The beauty—spiritual and physical—of the South lies in the fact that God has done so much for it and man so little. I have this for which to thank whatever gods may be: that having fixed my roots in this soil all contact, saving by the printed word, with contemporary poets is impossible.
That page is closed to me forever. I read Robinson and Frost with pleasure, and Aldington; Conrad Aiken’s minor music still echoes in my heart; but beyond these, that period might have never been. I no longer try to read the others at all.
It was A Shropshire Lad which closed the period. I found a paper-bound copy in a bookshop and when I opened it I discovered there the secret after which the moderns course howling like curs on a cold trail in a dark wood, giving off, it is true, an occasional note clear with beauty, but curs just the same. Here was reason for being born into a fantastic world: discovering the splendor of fortitude, the beauty of being of the soil like a tree about which fools might howl and which winds of disillusion and death and despair might strip, leaving it bleak, without bitterness; beautiful in sadness.
From this point the road is obvious. Shakespeare I read, and Spenser, and the Elizabethans, and Shelley and Keats. I read “Thou still unravished bride of quietness” and found a still water withal strong and potent, quiet with its own strength, and satisfying as bread. That beautiful awareness, so sure of its own power that it is not necessary to create the illusion of force by frenzy and motion. Take the odes to a Nightingale, to a Grecian urn, “Music to hear,” etc.; here is the spiritual beauty which the moderns strive vainly for with trickery, and yet beneath it one knows are entrails; masculinity.
Occasionally I see modern verse in magazines. In four years I have found but one cause for interest; a tendency among them to revert to formal rhymes and conventional forms again. Have they, too, seen the writing on the wall? Can one still hope? Or is this age, this decade, impossible for the creation of poetry? Is there nowhere among us a Keats in embryo, someone who will tune his lute to the beauty of the world? Life is not different from what it was when Shelley drove like a swallow southward from the unbearable English winter; living may be different, but not life. Time changes us, but Time’s self does not change. Here is the same air, the same sunlight in which Shelley dreamed of golden men and women immortal in a silver world and in which young John Keats wrote “Endymion” trying to gain enough silver to marry Fannie Brawne and set up an apothecary’s shop. Is not there among us someone who can write something beautiful and passionate and sad instead of saddening?
[Double Dealer, April 1925; reprinted in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins, Boston, 1962; the text printed here is based on Faulkner’s typescript, which is dated “October, 1924” and was reproduced in Mississippi Poems by William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi, 1979.]
On Criticism
WALT WHITMAN said, among bombast and muscle-bound platitudes, that to have great poets there must be great audiences too. If Walt Whitman realized this it should be universally obvious in this day of radio to inform us and the so-called high-brow magazines to correct our information; not to speak of the personal touch of the lecture platform. And yet, what have the periodicals and lecturers done to create either great audiences or great writers of us? Do these Sybils take the neophyte gently in hand and instruct him in the fundamentals of taste? They do not even try to inculcate in him a reverence for their mysteries, (thus robbing criticism of even its emotional value—and how else are you to control the herd, except through its emotions? Was there ever a logical mob?). Thus there is no tradition, no esprit de corps: All that is necessary for admission to the ranks of criticism is a typewriter.
They do not even try to mould his opinions for him. True, it is scarcely worth while moulding anyone’s opinions for him, but it is pleasant pastime changing his opinion from one fallacy to another, for his soul’s sake. The American critic, like the prestidigitator, tries to find just how much he can let the spectator see, and still get away with it—the superiority of the hand over the eye. He takes the piece under examination for an instrument upon which to run difficult arpeggios of cleverness. This seems so sophomoric, so useless; like the cornetist performing aural acrobatics while waiting for the band to assemble. With this difference: the cornetist gets tired after a while, and stops. The amazing possibility here occurs that the critic enjoys his own music. Do they, then enjoy reading each other? One can as easily imagine barbers shaving each other for fun.
The American critic blinds, not only his audience but himself as well, to the prime essential. His trade becomes mental gymnastics: he becomes a reincarnation of the side-show spell-binder of happy memory, holding the yokelry enravished, not with what he says, but how he says it. Their minds fly shut before the eye-filling meretricity of pyrotechnics. Who has not heard this conversation?
“Have you seen the last … (suit yourself)? Jones Brown is good this time; he … uh, What is that book? a novel, I think … on the end of my tongue … by some fellow. Anyway, Jones refers to him as an aesthetic boy scout. It’s good: you must read it.”
“Yes, I will: Brown is always good, do you remember what he said about someone: ‘A parrot that couldn’t fly and had never learned to curse’?”
And yet, when you ask him the author’s name, or the book’s, or what it is about, he cannot tell you! He either has not read it, or has not only been unmoved by it but has waited to read Brown to form an opinion. And Brown has offered no opinion whatever. Perhaps Brown himself has none.
How much better they do this sort of thing in England than in America! Of course there are in America critics as sane and tolerant and as soundly equipped, but with a few exceptions they have no status: the magazines which set the standard ignore them; or finding conditions unbearable, they ignore the magazines and live abroad. In a recent number of The Saturday Review Mr. Gerald Gould, reviewing The Hidden Player by Alfred Noyes, says:
“People do not talk like that … It will not do to set down ordinary speech of ordinary people; that would generally be dull … To give the deadly detail is misleading.” Here is the essential of criticism. So just and clear and complete: there is nothing more to be said. A criticism which not only the public, but the author as well, may read with profit. But what American critic would let it go at this? Who among our literary arbiters could miss this chance of referring to Mr. Noyes as “an aesthetic boy scout,” or something else as sophomoric and irrelevant? And what reader could then pick up the book with an unbiased mind, without a faint unease of patronage and pity … not for the book, but for Mr. Noyes? One in a hundred. And what writer, with his own compulsions to suffer, with his own urge to disfigure paper harrying him like a gad-fly, could get any profit or nourishment from being referred to as an aesthetic boy scout? Not one.
Saneness, that is the word. Live and let live; criticise with taste for a criterion, and not tongue. The English review criticises the book, the American the author. The American critic foists upon the reading public a distorted buffoon within whose shadow the titles of sundry uncut volumes vaguely lurk. Surely, if there are two professions in which there should be no professional jealousy, they are prostitution and literature.
As it is, competition becomes cutthroat. The writer cannot begin to compete with the critic, he is too busy writing and also he is organically unfitted for the contest. And if he had time and were properly armed, it would be unfair. The critic, once he becomes a habit with his readers, is considered infallible by them; and his contact with them is direct enough to allow him always the last word. And with the American the last word carries weight, is culminative. Probably because it gives him a chance to talk some himself.
[Double Dealer, January-February 1925; reprinted in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins, Boston, 1962. That text is printed here.]
Sherwood Anderson
FOR SOME REASON people seem to be interested not in what Mr. Anderson has written, but from what source he derives. The greater number who sp
eculate upon his origin say he derives from the Russians. If so, he has returned home, The Triumph of the Egg having been translated into Russian. A smaller number hold to the French theory. A cabinetmaker in New Orleans discovered that he resembles Zola, though how he arrived at this I can not see, unless it be that Zola also wrote books.
Like most speculation all this is interesting but bootless. Men grow from the soil, like corn and trees: I prefer to think of Mr. Anderson as a lusty corn field in his native Ohio. As he tells in his own story, his father not only seeded him physically, but planted also in him that belief, necessary to a writer, that his own emotions are important, and also planted in him the desire to tell them to someone.
Here are the green shoots, battling with earth for sustenance, threatened by the crows of starvation; and here was Mr. Anderson, helping around livery stables and race tracks, striping bicycles in a factory until the impulse to tell his story became too strong to be longer resisted.
Winesburg, Ohio
The simplicity of this title! And the stories are as simply done: short, he tells the story and stops. His very inexperience, his urgent need not to waste time or paper taught him one of the first attributes of genius. As a rule first books show more bravado than anything else, unless it be tediousness. But there is neither of these qualities in Winesburg. Mr. Anderson is tentative, self-effacing with his George Willards and Wash Williamses and banker White’s daughters, as though he were thinking: “Who am I, to pry into the souls of these people who, like myself, sprang from this same soil to suffer the same sorrows as I?” The only indication of the writer’s individuality which I find in Winesburg is his sympathy for them, a sympathy which, had the book been done as a full-length novel, would have become mawkish. Again the gods looked out for him. These people live and breathe: they are beautiful. There is the man who organized a baseball club, the man with the “speaking” hands, Elizabeth Willard, middle-aged, and the oldish doctor, between whom was a love that Cardinal Bembo might have dreamed. There is a Greek word for a love like theirs which Mr. Anderson probably had never heard. And behind all of them a ground of fecund earth and corn in the green spring and the slow, full hot summer and the rigorous masculine winter that hurts it not, but makes it stronger.
Marching Men
Just as there are lesser ears and good ears among the corn, so are there lesser books and good books in Mr. Anderson’s list. Marching Men is disappointing after Winesburg. But then anything any other American was doing at that time would have been disappointing after Winesburg.
Windy McPherson’s Son
After reading A Story Teller’s Story, one can see where Windy McPherson came from. And a comparison, I think, gives a clear indication of how far Mr. Anderson has grown. There is in both Marching Men and Windy McPherson’s Son a fundamental lack of humor, so much so that this lack of humor militates against him, but then growing corn has little time for humor.
Poor White
The corn still grows. The crows of starvation can no longer bother it nor tear its roots up. In this book he seems to get his fingers and toes again into the soil, as he did in Winesburg. Here again is the old refulgent earth and people who answer the compulsions of labor and food and sleep, whose passions are uncerebral. A young girl feeling the sweet frightening inevitability of adolescence, takes it as calmly as a tree takes its rising sap, and sees the spring that brought it become languorous and drowsy with summer, its work accomplished.
Many Marriages
Here, I think, is a bad ear, because it is not Mr. Anderson. I don’t know where it came from, but I do know that it is not a logical development from Winesburg and Poor White. The man here is a factory owner, a bourgeois, a man who was “top dog” because he was naturally forced to run his factory with people who had no factories of their own. In his other books there are no “under dogs” because there are no “top dogs”—save circumstance, your true democracy being at the same time a monarchy. And he gets away from the land. When he does this he is lost. And again humor is completely lacking. A 40-year-old man who has led a sedentary life must look sort of funny naked, walking up and down a room and talking. What would he do with his hands? Did you ever see a man tramping back and forth and talking, without putting his hands in his pockets? However, this story won the Dial prize in its year, so I am possibly wrong.
This has been translated into Russian and has been dramatized and produced in New York.
Horses and Men
A collection of short stories, reminiscent of Winesburg, but more sophisticated. After reading this book you inevitably want to reread Winesburg. Which makes one wonder if after all the short story is not Mr. Anderson’s medium. No sustained plot to bother you, nothing tedious; only the sharp episodic phases of people, the portraying of which Mr. Anderson’s halting questioning manner is best at. “I’m a Fool,” the best short story in America, to my thinking, is the tale of a lad’s adolescent pride in his profession (horse racing) and his body, of his belief in a world beautiful and passionate created for the chosen to race horses on, of his youthful pagan desire to preen in his lady’s eyes that brings him low at last. Here is a personal emotion that does strike the elemental chord in mankind.
Horses! What an evocative word in the history of man. Poets have used the horse as a symbol, kingdoms have been won by him; throughout history he has been a part of the kings of sports from the days when he thundered with quadrigae, to modern polo. His history and the history of man are intermingled beyond any unraveling; separate both are mortal, as one body they partake of the immortality of the gods. No other living thing holds the same place in the life of man as he does, not even the dog. One sometimes kicks a dog just for the sake of the kick.
Horses are a very part of the soil from which Mr. Anderson came. With horses his forefathers pioneered the land, with horses they wrung and tamed it for corn; bones and sweat of numberless men and horses have helped to make the land fecund. And why shouldn’t he (the horse) receive his tithe of the grain he helped to make? Why shouldn’t the best of his race know unfettered the arrogance and splendor of speed?
It is well. He, the chosen of his race, becomes, with the chosen of the race of man, again immortal upon a dirt track: let his duller brethren break ground for the duller among the race of man, let them draw the wagon to town and back in the late dusk, plodding under the stars. Not for him, gelded and reft of pride, to draw a creaking laden wagon into the barn, not for him to plod sedately before a buggy under the moon, between the fields of corn along the land.
In this book there are people, people that walk and live, and the ancient stout earth that takes his heartbreaking labor and gives grudgingly, mayhap, but gives an hundredfold.
A Story Teller’s Story
Here Mr. Anderson, trying to do one thing, has really written two distinct books. The first half, which was evidently intended to portray his physical picture, is really a novel based upon one character—his father. I don’t recall a character anywhere exactly like him—sort of a cross between the Baron Hulot and Gaudissart. The second half of the book in which he draws his mental portrait is quite different: it leaves me with a faint feeling that it should have been in a separate volume.
Here Mr. Anderson pries into his own mind, in the same tentative manner in which he did the factory owner’s mind. Up to here he is never philosophical; he believes that he knows little about it all, and leaves the reader to draw his own conclusions. He does not even offer opinions.
But in this second half of the book he assumes at times an elephantine kind of humor about himself, not at all the keen humor with which he pictured his father’s character. I think that this is due to the fact that Mr. Anderson is interested in his reactions to other people, and very little in himself. That is, he has not enough active ego to write successfully of himself. That is why George Moore is interesting only when he is telling about the women he has loved or the clever things he has said. Imagine George Moore trying to write Horses and Men! Imagine Mr.
Anderson trying to write Confessions of a Young Man! But the corn is maturing: I think the first half of A Story Teller’s Story is the best character delineation he has done; but taking the book as a whole I agree with Mr. Llewellyn Powys in the Dial: it is not his best contribution to American literature.
I do not mean to imply that Mr. Anderson has no sense of humor. He has, he has always had. But only recently has he got any of it into his stories, without deliberately writing a story with a humorous intent. I wonder sometimes if this is not due to the fact that he didn’t have leisure to write until long after these people had come to be in his mind; that he had cherished them until his perspective was slightly awry. Just as we cherish those whom we love; we sometimes find them ridiculous, but never humorous. The ridiculous indicates a sense of superiority, but to find something partaking of an eternal sardonic humor in our cherished ones is slightly discomforting.
No one, however, can accuse him of lacking in humor in the portrayal of the father in his last book. Which, I think, indicates that he has not matured yet, despite his accomplishments so far. He who conceived this man has yet something that will appear in its own good time.
We were spending a week-end on a river boat, Anderson and I. I had not slept much and so I was out and watching the sun rise, turning the muddy reaches of the Mississippi even, temporarily to magic, when he joined me, laughing.
“I had a funny dream last night. Let me tell you about it,” was his opening remark—not even a good morning.
“I dreamed that I couldn’t sleep, that I was riding around the country on a horse—had ridden for days. At last I met a man, and I swapped him the horse for a night’s sleep. This was in the morning and he told me where to bring the horse, and so when dark came I was right on time, standing in front of his house, holding the horse, ready to rush off to bed. But the fellow never showed up—left me standing there all night, holding the horse.”