Irving Howe 1974
Source: Saturday Review, 10 August 1974. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Except for patriots and scholars, there really is no major American literature before the 1830s. At that point began the ‘American Renaissance’, our first great literary period, in which writers like Emerson, Whitman and the early Melville proclaimed that in America paradise had not exactly been found - for they had, after all, eyes with which to see - but was a state of being within our common reach, a possibility to be won through the exercise and the purification of the individual will.
The myth inspiring these writers was that of a new start for humanity in the sacred emptiness of American space, a leap past the blood and chaos of European history. Not a good society, but a transcendence of social bonds; not a community of citizens, but a fraternal huddle seldom consisting of more than two persons - I, the self-created individual, the man or boy lustred through a direct intuition of godhead, and you, my amiable friend, sharing the pleasures of an unsullied nature - this was the commanding vision of nineteenth-century American literature.
What was being imaginatively summoned here was not merely a male fraternity, a miniature secret society at a distance from social rank, family bonds and female demands. It was also a benign anarchist utopia, a gathering of friends on a raft or in the woods or out at sea that would shake off the paltry calculations of good and evil and would thrive freely beyond the reach of the state or the constraints of authority. Every man would declare himself a pioneer of spirit, with a stake in the geography of transcendence or in what Emerson called the Oversoul. Every man would make himself anew, defining his character through a relentless flux, as if Adam never fell and Cain’s progeny did not settle in Europe and Asia.
Having reached its first rich bloom in the nineteenth century, the American imagination is incorrigibly romantic. So it has always been; so, probably, it will always be. But our romanticism is different from that of Europe. In its social innocence, ours supposes that a state of communal ecstasy (a runaway slave and a black boy, an alienated sailor and his brown friend) can replace the here-and-now of mundane or social politics; this illusion having burst, as it must, our writers fall into that bleakness of heart greying the late work of Twain and Melville. And American romanticism differs from that of Europe in that it retains strong alloys of Puritan moralism, so that in the work of a novelist like Henry James there is a complex interlocking between the desire for individual release and the memory of inexorable norms. But with whatever complications, the native American strain is romanticism, a soaring of ideal expectations, a faith in personal beatitude.
Our second great literary period came in the Twenties, when American writing broke out of its brilliant self-absorption, collided with the weight of Europe, and proclaimed the hope for a new paradise - F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘orgiastic future that year by year recedes’ - to be forever lost and perhaps well worth the losing. The deep, if unspoken, kinship that the writers of the Twenties established with their nineteenth-century forebears was that of simultaneously celebrating once again the pastoral vision of anarchic bliss (Hemingway with Nick Adams at the big, two-hearted river, Fitzgerald through Gatsby’s green light, Faulkner with the grave rituals of returning to the woods) and ruthlessly assaulting that vision, as if to announce that in anarchy, even the mildest Emersonian variant, there can be no bliss. The individual will, so imperiously exalted a century earlier, now became an agent of malaise and overreaching. (Melville, it is true, had already recognised as much in his conception of Captain Ahab, but it seems at least arguable that Ahab so dominates Moby Dick, as Hester Prynne does The Scarlet Letter, that the final thrust of the book is a re-assertion of Promethean romanticism, the dominion of the unbowed will, at no matter what cost.)
Reading again some of the major writers of the Twenties - Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stevens, Cummings, Williams, and a bit later, even Faulkner - one is struck by the sheer omnipresence, the exasperating inescapability, of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He haunts the American premises. He is both influence accepted and influence denied. Our wicked lamb, he has left his mark on every major American writer with the possible exception of Edith Wharton. (Even Theodore Dreiser, supposedly a mechanistic determinist, speaks in the Emersonian vein, bringing into play ‘a mystic something of beauty that perennially transfigures the world’.) Over and over again one hears echoes of Emerson’s call for the self-reliant man, follower of instinct and conscience (the two, implausibly, not very distinct in his writing) - over and over again, echoes of his romanticism asserting the godly blessedness of human reach. Imagine the outrage of this idea, possible only to America, that a relentless infinitude of will, emerging from a direct tie with godhead, should appear in our writing as a category of innocence! Captain Ahab is Emerson’s dark nephew, and Jay Gatsby is his descendant along a bastard line, grandson of an illicit union between the Faustian romanticism of the New England philosopher and the acquisitiveness of the American bourgeois.
The American writers of the Twenties saw themselves as latecomers. (I wrench this term from Harold Bloom’s book on literary influence.) They were latecomers in relation to the American experience, no longer able to draw full sustenance from its controlling myths and symbols; they were latecomers in relation to the great nineteenth-century American writers, receiving fragments of their world view but without much faith or confidence. (In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the American dream becomes Jake Barnes’ nightmare, forcing him to sleep with the light on; in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it becomes the monomania of Jay Gatsby, dragging him to a sordid death.) And the writers of the Twenties were latecomers in relation to cultural modernism, which had by then revolutionised European culture and demanded from them journeys, literal or symbolic, to Paris and Berlin.
For the first time American literature took on an international cast, not merely in its settings and references (as in Eliot’s The Waste Land, which set the tone for the age) but also, more deeply, in its major line of vision. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Cummings (in The Enormous Room) brought to our writing a tacit denial of the whole premise of American destiny, resisting sadly or sourly the idea that the New World represents mankind’s second chance - even as they remained enthralled by the charm and pathos of that notion. Europe broke into the consciousness of our writers as never before: Europe as the war, as history suddenly encountered, as heritage of human failure, as idea of social limitation. And once Europe had left its scar, our literature could never again yield so wistfully to the idyll of Huck’s raft and Natty Bumppo’s wilderness; it could never recapture the buoyancy of Emerson and Whitman.
The latecomer was, by necessity, a writer of self-consciousness. He struggled with fragments of conviction, he wrestled with a heritage of powerful ancestors, he could neither fully retain nor fully reject the seemingly assured values of an earlier moment. The phrase ‘crisis of values’ has by now become a cliché that makes us wince when we hear it, but it also points to the deepest realities of our epoch. For the writers of the Twenties, this crisis was no longer a problem, certainly not a discovery, since all that it signified was simply taken for granted. What was a problem was how to live and work after that crisis had registered in our awareness.
A vivid account of the tone of the Twenties comes from John Peale Bishop, the poet-critic who was a friend of both Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. In his essay ‘The Missing All’ - the title is from an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, ‘The missing All prevented me / From missing minor things.’ - Bishop describes how the young literary men returning from the First World War felt they had been cheated not only of time and health but also of truth and honour. They formed ‘really the first literary generation in America. There had been groups before, but they were not united by a communion of youth, a sense of experience shared and enemies encountered...’ They felt themselves cut off from all who held power and spoke with voices of authority.
The most tragic thing [continues Bishop] about the war was not that it made so many dead men, but that it destroyed the tragedy of death. Not only did the young suffer in the war, but [so did] every abstraction that would have sustained and given dignity to their suffering. The war made the traditional morality inacceptable... so that at its end the survivors were left to face, as they could, a world without values.
Yet in facing that world, they remained, whether they acknowledged the debt or not, the spiritual grandsons of Emerson, Whitman, Twain and Melville. The old American yearnings were still there, if only to exacerbate the sense of deracination and pain that informs the writing of the Twenties. And few things are likely to be more disturbing to a sensitive mind than a heritage of high romantic idealism that cannot be released except through anxieties of negation.
For writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings and the early Dos Passos, there could no longer be a question of clinging to traditional values. Nor could there even be a question of trying to find ‘new’ values. These writers knew it was their lot to spend their lives in uncertainty, and the problem that obsessed them was how to do this without violating their feelings - their deeply American, their finely inherited, feelings - about courage and dignity. They saw their task as a defensive one: the preservation of residual decencies even when they could not quite provide sufficient reasons for wishing to preserve them.
Writers burdened with this order of consciousness are likely to become fanatically protective towards language: it is their last line of defence. No other group of American poets and novelists has ever been so concerned as that of the Twenties - and here the influence of European modernism was decisive - with keeping alive the undefiled word. For Hemingway especially, the bare word, in its denotative scrupulousness, became a fortress of the self. Fitzgerald took greater chances with language, risking passages of high poetic generality: they reveal him, in falsity and wisdom, like a pure mirror. Cummings in his ragged poeticising, Williams in his modest phrasing, Dos Passos in his early Joycean play: for all such writers language became not merely the substance of craft but also a sign of honour.
To create an authentic style, a unit of prose or a line of verse free of bluster and pretence - this was now a sacred obligation. And an obligation that soon passed from language to behaviour. If you lack a structure of moral belief yet are sensitive to the need for moral perception, then what you will look for is something I have elsewhere called...
... a moral style... a series of gestures and rituals made to serve as a substitute for a moral outlook that could no longer be summoned; or a fragmentary code of behaviour by which to survive decently, as if there were - the drama consisting in the fact that there is not - a secure morality behind it. The search for a moral style, which I take to be fundamental to the best American writing between World War I and the depression, is a search undertaken by men who have learned that a life constricted to the standard of faute de mieux [1] can still be a rigorous, even an exalted, obligation.
No American writer felt this obligation more fiercely than did Hemingway, and for two or three decades he was probably the most influential novelist in the Western world, embodying its malaise and anguish in fictions of repressed candour. Now, 20 or so years later, one finds that students no longer respond to his fiction, certainly not with that surge of identification that I recall from my youth; they cannot see what ‘all the fuss is about’ in The Sun Also Rises, and they suspect its characters of self-dramatisation. Well, such faults do mar the best of Hemingway’s work, as they overrun the worst of it, but what younger readers often fail to detect is the moral context, the whole structure of feeling, from which Hemingway writes. They fail to grasp the terms of desperation informing the conduct of his characters: and suddenly - how astonishing - the most translucent of American stylists has come to seem obscure.
But it takes only a modest quantity of historical imagination to see that Hemingway was evoking the ‘essence’ of the modern experience through fables of violence that had their settings in Africa and Europe. The characteristic Hemingway hero - wounded but bearing his wound in silence, sensitive but scorning to devalue his feelings through rhetoric, defeated but finding a remnant of dignity in an honest confrontation of defeat - signifies the deracination of twentieth-century life, now felt to be so extreme that there is nothing to do but find a psychic shelter of one’s own, a place in which to make a last stand. But a last stand: not a rout.
All of Hemingway’s stories and novels can be read as efforts to find improvised gestures and surrogate codes - what I have called a moral style - for the good, the true and the heroic - or, that failing, at least for not yielding to the inner floods of panic. Hemingway struck to the heart of modern nihilism through stories about people who have come to the end of the line. Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Lady Brett, Frederick Henry, and then the prize-fighters, matadors, rich Americans and failed writers: all are at the brink, almost ready to surrender yet holding on to whatever fragment of morale they can. The compulsive stylisation of Hemingway’s prose was a way of letting the language tense and re-tense, so as to form a barrier or a dyke against the panic that had taken hold of his characters. Finally, Hemingway’s best work comes to seem an incitement to resistance and renewal through the frugal postures of moral style.
What Hemingway tried to do through his code of behaviour, Fitzgerald tried to reach through visions of grace. Fitzgerald understood instinctively that romanticism is the American fate. No matter how the American writer regards romanticism, he must steadily confront its premises. Being a latecomer, Fitzgerald could not, like Melville, enfranchise his romanticism through heroic figures larger than life or through epic narratives larger than novels; he had to cage his romanticism in the deflated wisdom of Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby; but it was the mark of Fitzgerald’s seriousness that at no point can we suppose the cage to be greater than the beast trapped within it.
A Fitzgerald critic, Milton Hindus, has written that ‘Fitzgerald’s trouble is that, like so many extreme romantics, he vacillated between two contrary views. He wanted to lead the good life from a spiritual point of view in the desert of worldly values where it was quite certain in advance that it could not be led.’ The remark is priceless in its thorough misunderstanding. For the desire that Mr Hindus attributes to Fitzgerald is a desire animating such classic European novels as Great Expectations, The Red and the Black and Lost Illusions. Still more, it is the story of every young man (and, increasingly, young woman) who stands at the threshold of modern life, drawn to the goods of the world but held back by the spirit of good.
To decide in advance that ‘the good life’ is impossible in ‘the desert of worldly values’ is to forgo the writing of novels, perhaps even to forgo the living of life. Every writer must have some complicity in the schemes and the delusions of his characters: he cannot be so high-minded as literary critics... Perhaps Fitzgerald had a greater complicity in the foolishness of his moment than most other writers have, but the pathos of his life and the greatness of his work derive from the extent to which he could both do emotional justice to this foolishness and mature beyond it. Had Fitzgerald been immune to the yearnings of American life, he would have been a wiser man than he was, but certainly not a better novelist. As he worshipped wealth, youth and glamour, they were surely false; as he later turned against them, his turning was true; but even in his turning, he kept some essential part of his earlier worship, and - one is inclined to say - he was right to do so.
Glamour is the crucial word here. Fitzgerald and Hemingway, as late romantics, wanted visible signs of grace: no small demand to make upon America. Hemingway gave up and looked abroad, as if grace had gone into exile. Fitzgerald wanted to find grace in the very materiality of the meretricious, perhaps in that aura of stylised excitement we call glamour. On Sundays and at other pious moments we know this to be a delusion, but in our actuality it is a delusion we cannot bear to shake off. Glamour, one learns from the dictionary, carries with it ‘a magical aura’, some transfiguring dimension endowing this world with the ineffable traits that classical religion had proposed for the other world. A heresy, of course. But surely the central American heresy, and in trying to make the quest for glamour into a discovery of value, Fitzgerald summoned the American experience as no one else has in the twentieth century.
But he went still further. Rereading The Great Gatsby some weeks ago, I was overcome with admiration for its perfect articulation, as one is overcome in reading Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe or Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But it was not an especially moving experience, perhaps because Fitzgerald’s book has become congealed for us as a classic, perhaps because its self-sufficiency leaves it without those reverberations we expect from the greatest literature. But rereading Fitzgerald’s next novel, Tender Is the Night, I became convinced that - together with Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury - this is the novel which marks the entrance of American culture into tragedy. Here American fiction moves beyond the idyll, the epic and the myth - all of which dominate our writing in the nineteenth century - and comes to the torn substances of life, such as we encounter in the greatest European novels.
Tender Is the Night is a badly flawed book but nevertheless wonderfully sustained by the decorum of considerateness which Fitzgerald brought to even the least worthy of his characters. Figures like Dick Diver, Nicole Warren and Rosemary Hoyt are, of course, distinctively American, but we are not tempted to think of them merely as Americans or as ‘representing’ American experience in some high, mythic way. They are all delicately life-sized, neither overblown for purposes of epic nor shrunken for purposes of comic assault; they are worthy of comparison with Anna Karenina and Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Isabel Archer; they share in our common fate of disintegration. Here Fitzgerald writes with the supreme vulnerability that William Troy once called ‘the authority of failure’, and through it he reaches, if not the great classic pattern of tragedy, then as much of the texture of the tragic as modern life allows. The American with the sensibility of a romantic brought up in the Twenties has matured into a man to whom suffering is as familiar as water, and there are passages of chaste eloquence that can move one more than whole books:
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of the individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
But there is another major American voice that first made itself heard in the Twenties, less immediately moving than that of Fitzgerald but serving beautifully to link the two great periods of American literature. Wallace Stevens, drawn to glitter in his earliest poems as Fitzgerald was to glamour, is a many-sided poet, rich and complicated. One side of him has recently been evoked by Harold Bloom, who sees Stevens as descended from ‘the inescapable father of the American Sublime’, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
But there is another Stevens (there always is), a poet so aware of the sentiments shared by the writers of the Twenties that he quickly absorbs them and moves beyond. As I read Stevens, the idea of what I have called moral style, though not of course the term itself, seems to be employed with some deliberateness, in part as a counter to that side of himself which yields to ‘the American Sublime’, the Emersonian expansiveness. At the base of Stevens’ work, as a force barely acknowledged yet always felt, lies a pressing awareness of human disorder. Rarely does it emerge as a dramatised instance; a trained connoisseur in chaos, he sees no need to linger before the evidence; other writers have fulfilled that task. The disorder that occupies the foreground of so much modern literature is calmly accepted by Stevens, just as the phases of American consciousness represented by Emerson and Fitzgerald are absorbed. In Stevens’ poetry a secular imagination measures with notable composure the losses it has suffered from the exhaustion of religious and native myths and then hopes that emotional equivalents or surrogates can be found in ‘One’s self and the mountains of one’s land’ - which is not, I think, so very far from what Hemingway and, less directly, Fitzgerald were hoping for.
If Stevens summons the romantic Emersonian voice acknowledging ‘something illogically received’, he also speaks for a sensibility beyond Fitzgerald’s pain:
The earth for us is flat and bare
There are no shadows. Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place...
Calmly, in the ruminative comedy of a mind accepting the deflations of modern history, Stevens writes his poems to rediscover the human gift for self-acceptance, poems that may enlarge a little our margins of autonomy and pleasure. Seeking a way to wrest convictions of selfhood out of a shameful era, Stevens turns us back to American nineteenth-century innerness but without pretending to reach American nineteenth-century transcendence. He tells us that, in times after crisis, there is always the possibility of attending our own consciousness, not fretfully, but just to listen to the hum of life. And even to the motions of decay and dying:
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruits thereof.
Two golden gourds distended on our vines...
Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
The laughing sky will see the two of us
Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.
One likes to indulge the fantasy, admittedly farfetched, that Dick Diver might speak such words to Nicole at the end of Tender Is the Night, but of course he cannot. The two of them remain too painfully locked into their agitation.
The search for moral style, that remnant which may save us after the collapse of our myths, places a tremendous burden upon literature, almost demanding that it provide us with norms of value we cannot find in experience. Yet precisely this aspect of the work of writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Stevens - utterly different in their personal sensibility but linked by a common situation - makes them seem close to us, sharing our needs and desires.
1. Faute de mieux - for lack of anything better - MIA.