Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

  And he has written good healthy plays, and—a strange thing—New York has realized his possibilities. The Emperor Jones played there, and The Straw and Anna Christie are playing in New York this winter. These last two are later plays, not of the sea, but the thing that makes them go is the same that made Gold and Diff’rent go, that made the Emperor Jones rise up and swagger in his egoism and cruelty, and die at last through his own hereditary fears: they all possess the same clarity and simplicity of plot and language. Nobody since The Playboy has gotten the force behind stage language that O’Neill has. The Emperor Jones’s “who dat dare whistle in de Emperor’s palace?” goes back to the Playboy’s “the likes of which would make the mitred bishops themselves strain at the bars of paradise for to see the lady Helen walking in her golden shawl.”

  He is still developing; his later plays The Straw and Anna Christie betray a changing attitude toward his characters, a change from a detached observation of his people brought low by sheer circumstance, to a more personal regard for their joys and hopes, their sufferings and despairs. Perhaps in time he will make something of the wealth of natural dramatic material in this country, the greatest source being our language. A national literature cannot spring from folk lore—though heaven knows, such a forcing has been tried often enough—for America is too big and there are too many folk lores: Southern negroes, Spanish and French strains, the old west, for these always will remain colloquial; nor will it come through our slang, which also is likewise indigenous to restricted portions of the country. It can, however, come from the strength of imaginative idiom which is understandable by all who read English. Nowhere today, saving in parts of Ireland, is the English language spoken with the same earthy strength as it is in the United States; though we are, as a nation, still inarticulate.

  [Mississippian, February 3, 1922]

  American Drama:

  Inhibitions

  —1—

  ONLY BY means of some astounding blind machination of chance will the next twenty-five years see in America a fundamentally sound play—a structure solidly built, properly produced and correctly acted. Playwrights and actors are now at the mercy of circumstances which must inevitably drive all imaginative people whose judgment is not temporarily aberrant, to various conditions of fancied relief; to a frank pandering to Frank Crane’s market—holding a spiritual spittoon, so to speak, for that stratum which, unfortunately, has money in this country—to Europe; and to synthetic whiskey.

  Writing people are all so pathetically torn between a desire to make a figure in the world and a morbid interest in their personal egos—the deadly fruit of the grafting of Sigmund Freud upon the dynamic chaos of a hodge-podge of nationalities. And, with characteristic national restlessness, those with imagination and some talent find it unbearable. O’Neill has turned his back on America to write of the sea, Marsden Hartley explodes vindicative fire crackers in Montmartre, Alfred Kreymborg has gone to Italy, and Ezra Pound furiously toys with spurious bronze in London. All have found America aesthetically impossible; yet, being of America, will some day return, a few into dyspeptic exile, others to write joyously for the movies.

  —2—

  We have, in America, an inexhaustible fund of dramatic material. Two sources occur to any one: the old Mississippi river days, and the romantic growth of railroads. And yet, when the Mississippi is mentioned, Mark Twain alone comes to mind: a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven “sure fire” literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

  Sound art, however, does not depend on the quality or quantity of available material: a man with real ability finds sufficient what he has to hand. Material does aid that person who does not possess quite enough driving force to create living figures out of his own brain; wealth of material does enable him to build better than he otherwise could. No one in America—no writer—can detach himself from the national literary shibboleths and pogroms to do this, though; those who are doing worth while things really labor infinitely more than the results achieved would show, for the reason that they must overcome all this self torture, must first slay the dragons which they, themselves, have raised. An apt instance was related to me by a dramatic critic on a New York magazine: Robert Edmund Jones, a designer of stage settings, discovered that, for some time, he had been subject to an intangible ailment. He found that the quality of his work had been mysteriously deteriorating, that his sleep and appetite were being undermined. A friend—perhaps the one who assisted him in discovering his alarming condition—advised him to repair to a certain practitioner of the new therapeutic psycho-analysis. He did so, was “siked,” and immediately recovered his appetite, his untroubled slumber, and his old zest in stage designing. This is what all writers who are exposed to the prevailing literary tendencies in America must combat; and, so long as socialism, psycho-analysis and the aesthetic attitude are profitable as well as popular, so long will such conditions obtain.

  One rainbow we have on our dramatic horizon: language as it is spoken in America. In comparison with it, British is a Sunday night affair of bread and milk—melodious but slightly tiresome nightingales in a formal clipped hedge. Other tongues are not considered here: the Northman is essentially the poet and playwright, as the Frenchman is the painter, and the German the musician. It does not always follow that a play built according to sound rules—i.e. simplicity and strength of language, thorough knowledge of material, and clarity of plot—will be a good play as a result; else playwriting would become a comparatively simple process. (Language means nothing to Shaw: except for the accident of birth he might well have written in French.) In America, however, with our paucity of mental balance, language is our logical savior. Very few authors are able to say anything simply; these extremists fluctuate between the manners of various dead-and-gone stylists—achieving therefrom a vehicle which might well serve to advertise soap and cigarettes—and sheer idiocy. Those who realize that language is our best bet employ slang and our “hard” colloquialisms in order to erect an edifice which resembles that of a mason who endeavors to build a skyscraper with brick alone, forgetting the need of a steel skeleton within it.

  Our wealth of language and our inarticulateness (inability to derive any benefit from the language) are due to the same cause: our racial chaos and our instinctive quickness to realize our simpler needs, and to supply them from any source. As a nation, we are a people of action (the astounding growth of the moving picture industry is a proof); even our language is action rather than communication between minds: those who might be justly called men of ideas take their thinking consciously, a matter of mental agility like an inverted Swedish exercise, and they frankly and naively call upon all near them to see and admire.

  This is the Hydra which we have raised, and which we become pessimists or idiots slaying; who have the fundamentals of the lustiest language of modern times; a language that seems, to the newly arrived foreigner, a mass of subtleties for the reason that it is employed only as a means of relief, when physical action is impossible or unpleasant, by all classes, ranging from the Harvard professor, through the gardeniaed aloof young liberal, to the lowliest pop vendor at the ball park.

  [Mississippian, March 17 and 24, 1922]

  Review

  OF

  Linda Condon—Cytherea—The Bright Shawl

  BY JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

  NO ONE since Poe has allowed himself to be enslaved by words as has Hergesheimer. What was, in Poe, however, a morbid but masculine emotional curiosity has degenerated with the age to a deliberate pandering to the emotions in Hergesheimer, like an attenuation of violins. A strange case of sex crucifixion turned backward upon itself: Mirandola and Cardinal Bembo become gestures in tinsel. He is subjective enough to bear life with fair equanimity, but he is afraid of living, of man in his sorry clay braving chance and circumstance.

  He has never written a novel—someone has yet to coin th
e word for each unit of his work—Linda Condon, in which he reached his apex, is not a novel. It is more like a lovely Byzantine frieze: a few unforgettable figures in silent arrested motion, forever beyond the reach of time and troubling the heart like music. His people are never actuated from within; they do not create life about them; they are like puppets assuming graceful but meaningless postures in answer to the author’s compulsions, and holding these attitudes until he arranges their limbs again in other gestures as graceful and as meaningless. His tact, though, is delicate and flawless—always a social grace. One can imagine Hergesheimer submerging himself in Linda Condon as in a still harbor where the age cannot hurt him and where rumor of the world reaches him only as a far faint sound of rain. Perhaps he wrote the book for this reason: surely a man of his delicacy and perception would never suffer the delusion that Linda Condon is a novel.

  For this reason the book troubles the heart, the faintest shadow of an insistence; as though one were waked from a dream, for a space into a quiet region of light and shadow, soundless and beyond despair. La figlia della sua mente, l’amorosa l’idea.

  Cytherea is nothing—the apostle James making an obscene gesture. Rather, the apostle James trying to carry off a top hat and a morning coat. A palpable and bootless attempt to ape the literary colors of the day.

  The Bright Shawl is better. The sublimated dime novel peopled, like Cytherea, with morbid men and obscene women. But skilful; the tricks of the trade were never employed with better effect, unless by Conrad. The induction to The Bright Shawl is good—he talks of the shawl for a page or so before one is aware of the presence of the shawl as a material object, before the word itself is said; it is like being in a room full of people, one of whom one has not yet directly looked at, though conscious all the time of his presence.

  These two books have swung to the opposite extreme from Linda Condon. Hergesheimer has tried to enter life, with disastrous results; Sinclair Lewis and The New York Times have corrupted him. He should never try to write about people at all; he should spend his time, if he must write, describing trees or marble fountains, houses or cities. Here his ability to write flawless prose would not be tortured by his unfortunate reactions to the apish imbecilities of the human race. As it is, he is like an emasculate priest surrounded by the puppets he has carved and clothed and painted—a terrific world without motion or meaning.

  [Mississippian, December 15, 1922]

  Review

  OF

  Ducdame

  BY JOHN COWPER POWYS

  TO LIVE means to vegetate. That is all that nature requires. All the fretting and stewing over this and that is man’s own invention. And when people are put in a natural setting which in any way intrigues the eye, the importance of the characters becomes negligible: they are not convincing. Imagine a Punch and Judy show without a hooded stage.

  Characters like Rook and his women, and Lexie and the women he did not have, should be put in play form—just the dialogue, to be read. But to write them in against a background of quiet, lovely English country defeats its own ends. Why is it that Americans don’t seem to feel that part of the earth’s surface in which their roots are? Joseph Hergesheimer, a decayed Pater, must go to Havana to write lovely prose; and when we try to describe our surroundings we do verbal calendars, lithographs on linoleum.

  Material and aesthetic significance are not the same, but material importance can destroy artistic importance, in spite of what we would like to believe. Here is winter and the last rumor of Indian summer like a blonde, weary woman with reverted gaze done so well that Mrs. Ashover and her problem and Lexie with his imminent death become quite peppy, for suffering the compulsions of air and temperature and season as man does, everything is imminent, particularly death at this season, so both of them lose their significance. Where is the man who can die as grandly as December? Lexie should have died with December and so have lived, taking thereby an immortality, as Napoleon’s old soldiers took an immortality from him. He was dead at Elba: and they were dead, regardless of the fact that they lingered in inns afterward.

  But Lexie, living, does serve an end.… “There sounded from some neighboring tree invisible to them both the world-old Cuckoo! Cuckoo! of the unconquerable augur of sweet mischief.

  “Lexie’s face relaxed.… ‘It hasn’t changed its tune yet!’ he cried, ‘the summer is only beginning!’ ”

  Hoarding his coppers of days, of hours and minutes. The only time that Lexie really lives as a character. And certainly he should live: the very passion for breath of a man shadowed by imminent and certain death, should live.

  This neurotic age! People are still children. Sophistication is like the shape of a hat. Think of what, say Balzac or O. Henry, could have done with a man foredoomed to near and unavoidable death. He could have robbed trains, committed the indiscretions which one who is afraid that he will live to see ninety cannot and dare not. But Lexie does none of these things: he does not even grandly seduce anyone.

  If it do come to pass

  That any man turn ass,

  Leaving his wealth and ease

  A stubborn will to please,

  Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame:

  Here shall he see

  Gross fools as he,

  An if he will come to me.

  To gather fools into a circle: God has already done that. God and Balzac. Fools answer the same compulsions that we of the (so-called) intelligentsia do. And why gather fools into a circle? Unless you have something to sell them like Henry Ford.

  Rook Ashover, Lexie his brother, Netta and Ann and Nell and the parson, seeing the new year in: Let the bird of loudest lay on the sole Arabian tree: death and division, and love and constancy are dead. Yet still the bitter days draw on, and Horace with one eye on Menelaus thinks Eheu! fugace!

  “Susannah and the Elders!” murmured Lexie.… “but aren’t they provocative and tantalizing? I wish we could hide ourselves in the weeds and see it making love to Leda.”

  There is Lexie. And here is Netta, descendants of barmaids with a passion for gentility. Abnegation. She gives over her lover for the lover’s sake. Do women do this? Perhaps their amazing ability for using chance to serve their own ends causes them to do quite obscure things (obscure to men, that is). But to think of women giving up anything which can or may be of use! Perish the thought.

  Katharsis: a loved shape purged of dross; a lingering scent or a single glove after the music itself has faded away. Grand to read, but not inevitable, in this day of money motives and keyhole excitements. And surely, women do not have to bother with this. Man invented chastity as he invented security—something for his particular temporary woman to wear.

  So he says: “Chastity is important, as my fathers believed. They sentimentalized over chastity. But I do not believe this: I do not believe that anything is true: people are shadows of a shade, serving some obscure end. Therefore I sentimentalize over the fact that I am not sentimental.”

  People like the sexton, Pod—“if the holy Lord had meant us to sleep single He would never have put it into our brains to hammer up these here double beds”—and Mr. Twiney—certainly they would not make a book; but, being of the earth earthy, they make the Rooks and Anns seem more futile than ever.

  These people are not dramatic material. What we want in our reading is people who do the things we cannot or dare not do, or people that motivate stories in us. Or people in whom the compulsions of climate reveal themselves only when the action itself is completed.

  Gathering people into a circle is like removing your overcoat at a Childs restaurant—you do it at your own risk. For sometimes you get a novel, and sometimes you don’t. From a successful novel you get a sense of completeness, of form: that is, the people in it do the things which you would do if you were, one by one, these people. We are all fools, probably; and most of us know it: but it is unbearable to believe that the things we do are not significant. And the things these people do are not significant, for they do things which
we do not like to believe we would do.

  .… Here shall he see

  Gross fools as he

  If only he come with me.

  To be gross fools: being a gross fool is as hard as being a saint. Being a gross anything is rather grand—bootlegger or politician or courtesan. One who can sincerely lie, or squeeze every potato before buying it; to be sincerely unpleasant to live with—this is something. But these people are not sincerely fools, none of them are. In the sense of having their actions change the trend of somebody’s life. They dub along without significance. But perhaps this was what Mr. Powys wanted. But surely they do not do those things that we as individuals would like to do to preserve that world of fine fabling in which we live.

  [This review appeared in the Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 22, 1925, signed “W. F.” It was discovered and confirmed as Faulkner’s by Professor Carvel Collins in 1950, and republished in the Mississippi Quarterly, Summer 1975. That text is printed here.]

  Review

  OF

  Test Pilot

  BY JIMMY COLLINS

  (The uncut text)

  I WAS disappointed in this book. But it was better than I expected. I mean, better as current literature. I had expected, hoped, that it would be a kind of new trend, a literature or blundering at self expression, not of a man, but of this whole new business of speed just to be moving fast; a kind of embryo, instead of the revelation by himself of a man who was a pretty good guy probably and did it pretty well and had more to say than some I know and in a sense was just incidentally writing about flying. Instead the book turns out to be a perfectly normal and pretty good collection of anecdotes out of the life and experience of a professional flyer. They are wide in range and of varying degrees of worth and interest, and one, an actual experience which reads like fiction, is excellent, the best thing in the book, concise and ordered and not only sustained but restrained. The others fall into groups, ranging from anecdotes of crashes which were not fatal, anecdotes over which flyers themselves laugh with what Laurence Stallings once called “that bizarre and macabre humor of flyers” and to which nonflyers would listen with horrified and aghast bewilderment. There is another group of hangar yarns, shop talk of pilots which some nonflyers would enjoy and others find merely dull and still others actually incomprehensible. Then there is a third group of stories. I mean, manufactured tales: some the kind of air stories you might find in a boys’ magazine, one a tale of poetic retribution, one after the classic Greek where man is destroyed wilfully and without reason by the gods—in this case Chance and Terror—and there is one sentimental piece which you might find in a magazine for ladies.