Chapter XII (1)

_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._