STYLE AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Maxwell Bodenheim

American literature is divided into three plaintive continents: clear cold psychological data; sentimental unbeautiful lying; and social propaganda. The first is a photograph; the second, a pretty vase; and the third, a decorated sledge-hammer.

The American Writer earnestly strives to accomplish something; he starts out with a fixed and lofty objective which ranges from a “portrayal of the soul of the masses” and an exposure of the iniquities of the present social system, to “an unfolding of the poetry that lies in simple people”. He seizes upon ideas that have been current coin in Europe for the past century, writes them much worse than they were originally written, and is hailed as a genius. His characters are marvels of realism—stop any milkman on the corner and he will talk exactly as Dreiser’s Witla talks, and act just as ordinary human beings in the “Arcadia Residence Hotel” or Winklehofer’s Alley would act. He writes on the theory that human beings lack eyes and cannot see the conditions about them, but must be carefully told in lengths of four hundred pages that a grafting politician is looting a city, that a man can immerse himself in moneymaking and lose his soul, that working-people are unjustly treated, that women are asserting their economic independence, and that society people drink and have gossamer-morals. If he is striving to educate people who are inclined to argue pro and con about these subtle matters, he could become a far more effective elementary teacher by compiling with his fellow-writers an encyclopedia which could be printed in serial form, or by having his work made into text books for schools and colleges. Since his aim is really the spreading of information about human beings, descriptive and psychological, his prose style is always simple, strong and clear, as the phrase goes, and he leaves imagination and beautiful word-mosaics to weak-kneed poets, who believe in making lyrical, elaborate lies about human beings and life in a desperate effort to escape the simple, strong and clear nightmares of conditions and sights about them. But what am I saying? Modern American poets have also become realistic in a different way. It has become a rigid shibboleth among American poets of the present day, that writing about a rose or a sunset inevitably proves that a man is a minor poet, and that steam-cranes, shoe-string peddlars, farm-hands, the Panama Canal, ice-wagon drivers and machinists are the only fit subjects for a spirited poet. And so the most sincere of the present landslide of American poets write about these subjects in a bold and true manner, providing a sort of unadorned kindergarten which your soul is supposed to attend. And the least sincere among them sing of realistic sights, but seem a little ashamed of their content, hiding it with picture-puzzle styles, which you piece together only to discover that they lead to very simple meanings.

Then there is another class of contemporary American poets, who strive hard to achieve subtle meanings, not realizing that only literary style is subtle, and that meanings are all on about the same intangible level. These poets write poems that seem experiments in differential calculus, until you suddenly discover that they are in reality many simple concepts mixed in a temporarily baffling fashion. In their plaintive search for originality of thought and emotion American writers achieve only twisted echoes of old-world literature, for the simple reason that outside of scientific research and pure philosophy ideas are eunuchs drained by centuries, and dressed in variations of old costumes. Any modern writer with a little research can discover that some old Hindoo or Chinaman or European said exactly what he is saying, and in a far more imaginative and beautiful way. But literary style alone remains a comparatively untouched region, because the great majority of writers, since the beginning of the Christian era, have always been clutched by some great burning message which they fancied the world needed or by some new situation in which human beings would act differently than they ever before acted, or by some important moral that required hundreds of pages for illustration. When they abandoned these important kingships it was either to lose themselves in aimless tears, to become vaguely exuberant, or to shrewdly analyze the mob-desires of their days and settle down to careful entertaining. In all of these aims, literary style became chief-cook-and-bottle-washer—an obedient servant, who was thoroughly whipped if he ever became rebellious, and achieved moments of sheer word-beauty, which failed to illuminate the aim of the writer, or which momentarily crystalized the writer’s formless rhapsodies.

Therefore absolutely new and beautiful word-designs are possible, since words alone, unconnected with great messages or sentimental self-portrayals, have been practically ignored by writers of the Christian Era.

When American writers become thoroughly decadent, and are not ashamed to frolic ardently with words, writing in a passionate surge in which imagination becomes a tipsy priest, marrying words and meaning, and waltzing arm in arm down the road with them, beauty in American literature will have its inception. One critic claims that this situation is impossible, because of the complacent democracy of this country, in which every country bumpkin and rich man with a large library considers himself an infallible judge of literary values, among other questions of art. Because of this he believes that only those writers who deal in elementary social instruction or sentimental commonplaces, can secure a hearing. But even if a small aristocracy were in control of the literary situation here, beautiful books would have to be distributed free of charge and would gain very little in circulation, because the average American is an unmellowed self-confident nondescript who considers culture to be for sale at bargain-prices. Each European country has had centuries in which to condense into that quiet sophistication which demands in fiction and poetry other intangible food than economic sermons or descriptions of the surface facts of its daily life, or sentimental ecstasies, while the American is still a little growing boy, interested only in literary marble-games. The American political situation has nothing to do with this—if we changed to a kingdom or an economic utopia tomorrow the American citizen would still purchase tons of Gouverneur Morris and Edna Ferber, and would still wistfully and wearily try to wade through occasional volumes from writers who have been recommended to him as “highbrows”.