My dear Mencken,
I have been intending to write to you for some months past a personal
and private letter with nothing more urgent in it than an affectionate
greeting and a strong appeal to you to come over here as soon as
possible and share my excellent Irish whisky, but there have been
certain utterances of yours in “The Smart Set” during the past few
months that have led me to make this letter a public one, because the
matter of it seems to me of general interest.
I know that you are set tight in your own opinions like a toad in its
hole, and you know how greatly, in the past, I have admired many of
those same dogmatisms. It is only because I admire so greatly your
critical mind and feel that you are doing a most important work for
English as well as American letters, that I write to you as I do. There
is little hope of changing you, but it is time that someone on this
side of the Atlantic challenged some of your absurd views about the
English novel and, above all, about English contemporary criticism.
In these recent numbers of “The Smart Set” you have returned again and
again to the main charges; one, that the English critics are engaged
in a sort of conspiracy against the contemporary American novel; the
other, that the same English critics are busied with log-rolling in
connection with their favorite novelists. You make distinct charges,
for instance, that no American novelist, save Hergesheimer, and Edith
Wharton, is treated with any respect over here: that is, that we
deliberately and of malice aforethought despise and condemn James
Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Ben
Hecht and the rest, and that we praise the works of, in your opinion,
poor novelists like Frank Swinnerton and Michael Sadleir, and neglect
the genius of such an author as W. L. George. You also imply that
the American public is paying too much attention to the contemporary
English novel and is neglecting the brilliant new American novel now
arising. Why, you ask, should the Americans flatter the English in this
way when the English so utterly neglect the American?
My dear Mencken, it is really time that you paid a visit to this happy
little island of ours. I should be very sorry indeed were you to come
just at the time of my visit to America. I look forward to eating, if
not drinking, with you in Baltimore, but even at the risk of missing
your most engaging company, I do beg you to come over. I regard it
as a matter of the utmost importance that the English and American
novelists should just at this time go hand in hand together. There is
a new American novel of the greatest interest and individualism, just
as there is a new language. It has already certain characteristics most
definitely of its own, yielding nothing to past tradition, English
or other, standing strongly on its own feet, the most interesting
movement, I think, in American letters of the last fifty years.
There is no reason however why, because of this new and splendid
phenomenon, the American critics should decide that the American
public has no more use for the English novel. The more individual and
distinctive the American novel becomes, the more different will it be
from the English and the more enjoyable will both be in comparison and
in friendly rivalry. It is quite impossible, for instance (to take one
or two recent examples), for any Englishman to father such books as
“Main Street”, “Moon-Calf”, “Miss Lulu Bett”, “Cytherea”, or “Three
Soldiers”, just as it would be equally impossible for “To Let” or
“Dangerous Ages” or “The Death of Society” or “Crome Yellow” to have
come from an American talent. Surely this is a good thing. Instead of
both countries producing, as they were engaged in doing twenty years
ago, insipid historical romances that might have come from anywhere,
the younger generations of both peoples are now working on their own
grounds, cultivating most happily their own gardens.
That brings me directly to your charge that the English critics are
neglecting the more recent American novelists. You except Edith
Wharton and Joseph Hergesheimer, so I will not speak of them, only
hinting in parenthesis that if you imagine that Hergesheimer’s art is
European rather than American, you are making the greatest mistake
of your young critical life; but is it true for a single moment that
Cabell, Booth Tarkington, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Miss
Cather and the others are passed over here? That their novels do not
command great sales here is perfectly true. For some reason, the
American novel presents English readers with conditions that are very
difficult for them to understand. Part of the difficulty is beyond
question this problem of the new American language. Take “Main Street”
or “Three Soldiers” or “Moon-Calf”, and you will find pages of those
books peppered with phrases that to nine Englishmen out of ten are
quite unintelligible. When you get to the words of Don Marquis or
Ring Lardner they might, for most English readers, be just as readily
written in Russian or Chinese. But it is not only difficulty of
language. American conditions simply have no parallel in this country.
The majority of Englishmen have not visited the United States, and
many of those who have been there have penetrated no farther than the
wilds of New York and Chicago.
Such a book as one of the very finest of all American novels, “My
Ántonia”, is simply not intelligible to the ordinary English reader,
and the small sales of “Main Street” over here are entirely due to
the fact that we have nothing in our country at all parallel with the
cultural conditions of your own small towns. It would be in many ways
much better for us if we had.
That these writers are critically neglected, is simply untrue. You
mention Cabell’s name. The limited edition of “Jurgen” that John
Lane published over here has been one of the great successes of the
autumn. The 3,000 copies of that edition were sold out within the first
fortnight, and booksellers are besieged with requests for it. That book
had columns of reviews in all the leading literary journals. The only
important paper that treated it with contempt was “The London Mercury”,
whose notices of fiction are by far its weakest section. “Figures of
Earth”, which has just appeared here, has again been treated with the
most serious attention. Sherwood Anderson has hitherto been presented
in England by his weakest work only, and it is not the fault of the
English critics if they do not yet realize how considerable an artist
he is. Such a book as Ben Hecht’s “Erik Dorn” has not, I think, yet
been published here, but in any case you would not, I imagine, wish to
have that represented as the finest flower of American contemporary
genius. Booth Tarkington has had critical attention here for years.
“The Narrow House” by Evelyn Scott received any number of reviews, and
“Miss Lulu Bett” was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm.
The fact, however, remains that the American novel is at present
dealing with conditions unknown to the English reader, while the
English novel is speaking of manners and customs that have been known
for generations to American visitors.
I come to your second charge, which is that the English reviewer is a
fellow of small cliques and coteries who is engaged in praising only
the works of his own set. Never was there anything falser. You instance
certain names, Frank Swinnerton, Michael Sadleir and others. The fact
of the matter is that there is a very wholesome tendency among English
critics here to knock any novelist on the head as soon as he shows
signs of getting above himself. This is an admirable and most natural
instinct in human nature, peculiar not only to the English. You will
remember that Henry James in some articles in the “Times” just before
the war collected certain young novelists together and either patted
them on the head or rapped them on the knuckles according to the way
in which you interpreted his rather mysterious prose. In any case, he
gave them undue prominence, they having but just then chipped the egg,
having the whole of their young literary lives in front of them. They
have suffered from this paternal blessing ever since, and in their
case, at any rate, there have been no logs rolled. Neither W. L. George
nor Frank Swinnerton was mentioned by Henry James. Mr. George has had,
it is true, some severe criticism for his last two or three novels,
but that is because they are provocative and argumentative, they were
pacifist in tendency during the war, and have on one occasion at least
been concerned with backgrounds that were not perhaps the atmospheres
in which his talent could work most naturally.
Frank Swinnerton, until after the publication of “Nocturne”, had
universal praise from the critics. After “Nocturne” he became a public
figure, a definite representative of the younger English novel and
therefore a legitimate Aunt Sally. “Coquette”, one of his very best
novels and certainly one of the best English novels of the last ten
years, received a very mixed press indeed, and you are quite wrong
if you imagine that he is being praised unduly. He is working most
wisely in a small corner of contemporary English life that he knows
absolutely, that is his own by right of mastery, and if you think
“Nocturne”, “Coquette”, “On the Staircase”, and “The Happy Family” are
poor novels, I can only reply to you that you don’t know the English
life of which he is writing.
As to Michael Sadleir, of whose “Privilege” you spoke with a
contemptuous sniff, there has, in his case, been no conspiracy to
praise. The reviews of that book were very divided. I would not have
expected you to be in sympathy with it. It is a romantic work both
definitely and deliberately, and has for its most ancient ancestor the
highly colored Mrs. Radcliffe whose fiction I suspect you of never
having read.
But these are mere matters of opinion. What I want to say to you is
that there is no evidence anywhere of log-rolling in the reviewing of
fiction in England today. With regard to modern poetry I am not so
sure, but I can speak there with no authority.
What it comes to, my dear Mencken, is that we want you over here for
a little while. Aren’t you conscious yourself of an increasing tinge
of provincialism in your critical utterances? Don’t you really think
that there is plenty of room for the contemporary English and American
novels to walk hand in hand? What we want over here is some definite
authority who will speak to us about the present development of the
American novel. You’re the man for that. Come over and help us. I can
promise you a most cordial welcome.
Yours ever,
+Hugh Walpole+.
_H. L. Mencken_
That a violent critic should ever prove other than the most mild
mannered of men is unthinkable. Mencken, the bitter, the cynical, the
terrible, is in reality a large, healthy, Germanic figure who lives in
a white house with green blinds in Baltimore, his home town, with his
mother. He is thoroughly domestic and exceedingly fond of beer. There
you have him! He is clever in his speech, though not so quick to the
attack as his co-editor, George Jean Nathan. His complexion is florid,
his manners sturdy, his gestures broad. His life has been devoted to
journalism and to a hearty public dislike of American politics, and the
more obvious “booberies” of the American scene. Yet he is an earnest
ballyboo for such idiosyncrasies as the so-called American language,
on which he has written a huge tome which must have involved much
painstaking research. He is, in the main, anti-British, though he seems
to have enjoyed himself when he was in London last season. At heart he
is a sentimentalist. This he has learned to conceal; but he has never
been able to destroy all copies of “Ventures into Verse” published in
1901. That and the quality of “The Smart Set” poetry betray him. As
a critical force he has had large influence in molding the younger
writers of America. He is often a champion for uncompromising realism.
He is far more interested in life problems, however, than in the
technique of writing. By nature a philosopher and a politician, he has
become by accident an editor and critic. With his co-editor he is now
engaged in a new venture, the establishing of a new monthly magazine,
“The American Mercury.”