Of his short stories, we advocate particularly “The Undefeated,” in Men Without Women, the spectacle of a moth-eaten toreador, expending a fiercety of determination, fighting for the recovery of past greatness and being dragged, step by step, to defeat, while the crowd looks on without sympathy. As though under glass, we watch this brutal discrepancy between efforts and results. It is Hemingway’s “starkness” at his best, the employment of strong-arm methods heretofore reserved for a lower order of fiction.
There are some writers who, while the tenor of their work is admirable, manage to produce no one thing in which their best qualities converge. Despite their excellence as artists, they can claim no outstanding book. There are others whose average of attainment is lower, yet who have hit happily upon one anthology number. The Time of Man, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, is far enough beyond My Heart and My Flesh and Jingling in the Wind to have been written by a different person. The Jingling suggests something of Chaucer, Candide and Alice in Wonderland, but remains a book of no great moment despite its distinguished antecedents. It is appealing in its literary sophistication, its incidental sallies into the picturesque. In My Heart and My Flesh, we remain unmoved by the heroine’s aberrations, which are conveyed less by psychological disclosure than by tricks of presentation, particularly the peopling of the brain with altercating voices, conversing as in the dialogue of a play and destroying the illusion of reality by means of a form to which the illusion of reality is essential. But Miss Roberts’s The Time of Man marks a flowering of the local-color novel. Her rustic heroine, necessarily sensitive beyond her station, is followed through a homely tragedy which recovers for us the feel of courage and our rage against injustice. One distinctly participates. Glenway Wescott has commented upon the beauty she distills out of the Kentucky dialect. This diction, though serving the ends of realism, arouses pleasures which are almost those of fantasy. Miss Roberts handles colloquial conversation with a tact undreamed of by Eugene O’Neill. The talk is as some distortion of speech might be if it were undertaken by an inventor with much linguistic subtlety, distortion made in the interests of a future form of beauty. And the heroine’s monologues, as they rise out of a narrative episode to end a chapter in zealous philosophizing, seem to be a personal discovery of the author.
Conrad Aiken is of that class whose level of production is high, while the single outstanding product is still lacking. There is about Aiken some of that interest in death and desiccation which distinguishes Eliot, and which usually coexists with selectness and sparsity of output. Yet Aiken is unloosed—his work, wide in its intellectual range but narrow emotionally, attains profuse embodiment. He can extract a common quality out of varied experiences. Thus, in reading his Blue Voyage, one has the satisfaction of a formula intricately repeated. The formula represents a man who has derived strong moral predispositions from his upbringing, but who has intellectually superimposed upon himself a dismissal of all such emotional investments. The result is a kind of hilarious morbidity; and the hero Demarest, despite his able equipment, is without dignity, unless we can find dignity in vacillation and the willingness to admit anything. Aiken might even be somewhat of a martyr—for I believe that he is striving for a set of post-Freudian moral judgments, trying to uncover what the good might be if we begin with the premise that all our mental processes are trivial. Thus, Blue Voyage sets soberly to work focusing much sensitivity and education upon amatory engrossment’s which could, by another artist, easily be made farcical. Demarest is a Puritan unhorsed. He is quick to confuse the female ankle with meditations upon abstruse metaphysical destinies. The flirtatious wenches on this boat are considered and observed by a protagonist who believes himself an erotomaniac simply because he happens to ponder upon sex for twenty-four hours a day. Yet the content of his thinking might argue a denial of his claim, proving him an observer, an outsider, who has been caught by the sexual symbol owing to its present somewhat arbitrary association with communion. His meditations are in constant deviation from their sexual starting-point, though Demarest chooses to interpret them in terms of their beginnings rather than in terms of their tangential escapes.
Regardless of wide differences, we might note one striking similarity between Blue Voyage and Waldo Frank’s The Dark Mother. Aiken, like Frank, uses the technical subterfuge of projecting his characters beyond themselves. By which I mean that, after each author has shown us his characters in their realistic, more or less unexpressive guise, he transports them hypothetically to a plane of intelligence and eloquence, allows them to discuss the mainsprings of their nature with one another, converts their realism into allegory and gives us an orgiastic fraternization such as the composer of the Choral Symphony might have taken delight in.
In Blue Voyage, Aiken has dispensed with protective dignity. His claim to respect seems to lie, not in reticence, not in such “uncontemporaneous” methods as Racinean elimination, but in the brightness of his disclosures. Here, it is not the form, but the law, that excludes. And the burden of his skepticism, in this book which is built about a transatlantic voyage, is lifted by that feeling of expectancy which is a large element in the psychology of travel. By way of happy ending, the book closes characteristically with Demarest entering for the first time the illicit cabin. It is a dingy homecoming.
Can we, in this review of fiction, include The Enormous Room of e. e. cummings? For, though founded upon the recording of actual events, the author’s incarceration in a French detention camp, it bears the marks of arrant fictionizing, might in fact even be described as the art of fabrication, the romanticizing of the realistic, the documentary lie. This is not reporting, this charitable eye for excrement, this ability to see everything startlingly, these distortions of one who, instructed to hold a mirror up to nature, obediently procured his mirror from a laughing gallery. The one thing we can know of the people in that enormous room is that they are not as Cummings asserts them to be. They have been converted into their super-selves by a freakish imagination necessarily compelled to expatiate upon its environment, pleased to read an event into happenings which, without such interpretive enterprise, would have been uneventful. Even in suffering, this quality of mind forces its owner upon a lark.
Cummings, to depict his object, assails it with a whole broadside of data; he overwhelms it; like a cartoonist, he industriously seeks the distortion of its every particular. He will look at a stomach, and find a belly; at a face and find a mug; at a chin and find three chins. It is the method of Gross. And unlike Frank, he uses the connotations of humor, to which distorting is proper.
His descriptions are often more vigorous than revealing. There is saliency for its own sake. The vigor of description may transcend its object and, even as the picture grows dim, leave us with a tingle of vigorous description. But the haze of the individual characters, which arises despite an exhaustive dwelling upon their details, assists in conveying a mass impression of the enormous room itself. Its occupants are indefinite but, as an aggregate, their swarming identity is established.
Cummings can hate irresponsibly, as in his ferocious attacks upon a non-existent gouvernement français. And he can praise irresponsibly. He can dote upon Jean Le Nègre, the royal beast in this enormous room, without submitting his judgments to the final consistency of permanent companionship. He is, after all, leaving. He can rhetorically pray for their meeting in death (another enormous room, be it observed) without worrying about the fact that they would have little in common for the years intervening. He possesses fortunate irresponsibility—somewhat as adolescents can be absolute in the criticism of their elders, can be uncompromising, through not yet having had to face compromise. We follow him through this freshness, through much joyous misery, ending in a return to prosperity, comfort, assured well-being:
My God, what an ugly island. Hope we don’t stay here long. All the redbloods first-class much excited about land. Damned ugly, I think.
Hullo.
The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upward into hard sunlight leaned a little through octaves of its parallel edges, leaningly strode upward into firm hard snowy sunlight; the noises of America nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men and which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride into immortal sunlight . . .
At times I have wished that all literature were