They Knew Not Joseph
By HOWAARD MUMFORD JONES
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TEACHING a class of lively undergraduates what they ought to know about American literature since 1890 is, if one is past the half-century mark, an experience at once baffling and queerly exciting, The excitement lie’s almost wholly in the unpredictability of the contacts (or lack of contact) between the cultural experience of one generation and the literary knowledge of another. The depressing aspect of the chore lies not only in the innocent ignorance of The Young about cultural landmarks in our national development; it lies also in their solemn and unhumorous attitude towards “literature.”
For literature is a serious matter (or so they have been trained to believe). It is the expression of a critical party line. It is the exposition of “values.” it is the desperate occasion of something called “criticism,” and criticism, among The Young, is about what painful Perkins was to our Calvinist predecessors: an intricate but rigid rule of faith. Lightness of touch, a concern for what is not “literature,” are not part of a cultural education.
What follows will have meaning mainly for aging persons who look forward with ambiguous emotions to retirement, and wonder about Winter Park, Florida. This generation once mistakenly thought Stevenson was a great writer. Long before Mr. T. S. Eliot found out about Kipling, it found out about Kipling. It was a generation born during the Pullman strike, vaguely conscious of the Spanish-American War, and coming into maturity about the time the first Roosevelt, was making the White House shake with sheer physical vitality.
In the radio world, of course, this generation does not exist. There was something with bustles, bucolic and infantile, called the Gay Nineties, but at this point history ceased; and as for the Big Stick, Fighting Bob Evans, the Pinchot-Ballinger row, President Taft (described by Senator Dolliver as a fat man in the White House, surrounded by people who know exactly what they want), the Bull Moose campaign, or the row at Princeton University between Dean West and Woodrow Wilson, they never existed. The Young, who pick up their living knowledge of history from the radio, are therefore of opinion that the Guy Nineties were immediately followed by the sinking of the Lusitania. This led to the Russian Revolution, and this in lurn was followed by apple-selling on the streets of Detroit, which continued until shortly before Pearl Harbor.
I his telescoped version of history necessarily leaves little room for the decorative arts. For example, The Young have never heard of the Gibson girl; and when I tell them that Richard Harding Davis was t he original of the Gibson man, they look pleasantly blank. When I try the explanation that the Gibson man was the Arrow Collar man of a later decade, this arouses almost no trace of recognition. I move on to the Calvert Whiskey ads about, leading men, and a faint, dawning light of pity appears in the eyes of promising juniors.
The Gibson girl, as I remember, was always appearing in double-page spreads in Life. But Life, of course, is Mr. Luce’s Life, just as Puck and Judge, if they are recognized at all, are only the pulp cartoon books you occasionally find on cheaper newsstands. Keppler, next to Nast America’s greatest, political cartoonist, is naturally without meaning; but so, too, are his sparkling literary contemporaries, H. C. Bunner, John Kendrick Bangs, and Frank R. Stockton. I can find nobody who has read A Houseboat on the Styx. But then, I can find nobody who has read “The Lady or the Tiger?” or who knows anything about Mrs. Aleshine. As for t he Carryls (Charles and Guy), even David McCord’s recent anthology of light verse reduces each of them to a poem apiece, albeit Charles’s is “ The Walloping Window-blind.”
But what J meant to say furt her about the Gibson girl is that she was always turning up, not only in Life, but also traced on fiat pieces of wood for the amateur pyrographer. Alas! neither pyrography nor raffia baskets nor the bead-stringing enthusiasm of my high school years has the slightest meaning for modern youth. They do not even know how John Singer Sargent translated the Gibson girl into oils. They only know the murals on the stairs of the Widener Library.
The Gibson girl and the Gibson man were such perfect representatives of the American ideal at ihe opening of the present century, they ought to be part of the education we give in the various courses in “American culture” that are springing up like mushrooms on our college campuses. These curricula have, however, the same desperate earnestness, the same unhumorous intentness upon the “American dream, “American idealism,” “American thought, I have before remarked. The literary staple of these courses is such philosophical fellows as Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Herman Melville (who apparently never, never smiled), Walt Whitman, and Henry Adams. Above all, Henry Adams.
The discovery by English departments of The Education of Henry Adams I shall always count an educational calamity. This book served to catalyze what (to use the expression of H. L. Mencken, a sage who wrote in those remote times) I can only call the cosmic bellyache. The cosmic bellyache is sometimes such that Mark Twain is read only for his mournful moments, as in The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? The Innocents Abroad becomes a document in international cultural relationships; The Gided Age. reveals the iniquities of American folkways; and Roughing It forms the basis of semantic studies about the meaning of “The West.”
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OF course The Young are to be forgiven their ignorance of Life (the old Life) and the other names 1 have listed. But are they (or we) to be forgiven for t heir not knowing who George Ade is — or was? Can you rear a proper younger crowd in this republic without the aid of Fables in Slangf The ripest collection of American literature on my shelves is The Oxford Anthology of American Literature; it includes neither George Ade nor Finley Peter Dunne. Alas, the Fables in Slang have nowadays to be glossed as if they were a translation of Beowulf, and I confidently expect some alert young Ph.D. candidate to bring out. an annotated edition. George Ade is as remote as the jokes that alleviated manual toil while the pyramids were building. As for Eugene Field, The Young have mostly never heard of him; or if they have, they don’t care. The trouble is that they were afflicted in their earlier years with “Little Boy Blue.”
Perhaps the most amazing blankness concerns the redoubtable O. Henry — who usually comes out as O’Henry. In one of his stories this Celtic genius has a sentence which runs: “A pompadour followed by a stenographer entered the room.” A puzzled sophomore asked me to explain why a dog preceded the stenographer. Much of O. Henry is simply unintelligible. Of course you can (and should) draw from this crushing fact moral implications about the inutility of writing in slang if you propose to be read by posterity (you know me, Al); but, speaking for my generation, all I can say is; “What has posterity ever done for us?” (That’s a joke, son — an eighteennineties joke!)
Right before World War I the advanced academic guard caught up with O. Henry, just as the advanced guard caught up with Melville about ten years ago, and as they are now making a cult of Henry James. O. Henry was analyzed; philosophy was found in him; he was adjudged to be the quintessential part of the American thing; he was, in sum, the academic berries. But where is Mr. Porter nowadays? Will the Melville cult and the T. S. Eliot boom and the Henry James enthusiasm suffer a similar catastrophe? Who knows?
As The Young sometimes frequent cinemas devoted to the development of the movies, they seem to know something about Buggies of Red Gap, whom they naturally confuse with Mr. Charles Laughton. When I point out, however, that Mr. Laughton doe*not write his own scripts, and inquire who crealed Buggies, there is an uncomfortable pause. I murmur “Ma Pettengill ” but nothing happens. The name of Marry Leon W ilson is like that of the Dodo. In fad,
I have to lecture with a great show of learning about the humor of the West, driving them like flocks to read not only Mr. Wilson’s prose and not only the tales of the Old Cattleman as set forth in the slow drawl of Alfred Henry Lewis; I have to assign The Virginian as a serious task. The only “Western” above the horizon in their high-minded world is Professor J. Frank Dobie. They might do worse.
What really hurts, however, is that The Young have never heard of Mr. Dooley. I mean this literally as a dark and tragic truth. They have never heard of Finley Peter Dunne; they do not know where Archey Road is; they do not understand Mr. Hennessey’s function in those immortal dialogues, so much like those of Socrates and so much briefer. What is worse, they cannot read him. It hurts the feelings of Irishmen nowadays to look at Mr. Dunne’s palpably wrongheaded dialect.
And The Young, who have painfully acquired a reverence for William Butler Yeats and have been taught to avoid the Celtic twilight, cannot read Mr. Dooley. I mean this literally. They cannot twist their tongues around that immortal, that bright and quenchless brogue. I think there is something wrong in a republic that has no Mr. Dooley; and while I admire Charlie McCarthy, Mr. McCarthy’s wisecracks are of too intimate and private a nature to direct public affairs. When Mr. Dooley spoke, the White House listened.
My boyhood was brightened by visions of Happy Hooligan, Foxy’ Grandpa, Maud, the Katzenjammer Kids, and Buster Brown — though for this latter character I had then, and have now, small liking. I do not expect The Young to recognize these names. But what of Little Nemo? Little Nemo, whose Sunday adventures did on paper all that Mr. Disney has since accomplished in his more beautiful animated drawings? Each week saw Little Nemo dreaming weird, multicolored, romantic dreams, each of them reaching its climax in some impossible metaphysical tangle, some crushing Piranesi-like nightmare, resolved in the last frame by Little Nemo’s waking to the fact that he had fallen out of bed.
I haven’t a doubt in the world that Little Nemo reveals some dark truth about the American psyche, and I wonder that D. H. Lawrence did not brigade him with Leatherstocking in that queer book he devoted to the deep, demoniac urges that characterize the American Muse. But Little Nemo is now one with Aristophanes and Richard Harding Davis and Pixley and Luders and Minnie Maddern Fiske and young Astyanax, the hope of Troy — something the professor makes you look up in the library. The Young retort that I have not read The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer.
I feel regretful about Little Nemo, but I am hotly indignant about Krazy Kat. (Yes, I know the strip continues, but I am talking about the classic days that drew the admiration of Gilbert Seldes in The Seven Liveily Arts.) Ignatz is not a Serious Problem in the Interpretation of American Culture. The brick that Offisa Pup too frequently failed to intercept has no place in The Economic Novel in America. The profound truth that “ it takes a bold woim to live emong a apple” is unknown to The Young. They deeply believe that American conservatives in the genteel tradition fought distortion in art because their gentility could not stomach modernism; they do not know that Mr. Herriman’s genius in the Hearsl newspapers taught us all we needed to know about distortion, long before anybody had dreamed of the Museum of Modern Art, sighed over El Greco, or discovered Mr. Dali’s melted watches.
Of course we had our serious thinkers, too. There was, for example, Max Nordau, now scorned by those who read Professor Hooton on apes and experience an agreeable terror at the prospect of the end of Western man. Those who have seen movies of Buchenwald are, however, not inclined to laugh away the Nordau prophecy of degeneration; and it was with a mild, ironic satisfaction that we Elder Statesmen witnessed the rediscovery of Mr. H. G. Wells’s scientific romances as foreshadowing the age of atoms and airplanes. I wonder whether a renewed vogue of The War of the Worlds and In the Days of the Comet will lead to Mr. Polly? I wonder, for that matter, whether anybody outside the Baker Street irregular’; knows who Professor Moriarty was?
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I INTEND no disrespect for H. L. Mencken by remarking that among The Young he is a dead duck. 1 think it was the late Professor Beers who said of Teddy Roosevelt’s death that it was like the ceasing of the playing of a military band. So was it when the old American Mercury shrank to pocket size. Mr. Mencken has lately done honorable things with his American Language, and when I last saw him, betrayed no intentions of sinking into an obscure senility, but from the point of view of The Young he is coeval with H. H. Brackenridge, the Mencken of an early time, who wrote Modern Chivalry; or, if that is loo obscure, Mr. Mencken is as remote as William of Ockham.
The belly laughter, the scornful Falstaffian thunder, the wild and raucous vocabulary, the symphonic double talk, the Rabelaisian abuse that poured like fiery lava from Hollins Street, now are reduced by The Young to such propositions as: “Was the Smart Set a truly international magazine?”; “Errors in Mencken’s Theory of Puritanism”; and “’Theodore Dreiser and Henry Louis Mencken. Comparison and Contrast.” They read A Book of Prefaces with the same docility they bring to Cardinal Newman, Bacons Lssays, and the first book of The Faerie Queene. It is all improving. But they no more know’ what the noise was all about than they know what Mr. Dooley meant when he retitled Roosevelt’s The Hough tiiders “Alone in Cubia.” For them the military band never played. They are attuned to quartets by Shostakovich.
Are there no contacts between class and teacher? Does no spark of recognition close I he gap? Yes, but only on serious issues. The Young are honorably concerned about the fate of the world. They do not like the existing practice of either statesmanship or scholarship. And of course they are right. But I should like il if they could understand what Masefield meant (a poet they seldom read) when he said, “The days that make us happy make us wise.”They overlook the wit in Edith Wharton because they are so intent on reading her as a chronicler of a Conflict in Social Aims.
They can see what Irving Babbitt and even what George F. Babbitt were all about; they cannot see what Brander Matthews, that crusader for craftsmanship, or what David Harum was all about. Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser — these (shall I say?) more obvious writers they “get.” But the high, supple art, the cosmic wisdom, the humane and lambent understanding of Ellen Glasgow or Willu Gather lie beyond them, despite all the current classroom conversation about the art of the novel and The Meaning of Prose. Civilization is in a bad way, and I hey cannot laugh.
Well, civilization is in a bad way. I do not laugh very much myself. But I do not think the absence of laughter is going to cure civilization, nor do I believe that a tense and overearnest younger generation in America is going to understand a tense and overearnest younger generation in Russia. Each will be only too certain its own ideology is right.
Perhaps we are about to be wiped out by our own devilishness. Perhaps, after all, Satan in The Mysterious Stranger is the symbol of something mysteriously called “our time.” The problem of evil was certainly attacked more earnestly in Moby Dick than it was in Archey Road. But I think Archey Road was the more civilized habitation. “Our time” also produced archy the cockroach and mehitabel, Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers, Will Rogers, F.P.A., Keith Preston, and “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”
I do not recall any record of such laughter in the epoch when Ausonius and Rufus Festus Avienus were pretending the barbarians did not. matter. In a casual way I am faintly cognizant of other literary periods heralding the decay of culture and the end of the world, periods from which humorists were strikingly absent. And as I think over all that The Young do not know about the gayety of American life from 1890 to Pearl Harbor, I am of opinion they are taking on an unnecessary burden of grief, and that the gloomy works of criticism they read about tragedy in American culture do not reflect all of American existence.
But The Young are not to blame. The truth is, I am. My professional compeers and I have constructed literary history and left out all the fun. Ours is a Cultural Effort. It goes after Value Judgments. We cultivate Taste. We improve something called the Art of Reading, even when Professor Adler tells us that we ourselves can ’t read. We are very, very earnest about interpreting life through literature. Ours is a serious task because, among other things, we must in an age of science and technology keep up in earnestness and comprehensive zeal with the nuclear physicists and the calculat ing machines. Which is probably all right.
Only, the thing our studies overlook is gusto — the savor and tang of ordinary American existence. The New Yorker, admirable magazine that if is, is our favorite reading matter because it is “sophisticated,”which means that the cartoons of Messrs. Price and Adams are in a different universe from the world of Mr. Fred Allen, Mr. Kay Kyser. and Duffy’s Tavern. But I wonder who ruled out Mr. Allen, Mr. Kyser, and Mr. Duffy from the sacred confines of American culture? I am still baffled why we professors of English are all so damn learned about Falstaff and so blandly ignorant of Mr. Dooley.