CHAPTER XV
ANNAN’S dreary, unpleasant and brilliantly ugly novel was published in April. There were three printings in the first week. Five in the second. In contradistinction to “small-town stuff,” it was “big-town.” New York of the middle-lower class. And it was New York. Stenograph and photograph could verify every word uttered and every portrait. The accuracy of its penny-gossip was amazing. It was apotheosis in epigram of the obvious.
The determined ignoring of all beauty; the almost fanatical blindness to everything except what is miserable, piddling, sordid, and deformed in humanity; the pathetic loyalty to the sort of “truth” which has a place in economic statistics if not in creative art—the drab, hopeless, ignoble atmosphere where swill was real enough to smell and where all delicacy and functional privacy was sternly disregarded, caused a literary uproar in the reading belt, and raucous applause among all Realists.
There are good Christians and good Jews, both admirable and loyal citizens of the Republic, good scholars, good soldiers, good men.
There are intellectual Bolshevists among Christians—degenerate fanatics, perverted Puritans; and among Jews are their equivalents.
The bawling Christian literary critic who assaults with Bolshevistic violence all literature except his own is a privileged blackmailer and commits legal libel.
His Jewish confrère is no more vulgar. Both are only partly educated. They live parasitically upon the body of literature. They are cooties.
The several more notorious ones welcomed Annan. They liked what he wrote because it was what they would have written if they could. Later, if he didn’t continue to write what they liked, they’d bite him. They had no other means of retaliation.
One, named Minkwitz, who made a good living by biting harder and with less discrimination than the usual literary cootie, wrote a violent article in praise of raw realism, and crowned Annan with it.
A female pervert on a Providence, Rhode Island, periodical discovered that there was a “delicate stench” about Annan’s realism which she found “rather stimulating than otherwise.”