desire which is in their
dreams, they draw their appalling logical conclusions. To that
humiliation, such as it is, I answer Drink! For the Oracle of
Babcuc also--that oracle which the little curé of Meudon was not
alone in misunderstanding--that oracle speaks the true wonder word.
The Archangel Michael wants to know what our dreams matter to the
angels and the demons:
“They matter much to them,” answers Jennicot. “Men go enslaved by
this dream of beauty: but never yet have they sought to embody
it, whether in their wives or in their equally droll works of art,
without imperfect results, without results that were maddening
to the dreamer. Men are resolved to know that which they may
wholeheartedly worship. No, they are not bent upon emulating what
they worship: it is rather that holiness also is a dream which
allures mankind resistlessly.”
Whereupon Saint Michael and Mr. Jennicot, in their perplexity, go back
to their cups. They have a great need of shaking off their thoughts.
Man’s dreaming is for both of them a topic of foremost importance. Are
not they produced by it? But to judge by dreamers’ pace in Cabell’s
novels, and by the wreckage of dreams strewing their path, what does
the future have in store for archangels and demons? Jennicot and St.
Michael console themselves by trying to reconcile their antinomies
_inter pocula_, among symbolic cups in which, according to the author,
life and death, reality and dreams, evil and wrong, god and devil, all
become mixed and lose their identity:
“Meanwhile he does not drink, he merely dreams, this little
Florian,” observes M. Jennicot, who seems to be the favorite
interpreter of the novelist. “He dreams of beauty and of holiness
fetched back by him to an earth which everywhere fell short of
his wishes, fetched down by him intrepidly from that imagined
high place where men attain to their insane desires. He dreams of
aspiring and joy and color and suffering and unreason, and of those
quaint taboos which you and he call sin, as being separate things,
not seeing how all blends in one vast cup. Nor does he see, as yet,
that this blending is very beautiful, when properly regarded and
very holy when approached without human conceit.”
Then the two faces which bent over Florian were somehow blended
into one face, and Florian knew that these two beings had melted
into one person, and that this person was prodding him very gently.
Whereupon the dreamer awakes. He is still only ten years old and
he has lived until thirty in his dream. Now the dream is gone. His
father, the Comte de Puysange, wakes him up. But Florian is not yet
through with dreaming awake, in spite of the author’s final statement
that henceforward Florian de Puysange settled down, and like Jurgen,
descended from heaven to earth.
Thus “The High Place” takes on at the end an authentic air of a novel
Doctor Faustus. But let us reach the last part of the cycle, “The Cream
of the Jest,” “a comedy of evasions.”
* * * * *
The principal character of the book, Felix Kennaston, is already known
to readers of Cabell; he was the ironist in one of his early works,
“The Eagle’s Shadow.” Kennaston had from remote descent authentic blood
of Dom Manuel and Jurgen in his veins. The book which portrays him is a
veritable treatise in romantic disguises. It harks back to the thesis
unfolded by the author in “Beyond Life.” Not satisfied with upholding
the rights of fiction, Cabell now shows us a writer of fiction at work.
Are we to see Cabell himself in Felix Kennaston? They look very much
alike. Kennaston too is writing an allegorical saga. One day, while
walking in his garden, he had stepped upon a little shining metal disc
which plays an important part in the book. (Each one of Cabell’s novels
has revolved around some talisman or charm.)
Felix Kennaston’s imagination gave a life of its own to this piece
of metal. It became a magic seal, the Sigil of Scoteia, a Key to
Dreamland. Whenever light touched it, Kennaston fell into a trance
and dreamt curious dreams. Thanks to this sigil, he spent his whole
life dreaming and he was not alone in his dreams. Of course he too
flirted therein with a fairy, La Belle Ettare, beautiful, enchanting,
wonderfully accomplished, and of whom Kennaston’s wife became
reasonably jealous. The book is a novel of intrigue only incidentally.
The real subject is the study of Kennaston’s mind at work. Behind him
we see the author pointing an explanatory finger.
Kennaston did not concern himself with fiction for its own sake, but
because it opened to him the gates of the Unknown. It was his road to
spiritual adventure. He is an authentic daydreamer. He is not unhappy.
He has every reason for being satisfied with life as it is. He is rich,
talented, successful as an author, married to an attractive woman; yet
he is bored. Bovaryism in his case is all the more striking because
it is gratuitous. Life weighs on his shoulders; like all of Cabell’s
heroes, he needs adventure, a written if not a real one. We find the
novelist and the adventurer united in his person. Kennaston represents
two things: first, the common run of man dissatisfied with reality and
instinctively seeking an escape through dreams, and then, the taking
to fiction, writing for more complete evasion. But let us listen to
Kennaston’s complaint against reality and his plea in favor of dreams.
It is he speaking through the mouth of the scribe Horvendile, his
double; we are reminded of the familiar grievances of Carol Kennicott,
Babbitt and the characters in Dreiser, Anderson and Sinclair Lewis:
I find my country an inadequate place in which to live.... Oh,
many persons live there happily enough! or, at worst, they seem
to find the prizes and the applause of my country worth striving
for wholeheartedly. But there is that in some of us which gets no
exercise there; and we struggle blindly, with impotent yearning,
to gain outlet for great powers which we know that we possess,
even though we do not know their names. And so, we dreamers wander
at adventure to Storisende--oh, and into more perilous realms
sometimes!--in search of a life that will find employment for
every faculty we have. For life in my country does not engross us
utterly. We dreamers waste there at loose ends, waste futilely....
Oh, yes! it may be that we are not sane; could we be sure of that,
it would be a comfort. But, as it is, we dreamers only know that
life in my country does not content us, and never can content
us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought while, into other and
fairer-seeming lands in search of--we know not what! And after a
little, we must go back into my country and live there as best we
may.
This is, in a nutshell, the plight of all the inhibited and repressed
people with whom we have met in the American _gesta_ told by the
American novelists of to-day.
Such is the summary of Felix Kennaston’s adventures. We understand now
the failure of Cabell’s heroes to make their escape. So their return
to the land described by the scribe Horvendile occurs only after a
long circumnavigation. Disgusted with reality, a Kennaston will not
capitulate without having experienced every possible form of dream.
He has no illusions about life, as he tells La Belle Ettare, but he
is anxious to wreak a beautiful vengeance on it. If he cannot live as
he wants, he will live as he may. Sick of men, he will hobnob in the
company of great heroes. In a sequence of curious chapters, Kennaston,
besides holding familiar converse with his fictitious Egeria, thanks
to his magic seal, takes huge delight in imaginary reincarnations. We
find him at Whitehall chatting with Cromwell, at Vaux-le-Vicomte during
a fête given by Fouquet, at the Conciergerie where he is waiting to be
called to the guillotine:
Nightly he went adventuring with Ettare: and they saw the cities
and manners of many men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca’s
mundivagant king; and among them even those three persons who had
most potently influenced human life....
For once, in an elongated room with buff-colored walls--having
scarlet hangings over its windows, and seeming larger than it
was in reality, because of its many mirrors--they foregathered
with Napoleon; on the evening of his coronation: the emperor
of half-Europe was fretting over an awkward hitch in the day’s
ceremony, caused by his sisters’ attempt to avoid carrying the
Empress Josephine’s train; and he was grumbling because the old
French families continued to ignore him as a parvenu.
In a neglected orchard sun-steeped and made drowsy by the murmur
of bees, they talked with Shakespeare; the playwright, his nerves
the worse for the preceding night’s potations, was peevishly
complaining of the meager success of his later comedies, worrying
over Lord Pembroke’s neglect of him, and trying to concoct a masque
in the style of fat Ben Jonson, since that was evidently what the
theater-patronizing public wanted. And they were with Pontius
Pilate in Jerusalem, on the evening of a day when the sky was black
and the earth had trembled; and Pilate, benevolent and replete with
supper, was explaining the latest theories concerning eclipses and
earthquakes to his little boy, and chuckling with fond pride in the
youngster’s intelligent questions.
“The Cream of the Jest” is another treatise on day-dreaming and
absent-mindedness. One day, alas! Kennaston’s wife threw in the
wastebasket the magic disc which was his key to wonderland. That was
the death blow to his flights into romance and the end of his romantic
career. His wife, too, died in a mysterious manner, probably punished
by the fairies for being too prosaic. We learn at the end of the book
as a sort of consolation over the loss of the talisman and an assurance
as to its origin--a signal revenge of reality upon dreams--that the
sigil of Scoteia was but the cover of a pot of cold cream!
Cabell buries Kennaston without much ceremony after calling him down
for his evasions. Yet the parting word is still in favor of dreams.
From the scientific point of view Kennaston is not hard to explain. His
was a case of auto-suggestion, but this explanation does not suffice
for the novelist. The case of Felix Kennaston was not an isolated one.
Felix was a representative man. He impersonated the conflict between
fiction and romance: To Kennaston
the dream alone could matter--his proud assurance that life was
not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and
confusion; and that he, this gross, weak animal, could be strong
and excellent and wise, and his existence a pageant of beauty and
nobility. To prove this dream was based on a delusion would be no
doubt an enjoyable retaliation for Kennaston’s being so unengaging
to the eye and so stupid to talk to; but it would make the dream no
whit less lovely or less dear to him--or to the rest of us either.
For it occurred to me that his history was, in essentials, the
history of our race, thus far. All I advanced for or against
him, equally, was true of all men that ever lived.... For it is
in this inadequate flesh that each of us must serve his dream;
and so, must fail in the dream’s service, and must parody that
which he holds dearest. To this we seem condemned, being what we
are. Thus, one and all, we play false to the dream, and it evades
us, and we dwindle into responsible citizens. And yet always
thereafter--because of many abiding memories--we know, assuredly,
that the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through dining
rooms and offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and
restaurants, “and so to bed” ...
It was in appropriate silence, therefore, that I regarded Felix
Kennaston as a parable. The man was not merely very human; he was
humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in
human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them
come true.
Such is the moral of “The Cream of the Jest,” a summarizing of Cabell’s
ironistic philosophy. It is decidedly Nietszchean. In a Puritan
land he conceives life as a work of art and sees in Art the highest
form of life to transcend itself. This he did with fine daring and
great poetic feeling in a chapter of the same book, “The Evolution
of a Vestryman.” In pages filled with a humor reminiscent of Samuel
Butler, Cabell eulogizes Chance. In a world of chance encounters,
Art alone reveals intentions and a goal to the human puppets. The
author, boldly unfolding his thesis, roundly scores the religions. He
reproaches them with postponing till the morrow what Art promises to
us _hic et nunc. Carpe diem!_ Cabell’s philosophy assumes an artistic
epicureanism midway between Anatole France and Walter Pater. Then
comes a paradoxical apology of Christianity, which Cabell forgives
for having falsified human perspectives because it has increased the
romantic interest of life. According to him, God did not die to redeem
us. Imagine a novelist dying for the marionettes he has paraded before
our eyes! God reincarnated himself and died to _express himself_ and
to teach us to do as much. What would the Puritans think of this new
theology?
* * * * *
I shall stop here with this rapid view of Cabell’s mind. I have
neglected his early works, although some of them were quite
significant. Some are even very attractive: “The Rivet in Grandfather’s
Neck” is the touching, beautiful and ironic story of an _amour
d’automne_ in the romantic background of a Virginia estate. Cabell is
a very subtle and delicate psychologist of the woman’s heart. “The
Eagle’s Shadow” is a suggestive sentimental “imbroglio.”
“The Cords of Vanity, A Comedy of Cowardice,” portrays a modern
descendant of Jurgen experiencing in real life all the adventures which
had occurred to Jurgen only in dreams. He flirts with, seduces, and
abandons half a dozen ladies, victims of his disillusioned philosophy
of love. This book gave Cabell a chance to display a delicious bit of
_marivaudage_.
CHAPTER XI
_Reinforcements: Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Floyd Dell, Joseph
Hergesheimer, Waldo Frank_
I have been up to this as objective as possible, sparing neither praise
nor criticism to the present-day American novelists. I confess that the
path I have followed has been rather arduous and not always leading
to gardens of pleasure. American realism does not provide on the road
artistic oases like Flaubert’s or Maupassant’s. The great Dreiserian
desert or the Andersonian jungle are hard enough to travel through. The
writers whom I have studied are more interesting for the subjects which
they treat than for their style. As artists they are imperfect, one
might be tempted to say uneducated. On the other hand, if I have been
at all sedulous in depicting them, the reader will be struck with the
unanimous character of their grievances. All of them almost ferociously
criticize the social man; all have of American life a somewhat tragic
opinion. The more optimistic among them feign to be ironical. Few show
either pity or resignation.
It was reserved for the women to soften this realism with a grain
of human pathos. The novels of Miss Willa Cather and Zona Gale in
particular are characterized by a profound feeling of sympathy towards
the inhibited people of whom they write. Willa Cather, like James
Branch Cabell, is from Virginia. As an analyst, she can be pitiless
when occasion requires and she was so when she wrote “A Lost Lady.”
This novel once again portrays an American Emma Bovary, buried in
the grass of a small town. From adventure to adventure, from fall to
fall, the Lost Lady ends up by marrying one of her servants. This book
is rich in intuitions. Its gloomy atmosphere enhances the feeling
of the tragedy of suppressed lives and the ensuing moral decadence.
Disregarding the chronological order, this novel can be compared with
a more recent work by the same author, “The Professor’s House.” It
is again the story of a recluse. The composition of the book is not
perfect. Being concerned primarily with faithfully representing people
and their surroundings, the author deprived “The Professor’s House”
of almost any plot. She appears to have hesitated between telling a
story and drawing portraits. The book is interrupted in the middle by a
lengthy digression. But the hero of the novel, Professor Saint Pierre,
is an attractive figure.
Saint Pierre would feel at home in one of Mr. Edouard Estaunié’s
books.[53] He is an ardent adept of the “secret life.” A very human
sort of man, with many prepossessing traits, Saint Pierre in his
home recalls King Lear among his daughters. The professor, who is a
historian, lives among comfortable surroundings. He likes his work and
is an enthusiastic student. All he needs is the solitude requisite to
bring his labors to an auspicious end. Unfortunately, he is the slave
to a shrewish woman, and plays the indulgent father to two coquettish
daughters, without mentioning the sons-in-law who are perfect
Philistines. This state of affairs is not conducive to serene living in
the academic groves. This is why the title of this novel is symbolic.
It is an allusion to the existence of Saint Pierre, living in two
different houses, just as he is leading two highly dissimilar lives.
The first house, the real one, is the home where he is besieged by
practical cares and worries. Poor Saint Pierre has a hard time of it,
what with holding his own with a wife and family who do not understand
him, and pretending to be a scholar and a writer! But there is the
other house, the little dream house which Saint Pierre rigged up all
for himself and within whose threshold he becomes his real self. It is
a haven of dreams. From its windows the distant azure of Lake Michigan
may be seen. There Saint Pierre is happy in solitude. But family
demands are pitiless. They pursue him in his retreat like a beast
trapped in the woods. In the end, to loosen this stranglehold, Saint
Pierre tries to commit suicide, casually, as if to give the impression
that he did not do it on purpose. But he is not even allowed to commit
suicide. Like most of the inhibited characters of American fiction, he
capitulates and makes a virtue of necessity. His failure is all the
more pathetic.
* * * * *
The other novels which have contributed to Miss Cather’s reputation
are equally based on suppression. They include the “Song of the Lark,”
“My Antonia,” “One of Ours.” The heroine of the “Song of the Lark,”
Thea Kronburg, is the daughter of a village pastor. She grew up alone
in an indifferent and commonplace atmosphere. She fell in love with
her German music master, who was the choir leader in the church where
Thea played the organ on Sundays. Her soul vents itself through music,
like Corinne or Consuelo. She must have art and passion to be happy.
Thea’s music teacher is also her professor of philosophy, and this
philosophy is not puritanical but romantic. How small the world! How
petty, life in America! There is only one thing worth while, and that
is aspiration, romance. It is that at the bottom of our hearts which
gives its value to all things,--its redness to the rose, its azure
to the skies and love to man. Without it there is no art. Poor Thea
is only too easily converted to this creed. Thank goodness, she will
not be cheated from her happiness! She leaves her village and has a
magnificent artistic career, but she remains modest and sincere in
success. Art for Thea is not vanity; it is the realization of her
dearest and most intimate self, the whole-hearted expression of her
truest personality.
Not all of the inhibited people portrayed by Miss Willa Cather have
been as fortunate as Thea Kronburg; witness the Lost Lady and Professor
Saint Pierre. In “My Antonia” the author has gone back to a less
optimistic theme. She has put into this novel the best of her art
and of her philosophy. The scene of the novel is far-away Nebraska.
Antonia is a Czech. “My Antonia” is what is called in America an
“immigrant” novel. Immigration has given to America a new exotic
background, and a new source of local color. In “My Antonia” Willa
Cather studies the immigrants with her usual sympathy. Antonia is a
portrait drawn from within. Her self-abnegation is rare. A hard worker,
devoted to children, betrayed yet ever faithful, she is a new edition
of Flaubert’s “Simple Heart.” She is the incarnation of the motherly
feeling. The sites of the Far West, the rustic rites of the seasons
form the background of this canvas painted with the simplicity and the
forcefulness of a master.
It is difficult to find in “My Antonia” passages for an anthology.
Everything in it holds together. The tale is unfolded, “not as a thing
of which one thinks, but as conscience itself,” slowly, in sheer
duration. “My Antonia” is a little epic, the “Evangeline” of the Far
West. Here is a description of a Nebraska hamlet. It tells a lot as to
the nostalgia of its inhabitants. It is Jim, the hero of the story, who
is speaking:
In the evening I used to prowl about, hunting for diversion. There
lay the familiar streets, frozen with snow or liquid mud. They led
to the houses of good people who were putting the babies to bed,
or simply sitting still before the parlor stove, digesting their
supper. Black Hawk had two saloons. One of them was admitted, even
by the church people, to be as respectable as a saloon could be.
Handsome Anton Jelinek, who had rented his homestead and come to
town, was the proprietor. In his saloon there were long tables
where the Bohemian and German farmers could eat the lunches they
brought from home while they drank their beer. Jelinek kept rye
bread on hand, and smoked fish and strong imported cheeses to
please the foreign palate. I liked to drop into his bar-room and
listen to the talk. But one day he overtook me on the street and
clapped me on the shoulder.
“Jim,” he said, “I am good friends with you and I always like to
see you. But you know how the church people think about saloons.
Your grandpa has always treated me fine, and I don’t like to have
you come into my place, because I know he don’t like it, and it
puts me in bad with him.”
So I was shut out of that.
Black Hawk is about as dead as Gopher Prairie or Winesburg, Ohio. Poor
Jim! There are very few distractions in this far Western village. There
is the druggist across his ice-cream and soda counter, the tobacconist
and the old German who stuffs birds, both of them great gossips. The
great thrill is going to see the night train fly by at the depot. At
the telegraph office, the idle clerk comforts himself in pinning on the
wall portraits of actors and actresses which he procured with cigarette
premiums. Then there is the station master who tries to forget the
death of his twins by fishing and writing letters to obtain a change of
residence:
“These,” says Jim, “were the distractions I had to choose from.
There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o’clock.
On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold
streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side,
with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy
shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle
porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe.
“Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and
unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on
in them seemed to be made up of evasions and negations; shifts to
save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate
the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like
living under a tyranny. People’s speech, their voices, their very
glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste,
every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep
in those houses, I thought, tried to live like mice in their own
kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the
surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and
cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful,
consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl
Club danced; then there was a little stir in the streets, and here
and there one could see a lighted window until midnight. But the
next night all was dark again.”
Thank God, even at Black Hawk there are a few compensations for a
refined sensibility. Antonia and Jim know how to see through things,
and they find beauty even in their monotonous surroundings. There are
the orchard, the hen yard, the stable and the charm of the rustic works
and days. There is the hay in the attic, the favorite nook of Antonia’s
brood. And then Christmas comes bringing the snow, the spiced cakes
made in true Bohemian fashion, then spring and the budding out of fresh
leaves and flowers. Jim is not blind to the familiar and simple beauty
around him. Let us follow him in Antonia’s wild garden:
Alone, I should never have found the garden--except, perhaps,
for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their
withering vines--and I felt very little interest in it when I got
there. I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over
the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light
air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and
sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would
be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the
tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the
grass. While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing in
one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them up out of the
soft brown earth and put them into the bag, I kept looking up at
the hawks that were doing what I might so easily do.
When grandmother was ready to go, I said I would like to stay up
there in the garden awhile.
She peered down at me from under her sunbonnet. “Aren’t you afraid
of the snakes?”
“A little,” I admitted, “but I’d like to stay anyhow.”
“Well, if you see one, don’t have anything to do with him. The big
yellow and brown ones won’t hurt you; they’re bull-snakes and help
to keep the gophers down. Don’t be scared if you see anything look
out of that hole in the bank over there. That’s a badger hole. He’s
about as big as a big ’possum, and his face is striped, black and
white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the men
harm him. In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I
like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.”
Grandmother swung the bag of potatoes over her shoulder and went
down the path, leaning forward a little. The road followed the
windings of the draw; when she came to the first bend she waved
at me and disappeared. I was left alone with this new feeling of
lightness and content.
The art of Miss Cather shows itself in these sketches of nature
faithfully and minutely observed, but pervaded too with a sympathetic
emotion. She herself has given us the key of her art, in an article
which she wrote when “The Professor’s House” was published. Her ideal
in writing, she tells us, would be to have people and things posing
before her as they would for painters of still life, like Rembrandt or
Chardin, omitting nothing from the background up to the surface. This
“still-life” painting is the most correct definition of Miss Cather’s
art. Her ambition is to treat style as secondary in respect to the
characters. She wants to omit what is only picturesque in order to let
people tell their own story, without any comment on her part. She takes
a green vase and a yellow orange and puts them side by side on a table.
She carefully avoids interfering and relies entirely on the objects
thus placed to produce an artistic effect. Let her make the reader
_see_ the green vase beside the orange. Nothing else matters. She
would like to have the style fused so completely with the object that
the reader would not even suspect the former’s existence. The people
for whom she writes are those whose chief interest is in the vase and
the orange as such, and in the way each lends it color to the other.
Here is an original programme of static and intimate realism based
upon a scrupulous reproduction of the object, a realism which could
not exist without this gift of sympathetic intuition (the Germans call
it _Einfühlung_) characteristic of Miss Willa Cather. The art of an
Edmond Jaloux, an Edouard Estaunié or a Georges Bernanos would give to
a reader familiar with French literature a fairly good understanding of
her talent. _Les choses voient_, but they see only for those who can
_feel_ them.
* * * * *
This wilfully static realism explains at once the qualities and faults
of Miss Cather’s war novel, “One of Ours.” The American critics
have not been very benevolent towards this book. The first and
autobiographical part of it is excellent. Faithful to her philosophy of
art through reminiscence, the author describes the youth of a child of
the prairies, also a victim of Puritanism. Eugene Willer, the hero of
“One of Ours,” is one of those American youths whose restlessness is
increasingly preoccupying the moralists and the sociologists. His is a
soul filled with desire and easily wounded by the things which surround
him. Miss Cather has told, with her usual minute realism, the sad story
and tragic death of this misunderstood youth. A tender and loving boy,
Eugene expected too much of life, and was hurt in his first encounter
with it. He had married a frigid woman, a “crystal cup.”[54] His wife
slammed the door in his face on their wedding night. The unfortunate
youth had no taste left for life after that. Hear him exhaling his
dejection in the moonlight, like Salammbô on her high terrace, or Carol
Kennicott in her Gopher Prairie garden. The moon which illuminated the
romantic enthusiasms of yore is nothing more than a mirror for the
deceptions of this American René. How many agonies has this pale moon
of the prairies shone upon!
Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of
people who talked and worked in the broad sun, there were captives
dwelling in darkness--never seen from birth to death. Into those
prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the windows and
looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe which betrayed
no secrets and comprehended all.... The people whose hearts were
set high needed such intercourse--whose wish was so beautiful that
there were no experiences in this world to satisfy it. And these
children of the moon, with their unappeased longings and futile
dreams, were a finer race than the children of the sun. This
conception flooded the boy’s heart like a second moonrise, flowed
through him indefinite and strong, while he lay deathly still for
fear of losing it.
Thus lamented the hero of “One of Ours,” a true _Obermann_ of the
prairie, seeking an ideal and a reason for existence.
Then came the war. How tragic is life, and how poor in resources is
the soul of man if it needs violent death to give it a meaning! The
American pacifists have shunned Miss Cather’s war novel. They have
not felt the bitter philosophy which exudes from it. Was it her
fault if those whom an army leader called “the élite of the best men
that ever were in America” went, in search of exaltation, to dye with
their blood the slopes of Belleau Wood? When are we going to have a
Freudian interpretation of the war as a supreme and tragic derivative
to inhibition?[55]
I shall stop here with the review of Miss Cather’s works. All of them
stand high as literary achievements. She belongs to that small group of
novelists who honor American letters and who are specialists of what
may be called “optimistic realism”: Ellen Glasgow, Mary Austin, Dorothy
Canfield, and Zona Gale, of the latter of whom I shall speak now.
* * * * *
Zona Gale was born in Wisconsin. She began with journalism and
published short stories and novels. She is the chronicler of American
life in the small towns of the Middle West. Her art recalls that of
Willa Cather. For the critics there are two Zona Gales. There is the
author of popular tales, such as “The Village of Friendship,” “Mother
of Men,” “When I Was a Little Girl,” “The Neighbors”; but “Birth” and
“Miss Lulu Bett” are her true masterpieces. “Miss Lulu Bett” appeared
in 1920 and won the author a wide reputation. It had a sensational
vogue on the screen. It is a classic. But let me begin with “Birth.”
Before speaking of it I want to recall what I have already mentioned of
that sensibility peculiar to Americans.
While the Frenchman, supposedly a domestic person, makes little of
family life on the stage and in his novels, the American idealizes
it. The father, the mother and the child, those are the corners
of his “eternal triangle.” Zona Gale has gratified the tastes of
that particular public. “Birth” is a work of original analysis, a
good psychological document for the study of certain maladies of
personality. The novel portrays a curious case of sentimental aphasia.
The hero of the book is a simple sort of soul. He married a woman his
superior in education. Awkward, _gauche_, even grotesque, he is at
bottom the best of men. His heart is paved with good intentions, but
unfortunately he knows not how to disclose them. Pitt--that is his
name--acts like a man, who knowing two languages, would be incapable
of translating one into the other. Failing to be able to express
himself, he buries himself in a sort of psychological twilight where he
vegetates and suffers in silence. Unable to express his sentiments to
others, he is reduced to acting for his own benefit what was meant for
them. His life is henceforward but a fiction, a novel which would never
have been read had not Zona Gale played the part of the publisher.
Pitt would make an excellent Pirandello character. Externally but a
grotesque clown, inside goodness and delicacy incarnate, he seemed to
come out of the shadows at the birth of his son. Pitt adores his child,
but as a father he continues to be a victim of Freudian inhibitions.
He feels every paternal sentiment, but he is unable to find the words
and gestures which correspond to his emotions. Little by little the
distance between father and child lengthens, and one day poor Pitt
disappears, misunderstood by his own child.
The book was followed by “Miss Lulu Bett.” Zona Gale studied in it
again the effects of suppression, but with new methods of dramatic
simplification. Her style is lighter; her portraits are more strikingly
pathetic and resemblant. Lulu Bett is a scapegoat. A Cinderella at home
and a slavey, her life is that of an automaton, and yet she possesses a
romantic heart. We must admire the skill with which Zona Gale was able
to keep her before us halfway between tears and laughter. Every reader
remembers poor Lulu’s courtship by an adventurer who subsequently
abandoned her, her devotion to the members of the household, her
marriage to the village music-dealer, all incidents of a trivial
nature, but sympathetically brought out to reveal the kind-hearted
Lulu. Zona Gale’s pathos is direct and familiar, almost trivial, but
pervaded with delicate and deep emotions.
All inhibited people are not necessarily Ophelias or Lady Macbeths.
There are many nuances to repression. Nevertheless, Lulu Bett is a
romantic heroine. Watch her at the piano. She can play with only one
finger and she is ignorant of real music, but the village piano-dealer
visited her, and Lulu, as the saying goes, puts herself out.... When
words fail, music is the natural interpreter of people who understand
one another, especially if they are lovers. Here is the charming
description of this timid concerto:
Cornish was displaying his music. “Got up quite attractive,” he
said--it was his formula of praise for his music.
“But we can’t try it over,” Lulu said, “if Di doesn’t come.”
“Well, say,” said Cornish shyly, “you know I left that Album of Old
Favorites here. Some of them we know by heart.”
Lulu looked. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, “there’s some of
these I can play with one hand--by ear. Maybe----”
“Why sure!” said Cornish.
Lulu sat at the piano. She had on the wool chally, long sacred to
the nights when she must combine her servant’s estate with the
quality of being Ina’s sister. She wore her coral beads and her
cameo cross. In her absence she had caught the trick of dressing
her hair so that it looked even more abundant--but she had not
dared to try it so until tonight, when Dwight was gone. Her
long wrist was curved high, her thin hand pressed and fingered
awkwardly, and at her mistakes her head dipped and stove to make
all right. Her foot continuously touched the loud pedal--the
blurred sound seemed to accomplish more. So she played “How Can I
Leave Thee,” and they managed to sing it. So she played “Long, Long
Ago,” and “Little Nell of Narragansett Bay.” Beyond open doors Mrs.
Bett listened, sang, it may be, with them; for when the singers
ceased, her voice might be heard still humming a loud closing bar.
“Well!” Cornish cried to Lulu; and then, in the formal village
phrase: “You’re quite a musician.”
“Oh, no!” Lulu disclaimed it. She looked up, flushed, smiling.
“I’ve never done this in front of anybody,” she owned. “I don’t
know what Dwight and Ina’d say.” She drooped.
They rested, and, miraculously, the air of the place had stirred
and quickened, as if the crippled, halting melody had some power of
its own, and poured this forth, even thus trampled.
“I guess you could do ’most anything you set your hand to,” said
Cornish.
“Oh, no,” Lulu said again.
“Sing and play and cook----”
“But I can’t earn anything. I’d like to earn something.” But this
she had not meant to say. She stopped, rather frightened.
Then there is the tragi-comical scene of Lulu Bett’s marriage, a mock
marriage unfortunately. One day the brother-in-law of Lulu’s sister
arrived from the West. He started to court Lulu. To celebrate his
homecoming the whole household had adjourned to a restaurant. There
are Lulu, her brother-in-law Dwight, who fulfills in the village the
functions of dentist and justice of the peace, Lulu’s sister, Ina,
and Ninian, the newcomer. Excited by the dinner, and without being
apparently aware that he is uttering before competent witnesses words
that might bind him, Ninian declares that he takes Lulu for his lawful
wedded wife, and Lulu accepts the challenge. She learns soon enough
that Ninian is a bigamist:
“Why not say the wedding service?” asked Ninian.
In the mention of wedlock there was always something stimulating
to Dwight, something of overwhelming humor. He shouted a derisive
endorsement of this proposal.
“I shouldn’t object,” said Ninian. “Should you, Miss Lulu?”
Lulu now burned the slow red of her torture. They were all looking
at her. She made an anguished effort to defend herself.
“I don’t know it,” she said, “so I can’t say it.” Ninian leaned
toward her.
“I, Ninian, take thee, Lulu, to be my wedded wife,” he pronounced.
“That’s the way it goes!”
“Lulu daren’t say it!” cried Dwight. He laughed so loudly that
those at the near tables turned. And, from the fastness of her
wifehood and motherhood, Ina laughed. Really, it was ridiculous to
think of Lulu that way....
Ninian laughed too. “Course she don’t dare to say it,” he
challenged.
From within Lulu, the strange Lulu, that other Lulu who sometimes
fought her battles, suddenly spoke out:
“I, Lulu, take thee, Ninian, to be my wedded husband.”
“You will?” Ninian cried.
“I will,” she said, laughing tremendously to prove that she too
could join in, could be as merry as the rest.
“And I will. There, by Jove, now have we entertained you, or
haven’t we?” Ninian laughed and pounded his soft fist on the table.
“Oh, say, honestly!” Ina was shocked. “I don’t think you ought
to--holy things--what’s the _matter_, Dwightie?”
Dwight Herbert Deacon’s eyes were staring and his face was scarlet.
“Say, by George,” he said, “a civil wedding is binding in this
State.”
“A civil wedding? Oh, well----” Ninian dismissed it.
“But I,” said Dwight, “happen to be a magistrate.”
They looked at one another foolishly. Dwight sprang up with the
indeterminate idea of inquiring something of someone, circled about
and returned. Ina had taken his chair and sat clasping Lulu’s hand.
Ninian continued to laugh ...
“I never saw one so offhand,” said Dwight. “But what you’ve said is
all you have to say according to law. And there don’t have to be
witnesses ... say!” he said, and sat again.
And so it happens that Lulu Bett is married to Ninian--not for long for
he deserts her right away and she comes back to her Cinderella’s duties
in her sister’s home.
Unfortunately for Lulu, Ninian was but an adventurer. How could she
possibly miss reading it in that man’s eyes? Betrayed and abandoned,
she came back home to resume her former drudgery. Zona Gale showed
some pity for her at the end, a relative sort of pity, for she
abandoned Lulu Bett to the circumambient banality.
* * * * *
I lack the space to go through the entire list of American novelists
of to-day who have specialized, in their rôle of scrupulous realists,
in the critique of Puritanism and of the repressions which follow upon
it. Among them I should like to make a special place for Floyd Dell,
one of the most original writers of to-day, author of “Moon Calf,” “The
Briary Bush,” and more recently “The Runaway.” This last novel depicts
a pathetic case of evasion. It tells the story of a man who goes as
far away as China to forget his natal village and married life. He
comes back after several years transformed and unrecognizable, to find
himself a complete stranger, even to his own daughter. Unfortunately,
the book ends like a popular “movie.”
Examples of dual personalities are not rare in the work of modern
American authors outside realism. I am thinking especially of the
novels of Joseph Hergesheimer and Waldo Frank, two notable artists.
Hergesheimer sticks to the purely romantic novel. He presented to us in
exotic or historic surroundings seductive personalities, half real and
half fantastic. The author of “Linda Condon,” of “Java Head,” is also
that of “Cytherea.” This last novel is very Freudian. It depicts the
explosion of a suppressed and tragic passion. The hero of “Cytherea,”
an adept of the “secret life,” is bewitched by the magical spell of
a fetish. He abandons his social rank, his wife, and his children,
and goes to Cuba to seek romantic exaltation. The woman he loves is
possessed like him of an irresistible desire. She is a magic doll, a
reincarnation of the goddess of Cytherea. The couple end sadly in the
tropics. She dies, and he finds himself alone in the world.
In “Linda Condon,” and particularly in “Java Head,” Hergesheimer has
dealt with similar topics. The hero of “Java Head” is a Puritan let
loose. He brought back with him to Hawthorne’s old Salem a Manchu
princess whom he married, thereby greatly scandalizing his relatives.
The book is full of picturesque and tragic contrasts. “Linda Condon,”
is a case of moral duplicity. Linda, bearing the weight of a loaded
heredity, is a willful inhibitor. She leads two lives. Pure as a
lily among roués, she abandons her carnal self to her husband, while
devoting to a sculptor an ideal love wherein her real personality is
gratified.
There is a great temptation to include Waldo Frank among the Freudians.
He is a master of the inner monologue. He has powerfully dramatized
in “Chalk Face” a morbid case of double personality. “Chalk Face” is
the story of a daydreamer, half insane, somewhat reminiscent of George
Duhamel’s Salavin. The insanity of this person is the result of a
divorce between his intentions and his will. His free will, lacking
balance, has gone over to the side of blind instincts and unconscious
desires. The hero of “Chalk Face” runs unconsciously to passionate
crime, and finally jumps into a lime kiln, in hallucination of his own
image.
Waldo Frank is not a pure realist. He likes to transpose reality
into lyrical and musical variations. His novel “A Holiday” should be
compared with Sherwood Anderson’s “Dark Laughter.” There are in it many
profound intuitions of the Negro soul.
“City Block” is a mysterious panorama, but yet a lyrical one, of a
modern city. The tableaux shown to us by the author appear through a
fantastic and subjective atmosphere recalling Edgar Poe. The author of
“Our America” is one of the most self-conscious artists of American
literature and a high-class critic, with no tender feelings towards the
Puritan tradition.
CHAPTER XII
_Ulysses’ Companions: Robert McAlmon, Ben Hecht, William Carlos
Williams_
The American novelists that I have dealt with so far have been veterans
of letters, men and women who have had a long career. Few of the
younger writers do not owe them something as regards their conception
of life and of art. They have imposed upon the new generation their
realism, their choice of subjects and their style. Most of the writers
of America borrowed their pessimistic philosophy and their direct mode
of expression from Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. Idealism is quite
dead in the American novel of to-day, at any rate that traditional
idealism based on sentimentality. Even the disillusioned realism of the
masters whose work I have analyzed no longer satisfies the young. They
have substituted cynicism and utter crudity for it. The newcomers have
lost all faith, hope and charity. The prevalent pessimism of the last
fifteen years of American literature, particularly noticeable in the
novel, betrays a profound disturbance of the American conscience. It is
partly the result of the political and social events of the last few
years.
When an ideal is shattered, when a faith dies out and when the sense
of a moral and social discipline is relaxed, apprehension, soul-fear
and anxiety prevail. This is precisely the case in the United
States to-day. American pessimism is the ransom of Puritanism. The
traditional idealism has failed. The young Americans are burning what
their fathers adored. Through their disenchantment they have sensed
the practical incapacities of the idealists. They sounded out the
transcendental vagueness of even as high a moral leader as Emerson, and
the democratic quixotism of Whitman made them smile. They relegated the
good Walt among those whom they ironically term “Chautauqua poets.”
William James had tried to reconcile idealism with utilitarianism,
the philosophy of the past with that of to-day, but he failed in his
attempt. Realism in the novel is contemporaneous with the advent of a
new philosophical school hostile to idealism, and it too called itself
“realism.”[56] This school is in direct contradiction to the theories
of William James. Yet his pragmatism was responsible for exasperating
the practical sense of the younger generation. Their suspicion of
ideology dates from the time when they noticed, upon applying James’
criterion, that it did not “pay.” What was the use of accumulating so
many transcendental vapors if our best energies were to be fed with
thin air? Doubtless, for those who can see, as Emerson said, the whole
world is contained in a drop of water, and our merest acts are rich in
heroic potentialities. But that is a personal point of view. The gift
of discovering the universe in an atom is not a general privilege.
One must needs be a Pascal, an Emerson or a Pasteur. What, in effect,
was developing in America under the cloak of transcendental idealism
(particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century) was the
most unrestrained sort of materialism and utilitarianism the world
had ever seen. It would seem that this transcendental idealism was
but a subterfuge actually favoring mercantilism. Other deceptions
were to follow. The pragmatic imperialism of Roosevelt and the mystic
imperialism of Woodrow Wilson also failed. What then was this idealism
which constantly appealed to Force and which applied the Scriptures
in terms of colonial annexations and commercial enterprises? So the
younger writers cast their lot, not with the tender, but with what
James called the tough-minded.
The Great War came to the élite of American youth as the supreme
disillusion. It was much discussed before America went in, and it was
still more discussed after it had been waged and won, when America came
out of it. No sooner was the armistice signed than a change occurred.
Polemics, regrets, retractations, revisions, the story is too well
known to bear repetition. The practical difficulties which arose
between America and her former allies or associates are the tangible
result of the upsetting of values, and responsibilities perpetrated by
the intellectuals or, as they are called to-day, the “revisionists.”
The result was a great moral confusion among the young. Yet the social
structure had not changed. Ever indulgent towards revolutions, even
to the point of fostering them philosophically in her bosom, provided
bombs were thrown in foreign lands, America itself had not moved. The
Government, the Church, the University, and the general state of ideas
and customs remained the same.
This is the paradox of American civilization. The individual seems
to evolve faster than the nation in the United States. Doubtless,
America has become more prosperous, materially speaking, but it is
precisely this purely material philosophy which is a scandal to the
young; they despair over it. Their country, rutted in self-complacency
and steeped in the illusions of 1776, gives them the impression of an
arrested civilization, of a multimillionaire who should have retired
from business. The disenchantment of peace followed that of war, and
intellectual and literary radicalism was born. Two Americans were
facing each other with drawn weapons.
This restlessness is quite apparent among the youth of the land.
They are favored by the well-known indulgence and relaxation of
discipline at home and in the school. In a country without traditions,
intellectual instability is perforce great, as great as the restraint
upon the _mores_ is tight. That with which the American youth clash,
the “enemy,” is a rather vague entity. In Europe it would take a
concrete shape, that of a man, of a creed, or an idea, but in America
it is something much more impalpable and dangerous. It is the general
state of public opinion and customs, the pretension of imposing upon
the élite the blind and ready-made ideals of the masses. Thwarted
desires, restraints, evasions, capitulations of the conscience or
social revolt,--those are the result of standardization, of democratic
leveling; they are equally the source of the pessimism which pervades
American letters to-day. That is how it happens that the United States,
so obviously optimistic as a nation, have a literature which is
becoming increasingly depressed and tragic in tone.
It is easy to imagine what a fertile soil such a state of mind affords
to the development of Freudian microbes, and to what excesses these
ardent and suppressed energies might go. It is for the criminologist
and the sociologist to tell that story--a heart-rending one, verily. A
great increase in criminality, especially among the young, the growth
of sadistic, erotic and eccentric impulses, the disintegration of the
family, neurasthenic and hysterical explosions, such is the other side
of the picture and the price which the United States is paying for its
material prosperity. Innumerable newspapers in search of new sensations
daily exploit these scandals upon which they thrive. The American
literature of to-day reflects this state of affairs faithfully.
The Frenchman or Continental is quite prepared to understand that sort
of literature. The United States have not had the monopoly of moral
anarchy since the war. The same wave of emancipation and revolt which
brought up in France the works of Radiguet, Roger Martin du Gard,
Morand, Lacretelle, Schlumberger, Lucien Fabre and others, has given
to America its McAlmons, its Ben Hechts, its Floyd Dells, its Waldo
Franks. The young American is a natural-born rebel. He has always been
that, or at least since Mark Twain wrote “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry
Finn.” How could he help it? What adolescence is freer than his?
Where in the world could there be fonder parents and less tyrannical
teachers? Is not the American coming of age from the very time of his
early youth? Is not playing hookey his favorite diversion? See with
what zest he goes in for sports, with what joy he plays the umpire. And
the automobile, and jazz, or giving the lie to prohibition, and the
thousand and one diversions and eccentricities with which he enlivens
his existence? America is so vast, the call-of-the-wild so forceful!
Numerous advanced American novelists have made themselves the
interpreters of suppressed youth. There has been great growth in the
“novel of adolescence” in America, as well as in France, in the last
ten years. I shall review in this chapter some of the more significant
ones. I begin with the novels of Robert McAlmon.
Mr. McAlmon is only thirty years old. He was born in Kansas, the ninth
child of an itinerant pastor. He earned his living around the ranches
and as a tramp and professional hobo, cowboy, reporter, press agent,
lumberjack, model in New York studios, all of which did not prevent
him from completing his studies in Los Angeles at the University of
Southern California. In 1918 he promoted an aviation magazine. Later,
in Paris, he founded with William Carlos Williams, “Contact,” a
printing firm, to which we owe the publication (in France, Oh, Land of
Liberty!) of some of the most daring and original works of the young
American school. Mr. McAlmon is the author of several volumes of poems
and short stories.
He is also the author of a novel called “Village.” This village is
named Wentworth. It recalls Sinclair Lewis’ Gopher Prairie and Sherwood
Anderson’s Winesburg. There is the same isolation, the same type of
shut-in lives, the identical tragic attempts at evasion and identical
suppression. Here is the panorama of Wentworth. It tells a lot as to
the nostalgia of its inhabitants:
Beyond the outskirts of the village, Wentworth, _le vent
soufflait_, if not more boisterously than in the city proper, with
a sweep uninterrupted by dwelling houses, or other obstacles.
Already the gloss and dazzle of snow, which had fallen but two days
ago, was dulled by the dust, which whirlpools and hurricanes of
rash, rushing winds had swept across the land for over a day and
a half, after a three-foot fall of snow. In the afternoon a lull
occurred; now again, at ten o’clock in the evening, the gale was
up, tearing into the snow and throwing it into banks that left
between them spaces of ground upon which uncovered grey-white snow
lay scantily. _Musique fantastique de la neige_, snow-wind clamour,
shrill shriek of cold, whiteness shattered by a highmoaning
vermilion calliope wail. Where are the grey wolf packs? The herd of
bison that thundered in catapulting panic across the plains?
Fifty miles away lay the Indian reservation, with its degenerating
remnants of a once wild and arrogant race. No evidence of will
or desire remains for the eye to observe. Apathy and dull
carelessness, without the consciousness of indifference, are all
that can be discerned.
Few farmers can be coming into the village for the next few days.
Not till the snow has packed down so that horses can plow their
way through the covered roads; not till need or the daring of more
audacious souls has caused a few farmers to remake the roadways,
will many leave their farm homeside fires to come and market in
Wentworth. Salt pork and potatoes, salt pork and sauerkraut,
milk and soggy bread, will suffice as a diet for German, Polish,
Swedish, and unexpected farm families in these cold days surely,
when they have sufficed as their main food always.
To be sure, though, there is little doubt that Ike Sorensen will
attempt to drive his faithful team to town from his ranch eight
miles out. It’s not to be thought that either wind or snow, or
cold, or rain, or heat, or hurricane, or blizzard, will keep old
Ike from crusading forth for his weekly drunk-on. He will have his
hard liquor though the world be crashing to its end.
Such is the background of Mr. McAlmon’s sketches. “Village” is hardly
a novel. It is a collection of vivid impressions serving to complete
our knowledge of the tragedies of moral isolation in America. The
pictures drawn by the author possess neither Sinclair Lewis’ humor nor
Sherwood Anderson’s _chiaro-oscuro_. They are deliberately bare, with
a thorough-going objectivity and frankness, reminiscent of a pure,
undiluted Maupassant. I shall not tell in detail the plot of “Village.”
There is none, to tell the truth. It is merely a series of sketches and
youthful confessions. What Robert McAlmon is telling us with his cruel
and cold impartiality of his young Americans is very little edifying.
Snow storms and rains are not the only weapons Wentworth uses to fight
off the drought. Its church spire does not cast its shadow upon saints.
The youth of Wentworth literally have the devil in them. McAlmon is
less optimistic than Mark Twain. His Tom Sawyers are cynics, with their
own good reasons. They are stifled by their surroundings, they are
walled up alive.
John Campbell, one of the characters of the book, is but a child. He
is being bored to death in the village. One day he runs out into the
fields, under the pretext of catching rabbits. He is brought home
bleeding. We surmise that he has committed suicide to escape paternal
corrections and reproof:
John Campbell went past cornfields late autumn crisped. Their
leaves rasped and shuddered in the wind, and their stalks whined
from the frost that kept them brittly chilled. A sear chill was
within him too, a hard rebellion at life, rotted only some portion
of his heart where the weakness of despair was a warm fluid
dampening the hardness of his defiance to helplessness.
Alternate waves of rage at, and indifferent understanding of, his
father, flowed through him. At moments he felt he could almost
sympathize with what life had made the older man. It was this very
sympathy that made him feel helpless himself in all of his outlook
on existence. At angry moments he could hatingly see his father’s
face within his mind, a face with waxen, shiny eyes, insistent with
neurotic rage. How dared he, having messed up his own life, as he
had, presume to dictate to anybody else what they should or should
not do, as though he had discovered a right way, and knew always
that what his son was doing was wrong.
But at the ebb of an emotion he would understand again. Who could
retain temper or patience with the continual bickerings of family
life, and forever pressing economic needs? Often enough John felt
himself driven wild with the oppression of home life. What way was
there to smash down all the barriers and have a degree of freedom
to act, and if the impulses he had were sinful, who had made them
so? But what was he to do? He’d hate farm work; he’d hate office
work in the city, and despise the people working around him for
their clerkish acquiescence. What was life about? A sickness of it
was in his stomach, tiring him to complete non-resistance for the
time being.
I shall stop here with the diagnosis of this precocious pessimism.
John Campbell is a representative young American. He is only a child,
but in his case, despair and cynicism have not waited for the years to
ripen. Alas! John Campbell is hardly a fiction. The readers of American
dailies could give him many brothers. Suicides and juvenile criminality
are not rare in the United States. Yet, poor little John’s pessimism
had not yet reached the purely conscious stage. That was left to his
elders. He had not suffered sufficiently or reflected enough upon his
distress to play the real Hamlet. He died while climbing a fence with
a loaded pistol in his hand, and it was never ascertained whether his
death was accidental or premeditated.
Robert McAlmon also displays for our benefit more matured and more
self-conscious pessimists who ask again, like John Campbell, “What
about life?”
Amazement before the mystery of existence, a sentiment of general
futility, misanthropy spreading from the family to the entire social
group, desire and hatred of women, lack of faith, despair and sarcasm,
such is the mental attitude of the young people we meet with in
“Village.” The last pages of the book are particularly symptomatic.
They recall the kind of talk heard in the yards of French Lycées, when
“Bel Ami,” “Nana,” “Against the Grain,” “Azyade,” and the “Garden of
Berenice,” first appeared. There was the same tone of cursing and irony
in Arthur Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” In France doubtless they spoke
better and wrote better, but not any more sincerely, and at bottom the
sentiments and the pessimism were identical. Towards 1890 the young
Frenchmen were already _fin de siècle_. In 1926 the young Americans
are _commencement de siècle_, and they join forces with the French in
doubting life and upholding Shakespeare’s dictum about it: “a tale told
by an idiot and which hath no meaning.”
Here is an example of a conversation between three youths of the
Middle West who were soon to go through the Arc de Triomphe with a
gun on their shoulders. Miss Willa Cather in “One of Ours,” and Mrs.
Wharton in “A Son at the Front” had pictured the war as a fight of
Providence occurring at the psychological moment to furnish an ideal to
the young and give them a chance to let some steam off. These rookies
in “Village” rather seem to belong in Barbusse’s “Squad.” They are
the musketeers of despair, but of an ironical despair. The War is
here, hurrah for the War! Little matter whether it be just or not, as
long as it drags us out of the tedium of our village! Listen to these
backsliding heroes exposing their philosophy of the great struggle:
“You can stay out if we get in, if you will be that yellow-livered.
There’ll never be conscription in this country.”
“Won’t there? Don’t you ever believe there won’t. But even if there
weren’t I’d have to go. Not because I couldn’t stand the gaff of
being called yellow-livered, but just because feeling it all about
me, and getting fed up with life anyway, I’d conclude what to hell,
and enlist some day, but without at all believing I was going to
serve any right cause by it, or that if we won that there would be
a great and gentle democracy throughout the world. I’d just go, and
kill Germans like the rest, because I’d get used to it being done;
but if I ever stopped to think I would think that maybe some of the
guys I killed were a hell of a lot more use in the world than I, or
than fellows around me. But there--well, life’s life. Let ’em die.
What’s useful anyway? Let’s talk of something else. I’m stalled.”
“Say, boy, if you’d use your head on making dollars rather than on
theories, you’d be better off,” Lloyd Scott advised. “I won’t waste
my life in pessimism anyway.”
“Neither will I; but I will live out my own temperament just
because I must; and also because it’s more interesting than letting
a set of social conventions which change with every generation and
with geographical situations, dictate one’s actions. Why limit
yourself?”
McAlmon’s soldiers are very fond of their off-color vocabulary. Like
the youth of to-day they affect the use of slang. It is one aspect
of their revolt. But to go back to our heroes (?), the problem of
the World War is not the only one which preoccupies them. Their
conversation takes on a more general turn. It is the meaning of life
which they question. Peter Reynalds and Lloyd Scott, whom I have
already quoted, continue to exchange their impressions. They compare
their philosophies of life. “Enough!” says one of them. “It is still
better to be making money. Skepticism never made anyone rich.” “Yes,”
says the other, “but you have to act according to your temperament.”
(See Dreiser.) “That is more interesting than letting social
conventions which change with every generation dictate your actions.
Why should one limit oneself?” Whereupon Lloyd Scott ceases to follow
him and wonders what the deuce is the matter with him. Peter answers
this question in a thoroughly skeptical manner. Why choose a stand if
you are disgusted with every one of them beforehand? There is something
wrong with his will power:
“It’s this. I’ve got to make a living for myself, and I’m damned if
there’s anything I like doing that pays. I tried newspaper work;
did sob stories for awhile and then couldn’t contemplate existence
any more; tried office work in a lumber concern and died with the
boredom of companionship about me. It’s the damned unrelated unrest
of an Irish temperament, I suppose. If the bloody war hadn’t come
on I’d have struck for Europe to see if living over there wasn’t
more gracious; aber mein gott. It’s this being an American; neither
a savage nor a civilized man. A roughneck, who’s a little too
refined.”
Whereupon the Wentworth Hamlet says good-night to his friends. Before
the war these pessimistic dialogues used to end with a return to the
village where wine, gambling, practical joking, love-making, and now
and then a suicide or an escape, proved that there was no smoke without
fire and that even in America not everything was well with the best of
possible worlds.
* * * * *
In “The Portrait of a Generation” and “Post-Adolescence,” Robert
McAlmon has repeated himself. He has made himself the spokesman of the
pathetic nihilism in which young Americans are struggling to-day. “The
Portrait of a Generation” is a handbook of pessimism mitigated with
humor and fantasy. It is Leopardi disguised as one of Jean Cocteau’s
_parade_. Robert McAlmon has learnt the “Gay Savoir” at the school of
the French Sadists. The door of his Inferno might well bear the motto:
“Jazz here,” just like any American bar in Montmartre or Montparnasse.
But under this travesty the pessimism is nevertheless profound:
Not in Europe or America are we at home, we, that ostracized
portion of degenerate mankind which lives on the continent
criticizing our home countries. The family of course is a decaying
institution. We don’t go in for dutifully pretended affections
now. What we want is an aristocracy of the intelligence. Not
the hard French face, so disillusioned. Not the wooden English
visage, prizing rudeness as a social asset.... Nothing left. There
is really nothing left for them or for the reckless American
flapper-impulsive need to keep rushing about space without
tradition or direction, swirled in the dynamic maelstrom, human
steel dust, lithe voiced electricity broadcast. The nation mourns
his honoured death.
Then Mr. McAlmon shows us the younger generation carried away in the
maelstrom of modern dynamism like scraps of steel, like those wireless
waves “whose voice races nimbly throughout the whole world.” “Ah! let
America at least weep decently over her own demise!”
The novels of youth published by American writers in the last few years
are quite numerous; I cannot review them all. The Parisian house of the
“Contact” editions whose president is Mr. McAlmon, has specialized in
realistic novels. It has published the most significant confessions of
these young writers, and among others the books of George Hemingway,
John Herrman, Emmanuel Carnevali, Gertrude Beasley, etc.[57] In “My
First Thirty Years,” Miss Beasley is hardly more reassuring than Robert
McAlmon. Her book frankly tells the brutal story of a young woman
obsessed by evil instincts in the midst of her family circle. Contact
with reality has stripped her of all illusions. She curses life and
those who have given it to her without her consent. She wishes that she
had never been born. It sounds like the Book of Job. After cursing her
father and mother, the heroine turns against the country of her birth,
“America is the land of murderous institutions. To be sure they do not
kill the body, but they leave us, like Frankenstein’s monster, a being
without a soul.”
Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a
sexual act of rape, being carried during the pre-natal period by
an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the
womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or
pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should
never have chosen. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb,
a pink, soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved
and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight
miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced
mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously
cruel, Christlike, and handsome man with an animal appetite for
begetting children.
A young novelist of the Middle West, Ben Hecht, has buried all the
illusions of those young people into two novels which even Stendhal
would not disown. In “Humpty-Dumpty” and in “Erik Dorn” realism is
pushed to the point of melodrama, but we perceive behind the veil of
cynicism a sadness and a moral confusion which are unmistakable. The
spiritual bankruptcies described by Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood
Anderson are idyls in comparison with the tableaux painted by Ben
Hecht. “Humpty-Dumpty” is the tragedy of the void. The hero of the
book is the catastrophic type of dual personality. He is a perverted
simulator playing his life instead of living it, and playing it
tragically, at the expense of others. A cruel sadist, he tortures
people just when he likes them most. Humpty-Dumpty, a sinister puppet,
is a moral, intellectual and social anarchist, as dangerous as a
roaming tiger, a tiger doubled with a dilettante letting his soul (for
he has a soul) wander among the flowers of decadent literature.
“Erik Dorn” is not less cynical than “Humpty-Dumpty.” It is a challenge
to society made by a nihilist. The hero of this novel goes straight
before him in life as he would in the jungle. He believes in nothing,
not even in himself. He is in love, and likes to make others suffer.
The approaching war is but a pretext to rouse his dormant sadistic
impulses. Erik Dorn is a Julien Sorel overlooked by the guillotine.
The novel is the work of a man of great talent who shows himself to
be--in the last chapters of the book, which describe the Communist
Revolution in Bavaria--a real animator. Here is an example of Erik
Dorn’s meditations:
A tawdry pantomime was life, a pouring of blood, a grappling with
shadows, a digging of graves. “Empty, empty,” his intelligence
whispered in its depths, “a make-believe of lusts. What else?
Nothing, nothing. Laws, ambitions, conventions--froth in an empty
glass. Tragedies, comedies--all a swarm of nothings. Dreams in the
hearts of men--thin fever outlines to which they clung in hope.
Nothing ... nothing ...”
Nitchevo! Vacuum! This Chicago Hamlet consoles himself by reading
Huysmans, Rémy de Gourmont, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier and Walter
Pater. He goes in for literature without believing in it. It helps him
to take life “against the grain.” “Living had made him forget life,”
says Ben Hecht. Erik Dorn plunged into books to chloroform his passions:
“Too much living has driven him from life,” Dorn thought,
“and killed his lusts. So he sits and reads books--the last
debauchery: strange, twisted phrases like idols, like totem
poles, like Polynesian masks. He sits contemplating them as he
once sat drunkenly watching the obscenities of black, white and
yellow-bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of life, for the
grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes in him from bestiality to
asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bacchanal of flesh, to-day
a bacchanal of words ... the posturings of courtezans and the
posturings of ornate phrases become the same.”
The heroine of this discouraging book resembles the hero. She too
is uncertain, lost, wandering through the maelstrom of life. Dorn,
according to the American critic who wrote the preface[58] is obviously
a rascal, but extenuating circumstances may be pleaded. If Dorn is
a rascal, we are told, that is the fault of Society. (America knows
its Rousseau well.) Dorn is “déclassé” through his own frankness as
regards himself and his fellow men; his “head is the parasite of his
heart.” (Should it not be the other way around?) Dorn is a sick man.
He can no longer react to external stimuli.[59] He lives on the margin
of life, in a mechanical fashion. He is a _dissociated_ being. He has
lost all conviction and become a sophist. Ideas are his amusements.
Words fascinate him. Experiences are for him but an excuse to displace
adjectives. He considers doctrines, dogmas and ideals as ridiculous
efforts to impose upon life, which is ever changing, little tags which
never vary. The sole reality for him is intelligence, and this is how
he defines it:
“Intelligence is a faculty which enables man to glance at the chaos of
ideas--and end up nowhere at all.”
Far be it from me to take these paradoxes for truths and to mistake
reality for those extreme views, _ab uno disce omnes_. One should be
wary of placing upon Young America the grimacing mask of a Middle
Western Faust. However, under all this melodramatic claptrap, we
perceive the unrest, the moral confusion, and the necessity for a
rejuvenation, characteristic of the younger generation.
* * * * *
Ben Hecht’s efforts to find in æsthetics a derivative and an issue
for suppressed energies are not isolated efforts. On all sides the
renaissance of ideas has made imperative the need for a revolution in
art and in literature. Those who have been disillusioned by life seek
a refuge in art, and bring with them their taste for originality and
eccentricity at any cost. The new American literature quickly acquired
a tone that was ironic, immoralistic and rebellious. The revolter
became Bohemian. Those who formerly inhibited now turned æsthetes,
somewhat later than the French whom they believed to be sincerely
following. America is young and naïve.
The modern American æsthete has been masterfully portrayed by one of
the best-informed American essayists of to-day.[60] Let us examine him
as he is destined to go down to posterity in the wake of the dandy,
the fatal man, the “fin de siècle” and the flapper. The American
æsthete, model 1924, is a child of the twentieth century, according
to Mr. Boyd. The Yellow Nineties had flickered out in the delirium
of the Spanish-American War when his first gurgles rejoiced the ears
of his expectant parents. If Musset were more than a name to him, a
hazy recollection of French literature courses, he might adapt a line
from the author of _La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle_ and declare:
“I came too late in a world too old.” The 1924 æsthete studied at
Princeton, Yale or Harvard, in the early years of the Woodrovian
epoch. At this time he was still “classical.” Between two escapades he
would go and worship at the tomb of William and Henry James. During
his careful education, American literature was revealed to him as a
pale and obedient provincial cousin, whose past contained occasional
indiscretions, such as Poe and Whitman, about whom the less said the
better. Then, the 1924 æsthete picked up a taste for Art after some
party in the red-plush drawing-rooms. He severed relations with the
rabble who preferred baseball and football to poetry. He was herded
into the intellectual fold, and borrowed his sociology and his ethics
from the advanced reviews. He discovered simultaneously Socialism
and French, or pseudo-French, literature. Then he floated in the
rarefied atmosphere of Advanced Thought. Came the War, and with it
disillusionment. The enthusiasm of the æsthetes was not to survive the
carping remarks of the critics and the pacifistic campaigns. By luck or
cunning, the æsthete succeeded in getting out of the actual trenches.
He edited his first paper.... Simultaneously with his plunge into arms
and letters he made his first venture into the refinements of sex,
thereby extending his French vocabulary and gaining that deep insight
into the intimate life of France which is still his proudest possession.
When militarism was finally overthrown, democracy made safe, and a
permanent peace established by the victorious and united Allies, he
was ready to stay on a little longer in Paris, and to participate in
the joys of La Rotonde and Les Deux Magots. There for a brief spell
he breathed the same air as the Dadaists, met Picasso and Philippe
Soupault, and allowed Ezra Pound to convince him that the French nation
was aware of the existence of Jean Cocteau, Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux
and Louis Aragon. From those who had nothing to say on the subject
when Marcel Proust published “Du Côté de Chez Swann” in 1913 he now
learned what a great man the author was, and formed those friendships
which caused him eventually to join in a tribute to Proust by a group
of English admirers who would have stoned Oscar Wilde had they been old
enough to do so when it was the right thing to do.
The time was not ripe for his repatriation, and so, with the same
critical equipment in French as in English, but with a still imperfect
control of the language as a complication, the now complete æsthete
returned to New York and descended upon Greenwich Village. His poems of
disenchantment were in the press, his war novel was nearly finished....
Both his prose and verse were remarkable chiefly for typographical
and syntactical eccentricities, and a high pressure of unidiomatic,
misprinted French to the square inch. His further contributions (if
any) to the art of prose narrative have consisted of a breathless
phallic symbolism--a sex obsession which sees the curves of a woman’s
body in every object not actually flat, including, I need hardly say,
the Earth, our great Mother.... Mr. Boyd is rather malignant, but the
portrait resembles the original. In the last analysis the æsthete may
be diagnosed as the literary counterpart of the traditional American
tourist in Paris. He is glamored by the gaudy spectacle of that most
provincial of great cities. Paris obsesses and holds the American
æsthete. He has learned all about “cineplastics” from the French
æsthetes. The faithful are called upon by a French expert to admire
the films of William S. Hart and Jack Pickford, and some one carefully
translates the poetic rhapsodies inspired in him by the contemplation
of their masterpieces. Two souls dwell in the breast of the æsthete,
and his allegiance is torn between the sales manager’s desk ... and the
esoteric editorial chair where experiments are made with stories which
discard the old binding of plot and narrative, the substitute being the
structural framework which appeals to us over and above the message of
the line.
* * * * *
This classical portrait of the latter-day American æsthete is being
modified under our very eyes. He is no longer in 1927 what he was in
1924. And of what will to-morrow be made? The American æsthete, model
1927, is much less bothered with erotica than his predecessor, and
like the husky child who beats his nurse, he is strong enough to shake
off the foreign yoke. Even in literature alliances have been broken,
if we are to believe Mr. William Carlos Williams, who published (in
France naturally and in a _de luxe_ edition) his delicious collection
of improvisations called “The Great American Novel.”[61] In the tone
of the inner monologue, and with a fanatic passion which does not
exclude humor, Mr. Williams makes a plea of “America for Americans” in
literature.
Europe is nothing to us. Simply nothing. Their music is death to us.
Do not imagine I do not see the necessity of learning from
Europe--or China, but we will learn what we will, and never what
they would teach us. America is a mass of pulp, a jelly, a
sensitive plant ready to take whatever print you want to put on it.
We have no art, no manners, no intellect--we have nothing. We water
at the eyes at our own stupidity. We have only mass movement like a
sea. But we are not a sea.
Europe we must--we have no words. Every word we get must be broken
off from the European mass. Every word we get placed over again by
some delicate hand. Piece by piece we must loosen what we want.
What we will have. Will they let it go? Hugh.
But William Carlos Williams has faith in America. According to him,
the art of to-morrow, American art _par excellence_, will be of the
“flamboyant” type. America is seeking new openings for her aspirations.
Is she as much of a Philistine as she is supposed to be? The American
who lives a model and edifying life (three meals a day, breakfast in
bed, new paper on the walls), that American at times emigrates to the
circus _en masse_, as Whitman used to say, to watch men, women and
animals executing exquisitely impossible tricks. What could be more
“flamboyant” than the trapeze man being projected into the air, and the
tiger jumping through man-made hoops, or the elephant upholding his
full weight by balancing his front legs on bottles? What could be more
“flamboyant” than the painted clown, eternal symbol of the human race,
laughing in order not to cry, and grimacing while making a thousand
grim jokes with small men all around him accomplishing their marvelous
feats?
Jazz, the Follies, the flapper in a green and orange dress, with her
red warpaint on, impossible riots of color in a world which abhors
gray! And the “movies”! They, too, deprived of all color, flaming
through the imagination of those watching them, a boundless flame of
romance, irrepressible humor, luxury, horror and great passion. Those
human souls which know not passion, which are able to create neither
romance nor splendor nor horror, those infinitely varied phases of
Beauty, those souls seek outside of themselves what they lack--a search
often futile, and how disastrous!
But imagination will not capitulate. If it cannot express itself
through dance or song, then it will try protestations and clamors. If
it cannot be a great flame, it will be a deformity. If not Art, it
will be Crime. Men, women and children cannot possibly be content with
a humdrum life. Let imagination embellish it, even to the point of
exaggeration. Let it give to life a touch of splendor and of horror,
with infinite beauty and depth. To receive all this from the outside
is not enough. A mere acceptation does not suffice. Imagination, to
satisfy itself, needs creative energy. The “flamboyant” expresses faith
in this energy. It is a cry of joy, a declaration of richness. It is,
at any rate, the first principle of all art.[62]
It was not without a purpose that I have quoted in the course of these
essays these confessions at some length. Behind the mask of fantasy
their accent is poignant at times. Let us remember particularly the
manner in which William Carlos Williams conceives art as a diversion to
and a remedy for inhibitions and dangerous living. I accept his views
readily. I do not want to pose as a sociologist or as a prophet, but I
venture to say that this æsthetic theory seems to be in perfect accord
with what the American novelists of to-day consider as the needs of
human nature. One fact is positive, if they have told the truth and
if my report has been accurate. A civilization, no matter how great
and prosperous, cannot rest upon the suppression of passions and the
restraint of human emotions. It cannot last without “Gay Science.” A
system of obstinate prohibitions opens the door to neurotic disorders,
crime and every form of eccentricity and perversion.
To return to the domain of literature and the novel, it is fortunate
that in following its natural bent Young America should have
instinctively found this truth. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
No matter how much of a rebel, of a skeptic, of a dilettante and of a
cynic Young America has been, it is much more earnest than it appears.
It is in quest of a new ideal. It does not believe in salvation through
restraint and puritanical resignation. It does not hope any more to
find its ideal in a system of repressions which is a negation of the
beautiful and the good in the human soul, nor yet in a philosophy, no
matter how transcendental, which forgets the man or the woman of flesh
and blood. Neither does it seek its ideal in the goods of this world.
Young America applies the dictum that man does not live by bread alone.
It says with Emerson that the value of this world is not measured in
bales of cotton or sacks of dollars. It tries to find its ideal in a
more felicitous, and in the last analysis, more artistic, conception
of life. It feels with justice that in art there is a profound
harmony which seizes us and which expresses us in the deepest part of
ourselves, a synthesis in which nothing is forgotten, a vast tolerance
founded upon a sense of real values. This ideal cannot serve for the
masses, but it can rejuvenate and humanize the schemes of the leaders.
Young America is making a slow, painful march towards this goal.
Awkward, and often violent in its efforts, it has already been rewarded
in its quest. It is impossible to doubt it after one glance at the
great crop of original works in prose and verse which it has gathered
in the last decade and a half.
* * * * *
I have arrived at the end of my labors. My one ambition has been to
present to the reader as complete and as faithful a panorama of the
modern American novel as possible. I have not said all, but I do not
think I have omitted anything essential. There remain to be cleared
up several points which are closely related to my subject. There is
the question of influences, especially of French influences. I have
alluded to the panegyric of Balzac by Theodore Dreiser. I could have
added that of Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourts, Huysmans, and especially
of Maupassant, who is still very popular in America. The American
novelists of to-day have not failed to acknowledge their debt to the
French realists, realizing that without them, they would not have been
what they are. An autonomous and autochthonous phenomenon as far as
origins and ends are concerned, the American novel has gone to France
to seek lessons in art and in frankness. From Balzac to Marcel Proust,
the American novelists know their French literature thoroughly. The
vogue in America of the French novelists has only been equalled by
the Russians, who are better able to play on the mystical chords
characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon.
I have been able to make only rapid allusions to the bonds which tie
the American novel of to-day to the English novel, but what American
writer of the twentieth century is not conversant with the works of
Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce?
There remains one stiff problem, that of documentation. In what measure
are we entitled to apply to the American novel and to the human types
which it presents to us the _ab uno disce omnes_? What is there in
common between the United States and its customs and the novels which
describe them? A difficult question, harking back to the problem of
literature conceived as the expression of society, the Taine’s problem
of the three factors. If I had had the time and the courage to front
it, I would have attempted to solve it by a _distinguo_ reminiscent
of Molière. We have society and society. The more liberal and varied
the morals, the less chance apparently for literature and manners to
correspond. On the other hand, the more stereotyped, conventional and
automatic the morals, the less chance that literature should differ
from them. And that seems to be the case in the United States, if
my studies are accurate. There has been such a development in the
unanimity of thoughts, feelings and aspirations, such a standardization
in America, that it has become impossible for the freest minds to
express themselves independently of their surroundings. This uniformity
having become tyrannical, the most liberal artists have only been able
to shake it off by studying it as a phenomenon in itself. To describe
it faithfully has become for them the best way of denouncing it. For
my own part, I think that there is a great resemblance between what
the American novelists have described and the actual facts. Even if
that were not so, there would remain this amazing unanimity in thinking
and in realistic observation. Even if Puritanism and repression, as
Hawthorne, Howells, Henry James, Mrs. Wharton, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis,
Anderson, Cabell and others describe them, were a fiction, there would
be, in the universal character of this fiction, an evidence of a state
of mind capable of impressing a psychologist. Allowing that Puritanism
is a vice, a malady of the mind, an obsession, is it not remarkable
that we should meet with it among the most notable American novelists
of yesterday and to-day? How could such a general obsession be
fictitious and exist without corresponding to something which explains
and justifies it? But I am firmly convinced of the great value of the
modern American novel from a documentary, psychological, moral and
social standpoint. As one critic expresses it, “just like the American
skyscrapers, the American novel has sprung from the soil, awkward,
utilitarian, often amorphous, more agreeable to the eye than to the
intellect, queer, painfully searching for new modes of expression, with
almost no relation with the site upon which it is growing or with what
surrounds it.” From the point of view of art and ideas, there have
never been in American literature works so defiant of the accepted laws
of decorum, perspective and harmony.
INDEX
Adams, Henry, 11, 69.
Advertising in America, 146, 147.
Æsthete, the modern American, 274-277.
“Age of Innocence, The,” 57.
“Ambassadors, The,” 53.
America, restlessness in, viii;
pessimism in, viii, ix, 8, 135;
considered an unromantic, 130 _n._;
sacrifice of the minority in, 146;
advertising in, 146-148;
the land of the superlative, 147;
crude conditions in parts of, 155, 156;
the land of the strenuous life, 186, 186 _n._;
conditions in, since the Great War, 259-261;
the modern novel as representative of conditions in, 282, 283;
standardization in, 282.
American æsthete, the modern, 274-277.
American background, the emptiness of, 48-50.
American culture, an arraignment of, 17, 18.
American language, 150.
American literary ideals, revolution in, 3-6;
the new, 7.
American literature, recent, pessimism in, viii, ix, 257, 260;
spirit of pioneers in, 5-7.
_American Mercury_, the, 10.
“American Tragedy, An,” 79, 110 _n._, 115-122.
American writers, later generation of, characteristics of, 23, 24.
Americans, optimism and contentment of, 13;
provided with comfort and material ease, 131, 132;
outside their homes, 132, 133;
their religion, 133;
the material organization of their life, 134;
in politics, 134, 135.
Anderson, Sherwood, 22, 53, 57;
and Freudism, 31;
influence of Walt Whitman on, 154, 155;
his primitivism, 154, 155, 155 _n._, 156;
his writing a groping toward the Unknown, 155;
his career, 155, 158, 159, 166-168;
the Freudian novelist _par excellence_, 156;
his “Windy McPherson’s Son,” 156, 157, 168-171;
little filial respect in his tales, 157;
a dreamer, 159-161, 175;
his feeling for the small craftsmen, 161, 162;
his world of fancy, 162-164;
his itch for writing, 164, 166;
his sensitiveness to words, 165;
excludes manufacturers of paper from his curses, 165, 166;
his apprenticeship at writing, 167;
his indifference to comfort while writing, 167;
his “Marching Men,” 171-180;
as an artist, 176, 199;
his “Poor White,” 181, 182;
his “Winesburg, Ohio,” 182-187;
suppressed sensibilities in his stories, 187;
his description of the tortures of inhibition, 188-191;
engaged on problems of sexual inhibition, 191;
his “Many Marriages,” 191-196;
his “Dark Laughter,” 196-199;
Negro songs in his novels, 197;
on New Orleans, 198, 199;
his definition of art, 199.
Andreiev, 23.
“Arrowsmith,” a satire of medical fakes, 148, 149;
summarized, 149;
written haphazardly, 150;
the language of, 150.
Art, shows a way out of chaos, 126;
and muck-raking, 153;
Anderson’s definition of, 199;
“flamboyant,” 278;
for art’s sake, 279 _n._;
the harmony in, 280, 281.
Atherton, in “A Modern Instance,” 64-66.
Atherton, Gertrude, 247 _n._
Austin, Mary, 248.
“Babbitt,” 144-148.
Balzac, Honoré de, 23, 153, 281.
Beach, Joseph Warren, his “The Outlook for American Prose,” 202 _n._
Beasley, Gertrude, 270, 271.
Beaut McGregor, in “Marching Men,” 171-173, 174, 177-180.
Behaviorism, 29, 30.
Ben Halleck, in “A Modern Instance,” 64-66.
Bernanos, Georges, 246.
Bio-chemistry, human psychology in terms of, 78, 83, 84, 95, 106,
109-118, 123.
Biological fatalism, 124.
“Birth,” 248, 249.
“Blithedale Romance, The,” the women in, 34.
“Book About Myself, A,” 98.
Bourget, Paul, a novel of, 4;
his process, 55;
crime determinism arraigned by, 116.
Bourne, Randolph, a literary radical, 4.
Bovarysme. _See_ Emma Bovary.
Boyd, Ernest, his “Portraits Real and Imaginary,” 274 _n._
Bruce Dudley (John Stockton), in “Dark Laughter,” 196-199.
Business-man, the American, 21.
Cabell, James Branch, 22;
the double aspect of his work, 200, 201;
his style, 202, 203;
his land of Poictesme, 203, 204;
the inhabitants of his Poictesme, 204, 205;
his philosophy, 205;
his defense of fiction, 205-208;
his “Jurgen,” 208, 209, 215-220, 223, 224;
his “Figures of Earth,” 209-212;
his “Domnei,” 212-215;
aimed to sketch an epic of human desire, 221;
his “The High Place,” 224-231;
his “The Cream of the Jest,” 231-237;
his early works, 237.
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, moving picture, 184.
“Call of the Wild,” 32, 94.
Canfield, Dorothy, 248.
“Captive, The,” 21 _n._
Carnevali, Emmanuel, 270.
Carol Kennicott, in “Main Street,” 136-144.
Cather, Willa, 22;
exhibits sympathy for her characters, 238;
her “A Lost Lady,” 239, 240;
her “My Antonia,” 241-245;
her art, 245, 246;
her “One of Ours,” 246-248;
her “My Mortal Enemy,” 248 _n._
Censorship, 20, 21 _n._
“Chalk Face,” 255.
Charlatans, 148.
Chautauqua poets, 258.
Chicago, artistic and literary center, 168, 174.
Chillingworth, Doctor, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 39-42.
Churches, in America, 133;
attacked in “Elmer Gantry,” 150, 152.
“City Block,” 256.
Civilization, modern, 173-175.
Clemenceau, Georges, 95 _n._
Clerical profession, fakes of, satirized in “Elmer Gantry,” 152,
153.
Clyde Griffith, in “An American Tragedy,” 115-122.
Communion of Saints, 98 _n._
Comte, Auguste, 124.
Conrad, Joseph, 282.
Conscience, a theory of, 110, 110 _n._, 116.
“Contact,” printing firm, 262, 270.
Cooper, James F., wrote the novel of adventure, 4.
“Cords of Vanity, The,” 237.
Cowperwood, in “The Financier,” 86-88, 105-111.
“Cream of the Jest, The,” 231-237.
Crime, in Hawthorne, 34;
in “Elsie Venner,” 110 _n._;
in Dreiser, 115-119.
Criminal responsibility, 110 _n._, 116, 118, 119.
Criticism, in America, 3-5.
“Crystal cup,” 247.
Curel, François de, 156 _n._
“Custom of the Country, The,” 56.
Cynicism, in recent novels, 257.
“Cytherea,” 254, 255.
“Daisy Miller,” 50.
“Dance before the Mirror,” 156 _n._
“Dark Laughter,” 196-199.
Darwinism, and Theodore Dreiser, 84, 85, 88, 93, 95 _n._
Day-dreaming, 156.
Decadence, 186 _n._
Degeneracy, 186 _n._
Deliverance, the problem of, 185.
Dell, Floyd, 22, 254.
Dickens, Charles, 147.
Dickinson, Emily, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
Dimmesdale, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 37-45.
Dom Manuel, in “Figures of Earth,” 209-212.
“Domnei,” 212-215.
Donatello, in “The Marble Faun,” 38.
Dostoievski, F. M., 23.
Double personality, 156.
Dreiser (or Dresser), Paul, 72.
Dreiser, Theodore, his arraignment of American culture, 17, 18;
absorbed by the problems of Puritan inhibitions, 22;
and Freudism, 31;
the historian of a disillusioned America, 71;
views social studies from an individual angle, 72;
his career, 72, 73;
his books, 73, 74;
his realism, 74, 75;
his enthusiasm for facts, 75-77;
the contents of his novels borrowed from the news column, 77-80;
his use of term _bio-chemistry_, 78;
does not comment in his novels, 80;
his essays, 81;
his philosophy, 81-83;
translates psychology in terms of bio-chemistry, 83, 84, 95, 106,
109-118, 123;
his evolutionism, 84, 85;
his supermen, 85, 93-95, 105, 111;
his blow to American idealism, 85, 86;
his illustration of the battle of life, 86-88;
his love for America, 88-93;
his “A Hoosier Holiday,” 88-93, 95-97;
his hero worship, 94;
his treatment of sexual problems, 95;
his Darwinian Philosophy, 95 _n._;
his hymn to the Vital Force, 95-97;
his belief in compensation (equation), 97, 98;
his pessimism and optimism, 98, 99;
suggests two solutions of the ethical problem, 99;
on spiritual progress, 100;
his liking for the Dutch painters, 101;
his definition of art, 101;
his “Sister Carrie,” 102-104;
his “Jennie Gerhardt,” 104, 105;
his “The Financier,” 105-108;
his “The Titan,” 108-111;
his “The Genius,” 111-115, 195;
his “An American Tragedy,” 115-122;
his theory of criminal responsibility, 116-119;
leaves little hope of reformation for the fallen, 123;
his biological fatalism, 124;
his decalogue, 124;
his ethics, 125, 126;
goes too far in starving the human emotions, 126, 127;
Walt Whitman’s influence on, 154;
on the primordial importance of the sexual question, 191.
Drunkenness, in recent American fiction, 187 _n._
Dual personalities, 182, 184, 254, 271.
Duhamel, George, 255.
Dutch painters, the, 101.
“Eagle’s Shadow, The,” 237.
Education, American, hostile to “wish-fulfillment,” 14.
Edwards, Jonathan, his sermons, 12.
Eggleston, Edward, and the Dutch painters, 101 _n._
Elite and masses, in America, the feud between, 9, 10.
“Elmer Gantry,” 150-153.
Elsie Leander, in “The Triumph of the Egg,” 167, 187-191.
Emerson, Charles, 223.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17;
a Puritan type of mind, 12;
his ethics, 98;
tried in “Representative Men” to delineate the ideal man, 222;
a transcendental realist, 222;
made much of dreams in his philosophy, 222.
Emma Bovary, in “Madame Bovary,” vii, 138, 142-144, 206.
English novelists, 23, 282.
“Erik Dorn,” 271-273.
Eroticism, the great issue of suppressed sensibilities, 187;
and mysticism, 191.
_See_ Sex problems, Sexual inhibition.
Estaunié, Edouard, 239, 246.
“Ethan Frome,” 60, 61.
Ethics, the Puritan, compared with those of Dreiser, 125;
conflict between social and individual, 130.
Eugene Witla, in “The Genius,” 111-114.
Evasions, 207, 208, 231, 254.
“False Dawn,” 56 _n._
Family life, in American plays and novels, 249.
Fiction, confusion between, and realism, in Howells’ work, 200, 201;
Cabell’s defense of, 205-207;
the craving for, 208.
_See_ Novel.
“Figures of Earth,” 209-212.
“Financier, The,” 71-73, 77, 79, 86-88, 105-108.
Firkins, Mr., 63.
“Flamboyant,” 278, 279, 279 _n._
Flaubert, Gustave, 23;
his “Madame Bovary,” vi, vii, 137, 138, 142-144, 206;
his “Bouvard and Pecuchet,” 129;
never lost sight of art, 153;
his influence on the American Novel, 281.
“Floating anxiety,” 19, 31, 146, 184.
Florian de Puysange, in “The High Place,” 224-231.
Frank, Waldo, 22;
Puritanism according to, 13-16;
dual personality in novels of, 254;
master of the minor dialogue, 255;
his novels, 255, 256.
“Free Air,” 128.
Free will, 116.
French novel, influence of the, on American novel, 23, 281.
Freud, Doctor, vi.
Freudism, and Puritanism, 31;
disquieting elements of, 32;
in the novels of Anderson, 156, 182, 188;
a literary rendering to, 184 _n._
Frost, Robert, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
“Fruit of the Tree, The,” 56.
Fuller, Margaret, an experience of, 142 _n._;
an example of suppression, 223.
Gale, Zona, 22;
the chronicler of American life in the small towns, 248;
her “Birth,” 248, 249;
her “Miss Lulu Bett,” 250-254.
Garland, Hamlin, on the case of realism _versus_ sentimentalism, 200
_n._
Gaultier, Jules de, his “Le Bovarysme,” vi.
“Gay Science,” 205, 220, 280.
“Genius, The,” 73, 77, 111-115, 195.
Glasgow, Ellen, 248.
“Golden Bowl, The,” 53.
Goncourts, the, influence of, on the American novel, 281.
Gopher Prairie, 135-144.
“Great American Novel, The,” 277.
Great War, the, 259, 266, 267, 275.
“Hand of the Potter, the,” 115.
“Happy ending,” the, 14.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, wrote the novel of manners, 4;
influence of Puritanism on, 12;
resemblances to Freudism in, 31, 32, 36-42;
attracted by problems of the inmost life, 32;
his life, 33;
his complex explained by his genealogy, 33;
the paganism of his imagination, 33, 34;
his women, 34, 38;
his conscience, 34;
haunted by the idea of crime and punishment, 34;
moral paradoxes of, 35;
as a psychologist, 36;
analysis of his “The Scarlet Letter,” 36-45;
his symbolism, 45, 46.
Hecht, Ben, 271-274.
Helvetius, 125.
Hemingway, George, 270.
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 22, 254.
Herrman, John, 270, 270 _n._
Hester Prynne, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 37-45.
“Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” 74, 97;
quotations from, 82-86.
“High Place, The,” 224-231.
Hilda, in “The Marble Faun,” 34, 38.
“Holiday, A,” 255.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, his “Elsie Venner,” 110 _n._
“Hoosier Holiday, A,” 74, 88-93, 95-97.
“House of Mirth, The,” 58, 59.
“House of the Seven Gables, The,” the character of Phœbe in, 34;
sin in, 34, 35;
the character of Clifford Pyncheon in, 38;
symbolism in, 45, 46.
Howells, William Dean, 22, 54;
his realism, 61, 62, 69;
his limitations, 62, 64;
divides society into two opposite classes, 63;
his moral system, 64-67;
his “A Modern Instance,” 64-66;
his “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” 66, 67;
his ideals those of the sentimental middle class, 67-70;
and Dreiser, 126, 127;
the descent from, to Sherwood Anderson, 169 _n._;
confusion between realism and fiction in, 201.
Hugh McVey, in “Poor White,” 181, 182.
Humor, American, 48;
and irony, 224, 225.
“Humpty-Dumpty,” 271.
Hurstwood, in “Sister Carrie,” 103.
Huysmans, influence of, on the American novel, 281.
Idealism, American, buried in the grave of the Transcendentalists,
16;
is largely manufactured by women, 21;
dead in the American novel of to-day, 257;
and utilitarianism, 258, 259;
transcendental, 258, 259.
Imagination, the rights of, claimed and defended by Cabell, 200,
201,
206;
the expression of, 279.
Imperialism, pragmatic, 259;
mystic, 259.
Individual and social ethics, 124-127, 130, 136.
“Inevitable Equation, The,” 81, 97.
Inhibited, city of the, 184.
Inhibition, the danger in, vii, 280;
the tortures of, described, 191;
the problem of sexual, 191;
effects caused by, prevalent among Puritan writers of New England,
223;
in novels of Willa Cather, 238-248;
in novels of Zona Gale, 249, 250;
in novels of Floyd Dell, 254.
Inness, George, 18.
Instinct, as opposed to the social code, 124-127, 130, 136.
Intelligence test, the, 25.
Irene Olenska, in “The Age of Innocence,” 57.
Irony and humor, 224, 225.
Jaloux, Edmond, 246.
James, Henry, 22;
master of the psychological novel, 4, 47;
needed the European background, 47, 48;
his indictment of America, 48-50;
his first novels, 50;
his women, 50-52;
his novels a contribution to the study of inhibitions, 52;
in æsthetics, 53;
uses _appreciation_, 53;
invented the _monologue intérieur_, 53;
composed from the center outward, 53;
as an artist, 54.
James, William, 4, 17, 149;
his psychological theories, 26, 27, 186;
his attempt to reconcile idealism with utilitarianism, 258.
“Java Head,” 254, 255.
Jazz, 197 _n._
Jeff Durgin, in “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” 66, 67.
Jennicot, in “The High Place,” 228-230.
“Jennie Gerhardt,” 73, 104, 105.
John Webster, in “Many Marriages,” 192-196.
Joyce, James, 22, 23, 27, 53, 282.
“Jurgen,” 208, 209, 215-220, 223, 224.
Kennaston, in “The Cream of the Jest,” 231-237.
Kennicott, in “Main Street,” 136-144.
“Kora in Hell,” 277 _n._
“Landlord at Lion’s Head, The,” 66, 67.
Lawrence, D. H., 23, 36, 282.
Lewis, Sinclair, 22;
his career, 128;
his “Free Air,” 128;
his “Mantrap,” 128;
his “Our Mr. Wren,” 129, 130;
his works inspired by feeling of conflict between social and
individual ethics, 130;
his “Main Street,” 135-144;
his “Babbitt,” 144-148;
his “Arrowsmith,” 148-150;
as an artist, 149, 150;
his language, 150;
his “Elmer Gantry,” 150-153.
Lily Bart, in “The House of Mirth,” 58, 59.
“Linda Condon,” 254, 255.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 186 _n._
London, Jack, and “the movies,” 4;
his “Martin Eden,” 167;
(mentioned, 110).
“Lost Lady, A,” 239.
Love, as bio-chemistry, 111, 113, 117.
McAlmon, Robert, his career, 262;
his “Village,” 262-269;
his “The Portrait of a Generation,” 269.
“Madonna of the Future, The,” 150.
“Main Street,” 135-144.
Mallarmé, Stephane, 166 _n._
“Mantrap,” 128.
“Many Marriages,” 191-196.
“Marble Faun, The,” paganism in, 34;
the character of Hilda in, 34, 38;
amorality in, 35;
the character of Donatello in, 38;
symbolism, 45, 46.
“Marching Men,” 158, 159, 171-180.
Marks, Percy, his “The Plastic Age,” 270 _n._
Martin, Doctor, psychologist, 28.
Masses and élite, in America, the feud between, 9, 10.
Masters, Edgar Lee, 18.
Mather, Cotton, his _Magnalia_, 10, 12.
Maupassant, Guy de, his influence on the American novel, 281.
Medical profession, the fakes of, satirized in “Arrowsmith,” 148.
Mencken, Henry, a literary radical, 4;
his magazine, 10;
his arraignment of Puritanism, 16;
his “The American Language,” 150.
“Mid-American Chants,” 155.
Middle West, 136.
Mid-Victorians, the, 74, 75, 126.
Milton, John, Puritanism the inspiration of his epic, 12.
Milton Daggett, in “Free Air,” 128.
“Miss Lulu Bett,” 250-254.
Mississippi River, the, 197.
“Modern Instance, A,” 64-66.
Molière, J. B., his M. Jourdain, 144.
_Monologue intérieur_, the, 53.
Moody, Mary, Emerson’s aunt, a _clairvoyante_, 223.
Moody, William Vaughn, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
“Mother complex,” 20, 21, 21 _n._, 69, 136.
“Movies,” 4, 14, 16 _n._, 20, 37;
psychoanalysis in, 184 _n._, 278.
Murger, H., his “Vie de Bohême,” 167.
“My Antonia,” 241-245.
“My First Thirty Years,” 270, 271.
“My Mortal Enemy,” 248 _n._
Myers, W. L., his “The Later Realism,” 258 _n._
Mysticism and eroticism, 191.
Nance McGregor, in “Marching Men,” 175-177.
Negro music, 197.
“New Englander, The,” 187-191.
New Orleans, 198, 199.
“New poetry,” 3.
“New Year’s Day,” 61 _n._
Nonconformists, American, 10.
Nordau, Max, his “Degeneracy,” 186 _n._
Novel, American, of the nineteenth century, 4, 7;
the recent change in, 7;
influence of the French novel on, 23, 281;
influence of the Russian novel on, 23, 281;
and the English novelists, 23, 282;
in 1900, 74;
drunkenness in, 187 _n._;
cynicism and crudity in, 257;
of adolescence, 262;
as a true representative of American conditions, 282, 283.
O’Higgins (Harvey) and Reede, their book on “The American Mind in
Action,” 18.
Ohio River, the, 197.
“Old Maid, The,” 61 _n._
“One of Ours,” 246-248.
O’Neill, Eugene, his “Desire Under the Elms,” 21 _n._;
drunkenness in his plays, 187 _n._;
stages a continuous monologue, 192 _n._
“Our America,” 256.
“Our Mr. Wren,” 129, 130.
Painting, the art of, 112, 113.
Palladino, Eusebia, 50 _n._
Pearl, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 34.
Personality, dissociation of, 27.
“Personality picture,” 28, 142, 156, 170, 221, 223.
Pessimism, in the United States, viii, ix, 8, 135;
in recent American literature, viii, ix, 257, 260.
Pirandello, 27.
Poe, Edgar Allan, the standard of the short story set by, 4;
the influence of Puritanism on, 12;
had an artistic conscience, 47;
haunted by the dead, 223.
Poictesme, the land of, 203-205, 209, 215, 221, 225.
Policeman, in the “movies,” 16 _n._
“Poor White,” 167, 181, 182.
“Portrait of a Generation, The,” 269.
“Post-Adolescence,” 269.
Pragmatism, 27, 149.
“Professor’s House, The,” 239, 240.
Proust, Marcel, 23, 27, 53, 276, 281.
Provincialism, 200 _n._
Psittacism, 184.
Psychoanalysis, vi, 30-32, 156, 169, 170, 182-187.
Psychology, experimental, study of, in America, 25.
Psychology, studies of morbid, 182-187.
Publicity in America, 146-148.
Puritan ethics, and Dreiser’s, 125.
Puritanism, the good points of, 11-13;
the bad points of, 13;
the revolt against, 13;
according to Waldo Frank, 13-16;
the decadence of, 15;
Mencken’s arraignment of, 16;
intellectual energies thwarted by, 18;
inhibitions of, 18-20, 22;
and psychoanalysis, 31;
and James Branch Cabell, 201.
_See_ Inhibition.
Radicalism, intellectual and literary, birth of, 260.
Radicals, American, 10, 11.
Rascoe, Burton, 273 _n._
Realism, of Howells, 61, 62, 201;
and fiction, confusion between, 200, 201;
_versus_ sentimentalism, 200 _n._;
fictitious, 201;
in psychology, 201;
revolt against, 201;
banned by Cabell, 206, 207;
of Willa Cather, 246;
static, 246;
optimistic, 248;
later, 258, 258 _n._, 270, 271.
“Reef, The,” 56.
Representative men, revaluation of, 19 _n._
Responsibility for Crime, 110 _n._, 116, 118, 119.
“Revisionists,” 259.
“Revolt against the village,” 200 _n._
Rimbaud, Arthur, 266.
“Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, The,” 237.
Robinson, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
“Roderick Hudson,” 50.
Romantic evasion, 207.
Romanticism, a psychological disease, vii;
M. Seillères, study of, 130 _n._;
and Puritanism, 200;
of Cabell, 205, 206.
Rousseau, J. J., 125.
“Runaway, The,” 254.
Russian novelists, their vogue in America, 23, 281.
Saint Pierre, 239, 240.
Sargent, John Singer, 18.
“Scarlet Letter, The,” paganism in, 34;
the character of Pearl in, 34;
amorality in, 35;
the purpose of, 36;
analysis of, 37-45.
Seillères, Eugene, his study of romanticism, 130 _n._
Self, the, 27-29;
dissociation and reunification of, 170.
Selves, three, 127, 186.
Sensibility, analysis of pathological forms of, 182-187.
Sentimentalism, and the realistic novel, 200;
_versus_ realism, 200 _n._
Sex problems, 59, 60, 95, 102-105, 111-115.
Sexual inhibition, the problem of, 191.
Shaw, G. B., his “Man and Superman,” 111.
Silas Lapham, 69, 70.
Sin, in Hawthorne, 34, 35.
“Sister Carrie,” 73, 102-104.
Social code, and instinct, 124-127, 130, 136.
Socialism, 135.
“Song of the Lark,” 240, 241.
“Soul-fear,” 19, 31, 146, 184.
“Spark, The,” 56 _n._
Standardization, vii, 282.
Standards, American, 9.
Stein, Gertrude, 165 _n._
Stendhal, his “Le rouge et noir,” 116.
“Story Teller’s Story, A,” quoted, 160, 161.
Strenuous life, America the land of, 186, 186 _n._
Style, of American fiction writers, 202, 203.
Subconscious, the, 26, 181.
Suggestive language, the, 165 _n._
“Summer,” 60, 61.
Superman, the, of Dreiser, 85, 93-95, 105, 111;
imagined by Emerson, 222.
Suppression. _See_ Inhibition.
“Tar,” 155, 155 _n._, 157 _n._, 162 _n._
Tartuffe, 151
Tchekhov, A. P., 23.
Thea Kronburg, in “Song of the Lark,” 240, 241.
Thoreau, Henry David, a Puritan type of mind, 12;
disguises himself, 223.
“Titan, The,” 71-73, 108-111.
Transcendental idealism, 258, 259.
Transcendentalists, the, 16, 222.
“Traveller at Forty, A,” 98, 101.
“Triumph of the Egg, The,” 167, 187-191, 193.
Twain, Mark, 68, 261;
voted for American philistinism, 49;
and the Mississippi and the Ohio, 197;
his “The Mysterious Stranger,” 224.
“Twelve Men,” 72, 74, 98.
Undine Spragg, in “The Custom of the Country,” 56.
Utilitarianism, and idealism, 258, 259.
Vechten, Carl van, 279 _n._
Vildrac, Charles, his “Paquebot Tenacity,” 21 _n._
“Village,” 262-269.
Wendell, Barrett, 187 _n._
Wharton, Edith, 22;
specialized in the society novel, 54;
her process, 55;
not introspective, 55;
indifferent to social and political problems, 56;
her satire of American life and society, 56;
her “The Custom of the Country,” 56;
her “The Age of Innocence,” 57;
the spiritual and moral indigence of her characters, 57-59;
her psychological insight, 59;
on the relation of the sexes, 59, 60;
her psychoanalysis, 60, 61;
her “Summer” and “Ethan Frome,” 60, 61;
her article on “The Great American Novel,” 200 _n._
“What Maisie Knew,” 52.
Whistler, J. A. M., 18.
Whitman, Walt, a standard set by, 4;
the United States a cornucopia to, 49;
his influence on Dreiser, 154;
his influence on Anderson, 154, 155;
his “I Walt Whitman, a Cosmos,” 195;
his changes, 223.
Will, function of the, 118.
Williams, William Carlos, one of founders of “Contact,” 262;
his “The Great American Novel,” 277, 278;
his idea of American art of the future, 278;
on imagination, 279.
Wilson, Edmund, on Henry James’ typical American virgin, 52 _n._
“Windy McPherson’s Son,” 156-158, 168-171.
“Winesburg, Ohio,” 158, 182-187.
“Wings of the Dove, The,” 52, 53.
“Wish-fulfillment,” 14.
Words, physical characteristics of, 165, 166, 166 _n._
Young America, in quest of a new ideal, 280, 281.
Zola, Émile, 23;
essay by James on, 54 _n._;
his influence on the American novel, 281.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _Nos actes nous suivent._
[2] In this survey of the case against the Puritan the author does not
claim to adhere to a literal rendering of the views of the different
critics. Many of the comments and examples are his own.
[3] A foreigner who goes to the American “movies” would not contradict
Mr. Mencken on this point. The policeman, as a _deus ex machina_,
to wind up a plot and bring in a happy ending, has no rival on the
American screen except perhaps the young girl, acting as Salvation
Nell. A squad of police rushing to the scene of a row or of an assault,
provided it arrives on the psychological moment, is sure to raise the
enthusiasm of the audience to the limit. Moral rescue by the police is
the most popular form of the Aristotelian _catharsis_ in America.
[4] The “leavings aside” of Theodore Dreiser in this indictment are
frequent enough to call for a fairer balance of the whole account when
all is told. I refer the reader, for a retort on this point, to the
first pages of this chapter, where I take the liberty to be much more
optimistic concerning the intellectual capital of America.
[5] Messrs. Harvey O’Higgins and Reede.
[6] A revaluation of most of the great American representative men
and women has taken place in the United States recently, in the light
of _ex professo_ Freudism and psychoanalysis. See the books of Crutch
on Edgar Poe, Van Wyck Brooks on Mark Twain, Anthony on Margaret
Fuller, Wood on Amy Lowell, etc., etc. This is another aspect of the
intellectual revolt in America to-day.
[7] This example is the author’s.
[8] This mother complex is one of the most difficult American
idiosyncrasies for the European to understand. The sublimation of
instincts in America reaches its limits in married life when the wife
becomes in familiar appellation “mother.” This American complex has no
equivalent in the Old World.
[9] The author of this book had a first-hand impression of the power
of the American woman as a censor when, in a certain city of the West,
an Association of Christian Mothers interfered to stop the production
of Charles Vildrac’s “Paquebot Tenacity.” Vildrac’s play, for the
un-Puritan critic, is a most moral play. It dramatizes the problem of
free will. It stages the conflict between a strong and a weak man, both
of them in the hands of Fate. The American “mothers” did not see these
moral issues. They were only concerned with a dialogue between one of
the characters and a maid around a bottle of champagne. The suppression
in New York City more recently of “The Captive,” a Freudian play of the
first order, marked another triumph for the “motherly complex.” Eugene
O’Neill’s Ibsenian drama “Desire under the Elms” was interdicted in Los
Angeles lately by the same “complex.” Meanwhile nude exhibitions which
could hardly be tolerated even in Montmartre are allowed to proceed
along every “gay White Way” throughout the United States.
[10] Is not this a reason, among others, why the American business man
stays “at his desk” until a late age, when the average European has
gone into retirement a long time before? Work for the latter is only a
makeshift in order to enjoy life better. For the American it is life
itself.
[11] J. Laumonnier, “Le Freudisme,” p. 8. Cf. _Ibid._, p. 113, an
essay on comparative psychology of peoples--based on Freudism. The
Anglo-Saxons are apparently distinguished by a particular aptitude for
inhibition and repression.
[12] Since this was written there has been an important revival of
Hawthorne criticism like the chapter in Mrs. L. L. Hazard’s “The
Frontier in American Literature,” and the book of Lloyd Morris, “The
Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne”; “Nathaniel Hawthorne,
A Study in Solitude” by Herbert Gorman. These critical studies support
very well the interpretation of Hawthorne presented in this volume.
[13] I take the liberty to coin this adjective in memory of Eusebia
Palladino, the famous medium.
[14] Edmund Wilson in the _New Republic_, March 16, 1927. Sarcastic Mr.
Wilson sums up the spiritual failure and the sentimental starvation of
the typical American virgin in Henry James’ novels as follows: “She
goes on eating marrons glacés in a hotel parlor with her father and
sister, all her life,” a life fortunately short enough to bring to a
quick close this original form of Dantesque torture.
[15] And yet Puritanism did not prevent Henry James from writing the
most sensible and most appreciative essay on Émile Zola in his “Notes
on Novelists.”
[16] “The Old Maid,” “New Year’s Day,” “The Spark,” “False Dawn.”
[17] “The Old Maid” and “New Year’s Day” by the same author go very
deep, too, in the analysis of subconscious emotions and their influence
on moral and social behavior.
[18] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” II.
[19] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.”
[20] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.”
[21] “The Financier.”
[22] “A Hoosier Holiday.”
[23] “A Hoosier Holiday.”
[24] This account of Dreiser’s Darwinian philosophy is being written
just at the moment when the great French statesman, Georges Clemenceau,
in the eighty-sixth year of his career, prints his “Au soir de la
pensée.” That this great man, who knew men and life as very few did,
can adhere to a philosophical creed literally in accord with that of
Theodore Dreiser as presented in these pages, may well lead the reader
to believe that, after all, there must be some truth in Darwinism as
a hypothesis to explain the essential features of our modern social
system.
[25] A more awkward and clumsy way to express one’s self in writing
than this passage cannot be easily imagined, and there are,
unfortunately, too many passages like this one in Dreiser’s books.
This pseudo-scientific jargon could be endured in Haeckel but it is
difficult to be, at the same time, a bio-chemist and an artist. This
groping through mysticism, science or triviality, toward literary
expression seems to be the curse of the new American writers.
[26] “A Hoosier Holiday.”
[27] Did not the Catholic Church have something similar to say on the
subject, with its dogma of the Communion of Saints and the atonement
for the wicked by the good?
[28] The lesson of the Dutch masters has been learned very early by
American realists. Thirty years ago, in his preface to “A Hoosier
Schoolmaster,” Edward Eggleston attributed his vocation as a novelist
to the reading of Taine’s book on Dutch painters.
[29] This theory of conscience can prepare the reader for Dreiser’s
views on crime and the criminal in “An American Tragedy.” It took
bio-chemistry a long time to become a substitute for the Puritan
doctrine of responsibility in the American novel. The first step in
this direction after that of Hawthorne was taken by Oliver Wendell
Holmes in the sixteenth chapter of “Elsie Venner.” There, good Dr.
Holmes mobilized a college professor to demonstrate “the limitations
of human responsibilities” from a scientific standpoint and present
the criminal as a sick person not to be hanged or electrocuted, but
preached to and cured, if possible, if not pensioned.
[30] The French philosopher and historian, M. Eugene Seillères, renewed
entirely the study of romanticism in Europe by viewing it as what he
calls _l’impérialisme mystique_, the imperialistic tendency toward
individual supremacy. If we applied his definition to America, this
country would stand as essentially unromantic, _i.e._, as the one which
gives the individual the least chance for self-expansion beyond certain
set limits. Hence the triumph of realism and middle-class standards in
American literature. In the last fifteen or twenty years, on the other
hand, the “revolt against the village” may well be interpreted as the
sign of a new romantic upheaval among us, if we accept Mr. Seillères’
definitions.
[31] “Main Street.”
[32] _Ibid._
[33] Margaret Fuller in her “Memoirs” has told similar experiences, as
when she thought herself to be a whirling dervish and fell inanimate on
the floor after performing like one of them.
[34] Let me refer the reader for instance to Jim Blausser’s speech to
his countrymen assembled to try to “boost” Gopher Prairie, and Doctor
Pickerbaugh’s orations in “Arrowsmith.”
[35] Let the reader turn to “Tar” in particular for a vivid impression
of Anderson’s primitivism. Beauty and the Beast fight there at close
hand. One marvels how a would-be artist could save his soul from
disgrace out of such a muddy and zoölogical chaos.
[36] The “dance before the mirror,” as the French playwright François
de Curel called it.
[37] In fact very little respect of any sort. For the desecration in
particular of the myth of birth, I refer the reader to the orgiastic
chapters in “Tar,” contrasting the birth of the little pigs with that
of a human being. The scene is almost epic in its coarse nakedness.
[38] “A Story Teller’s Story.”
[39] Anderson has told her story in “Tar.”
[40] A lesson which Anderson, as some of his critics tell, probably
learned from Gertrude Stein, a virtuoso of the suggestive language to
an extreme which the disciple has not yet followed, fortunately for us.
Miss Stein’s story of an American family is a quarry where many curious
gravels can be found, but no statues.
[41] Stephane Mallarmé, a pioneer of modern æsthetics, was himself
a victim of a similar spell. At the end of his career he replaced
inspiration by throwing haphazard words in black on white. He
originated a new process of composition in which words produced their
effect by sheer magic, like those Japanese paper-balls which blossom
out into a display of flowers when placed in a glass of water.
[42] Is not this proletarian appeal the main sign of difference between
the old and the new order of things in American literature? Passing
from William Dean Howells to Sherwood Anderson is like descending the
social ladder several rungs. No more well-to-do bourgeois, Laphams or
Kentons. Now Middle Western literature takes us down to the ground
floor and sometimes to the basement of democracy.
[43] In French _les refoulés_.
[44] This celebrated moving picture from the German studios has lately
put psychoanalysis on the screen and made it intelligible to the
masses. “Winesburg, Ohio” is not the only book of its kind which gives
a literary rendering to Freudism. It is contemporary of and well in
keeping with Pirandello’s plays, Eugene O’Neill’s drama and the newest
French plays by Lenormand, Sarment, Cromelynck, and others.
[45] _L’énergie américaine, l’énergie anglo-saxonne_, such was for the
last half a century the slogan of almost all the French travelers to
the United States. Did not a French consul write, a few years before
the War, a book called “La supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” based on
the same views? These critics knew only the surface of city life in
America. They ignored Winesburg and, of course, had not read Sherwood
Anderson. Decadence or, as Max Nordau called it in a sensational book
“Degeneracy,” has become a current topic in the books of the younger
American writers. Most of them could be inscribed with George Cabot
Lodge’s saying that: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of
which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third rate.” Such a
statement certainly calls for a serious qualification but it may prove
useful as a “damper” against the professional panegyrists abroad and
the megalomaniacs at home.
[46] The part played by drunkenness in recent American fiction is
appalling. In the good old days drinking used to be poetic and it was
still Horatian in the way the late Barrett Wendell presented it in a
famous essay. Since prohibition, it has become a narcotic and a dope.
The triumph of drunkenness as a _deus ex machina_ in modern American
literature will be found in Eugene O’Neill’s plays, although the fact
that we pass our time on his stage mostly among sailors, may be taken
as an extenuating circumstance.
[47] Eugene O’Neill, in “Emperor Jones,” succeeded in the _tour de
force_ of staging a continuous monologue, but he was clever enough
to use a tom-tom for a diversion from beginning to end. We miss this
diversion in “Many Marriages.”
[48] “Many Marriages,” 217.
[49] From Rousseau to jazz seems a very long way, and yet does not the
modern American, so fond of dancing to the tune of a Paul Whiteman
orchestra, in some gorgeous palace, unconsciously pay homage to the
primitive instincts so dear to the author of “Dark Laughter”? What a
piquant contrast, not only in shade but in ideals, that both the black
man and the Puritan should live within the same frontiers and that
the latter should borrow from the former one of his favorite forms of
self-expression.
[50] Hamlin Garland, in his “Crumbling Idols” (1894) frankly put the
case of realism _versus_ sentimentalism before the public. He quoted
Mistral and the French Felibres, as well as Taine and the critic Veron
in support of his plea for what he called _provincialism_. Realism
triumphed in American fiction until Mrs. Wharton published her article
on “The Great American Novel” in the _Yale Review_ for July, 1927.
She protested against what she called the “twelve-mile limit” and the
narrow horizons of “the village pump.” That the “revolt against the
village” will lead to an entire change of orientation in present-day
American fiction and possibly to a new flight “beyond the horizon” in
the next few years may soon become an easy and necessary prophecy.
[51] Let me refer the reader on this point to “The Outlook for American
Prose” by Joseph Warren Beach (The University of Chicago Press).
[52] And needless to say, in an entirely different spirit from the
“Connecticut Yankee” by Mark Twain, who showed himself a gross
Philistine in regard to medieval lore.
[53] Author of “La Vie secrète,” “Les Choses Voient,” etc.
[54] We owe that expression to Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, a much talented
novelist and a specialist of women’s psychology in the United States.
[55] In her latest short novel, “My Mortal Enemy,” Miss Cather has
brought the tragedy of moral repression to its most crucial point. She
tells the story of a woman who was looked upon as a rather peevish and
vain person by those who knew her and who, at the end, frees her truest
self in a pathetic prayer before going to die alone on a cliff above
the sea.
[56] This “later realism” has been studied through modern English
fiction by Professor W. L. Myers in his book “The Later Realism”
(Chicago University Press), a masterpiece of searching criticism.
[57] In his novel called “What Happens” John Herrman gives us a
pitiless and depressing document about the habits of college students
of both sexes. If this be a faithful painting, American youth would
then seem to have but two ideals--Vice and Alcohol. I leave the full
responsibility of this verdict to the author. A similar, but more
optimistic and moralizing representation, will be found in Mr. Percy
Marks’ novel, “The Plastic Age,” The Century Company, New York.
[58] Mr. Burton Rascoe.
[59] See in Chapter II my exposé of “behaviorism.”
[60] Mr. Ernest Boyd in his “Portraits Real and Imaginary.”
[61] To which we should add his amusing “Kora in Hell.”
[62] The advent of “flamboyant” will be found in the books of Messrs.
Carl van Vechten, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who take their
revenge on dullness with firecrackers, bull fights and champagne. Out
of the gloom of realistic fiction the sun rises beyond the horizon of
the “village pump” through the pages of “Firecrackers,” “The Great
Gatsby,” and Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” The return to art for
art’s sake may free the American novel from the shackles of pessimism.
Let us hope so.
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