THE LITERATURE OF MAIN STREET

We believe that it was a character in one of Oscar Wilde's books who, upon being asked the meaning of the term American dry goods, replied sapiently "American novels." One would not go quite so far as Lord Henry Wotton went in his wholesale estimate of America fiction, but there can be little doubt that the tendency of a huge proportion of modern American novels is in the direction of a literary provincialism which may, perhaps be described as aiming at the apotheosis of the commonplace. It may be urged that one of the world's greatest novels, "Madame Bovary," is from beginning to end a tale of bourgeois life in a provincial town— or "small town," as the Americans would call it — of France. But so far, America has not produced a Flaubert. The most depressing thing about the American "small town" novel is the prevailing atmosphere of gloom, amounting in some cases to morbidity which envelops Main-street and renders it to the unacclimatised one of the drabbest and dreariest thoroughfares imaginable. Let us take, by way of example "The Apple of the eye," the first novel of a young American writer, Mr Glenway Wescott which is reviewed in our "Books in Brief" column on another page of this issue. Here we have an undeniably powerful piece of work, the interest of which is centred in a little group of people, the inhabitants of a "small town" district in Wisconsin. The book is compact of sexual psychology and of an uncompromising realism, that will probably remind the reader of Zola, in that raw mood of his which was responsible for the squalor, and for the unnecessary and inartistic insistence upon unpleasant details which are conspicuous in such a book as "La Terre." In France this realism must be ascribed to a reaction from the high-flown romance in the manner more or less, of eighteenth century Samuel Richardson who "taught the passions to move at the command of virtue," and whose impeccable romances acquired in their day an immense reputation across the Channel. But the true realist's hatred of idealism in any shape or form is not greatly apparent in American literature. The American is, at heart, a confirmed sentimentalist, and so far from resenting the imputation of sentimentality, he seems rather to take it for righteousness; or, as a recent critic has said ; "This sentimentality deluges the headlines of the newspapers, and puffs out every little township with inordinate self-pride. And out of this, sentimental conceit emerge that strangely American faculty for boasting. It is not really that the American is more conceited than the European, but only that he finds this constant atmosphere of self-praise the best way in which he can sustain his own belief in himself." The criticism is not inapt.
One may ask oneself whether the noticeable trend of a certain section of American fiction towards naturalism is the beginning of a reaction against American sentimentality, just as realism in French literature was a protest against stilted and conventional romanticism. Mr. Belloc has expressed his opinion that, despite the fact that America has inherited the language and traditions of English literature, those traditions are gradually weakening, both in poetry and prose; while as regards the English language, which was good enough for Shakespeare and Milton, the hundred per cent. American novel imperatively demands an American education, or, failing that, a comprehensive glossary, if it is to be understood by the reader of another nationality. All this, of course, makes for literary provincialism in the wider sense of that term. Of late years there have been frequent and sometimes querulous complaints made in the American Press that, whereas America is keenly interested in English literature, England, on the other hand, displays a marked indifference towards the best contemporary American talent. Doubtless there is a measure of truth in these assertions, one has only to glance at the the of American fiction which is immensely retailed in England and Australia to realise that the best contemporary American literature is, to all intents and purposes, an unknown quantity, in countries other than America. Writers of purely ephemeral works like Gene Stratton Porter, Harold Bell Wright, R. W. Chambers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, and so on and so forth, are the authors whom the majority of readers accept without question as representative of American literature. The reason is not far to seek, each of these writers tells a conventional story in the conventional manner, and the conventional in literature is always assured of popularity so long as it is allied with the elemental passions (or the novelist's interpretation thereof) and those eternal relationships that exist— and have always existed—between mankind regardless of nation and creed. In the novels which break away from the ruck of American fiction, the non-American reader finds himself in a country which is as unfamiliar to him as the countries of Lilliput and Brobdingnag were strange to Lemuel Gulliver With French literature and French literary methods the English reader has much in common, in spite of the difference of tongue. Both being to old races, and the literature and language of the one are closely interrelated with the literature and language of the other. Thus, the English reader can appreciate a Huysmans even when he describes a bloater in the terms of an art critic eulogising a portrait by Velasquez or Rembrandt, but few English readers can have any real or abiding sympathy with or understanding of a Babbitt, of "Little old Zip City" or a Carol Kennicott, of Gopher Prairie.

It would be more than a mere mistake, it would be a crying injustice to estimate the modern movement in American fiction by the popular cowboy story and the novel of the Middle-West, or by that class of meretricious romance that deals more or less meticulously with the underworld of Americas great cities. During the last decade or so there has grown up a coterie of writers whose claims as producers of fiction of the better— that is, of the more definitely literary— kind cannot be overlooked. They may be comparatively few in number but it is often the little leaven that leaventh the whole. Perhaps where America most closely conforms with the English standard is in the field of literary criticism. The irony of that literary iconoclast, Mr. H. L. Mencken, is, no doubt, the most popular of all the various methods adopted by the literary critic — the breaking of idols, or at least the hurling of missiles at them, having been a favourite diversion of mankind from the very earliest of times. But besides Mr. Mencken, America has more cultured, if hardly more astute, arbiters of literature and letters in men like the renowned Santayana, who is almost as well known in England as he is in America, and Professors Stuart Sherman and John Erskine, two of the four editors (with Professor Trent and Dr. Van Doren) of the "Cambridge History of American Literature." None of these has quite the same air of enjoyment of criticism for criticism's sake that Mr. Mencken reveals in his writings, and possibly not the same felicity of expression, as for instance, when he describes Mr. Wells suffering from a 'messianic delusion' concerning his own supreme mission in life that seriously impairs his claims to be considered as a great artist. However this may be, it seems a pity that Mr. Mencken does not turn his critical attention to the literature of Main-street. If he could only demolish that unlovely thoroughfare so that no vestige of if remained and not one stone of it was left standing, he would confer a great and lasting benefit on American fiction.

 The West Australian 22 May 1926,