Chapter III: Ideas (3)

The corruptly glamorous values of an exploiting class are absorbed by the people, not because the people are corrupt, but because they lack values and glamour of their own. They have no ethos, they have no myth, they have no simplest story in which the elements of the laboring life take on essential and intrinsic worth. Lincoln, let it not be overlooked, became a corporation lawyer—like any movie hero. And Whitman has not yet been translated into American speech. But when a poet does arise, inspired to sing, as Burns did for his people, the values and virtues of laboring men as men, rather than as aspirants to wealth, the masses will follow him—even in the movies.

It is significant that no one has yet given the movie audience a set of values other than the prevailing. Has anyone tried? We suspect that such a poet would not languish in the anterooms of all the movie magnates.

And one reason for our confidence is the unique case of Charlie Chaplin. The average moviegoer does not love Chaplin more than he does Doug Fairbanks or Harold Lloyd or Lon Chaney because he thinks that Chaplin is a greater artist. The average movie fan believes that the high art of the screen is in such stars as Swanson or the Gishes. He is likely to be a bit ashamed of his love for Charlie. There are a dozen more “admired” actors. But the average American loves Chaplin most tenderly because Chaplin on the screen is so often a poor cuss of the people who remains one: and who “puts it over,” not by becoming a millionaire, but by remaining a human being. Charlie as waiter, bricklayer, fireman, bank sweeper, pawnbroker’s assistant, convict, is not at the tale’s end and in accordance with film formula, the owner of the restaurant, the contractor, the fire commissioner, the banker, the police lieutenant. He remains, fragilely, wholly, triumphantly, of the people. (“The Gold Rush,” in which Charlie strikes gold, is an exception.) He is the frail and unutterably sweet beginning of a movie mythos in which the common man may absorb poetic values not by changing his class, but _by becoming himself_. And this is the true reason why the common man adores him.

Here is a first step in our American labor and farmer movement which remains to be taken. It consists in the creating of living values within the life of laborer and farmer. Only so will the extrinsic values of “getting ahead” and of “getting into another class” be displaced. When such living values exist, the radical movements organized to put labor into power will have something to work with.

_1927_

3. THE COMEDY OF COMMERCE

Industrialism’s mood is tragic. In the early years, men’s wonder gave to it the glamour of romance. Something of the delicious terror memorialized in “The Castle of Otranto” went to men’s consideration of these new giants fleshed of iron and belching steam. But the monsters’ bite was too hard; too dolorous was the displacement which they brought to good men’s lives. These were no proper prodigies like the “Gothic,” avenging merely wrongs and rescuing the noble. So the romantic mood grew swiftly dark. With the early socialists and anarchists, it took on the Doom note of prophecy. Zola made it tragic. In the muckraking days of our magazines, the tales of factory and mill were grey and ominous. They were, indeed, replicas of the infernos of our industrial towns. Laughter, like the hero-workman’s little girl, languished and died in those swart caves whose breath was a blast and whose light was a sear of fire.

But as industrialism became more the usual circumstance, we began to react against it. And our reaction, having as its aim recovery, was comedic. That particular response to the grim industrial glower, which is the Comedy of Commerce, has found perfection in America. In England, the monsters’ bite has been too cruel. There are no spirits left, there is no energy, for the recovering laugh. In the Latin countries, the monsters’ sway is not bitter enough as yet to have provoked a systematic answer. (There are signs of it in France.) In Germany, as soon as industrialism flourished, the Teuton genius turned not to a balance of frolic or of smiles, but to an ideal compensation. The machine was drafted by neo-Hegelian argument into the soldierly service of Kultur. In America, we had no such metaphysical bent. The best we could do with our industrial tragedy was to cover it up with a surface, coruscating and comedic.

The symbol of this new comedy is the electric light on Broadway. It is, of course, commercial and of industrial antecedents. It is bright, dazzlingly. It displays power and wealth, yet it does not reveal. Instead it covers, with its hard cold beams, the rather shoddy buildings. It distracts the eye from the beholding of sources. It is a light that blinds. Any artist will assure you that the electric light is _false_—in the sense that it deforms.

But thanks to such enterprise, it will soon be inexact to speak of our “industrial cities.” Industry must continue, of course, to have its home. But industry will not continue to control the tone and nature of our dwellings. It will be disguised or hidden. It will become as the kitchen or the plumbing system of our social house, as the bowels of our social body. And we will be outwardly bedecked and bedizened in an obtrusive laughter the ingredients of which, indeed, will be the results of industry, and the purpose of which will be to deny its parent.

Already, not alone New York among our splendid cities has cloaked this tragic source of its greatness in the comedy of commerce. Forget the blare of the Broadway lights, and think of the shop windows. How gaily drugstores, hardware stores, delicatessens, shine with their myriad cavorting forms and colors. Think of the newspapers whose columns of dour news are plentifully (and profitably) balanced with the comedic patter of the advertisements. In our popular magazines, the reaction is complete. The mill town is disappearing from them; the honest workman’s daughter languishes less in print. It is the doughty salesman, the go-getter of commerce, with his steed a motor and his muse a flapper, who commands the pages not already commandeered by “National Advertisers.” Our more sophisticated books reveal the same aversion. Our “first-line” critics must, above all, be comic—if not clowns. They must provide the sedative of laughter. And the books they tout do likewise. Tragedy is _nefas_. The tragic stuff about us has cowed our spirit from the enterprise of making it a means for that joyous confrontation of truth which is tragedy. We glance off into comedy—if not farce. And the cleverism, the anecdote, the epigram, the swift cartoon—so close to the heart of the salesman—clutter as well the minds of our intellectual classes.

It is so with the theatre. In such a typical success as “The Show-Off” (called our best comedy by many of the reviewers) a minor role fell to Industry. Not the boy mechanic who actually _invents_ is the hero; but the salesman, the show-off, the man who by empty bluff and in utter ignorance of the product he is pushing, _puts over_ the invention. The industrial source of wealth remains wistfully indulged and sedulously hidden beneath the noisy comedy of commerce.

The comedy of commerce is a comedy of display. It is a denial of the industrial gloom by a boast of brightness. And yet its materials and its very rhythms are conditioned tragically by the tragic world it aims to deny. It is only a disguise; often frenetic, often wistful, never more than momently successful. Nowhere is this more plain than in the music of the comedy of commerce—Jazz. I do not desire to discuss the music roots of jazz: whether they lead you back to the Barbary Coast of San Francisco or to the Argentine or to the Congo. The product we have naturalized is the song of our reaction from the dull throb of the machine. Jazz syncopates the lathe-lunge, jazz shatters the piston-thrust, jazz shreds the hum of wheels, jazz is the spark and sudden lilt centrifugal to their incessant pulse. Jazz is a moment’s gaiety, after which the spirit droops, cheated and unnurtured. This song is not an escape from the Machine to limpid depths of the soul. It is the Machine itself! It is the music of a revolt that fails. Its voice is the mimicry of our industrial havoc.

You will find this irony in all corners of our successful world. Industry is the source of our power and of our sorrow. We are ashamed of its ugliness, hurt by its cruelties. We will employ the power it gives us to escape the sorrow. We seem so adept! We have ten thousand gay contrivances, all born of industry, to hide it. But all of them are like that paragon, the motor. Its chief purpose, of course, is to carry us away from factory smoke: ourselves figuratively, and the laborers whose Fords stand parked outside the mill, literally, when the day’s work is done. But alas! the machine that carries us away from industrialism carries its spirit along. The clever story in the _Satevepost_, the bungalow, the radio, the song and dance—all the little acts of the comedy of commerce—hold the bitter taste, essentialize the spirit and the forms of the industrial discomfort they are supposed to combat.

The Comedy of Commerce is a failure. It is an antidote brewed of the poison it would save from. We must go deeper for a healing laughter. Laughter that heals must come from health, not from the disease. It must spring from the whole vision and whole experience of life, not from a mere shrewd juggling and twisting of any of life’s products.

_1925_

4. JAZZ AND FOLK ART

In “The Comedy of Commerce,” I referred to jazz, not in uncomplimentary terms, but critically as an instance of the art of a commerce- and industry-ridden people. Many readers gave protest. So far as I could see, the chief point against me was that I had dared be critical of a folk art. Jazz, went their sentimental plaint, was the expression of a people. (I had not denied it.) Hence, hands off! Hence, down on worshipful knees!

There has, indeed, been abroad for a full century the curious notion that folk art—as once the king—can do no wrong: that folk art is necessarily good art: that the critic who dares to question folk art commits the unpardonable sin.

This is a point I would examine briefly, forgetting jazz as the mere pretext for it. The notion, to begin with, seems to be quite modern. Before Rousseau, folk art was known, of course; was appreciated; was, indeed, taken for granted. It was neither idealized nor despised. It was the art of the folk: the elite regarded it with the same relative eye with which they looked upon the people. The people was the mass, the soil, the loam, whence they had sprung; the body, if you will, for the aristocratic spirit. It was indispensable and it was causally, if not finally, good. No tyrant could think otherwise, without deleting the very substance of his power. Molière, in the first act of “Le Misanthrope,” expressed the common philosophic attitude toward folk art. To excoriate the precious nonsense of Oronte, Alceste quotes a popular Parisian ditty, and declares it vastly better than the sophisticate’s sonnet. He shatters the courtier with a point which today would be altogether lost. For he is uttering a paradox. Here, in our language, is the gist of his attack: “This popular Parisian song—you know its class—may not be much; but it _is_ sincere, sweet, lovely. And your sonnet, M. Oronte, which should of course be an improvement on such primitive traits, shows but their total loss.”

The crowning of folk art is a corollary from Rousseau who preached a “return to Nature”—as if civilized man were somehow miraculously out of nature; and “a return to infancy”—as if his own doctrines had not been the dream of a weary adult. If you accept the Rousseauistic premise, the modern notion follows about art. The best art, then, will be the least cultured, the most primitive, the most childlike. And poor man, addicted hopelessly to beauty, had best pursue his weakness in the art of folk who, thinking least, are least attainted. If, however, you reject the creed of Rousseau—which does not mean that you deny his value and his genius; if it seems clear to you that civilized man belongs as much to nature as a tree does, and that man’s need to live well, to know true, to aim high, is as healthy and as natural a function as the tree’s to grow good roots and blossom, then this indiscriminate adoring of folk art, merely because it _is_ folk art, is nonsense.

Dante was once ten years old. He was a remarkable child. He babbled sonnets and rondeaux which revealed his nature. Do you put the prattlings he produced at ten before the “Divina Commedia” he composed at fifty? If you are the usual folk-art worshiper, why not? Were those lyric works of Dante’s youth not the pure Dante? the untrammeled sign and substance of his soul? Were they not Dante’s folk art? And the “Divina Commedia”! what alien and sophisticate and unoriginal matters dulled the raptures of his early years to this! Aristotle, Aquinas, Virgil, the apocalypses of Jerusalem, the pseudo epigraphia of Alexandria—the whole theology and logic of the school-men had to “debauch” the pure Dante, ere he was ready to write his intricate, conscious poem. If you are a real lover of art, surely you will turn with mild disgust from the “Commedia” to his childhood singing.

I do not think this caricature of the folk art fad is too unjust to sharpen a just point. It is literally true that if greatness be ever in a man or a race, it must potentially have been there at the outset. Therefore the beginning expressions of that man or race will hold the germ of their significance. Most men, moreover, fail (perhaps most races also) to fulfill their spiritual promise. The promise universally exists. No child, no child-race is without it. Only the mature achievement is rare. And so it follows that the search for spiritual values among children will be, by and large, more fruitful than among men and women. But to say that the art expression of all children gives more than the art expression of all adults, because children all have the germ and adults seldom the flower—only this bad logic can lead us to conclude that child art and folk art are best, or even always good. Folk art is the seed of great art: seeds are more numerous than flowers. To cultivate the seed at the expense of the flower is a defeatism and a folly we are not quite cured of.

But folk art is not naïve in its elements, any more than are the babblings of the “purest” child. It is, more often, the naïve mirroring and mimicry of ideas caught from above. The emotions of folk art are childish. Yet they are the result of unconsciously inherited ideas, imposed by ruling classes. Take, for instance, the folk arts of medieval Christian Europe, the spirituals of the American Negro slave. Did the folk invent the intricate theology and philosophy on which they rested? Rather, they vulgarized the product of intellectual minorities—Prophets, Plato, Plotinus and the Patrists: made it a pabulum, at last, which later intellectuals could re-employ for the creating of more cultivated art. Another example: Russian folk music reveals traces of liturgical and synagogical music. Now, a new group of cultivated artists—Rimsky, Stravinsky, Ornstein—reforms this popularized pabulum of older minorities into a fresh intellectualized music.

Or consider our jazz. Jazz is not so much a folk music—like the Negro spirituals—as a folk accent in music. It expresses well a mass response to our world of piston rods, cylinders and mechanized laws. The response is of the folk and is passive. The nature of our world itself is due to the work and temperament of minorities alien to the jazzmakers. Jazz expresses a personal maladjustment to this world, righted by sheer and shrewd compliance. And this, doubtless, is why the races at once most flexible and most maladjusted—the Negro and the Jew—give the best jazz masters. Since the rhythm of our age is not transfigured in jazz, as in truly creative art, but is assimilated, the elements of the age itself which we may disapprove will appear also in jazz. In other words, a folk art—being so largely an art of reaction and of assimilation—will contain the faults of the adult minorities that rule the folk, as well as the pristine virtues of the people.

And we have other folk arts. “The Rosary”—jazzless, European saccharine—is as truly a folk art as any of the Berlin or Gershwin ditties. Harold Bell Wright’s books—messes of Victorian notions in decay—are also an American folk art. The New York “Daily News” is the daily art of a folk numbering several millions.

The adorers of folk art in its own divine right need but observe what they adore. That will be enough to cure them. Nor should they forget that in all culturally early epochs, dissatisfaction with folk art is one of the incentives for the production of great art.

_1926_

5. STRAIGHT STREETS

What is the meaning of our cities of rectangular streets? What is their effect on our souls? It is plain that Nature likes curves. You may find rough angles in rocky mountain wastes, or in the sort of creature that a microscope makes vaguely visible. But the Nature of man and near to man is a sinuous, rounded being. Think of our bodies and of the bodies of animals—not a Euclidean angle in the lot. Think of the shapes of flowers, plants, trees; of the configuration of the hills and fields; of the sweep of waters; of the globe. Now think of our interior worlds. Our physical dynamo has not a straight line in it. And our mental digestion is tortuous as our intestines. Logic may proceed theoretically like a plummet; but there’s nothing natural in such logic. Draconian justice might be called rectilinear, but it, too, does not exist in Nature. Uprightness when it is not tempered by the curves of mercy is repellent. Man’s mind moves in curves. His thoughts arch, vault, melt into reverie. Dream and sense swerve into each other. His heart, too, is full of arcuations. And the heart’s desires are parabolas. There is naught angular within us. Nor above us. Space, we have learned from Riemann, has a crimp and a curve. The “straight gravitational line” of Newton proves to be the “Einstein shift.” From the detour of solar systems back upon themselves within a spheroid Space, to the devexities of dream, man has a universe full of everything but angles. And yet, the American urbanite has elected to spend his days in a gridiron.

The towns of the Old World were and still are curved creatures. From Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope you will not find an ancient city that does not gyre like a heart or twist like the intestines. Indeed, the European links angles with humanity only in his thought of death. Christ was killed on a cross. St. Laurentius was roasted on a grid. When the fanatical Felipe of Spain built a monastery to express his contempt for life and his withdrawal to the grave, he patterned it after a gridiron.[5]

Curves rest: angles tire. How often the American abroad lets his eye float down the gentle swerve of a street and is soothed sensuously, and is moved as by a freshet of pleasant impulse. It is the curve! The jolliest street in Manhattan—the one that is most human, most laughing, most restful—is Broadway, which has a curve or two; and even at its straightest runs diagonally to the ruthless grid, thus giving the delusion of a flex. No wonder it has become the avenue of shows, the road for informal saunterings clear up to Harlem. No wonder the automobile, our pathetic symbol of escape, has made Broadway its home.

If straight bobbed hair delights, the reason is that it sets off the curves of our girl’s face. Her straight dress has value in so far as it reveals the rondures of her body. American civilization has revolutionized the shape of cities. It may yet appreciably alter the shape of man.

For we seem to be angularized in almost everything else. Not alone our streets are straight and stiff. Our houses are as rigid as if they were made of the building blocks of Brobdingnagian babes. Where else is there a spectacle like the recently grown splendor of Park Avenue—that parade of pompous tombs, shutting in wealth and shutting out the sun? Is it possible that the disfavor of Riverside Drive as a residence street among our leaders is due to the swinging rise and fall of that untypical parkway? Our laws, like our houses, become more rectangular and upright. Our morals are strait like the gates of Ellis Island. Even our faces.... If there be in all the world a human countenance made of angles instead of the immemorial curves, it must be that of Calvin Coolidge. So perhaps biology will give way after all to the rectangular will of our American world. Perhaps the flapper of tomorrow will have pyramidal breasts....

There is a reason for all this, and a good one. If you care to go to the heart of the matter you entrain by the Santa Fé and alight in some New Mexican pueblo.

The Indian’s culture is prophetic of what our culture must be. His nature is a guide to the understanding and achievement of our own. This does not mean that we are going to give up motors, and dress in paint and feathers, nor that the skyscraper will dwindle to the wigwam, nor even that our women at some distant date will be swinging their papooses across their shoulders. But it does mean that there is something deeper than these discrepancies between the Indian and ourselves. Something deeper, which we share.

The Amerind was profoundly, beautifully adjusted to the land. If you study him in his demeanor, his dance, his music, his pyramiding pueblos or his simple tepees, in his flinted arrows, in his decorations, you will find that the general symbol of his expression is a curve so sharp and so severe that it barely escapes being an angle. The curve is the way of acceptance: the angle is the way of resistance. America is a feverish world. Its geological tempo is not like that of Europe. It is far more terribly intense. I am certain that when the ancestors of the Indian crossed to America from Mongolia (or Atlantis) they resisted this atmospheric fury, as have we, with an angular restraint. That reaction was not a culture, any more than our present reactions from Europe or from mechanical civilization constitute a culture. The Indian culture began when his innate spiritual and intellectual values formed a solution with the world about him: his culture was achieved when the responses between his soul and the world had rounded into a unified _life_ which expressed both fully. After many ages, the Indian’s first reactive restraint toned down, and became the subtle and fertile curve of the Indian music, the symbolic gesture of his dance, the exquisite reticence of his demeanor.

Recently Dr. Jung of Zurich was in this country and made a visit to the pueblos in which he had been rightly advised that he would find archetypical remains of classic Indian culture. Dr. Jung had psychoanalyzed many Americans, and found in them all (whether their ancestry was Nordic, Latin or Semitic) a unique alliance of _wildness and restraint_ which did not exist in the European nature. Dr. Jung’s intuition told him that he would find this combination, so hidden in our souls, culturally expressed in the Indian pueblo. He was right. Despite the ponderous luggage with which we came from Europe and which so differs from what the Indian brought along, we must inevitably go the Indian’s way in the spirit, since we have come his way in the flesh.

When Babbitt tells us that American towns are laid out “regular” because it “pays,” he does not know how deeply he is right. Regularity and angularity pay, indeed, because such is the beginning of our self-assertion against a cosmic factor. In our straight streets, in our jazz, in our dress, in our morals, in our lantern-jaw Puritans, in our raillike girls, we manifest the first stage of resistance to the furious fire which is the nature of our world. The rigid angles will smooth out, will take on the curves of life—will become the forms of our American culture.

_1925_

_III. IDEAS_

1. SERIOUSNESS AND DADA

(_An Exchange with Malcolm Cowley_)

a.

It is possible in small space to touch but briefly, and upon one of its phases, the complex and defunct Dada movement. Its immediate progenitors were the Italian heirs of Athens and of Rome—they called themselves futurists: a restless Jew whose ancestors had settled in Rumania brought it to Paris. It had behind it, therefore, the ripe Mediterranean littorals and the full growth of Europe. It was a salutary burst of laughter in a world that felt itself too old. Europe was crystallized and desired a solvent. It creaked in stratified forms and laws and notions, and it yearned to explode.

The War was a violent but unsatisfactory excursion of a similar sort. The ponderous machinations of diplomacy had prepared this laughter of young millions rushing to a bright shambles from the straitened gloom of ordered cities and inherited farms. But the war was too superficial. Jaded Europe learned the inconsequent effect of such inebriety as death and murder. The deep spirit of the land was unmoved by columns of men miles long and by guns that raked cities. It was the esthetes of France—the solemn romanticists, the shrill Parnassians, the symbolists, the votaries of Bergson, it was the pragmatists of Germany and the rhetoricians of Italy, who invited the release of Dada by their formulations, hedgings-in and dogmas. There is no doubt that the face of Europe yearned for the smashing of a few cathedrals. But also the heart of Europe hungered after the battering of a few spiritual laws.

Dada was an emanation of this will of a too sober, too mature, too sanctified rationalist church. Scampering in disarray against metrics and the still more cloying bondages of “freedom,” imping against the roll of such millstones as Truth, as Unity, as Beauty, Dada was as logical as the most Freudian hallucination. It was an eruption, a breakup, a shower: it was a jag and a reversion. And having cooled the face of the old land and made Europe forget her uncomfortable age, it disappeared.

Good jokers, the Dadaists were: wistful creators, against sour sense, of sweet absurdity. But they did nothing more ridiculous than the installation of the Dada mood in American letters. Europe called for Dada by antithesis: America for analogous reasons calls for the antithesis of Dada. For America _is_ Dada. The richest mess of these bean-spillers of Italy, Germany and France is a flat accord beside the American chaos. Dada spans Brooklyn Bridge; it spins round Columbus Circle; it struts with the Ku-Klux Klan; it mixes with all brands of bootleg whisky; it prances in our shows; it preaches in our churches; it tremolos at our political conventions. Dada is in the typical Western university that spends $50,000 on cows and $200 on books. It is in the esthetics of Mr. Bryan, whose favorite work of art is any old Madonna. It is in the commercial comedy of our advertisements. (DO YOUR DUTY: CHEW MIXLETS GUM. BE AN AMERICAN: THROW YOUR RUBBISH HERE.) It is in the counterpoint of callow Hollywood and the immemorial desiccation of the California desert. It is in the medley of strutting chimneys and bowed heads, of strutting precepts and low deeds that make America. We are a hodgepodge, a boil. We are a maze of infernos and nirvanas. Our brew of Nigger-strut, of wailing Jew, of cantankerous Celt, of nostalgic Anglo-Saxon, is a brew of Dada. No wonder they imported our essential chaos to lighten the regularities of France! But we are young, and what we need is a bit of mature action. We are fantastic ourselves, and what we need is integrating thought. We are the most fecund joke on earth—for the overserious others. What we need, by way of rounding our lives into livableness, is a bit of seriousness for ourselves.

Our complexities provoke strange paradox in our deeds. Ourselves a spontaneous combustion of contrariety and antithesis, there grew up in us a fear and a shame of the spontaneous. (This is, of course, a trait of adolescence.) In order to become unspontaneous, we turned to Europe. Our attention was caught by a lot of youths of age on a “bust” of spontaneous laughter. In all solemnity, we artificed their spontaneity, crowning thereby the best of the Dada jokes. But we did not create Dada art. Dada art arose from the traditional maturity of Europe. The intellectual stuff and stamina, in our own case, were lacking: and what we got were weakling strains of the European pose muddled with American incompetence and lost against the background of American bewilderment.

A healthy reaction to our world must, of course, be the contrary of Dada: it must be ordered and serious and thorough. Dada worked well in overmature Europe. We, by analogue, must be fundamental, formal. That, indeed, is the proper mood of youth. The young cutup in the literature of our land is the bromide. We need him doubtless, but humbly in the rank and file. To be coruscant, smart and swift in the American language is to be platitudinous and banal. Therefore it is that the literature which poses as most advanced in the United States is for the most part quite the contrary—is as undifferentiate, indeed, from the common wallow, as the Mecca Mosque on Fifty-fourth Street, as the Hearst headlines, or as were the jokes of Josh Billings. Our cosmopolites who think that they are emulating Aragon and Cocteau and Firbank, our local realists and shockers who think they are reforming us, are all in reality but sweepings of the immense centrifugal action of the American world. Our surface twists and scintillates and shrieks. They are caught in it, they are slavish functions of the American mass which they profess to lead. They are the reflections of a world that is Dada and that is in danger of becoming narcissistic: of growing infatuated with its own twitching image.

The first step in the absorption and control of our Dada Jungle is the achievement of a serious, of a literally religious temper. The academies are turned away from America: their earnestness is frivolous. The neoclassicists are turned away from America: their nostalgia is anemic and their grace is shallow. The realists are submerged by America. The pragmatists are bluffed by America. The clever and decorative boys who clutter our “serious” magazines are reflecting not even America’s surface, but Europe’s thirsty reflection of our surface. None of this is serious, although doubtless all of this has its place in the chemistry of ferment....

If we can produce a handful of serious creators—men unafraid of unpopular words like philosophy, profundity, saintliness, devotion—and if we can keep them alive and at work a score of years, perhaps there’ll be a start toward integration: and after several hundred years, we may be mature enough to inspire a Dada of our own.

b.

_Dear Mr. Frank_:

The progress of literature (and here progress does not imply a betterment) is largely a series of reactions, a passage from one extreme to the other: romanticism succeeding classicism, realism against romance, estheticism against naturalism and Dada against the esthetes. But given the fact that every national literature starts from a different point and follows a different course, their reactions of a given moment can hardly be the same. For American writers to revolt from the tradition of Remy de Gourmont or Mallarmé is empty imitation, a gesture with no more significance than could be given to a French protest against anticigarette laws in the state of Kansas.

To this measure your attack, in the last issue of 1924, against a hypothetical group of American Dadas was completely justified. It would have been more valuable, however, less obviously biased, had you gone on to consider that the progress of literature is also a discovery of new principles, involving a rejection or reaffirmation of the old; and that such principles are international.

To call Dada “a ‘bust’ of spontaneous laughter” was absurd. You were on safer ground when you spoke of it as a reaction against European writers whom you listed as “the solemn romanticists, the shrill Parnassians, the symbolists, the votaries of Bergson ... the pragmatists of Germany and the rhetoricians of Italy”; or when you added that since few of these schools were represented in America, a similar American reaction would be stupid.

But Dada was also a discovery: that nonsense may be the strongest form of ridicule; that writing is often worst when it is most profound, saintly or devoted and best when it is approached in a spirit of play; that associational processes of thought often have more force than the logical; that defiance carried to the extremes of bravado is more to be admired than a passive mysticism.[6] Dada was the sense of exhilaration which was born when our old shackles were tested and found to be rusted away.

There was nothing geographical in these discoveries. But you prefer to play geographer.

You have been to Paris and carry back the gossip of Monsieur X the poet and Monsieur Y the novelist. Other American writers (I was one) have been to Paris. Some met Paul Fort and wrote polyphonic prose in his manner, some met Paul Valéry and became classicists, some met Soupault or Tzara and wrote a Yankee Dada, some met Jules Romains and his little group, studied his treatises, adopted his more solemn faults with some of his virtues and are proud to be called the Unanimists of America. There were a few Americans who met many writers of many schools, took the best of each and retained enough personal force to write about their own surroundings in their own manner, but you, Mr. Frank, are not generally included in their number.

Neither am I. One tries to keep free of the ten schools and two academies, but in this day of slogans we must all be ticketed, must possess a little slip of red, white or yellow cardboard printed with a name. I was in doubt which name to choose, but your article decides me. Let me therefore be considered as your butt: the clever but not coruscant, smart or swift young man who clutters our more serious magazines, the American Dada.

MALCOLM COWLEY

_Dear Mr. Cowley_:

It was good of you to send me a copy of what you consider your answer to my article “Seriousness and Dada,” with the invitation that I—as you phrase it—“continue the debate.” I have read carefully what you say; and I am forced to conclude that if there is to be a debate upon the principles suggested in my little essay, it has yet to begin. Until it does, I rest.

Many questions of fact rather than of theory are brought up, it is true, by your letter: but they are irrelevant to the issue. I might point out that your definition of the progress of letters is a good juvenile one, defining nothing. I might suggest, after your linking of the term “mysticism” with the adjective “passive” that you study a mystic, taking your choice from Hosea, Plato, Paul, Plotinus, Gabirol, Abélard, Aquinas, Bernard, Roger Bacon, Dante, Spinoza, Pascal, Teresa, Calvin, Blake, Dostoevski, Whitman, or any other who may appeal to you, and explain to us why and how this mysticism is passive. Finally, I might refer to your allusion to myself as having “been in Paris and returned with the gossip of M. X. and M. Y.” or to your veiled reference to my American “unanimism,” as convicting you of an impertinence which in turn is the result of an ignorance so essential as to disqualify you in your present temper from true intelligent discussion.

However, all of this is aside the point of my paper which sought by no means to destroy American Dada, but merely to put it snugly in its little place. The one statement in your letter which has the force of relevance is that in which you volunteer to be considered an American Dada. Of course, one must accept you so, since you insist upon it. I admit, however, that I for one could accept you in this guise with less regret had not my acquaintance with your poetry convinced me that you will be fit for better things when you achieve the moral courage to confront the reality of our world, and the spiritual energy to take issue with it; instead of permitting yourself to be flung off by its centrifugal action, in the fond belief that because you fly off to Nothing in a graceful pirouette and with a foreign oath upon your lips you are being any the less booted and beshat by the very elements of life which you profess to despise.

W. F.

_This exchange appeared in the December issue of 1924, a little
magazine edited and published by Edwin Seaver.... Of course, out of
Dada have come the surréalistes; and the best of their leaders
(Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, André Breton, etc.) combine their
romantic creed with communism. Malcolm Cowley has moved in a similar
direction. At least one of the important writers associated with Dada,
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, has moved into fascism, like Marinetti and
other earlier Italian futurists._

2. MR. MENCKEN, KING OF THE PHILISTINES

America, which protects its deer and partridges, still has perpetual open season for philosophy hunting. Dr. Durant turned “The Story of Philosophy” into a best seller by the shrewd device of leaving philosophy out and putting in its place anecdotal stories, whole chapters on nonmetaphysical authors, and his own not too subtly diffused contempt for the entire silly business of “ultimate problems.” John Dewey, the most characteristic American mind of his generation, has always been an antiphilosopher at heart (with unconscious vestiges of the poor side of Hegel). And here is Mr. Mencken, tripping upon the autumnal scene, all decked out in leather jerkin, hunting cap, cartridge belt, and his usual supply of automatic popguns.

“If you want to find out,” says Mr. Mencken, “how a philosopher feels when he is engaged in the practice of his profession, go to the nearest zoo and watch a chimpanzee at the wearying and hopeless job of chasing fleas. Both suffer damnably and neither can win.” The “fleas” in this case, you realize, are truth, the absolute, any ultimate concept of the real world, any distinction at all between reality and appearance. Elsewhere, in the same lofty Menckenian column, the same matter is called “bunk.” “For the absolute, of course,” he absolutely assures us, “is a mere banshee. No such thing exists. Philosophy in the narrow technical sense”—read, in the sense of the whole silly lineage from Pythagoras to Whitehead—“is largely moonshine and wind music.”

At last I know, from Mr. Mencken’s rigorous definitions, what is his secret desire: the unsated hunger which all his literary work has struggled to fulfill. Since, to his mind, philosophy is bunk and wind and moonshine, is it not clear that Mr. Mencken looks upon himself as a writer of philosophy? And if he strives to sharpshoot all the other philosophical fellows off the field, who can blame him, since he knows that his own particular brand of brass fanfare is the best for us?

Let us therefore take him as a philosopher: take him seriously, I mean, of course. And consider the matter of this “bunk” of metaphysics. A moment’s inquiry should make clear that if the philosophical “woolgathering” of man is to be judged merely by practical results—by results in the way man has lived; in contrast with the metaphysicians, the builders of temples were builders in sand, the makers of empires were but furious blowers of bubbles.

Of course, the findings of metaphysics—the logic of reality, and of epistemology—the logic of knowledge, are disputed, disputable, relative, impermanent. What is not? Even the term “eternal” is a pitiful, anthropomorphic thing, having no life and no sense save in the mouth of the evanescent creature who knows himself for mortal. If you will have nothing less than the eternal, what will you do with language, music, economics? what with religions, empires, arts? Do these outlast philosophy? On the contrary, they rest and have ever rested upon it.

Take the age of the Upanishads, nearly thirty centuries behind us. Do we speak the language of that day? We speak its philosophical thought. Do we live by its arts, its customs, its gods, its laws? Yet its metaphysics is a cogent factor in modern psychology, in modern letters. The era of the Upanishads is living for us, solely through its professional philosophers—those “idle” _sitters-about_ who spent their days spinning webs about Absolute and Will—webs so marvelously strong that they have outlasted cities and cultures.

What exists now of the Greece and Magna Græcia of the sixth century before Christ? Chiefly Pythagoras: and through him a good deal of history, ancient and modern, of science, ancient and modern, of mathematics, of physics, of religious doctrine. From his philosophy of number came the science of numbers: came Euclid: came the whole forever adumbrating realm of physics and mechanics, the modern mathematics of analysis, the modern critical realism (via other philosophers, of course, like Descartes and Leibnitz) which in men like Mach, Einstein, Russell, Whitehead, is once again transfiguring the world. From the abstractions of these technical philosophers of preclassic Greece came Plato (even as Aeschylus and Tragedy came from the Eleusinians): came Aristotle, came Plotinus: came at last such fairly practicable structures as the whole civilization of Christian Europe. From the moonshine of such men as Pythagoras, Protagoras, Plato, Heraclitus, Democritus and Zeno, tough-minded men managed to build states, churches, sciences, atomic theories, machines. Similarly, the prophets of Israel, the wise men of India and North Africa—questers of that Absolute which, in their ignorance they called God or Atman, whereas Mr. Mencken in his more modern language calls it bunk or fleas—gave to man a concept so very real that he has dwelt in it, builded from it his art, his ethics and his state, for many thousand years.

Mr. Mencken probably forgets that Bacon’s preparation for modern science was possible to him only because he rested wholly on a metaphysical faith: the assumption of an absolute Order without which, as Hume points out, there could be no science, because there could be no deduction from particular to general, from appearance to Law, from passing effect to eternal Cause. So Newton, also, rose from an intricate, profound, world-satisfying structure of metaphysical faith which a whole lineage of “professional flea-chasers” from Plato to Aquinas had molded at last into the Christian Cosmos.

Perhaps Mr. Mencken does not know that Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, had their metaphysics—had, above all, their masters, technical and abstruse, in metaphysics. Has not his careful study of the philosophical classics, which he assures us he “rereads every year when the weather is too hot for serious mental work,” revealed to him that his favorites, Conrad and Nietzsche, are romantic versions of Schopenhauer who, in turn, rests upon Kant and the philosophers of India? If he has no use for Kant, his disgust with the post-Kantian idealists (Hegel, for instance) is utterly beneath words. Yet, from these sources come psychoanalysis, Marxism, the Nietzschean anti-Marxism: come the non-Euclidean and _n_-dimensional geometers (Gauss, Riemann, Lobachevski, Minkowski), who in their turn nourished Lorentz, Einstein, the critical realists—makers of the modern world. And straight from Hegel is derived the impressionistic style in criticism which Mr. Mencken so adorns—since it is, indeed, his own.

It is one of the burdens of philosophy that lesser men turn its noble doubts into dogmatic denials: chip from its high structure of critique little stones to fling against it. In all ages, heedless people accept what the great past bequeaths them, live by it, and betray it. The man who is most proud of his Buick is most contemptuous of the thinker whose intricate thought made his car possible. The man most at ease in his Zion sneers most at the makers of the concepts which built his state and his morals.

_1926_

3. PSEUDO LITERATURE

The term, I believe, is Schopenhauer’s. He declared that there are two streams of writing, for the most part indistinguishably merged save for a very few. One of these, the effect of creative thought and of creative vision, he called literature; and all the rest, however pleasant and respectable, he outlawed. To go back to any flourishing epoch is to be convinced that Schopenhauer was right and that our present status is not essentially unique. The modish ladies of Weimar forsook Goethe for the “more modern” Kotzebue. Pradon and Quinault outbid Racine for favor. Alexandria, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, had swarms of writers who were so close to the contemporary clamor that they have died with it into as whole a silence. The printing press and the mock crowning of demos have merely aggravated an immemorial condition. Where only a minority could read, only a minority could be idle readers. Now that everyone is forced to read, the flood of words without creative source is stintless, and there are organized for it great armies of “distributing agents,” of which an unconsciously servile group call themselves reviewers—even critics! The swollen plethora of pseudo literature has perhaps lowered the visibility of the real through its sheer mass. But if this be argued an increased deterrent to the life and health of literature it is more than overcome by the increasing of the potential public for what is good. The more persons who can read at all, the more may read what is authentic.

There is then no good ground for the friend and writer of literature to complain. He has traditionally addressed a minority in a minority; and it exists for him today. The new presence of hawkers and bawlers purveying printed goods to the mob has not altered his position any more than has the deformation of the democratic doctrine into the myth that everybody is as good as everybody else. If the writer hungers after enormous sales, he is the victim of confusion: unconsciously, he desires to leave his true domain. If he feels that he is entitled to the royalties of a Michael Arlen or to the popularity of a Fannie Hurst, the urgence of his vision must be very weak. For it is the glorious compensation of the wooers of beauty and of truth that all other of life’s guerdons are by contrast dull. To have heard clear, even once, the word of God is to hear it forever in all the calls of life.

More serious and more concerning is another phase of this mutual attraction between the real with its rigorous solitude and the false with its populous cordialities. The purveyors of pseudo literature are so many that they fall into classes. They have their snobs, too, their social climbers. And there is among their readers an ample group sufficiently emerged from the rest to desire “culture” even at the cost of thrills. These persons are aware of the term “literature” and want their share in it. Their conception, of course, is derived from shallow study of the past. Incapable of recognizing the essence of an art, they dwell on its external traits and manners. And the contemporary writers who most flatter them are the emulators of these imitable parts. Such authors are competent in style, they are elegant, they reproduce in terms of up-to-dateness the forms and virtues of previous pioneers. Most of them will be novelists, dramatists, even poets. But they must have their critics. And to them falls the dangerous task of establishing a rationale for their kind; an aggressive apologia for all their sterile wares.

The creative, the heroic, the religious spirit of true literature is by such critics utterly ignored; and by repeated omission comes to be regarded as nonexistent. The novel which flows well, the tale which is pleasing, the construction which reflects current thought or current passion is hailed as _good_, and the more reflective, hence passive, it is, the higher is rated its importance. Unconsciously, it is assumed that literature has no independent body: that its real substance is the public taste. From this fallacy it follows that criticism becomes a solemn discussion of secondary traits—timeliness, grace and color. The primary creative stuff of literature without which these secondary qualities can have no true existence is forgotten. The terms of what is genuine are borrowed for what is false. And the confusion grows.

What hungry common reader could dream, from contemporary criticisms of Mr. Hergesheimer, of Mr. Cabell, of Miss Cather—supply your own names from the current columns—that these are makers of books with an essential lack: a lack as crucial as that which parts organic death from life? The books of such novelists are competent in so far as they are elegant reflections of styles in form and thought and language. As contributions to the creative life of the mind and of the spirit, they are inept. Their source is neither a luminous vision nor an authentic knowledge; but rather the shrewd perusal of past masters and present moods. Neither their purpose nor their substance adds one iota to the experience of man. To call them literature is to degrade the name.

And it is precisely urgent that the name “literature” be not degraded. For there is much in a name: much directing of intelligence, much shaping of powers. And we possess an age in which intelligence is not small, but confused, in which powers are lavish, but debauched. A critic of our day as aware as were Abélard and Anselm, would be as concerned as they were with the pragmatic virtues of the Name. He would know, as they did, that a confusion in words is the symbol of confusion in continents and souls. Much of the dangerous condition of our time springs from the fact that in the readjustment of social and spiritual forms, names have become the prostituted playthings of any fool or knave who wishes to mouth them.

Thus, the gigantic reaches of pseudo literature from the Hearst papers to Harold Bell Wright, being allotted their proper place, do no great harm. They touch only the senses they appeal to; they convince only minds incapable of conviction; there is no formidable claque to name them other than they are. Far more pernicious is the snob class of pseudo literature; for it sails under false colors and of late it proceeds almost unchallenged.

The challenge of other days was a competent tradition. Pseudo literature has always thrived on pretension. But an audience to whom the classics, holy or profane, were valid had an incessant standard to protect it. If a French academician extolled Quinault, there was Euripides to answer. If an Alexandrian put out a bad pseudepigraphia of Ezra, the Chronicles could face him. Our situation is more arduous. In the general liquidation of old forms, the esthetic tradition has dissolved. We must build up a new critical standard not only within, but from the current chaos.

_1925_

4. “UTILITARIAN ART”

It is revealing that the notion of “art for art’s sake,” of art sprung from itself and for itself, arose with the utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. If you will read the conversations of Goethe, the prefaces of Racine, the notebooks of Leonardo, the prose works of Dante, and finally trace back to Aristotle and to Plato, you may marvel (if you are a “modern”) at the ethical bias in all our classic art. Not alone Milton believed that he was writing “to justify the ways of God to men.” It is safe to say that if a respectable goldsmith of the Renaissance had been cornered for a “reason” for his work, he would have professed some moral or some religious purpose not too remote from that which moved the Alexandrians and the prophets. While theology was hale, esthetics was its handmaid. Later, art went into the service of the God of Reason; and later still, took on the harness of metaphysics when that logic had assumed the imperatives of revealed religion. Only when modern man has debauched the ideal of spiritual progress—old as the Hindus and the Hebrews—to a bare functional or mechanistic pattern do we come upon art so divinely considered that it may have no “purpose.”