It is a false book by an author who lingers in nigger cabarets hoping to heaven to pick up something to write about and make a sensation — and, of course, money.
Flight is another nigger book; much more respectable, but not much more important. The author, we are told, is himself a Negro. If we weren’t told, we should never know. But there is rather a call for coloured stuff, hence we had better be informed when we’re getting it.
The first part of Flight is interesting — the removal of Creoles, just creamy-coloured old French-Negro mixture, from the Creole quarter of New Orleans to the Negro quarter of Atlanta. This is real, as far as life goes, and external reality: except that to me, the Creole quarter of New Orleans is dead and lugubrious as a Jews’ burying ground, instead of highly romantic. But the first part of Flight is good Negro data.
The culture of Mr. White’s Creoles is much more acceptable than that of Mr. Van Vechten’s Harlem golden-browns. If it is only skin- deep, that is quite enough, since the pigmentation of the skin seems to be the only difference between the Negro and the white man. If there be such a thing as a Negro soul, then that of the Creole is very very French-American, and that of the Harlemite is very very Yankee-American. In fact, there seems no blackness about it at all. Reading Negro books, or books about Negroes written from the Negro standpoint, it is absolutely impossible to discover that the nigger is any blacker inside than we are. He’s an absolute white man, save for the colour of his skin: which, in many cases, is also just as white as a Mediterranean white man’s.
It is rather disappointing. One likes to cherish illusions about the race soul, the eternal Negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and with mystery. One is not allowed. The nigger is a white man through and through. He even sees himself as white men see him, blacker than he ought to be. And his soul is an Edison gramophone on which one puts the current records: which is what the white man’s soul is, just the same, a gramophone grinding over the old records.
New York is the melting-pot which melts even the nigger. The future population of this melting-pot will be a pale-greyish-brown in colour, and its psychology will be that of Mr. White or Byron Kas- son, which is the psychology of a shrewd mixture of English, Irish, German, Jewish, and Negro. These are the grand ingredients of the melting-pot, and the amalgam, or alloy, whatever you call it, will be a fine mixture of all of them. Unless the melting-pot gets upset.
Apparently there is only one feeling about the Negro, wherein he differs from the white man, according to Mr. White; and this is the feeling of warmth and humanness. But we don’t feel even that. More mercurial, but not by any means wanner or more human, the nigger seems to be: even in nigger books. And he sees in himself a talent for life which the white man has lost. But remembering glimpses of Harlem and Louisiana, and the down-at-heel greyness of the colourless Negro ambiente, myself I don’t feel even that.
But the one thing the Negro knows he can do, is sing and dance. He knows it, because the white man has pointed it out to him so often. There, again, however, disappointment! About one nigger in a thousand amounts to anything in song or dance: the rest are just as songful and limber as the rest of Americans.
Mimi, the pale-biscuit heroine of Flight, neither sings nor dances. She is rather cultured and makes smart dresses and passes over as white, then marries a well-to-do white American, but leaves him because he is not “live” enough, and goes back to Harlem. It is just what Nordic wives do, just how they feel about their husbands. And if they don’t go to Harlem, they go somewhere else. And then they come back. As Mimi will do. Three months of Nigger Heaven will have her fed up, and back she’ll be over the white line, settling again in the Washington Square region, and being “of French extraction.” Nothing is more monotonous than these removals.
All these books might as well be called Flight. They give one the impression of swarms of grasshoppers hopping big hops, and buzzing occasionally on the wing, all from nowhere to nowhere, all over the place. What’s the point of all this flight, when they start from nowhere and alight on nowhere? For the Nigger Heaven is as sure a nowhere as anywhere else.
Manhattan Transfer is still a greater ravel of flights from nowhere to nowhere. But at least the author knows it, and gets a kind of tragic significance into the fact. John Dos Passos is a far better writer than Mr. Van Vechten or Mr. White, and his book is a far more real and serious thing. To me, it is the best modern book about New York that I have read. It is an endless series of glimpses of people in the vast scuffle of Manhattan Island, as they turn up again and again and again, in a confusion that has no obvious rhythm, but wherein at last we recognize the systole-diastole of success and failure, the end being all failure, from the point of view of life; and then another flight towards another nowhere.
If you set a blank record revolving to receive all the sounds, and a film-camera going to photograph all the motions of a scattered group of individuals, at the points where they meet and touch in New York, you would more or less get Mr. Dos Passos’s method. It is a rush of disconnected scenes and scraps, a breathless confusion of isolated moments in a group of lives, pouring on through the years, from almost every part of New York. But the order of time is more or less kept. For half a page you are on the Lackawanna ferry-boat — or one of the ferry-boats — in the year 1900 or somewhere there — the next page you are in the Brevoort a year later — two pages ahead it is Central Park, you don’t know when — then the wharves- way up Hoboken — down Greenwich Village — the Algonquin Hotel- somebody’s apartment. And it seems to be different people, a different girl every time. The scenes whirl past like snowflakes. Broadway at night — whizz! gone! — a quick-lunch counter! gone! — a house on Riverside Drive, the Palisades, night — gone! But, gradually, you get to know the faces. It is like a movie picture with an intricacy of different stories and no close-ups and no writing in between. Mr. Dos Passos leaves out the writing in between.
But if you are content to be confused, at length you realize that the confusion is genuine, not affected; it is life, not a pose. The book becomes what life is, a stream of different things and different faces rushing along in the consciousness, with no apparent direction save that of time, from past to present, from youth to age, from birth to death, and no apparent goal at all. But what makes the rush so swift, one gradually realizes, is the wild, strange frenzy for success: egoistic, individualistic success.
This very complex film, of course, does not pretend to film all New York. Journalists, actors and actresses, dancers, unscrupulous lawyers, prostitutes, Jews, out-of-works, politicians, labour agents — that kind of gang. It is on the whole a gang, though we do touch respectability on Riverside Drive now and then. But it is a gang, the vast loose gang of strivers and winners and losers which seems to be the very pep of New York, the city itself an inordinately vast gang.
At first it seems too warm, too passionate. One thinks: this is much too healthily lusty for the present New York. Then we realize we are away before the war, when the place was steaming and alive. There is sex, fierce, ranting sex, real New York: sex as the prime stimulus to business success. One realizes what a lot of financial success has been due to the reckless speeding-up of the sex dynamo. Get hold of the right woman, get absolutely rushed out of yourself loving her up, and you’ll be able to rush a success in the city. Only, both to the man and woman, the sex must be the stimulant to success; otherwise it stimulates towards suicide, as it does with the one character whom the author loves, and who was “truly male.”
The war comes, and the whole rhythm collapses. The war ends. There are the same people. Some have got success, some haven’t. But success and failure alike are left irritable and inert. True, everybody is older, and the fire is dying down into spasmodic irritability. But in all the city the fire is dying down. The stimulant is played out, and you have the accumulating irritable restlessness of New York of today. The old thrill has gone, out of socialism as out of business, out of art as out of love, and the ci
ty rushes on ever faster, with more maddening irritation, knowing the apple is a Dead Sea shiner.
At the end of the book, the man who was a little boy at the beginning of the book, and now is a failure of perhaps something under forty, crosses on the ferry from Twenty-third Street, and walks away into the gruesome ugliness of the New Jersey side. He is making another flight into nowhere, to land upon nothingness.
“Say, will you give me a lift?” he asks the red-haired man at the wheel (of a furniture-van).
“How fur ye goin’?”
“I dunno . . . Pretty far.”
The End.
He might just as well have said “nowhere!”
In Our Time is the last of the four American books, and Mr. Hemingway has accepted the goal. He keeps on making flights, but he has no illusion about landing anywhere. He knows it will be nowhere every time.
In Our Time calls itself a book of stories, but it isn’t that. It is a series of successive sketches from a man’s life, and makes a fragmentary novel. The first scenes, by one of the big lakes in America — probably Superior — are the best; when Nick is a boy. Then come fragments of war — on the Italian front. Then a soldier back home, very late, in the little town way west in Oklahoma. Then a young American and wife in post-war Europe; a long sketch about an American jockey in Milan and Paris; then Nick is back again in the Lake Superior region, getting off the train at a burnt-out town, and tramping across the empty country to camp by a trout-stream. Trout is the one passion life has left him — and this won’t last long.
It is a short book: and it does not pretend to be about one man. But it is. It is as much as we need know of the man’s life. The sketches are short, sharp, vivid, and most of them excellent. (The “mottoes” in front seem a little affected.) And these few sketches are enough to create the man and all his history: we need know no more.
Nick is a type one meets in the more wild and woolly regions of the United States. He is the remains of the lone trapper and cowboy. Nowadays he is educated, and through with everything. It is a state of conscious, accepted indifference to everything except freedom from work and the moment’s interest. Mr. Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: getting connected up. Don’t get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don’t be held. Break it, and get away. Don’t get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! “Well, boy, I guess I’ll beat it.” Ah, the pleasure in saying that!
Mr. Hemingway’s sketches, for this reason, are excellent: so short, like striking a match, lighting a brief sensational cigarette, and it’s over. His young love-affair ends as one throws a cigarette-end away. “It isn’t fun any more.” — ”Everything’s gone to hell inside me.”
It is really honest. And it explains a great deal of sentimentality. When a thing has gone to hell inside you, your.sentimentalism tries to pretend it hasn’t. But Mr. Hemingway is through with the senti- mentalism. “It isn’t fun any more. I guess I’ll beat it.”
And he beats it, to somewhere else. In the end he’ll be a sort of tramp, endlessly moving on for the sake of moving away from where he is. This is a negative goal, and Mr. Hemingway is really good, because he’s perfectly straight about it. He is like Krebs, in that devastating Oklahoma sketch: he doesn’t love anybody, and it nauseates him to have to pretend he does. He doesn’t even want to love anybody; he doesn’t want to go anywhere, he doesn’t want to do anything. He wants just to lounge around and maintain a healthy state of nothingness inside himself, and an attitude of negation to everything outside himself. And why shouldn’t he, since that is exactly and sincerely what he feels? If he really doesn’t care, then why should he care? Anyhow, he doesn’t.
Solitaria, by V. V. Rozanov
We are told on the wrapper of this book that Prince Mirsky considered Rozanov “one of the greatest Russians of modern times . . . Rozanov is the greatest revelation of the Russian mind yet to be shown to the West.”
We become diffident, confronted with these superlatives. And when we have read E. Gollerbach’s long “Critico-Biographical Study,” forty-three pages, we are more suspicious still, in spite of the occasionally profound and striking quotations from Solitaria and from the same author’s Fallen Leaves. But there we are; we’ve got another of these morbidly introspective Russians, morbidly wallowing in adoration of Jesus, then getting up and spitting in His beard, or in His back hair, at least; characters such as Dostoievsky has familiarized us with, and of whom we are tired. Of these self-divided, gamin-religious Russians who are so absorbedly concerned with their own dirty linen and their own piebald souls we have had a little more than enough. The contradictions in them are not so very mysterious, or edifying, after all. They have a spurting, gamin hatred of civilization, of Europe, of Christianity, of governments, and of everything else, in their moments of energy; and in their inevitable relapses into weakness, they make the inevitable recantation; they whine, they humiliate themselves, they seek unspeakable humiliation for themselves, and call it Christ-like, and then with the left hand commit some dirty little crime or meanness, and call it the mysterious complexity of the human soul. It’s all masturbation, half-baked, and one gets tired of it. One gets tired of being told that Dostoievsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor “is the most profound declaration which ever was made about man and life.” As far as I’m concerned, in proportion as a man gets more profoundly and personally interested in himself, so does my interest in him wane. The more Dostoievsky gets worked up about the tragic nature of the human soul, the more I lose interest. I have read the Grand Inquisitor three times, and never can remember what it’s really about. This I make as a confession, not as a vaunt. It always seems to me, as the Germans say, mehr Schrei wie Wert.
And in Rozanov one fears one has got a pup out of the Dostoievsky kennel. Solitaria is a sort of philosophical work, about a hundred pages, of a kind not uncommon in Russia, consisting in fragmentary jottings of thoughts which occurred to the author, mostly during the years 1910 and 1911, apparently, and scribbled down where they came, in a cab, in the train, in the w.c., on the sole of a bathing-slipper. But the tnought that came in a cab might just as well have come in the w.c. or “examining my coins,” so what’s the odds? If Rozanov wanted to give the physical context to the thought, he’d have to create the scene. “In a cab,” or “examining my coins” means nothing.
Then we get a whole lot of bits, some of them interesting, some not; many of them to be classified under the heading of: To Jesus or not to Jesus! if we may profanely parody Hamlet’s To be or not to be. But it is the Russian’s own parody. Then you get a lot of self- conscious personal bits: “The only masculine thing about you — is your trousers”: which was said to Rozanov by a girl; though, as it isn’t particularly true, there was no point in his repeating it. However, he has that “self-probing” nature we have become acquainted with. “Teaching is form, and I am formless. In teaching there must be order and a system, and I am systemless and even disorderly. There is duty — and to me any duty at the bottom of my heart always seemed comical, and on any duty, at the bottom of my heart, I always wanted to play a trick (except tragic duty). . . .”
Here we have the pup of the Dostoievsky kennel, a so-called nihilist: in reality, a Mary-Mary-quite-contrary. It is largely tiresome contrariness, even if it is spontaneous and not self-induced.
And, of course, in Mary-Mary-quite-contrary we have the ever- recurrent whimper: / want to be good! I am good: Oh, I am so good, I’m better than anybody! I love Jesus and all the saints, and above all, the blessed Virgin! Oh, how I love purity! — and so forth. Then they give a loud crepitus ventris as a punctuation.
Dostoievsky has accustomed us to it, and we are hard-boiled. Poor Voltaire, if he recanted, he only recanted once, when his strength had left him, and he was neither here nor there. But these Russians are for ever on their death-beds, and neither here nor the
re.
Rozanov’s talk about “lovely faces and dear souls” of children, and “for two years I have been ‘in Easter,’ in the pealing of bells,” truly “arrayed in white raiment,” just makes me feel more hard- boiled than ever. It’s a cold egg.
Yet, in Solitaria there are occasional profound things. “I am not such a scoundrel yet as to think about morals” — ”Try to crucify the Sun, and you will see which is God” — and many others. But to me, self-conscious personal revelations, touched with the guttersnipe and the actor, are not very interesting. One has lived too long.
So that I come to the end of Gollerbach’s “Critico-Biographical Study” sick of the self-fingering sort of sloppiness, and I have very much the same feeling at the end of Solitaria, though occasionally Rozanov hits the nail on the head and makes it jump.
Then come twenty pages extracted from Rozanov’s The Apocalypse of Our Times, and at once the style changes, at once you have a real thing to deal with. The Apocalypse must be a far more important book than Solitaria, and we wish to heaven we had been given it instead. Now at last we see Rozanov as a real thinker, and “the greatest revelation of the Russian mind yet to be shown to the West.”
Rozanov had a real man in him, and it is true, what he says of himself, that he did not feel in himself that touch of the criminal which Dostoievsky felt in himself. Rozanov was not a criminal. Somewhere, he was integral, and grave, and a seer, a true one, not a gamin. We see it all in his Apocalypse. He is not really a Dostoiev- skian. That’s only his Russianitis.
The book is an attack on Christianity, and as far as we are given to see, there is no canting or recanting in it. It is passionate, and suddenly valid. It is not jibing or criticism or pulling to pieces. It is a real passion. Rozanov has more or less recovered the genuine pagan vision, the phallic vision, and with those eyes he looks, in amazement and consternation, on the mess of Christianity.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1035