At the end of the fiction section is the worst example of failure in method and effect, Philip Stevenson’s “Death of a Century.” What might have been sharp satire is a badly done, overwrought, and merely gross burlesque. Even burlesque must keep one foot on verisimilitude. It grows better out of healthy ridicule than wild-eyed hate. In the poetry and drama departments there are fine things (Waiting for Lefty among them). The reportage section is, in some instances, excellent and it should have been widely expanded, preferably at the expense of the literary criticism, almost all of which could have been left out. There is, as I have said, not a note of humor in the anthology, not even in Robert Forsythe’s piece on the Yale Bowl.
“This is my brother Ed. He’s given up.”
“Don’ts” for the Inflation
Don’t shout over the phone
Don’t run
Don’t lie down
Don’t keep saying “Hark!”
Don’t scream
Don’t offer money you printed yourself
Notes for a Proletarian Novel
Back in the nineties, a novelist practically had to write novels about a gentleman standing at the top of a flight of stairs with a sword in his hand, his shirt open at the throat, and a bandage around his forehead, defending some lady’s honor. These novels were not proletarian any way you looked at them, and they pay the penalty of seeming pretty dim and futile now. In fact, they may be said to be quite dead, along with Stanley Weyman and that long line of gallant French swordsmen which began with D’Artagnan and ended when Frenchmen began throwing rocks at gendarmes on May Day.
The next type of popular novel to come into vogue, as I remember it, had for its protagonist a tall, gaunt, melancholy author whose story involved his lifelong and unsuccessful search for Something Worth While. This he mainly sought for in women, and women always failed him because they turned out, much to his surprise, not to be God, Beauty, and Inspiration all in one. They turned out to be saucy and irritable at times, with no clearer understanding of what the protagonist was searching for than he had, so that in the end he wandered sadly off into the dusk, without a hat on, his lank hair blowing across his face, still searching. These novels were not proletarian either, and they seem pretty silly now in a world that is no longer safe for Individualism.
Then there was a period when a thin white line of ironic and satirical novels was thrown upon the shore. These novels made fun of Everything, in a nicely polished way, but you can’t do that any more because Everything has become sombre and important in the last few years. Authors privileged to live in this age must write novels about the workingman, with a drab economic background—and don’t let me see any of you sneaking into fine old Edith Wharton drawing-rooms. The tone of critics of literature is becoming sharper and more threatening as time goes on and not enough proletarian novels come out. There is a hint implicit in literary reviews that unless authors give up monkeying around with well-to-do characters who fritter their time away on Love, something is going to happen. There is no place for Love any more, either.
As much as I care about Individualism and Love, I’m not so dumb but what I see that I’ll have to settle down to a book about factory life if I’m going to keep up with the times. Unfortunately, the only factory I was ever in in my life was the Buckeye Steel Castings Company, in Columbus, Ohio, and that was so many years ago that I can’t remember a thing except that I stumbled over a big iron bucket and was lame for days. My other contacts with the working class have also been pretty slight, but I remember a few of them.
When I was sixteen, I used to work for a wealthy and bureaucratic wholesale optical-supply company in Columbus. I delivered lenses and frames to opticians about town, for twelve dollars a week, making my rounds on a bicycle. I suppose that I was pretty much ground down by the capitalistic system then, but I didn’t give it much thought because I was working at the time on the development of a baseball game to be played with a pair of dice. A few years later, during my senior year in high school, I got a job working after hours in a small tobacco store on Mt. Vernon Avenue. A great many workingmen came into the store, which was run by a man named Una Soderblom. Most of the patrons were employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company—engineers, firemen, and brakemen. My memory of their problems is dim, but I think that their greatest one was waking up in time to get to their trains. Often they turned over and went back to sleep after being telephoned by the official Caller. I could do the character of the Caller, all right. He was a slight grayish man who never wore a collar, but always wore a back collar button anyway, and he sat at a table with a telephone on it in the rear of the store. Just why his office was in the tobacco shop I never found out. He studied in his spare time what he called “Physic.” Physic was, in reality, the science of psychic phenomena, especially hypnotism. Most of the engineers and firemen scoffed at his studies, but there was one fireman named McCready who was a pushover for the Caller. The Caller used to hypnotize McCready every time he came into the store. He would do this by spinning a small top on one of the glass cigar counters, and make the fireman stare at it; then he would speak to him in a low, commanding voice and McCready would stiffen all over and begin to flop around as if he were a mechanical fireman instead of a live one. Most of the engineers who saw these performances were not very crazy about making runs with McCready. Another interesting character was an engineer who could spit fifteen feet, and there was a fireman who had been runner-up for two successive years in the speed races of the Central Ohio Ice Skating Carnival. I remember one day he came into the shop and said he had just bought a blue suit “with a red stripe into it.” And that’s all I got out of my experience with railroad workers. In those days I didn’t think much about the plight of the workingman, if, indeed, I knew that he had one, and anyway I was elected president of my senior class at high school while I was working at the shop, which made me feel superior to everybody that came into the place, even Mr. Soderblom.
Then when I was about twenty-three and going to the University, I got a summer-time job with an organization in Columbus known as the State-City Free Employment Agency. This brought me into contact with the working classes again, but I didn’t think anything at the time about studying their conditions and I can only remember a few things that happened. One day an unemployed cleaning woman came into the office and applied for housework. I asked her what kind of housework she wanted and she looked at me steadily and, I thought, disapprovingly for a long time. “Young man, are you saved?” she asked me. I lied and said that I was, but she obviously didn’t think so and went away dissatisfied with the way the agency was run. “What did you say to that woman?” demanded my superior, walking over to my desk. “She asked me if I was saved and I told her I was,” I said. He bit off the end of a stogy. “Never mind about that,” he said. “Git ‘em work. Git ‘em work.”
These constitute my principal experiences with the problems of the working classes, and they are not enough. I did have, to be sure, also some slight connection with the recent waiters’ strike in this city, as a member of a committee interested in their welfare, but I was pretty much overshadowed by the presence on the committee of three novelists, a columnist, and a painter. I became fairly familiar, however, with the problem of the waiters, but I doubt very much whether I could make a novel out of it. In the first place, I haven’t the slightest idea what waiters do when they go home. I have simply no picture at all of what they do at home, and an author cannot omit the home life of his characters from his novels. I could probably never bring myself to the point of asking a waiter to invite me to his home, because I always get tightened up in the presence of waiters. The only one I was ever at ease with was a waiter at the Waldorf whom I bought a drink for during the Cinderella Ball, mistaking him for an artist. I found out he was a waiter when he wouldn’t sit down. I wouldn’t know what to do if a waiter who was my host at his own house brought me a cocktail and didn’t sit down while I was drinking it. I suppose he would sit down, but I
don’t know. No waiter ever has sat down with me, and I wouldn’t know what would be the thing to do if one did. Stand up, maybe. You couldn’t tip a waiter unless one of you stood up.
I am pretty well persuaded by now that I am not the man to write a proletarian novel. Of course, there is always the drama, but that is just as difficult for me. I have tried a couple of plays and I always run into appalling problems. One of these is that my plays are always over at the end of the first act. There is never any reason in the world any of the characters should ever see each other again. Another problem is that although the people I put in plays talk quite glibly, they don’t do anything. They just sit there. I once wrote a whole act in which nobody moved. The expedient of going back over such an act and having the characters shift from chair to sofa and back again, smoking cigarettes, is not much of a help.
It is also extremely difficult to get characters on and off the stage dexterously. It may look easy, but it isn’t easy. I have frequently had to resort to dogfights. “I must go out and separate those dogs” is not, however, a sound or convincing exit line for someone you have to get off the stage. Furthermore, you can only use the dogfight device once unless the dogs are total strangers who have been tied up together in the back yard, and that would have to be explained. You can’t explain the relationship of two dogs, particularly two dogs your audience hasn’t seen, in less than thirty seconds, and thirty seconds is a long time in the theatre. Percy Hammond would write that the play was a noisy prank which nobody need go to see if he has anything else to do at all.
So there goes my play, too, probably. I don’t know what Mr. Granville Hicks will think of me. Mr. Hicks is one of the literary critics who most stoutly demand that all novels and plays be proletarian in theme, and all poems, too, as far as that goes. He believes that Emily Dickinson failed miserably in her lyrics about bees because she didn’t give any serious attention to the problem of the workers. My God, does anybody think drones are happy?
Ave Atque Vale
Three friends of mine, all of them writers, died this summer, for I have reached the time of life when a man’s contemporaries begin to drift away like autumn leaves, having attained their highest development and fullest color. One of these three was Carl Van Doren, distinguished friend, historian, teacher, editor, critic, and biographer of Benjamin Franklin. In his honor more than two hundred of the thousands of persons who knew, loved, and admired him gathered in New York in September. Such a meeting is likely to be marked by the kind of solemnity that grows out of reverence, and leads to tribute, estimate, and appraisal.
It came to me, sitting and listening to the warmly affectionate words of half a dozen of his closest friends and colleagues, that garments of praise must be inevitably cut in such a fashion as to fit several or even many individuals almost equally well, and that only the personal anecdote about a man is uniquely his own, and can be worn by no one else at all. There were not enough anecdotes about Carl Van Doren that night, since remembrance of glow and radiance is likely to create generalization. Clifton Fadiman, however, told of the time that Carl was asked to define a classic. “A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again,” said Mr. Van Doren. One of the speakers was Mary Margaret McBride, and of all the excellent memoirs, hers was one of the best, but she forgot to tell something that “my favorite man in all the world” had said one day on her radio program.
She asked him that day if it was hard to write. “Yes, it’s hard to write,” he said, “but it’s harder not to.” Carl had a fine talent for the off-hand but profound truth which is always made up in equal parts of fact and wit or humour. His statement about writing belongs in my private collection of rare items, along with Robert Benchley’s observation that the free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
My own favorite anecdote about Carl Van Doren takes me back nearly twenty years, or a decade before I came to know him personally. I had gone to Town Hall in New York, accompanied by a young lady, to listen to a debate on Humanism in which Mr. Van Doren was one of the participants, along with Henry Seidel Canby, the late Irving Babbitt, and others. Carl was the last speaker called on, and during the arguments of the others, my companion had been restless to the point of plain inattention. Then Carl stood up. Before he could speak a word, she turned to me and said warmly, “I’m on his side!” She wanted me to take her up to meet him when the debate was over, but I was too timid. “I just want to see him long enough to tell him I love him,” she said. Ten years later I told Carl about the incident one night at a party and he said, with his likeable smile, “Every man is entitled to meet the women that love him.” I think he did meet her. I have known very few people since I came to New York twenty-five years ago whom he didn’t know. None of them will ever forget him.
Recollections of Henry James
In almost every autobiography that I have picked up in the past four or five years, there has been a chapter devoted to reminiscences and impressions of Henry James. So I am going to give mine, even though this is not an autobiography, and even though I never met Henry James. An author must be “in the swim.” I feel that I can at least do as well as Mrs. Atherton does in her Adventures of a Novelist, for on one occasion she couldn’t make out what he was saying, and the only other time she ever met him she did make out what he was saying but doesn’t remember what it was.
Although I never met Henry James, I attended (or we’ll say that I did) a party one time at which he told the plot of The Bat, the mystery play then very popular and attracting a great deal of attention. One was really not supposed to tell how the play “came out,” for this would impair the pleasure of persons who had not yet seen it and who wanted to; I forget now whether it was also supposed to impair the pleasure of those who had not seen it and who had no intention of seeing it, but I suspect that it was: in those days, people’s pleasure was pretty easily impaired. There were a few persons at the party who knew how the play came out but hadn’t seen it, and a few others who had seen it and still didn’t know how it came out. Most of us, however, had not seen it and didn’t much care how it came out.
James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”—that his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.” This made his recital of The Bat one of the most remarkable afternoons of my life. Just as, having worked up to a circumstantial arrangement of characters in a concrete situation, he was about to distill some essence of that situation, about, in fine, to pluck from it some fruit into which one could get one’s teeth, he would go back and untangle for us the glittering, undulating skein with which he had, at the very beginning, wrapped up the so important (to him) donnée, the so charmingly perfect seed, or note absolute, of the story-salient.
There was finally for all of us, at long last, I think, the blurred conviction that the Master had either departed, somewhere in the midst of his beautifully modulated periods, from any further consideration of the play which he had started out to describe, or that he had “worked up to,” for his conclusion, the curtain of the second act rather than the curtain of the final act, having approached the centre, or “grain,” of the story idea from both the beginning and the end, alternately. Which method had the effect, for us, of his having left, fragilely frozen upon the stage, in gestures at once provocative and meaningless, a group of characters, heavy with aborted action, whom he had been causing to spin dreamily around in a circle, like the richly colored figures upon the dial of some old Swiss music box. The brilliant revolution of these marionettes ended at last and whatever “point” Henry James may have intended to make trailed away like mist in the sunlight, leaving us only the unforgettable image of the great placid gentleman talking quietly on and on, never having got anywhere, never, indeed, having, for the matter of that,
“come from” anywhere. We had watched him create for us, on the point of a needle, a gleaming and gracious hour, peopled richly with the most sensitive and aware characters, whose evanishment into thin air left us somehow with the feeling that we had become inextricably entangled forever with a group of persons who, while they had never for a moment existed, nevertheless left us, in their departure, with an emptiness that nothing ever again in this world could quite “make up for.”
I do not recall now how James happened to get started on The Bat, and in justice to the Master it is only fair to say that I am not quite sure that it really was The Bat which he gave us that afternoon. It does not now, nor did it then, make any special difference. It was not what Henry James had to say, nor yet the way he said it, that counted; it was something else: I don’t know what. Conrad was there and he was, as always, spellbound by the Master’s genius. “By God,” he would exclaim, “there was never anything like this!” Stevie Crane was not so engrossed; he stood, dark and sombre, in a corner of the room, lassoing, with a rope he had made of the fronds of some potted plants, the necks of vases and the tops of lamps.
All the people that you read about in autobiographies were there, too: W. H. Hudson, Edward Garnett, Miss Hurlbird and her sister, Maurice Hewlett, Ford Madox Ford, S. S. McClure, Ezra Pound, H.D., JE, T.R., Gilbert Cannan, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, Sir Edmund Gosse, Chauncey Depew, Joseph H. Choate, Nance O’Neil, Ambrose Bierce, William Gerhardi, Hugh Kingsmill, Richard Le Gallienne, William Randolph Hearst, Lily Langtry, Gene Tunney, Sir Hubert Wilkins, Count von Luckner, Richard Watson Gilder, Robert Underwood Johnson, Elihu Root, Jacob A. Riis, Fremont Older, Albert Jay Nock, Lyman Gage, Ben Lindsey, Doug and Mary Fairbanks, Arthur Brisbane, etc. How all these raconteurs ever let James get started I do not know, unless it was that James was, as you might say, always started in the sense that he had never, at any time, quite ended. As I recall it, one of those present, Mr. Choate, did manage to get in at least one of his anecdotes, even while James was “running on.” They sat in adjacent chairs, and their voices, if not the sense of their separate narratives, blended surprisingly well. Choate’s story dealt with a time in his career when, without funds, he found himself stranded in New Orleans. “Not wishing to stay longer in the Southern city,” said Choate, “for I felt that my opportunities lay elsewhere, I began to think of schemes for getting out of town, all of which, however, were frustrated by the fact that I did not have enough money to take a train or a boat northward. One day I encountered an old colored gentleman named Sam, to whom I explained my plight. ‘Why’n you-all steal a rowboat some night and row no’th?’ asked Sam. ‘By mawnin’ you-all’d be in Canada, dat’s wheah.’ ‘Dat’s wheah I’d be, huh?’ I said, diplomatically falling into his idiom and accent, but by no means won over to a plan of escape which necessitated the stealing of a rowboat. Eventually, it was decided that Sam, and not myself, should steal the rowboat and row to Canada during the night. It was now Sam’s turn to be reluctant, but I was firm. ‘Look heah, man,’ I said. ‘You-all proceed discreetly to de ribber jist she gittin’ dahk, and having selected a rowboat, git in an’ row no’th; by mawnin’ you-all absolutely certain to be in Canada.’ He still temporized, but in the end decided to act on my judgment. The next morning, just as dawn was breaking, I slipped down to the river to see whether Sam had actually taken a boat and rowed north. To my astonishment, there sat Sam in the dim light mightily rowing a boat which he had neglected to unfasten from the dock and which accordingly had not moved an inch! He had been rowing all night long without getting anywhere. I could hardly believe my eyes. ‘Why, hello, Sam!’ I shouted at him, finally. He looked slowly over his drooping shoulder, through the mist of early morning. ‘Who knows me up heah?’ he asked.”
Collecting Himself Page 8
