Cane by Jean Toomer. Liveright
The Boy in the Sun by Paul Rosenfeld. The Macaulay Company
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos. Harper & Brothers
The Bookman, August 1929, 561–567
Though we still hear of dissatisfaction with the status of art in America, art is a major industry. Hundreds of thousands of skilled workmen are dependent for their sustenance upon the output of a comparatively negligible band of artists. When we consider how much union labor goes into the reproduction and distribution of some erratic gentleman’s paragraphs, we may conclude that the frailest of esthetic temperaments is providing, thus indirectly, a livelihood for at least ten stalwart heads of families. And though our countrymen are told constantly that they despise art, they go on constantly showing that they love it. Between the hours of five and twelve p.m., the United States of America is devoted exclusively to transit and art, the transit being patronized by the art-goers. In the midst of much talk about working under pressure, we go on augmenting the specified hours of leisure—and for leisure, art is the only alternative to overeating, immorality and suicide.
With good art, the situation is less encouraging. But perhaps good art is merely a by-product of bad art, a notable deviation from the sounder average stock, a sport. I have never understood what would be gained by having the populace prefer Shakespeare to the Broadway school of drama. Good art is for people who cannot be satisfied with bad art. And profusion offers the best likelihood of important deviations, as the many purchasers of cheap records have enabled the perfecting of a mechanism whereby we may, at our pleasure, turn on Stokowsky playing Brahms.
That set of trivial magazines on the counter of the country drug store—do not abhor it, for it is culture. Culture is a state of society wherein one can save for eighteen volumes of Thomas Aquinas, if he will, while his neighbors are studying Hearst. As the world sleeps, with such at its pillow, you may enjoy the extreme prerogative of being left alone. The natural-born marauders are reading bad books, the lions are being milk-fed, while you are at peace to consider “a preserving and amassing of genius such as the world has never known before.” Documents upon any aspect of speculation or sensibility are readily obtainable.
And we rejoice that there have been many bad books in the last ten years, for they constitute our guaranty that there have been some good ones. Yet in singling out the superior, we should not be gentle. A book which merits encouragement for a season may require vilification for a decade, and praise is best sharpened with slander.
Perhaps we should consider first, to dismiss the sooner, Thornton Wilder. The Bridge of San Luis Rey can be sacrificed without loss. In its own way it says, “The scroll, my lord.” Its fatalism seems specious, trivial and even dishonest, as though consistency in the Maker’s ways were trumped up to serve the ends of plot. The Cabala is much better, though questionable in that general air of selectness which it has in common with the society novels of writers like Marcel Prévost, Marcelle Tinayre, Henri Bordeaux, Henri de Régnier and Paul Bourget. We find the phrase of music or the line of a painting mentioned with easy familiarity which takes for granted the reader’s deep acquaintance with the fashionable in art. And the work is vitiated at the close by that superficial coquetting with the mystic which mars The Bridge as a whole.
For one gift, Wilder is to be cherished. I refer, in The Cabala, to his succession of essays upon the various characters of his book. A queer, cracked lot, assembled in their oddity with considerable tact, they are described as in the lively letters of some traveller or visitor whose leisure among fountains and avenues leaves many energies unclaimed. “The Princess,” he says, “was astonished to find such quiet mastery in a woman without a de and the Signora was amazed to find the same quality in a noblewoman.” This is parlor talk of distinction, and The Cabala has much of it. Good examples of his characterizations could be chosen almost at random:
So I led her up to Dame Edith Steuert, Mrs. Edith Foster Prichard Steuert, author of Far From Thy Ways, I Strayed, the greatest hymn since Newman’s. Daughter, wife, sister, what not, of clergymen, she lived in the most exciting currents of Anglicanism. Her conversation ran on vacant livings and promising young men from Shropshire, and on the editorials in the latest St. George’s Banner and The Anglican Cry. She sat on platforms and raised subscriptions and got names. She seemed to be forever surrounded by a ballet of curates and widows who at her word, rose and swayed and passed the scones. For she was the author of the greatest hymn of modern times and gazing at her one wondered when the mood could have struck this loud conceited woman, the mood that had prompted those eight verses of despair and humility. The hymn could have been written by Cowper, that gentle soul exposed to the flame of an evangelism too hot even for negroes. For one minute in her troubled girlhood all the intermittent sincerity of generations of clergymen must have combined in her, and late at night, full of dejections she could not understand, she must have committed to her diary that heartbroken confession. Then the fit was over, and over forever.
This is vivacious epitome, and it is a trick which enlivens the whole of The Cabala. Still, the book dies with its plot, after giving us a kind of hypothetical reality which has not gone far enough into fancy to entertain us speculatively (as does a work like Hudson’s A Crystal Age), yet is too inventive for service as a formulation of life. The artist pronounces some number. Giving uniformity to many complex factors, he produces the typifying of an attitude. In the novel this is most often, but not invariably, done with the medium of a character. A posture like that of Childe Harold or a character like Julien Sorel contains a code of conduct beyond the limits of the fiction. Wilder, from this standpoint, does not qualify.
To take apart Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, after having read it with enjoyment, is to be aghast. We find that we have read about people taking baths and getting haircuts, having another drink and giving tips to the coatman. Three people converse negligibly with one another, whereupon we learn without protest that two of them were “in fine form” that day. We watch Americans doing pleasantly in Europe all sorts of low-powered things which chroniclers of the same events in America would detail with venom and despair. We see people, vaguely cultured, whom we know to be cultured by their rigorous avoidance of all cultural topics. Hemingway provides appeal for a kind of idealized, international philandering, the trivialities of selfish and complacent people, a somewhat cut-throat crowd, whose familiarity with one another is founded upon too flimsy a basis. In this Hollywood conception of glory, no difficult thing is advocated, if we except the discipline and refinement required to behold and appraise the bullfight. Here is the “lost generation,” contentedly lost. The book is particularly to be recommended to eager young girls with occasional yearnings, who associate brilliance with a rather sunny and literate form of idleness, who would like to imagine a world in which enjoyment comes easy and who, above all, have not yet been to Europe. For such reasons, I enjoyed it.
Hemingway’s power of continuity in The Sun Also Rises is exceptional. Things follow one another with no suggestion of abruptness, a result rare in a writer whose observations are so keenly stated, since emphasis upon one fact makes for its division from the next. His short, easily riding sentences form a sure succession of narrative statements, a minimum of psychology, a maximum of behavior. Yet the hero can be a thinker. Hear him, on Page 153:
I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy it. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.
Hemingway weeds out much that is pious, or pompous; he is a good corrective, as good a corrective as listening in the street. His enthusiasm is naturally reserved for the bulls. His bullfights are scrupulous in their bloodiness—indeed, his most eager writing is expended upon the display of subtleties in the physical, where subtlety has been least exploited. At