Collecting Himself

by Michael J. Rosen

  SHE LAUGHED, DR. SCHILDER!

  “There was once upon a time [the tale begins] a good man who had two children: a girl by his first wife, and a boy by the second. The girl was as white as milk, and her lips were like cherries.” The tale goes on to tell how the stepmother hated the little girl and one day sent her to the store to buy a pound of candles which, when she put them on the ground while she climbed over a stile, a dog stole. Three times this happened, with three different pounds of candles. “The stepmother was angry, but she pretended not to mind the loss. She said to the child: ‘Come, lay your head on my lap that I may comb your hair.’” Down to the ground fell the yellow silken hair as the stepmother combed it. Said she, finally: “I cannot part your hair on my knee, fetch a billet of wood.” When this was done she said, “I cannot part your hair with a comb, fetch me an ax.” So (brace yourself, Dr. Schilder, for here comes cruelty which makes the cruelty of Mr. Carroll seem like the extremely lovely nonsense it really is) the stepmother made the little girl put her head upon the billet of wood, and then she cut off her head with the ax. In the tale as Mr. Jacobs tells it there comes now this sentence: “So the mother wiped the ax and laughed.” In all of Lewis Carroll, Dr. Schilder, there is no such sentence as that. There, indeed, is grist for your mill; there is red meat for your grinder. But wait. We are coming to a real trend in cannibalism.

  “Then she took the heart and liver of the little girl, and she stewed them and brought them into the house for supper. The husband tasted them and shook his head. He said they tasted very strangely. She gave some to the little boy, but he would not eat.” The little boy, the story tells, took up what was left of his little sister and put her in a box and buried the box under a rose tree. “And every day he went to the tree and wept and his tears ran down on the box. One day the rose-tree flowered. It was spring, and there among the flowers was a white bird; and it sang, and sang, and sang like an angel out of heaven.” The song the bird sang is, in the version Mr. Jacobs uses, this dainty ditty:

  My wicked mother slew me,

  My dear father ate me,

  My little brother whom I love,

  Sits below and I sing above,

  Stick, stock, stone dead.

  The white bird, the tale goes, sang her song for the shoemaker, and he gave her two little red shoes; and she sang her song for the watchmaker, and he gave her a gold watch and chain; and she sang her song for three millers, and they put, when she asked for it, a millstone around her neck. Then the white bird flew to the house where the stepmother lived. And from there I give the tale as it is in the book, on to the end. “It rattled the millstone against the eaves of the house, and the stepmother said: ‘It thunders.’ Then the little boy ran out to see the thunder, and down dropped the red shoes at his feet. It rattled the millstone against the eaves of the house once more, and the stepmother said again: ‘It thunders.’ Then the father ran out, and down fell the chain about his neck. In ran father and son, laughing and saying: ‘See, what fine things the thunder has brought us!’ Then the bird rattled the millstone against the eaves of the house a third time; and the stepmother said: ‘It thunders again, perhaps the thunder has brought something for me,” and she ran out; but the moment she stepped outside the door down fell the millstone on her head; and so she died.”

  Dr. Paul Schilder will want, of course, to trace the extent of this cruel and cannibalistic story among the peoples of the world. To aid him in his quest I should like to quote a paragraph from Mr. Jacobs’s notes and references at the end of his book:

  SOURCE.—From the first edition of Henderson’s Folk-Lore of Northern Counties, p. 314, to which it was communicated by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould.

  PARALLELS.—This is better known under the title, “Orange and Lemon,” and with the refrain:

  “My mother killed me,

  My father picked my bones,

  My little sister buried me,

  Under the marble stones.”

  I heard this in Australia, and a friend of mine heard it in her youth in County Meath, Ireland. Mr. Jones gives part of it in Folk-Tales of the Magyars, 418-20, and another version occurs in Notes and Queries, vi. 496. Mr. I. Gollancz informs me he remembers a version entitled “Pepper, Salt, and Mustard,” with the refrain just given. Abroad it is Grimm’s “Juniper Tree,” where see further parallels. The German rhyme is sung by Margaret in the mad scene of Goethe’s Faust.

  Once launched onto the awful, far-spreading sea of folklore, Dr. Schilder will find a thousand examples, in the fairy tales of all countries, of fear and cruelty, horror and revenge, cannibalism and the laughing wiping of blood from gory axes. He must surely know, to give just one more example, the tale from the brothers Grimm of how a queen “quite yellow with envy” sang to another looking glass than Lewis Carroll’s: “O, mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?” and how, when the mirror answered that the fairest maid alive was the queen’s own stepdaughter, Snow White, the enraged lady sent for a huntsman and said to him: “Take the child away into the forest…. You must kill her and bring me her heart and tongue for a token.”

  OF ART AND OUR PSYCHOLOGISTS

  Dr. Schilder’s work, as I have said, is cut out for him. He has the evil nature of Charles Perrault to dip into, surely as black and devious and unwholesome as Lewis Carroll’s. He has the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen. He has Mother Goose, or much of it. He can spend at least a year on the legend of Childe Rowland, which is filled with perfectly swell sexual symbols—from (in some versions) an underground cave more provocative by far than the rabbit hole in Wonderland to the sinister Dark Tower of the more familiar versions. This one piece of research will lead him into the myth of Proserpine and into Browning and Shakespeare and Milton’s Comus and even into the dark and perilous kingdom of Arthurian legend. I should think that the good doctor could spend a profitable month on the famous and mysterious beast Galtisant, that was called the Questing Beast and that so plagued Sir Palamides—”the Questing Beast that had in shape a head like a serpent’s head, and a body like a leopard, buttocks like a lion, and footed like an hart; and in his body there was such a noise as it had been the noise of thirty couple of hounds questing, and such a noise that beast made wheresomever he went.”

  When he is through with all this, Dr. Schilder should be pretty well persuaded that behind the imaginative works of all the cruel writing men, further or nearer, lies the destructive and unstable, the fearful and unwholesome, the fine and beautiful cruelty of the peoples of the earth, the men and women in the fields and the huts and the market place, the original storytellers of this naughty world. If Dr. Schilder wishes to expose to the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association, at some far date, the charming savagery and the beautiful ruthlessness of these peoples of the world, these millions long dead—and still alive—that is up to him. I should protest mildly that there is much more important work to be done.

  I had planned, to be sure, a small analysis and defense of the nature of the artistic imagination for Dr. Schilder’s information. Thinking of this one afternoon, I stood at a window of my house in the country, and as I looked out three pheasants came walking across the snow, almost up to my window. They were so near that, if I had had a stout rubber band and a ruler to snap it from, I could have got one of them. Presently they wandered away, and with them, somehow, went my desire to explain the nature of the artistic imagination, in my humble way, to Dr. Paul Schilder. But I should like to leave with him, to ponder, one little definition, the definition of the word empathy as given in Webster’s New International Dictionary: “Imaginative projection of one’s own consciousness into another human being; sympathetic understanding of other than human beings.” There’s a great deal in that—for some people—Dr. Schilder.

  And, at the far end of all this tempest in a looking glass, I should like to set down, for Paul Schilder’s guidance, a sentence from the writings of the late Dr. Morton Prince, a truly intelligent psychologist. He was speaking of mul
tiple personality when he wrote it but he might have been speaking of the folk tales of the world or of the creatures and creations of Lewis Carroll: “Far from being mere freaks, monstrosities of consciousness, they are in fact shown to be manifestations of the very constitution of life.”

  Voices of Revolution

  The old bitter challenges to the bourgeois as critic, writer, and human being (in answer to the old bitter challenges of the bourgeois to the proletarian as critic, writer, and human being) ring out right at the start in Joseph Freeman’s introduction to Proletarian Literature in the United States. Nothing, I am afraid, will ever change this. We shall all meet at the barricades shouting, or writing, invective at the top of our voices. Interspersed, of course, with sound arguments (to which the other side will not listen). The bourgeois writer and critic and the proletarian writer and critic do not seem to be able to meet, sanely, on a forum. Their meeting place is the battlefield. They are cat and dog, Smith and Roosevelt. This cannot, I suppose, be changed and it is a rather melancholy reflection. Out of it are bound to come distortion, exaggeration, and, what is probably worse, triviality. But it presents a colorful, if meaningless, free-for-all, which members of both armies, being human beings born of war, are bound to find rather more pleasurable than deplorable.

  Mr. Freeman sets himself a large and important task in his introduction and, in great part, he discharges it well, the great part being an explanation of, and argument for, the values of revolutionary art. But here and there the old urge springs up, the old bitter desire to take irrelevant cracks at bourgeois literature (without specific instances), and at the more intimate emotions of the bourgeoisie, all the more intimate emotions of all the bourgeoisie. He hates to use the word “love” in relation to them. Thus he speaks of “lechery” and of “flirtations”; when he does use the word “lovers” he joins it up with “loafers.” This petty bitterness—it seems almost a neurosis—disfigures his arguments. He writes:

  Every writer creates not only out of his feelings, but out of his knowledge and his concepts and his will…. The feelings of the proletarian writer are molded by his experience and by the science which explains that experience, just as the bourgeois writer’s feelings are molded by his experiences and the class theories which rationalize them. Out of the experiences and the science of the proletariat the revolutionary poets, playwrights and novelists are developing an art which reveals more forces in the world than the love of the lecher and the pride of the Narcissist.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: A review of Proletarian Literature in the United States, edited by Granville Hicks.

  Well, there you are: the old slipping out of a sonorous and imposing argument into what is nothing more than a hot-tempered jibe, a silly sweeping insinuation. It is odd how that kind of thing has somehow or other become one of the major points in the literary battle. Studies of the effects of class backgrounds and social concepts upon the emotions belong in such works as Middletown, or in articles by themselves, but they should scarcely be flung helter-skelter into an analysis of the kind Mr. Freeman sets out to write, particularly if they degenerate into what has the thin ring of an absurd personal insult. So much of the critical writing of both proletarians and bourgeoisie sounds as if the writer were striking back at some individual who has been striking at him. I am afraid that is too often the case. Schoolgirls; boys behind the barn. And literature can go die, on the barricades, or behind the barn.

  But this is not getting into the book, which is divided into Fiction, Poetry, Reportage (that’s what they call it, don’t look at me), Drama, and Literary Criticism. It runs to 384 pages. It contains selections from the work of proletarian writers in the past five or six years. I have read it with great interest and I believe anybody with any sense of what is going on would also. I was mainly interested in the fiction; first, because it takes up more than a third of the volume; second, because, of the five divisions, I care most for fiction.

  The fiction here I found uneven: sincere generally, sometimes groping, often hysterical or overwrought, now and then distinctly moving. The only thing in this section that I think can last is John Dos Passos’s “The Body of an American” from 1919. Many of the other authors have the fault of whipping themselves up to a lather, or whipping their characters up to a lather, whereas Dos Passos whips his reader up to a lather. Somewhere in this book there should be a critical piece on his method. It might well have been put in, under Literary Criticism, in place of Mr. Gold’s famous attack on Thornton Wilder, which seems as dated as the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, or in place of Phillips’s and Rahv’s “Recent Problems of Revolutionary Literature,” which loses its points in a mass of heavy, difficult, and pedantic writing. For what some of these proletarian writers need to learn is simply how to write, not only with intensity, but with conviction, not only with a feeling for the worker but a feeling for literary effects. Even the Erskine Caldwell of “Daughter” (by which flabby story he is unfortunately represented here) might learn from Dos Passos. Compare (and you’ll have to read both pieces to see the really important difference) Caldwell’s refrain: “Daughter woke up hungry again…. I just couldn’t stand it” with Dos Passos’s: “Say buddy cant you tell me how I can get back to my outfit?” The first flops, the second gets you.

  Many of the stories are simply not convincing. I have read several two or three times to see if I could discover why. I think I found a few reasons. You don’t always believe that these authors were there, ever had been there; that they ever saw and heard these people they write about. They give you the feeling that they are writing what they want these people to have said. This seems to me an important point. It is not the subject matter, but the method of presentation, I believe, which has raised the bourgeois cry of “propaganda.” Proletarian literature must be written by men and women with a keen ear and eye for gestures and for words, for mannerisms and for idioms, or it fails. Jack Conroy catches perfectly the words of the Negro in his “A Coal Miner’s Widow” (particularly in the fine paragraph on page 58 beginning “‘Scuse me!”); but I don’t feel reality—I vaguely feel some literary influence—in most of Ben Field’s “Cow.” And he should be forever ashamed of having written this sentence: “He said something about her being without either and without clothes, but for the sake of somebody who liked him, as he had been unable to get her off, he had had all added.” But then read his “The Cock’s Funeral” in the first issue of Partisan Review and Anvil; it is fine, and it has what nothing in this anthology has: humor. Some of the richest humor in the world is the humor of the American proletariat.

  I think Albert Halper fails to make his scab taxi-driver come to life. I did not believe the driver and I did not believe his fares; I believed Mr. Halper’s sincerity; and that is not enough. More care and hard work, in watching and listening and writing, is what was needed here. The driver is not nearly so good as Joseph North’s driver in his reporter piece called “Taxi Strike,” and Mr. North’s study is far from excellent. I believe both Halper and North might profit by an examination into the way Robert Coates or St. Clair McKelway handles such pieces. I can tell you that their observation and their writing is hard, painstaking, and long. Nobody, however greatly aroused, can successfully bat off anything.

  Now I did believe Albert Maltz’s “Man on a Road” (minor note: I am told that no user of “you-all” ever addresses a solitary person as “you-all”). This story is written with sympathy and understanding but also with detachment (and oh, my friends, and oh, my foes, in detachment there is strength, not weakness). Mr. Maltz leaves the clear plight of his victim undefiled by exaggeration, anger, and what I can only call the “editorial comment” which seeps into some of the other pieces. You remember the man on the road after you have forgotten most of the figures in the book. Mr. Maltz knows how to make his reader angry without demanding that he be angry. And if this is not the procedure of class, it will forever remain the dictate of art.

  I thought that the dialogue in Grace Lumpkin’s “John Steve
ns” had an artificial sound—one gets to thinking more about the writer than about her people, more about her faults than about what is troubling her characters. I can understand why the Communist literati bewail the loss to the cause of Ring Lardner—as they should also bewail the straying of John O’Hara. In this kind of story an ear like theirs is worth more than rubies. To go on: there is too obvious strain and effort in Tillie Lerner; she grabs tremendously at the reader and at life and fails to fetch the reader and fails to capture life. William Rollins Jr. has a deplorable affection for typographical pyrotechnics: caps, italics, dashes. It makes his story almost impossible to read. I was reminded, in trying to read it, of what an old English professor of mine, the late Joseph Russell Taylor, used to say: you can’t get passion into a story with exclamation points. But Mr. Rollins deserves credit for one thing, at least: he is the only writer in this book who uses “God damn” in place of “goddam.” Josephine Herbst, so often authentic, writes: “A newsboy sang out, ‘Big Strike at Cumley’s, night crew walk out, big strike threatened, mayor urges arbitration.’” That is what she wanted to hear a newsboy sing out but it is not what any newsboy in this country ever sang out. I grant the importance of the scenes on which all these stories are based, but they cannot have reality, they cannot be literature, if they are slovenly done—merely because there is a rush for the barricades and proletarian writers are in a hurry. Art does not rush to the barricades. Nobody wants to believe that these authors sat in warm surroundings hurriedly writing of things they had never seen, or had merely glimpsed, yet that is often the impression they give.