American Novels: 1939
I
THE second year after the Armistice that interrupted an earlier World War saw the publication of Sherwood Anderson’s Poor White, Floyd Dell’s Moon Calf, John Dos Passos’s One Man’s Initiation, Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. That was 1920; Mr. Anderson’s Wineshurg, Ohio, Mr. Cabell’s Jurgen, and Miss Glasgow’s The Builders had appeared in 1919, Miss Cather’s My Ántonia in 1918. The principal occupations of American fiction during the next decade, one would think looking back on those novels today, ought to have been clearly discernible by the end of 1920. Criticism failed to discern them, however, as anyone may see who will look up the December summaries, and even if it had been able to deal prophetically with these novels there was not, in 1920, any portent of Mr. Hemingway and Mr. Faulkner, who had become important novelists when the decade ended. And if we move forward to 1926, when their first novels were published (The Sun Also Rises and Soldiers’ Pay), there is still no omen of James Farrell or of the change in Mr. Dos Passos’s work signalized by The 42nd Parallel which was to make him, with Mr. Farrell, a dominant figure during the 1930’s.
It would have been still more difficult to predict the future in 1914, the year when Europe went to war: Theodore Dreiser’s The Titan and Joseph Hergesheimer’s The Lay Anthony seem diagnostic now but hardly seemed so then. In 1917, when the United States went to war, Mr. Hergesheimer published his best novel, The Three Black Pennys, and Mr. Cabell’s second period opened with The Cream of the Jest. The forces that would shape the fiction of the twenties are not apparent in them.
This catalogue suggests that it is a waste of time to guess what American fiction will be like when the new war ends (if the writing of fiction survives) on the basis of what it was when the war began. Nevertheless there is a certain piety in stating what it was in 1939; one sets up a monument which may serve as a point of reference and orientation later on. Whatever novels of 1939 may prove in 1945 to have been such an unregarded omen as Mr. Dos Passos’s slight war novel was in 1920, and whatever novelists of 1950 are still unpublished in 1939 as Faulkner and Hemingway were in 1920, three novels fairly represent what American fiction was in the year when Europe resumed its war, the last year when America remained ignorant how far it would have to go to war.
II
The best novel of 1939, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, has been both praised and denounced in terms that will seem extravagant a year from now. It has been overpraised, on the whole, and it has been praised for some qualities that will be recognized as weaknesses when we are as far away from it as we are from, say, The Sun Also Rises. Nevertheless it is the mature work of a man who is both a born novelist and a disciplined artist, and its success is a literary phenomenon which reveals something important about the state of fiction in 1939. That so fine a novel should be so popular is important, but more important is the fact that its popularity signifies a triumph of pure fiction. For though the implications of Mr. Steinbeck’s book are revolutionary, as a novel it is conservative and even classical. Its challenge to the status quo certainly interests its readers and its long exposition of injustice certainly fascinates them, but both challenge and exposition rest upon a common base, the primary fact that readers are moved by the book and are moved not by its thesis but by the lives of its characters. They are moved by the lives of the Joad family — by what the Joads do and feel, by what happens to them.
The widespread comparison with Uncle Tom’s Cabin is inaccurate. Doubtless many readers have been so harrowed by Mr. Steinbeck’s book that they have wanted to do something about the economic system that exploits his characters, as many of Mrs. Stowe’s readers wanted to do something about slavery. But the economic system, which Mr. Steinbeck hates as much as Mrs. Stowe hated the slave system, is not a character in his book, whereas slavery was the principal character in hers. It was, in fact, the only life in her novel; her whites and blacks, her overseers and children, were illustrations of a theorem, manipulated with the assent of the reader through an apologue. Mr. Steinbeck does not personify the object of his hatred or illustrate his theorem; he does not write an apologue. He begins at the other end: his novel is a drama of events occurring in the lives of people. The book is judgment, propaganda, and manifesto all in one. But they emerge as consequences of the drama, not as its text.
If there has ever been a ‘proletarian’ novel, The Grapes of Wrath is one, but it controverts the theories decreed for proletarian fiction by left-wing critics while there was still a literary left — before the wane of fashion and the interior stresses of American Stalinism had destroyed it. Critics of the left set up criteria which amounted to a set of specifications for fiction; they were specifications of content, and proletarian novels were to be appraised by them. The answer in theory has been reaffirmed by Mr. Steinbeck in practice: not the orthodoxy of its contents, not the class struggle, dialectics, or a prayer for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the vitality of its characters and the reality of what happened to them, would determine the worth of a proletarian novel, as of any other. One brought Les Dieux Ont Soif, Vanity Fair, Pollyanna, and The Scalp Hunters to that simple basis of judgment, and one would have to judge in the same way any novel by an editor of the New Masses. If you wanted to develop proletarian fiction your first step was to find some good novelists. And a good novelist is one who can impart the illusion of life to the imaginary creatures who are his characters.
What happens to the characters of a novel must matter to the reader — that is the primary condition of fiction, an art whose illusion consists of the belief that historical events are happening in space and time to actual people. This primary condition is drama, or, if you prefer, it is story, whether the drama be physical, mental, or spiritual. Whatever matters for the novelist — idea, vision, moral, class struggle, love, tragedy — can matter for the reader only as he makes it matter by dramatizing it in the lives of his characters. If a novel has that drama, then there may be added unto it whatever the bounty of providence may have given the novelist. If it lacks that drama, whatever blueprints may have been set up for it, whatever the novelist’s aspiration may be, whatever symbolism he may use and whatever convictions he may have, it will remain something other— and something less — than fiction. The Grapes of Wrath is fine fiction because it is the drama of events happening to the Joads, of the Joads taking part in events; they live, therefore, and what happens to them matters so tremendously that many times the reader is at the limit of his endurance.
Before this book one was not sure about Mr. Steinbeck. He had had two kinds of success, a popular kind in Of Mice and Men and the more esoteric kind represented by private editions, small presses, and the approval of coteries. The best case that could be made out for him, however, rested not on these but on In Dubious Battle, a good but not weighty novel about a strike, and on Tortilla Flat, which had even less mass but more clearly promised the abundance of The Grapes of Wrath. The short stories which created his coterie reputation were the journeyman work of an artist trying out his versatility. Some of them were excellent, but others betrayed a tendency that has destroyed a good many American novelists; they were foggy with a mysticism that was presented as poetic emotion but might turn out to be mere vagueness and emptiness.
Of Mice and Men suggested an even more serious danger. Fiction does not ask that every novel have moral ideas, but it does require of every novelist that such moral ideas as he has shall be both intelligible and worthy of respect — if they are not, the emotions associated with them cannot be valid. And the moral values in Of Mice and Men were trivial; worse, they were confused; worse still, they were false. They confused disease with tragedy (which is Thomas Wolfe’s mistake also); they asserted that folie de touche proves a defect in the moral order; and they therefore invoked on behalf of Lenny emotions which were false to the point of sentimentality. They begot a serious doubt about Steinbeck’s future work.
That doubt has been dissipated by The Grapes of Wrath, whose moral standards are clear, firm, and righteous — and without meaning apart from the lives of the Joads. Qualities that were suspect in his short stories have persisted, however, and must be noted here though they have produced no serious blemish on the book. The muchdiscussed concluding scene is an error of judgment. The trouble with it is not that others have used the same device before, nor that, as Mr. Herschel Brickell has pointed out, it does not offer a usable solution to the economic problems of the time. The trouble is that it strikes a false and sentimental note at the end of a novel which up to that point has existed in an emotional medium as pure and affecting as any in our literature. It is symbolism gone sentimental, and it confuses the stuff of poetry with the stuff of fiction. So does the mysticism put in the mouth of Jim Casy the preacher, the one character in the book whom one does not accept. There is no necessity for a character to understand his own ideas and emotions, but there is an imperative necessity for his creator to understand them. And one carries from the book a suspicion that Mr. Steinbeck does not understand Jim Casy’s mystical groping, that he has tried to fill a gap in his own understanding with a blurred poetry which no one else can understand. It is a constant temptation to novelists to suggest portentousness by writing vaguely, to try to press beyond knowledge with the devices of poetry.
The same tendency appears in the inter-chapters that break up the story of the Joads. They were necessary because no one could have stood the painfulness of the story without some tranquillizing relief. But there are too many of them, they get to be too long, and one ends by skipping them. They are most effective when they dramatize their theme in a lunchroom or a camp in the chimps; they are most ineffective when they sing the theme in poetic prose. Few lines in literature are fixed, but if any is it is the boundary between poetry and prose, and novelists can cross it only at a loss. Like many other novelists, Mr. Steinbeck is a fine poet, but like the others he is less a novelist when he looses poetry on his page.
All this, however, merely says that, thank God, there are no perfect novels. The Grapes of Wrath is the year’s best novel because it has the most abundant life; one is so engaged with the lives of its people that their experience becomes one’s own. When that can be said of any novel there is little point in saying more. Style, technique, the many skills of fiction, are inseparable from content. But it is reassuring that in 1939 the most significant novel came out of the central tradition of fiction.
III
Even more than Thomas Wolfe’s earlier novels, The Web and the Rock is a collaboration between author and publisher. The first half of it reads as if it had been written to the publisher’s specifications in order to support the second half, and the second half was admittedly assembled by the publishers from a larger bulk. This arbitrary organization makes criticism reluctant, and reluctance is increased by Mr. Wolfe’s death and his tragic unfulfillment. But that unfulfillment is the one important problem that criticism must discuss in relating him to the fiction of his time.
For The Web and the Rock confirms what Of Time and the River had already established: that the intensity of Wolfe’s desire to make fiction out of his experience was not matched by his ability, that the fury which drove him could not be disciplined into art, and that apart from fury he had only a commonplace endowment as a novelist. Look Home-ward, Angel, his first novel, manifested an intermittent and fragmentary ability to realize the vision in fiction. That was his promise. But in Of Time and the River both vision and realization had diminished; they were swamped in fury and bad prose. That diminution is progressive in The Web and the Rock, which in the last third abandons all other objectives and becomes merely a documentation of insanity that seldom troubles to assume the appearance of fiction. It is clear that Wolfe could never have overcome the forces of disintegration; they had already defeated him. The memory of his promise and the tragedy of his defeat will remain. He will go down in our literature as a tormented soul, like Herman Melville, whose books will provide psychology and literary scholarship something of the same attractive hunting ground that Melville’s do. But they are much less important than Melville’s and their failure is much less mysterious. And regret for an artist’s failure to attain greatness has never yet made a work of art great.
It is true of many novelists, perhaps of most novelists except first-rate ones, that they can make the childhood of imagined characters more real than their maturity. The probable reason is that the novelists’ own childhood was more real to them than maturity — that minor fiction is frequently a form of infantile fixation. The best parts of Wolfe’s work are nearly all to be found in the boyhood of Eugene Gant and of the George Webber who is distinguished from Eugene only by name. It is there that frenzy most often forges the objective symbols of fiction and becomes a drama of human experience, of people living with one another in a world where events occur. It is a child’s world, however, and Wolfe never gets out of it. The dreads and ecstasies throughout his work are a child’s dreads and ecstasies. The figures that move across his stage (when there is a stage, when they do move) are a child’s magnifications, images seen by eyes that must forever look upward to enormous, distorted, inhuman creatures which are not understood, which remain monstrous. The motives attributed to them are a child’s baffled interpretation of how adults think and feel; the judgments passed on them express a child’s standards. The America about which Wolfe felt so vehemently remains a child’s countryside and nation. (Compare it with an adult’s America, Mr. Steinbeck’s.) What he gives us is a child’s-eye view. He was a giant, but he was a giant child.
His violent emotions, the ether in which his books exist, are simple, superficial, and in the end empty. He had an eager, loving recognition of many facets of American life. He understood, as more sophisticated novelists sometimes fail to understand, that baseball and fishing, livery stables and boys’ gangs, the Dempsey-Firpo fight and small-town superstitions, are important to Americans, But he could not tell what their importance is; their significance always turns out to be that of something that is said to or felt by a child. The inability does not matter when George Webber is frightened by the cruelty of other boys, — it is right that a boy’s terror shall be, in one of his favorite adjectives, nameless, — but it is paralyzing when the adult George Webber falls in love with an adult woman. This love affair is the exclusive occupation of the second half of The Web and the Rock; it extends through more than three hundred pages; it is, in words, the most tortured love affair our fiction contains. But it does not press through words to experience, it never comes alive. It is related in furious language, but for all its goat cries and bitten haunches, for all its innumerable curses and insults, it remains just language. The torture is verbal; the man and woman are not tortured, for they do not live; the reader is tortured by the length of their ordeal in prose, not by its reality. One is no more moved by them than by the twelve-sheet posters of a movie advertisement. They have a vast area, but no depth.
They do not live — and that is the failure of Wolfe’s work. Nor does the failure result solely from the immaturity of his understanding; he had other, equally fatal insufficiencies. He was a solipsist; no experience but his own was real. Like Eugene Gant, George Webber sees terrible things happen to other people. But they are terrible because they cause terror in Webber, not because other people suffer. Wolfe has said repeatedly that his drive was to absorb the world and then reproduce it; but he does not absorb the world, he only confuses it with his own world-hunger; and he does not reproduce the world, but only his own frenzy. At the end of both The Grapes of Wrath and The Web and the Rock one feels a tragic pity. But the pity which The Grapes of Wrath evokes is pity for the Joads, whereas one does not pity the people of The WTeb and the Rock, who have not lived. One pities not their suffering but their author’s.
And the catalogue is not yet complete, for he was under the further handicap that he could not impose on the material that obsessed him the elementary forms of fiction. He could tell us that life is dread, that life is fury, that the world is beautiful and terrible, that men are passionate and terrified and preyed on by longing and despair, that America is many-voiced and billion-footed. They are not new nor particularly penetrating messages, they are essentially an adolescent rhetoric, but the intensity with which they are announced might have given them importance if they had been forged into drama. But they are only infrequently and imperfectly raised from rhetorical assertion into a realization of people whose lives are engaged with one another. He tells us many times about some never understood evil in Southern life; the very repetition shows that he had some idea which one may associate with William Faulkner’s mystical but nevertheless dramatized vision, but it is only in an occasional passage that a Negro goes berserk or the poor-white boys draw knives. The rest is rhapsodic language, not experience. He tells us equally often about an evil in the life of the metropolis; the very repetition shows that he had some idea which one may associate with James Farrell’s slums, but it is never wrought into such a drama as Studs Lonigan’s wasting life. It remains a statement, many pages long and made through a megaphone, that George Webber walked in the city and felt bad about it.
Is there much to him besides frenzy? If you strain out the whirling agony of words unshaped in character, whose exact designation is cyclothymia, there is left nothing that would distinguish him from scores of mediocre novelists. He is fury and little more. Now the representation of fury is a proper occupation for fiction in our era; but it is not representation that we get from him, it is pure fury untransformed. His books are its conduits, not a significant form imposed on it by art, not its projection in human life.
Again one need only turn from The Web and the Rock to The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck is always a novelist in a way that Wolfe is only briefly and incompletely. Fiction is for him the thing happening to the people he is writing about; in Wolfe’s book the thing seldom happens — it is announced, described, chanted, yelled, trumpeted, but not realized. A page of Steinbeck is, to use a dramatist’s word, scene: people saying and doing and feeling things in the world of experience. A page of Wolfe is typically Wolfe himself gloating or mourning in private about something which he tells us has happened, something which he usually neglects to make happen, something furthermore which usually has no bearing on the people of his book. Rut fiction is the people of the book and what happens to them. So in the outcome the Joads break one’s heart, while George Webber and his mistress and his sinister enemies leave one untouched. The tragedy attributed to Webber by assertion is, in outline, quite as harrowing as that of the Joads, but it remains an assertion; it is not realized in fiction as theirs is, and so it is without power.
Wolfe’s life was tragic, but it would be unfortunate if his death should create the myth that a great artist died unfulfilled. Admirers of his books who are now working at such a myth are doing a disservice to young writers and the future of our fiction. He had intensity, a great vehemence, a splendid dedication to his work, and till this last book a noble, affirmative belief in the worth of life. All those qualities should be praised and will remain an inspiration to novelists. But he found no way to focus his intensity, he never developed enough craftsmanship to work his private world into fiction, his ideas and perceptions remained those of a child, and he had little to say about human experience. The torment he lived was pitiful, but his books are a disintegration. Praise of them is a betrayal of literature. For fiction is an art: it must begin by shaping the raw stuff that is without shape and by suffusing it with life; it has no meaning, nor even existence, except as it contrives to make imaginary people seem alive and what happens to them seem important.
IV
It is a striking fact that something like half of the novels which, in the last few years, have had either a wide sale or widespread critical approval have been historical novels. Part of this mode is just what it was in the days of Janice Meredith, romantic escape, but only a small part — for the world of today is almost as much with us in historical fiction as in Mr. Steinbeck’s books. Part of the increased interest comes from our enhanced nationalism, simply as honest, tub-thumping self-righteousness, more complexly as a troubled curiosity about the roots that have blossomed in our time. More important is the fact that the current desire for ‘social’ (read ‘sociological’) fiction can be more plausibly satisfied in the simplified past than in the confused present. The historical novel of the day is commonly a stern, often a too stern, examination of social forces working in past time. Finally, the past has a strong attraction for the novelist because he knows how it came out; he is sure of it; it gives him a continuity that the present denies him. Yesterday’s pattern is finished and therefore meaningful; today’s fades into the question mark of tomorrow.
Of late years, that is, the historical novel has tended to conform to the prevailing styles of fiction; it has been realistic, psychological, and sociological. Even the enchanted province of our national nostalgia, the pre-Civil War South, has been corrupted from within; though such loyal fantasts as Margaret Mitchell and Stark Young have worked in the traditional honeysuckle, resolutes like James Boyd, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Clifford Dowdey have been assaulting the romantic myth with a realistic social thesis. One area of dream and regret has remained, however; realism has not hitherto crossed the Missouri River. The Western frontier has remained the frontier of fantasy; the scent of sagebrush has been as romantic as that of honeysuckle. What fiction has chosen to see through the arch of a Conestoga wagon has been one more faery land, where d’Artagnan’s cousins are branding steers and washing gold. This appealing convention has produced one of our most durable native literary forms. But at last the convention has been violated, realism has crossed the frontier, and the late Southern monopoly has been broken — some of the American past, it develops, occurred on free soil after all. Mr. Vardis Fisher’s prize-winning novel, Children of God, is nearly as long as Gone with the Wind; it penetrates a thousand miles beyond the Missouri, all the way to Great Salt Lake; and no one is likely to complain that it is romantic.
The book is unwieldy, heavy, and marred by a recurrent ineptness. Mr. Fisher lacks Mr. Steinbeck’s economy of line and detail; his story is dangerously long and awkwardly put together. His prose is undistinguished; at best it fulfills its function without adorning it, like Sinclair Lewis’s; at worst it is rigid, hollow, and tiresomely verbose. His history is so literal that for long stretches the imaginative leavening seems to have been left out. His emphasis on the development of the Mormons as a social body slights the religious energies that formed and sustained them, so that God’s children seldom seem to be the creatures of God’s apocalypse which they actually were, tossed by the glories and tumult of the last days.
But the book’s vitality silences such objections as these. It tells one of the great stories of American history, the rise and migration of the Mormons, and tells it by means of a remarkable diversity of characters who live in their own right. Appropriately the full-length figures of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young dominate the others, and of these Young is much better done, but they are supported by, literally, scores of figures that cover the whole extent of Mormon experience throughout a period of more than sixty years. The result is something very uncommon in American fiction: the Mormons come to live in the reader’s awareness as a people.
Now this is a formidable achievement. Criticism has talked copiously about a theoretical form called the ‘group novel,’ but, in American literature particularly, specimens have been hard to find. Here is the thing itself. What anyone who reads the novel will remember longest is a lively impression of a whole people existing as a people, the ‘ peculiar people ‘ of Mormon idiom — a group which has a life of its own, a group from which the significance of every individual life is derived. That is the mass experience at which criticism has repeatedly told the group novel it must aim. That experience would be quite impossible here except that, straining them laboriously through his stiff prose and through his not too subtle perceptions, Mr. Fisher manages to endow a great number of individual characters with unmistakable life, a life of their own, an individual life The novel is written without the pyrotechnical devices that Mr. Dos Passes uses; it is done with a slow brushwork that is commonplace and wholly traditional, a repeated flat statement of literal experience. It is seldom poignant or memorable in detail; the thing stated is seen in flat lighting, never irradiated; no passage has the heart-rending immediacy of any scene in The Grapes of Wrath. But the ultimate test of fiction proves its quality: Mr. Fisher makes you believe in this variegated company of characters as persons, makes them live as persons, and they in turn make the Mormons live as a people. The solid, slow, page-by-page effect is cumulative, and at the end one has a lasting belief in greater common life of the Church to which the humble lives belong. That is the important attribute of a distinguished novel.
It is distinguished and it gives Mr. Fisher a stature he had not had before. He here has the support of a great theme which he will not easily find again, but Children of God makes him a novelist of importance. It also displays a victory over forces strikingly like those that defeated Wolfe. His earlier work included several quite bad novels, a bulk of autobiographical dissertation, and a tetralogy comparable to Wolfe’s novels in both length and personal fury. The welter of psychological data in the tetralogy is neurotic rather than psychotic, the prose is less rhapsodic than Wolfe’s, there is less violence, and less cosmic star-dust; but, though at its wildest it has more form than Wolfe ever achieved, it is essentially the same kind of personal yell without reference to the external world. The new book does not prove that a chaotic ego can be translated into art, for it abandons the ego altogether, but it abundantly proves that a novelist with plenty of chaos in his ego can make a world, as Wolfe repeatedly failed to do. Mr. Fisher has found his fulfillment outside himself; there are few more objective novels in our literature. And if it does not solve the problem of imposing form on subjective material, it does high-light Wolfe’s insufficiency. What would Wolfe have achieved if he had been able to write about the America he sensed, the Southerners he loved and feared, or even the literary parasites he despised, as objectively as Mr. Fisher writes about the Mormons?
V
If these three novels are representative of American fiction in the first war year, then the first thing to say is that technical experimentation had reached a pause in 1939. None of the three is an ‘experimental’ novel: Wolfe intended to work within the established forms, and the other two books are conventional to an extreme. Mr. Dos Passos’s novel of the year abandoned not only his exterior decorations but even his interest in the mass-mind; it was a biography-novel as conventional in form as a Rollo book. Mr. Faulkner’s Wild Palms essayed another of the tours de force expected of him; it was less eccentric than some of its predecessors and also less successful. Mr. Steinbeck’s richness and Mr. Fisher’s prodigality found the forms at hand adequate to their needs. Creativeness usually does: though it is the destiny of experimenters to prepare the means of expression for next generation’s novelists, their experimentation usually masks some lack of the life-giving power.
All three novels are intensely American. intensely occupied with America, though in The Web and the Rock the occupation is more intent than fact. Furthermore, the America described in both The Grapes of Wrath and Children of God is heroic; in both, men labor to the utmost to shape their destiny and live according to their vision. Both thus strike the familiar major chord of American fiction, but beyond the heroism they diverge. The lives of the Joads end in despair, but the novel they compose is resolute, positive, uncompromising. It is a courageous book, a book resolved on truthtelling and on more than that. It is, if you like, a portent of the greatest hopefulness; when fiction like this is being written, when novelists are resolved to exhibit with an insistence that cannot be ignored the evils they find in our nation, it may be that we are on our way to making evil less powerful here. But there is no such optimism in Children of God. The America it displays is an America forsaking its heritage, abandoning its dream, and declining to nonentity through paralysis of the will. Well, both tendencies were visible in the United States of 1939.
Europe exists in The Web and the Rock as one further backdrop for George Webber’s madness, but has no other significance, and it does not exist at all in Children of God or The Grapes of Wrath. There is no oncoming; the war is not a part of anyone’s thought or phantasy; the novels look backward through fiction’s eternal past time on experience finished and appraised. They thus lagged, as serious fiction always docs, behind the romances of the popular magazines, which began to report the new war in their familiar clichés before the autumn of 1939 was over. Spies and military villains spoke only German in the slicks, and there remained only the further step of putting Yankee uniforms on their captors. Serious fiction, however, is not likely to take up the war till it is over and novelists can begin to analyze their experience of it. (Mr. Dos Passos’s One Man’s Initiation appeared in 1920. His Three Soldiers followed in 1921. Then came a flood of war novels so great that it seemed as if a young novelist must begin his career in art by completing his career in arms.) How far our fiction will concern itself with the new war, once it is finished, will depend on how far the United States gets involved in it, but some effort to deal with it is inevitable. Remembering what fiction has said about war during the last twenty years, one wonders whether anything new can be said; but the novel has existed for three centuries primarily on the assumption that something new can be said about love.
Yet, when the last war was over, the principal desire of our fiction was not to render account of the war but to examine American life more minutely, more realistically, and more skeptically than ever before. The net effect of the war was to bring our literature into closer touch with our experience; the true omens in the catalogue that begins this essay were the novels of 1920, and the most prophetic of them was Main Street. That impetus has lasted down to 1939; whether The Grapes of Wrath and Children of God are omens as pre-war novels, they are unmistakably postwar. If fiction comes back to them in 1942 or 1945, to take off again in a peacetime world (whatever that phrase may prove to mean), the American novel will be resuming an established tradition, not beginning a new one. They seem, in fact, a fruition of 1920; their authors were feeling more deeply about America and writing about it more maturely than their predecessors did two years after the last war was over.