1
Our modern civilization is, if nothing else, a well-documented one. No sooner were we at war than we began to talk about the post-war world. Our introduction to the marvels of the post-war world began very shortly after Pearl Harbor. Prophets sprang up in every advertising agency and began to lead us into the promised land of the push button and the ever-present plastics—where every prospect was pleasantly postwar-ish and only man seemed likely to remain vile, as indeed he proved by brilliantly discovering how to smash the atom. It was significant that the art of propaganda, perfected to the point of art by the original perpetrators of the war, should become the means of showing us the wondrous shape of things to come.
So well indoctrinated were our people, so thoroughly documented had we become, that it occurred to many to venture opinions on the state of man in this almost perfect state of the future. It was obvious, even to the prophets, that man would engage in activities other than pushing buttons to start and to stop things, to change climate or a record, to launch a war, a ship or a new hydro-electric plant. It seemed obvious, even to the prophets, that there might be malice in this wonderland.
Man, with more leisure than ever before, would undoubtedly manage to stir up more trouble than ever before. And while we certainly were not going to sell apples on street corners, we knew enough, we said, to look for an increase in crime, a new wave of disillusionment and, most certainly, a new point of view.
We were quite resigned to these things. We were prepared to usher in a brave new world to the tune of some fantastic Gotterdammerung in the Bavarian Redoubt. The suicide of the Austrian Corporal was anti-climax indeed, since everyone knew, had known for years, that he had it in him. Things shuddered to a slow halt in Europe and the post-war world seemed about to be launched with nothing more stupendous in the offing than the truth about V-1, 2 and 3. The atom’s howl at Hiroshima came as the cataclysmic climax.
Well, then, once again we had fought in a great war and once again had emerged comparatively victorious. Because victors always anticipate a certain course of events which, we have yet to learn, never follow victory, we had already anticipated the cynicism that was to follow. At least we have learned to anticipate the cynicism, and that of course is an achievement. It represents, one must admit, progress. In developing and enlarging upon our visions of the push-button world we had not neglected to include the conception of push-button wars. This could be called the crowning cynicism—and a less disillusioned world might well do so.
But it is probable that our cynicism is really not quite so bitter as it was the last time, because one isn’t really cynical at discovering that what one never believed in does not exist. At any rate we felt, and perhaps we still do, that there was a pattern to be followed. We have had some prior knowledge of the pattern—it was becoming familiar to us. There might be, of course, some slight variations here and there. For example: in tracing out the pattern before, our cynicism resulted in an escape into realism—and this time it might result in an escape from realism. Cynicism in 1947 or 1948 might very well be an isotope of uranium 235, with a few unknown qualities but with a predictably high escape-velocity.
The post-war era seems to be fairly familiar. The political scene conforms in a great many respects—but our reactions do not. That we will do exactly the same thing about exactly the same problem is not only unthinkable, it is extremely unlikely. Blunder we very probably will, but we will have found new ways of blundering. After all, we do progress. And this time we can blunder with no more effort than is required to push a button. It might be argued, then, that it is extremely unimportant to ponder about the sort of things that will be written in this postwar world—escapist or realist. But that one may predict, in the face of this reality, an escape from realism seems at once probable and inevitable—and there are certain indications that seem to favor the inevitable.
Superficially we might consider that a number of critics and writers have remarked upon certain similarities between the late Forties and the early Twenties. And, so linked have the two decades become, a mere mention of the Twenties leads inevitably to a rediscovery of the Nineties. The Modern Library, which was more than just a publishing venture in the 1920’s, began its series of reprints with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. One of the first in a recent cycle of films developed about psychological themes was a somewhat sinister version of Dorian Gray. A recent theatrical season featured simultaneous presentations of a play about the Twenties and of several about the Nineties. Indeed, The Importance of Being Earnest—a likely title that!—gave fashion its first really fashionable color since before the war. Yellow, said a foremost fashion magazine was The Color. To be sure, these are only superficial similarities. That Wilde was revived in the Twenties and in the late Forties is a manifestation without much meaning in itself. That Yellow became a favorite color of the season was perhaps no more than a reaction to our khaki consciousness of the war years ... but there were other, and more significant, indications.
2
There have been, this past year or so, a number of articles appearing in various literary journals, and even of late in the more popular magazines, the burden of which seems to be something between a call for a new estimate of literature and a prediction that such an estimate is in the making. Certainly the recent years, during which more books were read by more people than at any time in history, have given practicing writers the wider audience they had, for centuries dreamed about. The writers for small cliques have had every opportunity to expand their cliques. The writers for the masses had such a market as even the most popular of them had never imagined. The Big Names ran to bigger printings than even a publisher had dreamed of. That we were in the midst of an almost world wide paper shortage seemed at least the most obvious result of this promiscuous reading and writing. But what have been its literary effects?
Have the realists gained in favor as they predicted, and had been predicting for years, that they would? Have the proletarian novelists grown in stature now that, at long last, the proletariat were not only reading but buying books? Have the multitudinous novels about the Common Man, the Little Man, the Man in the Street, been widely accepted by the Common Man, the Little Man, the Man in the Street? In this, the Century of the Common Man, such a conclusion would seem to have been foregone. The writers for the Common Man, spurred on by the foregone-ness of their conclusions, became commoner and commoner—but the Common Man began to show that he had developed a few rather uncommon tastes indeed. Aside from the comic books, which he consumed by the shipload (and they can scarcely be called realistic), he has done all sorts of queer things. He has granted the greatest gift in his power, sales running to a million or more, to a book about a lady and an egg, and to a group of the most outrageously escapists novels that have ever cluttered up a publisher’s list. Historical novels which were neither good history nor good novels, became the new opium of the masses. Lusty rogues and busty wenches went through their amorous routine with a dream of empire in their roving eyes. The Common Man went in heavily for mediaeval glamour and colonial swashbuckling. This may be explained on the always convenient grounds that the popular taste is lamentably lacking in it.
What about the intellectuals? They have shown a remarkable predilection for mystery novels with overtones of Kraft-Ebing and undertones of Freud. The “psychological” novel has enjoyed a vogue on a grand scale, and most popular novelists have had a shot at it themselves. Several novelists of a generation or two ago have been revived. Henry James has been the subject of half a dozen serious studies and most of his novels, the less boring ones, have been republished, re-reviewed and hailed as masterpieces by the Sunday reviewers. Trollope, too, has undergone the full treatment. The 1920’s have been rediscovered once again, this time complete with cartoons and photographs. We may anticipate that Charles Dickens will shortly become the subject of an intense and enthusiastic revival.
The Saturday Review has called for new gods. Life magazine demands to know whether or not fiction has a future, thinks not. The ladies’ fashion magazines, progressing rapidly in the opposite direction, present a gallery of “Significant writers” with photographs only slightly less rococo than their elegantly gowned caryatids, including one precious young fellow in a checkered weskit and the most engaging bangs.
In short, the Little Man, having digested an overdose of reading matter, seems about to form certain dietary preferences, and they are not going to be along the anticipated lines. Now this is not to be greatly wondered at. In any period of intense literary activity (and we must use the term very loosely), when, in short, “publishers will put covers on almost anything,” two things are bound to happen. The more popular novels set new records for sales and for bad writing. New writers are rushed into print before they’ve bothered to become good, and old established writers are tempted and inevitably, invariably and immediately succumb to the lure of mass sales. They are tricked into competing on the commonest possible grounds with the homesteaders. The more intellectual writers from their peaks in Darien gaze down upon ever widening horizons and find it difficult to focus upon anything of significance. They, too, are tricked into deserting their small, comfortable cliques and finally, after preliminary castings about, fall back upon the reliable old revival, or they hail with delirious delight some new master. Then, when this stage has been reached, a reaction sets in.
The awesome sight of so very many bad novels shocks even those who had succeeded in shocking themselves into insensibility. The critics are appalled by the flood they have helped to loose and, while waiting for the waters to abate, they keep themselves dry and in fairly good spirits by chanting a litany composed of the names of Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoievski, Gorki, Swift, Proust, Stendahl and a number of traditional but largely unreadable masters. Now and again they discover a sort of Cardiff Giant and exhibit it reverently to the masses. Books are written, critical studies composed, translations arranged for, editions planned. Critics, scholars, publishers and others solemnly take part in the usual ceremonies attendant upon the presentation of a new writer named, let us say, Smerv.
Alois Smerv is, or was, a Montenegran mystic. Comparatively little is known about his work, most of it has never been published, none of it can be readily understood. Nevertheless his name finds its way into practically every review devoted to anything but juveniles. Smerv seems to have been obsessed by most of the commoner manifestations made famous by various Viennese psycho-analysts. It is said that his books, had they ever been published, would have attracted the unfavorable attention of the fascist authorities and would undoubtedly have resulted in his expulsion from his homeland or his installation in a concentration camp. This, of course, is pure supposition, all that we know for certain is that Smerv died of acute myopia in 1942 in an obscure town in the Balkans. His note books, scrap books, ration books and a mess of mss. found their way into the sympathetic hands of an international litterateur—with the inevitable result. This, then, is one of our latest literary idols.
3
And now we come to the point of conceding that Arthur Machen is not and never has been a “naturalist,” that is, he has never written in the manner which we have come to call naturalism or realism. A great deal of modern American and English fiction over the past forty or fifty odd years has been of this sort. It stemmed, following one of the periodical Anglo-Saxon reversions to the Gallic, from Zola, the father of naturalism. One need hardly wonder what Machen might say today of naturalism and Zola, he said it some fifty years ago in Hieroglyphics and again in The Secret Glory. And Machen was saying then a great many of the things the critics of today are just beginning to discover.
To take an excellent example; we have the case of one of our best known and most highly regarded novelists; one whose realism has begun to transcend reality so much that his last book has been called an allegory. His characters are so super-real as to be almost “arch types,” and they may eventually come to be regarded, unless they are entirely lost in the shifting of values, as sketches worthy to stand in a Dickensian gallery along with Micawber and Pickwick.
For this is assuredly the direction of our drift—we are not only turning away from naturalism and realism, we are beginning to wonder why we ever turned to them at all. For literature as a removal from the common life, or art as an interpretation rather than a portrayal of life, has little to do with either naturalism or realism. It may be that, within this very decade, we will decide that the whole trend of the past thirty or forty years has been up a dead-end street inhabited by the dead-end kids of the literary world, whose greatest talent was to shock each other with the words they chalked up on the walls and fences of their realistic little slum.
It has become increasingly obvious, even to the more advanced critics, that there had come to exist but a very narrow line between the realistic-naturalistic novel and the journalism of the day. Not so long ago it was considered the highest praise to call a novel “a significant social document.” Now it is becoming more fashionable to refer to a novel as a rather poor novel as a novel, but a significant social document. We are, it would seem, about half-way round the circle. Mr. Sinclair Lewis wrote a book a year or two ago which is also a case in point. Although the critics were unanimous in pointing out that it was a very bad novel, they admitted that it was significant. So too, the flood of books about alcoholism, insanity, race prejudice and other social problems. Most of these books defy honest criticism on almost any grounds, since almost everyone is more or less opposed to the same things these books are against.
Of course these problems do exist, and they are urgent problems indeed; but they do not necessarily constitute the stuff of great or even good literature. Nor should the importance of the problem automatically confer importance or significance upon any writer, good, bad or indifferent, who chooses to deal with it. Today’s tabloid may be as raw a slice of life as today’s top ranking best seller—but no one calls it literature. As for the revolt against “the genteel tradition,” it was a natural reaction against stuffiness, Victorian morality and overly “nice” novels—but the course taken by those who rebelled against these things was not necessarily the right one. It was, or soon became, quite as stuffy and even more unreal. Still, there is much to be said on the subject, for realism, by which we can mean honesty, cannot be, and should not be, eliminated entirely as a literary force.
It cannot be said that Dickens, that eminent Victorian, was not a realist or that he was not realistic. No Hemingway he, to be sure, but still, no Harold Bell Wright. Nor can we say of many a writer relegated to oblivion by the realists that they were not realistic. John Galsworthy wrote as realistically of the upper-middle classes as John Steinbeck writes of paisanos—and Soames Forsyte is as much a person, a real person, as the youth with the acne. Now this is a very close to the heart of the matter, for the realists, and the naturalists, have claimed that writers like Galsworthy are not realists—and of course their point would be that Galsworthy wrote of Soames Forsyte and Steinbeck wrote of bums and vagrants, of the dispossessed and the youth with the acne.
It would seem, then, that they quarreled rather with Soames than with Galsworthy—that Soames was, for some reason or other, less real than, for example, an earnest young picket-line marcher. Indeed, it has been almost a prime principle, that the realists write of the so-called “underprivileged,” and all that was needed to earn a reputation for a book was a fairly accurate portrayal of life in the less-desirable quarters of any city or town. If a few scenes of drunken quarrels, beatings by cops (classically called Cossacks) and tableaux in which oppressed mill-workers were being violently oppressed, so much the better. Of course not all realists wrote exclusively about the underprivileged. Many wrote of the upper classes, for this was considered realism too—but only if the upper classes were portrayed in an unfavorable light. So it becomes apparent that almost the whole of realism has been a social rather than a literary movement. For a time, and under special conditions, this seemed reasonable enough, but there are indications that it is in the process of being rejected as the only literary criterion.
4
Of the novelists whose names have formed a sort of literary litany this past decade or two: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Farrell, Faulkner, Caldwell and Steinbeck—the work of Steinbeck offers most in the way of material for analysis according to the lights of both realists and romanticists. For Steinbeck has been hailed as a great realist, and it was he who first seems to have transcended reality, and certainly he comes closest to approaching the “removal from the common life” postulated by Machen as the prime requisite for the creative writer. The Grapes of Wrath was and is a wonderful book—as great a piece of journalism as has been produced in an age that specializes in that peculiar literary form—the documentary; and it was saved from being mere competent journalism, or even inspired journalism, by characterization alone. Here again we must look to Machen for, if not a direct reference to Steinbeck, at least an applicable parallel.
For Steinbeck’s characters, the Joads, the Paisanos, the Hermit with his dogs, the bums in Cannery Row—these are all figures of such proportion and created in such a perspective as that described by Machen in his essay on Dickens. Machen points out that Dickens was a symbolist ... no such persons as Pickwick or Micawber ever walked the earth. “They are creatures,” says Machen, “of the world of vision, of that other world which is beside us always, which transcends the sight of unpurged eyes.” And then Machen goes on to define the “true realist” as one who symbolizes “by means of phenomena, eternal verities.”
This deftness of Steinbeck’s in drawing portraits has led him into trouble with his devoted critics for whom, apparently, realism can be carried to extremes. A case in point is the Colonel in The Moon is Down. This German, if not Nazi, officer, it will be recalled, was quite a controversial figure back in the war days when the book was published. Now the Colonel had every right, actually and literarily, whether as an actual person or an imagined one, to act as he did. It may have been a none too happy choice for Steinbeck—he could have given us the Eric Von Stroheim figure we all expected of him, but he gave us instead the Major Stanhope type. This was not a very popular choice with the ardent and articulate admirers of Mr. Steinbeck’s realism.
Then there was the matter of Lifeboat, a motion picture shown during the war. Mr. Steinbeck did the script, or worked on it, or did whatever it is established writers do in Hollywood. At any rate Steinbeck was taken to task by at least one film critic and not a few columnists who stepped out of their roles long enough to have a look at the films. The story, a Hitchcock natural, involved a group of people thrown together in a lifeboat. Among the group was a German submarine officer—perhaps the Captain. The thing that angered the erstwhile admirers, confounded the critics and dismayed the defenders of Democracy, was that the German was portrayed as the most capable man aboard the lifeboat. Not only did he show qualities of leadership which were found to be detestably proficient, but other members of the crew, all Allies of one sort or another, were shown to be a confused and sometimes cowardly lot. This outrageous invention by a man with a reputation for realism upset the critics and the columnists. No less an authority than the American Sybil cried out against the extravagance of the invention in which an officer and a seaman was permitted to exercise both authority and seamanship. Of course most of these outcries may be attributed to the fact that we were then at war with both the confoundedly charming Colonel and the confoundedly capable Captain.
Nevertheless everyone breathed easier when Cannery Row was announced as a return to the “early Steinbeck” even though, by this time, realists everywhere had become aware of a chink in the armor, and the left-wing critics took a decidedly dim view of the light-hearted way in which Steinbeck’s social outcasts took their social ostracism.
When The Wayward Bus rattled onto the literary scene the critics scanned the faces of the passengers as eagerly as relatives waiting at the depot. Sure enough—there were cries of recognition from several groups. One crowd hailed the youth with the acne—Johnny had come marching home again to swell the ranks of the realists. Others, remembering the Colonel and the Captain, recognized at least a lineal descendant in the girl who sat in wine glasses. She was, for a girl who sat in wine glasses, sufficiently incredible to belong to the gallery of allegorical figures set up for the specific purpose of puzzling the proletarians. And so the bus pulled in with apparently the right character for almost everyone waiting at the depot.
This somewhat didactic digression, while it seems to have no direct bearing upon either Arthur Machen or his works, is offered in explanation of some of the theories expressed in Hieroglyphics—under the subtitle, if you wish, of The Ultimate Fate of a Realist.
5
We have arrived at a point in our literary history (or, if you prefer, our social progress, our ideological advancement, our cultural development) when there is need for a new estimate of the task and aims of our modern literature or at least the re-establishment of certain values and standards previously set aside.
We must once again divorce literature from life, if by that we will understand that literature is not, and never was supposed to be, a mirror held up before our common life. We must discard the so-called “true-to-life” standard by which our critical attitudes have been governed for so many years. Above all, we must renounce the propaganda psychosis, and we must admit that even good propaganda is never literature and that even great literature is seldom propaganda. We have those, of course, who will rise to point out that such and such a book or novel or play was excellent propaganda for such and such a cause or event. To which we may answer: it was not so conceived. For the glibness with which the word propaganda is used is rivalled only by the glibness of the propagandists themselves. To make a case for any work of literature as a bit of effective propaganda for any cause is to distort and debase the purpose for which it was created.
There is much too much to do with literature today that has nothing to do with literature at all. We must learn again that the weavers of fantasy are, after all, the veritable realists. For it must be admitted that we have at hand ample evidence that this is so.
There is realism in great literature, but realism alone does not make great literature. The writer, or observer, who sees an event or an occurrence, however rare or moving an event it may be, who is moved to write about it merely to describe, with minute realism, what he had observed is no more creating literature than the earnest New Englander who writes to the Times or the Globe to report the first robin. But Arthur Machen has said these things before—and said them better.
You will find, in the closing pages of Hieroglyphics, this passage, which seems an excellent closing passage for this digressive chapter:
“Have you noticed how many of the greatest writers, so far from desiring that compliment of ‘fidelity to life,’ do their best to get away from life, to make their books, in ordinary phraseology, ‘unreal.’ I do not know whether anybody has compared the facts before or made the only possible inference from them; but you remember how Rabelais professes to derive his book from a little mouldy manuscript, found in a tomb, how Cervantes beginning to propria persona authoris, breaks off and discovers the true history of Don Quixote in the Arabic Manuscript of Cid Hamet Benengeli, how Hawthorne prologizes with the custom-house at Salem, and lights, in an old lumber-room, on the documents telling him the story of The Scarlet Letter. Pickwick was the transcript of the ‘Transactions’ or ‘Papers’ of the Pickwick Club, and Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur shelters itself, in the same way, behind the personality of an imaginary writer. There is a very profound significance in all this, and you find a trace of the same instinct in the Greek Tragedies, where the final scene, the peripeteia, is not shown on the stage, but described by a ‘messenger.’ The fact is that the true artist, so far from being the imitator of life, endures some of his severest struggles in endeavoring to get away from life, and until he can do this he knows that his labor is all in vain.”