THE AMERICAN NOVEL
TO-DAY
A Social and Psychological Study
BY RÉGIS MICHAUD
BOSTON ~ 1928
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1928,
By Little, Brown, and Company
All rights reserved
Published January, 1928
Printed in the United States of America
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author wishes to express his indebtedness to the publishers who
have so kindly granted him permission to reprint extended quotations
from novels used in the chapters of this book. These include Robert
M. McBride & Company, publishers of “Jurgen,” “Figures of Earth,”
“Domnei” and “The Cream of the Jest” by James Branch Cabell; Houghton
Mifflin Company, publishers of “My Antonia” by Willa Cather; Boni &
Liveright, publishers of “An American Tragedy,” “A Hoosier Holiday,”
“The Genius,” “Sister Carrie,” “The Financier” and “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub”
by Theodore Dreiser and “Dark Laughter” by Sherwood Anderson; The
Viking Press, publishers of “Marching Men,” “The Triumph of the Egg,”
“A Story Teller’s Story,” “Windy McPherson’s Son” and “Many Marriages”
by Sherwood Anderson; and D. Appleton & Company, publishers of “Miss
Lulu Bett” by Zona Gale.
FOREWORD
This book grew out of a series of lectures given by the author at the
Sorbonne during the year 1926. These lectures were later published in
a volume which was awarded the Montyon prize by the French Academy.
The author’s first task is to apologize to the American reader for his
audacity in attempting to transcribe it into English, and to seek his
indulgence by reminding him that this is “an essay from a French pen,”
to quote our former ambassador, M. Jusserand. It is only fair that the
writer should warn his readers that the field of his investigation has
been limited. His purpose was not to write a complete history of the
American novel, although the principal masters of modern fiction have
been included in the book; nor was it his intention that this should be
purely a piece of literary criticism.
No one can open an American novel without being impressed by the
earnestness and the unanimity which the authors display in discussing
moral and social questions. Their books constitute a vast satire of
present-day American civilization, a defense of the rights of man
against the pressure of obsolete ideals and traditions. From this
standpoint, they constitute a homologous group while each retains his
full measure of originality.
Realism is not a new factor in American fiction. From Edward Eggleston
to Theodore Dreiser, the American novel has tended more and more to
become a precise account of American society. However, realism has
never been as prevalent and as outspoken as it is to-day. As the United
States increased in number and in population, the conflict between the
ideals of the individual and those of the mass became more and more
acute. Meanwhile the progress of experimental psychology afforded the
American novelist a new means of explaining and revealing the motives
of the individual.
In my book I have made reference to psychoanalysis in particular.
Current literary criticism cannot afford to ignore Doctor Freud. Some
masters of American literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Henry James, Margaret Fuller and Amy Lowell have lately been
subjected to a successful psychoanalysis. The new psychology permits a
more exact diagnosis of several important phases of our consciousness
which have their origin in the deepest recesses of our soul, and which,
though not literary in themselves, are often manifest in literature.
Freudian psychology is the natural ally of the sociologist. It shifts
the largest part of the responsibility for many of the moral diseases
and idiosyncrasies of the individual upon social institutions. By
presenting Puritanism as a form of moral inhibition it throws a new
light upon it.
Moral and psychological duplicity have been the subjects of several
European investigations before the ascendancy of Doctor Freud. One
of the most suggestive was presented in a book called “Le Bovarysme”
by the French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier. He chose Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary as being the most typical case of romantic inhibition.
He showed that after all romanticism was nothing but a psychological
disease and the attempt of an individual under social pressure to
appear in a double light in his own eyes. A more pathetic example can
scarcely be conceived than that of Flaubert’s heroine, Emma Bovary,
and her attempt to lead an imaginary life as a compensation for her
monotonous environment. It is obvious from a perusal of American
novels of to-day that Emma Bovary has many brothers and sisters in
this country. A normal society cannot exist without normal people and
the latter cannot be imagined without a certain amount of personal
freedom and felicity. Standardization, the tyranny of public opinion
and morals, the leveling of the exceptional to the mass ideal, petty
persecutions, blue laws, Comstockery and so forth, had a part to play
in Emma Bovary’s slow but sure moral and spiritual starvation, and in
her ultimate suicide. Social welfare rests on a harmonious balance of
give and take between the upper and lower classes. An excess of freedom
produces anarchy; an excess of tyranny, inhibitions, despair and crime.
No life is worth living wherein action is not a sister to dreams to
some extent, to use Baudelaire’s saying. The plight of Flaubert’s
heroine and that of Carol Kennicott in “Main Street” are different
aspects of the same social and moral disease--undue moral repression.
The author of this book is not a pessimist and he is well aware that
there are many American virtues; frankness, cordiality, buoyancy,
a love of life and a love of action, a craving for change, the
exaltation of youth, pure and triumphant, and the dynamism of national
life,--these are qualities which the Old World might envy the New. But
an outside observer might also have the right to point to the reverse
side of these qualities. What has become of ethical and intellectual
standards in the United States, a country so unmistakably prosperous
and happy from a material point of view? What is the present condition
of culture which exists behind the display of luxury and comfort? How
has America fared in the conflict of quality _versus_ quantity which
has swept the world?
One thing strikes the European in these United States of to-day; it
is the contrast between the general prosperity and the individual
discontent. The average American, taken out of his natural
surroundings, appears like one who is sacrificed by being harnessed to
some huge task whose importance he cannot grasp with reference to his
personal satisfaction. He has helped to build a colossal structure, but
what has he succeeded in achieving for his own gratification? Has he
not sacrificed his best personal interests to the general welfare? The
average American is an optimist superficially, but many disappointments
lie buried in his heart. There seems to be some ungratified longing
in his life; neither Puritan asceticism nor material prosperity can
satisfy the new generation in America. The newcomers declare themselves
discontented; they have become frankly pessimistic. A proud and wealthy
nation, the proudest and wealthiest of all, the most eager and the
most successful in conquering the means of material welfare, America
does not seem to know how to make her children happy. They are in
revolt, they are questioning the ideals and institutions of their
fathers. In poetry, in drama, in the pulpit and in the press, pessimism
and criticism prevail. Only recently the élite of the American
intelligentsia declared that the civilization of the United States had
been a failure.
What of all that? The author is not dismayed by these complaints. He
holds that art in its largest sense has always had pessimism as its
base and exaltation as its apogee. _Durch Leiden Freude!_ the great
Beethoven proclaimed. Better to have the blues of a Chatterton, an
Edgar Allan Poe, a Francis Thompson, than to have the banal optimism
of a Babbitt after a good meal. The present pessimism of the younger
generation in America is a good omen and an indication of a better
future. Young America is looking forward to more thrilling spiritual
adventures and it certainly will not be deceived in its high
expectations.
RÉGIS MICHAUD
CONTENTS
Foreword vii
I The Case Against the Puritans 3
II How Nathaniel Hawthorne Exorcised Hester Prynne 25
III Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells
and American Society on Parade 47
IV Theodore Dreiser as a Bio-Chemist 71
V Theodore Dreiser and the American Tragedy 102
VI Sinclair Lewis and the Average Man 128
VII Sherwood Anderson or When the Dreamer Awakes 154
VIII Sherwood Anderson on This Side of Freud 181
IX James Branch Cabell and the Escape to Poictesme 200
X James Branch Cabell on the High Place 221
XI Reinforcements: Willa Cather, Zona Gale, Floyd Dell,
Joseph Hergesheimer, Waldo Frank 238
XII Ulysses’ Companions: Robert McAlmon, Ben Hecht,
William Carlos Williams 257
Index 285
THE AMERICAN NOVEL TO-DAY
CHAPTER I
_The Case Against the Puritans_
The last fifteen years have seen a complete revolution in old American
literary ideals. There has been a new efflorescence of poetry known
as the “new poetry” movement. On the stage, after the attempts of
William Vaughn Moody to renew the American drama, by fusing together
realism and symbolism, Eugene O’Neill appeared and showed originality
in his lyric dramatizations. In criticism, talents of the first order
were revealed. The din of battles, the eagerness of controversies
bear witness to the existence of an intensive, intellectual life in
the United States to-day. Romanticism _versus_ classicism, progress
_versus_ tradition, or, to speak the language of the country,
radicalism _versus_ conservatism, waged a strenuous battle for their
respective ideals. Messrs. Mencken, Van Doren, Rosenfeld, Van Wyck
Brooks, Frank Harris, on the left wing, Paul Elmer More, the late
Stuart P. Sherman, Irving Babbitt, W. C. Brownell, on the right, have
made a sport of intellectual polemics and appreciation. American
criticism is not content with gliding on the surface of authors or
problems. It goes straight to moral problems and shows a keen intuition
of technics.
This spiritual effervescence is well worth our attention. The literary
nonconformist is a type not yet extinct in America. A revival of
the protestant spirit and of critical examination has taken place
in American literature. More faith and conviction have been spent
in literary production than in the pulpit of the churches. The late
Randolph Bourne was a typical example of the American literary radical,
and Mr. Henry Mencken continues the tradition among us.
Even from the literary point of view, the American novel in the
nineteenth century envied the rest of the world nothing. It produced
excellent models of all kinds. The novel of adventure, the novel of
manners have been stamped by Cooper and Hawthorne with the authentic
seal of genius. More recently, Henry James showed himself a master
of the psychological novel and an unparalleled artist. The vogue in
America and abroad of the American “movies” could not be explained
without the writings of Jack London. The short story, since Edgar Poe,
had been a product copyrighted in America, while American humorists had
won a worldwide reputation.
When all is told, if we make an inventory of the literary production
in the world, as compared with that of the United States, in prose
and verse, since, let us say, the advent of Baudelaire in France, we
see that America, a so-called utilitarian country, has set, in more
than one way, modern literary standards, with Poe, Whitman, Henry
James. Meanwhile, in the realm of thought, American philosophy and
psychology exerted a capital influence abroad. (A recent novel by M.
Paul Bourget[1] still takes for granted all the doctrines professed by
William James in his “Handbook of Psychology.”)
Let this be said in way of prelude, to make the readers of this
volume well aware of the fact that the author does not accept without
reserve all the criticisms hurled against American literature by
modern American critics. The fertility and originality of American
literature, in a country without literary traditions or institutions,
are facts beyond all doubt. They fill one with optimism regarding the
intellectual future of this great nation.
Yet, criticism is unleashed in the United States nowadays and it spares
nothing. If the French are critical by birth, one would say, judging
from the mass of evidence, that the modern American was born fussy.
In a country where the standards of life change overnight, critical
revaluations in literature are fatal. The American Hall of Fame could
not escape the law of perpetual transformation. Until recently, the
United States was the last country in the world which continued to take
for granted the optimism of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists.
Americans have not yet lost their faith in automatic progress. Despite
the “fundamentalists” they have evolution in their blood. May I
suggest, on the threshold of this book, that a European observer may be
better located, ideally speaking, to render American literature full
justice than even native critics? He has less illusions and also less
prejudices. He views the literary revolution in the recent years in
America as a result of the moral and social advance.
In the last twenty years a new class of writers has invaded American
literature. The spirit of the pioneers never died in America. The
young writers wanted to conquer new fields in an entirely new way.
Their originality was a challenge to the old order. More than any
other country since the War, literary America has struggled to find
a new heaven and a new earth. Modern writers are conscientiously and
deliberately insurgents. They turn a cold shoulder to traditions. In
fact, they belong, socially, to a new class. Few of them are well-to-do
bourgeois educated in expensive colleges and depending for their
writing upon leisure and incomes. American literature is no longer the
monopoly of gentlemen and scholars. The great majority of American
writers to-day are self-made men, born from the people, without any
blue blood and entirely democratic in their lives if not in their
ideals. Most of them wear the chevrons not of the universities but of
journalism. A great many, and the most noted among them, were reporters
before becoming authors. This throws not a little light on their
literary achievements. Most of them adhere to no church. The American
literary “Who’s Who” includes indiscriminately all creeds, Protestants,
Catholics, Jews, and free thinkers. American literature has shunned
respectability. It jumped from the right to the left and even to the
extreme left. From aristocratic or bourgeois it became revolutionary
and proletarian.
Even the geographical positions were altered. American literature had,
up to the most recent years, been largely manufactured in the eastern
States, a country conservative by tradition. As opportunities for
adventure became rare in the East, Boston, Philadelphia and even New
York ceased to be literary Meccas. The new literature developed in the
Middle West. This fact is not without its historical significance.
It marked a return of the American mind to the natural line of American
migration, from frontier to frontier, across the continent. The writers
took the path of the missionaries, the pioneers and the captains of
industry, the path of the covered wagon.
This was a challenge to the ideals of their predecessors. Classic
American writers leaned more on the East than on the West, more on
Europe than on their own country. Their literary taste and ideals,
if not always their programme, were European, or if you prefer,
Victorian. The new literature is strictly indigenous. It is crude and
in many ways primitive. It is no longer manufactured in drawing-rooms
or in studios, but in immediate contact with life. The great American
novel of the nineteenth century was exotic and retrospective. It
was sentimental and romantic. Its ethical and social background
was traditional. Sentimentality and romance, the search after the
picturesque, have gone by the boards. They have passed to the “movies”
or to the popular magazines, the latter almost as backward to-day as
they used to be fifty years ago and as harmless. The novel of adventure
has been extinct, as a _genre littéraire_ in America, since the death
of Jack London. Even the social novel has suffered a radical change.
It is no longer written from the outside, from the point of view of
society, as in the days of Frank Norris or Upton Sinclair. It is now
written from the inside, from the point of view of the individual. It
is more psychological than social. In fact, while the American novel
became more realistic, it also began to be beset by moral problems.
It ceased to be an epic to become a satire. From this point of view,
however, despite their cynicism, the new masters of American fiction
show themselves true to the old ideal. Their books are fraught with
idealism, with the spirit of reform and amelioration. Even when they
fight Puritanism, the American literary insurgents show themselves
more puritanic than the Puritans. They are haunted by the dream of a
better world and of a better humanity.
The fact that the new literature in America is contemporary with the
wave of pessimism which has marked the last twenty years is not a mere
coincidence. The two events stand very much together in a relation
of effect to cause. Pessimism in the United States to-day has not
yet affected the external aspects of American life. It has not made
the average American less buoyant and confident. The sunny side of
American life is still there. And yet, it cannot be denied that the
age of jazz is more gloomy than the age of Roosevelt. There is a great
deal of dissatisfaction in America to-day. The restless trend of life,
the mad pursuit of material ease, the desertion of the home, the
speed mania, the get-rich-quick impulse, are no longer the privilege
of the grown-up. The contagion of material welfare and luxury has
reached the young. It has lured them and led them astray. Educators,
clergymen, sociologists, and, unfortunately too, criminologists,
are much worried by the spread of the new paganism, and the growth
of juvenile delinquency. American homes and colleges are swamped
to-day with precocious supermen and superwomen eager to live their
lives, as the saying is, without knowing how, except by aping their
elders, by procuring expensive motor cars and jewels, or by securing
for themselves road-house privileges. Juvenile criminality is on the
increase. There is an epidemic of suicide among the young and the
standards of morality are not much higher among the mature at large. No
wonder that the American élite should be clamoring for a revaluation of
standards.
How can they win their fight? They are a handful in a mass of more
than one hundred million people, led, the vast majority of them, by
mob psychology and the tyranny of public opinion. This certainly is a
pathetic and vexing problem. For a European observer the fight in the
United States to-day is not so much that of good and evil, right and
wrong. The economic and material standards of the average American
are much higher than those in the Old World. The fight in America
to-day is, at the bottom, that of the élite against the masses, the
fight of quality _versus_ quantity. This problem lies far beyond
the power of statistics. It cannot be coped with by economists or
sociologists. It falls within the pale of the moralist, the mystic and
the philosopher. A big nation, like a big army, cannot exist without a
discipline and a strict subordination of the masses to their leaders.
How can this be possible without setting limits to the rights of
individual development? This problem is complicated in America by that
of standards. How are the demands of the masses going to be gratified
without a leveling down of the standards? Is not material comfort the
most obvious and most accessible value for the greater number? And what
has intellectual growth to do with material welfare?
A type of civilization is not easily changed. Only a Chinese general or
a Nietzschean philosopher would dare to solve the problem of the masses
by applying the remedy suggested, a long time ago, by the benign R. W.
Emerson:
Earth crowded, cries “Too many men.”
My counsel is kill nine in ten.
More than ten millions have been killed, within the last ten years, in
Christian warfare, and _quality_ does not seem to have won yet over
quantity. The polemics around the War have not solved but intensified
the feud between the American élite and the masses. Immediately after
the armistice of 1918, American radicals undertook a revaluation of war
responsibilities. The American intelligentsia had never put its heart
into the struggle. Conscientious objectors swarmed on all sides. The
present economic, political and intellectual chaos through the world
is largely the work of American nonconformists. They spared nothing to
reverse the guilts, to confuse the origin and the issues of the war.
The result of their efforts was an immense disarray of the world’s
conscience. The actual misunderstandings about debts and reparations,
the aloofness of the United States and their retirement within a narrow
and obsolete Monroeism, the Americano-phobia abroad can be credited
mostly to the exertions of American radicals. After they had lost their
temper with Europe they began their intellectual civil war at home.
Their target-practicing became suicidal. The glories of the American
Hall of Fame were lampooned in broad daylight. American institutions
and ideals were challenged. There was an orgy of self-exterminating
criticism. While radical newspapers and magazines wasted much ink to
blacken the lamb and to bleach the wolf, in international relations,
critics at home, like Mr. Mencken, turned their ire against their own
country. The “Magnalia Christi Americana” of Cotton Mather became
the “Americana” of the _American Mercury_. In Mr. Mencken’s amusing
magazine American glories and reputations were mowed down like daisies
on a lawn. The churches, the colleges, the Federal Government were
dealt with, at first hand and without much respect, and then appeared
the indictment of American civilization as a whole by the thirty
intellectuals. The confidence of the world in the United States and
of the United States in themselves must still be very great, if one
judges by the quick and informal dismissal into oblivion of this bulky
indictment.
As a result of all this, there seem to be two United States to-day
warring with each other. On the one hand we still have the “Land
of God,” a nation just as proud of itself to-day as it was in the
best days of the Roosevelt administration. And then there are the
discontented and self-criticizing United States, a land where every
article of the old creed is contradicted by self-disparaging critics.
Between the two, on a sort of No Man’s Land, wander not a few erratic
souls in quest of an ideal. The late Henry Adams was their model.
The upheaval against optimism and conformity is pretty general to-day
among the thinking classes in the United States. Protests, inquiries
and criticisms appear on all sides. If we believe them, American
citizens have been cheated of their rights to happiness as promised in
the American Constitution. But the fight among them is not so much with
the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as with the official
scapegoat, Puritanism.
As a collective and national state of mind, Puritanism can be traced
far back in American traditions and literature. Before indicting it, we
must not fail to see its good points, and it had many. Far from being
in itself adverse to all æsthetics, as its American critics would have
us believe, Puritanism was in the past a literary incentive of the
first order. Its tragic conception of life is much more artistic than
the dull optimism of the masses. No art is possible without pessimism.
Art in its essence is a challenge to life. Puritanism was the only
moral and religious system, outside Catholicism, which invented a
mythology and a symbolism in the modern times. It inspired the immortal
epic of Milton. It gave their quaint flavor even to Jonathan Edwards’
sermons and the “Magnalia” of Cotton Mather. No true road to salvation
can ignore the pits of human wickedness. The fantastic elements in
Hawthorne and Poe were largely borrowed from the demonology of the
Puritan divines. Puritanism believed in the devil. It was a tremendous
source of religious emotions. It fed the sense of the supernatural
which is to-day practically extinct in the American churches. It
favored the growth of mysticism and of the poetic faculties. It
enhanced the love of solitude. It shunned comfort and emphasized the
military and rugged aspects of life. It was friendly to nature and
not adverse to the call of the wild. It pondered over the ominous
problems of life, death, grace and responsibility. It inclined toward
simple life, intimacy with the humble and familiar aspects of life.
This Puritan type of mind has been illustrated by some of the most
intellectual leaders of America, Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson,
William Vaughn Moody, Robert Frost, Robinson. Puritanism was a synonym
for restraint, poverty, abnegation, depth of conscience and thought,
qualities sorely needed in our present state of civilization. We owe
to it the sense of the Infinite in the humblest objects and amidst the
most trivial circumstances of our life, what Maeterlinck called, after
Emerson, the sense of “the familiar sublime.” And let us not forget
those forms of inhibited irony which gave birth to American humor.
On the other hand, it is true, the toll levied by Puritanism on human
happiness has been ominous. For the average mind it meant intellectual
consumption and asphyxiation. Puritan asceticism was an enemy of
everything beautiful. Puritan institutions, the Puritan spirit of
prohibition and constraint, have been justly denounced by modern
critics as the chief obstacle to a rational and acceptable conception
of life. Puritanism showed an admirable knowledge of the truest sides
of existence and of its responsibilities, but it did not see all its
sides. It perceived only and denounced flesh and the devil. It was
suspicious of all the happy instincts and denied some essential human
cravings.
Hence the present revolt against it. The critics of Puritanism in
America to-day are legion. The anti-Puritan spirit forms the substratum
of contemporary American literature. It is only fair to Theodore
Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell and
others to try to show, in way of preamble, that their plea against
Puritan hypocrisy is supported by most of the up-to-date critics who
handle a pen in the United States to-day. To review them all would be a
long task. I shall deal only in this chapter with the most noted, like
Messrs. Waldo Frank, Henry Mencken, Theodore Dreiser and a few others.
Waldo Frank (in “Our America”) views Puritanism as a sort of moral and
mystic utilitarianism based on the repression of natural instincts.
As a religious and a practical expansionist (the one is not to be
separated from the other), the Puritan sacrificed moral growth to
physical hegemony. To conquer the continent and intensify his energies
he surrounded himself on all sides with restraints. Neurosis was the
result, but the Puritan charged it to the account of the Prince of
Darkness and the invisible powers. He wanted to reach salvation by a
short cut and did not hesitate to do violence to human nature. When
they attack Puritanism the new insurgents do not aim at windmills.
They see it as a practical influence still at work in American
society to-day. It gives them the key to American behavior. According
to them, the average American is a victim of puritanic repressions
since childhood. The system of American education is hostile to what
modern psychologists call “wish-fulfillment.” The American is active,
expansive, a progressionist and a doer in regard to matter. He shows
a virile conscience in his conduct toward the physical universe. On
the contrary, in regard to spiritual life, he dodges the facts and
shrinks within himself. His physical courage is undeniable, but he is
mentally and morally a coward. Read an American novel, attend a play
or a “movie.” All begins well. Human problems are not ignored but, at
the end, Puritan cowardice interferes to twist the facts and hide them
in an enforced “happy ending.” The American is a wonderful mechanical
engineer. When he cannot subdue reality by machinery, he resorts
to plots and schemes of his own. He tries to gamble and speculate.
Hence American ideology. When he has confused the issues the American
gives it up and he passes his problems to his church, his lodge, his
newspaper, or, preferably, to his wife, not to forget the mind reader
and the palmist. Optimism at all costs is a necessity for the business
man as well as for the pioneer. Expansion lives on assumptions, on
foregone conclusions and hopes supported by haphazard calculation.
According to Waldo Frank, Puritanism was tantamount to a religious
decadence. It was essentially irreligious. Not the meek in spirit but
the shrewd and the valiant were the elect of Puritanism. From the very
beginnings of colonization in America, Puritan idealism and commercial
imperialism went hand in hand. The decadence began at the epoch of
the Reformation. While all Europe was advancing along intellectual,
artistic and literary paths, the Puritan bartered his soul for earthly
possessions. Spiritual energies turned material. Physical exertions
for power paralyzed higher aspirations. The individual as such no
longer counted. Expansion was all and the building of an empire. Even
the notion of a personal God disappeared. The _genius loci_ replaced
Providence. _Magnalia Christi_ became _Magnalia Christi Americana_.[2]
That one of the most fervent forms of mysticism should have decayed
into being only a craving for material prosperity is the paradox and
the curse of Puritanism. America, we are told, is teeming to-day with
all the riches of this earth. From the top of a mountain the Tempter
would be proud to show it to Him who said that His kingdom did not
belong to this world. From the heights of the ideal, however, America
looks like a desert. Let her confess her sins, her emptiness, her
impurities. Let America repent and convert herself! Let her find a
way to salvation by giving up the Puritan ideals! Thus speaks the new
Zarathustra with an intensity of conviction and a zeal which betrays
the prophet and the idealist. Such an indictment takes us very far
away from the days of optimism, from Emerson, Whitman, William James
and Theodore Roosevelt. American idealism was buried in the grave of
the Transcendentalists. As for American energy it floundered in the
quagmire described by Theodore Dreiser in “An American Tragedy.”
After Waldo Frank let us hear Mr. Henry Mencken, than whom no better
expert for smashing the Puritan can be found (in “Puritanism as a
Literary Force”). According to him, except in the course of brief
escapades, the average American translates all values and even beauty
in terms of right and wrong. He is at the bottom a policeman and a
judge, a fanatic of the law.[3]
Americans do not hesitate to sacrifice beauty and passion to
respectability. If an American writer dared to follow the example of
either Zola or Balzac in their descriptions of American society, they
would be sent to the penitentiary for life. One of the most active
forces at work to keep up American civilization is a belief in the
universal presence of sin and the need of inquisition to uphold the
moral code. Readers familiar with Mr. Mencken’s writings will remember
with what fertility of imagination and keenness of wit he illustrated
his views on the subject. The richer the Puritan became the more
tyrannical he showed himself. His wealth made him intolerant and
oppressive. Now that he was assured of his salvation, he turned his
energies to convert the world outside by campaigns, crusades and so
forth. He tried to make the world safe for righteousness and morality
by compulsion, prohibitions and blue laws.
As a disciple of Zola and Balzac, and an extreme realist in his
descriptions of American society, Theodore Dreiser has not yet been
jailed for life, so far as we know. However, he enjoyed enough
scraps with the censor to have personal reasons for venting his
feelings concerning the Puritan. The author of “Sister Carrie” is
not a professional humorist, and yet he can hardly control himself
when he contemplates the American scene as ordained by Puritanism.
I quote freely from his essay on “Life, Art in America,” in “Hey
Rub-a-Dub-Dub.” Theodore Dreiser cannot refrain from chuckling, he
tells us, when he sees more than one hundred millions of his countrymen
loaded with a wealth which passes the imagination of the most
enthusiastic miser and unable to count among themselves a sculptor, a
poet, a singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician of the first rank.
For two centuries America enjoyed an amazing prosperity. Her land
is stuffed with mines, with oil and coal. It is full of beautiful
mountains, of large valleys and rivers. There are facilities of all
sorts for trade and for travel. And yet, with all her prosperity,
America hardly counts an artist or a thinker of mark. Where are we to
find, leaving aside Emerson and William James,[4] the American Spencer,
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Kant? Has America any historian to compare
with Macaulay, Grote or Gibbon? Has she any novelist like Maupassant
or Flaubert? Where is the American equivalent of Crooks, Roentgen,
Pasteur? Is there an American critic with the depth and forcibleness of
Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the De Goncourts? Has America a playwright like
Ibsen, Tchekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann or Brieux? Where are her Coquelins,
Sonnenthals, Forbes-Robertsons and Bernhardts? America has produced
only one poet since Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters. American painting can
marshal Whistler, Inness and Sargent, but two out of the three migrated
abroad. America has plenty of inventors, some of them remarkable, but
this has nothing to do with art and the freeing of the mind.
Such is Theodore Dreiser’s arraignment of American culture. Puritanism
thwarted intellectual energies. It is its fault if this country of
wonderful technicians remained in a state of childhood in regard
to higher mental achievements. On one hand the American grasps the
physical world with the might of a Titan, on the other he revels in
platitudes about brotherly love, purity, virtue, truth, etc., and
under the cover of these platitudes he unleashes the Comstocks against
independent writers.
There are some professional psychologists among the critics of
Puritanism to-day. In a recent book entitled “The American Mind
in Action” two of them[5] made a methodical study of puritanic
inhibitions. They selected, to illustrate their case, personalities
such as Emerson, Lincoln, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Comstock,
Barnum, Franklin, Longfellow and Margaret Fuller.[6]
According to these authors the Puritan repression of natural instincts
is a danger and a failure. It breeds hypocrisy and poisons the soul.
Puritanism is responsible for most of the mental tortures which have
been dramatized by American novelists in particular. The scientific
name for these tortures is “floating anxiety” or “soul-fear.” They
explain the transformation of Puritanism into imperialistic expansion.
Everything is good for the Puritan if it takes him away from himself,
from his fears, and his remorses. Hence his worship for action, for
prosperity and success at all cost. American energy, viewed from this
angle, is nothing but a substitute for scruples. If we believe this
theory, the darings of the modern business man, his pluck, his boasting
spirit of enterprise are only means to get rid of fright. A business
man’s courage resembles that of the “Chocolate Soldier” in Bernard
Shaw’s comedy. It is a derivative of fear, a _flight_ straight ahead
toward the enemy, because there is no hope left behind. The American
continent was conquered by religious misanthropists who vented their
bad feelings by starting an onslaught on the Indians and other inferior
races. The wrath of Miles Standish when he finds himself rebuked by
Priscilla in his courtship and his subsequent offensive on the Redskin
explains this point of view.[7] How different America would be if
the Virginian Cavalier had won over the Puritan! But the contrary
happened. Natural conditions and economic forces made Puritanism the
sole form of national ethics in the United States. So much the worse!
This state of blind repression and of anxious insecurity have made
Puritanism the only form of thinking in America. Notwithstanding the
diversion of affairs or the relaxation of sports, travel and amusement,
soul-fear cannot be eschewed.
The American worries about health, hygiene. He worries about success.
These are signs that the spiritual life is absent. Angry with himself,
and with others, the disillusioned Puritan becomes a raider and an
inquisitor. He wants to prohibit to others that happiness which is
denied to him. He fears his own fear; he distrusts his emotions. He is
afraid to surrender to nature which he regards as corrupt. And yet,
without emotions there is no art or literature possible. An example
of the Puritan inhibition, and of its effects on art, is Whistler
painting, with all his soul, the portrait of his mother and calling
it informally “Arrangement in black and white” for fear that he would
betray his inner feelings. False pride, _amour-propre_ and bluff are
the ransoms for Puritanism.
Another American complex, if we believe our critics, is the “mother
complex,” the American complex _par excellence_. The sublimation of
instincts in the American woman produced the so-called “motherly
feeling.” It triumphs in American magazines and in the “movies.” The
sentimental appeal to the motherly feeling is the surest and shortest
way to arouse the emotions of the American crowds.[8]
American idealism is largely manufactured by women. It is to women that
the average American owes his ideals and ethical or literary standards.
It is woman who inspires, supervises and censors art and literature in
the United States; it is she who makes them aseptic, consumptive and
tawdry.[9]
In business the American is a real “he-man” but, when he must face
moral issues, he surrenders to his mate. He tamed the physical universe
with machinery and became a leader of material civilization. He can
well solve mechanical problems, but ethics, philosophy and gay science
are beyond his pale. And this is why the typical American to-day is
so idealistic, so practical too, so inventive and so little of a
philosopher and of an artist. He is anxious, restless, assured of
himself on the surface but, in reality, very sensitive to criticism.
Nobody is more able than he to attain the goal of his ambitions and
nobody is more unhappy and helpless when he has reached it.[10]
Such is the survey of American ethics and psychology made by some of
the best-known American critics. In this book it is meant to compare
their views with those of the most noted among American novelists
to-day. Floating anxiety, soul fear, Freudian complexes and inhibitions
throw a great deal of light on the contemporary novel. The case against
the Puritan has been pressed by modern American novelists to the limit
of pathos.
The massive, clumsy, but forcible and convincing Theodore Dreiser, the
genial and yet embittered Sinclair Lewis, the mystic and intuitive
Sherwood Anderson, the ironic and quixotic James Branch Cabell,
accompanied by a galaxy of talented writers like Willa Cather, Zona
Gale, Floyd Dell, Joseph Hergesheimer, Waldo Frank,--all of them,
since Hawthorne, through Henry James, William Dean Howells and
Edith Wharton, show themselves obsessed by the problems of Puritan
inhibitions and their influence on human conduct. More recently still,
a host of younger writers has appeared in American fiction, all of them
fascinated by the question of psychological behavior. The wanderings
of Ulysses, in James Joyce’s Freudian epic, through the mazes of
subconsciousness, had many American followers. Several of them have
been included in this volume.
This book has no pretensions at being complete and it is not ashamed
of being systematic. It deals chiefly with those American writers who
explored the field of psychology and psychoanalysis and it happens to
include most of the greatest. All writers of American fiction to-day
could not be marshaled in line but the most famous are here. The author
is not a professional pessimist, but it is not his fault if the good
half-dozen of original talents to-day, in American literature, are
adepts in disillusion. There is no reason to be dismayed by this fact.
Great art has always been pessimistic; the more pessimistic, it seems,
the greater. The fact that an optimistic country like America has a
gloomy literature to-day must not be a deterrent. Art, in its highest
forms, is not a mere imitation of life. It is rather a reaction and a
protest against it. It lives and works in the sphere of aspirations.
The later generation of American writers is bent toward introspection
and realism. In art these writers want truth. Between them and the
past there is a gap. The time seems past for descriptive and objective
literature. Subjectivism prevails. Novelists to-day want to share the
lives of their characters. This new method of literary expression has
been called in France _monologue intérieur_. The intimacy between
reality and fiction has never been closer than now. The new writers
also are revolutionists and iconoclasts. They swore allegiance to no
master. Among foreign influences the Russian seems to be particularly
prevalent with them. The American novel to-day would not be what it is
without Dostoievski, Andreiev or Tchekhov. Neither does it deny its
debt to Balzac, Flaubert, Zola or Marcel Proust. D. H. Lawrence and
James Joyce also sponsored it.
In ethics and sociology the aloofness of the newcomers is complete.
Psychology, not morals, is their chief interest. They are indifferent
to rhetorics. The questions of style are alien to them. The password
nowadays is spontaneous and original expression. Any means to this end
is style.
Let us now, from Hawthorne to James Branch Cabell and others, begin our
journey through the field of American fiction.