It was clear that something new was needed—nobody is that dull, the harried editor heard in his dreams. This something was found, a new, a fearful and quite unprecedented growth, a pioneer and monstrous crossbreeding of indifference and total recall: The New Yorker “article” on Hemingway. Before this it seemed never to have occurred to us that brute sound, as it were, might be a novelty, that “pieces” may after all simply be made with words, any words, if they have been truly uttered by a person of some celebrity. One would have expected these offerings to be signed with tiny initials, indicating a stenographer, or better by a few steel tracings of a machine not yet on the market, but showing in its simplicity and efficiency every possibility of easy mass production. In France a person would be guillotined for such an invention, and the very idea of this article was an invention, perhaps in the dawn of time related to the interview or the conversation, but in itself bearing no more relation to those than a cough to a song recital. By comparison, Aubrey’s duchesses who “died of the pox” seem sweetly remembered.
Gorky’s reminiscences of Tolstoy—a masterpiece. If anyone today were capable of composing this exalted work about a living genius, he would become so befuddled, so bent and harassed with accusation, so fearful of putting in and leaving out, it would be sensible economy to leave off altogether and return to “creative” work. What to do with himself in the reminiscence? Shall he admit his own existence or is that an unpardonable self-assertion? And isn’t it putting it on a bit to pretend to “know” the marvelous being when there are so many others who have known him longer and “better.”
To these moral and aesthetic questions there is no answer. Meanwhile there is always, instead, publicity—so easy to swallow, so difficult to remember a moment later.
1953
ANDERSON, MILLAY, AND CRANE IN THEIR LETTERS
MANY PEOPLE believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.
In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires—this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is not a crudely sugary affair except in dreary personalities; in any case the ideal is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one’s fingerprints.
In the letters of artists and public figures we may not find literary charm, but we do invariably get a good notion of how the person saw himself over the years. This vision does not always strike us as “acute”; we are often tempted to put some poor fellow wise on the subject of his own character, to explain that we are a lot more impressed by his dying on the gallows than by his last “God bless you” to his wife. It is difficult to think of a man except as the sum of his remarkable deeds, a statue surrounded by selected objects and symbols. Private letters are disturbing to this belief. What they most often show is that people do not live their biographies.
•
In the last year or so the correspondence of quite a number of our writers has been published—Pound, Sinclair Lewis, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Edna Millay—and we have had memoirs on Willa Cather and others. The twenties, which only a few years ago felt so near, are gradually slipping back into that vault called American Literature, where the valuables are kept. The publication of letters is a compliment which suggests the writer is worth a kind of scrutiny not granted every author. As these writers begin to take on that faraway, mysterious, “historical” glaze, publications about them are of considerable importance; a certain ice of opinion, fact and fancy is already spreading over their images. And we cannot assume that eventually all letters, every scrap of interesting material will be published; what is more likely is that the selections, the biography, as we have them now will stand for a time.
It is, then, interesting that the first volume (who knows if there will be another?) of Sinclair Lewis’s letters should be entirely given over to communications he wrote and received from his publishers. Indeed, this correspondence is rather good fun, dealing as it does with the finagling, financing and advertising which, though uncommonly exposed to this extent, are in some way a part of literary history, as the billboard is a sort of cousin to the performance. We see Lewis composing a fan letter to be sent by his publishers to all the best writers of his day on the subject of that remarkable book Main Street; and wondering if perhaps something special isn’t needed for the elegant eye and heart of Edith Wharton. This was all a part of the game, but we may doubt Lewis, much as he liked to appear in print, would have been delighted by this whole volume of business testimony.
Sherwood Anderson’s letters are unhappily selected for quite the opposite reason. They are often bleak and dull to read because they are chosen upon a principle of reckless high-mindedness, a remorseless tracking of Anderson the writer, the artist, the thinker, at the expense of biography. It is felt that Anderson the advertising man, Anderson before forty, was, though alive, a mute statistic; and even after he has been allowed existence at forty only his literary life is permitted. But with Anderson, “the man” is overwhelmingly important. He appears to have been splintered, repressed, uncertain in an exceptional way; in a very real sense his literary equipment began and ended with this painful state of being. Though he could sometimes grow mannered and arty, he is not particularly vivid if you isolate him as “an artist.” It is as a case that he is unfailingly interesting, this peculiar rising and waning star, this man who brought to literature almost nothing except his own lacerated feelings. This latter circumstance, and not his Flaubertian dedication, is what makes us think of him sometimes as a typical American writer. With certain other authors an undeviating, purely literary selection would produce not only the most interesting but the truest portrait of the man: Ezra Pound’s life seems to have been, almost literally, an open book.
Yet, even if one were to admit the validity of excluding all letters written before Anderson became an author, it seems a bit lofty to omit nearly everything that happened to him during the period of authorship. During these years Anderson divorced three wives and married a fourth; a much-married man without love letters gives us a jolt. There is no letter to Anderson’s daughter, only two to his son Bob, who worked with him on the newspaper enterprise; a few more to his son, John, get under the wire because John too is an “artist,” a painter, and letters relating to that calling are summoned. This selection makes Anderson seem distinctly hard and unreal; wives are divorced in a footnote or abandoned like unpromising manuscripts, grown children when addressed at all are usually given a lecture on art—and the author himself is as naked as can be, stripped to a man who is writing another book. Anderson’s strange, restless soul, remarkable beyond all else for painful, shrinking feelings, is uneasy with his literary friends, Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld. Struggling to tell them what he is all about he is sometimes like a tenor with the stage all to himself: “I have been to Nebraska, where the big engines are tearing the hills to pieces; over the low hills runs the promise of corn. You wait, dear Brother! I shall bring God home to the sweaty men in the corn rows.” Or again he is not so much complex as hidden and diffuse, singing in a voice not always recognizable from one day to the next. He is a man of the Middle West he tells us, close to the people, and yet all sorts of angels seem to be whispering in his ear, correcting his accent.
•
Edna Millay’s letters—after reading them you hesitate to kn
ow what you thought you knew about this poet. Can this be that sensational young woman of legend who burnt the candle, built the house on sand, kissed so many lips? More than once you find yourself thinking of quite another enduring American type, Jo in Little Women, the resourceful, sensitive, devoted girl, bobbing her hair, not to be a flapper, but to pay for Father’s illness. These letters are very charming, although not in the sense one would care much to read them if they were not by Edna Millay, or at least by someone, for they haven’t that sort of power which can be enjoyed apart from a beforehand interest in the writer. They show, for one thing, an intense, unmixed family devotion; not merely an affection for spruced-up memories of colorful relations, long dead ancestors from a region one no longer visits, not earnestness and the urgings of duty, but an immense love for the present, living, impinging kin. This world of nicknames, old jokes, little gifts flying through the mails is startlingly passionate. With friends too there is very often the same extraordinarily intimate style, the same devotion, fidelity, acceptance—and all the while we know Edna Millay was becoming more remote from everyone, enduring very early “a sort of nervous breakdown which interferes a bit with my keeping my promises,” and later in hospitals with “an all but life-size nervous breakdown” and at last horribly alone in the country, cold, without even a telephone, dying miserably after a sleepless night. How is it possible with all this fraternal, familial feeling that the frantic, orphaned creature of the later years came into being? And how is it possible to begin with that this jolly, loving daughter and sister was in her most famous period in such violent revolt? Edna Millay seems to have had a wretched life, much more so than those persons whose earliest days were marked by a blighting, ambiguous relation to their families and later somewhat toward everyone. There is not anywhere a sadder story than this—the aching existence of this woman who loved and was loved by her family and friends, who, flaming youth and all, married only once and then, to all appearances, wisely. Even Emily Dickinson appears on happier ground in her upstairs bedroom.
It seems likely that Edna Millay’s fame and success came too early; the racking strain of keeping up to this is suggested everywhere. And more important: I think Edmund Wilson in his fascinating and moving work on her undervalues the spectacular pain of the sort of success she had. She was a woman famous for her fascinating, unconventional personality, and for rather conventional poems. She was not in the deepest sense “famous” or much cared for by many of the really good poets of her own time. Hart Crane’s opinion, written to a friend much stricken with Miss Millay, is interesting: “She really has genius in a limited sense, and is much better than Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson, Lady Speyer, etc., to mention a few drops in the bucket of feminine lushness that forms a kind of milky way in the poetic firmament of the time (likewise all times);—indeed I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning . . . I can only say I do not greatly care for Mme. Browning. . . . With her equipment Edna Millay is bound to succeed to the appreciative applause of a fairly large audience. And for you, who I rather suppose have not gone into this branch of literature with as much enthusiasm as myself, she is a creditable heroine.”
This was not an easy situation for Edna Millay to live with. You cannot give, as she did, your whole life to writing without caring horribly, even to the point of despair. And so in 1949 we find that she is planning a satire against T. S. Eliot. In this work she says there is to be, “nothing coarse, obscene, as there sometimes is in the work of Auden and Pound, and nothing so silly as the childish horsing around of Eliot, when he is trying to be funny. He has no sense of humor, and so he is not yet a true Englishman. There is, I think, in these poems of mine against Eliot nothing which could be considered abusive; they are merely murderous.”
This is appalling. Edna Millay was not a stupid or even an excessively vain person. She knew, in spite of this wild cry, that the literary approval of Pound was to be valued more highly than that of Frank Crowninshield. (Critics are often wrong, but writers are hardly ever wrong, hide and deny it as they will, in knowing whose opinion really counts.) Her words are not those of a poet secure in her powers, and they are especially harsh for this writer, who was forever generous and warmhearted toward other poets, including nearly all of her feminine rivals. This hopeless, killing bitterness about her own place, as I believe the projected satire reveals, is the end of a whole life which one can at least imagine to have been thrown off its natural, impressive track by a series of seemingly fortunate fatalities. Perhaps she was not meant to go to Greenwich Village at all and certainly not to become famous in her youth. She was sensible, moral, steadfast, a kind of prodigy—among her circle hardly anyone except Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop even rose to the second-rate. Not nearly enough was asked of her and she had no time to prepare herself in solitude—until it was too late. It is a tribute, a terrible one, to her possibilities and hopes that she was unable to enjoy the comforts of a strong, public position and split in two. Very few critics can find in Edna Millay’s poetry the power and greatness Wilson finds. Still there is something humanly delightful and pleasing in Wilson’s obstinacy, like the great Ruskin putting Kate Greenaway among the finest living artists—as he did.
•
One cannot read even a few of Hart Crane’s letters without feeling the editor, Brom Weber, has made a tremendous contribution. (Of course the “contribution” is Crane’s, but he could not have presented his own correspondence.) Fishing about in contemporary literature, Weber has dredged up a masterpiece, for these letters are marvelous, wonderful simply to read, important in what they add to our notion of Crane, and in an unruly, inadvertent fashion quite profound for the picture they give of America itself, and in particular the literary scene from 1916 to 1932, from Hart Crane at seventeen until his death at thirty-three. It is easy with this volume to be reminded of Keats’s letters, and if Crane’s are not quite so extraordinary as that the same must be said for most of English prose.
Poor Crane—a genius from Cleveland—with his little pair of parents, or his pair of little parents, so squeezing in their anxiety and egotism, so screeching in their divorce, the mother rather beached and given to a humble mysticism, the father, dazed and busy, a business success but not really. Crane’s parents are curdling and outrageous by their very multiplicity in America, their typicality; they are as real and to be expected, this young couple, as Cleveland itself. Vast numbers of people under middle age now have parents like this and are these persons’ only child. Hart Crane was merely a bit in the vanguard by getting there somewhat early. And the son himself, a poet, homosexual, drunkard, a suicide. One had not imagined much could be added to this macabre, but neat, biography. However, what the letters amazingly suggest is the disturbing possibility that Crane had a happy life.
Naturally, he was often much annoyed by his parents, but there is no doubt he was always much fascinated by them. He wrote this middling pair an extremely generous number of lively and often lengthy letters—a source of amazement when we consider Crane’s bumming about, drinking, and the dizzy life he had made for himself away from home. In the end he was returning from Mexico, not to New York, but to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, planning fantastically to “be of some help” to his stepmother in the shrunken state of solid assets which became known at his father’s death.
Contrary to the guilt feelings usually surmised, Crane seems to have “enjoyed”—no other word occurs to me—his homosexuality, taking about this the most healthy attitude possible under the circumstances. There is not the slightest suggestion in the letters that he worried about his inclinations or was trying to reform; if anything troubles him on this score it is continence, the lack of opportunity. For what it may be worth, we remark that his suicide came at a time when he was involved, and more than a little lukewarmly, with a woman. “You know you’re welcome—more than that, my dear, to make this your future headquarters. I miss you mucho, mucho, mucho! But I don’t think that either of us ought to urge the other into anyt
hing but the most spontaneous and mutually liberal arrangements.”
Crane also “enjoyed” alcohol—his letters are heathenish in their failure to express intentions to liberate himself from this pleasure. He could, however, be remorseful over his drunken actions and there is no doubt he tried his friends’ charity extravagantly. As the Russian proverb about drinking has it, “A man on foot is a poor companion for a man on horseback.” Yet Crane somehow never seems to feel he is galloping to destruction. In this he is very different from Fitzgerald, who had in the midst of chaos the rather cross-eyed power of gazing upon his deterioration as if he were not living it but somehow observing his soul and body as one would watch a drop of water slowly drying up in the sun. Crane, on the other hand, expresses over and over the greatest delight in alcohol; he sees himself as a true lover of the grape rather than a snuffling slave of the bottle and, though the results may be the same, the attitude alters the experience along the way. It is one thing to die in ecstasy and another to pass away, moaning, “I knew this stuff would get me in the end.” (This is not suggested as the literal deathbed mood of either of these authors, but as a fundamental difference of attitude toward their “difficulties.”)
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 4
