Second Mencken Chrestomathy (45 page)

But what of the thing itself? Is it good stuff? My feeling is that it isn’t. More, my feeling is that Dreiser is no more fitted to do a book of speculation than Joseph Conrad, say, is fitted to do a college yell. His talents simply do not lie in that direction. He lacks the mental agility, the insinuating suavity, the necessary capacity for romanticising a syllogism. Ideas themselves are such sober things that a sober man had better let them alone. What they need, to become bearable to a human race that hates them and is afraid of them, is the artful juggling of a William James, the insurance-agent persuasiveness of an Henri Bergson, the boob-bumping talents of a Martin Luther—best of all, the brilliant, almost Rabelaisian humor of a Nietzsche. Nietzsche went out into the swamp much further than any other explorer; he left such pall-bearers of the spirit as Spencer, Comte, Descartes and even Kant all shivering on the shore. And yet he never got bogged, and he never lost the attention of his audience. What saved him was the plain fact that he always gave a superb show—as good, almost, as a hanging. He converted the problem of evil into a melodrama with nine villains; he made of epistemology a sort of intellectual bed-room farce; he amalgamated Christianity and the music of Offenbach.…
Well, Dreiser is quite devoid of that gift. Skepticism, in his hands, is never charming; it is simply despairing. His criticism of God lacks ingenuity and audacity. Earnestly pursuing the true, he too often unearths the merely obvious, which is something not true at all. One misses the jauntiness of the accomplished duellist; his manner is rather that of an honest householder repelling burglars with a table-leg. In brief, it is enormously serious and painstaking stuff, but seldom very interesting stuff, and never delightful stuff. The sorrows of the world become the sorrows of Dreiser himself, and then the sorrows of his reader. He remains, in the last analysis, the novelist rather than the philosopher. He is vastly less a Schopenhauer than a Werther.

From the
American Mercury
, Feb., 1930, p. 254

Dreiser’s writing continues to be painful to those who seek a voluptuous delight in words. It is not that he writes merely bald journalese, as certain professors have alleged, but that he wallows naïvely in a curiously banal kind of preciosity. He is, indeed, full of pretty phrases and arch turns of thought, but they seldom come off. The effect, at its worst, is that of a hangman’s wink. He has been more or less impressed, apparently, by the familiar charge that his books are too long—that his chief sin is garrulousness. At all events, he shows a plain awareness of it: at one place he pauses in his narrative to say, “But hold! Do not despair. I am getting on.” The point here, however, is not well taken. He is not actually garrulous; he always says something apposite, even though it may be obvious. What ails him is simply an incapacity to let anything go. Every detail of the human comedy interests him so immensely that he is bound to get it down. This makes, at times, for hard reading, but it has probably also made Dreiser. The thing that distinguishes him from other novelists is simply his astounding fidelity of observation. He sees every flicker of the eye, every tremor of the mouth, every change of color, every trivial gesture, every awkwardness,
every wart. It is the warts, remember, that make the difference between a photograph and a human being.

From the Jewish
Daily Forward
, April 21, 1940. This was a special issue in celebration of Cahan’s eightieth birthday

“The Rise of David Levinsky” was one of the great literary events of the last dismal war to save democracy, and the book sticks in my mind to this day as one of the best American novels ever written. There were high hopes, at the time, that its distinguished success would draw Mr. Cahan away from the razzle-dazzle of daily journalism, and set him up as what might be called a career novelist, but he chose to go on giving his chief energies to his paper. Though I may regret that decision, I think I can at least understand it, for my own main interest, despite a number of ventures into books, has always been in the sort of writing that is printed today and forgotten tomorrow. It is quickly gone, but it is done while the mood is hot, and there is a kind of satisfaction in it that no work for the library can ever quite match. I like to think that even Shakespeare, when he pulled up to his desk, had the Bankside audience of next month, next week, or even next day in mind; not the cloistered scholars who, in some uncertain future, were to snuffle his texts. Mr. Cahan has given us no more “David Levinskys,” but he has done hard service, day in and day out, upon busy and hazardous fronts, and at eighty he may look back, as few men can ever look back, upon a long series of genuinely valuable accomplishments. It is a fine feat to write a first-rate novel, but it is also a fine feat to steer a great newspaper from success to success in difficult times. He has done both, and so my congratulations on his birthday are double—first, those of journalist to journalist, and then those of critic to novelist. I add the felicitations of an old friend who laments the fact that, in these later years, I have had the happiness of seeing him only too seldom.

The merits of “The Rise of David Levinsky” do not dim as the
years pass. It remains a fascinating story, and a completely competent piece of writing. It is difficult, re-reading it, to believe that the author, at the time it was under way, was doing most of his daily writing in another language. As I said of it back in 1917, it is done in English that is not only clear and honest, but also full of notable subtleties. The right word is always in the right place; there is none of the dull obviousness that marks so much American fiction, even today. We have had in this country native novelists—and good ones, too—with no more feeling for the language than a cat. We have had novels that read as if they had been written in Choctaw, and then clawed into English by translators having only the most meagre grasp of either language. But Mr. Cahan wrote as if English had been his tongue since childhood, and its writing his chief occupation. There was a brilliant surface to the book, and it was rich in happy and penetrating phrases. No critical acumen was needed to see that it had not been thrown off in a hurry: it was the mature and painstaking work of an artist with long experience behind him, and an extraordinary talent. Thus it is remembered today after nearly a quarter of a century, though most of the other fiction of its year is now as forgotten as the contemporary fashion in women’s hats.

It was remarkable also as a social document, and holds its importance in that character. No better novel about the immigrant has ever been written, or is likely to be written. The proletarian authors of our own day have devoted themselves heavily to the subject, and brought out a great many indignant and shocking books, but none of them has ever come within miles of the philosophical insight of Mr. Cahan. His David Levinsky is not a mere bugaboo in a political pamphlet; he is an authentic human being, shrewdly observed and very adroitly carved and painted. A man above the general, but still a man authentically of the general. The old East Side swarms about him; he never steps out of the ranks of his own people; they belong to his story as much as he himself belongs to it. Thus he takes on, in the end, a kind of representative character, and becomes the archetype of a civilization now greatly changed, and in most ways not for the better. If any more vivid presentation of the immigrant’s hopes and disappointments, thoughts and feelings, virtues and vices has ever been got upon paper,
then it has surely escaped me. All other novels upon the same theme fall short, in one way or another, of this one.

From the
Smart Set
, Jan., 1909, pp. 157–58.
A review of T
HE
H
ERMIT AND THE
W
ILD
W
OMAN
, by Edith Wharton; New York, 1908

Mrs. Edith Wharton’s new volume of short stories is one of those genteel and well-made books which seem to presuppose a high degree of culture and no little personal fastidiousness in the reader. I have read Conrad and Kipling on the deck of a smelly tramp steamer, with my attire confined to a simple suit of pajamas, and somehow, the time, the place and the garb seemed in no wise indecent; but after I had passed the first story in Mrs. Wharton’s book, I began to long for a velvet smoking jacket and a genuine Havana substitute for my corncob pipe. That is to say, the main concern of this charming and excellent writer is with the doings and meditations of ultra-civilized folks. The mental processes of an artist losing faith in his work, of a statesman tortured by an indiscreet wife, of a social climber reaching higher and higher—these are the problems in psychology that engage her. Her Hermit and her Wild Woman, true enough, are savages, but after all, they are mere figures of speech, and one feels that she means them to typify far more complex persons. In all the other stories we are frankly above the level of those who sweat and swear. It is not especially fashionable persons that she draws, for she knows well enough that fashionable persons often have elemental minds. A fairly accurate notion of her field may be derived from the thought that her average hero would suffer acutely on hearing a ragged entrance of the wood wind, or on suddenly encountering, by some mischance, a portrait in crayon. Of such are the people of her stories, and it
is needless to say that she pictures them with a sure and artistic hand.

From the
Smart Set
, Dec., 1911, p. 151.
A review of E
THAN
F
ROME
, by Edith Wharton; New York, 1911

The virtue of “Ethan Frome” is the somewhat uncommon virtue of dignity—of that dignity which belongs to sound, conscientious, thoughtful execution. In design the thing is far from impeccable. Mrs. Wharton, in truth, begins downright clumsily. The narrative proper is hidden behind a sort of prologue—a device unnecessary and fruitful of difficulties. But once she gets into that narrative, once the bad start is over, the rest of the tale is managed with such grace and skill, with such nice balance and care for detail, that one quickly forgets the artificiality of its beginning. We have here, in brief, an excellent piece of writing. Mrs. Wharton has seldom given better evidence of her craftsmanship. The dismal story of Ethan Frome, the lorn New England farmer; of his silent sacrifices for his insane mother, his hypochondriac wife; of his pitiful yearning for little Mattie Silver; of his endless, hopeless struggle with the unyielding soil; of the slow decay and death of his hopes, his ambitions, his lingering joy in life—this story, as it is set down, gathers the poignancy of true tragedy. One senses the unutterable desolation of those Northern valleys, the meaningless horror of life in those lonely farmhouses. A breath of chill Norwegian wind blows across the scene. There is in Ethan some hint of Alfred Allmers, of Hjalmar Ekdal. He is the archetype of an American we have been forgetting, in our eagerness to follow the doings of more pushful and spectacular fellows. He is the American whom life has passed over like the lightnings, leaving him hurt and mute by the roadside.

From the Baltimore
Sun
, May 28, 1939.
A review of T
HE
G
RAPES OF
W
RATH
, by John Steinbeck; New York, 1939

A shrill falsetto of enthusiasm for “The Grapes of Wrath” is passing through the pink weeklies and other such heralds of the New Day. That enthusiasm, of course, is only formally literary, for in a pink’s starry eyes fidelity to the Moscow theology always comes first, and aesthetic form and rational content only afterward. Whether or not Mr. Steinbeck is a Marxian, I don’t know, but I suspect that he isn’t. There are times, to be sure, when he seems to incline that way, but there are also times when he hauls up suddenly and busts out with the plain truth.

The story he has to tell is quite simple. A family of share-croppers in the Arkansas cotton belt, having afflicted the soil for years and gone further and further into debt, is finally chased off its so-called farm by the owner, who puts in tractor crews in an effort to get at least a part of his money back. At the moment this foul scheme of Wall Street goes into effect the circular of a California labor agent falls into the hands of the head of the house. Spelling it out, he discovers that it offers huge wages in the orchards and vineyards out there, with all the levantine domestic comforts of Hollywood. So the poor idiot piles his family into a rickety truck and the whole gang makes tracks for the new Utopia.

The result, it goes without saying, is something hard to distinguish from disillusion. After a hard trip over the deserts and mountains, the Joads find that California is really not Utopia at all. On the contrary, it is an unfriendly land swarming with other poor idiots looking for the same easy and lucrative jobs—sometimes only a dozen to each job, but more often a hundred. In consequence, wages are down to the bare sustenance level, and in many case below it, and general living conditions approximate those of a badly run hog-pen. The effects upon the Joads are naturally catastrophic. When we leave them at last they are in an advanced stage of disintegration
and apparently starving to death. Two of them have died and been buried along the road, a third is a fugitive from justice, two more have deserted, a sixth has gone crazy, a baby has been born and died, and another is on the way. Meanwhile, a fellow-traveler has been first jailed and then murdered. The survivors have run out of gas, food and hope.

It is not a pleasant story, but Mr. Steinbeck tells it with considerable skill. Though some of his personages are so grotesque that they often verge upon the ludicrous, he yet manages to keep them more or less real, and even to enlist the reader’s sympathy for them. He makes them talk in a dialect that is authentically vulgar American, and save when the temptation besets him to unload his political and theological theorizings upon them, he holds them in character. In the mother of the flock, and its only even remotely intelligent member, he has produced a very plausible figure, and one that, moreover, is undeniably appealing. But it is one thing to draw a gallery of convincing men, women and children, and quite another thing to work out in a rational way the genesis of their destiny. This last is the business of any really first-rate novelist, but at it Mr. Steinbeck surely does not shine. The best he can suggest is that all the troubles of the Joads are due to the evil machinations of economic royalists. In brief, the ideational structure of his story is borrowed, lock, stock and barrel, from the dismal hooey that fills the pink weeklies every week. Most of his interludes of formal exposition and speculation—there is one between every two chapters—might have been lifted almost verbatim from the editorials in the
New Republic
, and whenever he attempts to give his narrative a flavor of
Tendenz
the result is indistinguishable from the sociological gurgling that goes on
ad nauseam
in the
Nation.