Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)

by Carl Van Doren

With The Anthology of Another Town E.W. Howe, obviously on the suggestion of Spoon River, returned to the caustic analysis of American village life which he may be said to have inaugurated in The Story of a Country Town almost forty years before. Then he had been young enough to feel it necessary to invent romantic embroideries for his grim tale, somewhat as Emily Brontë under somewhat similar circumstances has done for Wuthering Heights—the novel which Mr. Howe's story most resembles. But all his inventions were stern, full of a powerful dissatisfaction, merciless toward the idyllic versions of country life which sweetened the decade of the eighties. Even among the pioneers whom Mr. Masters idealizes there were, according to the older man, slackness and shabbiness, and at the first opportunity to take their ease in the new world they had won from nature they sank down, too nerveless for passion or violence, into the easy vices: idleness, whining, gossip, drunkenness, sodden inutility. Against such qualities Mr. Howe has from the first proceeded with the doctrines of another Franklin, but of a Franklin without whimsical persuasions or elegant graces. Having apparently come to the conclusion that he was a failure as a novelist because he made no great stir with his experiments in that trade, he confined himself to more or less orthodox journalism for a generation, and then, retiring, founded his organ of "indignation and information"—E.W. Howe's Monthly—and began to pour forth the stream of aphoristic honesty which makes him easily first among the rural sages.

In no sense, of course, does he assume the cosmopolitan and international attitude which most of the naturalists assume: "Provincialism," he curtly says, "is the best thing in the world." Nor is he in any of the casual senses a radical: "In everything in which man is interested, the world knows what is best for him…. Millions of men have lived millions of years, and tried everything." Neither has he any patience with speculation for its own sake: "There are no mysteries. Where does the wind come from? It doesn't matter: we know the habits of wind after it arrives." As to politics: "The people are always worsted in an election." As to altruism: "The long and the short of it is, whoever catches the fool first is entitled to shear him." As to love: "We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as we do around pigs." As to money: "In theory, it is not respectable to be rich. In fact, poverty is a disgrace." As to literature: "Poets are prophets whose prophesying never comes true." As to prudence: "Trying to live a spiritual life in a material world is the greatest folly I know anything about." As to persistent hopefulness: "Pessimism is always nearer the truth than optimism."

When the author of such aphorisms undertook to write another anthology about another town he naturally avoided the mystical elevation of Spoon River as well as its verse; he used the irony of a disillusioned man and the directness of a bullet. His scheme was not to assemble epitaphs for the dead of the village but to tell crisp anecdotes of the living. He had no iniquities in the human order to assail, since he believes that the order is just and that it rarely hurts any one who does not deserve to be hurt by reason of some avoidable imbecility. He made no specialty of scandal; he did not inquire curiously into the byways of sex; he let pathology alone. He appears in the book to be—as he is in the flesh—a wise old man letting his memory run through the town and recalling bits of decent, illuminating gossip. He is willing to tell a fantastic yarn with a dry face or to tuck a tragedy in a sentence; to repeat some village legend in his own low tones or to puncture some village bubble with a cynical inquiry.

Yet for all his acceptance and tolerance of the village he is far from helping to continue the sentimental traditions concerning it. The common sense which he considers the basis of all philosophy—"If it isn't common sense, it isn't philosophy"—he has the gift of expounding in a language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms—making it out a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His village is not dainty, like a poem, for the reason that he believes no village ever was; at least he has never seen one like that. Downrightness like his is death to mere pretty notions about tribes and towns quite as truly as are the positive indictments brought against them by Mr. Masters and Mr. Anderson. If Mr. Howe is less vivid than those two, because he distrusts passion and poetry, he is also quieter and surer. "I am not an Agnostic; I know…. I have lived a long time, and my real problems have always been simple."

Sinclair Lewis

Spoon River Anthology was a collection of poems, Winesburg, Ohio was a collection of short stories, The Anthology of Another Town was a collection of anecdotes. It remained for a novel in the customary form, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, to bring to hundreds of thousands the protest against the village which these books brought to thousands.

Mr. Lewis, like Mr. Masters, clearly has revenges to take upon the narrow community in which he grew up, nourished, no doubt, on the complacency native to such neighborhoods and yet increasingly resentful. Less poetical than his predecessor, the younger novelist went further in both his specifications and his generalizations. Instead of brooding closely, ironically, profoundly, under the black wings of the thought of death, Mr. Lewis satisfies himself with a slashing portrait of Gopher Prairie done to the life with the fingers of ridicule. He has photographic gifts of accuracy; he has all the arts of mimicry; he has a tireless gusto in his pursuit of the tedious commonplace. Each item of his evidence is convincing, and the accumulation is irresistible. No other American small town has been drawn with such exactness of detail in any other American novel. Various elements of scandal crop out here and there, but the principal accusation which Mr. Lewis brings against his village—and indeed against all villages—is that of being dull. "It is contentment … the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dulness made God."

Not dulness itself so much as dulness militant and prospering arouses this satirist. The whole world, he believes, is being leveled by the march of machines into one monotonous uniformity, before which all the individual colors and graces and prides and habits flee—or would flee if there were any asylum still uninvaded. Thus Mr. Lewis's voice continues the opposition which Wordsworth raised to the coming of a railroad into his paradise among the Lakes and which Ruskin and Matthew Arnold and William Morris raised to the standardization of life which went on during their century. The American voice, however, speaks of American conditions. The villages of the Middle West, it asseverates, have been conquered and converted by the legions of mediocrity, and now, grown rich and vain, are setting out to carry the dingy banner, led by the booster's calliope and the evangelist's bass drum, farther than it has ever gone before—to make provincialism imperialistic; so that all the native and instinctive virtues, freedoms, powers must rally in their own defense.

Mr. Lewis hates such dulness—the village virus—as the saints hate sin. Indeed it is with a sort of new Puritanism that he and his contemporaries wage against the dull a war something like that which certain of their elders once waged against the bad. Only a satiric anger helped out by the sense of being on crusade could have sustained the author of Main Street through the laborious compilation of those brilliant details which illustrate the complacency of Gopher Prairie and which seem less brilliant than laborious to bystanders not particularly concerned in his crusade. The question, of course, arises whether the ancient war upon stupidity is a better literary cause to fight in than the equally ancient war upon sin. Both narrow themselves to doctrinal contentions, apparently forgetting for the moment that either being virtuous or being intelligent is but a half—or thereabouts—of existence, and that the two qualities are hopelessly intertwined. There are thoughtful novelists who, as they do not condemn lapses of virtue too harshly, so also do not too harshly condemn deficiencies of intelligence, feeling that the common humanity of men and women is enough to make them fit for fiction. Mr. Lewis must be thought of as sitting in the seat of the scornful, with the satirists rather than with the poets, must be seen to recall the earlier, vexed, sardonic Spoon River rather than the later, calmer, loftier.

Satire and moralism, however, have large rights in the domain of literature. Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the populace. The reception of Main Street is a memorable episode in literary history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on.