Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  The editor of The Man (an impatient and suspicious fellow named Quackenbush) turned the letter over to Miss Stelzenmuller, editor of The Woman. Miss Stelzenmuller, who is not so impatient as Mr. Quackenbush, but even more suspicious, hastily stuffed Martha’s letter, Dorothea’s poems, and Miss Denny’s letter into an envelope and sent them all on to me.

  Not a man who is easily outdone, I am sending Miss Stelzenmuller an envelope containing three drawings of Fort Sumter by my young niece, a copy of Out Where the West Begins, and a letter from a California woman to her daughter at college, advising her to have her teeth out if they (the teeth) are pushing her teeth out.

  This letter from the California woman, found on a Hollywood street by Mr. Richard Connell, was sent on to me by Mr. Connell, probably in the hope that I would not know what to do with it. As for Dorothea’s poems and the letter from Miss Denny to Miss Stelzenmuller, I have put them in a plain white envelope and sent them off to Mr. Connell. Give him something to think about.

  The Book-End

  THURBER ON OTHER WRITERS

  Excerpts from “The Book-End,” 1923

  They have started selecting the ten books to take to a desert island with one again. The International Book Review has had some notable writers select their ten; a newspaper syndicate publishes the selections of prominent people, and other publications have caught the spirit of the thing. We thought this indoor sport died out about eight years ago when James Mongomery Flagg went to the head of the class by picking nine books of cigaret papers and old Irv’ Cobb’s Back Home.

  Why not select the ten movie actresses whom you would prefer to take to a desert island? Ourself, we select nine copies of Norma Talmadge, and Pauline Garon.

  To die as Jim Faulkner died is not death at all. It is merely ceasing to be, tangibly, in the places where one has been. And tangibility is an unsatisfactory thing, and of all things the most transitory. Some of us have little more than that. We impinge on the consciousness of our fellow beings and when the stimulus is gone there is nothing left but the memory of an image, and that is death. But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades forever the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette in the O. Henry story. It is the surest intimation that we may have of immortality. Such was the spirit of James W. Faulkner.

  Anyone who reads at all diversely during these bizarre nineteen twenties cannot escape the conclusion that a number of crazy men and women are writing stuff which remarkably passes for important composition among certain persons who should know better. Mr. Stuart P. Sherman, however, refused to be numbered among those who stand in awe and admiration of one of the most eminent of the idiots, Gertrude Stein. He reviews her Geography and Plays in the Aug. II issue of the Literary Review of the New York Evening Post and arrives at the conviction that it is a marvellous and painstaking achievement in setting down approximately 80,000 words which mean nothing at all.

  Mr. Sherwood Anderson, who, in the course of some worthwhile writings has got off huge sections of imbecilic vagaries, whoops it up every now and then for Gertrude and has written in that vein an introduction to her barrel of words. Just one of several quotations from Miss Stein is enough upon which to rest one’s case: “When she was quite a young one she knew she had been in a family living and that that family living was one that anyone could be one not have been having if they were to be one being one not thinking about being one having been having family living.” That, it appears, is part of a “Portrait of Constance Fletcher.”

  Some months ago we resolved to enter wholeheartedly into the movement to embrace the obscurely amazing as the genuinely important and strove to sustain the belief that Ben Hecht’s Erik Dorn, for example, is hot intellectual stuff. But the strain upon our natural tastes, sophomoric and old-fashioned as they may be, was too great. We return to James and Hergesheimer and Conrad, to beautiful words so arranged as to present truthful ideas intelligibly. In Hecht and Stein, the poetry of Amy Lowell at its oddest, the works of James Joyce and Anderson and T. S. Eliot may be the beginnings of a modern literature which shall eventually obliterate the memory of the old order of sentences and sense; but we trust that such legal prohibition of the old stuff as may eventually be written into the law of the land will not carry with it a penalty for possession in one’s home of the books one has learned, in his unenlightened way, to love.

  Mr. Charles Norris has added Bread to his list of monosyllabic novels, of which the first two were Salt and Brass. We rapidly lose interest in any writer who is so easily entertained, or who, by some unaccountable back alley of reasoning, comes to the conclusion that it is striking to name his books in that manner. Salt was, in some ways and in some chapters, a fine piece of work. It drew, for one thing, the most authentic picture of what was called in that day “chicken” that has ever been drawn. But it had too much moralizing and this-is-the-waying, and alas-alasing in it, and it actually ended up with a paragraph saying, in effect, here let us leave them, confident that they will get along all right from now on, etc.

  This business of naming novels after food and plumbing is but one step removed from the peculiar desideratum of Louis Joseph Vance, who some years ago swore or bet or something he could write ten or twelve books, the titles of which should each have two words beginning with “B”—the Brass Bowl, Bronze Bell, Black Bag, etc.—we forget how many he actually did before the fever wore off or the keeper came to tell him his army was waiting.

  The movies just love to jump upon such novels, however, tie-and-dye them, place rosettes in their buttonholes, stand a huge ormolu clock on their mantel, plaster a rococo cornice on their eaves, and, turning to the admiring people, exclaim, “Voila!—a super-extra-de luxe photoplay!” “Is Your Wedding Ring Brass?” was the batik wall hanging they finally made out of Brass. “Does Your Bread Weigh a Pound?” will probably be the companion piece they will weave out of the newest novel.

  Idle Thought of a Busy Literatus.

  One great advantage which poetry has over prose—one sense in which, we might even say, it is considerably more beautiful—is that it fills up space approximately three times as rapidly.

  Among the books we have been trying to get around to, without any success so far, are Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf; The Dancer in the Shrine, by Amanda Benjamin Hall; The Flower in Drama, by Stark Young; A Pocketful of Poses, by Anne Parrish (we like a picture we saw of her recently); Fiery Particles, by C. E. Montague; and The Judge, by Rebecca West.

  Add things which mean nothing in my life: the autographed edition of the words of Mr. James Oliver Curwood.

  Among the books which we don’t intend to get around to are Structural Steelwork, by William H. Black; Pung Chow: The Game of a Hundred Intelligences, New York: Schilling; Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology; Black Oxen, by Gertrude Atherton; Ten Nights in a Radio Head-set, by Alton D. Spencer; Gargoyles, by Ben Hecht; and The Dynamo, Its Theory, Design and Manufacture, by C. C. Hawkins.

  Among the books which we really ought to get around to, we suppose, is Tobacco and Mental Efficiency, by M. V. O’Shea.

  The award of the Pulitzer Prize for 1922 to Willa Cather’s One of Ours, favorably mentioned by this department last week, has aroused protests from many critics who loudly assert that Babbitt was the best American novel of last year. It was. But the award was not made for the best novel, in the sense in which Heywood Broun and the rest of the Algonquins mean it, but for the book which “best presents the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Mr. Sinclair Lewis does not deal with the wholesome atmosphere of American life or the highest standard of American manners and manho
od. He deals with 100 per cent Americanism.

  Narrowed as the field is by the requirements fixed by the committee, few meritorious novels of the nineteen-twenties can fall within it. The thing we rejoice in is that the award went to Miss Cather and not to Zane Grey or Gene Stratton Porter. The author of My Antonia is one of the few important novelists in this country who do not confine themselves altogether to realistic portrayals of the lives of Klux kleagles, morons, defectives, psychopaths, sex-starvelings, wealthy realtors, plate glass manufacturers who covet widows, small town garage proprietors who covet the wives of the hotel managers, and miscellaneous wives and widows and other women with grotesquely improper desiderata.

  This Testimonial, Carl, Has All the Contour of a Tongue in the Cheek.

  (We lift it from the jacket of Stratford Publishing Co. books.)

  A tribute from Carl Sandburg, one of the prize winners for the two best books of poems published in 1918—

  Dear Dr. Schnittkind:

  I like the whole general drift of your books—you look to me like a builder.

  Now we know of one other publisher who looks to us like a third-baseman, but after all, personal appearance is no reliable criterion. However, as Herman Miller wrote us, apropos of the Sandburg tribute, “If we are to be builders, we must deal more and more with the concrete.”

  “Am I the only woman in America who isn’t writing novels?”

  More Authors Cover the Snyder Trial

  I

  WHO DID WE DID DID WE WE DID, SAYS MISS STEIN!

  By Gertrude Stein

  This is a trial. This is quite a trial. I am on trial. They are on trial. Who is on trial?

  I can tell you how it is. I can tell you have told you will tell you how it is.

  There is a man. There is a woman. There is not a man. There would have been a man. There was a man. There were two men. There is one man. There is a woman where is a woman is a man.

  He says he did. He says he did not. She says she did. She says she did not. She says he did. He says she did. She says they did. He says they did. He says they did not. She says they did not. I’ll say they did.

  II

  JOYCE FINDS SOCKSOCKING IS BIG ELEMENT IN MURDER CASE!

  By James Joyce

  Trial regen by trialholden Queenscountycourthouse with tumpetty taptap mid socksocking with sashweights by jackals. In socksocking, the sashwiring goes: guggengaggleoggoggsnukkkk…. To corsetsale is to alibi is to meetinlovenkillenlove. Rehab des arbah sed drahab! Not a quart of papa’s booze had poison booze vor the killparty for the snugglesnuggle….

  III

  OUT A MILE, WRITES COBB!

  By Ty Cobb

  Stealing home from a bridge game is a clever stunt, if properly worked. But it should never be followed by the hit-and-run play.

  It’s not like the Cry Baby bandits—four bawls and a walk to Sing Sing. Snyder merely hit into a double play and was out a mile, Syracuse to New York to Syracuse.

  If You Ask Me

  (THOMAS WOLFE)

  “What novel in your memory has received such praise as this?” Harper’s asks in an advertisement, referring to Thomas Wolfe’s new book. The praise that is then set down as the highest within your recollection or mine reads like this: “One of the most vital and wide-embracing pictures of American life,” “An authentic work of art, of genius,” “Finest, most mature book he ever wrote,” “He will stand with Melville,” “… a tide mark.”

  Anybody who reads book reviews fairly consistently would reply, without hesitation, to Harper’s question: “About 1,100 novels in my memory have received such praise as this.”

  A few years ago Mr. Geoffrey Hellman, in a searching examination of American book reviews, found a bushel-basketful of paeans of praise for novels, any one of which would make Harper’s little collection look like unmitigated disapproval. John Cowper Powys, for his Wolf Solent, was compared not only to Melville but to Dickens, Hardy, Shakespeare, Dante, Keats, Shelley, Congreve, Whitman, and Carlyle. At least twice a month, as all readers of book reviews know, a new genius emerges and sets an all-time All-American tide mark with a vital and all-embracing picture of American life that is haunting and unforgettable and filled with a unique power and a strange and moving beauty.

  I have never been able to read very far in Thomas Wolfe. I have asked, as Mr. Mencken used to do in such cases, for divine support but I am simply not strong enough to battle my way through Wolfe’s thunderous tides and swim out to the “confused but intuitive sense of the apparent meaning and pattern of Life,” which is said to lie somewhere in the vast surging ocean of his 735-page novels.

  The critics will tell you that this is conventional criticism and that you should not look for Form where there is Divine Fire. I restrain the impulse to reply to this, quite simply, “Nuts!” It seems to me the conventional excuse advanced on behalf of the Genius. He is not supposed to labor over an idea until he cuts it down from 6,700 sprawling words to the three paragraphs which will express it perfectly, that is, bring it within the definition of Art. The critics not only excused the big good Wolfe’s sprawl, but convinced themselves and him that his mystic talents demanded the sprawl, and so he sprawled more and more as Time and the River rolled or from novel to novel.

  If Thomas Wolfe had lived, it seems likely that his literary house would have become more and more littered and dusty. He did not believe in winding the clocks or cleaning the silver; he never swept the floor or washed the window panes; long, untrimmed essays grew up in the window boxes of his prose and were not plucked out. That kind of housekeeping may be Divine Fire but it isn’t art.

  Author’s note: Defenses of Mr. Wolfe and attacks on this column must be double-spaced on a typewriter equipped with a fresh black ribbon.

  “This is my house, Mr. Wolfe, and if you don’t get out I’ll throw you out!”

  “He looks a little like Thomas Wolfe, and he certainly makes the most of it.”

  Recommended Reading

  West Cornwall, Conn.

  May 15, 1949

  Dear Miss Whitaker:

  … One of my closest friends, a former professor of English, who was one of the best amateur actors I have ever known, deplored, just before his death last month, the fact that Rosie is going to attend a college given over entirely to the teaching of dramatics. He felt that the best actors and actresses were the product of life and literature, rather than of merely technical study. I have had this in mind also, and one of my graduation presents to Rosie is a list of some 20 books, most of them under 90,000 words, all of them beautifully written, which I thought might help to supply the lack of a general arts course in college. I have felt that she could write as well as act, but she seems to believe that writing is “too hard.” This is definite proof that she knows about writing. I will let the future take care of her career. It is foolish for a father to worry about his daughter, and even more foolish to worry about her career. If he expects a scrapbook full of favorable reviews of her acting or her writing, he is likely to get instead a couple of granddaughters—this makes him a much luckier man….

  Sincerely yours,

  JAMES THURBER

  EDITOR’S NOTE: James and Althea’s daughter, Rosemary, attended Northampton School for Girls. Sarah B. Whitaker, headmistress, received these letters from Thurber.

  West Cornwall, Conn.

  June i, 1949

  Dear Miss Whitaker:

  … Since Rosie is intent on the theater, I have decided to let her keep that difficult dream until it comes true or she finds out she doesn’t want it. I have felt that she could become a writer, but years ago she said it was too hard. I am on the soundest ground of experience when I say that for every one young male writer who gives up I have found a half dozen girls in New York who could not stand rewriting or rejections. I think that 17 is too young for her to know what she wants to do or actually can do, and since this is true, all decisions are hard to make.

  The list of books I am giving her consists la
rgely of short novels that interested, inspired, or excited me for their story, their style, their originality, or some other quality. They are all easy to read and calculated to prove that worthwhile writing, by Americans and English in this century, can be as absorbing as novels like Centennial Summer which Rosie read largely because of the movie. I have long contemplated an article for Harper’s on the problem of literature for the young. I was a great reader from the time I was 10, but most of my enthusiasms in high school and college I found outside class. I am a rabid antagonist of the Silas Marner kind of required reading. Neither this nor The Spy, nor The Talisman, nor The Return of the Native stirred my interest as a writer and appreciator as much as the good books I read for myself. I realize that the question of content, especially the sexual, is difficult for teachers everywhere in the case of the adolescent. Rosie, however, will soon be 18, at which [age] my grandmother had two children, and I think that she will discover in reading these books that writing can be fun. In preparation for my article, on which I have much research to do, I have discovered, neither to my dismay nor surprise, that most school girls of 17 have read the sexy parts of God’s Little Acre and Appointment in Samarra, to mention two. They get it out of context and in distortion, exchanging books in which pages are marked, never beginning or ending the books. I was disappointed to see that such a lovely thing as My Antonia could become uninteresting to Rosie in prospect merely because it was listed in a reading list. I expect the young girl would come to hate that heroine, but I hope that A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy will restore her belief in Willa Cather. I do not believe they would affect her faith in the American woman, and if she has the creative talent I suspect, she will get more out of the story and the style than she will out of its fictional facts.