My reason for pointing this out is a somewhat complicated one. But first of all, I feel that it provides us with a criterion for approaching Mr. Frank. Thus, we have the two possibilities: a book must be statistically true, a whole and proper valuation of life; or it must be true in the sense that Mallarmé’s fauns are true, must be a beautiful possibility created in the mind of the artist. I have consistently objected that Mr. Frank does not qualify on condition one; life as he presents it is assiduously culled, the volitional clement of the artist is over-emphasized. Or, to borrow from a colleague, M. Cowley, I should say that he has stacked the cards. However, if we admit this cheating, take it as a basis of our calculations, we must next inquire as to whether Mr. Frank cheats dextrously; we shall not ask if he is false, but if he is superbly false. On the whole, I think he is not, for the two books under consideration are not finally beautiful. They lack just that element of cold carving, that bloodless autopsy of the emotions, which allows Mallarmé so near an approach to perfection.
True, these books have many passages of thick beauty such as Mallarmé probably never dreamed of. When Mr. Frank, for instance, undresses one of his women, and opens his throat and sings thereat, the song is full and lovely. Or when, as in Rahab . . . but the situation must be explained more fully: Mrs. Luve is a procuress, but a procuress with her Bible and her refinements, a procuress who needs a great deal of explanation. Mr. Frank takes us through a book to explain her, and at the end we do accept his attitude—we believe that she is a delicate woman whose denigration has an almost Christlike significance. We see her, then, in the midst of her set, politicians, gamblers, crooks, whores. We hear their vulgarly minute conversation, note their unenlightened envelopment in the immediate moment; whereupon, of a sudden, the author gives a projection of each character, or, technically speaking, draws out the song of each character, the lyric surrender to a grand communion of passions. That is, they sit in the room, each aware of his apartness from the others; but each has a purer attitude within him somewhere, a naïve burst of confidence which is suppressed: it is this naïve burst which Mr. Frank gives in his lyrical projections of the characters present. Here passion has justified itself by the discovery of an excellent subterfuge; it is Waldo Frank at his best.
On the whole, however, I must confess that the author’s intensity is too direct, lies too far beyond the subterfuge. Mr. Frank is as serious as Buddha, which is a dangerous thing to be in an age which could produce Ulysses. If we have to choose between an artist who is passionless and clever, and an artist who is tumultuous and non-clever, it is a sad pair to choose from, but the former would be nearer to art. Mr. Frank, as I have noted above, can be clever, but as a rule he is too precipitant. As a result, his works lack edges; one catches an abundance of rich overtones, but they obscure the note itself. What, for instance, is the structural significance of the City Block cycle? What is the inevitable centre about which it revolves? It should force itself upon us from the complexion of the work. Structure is not so priestly a thing that only the elect can glimpse it. Structure is the first principle of a work, not the last.
As to Rahab, the case is simpler. One does, on finishing it, get a definite retrospect. The author starts with Mrs. Luve, a procuress; then he goes back to the beginning, and gives us Mrs. Luve’s career; ending upon Mrs. Luve, exactly where the book began, we now have this procuress with all the qualifications and subtilizations of 250 pages. She emerges, somehow, stationary, like a fireplug on a busy street, like a boat anchored in a fog. There is nothing priestly about this; it is, in fact, startlingly simple. The book is undoubtedly Mr. Frank’s best piece of work up to date. It is the logical culmination of The Dark Mother, representing directly that type of writing which the former book was feeling for. That is, Mr. Frank has found the manner which best carries his burden. . . . The same is true of certain stories in City Block taken as isolated units. In stories like “Under the Dome” and “John the Baptist” Mr. Frank has made just as accurate a junction between the burden and the expression thereof. That is, so far as the untrammeled, direct giving of himself is concerned, the author has attained it. These works go the whole extent of Croceanism: the expression is immediate and full.
But expression is not all of art; the rest is elegance. Mr. Frank has done a valiant task in his fight against the inhibitory baggage which American art has had to lug. His work on this score is as significant as that of Van Wyck Brooks. But both men, under the urge of their evangelism, tend to make the emphasis on expression too exclusive. It is an excellent corrective, which becomes in turn a defect if carried too far.
Enlarging the Narrow House
Narcissus by Evelyn Scott. Harcourt, Brace and Company
The Dial, September 1922, 346–348
Having read only those portions of Rupert Hughes which are pasted on the sides of newsstands, I can hardly venture to discuss him with authority. Yet, if I were to form a tentative judgment on those summaries and blurbs, I should say that Mr. Hughes is an author who gives us something like a society drama, with characters, plot, and setting all more or less typical of some actual stratum, or condition, in society. In this I may be entirely unjust to Mr. Hughes. But in revenge I am positive that it applies to Mrs. Scott, who wrote The Narrow House, and who has now made that house gratifyingly less narrow in her new novel Narcissus.
But as Mrs. Scott is quite plainly a much more complex writer than Mr. Hughes, one feels at the start that the juxtaposition of the two names is false. To begin with, Mr. Hughes would not write like this, which I take from The Narrow House:
The room closed them like a coffin. Their life was their own. It did not flow in from the street.
No, that is not like Mr. Hughes; it is like Mr. Waldo Frank. There are other passages scattered through Mrs. Scott’s books which show the influence of Ulysses, a strain which it is safe to suppose has never defiled our great cinema novelist. However, Mrs. Scott writes:
I’m suffering deeply, Julia. You are suffering. I see it. It is only the little person who doesn’t suffer. Why do you resent me? Life is always making patterns. It has thrown us three—you and me, and your husband—into a design—a relationship to each other.
And although Mr. Hughes would probably never have stepped so circumspectly around the word “triangle,” it is safe to assume that the situation has occurred to him: Lawrence immersed in his chemical work; Dudley, a young artist, lover of Julia; Julia, the wife of Lawrence, beautiful and idle. But I have spoken of Mrs. Scott’s greater complexity; let us examine just how it affects her treatment of this vexing problem. First going back to The Narrow House.
The Narrow House was part of that astonishing post-war movement of anti-chauvinism among the intellectuals, a movement which attained its greatest expression in the sales of Main Street and the departure of Mr. Harold Stearns for Europe. The Narrow House, then, was what might be termed “professionally depressing.” Like most of 1921’s record, it dipped back into Zola, being somewhat more circumspect and infinitely less powerful. It showed dull, broken lives, American lives which were so weary, so hateful, that even the American sun was discovered to shine with fatigue upon them.
In her second work Mrs. Scott has cut away a great deal of this misery praetor necessitatem. The house is distinctly less narrow. The professional depression is for the most part lightened. Despite her public’s approval of the patent gesture in The Narrow House, Mrs. Scott seems to have developed a distrust of it. But unfortunately, the resultant virtue is only a negative one; the author has gone through the excesses of The Narrow House to attain the neutralization of Narcissus.
At the same time she has attempted to graft upon her style elements of James Joyce and Waldo Frank. There is no objection to them as influences. There is no particular reason why writers should begin over again, when philosophers hand their apparatus from one to the other throughout the ages. Thus, my objection is neither to influences in general nor to these particular influences; but I do question the propriety of the influences as they appear in Narcissus.
For they produce a work which is peculiarly lacking in correlation. One feels this especially in the case of Waldo Frank, since his method