jocosity in the grand manner. For a long while past, as time goes among
such neo-logomaniacs, the youths of the movement have been whooping up
one Guillaume Apollinaire. When this Apollinaire died in 1918, so they
lamented, there passed out the greatest creative mind that France had
seen since the Middle Ages. He was to Jean Cocteau, even, as Cocteau
was to Eugène Sue. His books were uncompromising and revolutionary;
had he lived he would have done to the banal prose of the Babbitts of
letters what Eric Satie has done to the art of the fugue. Such news
was not only printed in the _Tendenz_ magazines that come and go; it
was transmitted by word of mouth from end to end of Greenwich Village.
More, it percolated to graver quarters. The estimable _Dial_ let it be
known that Apollinaire was a profound influence on the literature and
perhaps still more on the art and spirit of this modern period. Once,
when Dr. Canby was off lecturing in Lancaster, Pa., his name even got
into the _Literary Review_.
This electric rumor of him was helped to prosperity by the fact that
specific data about him were extremely hard to come by. His books
seemed to be rare--some of them, indeed, unprocurable--, and even
when one of them was obtained and examined it turned out to be largely
unintelligible. He wrote, it appeared, in an occult dialect, partly
made up of fantastic slang from the French army. He gave to old words
new and mysterious meanings. He kept wholly outside the vocabulary at
the back of “College French.” Even returning exiles from La Rotonde
were baffled by some of his phrases; all that they could venture was
that they were unprecedented and probably obscene. But the Village,
as everyone knows, does not spurn the cabalistic; on the contrary, it
embraces and venerates the cabalistic. Apollinaire grew in fame as he
became unscrutable. Displacing Cocteau, Paul Morand, Harry Kemp, T. S.
Eliot, André Salmon, Paul Valéry, Maxwell Bodenheim, Jean Giraudoux
and all the other gods of that checkered dynasty, he was lifted to
the first place in the Valhalla of the Advanced Thinkers. It was
Apollinaire’s year....
The work before us is the pricking of the bladder--a jest highly
effective, but somewhat barbarous. M. Josephson simply translates
Apollinaire’s masterpiece, adds an _apparatus criticus_ in the manner
of T. S. Eliot, and then retires discreetly to wait for the yells. They
will make a dreadful din, or I am no literary pathologist! For what
does “The Poet Assassinated” turn out to be? It turns out to be a dull
pasquinade in the manner of a rather atheistic sophomore, with a few
dirty words thrown in to shock the _booboisie_. From end to end there
is not as much wit in it as you will hear in a genealogical exchange
between two taxicab drivers. It is flat, flabby and idiotic. It is as
profound as an editorial in the Washington _Star_ and as revolutionary
as Ayer’s Almanac. It is the best joke pulled off on the Young
Forward-Lookers since Eliot floored them with the notes to “The Waste
Land.”
M. Josephson rather spoils its effect, I believe, by rubbing it
in--that is, by hinting that Apollinaire was of romantic and mysterious
origin--that his mother was a Polish lady of noble name and his father
a high prelate of the Catholic Church--that he himself was born at
Monte Carlo and baptized in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. This is
too much. Apollinaire was, like all Frenchmen of humor, a German
Jew. His father was a respectable waiter at Appenrodt’s, by name
Max Spritzwasser: hence the _nom de plume_. His mother was a Mlle.
Kunigunda Luise Schmidt, of Holzkirchen, Oberbayern.
10
_Sweet Stuff_
SIX DAYS OF THE WEEK: A BOOK OF THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE AND RELIGION, by
Henry van Dyke. New York: _Charles Scribner’s Sons_. [The American
Mercury, March, 1925.]
I offer a specimen:
As living beings we are part of a universe of life.
A second:
Unless we men resolve to be good, the world will never be better.
A third:
Behind Christianity there is Christ.
A fourth:
If Washington had not liberated the American Republic, Lincoln would
have had no Union to save.
A fifth:
Some people say that a revolution is coming on in our own age and
country. It is possible.
A sixth:
God made us all.
A seventh:
It is a well-known fact that men can lie, and that very frequently
they do.
An eighth:
To be foolish is an infirmity. To fool others is a trick.
A ninth:
The Bible was not given to teach science, but religion.
A tenth:
A whole life spent with God is better than half a life.
An eleventh:
Drunkenness ruins more homes and wrecks more lives than war.
A twelfth:
Anything out of the ordinary line will attract notice.
Tupper _est mort_! _Hoch_ Tupper! _Hoch, hoch! Dreimal hoch!_
IX. THE FRINGES OF LOVELY LETTERS
1
_Authorship as a Trade_
It is my observation as an editor that most beginning authors are
attracted to the trade of letters, not because they have anything
apposite and exigent to say, but simply, because it seems easy. Let us
imagine an ambitious and somewhat gassy young gal, turned out of the
public high-school down the street with good marks in English--that is,
in the sort of literary composition practiced by schoolma’ms. Having
read “Ulysses,” “Jurgen” and “Babbitt,” she is disinclined to follow
her mother too precipitately into the jaws of holy monogamy--or, at
all events, she shrinks from marrying such a clod as her father is,
and as her brothers and male classmates will be to-morrow. What to do?
The professions demand technical equipment. Commerce is sordid. The
secretary, even of a rich and handsome man, must get up at 7.30 A. M.
Most of the fine arts are regarded, by her family, as immoral. So she
pays $3 down on a second-hand typewriter, lays in a stock of copy
paper, and proceeds to enrich the national literature.
It is such aspirants, I suppose, who keep the pot boiling for the
schools of short-story writing and scenario writing that now swarm in
the land. Certainly these schools, in so far as I have any acquaintance
with them, offer nothing of value to the beginner of genuine talent.
They seem to be run, in the main, by persons as completely devoid of
critical sense as so many Congressmen, street railway curve-greasers
or Methodist revivalists. Their text-books are masses of unmitigated
rubbish. But no doubt that rubbish seems impressive enough to the
customers I have mentioned, for it is both very vague and very
cocksure--an almost irresistible combination. So a hundred thousand
second-hand Coronas rattle and jingle in ten thousand remote and lonely
towns, and the mail of every magazine editor in America is as heavy as
the mail of a get-rich-quick stockbroker.
Unluckily, there is seldom anything in this mail to bulge his eyes
and make his heart go pitter-pat. What he finds in it, day in and day
out, is simply the same dull, obvious, shoddy stuff--the same banal
and threadbare ideas set forth in the same flabby and unbeautiful
words. They all seem to write alike, as, indeed, they all seem to think
alike. They react to stimuli with the machine-like uniformity and
precision of soldiers in a file. The spectacle of life is to all of
them exactly the same spectacle. They bring no more to it, of private,
singular vision, than so many photographic lenses. In brief, they are
unanimously commonplace, unanimously stupid. Free education has cursed
them with aspirations beyond their congenital capacities, and they
offer the art of letters only the gifts suitable to the lowly crafts
of the jazz-baby and the schoolma’m. They come from an intellectual
level where conformity seems the highest of goods, and so they lack
the primary requisite of the imaginative author: the capacity to see
the human comedy afresh, to discover new relations between things,
to discover new significances in man’s eternal struggle with his
fate. What they have to say is simply what any moderately intelligent
suburban pastor or country editor would have to say, and so it is not
worth hearing.
This disparity between aspiration and equipment runs through the whole
of American life; material prosperity and popular education have made
it a sort of national disease. Two-thirds of the professors in our
colleges are simply cans full of undigested knowledge, mechanically
acquired; they cannot utilize it; they cannot think. We are cursed
likewise with hordes of lawyers who would be happier and more useful
driving trucks, and hordes of doctors who would be strained even
as druggists. So in the realm of beautiful letters. Poetry has
become a recreation among us for the intellectually unemployed and
unemployable: persons who, a few generations ago, would have taken it
out on china-painting. The writing of novels is undertaken by thousands
who lack the skill to describe a dog-fight. The result is a colossal
waste of paper, ink and postage--worse, of binding cloth and gold
foil. For a great deal of this drivel, by one dodge or another, gets
into print. Many of the correspondence-school students, after hard
diligence, learn how to write for the cheap magazines; not a few of
them eventually appear between covers, and are solemnly reviewed.
Does such stuff sell? Apparently it does, else the publishers would
not print so much, of it. Its effect upon those who read it must be
even worse than that of the newspapers and popular magazines. They come
to it with confident expectations. It is pretentiously bound; _ergo_,
there must be something in it. That something is simply platitude.
What has been said a thousand times is said all over again. This time
it must be true! Thus the standardization of the American mind goes
on, and against ideas that are genuinely novel there are higher and
higher battlements erected. Meanwhile, on the lower levels, where the
latest recruits to letters sweat and hope, this rubbish is laboriously
imitated. Turn to any of the cheap fiction magazines, and you will
find out how bad it can be at its worst. No, not quite at its worst,
for the contributors to the cheap fiction magazines have at least
broken into print--they have as they say, made the grade. Below them
are thousands of aspirants of even slenderer talents--customers of
the correspondence schools, patrons of lectures by itinerant literary
pedagogues, patient manufacturers of the dreadful stuff that clogs
every magazine editor’s mail. Here is the ultimate reservoir of the
national literature--and here, unless I err, is only bilge.
The remedy? I know of none. Moreover, I do not believe in remedies. So
long as the prevailing pedagogues are not found out, and the absurd
effort to cram every moron with book-learning goes on in the Republic,
that long there will be too much reading, and too much writing. But let
us get out of the fact whatever consolation is in it: too much writing,
at worst, is at least a bearable evil. Certainly it is vastly less
dangerous than too much religion, and less a nuisance than too much
politics. The floggers of Coronas, if they were halted by law, might
take to the uplift--as, indeed, many corn-fed pedagogues are already
doing, driven out of their jobs by the murrain of Fundamentalism. If
I yell against them it is because, on days when the rain keeps me
indoors, I am a critic. Perhaps other folks suffer less. Nevertheless,
I often wonder what the genuinely competent novelists of the nation
think of it--how the invasion of their craft by so many bunglers and
numskulls appears to them, and affects them. Surely it must tend to
narrow the audience they appeal to, and so do them damage. Who was it
who said that, in order that there may be great poets, there must be
great audiences too? I believe it was old Walt. He knew. Facing an
audience deluged with molasses by Whittier, Felicia Hemans and Fanny
Fern, he found the assumptions all against him. He was different, and
hence suspicious: it took him two generations to make his way. The
competent novelist, setting up shop in America to-day, is confronted
by the same flood. If he is pertinacious, he may win in the end,
but certainly it takes endurance. Hergesheimer, in his first book,
unquestionably had something to say. Its point of view was new;
there was a fine plausibility in it; it was worth attending to. But
Hergesheimer drove along for eight or ten years, almost in a vacuum.
I could add others: Anderson, Cabell, even Dreiser. Cabell became
known to the women’s clubs with his twelfth book. Meanwhile, a dozen
cheesemongers had been adored, and a thousand had made good livings
with their sets of rubber-stamps.
2
_Authors as Persons_
My trade forces me into constant association with persons of literary
skill and aspiration, good and bad, male and female, foreign and
domestic. I can only report, after a quarter of a century of commerce
with them, that I find them, with a few brilliant exceptions, very
dull, and that I greatly prefer the society of Babbitts. Is this
heresy? If so, I can only offer my sincere regrets. The words are wrung
from me, not by any desire to be unpleasant, but simply by a lifelong
and incurable affection for what, for want of a better name, is called
the truth. Nine-tenths of the literary gents that I know, indeed, are
hotter for the dollar than any Babbitt ever heard of. Their talk is not
about what they write, but about what they get for it. Not infrequently
they get a great deal. I know a number who make more annually
than honest bank presidents, even than Christian bank presidents.
A few probably top the incomes of railroad purchasing-agents and
nose-and-throat specialists, and come close to the incomes of realtors,
lawyers and bootleggers. They practice a very profitable trade.
And no wonder, for they pursue it in the most assiduously literate
country in Christendom. Our people, perhaps, seldom read anything that
is good, but they at least read--day and night, weekdays and Sundays.
We have so many magazines of more than 500,000 circulation that a list
of them would fill this page. We have at least a dozen above 1,000,000.
These magazines have immense advertising revenues, and are thus very
prosperous. They can therefore pay high prices for manuscripts. The
business of supplying such manuscripts has made a whole herd of authors
rich. I do not object to their wealth; I simply report its lamentable
effects upon them, and upon the aspirants who strive to imitate them.
For those effects go down to the lowest levels. The neophyte, as I
have said, seldom shows any yearning to discharge ideas, to express
himself, to tackle and master a difficult enterprise; he shows only a
desire to get money in what seems to him to be an easy way. Short cuts,
quick sales, easy profits--it is all very American. Do we gabble about
efficiency? Then the explanation is to be sought in the backwashes of
Freudism. Nowhere else on earth is genuine competence so rare. The
average American plumber cannot plumb; the average American cook cannot
cook; the average American literary gent has nothing to say, and says
it with rubber-stamps.
But I was speaking of the literati as persons. They suffer, I believe
from two things. The first is what I have just described: their general
fraudulence. The second springs out of the fact that their position,
in the Republic, is very insecure--that they have no public dignity.
It is no longer honorable _per se_ to be engaged in travails of the
spirit, as it used to be in the New England of the _Aufklärung_; it
is honorable only if it pays. I believe that the fact discourages
many aspirants who, if they went on, might come to something. They
are blasted in their tender years, and so literature loses them. Too
sensitive to sit below the salt, they join the hearty, red-blooded men
who feast above it, admired by the national gallery. It is, indeed,
not surprising that the majority of college graduates, once headed as
a matter of course for the grove of Athene, now go into business--that
Harvard now turns out ten times as many bond salesmen every year as
metaphysicians and martyrs. Business, in America, offers higher rewards
than any other human enterprise, not only in money but also in dignity.
Thus it tends to attract the best brains of the country. Is Kiwanis
idiotic? The answer is that Kiwanis no more represents business than
Greenwich Village represents literature. On the higher levels its bilge
does not flow--and on those higher levels, as I have hinted, there are
shrewder fellows, and more amusing, than ever you will find in the
Authors’ Club. These fellows, by the strict canons of ethnology, are
Babbitts, but it seems to me that they are responsible nevertheless for
everything that makes life in the United States tolerable. One finds,
in their company, excellent wines and liquors, and one seldom hears any
cant.
I don’t believe that this is a healthy state of affairs. I believe
that business should be left to commonplace and insensitive minds, and
that men of originality, and hence of genuine charm, should be sucked
automatically into enterprises of a greater complexity and subtlety.
It is done in more ancient countries; it has been done from remote
antiquity under civilizations that have aged in the wood, and are
free from fusel oil. But it is not yet done in These States. Only an
overwhelming natural impulse--perhaps complicated by insanity--can urge
an American into the writing of fugues or epics. The pull is toward
the investment securities business. That pull, yielded to, leads to
high rewards. The successful business man among us--and only the sheer
imbecile, in such gaudy times as these, is not successful--enjoys the
public respect and adulation that elsewhere bathe only bishops and
generals of artillery. He is treated with dignity in the newspapers,
even when he appears in combat with his wife’s lover. His opinion is
sought upon all public questions, including the æsthetic. In the stews
and wine-shops he receives the attention that, in old Vienna, used to
be given to Beethoven. He enjoys an aristocratic immunity to most forms
of judicial process. He wears the _legion d’honneur_, is an LL. D. of
Yale, and is received cordially at the White House.
The literary gent, however worthy, scales no such heights under our
_Kultur_. Only one President since the birth of the Republic has
ever welcomed men of letters at the White House, and that one, the
sainted Roosevelt, judged them by their theological orthodoxy and the
hair upon their chests. A few colored poets were added to make the
first pages; that was all. The literati thus wander about somewhat
disconsolately among us, and tend to become morose and dull. If they
enjoy the princely fees of the train-boy magazines, they are simply
third-rate business men--successful, perhaps, but without the Larger
Vision. If they happen to be genuine artists--and now and then it
_does_ happen--they are as lonely as life insurance solicitors at a
convention of Seventh Day Adventists. Such sorrows do not make for
_Gemütlichkeit_. There is much more of it in the pants business.
3
_Birth Pangs_
I have just said that the typical American author, when he talks
intelligibly at all, talks of money. I have said also that his aim in
writing is not to rid himself of ideas that bulge and fever his skull,
but to get that money in an easy way. Both statements, though true,
need a certain qualification. Writing looks easier to the neophyte than
any other job open to him, but once he settles down to its practice
he finds that it is full of unanticipated pains. So he tends, as he
grows older, to talk of those pains almost as much as he talks of their
rewards in cash. Here, indeed, all the authors that I know agree,
if they agree on nothing else, and in their agreement they show the
greatest heat and eloquence. And the beautiful ladies of the trade
reënforce and ratify the plaint of the bucks. Writing, they all say,
is the most dreadful chore ever inflicted upon human beings. It is not
only exhausting mentally; it is also extremely fatiguing physically.
The writer leaves his desk, his day’s work done, with his mind empty
and the muscles of his back and neck full of a crippling stiffness. He
has suffered horribly that the babies may be fed and beauty may not die.
The worst of it is that he must always suffer alone. If authors
could work in large, well-ventilated factories, like cigarmakers or
garment-workers, with plenty of their mates about and a flow of lively
professional gossip to entertain them, their labor would be immensely
lighter. But it is essential to their craft that they perform its
tedious and vexatious operations _a cappella_, and so the horrors of
loneliness are added to its other unpleasantnesses. An author at work
is continuously and inescapably in the presence of himself. There is
nothing to divert and soothe him. So every time a vagrant regret or
sorrow assails him, it has him instantly by the ear, and every time
a wandering ache runs down his leg it shakes him like the bite of a
tiger. I have yet to meet an author who was not a hypochondriac. Saving
only physicians, who are always ill and in fear of death, the literati
are perhaps the most lavish consumers of pills and philtres in this
world, and the most willing customers of surgeons. I can scarcely think
of one, known to me personally, who is not constantly dosing himself
with medicines, or regularly resorting to the knife. At the head of the
craft stand men who are even more celebrated as invalids than they are
as authors. I know of one who----
But perhaps I had better avoid invading what, after all, may be private
confidences, though they are certainly not imparted in confidential
tones. The point is that an author, penned in a room during all his
working hours with no company save his own, is bound to be more
conscious than other men of the petty malaises that assail all of us.
They tackle him, so to speak, in a vacuum; he can’t seek diversion
from them without at the same time suffering diversion from his work.
And what they leave of him is tortured and demoralized by wayward
and uncomfortable thoughts. It must be obvious that other men, even
among the intelligentsia, are not beset so cruelly. A judge on the
bench, entertaining a ringing in the ears, can do his work almost
as well as if he heard only the voluptuous rhetoric of the lawyers.
A clergyman, carrying on his degraded mummery, is not appreciably
crippled by a sour stomach: what he says has been said before, and only
scoundrels question it. And a surgeon, plying his exhilarating art
and mystery, suffers no professional damage from the wild thought that
the attending nurse is more sightly than his wife. But I defy anyone
to write a competent sonnet with a ringing in his ears, or to compose
sound criticism with a sour stomach, or to do a plausible love scene
with a head free of private amorous fancies. These things are sheer
impossibilities. The poor literatus encounters them and their like
every time he enters his work-room and spits on his hands. The moment
the door bangs he begins a depressing, losing struggle with his body
and his mind.
Why then, do rational men and women engage in so barbarous and
exhausting a vocation--for there are relatively intelligent and
enlightened authors, remember, just as there are relatively honest
politicians, and even bishops. What keeps them from deserting it
for trades that are less onerous, and, in the eyes of their fellow
creatures, more respectable? The first, and perhaps the foremost reason
I have already exposed at length: the thing pays. But there is another,
and it ought to be heard too. It lies, I believe, in the fact that an
author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal
vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer
impossibility to hold it in. His overpowering impulse is to gyrate
before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells.
This being forbidden by the _Polizei_ of all civilized countries, he
takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called
self-expression.