1
Our modern civilization is, if nothing else, a well-documented one. No
sooner were we at war than we began to talk about the post-war world.
Our introduction to the marvels of the post-war world began very shortly
after Pearl Harbor. Prophets sprang up in every advertising agency and
began to lead us into the promised land of the push button and the
ever-present plastics—where every prospect was pleasantly postwar-ish and
only man seemed likely to remain vile, as indeed he proved by brilliantly
discovering how to smash the atom. It was significant that the art of
propaganda, perfected to the point of art by the original perpetrators
of the war, should become the means of showing us the wondrous shape of
things to come.
So well indoctrinated were our people, so thoroughly documented had we
become, that it occurred to many to venture opinions on the state of man
in this almost perfect state of the future. It was obvious, even to the
prophets, that man would engage in activities other than pushing buttons
to start and to stop things, to change climate or a record, to launch a
war, a ship or a new hydro-electric plant. It seemed obvious, even to
the prophets, that there might be malice in this wonderland.
Man, with more leisure than ever before, would undoubtedly manage to stir
up more trouble than ever before. And while we certainly were not going
to sell apples on street corners, we knew enough, we said, to look for an
increase in crime, a new wave of disillusionment and, most certainly, a
new point of view.
We were quite resigned to these things. We were prepared to usher in a
brave new world to the tune of some fantastic Gotterdammerung in the
Bavarian Redoubt. The suicide of the Austrian Corporal was anti-climax
indeed, since everyone knew, had known for years, that he had it in him.
Things shuddered to a slow halt in Europe and the post-war world seemed
about to be launched with nothing more stupendous in the offing than
the truth about V-1, 2 and 3. The atom’s howl at Hiroshima came as the
cataclysmic climax.
Well, then, once again we had fought in a great war and once again had
emerged comparatively victorious. Because victors always anticipate
a certain course of events which, we have yet to learn, never follow
victory, we had already anticipated the cynicism that was to follow. At
least we have learned to anticipate the cynicism, and that of course is
an achievement. It represents, one must admit, progress. In developing
and enlarging upon our visions of the push-button world we had not
neglected to include the conception of push-button wars. This could be
called the crowning cynicism—and a less disillusioned world might well do
so.
But it is probable that our cynicism is really not quite so bitter as
it was the last time, because one isn’t really cynical at discovering
that what one never believed in does not exist. At any rate we felt, and
perhaps we still do, that there was a pattern to be followed. We have had
some prior knowledge of the pattern—it was becoming familiar to us. There
might be, of course, some slight variations here and there. For example:
in tracing out the pattern before, our cynicism resulted in an escape
into realism—and this time it might result in an escape from realism.
Cynicism in 1947 or 1948 might very well be an isotope of uranium 235,
with a few unknown qualities but with a predictably high escape-velocity.
The post-war era seems to be fairly familiar. The political scene
conforms in a great many respects—but our reactions do not. That we will
do exactly the same thing about exactly the same problem is not only
unthinkable, it is extremely unlikely. Blunder we very probably will, but
we will have found new ways of blundering. After all, we do progress. And
this time we can blunder with no more effort than is required to push a
button. It might be argued, then, that it is extremely unimportant to
ponder about the sort of things that will be written in this postwar
world—escapist or realist. But that one may predict, in the face of this
reality, an escape from realism seems at once probable and inevitable—and
there are certain indications that seem to favor the inevitable.
Superficially we might consider that a number of critics and writers
have remarked upon certain similarities between the late Forties and
the early Twenties. And, so linked have the two decades become, a
mere mention of the Twenties leads inevitably to a rediscovery of the
Nineties. The Modern Library, which was more than just a publishing
venture in the 1920’s, began its series of reprints with Oscar Wilde’s
_Dorian Gray_. One of the first in a recent cycle of films developed
about psychological themes was a somewhat sinister version of _Dorian
Gray_. A recent theatrical season featured simultaneous presentations of
a play about the Twenties and of several about the Nineties. Indeed, _The
Importance of Being Earnest_—a likely title that!—gave fashion its first
really fashionable color since before the war. Yellow, said a foremost
fashion magazine was _The Color_. To be sure, these are only superficial
similarities. That Wilde was revived in the Twenties and in the late
Forties is a manifestation without much meaning in itself. That Yellow
became a favorite color of the season was perhaps no more than a reaction
to our khaki consciousness of the war years ... but there were other, and
more significant, indications.
2
There have been, this past year or so, a number of articles appearing
in various literary journals, and even of late in the more popular
magazines, the burden of which seems to be something between a call for a
new estimate of literature and a prediction that such an estimate is in
the making. Certainly the recent years, during which more books were read
by more people than at any time in history, have given practicing writers
the wider audience they had, for centuries dreamed about. The writers
for small cliques have had every opportunity to expand their cliques.
The writers for the masses had such a market as even the most popular
of them had never imagined. The Big Names ran to bigger printings than
even a publisher had dreamed of. That we were in the midst of an almost
world wide paper shortage seemed at least the most obvious result of this
promiscuous reading and writing. But what have been its literary effects?
Have the realists gained in favor as they predicted, and had been
predicting for years, that they would? Have the proletarian novelists
grown in stature now that, at long last, the proletariat were not only
reading but buying books? Have the multitudinous novels about the Common
Man, the Little Man, the Man in the Street, been widely accepted by the
Common Man, the Little Man, the Man in the Street? In this, the Century
of the Common Man, such a conclusion would seem to have been foregone.
The writers for the Common Man, spurred on by the foregone-ness of their
conclusions, became commoner and commoner—but the Common Man began to
show that he had developed a few rather uncommon tastes indeed. Aside
from the comic books, which he consumed by the shipload (and they can
scarcely be called realistic), he has done all sorts of queer things. He
has granted the greatest gift in his power, sales running to a million
or more, to a book about a lady and an egg, and to a group of the most
outrageously escapists novels that have ever cluttered up a publisher’s
list. Historical novels which were neither good history nor good novels,
became the new opium of the masses. Lusty rogues and busty wenches went
through their amorous routine with a dream of empire in their roving
eyes. The Common Man went in heavily for mediaeval glamour and colonial
swashbuckling. This may be explained on the always convenient grounds
that the popular taste is lamentably lacking in it.
What about the intellectuals? They have shown a remarkable predilection
for mystery novels with overtones of Kraft-Ebing and undertones of
Freud. The “psychological” novel has enjoyed a vogue on a grand scale,
and most popular novelists have had a shot at it themselves. Several
novelists of a generation or two ago have been revived. Henry James has
been the subject of half a dozen serious studies and most of his novels,
the less boring ones, have been republished, re-reviewed and hailed as
masterpieces by the Sunday reviewers. Trollope, too, has undergone the
full treatment. The 1920’s have been rediscovered once again, this time
complete with cartoons and photographs. We may anticipate that Charles
Dickens will shortly become the subject of an intense and enthusiastic
revival.
The _Saturday Review_ has called for new gods. _Life_ magazine demands
to know whether or not fiction has a future, thinks not. The ladies’
fashion magazines, progressing rapidly in the opposite direction, present
a gallery of “Significant writers” with photographs only slightly less
rococo than their elegantly gowned caryatids, including one precious
young fellow in a checkered weskit and the most engaging bangs.
In short, the Little Man, having digested an overdose of reading matter,
seems about to form certain dietary preferences, and they are not going
to be along the anticipated lines. Now this is not to be greatly
wondered at. In any period of intense literary activity (and we must use
the term very loosely), when, in short, “publishers will put covers on
almost anything,” two things are bound to happen. The more popular novels
set new records for sales and for bad writing. New writers are rushed
into print before they’ve bothered to become good, and old established
writers are tempted and inevitably, invariably and immediately succumb to
the lure of mass sales. They are tricked into competing on the commonest
possible grounds with the homesteaders. The more intellectual writers
from their peaks in Darien gaze down upon ever widening horizons and
find it difficult to focus upon anything of significance. They, too, are
tricked into deserting their small, comfortable cliques and finally,
after preliminary castings about, fall back upon the reliable old
revival, or they hail with delirious delight some new master. Then, when
this stage has been reached, a reaction sets in.
The awesome sight of so very many bad novels shocks even those who had
succeeded in shocking themselves into insensibility. The critics are
appalled by the flood they have helped to loose and, while waiting
for the waters to abate, they keep themselves dry and in fairly good
spirits by chanting a litany composed of the names of Tolstoy, Zola,
Dostoievski, Gorki, Swift, Proust, Stendahl and a number of traditional
but largely unreadable masters. Now and again they discover a sort of
Cardiff Giant and exhibit it reverently to the masses. Books are written,
critical studies composed, translations arranged for, editions planned.
Critics, scholars, publishers and others solemnly take part in the usual
ceremonies attendant upon the presentation of a new writer named, let us
say, Smerv.
Alois Smerv is, or was, a Montenegran mystic. Comparatively little is
known about his work, most of it has never been published, none of it
can be readily understood. Nevertheless his name finds its way into
practically every review devoted to anything but juveniles. Smerv seems
to have been obsessed by most of the commoner manifestations made famous
by various Viennese psycho-analysts. It is said that his books, had they
ever been published, would have attracted the unfavorable attention
of the fascist authorities and would undoubtedly have resulted in his
expulsion from his homeland or his installation in a concentration
camp. This, of course, is pure supposition, all that we know for
certain is that Smerv died of acute myopia in 1942 in an obscure town
in the Balkans. His note books, scrap books, ration books and a mess
of mss. found their way into the sympathetic hands of an international
litterateur—with the inevitable result. This, then, is one of our latest
literary idols.
3
And now we come to the point of conceding that Arthur Machen is not
and never has been a “naturalist,” that is, he has never written in
the manner which we have come to call naturalism or realism. A great
deal of modern American and English fiction over the past forty or
fifty odd years has been of this sort. It stemmed, following one of the
periodical Anglo-Saxon reversions to the Gallic, from Zola, the father
of naturalism. One need hardly wonder what Machen might say today of
naturalism and Zola, he said it some fifty years ago in _Hieroglyphics_
and again in _The Secret Glory_. And Machen was saying _then_ a great
many of the things the critics of today are just beginning to discover.
To take an excellent example; we have the case of one of our best known
and most highly regarded novelists; one whose realism has begun to
transcend reality so much that his last book has been called an allegory.
His characters are so super-real as to be almost “arch types,” and they
may eventually come to be regarded, unless they are entirely lost in the
shifting of values, as sketches worthy to stand in a Dickensian gallery
along with Micawber and Pickwick.
For this is assuredly the direction of our drift—we are not only turning
away from naturalism and realism, we are beginning to wonder why we ever
turned to them at all. For literature as a removal from the common life,
or art as an interpretation rather than a portrayal of life, has little
to do with either naturalism or realism. It may be that, within this very
decade, we will decide that the whole trend of the past thirty or forty
years has been up a dead-end street inhabited by the dead-end kids of the
literary world, whose greatest talent was to shock each other with the
words they chalked up on the walls and fences of their realistic little
slum.
It has become increasingly obvious, even to the more advanced critics,
that there had come to exist but a very narrow line between the
realistic-naturalistic novel and the journalism of the day. Not so long
ago it was considered the highest praise to call a novel “a significant
social document.” Now it is becoming more fashionable to refer to a
novel as a rather poor novel _as_ a novel, _but_ a significant social
document. We are, it would seem, about half-way round the circle. Mr.
Sinclair Lewis wrote a book a year or two ago which is also a case in
point. Although the critics were unanimous in pointing out that it was
a very bad novel, they admitted that it was significant. So too, the
flood of books about alcoholism, insanity, race prejudice and other
social problems. Most of these books defy honest criticism on almost any
grounds, since almost everyone is more or less opposed to the same things
these books are against.
Of course these problems do exist, and they are urgent problems indeed;
but they do not necessarily constitute the stuff of great or even good
literature. Nor should the importance of the problem automatically confer
importance or significance upon any writer, good, bad or indifferent, who
chooses to deal with it. Today’s tabloid may be as raw a slice of life as
today’s top ranking best seller—but no one calls it literature. As for
the revolt against “the genteel tradition,” it was a natural reaction
against stuffiness, Victorian morality and overly “nice” novels—but
the course taken by those who rebelled against these things was not
necessarily the right one. It was, or soon became, quite as stuffy and
even more unreal. Still, there is much to be said on the subject, for
realism, by which we _can_ mean honesty, cannot be, and should not be,
eliminated entirely as a literary force.
It cannot be said that Dickens, that eminent Victorian, was not a realist
or that he was not realistic. No Hemingway he, to be sure, but still,
no Harold Bell Wright. Nor can we say of many a writer relegated to
oblivion by the realists that they were not realistic. John Galsworthy
wrote as realistically of the upper-middle classes as John Steinbeck
writes of paisanos—and Soames Forsyte is as much a person, a _real_
person, as the youth with the acne. Now this is a very close to the heart
of the matter, for the realists, and the naturalists, have claimed that
writers like Galsworthy are not realists—and of course their point would
be that Galsworthy wrote of Soames Forsyte and Steinbeck wrote of bums
and vagrants, of the dispossessed and the youth with the acne.
It would seem, then, that they quarreled rather with Soames than
with Galsworthy—that Soames was, for some reason or other, less real
than, for example, an earnest young picket-line marcher. Indeed,
it has been almost a prime principle, that the realists write of
the so-called “underprivileged,” and all that was needed to earn a
reputation for a book was a fairly accurate portrayal of life in the
less-desirable quarters of any city or town. If a few scenes of drunken
quarrels, beatings by cops (classically called Cossacks) and tableaux
in which oppressed mill-workers were being violently oppressed, so
much the better. Of course not all realists wrote exclusively about
the underprivileged. Many wrote of the upper classes, for this was
considered realism too—but only if the upper classes were portrayed in
an unfavorable light. So it becomes apparent that almost the whole of
realism has been a social rather than a literary movement. For a time,
and under special conditions, this seemed reasonable enough, but there
are indications that it is in the process of being rejected as the only
literary criterion.
4
Of the novelists whose names have formed a sort of literary litany this
past decade or two: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Farrell, Faulkner, Caldwell
and Steinbeck—the work of Steinbeck offers most in the way of material
for analysis according to the lights of both realists and romanticists.
For Steinbeck has been hailed as a great realist, and it was he who
first seems to have transcended reality, and certainly he comes closest
to approaching the “removal from the common life” postulated by Machen
as the prime requisite for the creative writer. _The Grapes of Wrath_
was and is a wonderful book—as great a piece of journalism as has been
produced in an age that specializes in that peculiar literary form—the
documentary; and it was saved from being mere competent journalism, or
even inspired journalism, by characterization alone. Here again we must
look to Machen for, if not a direct reference to Steinbeck, at least an
applicable parallel.
For Steinbeck’s characters, the Joads, the Paisanos, the Hermit with his
dogs, the bums in _Cannery Row_—these are all figures of such proportion
and created in such a perspective as that described by Machen in his
essay on Dickens. Machen points out that Dickens was a symbolist ...
no such persons as Pickwick or Micawber ever walked the earth. “They
are creatures,” says Machen, “of the world of vision, of that other
world which is beside us always, which transcends the sight of unpurged
eyes.” And then Machen goes on to define the “true realist” as one who
symbolizes “by means of phenomena, eternal verities.”
This deftness of Steinbeck’s in drawing portraits has led him into
trouble with his devoted critics for whom, apparently, realism can be
carried to extremes. A case in point is the Colonel in _The Moon is
Down_. This German, if not Nazi, officer, it will be recalled, was quite
a controversial figure back in the war days when the book was published.
Now the Colonel had every right, actually and literarily, whether as an
actual person or an imagined one, to act as he did. It may have been a
none too happy choice for Steinbeck—he could have given us the Eric Von
Stroheim figure we all expected of him, but he gave us instead the Major
Stanhope type. This was not a very popular choice with the ardent and
articulate admirers of Mr. Steinbeck’s realism.
Then there was the matter of _Lifeboat_, a motion picture shown during
the war. Mr. Steinbeck did the script, or worked on it, or did whatever
it is established writers do in Hollywood. At any rate Steinbeck was
taken to task by at least one film critic and not a few columnists who
stepped out of their roles long enough to have a look at the films. The
story, a Hitchcock natural, involved a group of people thrown together
in a lifeboat. Among the group was a German submarine officer—perhaps
the Captain. The thing that angered the erstwhile admirers, confounded
the critics and dismayed the defenders of Democracy, was that the German
was portrayed as the most capable man aboard the lifeboat. Not only
did he show qualities of leadership which were found to be detestably
proficient, but other members of the crew, all Allies of one sort or
another, were shown to be a confused and sometimes cowardly lot. This
outrageous invention by a man with a reputation for realism upset the
critics and the columnists. No less an authority than the American Sybil
cried out against the extravagance of the invention in which an officer
and a seaman was permitted to exercise both authority and seamanship.
Of course most of these outcries may be attributed to the fact that we
were then at war with both the confoundedly charming Colonel and the
confoundedly capable Captain.
Nevertheless everyone breathed easier when _Cannery Row_ was announced
as a return to the “early Steinbeck” even though, by this time, realists
everywhere had become aware of a chink in the armor, and the left-wing
critics took a decidedly dim view of the light-hearted way in which
Steinbeck’s social outcasts took their social ostracism.
When _The Wayward Bus_ rattled onto the literary scene the critics
scanned the faces of the passengers as eagerly as relatives waiting at
the depot. Sure enough—there were cries of recognition from several
groups. One crowd hailed the youth with the acne—Johnny had come marching
home again to swell the ranks of the realists. Others, remembering the
Colonel and the Captain, recognized at least a lineal descendant in
the girl who sat in wine glasses. She was, for a girl who sat in wine
glasses, sufficiently incredible to belong to the gallery of allegorical
figures set up for the specific purpose of puzzling the proletarians.
And so the bus pulled in with apparently the right character for almost
everyone waiting at the depot.
This somewhat didactic digression, while it seems to have no direct
bearing upon either Arthur Machen or his works, is offered in explanation
of some of the theories expressed in _Hieroglyphics_—under the subtitle,
if you wish, of _The Ultimate Fate of a Realist_.
5
We have arrived at a point in our literary history (or, if you prefer,
our social progress, our ideological advancement, our cultural
development) when there is need for a new estimate of the task and aims
of our modern literature or at least the re-establishment of certain
values and standards previously set aside.
We must once again divorce literature from life, if by that we will
understand that literature is not, and never was supposed to be, a
mirror held up before our common life. We must discard the so-called
“true-to-life” standard by which our critical attitudes have been
governed for so many years. Above all, we must renounce the propaganda
psychosis, and we must admit that even good propaganda is never
literature and that even great literature is seldom propaganda. We have
those, of course, who will rise to point out that such and such a book
or novel or play was excellent propaganda for such and such a cause
or event. To which we may answer: it was not so conceived. For the
glibness with which the word propaganda is used is rivalled only by the
glibness of the propagandists themselves. To make a case for any work of
literature as a bit of effective propaganda for any cause is to distort
and debase the purpose for which it was created.
There is much too much to do with literature today that has nothing
to do with literature at all. We must learn again that the weavers of
fantasy are, after all, the veritable realists. For it must be admitted
that we have at hand ample evidence that this is so.
There is realism in great literature, but realism alone does not make
great literature. The writer, or observer, who sees an event or an
occurrence, however rare or moving an event it may be, who is moved to
write about it merely to describe, with minute realism, what he had
observed is no more creating literature than the earnest New Englander
who writes to the Times or the Globe to report the first robin. But
Arthur Machen has said these things before—and said them better.
You will find, in the closing pages of _Hieroglyphics_, this passage,
which seems an excellent closing passage for this digressive chapter:
“Have you noticed how many of the greatest writers, so far from desiring
that compliment of ‘fidelity to life,’ do their best to get away from
life, to make their books, in ordinary phraseology, ‘unreal.’ I do not
know whether anybody has compared the facts before or made the only
possible inference from them; but you remember how Rabelais professes
to derive his book from a little mouldy manuscript, found in a tomb,
how Cervantes beginning to _propria persona authoris_, breaks off and
discovers the true history of _Don Quixote_ in the Arabic Manuscript of
Cid Hamet Benengeli, how Hawthorne prologizes with the custom-house at
Salem, and lights, in an old lumber-room, on the documents telling him
the story of _The Scarlet Letter_. _Pickwick_ was the transcript of the
‘Transactions’ or ‘Papers’ of the Pickwick Club, and Tennyson’s _Morte
d’Arthur_ shelters itself, in the same way, behind the personality of an
imaginary writer. There is a very profound significance in all this, and
you find a trace of the same instinct in the Greek Tragedies, where the
final scene, the peripeteia, is not shown on the stage, but described by
a ‘messenger.’ The fact is that the true artist, so far from being the
imitator of life, endures some of his severest struggles in endeavoring
to get away from life, and until he can do this he knows that his labor
is all in vain.”
_Chapter Ten_