Puffeteers—and Puffeteering

The Fondness of Our Literary Critics for Passing the Puff and Hurling the Bouquet

SIMEON STRUNSKY

OUR approach to this most interesting phase in the present-day development of American literature", writes the learned traveller, Tsinan-fu, from whom the greater part of the succeeding 1800 words, approximately, will be borrowed, "lies across a veritable jungle of etymology. Through this we must by turn feel our way with the delicacy of an old-style diplomat or hack our way with ruthless strokes of the machete".

"It is always useful, in the study of any subject, to go back to the root meaning of the terms employed. Sometimes the affiliation between the original Aryan root and the 1921 word is so intimate as to be illuminating. Most often the lack of connection between the present-day word and its etymological origins is so obvious as to be highly stimulating. This satisfies the law of successful authorship as laid down by our great rhetorician Shan-Tung in his book, 'Seven Keys to Paradise', which he wrote as a text-book for the young Crown Prince Han-Kow, offspring of the Emperor Wai-Pu and the younger daughter of Rameses II of the Nile Empire. Most of the principles of this admirable text-book are to be found, slightly changed, in nearly all American manuals on the Art of the Short Story".

"'In the treatment of any subject', wrote the learned Shan-Tung, 'the writer's ambition must be to illuminate. If he cannot illuminate then he must stimulate. We may put it another way. In any literary work some one must worry. If the author cannot or will not worry sufficiently to make this point plain, then let the reader worry. This is sometimes called stimulating, sometimes intriguing, and sometimes suggestive'."

Puffeteers and Profiteers

BUT we are away from our point. The traveller Tsinan-fu, in his observations on the etymology of the word Puffeteer—one who puffs or overpraises—employs both the delicate method of deduction and what the Chinese sometimes call the rough-neck method of intuition. One school of lexicographers explains Puffeteer as a playful variant on the word Profiteer. Here the allusion would clearly be to the mutual profit derived by Robinson and Jones, two men of letters, whenever Robinson in his column of literary gossip hails Jones's novel The Speckled Beauty as the outstanding work of fiction of the last twenty years, and when Jones, in a special article in the Watchtower, greets Robinson's Long Lanes and Short Turnings as a revelation of the possibilities of the short essay such as Montaigne glimpsed, and Lamb strove for without actually achieving. Those who have carried to the highest point of perfection this new art of tossing the ball are sometimes known as Excess Puffeteers.

However, there are scholars who disagree. To them the word Puffeteer plainly traces back, by a familiar operation of Grimm's Law, to the word Buffeteer, with a simple change from the hard labial b to the soft labial p, sometimes known also as the Law of Lip-Service. But once we get back to the word "buffet" we encounter a radical subdivision of opinion. One school takes "buffet" in the sense in which Richard the Lion-Hearted exchanged buffets with Friar Tuck in Ivanhoe. By a change of b into p the meaning of the word has been changed from buffet, a blow, to Puffet, a caress. The Puffeteer school of criticism would thus embody a sharp reaction from the Buffeteer school of criticism, a reaction from the criticism of the brass-knuckle to the criticism of the Swedish massage.

The motto of the Buffeteer school of critics is: "If you see a rising head, knock it". The motto of the Puffeteer school of critics is: "If you see a rising head, anoint it and crown it— without examining too closely into its contents".

Cream Puffs from Critics

BUT not at all, insists the opposite school of buffet etymologists. You start from buffet, all right; but the real meaning is not a blow but a side-board, from which sustenance is distributed to the guest, frequently by himself, frequently by a sympathetic hand that happens to be available. This (points out our authority, Tsinan-fu), would be ingenious and complicated enough; but it goes beyond that. Upon the original stem of buffet, in its food sense, there has been imposed the terminal ending "teer", from the word cafeteria, a well-known American institution for self-feeding at moderate cost. Two words so intimately related in meaning, though separated by all the width of the Atlantic Ocean and the North American continent—cafeteria being Californian in origin—were intended by Nature to blend and reinforce each other. The Puffeteers would therefore be the practitioners of literature who feed themselves, or each other, from the Buffeteria or Puffeteeria.

There is, to be sure, the further hypothesis that Puffeteers is an abbreviated form of Cream-Puffeteers, in allusion to the most common article of diet the members of this class are accustomed to hand each other, but that way leads only into the heart of the literary jungle, and we may as well call a halt.

For our purposes the earlier definition is the more plausible and useful. The Puffeteers are the customers of the Puffeteeria, known to members of the non-literary classes as the Automat. In both, the essence of the matter is self-help. A second essential is cheapness. You can get at the Puffeteeria-Automat a solid meal of eulogy for a fractional part of the price one would pay at one of the established restaurants where the service is in the hands of professorial critics and is, nevertheless, terribly slow. A professorial waiter of literature will sometimes insist on keeping the guest twenty years with his napkin on his lap before bringing him his order. In the PuffeteerAutomat, on the contrary, the service is almost instantaneous and, as the second half of the names implies, almost mechanical. Robinson hands Jones a wreath of laurel, and Jones comes back automatically with a crown of bay for Robinson.

There are people in the United States, observes our admirable Tsinan-fu, who are displeased with the art of the Puffeteer as it is being practiced to-day in literary pages, in columns, or in single file. They resent both the motives and the results. They ask, with regard to the latter, whether it is best for American literature that every week shall bring forth a novel calculated to make Balzac sit up and take notice; whether every fortnight shall produce a volume of essays digging down deeper into the roots of life than Rochefoucauld, or tapping sources of humour inaccessible to Mark Twain.

Such verdicts are sometimes supposed to be encouraging to the younger writers. But, say these anxious objectors, suppose the young writers, encouraged by the easy output of novels plumbing to the depths of life, proceed to do some plumbing on their own account. How long will it be before literature has exhausted life, like the indiscriminate drilling in the Tampico oil-field, and literature will have to sit down and wait for life to catch up with it? Would it not be better to husband our natural resources by permitting the publication of the greatest novel of the quarter-century only once every three years instead of twice a year, as is at present the custom?

A Defense of the Clique

THERE is something in this plea, remarks our admirable Tsinan-fu. It reminds him of the eroded hillsides of his native land, pillaged by the reckless exploitation of the ancient forests. Tsinan-fu is also reminded of the remark made by the great Yang-tse-Kiang when the news of the collapse of the Tower of Babel reached Peking: "That's what comes from piling it on".

Others in the United States deplore the motives behind the art of the Puffeteers. They refer to it as the commercialization of literature. They say that there ought to be limits to the cooperative ideal, as, for instance, when one hand washes another. They feel that literature and art ought to be an exception to the Rotarian tactics of rolling each other's hoops. Above all, they say that the United States, which is so obviously lacking in the ideal of the golden mean, will derive little good in the long run from the mutual-insurance methods of the Puffeteers, with their semiannual distribution of huge but unaccumulated dividends. They say: Shall we never approach the Attic ideal of "Nothing in Excess"? Must it always be, for this nation, a violent swing between the process of passing the buck and the process of hurling the bouquet?

Well, remarks the sage and sympathetic Tsinan-fu, there is nothing to it. The Puffeteers are doing good work for America and for American art and literature. He cites the case of his own country. Where would the golden age of Hai-Ping literature in China have been (corresponding roughly to the age of Hammurabi in Babylon) if China had not developed its own elaborate Puffeteer system? In the outburst of that glorious period of creative art in China, no mean role was played by the members of the S. P. C. A. (the Society for the Puffeteerization of Criticism of Authors).

Tsinan-fu's country was the first among the nations to recognize the valuable services rendered by the literary cliques and coteries, and cenacles, and groups.

He recalls, for instance, the celebrated episode in the literary history of China connected with the poet and playwright Huig-tor-Yu-Gow and his drama Ernan-Yi over which there were riots in the streets of Peking between rival coteries and the triumph of which ushered in the great Romantic movement in China which lasted until the seizure of Kiao-Chau by the Germans and WeiHai-Wei by the English in the year 1898 A. D., when the great era of Chinese realism set in. "The wires of civilization", remarks Tsinan-fu in his own tight-lipped manner, "are almost invariably pulled by the little groups".

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Continued from page 45

How could it be otherwise, our estimable Celestial observer goes on to ask. Art cannot live without the breath of appreciation, even of eulogy. Until the world at large is ready to bestow its favour on the struggling writer and artist, where is he to draw the very air he must live upon, if not from the little group, the coterie, the clique? "Call them mutual-admiration societies—what then? They have their justification in Nature herself, which, for her own purposes, has devised the most restricted mutual-admiration group on record, consisting of one man and one woman, whose evaluations of each other, under the influence of the clique sentiment known as Love, would not always commend itself to the unbiased critic".

And so, concludes our Far Eastern observer, until the young author has won his normal bread and salt from the public at large, we must be content to see him maintain existence on the unbalanced ration of the Cream-Puffeteeria.