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Of the novelists whose names have formed a sort of literary litany this past decade or two: Hemingway, Dos Passos, Farrell, Faulkner, Caldwell and Steinbeck—the work of Steinbeck offers most in the way of material for analysis according to the lights of both realists and romanticists. For Steinbeck has been hailed as a great realist, and it was he who first seems to have transcended reality, and certainly he comes closest to approaching the “removal from the common life” postulated by Machen as the prime requisite for the creative writer. The Grapes of Wrath was and is a wonderful book—as great a piece of journalism as has been produced in an age that specializes in that peculiar literary form—the documentary; and it was saved from being mere competent journalism, or even inspired journalism, by characterization alone. Here again we must look to Machen for, if not a direct reference to Steinbeck, at least an applicable parallel.
For Steinbeck’s characters, the Joads, the Paisanos, the Hermit with his dogs, the bums in Cannery Row—these are all figures of such proportion and created in such a perspective as that described by Machen in his essay on Dickens. Machen points out that Dickens was a symbolist ... no such persons as Pickwick or Micawber ever walked the earth. “They are creatures,” says Machen, “of the world of vision, of that other world which is beside us always, which transcends the sight of unpurged eyes.” And then Machen goes on to define the “true realist” as one who symbolizes “by means of phenomena, eternal verities.”
This deftness of Steinbeck’s in drawing portraits has led him into trouble with his devoted critics for whom, apparently, realism can be carried to extremes. A case in point is the Colonel in The Moon is Down. This German, if not Nazi, officer, it will be recalled, was quite a controversial figure back in the war days when the book was published. Now the Colonel had every right, actually and literarily, whether as an actual person or an imagined one, to act as he did. It may have been a none too happy choice for Steinbeck—he could have given us the Eric Von Stroheim figure we all expected of him, but he gave us instead the Major Stanhope type. This was not a very popular choice with the ardent and articulate admirers of Mr. Steinbeck’s realism.
Then there was the matter of Lifeboat, a motion picture shown during the war. Mr. Steinbeck did the script, or worked on it, or did whatever it is established writers do in Hollywood. At any rate Steinbeck was taken to task by at least one film critic and not a few columnists who stepped out of their roles long enough to have a look at the films. The story, a Hitchcock natural, involved a group of people thrown together in a lifeboat. Among the group was a German submarine officer—perhaps the Captain. The thing that angered the erstwhile admirers, confounded the critics and dismayed the defenders of Democracy, was that the German was portrayed as the most capable man aboard the lifeboat. Not only did he show qualities of leadership which were found to be detestably proficient, but other members of the crew, all Allies of one sort or another, were shown to be a confused and sometimes cowardly lot. This outrageous invention by a man with a reputation for realism upset the critics and the columnists. No less an authority than the American Sybil cried out against the extravagance of the invention in which an officer and a seaman was permitted to exercise both authority and seamanship. Of course most of these outcries may be attributed to the fact that we were then at war with both the confoundedly charming Colonel and the confoundedly capable Captain.
Nevertheless everyone breathed easier when Cannery Row was announced as a return to the “early Steinbeck” even though, by this time, realists everywhere had become aware of a chink in the armor, and the left-wing critics took a decidedly dim view of the light-hearted way in which Steinbeck’s social outcasts took their social ostracism.
When The Wayward Bus rattled onto the literary scene the critics scanned the faces of the passengers as eagerly as relatives waiting at the depot. Sure enough—there were cries of recognition from several groups. One crowd hailed the youth with the acne—Johnny had come marching home again to swell the ranks of the realists. Others, remembering the Colonel and the Captain, recognized at least a lineal descendant in the girl who sat in wine glasses. She was, for a girl who sat in wine glasses, sufficiently incredible to belong to the gallery of allegorical figures set up for the specific purpose of puzzling the proletarians. And so the bus pulled in with apparently the right character for almost everyone waiting at the depot.
This somewhat didactic digression, while it seems to have no direct bearing upon either Arthur Machen or his works, is offered in explanation of some of the theories expressed in Hieroglyphics—under the subtitle, if you wish, of The Ultimate Fate of a Realist.