Sawing the Air
I can take off my shirt and tear it, and so make a ripping razzly noise, and the people will say: ‘Look at him tear his shirt.’ — SANDBURG.
Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently. — SHAKESPEARE.
THE two vices of style to which current novelists are most addicted, aside from mere slovenliness, are affectation and sentimental violence. I have had my say on the subject of affectation. Affectation is bad enough. But the most suicidal practice of writers insensitive to verbal niceties is the constant, mechanical use of words, especially of adjectives and adverbs, denoting what Mr. Swinnerton so well calls ‘extremity of feeling.’ Next to ‘poignant,’ the favorite word of the moment is probably ‘passionate.’ ‘A passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her’: the first half of the phrase might well be from an English pen; it is the ‘sadistic’ note of the second half that marks it for the work of either Mr. Hecht or Mr. Fitzgerald. And even the sadism is not a certain indication of American authorship; for does not Mr. Swinnerton represent the very nicest of his three lovers as ‘shot through and through with an impulse either to kiss or to strike her’?
In much the same class, but less common and more affected, is the word ‘intolerable,’ which Mr. Hergesheimer has brought into style among Americans, and which Mr. Swinnerton does not disdain. Not even Mr. Lewis is immune to this infection. Even his
Babbitt is capable of intolerable and illogical emotions on hearing Mrs. Judique sing ‘My Creole Queen.’ But Mr. Lewis is not up to the Hergesheimer pitch. It was the hero of Cytherea who, ‘with an involuntary and brutal movement,’ took, if I remember, the heroine in his arms, ‘and kissed her with a flame-like and intolerable passion.’ It was intolerable; but she bore it. It was flame-like; but she survived.
The trouble with this sort of thing is not that we do not like to be moved, but that this is not the way to move us. It is particularly among the English writers that the excessive use of superlatives and of repetitions defeats its own purpose and wears out all our power of faith in the emotions represented. Mr. Swinnerton is not content to have his hero shot through and through with an impulse: he must needs have his heroine shot through and through with knowledge, and pierced through and through with longing, and even a quiet domestic scene must be shot through and through with a beautiful tranquillity. Things are not felt passionately, which in itself implies a considerable degree of feeling; things must be felt most passionately. People are not singularly, that is uniquely, moved: they must be most singularly moved. The heroine must not be merely shaken with a shudder; it must be, ‘A deep shudder shook her.’ If there is one word in English which tells of extreme feeling it is the word anguish; my dictionary calls it ‘excruciating distress.’ Anguish is a word which should stand out on a page like a scarlet hunting-coat on a snowy landscape. ‘Shuddering anguish’ is ultra-violet, and beyond our range of vision.
It has been suggested that some countenance is lent to the latter-day story-tellers by the fondness of Henry James, in such books as The Awkward Age and The Golden Bowl, for adjectives like wonderful, beautiful, magnificent. And I am inclined to grant that certain writers have been misled by this mannerism of James, and that much that is sentimental and affected in current writing has its ultimate origin in tricks of style which in the master are properly neither affected nor sentimental. Above all, not sentimental. For it is obvious, on reflection, that these adjectives are not so much the property of James as of his characters, for whom they make up a sort of smart drawing-room jargon, half-humorous in tone.
And, what is still more to the point, these terms of extravagant approval are not applied to the feelings. It is by quite other means that James indicates the generally suppressed emotions of his dramatis personæ. It is their social form, the intelligence with which they meet the tests applied to one another, which receives this meed of whimsical praise. It is simply the recognition these people give to the very definite moves they make in their complicated and exacting social game. To apply the term ‘magnificent’ to the high ‘line’ taken by Mrs. Brookenham in regard to the proposed marriage of Nanda and Van, or ‘beautiful’ to the strategy by which Maggie wins back her husband and mends her broken bowl, is like applying the same terms to a move in chess by which one double-checks his opponent’s king. The citation of James is the best means of exposing the crudeness of certain writers who may fancy themselves his disciples.
The least convincing and most nauseating passages in current novels are naturally the scenes of love-making. In the books of last year, it is true, there was a certain abatement of what I may be allowed to call the crushedstrawberry manner. In The Bright Shawl Mr. Hergesheimer has given us a book without love-making. The lovemaking of Joan and Johnny in The Cathedral is demure enough, with no reminder of the crushing embraces of the earlier works of Mr. Walpole. Mr. Hecht and Mr. Fitzgerald do indeed hark back to the physical violence of year before last. ‘His arms crushed her. He fastened against her. He could brook no resistance.’ That is from Gargoyles. In The Beautiful and Damned, it was the heroine’s dress that suffered. ‘Together they crushed out the stiff folds of her dress in one triumphant and enduring embrace.’ Mr. Hutchinson rises in one passage to the requirements of sentimental passion of the arms-and-the-man type, but with a discreet avoidance of unpleasant images. The whole passage is worth citation.
She caught her breath. . . .
The thing’s too poignant for the words a man has.
She was caught in his arms, terribly enfolding her. He was crying in her ears, passionately, triumphantly, ‘Rosalie! Rosalie!’ She was in his arms. Those long, strong arms of his were round her; and she was caught against his heart, her face upturned to his, his face against her own; and she was swooning, falling through incredible spaces, drowning in incredible seas, sinking through incredible blackness; and in her ears his voice, coming to her in her extremity like the beat of a wing in the night, like the first pulsing roll of music enormously remote, ‘Rosalie! Rosalie!’
The thing’s too poignant for the words one has.
Surely Mr. Hutchinson need not tell us more than once what we have a thousand times determined for ourselves. But what we should like him to tell us is, why, with such a conviction of the inadequacy of his words, he continues to pour them forth with such merciless copiousness. One cannot even distinguish in Mr. Hutchinson the words of this year from those of last. There is only a difference in the relative frequency of one or another. ‘Frightful’and ‘terrible’ and ‘horrible’ may turn up more frequently in last year’s book; they may count up by the dozens or the scores. In this year’s book the dozens or the scores are for ‘extraordinary,’ ‘enthralling,’ ‘enormous,’ and ‘pathetic.’ ‘Inconceivably tremendous, unimaginably awful,’ in last year’s book gives way in this to ‘most terribly pathetic’ and ‘extraordinarily wonderful and delicious,’ ‘utterly splendid’ to ‘tremendously splendid,’ ‘perfectly wonderful’ to ‘enormously wonderful.’ On the whole, in the later book, the same word will be found used about twice as often on a page as in the earlier.
The thoughts of Rosalie, not sequent, but going about and amounting thusly, were thus: ‘That is very pathetic. That is horribly sad and pathetic. Coming at the end like that and without any strokes and flourishes, it is as if she was exhausted of her hate and rage and just put out an utterly tired hand and set this here like a sigh. That’s pathetic, the mere look of it and that thought of it. . . . And then she steps back on his foot and there’s “his dear face” smiling at her; ah, it’s pathetic, it’s poignant! I can see it absolutely. Yes, I can . . . that frightful ending of hers: “You can get dozens and dozens of men to love you, but you have taken mine and I can never, never get another.” That is most terribly pathetic. I think that is the most poignant thing I have ever heard. Well, I can realize its utter pathos; I can realize it but I cannot feel it.’
All within a page, and no end in sight!
In some parts of This Freedom there is just a suggestion of a very great story-teller. It was the manner of Charles Dickens, having fastened upon some droll or grotesque feature of a character, to ring the changes upon it humorous-wise in his own delicious and inimitable way, till the whole family of readers was sated with laughter. But it is with visible and substantial things that he deals, and not with adjectives; or, if with adjectives, it is not the sort of adjectives which make up the stock of Mr. Hutchinson. There is Miss Murdstone as seen by David Copperfield on her first arrival: —
She brought with her two uncompromising hard black boxes, with her initials on the lid in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman, she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone.
There is always in Dickens a great stir and bustle like that which Mr. Hutchinson tries to create in the opening chapters of This Freedom. But it is a real stir and bustle, a real drollery, made up of human traits and movements caught by an artist, and not the tedious and factitious liveliness of This Freedom, with its endless harping on those extraordinary and wonderful males!
But, after all, the absurdities of Mr. Hutchinson are too gross and palpable to justify long comment. The moral of Mr. Hutchinson is for Mr. Swinnerton and Mr. Walpole. The author of Nocturne and Coquette is worth saving, and still more the author of Fortitude and The Duchesse of Wrexe. And they are much in need of saving from the contagion of this manner of writing. They do not indulge in mawkish pentameters and lisping Homeric similes, like Mr. Hutchinson; they do not, like him, quote and garble the poems of Stevenson and Byron and Wordsworth (If Winter Comes, page 411; This Freedom, pages 151, 159); not to speak of the litany (page 138), and the familiar rules of mathematics (page 224). But do they realize how often they suggest the manner of their popular compatriot? They may not so often disarrange the order of English words with the smirking selfconceit of a Roman buck wearing his toga with a difference. (‘When from her first terrible dismay — that frightful crying, her face turned to the pillow — she had recovered; when to the lovely ardour of her love — stealing about her, soothing her, in the night; bursting upon her, ravishing her, in the morning — she had passed on.) But neither Mr. Walpole nor Mr. Swinnerton is altogether above the temptations of sentimental foppishness in the placing of words. ‘He looked across at the house as on the evening of his arrival from that same step he had looked.’(The Cathedral.) ‘Almost, her lips trembled. . . . Almost, he did not look at her.’ (The Three Lovers.)
And both these talented novelists have, in particular, largely gone over to the convulsive manner of indicating emotion by a series of adjectival shocks about as indicative of true feeling as the twitching features of a paralytic. I do not suppose they are deliberately imitating the style of their popular rival.
I will not be so cynical as to suggest that they have been affected by a vision of his gate-receipts. I doubt if they have any idea of the habits they have fallen into. Does Mr. Swinnerton know that, in the use of the words ‘extraordinary’ and ‘extraordinarily,’ he has exceeded in his last book the average frequency of Mr. Wells, and actually approaches the figures of Mr. Hutchinson? Does Mr. Walpole know how often, in his wish to make us realize the suffering of his characters, he uses the words ‘horrible’and ‘horror,’ ‘terrible’ and ‘terribly,’ ‘desperate’ and ‘desperately’? Does either of them realize how often, in the effort to make us jump with their characters, they jab us with the words ‘sudden’ and ‘suddenly,’ until we grow hard skin over that sensitive spot? ‘Suddenly an absurd fancy seized her. . . . Then suddenly it overcame her. . . . He suddenly smiled. . . . She suddenly realized. . . . “Love me!” he burst out suddenly, starting up in his chair. . . . He turned, looking at her. Then suddenly put his arms around her and kissed her.’ All in less than two pages. This happens to be from The Cathedral, but it might just as well be from The Three Lovers.
It is in passages where they would render the sensations of a character with a weak or agitated heart that these men most remind us of Mr. Hutchinson. I have seldom met with a person in fiction who was so liable as Patricia Quin to racing, beating, and fluttering of the heart — a person, that is, who is supposed to possess a sound organ. Mr. Walpole has more occasion for registering such phenomena, inasmuch as he is preparing the reader for the eventual death of Archdeacon Brandon. But Mr. Walpole might have given us quite sufficient warning of that event with a third or a quarter of his display of medical science. The thing begins to get ridiculous long before we come to the death of the Archdeacon. The climax comes when the author assures us, in a most serious passage, that ‘Brandon’s heart began to race round like a pony in a paddock.’ It is this kind of thing that makes one feel in reading The Cathedral and The ThreeLovers that one is dealing with hackwork, turned out by the yard — the sort of thing they do in Hollywood and Carmel-by-the-Sea.
This is in no sense the style of the great dramatic writers. It is the refuge of those who feel not deeply but too well; or it is the makeshift of those who feel obliged to procure houses and motors more suitable to their social position. Archdeacon Brandon is well conceived, and obviously of the kindred of Michael Henchard, the Casterbridge grain-merchant and his own worst enemy. Let Mr. Walpole read again his Mayor of Casterbridge. Mr. Walpole is evidently a disciple of Dostoevsky, who writes so profoundly of the spiritual history of ‘our town.’ Let him read The Brothers Karamazov. Let him read Anna Karénina. He and Mr. Swinnerton wish to represent the mental sufferings of human beings strongly endowed. Let them read of the insomnia of Evelyn Innes, which drove her into the convent, or of Esther Waters awaiting the news from the Derby which was to settle the fate of her husband — life or death. The great writers deal not in adjectives, the words of the year; they deal ‘boldly with substantial things.’
Oh, that I had the brush of Max Beerbohm! Oh, that I had his pen, that I might show these men, in parody, the folly of their ways! But the author of A Christmas Garland has woven a wreath for distinguished brows. It is men of note whom he celebrates with parody — John Galsworthy and Joseph Conrad, Maurice Hewlett and Hilaire Belloc. Let the younger men choose their company, let them choose their models well, lest they may never be game for such as Max Beerbohm.