Thus, the novel fluctuates between its strict localization and this lyrical drawing of the ever-widening circles. As a result the book has no consistent drive. Even the blurb is at a loss, for it heralds “A story of a group of people who are hindered by the relaxation of old standards of conduct and don’t know what to do with their new freedom.” There is, to be sure, one adolescent who enters and exits at intervals throughout the book, and who is undecided concerning his future. But even here the element of social transitions is only indirectly touched upon. (For which, by the way, let us be grateful.) I spoke of the opening triangle: Dudley, the artist; Julia, the wife; Lawrence, the husband. Actuated by a set of nuances which is not completely cogent—and the vagueness arises precisely because Mrs. Scott always switches at such times from strict analysis of motives to Waldo Frank’s type of lyrism—she tells Lawrence of their affair. He moves his bed into another room, and starts carrying his life from her bit by bit. She breaks off with Dudley—again by a set of elusive nuances—in the direction of a business man, and has an affair with him. After which she finally pierces Lawrence’s steel on the last two pages, there is a reconciliation, and the book closes with:
Unacknowledged, each kept for himself a pain which the other could not heal. Each pitied the other’s illusion, and was steadied by it into gentleness.
Perhaps, in this fluctuation between the strict localizing of her characters and the drawing of lyrical circles, I have objected to the very thing which Mrs. Scott was aiming for. But, if we are to have two poles of treatment, we must also have their polarity. It is not sufficient to juxtapose them without reconciliation. In the truest sense, significance is lost: the significance of some modus consistently and exclusively pursued.
Immersion
A Book by Djuna Barnes. Boni and Liveright
The Dial, May 1924, 460–461
Some considerable time past, when reviewing a book in The Dial, I had occasion to speak of immersion-in-life with a somewhat categorical disapproval. Since then, this has lain on the conscience. For though I still feel that the book belittled was an inferior one, and inferior precisely because of its patient and dutiful immersion in life, it has seemed that the category itself should be revised. For in art a category can be degraded or justified by the individual instance exemplifying it.
The reading of Miss Barnes’ book makes the revision imperative. The author of these stories, plays, poems, and drawings is undoubtedly immersed—and to such an extent that if you have the modern interest in the mechanics of writing you must wonder how eager her preoccupations must have been to have made her miss so much. Yet her pages have a force, an ingenuity, which rises purely from the intensity of her message.
Miss Barnes seems to have seized upon the form nearest to hand, the one-acter, and to have shaped all her subjects to this simple mold. To wit: there is a situation, this situation is followed by a general jog-trot of plot for so long, and then, with only two or three hundred words to go, the author seizes a knife or a pistol, or stages an incestuous kiss, or something similar—in short, unwinds the rest of her plot with a snap, and the story is over.
If one is looking for an astute and concentrated method of writing, then, one will not find it in any of Miss Barnes’ paragraphs. There are no interior designs, no “functioning” sentences. The occasional shame-faced attempts at an epigram are nearly always painful. So that we must situate the appeal of this book precisely in the vigour of her attitudes, in her immersion. Nor are these attitudes themselves unimpeachable. A great deal is weak Russian, a great deal is old stuff; Miss Barnes’ vamps, for instance, are almost as pat as movie vamps.
I spoke of a force or ingenuity rising purely from the intensity of her message. The opening of her story “Oscar” is a good example of what I mean. It begins with four descriptions: a place, a woman, a man, another man. A priori it should be safe to say that a story should not begin with such a Walter Scott sameness. Yet these very pages have a swift stride. Of one of the men:
He smelled very strongly of horses, and was proud of it. He pretended a fondness for all that goes under hide or hair, but a collie bitch, known for her gentleness, snapped at him and bit him. He invariably carried a leather thong, braided at the base for a handle, and would stand for hours talking, with his legs apart, whirling this contrived whip, and, looking out of the corner of his eyes would pull his moustache, waiting to see which of the ladies would draw in her feet.
The other descriptions are equally firm. The effect is probably gained by the fact that the descriptions themselves are plots. Another instance of how Miss Barnes can produce results by the sheer earnestness of her conception is in the dialogue, “To the Dogs.” Gheid Storm, a direct and unsubtle young man, comes to Helena Hucksteppe “in the mountains of Cornwall-on-Hudson” to offer her himself. She proves, to the satisfaction of him and the reader, that he could not make things very interesting for this advanced and rather vampish lady. Time and again he puts out a statement, and her answer is designed to kill it; thus, a topic is exhausted by his sentence and her reply—yet Miss Barnes manages, along with this effect, to keep up the illusion of continuity in the dialogue.
In A Book the will to tragedy is maintained with a sureness which is very rarely met with in contemporary writing. And if the author does not convince us that her stories carry very far beyond themselves, she does make us feel that this little corner of experience she is dealing with is handled with the adequate reactions. By which I mean that we can accept the fatalities of her stories, and perhaps even feel that the last bit of plot unwinding with its snap really belonged to the texture of her subject. In her drawings this will to tragedy is equally convincing. Her portraits seem to possess that strained attitude in living which goldfish have when sucking air at the surface of a bowl. Her poetry, again, carries the same vein. At best it is hot, tight, and sullen. The whole, put into one book, produces a very satisfactory program.
Ethics of the Artist
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Alfred A. Knopf
The Dial, November 1924, 420–422
Although Buddenbrooks was written by Mann in his twenties, it is the work of a writer who, if not mature, quite obviously placed a high value upon maturity as a literary acquisition. While thanks to the solidity of the North German civilization which Mann was depicting, at this early age he had already seen people “placed,” had already seen so many points in the progress of their lives from ambition to success or frustration, that he could plot the entire curve of their careers. This, I take it, is a major aspect of experience. And meditation upon this experience is one aspect of philosophy. Buddenbrooks is rich in both.
Buddenbrooks is the story of a North German merchant family through four generations, developing from a genial, normal stock which enjoyed life and took the good things of life without question, through two generations of growing introversion, where the openness to externals became less of an appetite and more of a moral obligation, finally culminating in the artist whose sensitiveness to outside impressions has “o’erleapt itself and fallen on t’other,” so that he is unable to accept normal everyday life even as a duty, but takes to music and poetry like a drug. This is called the Decay of a Family. Over against this, almost as an artistic necessity, we have the rise of bolder and more unscrupulous merchants, vigorous, good-natured, destroying the older family through necessity rather than malice, as fit for living as Nietzsche’s blond beast, and above all, thick-skinned. The story is pursued patiently, stroke upon stroke, often with a delicate sense of chapter development and transition; and when it is over we have this major form of a march through four generations, a curve as natural as the cycle