III
LITTERATEURS: AMERICAN WRITERS

A Story Teller’s Story, by Sherwood Anderson.
William Dean Howells, by Oscar W. Firkins.
Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days, by Edward Larocque Tinker.
Mark Twain’s Autobiography.
Henry Thoreau, by Leon Bazalgette.
The Pilgrimage of Henry James, by Van Wyck Brooks.

The next best thing to talking about ourselves is talking about others. Hence the lure of autobiographies, biographies, and autobiographical fiction. James Joyce wrote a book half the size of Webster’s Dictionary to tell of a few hours in his own life, and Ben Hecht seemingly cannot exhaust himself. The genesis and development of personality can be conveyed only by words. Palette and brush in master hands can preserve for posterity the lineaments, and in a measure the character, of those we love and those the world admires or fears; but the written word alone is the medium to convey the soul. Sherwood Anderson has laid bare his soul in A Story Teller’s Story, and he has drawn a portrait of his father that surpasses Velasquez’ Innocent VI.

Rarely have autistic and purposeful thinking, revery and directed mental activity, been so skilfully displayed, so successfully made vocal. In the lines, and between the lines, Mr. Anderson has told all he knows about himself and more. He has put psychologists and writers, be they Freudians or behaviourists, subjectivists or objectivists, under obligation to him, for he has permitted them to observe the gestation and travail of the poet’s fancy, the birth and growth of poetical form. His story, taken with Mr. Stieglitz’s portrait, tells all there is to know about a creature at once as simple as the heart of a child and as complex as the mid-brain of an adult who first saw the light of day in Camden, Ohio, nearly half a century ago.

He knows little of his ancestry, but that little goes a long way to explain him. His father, a fifty-fifty mixture of Colonel Sellers and Wilkins Micawber, born in the South and given to rum, romancing, and revery, was once a dandy and always a hokum expert. The origin of his mother, who had been a bound girl in a farmer’s family until she married, was something of a mystery, which her children did not care to solve; but she was kind, indulgent, faithful, and she suffered fools silently. Her mother was an Italian peasant, one eyed, polyandrous, and at times murderous. Once a tramp tried to rob her humble home. She beat him until he begged for mercy; then she filled him and herself with hard cider and the two went singing off together down the road. Marvellous germ-and sperm-plasm for a poet; wondrous parentage for one destined to be absorbed by the visual fancies of his unconscious, to see strange features in the clouds with Polonius, and faces in the fire with William Blake. No wonder Sherwood Anderson has often been called a “nut.” He is not averse to being thought a little insane, but he has been stung to the quick by charges of “personal immorality.” One with such ancestry is perhaps not so likely to be an invert as a poet, but it is from similar ancestry that they both not infrequently come. Had Mr. Anderson investigated the forebears of Judge Turner who found the boys of his town were not of his sort and was unable to understand them, who had never married, and indeed cared nothing for women, he would have found them in many respects similar to his own. The judge was very congenial to him, despite the disparity of age. They saw many things eye to eye; and the short, fat, neatly dressed man with bald head, white Van Dyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks, and extraordinarily small hands and feet, is as typical an example of the strange genesic anomaly as was M. de Charlus whose acquaintance we made in Marcel Proust’s much discussed Swann’s Way. To understand the long, long thoughts the judge had when as a boy he meditated poisoning some of his schoolmates, one must either have “temperament” and “fixations” like Mr. Anderson’s or else be a psychiatrist.

A Story Teller’s Story is full of portraits, mostly miniature, but here and there is a life-size done with a few sweeps of the brush. Such is that of Alonzo Berner, from whom Mr. Anderson learned as much about men as Mr. Kipling did about women from the “arf caste widow, the woman at Prome, the wife of the head groom or the girl at home.” Alonzo did not have that contempt for men that Sherwood had. He knew the great commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; he had learned there was none other greater; and it was vouchsafed him to believe. “Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it?” You got it, Sherwood, from the one-eyed grandmother who tried to kill her granddaughter with a butcher knife, who had four husbands and was ready for a fifth. Alonzo escaped it through the father who had, the night the stallion Peter Point died, “some thought about most human beings, including myself, that I haven’t ever forgot.”

Next to the evolution of the artist, the determination of Sherwood Anderson to be a writer, the transformation from slug laborer to chrysalis writer, these analyses are best in a book which is all excellent.

Freudians will find Mr. Anderson’s story of his life corroborative of their teachings. Fanciful birth, vicarious parentage, fantasying childhood, reverying manhood, sexual fixation, self-observation, unconscious fantasy following in the wake of conscious thought, conflict between authority and desire—all these and more are here. Rather than dwell upon them, and upon his artistic temperament, rather than attempt a summary of his conduct which would represent his strivings toward the beautiful, I shall discuss what may be called his urge to authorship. The most remarkable thing about it is that it did not seize him until comparatively late in life. What it lost in forwardness it made up in intensity. After having lived nearly one-half of the life of man as a laborer and business man, he began to write.

The song chanted by Solomon that has come down the ages to testify that the wisest of men was also a poet, is not more pregnant with sincerity, no more redolent of fervor than Mr. Anderson’s record of his art which he sought in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stars. By night on his bed he sought it; he sought it in city streets and country fields, from watchman and from barman, only to find it finally within himself; in his own creating, shaping intellect into which the unconscious had projected its own grist. He began to write of his observations, experiences, and fantasies; and as he wrote he seasoned them more and more generously with his aspiration: to cause his fellow men to share his love of beauty, to thrust beauty first upon the middle west and then upon the U. S. A., to show that happiness and prosperity are not synonymous. He was by nature a word-fellow who could at most any time, be hypnotised by high-sounding words, and he was to come under the influence of Gertrude Stein, a “surefire” verbal artist; all of this resulted in Many Marriages, which was the life of the author strung on a fictional clothes horse. John Webster’s grand geste in fiction is Sherwood Anderson’s in reality. It came to him like a revelation; it came with a rush: the overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness engendered by buying or selling. “I was in my whole nature a tale-teller. My father had been one and his not knowing had destroyed him. The corrupt unspeakable thing that happened to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter of buying and selling.” And so he walked out of his factory saying to his secretary, “You may have it, I am not coming back any more.” As he walked along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out of the town, he whispered to himself, “Oh, you tricky little words, you are my brothers and for the rest of my life I will be a servant to you.”

That is what he is to-day and likely will remain—a servant of words. And though their servant, he is yet their master, for he is able to assemble them in beauty and in majesty; he can march them rhythmically in single or double file, or in platoons; he can blend them as a kaleidoscope blends colors; he can draw from them a harmony that Rimsky-Korsakoff drew from sounds, that Léon Bakst drew from motion and colour. Indeed, there is a music in his style which, though not classical, is charming. There is a measured flow of words in every sentence; alliterations and rhythms, resonances and luminosities which no contemporaneous American writing exceeds. But its author has a lack and a compulsion. The former is in the ideational field, the latter in the emotional. He lacks capacity for synthesis and integration, and he is obsessed with sex. No one who reads of Nora, and of the high school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of that place and come to Chicago with her husband to make their way in the great world, can fail to interpret his obsession; neither can the reader fail to understand how large it has loomed in Mr, Anderson’s life.

The stories Sherwood Anderson used to hear on every side in stable, work-shop, and factory concerned, he says, one impulse in life. He grew unspeakably weary of hearing them, and gradually a doubt invaded his mind. A similar weariness has come to many readers of his stories; and the doubt that he had of his fellow keg rollers, I have of him.

Few critics will be able to dispose of Sherwood Anderson in as brief space as his friend Mr. Ben Hecht: “I can give you all of Sherwood Anderson in a sentence—the wistful idealisation of the masculine menopause.” Like so many things Mr. Humpty Dumpty Hecht says, there is truth in it.

Sherwood Anderson of manic-depressive temperament is an artist who is a blend of many characteristics, the predominant one of which is a love of beauty, particularly of form. All of them are inherited. Had he been able, or enabled, to bring the unconscious of his make-up into consciousness early in life, he might have earned the immortality of Hawthorne, Howells, or Crane. Had he studied Fielding instead of Whitman, Chekhov instead of Clemens, he might have been the bell-cow of the literary herd of the midwest. The man who first said “It is never too late to mend” has much to answer for.

Bliss Perry, whose reputation for sanity, soundness, and penetration as a literary critic has long been established, says that Mr. Firkins’s study of William D. Howells is a great biography. I feel as a pariah should feel when I cannot share an authority’s conviction and sentiment. But there is a discursiveness, a pretentiousness, a highfalutin tone about it that distract me, and a papal atmosphere about it that I do not breathe easily or invigoratingly. Little annoying flaws of grammar and construction obtrude themselves while one reads it. “I will set down briefly the migrations and occupations of the family.” “The style has a pre-existence in the psychology, is in essence the ingress of that psychology into language.” “When an incident of travel reaches its probe into the sensitiveness of the author’s profoundest and saddest convictions,” etc.

Self-forgetfulness, it has been said, is the beginning of happiness among books; and it is because I cannot get lost to myself that I have found less pleasure in Mr. Firkins’s book than in any save Mr. Bok’s. When I read “the curious strengthening of the position of the amphibious Balzac in our day,” I immediately begin searching for the justification of “curious”—and why “amphibious”? Then there darts into my memory chamber a line from an Essay in Criticism, by Robert Lynd, that I read two or three years ago in The London Mercury: “All criticism is, from one point of view, an impertinence.” Stuart P. Sherman, reviewing recently Mr. Mencken’s latest book, said he was determined to conclude his review with a gesture of amicality. I am equally determined to say that Mr. Firkins’s book would not have received such universal praise from the reviewers had it not deserved it.

We like to read about men of genius and identify our virtues with theirs; we deny ourselves their sins, and we do not recognise our limitations in theirs. Lafcadio Hearn was a man of genius who had tremendous limitations, and undoubtedly the Reverend John Roach Straton would say he wallowed in sin. But he was an interesting human being; he had a most uncommon ancestry; and if there were any occidental and Christian conventions he did not trample upon, transcend and rail at, it was because he did not encounter them.

In one of his letters to Henry E. Krehbiel, he called himself a dreamer of monstrous dreams. The reader who gets information of Hearn from Mr. Tinker’s book will think he should have said “a monster dreamer of monstrous dreams,” for the Hearn depicted in Lafcadio Hearn’s American Days was a monster. He ate like one, he loved like one, he had no family feeling, no capacity for sustained friendship. No hand extended to help him was withdrawn unbitten; no kindness was ever accepted that he did not endeavour to repay with cruelty and abuse; no appreciation and praise were ever accorded him that he did not reciprocate with scurrility and scorn. Exceptions prove the rule: Mr. Courtney’s hand bore no teeth marks and Elwood Hendrick still speaks lovingly of him.

All that Mr. Tinker says of him may be true, but it is not a picture of Lafcadio Hearn as he really was, or as the letters published by Mrs. Elizabeth Bisland Wetmore discover him, or as Reminiscences by his widow show him to be. He was hybrid, he was oversexed, he had paranoiac trends, he was pathologically sensitive and morbidly timid, he was deformed facially and possibly morally, and he saw neither far nor straight. What has all that to do with Lafcadio Hearn, an asset of literature? He wrote like a god and he made angelic music. Chita, Kokoro, The Nun of the Temple of Amida, attest it. He was a critic in the class of Rémy de Gourmont. He was a translator that Mrs. Constance Garnett would call master. He had a flair for beauty of literary style keener than any one since Pater. He could not judge men and he could not discriminate between women; he had no colour sense, and his olfactory sense was abnormal; he had greater compassion for turtles and toads than he had for Jesuits and Jews; but he rarely hurt any one’s feelings save those of Mr. Alden. That grand old mediator of writers’ thoughts and reflections said, “Father, forgive him, he neither knows the nature of his act, nor the enormity of the offence, for he is a genius.” He may not have been “cultured” to a twisted mind like that possessed by Dr. George M. Gould, but Goethe would have thought him cultured, for he was a poet; and George Moore would have made an affirmation to that effect for, like himself, Hearn was a story-teller; Aristippus would not have denied him, for he too was a hedonist, and Anatole France would have proclaimed him, for they both held that beauty was the touchstone for worth.

Judged by his contribution to literature, he was a man of culture and he had illumination and understanding.

I can understand that it interests physicians, especially psychiatrists, to investigate the ancestry and study the conduct of men who agitated the waters of their time; but I cannot understand what bearing heritage or behaviour has on the contribution of these men to literature. How does it concern the seeker of emotional solace or intellectual sustenance to know that Poe and Verlaine were drunkards, that Rimbaud and Baudelaire were inverted genesically; that Hearn’s father was an Irish rake devoid of parental responsibility, his mother an Ionian of composite ancestry profoundly psychopathic who married a Jew?

Mr. Tinker says, “Hearn’s peculiarities and mental affinities were entirely the result of idiosyncrasies of ancestry and youthful environment.” Well, is Hearn any different in that respect from the whole world? Does Mr. Tinker aim to do what Mr. White recently attempted to do for Woodrow Wilson: allot his cardiac virtues to the Wilsons and his cerebral gifts to the Woodrows? I suppose he would attribute his bulimia and illassible sexual cravings to Charles Bush Hearn; his tenderness for cats and his desire to create beauty to Rosa Tessima; his Jesuit phobia to the strain of English blood; his penchant for gastronomies to the Turk strain; his Wanderlust to an ancestral Arab; his passion for personal cleanliness to a gipsy forebear who had learned that there are few more pleasant experiences than those of bathing; his pride to a remote Moor; but his sensitiveness came from his wall eye—all his friends say that.

Mr. Tinker thinks “his warring inherited instincts were to have a large part in moulding his life, for they made of his soul a battleground. Frank Oriental sensuousness was shamed, but not curbed, by Anglo-Saxon self-control. Gallic expansiveness tried to break through Arab impassivity, and all the while, Gipsy lure of the road and love of new location lashed his life to restlessness; in short, what one set of inherited impulses bade him do, another inhibited, until all constructive action was paralysed.”

Lafcadio Hearn’s soul as it has been revealed to me from a long intimacy with his writings is not my idea of a battleground. Undoubtedly his instincts had much to do with shaping his life. They have in shaping the life of any one who amounts to something. Lafcadio Hearn had a very high sex coefficient and he did not bend the knee to church and convention. Well, there are others, and I fancy they would deny that their souls are battlegrounds. And this paralysis of constructive action, how does that show itself? Certainly not in New Orleans, more certainly not in Japan. Perhaps in Martinique? The heat and the atmosphere there make for lassitude that is tantamount to paralysis. We are perhaps on safer ground in attributing it to them than to warring impulses. I need scarcely add that I do not admit Hearn’s “paralysis of constructive action.”

Mr. Tinker’s book is a wrong picture of Lafcadio Hearn, but it is not the author’s fault. It is Hearn’s fault. He should not have philandered with Althea Foley; he should have spurned Dr. Gould’s advances; and knowing Denny Corcoran’s record he should have avoided him; and we can never forgive him for not wearing “stylebuilt” clothes. Had he done so he would not have had Krehbiel’s door slammed in his face, nor would the great musical critic have had occasion to write the letter, Cæsarean in brevity and Nelsonian in construction: “Dear Hearn, you can go to Japan, or you can go to Hell.”

Suppose Mr. Tinker were to get drunk and stay so more or less for a week, and that I should shadow him with camera and notebook. Does any one think that my record of his conduct and my picture of him would be correct or adequate? I do not. It might do him a great injustice.

However, much should be forgiven a biographer who makes such searching criticism as: Hearn’s constant vigilance to suppress finally came to inhibit his creative power. This explains the carefully wrought artificiality—the tenuousness of subject matter, but the exquisite finish of form—which is characteristic of all his books. The truth is he was forced to spin gossamer out of hemp when he could have made it into strong rope.

William Dean Howells said that Mark Twain was the Lincoln of literature. That is the apogee of praise. The more facets of his personality we see, the more richly does he seem to deserve the praise.

The immortality of Poe, Whitman, and Mark Twain would seem to be assured. Other names have been on the roster long enough to make it fairly certain that they also will be chosen, but Hawthorne’s reputation wanes as Melville’s enhances. Edwin Robinson a generation hence may have greater renown than Longfellow, and William James may be quoted when Emerson is forgotten.

We long for a great emotional writer as the Jews long for a Messiah, and the fact that Mark Twain was vouchsafed us encourages me to believe that our chances are greater than those of the Jews. We have never had a really great poet unless Whitman was one, and not even an approach to a satirist, and Mark Twain is our signal contribution to humour. He had also the capacity to convey it, and an unawareness of the supremacy of either gift. With it all he was a philosopher, a man of culture, and fundamentally a poet.

His was the antithesis of the Messianic complex. He had a simple heart, and an intricate soul. None of his writings reveals it as does his autobiography. It is as unlike the customary autobiography as Mark Twain was unlike the average man. It does not begin with a tedious narrative of his forebears, and tiresome descriptions of their environment. Nor does it dwell upon his mental prodigiousness and moral sufficiency, followed by the enumeration of the obstacles he surmounted owing to his health, holiness, habit, and his unusual possessions. It does not end with a verbal portrait provocative of memories of Dr. Munyon and his warnings.

It is the picture of a man, happily not a one-hundred-percent-American, who lived during the second most important epoch of this country’s history, and who from early childhood was a close observer and from his youth a faithful transcriber of his observations. He began to write his autobiography in his teens and continued to write it nearly to the day of his death. Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Innocents Abroad, are just as much description of his life as his autobiography.

Mark Twain’s conception of how to write biography was to start at no particular “period,” to wander at will over his life, to talk only about the thing which interested him for the moment, to drop it when its interest threatened to pale, and to turn his talk upon the new and more interesting things that intruded themselves into his mind meantime.

It is not only the picture of Samuel L. Clemens that one gets with the autobiography. There are little masterpieces of his brother Orion, of his daughter Susy, of his wife and of his mother, and there is one of General Grant that should add to his fame as a generous, kindly, big-hearted, forgiving man.