THE AMERICAN NOVEL TO-DAY

A Social and Psychological Study BY RÉGIS MICHAUD BOSTON ~ 1928 LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1928, By Little, Brown, and Company All rights reserved Published January, 1928 Printed in the United States of America

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author wishes to express his indebtedness to the publishers who have so kindly granted him permission to reprint extended quotations from novels used in the chapters of this book. These include Robert M. McBride & Company, publishers of “Jurgen,” “Figures of Earth,” “Domnei” and “The Cream of the Jest” by James Branch Cabell; Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers of “My Antonia” by Willa Cather; Boni & Liveright, publishers of “An American Tragedy,” “A Hoosier Holiday,” “The Genius,” “Sister Carrie,” “The Financier” and “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub” by Theodore Dreiser and “Dark Laughter” by Sherwood Anderson; The Viking Press, publishers of “Marching Men,” “The Triumph of the Egg,” “A Story Teller’s Story,” “Windy McPherson’s Son” and “Many Marriages” by Sherwood Anderson; and D. Appleton & Company, publishers of “Miss Lulu Bett” by Zona Gale.

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FOREWORD

This book grew out of a series of lectures given by the author at the Sorbonne during the year 1926. These lectures were later published in a volume which was awarded the Montyon prize by the French Academy. The author’s first task is to apologize to the American reader for his audacity in attempting to transcribe it into English, and to seek his indulgence by reminding him that this is “an essay from a French pen,” to quote our former ambassador, M. Jusserand. It is only fair that the writer should warn his readers that the field of his investigation has been limited. His purpose was not to write a complete history of the American novel, although the principal masters of modern fiction have been included in the book; nor was it his intention that this should be purely a piece of literary criticism.

No one can open an American novel without being impressed by the earnestness and the unanimity which the authors display in discussing moral and social questions. Their books constitute a vast satire of present-day American civilization, a defense of the rights of man against the pressure of obsolete ideals and traditions. From this standpoint, they constitute a homologous group while each retains his full measure of originality.

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Realism is not a new factor in American fiction. From Edward Eggleston to Theodore Dreiser, the American novel has tended more and more to become a precise account of American society. However, realism has never been as prevalent and as outspoken as it is to-day. As the United States increased in number and in population, the conflict between the ideals of the individual and those of the mass became more and more acute. Meanwhile the progress of experimental psychology afforded the American novelist a new means of explaining and revealing the motives of the individual.

In my book I have made reference to psychoanalysis in particular. Current literary criticism cannot afford to ignore Doctor Freud. Some masters of American literature, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Margaret Fuller and Amy Lowell have lately been subjected to a successful psychoanalysis. The new psychology permits a more exact diagnosis of several important phases of our consciousness which have their origin in the deepest recesses of our soul, and which, though not literary in themselves, are often manifest in literature. Freudian psychology is the natural ally of the sociologist. It shifts the largest part of the responsibility for many of the moral diseases and idiosyncrasies of the individual upon social institutions. By presenting Puritanism as a form of moral inhibition it throws a new light upon it.

Moral and psychological duplicity have been the subjects of several European investigations before the ascendancy of Doctor Freud. One of the most suggestive was presented in a book called “Le Bovarysme” by the French philosopher, Jules de Gaultier. He chose Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as being the most typical ixcase of romantic inhibition. He showed that after all romanticism was nothing but a psychological disease and the attempt of an individual under social pressure to appear in a double light in his own eyes. A more pathetic example can scarcely be conceived than that of Flaubert’s heroine, Emma Bovary, and her attempt to lead an imaginary life as a compensation for her monotonous environment. It is obvious from a perusal of American novels of to-day that Emma Bovary has many brothers and sisters in this country. A normal society cannot exist without normal people and the latter cannot be imagined without a certain amount of personal freedom and felicity. Standardization, the tyranny of public opinion and morals, the leveling of

the exceptional to the mass ideal, petty persecutions, blue laws, Comstockery and so forth, had a part to play in Emma Bovary’s slow but sure moral and spiritual starvation, and in her ultimate suicide. Social welfare rests on a harmonious balance of give and take between the upper and lower classes. An excess of freedom produces anarchy; an excess of tyranny, inhibitions, despair and crime. No life is worth living wherein action is not a sister to dreams to some extent, to use Baudelaire’s saying. The plight of Flaubert’s heroine and that of Carol Kennicott in “Main Street” are different aspects of the same social and moral disease—undue moral repression.

The author of this book is not a pessimist and he is well aware that there are many American virtues; frankness, cordiality, buoyancy, a love of life and a love of action, a craving for change, the exaltation of youth, pure and triumphant, and the dynamism of national life,—these are qualities which the Old World xmight envy the New. But an outside observer might also have the right to point to the reverse side of these qualities. What has become of ethical and intellectual standards in the United States, a country so unmistakably prosperous and happy from a material point of view? What is the present condition of culture which exists behind the display of luxury and comfort? How has America fared in the conflict of quality versus quantity which has swept the world?

One thing strikes the European in these United States of to-day; it is the contrast between the general prosperity and the individual discontent. The average American, taken out of his natural surroundings, appears like one who is sacrificed by being harnessed to some huge task whose importance he cannot grasp with reference to his personal satisfaction. He has helped to build a colossal structure, but what has he succeeded in achieving for his own gratification? Has he not sacrificed his best personal interests to the general welfare? The average American is an optimist superficially, but many disappointments lie buried in his heart. There seems to be some ungratified longing in his life; neither Puritan asceticism nor material prosperity can satisfy the new generation in America. The newcomers declare themselves discontented; they have become frankly pessimistic. A proud and wealthy nation, the proudest and wealthiest of all, the most eager and the most successful in conquering the means of material welfare, America does not seem to know how to make

her children happy. They are in revolt, they are questioning the ideals and institutions of their fathers. In poetry, in drama, in the pulpit and in the press, pessimism and criticism prevail. Only recently the xiélite of the American intelligentsia declared that the civilization of the United States had been a failure.

What of all that? The author is not dismayed by these complaints. He holds that art in its largest sense has always had pessimism as its base and exaltation as its apogee. Durch Leiden Freude! the great Beethoven proclaimed. Better to have the blues of a Chatterton, an Edgar Allan Poe, a Francis Thompson, than to have the banal optimism of a Babbitt after a good meal. The present pessimism of the younger generation in America is a good omen and an indication of a better future. Young America is looking forward to more thrilling spiritual adventures and it certainly will not be deceived in its high expectations.

RÉGIS MICHAUD

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CHAPTER I The Case Against the Puritans

The last fifteen years have seen a complete revolution in old American literary ideals. There has been a new efflorescence of poetry known as the “new poetry” movement. On the stage, after the attempts of William Vaughn Moody to renew the American drama, by fusing together realism and symbolism, Eugene O’Neill appeared and showed originality in his lyric dramatizations. In criticism, talents of the first order were revealed. The din of battles, the eagerness of controversies bear witness to the existence of an intensive, intellectual life in the United States to-day. Romanticism versus classicism, progress versus tradition, or, to speak the language of the country, radicalism versus conservatism, waged a strenuous battle for their respective ideals. Messrs. Mencken, Van Doren, Rosenfeld, Van Wyck Brooks, Frank Harris, on the left wing, Paul Elmer More, the late Stuart P. Sherman, Irving Babbitt, W. C. Brownell, on the right, have made a sport of intellectual polemics and appreciation. American criticism is not content with gliding on the surface

of authors or problems. It goes straight to moral problems and shows a keen intuition of technics.

This spiritual effervescence is well worth our attention. The literary nonconformist is a type not yet extinct in America. A revival of the protestant spirit 4and of critical examination has taken place in American literature. More faith and conviction have been spent in literary production than in the pulpit of the churches. The late Randolph Bourne was a typical example of the American literary radical, and Mr. Henry Mencken continues the tradition among us.

Even from the literary point of view, the American novel in the nineteenth century envied the rest of the world nothing. It produced excellent models of all kinds. The novel of adventure, the novel of manners have been stamped by Cooper and Hawthorne with the authentic seal of genius. More recently, Henry James showed himself a master of the psychological novel and an unparalleled artist. The vogue in America and abroad of the American “movies” could not be explained without the writings of Jack London. The short story, since Edgar Poe, had been a product copyrighted in America, while American humorists had won a worldwide reputation.

When all is told, if we make an inventory of the literary production in the world, as compared with that of the United States, in prose and verse, since, let us say, the advent of Baudelaire in France, we see that America, a so-called utilitarian country, has set, in more than one way, modern literary standards, with Poe, Whitman, Henry James. Meanwhile, in the realm of thought, American philosophy and psychology exerted a capital influence abroad. (A recent novel by M. Paul Bourget⁠[1] still takes for granted all the doctrines professed by William James in his “Handbook of Psychology.”)

Let this be said in way of prelude, to make the readers 5of this volume well aware of the fact that the author does not accept without reserve all the criticisms hurled against American literature by modern American critics. The fertility and originality of American literature, in a country without literary traditions or institutions, are facts beyond all doubt. They fill one with optimism regarding the intellectual future of this great nation.

Yet, criticism is unleashed in the United States nowadays and it spares nothing. If the French are critical by birth, one would say, judging from the mass of evidence, that the modern American was born fussy. In a country where the standards of life change overnight, critical revaluations in literature are fatal. The American Hall of Fame could not escape the law of perpetual transformation. Until recently, the United States was the last country in the world which continued to take for granted the optimism of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists. Americans have not yet lost their faith in automatic progress. Despite the “fundamentalists” they have evolution in their blood. May I suggest, on the threshold of this book, that a European observer may be better located, ideally speaking, to render American literature full justice than even native critics? He has less illusions and also less prejudices. He views the literary revolution in the recent years in America as a result of the moral and social advance.

In the last twenty years a new class of writers has invaded American literature. The spirit of the pioneers never died in America. The young writers wanted to conquer new fields in an entirely new way. Their originality was a challenge to the old order. More than any other country since the War, literary America has 6struggled to find a new heaven and a new earth. Modern writers are conscientiously and deliberately insurgents. They turn a cold shoulder to traditions. In fact, they belong, socially, to a new class. Few of them are well-to-do bourgeois educated in expensive colleges and depending for their writing upon leisure and incomes. American literature is no longer the monopoly of gentlemen and scholars. The great majority of American writers to-day are self-made men, born from the people, without any blue blood and entirely democratic in their lives if not in their ideals. Most of them wear the chevrons not of the universities but of journalism. A great many, and the most noted among them, were reporters before becoming authors. This

throws not a little light on their literary achievements. Most of them adhere to no church. The American literary “Who’s Who” includes indiscriminately all creeds, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and free thinkers. American literature has shunned respectability. It jumped from the right to the left and even to the extreme left. From aristocratic or bourgeois it became revolutionary and proletarian.

Even the geographical positions were altered. American literature had, up to the most recent years, been largely manufactured in the eastern States, a country conservative by tradition. As opportunities for adventure became rare in the East, Boston, Philadelphia and even New York ceased to be literary Meccas. The new literature developed in the Middle West. This fact is not without its historical significance.

It marked a return of the American mind to the natural line of American migration, from frontier to frontier, across the continent. The writers took the 7path of the missionaries, the pioneers and the captains of industry, the path of the covered wagon.

This was a challenge to the ideals of their predecessors. Classic American writers leaned more on the East than on the West, more on Europe than on their own country. Their literary taste and ideals, if not always their programme, were European, or if you prefer, Victorian. The new literature is strictly indigenous. It is crude and in many ways primitive. It is no longer manufactured in drawing-rooms or in studios, but in immediate contact with life. The great American novel of the nineteenth century was exotic and retrospective. It was sentimental and romantic. Its ethical and social background was traditional. Sentimentality and romance, the search after the picturesque, have gone by the boards. They have passed to the “movies” or to the popular magazines, the latter almost as backward to-day as they used to be fifty years ago and as harmless. The novel of adventure has been extinct, as a genre littéraire in America, since the death of Jack London. Even the social novel has suffered a radical change. It is no longer written from the outside, from

the point of view of society, as in the days of Frank Norris or Upton Sinclair. It is now written from the inside, from the point of view of the individual. It is more psychological than social. In fact, while the American novel became more realistic, it also began to be beset by moral problems. It ceased to be an epic to become a satire. From this point of view, however, despite their cynicism, the new masters of American fiction show themselves true to the old ideal. Their books are fraught with idealism, with the spirit of reform and amelioration. Even when they fight Puritanism, 8the American literary insurgents show themselves more puritanic than the Puritans. They are haunted by the dream of a better world and of a better humanity.

The fact that the new literature in America is contemporary with the wave of pessimism which has marked the last twenty years is not a mere coincidence. The two events stand very much together in a relation of effect to cause. Pessimism in the United States to-day has not yet affected the external aspects of American life. It has not made the average American less buoyant and confident. The sunny side of American life is still there. And yet, it cannot be denied that the age of jazz is more gloomy than the age of Roosevelt. There is a great deal of dissatisfaction in America to-day. The restless trend of life, the mad pursuit of material ease, the desertion of the home, the speed mania, the get-rich-quick impulse, are no longer the privilege of the grown-up. The contagion of material welfare and luxury has reached the young. It has lured them and led them astray. Educators, clergymen, sociologists, and, unfortunately too, criminologists, are much worried by the spread of the new paganism, and the growth of juvenile delinquency. American homes and

colleges are swamped to-day with precocious supermen and superwomen eager to live their lives, as the saying is, without knowing how, except by aping their elders, by procuring expensive motor cars and jewels, or by securing for themselves road-house privileges. Juvenile criminality is on the increase. There is an epidemic of suicide among the young and the standards of morality are not much higher among the mature at large. No wonder that the American élite should be clamoring for a revaluation of standards.

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How can they win their fight? They are a handful in a mass of more than one hundred million people, led, the vast majority of them, by mob psychology and the tyranny of public opinion. This certainly is a pathetic and vexing problem. For a European observer the fight in the United States to-day is not so much that of good and evil, right and wrong. The economic and material standards of the average American are much higher than those in the Old World. The fight in America to-day is, at the bottom, that of the élite against the masses, the fight of quality versus quantity. This problem lies far beyond the power of statistics. It cannot be coped with by economists or sociologists. It falls within the pale of the moralist, the mystic and the philosopher. A big nation, like a big army, cannot exist without a discipline and a strict subordination of the masses to their leaders. How can this be possible without setting limits to the rights of individual development? This problem is complicated in America by that of standards. How are the demands of the masses going to be gratified

without a leveling down of the standards? Is not material comfort the most obvious and most accessible value for the greater number? And what has intellectual growth to do with material welfare?

A type of civilization is not easily changed. Only a Chinese general or a Nietzschean philosopher would dare to solve the problem of the masses by applying the remedy suggested, a long time ago, by the benign R. W. Emerson: