Context
Complex Life and Complex Letters
Marguerite Young
The following essay first appeared in 1946. It is collected in Young’s Inviting the Muses: Stories, Essays, Reviews.
Literature is our night life, our dream life—and the sun may not rise tomorrow.
The old theologians used to say that God was always dreaming. One held the world and all its people and all its furniture and all the angelic choirs to be dreams in the mind of God. Were not God’s the strangest dreams imaginable? Was God plain, simple, and sensible, that God who was and still may be the greatest fiction writer of them all—His sentences, replete with the most baroque imagery, and quite circumlocutious, and even a little long-drawn?
The fantasy of literature can never keep pace with the fantasy of life, itself a moving shadow play of symbols written on space. More and more, our day life is becoming like our night life, a dream within a dream, distended and at large. It might have seemed an extreme literary fantasy once—but it is the brute fact that now in Russia, you may be killed in an accident, be brought back to life by artificial means, write a letter home or even a love letter to literature, and die again, maybe in three days, maybe at a grand old age. In Russia, there are dead men marrying women, dead men fathering children. The material state has, like the spiritual, its romance.
What I wonder is—when are some of our commonsense literary critics going to catch on to the fact that, as life is complex, the literature which expresses it must be also complex? One of the great pleasures of reading is that the mind oscillates between the reality and the phantom, and that the mind recognizes its oscillation—whereas, in life, it is not always so. I am tired of all the followers of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street—I wish they would get acquainted equally well with Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Thorny Sinclair Lewis, more astute than his followers, intended no final statement on the subject of reality. He is, in fact, the first creator. He would be the first to see that, in certain contexts, Babbitt may be the phantom and the unicorn the reality. America is, like everywhere else, the Arabia of the soul.
E. E. Cummings, skeptic poet, speaks of the midnight emitting on the air intaglios of nothing. Is not this a kind of reality?
Personally, I’ve never been quite sure where reality ends and unreality begins—though I share that dilemma, I fear, with wiser people than I. It seems to me as if, instead of dismissing modern literature as experimental or surrealistic or impressionistic or the great artifice, we should stop and think a little about the experimental, surrealistic, impressionistic, artificial life of our experience. Literature, after all, only illuminates life’s walking mysteries, ourselves. It can create nothing but that which, in a sense, was already there. The greatest realism is neither plain nor simple but the knowledge that the cosmic and the psychic are all mixed up in one illusive pattern. It’s hard sometimes to distinguish between the two. Newton’s law of gravity, we are told by the astrophysicists, has just jumped out the window—but that is the sort of thing that was always happening in Alice in Wonderland, a paradise for the relativist. It’s curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said in Wonderland—but we know now that we can travel fastest when seemingly standing perfectly still.
And, as I began by saying, the sun may not rise tomorrow, after all. The chances are, it will—but should it get off its course, no law of ours can put it back again. It is just like Humpty Dumpty—all the king’s horses, all the king’s men could not put him together again. Perhaps, as to reality, the fragments were all there ever were. John Stuart Mill, a logician and not a surrealist or author of fairy tales, argued that there is nothing given in nature but only our expectation of it, our habit of belief. Mill proposed the insubstantiality of the dreamlike future and also that our feeling for the past may be based upon a cosmic joke, a delusion of the dreaming senses. With his present equipment of memory, Mill said, he might well consider that there had been a long duration of history, his own, the world’s. Yet suppose that the world and himself were created only three minutes ago, just as he sat in his easy chair and that, in the act of creation, a supernatural agency had given him his head upon his shoulders and deceptive memory? How would he guess the vast, spectacular joke that had been played upon him? He would be unable to recognize the fiction of a past history, the world’s—or that, in remembering an old face he saw once in his childhood, he remembered something that never had existed. More, the clock that struck an hour ago had never struck.
Chaos, confusion, these are not, after all, a modern inheritance nor a modern sickness of the soul, as J. Donald Adams, most eminent of commonsense critics, would have them be. There have always been such weighty problems.
The commonsense critics would like to think otherwise. They look for a literature which will not be dangerous. They are those who, like Alderman Butler of Dublin, inquire little into the history of ideas, and attribute the sad state of the world to the intellectualism of James Joyce or George Bernard Shaw. This age does not need, they say, another Reverend Jonathan Swift raising his hoary head, another Gulliver’s Travels, that social and scientific and moral fairy tale of changing perspectives, giants, dwarfs, unreasonable men, and reasonable horses. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, considered by many critics the best novel in any language, would be much better, they say, if only it had not been burdened with a theory of history. Their attitude is even more provincial than Alderman Butler’s, for he at least accepts the angelic intellectualism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The commonsense critics speak of "universal truths," but the universal truths they want are not the intaglios emitted by nothing on midnight—rather, a few easily recognizable human types, plots, happy endings. Everything is to be very direct.
Any idea about man’s anomalous character and position in the transshifting universe of lost events is, they say, unnecessary luggage. Style in writing is nothing but thinking, and yet they disparage style as if it were a pretentious ornament. In the twentieth century, they feel, there can be no style—it is just enough to say, "The cat was on the mat," for the cat must always be recognizable. Josephine Johnson’s Wildwood, lighting up a small field of perception, was attacked by such critics because of its pretentious style—and I suppose that, extending their argument, the Book of Revelations is even more perceptive, more highly stylized, and more pretentious.
What is it that such anti-literary literary critics really want, when it comes right down to brass tacks? They want literature to be simple, plain, sensible, healthy, unassuming, underwritten, comfortable. When pressed to find an example of such fiction, they have a hard time. They are likely to mention very unlikely titles—so what they must admit, if they are honest, is that there has never been any decent literature at all. Pilgrim’s Progress, the kind of inoffensive book they mention, has its wild Gothic elements, even its monstrosities—and is thus closely related to works as seemingly far removed from it as William Faulkner’s novels, Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories such as "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz," the more extreme of Eudora Welty’s dream-inducing short stories, Robert Penn Warren’s "Cass Mastern’s Wedding Ring," Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a story of mutes. Do any of these works repeat each other in an endless pattern of mediocrity?
In our streamlined age, we are turning out books with the efficiency of Willow Run, "average" books for "average" readers, whoever those readers may be—books about the good old days when life was rugged, books about typical households in the gaslight era, stuffy period pieces with all furniture and no people, thin romances of ersatz history as seen through the eyes of a Turquoise or an Amber, problem novels which solve their problems at a single blow, Madame Bovary molded to the pattern of St. Louis, Henry James’s novels turned into action stories—in fact, what have you? A musical cookbook, a book smelling like attar of roses perfume? It is all possible. One publisher advertises that we can escape by reading a new best-seller by a delectable Miss So and So. If we will follow the chapters of her book, we will "feel the strain ebbing away from our heart and brain," and we will find a world well worth the saving.
Does it not seem, however, an ironic reversal of values when we see the literature of the normal, such as Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I or Kenneth Horan’s Papa Went to Congress, both trivial, become the literature of escape from the abnormal experience of our daily lives? The literature of the normal has now become the last and only ivory tower. Perhaps it always was. Even the English nursery rhymes, as James Johnson Sweeney shows in the Museum of Modern Art collection illustrated rapaciously by Alexander Calder, even Mother Goose has a macabre origin and meaning. "London Bridge Is Falling Down"—that song began with the good old folk custom of burying a live lady in the masonry in order to avert bad luck.
I wish that the middlebrow worshippers of the simple would read the nursery rhymes in the light of their original meaning! If they are too grown up for the nursery rhymes, I suggest Voltaire’s Candide or Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas, both written in a so-called Age of Reason to prove that this is not the best of all possible worlds. There might be less criticism then of the writer who, no matter where he goes, even when he goes to a little chicken farm in Iowa, is still not an escapist—life being life, wherever it is. According to commonsense reviewers, Carson McCullers’s A Member of the Wedding has overemphasized violence, mental agony, and tendencies toward self-delusion. What about Browning’s Pippa Passes, a series of murder stories?
No, an honest literature has moved necessarily in a realm of ambiguities, violences, self-delusions. An honest literature, from Job to Richard Wright, has even been a little morbid in spots. I wish the commonsense critics would read for something more than the "story" and the "character" and the "plot"—I wish they would read for the themes which give these matters their importance.
There might be, with a cosmopolitan approach, more honesty in the description of books at every level. The old dime novel was not palmed off as literature upon an unsuspecting public as the new dime novel is. Laura Jean Libbey was never "the second Emily Brontë, the second Proust"—as the new dime novel often is—the old dime novel in a new cover—brought up to date, of course, with touches of style, touches of Marx, touches of Freud, touches of Proust—but nothing too much—never, in a million years, Proust, whose paragraphs are several pages long. What is desired is the stereotyped view of life, the uncircumlocutious sentence, even the blank page—while books which attempt the greater vision of complexity are popularly described as rootless moderns, merely perverse, the sports of nature. From Reverend Laurence Sterne’s wonderfully anarchic Tristram Shandy, however, do stem such modern rebels as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan, Alex Comfort, Marianne Moore, to mention only a few. Tristram Shandy is itself the result of John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, concerned with the sensations.
Universal things—well, they are really quite eccentric. There are more individuals than types, more dreams than dreamless reality. There are thirteen ways of looking at a single blackbird, as the poet Wallace Stevens says—as many ways of looking at blackbirds as there are people. Besides, both the people and the blackbird change somewhat.
I know of a former Catholic nun who heard so often that Gertrude Stein’s works are strange and unintelligible, not the speech of an angel—she believed what she heard. She would not even let a book by Gertrude Stein into her house, she said. Then a young soldier playwright returning from the wars persuaded her to read Wars I Have Seen, and now she is reading all Stein’s other books. Stein writes, she says, as people talk. Not all the strangeness wears off, the strangeness may even increase—but the loving reader will finally find himself at home in the pages of a book which, at first glance, seemed alien. When I first read Joyce’s Ulysses, I felt as if I were under an ether mask—but after all, there was a pattern, a curious logic. I wish that all literary critics could be, like Edmund Wilson, the detective unraveling the idea—but the commonsense critics are, in all probability, adverse to literature. When Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House was posthumously published a year or so back, it was easier to attribute the author’s suicide to her style than to examine those golden theories of knowledge which conditioned every glittering sentence, whether it described a maidservant or an empty house or a crowded London street.
Such pseudo-morality, passing for literary evaluation, takes some peculiar turns. When Pantheon Press brought out, a year ago, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales with delicate illustrations by Josef Scharl, though W. H. Auden welcomed it, experts on juveniles advised hysterically: "Don’t subject your American children to this German orgy of brutality, these stories of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," et cetera. Peculiarly enough, the Fascist order betrayed the same intense distrust of the Grimm fairy tales, and for the same reasons. Goering and Goebbels were sensible—whereas in Grimm we find a symbolic, disorderly, evasive, immaterial world order, a glass coffin in which the corpse may dream a world. Fairy tales are of no nation—they are international, the history of man which is never included in the history books. The mythic element, Wilhelm Grimm said, is like small pieces of a shattered jewel which are lying strewn on the ground all overgrown with grass and flowers, and can only be discovered by the farseeing eye. Their felt but hidden value, says the Irish poet Padraic Colum, author of the preface, makes the connection between certain subtle modern works and the Old World fairy tale.
I wonder what objections will be brought against Pantheon’s more recent companion volume, Russian Fairy Tales? Will the fairy princess have turned into a communist?
As for the American myth, it is fabulous, too—I don’t know why we should ever be considered a plain people; our heads are in the clouds. Lately, I’ve been reading Fawn M. Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, the brilliant biography of that wild-eyed Joseph Smith who, looking for lost treasures in the ground, stumbled onto the writings of an American angel, and founded, as a result of this encounter, the Mormon Church. No, America is not dull, and I’m tired of all the neat little books which describe it as dull. What it gets down to is that mediocrity of vision produces mediocrity of writing, nearly always tailor-made, like William Maxwell’s carefully composed The Folded Leaf where there is one neat insight per page, timed like a metronome.
Well, but the beautiful books have had more than one insight per page—in fact, they are a wilderness of color and sight and sound. Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, less elegiac than The Folded Leaf, gives what it intends, "the kaleidoscopic noise-picture of existence, the volatile, the demanding but unrealized vision of knowledge." Alex Comfort’s The Power House, perhaps the most distinguished novel of last year, shows the fragmentation of cosmic and psychic reality in war and peace. The aviators in Irwin Shaw’s short stories are modern versions of angels, bringing all vistas into the play of consciousness. The imagery of Egypt comes once more to Main Street—the literature of the American Nights will be, in a few more centuries, as fantastic as the literature of the Arabian Nights. Sheep and goats are to man the ships which will be dissolved when the atom bomb falls experimentally in the Pacific atolls—it all sounds like something Jonathan Swift could have thought up or like one of the thousand tales of Scheherazade. How can literature be of the modern world and not a crazy thing? In Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet, we see the modern world itself equated with a motion picture set, manufacturing a false scenario with false scenery. Be careful, Isherwood seems to be saying—What you may take for real may be just another motion picture set.
Is not the world we live in partly make-believe, too, like the many phantasmagoric worlds of literature and the other side of the looking glass? Just as our daily reality is posited on many illusions, so is literature, which is, after all, only an aspect of this devious life. In literature, true, we see the illusion illuminated as perhaps life’s ultimate meaning—whether it is Shakespeare’s Hamlet or such recent books as Katherine Anne Porter’s The Leaning Tower, Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Joseph Stanley Pennell’s The History of Rome Hanks, Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads or The Magic Mountain or Death in Venice, Allen Tate’s The Winter Sea, a book of poems. None are of the "Grandpa sat on the front porch" realism, the "Grandma tossed another hotcake" realism which describes nobody and nowhere. I’m tired of all the empty faces of juvenile heroines with long eyelashes and their indecision as to whether to marry Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown, two identical characters. I’d rather read Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads, showing how two men get their heads exchanged without their knowledge of the transaction, so that the mental head is on the athletic body, the athletic head is on the mental body.
I can imagine a chorus of those conservative critics before whom the artistic creator appears for the first time. The lovers of the mediocre suddenly become the lovers of perfection. To Herman Melville, they say—We rather like your work, Mr. Melville, but why spend so much space describing the interior of the whale? Aren’t both the whale and the universe a little exaggerated, a little beyond the average man? Cherchez la femme, Mr. Melville, it’s much more lifelike. Stay at home. To Nathaniel Hawthorne, they say—Mr. Hawthorne, you have done rather well, but why did you think you could see all of life through a hole in the window blind? Why don’t you travel? Aren’t you going to an extreme about human nature in the case of Mr. Feathertop, who has a broomstick instead of a spinal column, here on the sixth page? Isn’t he rather artificial?—Yes, why did Melville travel, and why did Hawthorne stay at home? Why is Ernest Hemingway so concerned with blood and thunder and why was Henry James so concerned with fashionable people in gilded drawing rooms? Why did Kafka think that a man could turn into a cockroach? Do these writers think that we, mature human beings who have come up the hard way, cannot check our findings, as J. Donald Adams says, against theirs? Do they think that life is as mysterious as science? Why write at all? Why, why? The cat is on the mat, and that’s the end of that.
