Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke

      A Transitional Novel

      The Dark Mother by Waldo Frank

      The Literary Review (New York Evening Post), November 1920, 6

      A number of years ago, Professor Münsterberg defined the three successive stages of a nation’s existence as provincial, cosmopolitan, and national. At that time he judged America to be emerging from the cosmopolitan stage into the national. In other words, we were reaching the culmination of our development in approaching the ante-bellum chauvinism of Germany and France. Although the war may have had the effect of disintegrating this attitude in Europe, war and our increased foreign trade are just marking the true beginnings of the national spirit in America.

      Concomitant with an interest in the political and economic sides of our national development comes the interest in our development as an intellectual and social unit. Beginning a few decades back with the epic novels of Frank Norris, we have since then refined upon the study of ourselves, with such results as Van Wyck Brooks’s subtle posing of Mark Twain against the background of our dying puritanism, and Waldo Frank’s sublimated press-agenting, Our America.

      There is one type of contemporary intellectual American who thinks he must flee from America. There is another group of artists concerned mainly with themselves and the manifestation of themselves in their medium; their environment is of merely accidental importance, employed or discarded for some purely subjective reason. A third kind is trying to distil some essence which they can call America, to give us some national integrity which can begin a tradition for us, form the sproutings of a purely indigenous culture. Such a man is Waldo Frank.

      I don’t know just why it is, but these alchemists in search of the gold of American unity have nearly always been rhapsodists; perhaps it is because Whitman was a rhapsodist. In any case, they usually interpret America in terms of breathlessness. They record a fever chart. We must be written about in a tempo agitato, in restlessly vacillating curves of rhythm. Speed, then, and syncopated noise are the first principles of American unity? I question it.

      In illustration of this, I recall reading the opening chapter to Our America, that masterful frenzy of American corruption and chaos, The Land of the Pioneer. I was buried in the history room of the library, where a man was frowned on for whispering. The air was stuffy and artificially still. But as I read I no longer received the impression of my surroundings. I got into the feel of 200 years of American herculeanism. I saw our origins as white dashes, monstrous errors, gigantic diseases. As I left the library America seemed to me something terrifying, something beautifully wrong, something moon-mad and money-mad and joy-mad and hate-mad.

      I stepped out on Forty-second Street. The day was mild and confident. One chap stopped to light a cigarette. A young woman was trotting a little lap dog. I went into Bryant Park and observed people dozing in the sun. Two girls were giggling and eating peanuts. I sat in the park a while, and then went home on the elevated. It was crowded, but there was no confusion. That evening I went to visit a friend, and found him playing pinochle with his parents. After a number of equally harmless and placid observations I wondered just where this feverish America was. I felt that I had been tricked. . . . No wonder Waldo Frank disapproves of the pragmatists!

      In his present novel, The Dark Mother, Mr. Frank applies the same general mentality. His characters struggle through a world of superlatives. This, for instance, is a good sample of his method of approach:

      Her sleep was a strange thing. No real dreams—streakings of thought and dream ran through her night like falling flames. So that her night was neither sleep nor waking. It was an endless trembling between two worlds, it was a part of Chaos. She lay there and her body was a restless weight holding her down. She was like a little boat tossed at anchor by a broken sea. Her body and her consciousness: these were the anchor. They kept her from running wild with the waves. And the waves kept her from being quiet at her anchor. She was torn. She was a continuous play of hindered movement.

      It is done well, frequently with beauty. The only question is that of its initial validity. The characters suffer too often; or rather, we are told that they do this excessive suffering. For it is only rarely that these characters are seen in actual operation; but these rare places are remarkable. The Judas-psychology of Tom guying his dear friend in the presence of two ninnies, for instance, is unforgettable. And Cornelia’s suicide is handled with a certain business-like directness.

      Broadly stated, the story is about a dreamy young man from the country whose whole body and soul are bent upon remaining exalted. He is the country cousin endangered in a Big City. In it Mr. Frank intends to hint at those unexpressible nuances of relationship which arise among people of affection. But his book operates on latent motives. He gives too much to the emotions and not enough to the intellect. As a consequence, we suddenly stop moving with the author, and see quite coldly that hearts are broken and souls endangered. The turmoil of diction continues, but it has lost significance. Surely, Mr. Frank is a more convincing narrator in his essays.

      The Dark Mother is decidedly a transitional novel. Although it was written in 1917–1918, Mr. Frank is already doing something different with his methods of writing prose. For I think it is safe to suppose that “Under the Dome,” a short story which was published this September, was written after The Dark Mother. Free verse is well enough established now, but free prose is only beginning. Writers of English prose who got beyond the standard dribble of the modern English novel are floundering temporarily in the chaos of a more sensitive medium, a more pliant form. Mr. Frank is one of the foremost of these martyrs in America. The Dark Mother is a lost cause, so far as the medium goes. For it is transitional; it is neither the novel, nor something distinct from the novel. Judged as a novel, it does not satisfy; and there is nothing else to judge it by.

      Experimentation with the novel will be done at a dreadful sacrifice. For a novel normally takes at least a year to produce. Now, if at the end of a year the experiment is not satisfactory, that means a good portion of a man’s life gone. In verse the experiment was less fatal. The comparatively short time it takes to produce a unit of poetry is not significant. This is perhaps the reason why prose is only now beginning to break, after the poetic revolt is nearly established.

      In any case, Waldo Frank is en route for something or other. At present his mind is still cluttered up with innumerable clichés, which may be true or may be false, but are clichés all the same. It is a cliché, for instance, to think that every time your hero looks at a New York street you have to lyricize on the great brute city. It is a cliché to write in terms of great elations and great miseries when human beings think in terms of mild comforts and irritating discomforts. It is a cliché to assume that one is made cynical and broken by familiarity with the ways of the world, while idealism is a sort of divine stupidity.

      Of course, any one can see beyond the cliché. The difficulty is to produce beyond the cliché. The man who can write “She trudged through the bright pink snow” has the proper equipment. Or this about a song sung by foreigners in a travelling railway car:

      The melody throbbed higher. Sharp flashings of desire were now in the women’s voices; the men’s were weary and disconsolate, dying down. The song was over.

      A new silence lay in the car. The car ran on, subdued in it and sweetened.