What Has 1932 Done for Literature?

I

THE world of 1932 was a sad, drab, harried, disordered place. Millions of people, with no daily work to do, anxiously counted their hours; for our civilization, preoccupied with moving machinery, had lost even its poor peculiar method of filling its emptiness: the wheels did not move.

One remembered the predictions, made with nauseating smugness and complacency in the middle twenties, that the prosperity of American business would cause a renaissance in all the arts. Surely, if this were so, literature had nothing to offer in 1932? On the contrary: if reality existed anywhere during the past year, except in the misery and exacerbation and terror of the common man’s life, it existed in literature.

Under the régime of finance, the business man, and even the psychologists who took their clue from him, had the habit of looking upon literature as a refuge from reality: to these sage spirits all literature served as a mere fantasy of escape. This crude nonsense could scarcely withstand the shock of the present year. We have discovered that the business man has nourished an infantile mind, not the poet; that the New Capitalism was a more blatant example of wishful thinking than the shoddiest romantic novel; and that, in comparison with the politicians who waited for the wind to build up again the house of cards that the wind had blown down, the most subjective philosopher was a master of hard facts.

Some of us had openly suspected all these things before 1929; but by 1932 they had become notorious.

II

The death of Lytton Strachey brought symbolically to an end a whole period in biography — the period of deflation. One cannot, I believe, point to a significant biography during the past year in the Stracheyan tradition; even the acute study of The Tragedy of Henry Ford, by Mr. J. N. Leonard, reduced that erstwhile hero to his proper dimensions by an essentially sympathetic analysis. Indeed, the documentary Victorian biography began once more to flourish: Nevins’s Cleveland, Hendrick’s Carnegie, Bowers’s study of Beveridge. Perhaps the reaction has gone too far: the truth is that these fat, factual books are a little dull. Compared with Mr. Thomas Beer’s Stephen Crane or his Mark Hanna, which had documentary soundness and dramatic emphasis, these big biographies fall short of the mark. It is a dishonest compliment to dullness to hold that only shallow books can be well written — and it happens to be untrue.

Had Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright done no more than record the bare minutiæ of his life, his Autobiography would have been an event. For he is not merely the most important and influential architect America has produced, not excluding Richardson, but he is also the most original; and even a small clue to his mind and development would be important. Mr. Wright, however, is a distinguished individual in his own right, an American in the grand style, like Whitman: spacious in gesture as the prairie, juicy as a cornstalk in July, a proud, dominating, exasperating, and altogether lovable man. He would not disdain the adjective ‘romantic’ to describe both his life and his work, and as the object of romanticism is the expression of the unique and the individualized, so the most satisfactory form of art it has produced, from Rousseau onward, is the autobiography.

Mr. Wright’s book is a literary act that compares in brilliance and originality with his buildings, a work with the marks of a novelist, indeed of a poet, on almost every page. Here are the Wisconsin hills and farmsteads, the romantic background of the land pioneer, as well as the strident energetic cities of mid-America; and happily the cow, the pig, and the horse have a place in Mr. Wright’s consciousness as well as the industrialists who controlled the cities. No one, not even John Burroughs or Liberty Bailey, has written more tenderly and sympathetically about the countryside. Mr. Wright’s manhood was full of hard passages — tragedies, disappointments, frustrations — which called for the finest resources of tact and courage to make their telling true; and it is precisely in these passages that Mr. Wright has triumphed most completely. No autobiography on this level has appeared in America since the quite antipodal story of The Education of Henry Adams.

In his Life of Emerson, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks completed the cycle of portraits he began in his studies of Mark Twain and Henry James. Here Mr. Brooks finally abandoned the method of analytical biography, which kills the man and learnedly dissects the cadaver. He took the most completely fulfilled and rounded life in American letters, a man who had utilized and surmounted his environment, and carried the method partly explored in The Pilgrimage of Henry James to its conclusion, demonstrating the mood and the manner of synthesis. The result is a work of art, so rich in perceptions, so warm in color, so pervasively humorous and sane, that it sets Mr. Brooks not merely in the forefront of our masters of prose style, — where he has always been, — but among the best of our imaginative writers.

In his Emerson, Mr. Brooks accomplished in biography what Miss Virginia Woolf had done in the novel. The parallel between Mr. Brooks’s work and Miss Woolf’s novels is all the more accurate because the main defect of the stream-of-consciousness method is common to both: while it is admirable for handling impressions and sensations and building up, very subtly, a complex net of human relationships in their passage through time, it is not a vehicle for ideas. In To the Lighthouse, one knows every fine shade of the philosopher’s personality without once having had a satisfactory glimpse of his philosophy. So in The Life of Emerson one sees every facet of his environment: his New England, his America, his Western Civilization. What is missing is that cosmic and stellar platonism by whose North Star Emerson guided himself through the streets of Concord and the meadows of the Musketaquid. But Mr. Brooks’s feat was to do with Emerson what no one had quite accomplished before: restore that benign remote figure to life; and the living being he re-created is after all the most persuasive introduction to the serene religious mind that made the Universe its home.

One cannot put any of the other biographies in the same rank as Mr. Wright’s story or Mr. Brooks’s Emerson. But one or two books fully deserve notice: foremost, Mr. C. Hartley Grattan’s excellent study of The Three Jameses, a book that for the first time gives adequate appreciation to Henry James, Senior, and examines, with fine understanding, the life and accomplishment of his more influential sons. Miss Clara Stillman’s well-balanced study of Samuel Butler must not be forgotten; nor yet Miss Dorothy Dudley’s Forgotten Frontiers, a portrait of Theodore Dreiser, a little overwritten and somewhat confusedly detailed, but gay and intelligent and often acute in its discriminations.

III

For the last generation criticism has been a major department of American letters. Before that time, we had only isolated critics. While the work of Woodberry, Brownell, More, Mather, Babbitt, Spingarn, Mencken, and Lewisohn made the first solid advance, it remained for Mr. Van Wyck Brooks to bring criticism into an American focus.

During the twenties Mr. Brooks’s reputation lay under a partial shadow. The reference to society and the human soul, which is constant in his vigorous humanism, had given way to the fashion of considering literature as a self-sustaining interest, operating in a vacuum. Mr. Brooks’s concern for a social medium that should assist in the creation and diffusion of values, that should heighten the writer’s sense of responsibility and foster a disciplined adult consciousness, was not shared by many of the younger men. Their spirit and thought were best expressed by the author of The Waste Land — a denial of values, a denial of society, a denial of the possibilities of order beyond the jagged edges of the ego.

To-day, Mr. T. S. Eliot himself has retreated from a waste land of denial to a waste land of equally bleak affirmation, founded on a parochial religion and an even more phantasmal doctrine of royalism. His most important essays have now been published in a single volume: Selected Essays, 19171932—the work of a man with an acute taste, a cultivated intelligence, a suave and illuminating scholarship. Mr. Eliot is at his best in linear and textual criticism; he is the helpmeet and counselor of writers, an aid to those who would wring the last ounce of effect out of meagre materials, a man to turn to in times of starvation, when nourishment must be extracted from wood pulp and husks. He is a master of rhetorical method, and his talents here are neither small nor unimportant; the poet who has not sat at Mr. Eliot’s feet has much to learn. In the larger issues of existence, unfortunately, Mr. Eliot is a fish out of water, either because he lacks some fundamental relation with his environment or because he is the victim of his own doctrine, that a work of art succeeds in proportion as it removes itself from the actual personality and experience of the writer. Both Mr. Eliot’s intellect and his moral discipline are impressive; but he reminds one of Samuel Johnson by reason of the fact that these virtues are coupled with a grasp of only small issues and limited possibilities.

Passing to Mr. Van Wyck Brooks’s Sketches in Criticism, most of which were published in slightly different form in the Freeman in the early twenties, one sees that he remains to-day the most central critic in American literature. Indifferent to fashion, it turns out that Mr. Brooks has anticipated its mutations: the narrow æstheticism, against which he sharply contended, is now in disrepute; and as for the younger writers, who have suddenly become converted to Karl Marx, Mr. Brooks not merely was ahead of them here, but his doctrine of the creative rôle of literature is closer to the essential dialectic of Marxism than is the notion that literature should be produced in a communist society, like copy in an advertising agency, to sell the client’s goods.

That many people still resent Mr. Brooks and his influence is natural; since for them to realize the importance to-day of what he has always stood for would be to confess that they themselves had, during the past decade, been derelict. Like a man awakened by his own snore, Mr. Brooks’s opponents would conceal their embarrassment by trying to convince themselves that everyone else had been asleep.

In The Stage Is Set, Mr. Lee Simonson has worked out in detail the sort of criticism that Mr. Brooks has established and practised. The theme of Mr. Simonson’s work is the art of scenic decoration; but so just is his sense of proportion and so well knit his historical background that this art, while it remains the central object of his book and the source of his illustrations, never usurps, so to say, too great a part of the stage. It is philosophy and society and religion and the drama itself that give to the scenic background whatever importance it has for Mr. Simonson: he does not find God in a revolving stage, nor Heaven in a lighting arrangement; and not the least important of his chapters is that on The Playwright and the Spoken Word. This kind of history and criticism — the two are always close, whether one shares Croce’s philosophy or not — is the true consummation of abstract theorizing and specialized scholarship.

Beyond Tragedy: A Study of the Dramatic Temper is a work in quite another key: a philosophic soliloquy which gains weight and density by reason of the fact that the author is himself one of the most interesting of the younger dramatists — Mr. Virgil Geddes. Not because it settles difficulties, but because it raises significant problems in a field none too thoroughly cultivated and because it indicates a fresh attitude, often with quietly original perceptions, Beyond Tragedy claims our attention.

IV

Perhaps the two most important works of history that appeared in 1932 concern Russia: one is Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, and the other is the first volume of Mr. G. T. Robinson’s Rural Russia under the Old Regime.

Trotsky is one of those rare figures who can both act history and write about it: in both events and letters he has style. Mr. Max Eastman’s translation conveys the prose of a skilled writer: compact, epigrammatic, ironic, witty, yet capable of sustained movement, and equally happy in dealing with a passing event or a problem in philosophy. One feels with Trotsky as one felt with the leader of the Wild Boys in the Russian film, The Road to Life: there must be a potent secret in a country and a movement that can produce such a man. Some of our latterday historians, in their desire for dispassionateness, have unfortunately not realized that history, even at lowest ebb, is drama. By treating the facts in such a fashion as to disguise the personalities, the clash of will, the inner tumult, these historians have not achieved historical objectivity but departed from it. It is Trotsky’s sense of the inherent drama of society, seasoned by his close respect for facts, that gives him the attributes of a great historian.

Mr. Geroid Tanquary Robinson’s history helps recapture for American scholarship the lustre that originally attended the work of Motley, Prescott, and Ticknor: men at work on scenes and cultures remote from their own, yet making a classic contribution to the subject. His book is in one sense complementary to Trotsky’s, for it makes explicable the ultimate misery, degradation, and terrible discontent of the peasants; but Mr. Robinson writes with no disposition to snare history within the net of Marxian dialectic. So skillfully, however, has he marshaled his facts, so tellingly has he laid his factual researches alongside poignant pictures of Russian rural life, both in the remote past and after the Revolution, that one never forgets for a moment it is men’s lives he is discussing — not simply statistical tabulations and an ‘agrarian problem.’ The historians who have done best as writers are those who have had an eye to the real life of society in all its fruitful complexity: men who, by their richer sense of the document, by their ability to push beyond the abstract signs of events, have earned the privilege of writing like men, about the deeds of men. That is the strength of Trotsky, with his passionate imperious will and his skillful repartee, exchanged from the wings with other actors still on the stage of history; and that, in another fashion, is the strength of Mr. Geroid Robinson.

But there is a difference between the human and the all-too-human. This is well illustrated in another history, Egon Friedell’s Cultural History of the Modern Age. Whereas a little more than a hundred years ago Sir Walter Scott’s novels helped make over the discipline of history, to-day in Friedell’s work the materials of history have been subjectively dissipated into a novel — a novel told with gusto and illuminated not infrequently with those fine incredible insights that Friedell’s master, Spengler, suddenly discloses; but the severity of the form is gone. The result is a species of brilliant intellectual journalism — full of jokes that will be incomprehensible a generation hence and attempts at profundity that will be irrelevant.

Art, like a game, comes to an end when it is made too easy — when the rules are improvised on the moment as well as the moves of the players. The tension between fact and judgment, between event and interpretation, which defines the art of history is, in Friedell’s monumental work, on the point of dissolution; one step further and the historian, divorced from responsibility, will become a writer of pure fiction — he will invent his characters and arbitrarily rearrange his dates. The method will give a partial subjective satisfaction, perhaps, like cheating at solitaire in order to be sure of winning; but it will forfeit the more virile pleasure of history proper.

V

In poetry, neither Mr. E. A. Robinson’s Nicodemus nor Mr. Robinson Jeffers’s Thurso’s Landing added to the dimensions of their work. But Mr. Alfred Kreymborg’s swift gnomic verses about the state of mankind, in The Little World, were full of the wit and humor and mockery and kindly humanity that are the special flavor of the man; using a superficially simple form, he said many things that no one had said so pithily before. Then, too, Miss Elinor Wylie’s collected poems appeared — a matter that needs an essay rather than a paragraph in which to do even summary justice.

Above all, there is Mr. Archibald MacLeish’s Conquistador, perhaps the most perfect piece of sustained poetry that anyone has written in America in recent years: a poem done in an authentic idiom whose salty words come with a full-throated vigor — the men, the landscapes, the savage peoples of Mexico, revealed by one of Cortes’s men, telling a tale of fighting and the aftermath of fighting, of treachery and cruelty and heroism, of the hardiness of manhood and the grayness of age, the shriveling grayness of despair.

But somehow this beautiful poem leaves a residual question — what does it mean? I cannot answer, and I am not satisfied with the explanations of those who have found philosophical and mystical implications in the poem. What abides is a great procession of images, a panorama, the immediacy of things felt and seen and tasted, a poem rich, dense, poignant, memorable, but in some obscure way a little empty. There is a sort of physiological gap in Conquistador; but where does it lie? In the Spaniards’ deeds? In the poet? In contemporary society, whose disorder and blank brutality affect both the poet and the audience, so that they must acquire a protective remoteness? The afferent nerves receive impressions and transmit them quickly, warmly; but the efferent nerves are not in order; the connection remains incomplete; no action follows, even at a hundred removes. When Sir Philip Sidney read Chevy Chase he was roused like a war horse at the sound of a trumpet. But the violence and heroism of Conquistador leave one unruffled: one has remained outside its drama as one remains outside the sordid duels of contemporary gunmen.

In fiction, no single work dominates the year. The two major stories in Miss Willa Cather’s Obscure Destinies are written with a tender understanding of the humbler levels of consciousness which betrays the genuine novelist: these stories of Miss Gather, along with those of Miss Elizabeth Madox Roberts in The Haunted Mirror, are perhaps the most satisfactory works of fiction published in the current year. If I say nothing about the excellent craftsmanship of Miss Glasgow’s The Sheltered Life, or about Miss Pearl Buck’s continuation of The Good Earth in Sons, it is not to belittle the favorable popular judgment of these books; the judgment is sound, even though the novels themselves lack that last stab of awe and wonder which is the poet’s thrust.

The success of The Fountain, by Mr. Charles Morgan, was not perhaps undeserved; but it remains to be accounted for. The story of a man welcoming captivity as a prisoner of war, and seeking to find himself in a withdrawn monastic routine, is at first blush a strange foundation for a popular novel — even though a lovely woman enters at the appropriate moment. But The Fountain’s special appeal derives, I think, from the fact that the themes of philosophy are deeply popular ones; let anyone talk about God or Free Will in a smoking room, William James once remarked, and everyone becomes instantly animated. Mr. Morgan satisfied this hunger: his book is saved from being a conventional love story in an exotic Dutch setting by reason of its ideal dimensions. Despite his touch of English self-consciousness in dealing with spiritual problems, Mr. Morgan proved how much a novel could gain by having an important subject — how much more human is philosophy than bootlegging, and how much more deeply sexual a restricted passion is than endless chapters of drunken promiscuity.

One records with pleasure the fact that Mr. Sherwood Anderson, after a long silence, has returned to the novel. In Beyond Desire he probes with slow, soft, gentle fingers our raw bruised places, like a physician who is more friend than practitioner. The narrative moves a little tortuously; but the picture of the Southern mill town, with its dissolving mores, its confused youth, its brutal industrial conflict, is far better drawn than the more violent poster-lithographs that have recently come out of the South. In the first chapter it seemed that Mr. Anderson was about to paint prophetically the portrait of the new revolutionist, doing for contemporary America what Turgenev did for Russia in Fathers and Sons. But no: Mr. Anderson’s characters remain groping; the novel does not move, as did his early work, Marching Men, toward a positive conception of action and character, positive enough to create living men in its image.

From the younger novelists there come, fortunately, a fresher breath and a more masculine impulse toward creation. In God’s Angry Man, Mr. Leonard Ehrlich, following closely the actual life of John Brown, has written a narrative of epical dimensions — another proof of Herman Melville’s dictum that important works are written, not about minnows, but about whales. Even were this not, astonishingly, the first book of a very young man, it would still stand out conspicuously among the novels of the year: its freedom from aimless stylistic affectations, its clear intelligence, its large rhythm of development, its just sense of both literary and human values, make it a work of unusual power. Is this novel, like Mr. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, a harbinger of a new literary generation? If it is, we can face the lean and troubled years that are to come with confidence, if not serenity.¹