IN THE AMERICAN JUNGLE
[1925–1936]
[Illustration: © _Sheldon Dick_]
In the
American Jungle
[1925–1936]
WALDO FRANK
_Photographic Decorations by William H. Field_
FARRAR _&_ RINEHART, _Incorporated_
NEW YORK · TORONTO
[Illustration: A vintage, stylized oval emblem resembling a leaf or
fruit, featuring the bold capital letters 'F' and 'R' on either side of
a central vertical stem.]
COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY WALDO FRANK
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_to my friend Adolph S. Oko_
FOREWORD
For the general idea and design of this book, I am indebted to my
friend, Harold Clurman, the director of the Group Theater. During
several years, he urged me to publish a collection of my papers similar
to “SALVOS” which united certain of my short critical writings from 1915
to 1924. I was always too busy—and the notion of a miscellany does not
appeal to me. At last, at his request, I handed him from my files what I
could find of my articles and papers published in the past twelve years.
I was amazed to find how much it was. Several months later, he returned
to me a selection, reduced by two thirds. He pointed out that what he
had put in order was not a miscellany but _a book_ with a beginning, a
middle and a conclusion: a book even with a “plot”!
The materials that compose this “collective portrait” of an era which
spans the Boom, the Depression, and (perhaps) the beginning, in Spain,
of the new World War that may end the world we have all lived in,
appeared originally in the following periodicals (of New York, unless
otherwise noted):
_The Adelphi_ (London), _The Dial_, _Europe_ (Paris), _Harper’s_, _The
Menorah Journal_, _La Nación_ (Buenos Aires), _The New Masses_, _The New
Republic_, _The New Yorker_, _Occidente_ (Rome), _El Repertorio
Americano_ (San José, Costa Rica), _Scribner’s_, _Soviet Russia Today_,
_Sur_ (Buenos Aires), _Virginia Quarterly Review_, _The Guardian_
(Philadelphia).
Many other magazines reprinted or translated some of this material, but
since I have no full list of these I have not named them.
W. F.
New York, December, 1936
CONTENTS
_Foreword_ vii
ONE: BOOM YEAR SKETCHES
1. I DISCOVER THE NEW WORLD 3
2. A SAVAGE ISLE 16
3. A MOB AND A MACHINE 21
4. MURDER AS BAD ART 25
5. THE BATTLE OF A CENTURY AND A HALF 29
6. ENNOBLING OUR CRIMINALS 35
7. READING THE SPORTS 38
8. THE NEW CONQUISTADORES 41
9. TWO FACES 45
10. THE DRUG ON THE MARKET 48
TWO: PORTRAITS
I. _MEN_
1. RANDOLPH BOURNE 59
2. CHARLES CHAPLIN 61
3. D. H. LAWRENCE 74
4. HERBERT CROLY 75
5. SIGMUND FREUD 82
6. SHERWOOD ANDERSON 93
7. HART CRANE 96
II. _AMERICAN TRAITS_
1. IN DEFENSE OF OUR VULGARITY 109
2. THE MOVIES AND THE MASSES 112
3. THE COMEDY OF COMMERCE 116
4. JAZZ AND FOLK ART 119
5. STRAIGHT STREETS 123
III. _IDEAS_
1. SERIOUSNESS AND DADA 128
2. MR. MENCKEN, KING OF THE PHILISTINES 135
3. PSEUDO LITERATURE 139
4. “UTILITARIAN ART” 142
5. ART IN OUR JUNGLE 146
6. THE ARTIST IN OUR JUNGLE 149
7. THE MACHINE AND METAPHYSICS 153
THREE: BOOKS
1. POE AT LAST 161
2. FRANCE AND THOREAU 165
3. FAIRY TALES FOR THE OLD 168
4. DUSK AND DAWN 172
5. ELEGY FOR ANARCHISM 177
6. THE BOOK OF LEO STEIN 183
7. REFLECTIONS ON SPENGLER 188
8. THE MODERN DISTEMPER 201
9. THE “UNIVERSE” OF T. S. ELIOT 220
FOUR: SOME PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FOR THE SURVIVAL OF MAN
1. SOLIDARITY IS NOT ENOUGH 231
2. WITH MARX, SPINOZA ... 240
3. FROM MANY MESSAGES TO MANY PEOPLES:
I. WAR IS WITH US NOW 254
II. TO THE STUDENTS OF CUBA 256
III. THE TOUCHSTONE 260
IV. TO ROMAIN ROLLAND ON HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 262
V. TO THE PREMIER OF FRANCE 265
VI. VALUES OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WRITER 269
VII. THE WRITER’S PART IN SOCIAL REVOLUTION 279
4. TERRE HAUTE HOTEL 287
INDEX 295
“... _in a dying world, creation is revolution_.”
“Our America,” 1919
“_The American jungle is rich in denatured elements of a transplanted
world: it consists largely in those deposits, cultural, political,
economic, which justify our calling ‘the new world’ the Grave of
Europe._”
“The Re-Discovery of America,” 1929
ONE: BOOM YEAR SKETCHES
1. I DISCOVER THE NEW WORLD
a.
The most important room at home was the library. Our house was the usual
four-story brownstone segment in the unbroken wall of an upper West Side
block. There were plenty of windows. Those to the north looked out upon
the street where grocery wagons rattled by day and by night the gas
lamps dimly slumbered. Those to the south gave a broad view of another
wall of houses which at dark became fantastic with lighted windows
holding many secrets and black silhouettes mysteriously alive behind
drawn blinds. And beyond the houses was the glow of the great city. The
library had but a single window; it was too little for so large and low
a room. Even by day the library was dark and, since the window opened on
a strip of yard choked by an ugly ailanthus, I never looked through that
window. When I was in this room New York did not come in; New York
stayed distant and silent. The real world became this world of books;
and almost all the books had come from Europe.
Among the pictures on the walls were those of two Americans: Washington
and Lincoln. But they had little to do with the America outside the
window. They spoke to me less eloquently than the novelists and poets of
England, than the thinkers of Germany, than the Athenians and Romans all
living on the shelves. This library in my father’s house in the city of
New York was a sanctuary of Europe. It glowed with a secluded quiet and
with a life of its own. And here my childhood lived with an intensity
and depth of feeling that not school, not the streets could give me.
My father nearly every year went to Europe. We would go down to the ship
often, on the eve of his sailing, board the great vessel, and dine with
the captain in his cabin. I was in Europe then: everything, from the
food we ate to the words we heard, was strange to America. Father sailed
away, and mother bundled us children into a train. We got at last into a
shimmer of meadows and of young green trees. But even in the mountains
Europe was not far distant. Letters would presently arrive with foreign
stamps. They were long letters: page upon page of personal description
in which my father narrated his adventures in Hamburg, in London, in
Paris. His trips were short—business trips. When he came back he brought
Europe still more vividly along; in the air of his clothes, in the scent
of his label-plastered luggage. And then mother was always there: and
that made more of Europe. Mother was an artist. She sang every day.
Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf—these were the
voices that came with us even to the mountains.
My room in the city home was on the top floor. I was the youngest, a
tragic fate since it meant my going earliest to bed. It was not easy,
this clambering up from the lighted drawing room filled with the cheer
of guests, through the shadowed house. But the fourth floor was mine,
and already I was a confirmed breaker of laws. I knew that my father
would presently sit down at the organ or the piano to accompany my
mother. I would then take a blanket from my bed, wrap myself snugly, and
seat myself on the stair. My mother’s singing came clearly through the
house. School was a dim fable beside the reality of those songs; even
the strong words on the library shelves were weak by contrast. That
lovely, breathing voice with its perfect modulation and its subtle
colors brought the lands across the sea miraculously near as I sat in
guilt—and in ecstasy—upon the stair.
So when I went to Europe (several times before I was old enough for
college) I found lands familiar to the library of my father and to my
mother’s music: familiar also through the American poets, Longfellow,
Lowell, Holmes. Cooper’s redskins and sea rovers were more remote to me
than the cockneys of Dickens, the Parisians of Balzac. As to Poe, whose
wistful little house my father showed me in a Fordham waste of goats and
cans, his land seemed a wraithlike world in no way kin to the
rectangular New York that was, for me, most of America.
Of course, this European “nature” of my boyhood was wholly and merely
conscious surface. My hours of school, my mates of the street, the
values and activities of parent and relative, under all, the food I ate
and the air I breathed—flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone—were American.
But these depths were voiceless, and I did not know them. Even the
family traditions: the adventures of my father’s father in New York
during the Civil War, the tales of my mother’s mother about the Yankee
army that burned her Alabama home and stole her heirlooms, and about her
running the blockade in a tiny rowboat in Mobile bay (with mother a
child in arms and the constant fear that if she cried the Yankee ships
would find them) failed somehow to come as close as the great tales I
read in Homer or in Tolstoi: tales of Europe. America was in me, of
course; but too close for my roving mind to know it.
b.
In my fifteenth year I had a great adventure. I picked up a history of
American literature which spoke, coldly and slightingly enough, of an
unknown poet, of whose curious style there was appended an example
called “O Pioneers!”
I procured a green-bound volume, “Leaves of Grass”; it had a title page
in archaic type and the portrait of an ancient bearded sage, all grey,
who signed himself Walt Whitman. I read, studied, annotated, as I might
have done with the Bible if I had been reared religiously. Whitman
stirred deep voices in my soul; he inspired me. I believe in those early
days I understood him well enough. But one so obvious fact escaped me,
since I was not ready for it: the fact that this man was an American,
that his experience was related to my own and that this was why I loved
him! I thought he was as remote—and holy—as a Hebrew prophet!
That spring there was the annual oratory contest at the high school. The
usual bright lads rose before an auditorium of a thousand people and
bespoke “The Spirit of ’76,” “The Blessings of Democracy,” and so forth.
And then a strange thing happened. A short, black-haired boy stood upon
the rostrum and for half an hour harangued the audience about the merits
of an unknown, dead poet called Walt Whitman. He must have been eloquent
as well as amusing, for the judges gave him the gold medal for his
effort. But the whole affair remained somehow outside his experience as
an American. These teachers who had rewarded him for praising Whitman
kept on quoting Longfellow. Whitman’s value seemed well symbolized by
the useless medal of gold which the boy’s mother put away and which he
never saw again. Whitman was an outsider, a myth—almost an outcast.
But Europe came ever closer. I was done with school and too young for
college. So I was sent abroad. I discovered myself at sixteen, at
seventeen, to be of an age which on the Continent was deemed the age of
a man! I consorted with students from every land of Europe: Russians,
Spaniards, Serbians, Jews from Egypt, burly football players from Great
Britain. They were not “pretty” fellows. They knew life—women—books. We
sat about at night, drinking our tea with rum; and the air was less
thick with tobacco smoke than with the thunder of exciting talk.
Revolution, art, morality, death: all the old dwellers of the books
which I had met in my father’s library took on flesh, grew warm, grew
urgent. And here at last, so many miles from his Manhattan, Whitman
became alive; Poe found recognition. “America?” said my European
friends. “It is the place that gave us Poe and Whitman.”
I had engaged my room at Harvard. But I wanted to go to Heidelberg, I
wanted, like my friends, to make the rounds of the great universities of
Germany, England, Paris. I wanted to persevere in this world of midnight
tea and rum with its dizzy flights into art and metaphysics. Europe
beckoned me on, like a dark, mellow woman in whom the Mother eternally
old and the Lover wondrously young were merged. And my father would not
have stood against my will. He was an imperious, passionate man, whose
prime passion was respect for the personality of others. A tyrant in
matters of deportment, he hated all interference in adventures of the
spirit. He had watched me, perhaps amused, perhaps with a hidden pang,
go about at the age of twelve with my undigested load of Ibsen and Zola
and Tolstoi. He had observed me, bored with school, become a truant,
frequent the vaudeville shows or barricade myself from furious teachers
in the office of our high school paper. Now, when the formal letters
came from Heidelberg, telling the young American that he knew enough to
be admitted, my father would not have said no, whatever his conviction.
But my older brother was less philosophical. He came to Europe; and in a
hotel room high above the Seine we had what for me was a decisive
battle.
“You are not going to Heidelberg,” said my brother. “You are going to be
an American, by gum! And what’s more, you are not going to Harvard.
You’re queer enough as it is. You’re going to be not only an American,
but as _human_ an American as I can make you. I’m going to send you to a
place that will smooth out your angles and your crotchets. Yale for
you.”... And to Yale I went.
I suppose I had been ill-prepared for the “dear old Campus.” My
classmates were engrossed in football, not in ideas; in Greek-letter
fraternities, not in secret revolutionary orders. They got drunk on beer
and sang sentimental songs, whereas my friends in Europe had sipped
their liquor soberly for the most part, and got drunk on Nietzsche.
Good, groping, earnest fellows, my chums at Yale seemed children to me.
I went through college a rather cantankerous rebel. To amuse myself I
wrote dramatic criticism for a local paper, losing no occasion to bewray
America’s woeful “lack of culture”; I played Bach; I wrote a book on the
Literature of Modern France; and always my eyes continued to turn east,
across the Atlantic Ocean.
Active journalism in New York was a leap from a nursery to a sort of
jungle. The academic cloisters had struck me as anemic imitations of the
full-blooded youthfulness which I had seen in Europe. I liked sport well
enough; but was there not as well an athleticism in literature and in
philosophy? Now came New York once again: a New York of murders,
robberies, politics, and visiting celebrities who spent the
interviewer’s hour telling him pleasant things about America which were
not so.
This New York seemed wholly body. While the slums reeked with poverty
and vice, while the high spirit of youth was trampled out by the thresh
of mechanical progress, the City seemed aware only of problems of
traffic, of taxation, of money. A vast town, New York; but since it was
concerned only with the mechanics of sheer physical growth, it struck me
as a baby—a sort of Brobdingnagian baby. If a man proposed municipal
ownership of public utilities, or cheap gas, he was treated like a
monster. If a woman was suspected of infidelity, it seemed right to drag
her to a divorce court; and the important thing—the only important
thing—seemed to be to ascertain the fact; the deep hidden significances
of her character, of her unhappiness, of the subtle treatment of her
husband—all these elements of truth were ignored. I could not accept
this gross, this infantile America, which was all the America I knew.
Being a child myself, I made the same old gross mistake: I imagined that
my Paradise existed “over there,” across the sea. I packed a bag at last
and went to live in Paris.
c.
When I arrived it was nightfall. I left my bags at a hotel and wandered
up the Boul’ Mich’—the gaudy thoroughfare of the Latin Quarter. I saw no
face that I knew in the thronged terraces of the cafés which made two
fertile banks from the Gardens of the Luxembourg down to the Seine. But
I felt happy and I felt at home. I began to write. I found myself in a
world where writing—the sheer creative act—was considered a sacrament
and a service: not because of what it brought, not for what it did—for
itself. It was in the air—this rhythm of creation. Life was looked on as
a lovely, mysterious adventure, and its true priests were they who sang
of it, who pictured it, who revealed its beauty. I made friends. Here,
among these swarms of enthusiasts who spent their days arguing about a
picture or a poet, I found men after my own heart. And I found a woman,
a true daughter of this world who took me in and made me part of it. And
then, after a brief year, just as I was beginning truly to be at home, I
packed my bags and I went back to New York!
What had happened? I was having a good time and a successful one. Living
was cheap there. It was extremely easy for a journalist like myself to
send articles and stories to the United States, convert the few dollars
into many francs, and live like a young lord in this perpetual holiday
town where poverty was no disgrace, where there was as much honor in
contributing to certain magazines as in being elected to the Senate! Did
not wealthy ladies of Paris find the same thrill in climbing five musty
flights of stairs to the garret of an obscure American author that our
own ladies found in dining with celebrities from Paris? Was there indeed
not a whole world here fashioned for the artist and ruled by his desire?
Paris itself, vast and modern, had the leisurely freedom of an
aristocratic village. Here was a huge city in which there were happy
people, in which there were trees and gardens, in which there was room
for all moods, all liberties—even for a bit of license.
I had more than I had ever had, and yet I gave it up quite simply
because I did not want it, and I could not stand it. In several of the
cafés of Paris there gathered artists from America. Many of them had not
been home in years; most of them came from small places in the interior
and had had no contact with Europe until they had come over. They spoke
seldom of our country. But when they did, they sneered, they jeered,
they swore they were done with the barbaric land that had given them
birth. I could not argue with them; so much of what they said was simply
fact. Yet it was in the company of these Americans that I began to feel
most sharply my need of coming back. If what they said was true, all the
more urgent was the return of men like themselves who claimed to be
conveyers of the truth, creators of beauty—men who could endow America
with what they accused America of lacking.
But I went little with these expatriates. My knowledge of the language,
my love and, bit by bit, my work gained me an entrance into the true
world of France, which before the War was the home of so much of Europe.
I was happy here, but I was not _needed_. I was being nourished by what
other men, through centuries and ages, had created. I was a parasite. At
least, so it seemed to me. I do not believe that I thought further in
those youthful days. Certainly, I thought scarcely at all of what I was
going to find when I returned. I knew simply that I was going home. I
left the best friends that I had ever had, the most congenial home, I
left my love (she never understood). I took a boat. I rented a room in
Washington Place. I stared at the dirty wall—and wondered what madness
had driven me. No matter. I was where I belonged!
d.
The year was 1913 and I was twenty-three. I was alone and miserable as I
had never been. In Paris they had not understood why I had left them.
But in America no one even knew that I was here. I had outgrown my old
friends. I was done with newspapers. Everything that a young man most
needs—companionship, ideas, love—was beyond the ocean. Here? I lay on my
iron cot and stared at the blank walls; I heard the elevated trains
pound past and the arrogant motors shuffle and the crowds press, press
in their weary quest for money—in their vast indifference to all which
made _my_ world. I was unable to eat, unable to sleep—unable to work. At
times, in my weakness, I thought of what I had left behind in Paris. But
always I knew that I was not going back—never going back until I had
proven to my friends abroad, both the Europeans and the Americans, that
I was right in leaving.
In 1914 America was not what the young artist or writer found ten years
later. There were no magazines hospitable to virgin efforts, there were
no Little Theatres, no liberal weeklies. The land seemed a hostile
waste, consumed by the fires of possession. Whatever “literature and
art” there was had to be imported from Europe in order to find a market.
But did not this fact prove that such as I were needed? The very fact
that life was hard here, that life did not seem to want me, that America
was quite resigned to letting me starve—did not this prove that I was
_needed_, and that I had come home?
So I set to work upon the pleasant task of making myself wanted in a
world that seemed to be getting along extremely well without me. I soon
learned that it was getting on so well, chiefly on the surface. I had a
vision then, in those dark days, which gave me light and strength, and
which has never left me.
I saw our land as a fumbling giant child, idealistically hungry as was
no other land in all the West, but helpless to express its hunger. Our
forefathers had come here brimful of religious energy: Puritans from
England, Catholics from Spain, Jews from Germany and Russia. And here
were material things that must be done: a continent to clear, bridges to
build, a nation to house. Our fathers had learned to perform these
substantial chores; they had performed them so miraculously well because
of the spiritual force which drove them. But now that they longed to
express their deeper dreams, their subtler ideals, they did not know
how. So that, for want of better, they poured all their poetry and most
of their religion into the business at hand: made it express their
idealism which they could not express otherwise at all!
We spent so much time making money because the poets had not yet come to
teach us to make better things. We were so proud of our machines because
the builders of more significant beauty had not yet come among us. We
were such busybodies about the personal habits of our neighbors—keeping
them from an innocent drink or even from a cigarette—because the teacher
had not yet appeared to show us better ways of ennobling our souls. And
finally, we marched about in white sheets, passed restrictive laws
against immigration, grew intolerant of the chaos of creeds and races in
our midst, because we were not yet strong enough, mature enough, to
conceive of a unity of inclusion rather than of exclusion.
Now I was ready to see America. I had intellectually or in the flesh
been “round the world.” I had known personally the men of modern Europe,
studied the masters of ancient Greece, Israel, and India. I discovered
America last—which was the right way to discover it, since America is to
be the last word, the summing up of all the yesterdays which have poured
their blood upon the American shores.
I went west. Under the noisy, dirty, braggart mood of Chicago I felt a
childlike spirit—I found childlike men. I found a fertile and sweet
world pushing up in this town which Sandburg called the Hog-butcher of
the world—pushing up under the coal and the grime like springtime grass
beneath the muck of winter.
I helped to edit a country paper in the heart of Kansas. I spoke to the
farmers, wrote for them, lived with them. And though I had done the same
thing with the intellectuals of Paris, I found here a warmth of response
which I had not found abroad. Here in this crude corngrower hungering to
“git America and his dream together,” and in his overworked wife
scheming to give her girls the “culture” she had never had, was a seed
of the spirit which needed only nurture and the sun to flower. And I had
talks in the kitchens of solitary farms that moved me in a way
mysteriously deep and gave me strength.
I lived with coal miners. I found them hungry for light, possessed of an
infallible instinct for the tragic beauty of the world. They, too, were
spiritual seed long underground and ready to push up. And when a fellow
who had mined since he was twelve and who had never seen his dad by
light of day piloted me through a leaky shaft with a care that was
loving and paternal, I realized what I had won by giving up salutes of
another sort in Paris.
I went south—to the country which my mother had left as a baby. I spent
months in lodgings in that slumberous aristocrat of cities, Richmond.
Here, too, were esthetes, weavers of silly images of distant Paradise. I
did not see them. I saw a people, stricken still under the curse of a
past and under the load of an intricate present: a people hungering for
light, for expression—a people hungering and, hence, a people growing. I
came to know the Negroes in the cypress swamps of Alabama and
Mississippi. I lived with them, I spoke to them in their churches and
their schools. In these dark breasts was a flame. I realized the
wondrous wealth of spirit and of dream which America possesses in her
Negroes.
And I saw the Indians of the Southwest pueblos. In their classic
ceremonial dances, in their deeply unselfish religion of nature, in the
dignity and restraint of their lives and culture, I recognized an
American past—and an American example. Here was a spiritual splendor
which America had created. Like all our past it was waning. Would we
create it anew in our own culture?
e.
Finally, after the War, I went again to Europe. I had begun to put my
vision of America into books. Many intellectuals had sneered. A large
group of them had even come together under the leadership of one of the
Americans who spend their time in Paris and had published a fat book to
prove that America was hopeless, an altogether unlivable place. Much of
the response which my books had won had come, not from the
intellectuals, but from those very byways of our country—the farms of
the West, the cities of the North, the fields of the South—where I had
wandered and where I had been nourished. And some of the response had
come from Europe. My books had been translated. And now that I was again
in Paris the writers of that great city called me to them and told me
with warm hospitality that this new America of which I wrote was what
_they_ needed. For, they said, the spiritual power of Europe was
declining. Europe’s noon was past. Europe, which had created and
nurtured us, now needed nurture! If America was indeed to be a land to
distil new spiritual values out of our modern chaos it would be the
savior of the Old World!
Some of the writers of France and England had been here, and were
pessimistic. “Do not believe him,” they said. “He and his sort are only
importations from Europe—they represent a transplanted dream of the Old
World. They cannot thrive in America. They will be crushed out. Their
light is a twilight, not a dawn. The future of America is steel, more
steel; is gold, more gold; is the triumph of a sordid, ignorant Herd.
There is no hope.”
But at these men I smiled. They had seen what I saw as a boy: they had
been repelled by the crude, the ignorant surface....
A few days before I left for home I was sitting in a library infinitely
richer than the one in my father’s house. It was the library of the
master, Anatole France. There he sat in his red skullcap by the open
fire. About him in manuscript, in illuminated volume, in precious
bibelot, ranged wide treasures of European culture, and in him lived the
essence of that culture—the exquisite distillation of the thought of a
hundred ages.
“Make no mistake,” he smiled at me, “Europe is a tale that has been
told. Our long twilight is before us. But I believe in your American
dream. And I will tell you why. It is not because of your books. It is
because of the pictures I have seen, in common magazines, of your girls
and your women. You have said a great deal about Puritanism, about
materialism in America. Those glorious girls belie all that. How could
an ugly world produce such women? How could such women produce an ugly
world?”...
_1925_
2. A SAVAGE ISLE
a.
I’ve been away from home for almost a year. In France, in Germany, in
Lithuania and Poland, in Egypt and Palestine and Tunis, I’ve talked with
eager men about my own fabulous country. Everywhere people knew about
America. They told me all about it. I learned a lot.
I’m a peaceful fellow, not given to argument. And I’m impressionable,
delighted to agree with what is told me. This I find particularly easy
when what I hear is pleasant; when I am taken, for instance, in my
capacity of American, for a citizen of Eldorado or of Ophir. So
gradually, as the months of my absence grew, I found myself accepting
what I heard, in Europe, Africa and Asia, about my native land.
By the time I took ship from Boulogne, this—more or less—is the portrait
of America which the industrialist of Essen, the rabbi of Posen, the
Vilna medical professor, the Tunisian judge, the merchant of Damascus,
the Parisian dentist, the nationalist of Egypt, had impressed upon me:
America ... meaning above all New York ... is the most modern, the most
civilized, the most genteel, the most efficient, the most expeditious,
the most comfortable spot on earth. In America, there are no low or
humble classes. In America, everywhere, the families dwell on the
twentieth floors of palaces equipped with electric ice and radiant heat;
and when they descend to the street it is to roll away in private autos.
In America, everybody has a hand in the state; everybody has a heart for
public welfare; everybody reads; everybody considers everybody’s rights
to peace and comfort. In America, the rich lavish their money upon
scientific progress for its own sake; and of course, in America,
everyone is rich.
... In America, the women are beautiful, free and pure. They are
comrades to men. The American man is as pure as his mother. Vice is not
tolerated, drink is unknown.
... It is true that this American folk is overconcerned with material
well-being. But at least it has uplifted material well-being to the rank
of an art. The American people have perhaps too great a care for money.
But, at least, they spend it with splendor, and get for what they spend
their heart’s desire. For here are gleaming cities, marvelously fed with
sun and air; here are farmlands ribboned with smooth roads and labored
by miraculous machines.
... In America, to sum up, are men and women elegant, cheerful,
leisured, powerful, serene. The rest of the backward world is jealous of
America, of course. The world, in places, quite sincerely thinks that
there are spiritual values which shining America may have missed. But
America is the apogee of material refinement. Beside American towns,
Paris must seem an unkempt village, Warsaw a dumpheap....
b.
Finally my boat put into the great American harbor. I came up on deck,
my eyes shiningly ready to enjoy the America of the talkers of Europe,
Africa and Asia.
I saw no scintillant city rising like an army of arrows toward the Sun,
its father. What I saw was a conglomerate of buildings, formless with
haphazard shapes, a phalanx of skyscrapers as formidable from the
distance as an old comb lacking half its teeth. A sprawling and grimy
town above the noble Hudson. And the famous buildings, if they were at
all the symbol of power, made me think of a baby giant, in weak control
of his muscles, who had heaped this tilting mess of blocks upon the
floor of his playroom.
The river-front streets had a brash rottenness that hurt, after the
mellow rottenness of Fez. The houses were cheap and dirty. They revealed
no imagination: a dull obsession seemed the architect of these
innumerable banks of brick. A folk had dumped these houses where they
stood, with its mind elsewhere or totally absent, with its heart cold or
altogether lacking. As the taxi shunted me along, going slower than a
rickshaw in Pekin (a taxi dirtier than any in Madrid, and driven by a
man who needed but a soiled burnoose and a turban to brother him with
the sword-eater in the Tangier Sacco), I thought of the improvised
squalor in certain modern sections of Egyptian towns and of the far
sweeter and swifter rhythm of the Saharan camel. And as the traffic
crawled under the marshaling terror of the cop, I remembered the ease
and speed with which one flies through the intricate network of Paris.
Fifth Avenue has a splendor; Park Avenue (when at last I reached it)
flaunted the elegance of a Brobdingnagian refrigerator, electrically
cooled. But I’d gone through an hour of back yard and alley to get
there....
I went uptown. I discovered empty lots throughout the heart of the city,
and unpaved stretches of street where my car bumped precisely as I had
been bumped on the winter-logged roads of Poland. Indeed, more and more,
this iridescent city of men’s dreams—in its disorder, in its dirt, in
its noise, in its lack of form and style—brought to my mind the towns I
had seen in Eastern Europe: towns where for ten unceasing years armies,
rebellions, insurrections, pogroms, have spewed their havoc.
I dismounted at last from my taxi, and began to look into the faces of
this most pampered, ultracivilized and genteel people. Since they are
having a good time, enjoying the “top of the world,” why are they so
gloomy about it? Since they are at ease in their Zion of physical
comfort, why are they so uncomfortable, so nervous, so harassed? Since
they have been polished off by all the polishing machines of the
Modernist Machine Age, why do their brutal faces make me quake? I am no
dauntless Galahad. But I have roamed the water front of Antwerp,
searched the night kasbah of Algiers, tramped the lightless wastes of
London’s Wapping, tempted the traps of Cádiz and of Jaffa. I have never
seen faces more sullen, more dehumanized, than these of New Yorkers. I
forgot all about my conversations with the informed gentlemen of Europe,
Africa and Asia. I recalled certain statistics and knew that I was in a
town where thieving is a soft profession and where holdups and
assassinations hugely outnumber the totals in populous European
countries.
Also, I was forced to remember that alcohol intoxicates. In my first ten
hours I saw more drunkenness in my native village than I had observed in
as many months in Spain.
c.
At last I was safely in bed in a room the price of which for the night
was a little over the cost of a week’s rental of a furnished farm in
France. There came to my blasted ears, beneath the zephyrous purr of a
million motors emitting carbon gas and of a thousand radios drenching
the air with the still more noxious fumes of ballyhoo, fragments of
flattering talks about my native land in Paris, Berlin, Warsaw,
Jerusalem and Cairo.
“Comfort” ... I heard: “speed ... efficiency” ... “mechanical
perfection” ... “civilization too easy, too happy, too refined.”... On
the fields of France they had once builded great Gothic myths; and Egypt
has her Sphinx; and Palestine wove the legends of Jehovah. Now, the sons
of these mythmakers croon fables of an America where houses sing with
gladness, and men move noiselessly and swift from pleasure to pleasure.
Please do not mistake me. I have no grouch; I am not pessimistic. I live
in the land of my birth through choice; I deem myself fortunate in being
a New Yorker. But the notion that our country is at an apex of
perfection is the most inept falsehood. We are barbarians in a savage
jungle, we are at the sultriest beginning.
That, precisely, is the fun of living here. Everything, however
primitive and basic, still must be accomplished: the present generation
of Americans are more profoundly pioneers than Daniel Boone, more
original adventurers than Columbus. The myth consists of supposing that
we are, to date, more than a lot of babies rising from the womb of
Europe.
Of course, the European and African and Asiatic supporters of this myth
have been helped by ourselves. They have got their “information” and
their “facts” from the News. That modern Wonder, compact of cable,
print, radio, and motion picture—has it not “linked the whole world
close together,” making each man know all about his brothers? And could
I expect the American myth to fail to carry in Morocco, when it succeeds
right here?
Grab your paper and plunge into the subway. The steel corridors have an
infernal beauty and the subway stinks. The noise deafens you and you are
jammed for forty minutes between strap-hanging troglodytes all reading
the same paper. That paper shrieks an incessant alternation of Lust and
Death, fulfilling the portrait of a savage jungle. No matter. On the
editorial page you will be sweetly informed that your land is the
Pinnacle of Progress, your town the culmination of man’s seeking ages.
And you, too, will be convinced of the American—the modern—myth.
[Illustration: © _Acme_]
d.
I know a way out, if you want one. Let the conduits of “information” and
“news” be placed in the hands of philosophers and men of science. For
instance, give the dailies to the metaphysicians; the weeklies to the
psychologists, the radio and movies to experts in social science. And
let it be stipulated that no edition and no story be released, until the
_entire Board agree upon the truth_. This would at once diminish the
output of press, radio and cinema to precisely what that output was in
the year 1200 B.C., and thereby enhance our accurate knowledge of the
world—and of America—to what that knowledge was in those more illumined
days.
_1928_
3. A MOB AND A MACHINE
I went up to the opening ball game at the Polo Grounds. A number of
thousands of others went along with me. I suppose it may safely be
surmised that all of us were there to have a good time. However varied
our definitions of what a good time is, all of us, at least, must have
had the idea that a good time was to be had at a ball game.
What happened to us, up there, strikes me as pathetic. I am not
referring to the particular brand of ball played that afternoon by the
Giants or the Braves. It was typical baseball, more or less: and it was
the typical scene.
Here was the great stadium filled with the black human mass. The field
is enormous; the stands must be huge to compass the field. The majority
of us were pretty remote from the inner diamond where most of the game
takes place. On the periphery of it all were we—we, the great human
throng—spread parabola-wise around the field. And in one corner of that
field was the tight, shut diamond: and was the machine of players going
through its motions.
It would be hard to exaggerate the abyss that separates a ball game at
the Polo Grounds from the vast crowds that watch it. We all know the
picture of the hungry lad peering at the man in Childs who flips the
wheat cakes on the grid inside the window. It seems to me that that boy
is less remote from his cakes than we were from our ball game.
Just think of those titanic stands of steel. If they are not wholly
filled, their emptiness makes a menacing unlit presence all about,
chilling the spectacle of the game. And if they are packed, they form a
human mob so great it is unwieldy. No normal ball game can stir it more
than ten seconds out of every hour.
We and the teams, moreover, had so little in common! Good baseball, such
as is habitually played by the Major Leagues, is a smooth-running,
impersonal affair. As little is left to the discretion of the players on
the field as it is possible to leave them. They are tools, or rather
parts of a mechanism run by a “mastermind” who sits on the bench.
Batsman and fielder mechanically carry out motions whose plan and
purpose are established for them. Even in the ultimate personal element
that remains—the hitting of the ball, the fielding of the ball—the good
player is a specialist, a coldly trained performer whose ways are very
far removed from the ways of the urban, sedentary throng. The beauty of
baseball, indeed, is precisely in its mechanical perfection. It is
related to the beauty of a machine, rather than of art.
Far, far away is the crowd. It is not close in any sense, as is the
theatre crowd, for instance, close to the actors on the stage. A theatre
is a shut, packed unity: crowd and performers are physically knit. And
what the physical proximity of audience and stage does not effect, the
emotions expressed on the stage supply. Humor, pathos, passion, dancing,
music—these are all symbols enacted by the players and immediately
current in the life of every man and woman watching. But the ball game
is a machine: by and large, it remains as separate from the mob as might
a brilliantly intricate dynamo set out upon the field.
Sitting there, that day, I understood why Babe Ruth—ignoble, fat fellow
that he is—deserves his vogue. I understood that a man like the Babe is
indeed greater than the National Game. It is such as he who enable the
wistful mob to have some sort of contact with the game. For baseball is
only clockwork; but the Babe is a boy—moody, clever, human. He “gets
across.” One crowd sees the game: another crowd follows it on the
scoreboard of Times Square; America reads of it in Kalamazoo and
Junktown. All, with a difference only of degree, are separate from this
highly organized, privately owned, secretly controlled affair of
baseball.
Here comes a player, with whom the crowd can identify itself. Babe Ruth
catapulting the pill into the grandstand is a symbol. There have been
subtler batsmen, but all of them, Lajoie, Wagner, Sisler, Cobb, aimed
for the base hit which stays _inside_ the field. The Babe’s home run is
an effort on the part of the machine to _connect_ with the crowd. When
the ball reaches the bleachers, contact is established. The game and the
watchers of the game for that instant have the ball in common. Babe Ruth
is the demagogue of baseball.
Not only is Babe Ruth greater than the game: such little episodes as the
periodic scandals, so deplored by moral managers and punctilious
pressmen, are little less than godsends. If they did not crop up from
time to time, Judge Landis would do well to invent them. They, too,
introduce into the machinery of baseball certain negotiable passions:
public responses to bribery, temptation, nobility and vice, come to
reinforce the old worn response of partisanship—a response difficult to
sustain when players are swapped from town to town like cattle. Anything
that makes us feel—even if what we feel is only anger—helps the game.
What a hungry, wistful crowd we are, seated in our ascetic seats! The
game itself rarely holds us. Most of us, where we are placed, cannot
spot a ball from a strike, until we see it posted. We cannot tell
Bancroft from Marriott at the bat, without looking up the number and
consulting our score card. And save for a few tense moments, the game is
as static down there as a dead motor on a winter morning.
No wonder we are driven to help ourselves to entertainment!
We call every player by his first name. That helps. It makes him less
remote, away down there.
We shout advice to him. Praise. Vituperation. We josh him, we cuss him
out. That helps. It makes us, in some wise, participants, after all, in
our great National Sport.
When a ball comes our way, we make the most of it. We shout at a long
fly, even if it is caught. We pray for a home run in our particular
direction.
But even when the game runs on, smooth and cold and remote, we can make
use of it. It permits us to act like children—or like madmen. That
helps, by golly! Where else can we scream ourselves hoarse—about
nothing? Where else can we make all the strange, uncivilized noises of
which the human throat is capable? We hoot, shout, boo, scream, whistle.
We get excited—without consequences. We get profane, abusive,
grandiose—without danger of having to pay. Downtown, excitement about
much is bad business. Here, corybantic ecstasy about nothing is good
form. To hell with the ball game, after all. We can enact lyrical dramas
of rage, disgust, beatitude—flinging our jewels of gesture to the empty
air, even if the game be a machine and a sell.
And after an hour and a half of this, we can pack ourselves like grains
of sand into a stifled elevated train, and read in the headlines of the
paper we have just bought what a significant national event we have just
witnessed....
It is quite true that the old-fashioned humble game was better sport.
The bleachers hugged the field. The players were visible: we could see
the sweat on them and the look in their eyes. They made more errors, but
even in that were they not closer to us? Well, like everything else in
our America, the Game’s got bigger—and that means better. Even sport had
to be specialized. It used to be an enjoyable means of moving our own
bodies. Not any more. Now there’s a machine that does the moving, while
our forty thousand bodies sit packed and rancid in the grandstands. You
gotta expect to pay for the privilege of belonging to the most
progressive country on earth.
_1925_
4. MURDER AS BAD ART
Nearly every day you see the statistics in the papers. “Half as many
homicides in Erie in an hour, as in England in an era.” “As many
assassinations in St. Louis in a second, as in Yucatán in a year.” “More
murders in Manhattan in a month, than in Schleswig-Holstein in a
century.” From which it is to be inferred that private slaughter is an
American activity.
When, moreover, you observe the high consideration accorded to our
slayers—a consideration expressed in most cases by letting them alone
(and this, in a democracy where such a privilege is almost unheard of!)
or—in the few authenticated instances of capture—by hero worship and
adulation, it becomes further clear that we regard the murderer somewhat
as Spaniards the matador, as Frenchmen the poet, as Germans the
philosopher, as Jews the prophet.
Murder is an American expression, a folk art. It contains some virtue so
close to our desire that we have protected it jealously from the class
distinctions which begin to encroach on our once so purely democratic
life. The American murderer can win a front page, be he millionaire or
beggar. The same sob sisters will write him up—gilded clubman or lowly
loafer. There is no hierarchy here but Merit; no limit to glory save the
intensest competition. Murder, in short, is an American art. My quarrel
with it is that it is bad art; and that America’s growing devotion to it
threatens our cultural progress.
Consider, first, the psychology of murder. Murder is above all a
solution. We take an elementary case. _A_ hates _B_—hates the sight and
presence of _B_. So _A_ kills _B_. _A_ no longer sees what he hates to
see. _He has succeeded_: he has found a solution. This is the
instinctive murder. We will complicate it with a higher impulse. _A_
wants _B_‘s purse. _B_, alive, would prefer not to give his purse to
_A_. So _A_ shoots _B_ or slits _B_’s throat. _B_ no longer objects to
giving _A_ his purse. _A_, once again, has succeeded. He has found a
solution. This is the emotional murder—what the Europeans know as the
_crime passionnel_: since the commercial desire, the will to earn, is
the dominant American emotion. We go still higher in the category. _A_
wants _B_’s girl, or _B_’s social status as Beer Baron. _B_, active and
alive, is too handsome and too clever. _A_ spoils _B_’s beauty by
bashing in his face, and overcomes _B_’s intellectual superiority by
bashing out his brains. _A_, now unimpeded, wins Girl and Fortune. He
has succeeded again: found a solution again. This is the intellectual
murder: since Shakespeare and Milton severally tell us that love of
woman and love of fame are the last infirmities of the noble mind.
Having thus placed murder under the Microscope provided by a scientific
age, we have detected in it a constant germ: what might be called the
_success bacillus_—the will to a quick solution. Now it must be
understood why murder is so advanced and wide a practice in the United
States. We are believers in success: we are clamorers for a solution: we
are no brookers of delay. Take our three hypothetic situations between
_A_ and _B_; and consider how in a less successful milieu than our own
they might be blunderingly met. A French _A_ hates a French _B_: he
grins and bears it—or he fights, perhaps vainly, to overcome his
hatred—or he avoids _B_—or possibly he comes close to his foe and, by
studying him well, strains to turn hate to love. These are arduous
endeavors, for which there is no _guarantee_ of success. None of them
_gets results_, like arsenic or a bullet.