Naturally, the thing is done very simply. Maugham’s success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus—by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery—in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life. The average novelist, grappling with such a hero, always makes the fatal error of trying to account for him wholly—of reducing him to a composite of fictional rubber-stamps. Thus he inevitably takes on commonness, and in proportion as he is clearly drawn he loses plausibility as a man of genius. Maugham falls into no such blunder. Of Strickland, the unit of human society—the Strickland who eats, sleeps, travels about, reads the newspapers, changes his shirt, has his shoes polished, dodges automobiles and goes to business every morning like the rest of us—we get a portrait that is careful, logical and meticulous—in brief, that is brilliantly life-like. But of the vaster, darker Strickland who is a man of genius—the Strickland who deserts his family to go to Paris to paint, and there plods his way to extraordinary achievement, and then throws away his life in the South Seas—of this Strickland we see only an image made up of sudden and brief points of light, like flashes of Summer lightning below the horizon. He is, in one aspect, made convincingly vivid; he is, in the other, left in the shadow of mystery. That is precisely how we all see a man of genius in real life; he is half plain John Smith and half inscrutable monster. It remained for Maugham to get the thing into a novel. If there were no other merit in his book, it would stand out from the general for that unusually deft and effective character sketch.
As for the machinery of the effect, part of it is borrowed from Joseph Conrad, to wit, the device of presenting the story through the medium of an onlooker, himself fascinated and daunted by the enigma of it. This device, of course, was not invented by Conrad, but it seems to me that he has employed it to better purpose than any other novelist writing in English. Consider, for example, how magnificently it is used in “Typhoon,” in “Lord Jim,” and in “Heart of Darkness.” These stories, straightforwardly told, would still be stories of very high quality, but I believe that a good deal of their present strange flavor would be gone; they would cease to suggest the sinister and inexplicable. There appears to be a theory among novelists that the precisely contrary method is the more convincing—that the way to write a tale that will carry the air of reality is to do it in the autobiographical form. But that is surely not true. When he adopts the autobiographical form the novelist is compelled to account for his protagonist completely; he must attain to realism by pretending to omniscience. That pretension has brought many an otherwise sound novel to disaster. I am almost convinced that it would have brought even “Lord Jim” into difficulties. What holds our interest in Jim to the last, and leaves us with a memory of him that glows for long days, is the dark wonder of him. We learn enough about him to see him clearly, but we never quite penetrate his soul—we are never quite certain about the interplay of motives that brings him to his romantic catastrophe. Take away the droning Marlow, and he would come too close to the camera. Thus there lies, beyond the crude realism of white light, the finer, softer realism of delicately managed shadows. More than half the charm of Conrad, I daresay, is due to his superb capacity for managing them. At the end of every one of his incomparable tales there is a question-mark. He leaves us to answer as we will, each according to the light within.… I think that Maugham, borrowing that device, has employed it with noteworthy success. He is, God knows, no Conrad, but he has written a very excellent novel, and in it there is plenty of evidence that its quality is no mere accident, but the product of very deliberate and intelligent effort.
Scherzo for the Bassoon
From the Smart Set, May, 1922, pp. 142–43.
A review of CROME YELLOW, by Aldous Huxley; New York, 1922
Aldous Huxley’s “Crome Yellow,” if it be called a novel, violates all of the rules and regulations that I have laid down so smugly. But why call it a novel? I can see absolutely no reason for doing so, save that the publisher falls into the error in his slip-cover, press-matter and canned review. As a matter of fact, the book is simply an elaborate piece of spoofing, without form and without direction. It begins, goes on aimlessly, and then suddenly stops. But are only novels fit to read? Nay; try “Crome Yellow.” If it does not make you yell with joy, then I throw off the prophetical robes forever. It is a piece of buffoonery that sweeps the whole range from the most delicate and suggestive tickling to the most violent thumping of the ribs. It has made me laugh as I have not laughed since I read the Inaugural Harangue of Dr. Harding.
This Huxley, in truth, is a fellow of the utmost shrewdness, ingenuity, sophistication, impudence, waggishness and contumacy—a literary atheist who is forever driving herds of sheep, hogs, camels, calves and jackasses into the most sacred temples of his people. He represents the extreme swing of the reaction against everything that a respectable Englishman holds to be true and holy. The attitude is no pose, as it would be among the fugitives from the cow states in Greenwich Village; it comes to him legitimately from his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, perhaps the roughest and most devastating manhandler of gods ever heard of in human history. Old Thomas Henry was a master of cultural havoc and rapine simply because he never grew indignant. In the midst of his most fearful crimes against divine revelation he maintained the aloof and courtly air of an executioner cutting off the head of a beautiful queen. Did he disembowel the Pentateuch, to the scandal of Christendom? Then it was surely done politely—even with a certain easy geniality. Did he knock poor old Gladstone all over the lot, first standing him on his head and then bouncing him upon his gluteus maximus? Then the business somehow got the graceful character of a Wienerwalz. Aldous is obviously less learned than his eminent grandpa. I doubt that he is privy to the morphology of Astacus fluviatilis or that he knows anything more about the Pleistocene or the Middle Devonian than is common gossip among Oxford barmaids. But though he thus shows a falling off in positive knowledge, he is far ahead of the Ur-Huxley in worldly wisdom, and it is this worldly wisdom which produces the charm of “Crome Yellow.” Here, in brief, is a civilized man’s reductio ad absurdum of his age—his contemptuous kicking of its pantaloons. Here, in a short space, delicately, ingratiatingly and irresistibly, whole categories and archipelagoes of contemporary imbecilities are brought to the trial by wit. In some dull review or other I have encountered the news that all the characters of the fable are real people and that the author himself is Denis, the minor poet, who loses his girl by being too cerebral and analytical to grab her. Nonsense! Huxley, if he is there at all, is Scogan, the chorus to the whole drama, with his astounding common sense, his acidulous humor, and his incomparable heresies.
D. H. Lawrence
From the Smart Set, Feb., 1923, pp. 140–41
The case of Lawrence continues to baffle me. First I read the current encomiums of him as a man of genius, then I pray humbly to God, and then I read his books. They leave me hopelessly convinced, despite all the high testimony to the contrary, that what is in them is extremely hollow and trivial stuff—that they are full of false psychology, preposterous episodes, and stiff and artificial people. Of late I have been giving hard study to what is widely regarded as the author’s masterpiece, to wit, “Women in Love.” In brief, the story of two provincial English-women, sisters, who track down a pair of husbands. This business, it turns out, is not easy. The swains are coy, and one of them, at least, carries about with him a very violent anti-connubial complex. Nevertheless, the girls persist, and in the end they are successful, though both have to employ the desperate device of offering their favors before the parson cries “Go!” The dialogues which forward the benign busi
ness are set forth at extreme length, and to me, at all events, they appear magnificently nonsensical. If this is “psychology,” as the Lawrence fanatics would have us believe, then it is unquestionably the psychology of maniacs. One of the swains, Birkin, actually runs amok more than once. I submit his conversation, as Lawrence reports it, to the judgment of a candid world. His most massive ideas are simply psychopathological. As for the girls, they are both fools. In brief, a book full of blowsy tosh.
But why, then, the vast esoteric vogue of Lawrence? He is highly esteemed, I am convinced, simply because he is rather bold in his dealing with sexual transactions. He is not content to stop with the usual eye-rolling and hard breathing; he proceeds to physiological phenomena of a far less seemly character. When Hermione, the fat girl, whacks her beau over the head, the effects upon her own central nervous system are those described in certain chapters of Krafft-Ebing. I do not say that these effects are improbable, and I certainly do not argue that Lawrence sets them forth with anything properly describable as indecency: the Comstockian attack upon his book, indeed, is characteristically imbecile. But what I do say is that his current celebrity rests very largely upon his obvious preoccupation with such things, and that all his antecedent “psychology,” though it is mainly nonsensical, is taken on trust for the sake of them. Standing by itself, or leading to some less blushful goal, that “psychology” would simply bore his customers. It is, as I have said, extremely bizarre and unconvincing. People do not do things for the motives that he credits to them, nor do they explain their acts in the outlandish terms he uses. To argue, as some of his admirers do, that his work marks an advance in the inner structure and content of the English novel, and that he is teaching all other novelists something about their business that they never knew before he mounted the stump—to argue thus is to depart definitely from all sense and logic. There is nothing in his novels—and I have now read them all, and some of them twice—that properly deserves such astounding encomiums. They are, in spots, competently written, but those spots are few and wide apart. In the main, he is horribly dull.
*For a discussion of the latter, see this page.
XVI. AMERICAN NOVELISTS
The Puritan Abroad
From the Smart Set, Oct., 1915, p. 152
MARK TWAIN was a great artist, but his nationality hung around his neck like a millstone. So long as he confined himself to the sympathetic portrayal of American people and American scenes, laughing gently and caressing while he laughed—for example, in “Huckleberry Finn”—he produced work that will live long after the artificialities of the Boston Brahmins are forgotten. But the moment he came into conflict, as an American, with the ideas and ideals of other peoples, the moment he essayed to convert his humor into something sharp and destructive, that moment he became merely silly and the joke was on him. One plows through “The Innocents Abroad” and through parts of “A Tramp Abroad” with something akin to amazement. Is such coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as humor? Is it really the mark of a smart fellow to laugh at “Lohengrin”? Is Titian’s chromo of Moses in the bulrushes really the best picture in Europe? Is there nothing in Catholicism save petty grafting, monastic scandals, and the worship of the knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? May not one, disbelieving in it, still be profoundly moved by its dazzling history, the lingering monuments of its old power, the charm of its prodigal and melancholy beauty? In the presence of the unaccustomed, Mark Twain the artist was obliterated by Mark Twain the American: all he could see in it was strangeness, and all he could see in strangeness was hostility. There are chapters in “Huckleberry Finn” in which he stands side by side with Cervantes and Molière; there are chapters in “The Innocents Abroad” in which he is indistinguishable from Mutt and Jeff. Had he been born in France (the country of his chief abomination) instead of in a Puritan village of the United States, he would have conquered the world. But try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of the Puritan smugness, the Puritan distrust of ideas, the Puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself, entirely distinct from and beyond all mere morality.
George Ade
From PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES, 1919, pp. 114–22.
First printed in part in the Smart Set, Feb., 1913, pp. 154–55, and in part in the New York Evening Mail, July 7, 1917
George Ade was one of the few genuinely original literary craftsmen in practice among us in his time. He came nearer to making sound and living literature, when he had full steam up, than any save a scant half-dozen of the contemporary novelists, and the whole body of his work, both in books and for the stage, was as thoroughly American, in cut and color, in tang and savor, in structure and point of view, as the work of Mark Twain. No single American novel of the first years of the century showed more sense of nationality, a keener feeling for national prejudice and peculiarity, a sharper and more pervasive Americanism than such Adean fables as “The Good Fairy of the Eighth Ward and the Dollar Excursion of the Steam-Fitters,” “The Mandolin Players and the Willing Performer,” and “The Adult Girl Who Got Busy Before They Could Ring the Bell on Her.” Here, under all the labored extravagance, there are brilliant flashlight pictures of the American people in the Roosevelt I era, and American ways of thinking, and the whole of American Kultur. Here the veritable Americano of the early 1900s stands forth, lacking not a waggery, a superstition, a snuffle or a wen.
Ade himself, for all his story-teller’s pretense of remoteness, was as absolutely American as any of his prairie-town traders and pushers, Shylocks and Dogberries, beaux and belles. He fairly reeked with the national Philistinism, the national respect for respectability, the national distrust of ideas. He was a marcher, one fancies, in parades; he joined movements, and movements against movements; he knew no language save his own; he regarded Roosevelt I quite seriously and a Mozart or an Ibsen as a joke; one would not be surprised to hear that, until he went off to his fresh-water college, he slept in his underwear and read the Epworth Herald. But, like Dreiser, he was a peasant touched by the divine fire; somehow, a great instinctive artist got himself born out there in that lush Indiana countryside. He had the rare faculty of seeing accurately, even when the thing seen was directly under his nose, and he had the still rarer faculty of recording vividly, of making the thing seen move with life. One often doubts a character in a novel, even in a good novel, but who ever doubted Gus in “The Two Mandolin Players,” or Mae in “Sister Mae,” or, to pass from the fables, Payson in “Mr. Payson’s Satirical Christmas”? Here, with strokes so crude and obvious that they seem to be laid on with a broom, Ade achieved what O. Henry, with all his sideshow-barker smartness, always failed to achieve; he filled his bizarre tales with human beings. There was never any artfulness on the surface. The tale itself was never novel, or complex; it never surprised; often it was downright banal. But underneath there was an artfulness infinitely well wrought, and that was the artfulness of a story-teller who dredged his story out of his people, swiftly and skillfully, and did not squeeze his people into his story, laboriously and unconvincingly.
Needless to say, a moralist stood behind the comedian, for he was 100% American. He would teach; he even grew indignant. Roaring like a yokel at a burlesque show over such wild and light-hearted jocosities as “Paducah’s Favorite Comedians” and “Why ‘Gondola’ Was Put Away,” one turns with something of a start to such things as “Little Lutie,” “The Honest Money Maker,” and “The Corporation Director and the Mislaid Ambition.” Up to a certain point it is all laughter, but after that there is a flash of the knife, a show of teeth. Here a national limitation closed in upon the satirist. He could not quite separate the unaccustomed from the abominable; he was unable to avoid rattling his Philistine trappings a bit proudly; he must prove that he, too, was a right-thinking American, a solid citizen and a patriot, unshaken in his lofty rectitude by such poisons as aristocracy, adultery, hors d’oeuvres and the sonata form. But in other directions this thorough-going nationalism helped him ra
ther than hindered him. It enabled him, for one thing, to see into sentimentality, and to comprehend it and project it accurately. I know of no book which displays the mooniness of youth with more feeling and sympathy than “Artie,” save it be Frank Norris’s forgotten “Blix.” In such fields Ade achieved a success that is rare and indubitable. He made the thing charming and he made it plain.
But all these fables and other compositions of his are mere sketches, inconsiderable trifles, impromptus in bad English, easy to write and of no importance? Are they, indeed? Do not believe it for a moment. Back in 1905 or thereabout, when Ade was at the height of his celebrity as a newspaper Sganarelle, scores of hack comedians tried to imitate him—and all failed. I myself was of the number. I operated a so-called funny column in a daily newspaper, and like my colleagues near and far, I essayed to manufacture fables in slang. What miserable botches they were! How easy it was to imitate Ade’s manner—and how impossible to imitate his matter. No; please don’t get the notion that it is a simple thing to write such a fable as that of “The All-Night Seance and the Limit That Ceased to Be,” or that of “The Preacher Who Flew His Kite, But Not Because He Wished to Do So,” or that of “The Roystering Blades.” Far from it, indeed. On the contrary, the only way you will ever accomplish the feat will be by first getting Ade’s firm grasp upon American character, and his ability to think out a straightforward, simple, amusing story, and his alert feeling for contrast and climax, and his extraordinary talent for devising novel, vivid and unforgettable phrases. Those phrases of his sometimes wear the external vestments of a passing slang, but they are no more commonplace and vulgar at bottom than Gray’s “mute, inglorious Milton” or the “somewheres East of Suez” of Kipling. They reduce an idea to a few pregnant syllables. They give the attention a fillip and light up a whole scene in a flash. They are the running evidences of an eye that saw clearly and of a mind that thought shrewdly. They give distinction to the work of a man who so well concealed a highly complex and efficient artistry that few ever noticed it.
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