In philosophy, there were Schopenhauer, Hegel, Spencer, Comte; in the
novel, there were Balzac and Dostoevski; in music, there were Beethoven,
Moussorgsky, Wagner; in painting, there were Delacroix, Ingres, Cézanne;
in the sciences, there were Marx and Darwin. All these men, despite
immense distinctions, were of one family. They were in touch with
objective reality, masters of inquiry, often discoverers in the fields
from which they mined their materials. But their constructions, unlike
the worlds of the great Catholic creators right down to Bach, Descartes,
Racine, were the embodiments of the personal will of their creators.
There is, here, no contradiction; nor were these nineteenth-century
worlds less “real,” because personal, or of less social use. Man is not
an isolated atom. The genius who erects a world in the image of
himself—if his self-search be deep and his self-mastery strong—will
produce a work of universal nature. The more profound the subjective
impulse, the more complete the command over objective nature in order to
fulfill it. That is why the scientific realism of a Cézanne
qualitatively equals that of a Darwin; why a poet like Wagner portrays
the reality of Middle Europe; why an economist like Marx may write as
emotionally as Isaiah; and why we find in the solipsistic verse of a
Rimbaud prophecies, which science has fulfilled, of the nature and
behavior of the atom.
I have needed to speak of these nineteenth-century Titans, because
Sigmund Freud, whose work dates from the 1890’s, is the last of their
line. To understand him, we must know his family. It was a family of men
moved to replace, by their own work, the broken synthesis of Catholic
Europe. They were all absolutists, seeking in some genetic principle of
unitary vision the pattern that God supplied in the old order. The law
may have been progress and reason or (as in Dostoevski and Rimbaud)
their denial; may have been will or (as in Schopenhauer) its overcoming;
it may have been some genetic rule like the survival of the fittest,
sexual selection, Aryan-Lutheran supremacy, class struggle, etc. Always
there was implicit in the texture of these men’s constructions an
absolute rationalism, or the nullification of reason; a faith in the
sufficiency of the senses as a report of truth, or total rejection.
These worlds, risen from an abstract and absolute law, were built of
materials preponderantly personal—more idiosyncratic, indeed (although
the work were a book on economics), than the love lyric of any medieval
poet who accepted his immersion in a common cosmic pattern.
The twentieth century will be different: its creative work will be to
reconcile and integrate apparently contradictory laws by the aid of
supersensory dimensions. It will be the relativistic age, in which the
discoveries of the absolutists of the nineteenth century—Nietzsche and
Marx, Dostoevski and Darwin, Rimbaud and Spencer—will be worked together
for the making not of worlds, but of _the world_, and not less personal
because socially pragmatic. To this new era, barely ushered in by men
like Bergson, Whitehead, S. Alexander, André Gide, Franz Kafka, etc.,
Freud does not belong. But in the perspective of cultural history, he
will be seen as a contemporary of Darwin, Schopenhauer, Dostoevski,
Marx; and he may be known, by the fecundity of his work, as their equal.
b.
Freud began as a physician; as one seeking to heal human ills. But he
found, in the dark places of the human heart, a world as personal,
tragic and universal as the world of Dostoevski. The psychological
system of Freud is, first of all, a great human drama. Here, in the
arcana of the soul, are complex organisms: the superego, dwelling place
of the fathers—conscience and tradition; the id, hinterland of the
immense accumulations of instinct, habit, appetite; and between them the
ego, where lives the individual will. These organisms are interacting
units, from whose clash rise devious characters with strange names:
cathex, complex, sex-urge, death-urge, neurosis, fixation or repression
or sublimation of libido. They are all filled with the life of action;
they make lyric and epic conquests of the objective world; they also
interlock in secret combat or in more terrible alliance, giving forth
the gamut of emotions from horror to ecstasy, and producing the many
mansions of human deed from pastoral beginnings when the infant offers
its prized excrement as a gift to its mother, to heights where men make
philosophies and religions.
This world of Freud has complex unity. Among the welter of symptom,
dream, and cultural act move the “heroes”: the radical urge for life
(sex and self-preservation) and the masochist-sadist hunger, born of
life, for the return to death. And like all the esthetic constructions
of the nineteenth-century Titans, this world has a personal savor. “The
Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud’s pivotal work, in its revelation of a
passionate individual nature may be compared with the “Confessions” of
Rousseau (the father of the century), with Dostoevski’s “Notes from
Underground,” with Volume I of “Capital,” with Schopenhauer’s “The World
as Will and Idea,” and with “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” A man is speaking.
He is building a system from his discoveries and observations by the use
of a legitimate instrument of science. But first and last, _a man_ is
revealing himself. And only less intensely is this true of all Freud’s
books. Whether he writes of the genetic sources of Da Vinci’s art (in
“Leonardo da Vinci”) or of a savage totem (in “Totem and Taboo”) or of a
slip of the tongue (in “Psychopathology of Everyday Life”), he brings
himself to the construction. While with healing hand he touches the
lesions of a soul, he is really carrying to these dark places a flame
from his own Promethean nature.
Most men solve their inner conflicts by forgetting about them (with the
magic of ready-made solutions or of drugs, sexual, mechanical,
alcoholic, patriotic); some men need to create a world of their own to
solve them. Marx, suffering within himself the lesion of social
injustice, created a world that mankind will use as a rationale of cure
for its social diseases. The humbly religious Darwin, agonized by an age
of “Enlightenment” that had dissevered him from God only to marry him
with chaos, forecast a biological order where the human species could
begin again to find the peace of integration between its lowest and its
highest parts. Freud also makes answer to a personal conflict.
He is a man who accepts the dogma of nineteenth-century science. “There
is no other source of knowledge,” he says, “but the intellectual
manipulation of carefully verified observations, in fact, what is called
research ... and no knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition
or inspiration.” This is pure eighteenth-century rationalism. Thus
armed, he goes down into the irrational depths of the soul, a chaos to
be conquered. His highway is the dream; and the Freudian technique of
dream interpretation by word and thought associations and by the use of
symbols is one of the mightiest acts of the imagination. The domain
where the dream has led him, which he calls the id, is a jungle of the
lusts of human organs aprowl like wild beasts among the tropical trees
and swamps of primeval habit. But Freud will not surrender to this
phantasmagoric and miasmic world; he will draw forth from its flux, by
means of reason, energy for the three-dimensional world of reasonable
practice, and this limited world he will insist to be the one reality.
It is a struggle between uneven forces, and the consequence is a
psychological design (called “real”) that is drenched with the
passionate and heroic will of its author.
It is illuminating to compare this Freudian world with the world of
Dostoevski. The novelist explores the same Amazonian jungles of the
unconscious, made manifest in their most morbid extremes. He, too, has
gone down, through the need of an integrating principle that shall
transfigure this chaos into truth. His method is the precise opposite of
Freud’s. Dostoevski follows the unconscious impulse of men to its
irrational source, and he accepts this source as the sole reality,
finding in it his God and his values. He rejects as unreal the
contradictory world of reason and all the social-moral constructs of
reason. This rejected “conscious” world is dream for Dostoevski; the
nineteenth-century culture built from it in Europe is false for him; and
in the obscurantist ecstasy of what Freud calls the “lowest levels of
the id,” the Russian finds his salvation of “waking.” Freud moves toward
the irrational source only to reject of it what reason cannot bind; and
only such energies of the unconscious as reason can draw back into a
world of social conformity will he call “real.” The materials of
Dostoevski’s art, made plastic in the great organisms of his novels, are
identical with the materials of Freud’s world made into the looser
esthetic form of a psychological system.
Dostoevski does not succeed in his absolutist attempt to deny reality to
all experience of reason: if the irrational ecstasy is man’s sole
waking, there is much sleep in his books, and hence their substance. The
same holds with Freud. He would be the first to disclaim victory in his
attempt to naturalize all the energy of the id within the domain of
reason. There is much “sleep” and much darkness in his system: hence its
livingness.
Time and again, Freud is led to limits where he is face to face with
Dostoevski’s “real”—the mystic and the occult. “It can easily be
imagined,” he says, “that certain practices of the mystics may succeed
in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the
mind, so that, for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp
relations in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would
otherwise be inaccessible to it. Whether such a procedure can put one in
possession of ultimate truths [there speaks the absolutist devotee of
reason] may be safely doubted. All the same, we must admit that the
therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis have chosen much the same method
of approach. For their object is to strengthen the ego, to make it more
independent of the superego, ... to take over new portions of the id.
Where id was, there ego shall be.”
Freud does not admit the premise of the mystic method, which is, of
course, that the cosmic lives within the individual unconscious (the id)
so that the following of percepts to their source rounds man’s circle to
God. But Dostoevski, typical mystic in revolt against the world of
reason, would not see the implication in Freud’s rationalist method: if
the findings of reason are universal, reason must be cosmic. This
rationalist premise is also mystic, and also irrationally rounds the
circle between man and God. Freud, like all the nineteenth-century
rationalists, is an unconscious follower of the older, ethical Kant.
Dostoevski was a conscious, and hence a more reasonable, mystic. But
both groups of absolutists, in their attempt to exclude a part of man’s
equipment for finding truth—the one group reason, the other group
organic intuition—are doomed to failure. And in Freud, no less than in
Dostoevski, this awareness of limitations gives the poignant note of the
Titans who are helpless to create a world against the indefeasible God
who is the Whole. In all the great nineteenth-century creations, there
is this discord between the will and the work. It gives to the pages of
Freud a personal vibration that is not the least of their value.
c.
What of the scientific values of Freud’s work? Psychoanalysis is, first
of all, a therapy in the treatment of nervous and psychic disorders.
Thousands of physicians, for the most part in the Central European and
Anglo-Saxon countries, practice it, and seemingly with success. But
therapy is the least important aspect of Freud’s work. Most of the ills
of personal maladjustment which the Freudian analysis may cure are
symptoms of the disorder, economic, social, cultural, of the
contemporary world. The right way to overcome them is to attack the
disease, not its individual symbols. In this task, the light thrown by
Freud on the human psyche is of great importance; the actual relief
given to a few persons is immaterial. The time required by an analysis,
and the expense, make the method (under our present system) available
chiefly to the type of idle woman and parasitic man who are not worth
saving at the price of the lengthy effort which the analyst must devote
to readjusting them into a morbid world. It would really be better for
the whole leisured class, who have supported so many analysts in luxury,
to be converted en masse to the Catholic Church. They could all go to
Lourdes, whose record of cures is vastly more varied. There is this
difference, however. When a patient finds relief at a Catholic shrine,
no one is the wiser: the cure has been worked in an invulnerable
darkness. But when even the most useless society woman is analyzed by a
Freudian, although she may not be cured, the analyst and science know
something more about the human soul. Psychoanalysis as a therapy is
justified, in so far as the physician is more important than the
patient.
Freud, therefore, is within the tradition of his Jewish fathers, to whom
Wisdom was never (as it was with the Hindus) an end to be independently
attained, but the common fruit of the tree of humane living. Freud, the
physician, is moved to heal the suffering of his fellows; and from this
humble, socially immaterial ministration has issued a deep knowledge.
I am not qualified to judge the precise final values, as objective
science, of the Freudian system. But, of course, objective science has
no final values. Despite its assumption of definitive laws, the light of
generations makes of the science of any epoch a mere trend or method
toward knowledge. That scientific work whose path is followed farther,
is good work; and here is its ultimate value. Thus the mathematical
science of a Pascal or a Leibnitz is good; and in this sense, it is
already clear that the Freudian technology is good. His dicta on any
specific problem, such as the origin of neurosis or the setup of the
psyche, may be amended. Indeed, Freud has himself refuted several of his
early propositions. For instance, he used to hold that in the anxiety
neurosis, the repression caused the anxiety, and his analytic experience
has now taught him, as indicated in “A New Series of Introductory
Lectures to Psycho-Analysis,” that the anxiety comes first, and that its
source is a (disguised) actual trauma. In the technique of analysis,
this reversal is important. But it reveals at what deeper level than any
fact or system lies the scientific value of Freud’s work. Freud’s vision
of the soul as an organism in dynamic integration with the physical
body, with the social body, and with the historic body of mankind, has
given us a _method_. And by this method we have come more close than we
had come before to the sources of behavior, to an anatomy of ideas and
emotions. Already, the uses of the method have proliferated widely. It
has shed light on the social origins of man, anthropological and
cultural; and on the problems of character formation without which there
can be no science of education and no science of ethics. By its
fecundity, the method of Freud’s psychology will perhaps prove to be as
good science as the method of Darwin’s biology or of the Marxian
historical critique.
I have said that the least value of Freud’s work is its therapy; I may
amend this by saying that in therapy lie its greatest evils. Persons who
go to psychoanalysis to be cured of neurosis or of a functional
maladjustment, inevitably look for guiding values which anciently were
given by religion. They seek _a way of life_; and the analyst is placed
in the position of spiritual leader. This is not Freud’s claim. He
scouts all Weltanschauung beyond the scientific acceptance and ordering
of the report of the senses. These rationalists are all naïve in their
failure to recognize the limiting dogmatism of their creed. A measuring
rod that negates what lies beyond its scope is the sternest of
dogmatists. The man who disclaims any individual norm of values, and yet
deals with the subtlest problems of human adjustment, implicitly accepts
the values that are current and actively rejects what lies outside his
measure. The patient is sick because he does not fit into the world as
he finds it; the analyst who cures him helps him into this world, which
means that he has set up, as the desired norm, the values of the world.
If the analyst is not aware of this, his acceptance is merely the more
blind and his work upon the soul of the patient the more irresponsible.
This is a serious criticism to be made against psychoanalysis from the
viewpoint of a world sorely in need of revolution in the domain of
values. And it may well be that the maladjusted neurotic of today is
closer to the norm of healthy social transformation than the neurotic
whom Freudian analysis has made “fit and content” within a society of
false individualism and cultural decay.
A more serious, because more philosophical, indictment is that the
Freudian system (not the method) makes of mental life a region without
polarity with either cosmos or individual person. The explorer Knud
Rasmussen once asked an Eskimo, who lived within the ice of the Arctic
Circle and whose food was the raw flesh of caribou, “What do you
understand by the soul?” And Ikinilik, the savage, answered: “It is
something beyond understanding, that makes me a human being.” Freud, the
man, would probably agree; Freud, the nineteenth century rationalist,
cannot admit of this “something beyond understanding.” He must draw his
charts of human behavior, his maps of the mind, without allowance for
this “x.” But what if the “x” is needed to produce, from Freud’s
hypothetic id and ego, the human being? What if all Freud’s analytic
counters, lacking this “x,” do not add up into the synthesis—the actual
person? “The id,” says Freud, “is the whole personality and the ego is
within it.” But Freud’s id is a chaos of instinct and desire, timeless
and spaceless, from which by definition all cosmic connection is
excised. How does it manage, out of its anarchic tidings, to throw up
the ego and the superego with their cultural cosmic sublimations? Where
is the forming factor? Dostoevski, who finds God at the irrational and
subnormal source, has a more logical explanation. Jung, the Swiss
psychologist, although he lacks Freud’s intellectual genius and although
his work is not, like Freud’s, a great esthetic body, is more logical,
calling the id the “collective unconscious” and finding there the cosmic
seed that can explain the human fruit. You can insert no new element,
says Whitehead, in an evolving organism. It must be there at the
beginning. Freud, in his rationalist refusal to allow within the id, at
least hypothetically, the mystic “x” which can alone explain the
flowering from the muck of the intellectual and esthetic capacities of
man, meets the tragic fate of all rationalists whose ultimate syllogism
proves the irrationality of the rationalist dogma.
But whatever the reader judges to be the validity of the Freudian system
or the virtues of his own use of his method, he must know, as he reads
the books of Sigmund Freud, that he stands within the presence of true
human greatness. Freud, indeed, is one of the supreme intellectual
heroes of our time: one of those men who make life more livable for us
all through the fact of their existence. In his writings, we sense the
heroism of his effort, armed alone by faith in reason, to conquer cosmic
continents. We think of the first Spaniards, exploring with the
blunderbuss and a Cross, yet giving the Americas to man. Freud, also,
with a faith and weapons equally foredoomed, has discovered a new world
which, by outliving him, will make him immortal.
_1934_
6. SHERWOOD ANDERSON
One must approach the stories of this storyteller in the spirit of
reverence, in the spirit of mystery—as one approaches the child. Let the
critical come after. If one begins by analyzing Sherwood Anderson, one
will not receive him; and all one’s analysis will go for naught. Let him
lodge in us ungrudgingly; not till then let our intellectual
questionings have play.
For his tales are a testimony; and they testify to the still infantile
revelation of Our America. What would have happened in Europe, if the
naïve confessionals of convert Gaul and Frank and Goth had been analyzed
before they were accepted? Anderson’s books are a relation of the search
for fresh religious values; a groping toward an Apocalypse in our own
inchoate terms. Woe to us if we do not nurture this act in the childlike
simplicity of the man who gives it!
We shall create a Scripture in our land. And of the stuff of Scripture
are the glowing songs of “Winesburg, Ohio,” “A Story Teller’s Story,”
the subsequent volumes. Scripture they are not. They are not hard,
clear, strong enough for that. They are to our new Scripture that shall
be, possibly, as were the lost Songs of Miriam to the subsequent Books
of Moses; as the pre-Vedic psalms to the Rig-Veda; as the stammering
testimonies before St. Isidore of Christians from the Rhine to the
Guadalquivir, to that medieval Scripture of Abélard, Anselm, Aquinas.
They are source, a living inchoate source. We must let them speak in us
and for us, in order to grow beyond them.
If we fail to accept them, America will turn against them. There are
already signs of this revulsion—weakness turned into bravado—in the
shrill gestures of young-old men like Ernest Hemingway. We shall have to
spew out this false maturity; we shall have to go back and _live
through_ Anderson in order to grow beyond our childhood.
From the molder heap of nineteenth-century America rise flames of
longing and dance a moment in the air. Then they fall back into the
smoke, lost, fetidly lost. There is still too much damp muck for the
divine bonfire which America shall be. We cannot yet burn. We can get
ready to burn.
Such is the burden of Sherwood Anderson’s books; they are a playing of
wistful flames over the muck heap. There have been other flames,
hardier, greater. Either they came before our modern muck heap, or they
played on its edge. The flames of Thoreau, Melville, Poe, the fire of
Whitman, stood clear enough away to cast light to Europe. Anderson’s
flame is more modest. But it is at the heart, not at the edge of the
molder. It does not light Paris and London; it helps warm _us_. It helps
prepare the muck heap for the great bonfire. Its value lies in its
inwardness, in its humble staying.
All the tales of this storyteller are little inward-creeping tongues of
fire. Anderson himself is a fragment flame flickering through America’s
chaos: licking, curling, dancing, smoking, fainting. He is not organic,
he has no body and no eyes. He ignites nothing. He warms, he lessens the
dank, he cleanses the stench of the muck heap. After, the bonfire.
When we have accepted him, we can place him; and by this means place
America. Looking upon this man’s nature, listening to his words, above
all to the dull beat of his feet, we realize what a task this is: to
make America into a holy land. Elijah and Amos wrestling with their
idolaters, the Judges and Prophets swearing to force their pack of
stubborn shepherds into the Word of God, had a task no harder than ours
who would make America into a luminous land. If you have doubts, here
are books to strengthen despair; if you hesitate in your need to
transcend despair, here are books to hearten you by their songs of man’s
mysterious emergence.
Whence came Sherwood Anderson? and what had he? If this be not God in
his blundering step, in his blinded eye, then God is not immanent on
earth. Not intelligence, not shrewdness, not cultural purpose, moved
this man. To the end he will be deaf, dumb, blind. The Midwest lives in
his stories but not in his knowledge of himself. He comes to New York, a
man past forty years. Can you say that he saw even one skyscraper, even
one person? High men, low men, bitter men and sweet, dance in equal
delirium before him. He goes to Europe, a pilgrimage through the
detritus of his own youthful readings about Europe. So he has gone
through life: so, in a true esthetic form of faint emergence out of
chaos, he has created his tales. Creeping flames searching in muck and
drench for the dry brand, striving so wistfully hard to catch on, to
ignite!
I spoke with a sharp critic from England about “A Story Teller’s Story.”
He disposed of it with ease: it lacked form, it lacked clarity of image
and thought, it gave nothing of Ohio, nothing of New York; it was vague
in picturing the associates of childhood, the transition years; it had
no incisive word on the artists encountered in the East. The European
mind could not touch the flavor of this revelation. What it saw as
muddle is search; what it saw as evasion is honest effort.
Sherwood Anderson used to sing of the gods, the new-old gods coming out
of the corn into the streets of Chicago. Primitive gods they were,
almost phallic. Mere trunks of power, moving; mere conveyancers of life
greyly luminous into the builded blackness of our cities. Sherwood
Anderson is such a god, himself. There must be many, ere the new Elohim
grow into the new Jehovah.
_1926_
7. HART CRANE