Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
could only forecast the ultimate consequences, whereas Sinclair Lewis
is dealing with effects. Plugson of Undershot is now the universal
dictator. Before the war there was still life and hope in western
civilization; it was not yet reduced to being a common Babbitt warren,
with its Billy Sundays and Almus Pickerbaughs, its artists and editors
and scientists, on the Plugson pay-roll. What emerges from the drab
pages of Sinclair Lewis that is suggestive is the authoritative
pronouncement that the effects forecast by the earlier critics have
become in our day the regnant order of things. Babbitt is the son of
Plugson of Undershot, and Babbitt is a walking corpse who refuses to
be put decently away to make room for living men. An empty soul, he is
the symbol of our common emptiness. Historically he marks the final
passing in America of the civilization that came from the fruitful
loins of the eighteenth century. For a hundred and fifty years western
civilization had sustained its hopes on the rich nourishment provided
by the great age of the Enlightenment. Faith in the excellence of
man, in the law of progress, in the ultimate reign of justice, in the
conquest of nature, in the finality and sufficiency of democracy,
faith in short in the excellence of life, was the great driving force
in those earlier, simpler days. It was a noble dream--that dream of
the Enlightenment--but it was slowly dissipated by an encompassing
materialism that came likewise out of the eighteenth century. Faith in
machinery came to supersede faith in man; the Industrial Revolution
submerged the hopes of the French Revolution. And now we have fallen
so low that our faith in justice, progress, the potentialities of
human nature, the excellence of democracy, is stricken with pernicious
anemia, and even faith in the machine is dying. Only science remains
to take the place of the old romantic creed, and science with its
psychology and physics is fast reducing man to a complex bundle of
glands, at the mercy of a mechanistic universe. Babbitt, to be sure,
has not yet discovered the predicament he is in, but Martin Arrowsmith
knows; and while Babbitt is whistling somewhat futilely, Arrowsmith is
hard at work in the laboratory seeking a new philosophy to take the
place of the old. The outlook is not promising, but until a new faith
emerges from the test-tube Sinclair Lewis will wander in the fogs of
disillusion.
But enough of such crape-hanging at a time when our best minds
are engaged in the great work of stabilizing prosperity. What are
test-tubes in comparison with the infallible statistics patriotically
disseminated by the National City Bank? To parade such heresies in
the face of the progressive American public is enough to damn any
man, genius or not. We want no carpers or cynics in our congenial
membership. We must all get together to put across the drive for a
bigger and richer and better America; and so, reluctantly, despite the
fact that in many ways he is a good fellow, we blackball Sinclair Lewis.
Sherwood Anderson: A Psychological Naturalist[831]
Unlike our earlier naturalists in handling of material and dramatic
interests. Concerned with inner life rather than outer, with hidden
drives rather than environment. Accepts the main criteria of
naturalism: determinism, distortion, pessimism. A lean and sparing
writer whose symbolisms are obscure and puzzling. A single theme:
the disastrous effect of frustrations and repressions that create
grotesques. Due to (1) Crude, narrow environment that drives to strange
aberrations; (2) Repressed instincts that break forth in abnormal
action. The consequence a black loneliness--the hunger of fellowship
and its denial. Limited in scope to episodic crises--hence his better
stories short. Many failures: _Marching Men_; _Windy McPherson’s Son_;
_Poor White_ (1920); _Many Marriages_ (1923)--a clumsy account of a
Babbitt gone on a psychological spree; _Horses and Men_ (1923)--some
more Grotesques; see in particular “A Chicago Hamlet.”
_Winesburg, Ohio_ (1918). A prose _Spoon River Anthology_, with an
excellent collection of grotesques. Sharp vignettes; lonely, thwarted
lives, “confused and disconcerted by the facts of life.” A background
of earlier America, crude and ugly, that drives to religious fanaticism
in Steve Bentley; to passionate rebellion in Kate Swift; to bitter
irony in Ray Pearson. Note the deterministic conclusion of “The Untold
Lie”--“Tricked, by Gad, that’s what I was; tricked by life and made
a fool of”; and the pessimism: ... “he shouted a protest against his
life, against all life, against everything that makes life ugly.”
_The Triumph of the Egg_ (1921). A strange and difficult book with
its subtle symbolisms. The theme is the common hunger for romance and
fellowship that confuses itself with sex and is unsatisfied. Suggested
in prefatory poem: “I have a wonderful story to tell but know no way to
tell it.”
1. _The Egg._ An epitome of his philosophy of grotesques. The egg
breeds life that is futile, and life reproduces the egg. A morbid
disgust that would bottle the egg, and the failure.
2. _Out of Nowhere Into Nothing._ Theme is the “white wonder of
life”--what it is and the part it plays in shaping life; a sex illusion
that in its mystic appeal to youth guarantees the perpetuation of the
race. To age there is no “white wonder,” but the life processes are
dirty, and lead to final imprisonment in a common trap. Hence the
“white wonder” is the supreme jest of nature, sardonic, beguiling,
gathering its victims who eagerly run their predetermined course.
3. _Brothers._ A suggestion of the true “white wonder of life”--the
brotherhood of man in a lonely world--“beyond words, beyond
passion--the fellowship in living, the fellowship in life.” But men
cannot break through the walls of themselves to grasp it, and the
dirt of the world destroys its beauty. “The whole story of mankind’s
loneliness, of the effort to reach out to unattainable beauty, tried to
get itself expressed from the lips of a mumbling old man, crazed with
loneliness.” “We have different names but we are brothers.” “Already
I have written three hundred, four hundred thousand words. Are there
no words that lead into life?” See conclusion of “The Man in the Brown
Coat.”
_A Story Teller’s Story_ (1924). An attempt to lay bare the emotional
life of one seeking to be an artist in America; to plumb his own
consciousness, to escape from a world he hates. Such escape comes from
reaching down “through all the broken surface distractions of modern
life to that old craft out of which culture springs.” He must pull
himself free from a deadening and devastating routine of an industrial
society with its empty ambitions. And having found his craft he finds a
recompense in life. “I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often
seen old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in factories.
And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean by
men and women who had never known me, could have no personal reasons
for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that, for such
brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been unclean
at such moments of service?” A stimulating and suggestive document of
modern life.
The note of determinism in Anderson expressed in two images, the wall
and escape--running to get away from what holds us fast. But in running
away from the old self to find a new, we carry the old self with us.
Anderson one of the three or four most important men now writing
fiction in America. Compare with D. H. Lawrence.
A New Romance
The new romance and the new naturalism both spring from a common
root--hatred of the meanness and ugliness of modern life; but romance
seeks to evade and forget what naturalism examines curiously. It is a
defense mechanism against things as they are and springs from:
1. Disgust at the verisimilitude of naturalism that parades the crude
ugliness of life as if it were the reality. The dream more important
than the fact, for our real existence is within the imagination,
removed from material futilities, where we may satisfy our hunger for
beauty, for far-ranging adventure, for ideal existence.
2. The impulse to free creation. Real life overshadowed and darkened by
a sense of impotence; men are flies caught in the web of circumstance.
But in romance the will is unshackled and the free imagination plays
with time and space, shaping fate to its liking in terms of beauty,
dwelling in a world as we should like it to be. Romance hence is the
ideal cosmos of the ego.
3. The spirit of youth that has brooded over life and refuses to
abandon its dreams. The inevitable outcome irony, an undertone of
sadness, a recognition of the pessimism against which it desires to be
a defense. This the final note. So compare the _Eros et mors_ of old
romance....[832]
1917-1924[833]
_Introduction_: With the entry of America into the war came a sharp
change in literary development. Regimentation due to war psychology
destroyed the movement of social criticism which dominated fiction
between 1903 and 1917. The liberal movement in economics and politics
came to an abrupt end, and the problem novel ceased to be written.
Almost overnight it became old-fashioned. The year 1918 sterile.[834]
With the year 1919 began a new literary period. Three major movements:
1. A resurgence of naturalism, inspired by psychology rather than by
economics, with a tendency to impressionism in handling: represented by
Sherwood Anderson.
2. A new romanticism, seeking ideal beauty as a defense against reality
and emerging in irony: represented by James Branch Cabell.
3. A new criticism: A revolt of the young intellectuals against
the dominant middle class--its Puritanism, its Victorianism, its
acquisitive ideals: represented by Sinclair Lewis.
I • The Small Town in Fiction
The first expression of the new literature. Chiefly a middle-western
development--and a late phase of the literature of the local. A
reaction from the “economic city,” with its centralizing economics,
which dominated the problem novel. Two antagonistic interpretations:
(1) The romantic small town, or the theory of a kindly, democratic
world; (2) The realistic small town, or the theory of a petty,
competitive world.
I. _The Romantic Interpretation of the Small Town._ A hold-over from
an earlier period. Derives from Riley; elaborated and defended by
Meredith Nicholson, _The Valley of Democracy_ (1918). According to
this theory the middle-western village is: (1) A land of economic
well-being, uncursed by poverty and unspoiled by wealth; (2) A land
of “folksiness”--the village a great family in its neighborliness,
friendliness, sympathy; (3) Primarily middle-class, and therefore
characteristically American, wholesome, and human in spite of its
prosaic shortcomings; (4) The home of American democracy, dominated
by the spirit of equality, where men are measured by their native
qualities.[835]
William Allen White: A Son of the Middle Border
Product of middle-class, Puritan Kansas. Dominated by sentiment,
believes in the essential fairness of men. Two major ideas: (1)
Belief in the excellence of western village life; (2) Fear lest
this life be submerged by industrialism. A romantic and political
Progressive. Formulated his political theory in _The Old Order
Changeth_ (1910)--thesis, that America is changing from representative
republicanism to democracy. The problem is to make business honest. Not
an intellectual. His plots resemble Thackeray’s--leisurely, gossipy,
confidential asides, a large canvas, many figures, a long period of
time. His attitude admirably expressed in _Emporia and New York_ (1906).
_At the Court of Boyville_ (1899). The romance of youth set against