The Cold Shower vs. the Opiate in Literature

The French Flight from France and the Recent Discovery of Podunk by the Americans

MONTGOMERY BELGION

THE post-war disillusion weighs more heavily on Europe than on America, and one significant result is a topsy-turvy relation between the literature of the two continents. Of the disillusion itself the signs cannot be mistaken. Even the victorious peacemakers must have an inkling of it, for their heads have been the mark for stones of discontent instead of laurels of gratitude. America battles with trade depression, unemployment, a lack of stimulus, but she is fortified by the possession of peace and plenty. Yet, even social events appear shorn of some of their bygone vivacity, and profiteers scarcely dare profess optimism.

In Europe, the scene of the struggle, the situation necessarily must be worse. Europe is stricken, poor and weary, as well as disappointed. Take France, for example. No country suffered more during the struggle, none was more certainly victorious. Yet there this disillusion is treated as an ephemeral commonplace, so all pervading is it. Of course France will survive her victory, as she survived the victorious Crusades, the successful wars of the Revolution, the triumphs of the First Empire. But meanwhile her nearness to despair is far other than the dissatisfaction of America.

A nation's consciousness is reflected by what it reads, and the extent and length of the reaction to the collapse of the high hopes born of the war's needs naturally affect the intelligently popular books. On the writer's side this is all the more so, because in one way literature, whatever the value of its manifestations, was never nearer life. It is probable that never before this war has any happening touched so closely every artist and writer personally. So many were combatants, and even the onlooker, certainly in Europe, found himself attacked through his sensibility as never before by the common war fever and likewise by the depression of the peace. Contrary to some expectations, no first rate new author has made himself heard now that the guns are silenced. Probably he needs more time. But the established writing-man who is expected— and perhaps is able—to feel what is happening before it becomes evident, has given proof in the last two years of a changed outlook both in America and in France.

American Naturalism

THE consequence proves a quaint exchange. For America, it seems, has imported in literature the old realism which, in France, was fading in 1914 and then flamed again momentarily in the war, like an expiring fire, blown by the bellows of indignation of Barbusse and one or two others, who were outraged at the comparison of an offensive with a picnic. On the other hand, the young French writers, restless and more despondent, are producing an adventure story perhaps better than the old, a used pattern fashioned anew.

The most popular New York novels of last season—Main Street, Moon-Calf, The Age of Innocence—illustrate what I mean by Europe's old realism. So do the theatrical successes, for except The Emperor Jones, most Broadway drama postures at least as realism. If America finds the war barren in relation to the expectations to which it gave rise, the depression is, after all, due only to a business deal which has partly failed. The firm for a time may curtail its staff, it will be more prudent in future, and that is the extent of the harm done.

So popular American writers, finding for the moment ideals and institutions as hollow as their boyhood's dreams, are not vitally hit: life itself in its bitterness remains fascinating to them. So they have thrown themselves at life "as it is." Out with the bitter truth, and see if it won't cheer you!

Not so the French. France is not only the victim of a bad deal; she is rather like a man whose house is burned down the day he goes bankrupt, and who is then overwhelmed by a family tragedy. The French reader of imaginative writing, as a result, now demands imperatively to escape from life. Hence, while in the literature of entertainment Americans apparently enjoy the bracing cold shower of realism, the French yearn for the opiates of adventure and fantasy!

The French Spirit

HENCE the penetrating psychological novel is for the French unbearably morbid today. It would either so detach the reader as to make him impatient with its minutiae or press him into nerve-torturing introspection. Both states he would avoid. The American, with disillusion tempered by the freshness and vitality of his country, rather relishes looking at life "as it is"—in fiction. He has the luck to thrill at recognizing himself and naturally enjoys equally reading of people not more evolved than he was last year or last month.

But the Frenchman wants more than anything to forget life "as it is." He wants the comfort of an armchair and the thrill of adventure or fantasy in his reading. This is why Joseph Conrad's psychological side is concealed from French readers, and he is advertised as a writer of pure adventure. This is why the Samuel Butler of Erewhon is now a craze with the Paris intellectuals. This, again, is the explanation of the vogue in France of such authors as Valery Larbaud, Pierre Benoit, Pierre MacOrlan, Louis Chadourne, whom I pick because they are typical.

Pierre Benoit of course is known in America by his L'Atlantide, and the publicity that resulted from the suspicion that he had plagiarized Rider Haggard. His next novel, Pour Don Carlos, followed Conrad's The Arrow of Gold, and while there is no plagiarism there, it is unusual to find the French following in the wake of the English in plot and period. Both these productions supplied a special demand, Pierre MacOrlan, too, had laboured for years to boost the type of adventure yarn he writes, and now circumstances are calling him to his own. His the tales of tropical beaches, vicious pirates, plague, hunger, treachery, all told tensely and cynically, sometimes with a crude frankness.

But let me dwell on Valery Larbaud. It is he who for my present purpose I believe I may say embodies a significant postwar spirit. Be Freudian enough to conceive a man whose writing suggests the aloofness of Cabell, the cynicism of Mencken, and the varied scenery of Robert W. Chambers! This combination in Larbaud shows, I think, at once the value and the hope of the new French adventure story: even in her weariness literary France effects a synthesis, steps forward. Neither Cabell nor Mencken, of course, owes his outlook to the war, and Larbaud, it is true, had already professed his attitude in 1913 and before. But it required the peace to bring his writing into accord with the popular pulse. No matter that he is not a new author, and it is beside the point that he is a good one. He responds to the need that the moment has awakened in the intelligent French reader.

Larbaud has been always a wanderer. He is a recognized French authority on English literature, and it is he who is making Butler known in France. But he is more than that: in London, it is said, he can pass as an Englishman, in Madrid as a Castilian don. His chief pre-war book proved an incitement to be cosmopolitan—and yet laugh at yourself. A. O. Barnabooth was no novel, but a philosophy and a satire of travel and life. Enfantines, later, was hailed as Stevensonian.

Insist on Larbaud and I am looking out for his next long book with some avidity because in a way he is the precursor of the young men who are turning their back on life as it goes on purely inside a busy brain. These very young men are just as keen on travel as he is. Louis Chadourne—clean shaven and tweed coated—would be delighted to be thought in the street an American, and he does approximate to the American young rover. Since he left the French army he has toured the world, and a whole group of his fellows are doing the same. His first novel, Le Maitre du Navire, is an adventure story of the new type, of course; its success put him in the running for the Prix Goncourt last year.

Carco and Toulet

BUT it is not essential that theadventure story demanded by the French should have its scene laid afar. The action can take place in Paris itself, and the apache stories of Francis Carco rival for the discerning the slightly more popular tales of foreign lands. Some prefer them, for they combine the two avenues of escape from life: adventure and fantasy. And they satisfy a yearning for a new truth found in the human characteristics surviving in depraved hooligans, Carco's heroes. A special fascination pervades their astounding slang and distorted psychology. One learns with conviction from Carco that an apache may be hospitable where a bourgeois would be hostile. His success lies in the new atmosphere he has created, an atmosphere over which broods the menace of the law, the anxiety of danger. Paris looks to him, and he is only 29.

Still, those French readers who possibly matter most, the most literate, the most sensitive, find little solace in adventure; their weary boredom, verging on despair, is assuaged only by fantasy, and thus it is that the books of P. J. Toulet are also acquiring a vogue. Toulet was in the full flower of production when he died at SO last winter, and his reputation is coming posthumously. He is the supreme type of the amateur in letters, and he never pushed, so that his admirers have had to discover him. He is a bitter moralist, a desperate poet, who worked under all the masks of fantasy from the most frivolous to the most hallucinated, and is further a master of the subtleties and purity of French worthy of comparison with Mallarme. His books, such as La Jeune Fiile Verte and Monsieur du Paur, are nothing less than exquisite in their cynicism, satire, and unreality. Allied to Toulet, less admired, but more kindly in outlook is Emile Henriot, whose new novel, Les Temps Innocents, is announced.

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No woman is responding to the French literary appetite of the moment.

The morbidity of Colette and the sentimentality of Marcelle Tinayre appeal still of course to those who are blind, deaf, and dumb. But the kinds of reading that matter, that I have just outlined, are masculine in their source.

Doubtless the time will come when these kinds will be popular here. Feel not complacent, be not sophisticated, O American, at your delight in cold realism; you will return to your old favourites when they appear in new guise. When you have journeyed a little farther down the valley of disillusion, you will find in the new adventure story an alluring, exotic fragrance; in the fantasy a bittersweet savour!