has yet done. His best writing is in it, and his best observation.
What interests him fundamentally is the conflict between the natural
impulses of men and women and the conventions of the society that
they are parts of. The struggles he depicts are not between heroes
and villains, dukes and peasants, patriots and spies, but between the
desire to be happy and the desire to be respected. It is, perhaps, a
tribute to the sly humor of God that whichever way the battle goes,
the result is bound to be disastrous to the man himself. If, seeking
happiness in a world that is jealous of it and so frowns upon it, he
sacrifices the good will of his fellow men, he always finds in the end
that happiness is not happiness at all without it. And if, grabbing
the other horn of the dilemma, he sacrifices the free play of his
instincts to the respect of those fellow men, he finds that he has also
sacrificed his respect for himself. Hergesheimer is no seer. He does
not presume to solve the problem; he merely states it with agreeable
variations and in the light of a compassionate irony. In “Cytherea” it
takes the ancient form of the sexual triangle--old material, but here
treated, despite the underlying skepticism, with a new illumination.
What we are asked to observe is a marriage in which all the customary
causes follow instead of precede their customary effects. To the eye of
the world, and even, perhaps, to the eye of the secondary figures in
it, the Randon-Grove affair is no more than a standard-model adultery,
orthodox in its origin and in its course. Lee Randon, with an amiable
and faithful wife, Fanny, at home in Eastlake, Pa., in the Country-Club
Belt, with two charming children at her knee, goes to the hell-hole
known as New York, falls in love with the sinister Mrs. Savina Grove,
and forthwith bolts with her to Cuba, there to encounter a just
retribution in the form of her grotesque death. But that is precisely
what does _not_ happen--that is, interiorly. Savina actually has
little more to do with the flight of Randon than the Pullman Company
which hauls him southward. It is already inevitable when he leaves
Eastlake for New York, almost unaware of her existence. Its springs are
to be sought in the very normalcy that it so profoundly outrages. He is
the victim, like Fanny, his wife, of a marriage that has turned upon
and devoured itself.
Hergesheimer was never more convincing than in his anatomizing of this
_débâcle_. He is too impatient, and perhaps too fine an artist, to do
it in the conventional realistic manner of piling up small detail.
Instead he launches into it with a bold sagittal section, and at once
the play of forces becomes comprehensible. What ails Randon, in brief,
is that he has a wife who is a shade too good. Beautiful, dutiful,
amiable, virtuous, yes. But not provocative enough--not sufficiently
the lady of scarlet in the chemise of snowy white. Worse, a touch
of stupid blindness is in her: she can see the honest business man,
but she can’t see the romantic lurking within him. When Randon, at
a country-club dance, sits out a hoe-down with some flashy houri on
the stairs, all that Fanny can see in it is a vulgar matter, like
kissing a chambermaid behind the door. Even when Randon brings home
the doll, Cytherea, and gives it a place of honor in their house, and
begins mooning over it strangely, she is unable to account for the
business in any terms save those of transient silliness. The truth
is that Cytherea is to Randon what La Belle Ettarre is to Cabell’s
Felix Kennaston--his altar-flame in a dun world, his visualization of
the unattainable, his symbol of what might have been. In her presence
he communes secretly with the outlaw hidden beneath the chairman of
executive committees, the gypsy concealed in the sound Americano. One
day, bent upon God’s work (specifically, upon breaking up a nefarious
affair between a neighboring Rotarian and a moving-picture lady), he
encounters the aforesaid Savina Grove, accidentally brushes her patella
with his own, get an incandescent glare in return, discovers to his
horror that she is the living image of Cytherea--and ten days later is
aboard the Key West Express with her, bound for San Cristobal de la
Habaña, and the fires eternal.
A matter, fundamentally, of coincidence. Savina, too, has her Cytherea,
though not projected into a doll. She too has toiled up the long slope
of a flabby marriage, and come at last to the high crags where the
air is thin, and a sudden giddiness may be looked for. To call the
thing a love-affair, in the ordinary sense, is rather fantastic; its
very endearments are forced and mawkish. What Randon wants is not more
love, but an escape from the bonds and penalties of love--a leap into
pure adventure. And what Savina wants, as she very frankly confesses,
is the same thing. If a concrete lover must go with it, then that
lover must be everything that the decorous William Loyd Grove is
not--violent, exigent, savage, inordinate, even a bit gross. I doubt
that Savina gets her wish any more than Randon gets his. Good business
men make but indifferent Grand Turks, even when they are in revolt: it
is the tragedy of Western civilization. And there is no deliverance
from the bonds of habit and appearance, even with a mistress. Ten days
after he reaches Havana, Randon is almost as securely married as he was
at Eastlake. Worse, Eastlake itself reaches out its long arm and begins
to punish him, and Savina with him. The conventions of Christendom,
alas, are not to be spat upon. Far back in the Cuban hinterland, in a
squalid little sugar town, it is a photograph of Fanny that gives a
final touch of gruesomeness to the drama of Randon and Savina. There,
overtaken in her sin by that banal likeness of the enemy she has never
seen, she dies her preposterous death. An ending profoundly ironical.
A curtain that gives a final touch of macabre humor to a tale that,
from first to last, is full of the spirit of high comedy. Hergesheimer
never devised one more sardonically amusing, and he never told one with
greater skill.
The reviewers, contemplating it, were shocked by his hedonism in
trivialities--his unctuous manner of recording the flavor of a drink,
the sheen of a fabric, the set of a skirt, the furnishings of a room.
In all that, I suppose, they saw something Babylonish, and against
the Constitution. But this hedonism is really as essential a part of
Hergesheimer as moral purpose is part of a Puritan. He looks upon the
world, not as a trial of virtue, but as a beautiful experience--in
part, indeed, as a downright voluptuous experience. If it is elevating
to the soul to observe the fine colors of a sunset, then why is it not
quite as elevating to observe the fine colors of a woman’s hair, the
silk of her frock, a piece of old mahogany, a Jack Rose cocktail? Here
it is not actually Hergesheimer’s delight in beauty that gives offense,
but his inability to differentiate between the beauty that is also
the good and the true, and the beauty that is simply beauty. As for
me, I incline to go with him in his heresy. It constitutes a valuable
antidote to the moral obsession which still hangs over American
letters, despite the collapse of the Puritan _Kultur_. It still seems
a bit foreign and bizarre, but that is because we have yet to achieve
a complete emancipation from the International Sunday-school Lessons.
In “Cytherea,” as in “Java Head,” it gives a warm and exotic glow to
the narrative. That narrative is always recounted, not by a moralist,
but by an artist. He knows how to give an episode color and reality
by the artful use of words and the images that they bring up--how to
manage the tempo, the play of light, the surrounding harmonies. This
investiture is always as much a part of his story as his tale itself.
So is his English style, so abhorrent to grammarians. When he writes
a sentence that is a bit artificial and complex, it is because he is
describing something that is itself a bit artificial and complex. When
he varies his rhythms suddenly and sharply, it is not because he is
unable to write in the monotonous sing-song of a rhetoric professor,
but because he doesn’t want to write that way. Whatever such a man
writes is _ipso facto_ good English. It is not for pedagogues to
criticise it, but to try to comprehend it and teach it. The delusion to
the contrary is the cause of much folly.
3
_Lardner_
A few years ago a young college professor, eager to make a name for
himself, brought out a laborious “critical” edition of “Sam Slick,”
by Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, eighty-seven years after its first
publication. It turned out to be quite unreadable--a dreadful series of
archaic jocosities about varieties of _Homo americanus_ long perished
and forgotten, in a dialect now intelligible only to paleophilologists.
Sometimes I have a fear that the same fate awaits Ring Lardner. The
professors of his own day, of course, are quite unaware of him,
save perhaps as a low zany to be enjoyed behind the door. They would
no more venture to whoop him up publicly and officially than their
predecessors of 1880 would have ventured to whoop up Mark Twain, or
their remoter predecessors of 1837 would have dared to say anything for
Haliburton. In such matters the academic mind, being chiefly animated
by a fear of sneers, works very slowly. So slowly, indeed, does it work
that it usually works too late. By the time Mark Twain got into the
text-books for sophomores two-thirds of his compositions, as the Young
Intellectuals say, had already begun to date; by the time Haliburton
was served up as a sandwich between introduction and notes he was
already dead. As I say, I suspect sadly that Lardner is doomed to go
the same route. His stories, it seems to me, are superbly adroit and
amusing; no other contemporary American, sober or gay, writes better.
But I doubt that they last: our grandchildren will wonder what they
are about. It is not only, or even mainly, that the dialect that fills
them will pass, though that fact is obviously a serious handicap in
itself. It is principally that the people they depict will pass, that
Lardner’s Low Down Americans--his incomparable baseball players, pugs,
song-writers, Elks, small-town Rotarians and golf caddies--are flitting
figures of a transient civilization and doomed to be as puzzling and
soporific, in the year 2000, as Haliburton’s Yankee clock peddler is
to-day.
The fact--if I may assume it to be a fact--is certain not to be set
against Lardner’s account; on the contrary, it is, in its way, highly
complimentary to him. For he has deliberately applied himself, not
to the anatomizing of the general human soul, but to the meticulous
histological study of a few salient individuals of his time and nation,
and he has done it with such subtle and penetrating skill that one
must belong to his time and nation to follow him. I doubt that anyone
who is not familiar with professional ball players, intimately and at
first hand, will ever comprehend the full merit of the amazing sketches
in “You Know Me, Al”; I doubt that anyone who has not given close and
deliberate attention to the American vulgate will ever realize how
magnificently Lardner handles it. He has had more imitators, I suppose,
than any other living American writer, but has he any actual rivals? If
so, I have yet to hear of them. They all try to write the speech of the
streets as adeptly and as amusingly as he writes it, and they all fall
short of him; the next best is miles and miles behind him. And they
are all inferior in observation, in sense of character, in shrewdness
and insight. His studies, to be sure, are never very profound; he
makes no attempt to get at the primary springs of human motive; all
his people share the same amiable stupidity, the same transparent
vanity, the same shallow swinishness; they are all human Fords in
bad repair, and alike at bottom. But if he thus confines himself to
the surface, it yet remains a fact that his investigations on that
surface are extraordinarily alert, ingenious and brilliant--that the
character he finally sets before us, however roughly articulated as to
bones, is so astoundingly realistic as to epidermis that the effect is
indistinguishable from that of life itself. The old man in “The Golden
Honeymoon” is not merely well done; he is perfect. And so is the girl
in “Some Like Them Cold.” And so, even, is the idiotic Frank X. Farrell
in “Alibi Ike”--an extravagant grotesque and yet quite real from
glabella to calcaneus.
Lardner knows more about the management of the short story than all
of its professors. His stories are built very carefully, and yet they
seem to be wholly spontaneous, and even formless. He has grasped the
primary fact that no conceivable ingenuity can save a story that
fails to show a recognizable and interesting character; he knows that
a good character sketch is always a good story, no matter what its
structure. Perhaps he gets less attention than he ought to get, even
among the anti-academic critics, because his people are all lowly
boors. For your reviewer of books, like every other sort of American,
is always vastly impressed by fashionable pretensions. He belongs to
the white collar class of labor, and shares its prejudices. He praises
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories of country-club flappers eloquently, and
overlooks Fitzgerald’s other stories, most of which are much better.
He can’t rid himself of the feeling that Edith Wharton, whose people
have butlers, is a better novelist than Willa Cather, whose people, in
the main, dine in their kitchens. He lingers under the spell of Henry
James, whose most humble character, at any rate of the later years,
was at least an Englishman, and hence superior. Lardner, so to speak,
hits such critics under the belt. He not only fills his stories with
people who read the tabloids, say “Shake hands with my friend,” and
buy diamond rings on the instalment plan; he also shows them having
a good time in the world, and quite devoid of inferiority complexes.
They amuse him sardonically, but he does not pity them. A fatal error!
The moron, perhaps, has a place in fiction, as in life, but he is
not to be treated too easily and casually. It must be shown that he
suffers tragically because he cannot abandon the plow to write poetry,
or the sample-case to study for opera. Lardner is more realistic.
If his typical hero has a secret sorrow it is that he is too old to
take up osteopathy and too much in dread of his wife to venture into
bootlegging.
Of late a sharply acrid flavor has got into Lardner’s buffoonery.
His baseball players and fifth-rate pugilists, beginning in his
first stories as harmless jackasses, gradually convert themselves
into loathsome scoundrels. The same change shows itself in Sinclair
Lewis; it is difficult, even for an American, to contemplate the
American without yielding to something hard to distinguish from moral
indignation. Turn, for example, to the sketches in the volume called
“The Love Nest.” The first tells the story of a cinema queen married to
a magnate of the films. On the surface she seems to be nothing but a
noodle, but underneath there is a sewer; the woman is such a pig that
she makes one shudder. Again, he investigates another familiar type:
the village practical joker. The fellow in one form or other, has been
laughed at since the days of Aristophanes. But here is a mercilessly
realistic examination of his dunghill humor, and of its effects upon
decent people. A third figure is a successful theatrical manager: he
turns out to have the professional competence of a chiropractor and the
honor of a Prohibition agent. A fourth is a writer of popular songs:
stealing other men’s ideas has become so fixed a habit with him that
he comes to believe that he has an actual right to them. A fourth is a
trained nurse--but I spare you this dreadful nurse. The rest are bores
of the homicidal type. One gets the effect, communing with the whole
gang, of visiting a museum of anatomy. They are as shocking as what
one encounters there--but in every detail they are as unmistakably real.
Lardner conceals his new savagery, of course, beneath his old humor. It
does not flag. No man writing among us has greater skill at the more
extravagant varieties of jocosity. He sees startling and revelatory
likeness between immensely disparate things, and he is full of pawky
observations and bizarre comments. Two baseball players are palavering,
and one of them, Young Jake, is boasting of his conquests during
Spring practice below the Potomac. “Down South ain’t here!” replies
the other. “Those dames in some of those swamps, they lose their head
when they see a man with shoes on!” The two proceed to the discussion
of a third imbecile, guilty of some obscure tort. “Why,” inquires
Young Jake, “didn’t you break his nose or bust him in the chin?” “His
nose was already broke,” replied the other, “and he didn’t have no
chin.” Such wise cracks seem easy to devise. Broadway diverts itself
by manufacturing them. They constitute the substance of half the
town shows. But in those made by Lardner there is something far more
than mere facile humor: they are all rigidly in character, and they
illuminate that character. Few American novelists, great or small,
have character more firmly in hand. Lardner does not see situations;
he sees people. And what people! They are all as revolting as so many
Methodist evangelists, and they are all as thoroughly American.
4
_Masters_
The case of Masters remains mysterious; more, even, than Sherwood
Anderson, his fellow fugitive from a Chicago in decay, he presents
an enigma to the prayerful critic. On the one hand there stands “The
Spoon River Anthology,” unquestionably the most eloquent, the most
profound and the most thoroughly national volume of poetry published
in America since “Leaves of Grass”; on the other hand stands a great
mass of feeble doggerel--imitations of Byron, of Browning, of Lowell,
of George H. Boker, of all the bad poets since the dawn of the
Nineteenth Century. Of late he turns to prose, and with results almost
as confusing. In all of his books there are fine touches, and in one of
them, “Mitch Miller,” there are many of them. But in all of them there
are also banalities so crass and so vast that it is almost impossible
to imagine a literate man letting them go by. Consider, for example,
the novel, “Mirage.” It seems to me to be one of the most idiotic and
yet one of the most interesting American novels that I have ever read.
Whole pages of it are given over to philosophical discussions that
recall nothing so much as the palavers of neighboring barbers between
shaves, and yet they are intermingled with observations that are shrewd
and sound, and that are set forth with excellent grace and no little
eloquence. Some of the characters in the book are mere stuffed dummies,
creaking in every joint; others stand out as brilliantly alive as
the people of Dreiser or Miss Cather. My suspicion is that there are
actually two Masterses, that the man is a sort of literary diplococcus.
At his worst, he is intolerably affected, arty and artificial--almost
a fit companion for the occult, unintelligible geniuses hymned in the
_Dial_. At his best he probably gets nearer to the essential truth
about the civilization we suffer under than any other contemporary
literatus.
“Mirage,” I daresay, is already forgotten, though it was published
only in 1924. In substance, it is the story of Skeeters Kirby’s quest
for the Wonder Woman that all sentimentalists seek, and that none of
them finds until drink has brought him to his deathbed, and he sees
the fat, affable nurse through a purple haze. Skeeters comes from the
town of Mitch Miller, and when we first encounter him he is a lawyer
in Chicago. Already the search for the Perfect Doll has begun to leave
scars upon his psyche. First there was the sweet one who died before
he could get her to the altar; then there was the naughty Alicia, his
lawful wife, but, as he would say himself, a lemon. As the story
opens, Alicia, divorcing him, had just blackmailed him out of $70,000,
almost his whole fortune, as the price of her silence about Mrs. Becky
Morris. Becky is the widow of a rich old man, and now enjoys the
usufruct of his tenements and hereditaments. She has red hair and a
charming manner, and is a great liar. She falsely pretends to have read
Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Idea,” and passes in her circle
as an intellectual on the strength of it. She tells Skeeters that she
is virtuous, or, rather, that she _has_ been virtuous, and all the
while she is carrying on with one Delaher, a handsome frequenter of the
Hotel Ritzdorf in New York. A saucy and poisonous baggage, this Becky,
but Skeeters falls violently in love with her, and gladly pays Alicia
the $70,000 in order to protect her from scandal. But then she leaves
him, writes him a letter of farewell, and refuses flatly to marry him,
and when he pursues her to New York, confronts her with her adulteries,
and throws up to her the fact that he has gone broke for her, she
requites him only with a dreadful slanging. I quote the exact text:
Kirby took a drink of brandy from the flask and came to her, taking
her in his arms. “Tell, me, dear, what shall we do? Are we engaged?”
Becky shook her head.
“What do you wish? Shall I treat you as my bride-to-be, or shall we
go on as we are now?”
“Go on as we are now!”
“You know I am free now--and it cost me, too, to be free.”
“How much?”
“Seventy thousand dollars.”
“That’s not much.”
“It’s practically all I have.”
“Well, _Alicia won’t have such a large income out of it_.”
“And I paid it for you.”
Becky opened her eyes. Her face became a bonfire of rage. Her red
hair bristled like a wild animal’s.
“You’re just a liar to say that! And you can’t say such things in my
room. This is my room; _I pay for it_. And _you can be respectful to
me here, or you can go_.”
Kirby did not betray his anger. He concentrated it and went on: “_I
beg your pardon._”
In a voice as soft as oil he asked:
“Did you see Delaher?”
“Yes, I did, and he’s a rough-neck.”
“Well?”
“None of your business!”
“None of my business, eh?” Kirby said, with a bitter intonation.
“Leave my room,” Becky said.
“No, I’ll not leave your room.”
“_I’ll have you put out._”
“You don’t dare, Becky--you don’t dare!”...
Two pages more of this, and then Becky breaks out grandly:
“What do you want, anyway? You have had everything I have to give: my
hospitality, _my bread, my wine, my couch, my affection, gift-tokens
of my love_--what do you want?”
Kirby explains that he wants a wife and a soulmate--“a mind to be the
companion of my mind.” But Becky refuses to marry him. Instead she goes
to her bedroom and then returns with Kirby’s letters:
“Here are your letters. You’ve stayed and had your say out. And now
that you’ve said it, you can see for yourself that _you have no case
against me_.... Here are your letters.”
“I don’t want them.”
“Very well, I’ll tear them up.”
She proceeded to do so.
“_Now all the evidence is destroyed_,” he said.
I have thrown in a few italics to point the high spots of this singular
colloquy. It goes on for page after page, and the whole book is filled
with dialogues like it. What is one to make of such inconceivable
banality? Is there worse in “An American Tragedy”? But Masters,
you may say, is trying to depict eighth-rate people--frequenters
of cabarets and hotel grill-rooms, male and female Elks, dubious
hangers-on upon the edges of intelligence and decency--and that is how
they actually talk. It may be so, but I note at once two objections
to that defense. The first is that Masters does not appear to regard
Kirby as eighth-rate; on the contrary, he takes the fellow’s moony
drabbing quite seriously, and even tries to get a touch of the tragic
into it. The second is that precisely the same hollow and meaningless
fustian often appears when the author speaks in his own person. The
way he tells his story is almost precisely the way it would be told by
a somewhat intellectual shoe-drummer in a Pullman smoking-room. Its
approach to the eternal sex question, its central theme, is exactly
that of such a gentleman; its very phrases, in the main, are his
phrases. He actually appears, in fact, as a sort of chorus to the
drama, under the name of Bob Haydon. Bob, facing disillusion and death,
favors Kirby with many cantos of philosophy. Their general burden is
that the prudent man, having marked a sweet one to his taste, uses her
person to his wicked ends, and then kicks her out. Kirby’s agonies do
not move Bob, and neither do they bore him. “Bore me!” he exclaims.
“This is better than a circus!”