Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Russian novelists, particularly Dostoievsky, were criticized harshly for their so called "cruelty." This same objection is now being raised against the new Southern writers. On first thought the accusation seems puzzling. Art, from the time of the Gteek tragedians on, has unhesitatingly portrayed violence, madness, murder, and destruction. No single instance of "cruelty" in Russian or Southern writing could not be matched or outdone by the Greeks, the Elizabethans, or, for that matter, the creators of the Old Testament. Therefore it is not the specific "cruelty" itself that is shocking, but the manner in which it is presented. And it is in this approach to life and suffering that the Southerners are so indebted to the Russians. The technique briefly is this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail.
To the reader accustomed to the classical traditions this method has a repellent quality. If, for instance, a child dies and the life and death of this child is ptesented in a single sentence, and if the author passes over this without comment or apparent pity but goes on with no shift in tone to some trivial detail—this method of presentation seems cynical. The reader is used to having the relative values of an emotional experience categorized by the author. And when the author disclaims this responsibility the reader is confused and offended.
Marmeladov's funeral supper in Crime and Punishment and As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, are good examples of this type of realism. The two works have much in common. Both deal with the subject of death. In both there is a fusion of anguish and farce that acts on the reader with an almost physical force. Marveladov's violent death, Katerina Ivanovna's agitation about the supper, the details of the food served, the clerk "who had not a word to say for himself and smelt abominably"—on the surface the whole situation would seem to be a hopeless emotional rag-bag. In the face of agony and starvation the reader suddenly finds himself laughing at the absurdities between Katerina Ivanovna and the landlady, or smiling at the antics of the little Pole. And unconsciously after the laughter the reader feels guilty; he senses that the author has duped him in some way.
Farce and tragedy have always been used as foils for each other. But it is rare, except in the works of the Russians and the Southerners, that they are superimposed one upon the other so that their effects are experienced simultaneously. It is this emotional composite that has brought about the accusations of "cruelty." D. S. Mirsky, in commenting on a passage from Dostoievsky, says: "Though the element of humor is unmistakably present, it is a kind of humor that requires a rather peculiar constitution to amuse."
In Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, this fusion is complete. The story deals with the funeral journey made by Anse Bundren to bury his wife. He is taking the body to his wife's family graveyard some forty-miles away; the journey takes him and his children several days and in the course of it the body decomposes in the heat and they meet with a mad plethora of disasters. They lose their mules while fording a stream, one son breaks his leg and it becomes gangrenous, another son goes mad, the daughter is seduced—a more unholy cortege could hardly be imagined. But the immensities of these disasters are given no more accent than the most inconsequential happenings. Anse throughout the story has his mind on the false teeth he is going to buy when he reaches the town. The girl is concerned with some cake she has brought with her to sell. The boy with the gangrenous leg keeps saying of the pain, "It don't bother me none," and his main worry is that his box of carpenter's tools will be lost on the way. The author reports this confusion of values but takes on himself no spiritual responsibility.
To understand this attitude one has to know the South. The South and old Russia have much in common sociologically. The South has always been a section apart from the rest of the United States, having interests and a personality distinctly its own. Economically and in other ways it has been used as a sort of colony to the rest of the nation. The poverty is unlike anything known in other parts of this country. In social structure there is a division of classes similar to that in old Russia. The South is the only part of the nation having a definite peasant class. But in spite of social divisions the people of the South are homogeneous. The Southerner and the Russian are both "types" in that they have certain recognizable and national psychological traits. Hedonistic, imaginative, lazy, and emotional—there is surely a cousinly resemblance.
In both the South and old Russia the cheapness of life is realized at every turn. The thing itself, the material detail, has an exaggerated value. Life is plentiful; children are born and they die, or if they do not die they live and struggle. And in the fight to maintain existence the whole life and suffering of a human being can be bound up in ten acres of washed out land, in a mule, in a bale of cotton. In Chekhov's, "The Peasants," the loss of the samovar in the hut is as sad, if not sadder, than the death of Nikolai or the cruelty of the old grandmother. And in Tobacco Road, Jeeter Lester's bargain, the swapping of his daughter for seven dollars and a throw-in, is symbolical. Life, death, the experiences of the spirit, these come and go and we do not know for what reason; but the thing is there, it remains to plague or comfort, and its value is immutable.
Gogol is credited to be the first of the realists. In "The Overcoat" the little clerk identifies his whole life with his new winter cloak, and loses heart and dies when it is stolen. From the time of Gogol, or from about 1850 until 1900, imaginative writing in Russia can be regarded as one artistic growth. Chekhov differs certainly from Aksakov and from Turgenev, but taken all in all the approach to their material and the general technique is the same. Morally the attitude is this: human beings are neither good nor evil, they are only unhappy and more or less adjusted to their unhappiness. People are born into a world of confusion, a society in which the system of values is so uncertain that who can say if a man is worth more than a load of hay, or if life itself is precious enough to justify the struggle to obtain the material objects necessary for its maintenance. This attitude was perhaps characteristic of all Russians during those times, and the writers only reported exactly what was true in their time and place. It is the unconscious moral approach, the fundamental spiritual basis of their work. But this by no means precludes a higher conscious level. And it is in the great philosophical novels that the culmination of Russian realism has been reached.
In the space of fourteen years, from 1866 to 1880, Dostoievsky wrote his four masterpieces: Crime and Punishment, the Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. These works are exttemely complex. Dostoievsky, in the true Russian tradition, approaches life from a completely unbiased point of view; the evil, the confusion of life, he reports with the sharpest candor, fusing the most diverse emotions into a composite whole. But in addition to this he employs the analytical approach. It is almost as though having long looked on life and having faithfully reflected what he has seen in his art, he is appalled both by life itself and by what he has written. And unable to reject either, or to delude himself, he assumes the supreme responsibility and answers the riddle of life itself. But to do so he would have to be a Messiah. Sociologically these problems could never be altogether solved, and besides Dostoievsky was indifferent to economic theories. And it is in his role as a Messiah that Dostoievsky fails to meet the responsibility he has assumed. The questions he poses are too immense. They are like angry demands to God. Why has man let himself be demeaned and allowed his spirit to be corrupted by matter? Why is there evil? Why poverty and suffering? Dostoievsky demands magnificently, but his solution, the "new Christianity," does not answer; it is almost as though he uses Christ as a contrivance.
The "solution" to Crime and Punishment is a personal solution, the problems were metaphysical and universal. Raskolnikov is a symbol of the tragic inability of man to find an inward harmony with this world of disorder. The problem deals with the evils of society, and Raskolnikov is only a result of this discordance. By withdrawal, by pe
rsonal expiation, by the recognition of a personal God, a Raskolnikov may or may not find a subjective state of grace. But if so only a collateral issue has been resolved; the basic problem remains untouched. It is like trying to reach the Q.E.D. of a geometrical problem by means of primer arithmetic.
As a moral analyst Tolstoi is clearer. He not only demands why, but what and how as well. From the time he was about fifty years of age his Confessions give us a beautiful record of a human being in conflict with a world of disharmony. "I felt," he wrote, "that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped." He goes on to admit that from an outward point of view his own personal life was ideal—he was in good health, unworried by finances, content in his family. Yet the whole of life around him seemed grotesquely out of balance. He writes: "The meaningless absurdity of life—it is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man." Tolstoi's conversion is too well known to need more than mention here. In essence it is the same as Raskolnikov's as it is a purely solitary spiritual experience and fails to solve the problem as a whole.
But the measure of success achieved by these metaphysical and moral explorations is not of the greatest importance in itself. Their value is primarily catalytic. It is the way in which these moral probings affect the work as a whole that counts. And the effect is enormous. For Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, and the minor moralists brought to Russian realism one element that had hitherto been obscure or lacking. That is the element of passion.
Gogol has an imaginative creativeness that is overwhelming. As a satirist he has few equals, and his purely technical equipment is enormous. But of passion he has not a trace. Aksakov, Turgenev, Herzen, Chekhov, diverse as their separate geniuses are, they are alike in lacking this particular level of emotion. In the work of Dostoievsky and Tolstoi it is as though Russian literature suddenly closed its fist, and the whole literary organism was affected; there was a new tenseness, a gathering together of resources, a radically tightened nervous tone. With the moralists Russian realism reached its most fervent and glorious phase.
From the viewpoint of artistic merit it would be absurd to compare the new Southern writers with the Russians. It is only in their approach to their material that analogies can be drawn. The first real novel (this does not include old romances) to be written in the South did not appear until after 1900, when Russian realism was already on the decline. Barren Ground, by Ellen Glasgow, marked the beginning of an uncertain period of development, and Southern literature can only be considered to have made its start during the past fifteen years. But with the arrival of Caldwell and Faulkner a new and vital outgrowth began. And the South at the present time boils with literary energy. W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South says that if these days you shoot off a gun at random below the Mason-Dixon line you are bound by the law of averages to hit a writer.
An observer should not criticize a work of art on the grounds that it lacks certain qualities that the artist himself never intended to include. The writer has the prerogative of limiting his own scope, of staking the boundaries of his own kingdom. This must be remembered when attempting to appraise the work now being done in the South.
The Southern writers have reacted to their environment in just the same manner as the Russians prior to the time of Dostoievsky and Tolstoi. They have transposed the painful substance of life around them as accurately as possible, without taking the part of emotional panderer between the truth as it is and the feelings of the reader. The "cruelty" of which the Southerners have been accused is at bottom only a sort of naïveté, an acceptance of spiritual inconsistencies without asking the reason why, without attempting to propose an answer. Undeniably there is an infantile quality about this clarity of vision and rejection of responsibility.
But literature in the South is a young growth, and it cannot be blamed because of its youth. One can only speculate about the possible course of its development or retrogression. Southern writing has reached the limits of a moral realism; something more must be added if it is to continue to flourish. As yet there has been no forerunner of an analytical moralist such as Tolstoi or a mystic like Dostoievsky. But the material with which Southern literature deals seems to demand of itself that certain basic questions be posed. If and when this group of writers is able to assume a philosophical responsibility, the whole tone and structure of their work will be enriched, and Southern writing will enter a more complete and vigorous stage in its evolution.
[Decision, July 1941]
LONELINESS ... AN AMERICAN MALADY
THIS CITY, NEW YORK—consider the people in it, the eight million of us. An English friend of mine, when asked why he lived in New York City, said that he liked it here because he could be so alone. While it was my friend's desire to be alone, the aloneness of many Americans who live in cities is an involuntary and fearful thing. It has been said that loneliness is the great American malady. What is the nature of this loneliness? It would seem essentially to be a quest for identity.
To the spectator, the amateur philosopher, no motive among the complex ricochets of our desires and rejections seems stronger or more enduring than the will of the individual to claim his identity and belong. From infancy to death, the human being is obsessed by these dual motives. During our first weeks of life, the question of identity shares urgency with the need for milk. The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him, and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes a pristine wonder.
Consciousness of self is the first abstract problem that the human being solves. Indeed, it is this self-consciousness that removes us from lower animals. This primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world in which he finds himself.
After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.
In The Member of the Wedding the lovely 12-year-old girl, Frankie Addams, articulates this universal need: "The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome."
Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We, and there is a paradox about personal love. Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts out fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting questions: "Who am I?" "Why am I?" "Where am I going?"—and having cast out fear, we can be honest and charitable.
For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question "Who am I?" recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildeted soul can answer only: "Since I do not understand 'Who I am,' I only know what I am not." The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.
The loneliness of Americans does not have its source in xenophobia; as a nation we are an outgoing people, reaching always for immediate contacts, further experience. But we tend to seek out things as individuals, alone. The European, secure in his family ties and rigid class loyalties, knows little of the moral loneliness that is native to us Americans. While the European artists tend to form groups or aesthetic schools, the American artist is the eternal maverick—not only from society in the way of all creative minds, but within the orbit of his own art.
Thoreau took to the woods to seek the ultimate m
eaning of his life. His creed was simplicity and his modus vivendi the deliberate stripping of external life to the Spartan necessities in order that his inward life could freely flourish. His objective, as he put it, was to back the world into a corner. And in that way did he discover "What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."
On the other hand, Thomas Wolfe turned to the city, and in his wanderings around New York he continued his frenetic and lifelong search for the lost brother, the magic door. He too backed the world into a corner, and as he passed among the city's millions, returning their stares, he experienced "That silent meeting [that] is the summary of all the meetings of men's lives."
Whether in the pastoral joys of country life or in the labyrinthine city, we Americans are always seeking. We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart—the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.
[This Week, December 19, 1949]
THE VISION SHARED
I WONDER WHY I accepted this assignment. The ingenuities of aesthetics have never been my problems. Flight, in itself, interests me and I am indifferent to salting the bird's tail. Finding myself so awkwardly committed, I am reminded of a similar contretemps that happened in France three years ago. Soon after our arrival in Paris a charming gentleman came to see us and talked a good deal to me in French as rapid as a waterfall and equally intelligible to me. I understood nothing except that our caller wanted something rarher urgently from me. So with amiability but little sense I spoke one of my few French words: "Oui." The caller pumped my hand and bowed out saying, "Ah, bon! Ah, bon!" He came twice again and the mysterious procedure was repeated. But things are strange in a new country and I didn't trouble myself untd the day a friend came to our hotel and asked what in the world I was up to now. She took from her purse a card and I read it ten times and fell on the bed. The card was a nicely printed invitation to La Salle Richelieu at the Sorbonne to hear Carson McCullers lecture on a comparison between modern French and American literature. This was scheduled for the very next evening. My husband read the card and started packing. I telephoned an old friend from the American Embassy and he came to us. He laughed and I cried and we all drank brandy for some hours. After rationalization he said, "Since you obviously cannot lecture in French at the Sorbonne tomorrow evening, try to think of what you can do?" I watched my husband packing, then I thought of a recently finished poem. Our friend, a former literary critic, heard the poem and thought that it would do. He wrote a little apology in French for me that began: "Je regrette beaucoup mats je ne parle pas français—" The next evening I went to La Salle Richelieu, said my poem and sat there on the platform, trying to look intelligent as two critics debated the aspects of the two literatures in a language I did not understand.
The Mortgaged Heart Page 27