Some Contemporary Authors

A. Child's Impressions of Lewis, Mencken, Cabell, Arlen, and Other Literary Figures

ELIZABETH BENSON

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second article to appear in Vanity Fair by Elizabeth Benson, an author who is twelve years of age, and the youngest of the contributors to these pages. In official intelligence tests, Miss Benson secured the highest intelligence quotient ever recorded in American educational annals. One of the unusual things about her is that although so young, Miss Benson has done a prodigious amount of reading. In her twelve years, she has already read, perhaps, more than the majority of adults do in an entire life-time. Her impressions of books and authors have interest, and perhaps even a critical value. The especial worth of her views and emphatic opinions, however, lies in the fact that they are a child's reaction to traditional literature and to the works of contemporary authors.

ANY child, who has a passion for the best in literature, comes rather early to a turning point in a reading career. In the "age of innocence", when no parent dreamed of allowing a child to suspect that babies did not arrive via the stork route, there were only two types of food on the literary menu: first, the "classics"—Dickens, Thackeray, and Scott, among the novelists; Whittier, Poe, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coleridge, among the poets who could not corrupt the morals of youth; Holmes, Lamb, Burke, Emerson, Irving, among the essayists, prescribed conscientiously as brain food much as carrots and spinach are forced upon protesting palates, yearning for sweets; second, the gentle, sexless, rice-pudding books, written expressly for "young people"—the Elsie Dinsmore series, the Rollo books, the Little Cousin scries, the Little Colonel series, the Dorothy books, the Alger work-and-win series, duplicated ad nauseam, and designed to make red-blooded, 100% Americans out of good little boys and girls.

I am devoutly grateful to fate for having allowed me to escape the "age of innocence", and for having given me a broad-minded mother who permitted me to read anything and everything I could lay my hands on, trusting in my innate good judgment to separate the wheat from the chaff. I devoured the classics, not because they were classics and hence a prescribed literary diet, but because they were exceptionally good books. I had read all of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Shakespeare by the time I was nine years old, and then came the turning point in my reading career about which I generalized in my opening sentence. Of course, I had read the rice-pudding books, too, but had repudiated them as insipid pap. They still take up a lot of shelf-room in public libraries, and until I was ten years old, and in high school, I was not permitted to seek mental food outside the children's rooms of the public library.

I could not keep on re-reading the classics forever, and growing up seemed to be a slow business. My mother came to my rescue, by permitting me to read the books she was buying for her own pleasure, though she was severely criticized by some of our friends for doing so. At ten I read Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Butler's The Way of All Flesh, a good deal of Leonard Merrick, whom I admired tremendously, The Caftain's Doll by D. H. Lawrence, practically all of Dc Maupassant, Balzac and Dumas, much of Flaubert, all of Ibsen's plays, and the current American and English novels.

It was when I had exhausted the sophisticated modern classics among the English and French authors that I came sharply up against the fact that there are not a great many worthwhile books being published in America. It was a distinct drop from Hardy and Flaubert and Merrick to Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst and Rupert Hughes. For nearly three years I have read the most talked-of books issued in the great semi-annual flood from the publishing houses, and I have reaped disappointment far oftener than I have harvested inspiration or unalloyed delight.

There seems to me to be a dearth of genius in America. There is much talent—for we have Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber, Margaret Wilson, Carl Van Vechtcn, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Leonard Cline, Ruth Suckow, Sherwood Anderson, and innumerable others who are either tremendously earnest and conscientious, bowed down under noble missions and fanatic realism, or bent on entertaining us with their pretty gift of words and characterizations. But there seems to me to be no master among them all, unless it be James Branch Cabell, who is the lone wolf of American letters, the Rabelais of Virginia, driven to expatriating himself in his shelf of whimsical books, and creating an absurd, delightful, Freudianfree country of his own imagination.

I VERY much doubt that more than half a dozen books written in America during the last twenty years since our literary release from the trammeling "age of innocence" will live to attain the dignity of "classics," reposing in dingy red covers on the shelves of the public libraries, as the heavy meat dish on the prescribed literary diet for young people. Offhand, I could not name that meagre half-dozen to save my life. I am afraid my own children and grand-children will have to come to the conclusion that we had no great writers during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

If there is anyone in America today who is writing for the sheer love of words and ideas— except Cabell of course—I do not know who it is. Fannie Hurst does it occasionally, as in Lummox and Affassionata, but her love for words and for character dissection leads her into strange spasms of literary hysteria, which is unbecoming to an artist. And after Affassionata, beautiful and moving, in spite of its author's hysteria, she writes a thing like Mannequin,—which would not have been a bad first novel by an obscure youngster, but is inexcusable when it comes from the pen which wrote Lummox and Affassionata.

It is not the man who loves words, who has a passionate adoration for style and beauty of ideas, who wins recognition as a writer in America today. It is the man who uses words as hammers with which to knock American life, American manners, American small towns, American commercialism. Among the most successful destructionists are Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Ben Hecht and Carl Van Vechtcn, though the latter has other missions in life, and smacks more of the English or French novelist in the lightness and charm of his touch.

Sinclair Lewis is the dean of the school of destructionists. With his successful cynicism and his devastating scorn of the inhabitants and ideals of American small towns, Mr. Lewis has succeeded in tearing from the more sensitive type of Babbitt his protecting garment of Babbittry, but has given him nothing with which to clothe his shivering nakedness. Like all disillusioned spirits, Lewis is a destroyer. But he is not a builder. Of course I know that it is very seldom that wrecking-crews and architects inhabit the same offices, but I am a little tired of seeing everything destroyed and nothing built in its place. The Babbitts of America arc rather like the pathetic nouveaux riches of society. Babbitt knows, because Mencken and Lewis and their kind have told him so, that all he has considered cultural and worthwhile and beautiful is uncultured, crude and ugly, but he does not know what constitutes good taste, culture, and beauty, or where he can find it. Maybe he once looked to New York as a Mecca for provincial Americans, but then along came Dos Passos' bitter and lengthy and incoherent Manhattan Transfer, proving New York to be as Main Street as Babbitt's own home town.

I rather pity the poor Babbitts and Dr. Kennicutts whose Rotary Club importance and Masonic finery have been torn from them by Lewis' ruthless hand, and who do not have the least idea what ideals and manners they should cultivate, so that they may become cultured and smart and urban, and thus earn Mr. Lewis' praise. But I doubt if Mr. Lewis knows how to praise; I think he must be permanently astigmatic from having looked with crossed eyes at life in the small towns for so long a time; and I suppose I really need not worry about the Babbitts and the Dr. Kennicutts, for they may not suspect that they have been ruthlessly exposed; they probably do not pay Mr. Lewis the compliment of reading his books.

MR. MENCKEN, too, seems to be in a frightful stew over the terrible state of affairs in the provinces—the crudeness and lack of culture in Indiana, Iowa, Kansas and Texas; the fact that women still attend literary societies and that a certain proportion of the population still believes in the Immaculate Conception and the Whalc-and-Jonah story. He seems desperately unhappy over the rawness and crudity of American life—outside of New York and Baltimore, and probably Baltimore too is a little crude, in spite of the fact that Mr. Mencken honours it with his residence; but I think he would be even more unhappy if a fairy could wave a magic wand over the provinces and change them in a twinkling of an eye into whatever it is that Mr. Mencken would have them. (I am not sure what Mr. Mencken's ideas of an American Utopia of Culture are, and I doubt if he is himself). For Mr. Mencken would then be deprived of his only pleasure in life—that of telling us what is wrong with America. I read The American Mercury, and admire much of it, but it isn't my Bible, and it nearly always manages to irritate me by its harping on the one subject of America's rawness. I sincerely believe that if the destructionists could be persuaded to turn their talents toward the creation of literature for literature's sake, not for the sake of reforming America, that more good would be accomplished than the destructionists dream of.

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Carl Van Vechten has no reverence for America, but neither does he consider himself a God-appointed reformer. He is, rather, a reporter, with a smart "colyumist's" trick of attracting attention. He writes lightly, with ease, and without quotation marks, which device he seems to have hit upon as a clever way of proving that he is different. In Firecrackers and The Tattooed Countess he achieves a smart sophistication, qualifying as a stylist with a Continental flavour. His latest contribution, Nigger Heaven, throws him back into the rank of his American contemporaries with a mission, but it is excellent reporting, in spite of his too-evident fear of offending, on one hand, the aesthetic feelings of the whites, and, on the other hand, the sensitiveness of the Negroes, whom he honestly tries to understand and with whom he is deeply sympathetic in their struggle for a right to live and work and love. It was a spiky fence to straddle, but Mr. Van Vechten does it fairly well, except in the character of his heroine, Mary Love, who is a straw figure, lacking the picturesque savagery of her black blood and the forcefulness of character with which her white blood might have been expected to endow her. The book will probably please neither the whites nor the blacks very keenly. Passages of description in the beginning and toward the end of the book are extraordinarily vital and colourful, for in them Mr. Van Vechten forgets his mission and allows his clever pen to dance as madly as the half-savage characters he describes.

Not all reporter-novelists write with the brilliance and ease of the deft Mr. Van Vechten. But some of these graduate reporters turned novelist write with more conscience and with pencilclutching, heavy handed sincerity, labelling their efforts realism. Theodore Dreiser, with his great, slowthinking brain, his feeling of kinship with middle-class people, his humourless eyes—seeing everything and recording it in infinite, painful detail, is a good reporter, though not an inspired one. He has a great deal to say and he conscientiously tells it.

Of the bald, ruthless realists, those who scorn to dress up a story with the beauty of words skillfully chosen, Ruth Suckow and Sherwood Anderson achieve distinction by their sincerity, though a bit cursed with "missions" and "messages." Anderson is developing a new deftness and a sort of style, though I found Dark Laughter emotionally cold.

Ben Hecht, in spite of his love for the bawdy and shockingly obscene, achieves a sort of delirious prose beauty in Eric Dorn, Humpty Dumpty and Count Bruga, though the latter is tinged with a curiously bitter malice. Hecht can describe emotions and mental processes with more brevity and brilliance than any other American author, but he can conceive of few emotions and few mental processes not intimately connected with seduction.

Cabell, I should say, is destined to live, to become a classic, although censorious librarians will undoubtedly keep his most perfect conception, Jurgen, out of the reach of "young people." Cabell writes with such a fastidious pen that, on first reading, his books appear to be froth, but that froth holds, under its whipped cream surface, strange, fantastic, almost frightening significances. He writes with an Englishman's charming, easy detachment about everything, even sex! He has a genius for creating characters that his readers love tenderly. Without quite realizing why, I find myself loving Jurgen of the poetic imagination, who possesses the gift for brilliant, fantastic conversation with which Cabell endows most of his favourites; thinking tenderly of grim old Coth of the Rocks, a stubborn, grumbling patriarch, with a great love glowing in his heart; Dom Manuel, tall, squinting, and gray, stirs me deeply, though he is seen but in shadow and through the eyes of his followers.

Cabell dreamed a fantastic dream, and out of that dream grew book after book. And though that idea was impossible make-believe, it seems to the reader the realest thing in the world, while the Cabell magic is working. In Jurgen and Figures of Earth and The Cream of the Jest, Cabell, through some magical mutation, transforms dreams and visions of purple and rose and gold into human beings, and brings the most precious and delicate of illusions down to the most ordinary ken.

But The Biography, as Cabell calls his shelf of books, is ended. Perhaps he spun the cobweb of his dreams too fine. At any rate, Cabell, unless he is to go down to posterity as the man who dreamed only one dream, must find a new field for his genius.

English novelists, with the exception of those numerous earnest young writers who persist in telling the entire story of their lives, from birth, through public schools and Oxford, to war and death, are not so concerned with realism and reform as our own American novelists. To judge by Merrick, Locke, Meredith, Barrie, and Galsworthy, English authors dare to be more romantic than our own writers. Perhaps that is one reason why they are so popular over here.

One curious manifestation of our craving for romance is the meteoric success of Michael Aden. Aden's books arc pseudo-sophisticated versions of the Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth's tales of dukes and earls who loved governesses and gardeners' daughters. Stripped of his smart cloak of words, his plots will hardly bear analysis. Wheft I began The Green Hat, I thought I had discovered a very clever new stylist, a man who dressed his pages with ropes of pearls. But I soon found that the pearls, like his lords and ladies, were synthetic.

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Arlen has created one man and one woman, or rather, he has created formulae which he labels "hero" and "heroine". His heroine must be exceptionally lovely, must be a "lady of quality"—a phrase which Monsieur Arlen rolls under his tongue as if it were a piece of hard, sweet candy— must talk as cleverly as the characters in a French farce and as naughtily, and must, before Arlen will have anything to do with her, have lost her virtue. The hero must be as beautiful as the heroine, though in a more virile way, must also talk like the characters in a French farce, and must have a quixotic sense of honour which will lead him into impossible situations where he may have a chance to be a perfect foil for the lovely and unvirtuous heroine. Arlen's plots are all slight variations of the same bedroom farce. As for his minor characters, they are all pale copies of the hero and heroine, all are witty, debonair and unvirtuous. Arlen's one serious concern with them is to see that an Armenian is always included in the dramatis personae. The Arlen shelf of books, produced with amazing rapidity, plainly betray a middle-class viewpoint, the viewpoint of the devoted sycophant of the fantastic world which he imagines exists on the other side of closed doors. Of course I know nothing from personal experience of English society—Mr. Arlen's beloved Mayfair—but I have a hunch that the real lords and ladies are truly amazed at their portraits and wish they could talk only half as brilliantly as Mr. Arlen makes them converse on his cream-tinted, deckle-edged pages. But the Englishman who gives me more unalloyedsdelight than any other author is Aldous Huxley. It is hard,

I find, to put my finger on the quality that endears Huxley to me. It becomes more elusive as I search for it. His plot, of course, is negligible. He would prefer not to have one at ail but for the fact that readers do so insist on a "story". His style is his chief charm. But he embroiders the lovely patterns of his sentences with pearls of information, strewing them with a lavish, careless gesture, as if a little ashamed of his amazing fund of knowledge on every subject under the sun. My chief ambition at present is to know one-tenth as much about all the charming things and places in the world as do Aldous Huxley and James Branch Cabell. Their erudition, and their absence of snobbishness and showmanship, fascinate me. Just reading one book of Huxley's—Those Barren Leaves, for instance, or that charming book of travel essays, Along the Road, makes me far more dissatisfied with being a crude, uncultured American than all the issues of The American Mercury put together.

When any one asks me which single book of all that I have read I like the most, I answer, "Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage". I have read it four times and will probably read it once a year for the rest of my life. I have almost the same fondness for Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, which I have read three times. Butler has done more than any other writer to champion the cause of freedom for children, but aside from the mission of the book it is fascinating entertainment. We need an American novelist who can write as understandingly and profoundly of the relationship between parents and children.