economic or moral. The question isn’t what a man thinks, but what he
has to give away that is worth having. Ten years ago a professional
Prohibitionist had no more standing in the town than a professional
astrologer, Assyriologist or wart-remover; five years ago, having
proved that his gang could make or break Congressmen, he got all the
deference that belonged to the Chief Justice; now, with the wet wolves
chasing him, he is once more in eclipse. If William Z. Foster were
elected President to-morrow, the most fanatical Coolidge men of to-day
would flock to the White House the day after, and try to catch his
eye. Coolidge, while Harding was living, was an obscure and impotent
fellow, viewed with contempt by everyone. The instant he mounted the
throne he became a Master Mind. Fergusson got all of this into “Capitol
Hill,” which is not the story of a combat between the True and the
False in politics, but the simple tale of a typical Washingtonian’s
struggle to the front--a tale that should be an inspiration to every
Rotarian in the land. He begins as a petty job-holder in the Capitol
itself, mailing congressional speeches to constituents on the steppes;
he ends at the head of a glittering banquet table, with a Senator to
one side of him and a member of the Cabinet to the other--a man who has
somehow got power into his hands, and can dispense jobs, and is thus an
indubitable somebody. Everybody in Washington who has jobs to dispense
is somebody.
This eternal struggle is sordid, but, as Fergusson has shown, it is
also extremely amusing. It brings out, as the moralists say, the
worst that is in human nature, which is always the most charming. It
reduces all men to one common level of ignominy, and so rids them of
their customary false-faces. They take on a new humanity. Ceasing to
be Guardians of the Constitution, Foes to the Interests, Apostles of
Economy, Prophets of World Peace, and such-like banshees, they become
ordinary men, like John Doe and Richard Roe. One beholds them sweating,
not liquid idealism, but genuine sweat. They hope, fear, aspire,
suffer. They are preyed upon, not by J. P. Morgan, but by designing
cuties. They go to the White House, not to argue for the World Court,
but to hog patronage. From end to end of Fergusson’s chronicle there
is absolutely no mention of the tariff, or of the farmer and his woes,
or of the budget system, or of the Far Eastern question. I marvel that
more American novelists have not gone to this lush and delightful
material. The supply is endless and lies wide open. Six months in
Washington is enough to load an ambitious novelist for all eternity.
(Think of what George Moore has made of his one love-affair, back in
1877!) The Washington correspondents, of course, look at it without
seeing it, and so do all the Washington novelists save Fergusson.
But that is saying nothing. A Washington correspondent is one with
a special talent for failing to see what is before his eyes. I have
beheld a whole herd of them sit through a national convention without
once laughing.
Fergusson, in “Capitol Hill,” keeps mainly to that end of Pennsylvania
avenue which gives his book its name. I believe that the makings of
a far better novel of Washington life are to be found at the other
end, to wit, in and about the alabaster cage which houses the heir
of Washington, Lincoln and Chester A. Arthur. Why, indeed, has no one
ever put _kaiserliche Majestät_ into fiction--save, of course, as a
disembodied spirit, vaguely radiating idealism? The revelations in the
Daugherty inquiry gave a hint of unworked riches--but there is enough
dramatic and even melodramatic material without descending to scandal.
A President is a man like the rest of us. He can laugh and he can
groan. There are days when his breakfast agrees with him, and days when
it doesn’t. His eyes have the common optical properties: they can see
a sweet one as far as they can see a member of the Interstate Commerce
Commission. All the funnels of intrigue are aimed at him. He is the
common butt of every loud-speaker. No other man in this sad vale has so
many jobs to give out, or one-half so many. Try to imagine a day in his
life, from dawn to midnight. Do it, and you will have the best American
novel ever heard of.
3
But I am forgetting my other candidates--for example, the American
university president. I mean, of course, the university president
of the new six-cylinder, air-cooled, four-wheel-brake model--half
the quack, half the visionary, and wholly the go-getter--the brisk,
business-like, confidential, button-holing, regular fellow who
harangues Rotary and Kiwanis, extracts millions from usurers by
alarming them about Bolshevism, and so builds his colossal pedagogical
slaughter-house, with its tens of thousands of students, its professors
of cheese-making, investment securities and cheer-leading, its galaxy
of football stars, and its general air of Barnum’s circus. Why has this
astounding mountebank not got into a book? He fairly yells for loving
embalming _à la_ Babbitt. He is not only stupendously picaresque and
amusing in himself--the final heir, at once, of Abelard, Cagliostro,
Increase Mather, the Fox sisters, Pestalozzi, Dr. Munyon, Godey of
the _Ladies’ Book_, and Daniel Drew--; he is also thoroughly and
magnificently characteristic of the great land we live in. No other
country has ever produced anything quite like him. No other country, I
suspect, would tolerate him. But here he lives and flourishes, a superb
and perfect American--and yet our novelists all neglect him.
Worse and more incredible still, they neglect the most American of all
Americans, the very _Ur-Amerikaner_--to wit, the malignant moralist,
the Christian turned cannibal, the snouting and preposterous Puritan.
Where is there the American novel in which he is even half limned?
There are, to be sure, glimpses of him in “The Song of the Lark,”
by Willa Cather, and in “Babbitt,” and there is a more elaborate
but still incomplete sketch in E. W. Howe’s “The Story of a Country
Town.” But Howe, unfortunately, had other fish to fry: he slapped in
his bucolic wowser brilliantly, and then passed on to melodrama and
the agonies of young love. So, too, with Lewis and Miss Cather. Thus,
though the Puritan Father lies embalmed magnificently in the pages of
Hawthorne, his heir and assign of the present day, the high-powered
uplifter, the prophet of harsh and unenforceable laws, the incurable
reformer and nuisance--this sweet fellow yet awaits his anatomist.
What a novel is in him! Indeed, what a shelf of novels! For he has
as many forms as there are varieties of human delusion. Sometimes
he is a tin-pot evangelist, sweating to transform Oklahoma City or
Altoona, Pa., into the New Jerusalem. Sometimes he is a hireling of the
Anti-Saloon League, sworn to Law Enforcement. Sometimes he is a strict
Sabbatarian, bawling for the police whenever he detects his neighbor
washing bottles or varnishing the Ford on Sunday morning. Again he is a
vice-crusader, chasing the scarlet lady with fierce Christian shouts.
Yet again he is a comstock, wearing out his eyes in the quest for smut.
He may even be female--a lady Ph.D. in a linoleum hat, patrolling
the cow towns and the city slums, handing out edifying literature,
teaching poor Polish women how to have babies. Whatever his form,
he is tremendously grotesque and tremendously amusing--and always he
drips with national juices, always he is as thoroughly American as a
bootlegger or a college yell. If he exists at all in other lands, it is
only in rudimentary and aberrant forms. Try to imagine a French Wayne
B. Wheeler, or a Spanish Billy Sunday, or a German William Jennings
Bryan. It is as impossible as imagining a Coolidge in the Rome of
Julius.
Since the earliest days, as everyone knows, American jurisprudence has
been founded upon the axiom that it is the first duty of every citizen
to police his neighbors, and especially those he envies, or otherwise
dislikes. There is no such thing, in this grand and puissant nation,
as privacy. The yokels out in Iowa, neglecting their horned cattle,
have a right, it appears--nay, a sacred duty!--to peek into my home in
Baltimore, and tell me what I may and may not drink with my meals. An
out-at-elbow Methodist preacher in Boston sets himself up to decide
what I may read. An obscure and unintelligent job-holder in Washington,
inspired by God, determines what I may receive in the mails. I must
not buy lottery tickets because it offends the moral sentiment of
Kansas. I must keep Sunday as the Sabbath, which is in conflict with
Genesis, because it is ordered by persons who believe that Genesis
can’t be wrong. Such are the laws of the greatest free nation ever
seen on earth. We are all governed by them. But a government of laws,
of course, is a mere phantasm of political theorists: the thing is
always found, on inspection, to be really a government of men. In the
United States, it seems to me, the tendency is for such men to come
increasingly from the class of professional uplifters. It is not the
bankers who run the ostensible heads of the state, as the Liberals
believe, nor the so-called bosses, as the bosses themselves believe,
but the wowsers. And what is a wowser? What does the word mean? It
means precisely what you think of inevitably when you hear it. A wowser
is a wowser. He bears a divine commission to regulate and improve the
rest of us. He knows exactly what is best for us. He is what Howe calls
a Good Man. So long as you and I are sinful, he can’t sleep. So long as
we are happy, he is after us.
I throw off the guess that there are at least forty novels in the
wowser--that is, forty good ones. He has, as I have said, as many
forms as the demons who ride him, and every one of them should make a
competent novelist, authentically called to the vocation, leap in air
with loud hosannas, and spit upon his hands. His psychology remains
mysterious. The Freudians, I believe, have misunderstood him, and the
psychiatrists have avoided him. What are the springs of his peculiar
frenzy to harass and punish his fellow men? By what process of malign
eugenics is he hatched? And what is his typical life history? Here is
work for the novelist, which is to say, for the professional anatomist
of character. I believe that Frank Norris, had he lived, would have
tackled it with enthusiasm, and made a great success of its execution.
Norris, like Dreiser after him, had a romantic and even a mystical
inclination, but at bottom he was a satirist--and the American Puritan
was made for satirists as catnip was made for cats. It is easy to laugh
at him, but it is hard to hate him. He is eternally in the position of
a man trying to empty the ocean with a tin-dipper. He will be mauled,
and the chance he offers thrown away, if the novelist who attempts him
in the end forgets the tragedy under his comedy. I have known many
American wowsers in my time, some of them intimately. They were all
intensely unhappy men. They suffered as vastly as Prometheus chained to
his rock, with the buzzards exploring his liver. A novelist blind to
that capital fact will never comprehend the type. It needs irony--but
above all it needs pity.
4
So does another type that also awaits its Thackeray: to wit, the
American journalist. Most American novelists, before they challenge
Dostoevski, put in an apprenticeship on the public prints, and thus
have a chance to study and grasp the peculiarities of the journalistic
mind; nevertheless, the fact remains that there is not a single
genuine newspaper man, done in the grand manner, in the whole range
of American fiction. As in the case of the wowser, there are some
excellent brief sketches, but there is no adequate portrait of the
journalist as a whole, from his beginnings as a romantic young reporter
to his finish as a Babbitt, correct in every idea and as hollow as
a jug. Here, I believe, is genuine tragedy. Here is the matter that
enters into all fiction of the first class. Here is human character in
disintegration--the primary theme of every sound novelist ever heard
of, from Fielding to Zola and from Turgeniev to Joseph Conrad. I know
of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the
journalist. He is, in his first phase, genuinely romantic. He plans
to be both an artist and a moralist--a master of lovely words and a
merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing
jackass in his community--that is, if his career goes on to what is
called success. He becomes the repository of all its worst delusions
and superstitions. He becomes the darling of all its frauds and idiots,
and the despair of all its honest men. He belongs to a good club, and
the initiation fee was his soul.
Here I speak by the book, for I have been in active practice as
a journalist for more than a quarter of a century, and have an
immense acquaintance in the craft. I could name a man who fits my
specifications exactly in every American city east of the Mississippi,
and refrain only on the advice of counsel. I do not say that all
journalists go that route. Far from it! Many escape by failing; some
even escape by succeeding. But the majority succumb. They begin with
high hopes. They end with safe jobs. In the career of any such man,
it seems to me, there are materials for fiction of the highest order.
He is interesting intrinsically, for his early ambition is at least
not ignoble--he is not born an earthworm. And he is interesting as a
figure in drama, for he falls gradually, resisting all the while, to
forces that are beyond his strength. If he can’t make the grade, it is
not because he is unwilling or weak, but because the grade itself is
too steep. Here is tragedy--and here is America. For the curse of this
country, as of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats
its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to
have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public
sense, is a respectable vacuum.
I heave this typical American journalist to the massed novelists of
the Federal Union, and invite them to lay on. There is a capital novel
in him--a capital character sketch and a capital picture of the
American scene. He is representative and yet he is not commonplace.
People will recognize him, and yet they are not familiar with him. Let
the fictioneers have at him! But let them bear in mind that, like the
wowser, he is not to be done to the tune of superior sneers. He is a
wreck, but he has not succumbed to the gales without resistance. Let
him be done ironically, as Lewis did Babbitt, but let him be done also
with pity. He is not a comedian, but a tragedian. Above all, let him
be done without any mouthing of theories. His simple story is poignant
enough.
Is he too difficult? Then I offer a substitute: the American policeman.
Certainly it is high time for him to get into a book. I dedicate him to
the novelists of the nation at once, and provide them simultaneously
with all the plot they will need. A moron with an IQ of 53, despairing
of ever getting a better job, goes on the force and begins pounding a
beat. A chance favor to a saloonkeeper makes a sergeant of him, and
thereafter he slowly mounts the ladder. At the end he is an inspector,
and in charge of operations against a fabulous crime wave, imagined
by the city editor of a tabloid newspaper. Isn’t that enough? What
a vivid and exhilarating picture of American life could be got out
of it! What humors are there, and what genuine drama! Nor are the
materials esoteric. Every newspaper reporter’s head is stuffed with
them. I myself could do such a work in ten volumes folio. Nine young
journalists out of ten, I believe, aspire to the novel. Well, here is a
chance to write a novel as good as “Babbitt.”
XI. ON LIVING IN BALTIMORE
Some time ago, writing in an eminent Baltimore newspaper upon the
Baltimore of my boyhood, I permitted myself an eloquent passage
upon its charm, and let fall the doctrine that nearly all of that
charm had vanished. Mere rhetoric, I greatly fear. The old charm, in
truth, still survives in the town, despite the frantic efforts of the
boosters and boomers who, in late years, have replaced all its ancient
cobblestones with asphalt, and bedizened it with Great White Ways and
suburban boulevards, and surrounded it with stinking steel plants and
oil refineries, and increased its population from 400,000 to 800,000.
I am never more conscious of the fact than when I return to it from
New York. Behind me lies the greatest city of the modern world, with
more money in it than all Europe and more clowns and harlots than all
Asia, and yet it has no more charm than a circus lot or a second-rate
hotel. It can’t show a single genuinely distinguished street. It hasn’t
a single park that is more lovely than a cemetery lot. It is without
manner as it is without manners. Escaping from it to so ancient and
solid a town as Baltimore is like coming out of a football crowd into
quiet communion with a fair one who is also amiable, and has the gift
of consolation for hard-beset and despairing men.
I have confessed to rhetoric, but I surely do not indulge in it here.
For twenty-five years I have resisted a constant temptation to move to
New York, and I resist it more easily to-day than I did when it began.
I am, perhaps, the most arduous commuter ever heard of, even in that
Babylon of commuters. My office is on Manhattan Island and has been
there since 1914; yet I live, vote and have my being in Baltimore, and
go back there the instant my job allows. If my desk bangs at 3 P. M. I
leap for the 3.25 train. Four long hours in the Pullman follow, but the
first is the worst. My back, at all events, is toward New York! Behind
lies a place fit only for the gross business of getting money; ahead is
a place made for enjoying it.
What makes New York so dreadful, I believe, is mainly the fact that
the vast majority of its people have been forced to rid themselves of
one of the oldest and most powerful of human instincts--the instinct
to make a permanent home. Crowded, shoved about and exploited without
mercy, they have lost the feeling that any part of the earth belongs
to them, and so they simply camp out like tramps, waiting for the
constables to rush in and chase them away. I am not speaking here of
the poor (God knows how they exist in New York at all!); I am speaking
of the well-to-do, even of the rich. The very richest man, in New York,
is never quite sure that the house he lives in now will be his next
year--that he will be able to resist the constant pressure of business
expansion and rising land values. I have known actual millionaires to
be chased out of their homes in this way, and forced into apartments.
In Baltimore too, the same pressure exists, to be sure, but it is not
oppressive, for the householder can meet it by yielding to it half way.
It may force him into the suburbs, even into the adjacent country, but
he is still in direct contact with the city, sharing in its life, and
wherever he lands he may make a stand. But on Manhattan Island he is
quickly brought up by the rivers, and once he has crossed them he may
as well move to Syracuse or Trenton.
Nine times out of ten he tries to avoid crossing them. That is, he
moves into meaner quarters on the island itself, and pays more for
them. His house gives way to a flat--one offering perhaps half the
room for his goods and chattels that his house offered. Next year he
is in a smaller flat, and three-fourths of his goods and chattels have
vanished. A few years more, and he is in two or three rooms. Finally,
he lands in an hotel. At this point he ceases to exist as the head
of a house. His quarters are precisely like the quarters of 50,000
other men. The front he presents to the world is simply an anonymous
door on a gloomy corridor. Inside, he lives like a sardine in a can.
Such a habitation, it must be plain, cannot be called a home. A home
is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in its permanence,
in its capacity for accretion and solidification, in its quality of
representing, in all its details, the personalities of the people who
live in it. In the course of years it becomes a sort of museum of these
people; they give it its indefinable air, separating it from all other
homes, as one human face is separated from all others. It is at once a
refuge from the world, a treasure-house, a castle, and the shrine of a
whole hierarchy of peculiarly private and potent gods.
This concept of the home cannot survive the mode of life that prevails
in New York. I have seen it go to pieces under my eyes in the houses of
my own friends. The intense crowding in the town, and the restlessness
and unhappiness that go with it, make it almost impossible for anyone
to accumulate the materials of a home--the trivial, fortuitous and
often grotesque things that gather around a family, as glories and
debts gather around a state. The New Yorker lacks the room to house
them; he thus learns to live without them. In the end he is a stranger
in the house he lives in. More and more, it tends to be no more than
Job No. 16432b from this or that decorator’s studio. I know one New
Yorker, a man of considerable means, who moves every three years. Every
time he moves his wife sells the entire contents of the apartment she
is leaving, and employs a decorator to outfit the new one. To me, at
all events, such a mode of living would be unendurable. The charm of
getting home, as I see it, is the charm of getting back to what is
inextricably my own--to things familiar and long loved, to things
that belong to me alone and none other. I have lived in one house in
Baltimore for nearly forty-five years. It has changed in that time,
as I have--but somehow it still remains the same. No conceivable
decorator’s masterpiece could give me the same ease. It is as much a
part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I’d be as certainly
crippled as if I lost a leg.
I believe that this feeling for the hearth, for the immemorial lares
and penates, is infinitely stronger in Baltimore than in New York--that
it has better survived there, indeed, than in any other large city
of America--and that its persistence accounts for the superior charm
of the town. There are, of course, thousands of Baltimoreans in
flats--but I know of none to whom a flat seems more than a make-shift,
a substitute, a necessary and temporary evil. They are all planning to
get out, to find house-room in one of the new suburbs, to resume living
in a home. What they see about them is too painfully not theirs. The
New Yorker has simply lost that discontent. He is a vagabond. His
notions of the agreeable become those of a vaudeville actor. He takes
on the shallowness and unpleasantness of any other homeless man. He
is highly sophisticated, and inordinately trashy. The fact no doubt
explains the lack of charm that one finds in his town; the fact that
the normal man of Baltimore is almost his exact antithesis explains
the charm that is there. Human relations, in such a place, tend to
assume a solid permanence. A man’s circle of friends becomes a sort of
extension of his family circle. His contacts are with men and women who
are rooted as he is. They are not moving all the time, and so they are
not changing their friends all the time. Thus abiding relationships
tend to be built up, and when fortune brings unexpected changes, they
survive those changes. The men I know and esteem in Baltimore are, on
the whole, men I have known and esteemed a long while; even those who
have come into my ken relatively lately seem likely to last. But of
the men I knew best when I first began going to New York, twenty-five
years ago, not one is a friend to-day. Of those I knew best ten years
ago, not six are friends. The rest have got lost in the riot, and the
friends of to-day, I sometimes fear, will get lost in the same way.
In human relationships that are so casual there is seldom any
satisfaction. It is our fellows who make life endurable to us, and
give it a purpose and a meaning; if our contacts with them are light
and frivolous there is something lacking, and it is something of the
very first importance. What I contend is that in Baltimore, under a
slow-moving and cautious social organization, touched by the Southern
sun, such contacts are more enduring than elsewhere, and that life
in consequence is more agreeable. Of the external embellishments
of life there is a plenty there--as great a supply, indeed, to any
rational taste, as in New York itself. But there is also something much
better: a tradition of sound and comfortable living. A Baltimorean
is not merely John Doe, an isolated individual of _Homo sapiens_,
exactly like every other John Doe. He is John Doe _of_ a certain
place--of Baltimore, of a definite _house_ in Baltimore. It is not by
accident that all the peoples of Europe, very early in their history,
distinguished their best men by adding _of_ this or that place to their
names.
XII. THE LAST NEW ENGLANDER