sharpen a just point. It is literally true that if greatness be ever in
a man or a race, it must potentially have been there at the outset.
Therefore the beginning expressions of that man or race will hold the
germ of their significance. Most men, moreover, fail (perhaps most races
also) to fulfill their spiritual promise. The promise universally
exists. No child, no child-race is without it. Only the mature
achievement is rare. And so it follows that the search for spiritual
values among children will be, by and large, more fruitful than among
men and women. But to say that the art expression of all children gives
more than the art expression of all adults, because children all have
the germ and adults seldom the flower—only this bad logic can lead us to
conclude that child art and folk art are best, or even always good. Folk
art is the seed of great art: seeds are more numerous than flowers. To
cultivate the seed at the expense of the flower is a defeatism and a
folly we are not quite cured of.
But folk art is not naïve in its elements, any more than are the
babblings of the “purest” child. It is, more often, the naïve mirroring
and mimicry of ideas caught from above. The emotions of folk art are
childish. Yet they are the result of unconsciously inherited ideas,
imposed by ruling classes. Take, for instance, the folk arts of medieval
Christian Europe, the spirituals of the American Negro slave. Did the
folk invent the intricate theology and philosophy on which they rested?
Rather, they vulgarized the product of intellectual minorities—Prophets,
Plato, Plotinus and the Patrists: made it a pabulum, at last, which
later intellectuals could re-employ for the creating of more cultivated
art. Another example: Russian folk music reveals traces of liturgical
and synagogical music. Now, a new group of cultivated artists—Rimsky,
Stravinsky, Ornstein—reforms this popularized pabulum of older
minorities into a fresh intellectualized music.
[Illustration: © _Fairchild Aerial Surveys_]
Or consider our jazz. Jazz is not so much a folk music—like the Negro
spirituals—as a folk accent in music. It expresses well a mass response
to our world of piston rods, cylinders and mechanized laws. The response
is of the folk and is passive. The nature of our world itself is due to
the work and temperament of minorities alien to the jazzmakers. Jazz
expresses a personal maladjustment to this world, righted by sheer and
shrewd compliance. And this, doubtless, is why the races at once most
flexible and most maladjusted—the Negro and the Jew—give the best jazz
masters. Since the rhythm of our age is not transfigured in jazz, as in
truly creative art, but is assimilated, the elements of the age itself
which we may disapprove will appear also in jazz. In other words, a folk
art—being so largely an art of reaction and of assimilation—will contain
the faults of the adult minorities that rule the folk, as well as the
pristine virtues of the people.
And we have other folk arts. “The Rosary”—jazzless, European
saccharine—is as truly a folk art as any of the Berlin or Gershwin
ditties. Harold Bell Wright’s books—messes of Victorian notions in
decay—are also an American folk art. The New York “Daily News” is the
daily art of a folk numbering several millions.
The adorers of folk art in its own divine right need but observe what
they adore. That will be enough to cure them. Nor should they forget
that in all culturally early epochs, dissatisfaction with folk art is
one of the incentives for the production of great art.
_1926_
5. STRAIGHT STREETS
What is the meaning of our cities of rectangular streets? What is their
effect on our souls? It is plain that Nature likes curves. You may find
rough angles in rocky mountain wastes, or in the sort of creature that a
microscope makes vaguely visible. But the Nature of man and near to man
is a sinuous, rounded being. Think of our bodies and of the bodies of
animals—not a Euclidean angle in the lot. Think of the shapes of
flowers, plants, trees; of the configuration of the hills and fields; of
the sweep of waters; of the globe. Now think of our interior worlds. Our
physical dynamo has not a straight line in it. And our mental digestion
is tortuous as our intestines. Logic may proceed theoretically like a
plummet; but there’s nothing natural in such logic. Draconian justice
might be called rectilinear, but it, too, does not exist in Nature.
Uprightness when it is not tempered by the curves of mercy is repellent.
Man’s mind moves in curves. His thoughts arch, vault, melt into reverie.
Dream and sense swerve into each other. His heart, too, is full of
arcuations. And the heart’s desires are parabolas. There is naught
angular within us. Nor above us. Space, we have learned from Riemann,
has a crimp and a curve. The “straight gravitational line” of Newton
proves to be the “Einstein shift.” From the detour of solar systems back
upon themselves within a spheroid Space, to the devexities of dream, man
has a universe full of everything but angles. And yet, the American
urbanite has elected to spend his days in a gridiron.
The towns of the Old World were and still are curved creatures. From
Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope you will not find an ancient city that
does not gyre like a heart or twist like the intestines. Indeed, the
European links angles with humanity only in his thought of death. Christ
was killed on a cross. St. Laurentius was roasted on a grid. When the
fanatical Felipe of Spain built a monastery to express his contempt for
life and his withdrawal to the grave, he patterned it after a
gridiron.[5]
Curves rest: angles tire. How often the American abroad lets his eye
float down the gentle swerve of a street and is soothed sensuously, and
is moved as by a freshet of pleasant impulse. It is the curve! The
jolliest street in Manhattan—the one that is most human, most laughing,
most restful—is Broadway, which has a curve or two; and even at its
straightest runs diagonally to the ruthless grid, thus giving the
delusion of a flex. No wonder it has become the avenue of shows, the
road for informal saunterings clear up to Harlem. No wonder the
automobile, our pathetic symbol of escape, has made Broadway its home.
If straight bobbed hair delights, the reason is that it sets off the
curves of our girl’s face. Her straight dress has value in so far as it
reveals the rondures of her body. American civilization has
revolutionized the shape of cities. It may yet appreciably alter the
shape of man.
For we seem to be angularized in almost everything else. Not alone our
streets are straight and stiff. Our houses are as rigid as if they were
made of the building blocks of Brobdingnagian babes. Where else is there
a spectacle like the recently grown splendor of Park Avenue—that parade
of pompous tombs, shutting in wealth and shutting out the sun? Is it
possible that the disfavor of Riverside Drive as a residence street
among our leaders is due to the swinging rise and fall of that untypical
parkway? Our laws, like our houses, become more rectangular and upright.
Our morals are strait like the gates of Ellis Island. Even our faces....
If there be in all the world a human countenance made of angles instead
of the immemorial curves, it must be that of Calvin Coolidge. So perhaps
biology will give way after all to the rectangular will of our American
world. Perhaps the flapper of tomorrow will have pyramidal breasts....
There is a reason for all this, and a good one. If you care to go to the
heart of the matter you entrain by the Santa Fé and alight in some New
Mexican pueblo.
The Indian’s culture is prophetic of what our culture must be. His
nature is a guide to the understanding and achievement of our own. This
does not mean that we are going to give up motors, and dress in paint
and feathers, nor that the skyscraper will dwindle to the wigwam, nor
even that our women at some distant date will be swinging their papooses
across their shoulders. But it does mean that there is something deeper
than these discrepancies between the Indian and ourselves. Something
deeper, which we share.
The Amerind was profoundly, beautifully adjusted to the land. If you
study him in his demeanor, his dance, his music, his pyramiding pueblos
or his simple tepees, in his flinted arrows, in his decorations, you
will find that the general symbol of his expression is a curve so sharp
and so severe that it barely escapes being an angle. The curve is the
way of acceptance: the angle is the way of resistance. America is a
feverish world. Its geological tempo is not like that of Europe. It is
far more terribly intense. I am certain that when the ancestors of the
Indian crossed to America from Mongolia (or Atlantis) they resisted this
atmospheric fury, as have we, with an angular restraint. That reaction
was not a culture, any more than our present reactions from Europe or
from mechanical civilization constitute a culture. The Indian culture
began when his innate spiritual and intellectual values formed a
solution with the world about him: his culture was achieved when the
responses between his soul and the world had rounded into a unified
_life_ which expressed both fully. After many ages, the Indian’s first
reactive restraint toned down, and became the subtle and fertile curve
of the Indian music, the symbolic gesture of his dance, the exquisite
reticence of his demeanor.
Recently Dr. Jung of Zurich was in this country and made a visit to the
pueblos in which he had been rightly advised that he would find
archetypical remains of classic Indian culture. Dr. Jung had
psychoanalyzed many Americans, and found in them all (whether their
ancestry was Nordic, Latin or Semitic) a unique alliance of _wildness
and restraint_ which did not exist in the European nature. Dr. Jung’s
intuition told him that he would find this combination, so hidden in our
souls, culturally expressed in the Indian pueblo. He was right. Despite
the ponderous luggage with which we came from Europe and which so
differs from what the Indian brought along, we must inevitably go the
Indian’s way in the spirit, since we have come his way in the flesh.
When Babbitt tells us that American towns are laid out “regular” because
it “pays,” he does not know how deeply he is right. Regularity and
angularity pay, indeed, because such is the beginning of our
self-assertion against a cosmic factor. In our straight streets, in our
jazz, in our dress, in our morals, in our lantern-jaw Puritans, in our
raillike girls, we manifest the first stage of resistance to the furious
fire which is the nature of our world. The rigid angles will smooth out,
will take on the curves of life—will become the forms of our American
culture.
_1925_
_III. IDEAS_
1. SERIOUSNESS AND DADA
(_An Exchange with Malcolm Cowley_)
a.
It is possible in small space to touch but briefly, and upon one of its
phases, the complex and defunct Dada movement. Its immediate progenitors
were the Italian heirs of Athens and of Rome—they called themselves
futurists: a restless Jew whose ancestors had settled in Rumania brought
it to Paris. It had behind it, therefore, the ripe Mediterranean
littorals and the full growth of Europe. It was a salutary burst of
laughter in a world that felt itself too old. Europe was crystallized
and desired a solvent. It creaked in stratified forms and laws and
notions, and it yearned to explode.
The War was a violent but unsatisfactory excursion of a similar sort.
The ponderous machinations of diplomacy had prepared this laughter of
young millions rushing to a bright shambles from the straitened gloom of
ordered cities and inherited farms. But the war was too superficial.
Jaded Europe learned the inconsequent effect of such inebriety as death
and murder. The deep spirit of the land was unmoved by columns of men
miles long and by guns that raked cities. It was the esthetes of
France—the solemn romanticists, the shrill Parnassians, the symbolists,
the votaries of Bergson, it was the pragmatists of Germany and the
rhetoricians of Italy, who invited the release of Dada by their
formulations, hedgings-in and dogmas. There is no doubt that the face of
Europe yearned for the smashing of a few cathedrals. But also the heart
of Europe hungered after the battering of a few spiritual laws.
Dada was an emanation of this will of a too sober, too mature, too
sanctified rationalist church. Scampering in disarray against metrics
and the still more cloying bondages of “freedom,” imping against the
roll of such millstones as Truth, as Unity, as Beauty, Dada was as
logical as the most Freudian hallucination. It was an eruption, a
breakup, a shower: it was a jag and a reversion. And having cooled the
face of the old land and made Europe forget her uncomfortable age, it
disappeared.
Good jokers, the Dadaists were: wistful creators, against sour sense, of
sweet absurdity. But they did nothing more ridiculous than the
installation of the Dada mood in American letters. Europe called for
Dada by antithesis: America for analogous reasons calls for the
antithesis of Dada. For America _is_ Dada. The richest mess of these
bean-spillers of Italy, Germany and France is a flat accord beside the
American chaos. Dada spans Brooklyn Bridge; it spins round Columbus
Circle; it struts with the Ku-Klux Klan; it mixes with all brands of
bootleg whisky; it prances in our shows; it preaches in our churches; it
tremolos at our political conventions. Dada is in the typical Western
university that spends $50,000 on cows and $200 on books. It is in the
esthetics of Mr. Bryan, whose favorite work of art is any old Madonna.
It is in the commercial comedy of our advertisements. (DO YOUR DUTY:
CHEW MIXLETS GUM. BE AN AMERICAN: THROW YOUR RUBBISH HERE.) It is in the
counterpoint of callow Hollywood and the immemorial desiccation of the
California desert. It is in the medley of strutting chimneys and bowed
heads, of strutting precepts and low deeds that make America. We are a
hodgepodge, a boil. We are a maze of infernos and nirvanas. Our brew of
Nigger-strut, of wailing Jew, of cantankerous Celt, of nostalgic
Anglo-Saxon, is a brew of Dada. No wonder they imported our essential
chaos to lighten the regularities of France! But we are young, and what
we need is a bit of mature action. We are fantastic ourselves, and what
we need is integrating thought. We are the most fecund joke on earth—for
the overserious others. What we need, by way of rounding our lives into
livableness, is a bit of seriousness for ourselves.
Our complexities provoke strange paradox in our deeds. Ourselves a
spontaneous combustion of contrariety and antithesis, there grew up in
us a fear and a shame of the spontaneous. (This is, of course, a trait
of adolescence.) In order to become unspontaneous, we turned to Europe.
Our attention was caught by a lot of youths of age on a “bust” of
spontaneous laughter. In all solemnity, we artificed their spontaneity,
crowning thereby the best of the Dada jokes. But we did not create Dada
art. Dada art arose from the traditional maturity of Europe. The
intellectual stuff and stamina, in our own case, were lacking: and what
we got were weakling strains of the European pose muddled with American
incompetence and lost against the background of American bewilderment.
A healthy reaction to our world must, of course, be the contrary of
Dada: it must be ordered and serious and thorough. Dada worked well in
overmature Europe. We, by analogue, must be fundamental, formal. That,
indeed, is the proper mood of youth. The young cutup in the literature
of our land is the bromide. We need him doubtless, but humbly in the
rank and file. To be coruscant, smart and swift in the American language
is to be platitudinous and banal. Therefore it is that the literature
which poses as most advanced in the United States is for the most part
quite the contrary—is as undifferentiate, indeed, from the common
wallow, as the Mecca Mosque on Fifty-fourth Street, as the Hearst
headlines, or as were the jokes of Josh Billings. Our cosmopolites who
think that they are emulating Aragon and Cocteau and Firbank, our local
realists and shockers who think they are reforming us, are all in
reality but sweepings of the immense centrifugal action of the American
world. Our surface twists and scintillates and shrieks. They are caught
in it, they are slavish functions of the American mass which they
profess to lead. They are the reflections of a world that is Dada and
that is in danger of becoming narcissistic: of growing infatuated with
its own twitching image.
The first step in the absorption and control of our Dada Jungle is the
achievement of a serious, of a literally religious temper. The academies
are turned away from America: their earnestness is frivolous. The
neoclassicists are turned away from America: their nostalgia is anemic
and their grace is shallow. The realists are submerged by America. The
pragmatists are bluffed by America. The clever and decorative boys who
clutter our “serious” magazines are reflecting not even America’s
surface, but Europe’s thirsty reflection of our surface. None of this is
serious, although doubtless all of this has its place in the chemistry
of ferment....
If we can produce a handful of serious creators—men unafraid of
unpopular words like philosophy, profundity, saintliness, devotion—and
if we can keep them alive and at work a score of years, perhaps there’ll
be a start toward integration: and after several hundred years, we may
be mature enough to inspire a Dada of our own.
b.
_Dear Mr. Frank_:
The progress of literature (and here progress does not imply a
betterment) is largely a series of reactions, a passage from one extreme
to the other: romanticism succeeding classicism, realism against
romance, estheticism against naturalism and Dada against the esthetes.
But given the fact that every national literature starts from a
different point and follows a different course, their reactions of a
given moment can hardly be the same. For American writers to revolt from
the tradition of Remy de Gourmont or Mallarmé is empty imitation, a
gesture with no more significance than could be given to a French
protest against anticigarette laws in the state of Kansas.
To this measure your attack, in the last issue of 1924, against a
hypothetical group of American Dadas was completely justified. It would
have been more valuable, however, less obviously biased, had you gone on
to consider that the progress of literature is also a discovery of new
principles, involving a rejection or reaffirmation of the old; and that
such principles are international.
To call Dada “a ‘bust’ of spontaneous laughter” was absurd. You were on
safer ground when you spoke of it as a reaction against European writers
whom you listed as “the solemn romanticists, the shrill Parnassians, the
symbolists, the votaries of Bergson ... the pragmatists of Germany and
the rhetoricians of Italy”; or when you added that since few of these
schools were represented in America, a similar American reaction would
be stupid.
But Dada was also a discovery: that nonsense may be the strongest form
of ridicule; that writing is often worst when it is most profound,
saintly or devoted and best when it is approached in a spirit of play;
that associational processes of thought often have more force than the
logical; that defiance carried to the extremes of bravado is more to be
admired than a passive mysticism.[6] Dada was the sense of exhilaration
which was born when our old shackles were tested and found to be rusted
away.
There was nothing geographical in these discoveries. But you prefer to
play geographer.
You have been to Paris and carry back the gossip of Monsieur X the poet
and Monsieur Y the novelist. Other American writers (I was one) have
been to Paris. Some met Paul Fort and wrote polyphonic prose in his
manner, some met Paul Valéry and became classicists, some met Soupault
or Tzara and wrote a Yankee Dada, some met Jules Romains and his little
group, studied his treatises, adopted his more solemn faults with some
of his virtues and are proud to be called the Unanimists of America.
There were a few Americans who met many writers of many schools, took
the best of each and retained enough personal force to write about their
own surroundings in their own manner, but you, Mr. Frank, are not
generally included in their number.
Neither am I. One tries to keep free of the ten schools and two
academies, but in this day of slogans we must all be ticketed, must
possess a little slip of red, white or yellow cardboard printed with a
name. I was in doubt which name to choose, but your article decides me.
Let me therefore be considered as your butt: the clever but not
coruscant, smart or swift young man who clutters our more serious
magazines, the American Dada.
MALCOLM COWLEY
_Dear Mr. Cowley_:
It was good of you to send me a copy of what you consider your answer to
my article “Seriousness and Dada,” with the invitation that I—as you
phrase it—“continue the debate.” I have read carefully what you say; and
I am forced to conclude that if there is to be a debate upon the
principles suggested in my little essay, it has yet to begin. Until it
does, I rest.
Many questions of fact rather than of theory are brought up, it is true,
by your letter: but they are irrelevant to the issue. I might point out
that your definition of the progress of letters is a good juvenile one,
defining nothing. I might suggest, after your linking of the term
“mysticism” with the adjective “passive” that you study a mystic, taking
your choice from Hosea, Plato, Paul, Plotinus, Gabirol, Abélard,
Aquinas, Bernard, Roger Bacon, Dante, Spinoza, Pascal, Teresa, Calvin,
Blake, Dostoevski, Whitman, or any other who may appeal to you, and
explain to us why and how this mysticism is passive. Finally, I might
refer to your allusion to myself as having “been in Paris and returned
with the gossip of M. X. and M. Y.” or to your veiled reference to my
American “unanimism,” as convicting you of an impertinence which in turn
is the result of an ignorance so essential as to disqualify you in your
present temper from true intelligent discussion.
However, all of this is aside the point of my paper which sought by no
means to destroy American Dada, but merely to put it snugly in its
little place. The one statement in your letter which has the force of
relevance is that in which you volunteer to be considered an American
Dada. Of course, one must accept you so, since you insist upon it. I
admit, however, that I for one could accept you in this guise with less
regret had not my acquaintance with your poetry convinced me that you
will be fit for better things when you achieve the moral courage to
confront the reality of our world, and the spiritual energy to take
issue with it; instead of permitting yourself to be flung off by its
centrifugal action, in the fond belief that because you fly off to
Nothing in a graceful pirouette and with a foreign oath upon your lips
you are being any the less booted and beshat by the very elements of
life which you profess to despise.
W. F.
_This exchange appeared in the December issue of 1924, a little
magazine edited and published by Edwin Seaver.... Of course, out of
Dada have come the surréalistes; and the best of their leaders
(Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, André Breton, etc.) combine their
romantic creed with communism. Malcolm Cowley has moved in a similar
direction. At least one of the important writers associated with Dada,
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, has moved into fascism, like Marinetti and
other earlier Italian futurists._
2. MR. MENCKEN, KING OF THE PHILISTINES
America, which protects its deer and partridges, still has perpetual
open season for philosophy hunting. Dr. Durant turned “The Story of
Philosophy” into a best seller by the shrewd device of leaving
philosophy out and putting in its place anecdotal stories, whole
chapters on nonmetaphysical authors, and his own not too subtly diffused
contempt for the entire silly business of “ultimate problems.” John
Dewey, the most characteristic American mind of his generation, has
always been an antiphilosopher at heart (with unconscious vestiges of
the poor side of Hegel). And here is Mr. Mencken, tripping upon the
autumnal scene, all decked out in leather jerkin, hunting cap, cartridge
belt, and his usual supply of automatic popguns.