As the hero-poet is brought up in Middle Western towns, he must begin to worry as to whether he likes certain girls or really loves them. At times when he is silent, as is the way with poets, people will suggest that it is because a cat has his tongue. There are further girls to be kissed on the roller-coaster, and there must be a love affair beginning with moonlight on the river. Occasionally a sentence will occur about “being true to one’s soul.”
Floyd Dell has solved this problem by making his book a frank study of mediocrity. Brought up in mediocre surroundings, with a mediocre sentimental equipment, the hero writes verse which is mediocre and meets all sorts of mediocre people. Later on, as the hero grows older, he goes through a few denim love affairs, works at indifferent jobs, and plans a crude novel. As the book nears its close, a series of love scenes occur which nearly destroy us with their mediocrity, love scenes evolving along the following lines:
She came and put her arms around him. “Felix, dear, I’m so sorry. I—I didn’t know you cared—like that.”
He looked up, his face grotesquely twisted with sobs. “You didn’t know I cared?”
“No,” she whispered. “Not in that way. Did you really love me so much?”
He looked at her tragically. “What happened?” he asked. “What really came between us? I can’t quite believe it.”
She smoothed his hair. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It does seem strange, doesn’t it? We loved each other so much. And then—”
The sum and substance is that she marries another man, and the hero goes down the road with a sudden illumination; he will escape to Chicago. Trifling as it is, it is his one emergence above the dead level of existence.
The danger of such a subject, of course, is that the mediocrity of the hero may penetrate the author’s presentation. This nearly happened in the case of Flaubert; but Flaubert was saved by his hatred for his Frederic Moreau. In Floyd Dell’s case the hate seems to be lacking. Indeed, the author seems almost complacent with his hero’s avid grasp of atheism, socialism, and other patently high-brow theses which throbbed among the high-school intellectuals of a decade or so back.
And as a consequence, Mr. Dell finally succumbs. His first chapter, a chapter dealing with the hero’s antecedents, and therefore written before Felix could get a grip on him, is a piece of gratifyingly terse writing; a kind of apotheosized business English. But when Felix enters, the good writing is over. Only once or twice after that is the author able to rise above his cretin. He gets down a couple of Middle Western interiors with accuracy, for instance, and writes two positively magnificent pages about a crippled boy. This cripple is introduced out of the void; he is placed before us in a few lines; we accept the entire significance of his mania for playing at God; and then his is dismissed, gone out of the book entirely.
After that Mr. Dell resigns himself to his task. His words develop a dull and unpenetrative edge, while his form is not at all illuminative. One is lost in a meandering of incident which has been given no significance by any concerted impulse, any synthetic grasp of the subject, any consistent overtone or generality. The book, which is the story of a life, takes on no more composition than life itself would have. To make a distinction between two possible kinds of fiction, it would be a diary rather than an essence, which is to say, the facts without an implication. We learn such things, for instance, as that the hero does not know French or German, things which point to no basic conception. Even the chapter ending becomes slovenly, resorting to such unhappy closes as “Good,” said Felix. “Let’s!” or “One can’t get everything the island has to offer and still have a carefree home.”
Judging from this first novel of his, it is safe to prophesy that Floyd Dell is to belong to no school, to ride no literary hobby horse. Glancing over the world of modern writers to define just what Mr. Dell is not, I should say first of all that he does not fall among the verbalists. Roughly, the verbalists are those who are trying to restore the ecstasy of the proscenium speech. In France another phase of verbalism is the reduction ad absurdum of the Dadaistes: here the word is dignified to a height beyond mere meaning, a murmur of the prophet under an anæsthetic. And if what I have seen of Walter Hasenclever’s work is representative, I should say that the post-war verbalist movement in Germany is an attempt to supplant the sentence by the word, to find the shortest possible synthesis for an idea, and to gain a peculiar effect on human lostness by this method.
There are also the fragmentarists, which Floyd Dell is not. The fragmentarists are working on the value of the disjointed, carrying out a theory which William Carlos Williams has captured very precisely: “The speed of the emotions is sometimes such that thrashing about in a thin exaltation of despair many matters are touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.”
Furthermore, there are all the neo-Catholics and their non-believing disciples; one side of the movement makes for an ingenuous mysticism, the other for the rabies of a defenestrated Christian. There are still other movements, ranging from the attempt to reconstruct the sentimental side of Hellenism, through the attempt to destroy the novel, to the attempt at developing the expressiveness of mere typographical arrangement. Another group is trying to follow up the technique bequeathed it by the world’s last genius, Jules Laforgue. Their attempt is to be sad by means of a scientific nomenclature.
But in the meantime, placed quite immune above the battle, undisturbed by all this blind theorizing and futile tentative, Floyd Dell purls happily, “And Felix was immersed again in the day dreams which books unfolded for him . . . her sweet and friendly presence . . . the poignant wonder of night . . . Felix breathed freely once more . . . he walked away, framing the words in rhythmic sequence.”
Axiomatics
The Mask by John Cournos. George H. Doran Company
The Dial 68, April 1920, 496–499
There are dreadful people I have met who think that to be of any value, a work of art must have magnitude. They appraise art by its bulk and its momentum if hurled, while a symphony for eighty pieces would, in their scheme of judgment s, be eighty times as important as a sonata. To have concocted Big Moments, to have dealt in everybody’s heart-throbs, to have approached some sort of exaltation, is to have merited their ultimate benediction. They have waded through Dreiser, wallowed in English trilogies, and gulped great waves of 1850 Russian epilepticism. But it never occurs to them that a horn tooting away for dear life might be ridiculous. . . . Over against their almost universal trombonism, if one is to plead that the world still has taste, can be mentioned a scraggly number of tinkerers with the harpsichord. The harpsichord was a frail instrument, somewhat glib, although not more so than the Moralités Légendaires of Laforgue, or some of de Gourmont’s excursions. We are in sad need of a trombone here in America to toot the value of the harpsichordists.
But the harpsichordists do not belong in a discussion of The Mask. I mention them simply because Up induces the thought of Down, and systole is accompanied by diastole; because I couldn’t read Cannan without remembering Les Chevaux de Diomede. Mr. Cournos, that is to say, plays the trombone; and for a comparative beginner, he plays it well.
Mr. Cournos is very seriously immersed in the floods of life. In a novel that is evidently the redoing of a vivid personal experience—d’Aurevilly said that we all had two or three of such plots in our sack—he writes with all the fervour of a Dostoevsky. For like Dostoevsky, he is manipulating the throbbing realities. Life is a struggle for adjustment, a painful attempt to resolve things. These efforts begin when the newborn sees blurred movings with unfocused eyes, and end, I suppose, with death. All of which is a banal outlook on life, and has produced masterpieces.
The objection to misery and struggle as an impetus to art is that it takes the caution out of a man. The violent surge of things to be said pushes one recklessly on, so that he has no time for questioning his aesthetics. Standards have to be taken for granted; if the house is to be erected hastily, we must grab the hammer and nails nearest at hand. By this I do not necessarily mean that the book is dashed off at top speed. Samuel Butler spent years with his Way of All Flesh, and yet whenever he came to it, he came not