The way the world is going

The American people is far less sensitive to foreign opinion than it used to be, but three or four letters to this address witness that there are still Americans who want to have themselves discussed. They ask for prophecies of the American future. The demand is too big for me. But, in common with many other English people, I have been made to think rather vividly about certain aspects of the American future in the last few months, and it may be interesting to turn over the convergent reactions and conclusions.

English people will not consent to think of Americans as foreigners and aliens in the way in which they think of Turks or Italians. They have a great and intimate curiosity about things American. It is not always a friendly intimacy they feel; there is a great deal of irritation and hostility both ways. But while an Englishman will never say, “I might be an Italian,” it comes very easily to him to say, “I might be an American.” Imaginatively he tries on the stars and stripes. He is eager for American plays and receptive of American novels. He can see himself living like that. Without a monarchy, the “county” and our army people, I do not know how like Americans we English might not be.

American common life is being set down now very ably and vividly by American writers, primarily for the benefit of American readers, but their work is gaining the constantly increasing and constantly more respectful attention of European readers. Until quite our own time, American novels have been, so to speak, European novels about America; they followed European methods and respected European standards. Their characters had a morbid predisposition to cross the Atlantic. But now there is a growing school of American writers who take their own way with their own novel and enviable wealth of material. Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and above all Dreiser, are outstanding examples of this new-won American literary independence, of which Edgar Allan Poe and Whitman were the prophets and Stephen Crane the most brilliant pioneer. Upton Sinclair veils the power of a very considerable writer in the flag of a vehement propagandist, but he too must not be forgotten in the reckoning of America’s literary liberation.

“Babbitt” we felt was a great exposition of commercial America seen and written with complete originality, and though many of us found “Martin Arrowsmith” a little incredible and unconvincing, “Elmer Gantry” again has produced the distinctive Sinclair Lewis effect, which is that of looking at a vividly interesting reality through a lens which refracts and exaggerates indeed, but which may even exhibit all the better by virtue of its magnification. One believes in Babbitt and understands that the American world may be infested by innumerable Babbitts, while at the same time one may doubt whether there was ever quite such a Babbitt as Babbitt. “Elmer Gantry,” which deals with the popular religious life, is even more like seeing through the curves of a bottle. It has the quality of veracity. One feels, that is to say, that what is seen in it is truly there; that it is not “made up.” But also one feels that the thing seen is different in its proportions. The story is universal. Where there is revivalism and popular missioning, whether it be Catholic or Protestant, or “New Thought” or No Thought, there is the same danger of reaction between the “magnetic” preacher type and the excitable woman convert or associate. But the scale of the development is distinctive because of the entirely unprecedented social atmosphere in which it goes on, and there lies the major interest of the European observer.

The first quality that impresses the European is the abounding vigour of the social life these books reveal; the next is its immense crudity, and hard on that its lack of variety in culture and the absence of half shades, a sort of universal black and whiteness. Everybody seems to think the same things and to express them by the same common idioms. Henry James, in his all too rarely cited book, “The American Scene,” complains of his native land as he saw it in 1909, that “nothing in the array is ‘behind’ anything else—an odd result, I admit, of the fact that so many things affirm themselves as preponderantly before.” “Babbitt” and “Elmer Gantry” tell of a world that must be on the street line or perish. With the book in hand one might say, “This is a community wholly without criticism,” which would be to ignore completely the existence of the book in hand. But it is a community in which criticism and the idea of dropping out of the front line to think about things is evidently only beginning.

An American novel of outstanding power which is being read all over Europe with great curiosity and admiration is Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy.” Dreiser is, in the extreme sense of the word, a genius. He seems to work by some rare and inexplicable impulse, enormously, without self-criticism or any fun or fatigue in the writing. Long ago I admired his “Sister Carrie,” and rebelled against his long novel, “The Genius,” surely the largest, dullest piece of ineptitude that has ever been produced by a first-class writer. His “American Tragedy,” still vaster, is—I agree with Bennett—one of the very greatest novels of this century. It is a far more than life-size rendering of a poor little representative corner of American existence, lit up by a flash of miserable tragedy. But I would disagree with Bennett’s condemnation of its style. It is raw, full of barbaric locutions, but it never fatigues; it keeps the reader reading, it gets the large, harsh, superficial truth that it has to tell with a force that no grammatical precision and no correctitude could attain. Large, harsh, and superficial that truth is, and fresh from this book I am moved to express something about America that has been smouldering in my mind for some time.

Let me set down two impressions of a very intelligent French reader of these representative books. The first impression was one of the wide freedom of movement and the universal restlessness of these common people, compared with the rooted, limited lives of their European equivalents (so far as they can be counted as equivalents). The next, and the stronger, was the extreme thinness and poverty of their mental life. We were in the presence of a people with no depth of conversation at all. They had no variety nor penetration in their discussion. They had no poetry whatever. They did not seem to know the names of, or ever to have observed, any birds, flowers, minerals, or any natural things. They had no metaphors, but slang phrases horribly bent and flattened by excessive use. They betrayed nothing a European could recognize as religion and no general ideas of any sort. Their revivalism was the cheapest, shallowest orgy of mass emotion. They knew nothing of any literature. They read so badly that their news had to be shouted at them from the tops of columns. The poverty of their language was amazing. The lover wrung to ecstasy might say: “My! but you’re cute.” The phrase for all occasions seemed to be “That gets me!” My French observer insisted that here was a people degenerating, worn down, halfway back to speechlessness and brutishness. We had a long argument, because I am still a backer of the United States, and in the end we both gave ground.

I had to grant the flattening and cheapening of the language, but it was arguable that that was a phase. Two-thirds of the surnames in Dreiser’s book were Central or Eastern European names. These people were newcomers; they had left Polish, or Czech, or Yiddish, or German behind them, and the names of flowers and legend and metaphor had been also left behind. There had been a vast mental attrition during the process of transplantation to a new soil. No real attempt had been made to assimilate them to any conceivable American culture. Was it any wonder if they dealt with each other through a cheap sort of English, tenses and moods all wrong? And, moreover, they were still unsettled, moving over a big area, where flowers and suchlike poetic material varied. People do not pick up the phraseology for that sort of thing en route. And just as their native languages had worn off in the rub and movement of immigration so too their native faith and traditions had been rubbed down to something very cheap, thin, and raw. But that was only a phase of clearance. Stripping is not degeneration. Clearing a site is not decay.

So I argued. The antagonist, however, scored points by demanding what, if there was a clearance, was being built in the clearing. Where were the great vigorous schools and colleges in which the new culture was to arise? Where were the signs of a copious cheap literature of high quality? One had glimpses of American college life, and the quality of the new civilization brewing there was, well, questionable. America, said my friend, was a new thing in the world, a vast possibility, a hope for all mankind. The schools, the colleges, the popular literature, the intellectual leading of such a community, if it was indeed to realize these hopes and achieve its destiny, had to be far stouter, bigger, and better things than poor old muddling Europe could show. Were they even as good? The travelling Americans one met in Europe seemed, when it came to any abstract discussion, to be far less able to express and handle ideas than their European equivalents. But that brought down the talk to individual instances, in which no argument is ever possible.

I turn back to Henry James. He describes a long journey from north to south. He speaks of “the general pretension of the Pullman, the great, monotonous rumble of which seems for ever to say to you: ‘See what I’m making of all this, see what I’m making, what I’m making...’”

To which in his character of returning native he replies: “I see what you are not making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not, and how can I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?—which appears never so welcome to you, for its measure of truth, as it ought to be!”

I still hesitate to adjudicate. I hate to cheapen, or even to seem to cheapen, the immense achievement which America embodies in material form. But I could wish for better evidence than these novels and the general report of things over there give me, of a great and unprecedented movement throughout that community towards sustained intellectual activity on a scale commensurate with American opportunity. Things, it seems to me, stand very much as follows. The common schools of a number of States in the Union (but by no means all) are perhaps as good as the elementary schools of Britain and Germany. No better. Yes, but for the peculiar needs of America they ought to be four times better. Children do not go to school so regularly as they do in Western Europe, and they ought to go more. America is rich enough to keep all her children at school until sixteen, learning to use their own language fully and skilfully, learning the elements of science and something sound and solid about the rest of the world. She does nothing of the sort. Her educational progress is shallow and pretentious. It is decades behind her material progress. The Fundamentalist controversy displayed great areas of the United States as being mentally twenty years behind Western Europe. She ought to be handing out to her people all the best literature of the world, good scientific works and modern discussion at a quarter of a dollar or less for a full book. We can do that in England, but in America books of that sort cost anything from one dollar to twenty. Common people in America and their children must read old, worn books or none. She is, in fact, building the great nation of the future on a foundation that would be thought insufficient even for an effete and tradition-cemented European community. This will not do. She has to see to that. If she does not see to that all her large promise is in vain. But the growing volume of self-criticism in America, of which the books I have cited are only samples, is a very hopeful sign that she will see to it. The sooner she sets about seeing to it good and hard, the more cheerfully will my hopes for America go about in my mind.

But the job is no slight one. If it is to be done at all, a very great effort indeed is required. The universities, book distribution, and above all the common schools in America must have something like a renascence before the atmosphere of “An American Tragedy” can be pushed out of reality into history, and the American people take the place its material advantages offer it of leadership among the nations of the earth.

15 May, 1927.