Reporting America
REVERSING the lot of his English contemporary, the American novelist of the last 30 years has had such an immense amount of material to get down on paper quickly before an even more fantastic fall obliterated it, that there has been little time for reflection. Everything has happened at once ; the rise of the buccaneer millionaires, the immigrations, Hollywood, the boom which turned Babbitt into a world power, the coming of gangsterdoin, the chaos of the slump. Self-consciousness had arrived, too. The novelists of the period turned to report it. Thus one finds in so many of them the excitement of actuality but the tedium of news print ; and it is interesting to note what a large number of the American writers have in fact served their time on newspapers. How different it has been with the English novelists ! Nothing has happened dramatically enough in society around them to sweep them off their feet, except the War. On the War only, our material is richer than America's.
The American novelists who saw the momentousness of their material in the last 30 years were an advanced guard of realists and satirists with a taste for the grim. All the pleasures of shocking the bourgeois, wigging the provincial, smacking at the Bible belt and upsetting the puritans were theirs. They did not have to be esoteric like Lawrence or Joyce. There were few private worlds of sensibility. You were a man in an amazing street and you simply told what the man in the street knew but, as a good go-getting citizen, didn't care to mention. It is curious, as one goes through the name- crowded pages of Mr. Harlan Hatcher's catalogue, to trace the development of the man-in-the-street novel from Theodore Dreiser's ,Balz.acian accumulations to the inevitable dis- integration which took place when the man in the street tired of accumulating and set down merely what went on before his eyes. Sinclair Lewis first, then O'Hara, Hemingway and Faulkner bring realism into the inevitable cul-de-sac. But though these may have come to a dead end, they have had a lively run for their money. They were inimitably American, whereas the novelists who have attempted digestion and reflection must all seem derivative to an English reader. The kind of thing which Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, James Branch Cabell and Thornton Wilder have done, we have done better.
Mr. Hatcher is exhaustive. The big figures have chapters to themselves ; but scores of lesser novelists are noted ; their " tendencies " labelled. On the younger generation he is brief; and while the book may be useful to students taking some fantastic and dreary B.Fic(Oswego), a method which classifies the novel according to its realism, poetic and hard- boiled, satire and social protest, eroticism, fantasy, prole- tarian, dew romance and (!) great expectations, reduces criticism to little More than a form-book by some earnest book maker with a national purpose. Still, Mr. Hatcher has a theme. He follows realism to its grave. And I suppose those who feel they ought to know about American fiction without reading it will profit by his intelligent industry.
V. S. PRITCHETT.
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