LITERATURE IN AMERICA

Southland Times, Issue 23538, 18 June 1938, Page 14

LITERATURE IN AMERICA

Modern Trends Reviewed

[By CLIFTON FADIMAN, literary editor of The New Yorker, in a broadcast address.] Part of the business of literary critics is to conduct autopsies. It is often their pleasure as well. There are few things that give critics more pleasure than a well-laid-out literary corpse on which to practise dissection. Of course, you must be sure it is a real corpse. One of our wits, Dorothy Parker, when she received the news that Calvin Coolidge had died, remarked: “How can they tell?” In the same way, there are some American writers who have been living for some years in a state of suspended animation. James Branch Cabell is perhaps one, Joseph Hergesheimer is another; no doubt you on your side have your own museum pieces. But our job is to give a medical report on a patient who is very much alive. We shall, in other words, conduct an examination on the body of American literature. This patient is troubled with several complaints; a few of them are serious, many trivial, and one or two imaginary. Let us consider age first of all. A young lady in conversation with George Bernard Shaw once exclaimed rapturously: “Ah, youth/youth, what a wonderful thing is youth!” Mi- Shaw is said to have replied: “How true that is, and what a shame to waste it on children.” Modern American literature is young, so young as to be annoying at times. It really dates only from about 1900 when Theodore Dreiser published his novel “Sister Carrie,” and with it cut the throat of the genteel tradition. In a sense we are now passing through a kind of Elizabethan age, an Elizabethan age minus a Shakespeare; we have something of the violence of the minor Elizabethans; their absence of restraint, their fury of language, their tendency to resurrect, and their pose of pessimism. But these are proper to a young literature. They are its growing pains, even though often the pains may seem to arise in the reader rather than in the writer. But perhaps these growing pains are better than the anaemia from which a great deal of English writing has been suffering of late. As to the patient’s height and weight, let us admit at once that current American writings cannot compare with the greatest. Our writers of highest stature, Sinclair Lewis _ and Ernest Hemingway among novelists, Edmund Wilson and Lewis Mumford among critics and social historians, Eugene O’Neill among dramatists, are still not world figures for all their talent. Place them beside a Balzac, a Coleridge, a Shaw—tiie comparison does not dwarf them, but it is clear that so far, at least, they belong to a lower order of genius. Perhaps our time, so troubled, so confused, does not tend to produce really great figures. Perhaps we are still too young, or it is just possible that cranky old Samuel Butler was right when he said that he did. not think America was a good place, in which to be a genius. I prefer to think that our patient is still growing, and that, its optimum height and weight are still a matter of anybody’s guess. As to the patient’s heredity, our medical examiner may make some such brief note as this. The patient, though connected by blood with the great tradition of English literature, shows fewer and fewer signs of that connection. Present emphasis on independence, probably a form of rebellion against the parent. The red blood corpuscle content is high; there are even signs of high blood pressure, accompanied by slight rises of temperature and speeding-up of pulse rate. In support of our doctor’s statement we might point to the masculinity of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, to the outdoor vigour of Kenneth Roberts, to the tough novels of John Steinbeck, and to the energy of our best younger poets like Archibald Macleish and Stephen Benet On the other hand, there are j slight traces of sugar in the blood. The sugar is provided, one might say, by such writers as Robert Nathan, with talent for fantasy, and just a little too much sweetness in it, or by otherwise good regional novelists like Mary Ellen Chase, who tend to romanticize the past of New England and wrap its history in a kind of pink cloak of idealism. The novel and the play of Thornton Wilder, beautiful as they are, seem to some palates to taste slightly of syrup. There is not much danger, but the patient must keep in mind the chance of diabetes.

The patient’s vision requires a word or two. I should say on tne whole that our current literature is a little nearsighted. One of our most typical novelists, for example, is John Dos Passos. He has a fine feeling for the present and the immediate past, but little feeling for history in general, or for humanity in terms of what it may become. The bitter tone of much of our realistic literature is due to this narrowness of vision. The charge is often made against writers like John Duff Patter and Sinclair Lewis that they are repertorial. There is some truth in this. In America at least we seem to be living in an age of magnificent journalism, but this journalism can produce characters as unforgettable as Babbitt and Arrowsmith.

What shall we say of the digestion of American literature? Perhaps we shall say that it is becoming more and more selective. We reject strange nourishment; we live more and more on our own cultural fat. France and England for the first three decades of the century meant much to our writers; they mean little now. The influence of Joyce, of D. H. Lawrence, Proust, Gide is only feebly felt. We are developing, whether for good or ill, along our own line. Writers like Hemingway, to name a big figure, or like John O’Hara, Clifford Odets, Erskine Caldwell, to name some lesser ones, are working out in different ways a unique American style. It owes little to English speech, of whatever social class; nothing to continental influences. It continues, enlarges the completely American idiom of Mark Twain.

I should say, too, that our patient, or part of him, is suffering at the moment from an enlargement of the sense of the past. We have in our southern States a numerous and important school of writers who are still fighting in the Civil War. They are in general very regional, very retrospective. The most sensational example is Mr William Faulkner. He writes about a postCivil'War South filled with gas, mental disease and moral decay. Yet there is something in this South, something violent and morbid, that attracts him, so that he at once celebrates it and reviles it. I should tell you frankly that I have no right to speak of the books of Mr Faulkner. Someone, you know, once said “I am informed on good authority that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” Well, I’m informed on good authority that Mr Faulkner’s novels are better than they read. I for one do not claim to understand them fully. Perhaps some of my readers have had better luck with them. Well, so much for diagnosis. Now for

prognosis. My feeling is that some symptoms of the patient will disappear in the near future, and others moderate themselves. I look forward, for example, to a growing nationalism in our literature. I believe also that the cult of the past and the cult of the region or section will increase for a while and then die out as it becomes clearer that we can only solve our problems political or cultural as a national unit and by collective effort. It is my hope that the bumptiousness, the youthful romanticism and the childish cynicism of many of our writers will give way to a more balanced, a more catholic view of life; and I hope too that the surface realism of American fiction will deepen into the kind of realism we find in Thackeray, in Balzac, in Tolstoy. A word or two now about the treatment of our patient. I don’t think it would do our writers any harm to take a small dose of bitter self-criticism, and a dose of humour too might not be amiss.

Franz Werfel, the Austrian novelist dramatist and poet, was expected to arrive in England last month on his first visit Werfel’s work was much admired by Dr von Schuschnigg, who conferred on him the highest order given by the former Austrian Government for artistic merit. The novelist, who is 48 years of age, is a native of Prague. His writings have been translated into many European languages, and in addition he has written plays which have been produced in New York, by the Stage Society in London and in many of the other capital cities of Europe. It has been said of him that he was the most truly representative writer of Imperial Austria, and that he expressed, as no one else did, the thoughts and longings of the younger generation in Austria.