Writers in Crisis : The American Novel Between the Two
Wars. By Maxwell Geismar. (Seeker and Warburg. 16s.)
BOOKS OF THE DAY
America Growing Up
Writers in Crisis : The American Novel Between the Two Wars. By Maxwell Geismar. (Seeker and Warburg. 16s.) Tans book comes from America with the commendation of America's leading literary critic, Edmund Wilson, who describes it as " the best book of criticism I have read on a contemporary American subject." The author is a graduate of Columbia who has taught at Harvard and contributed to the New York Herald
Tribune and the Nation, and this, his first book, is a serious treat- ment of a serious and intensely interesting subject—American life as revealed in its own contemporary literature.' It consists of seven sections, of which six are devoted to the study of six American writers: Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos, Passes, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck. The seventh section is a final summary of the author's thesis that America's long adolescence is, at last, over. Nothing could be more important to the world than this, if true. Personally, I do not think it as true as I should like it to be, or as Maxwell Geismar, somewhat dramatically, inclines to believe. However, he makes out an im- pressive case for- it by his penetrating analysis of the six writers who both by talent and influence deserve the prominence given to them.
The brilliant essay on the late Ring Lardner, the jazz Mark Twain of the nineteen-twenties—who reflected with the satiric bitterness of personal despair America's capitalistic Boom Age—is by way of being the critic's initiatory diagnosis of America's state of health, and everybody who wishes to understand our period should read it. Europe has had the same complaint, only more localised, and subjected to such drastic treatment by way of the quack cure of Fascism that the less intelligent Americans (to whom neither Mr. Geismar nor the American authors he studies belong) were able to deceive themselves from 1920 to 1939 into thinking they were, comparatively, sound and high-minded. Actually, America's danger-point is still to come ; for when Fascism is crushed in Europe it may, when peace arrives, break out in its most dangerous form in the United States ; since, though the Boom Age of Capitalism may have passed in the U.S.A., as the writings of all these authors imply, yet it still remains to be shown that the sounder and older American democratic tradition will be strong enough to weather the corning storm. America, as its principal authors and Mr. Geismar show, has the disadvantages—compared with European nations—of a larger and less homogeneous public and a more youthful and less self-critical mentality. Ring Lardner's ironical description of home—" it is where you can take off your shoes. It's where you can have more soup. It's where you don't half to say nothing when they's nothing to say. . . . It's where you don't half to listen . . ."—represents not an American but a world ideal, and it would be foolish noi to recognise the fact ; but in Europe, and also in Britain, there exists a stronger critical tradition against such a popular surrender along the line. of least resistance ; although, admittedly, our own daily newspapers have stealthily fostered it in the last two decades in their steady attack on all intellectual standards.
Mr. Geismar sho Ars how, in despair at their isolation in a world of business success-standards, these American authors turned to Republican Spain and Communist Russia in search of a more decent society. His essay on John Dos Passos, one of the most sympathetic and perspicacious in this book, makes clear how Dos Passos, disillusioned by the "revolutionary factionalism and inter- necine strife " of Republican Spain, has at last learned that America also has its revolutions, " its struggle:: to maintain human dignity against oppressive forces, its own needs of that New Order which our radical thinkers sought everywhere but in America." He further shows how all these authors—except, of course, Lardner, who had not the culture and the degree of consciousness to enable him to understand as well as to record what he saw—have slowly turned from escapism to the realisation that the battlefield where they are needed is their own country, and that, far from being isolated there, large numbers of their fellow-countrymen, the inw articulate middle masses, do share their ideals and their hopes.
In other words, the chief intellectuals in the United States seem to have turned away from the sterile negative disillusion of the 'twenties to a more positive and hopeful attitude, having recovered from the shocking realisation of the emptiness of their country's universal idealistic phrase-making, so at variance with its actual soulless greed. Mr. Geismar goes even further, and seems to believe that not only is the gulf closing between social energy and social intelligence in America, but that, as a nation, it may even learn to turn from the path of international economic competition—which is likely to be the next stage in America's crude " Success Story "- to a way of international co-operation. To me this is difficult to credit ; indeed, it is one of the charms as it is one of the weaknesses of this remarkable and important book that the author, like the famous American writers whose production he so brilliantly analyses, shows something of that optimistic adolescence which still dis- tinguishes America from Europe. But the American novelists here presented have a greater gusto and immediate importance than any of our own contemporaries. They have a bustling superficial faith in their own country. It will be with somewhat less obvious enthusiasm that they will go on to seek a faith in the world.
W. J. TURNER.
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