Oldalképek
PDF
ePub
[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed]

AUGUST, 1924

KEEPING UP WITH THE SMART SET IN LITERATURE

BY SAMUEL MCCHORD CROTHERS

BEFORE Tomlinson joined our Literary Society, it was a very quiet affair. We were only a company of friends who met together and read aloud from the literature of the day. We did n't interpret 'the day' too literally; indeed we were inclined to the Biblical idea that one day might be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. If any member came across a good thing, he brought it along and shared the pleasure with us. A trifle like a thousand years since the decease of an author did n't trouble us. We gradually drifted into the habit of reading poetry not because we thought it intrinsically better than prose, but because it was more condensed. Moreover it was particularly adapted for reading aloud. We got more pleasure through the ear than through the eye. We found we could enjoy many of our contemporary poets better that way. We found that their poems sounded better than they looked. In this way we were not confined to the old favorites, but were gradually becoming accustomed to new voices.

That was before Tomlinson joined the society. He came in with a bang. There was an urgency about him which was a little disconcerting to the older

VOL. 134-NO. 2

A

I

members, but we realized that we needed new blood. He gave us his views at the second meeting that he attended. We should look upon ourselves not as a society of antiquarians, but as a poetical current-events club. We should be on a sharp lookout for new genius, and we should aim to be ninety per cent efficient. We should let no gifted man escape. Poetic genius is like a fire: we never know where or when it's going to break out. We must rush to it at the first alarm, and not wait for the heavy critics who are never on the spot till the fire's out. He had noticed, he said, that some of the members had brought in old stuff, some of it published as much as a dozen years ago. We must cut that out. If we were to keep up with the march of literature, we must think no longer in centuries or decades, we must be up to the minute.

He warned us that we must beware of the obvious. Anything that is obviously agreeable is likely to be reactionary. Keats, who in some respects was in advance of his age, confessed as much. He said:

'A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases

That's why our most up-to-date critics are suspicious of a thing of

beauty. People stop to contemplate it and watch its beauty increase, and by so doing they obstruct the intellectual sidewalk. The progressive artist who wants to keep the crowd moving must make it painful for any to loiter too long before his work.

The purpose of poetry, according to Tomlinson, is to serve as an intelligence test. It would never do to have the same test repeated. You could never get at the intelligence quotient that way. If you find you can understand a bit of poetry, then you must try something harder. If we eliminate the easy pieces, he said, we will soon get rid of the dead wood. Those who can't stand the pace will drop out.

Tomlinson spoke in an easy, confident way. He had been taking a correspondence course in salesmanship that guaranteed that he could impose his ideas on others by sheer force of acquired personality. The rest of us had n't taken the course, so we yielded.

From that day our literary society changed its character. Those who proved unadaptable dropped out. Whenever we saw an old head we hit it. Whenever we heard of a new verse form, or an example of formlessness, we studied it. We had no tolerance for the things of yester-week. We had no longer any literary background and were glad of it. We had emerged from the shadow of great names and were in the open. Tomlinson began to talk of the New Humanism and assured us we were 'It.'

Those were great days for the club, when we could watch a succession of books of poetry emerge from the Unknown, like Pharaoh's fat and well favored kine presaging years of plenty. But Tomlinson was just as well pleased when they were followed by lean volumes whose meagerness grew on acquaintance.

'People used to write poetry,' he

would say. 'Some do now; but some of the smartest poets just throw a line or two upon the page, and let us do the

rest. It saves their time and cultivates our imagination. Here's a specimen page of a book of poems. It's not much to look at, mostly margin. You have to read between the lines, and all around. The poet is a master of the hiatus. All his hiatuses are rich and revealing. You will notice that he begins as if he were going to say something, and then he does n't. That makes it exciting. It's like watching a man on skis at a winter tournament. He comes like a streak down the icy slide to the jumping-off place, and then shoots through the air for a hundred feet or so. The thrill comes when you see him going off through space, and you don't know whether he will land on his head or on his feet. We must get rid of the old pedestrian traditions and enter into the spirit of the poet Ezra Pound tells about.

'My muse is eager to instruct me in a new gamut

or gambetto.

Up, up, my soul, from your lowly cantillations, put on a timely vigor.'

'What is a gambetto?' asked a timid new member.

'It's something the old poets did n't have,' said Tomlinson. "The thing which this society needs to take to heart is that if we are to keep up with the march of mind, we must put a timely vigor on.

'According to the Freudians a person is either an introvert, or an extrovert. An introvert is always turning his mind in on itself to see what it looks like. An extrovert sits up and takes notice of what is going on outside. Now that explains the different kinds of poetry. An extrovert will look out of doors and describe a rain storm, the drops of water falling on the umbrella, and that sort of thing. An introvert is not interested in a rain storm, but he can

make poetry out of his own brain storms. He gives you an instantaneous view of his mind when it is struck by an emotional blizzard.

'We want to study both kinds, just as they come along. Now here is a poem by an extrovert. It's thoroughly objective. The poet does n't waste any emotion, he just gives a snapshot of what goes on.

'I grasped the greasy subway strap, And I read the lurid advertisements, I chewed my gum voraciously. "That is n't a very pretty scene, but you are made to see it. It bears the stamp of truth. Now if the poet were an introvert he would n't say anything about these details. He would give you an impressionistic view of what was going on in the gum-chewer's mind as he was hanging on for dear life to the strap. It would n't be much, but you would get a general impression of mental vacuity. There are flutterings of inchoate sensations. There is a suggestion of intelligence somewhere, like a faint perfume. You can't be sure of it. Perhaps it is n't a thought, but maybe it is. What it is that the gum-chewer has in mind the poet does n't tell directly. Such brutal frankness would destroy the whole effect. He gives you the impression of what something in the gum-chewer's mind, makes on his mind. Then he leaves you with the impression that it does n't matter much anyway. It's all very stimulating. If we can only keep our minds limbered up so that we can catch each poem as it comes we'll be all right.

'Let me read what a competent critic says about an admirable new poet:

'He has pregnant fragile untouched emotions. His verse has the appearance of perverse abandon, of dizzy falling. There is always the appeal to the motor and visceral sensations, change of position, alarming passive motion as in an elevator.

"That sounds like something new. The poem makes you have that gone feeling which you have when an elevator drops from under you. The old poets could n't produce such effects; they did n't have elevators in those days.'

'Do you really like all that, Tomlinson?' I asked.

'It is n't a question of liking,' he said, 'It's a question of learning to like what's being produced. If we are going to encourage the producers, the consumers must do their part. If the people in Fresno are to produce more raisins, the people in Boston are told to eat more raisins, and they do it. If we are to keep the wheat farms in North Dakota at the peak of production, we must eat more bread. And so if we are to have an American school of poetry, we must read more poetry, and read it quick.'

This view of the subject gave me a new respect for Tomlinson, as I saw that he had a sense of social responsibility. But it put a new strain on our critical powers. We felt that procrastination might be fatal. As Tomlinson said, 'We must appreciate while the appreciation is good.'

As we were whirled through contemporary verse I had glimpses of beautiful things over which I wished to linger. There were ways of pleasantness and paths of peace. But to ask Tomlinson to slow down that we might enjoy them was like asking a motorist to leave the state highways in order to loiter along a shady wood road. So we yielded to his will and began to adopt his language of hasty admiration for all that was unfamiliar.

Sometimes I expostulated mildly. 'Don't you think it would rest the club if we stopped to get a bit of perspective?' 'We don't want perspective. What we are after is originality.'

'But what is originality?' I asked.

'It is being different from the way they used to be.'

'But how can we know that we are different unless we know how they used to be? The other day I took up Dr. Johnson's introduction to Cowley and it struck me that the fashionable poets of the seventeenth century might not have been so different from their successors as we imagine. Dr. Johnson says, "They were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising.

Their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before. . . . Authors of this race were more desirous of being admired than understood."

"In their headlong search for originality these seventeenth-century poets produced "a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike, and they conceived that to be the highest kind of writing in verse which is chiefly to be preferred for its near affinity to prose. . . . This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of the barren and flattered the laziness of the idle that it immediately overspread our books of poetry, and all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fashion."

'Dr. Johnson was an incorrigible old Tory,' said Tomlinson.

"Perhaps so,' I answered, 'but in this instance he was talking not about a new fashion, but about one that had for the time gone out. He says, "The fashionable style remained chiefly with Cowley; Suckling could not reach it and Milton disdained it."

'Don't you think we could have a better sense of values in contemporary literature if we had something to measure them by? When an inventor has a happy thought about a mouse trap he employs someone to go to the Patent Office to find out whether there is anything like it there.

'He inquires as to "the state of the art." Of course if we were contented to enjoy a thing of beauty just because it is beautiful we would n't mind how old it was. But if it's this season's novelties we are after, we ought to make sure they are novelties.'

Tomlinson looked at me with commiseration. 'I see that you are feeling the strain. All of us do at times. But you must n't look back. Remember Lot's wife. Remember what Washing

ton

or was it Jefferson said about entangling alliances. Don't get entangled with former generations. They had another set of primary interests in poetry as in every thing else.'

'But what if it should turn out that the primary human interests are the same in all generations, and it's only the secondary interests that are different? Let me read you a bit of Euphues' Anatomy of Wit, which was very fashionable reading in the sixteenth century. He watches the swift procession of the books of the day with eagerness to keep up with them.

'We constantly see the booke that at Christmas lieth bound on the stacioner's

stall, at Easter be broken in the haberdasher's shop. It is not strange when the greatest wonder lasteth but nine days, that a new booke should not endure but three months. But a fashion is but a day's wearing and a booke but an hour's reading.

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
« ElőzőTovább »