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.
5
We have arrived at a point in our literary history (or, if you prefer, our social progress, our ideological advancement, our cultural development) when there is need for a new estimate of the task and aims of our modern literature or at least the re-establishment of certain values and standards previously set aside.
We must once again divorce literature from life, if by that we will understand that literature is not, and never was supposed to be, a mirror held up before our common life. We must discard the so-called “true-to-life” standard by which our critical attitudes have been governed for so many years. Above all, we must renounce the propaganda psychosis, and we must admit that even good propaganda is never literature and that even great literature is seldom propaganda. We have those, of course, who will rise to point out that such and such a book or novel or play was excellent propaganda for such and such a cause or event. To which we may answer: it was not so conceived. For the glibness with which the word propaganda is used is rivalled only by the glibness of the propagandists themselves. To make a case for any work of literature as a bit of effective propaganda for any cause is to distort and debase the purpose for which it was created.
There is much too much to do with literature today that has nothing to do with literature at all. We must learn again that the weavers of fantasy are, after all, the veritable realists. For it must be admitted that we have at hand ample evidence that this is so.