American Literature
The Great Tradition. By Granville Hicks. (Macmillan. 10s. 6d. ) TAKEN purely as scholarship, this book provides an excellent, if superficial, interpretation of the growth of American Literature since the Civil War. Mr. Hicks' knowledge is wide tut never exceeds his power of organization. His quotations are brief, yet significant. Most people epitomize themselves in a single remark at least once in their lives : and these remarks Mr. Hicks has skill in discovering.
By American Literature he means literature dealing with the United States, not literature by Americans. For example, he omits all mention of Edgar Allan Poe, even though his influence on Ambrose Bierce must have been considerable. Herman Melville, the greatest artist that America has pro- duced, he puts on one side for having chosen to write of Nan- tucket rather than the U.S.A. Mr. Ezra Pound and the Ex- patriots are summarily dismissed. Only those authors who have faced the problems presented by the nature of the United States axe significant for his purpose. The people, not people, is the theme he looks for.
He traces from Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau the efforts that authors have made to face the increasing com- plexity of an industrial, capitalist society, whose prime sanction is money. Time and again he shows the defeat of those ambitious to embrace the whole life of the States, and the flight and partial success of those who isolate, select from or ignore the complexity with which they are surrounded. He demonstrates how novels of politics, business and labour have failed through the inability of their authors to envisage the significance of their whole subject.
Mr. Hicks has certainly brought order into a chaotic mass of material : and the basis of his attack on modern American writers is very interesting :
" There are many other signs that in the coming years the effort of a certain number of writers will be devoted, not to the creation of a leisure-class culture, but to the development of a body of capitalist apologetics. After all, the writers of whom we have been speaking (T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, &e.) do depend on the capitalist system. A while ago, when all was going well, they could ignore that fact, but now most of them realize it very keenly. At present they content themselves with attacking the enemies of capitalism, the while they discuss plans for its modification and preservation. But if the situation grows worse and capitalism is further imperilled it is reasonable to suppose that a certain number of writers will take a more definite stand in its defence. Most of them will not, presumably, defend capitalism as such, but they will defend a set of doctrines that involve not merely the preservation but the consolidation and expansion of capitalist power. They will, in short, become fascists."
This accusation, which may seem rather exaggerated, gains force from the continual instances which he has adduced of former American writers betraying their art to the interests of property. He seems right in maintaining that these authors will resent any political change, in so far as it ad- versely affects their financial positions (who would not ?). That these writers would be unable to adapt themselves to working under new political conditions is less certain. The experience of revolutions proves even more that revolutionaries cannot accept art than that artists cannot accept revolutions. In detecting the capitalist bias of many artists, Mr. Hicks has exposed a flaw in much of the best modern American—and for that matter, English—work. But his suggested remedy of a proletarian literature based on Marxist principles merely replaces one political prejudice with another.
The fallacy underlying Mr. Hicks' attitude is that he is not interested in literature as such. For him the writer must be prophet, politician, economist and sociologist, plus a little something which the others haven't got. For him, economic laws alone regulate human conduct ; psychological principles merely ruling the province of pathology. He takes a ra- tionalist attitude to life, which ignores the unconscious sources of activity and belief. The difference between a believer in capitalism and in communism is for him one begotten of different economic status—even though men holding these opposing beliefs work in the same factory at the same task for the same wage. He does not realize that psychological motives, underlying the conflicting political principles, account for the difference in belief (under capitalism, the social structure is a father-son alignment, under communism a fraternity or brother-to-brother relationship).
In so far as the artist becomes paltisan to political principles, his art suffers. As artist, he should understand all causes but espouse none, though his beliefs may carry him in his capacity of citizen as far and violently as you will. Mr. John Dos Passos, the only literary figure of today in whom Mr. Hicks has hope, is not a partisan in his books, whatever his personal political opinions may be. He has the detach- ment from theory and the sympathy with individuals, which are the negative and positive conditions of artistry.
As a communist, Mr. Hicks has examined American writers for capitalist bias. Rejecting those in whom he finds it, he has gathered all others to himself, saying, with a certain lack of discrimination : " Whoever is not against me, is with me." Perhaps he may have the opportunity at a later date of dis- covering in artists as great a detachment from communism as from the existing system.
ARTHUR CALDER-MARSHALL.
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