The Disillusionists

The New Novelists Do Not Even Believe in Novel Writing

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

MOON Calf—the first novel in which Mr. Floyd Dell appeared under the assumed name of Felix Fay—was undeniably a work of some charm. Accurately, and with shy sympathy, Mr. Dell traced the adventures of this child pinched and starved of understanding, this adolescent Pierrot gaping gracelessly on the moon, this Jules Laforgue sterile in Port Royal, Iowa. This work, in spite of an increasing sentimentality and an unkempt style, was of such contemporary importance that many of us have awaited with interest Mr. Dell's second novel, now being published by Alfred A. Knopf under the title of Briary Bush.

Briary Bush is concerned with further adventures of Felix Fay. Escaping from his Iowa town, he comes to Chicago, a city—according to Mr. Dell—uncommonly kind to moon calves. From reporter he rises rapidly, until, at twentythree, he is "the dramatic critic of a great Chicago newspaper," able to support himself, a wife, a hand-vermilioned studio and a lonely work room. His play, The Dryad, is produced by the Artists' Theatre, and he is hailed by his own journal as "the new Barrie." He falls in with a veritable stockyard of moon calves, refugees like himself from the villages of the interland: girls, smocked and wide-staring, painting in the manner of Cezanne and Matisse; reporters forever planning to write a novel or a play; youths delicately cultivating the detached attitude, an exquisite vagabondage and the novels of Flaubert. With these and other such, Felix lunches in Hungarian restaurants and discusses the Life Force with admirable candor; he learns how the human spirit is kept awake by black coffee steeped at midnight over alcohol burners; he discerns how the freedom of the soul is served by irregular meals; in short, he becomes an enthusiastic citoyen of the Chicagoan Republic of Bohemia, hurling the bourgeoisie into imaginary tumbrils while canting the Bab Ballads.

Felix Fay marries, or perhaps is married by one Rose Ann, the daughter of a frayed and eccentric country clergyman. The greater part of the book is taken up with their attempts to combine "free love" with holy wedlock. Granting that this is the period when Bernard Shaw was newly arrived and surreptitiously read in Chicago, such a theme strikes one, at this late date, as a little silly. If Mr. Dell is as he has been called, a faun at the barricades, the faun has this time lingered overlong at one of the piles thrown up by the revolutionists of 1910.

Even so, the theme might have been saved had Mr. Dell allowed himself a little of the detachment he so casually despises, or had he been able to disengage himself from his central character.

The scenes and figures of Briary Bush might have been treated from afar, gayly, with bitter or light-hearted humor. Or, better still, they might have been treated from close-by, intently, poignantly, pathetically. Surely there is pathos in these sensitive, lonely boys and girls, crowding toward Chicago from grey ramshackly towns and the green and fecund prairies, hankering after an aloof, indecisive loveliness and the free exchange of ideas and the closeness of their own kind—these poetes manquds, these painters with aesthetic rickets, these intellectuals without critical intelligence. The young Compton Mackenzie might have handled it satirically ; Octave Mirbeau, in the days when Sebastien Roch was written, might have made of it a tragedy. But Mr. Floyd Dell has chosen to treat it in a mood of sentimental reminiscence. This is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable.

"Erik Dorn"

THE beginning and the end of Erik Dorn (Putnam) likewise have their setting in Chicago and Mr. Ben Hecht has presented us with a vast dithering vision of an American city, such as has not before existed in our literature. Some of the more violent poets have indeed shown us detached fragments of such a scene. Mr. Hecht summons it before our eyes in its entire madness; the dark flicker of a geometric cinematograph without motion—a blur of pallid monotonous faces, a confusion of tumbling rectangles—passing the accompaniment of a music so monotonously strident as to be without sound.

Erik Dorn is a journalist, and the newspaper office has been well chosen as a vantage point from which to view the whole tragic absurdity of our civilization. But the pantomime could not have been set in motion with a style less modern, less flexible than Mr. Hecht's. He has gone, it would seem to the revoltes, poets and prosateurs, who have most successfully experimented with words, and from them derived a means of expression, essentially his own, wider in range than that of any of his masters. He has at his disposal the lyric fall of Sandburg, the subtlety of Maxwell Bodenheim, the bludgeons of a Mencken, the fragmentary periods of the Little Review group—a style at once nervous and hardy, epigrammatic, precise in vision, rich in metaphor.

Consider, for example this intellectual club play in the manner of the author of Prejudices.

"The sanity of battlefields is in direct ratio to the insanity of the non-combatants. . . . Thus every war is to

its non-combatants a holy war. And we get a swivel-chair collection of nincompoops raving weirdly, as the casualty lists pour in, of humanity and democracy."

Or this snowstorm in a city street, a thing exquisitely modern, accurate and strange.

"It was now snowing heavily. A thick white lattice raised itself from the streets against the darkness. The little black hectagonals of night danced between its spaces. Long white curtains painted themselves on the shadows of the city. The lovers walked unaware of the street. The snow crowded gently about them, moving patiently like a white and silent dream over their heads. Phantom houses stared after them. Slanting rooftops spread wings of silver in the night and drifted toward the moon. The half-closed leaden eyes of windows watched from another world."

The Character of Dorn

ERIK DORN is himself a virtuoso of words. Unlike most characters in fiction who are supposed to talk brilliantly, Dorn is not compelled to silence by his author's inability to devise epigrams. He finds a relief from his lack of convictions in producing phrases— like a conjurer drawing forth marvellous rabbits from sleeves which should contain arms. He is a funambulist balanced over nothingness; to relieve his tedium he juggles colored words.

He has early become aware of himself, and at thirty he is beyond illusion, beyond good and evil, a genius rendered sterile by his own cleverness. Life presents itself to him as a picture with which he has no contact, a pattern of intricate, shifting forms, with no purpose but to divert his mocking eyes. Progress is a matter of better plumbing and more restrained gestures; the press a more absurd caricature of an absurd reality. He views America's entrance into the war, the Peace Conference, the German Revolution, with impartial aloofness, amusedly turning up the corners of his lips, making more and bitterer phrases.

Yet he is not beyond emotion, nor beyond tears. Burnt through by desires, wanting something more than the world can offer him, he is loosed from his calm by a neurotic girl, who is momentarily a hint of something beyond the ridiculousness of things. Chafing him into a bodily ectasy, love becomes a passion sufficient in itself and he ceases to make chatter. Then love burns itself out, and he finds himself almost silent, grown older.

I would not imply that the book is a mere assemblage of phrases, no matter how brilliant. It has, in an ample sense, form. I cannot understand those who find it disorderly, for the episodes, the rhapsodic interludes, have a due proportion and the several themes of the book return, each upon itself. The tale opens with Erik smiling in mockery on his senile father, mumbling from his eighty years "Wait, Wait. It is too early for you to say you have lived." It ends with the old dottard smiling on his son, who has in the meanwhile somehow disintegrated under life,—an Erik whose emotions have dimmed, whose sensitiveness is dulled, whose mouth is all but sterile of phrase. This is surely not formlessness.

To be sure the thought is at times confused; there are phrases which fail, either because they are blurred or precious. There are incidents, which have the unreality of a nightmare, or, better still, the unreality of a scene in Dostoievsky, the characters thinking one thing saying another, moved by one impulse and acting on its contrary. It is not always clear whether we are looking in Dorn's eyes or those of the author. But the book as a whole is as beautiful and disturbing as a live thing.

It remains to consider how far Erik Dorn is a brilliantly colored caricature of a generation of disillusionists, a generation which, though still young, can find no reason for its continued existence but that the blood is warm and quick in its veins.

The Translator of His Day

"I'M like men will all be later, when their emotions are finally absorbed by the ingenious surfaces they've surrounded themselves with, and life lies forever buried behind the inventions of engineers, scientists and business men."

But Dorn is too individual, too much the impotent genius, to be the "perfect translator of his country and his day" he fancies himself. He is a son of Russian Jews, and they have given him another method of thought than that of his fellows. And yet, Mr. Owen Johnson might learn from him unguessed reasons for the wasting of a generation, too clever for creeds, too tired for illusion, a generation of which some sit in loneliness on the dust piles of dreams and find no hope but in the one word Perhaps, and some cry out because of their exhausted nerves, worn and exacerbated by the noise of traffic and light, and some sit in witty groups exchanging mockeries.

THE WASTED GENERATION (Little, Brown and Company) is such a novel of the Great War as might well be reconstructed some years hence from bound volumes of the New York Times, 1916-1919, George Bellows' lithographs, a civilian's knowledge of French ports and unidiomatic French—provided the moral indignation could be recaptured. But the story scarcely exists—even for the teller. Mr. Owen Johnson stands behind his David Littledale solemnly asking and asking why the intellectual and political control of the United States has passed from those whose forbears landed from high-pooped sailing vessels. Mr. Johnson leaves the question unanswered, but the novel itself explains why some Americans of seven generations have lost their intellectual position. Politically the New England gentleman disappeared about 1828, because he insisted on treating a new and turbulent America to the ethics of the XVII century, the political principles and decorous standards of the XVIII. Mr. Johnson's hero is therefore left in the somewhat wistful attitude of regretting the election of Andrew Jackson.

The Blood of the Conquerors

WHILE Mr. Johnson querulously mourns the decay of New England gentlemen, Harvey Fergusson, in a more skillful fashion, dramatizes the passing of a lordlier and more ancient aristocracy—the Spaniards of the Southwest. He presents the conflict between the decayed, but still civilized Dons, drawing their blood from the Hispanic conquerors of the soil, and the raucous ready-made Americans who have, in the last generation, advanced by infiltration. The Blood of the Conquerors (Knopf) is carried to an incontestable conclusion—sanctified commercialism and the tawdry country club are left in control, and one more young man, in whom for a while desire and indignation had flamed, subsides into an apathy which is almost contentment.

New Mexico is seen with such freshness and intelligence that it is hard to believe the book has any possibilities for the movies. Bill Hart would indeed be lonely and ill at ease in a region so thoroughly depopulated of the familiar figures of the southwestern novel. The landscape is once more made foreign and very old, a land half Latin, half Indian, where the few remaining Spaniards who have not squandered their inheritance still hold feudal privileges over tbe bodies of their peasants and half-breed flagellants yearly renew bloody and mystic rites, which date at least from the XVII century and perhaps from still older superstitions of the desert.

The Blood of the Conquerors is an able and interesting first novel, well conceived and well written.

Gold Shod (Boni and Liveright) by Newton Fueslle, the already praised author of The Flail, is a work planned on a long scale, undertaking to explain anew the American business man. In its performance, however, it comes perilously near being of a romance of the automobile industry. True, there is a surface expertness and sophistication and an air of disillusion at the end; there is observation and occasional hints of dark understanding, but the book as a whole does not convince me, either as a literary performance or as a psychological study of a successful business man who had been happier as a commercial artist or a hack writer.

Presumably it is a novel of divided aims, the tale of a man who rides gold shod over the corpse of the artist in himself. But whether considered as a youth with a vague disposition toward the arts, or as a powerful figure in the motor industry, the central figure leaves me without conviction. I know nothing about the manufacture of automobiles, and have only once or twice in my life come in contact with business men, but I doubt exceedingly if such a man could, even under the most favourable circumstances and the goadings of a more determined wife, come to success. The wife, however, is excellently drawn.

The woman who harasses her husband into a secure financial position has been waiting for some time to be put into a novel. I can but think of the young men I have known, once delightfully shiftless companions, generous, given to aimless talk, and now married, taciturn and unhappily efficient. Chesterton in one of his essays insists that the opposition of women to the tavern is not that their husbands return drunken to beat them and break the furniture, but that the tavern and the club afford too easy an outlet to a man's disposition to waste his money and exhaust himself in talk. Perhaps so. It seems wiser than most of Mr. Chesterton's wisdom.

A South Sea Bubble

ALTHOUGH it scarcely comes within the range of a resume of the month's novels, I cannot forbear mentioning The Cruise of the Kawa, which should be the last word on the South Seas. Certainly Doctor Walter Traprock has hoped to make it the last word. As a splendidly mendacious traveller Traprock far exceeds Frederick O'Brien, and approaches the late Baron Munchausen. The audible island, the dew fish, and the fatu-liva bird with its square eggs spotted like beach dice make the Filbert Islands far more delightfully unbelievable than Tahiti has ever been, certainly since the last few returned travellers have reported that Papeete resembles nothing so much as a smaller Trenton with all the modern improvements of ten years ago.