Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
university, an idealist who enlists and is disillusioned. A study of
the war machine and the effect of regimentation on different types of
men--the contrast between army discipline and a lax individualism,
and the disasters that may ensue from sudden change. Fuselli a
low-grade character who wants to rise; Chrisfield a solid animal who
becomes sullen; Andrews a highly nervous organism, to whom routine is
killing. Coarse episodes set in a brilliant background: the glamour of
militarism gone.
E. E. Cummings
_The Enormous Room_ (1922). A brilliant revelation of the tortures
endured by an artist unjustly imprisoned in a French military prison.
Supplements _Three Soldiers_ in destroying the appeal of military
glamour. An attack particularly on the common notion of heroic,
chivalrous France.
Thomas Boyd
_Through the Wheat_ (1923). An impressionistic handling of the
reactions of a normal American soldier, Private Hicks, to the war.
The keynote is numbness--a deadly numbness which offers the sole
defense of the normal mind against the horrors it confronts. Its
matter-of-factness, detached point of view, and the ordinariness of the
hero, set it apart from _Three Soldiers_ and _The Enormous Room_. An
excellent bit of impressionism.
Laurence Stallings
_Plumes_ (1924). A story of war by one who has suffered mutilation
from it. The theme--“If you are smashed badly ... and if you have any
intelligence you must remake a world to live in.” A study of post-war
disillusionment, naturalistically handled. So compare the play in which
he collaborated--_What Price Glory?_
VI • Youth in Revolt--Certain Purveyors of the Hectic
A group of youthful poseurs at the mercy of undigested reactions to
Nietzsche, Butler, Dadaism, Vorticism, Socialism; overbalanced by
changes in American critical and creative standards, and in love with
copious vocabularies and callow emotions. Given to satirizing the
educational methods of _alma mater_; quick to espouse new causes;
enthusiastic for revolt as a profession. A prolific movement which as
yet has accomplished nothing seriously creative.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
_This Side of Paradise_ (1921); _The Beautiful and the Damned_ (1922).
A bad boy who loves to smash things to show how naughty he is; a bright
boy who loves to say smart things to show how clever he is. Precocious,
ignorant--a short candle already burnt out.
Stephen Vincent Benét and Floyd Dell
Benét: _Heavens and Earth_ (1920); _The Beginning of Wisdom_ (1921);
_Young People’s Pride_ (1923); _Jean Hugenot_ (1923). Floyd Dell: _Moon
Calf_ (1921); _Briary Bush_ (1922); _Janet March_ (1923).
Luminaries of the school which holds that the sufficient tests of
intellectual emancipation are rolled hose, midnight discussions, black
coffee, and the discarding of wedding rings. Floyd Dell the most
serious and ablest of the group.
Ben Hecht
_Eric Dorn_ (1921); _Gargoyles_ (1922). An almost naturalistic distrust
of formal education, love, and government, and an unsubstantiated
belief in the efficacy of revolt in general and the romance of city
streets in particular. A burnt-out rocket. His last books--_1001
Afternoons in Chicago_ (1923) and _Florentine Dagger_ (1924) worse than
inconsequential.
Ole Rölvaag’s “Giants in the Earth”[843]
The dramatic contrast between Per Hansa, type of the natural pioneer
who sees the golden light of promise flooding the windswept plains, and
Beret, child of an old folk civilization who hungers for the home ways
and in whose heart the terror of loneliness gathers, penetrates to the
deeper reality of life as it was lived for three hundred years on the
American frontier. It is not a late or rare phenomenon; it is only late
and rare in literature. We have been used to viewing the frontier in
broad and generous perspective and have responded most sympathetically
to the epic note that runs through the tale of the conquest of the
continent. It is the great American romance that gives life and drama
to our history. It was this epic quality that de Tocqueville felt when
he discovered the poetry of America in the silent march of a race
toward the far-off Pacific, hewing its way triumphantly through forests
and mountains to arrive at its objective. But the emotional side, the
final ledger of human values, we have too little considered--the men
and women broken by the frontier, the great army of derelicts who
failed and were laid away, like the Norse immigrant lad, in forgotten
graves. The cost of it all in human happiness--the loneliness, the
disappointments, the renunciations, the severing of old ties and
quitting of familiar places, the appalling lack of those intangible
cushions for the nerves that could not be transported on horseback or
in prairie schooners: these imponderables too often have been left out
of the reckoning in our traditional romantic interpretation. But with
the growth of a maturer realism we are beginning to understand how
great was the price exacted by the frontier; and it is because _Giants
in the Earth_, for the first time in our fiction, evaluates adequately
the settlement in terms of emotion, because it penetrates to the secret
inner life of men and women who undertook the heavy work of subduing
the wilderness, that it is--quite apart from all artistic values--a
great historical document.
If in one sense the conquest of the continent is the great American
epic, in another sense it is the great American tragedy. The vastness
of the unexplored reaches, the inhospitality of the wilderness, the
want of human aid and comfort when disaster came, these were terrifying
things to gentle souls whom fate had not roughhewn for pioneering. Fear
must have been a familiar visitor to the heart of the pioneer woman,
and for a hundred and fifty years this fear of the dark wilderness was
one reason why the settlements clung to the more hospitable seaboard.
There, at least, was an outlook toward the old home. But with the
crossing of the Allegheny Mountains, following the Revolutionary War,
the frontier spirit came into its own. A spirit of restlessness took
possession of men, and the thin line of settlements advanced swiftly,
overrunning the Inland Empire with its interminable forests and
malarial swamps, sprawling rudely from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of
Mexico. To subdue the land was no easy task. Upon the old and the weak
the wilderness laid a ruthless hand, and even of the strength of the
young it took heavy toll. Tragedy was always lurking at the door of
the backwoods cabin. In Beveridge’s _Life of Lincoln_ there is a grim
story of the hardships suffered by the Lincoln family in Indiana that
leaves no room for romance--husband, wife, two children, and later an
old couple, were forced to pig together all winter in a brush camp open
on one side to the weather, with only a fire in front for cooking and
heating--a mode of life below that of the Indian in his skin teepee.
And then a mysterious disease fell upon them, virulent and fateful,
and the old couple were taken from their cots on the ground and put
away beneath the soil to find what rest they might there. That men
should break and women go mad under such strain is no more than may be
expected of human nature. Beret, the wife of Per Hansa, brooding in her
sod-hut in Dakota, afraid of life and of her own thoughts, and turning
for comfort to a dark religion, is a type of thousands of frontier
women who--as the historian Ridpath said of his parents--“toiled and
suffered and died that their children might inherit the promise.”
* * * * *
Very likely we should have felt the tragedy of the frontier long
ago if we had been as much concerned with inner experience as with
outward act, if we had been psychologists as well as chroniclers.
But we have been too prone to romanticize the objective reality and
disguise slatternly ways with the garb of backwoods independence. The
realistic eighteenth century made no such mistake. Such infrequent
glimpses of the first frontier as we catch in our early literature
suggest a swift descent into grossness as the settlements were left
behind. In the _Journal of Madam Sarah Knight_, which dates from the
opening years of the eighteenth century, are brief notes of what fell
under her sharp eyes on a horseback trip from Boston to New York. The
sketches she has penciled are far from bucolic. Certain of the figures
that emerge casually from her pages are no other than decivilized
grotesques--animal-like creatures for whom returning to a state of
nature meant living filthily in mean huts, traveling back centuries
toward the primitive ways of the cavemen. Of the emotional reactions of
these early children of the wilderness Madam Knight tells us nothing;
so casual an observer would have no opportunity to penetrate beneath
the unlovely surface.
A quarter century later Colonel William Byrd, the first gentleman of
Virginia, wrote his graphic _History of the Dividing Line_, an account
of a boundary survey run between the colonies of Virginia and South
Carolina. As the survey leaves the seacoast behind and approaches the
frontier, the same characteristics appear that Madam Knight noted--a
rough and surly independence, a dislike of established law and order,
and a shiftless way of life that is content to subsist off the country.
“Lubberland,” Colonel Byrd called the Carolina backwoods where a new
race of poor whites was springing up--a rude decivilized existence that
bore heavily on the women and was heedless of the common amenities of
social life. In _Letters from an American Farmer_ (1773) written by
St. John de Crèvecœur, a cultivated Norman who established himself
in the colonies after serving in the French army under Montcalm, the
same sharp judgment is passed on the frontier. Crèvecœur was of the
romantic school of Rousseau and eloquent in praise of life lived close
to nature, yet even he discovers the frontier to be a blot on colonial
civilization, the abode of rude and lawless figures who precede by a
decade the sober army of occupation.
In the eighteenth century the testimony is clear that the
frontiersmen--or “borderers,” as they were commonly called--were rough
bumptious fellows who fled the settlements partly because of a dislike
of ordered and seemly ways. The colonial gentry, men like the Rev.
Timothy Dwight, held them in deep contempt and rejoiced when they
quitted the settlements and plunged deep into the wilderness beyond
the jurisdiction of church and state. Lawlessness, shiftlessness, a
passion like Jurgen’s to follow after their own wishes and their own
desires, seem to have been the characteristics of these rude men and
slatternly women, as the aristocratic eighteenth century judged them.
That is very far from the whole story, to be sure. Our later historians
have made clear that from this same leveling frontier issued the
spirit of American democracy, and that from these rough individualists
came the great movement of Jacksonianism that swept away the class
distinctions of an earlier century. Accepting so much, and recognizing
the part played by the frontier in shaping the institutions and the
psychology of America, it remains true, nevertheless, that the lot of
the backwoodsman was hard and the price he paid in civilization for his
freedom was great. The sod house of the Dakota plains was only a late
adaptation of the primitive huts that were strung along the earlier
frontier. What loneliness filled the hearts of the drab women who made
hoecakes and dressed deer skins, what rebellions at their lot stirred
dumbly within them, no record remains to tell and no literature has
cared to concern itself about.
It was not till the nineteenth century that authentic accounts of the