American nights entertainment
clear and modest path, and where pseudo-science has done and is doing
the greatest havoc, it puts truth in armour for the hardest part of a
difficult journey.
iii
If, as some contend, the purpose of fiction is entertainment--an
assertion we need not either attempt to refute nor deny--then the
mark of good fiction is that, while perhaps entertaining us, it does
something else. And about the “something else” I should think we need
not be narrow in definitions. Maybe the entertaining novel we are
reading adds its unobtrusive item to our understanding of this or that;
maybe it tunes up our emotional natures. Or it may accomplish its
bye-purpose in other directions. We may or may not be conscious of the
additional result, or, if conscious of it, we may continue (perhaps
wisely) to read for the sole purpose of being entertained. I do not
believe one should read fiction with the something else in mind, nor,
in a brief account of some new novels, would I attempt to suggest
what the something else--differing, it is likely, with the individual
reader--may turn out to be. If one asks me for bread, I will not offer
him a loaf of vitamins, but palatable bread from which his body may
take the elements it pleases.
For examples, you may derive from John Buchan’s _Midwinter_ your
clearest idea of Dr. Samuel Johnson, or your greatest knowledge
about the affections of a young lady; your own mind will satisfy
its proper need. From Compton Mackenzie’s _The Altar Steps_ and its
sequel, _Parson’s Progress_, certain temperaments gain religious and
ecclesiastical satisfactions. The modern, intimate taste for sensory
impulses can be gratified in reading John Dos Passos’s unusual novel,
_Streets of Night_; just as the correlative instinct for a fresh and
daring idealism is fed by such a fine first novel as Cyril Hume’s _The
Wife of the Centaur_. Arnold Bennett’s _Riceyman Steps_, with its story
of a young charwoman who works for a miserly bookseller and his wife,
renews the heart in its assurance of our common humanity, and offers
the rich nourishment which rejoiced us in _The Old Wives’ Tale_. And so
it goes with fiction.
We think of Brand Whitlock now as the author of _Belgium_, but a
further thought recalls him, and with pleasure, as a writer of fiction.
His new novel, _J. Hardin & Son_, was planned ten years and more ago
and discussed with the late William Dean Howells, whose interest in
it was keen. The actual writing had begun in the summer of 1914 at a
small country place near Brussels when the catastrophe of war began
its pre-emption upon all of the American Minister’s time and energy.
Except for intervals of thinking about it and occasional notes, Mr.
Whitlock could do nothing but protect the manuscript on journeyings to
and fro--until the end of 1918, when, after the armistice, he resumed
writing as opportunity offered. The book was progressing in earnest at
Biarritz and Spa in 1922, and was completed in New York in the spring
of 1923. Mr. Howells’s interest will be understood when it is explained
that _J. Hardin & Son_ takes place in a little Ohio town. The story
begins when Paul Hardin, the son, is ten and accompanies him to middle
age--perhaps one should say to that point in or at the beginning of
middle age where, as with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a man’s character
takes its final determining shape in some act or decision which
controls the rest of his life. For Paul Hardin this moment comes when
he recognises one of the buggies made forty years before by his father,
takes hold of one of the spokes and finds it as solid, as resistant
as on the day it was made. Paul had hardly liked his father, whose
sternly-held and sternly-expressed views and whose passion for moral
reform in the shape of prohibition seemed like a life-long and perverse
obstinacy, embittering all the preludes to affection, sympathy or even
understanding. Yet now! Something comes out of that spoke, something
out of his father’s life that settles his behaviour toward the two
women who are for him to deal with in regard to himself. Mr. Whitlock
has aimed, however, at the reconstruction of a period in American life.
His momentous personal problem in the life of Paul Hardin is simply the
foreground for a study of American ideas in a certain kind of community
in the years within his own recollection, say from 1880 on pretty well
into our century. Over a hundred characters, many of them of more than
passing importance, are involved in the extremely varied but entirely
naturalistic incidents of the novel.
_J. Hardin & Son_, the work of an American at fifty, makes a contrast
with the work of a Norwegian of fifty, the age at which Jonas Lie wrote
his _The Family at Gilje_. The Norwegian novelist, whose story is just
offered in a careful translation, uses a much simpler scheme. His tale
opens with a picture of a home in the mountains of Norway where a
father and mother are anxious to get their children married off. It
ends when each child has solved his or her problem. If environment
conquers in one child, individuality is sure to come out on top in
another. Jonas Lie’s book, I am told, makes Norwegians feel that they
are living again the scenes of early life; and at the same time the
novel is full of the most modern ideas about marriage, the home and the
management of children, introduced not by main strength and the hazard
of fictional illusion but subtly, by an artist who shared Ibsen’s
supply of “social dynamite” but whose artistry was paramount. Lie is
called a realist, as, I suppose, Bojer and most of the Scandinavians
would be (except Jens Jacobsen in _Marie Grubbe_); but what is the
white magic in these writers of the white snow-countries that makes
their realism so unfailingly poetic? Is it indigenous? Cannot we
acquire it here in America? Shall we exile our artists to Canada,
whence now comes little but the worn-out stories of strong men and
their uniform primitiveness with women?
I do not know the answers to these questions, nor do you; but I do
know that certain writers are _simpatico_ in certain provinces of
society--Frank Swinnerton, for example, in the stratum whence he
drew his _Nocturne_ and his _Coquette_ and in the somewhat different
middle-class level on which we meet the characters of his new story,
_Young Felix_. Here is a satisfactory representative English novel
in the mode called realism to contrast with our American and our
Norwegian. I say “contrast”--for I don’t think comparisons will get us
very far. What we are better employed in doing, in my opinion, is a
species of addition rather than subtraction; we shall find a difference
in the attitude as well as the art of Brand Whitlock, Jonas Lie, and
Frank Swinnerton. Is not each worth our while? I think so. I think such
a novel as Jay William Hudson’s _Nowhere Else in the World_ is worth
the while of most readers, who may, however, be a bit puzzled at first
to discover how different it is from his _Abbé Pierre_. Mr. Hudson
may possibly have written the Great Chicago Novel as Carl Sandburg is
sometimes thought to have written the great Chicago hymn or chant. At
least, his _Nowhere Else in the World_ is in its essence apocalyptic.
Stephen Kent, who had been enchanted by Paris after a youthful
rebellion against Chicago and its blatant commercialism, lives to look
upon the city of his birth as “like Rodin’s ‘Thinker,’ primitive,
powerful, with mighty sinews,” as “the spiritual capital of America,”
as a place where he and others will join in “moulding, not paintings
and statues, but a civilisation destined to be the summit of all art,
of all dreams.” There is incidentally in this tense story a competent
picture of American academic life which will cause squirmings. Mr.
Hudson’s knowledge of American colleges is derived at first hand.
Much first hand knowledge, I happen to know, has gone into the writing
of George Looms’s second novel, _John-No-Brawn._ The action of this
rather terrible but certainly impressive piece of fiction takes place
in Louisville, Kentucky, the author’s home town, and in and near
Denver, Colorado. The book is one of an intensity that has already
occasioned extremely divergent opinions. The story is that of a sick
man, an indeterminate character trapped by the horrible and inescapable
fact of disease. He comes to the conclusion that he is a hopeless
drag on his young wife. Against the warnings, protests and threats
of doctor and nurse, he walks out of the hospital. “They watched him
near the stairway, saw him reel slightly and then reach out his hand
and take hold of the banister--saw him steady himself. He paused for
a moment ... and then he passed around the partition corner, out of
sight.” Such an ending is exalting or deadly in its depressiveness, as
you please; just as the story itself is a thing of magnificence or of
utter drabness. Like the powerful war novel by Thomas Boyd, _Through
the Wheat_, a violent reaction in one direction or another is to be
expected of the reader. It is probably an advantage in Mr. Boyd’s novel
over Dos Passos’s _Three Soldiers_ that _Through the Wheat_ is almost
entirely a story of fighting in the front line. All agree that this was
war, at least, and something is gained at the outset by the setting
aside of various prejudices and preconceptions. _Through the Wheat_,
far more than _Three Soldiers_, contrasts with high effectiveness
with Henri Barbusse’s _Under Fire_. Again may I plead that if the two
novels, the French and the American, are to be entered in a fight by
rounds, there can and should be no decision. _Through the Wheat_ is a
wonderful thing to have been plucked in Belleau Wood, at Soissons and
Saint Mihiel by a boy not yet twenty.
While Mr. Whitlock is going back of our day for his Middle Western
picture, Meredith Nicholson, slightly his senior, has been busy with
the immediacy not only of the present day but the very hour. Mr.
Nicholson’s new novel, _The Hope of Happiness_, like its predecessor,
_Broken Barriers_, reckons with a social life in which, if they have
not been entirely swept aside, American standards of conduct have been
very much altered. The young woman who drinks too hopelessly much is
put before us, but the essential story is one of a situation between
father and unacknowledged son with the probable complications of men’s
business and women’s love. There is an ability of characterisation and
a temper and evenness in the writing which make the reader feel that
Mr. Nicholson writes for a much ampler purpose than would be served by
a novel of changing manners and enlarged social license. These are mere
appurtenances of the story he has to tell.
Not to have a story to tell is to forfeit the best claim to
consideration at the hands of most readers of fiction; and among
those Americans who have never made the forfeiture I would have no
hesitation in naming Irvin S. Cobb. The award of the O. Henry Memorial
Prize for 1922 to the title story in Cobb’s _Snake Doctor and Other
Stories_ seems to me more or less of an irrelevance; Cobb has written
so many capital stories and the award, if it had then existed, might
so easily have gone to him years ago. The tales collected in _Snake
Doctor and Other Stories_ exhibit, perhaps, a greater variety than
some of the earlier collections, and there is a Judge Priest story
without which, I am certain, a majority of Cobb’s readers would
consider the book incomplete. “Snake Doctor” itself has been criticised
as being altogether mechanical. My suggestion to those who advance
that criticism would be conveyed in the form of a question, or two
questions: Did they get no thrill from reading the story? And if they
did, was that thrill a purely mechanical effect? For the point is not
whether the thing producing an effect is a mechanism, but the nature