Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
level of inventiveness. When nothing else is happening, the manipulation of the medium should reward our attention, providing the inarticulate reader with inarticulate delight and the analytic one with material for swift analysis. Cummings in The Enormous Room does meet this requirement. Though, sometimes, he relies upon slang paraphrase—and when he speaks of going through a door haughtily, “using all the perpendicular inches God has given me,” we know that he has drawn himself up to his full height. But there is always ebullience. The author strives that the reader may relax. Should one open the book at random, wherever the eye falls the page comes to life. Granted that the life is not invariably beyond our protest—that it might often be a better quality of life—the buoyancy is to be found throughout and promptly declares itself.
Wescott is a writer of short stories. Good-bye Wisconsin is avowedly a collection of short stories; and his two novels, The Apple of the Eye and The Grandmothers, are sequences of short stories in disguise. Perhaps one of the best examples of his suggestive method is “The Whistling Swan,” the piece which ends Good-bye Wisconsin. We see a young musician, who is in Wisconsin after having been subsidized abroad. There is a young girl, who loves him with a certain disturbing awe. He is trying to decide whether to remain, or to make new plans for a return to Paris. While walking in the woods, with a gun and his indecision, he comes upon a swan, which startles him and which he shoots almost before thinking. Indecision vanishes. He will remain. In the shooting of the bird, felled in a flutter of expert prose, he slays a portion of himself, that portion which was drawing him to Paris. Wescott suggests—we are at liberty to complete the psychology. An aspect of the hero’s self is externalized, and he slays it. The event may be taken, not as the cause of his reversal, but as the paralleling of it. That which occurs within, by the dark and devious channels of decision, he duplicates without as the destruction of a swan. Following this symbolic elimination, he is prepared to remain, to marry, and let our gentle girl become indispensable to him.
There is a sweetly morbid effect in Wescott, as when, in The Grandmothers, he discusses past romance in the presence of old age. “The October afternoon on which she was buried, among her relations and his own, mingled in his memory with the afternoons of her girlhood.” As we read of his pioneers, we feel that this vast continent was peopled in gloom; where there is enthusiasm, it is seen through the despair and envy of another, or in the melancholy of retrospect. He writes of Grandfather Tower: “His beard was parted in the middle, and fell on each side of a large bone button in his shirt collar; his rheumatic hands were clenched; and wherever he went, he seemed to be elbowing aside invisible people on his way.” Similarly, in The Apple of the Eye, he takes a charming character from us, showing her body carrion after we had learned much of her difficult ways of feeling. And his short stories hint vaguely of corruption, corruption which even gains moment by being vaguely hinted.
Wescott gives the impression of one whose written frankness is kept suavely in arrears of his understanding; he diverges from his readers with discretion; determined neither to give offense nor to leave the offensive unsaid, he is necessarily unctuous. Westcott tells old stories. It is part of his success. To the circumambient he adds suavity. His pages, being liquid, flow. They flow through the mind, merging into one another, making perfect conformity. Plot and the statement of an attitude are, by his ways, skillfully interchangeable; neither is a digression from the other; both are aspects of a method essentially lyrical.
Waldo Frank we dare omit. Yet we recognize his great seriousness, recognize him even as a prophetic writer who could view with bitterness the spectacle of his work being incorporated elsewhere, piece by piece, not by plagiarists, but by artists who have in their own manner arrived at his results. Such men as Anderson we dare omit for other reasons: they have been amply appraised.
We regret the silence of Jean Toomer, after his early volume, Cane, a work showing the influence of Frank and Anderson jointly. Toomer takes the business of fiction very earnestly and is, perhaps, hindered temporarily by the desire to incorporate greater complexity into his work. There are many aspects of experience which must undergo a discipline of esthetic trickery before they can serve the purposes of lyric prose. And Toomer, essentially Negro in his inspiration, would surely never be content to let the singing quality depart from his work.
Paul Rosenfeld’s The Boy in the Sun shows to advantage the impressionistic treatment which the author applies with less fitness in his criticism. Perhaps it reflects the influence of Frank in that the metaphor, the image, tends to supplant psychological analysis. Since his adolescent is left at the end, still living, and even walking “through the cold spring evening,” we dare entertain the possibility of a sequel, treating of a treacherous passage from wonder to acceptance.
In Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos abandons his earlier, descriptive style for the methods of a playwright. Out of blunt materials—beaneries, seduction in the slums, low-visioned ambitions, thefts, brawls, dirty tricks—the author accumulates a grimy, but easily recognizable metropolis. Dos Passos contributes a new quickness to narrative, by a succession of pointed episodes, lives glimpsed preferably at moments of change or decision. Each event is thus a kind of miniature peripety, a plot at some culminating stage. His book affords us no new enlightenment, but it rises to the category of excellence through the sheer efficiency by which it represents its genre. The dishes-in-the-sink tradition is here carried to fulfillment.
We should also mention the appearance of Jonathan Leonard’s novel, Back to Stay. Leonard first attracted attention when a long story of his was published in The Second American Caravan. With his love of oddity, his peculiar preciosity in the linking of statement and answer, his pleasant glibness, readers who seek too exclusively in novels the sense of reality might find him disappointing. Dramatic situations are allowed to trickle away, sapped by the author’s and his characters’ perverse gift of loquacity. But by this loss, the flavor of his repartee is more emphasized.
We shall not venture upon the future. There seems little indication of any pronounced change. We might wish for the decease of the gossip novel, as having been written frequently enough. We might plead the obligations of history, maintaining that the accumulations in this medium are sufficient. We might hope to see local color become a less important aspect of fiction, on the grounds that it can hardly be done better than it has been done by many men long since dead. We might prefer to find the greater stressing of fiction as a literary experience, a speculative activity, a method of inquiry, rather than as a form of vicarious living. Meanwhile, there are advantages in the possession of these technicians who can entertain thee, at mealtimes, on the boulevards and by thy pillow, with able and compliant prose.
Permanence and Change
Joseph and His Brother by Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Alfred A. Knopf
The New Republic, June 1934, 186–187. Also in The Philosophy of Literary Form
This first volume of Thomas Mann’s trilogy carries us, as down a deep shaft, to old Biblical regions across which lie peaceful and pastorally melancholy landscapes. Down into the big black hole of the past we drift, until we come upon a world that lived three thousand years ago and is now, by Orphic conjuring, made to live again. The book has about it a quality that has almost vanished from contemporary fiction. It is contemplative, or ruminant—so perhaps one could speak more intelligently of its effects after a long interim of silence during which one returned to it only in memory. One must judge Mann, not as an adept in quickly caught and quickly forgotten impressions (not as the equivalent in pure art of the methods of advertising in applied art)—his value resides rather in a subtle, patient and skillfully sustained evangelism which produces changes in us capable of developing through decades.
Mann is a very thorough writer—and surely this melancholy volume, with its astonishingly complex morality, is the end-product of his thoroughness. As one reads it, one understands the solemn note that has gained prominence in his later critical writings. It seems clear that, in a pre-scientific era, Mann would have become a priest—or still farther back, in more primitive groups, he would have taken his place in the college of elders who carefully scan the tribal archives that all new acts may be judged and shaped by precedent. Indeed, as we read this reworking of the Biblical legends clustered about Isaac, Jacob, Esau, Leah, Rachel and Joseph, we get a new understanding of the part played by precedent in