_Ulysses’ Companions: Robert McAlmon, Ben Hecht, William Carlos
Williams_
The American novelists that I have dealt with so far have been veterans
of letters, men and women who have had a long career. Few of the
younger writers do not owe them something as regards their conception
of life and of art. They have imposed upon the new generation their
realism, their choice of subjects and their style. Most of the writers
of America borrowed their pessimistic philosophy and their direct mode
of expression from Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson. Idealism is quite
dead in the American novel of to-day, at any rate that traditional
idealism based on sentimentality. Even the disillusioned realism of the
masters whose work I have analyzed no longer satisfies the young. They
have substituted cynicism and utter crudity for it. The newcomers have
lost all faith, hope and charity. The prevalent pessimism of the last
fifteen years of American literature, particularly noticeable in the
novel, betrays a profound disturbance of the American conscience. It is
partly the result of the political and social events of the last few
years.
When an ideal is shattered, when a faith dies out and when the sense
of a moral and social discipline is relaxed, apprehension, soul-fear
and anxiety prevail. This is precisely the case in the United
States to-day. American pessimism is the ransom of Puritanism. The
traditional idealism has failed. The young Americans are burning what
their fathers adored. Through their disenchantment they have sensed
the practical incapacities of the idealists. They sounded out the
transcendental vagueness of even as high a moral leader as Emerson, and
the democratic quixotism of Whitman made them smile. They relegated the
good Walt among those whom they ironically term “Chautauqua poets.”
William James had tried to reconcile idealism with utilitarianism,
the philosophy of the past with that of to-day, but he failed in his
attempt. Realism in the novel is contemporaneous with the advent of a
new philosophical school hostile to idealism, and it too called itself
“realism.”[56] This school is in direct contradiction to the theories
of William James. Yet his pragmatism was responsible for exasperating
the practical sense of the younger generation. Their suspicion of
ideology dates from the time when they noticed, upon applying James’
criterion, that it did not “pay.” What was the use of accumulating so
many transcendental vapors if our best energies were to be fed with
thin air? Doubtless, for those who can see, as Emerson said, the whole
world is contained in a drop of water, and our merest acts are rich in
heroic potentialities. But that is a personal point of view. The gift
of discovering the universe in an atom is not a general privilege.
One must needs be a Pascal, an Emerson or a Pasteur. What, in effect,
was developing in America under the cloak of transcendental idealism
(particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century) was the
most unrestrained sort of materialism and utilitarianism the world
had ever seen. It would seem that this transcendental idealism was
but a subterfuge actually favoring mercantilism. Other deceptions
were to follow. The pragmatic imperialism of Roosevelt and the mystic
imperialism of Woodrow Wilson also failed. What then was this idealism
which constantly appealed to Force and which applied the Scriptures
in terms of colonial annexations and commercial enterprises? So the
younger writers cast their lot, not with the tender, but with what
James called the tough-minded.
The Great War came to the élite of American youth as the supreme
disillusion. It was much discussed before America went in, and it was
still more discussed after it had been waged and won, when America came
out of it. No sooner was the armistice signed than a change occurred.
Polemics, regrets, retractations, revisions, the story is too well
known to bear repetition. The practical difficulties which arose
between America and her former allies or associates are the tangible
result of the upsetting of values, and responsibilities perpetrated by
the intellectuals or, as they are called to-day, the “revisionists.”
The result was a great moral confusion among the young. Yet the social
structure had not changed. Ever indulgent towards revolutions, even
to the point of fostering them philosophically in her bosom, provided
bombs were thrown in foreign lands, America itself had not moved. The
Government, the Church, the University, and the general state of ideas
and customs remained the same.
This is the paradox of American civilization. The individual seems
to evolve faster than the nation in the United States. Doubtless,
America has become more prosperous, materially speaking, but it is
precisely this purely material philosophy which is a scandal to the
young; they despair over it. Their country, rutted in self-complacency
and steeped in the illusions of 1776, gives them the impression of an
arrested civilization, of a multimillionaire who should have retired
from business. The disenchantment of peace followed that of war, and
intellectual and literary radicalism was born. Two Americans were
facing each other with drawn weapons.
This restlessness is quite apparent among the youth of the land.
They are favored by the well-known indulgence and relaxation of
discipline at home and in the school. In a country without traditions,
intellectual instability is perforce great, as great as the restraint
upon the _mores_ is tight. That with which the American youth clash,
the “enemy,” is a rather vague entity. In Europe it would take a
concrete shape, that of a man, of a creed, or an idea, but in America
it is something much more impalpable and dangerous. It is the general
state of public opinion and customs, the pretension of imposing upon
the élite the blind and ready-made ideals of the masses. Thwarted
desires, restraints, evasions, capitulations of the conscience or
social revolt,--those are the result of standardization, of democratic
leveling; they are equally the source of the pessimism which pervades
American letters to-day. That is how it happens that the United States,
so obviously optimistic as a nation, have a literature which is
becoming increasingly depressed and tragic in tone.
It is easy to imagine what a fertile soil such a state of mind affords
to the development of Freudian microbes, and to what excesses these
ardent and suppressed energies might go. It is for the criminologist
and the sociologist to tell that story--a heart-rending one, verily. A
great increase in criminality, especially among the young, the growth
of sadistic, erotic and eccentric impulses, the disintegration of the
family, neurasthenic and hysterical explosions, such is the other side
of the picture and the price which the United States is paying for its
material prosperity. Innumerable newspapers in search of new sensations
daily exploit these scandals upon which they thrive. The American
literature of to-day reflects this state of affairs faithfully.
The Frenchman or Continental is quite prepared to understand that sort
of literature. The United States have not had the monopoly of moral
anarchy since the war. The same wave of emancipation and revolt which
brought up in France the works of Radiguet, Roger Martin du Gard,
Morand, Lacretelle, Schlumberger, Lucien Fabre and others, has given
to America its McAlmons, its Ben Hechts, its Floyd Dells, its Waldo
Franks. The young American is a natural-born rebel. He has always been
that, or at least since Mark Twain wrote “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry
Finn.” How could he help it? What adolescence is freer than his?
Where in the world could there be fonder parents and less tyrannical
teachers? Is not the American coming of age from the very time of his
early youth? Is not playing hookey his favorite diversion? See with
what zest he goes in for sports, with what joy he plays the umpire. And
the automobile, and jazz, or giving the lie to prohibition, and the
thousand and one diversions and eccentricities with which he enlivens
his existence? America is so vast, the call-of-the-wild so forceful!
Numerous advanced American novelists have made themselves the
interpreters of suppressed youth. There has been great growth in the
“novel of adolescence” in America, as well as in France, in the last
ten years. I shall review in this chapter some of the more significant
ones. I begin with the novels of Robert McAlmon.
Mr. McAlmon is only thirty years old. He was born in Kansas, the ninth
child of an itinerant pastor. He earned his living around the ranches
and as a tramp and professional hobo, cowboy, reporter, press agent,
lumberjack, model in New York studios, all of which did not prevent
him from completing his studies in Los Angeles at the University of
Southern California. In 1918 he promoted an aviation magazine. Later,
in Paris, he founded with William Carlos Williams, “Contact,” a
printing firm, to which we owe the publication (in France, Oh, Land of
Liberty!) of some of the most daring and original works of the young
American school. Mr. McAlmon is the author of several volumes of poems
and short stories.
He is also the author of a novel called “Village.” This village is
named Wentworth. It recalls Sinclair Lewis’ Gopher Prairie and Sherwood
Anderson’s Winesburg. There is the same isolation, the same type of
shut-in lives, the identical tragic attempts at evasion and identical
suppression. Here is the panorama of Wentworth. It tells a lot as to
the nostalgia of its inhabitants:
Beyond the outskirts of the village, Wentworth, _le vent
soufflait_, if not more boisterously than in the city proper, with
a sweep uninterrupted by dwelling houses, or other obstacles.
Already the gloss and dazzle of snow, which had fallen but two days
ago, was dulled by the dust, which whirlpools and hurricanes of
rash, rushing winds had swept across the land for over a day and
a half, after a three-foot fall of snow. In the afternoon a lull
occurred; now again, at ten o’clock in the evening, the gale was
up, tearing into the snow and throwing it into banks that left
between them spaces of ground upon which uncovered grey-white snow
lay scantily. _Musique fantastique de la neige_, snow-wind clamour,
shrill shriek of cold, whiteness shattered by a highmoaning
vermilion calliope wail. Where are the grey wolf packs? The herd of
bison that thundered in catapulting panic across the plains?
Fifty miles away lay the Indian reservation, with its degenerating
remnants of a once wild and arrogant race. No evidence of will
or desire remains for the eye to observe. Apathy and dull
carelessness, without the consciousness of indifference, are all
that can be discerned.
Few farmers can be coming into the village for the next few days.
Not till the snow has packed down so that horses can plow their
way through the covered roads; not till need or the daring of more
audacious souls has caused a few farmers to remake the roadways,
will many leave their farm homeside fires to come and market in
Wentworth. Salt pork and potatoes, salt pork and sauerkraut,
milk and soggy bread, will suffice as a diet for German, Polish,
Swedish, and unexpected farm families in these cold days surely,
when they have sufficed as their main food always.
To be sure, though, there is little doubt that Ike Sorensen will
attempt to drive his faithful team to town from his ranch eight
miles out. It’s not to be thought that either wind or snow, or
cold, or rain, or heat, or hurricane, or blizzard, will keep old
Ike from crusading forth for his weekly drunk-on. He will have his
hard liquor though the world be crashing to its end.
Such is the background of Mr. McAlmon’s sketches. “Village” is hardly
a novel. It is a collection of vivid impressions serving to complete
our knowledge of the tragedies of moral isolation in America. The
pictures drawn by the author possess neither Sinclair Lewis’ humor nor
Sherwood Anderson’s _chiaro-oscuro_. They are deliberately bare, with
a thorough-going objectivity and frankness, reminiscent of a pure,
undiluted Maupassant. I shall not tell in detail the plot of “Village.”
There is none, to tell the truth. It is merely a series of sketches and
youthful confessions. What Robert McAlmon is telling us with his cruel
and cold impartiality of his young Americans is very little edifying.
Snow storms and rains are not the only weapons Wentworth uses to fight
off the drought. Its church spire does not cast its shadow upon saints.
The youth of Wentworth literally have the devil in them. McAlmon is
less optimistic than Mark Twain. His Tom Sawyers are cynics, with their
own good reasons. They are stifled by their surroundings, they are
walled up alive.
John Campbell, one of the characters of the book, is but a child. He
is being bored to death in the village. One day he runs out into the
fields, under the pretext of catching rabbits. He is brought home
bleeding. We surmise that he has committed suicide to escape paternal
corrections and reproof:
John Campbell went past cornfields late autumn crisped. Their
leaves rasped and shuddered in the wind, and their stalks whined
from the frost that kept them brittly chilled. A sear chill was
within him too, a hard rebellion at life, rotted only some portion
of his heart where the weakness of despair was a warm fluid
dampening the hardness of his defiance to helplessness.
Alternate waves of rage at, and indifferent understanding of, his
father, flowed through him. At moments he felt he could almost
sympathize with what life had made the older man. It was this very
sympathy that made him feel helpless himself in all of his outlook
on existence. At angry moments he could hatingly see his father’s
face within his mind, a face with waxen, shiny eyes, insistent with
neurotic rage. How dared he, having messed up his own life, as he
had, presume to dictate to anybody else what they should or should
not do, as though he had discovered a right way, and knew always
that what his son was doing was wrong.
But at the ebb of an emotion he would understand again. Who could
retain temper or patience with the continual bickerings of family
life, and forever pressing economic needs? Often enough John felt
himself driven wild with the oppression of home life. What way was
there to smash down all the barriers and have a degree of freedom
to act, and if the impulses he had were sinful, who had made them
so? But what was he to do? He’d hate farm work; he’d hate office
work in the city, and despise the people working around him for
their clerkish acquiescence. What was life about? A sickness of it
was in his stomach, tiring him to complete non-resistance for the
time being.
I shall stop here with the diagnosis of this precocious pessimism.
John Campbell is a representative young American. He is only a child,
but in his case, despair and cynicism have not waited for the years to
ripen. Alas! John Campbell is hardly a fiction. The readers of American
dailies could give him many brothers. Suicides and juvenile criminality
are not rare in the United States. Yet, poor little John’s pessimism
had not yet reached the purely conscious stage. That was left to his
elders. He had not suffered sufficiently or reflected enough upon his
distress to play the real Hamlet. He died while climbing a fence with
a loaded pistol in his hand, and it was never ascertained whether his
death was accidental or premeditated.
Robert McAlmon also displays for our benefit more matured and more
self-conscious pessimists who ask again, like John Campbell, “What
about life?”
Amazement before the mystery of existence, a sentiment of general
futility, misanthropy spreading from the family to the entire social
group, desire and hatred of women, lack of faith, despair and sarcasm,
such is the mental attitude of the young people we meet with in
“Village.” The last pages of the book are particularly symptomatic.
They recall the kind of talk heard in the yards of French Lycées, when
“Bel Ami,” “Nana,” “Against the Grain,” “Azyade,” and the “Garden of
Berenice,” first appeared. There was the same tone of cursing and irony
in Arthur Rimbaud’s “Illuminations.” In France doubtless they spoke
better and wrote better, but not any more sincerely, and at bottom the
sentiments and the pessimism were identical. Towards 1890 the young
Frenchmen were already _fin de siècle_. In 1926 the young Americans
are _commencement de siècle_, and they join forces with the French in
doubting life and upholding Shakespeare’s dictum about it: “a tale told
by an idiot and which hath no meaning.”
Here is an example of a conversation between three youths of the
Middle West who were soon to go through the Arc de Triomphe with a
gun on their shoulders. Miss Willa Cather in “One of Ours,” and Mrs.
Wharton in “A Son at the Front” had pictured the war as a fight of
Providence occurring at the psychological moment to furnish an ideal to
the young and give them a chance to let some steam off. These rookies
in “Village” rather seem to belong in Barbusse’s “Squad.” They are
the musketeers of despair, but of an ironical despair. The War is
here, hurrah for the War! Little matter whether it be just or not, as
long as it drags us out of the tedium of our village! Listen to these
backsliding heroes exposing their philosophy of the great struggle:
“You can stay out if we get in, if you will be that yellow-livered.
There’ll never be conscription in this country.”
“Won’t there? Don’t you ever believe there won’t. But even if there
weren’t I’d have to go. Not because I couldn’t stand the gaff of
being called yellow-livered, but just because feeling it all about
me, and getting fed up with life anyway, I’d conclude what to hell,
and enlist some day, but without at all believing I was going to
serve any right cause by it, or that if we won that there would be
a great and gentle democracy throughout the world. I’d just go, and
kill Germans like the rest, because I’d get used to it being done;
but if I ever stopped to think I would think that maybe some of the
guys I killed were a hell of a lot more use in the world than I, or
than fellows around me. But there--well, life’s life. Let ’em die.
What’s useful anyway? Let’s talk of something else. I’m stalled.”
“Say, boy, if you’d use your head on making dollars rather than on
theories, you’d be better off,” Lloyd Scott advised. “I won’t waste
my life in pessimism anyway.”
“Neither will I; but I will live out my own temperament just
because I must; and also because it’s more interesting than letting
a set of social conventions which change with every generation and
with geographical situations, dictate one’s actions. Why limit
yourself?”
McAlmon’s soldiers are very fond of their off-color vocabulary. Like
the youth of to-day they affect the use of slang. It is one aspect
of their revolt. But to go back to our heroes (?), the problem of
the World War is not the only one which preoccupies them. Their
conversation takes on a more general turn. It is the meaning of life
which they question. Peter Reynalds and Lloyd Scott, whom I have
already quoted, continue to exchange their impressions. They compare
their philosophies of life. “Enough!” says one of them. “It is still
better to be making money. Skepticism never made anyone rich.” “Yes,”
says the other, “but you have to act according to your temperament.”
(See Dreiser.) “That is more interesting than letting social
conventions which change with every generation dictate your actions.
Why should one limit oneself?” Whereupon Lloyd Scott ceases to follow
him and wonders what the deuce is the matter with him. Peter answers
this question in a thoroughly skeptical manner. Why choose a stand if
you are disgusted with every one of them beforehand? There is something
wrong with his will power:
“It’s this. I’ve got to make a living for myself, and I’m damned if
there’s anything I like doing that pays. I tried newspaper work;
did sob stories for awhile and then couldn’t contemplate existence
any more; tried office work in a lumber concern and died with the
boredom of companionship about me. It’s the damned unrelated unrest
of an Irish temperament, I suppose. If the bloody war hadn’t come
on I’d have struck for Europe to see if living over there wasn’t
more gracious; aber mein gott. It’s this being an American; neither
a savage nor a civilized man. A roughneck, who’s a little too
refined.”
Whereupon the Wentworth Hamlet says good-night to his friends. Before
the war these pessimistic dialogues used to end with a return to the
village where wine, gambling, practical joking, love-making, and now
and then a suicide or an escape, proved that there was no smoke without
fire and that even in America not everything was well with the best of
possible worlds.
* * * * *
In “The Portrait of a Generation” and “Post-Adolescence,” Robert
McAlmon has repeated himself. He has made himself the spokesman of the
pathetic nihilism in which young Americans are struggling to-day. “The
Portrait of a Generation” is a handbook of pessimism mitigated with
humor and fantasy. It is Leopardi disguised as one of Jean Cocteau’s
_parade_. Robert McAlmon has learnt the “Gay Savoir” at the school of
the French Sadists. The door of his Inferno might well bear the motto:
“Jazz here,” just like any American bar in Montmartre or Montparnasse.
But under this travesty the pessimism is nevertheless profound:
Not in Europe or America are we at home, we, that ostracized
portion of degenerate mankind which lives on the continent
criticizing our home countries. The family of course is a decaying
institution. We don’t go in for dutifully pretended affections
now. What we want is an aristocracy of the intelligence. Not
the hard French face, so disillusioned. Not the wooden English
visage, prizing rudeness as a social asset.... Nothing left. There
is really nothing left for them or for the reckless American
flapper-impulsive need to keep rushing about space without
tradition or direction, swirled in the dynamic maelstrom, human
steel dust, lithe voiced electricity broadcast. The nation mourns
his honoured death.
Then Mr. McAlmon shows us the younger generation carried away in the
maelstrom of modern dynamism like scraps of steel, like those wireless
waves “whose voice races nimbly throughout the whole world.” “Ah! let
America at least weep decently over her own demise!”
The novels of youth published by American writers in the last few years
are quite numerous; I cannot review them all. The Parisian house of the
“Contact” editions whose president is Mr. McAlmon, has specialized in
realistic novels. It has published the most significant confessions of
these young writers, and among others the books of George Hemingway,
John Herrman, Emmanuel Carnevali, Gertrude Beasley, etc.[57] In “My
First Thirty Years,” Miss Beasley is hardly more reassuring than Robert
McAlmon. Her book frankly tells the brutal story of a young woman
obsessed by evil instincts in the midst of her family circle. Contact
with reality has stripped her of all illusions. She curses life and
those who have given it to her without her consent. She wishes that she
had never been born. It sounds like the Book of Job. After cursing her
father and mother, the heroine turns against the country of her birth,
“America is the land of murderous institutions. To be sure they do not
kill the body, but they leave us, like Frankenstein’s monster, a being
without a soul.”
Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a
sexual act of rape, being carried during the pre-natal period by
an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the
womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or
pitied, and brought into association with people whom I should
never have chosen. Sometimes I wish that, as I lay in the womb,
a pink, soft embryo, I had somehow thought, breathed or moved
and wrought destruction to the woman who bore me, and her eight
miserable children who preceded me, and the four round-faced
mediocrities who came after me, and her husband, a monstrously
cruel, Christlike, and handsome man with an animal appetite for
begetting children.
A young novelist of the Middle West, Ben Hecht, has buried all the
illusions of those young people into two novels which even Stendhal
would not disown. In “Humpty-Dumpty” and in “Erik Dorn” realism is
pushed to the point of melodrama, but we perceive behind the veil of
cynicism a sadness and a moral confusion which are unmistakable. The
spiritual bankruptcies described by Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood
Anderson are idyls in comparison with the tableaux painted by Ben
Hecht. “Humpty-Dumpty” is the tragedy of the void. The hero of the
book is the catastrophic type of dual personality. He is a perverted
simulator playing his life instead of living it, and playing it
tragically, at the expense of others. A cruel sadist, he tortures
people just when he likes them most. Humpty-Dumpty, a sinister puppet,
is a moral, intellectual and social anarchist, as dangerous as a
roaming tiger, a tiger doubled with a dilettante letting his soul (for
he has a soul) wander among the flowers of decadent literature.
“Erik Dorn” is not less cynical than “Humpty-Dumpty.” It is a challenge
to society made by a nihilist. The hero of this novel goes straight
before him in life as he would in the jungle. He believes in nothing,
not even in himself. He is in love, and likes to make others suffer.
The approaching war is but a pretext to rouse his dormant sadistic
impulses. Erik Dorn is a Julien Sorel overlooked by the guillotine.
The novel is the work of a man of great talent who shows himself to
be--in the last chapters of the book, which describe the Communist
Revolution in Bavaria--a real animator. Here is an example of Erik
Dorn’s meditations:
A tawdry pantomime was life, a pouring of blood, a grappling with
shadows, a digging of graves. “Empty, empty,” his intelligence
whispered in its depths, “a make-believe of lusts. What else?
Nothing, nothing. Laws, ambitions, conventions--froth in an empty
glass. Tragedies, comedies--all a swarm of nothings. Dreams in the
hearts of men--thin fever outlines to which they clung in hope.
Nothing ... nothing ...”
Nitchevo! Vacuum! This Chicago Hamlet consoles himself by reading
Huysmans, Rémy de Gourmont, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier and Walter
Pater. He goes in for literature without believing in it. It helps him
to take life “against the grain.” “Living had made him forget life,”
says Ben Hecht. Erik Dorn plunged into books to chloroform his passions:
“Too much living has driven him from life,” Dorn thought,
“and killed his lusts. So he sits and reads books--the last
debauchery: strange, twisted phrases like idols, like totem
poles, like Polynesian masks. He sits contemplating them as he
once sat drunkenly watching the obscenities of black, white and
yellow-bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of life, for the
grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes in him from bestiality to
asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bacchanal of flesh, to-day
a bacchanal of words ... the posturings of courtezans and the
posturings of ornate phrases become the same.”
The heroine of this discouraging book resembles the hero. She too
is uncertain, lost, wandering through the maelstrom of life. Dorn,
according to the American critic who wrote the preface[58] is obviously
a rascal, but extenuating circumstances may be pleaded. If Dorn is
a rascal, we are told, that is the fault of Society. (America knows
its Rousseau well.) Dorn is “déclassé” through his own frankness as
regards himself and his fellow men; his “head is the parasite of his
heart.” (Should it not be the other way around?) Dorn is a sick man.
He can no longer react to external stimuli.[59] He lives on the margin
of life, in a mechanical fashion. He is a _dissociated_ being. He has
lost all conviction and become a sophist. Ideas are his amusements.
Words fascinate him. Experiences are for him but an excuse to displace
adjectives. He considers doctrines, dogmas and ideals as ridiculous
efforts to impose upon life, which is ever changing, little tags which
never vary. The sole reality for him is intelligence, and this is how
he defines it:
“Intelligence is a faculty which enables man to glance at the chaos of
ideas--and end up nowhere at all.”
Far be it from me to take these paradoxes for truths and to mistake
reality for those extreme views, _ab uno disce omnes_. One should be
wary of placing upon Young America the grimacing mask of a Middle
Western Faust. However, under all this melodramatic claptrap, we
perceive the unrest, the moral confusion, and the necessity for a
rejuvenation, characteristic of the younger generation.
* * * * *
Ben Hecht’s efforts to find in æsthetics a derivative and an issue
for suppressed energies are not isolated efforts. On all sides the
renaissance of ideas has made imperative the need for a revolution in
art and in literature. Those who have been disillusioned by life seek
a refuge in art, and bring with them their taste for originality and
eccentricity at any cost. The new American literature quickly acquired
a tone that was ironic, immoralistic and rebellious. The revolter
became Bohemian. Those who formerly inhibited now turned æsthetes,
somewhat later than the French whom they believed to be sincerely
following. America is young and naïve.
The modern American æsthete has been masterfully portrayed by one of
the best-informed American essayists of to-day.[60] Let us examine him
as he is destined to go down to posterity in the wake of the dandy,
the fatal man, the “fin de siècle” and the flapper. The American
æsthete, model 1924, is a child of the twentieth century, according
to Mr. Boyd. The Yellow Nineties had flickered out in the delirium
of the Spanish-American War when his first gurgles rejoiced the ears
of his expectant parents. If Musset were more than a name to him, a
hazy recollection of French literature courses, he might adapt a line
from the author of _La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle_ and declare:
“I came too late in a world too old.” The 1924 æsthete studied at
Princeton, Yale or Harvard, in the early years of the Woodrovian
epoch. At this time he was still “classical.” Between two escapades he
would go and worship at the tomb of William and Henry James. During
his careful education, American literature was revealed to him as a
pale and obedient provincial cousin, whose past contained occasional
indiscretions, such as Poe and Whitman, about whom the less said the
better. Then, the 1924 æsthete picked up a taste for Art after some
party in the red-plush drawing-rooms. He severed relations with the
rabble who preferred baseball and football to poetry. He was herded
into the intellectual fold, and borrowed his sociology and his ethics
from the advanced reviews. He discovered simultaneously Socialism
and French, or pseudo-French, literature. Then he floated in the
rarefied atmosphere of Advanced Thought. Came the War, and with it
disillusionment. The enthusiasm of the æsthetes was not to survive the
carping remarks of the critics and the pacifistic campaigns. By luck or
cunning, the æsthete succeeded in getting out of the actual trenches.
He edited his first paper.... Simultaneously with his plunge into arms
and letters he made his first venture into the refinements of sex,
thereby extending his French vocabulary and gaining that deep insight
into the intimate life of France which is still his proudest possession.
When militarism was finally overthrown, democracy made safe, and a
permanent peace established by the victorious and united Allies, he
was ready to stay on a little longer in Paris, and to participate in
the joys of La Rotonde and Les Deux Magots. There for a brief spell
he breathed the same air as the Dadaists, met Picasso and Philippe
Soupault, and allowed Ezra Pound to convince him that the French nation
was aware of the existence of Jean Cocteau, Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux
and Louis Aragon. From those who had nothing to say on the subject
when Marcel Proust published “Du Côté de Chez Swann” in 1913 he now
learned what a great man the author was, and formed those friendships
which caused him eventually to join in a tribute to Proust by a group
of English admirers who would have stoned Oscar Wilde had they been old
enough to do so when it was the right thing to do.
The time was not ripe for his repatriation, and so, with the same
critical equipment in French as in English, but with a still imperfect
control of the language as a complication, the now complete æsthete
returned to New York and descended upon Greenwich Village. His poems of
disenchantment were in the press, his war novel was nearly finished....
Both his prose and verse were remarkable chiefly for typographical
and syntactical eccentricities, and a high pressure of unidiomatic,
misprinted French to the square inch. His further contributions (if
any) to the art of prose narrative have consisted of a breathless
phallic symbolism--a sex obsession which sees the curves of a woman’s
body in every object not actually flat, including, I need hardly say,
the Earth, our great Mother.... Mr. Boyd is rather malignant, but the
portrait resembles the original. In the last analysis the æsthete may
be diagnosed as the literary counterpart of the traditional American
tourist in Paris. He is glamored by the gaudy spectacle of that most
provincial of great cities. Paris obsesses and holds the American
æsthete. He has learned all about “cineplastics” from the French
æsthetes. The faithful are called upon by a French expert to admire
the films of William S. Hart and Jack Pickford, and some one carefully
translates the poetic rhapsodies inspired in him by the contemplation
of their masterpieces. Two souls dwell in the breast of the æsthete,
and his allegiance is torn between the sales manager’s desk ... and the
esoteric editorial chair where experiments are made with stories which
discard the old binding of plot and narrative, the substitute being the
structural framework which appeals to us over and above the message of
the line.
* * * * *
This classical portrait of the latter-day American æsthete is being
modified under our very eyes. He is no longer in 1927 what he was in
1924. And of what will to-morrow be made? The American æsthete, model
1927, is much less bothered with erotica than his predecessor, and
like the husky child who beats his nurse, he is strong enough to shake
off the foreign yoke. Even in literature alliances have been broken,
if we are to believe Mr. William Carlos Williams, who published (in
France naturally and in a _de luxe_ edition) his delicious collection
of improvisations called “The Great American Novel.”[61] In the tone
of the inner monologue, and with a fanatic passion which does not
exclude humor, Mr. Williams makes a plea of “America for Americans” in
literature.
Europe is nothing to us. Simply nothing. Their music is death to us.
Do not imagine I do not see the necessity of learning from
Europe--or China, but we will learn what we will, and never what
they would teach us. America is a mass of pulp, a jelly, a
sensitive plant ready to take whatever print you want to put on it.
We have no art, no manners, no intellect--we have nothing. We water
at the eyes at our own stupidity. We have only mass movement like a
sea. But we are not a sea.
Europe we must--we have no words. Every word we get must be broken
off from the European mass. Every word we get placed over again by
some delicate hand. Piece by piece we must loosen what we want.
What we will have. Will they let it go? Hugh.
But William Carlos Williams has faith in America. According to him,
the art of to-morrow, American art _par excellence_, will be of the
“flamboyant” type. America is seeking new openings for her aspirations.
Is she as much of a Philistine as she is supposed to be? The American
who lives a model and edifying life (three meals a day, breakfast in
bed, new paper on the walls), that American at times emigrates to the
circus _en masse_, as Whitman used to say, to watch men, women and
animals executing exquisitely impossible tricks. What could be more
“flamboyant” than the trapeze man being projected into the air, and the
tiger jumping through man-made hoops, or the elephant upholding his
full weight by balancing his front legs on bottles? What could be more
“flamboyant” than the painted clown, eternal symbol of the human race,
laughing in order not to cry, and grimacing while making a thousand
grim jokes with small men all around him accomplishing their marvelous
feats?
Jazz, the Follies, the flapper in a green and orange dress, with her
red warpaint on, impossible riots of color in a world which abhors
gray! And the “movies”! They, too, deprived of all color, flaming
through the imagination of those watching them, a boundless flame of
romance, irrepressible humor, luxury, horror and great passion. Those
human souls which know not passion, which are able to create neither
romance nor splendor nor horror, those infinitely varied phases of
Beauty, those souls seek outside of themselves what they lack--a search
often futile, and how disastrous!
But imagination will not capitulate. If it cannot express itself
through dance or song, then it will try protestations and clamors. If
it cannot be a great flame, it will be a deformity. If not Art, it
will be Crime. Men, women and children cannot possibly be content with
a humdrum life. Let imagination embellish it, even to the point of
exaggeration. Let it give to life a touch of splendor and of horror,
with infinite beauty and depth. To receive all this from the outside
is not enough. A mere acceptation does not suffice. Imagination, to
satisfy itself, needs creative energy. The “flamboyant” expresses faith
in this energy. It is a cry of joy, a declaration of richness. It is,
at any rate, the first principle of all art.[62]
It was not without a purpose that I have quoted in the course of these
essays these confessions at some length. Behind the mask of fantasy
their accent is poignant at times. Let us remember particularly the
manner in which William Carlos Williams conceives art as a diversion to
and a remedy for inhibitions and dangerous living. I accept his views
readily. I do not want to pose as a sociologist or as a prophet, but I
venture to say that this æsthetic theory seems to be in perfect accord
with what the American novelists of to-day consider as the needs of
human nature. One fact is positive, if they have told the truth and
if my report has been accurate. A civilization, no matter how great
and prosperous, cannot rest upon the suppression of passions and the
restraint of human emotions. It cannot last without “Gay Science.” A
system of obstinate prohibitions opens the door to neurotic disorders,
crime and every form of eccentricity and perversion.
To return to the domain of literature and the novel, it is fortunate
that in following its natural bent Young America should have
instinctively found this truth. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
No matter how much of a rebel, of a skeptic, of a dilettante and of a
cynic Young America has been, it is much more earnest than it appears.
It is in quest of a new ideal. It does not believe in salvation through
restraint and puritanical resignation. It does not hope any more to
find its ideal in a system of repressions which is a negation of the
beautiful and the good in the human soul, nor yet in a philosophy, no
matter how transcendental, which forgets the man or the woman of flesh
and blood. Neither does it seek its ideal in the goods of this world.
Young America applies the dictum that man does not live by bread alone.
It says with Emerson that the value of this world is not measured in
bales of cotton or sacks of dollars. It tries to find its ideal in a
more felicitous, and in the last analysis, more artistic, conception
of life. It feels with justice that in art there is a profound
harmony which seizes us and which expresses us in the deepest part of
ourselves, a synthesis in which nothing is forgotten, a vast tolerance
founded upon a sense of real values. This ideal cannot serve for the
masses, but it can rejuvenate and humanize the schemes of the leaders.
Young America is making a slow, painful march towards this goal.
Awkward, and often violent in its efforts, it has already been rewarded
in its quest. It is impossible to doubt it after one glance at the
great crop of original works in prose and verse which it has gathered
in the last decade and a half.
* * * * *
I have arrived at the end of my labors. My one ambition has been to
present to the reader as complete and as faithful a panorama of the
modern American novel as possible. I have not said all, but I do not
think I have omitted anything essential. There remain to be cleared
up several points which are closely related to my subject. There is
the question of influences, especially of French influences. I have
alluded to the panegyric of Balzac by Theodore Dreiser. I could have
added that of Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourts, Huysmans, and especially
of Maupassant, who is still very popular in America. The American
novelists of to-day have not failed to acknowledge their debt to the
French realists, realizing that without them, they would not have been
what they are. An autonomous and autochthonous phenomenon as far as
origins and ends are concerned, the American novel has gone to France
to seek lessons in art and in frankness. From Balzac to Marcel Proust,
the American novelists know their French literature thoroughly. The
vogue in America of the French novelists has only been equalled by
the Russians, who are better able to play on the mystical chords
characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon.
I have been able to make only rapid allusions to the bonds which tie
the American novel of to-day to the English novel, but what American
writer of the twentieth century is not conversant with the works of
Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce?
There remains one stiff problem, that of documentation. In what measure
are we entitled to apply to the American novel and to the human types
which it presents to us the _ab uno disce omnes_? What is there in
common between the United States and its customs and the novels which
describe them? A difficult question, harking back to the problem of
literature conceived as the expression of society, the Taine’s problem
of the three factors. If I had had the time and the courage to front
it, I would have attempted to solve it by a _distinguo_ reminiscent
of Molière. We have society and society. The more liberal and varied
the morals, the less chance apparently for literature and manners to
correspond. On the other hand, the more stereotyped, conventional and
automatic the morals, the less chance that literature should differ
from them. And that seems to be the case in the United States, if
my studies are accurate. There has been such a development in the
unanimity of thoughts, feelings and aspirations, such a standardization
in America, that it has become impossible for the freest minds to
express themselves independently of their surroundings. This uniformity
having become tyrannical, the most liberal artists have only been able
to shake it off by studying it as a phenomenon in itself. To describe
it faithfully has become for them the best way of denouncing it. For
my own part, I think that there is a great resemblance between what
the American novelists have described and the actual facts. Even if
that were not so, there would remain this amazing unanimity in thinking
and in realistic observation. Even if Puritanism and repression, as
Hawthorne, Howells, Henry James, Mrs. Wharton, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis,
Anderson, Cabell and others describe them, were a fiction, there would
be, in the universal character of this fiction, an evidence of a state
of mind capable of impressing a psychologist. Allowing that Puritanism
is a vice, a malady of the mind, an obsession, is it not remarkable
that we should meet with it among the most notable American novelists
of yesterday and to-day? How could such a general obsession be
fictitious and exist without corresponding to something which explains
and justifies it? But I am firmly convinced of the great value of the
modern American novel from a documentary, psychological, moral and
social standpoint. As one critic expresses it, “just like the American
skyscrapers, the American novel has sprung from the soil, awkward,
utilitarian, often amorphous, more agreeable to the eye than to the
intellect, queer, painfully searching for new modes of expression, with
almost no relation with the site upon which it is growing or with what
surrounds it.” From the point of view of art and ideas, there have
never been in American literature works so defiant of the accepted laws
of decorum, perspective and harmony.
INDEX
Adams, Henry, 11, 69.
Advertising in America, 146, 147.
Æsthete, the modern American, 274-277.
“Age of Innocence, The,” 57.
“Ambassadors, The,” 53.
America, restlessness in, viii;
pessimism in, viii, ix, 8, 135;
considered an unromantic, 130 _n._;
sacrifice of the minority in, 146;
advertising in, 146-148;
the land of the superlative, 147;
crude conditions in parts of, 155, 156;
the land of the strenuous life, 186, 186 _n._;
conditions in, since the Great War, 259-261;
the modern novel as representative of conditions in, 282, 283;
standardization in, 282.
American æsthete, the modern, 274-277.
American background, the emptiness of, 48-50.
American culture, an arraignment of, 17, 18.
American language, 150.
American literary ideals, revolution in, 3-6;
the new, 7.
American literature, recent, pessimism in, viii, ix, 257, 260;
spirit of pioneers in, 5-7.
_American Mercury_, the, 10.
“American Tragedy, An,” 79, 110 _n._, 115-122.
American writers, later generation of, characteristics of, 23, 24.
Americans, optimism and contentment of, 13;
provided with comfort and material ease, 131, 132;
outside their homes, 132, 133;
their religion, 133;
the material organization of their life, 134;
in politics, 134, 135.
Anderson, Sherwood, 22, 53, 57;
and Freudism, 31;
influence of Walt Whitman on, 154, 155;
his primitivism, 154, 155, 155 _n._, 156;
his writing a groping toward the Unknown, 155;
his career, 155, 158, 159, 166-168;
the Freudian novelist _par excellence_, 156;
his “Windy McPherson’s Son,” 156, 157, 168-171;
little filial respect in his tales, 157;
a dreamer, 159-161, 175;
his feeling for the small craftsmen, 161, 162;
his world of fancy, 162-164;
his itch for writing, 164, 166;
his sensitiveness to words, 165;
excludes manufacturers of paper from his curses, 165, 166;
his apprenticeship at writing, 167;
his indifference to comfort while writing, 167;
his “Marching Men,” 171-180;
as an artist, 176, 199;
his “Poor White,” 181, 182;
his “Winesburg, Ohio,” 182-187;
suppressed sensibilities in his stories, 187;
his description of the tortures of inhibition, 188-191;
engaged on problems of sexual inhibition, 191;
his “Many Marriages,” 191-196;
his “Dark Laughter,” 196-199;
Negro songs in his novels, 197;
on New Orleans, 198, 199;
his definition of art, 199.
Andreiev, 23.
“Arrowsmith,” a satire of medical fakes, 148, 149;
summarized, 149;
written haphazardly, 150;
the language of, 150.
Art, shows a way out of chaos, 126;
and muck-raking, 153;
Anderson’s definition of, 199;
“flamboyant,” 278;
for art’s sake, 279 _n._;
the harmony in, 280, 281.
Atherton, in “A Modern Instance,” 64-66.
Atherton, Gertrude, 247 _n._
Austin, Mary, 248.
“Babbitt,” 144-148.
Balzac, Honoré de, 23, 153, 281.
Beach, Joseph Warren, his “The Outlook for American Prose,” 202 _n._
Beasley, Gertrude, 270, 271.
Beaut McGregor, in “Marching Men,” 171-173, 174, 177-180.
Behaviorism, 29, 30.
Ben Halleck, in “A Modern Instance,” 64-66.
Bernanos, Georges, 246.
Bio-chemistry, human psychology in terms of, 78, 83, 84, 95, 106,
109-118, 123.
Biological fatalism, 124.
“Birth,” 248, 249.
“Blithedale Romance, The,” the women in, 34.
“Book About Myself, A,” 98.
Bourget, Paul, a novel of, 4;
his process, 55;
crime determinism arraigned by, 116.
Bourne, Randolph, a literary radical, 4.
Bovarysme. _See_ Emma Bovary.
Boyd, Ernest, his “Portraits Real and Imaginary,” 274 _n._
Bruce Dudley (John Stockton), in “Dark Laughter,” 196-199.
Business-man, the American, 21.
Cabell, James Branch, 22;
the double aspect of his work, 200, 201;
his style, 202, 203;
his land of Poictesme, 203, 204;
the inhabitants of his Poictesme, 204, 205;
his philosophy, 205;
his defense of fiction, 205-208;
his “Jurgen,” 208, 209, 215-220, 223, 224;
his “Figures of Earth,” 209-212;
his “Domnei,” 212-215;
aimed to sketch an epic of human desire, 221;
his “The High Place,” 224-231;
his “The Cream of the Jest,” 231-237;
his early works, 237.
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, moving picture, 184.
“Call of the Wild,” 32, 94.
Canfield, Dorothy, 248.
“Captive, The,” 21 _n._
Carnevali, Emmanuel, 270.
Carol Kennicott, in “Main Street,” 136-144.
Cather, Willa, 22;
exhibits sympathy for her characters, 238;
her “A Lost Lady,” 239, 240;
her “My Antonia,” 241-245;
her art, 245, 246;
her “One of Ours,” 246-248;
her “My Mortal Enemy,” 248 _n._
Censorship, 20, 21 _n._
“Chalk Face,” 255.
Charlatans, 148.
Chautauqua poets, 258.
Chicago, artistic and literary center, 168, 174.
Chillingworth, Doctor, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 39-42.
Churches, in America, 133;
attacked in “Elmer Gantry,” 150, 152.
“City Block,” 256.
Civilization, modern, 173-175.
Clemenceau, Georges, 95 _n._
Clerical profession, fakes of, satirized in “Elmer Gantry,” 152,
153.
Clyde Griffith, in “An American Tragedy,” 115-122.
Communion of Saints, 98 _n._
Comte, Auguste, 124.
Conrad, Joseph, 282.
Conscience, a theory of, 110, 110 _n._, 116.
“Contact,” printing firm, 262, 270.
Cooper, James F., wrote the novel of adventure, 4.
“Cords of Vanity, The,” 237.
Cowperwood, in “The Financier,” 86-88, 105-111.
“Cream of the Jest, The,” 231-237.
Crime, in Hawthorne, 34;
in “Elsie Venner,” 110 _n._;
in Dreiser, 115-119.
Criminal responsibility, 110 _n._, 116, 118, 119.
Criticism, in America, 3-5.
“Crystal cup,” 247.
Curel, François de, 156 _n._
“Custom of the Country, The,” 56.
Cynicism, in recent novels, 257.
“Cytherea,” 254, 255.
“Daisy Miller,” 50.
“Dance before the Mirror,” 156 _n._
“Dark Laughter,” 196-199.
Darwinism, and Theodore Dreiser, 84, 85, 88, 93, 95 _n._
Day-dreaming, 156.
Decadence, 186 _n._
Degeneracy, 186 _n._
Deliverance, the problem of, 185.
Dell, Floyd, 22, 254.
Dickens, Charles, 147.
Dickinson, Emily, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
Dimmesdale, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 37-45.
Dom Manuel, in “Figures of Earth,” 209-212.
“Domnei,” 212-215.
Donatello, in “The Marble Faun,” 38.
Dostoievski, F. M., 23.
Double personality, 156.
Dreiser (or Dresser), Paul, 72.
Dreiser, Theodore, his arraignment of American culture, 17, 18;
absorbed by the problems of Puritan inhibitions, 22;
and Freudism, 31;
the historian of a disillusioned America, 71;
views social studies from an individual angle, 72;
his career, 72, 73;
his books, 73, 74;
his realism, 74, 75;
his enthusiasm for facts, 75-77;
the contents of his novels borrowed from the news column, 77-80;
his use of term _bio-chemistry_, 78;
does not comment in his novels, 80;
his essays, 81;
his philosophy, 81-83;
translates psychology in terms of bio-chemistry, 83, 84, 95, 106,
109-118, 123;
his evolutionism, 84, 85;
his supermen, 85, 93-95, 105, 111;
his blow to American idealism, 85, 86;
his illustration of the battle of life, 86-88;
his love for America, 88-93;
his “A Hoosier Holiday,” 88-93, 95-97;
his hero worship, 94;
his treatment of sexual problems, 95;
his Darwinian Philosophy, 95 _n._;
his hymn to the Vital Force, 95-97;
his belief in compensation (equation), 97, 98;
his pessimism and optimism, 98, 99;
suggests two solutions of the ethical problem, 99;
on spiritual progress, 100;
his liking for the Dutch painters, 101;
his definition of art, 101;
his “Sister Carrie,” 102-104;
his “Jennie Gerhardt,” 104, 105;
his “The Financier,” 105-108;
his “The Titan,” 108-111;
his “The Genius,” 111-115, 195;
his “An American Tragedy,” 115-122;
his theory of criminal responsibility, 116-119;
leaves little hope of reformation for the fallen, 123;
his biological fatalism, 124;
his decalogue, 124;
his ethics, 125, 126;
goes too far in starving the human emotions, 126, 127;
Walt Whitman’s influence on, 154;
on the primordial importance of the sexual question, 191.
Drunkenness, in recent American fiction, 187 _n._
Dual personalities, 182, 184, 254, 271.
Duhamel, George, 255.
Dutch painters, the, 101.
“Eagle’s Shadow, The,” 237.
Education, American, hostile to “wish-fulfillment,” 14.
Edwards, Jonathan, his sermons, 12.
Eggleston, Edward, and the Dutch painters, 101 _n._
Elite and masses, in America, the feud between, 9, 10.
“Elmer Gantry,” 150-153.
Elsie Leander, in “The Triumph of the Egg,” 167, 187-191.
Emerson, Charles, 223.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17;
a Puritan type of mind, 12;
his ethics, 98;
tried in “Representative Men” to delineate the ideal man, 222;
a transcendental realist, 222;
made much of dreams in his philosophy, 222.
Emma Bovary, in “Madame Bovary,” vii, 138, 142-144, 206.
English novelists, 23, 282.
“Erik Dorn,” 271-273.
Eroticism, the great issue of suppressed sensibilities, 187;
and mysticism, 191.
_See_ Sex problems, Sexual inhibition.
Estaunié, Edouard, 239, 246.
“Ethan Frome,” 60, 61.
Ethics, the Puritan, compared with those of Dreiser, 125;
conflict between social and individual, 130.
Eugene Witla, in “The Genius,” 111-114.
Evasions, 207, 208, 231, 254.
“False Dawn,” 56 _n._
Family life, in American plays and novels, 249.
Fiction, confusion between, and realism, in Howells’ work, 200, 201;
Cabell’s defense of, 205-207;
the craving for, 208.
_See_ Novel.
“Figures of Earth,” 209-212.
“Financier, The,” 71-73, 77, 79, 86-88, 105-108.
Firkins, Mr., 63.
“Flamboyant,” 278, 279, 279 _n._
Flaubert, Gustave, 23;
his “Madame Bovary,” vi, vii, 137, 138, 142-144, 206;
his “Bouvard and Pecuchet,” 129;
never lost sight of art, 153;
his influence on the American Novel, 281.
“Floating anxiety,” 19, 31, 146, 184.
Florian de Puysange, in “The High Place,” 224-231.
Frank, Waldo, 22;
Puritanism according to, 13-16;
dual personality in novels of, 254;
master of the minor dialogue, 255;
his novels, 255, 256.
“Free Air,” 128.
Free will, 116.
French novel, influence of the, on American novel, 23, 281.
Freud, Doctor, vi.
Freudism, and Puritanism, 31;
disquieting elements of, 32;
in the novels of Anderson, 156, 182, 188;
a literary rendering to, 184 _n._
Frost, Robert, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
“Fruit of the Tree, The,” 56.
Fuller, Margaret, an experience of, 142 _n._;
an example of suppression, 223.
Gale, Zona, 22;
the chronicler of American life in the small towns, 248;
her “Birth,” 248, 249;
her “Miss Lulu Bett,” 250-254.
Garland, Hamlin, on the case of realism _versus_ sentimentalism, 200
_n._
Gaultier, Jules de, his “Le Bovarysme,” vi.
“Gay Science,” 205, 220, 280.
“Genius, The,” 73, 77, 111-115, 195.
Glasgow, Ellen, 248.
“Golden Bowl, The,” 53.
Goncourts, the, influence of, on the American novel, 281.
Gopher Prairie, 135-144.
“Great American Novel, The,” 277.
Great War, the, 259, 266, 267, 275.
“Hand of the Potter, the,” 115.
“Happy ending,” the, 14.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, wrote the novel of manners, 4;
influence of Puritanism on, 12;
resemblances to Freudism in, 31, 32, 36-42;
attracted by problems of the inmost life, 32;
his life, 33;
his complex explained by his genealogy, 33;
the paganism of his imagination, 33, 34;
his women, 34, 38;
his conscience, 34;
haunted by the idea of crime and punishment, 34;
moral paradoxes of, 35;
as a psychologist, 36;
analysis of his “The Scarlet Letter,” 36-45;
his symbolism, 45, 46.
Hecht, Ben, 271-274.
Helvetius, 125.
Hemingway, George, 270.
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 22, 254.
Herrman, John, 270, 270 _n._
Hester Prynne, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 37-45.
“Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” 74, 97;
quotations from, 82-86.
“High Place, The,” 224-231.
Hilda, in “The Marble Faun,” 34, 38.
“Holiday, A,” 255.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, his “Elsie Venner,” 110 _n._
“Hoosier Holiday, A,” 74, 88-93, 95-97.
“House of Mirth, The,” 58, 59.
“House of the Seven Gables, The,” the character of Phœbe in, 34;
sin in, 34, 35;
the character of Clifford Pyncheon in, 38;
symbolism in, 45, 46.
Howells, William Dean, 22, 54;
his realism, 61, 62, 69;
his limitations, 62, 64;
divides society into two opposite classes, 63;
his moral system, 64-67;
his “A Modern Instance,” 64-66;
his “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” 66, 67;
his ideals those of the sentimental middle class, 67-70;
and Dreiser, 126, 127;
the descent from, to Sherwood Anderson, 169 _n._;
confusion between realism and fiction in, 201.
Hugh McVey, in “Poor White,” 181, 182.
Humor, American, 48;
and irony, 224, 225.
“Humpty-Dumpty,” 271.
Hurstwood, in “Sister Carrie,” 103.
Huysmans, influence of, on the American novel, 281.
Idealism, American, buried in the grave of the Transcendentalists,
16;
is largely manufactured by women, 21;
dead in the American novel of to-day, 257;
and utilitarianism, 258, 259;
transcendental, 258, 259.
Imagination, the rights of, claimed and defended by Cabell, 200,
201,
206;
the expression of, 279.
Imperialism, pragmatic, 259;
mystic, 259.
Individual and social ethics, 124-127, 130, 136.
“Inevitable Equation, The,” 81, 97.
Inhibited, city of the, 184.
Inhibition, the danger in, vii, 280;
the tortures of, described, 191;
the problem of sexual, 191;
effects caused by, prevalent among Puritan writers of New England,
223;
in novels of Willa Cather, 238-248;
in novels of Zona Gale, 249, 250;
in novels of Floyd Dell, 254.
Inness, George, 18.
Instinct, as opposed to the social code, 124-127, 130, 136.
Intelligence test, the, 25.
Irene Olenska, in “The Age of Innocence,” 57.
Irony and humor, 224, 225.
Jaloux, Edmond, 246.
James, Henry, 22;
master of the psychological novel, 4, 47;
needed the European background, 47, 48;
his indictment of America, 48-50;
his first novels, 50;
his women, 50-52;
his novels a contribution to the study of inhibitions, 52;
in æsthetics, 53;
uses _appreciation_, 53;
invented the _monologue intérieur_, 53;
composed from the center outward, 53;
as an artist, 54.
James, William, 4, 17, 149;
his psychological theories, 26, 27, 186;
his attempt to reconcile idealism with utilitarianism, 258.
“Java Head,” 254, 255.
Jazz, 197 _n._
Jeff Durgin, in “The Landlord at Lion’s Head,” 66, 67.
Jennicot, in “The High Place,” 228-230.
“Jennie Gerhardt,” 73, 104, 105.
John Webster, in “Many Marriages,” 192-196.
Joyce, James, 22, 23, 27, 53, 282.
“Jurgen,” 208, 209, 215-220, 223, 224.
Kennaston, in “The Cream of the Jest,” 231-237.
Kennicott, in “Main Street,” 136-144.
“Kora in Hell,” 277 _n._
“Landlord at Lion’s Head, The,” 66, 67.
Lawrence, D. H., 23, 36, 282.
Lewis, Sinclair, 22;
his career, 128;
his “Free Air,” 128;
his “Mantrap,” 128;
his “Our Mr. Wren,” 129, 130;
his works inspired by feeling of conflict between social and
individual ethics, 130;
his “Main Street,” 135-144;
his “Babbitt,” 144-148;
his “Arrowsmith,” 148-150;
as an artist, 149, 150;
his language, 150;
his “Elmer Gantry,” 150-153.
Lily Bart, in “The House of Mirth,” 58, 59.
“Linda Condon,” 254, 255.
Lodge, Henry Cabot, 186 _n._
London, Jack, and “the movies,” 4;
his “Martin Eden,” 167;
(mentioned, 110).
“Lost Lady, A,” 239.
Love, as bio-chemistry, 111, 113, 117.
McAlmon, Robert, his career, 262;
his “Village,” 262-269;
his “The Portrait of a Generation,” 269.
“Madonna of the Future, The,” 150.
“Main Street,” 135-144.
Mallarmé, Stephane, 166 _n._
“Mantrap,” 128.
“Many Marriages,” 191-196.
“Marble Faun, The,” paganism in, 34;
the character of Hilda in, 34, 38;
amorality in, 35;
the character of Donatello in, 38;
symbolism, 45, 46.
“Marching Men,” 158, 159, 171-180.
Marks, Percy, his “The Plastic Age,” 270 _n._
Martin, Doctor, psychologist, 28.
Masses and élite, in America, the feud between, 9, 10.
Masters, Edgar Lee, 18.
Mather, Cotton, his _Magnalia_, 10, 12.
Maupassant, Guy de, his influence on the American novel, 281.
Medical profession, the fakes of, satirized in “Arrowsmith,” 148.
Mencken, Henry, a literary radical, 4;
his magazine, 10;
his arraignment of Puritanism, 16;
his “The American Language,” 150.
“Mid-American Chants,” 155.
Middle West, 136.
Mid-Victorians, the, 74, 75, 126.
Milton, John, Puritanism the inspiration of his epic, 12.
Milton Daggett, in “Free Air,” 128.
“Miss Lulu Bett,” 250-254.
Mississippi River, the, 197.
“Modern Instance, A,” 64-66.
Molière, J. B., his M. Jourdain, 144.
_Monologue intérieur_, the, 53.
Moody, Mary, Emerson’s aunt, a _clairvoyante_, 223.
Moody, William Vaughn, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
“Mother complex,” 20, 21, 21 _n._, 69, 136.
“Movies,” 4, 14, 16 _n._, 20, 37;
psychoanalysis in, 184 _n._, 278.
Murger, H., his “Vie de Bohême,” 167.
“My Antonia,” 241-245.
“My First Thirty Years,” 270, 271.
“My Mortal Enemy,” 248 _n._
Myers, W. L., his “The Later Realism,” 258 _n._
Mysticism and eroticism, 191.
Nance McGregor, in “Marching Men,” 175-177.
Negro music, 197.
“New Englander, The,” 187-191.
New Orleans, 198, 199.
“New poetry,” 3.
“New Year’s Day,” 61 _n._
Nonconformists, American, 10.
Nordau, Max, his “Degeneracy,” 186 _n._
Novel, American, of the nineteenth century, 4, 7;
the recent change in, 7;
influence of the French novel on, 23, 281;
influence of the Russian novel on, 23, 281;
and the English novelists, 23, 282;
in 1900, 74;
drunkenness in, 187 _n._;
cynicism and crudity in, 257;
of adolescence, 262;
as a true representative of American conditions, 282, 283.
O’Higgins (Harvey) and Reede, their book on “The American Mind in
Action,” 18.
Ohio River, the, 197.
“Old Maid, The,” 61 _n._
“One of Ours,” 246-248.
O’Neill, Eugene, his “Desire Under the Elms,” 21 _n._;
drunkenness in his plays, 187 _n._;
stages a continuous monologue, 192 _n._
“Our America,” 256.
“Our Mr. Wren,” 129, 130.
Painting, the art of, 112, 113.
Palladino, Eusebia, 50 _n._
Pearl, in “The Scarlet Letter,” 34.
Personality, dissociation of, 27.
“Personality picture,” 28, 142, 156, 170, 221, 223.
Pessimism, in the United States, viii, ix, 8, 135;
in recent American literature, viii, ix, 257, 260.
Pirandello, 27.
Poe, Edgar Allan, the standard of the short story set by, 4;
the influence of Puritanism on, 12;
had an artistic conscience, 47;
haunted by the dead, 223.
Poictesme, the land of, 203-205, 209, 215, 221, 225.
Policeman, in the “movies,” 16 _n._
“Poor White,” 167, 181, 182.
“Portrait of a Generation, The,” 269.
“Post-Adolescence,” 269.
Pragmatism, 27, 149.
“Professor’s House, The,” 239, 240.
Proust, Marcel, 23, 27, 53, 276, 281.
Provincialism, 200 _n._
Psittacism, 184.
Psychoanalysis, vi, 30-32, 156, 169, 170, 182-187.
Psychology, experimental, study of, in America, 25.
Psychology, studies of morbid, 182-187.
Publicity in America, 146-148.
Puritan ethics, and Dreiser’s, 125.
Puritanism, the good points of, 11-13;
the bad points of, 13;
the revolt against, 13;
according to Waldo Frank, 13-16;
the decadence of, 15;
Mencken’s arraignment of, 16;
intellectual energies thwarted by, 18;
inhibitions of, 18-20, 22;
and psychoanalysis, 31;
and James Branch Cabell, 201.
_See_ Inhibition.
Radicalism, intellectual and literary, birth of, 260.
Radicals, American, 10, 11.
Rascoe, Burton, 273 _n._
Realism, of Howells, 61, 62, 201;
and fiction, confusion between, 200, 201;
_versus_ sentimentalism, 200 _n._;
fictitious, 201;
in psychology, 201;
revolt against, 201;
banned by Cabell, 206, 207;
of Willa Cather, 246;
static, 246;
optimistic, 248;
later, 258, 258 _n._, 270, 271.
“Reef, The,” 56.
Representative men, revaluation of, 19 _n._
Responsibility for Crime, 110 _n._, 116, 118, 119.
“Revisionists,” 259.
“Revolt against the village,” 200 _n._
Rimbaud, Arthur, 266.
“Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, The,” 237.
Robinson, a Puritan type of mind, 12.
“Roderick Hudson,” 50.
Romantic evasion, 207.
Romanticism, a psychological disease, vii;
M. Seillères, study of, 130 _n._;
and Puritanism, 200;
of Cabell, 205, 206.
Rousseau, J. J., 125.
“Runaway, The,” 254.
Russian novelists, their vogue in America, 23, 281.
Saint Pierre, 239, 240.
Sargent, John Singer, 18.
“Scarlet Letter, The,” paganism in, 34;
the character of Pearl in, 34;
amorality in, 35;
the purpose of, 36;
analysis of, 37-45.
Seillères, Eugene, his study of romanticism, 130 _n._
Self, the, 27-29;
dissociation and reunification of, 170.
Selves, three, 127, 186.
Sensibility, analysis of pathological forms of, 182-187.
Sentimentalism, and the realistic novel, 200;
_versus_ realism, 200 _n._
Sex problems, 59, 60, 95, 102-105, 111-115.
Sexual inhibition, the problem of, 191.
Shaw, G. B., his “Man and Superman,” 111.
Silas Lapham, 69, 70.
Sin, in Hawthorne, 34, 35.
“Sister Carrie,” 73, 102-104.
Social code, and instinct, 124-127, 130, 136.
Socialism, 135.
“Song of the Lark,” 240, 241.
“Soul-fear,” 19, 31, 146, 184.
“Spark, The,” 56 _n._
Standardization, vii, 282.
Standards, American, 9.
Stein, Gertrude, 165 _n._
Stendhal, his “Le rouge et noir,” 116.
“Story Teller’s Story, A,” quoted, 160, 161.
Strenuous life, America the land of, 186, 186 _n._
Style, of American fiction writers, 202, 203.
Subconscious, the, 26, 181.
Suggestive language, the, 165 _n._
“Summer,” 60, 61.
Superman, the, of Dreiser, 85, 93-95, 105, 111;
imagined by Emerson, 222.
Suppression. _See_ Inhibition.
“Tar,” 155, 155 _n._, 157 _n._, 162 _n._
Tartuffe, 151
Tchekhov, A. P., 23.
Thea Kronburg, in “Song of the Lark,” 240, 241.
Thoreau, Henry David, a Puritan type of mind, 12;
disguises himself, 223.
“Titan, The,” 71-73, 108-111.
Transcendental idealism, 258, 259.
Transcendentalists, the, 16, 222.
“Traveller at Forty, A,” 98, 101.
“Triumph of the Egg, The,” 167, 187-191, 193.
Twain, Mark, 68, 261;
voted for American philistinism, 49;
and the Mississippi and the Ohio, 197;
his “The Mysterious Stranger,” 224.
“Twelve Men,” 72, 74, 98.
Undine Spragg, in “The Custom of the Country,” 56.
Utilitarianism, and idealism, 258, 259.
Vechten, Carl van, 279 _n._
Vildrac, Charles, his “Paquebot Tenacity,” 21 _n._
“Village,” 262-269.
Wendell, Barrett, 187 _n._
Wharton, Edith, 22;
specialized in the society novel, 54;
her process, 55;
not introspective, 55;
indifferent to social and political problems, 56;
her satire of American life and society, 56;
her “The Custom of the Country,” 56;
her “The Age of Innocence,” 57;
the spiritual and moral indigence of her characters, 57-59;
her psychological insight, 59;
on the relation of the sexes, 59, 60;
her psychoanalysis, 60, 61;
her “Summer” and “Ethan Frome,” 60, 61;
her article on “The Great American Novel,” 200 _n._
“What Maisie Knew,” 52.
Whistler, J. A. M., 18.
Whitman, Walt, a standard set by, 4;
the United States a cornucopia to, 49;
his influence on Dreiser, 154;
his influence on Anderson, 154, 155;
his “I Walt Whitman, a Cosmos,” 195;
his changes, 223.
Will, function of the, 118.
Williams, William Carlos, one of founders of “Contact,” 262;
his “The Great American Novel,” 277, 278;
his idea of American art of the future, 278;
on imagination, 279.
Wilson, Edmund, on Henry James’ typical American virgin, 52 _n._
“Windy McPherson’s Son,” 156-158, 168-171.
“Winesburg, Ohio,” 158, 182-187.
“Wings of the Dove, The,” 52, 53.
“Wish-fulfillment,” 14.
Words, physical characteristics of, 165, 166, 166 _n._
Young America, in quest of a new ideal, 280, 281.
Zola, Émile, 23;
essay by James on, 54 _n._;
his influence on the American novel, 281.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _Nos actes nous suivent._
[2] In this survey of the case against the Puritan the author does not
claim to adhere to a literal rendering of the views of the different
critics. Many of the comments and examples are his own.
[3] A foreigner who goes to the American “movies” would not contradict
Mr. Mencken on this point. The policeman, as a _deus ex machina_,
to wind up a plot and bring in a happy ending, has no rival on the
American screen except perhaps the young girl, acting as Salvation
Nell. A squad of police rushing to the scene of a row or of an assault,
provided it arrives on the psychological moment, is sure to raise the
enthusiasm of the audience to the limit. Moral rescue by the police is
the most popular form of the Aristotelian _catharsis_ in America.
[4] The “leavings aside” of Theodore Dreiser in this indictment are
frequent enough to call for a fairer balance of the whole account when
all is told. I refer the reader, for a retort on this point, to the
first pages of this chapter, where I take the liberty to be much more
optimistic concerning the intellectual capital of America.
[5] Messrs. Harvey O’Higgins and Reede.
[6] A revaluation of most of the great American representative men
and women has taken place in the United States recently, in the light
of _ex professo_ Freudism and psychoanalysis. See the books of Crutch
on Edgar Poe, Van Wyck Brooks on Mark Twain, Anthony on Margaret
Fuller, Wood on Amy Lowell, etc., etc. This is another aspect of the
intellectual revolt in America to-day.
[7] This example is the author’s.
[8] This mother complex is one of the most difficult American
idiosyncrasies for the European to understand. The sublimation of
instincts in America reaches its limits in married life when the wife
becomes in familiar appellation “mother.” This American complex has no
equivalent in the Old World.
[9] The author of this book had a first-hand impression of the power
of the American woman as a censor when, in a certain city of the West,
an Association of Christian Mothers interfered to stop the production
of Charles Vildrac’s “Paquebot Tenacity.” Vildrac’s play, for the
un-Puritan critic, is a most moral play. It dramatizes the problem of
free will. It stages the conflict between a strong and a weak man, both
of them in the hands of Fate. The American “mothers” did not see these
moral issues. They were only concerned with a dialogue between one of
the characters and a maid around a bottle of champagne. The suppression
in New York City more recently of “The Captive,” a Freudian play of the
first order, marked another triumph for the “motherly complex.” Eugene
O’Neill’s Ibsenian drama “Desire under the Elms” was interdicted in Los
Angeles lately by the same “complex.” Meanwhile nude exhibitions which
could hardly be tolerated even in Montmartre are allowed to proceed
along every “gay White Way” throughout the United States.
[10] Is not this a reason, among others, why the American business man
stays “at his desk” until a late age, when the average European has
gone into retirement a long time before? Work for the latter is only a
makeshift in order to enjoy life better. For the American it is life
itself.
[11] J. Laumonnier, “Le Freudisme,” p. 8. Cf. _Ibid._, p. 113, an
essay on comparative psychology of peoples--based on Freudism. The
Anglo-Saxons are apparently distinguished by a particular aptitude for
inhibition and repression.
[12] Since this was written there has been an important revival of
Hawthorne criticism like the chapter in Mrs. L. L. Hazard’s “The
Frontier in American Literature,” and the book of Lloyd Morris, “The
Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne”; “Nathaniel Hawthorne,
A Study in Solitude” by Herbert Gorman. These critical studies support
very well the interpretation of Hawthorne presented in this volume.
[13] I take the liberty to coin this adjective in memory of Eusebia
Palladino, the famous medium.
[14] Edmund Wilson in the _New Republic_, March 16, 1927. Sarcastic Mr.
Wilson sums up the spiritual failure and the sentimental starvation of
the typical American virgin in Henry James’ novels as follows: “She
goes on eating marrons glacés in a hotel parlor with her father and
sister, all her life,” a life fortunately short enough to bring to a
quick close this original form of Dantesque torture.
[15] And yet Puritanism did not prevent Henry James from writing the
most sensible and most appreciative essay on Émile Zola in his “Notes
on Novelists.”
[16] “The Old Maid,” “New Year’s Day,” “The Spark,” “False Dawn.”
[17] “The Old Maid” and “New Year’s Day” by the same author go very
deep, too, in the analysis of subconscious emotions and their influence
on moral and social behavior.
[18] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” II.
[19] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.”
[20] “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.”
[21] “The Financier.”
[22] “A Hoosier Holiday.”
[23] “A Hoosier Holiday.”
[24] This account of Dreiser’s Darwinian philosophy is being written
just at the moment when the great French statesman, Georges Clemenceau,
in the eighty-sixth year of his career, prints his “Au soir de la
pensée.” That this great man, who knew men and life as very few did,
can adhere to a philosophical creed literally in accord with that of
Theodore Dreiser as presented in these pages, may well lead the reader
to believe that, after all, there must be some truth in Darwinism as
a hypothesis to explain the essential features of our modern social
system.
[25] A more awkward and clumsy way to express one’s self in writing
than this passage cannot be easily imagined, and there are,
unfortunately, too many passages like this one in Dreiser’s books.
This pseudo-scientific jargon could be endured in Haeckel but it is
difficult to be, at the same time, a bio-chemist and an artist. This
groping through mysticism, science or triviality, toward literary
expression seems to be the curse of the new American writers.
[26] “A Hoosier Holiday.”
[27] Did not the Catholic Church have something similar to say on the
subject, with its dogma of the Communion of Saints and the atonement
for the wicked by the good?
[28] The lesson of the Dutch masters has been learned very early by
American realists. Thirty years ago, in his preface to “A Hoosier
Schoolmaster,” Edward Eggleston attributed his vocation as a novelist
to the reading of Taine’s book on Dutch painters.
[29] This theory of conscience can prepare the reader for Dreiser’s
views on crime and the criminal in “An American Tragedy.” It took
bio-chemistry a long time to become a substitute for the Puritan
doctrine of responsibility in the American novel. The first step in
this direction after that of Hawthorne was taken by Oliver Wendell
Holmes in the sixteenth chapter of “Elsie Venner.” There, good Dr.
Holmes mobilized a college professor to demonstrate “the limitations
of human responsibilities” from a scientific standpoint and present
the criminal as a sick person not to be hanged or electrocuted, but
preached to and cured, if possible, if not pensioned.
[30] The French philosopher and historian, M. Eugene Seillères, renewed
entirely the study of romanticism in Europe by viewing it as what he
calls _l’impérialisme mystique_, the imperialistic tendency toward
individual supremacy. If we applied his definition to America, this
country would stand as essentially unromantic, _i.e._, as the one which
gives the individual the least chance for self-expansion beyond certain
set limits. Hence the triumph of realism and middle-class standards in
American literature. In the last fifteen or twenty years, on the other
hand, the “revolt against the village” may well be interpreted as the
sign of a new romantic upheaval among us, if we accept Mr. Seillères’
definitions.
[31] “Main Street.”
[32] _Ibid._
[33] Margaret Fuller in her “Memoirs” has told similar experiences, as
when she thought herself to be a whirling dervish and fell inanimate on
the floor after performing like one of them.
[34] Let me refer the reader for instance to Jim Blausser’s speech to
his countrymen assembled to try to “boost” Gopher Prairie, and Doctor
Pickerbaugh’s orations in “Arrowsmith.”
[35] Let the reader turn to “Tar” in particular for a vivid impression
of Anderson’s primitivism. Beauty and the Beast fight there at close
hand. One marvels how a would-be artist could save his soul from
disgrace out of such a muddy and zoölogical chaos.
[36] The “dance before the mirror,” as the French playwright François
de Curel called it.
[37] In fact very little respect of any sort. For the desecration in
particular of the myth of birth, I refer the reader to the orgiastic
chapters in “Tar,” contrasting the birth of the little pigs with that
of a human being. The scene is almost epic in its coarse nakedness.
[38] “A Story Teller’s Story.”
[39] Anderson has told her story in “Tar.”
[40] A lesson which Anderson, as some of his critics tell, probably
learned from Gertrude Stein, a virtuoso of the suggestive language to
an extreme which the disciple has not yet followed, fortunately for us.
Miss Stein’s story of an American family is a quarry where many curious
gravels can be found, but no statues.
[41] Stephane Mallarmé, a pioneer of modern æsthetics, was himself
a victim of a similar spell. At the end of his career he replaced
inspiration by throwing haphazard words in black on white. He
originated a new process of composition in which words produced their
effect by sheer magic, like those Japanese paper-balls which blossom
out into a display of flowers when placed in a glass of water.
[42] Is not this proletarian appeal the main sign of difference between
the old and the new order of things in American literature? Passing
from William Dean Howells to Sherwood Anderson is like descending the
social ladder several rungs. No more well-to-do bourgeois, Laphams or
Kentons. Now Middle Western literature takes us down to the ground
floor and sometimes to the basement of democracy.
[43] In French _les refoulés_.
[44] This celebrated moving picture from the German studios has lately
put psychoanalysis on the screen and made it intelligible to the
masses. “Winesburg, Ohio” is not the only book of its kind which gives
a literary rendering to Freudism. It is contemporary of and well in
keeping with Pirandello’s plays, Eugene O’Neill’s drama and the newest
French plays by Lenormand, Sarment, Cromelynck, and others.
[45] _L’énergie américaine, l’énergie anglo-saxonne_, such was for the
last half a century the slogan of almost all the French travelers to
the United States. Did not a French consul write, a few years before
the War, a book called “La supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” based on
the same views? These critics knew only the surface of city life in
America. They ignored Winesburg and, of course, had not read Sherwood
Anderson. Decadence or, as Max Nordau called it in a sensational book
“Degeneracy,” has become a current topic in the books of the younger
American writers. Most of them could be inscribed with George Cabot
Lodge’s saying that: “We are a dying race, as every race must be of
which the men are, as men and not accumulators, third rate.” Such a
statement certainly calls for a serious qualification but it may prove
useful as a “damper” against the professional panegyrists abroad and
the megalomaniacs at home.
[46] The part played by drunkenness in recent American fiction is
appalling. In the good old days drinking used to be poetic and it was
still Horatian in the way the late Barrett Wendell presented it in a
famous essay. Since prohibition, it has become a narcotic and a dope.
The triumph of drunkenness as a _deus ex machina_ in modern American
literature will be found in Eugene O’Neill’s plays, although the fact
that we pass our time on his stage mostly among sailors, may be taken
as an extenuating circumstance.
[47] Eugene O’Neill, in “Emperor Jones,” succeeded in the _tour de
force_ of staging a continuous monologue, but he was clever enough
to use a tom-tom for a diversion from beginning to end. We miss this
diversion in “Many Marriages.”
[48] “Many Marriages,” 217.
[49] From Rousseau to jazz seems a very long way, and yet does not the
modern American, so fond of dancing to the tune of a Paul Whiteman
orchestra, in some gorgeous palace, unconsciously pay homage to the
primitive instincts so dear to the author of “Dark Laughter”? What a
piquant contrast, not only in shade but in ideals, that both the black
man and the Puritan should live within the same frontiers and that
the latter should borrow from the former one of his favorite forms of
self-expression.
[50] Hamlin Garland, in his “Crumbling Idols” (1894) frankly put the
case of realism _versus_ sentimentalism before the public. He quoted
Mistral and the French Felibres, as well as Taine and the critic Veron
in support of his plea for what he called _provincialism_. Realism
triumphed in American fiction until Mrs. Wharton published her article
on “The Great American Novel” in the _Yale Review_ for July, 1927.
She protested against what she called the “twelve-mile limit” and the
narrow horizons of “the village pump.” That the “revolt against the
village” will lead to an entire change of orientation in present-day
American fiction and possibly to a new flight “beyond the horizon” in
the next few years may soon become an easy and necessary prophecy.
[51] Let me refer the reader on this point to “The Outlook for American
Prose” by Joseph Warren Beach (The University of Chicago Press).
[52] And needless to say, in an entirely different spirit from the
“Connecticut Yankee” by Mark Twain, who showed himself a gross
Philistine in regard to medieval lore.
[53] Author of “La Vie secrète,” “Les Choses Voient,” etc.
[54] We owe that expression to Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, a much talented
novelist and a specialist of women’s psychology in the United States.
[55] In her latest short novel, “My Mortal Enemy,” Miss Cather has
brought the tragedy of moral repression to its most crucial point. She
tells the story of a woman who was looked upon as a rather peevish and
vain person by those who knew her and who, at the end, frees her truest
self in a pathetic prayer before going to die alone on a cliff above
the sea.
[56] This “later realism” has been studied through modern English
fiction by Professor W. L. Myers in his book “The Later Realism”
(Chicago University Press), a masterpiece of searching criticism.
[57] In his novel called “What Happens” John Herrman gives us a
pitiless and depressing document about the habits of college students
of both sexes. If this be a faithful painting, American youth would
then seem to have but two ideals--Vice and Alcohol. I leave the full
responsibility of this verdict to the author. A similar, but more
optimistic and moralizing representation, will be found in Mr. Percy
Marks’ novel, “The Plastic Age,” The Century Company, New York.
[58] Mr. Burton Rascoe.
[59] See in Chapter II my exposé of “behaviorism.”
[60] Mr. Ernest Boyd in his “Portraits Real and Imaginary.”
[61] To which we should add his amusing “Kora in Hell.”
[62] The advent of “flamboyant” will be found in the books of Messrs.
Carl van Vechten, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who take their
revenge on dullness with firecrackers, bull fights and champagne. Out
of the gloom of realistic fiction the sun rises beyond the horizon of
the “village pump” through the pages of “Firecrackers,” “The Great
Gatsby,” and Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” The return to art for
art’s sake may free the American novel from the shackles of pessimism.
Let us hope so.