Book Notes From Limbo
WHO now reads Bolingbroke?” — Burke’s candle-snuffing query has become, with change of name, a standard nomination blank for oblivion. And in our rigid, Establishment-run literary age of sheep and goats among writers, and, among critics, of sheep of another kind, the inquiry can be made sooner and be made oftener than it once was; indeed, just among American novelists, or even just among their best known novels, there is a large roster of candidates. And it’s not only who now reads, among the antiquated, Richard Carvel or The Grandissimes, or, among the discredited, Java Head or Jurgen, but among once-well-spoken-of novels that today’s fashionable and formidable critics never give a thought to — The Time of Man or They Stooped to Folly, The Venetian Glass Nephew or Miss Lulu Bett; indeed, to many very well educated people the question here would be not who reads such books but who on earth wrote them? Yet one can go to far better known novels which had a fine press in their day and a fine sale, and which still go on selling, often as paperbacks, that are seldom encountered in the higher criticism and almost never re-examined. Out of curiosity I took, as they came to mind, four such books that I had once read with varying degrees of pleasure and had not read for a great many years — Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams, Willa Gather’s A Lost Lady, Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre. In doing so, I intended no solemn investigation, no literary historian’s careful balancing of the books, but merely to see what changing fashions and a radically changed world had done, or failed to do, with a few books that achieved recognition not terribly long ago.
Booth Tarkington cannot but be a happy adolescent memory for people of a certain age, but he is today a writer with no place in even the most broadly conceived literary world. Nor is this too hard to account for. His very first success, Monsieur Beaucaire, was a period romance written with a later period’s romanticism; his big successes — Penrod, Penrod and Sam, Seventeen — were at the often hilarious expense of middle-class boyhood and adolescence. Yet, early and late, Tarkington was concerned with a species of American realism, and the eye and ear for cartoon-sized truth that went into Penrod and Willy Baxter, strengthened by his solid knowledge of urban Midwestern life, could make his concern rewarding. But of all Tarkington’s efforts, Alice Adams alone seemed successful enough, at a level high enough, to outlast its time. Published in 1921, it arrived about halfway through the period when the Midwest, preceding the South by a decade or more, dominated the literary world. Besides Tarkington, it included among others Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Zona Gale. Indianapolis, as symbol and city, seems clearly the locale for Tarkington’s story of a girl from a down-at-heel family, prodded into rising in the world by her socially ambitious mother and her own stagy dreams, and, when courted by a very eligible young man, substituting opulent fibs for the grimy facts. Chronicling it, Tarkington gave fairly meager house room to comedy, and sighed rather than smiled over his satire. Alice with her naïvely clever pretenses, Alice trying to swagger while teetering on the outmost edge of things, Alice attempting wild unmakable bids instead of putting her cards on the table, does herself in; but in some degree the cards are stacked against her, and help to ruin, rather dishonorably, the family as well. Overcompensating for many previous happy endings, Tarkington at a certain point heaps upon the Adamses such woes as suggest one of the more calamity-ridden chapters of Candide. But Tarkington’s softened conclusion is Candidean too: a sobered Alice enters business school, prepared at last to cultivate her garden patch.
What Alice Adams represents might be called the double-edged drama of unimportance, not just because much of it is touching or painful for being unimportant, but because, minute in itself, it spreads sociologically wide, and, superficial in itself, it cuts humanly deep. The enemy in such social buffetings is less snobbery than self-interest: “They leave Alice out of their dinners, and dances,” her mother remarks, “simply because she can’t give any dinners and dances to leave them out of.” There are touches of both Becky Sharp and Emma Bovary in Alice’s realistic connivings and her romantic daydreams; but much more immediate is America’s deceptive, hence often disastrous, democratic pledge of a roseate future, a storybook fate. The hero in Sherwood Anderson’s I’m a Fool tells much the same lies that Alice does; except for a reversed type of heroine, the situation in Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie is remarkably like Tarkington’s.
As a novel, Alice Adams can be cumbersome in its prose, repetitious and i-dotting in its presentation. But it is never very damagingly so; much of the dialogue is admirable, and Alice’s father seems notably real. Tarkington excels at particular scenes, not least the two which once were famous: Alice, a wallflower at her one big dance, ostentatiously playacting that she but awaits a temporarily absent dance partner; and the “dinner party” for Alice’s suitor, which, sufficiently doomed by its blunders and pretensions, is cursed with a steaming hot night, a sweltering dining room, and a housepervaded odor of brussels sprouts. Here again neither trivial concerns nor comic overtones quite deaden the painful actuality. Indeed, the book’s painfulness is more impressive than pathos would be; nor is the book altogether uncontemporary. What it revolves around would today be labeled status; what at a homely level dominates it is currently known as angst.
In Establishment circles Willa Cather stands far higher than Tarkington and seems, indeed, not precisely dismissed but, one might say, tabled — her books marked, as though they were her private papers, “Not to be examined until 1976” (when she would have been half as old as her country). There is today not just more urgent but more congenial business, for affirmation bulks large in Willa Cather’s earlier novels and escapism in her later ones. Nor does A Lost Lady lack readers today, however much in the face of today’s concerns it may lack relevance. If the book has its minor weaknesses, they were always there: a prose overscented in places, a past-tense wistfulness overstressed, a possibly indirect handling of key scenes; the flaws of an evocative, and handsomely evoked, period world — of pioneer land developers and railroaders between the Mississippi and the Rockies — in decline, and of a heroine, all “fragility and grace” and a contriver of beckoning and bright occasions but weak in fiber and succumbing to coarseness. And there is nothing unbelievable or actually suppressed or ultimately prettified about the story — nothing really very different, at least in its lyricism, its lostness, its end of an era, its passing of an order from, say, The Cherry Orchard (Ivy Peters, indeed, is a far worse Lopakhin). The analogy is a limited one: A Lost Lady is much smaller scaled, much less socially symptomatic, with more tears in it and less teeth. But in truth the book forty years ago quite lacked importance and even significance; what it had and has is a certain distinction. There is not very much that needs to be said about it: it is one of those books that induce response rather than reflectiveness, appreciation sooner than analysis, but that yet contribute something more substantial than a mood or an emotion. And however much she might be in later books, Miss Cather here is not really escapist, though very plainly elegiac. Her touch is too sure for her to be merely sentimental, as her tears — she was steeped in Virgil — bring his celebrated and humane ones to mind.
Of the four books, the most immediate best seller, though it might have seemed the most unlikely one, was The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It had qualities, rather, that appeal to a civilized, if perhaps slightly too sherry-sipping, public — the well-turned phrase, the well-wrought description, ironic touches, scholarly allusions, literary ancestry: what an Anatole France might have written with gleams of mysticism instead of mischief in his eye. It was a book for sprightly, even-tempered discussion: in 1714 — and in the very first sentence — a Peruvian bridge collapses, sending five people to their deaths in a gulf below, with the story thereafter recounting their five lives. Two of these were a Madame dc Sévigné-ish lady later immortalized by the letters she wrote to her self-centered daughter, and the maid she was traveling with; a third was a twin deeply attached to his brother and undone by his brother’s death; the others were a worldly, scholarly rascal and the small son of an actress he helped make famous. The sophisticated story and the often stylish storytelling could hardly, by themselves, have beguiled a huge reading public, and some of the explanation very likely lay in what might be called the theme. “Why did it happen,” asks Wilder’s Brother Juniper, “to those five?” Such a question, prompted by so easily visualized yet shockingly dramatic an accident, cannot but arouse curiosity concerning the answer. It possesses, in fact, a real mystery-story element — not a whodunit, for we are given to understand that God or Providence did, but a why-should-they: in other words, rather than the usual criminological gambit, a philosophical gimmick. Offered such a piquant enigma, such housebroken mysticism, a very large public might well delight for once in a highbrow game. The book, moreover, had the further merit of being extremely short, and the bridge of being most unperplexingly symbolic. “There is a land of the living,” runs the final sentence, “and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
To assign reasons, beyond the pull of fashion, for the book’s great popular success is in some respects to appraise its intrinsic value. Perhaps the big point about The Bridge is that in any real philosophic sense it has no point; neither as symbolizing the power of love nor as explicating the ways of God is the accident valid; the collapse of the bridge merely provides the scaffolding of the story. And, whether fortuitous or foreordained, the deaths of the five victims and their raison de ne pas être point much more to the book’s creator than to the world’s. The appeal of The Bridge lies in nothing structural but something decorative, not in what has meaning but in a tradition-lined, culture-mellowed sensibility. Its novelty derived from its indebtedness; it was not old hat, it was new — with borrowed plumes. Too thin and too literary to approach being literature, and unable to emerge as either high comedy or speculative drama, The Bridge falls well below what in the same genre Wilder’s The Cabala achieved — a fine gleam of mischief in at least one eye, a fine command of high comedy in much of the book.
Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre — as the shameless front and back covers of the paperback edition attest — goes smooching on; indeed, its boasted eight million readers proclaim how spectacularly Caldwell hit pay dirt. That, thanks also to Tobacco Road, he became a kind of laureate of sex and squalor is too bad; for, however given to unrationed sex and in places to unrealized objectives, God’s Little Acre has still its comic vigor, its blend of the human, subhuman, and heroic called lustiness, its vivid folk characterizations, and — rare in the fiction of the 1930s — its dramatized rather than editorialized feeling for the exploited.
At one extreme stands Ty Ty, the Walden family’s monomaniac sire and sage, digging “scientifically” for gold on his Georgia farm, but never digging, indeed forever shifting, the acre whose yield would have to be given to the church. At the other extreme stands his son-in-law Will Thompson, the leader of striking mill workers who, in an austerely powerful scene, is murdered by company guards. Grouped between the two, shiftless and sullen, easygoing and passionate, jealous and generous, are sons and suitors, are the daughters of the house and Griselda, the beautiful daughter-in-law, the femme-fatale cause of one of Ty Ty’s sons being killed by another. The murdered rich city-son seems to me largely cardboard, and, however maddened by Griselda’s beauty, seems used in turn as a diabolus ex machina. The dialogue varies in saltiness and convincingness; the comic and realistic do not always dovetail, though together they provide a folkish whole; passages involving what today would be termed the mystique of primitive love and sex are rather glumpy, and sex itself almost as frequent and regular as breathing. Yet in the sexual landscape of 1968, Caldwell’s bawdry — comic when a gluttonous rural recreation, not so comic when a dangerous family free-for-all — seems a little old-fashioned and ever so faintly biblical. And even if the story, while projecting diversity rather than unity of mood, provides monotony rather than variety of motivation, it yet takes on a certain life of its own and, in its darker pages, a certain dimension.
None of these test novels emerges as anything like a major work, none can be indignantly cited as the victim of criminal critical neglect; indeed, the significant inference may be how many other neglected novels of roughly the same period possess much the same merit. Yet if none of these books is in any way a landmark or a monument, all four have two things that much well-regarded current fiction, whatever its greater relevance or its own particular virtues, lacks: they have merit as novels, they give pleasure as reading matter. (Still, what is relevance? Recently, students of mine found Odets’ Awake and Sing rather “interesting” — but just as a very decided period piece; and they may well have been right.)
Mr. Kronenberger, literary critic and essayist, appears in theATLANTICon a regular basis.
For these and many comparable novels, neglect is in any age inevitable, there being far too much else to outshine or overshadow them; and today’s issues, crises, compulsions, fostering indifference toward the past generally, cannot but increase the neglect. It is further much increased at the very citadel and center of literary appraisal. Nowadays the class of readers who, so to speak, read superior books are much less explorative and self-determining than formerly, when they were drawn from book to book through curiosity rather than counsel, infection rather than instruction. Nowadays too many such people read for a purpose, too few for cultivated pleasure. For today literature, even just American literature, is a vast academic industry, with, as compared to a generation ago, innumerably more people going to college, and perhaps ten times as many to graduate school, so that reading for serious pleasure sadly trails reading for term papers, for theses, for research, for publication, for tenure; so that preferring to explore on one’s own or to order à la carte can be not just discouraged but disastrous. Yet it’s not only that the curriculum is so table d’hôte, it’s that it is uniformly so, it’s that English departments throughout the country seem part of a vast restaurant chain. Moreover, the fewness of the authors listed, which might suggest more reading leisure, in practice dooms it: too often the Melvilles and Jameses, the Faulkners and Frosts, must be read in full, must be read in depth, besides which graduate students and professors must read everything written about them, must read all kinds of dissertations and publish-or-perish material, couched in an unrhythmic, not to say unreadable, prose, encrusted with jargon and weedy with vogue words, and with any page appearing without footnotes as unseemly as a French lady appearing in public without gloves.
Perhaps bulking as large as the immured readingfor-a-purpose of those with their livings at stake is the perturbed reading of those who see at stake their lives; theirs the huge literature urgently connected today with the world about them, with all the arguments and analogies, the symptoms and strategies, the malignancies and therapies concerning violence and Vietnam, slum poverty and overpopulation, delinquency and drugs, conflicts of race and clashes of isms, all this abundant and alarming enough to account for ours being the most unhistorical-minded of generations.
Among those much less committed and those much less au courant, largely middle-aged, middleclass, middlebrow, the people who indeed never do anything for what is new or bold in writing but who frequently keep unfashionable books alive — as, at their most serviceable, they once did with Dickens and George Eliot, and with Frost as well as Tennyson — there is always a greater life-span for novels like A Lost Lady and Alice Adams and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. They are never in the shop window, nor do they belong there, but they are somewhere at the back of the shop; this a reasonable fate, not a hard one. A little curiously, and it only occurred to me while writing this, none of the four books I hit upon is in the least autobiographical in its story, though three of them are in their setting. Unlike today when, with its anxiety and alienation, the sociological and the subjective tend to unite in fiction, the treatment in novels like these four is primarily detached and rarely self-entangled; and if compared with today, the theme or problem seems less probed and illuminated, even a God’s Little Acre has qualities that make it still accessible, identifiable, and not flagrantly irrelevant. That there is nothing difficult about any of these four novels perhaps argues that there is nothing deep as well; yet, however vital and central are today’s major works, can we with certainty contend how deep they are in an age rampant with swirling waters and quite bereft of still ones?