Critical Woodcuts/Floyd Dell on the Coast of Bohemia
THE publication of a new novel[1] by Mr. Floyd Dell has for the second time within a week set me to reflecting ironically on this thought: "What a crew of political subversives our literary radicals are becoming!"
Suppose you are an impressionable young person, and suppose the current drastic criticism of American civilization has convinced you that our "bourgeois" society is uninteresting and unlovely—humdrum, hidebound, and tedious to the yawning point. You turn to writers who are busy making ideals for the younger generation. You turn to two of our novelists who, like their master, Mr. H. G. Wells, regard the novel as a branch of social dynamics, and what guiding beam is thrown on your pathway?
Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who was once thought to be tainted with Socialism, and who certainly has a rare talent for presenting human beings as members of organized society—Mr. Lewis has at last given us in "Arrowsmith" a novel which presents a clear-cut ideal and suggests a way out of the vulgar stress of a competitive money-making society. But what a way out!—to renounce the world for the quest of pure truth in the laboratory—a way prescribable only to solitary remorselessly energetic individuals dedicated to the pursuit of science, capable of severing all social bonds in order to voyage through strange seas of thought alone.
Mr. Floyd Dell has also, in one way and another, acquired what young unacademic authors rather enjoy, a reputation for being dangerous to existing institutions. He has been in court under the espionage act, together with his editorial colleague, that passionate immitigable individualist, Mr. Max Eastman. He has had a book—"Janet March"—suppressed or withdrawn. He has written an admirable panegyric on John Greenleaf Whittier and other conscientious objectors. He has talked blithely of The Revolution, and has, for picturesque purposes, painted his eagerness to assist at the building of a barricade. In the spring of life a young man's talking lightly turns to social Utopias.
But talking is a privilege guaranteed by the Constitution—though it is not always upheld by the police. As Disraeli pointed out, it is "imagination," not talking, that "governs mankind." And Mr. Dell's imagination is thoroughly unsocialistic. He may, to be sure, join the Socialist party, because, being out of power, it is free from responsibility and rich in promises and because it contains a number of intellectual Jews who relish, as few "Anglo-Saxons" do, the excitement of talk, the intoxication of ideas, the exhilaration of protest. He may for an evening unite with them in discussing the redistribution of political and economic power. But the "inner form" of Mr. Dell's imagination is individualistic and anarchical. Everything in him that is deep and instinctive loathes the impositions of power, loathes regulated work, loathes regimentation, loathes forced co-operation and
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equalization, loathes obligation. Mr. Dell loves freedom and spontaneity just as heartily as Mr. J. P. Morgan does.
In the twentieth century, all literary men of any sense, like all sensible kings and presidents, wish to show themselves friendly to the poor and the inarticulate. But Mr. Dell is a poet, and no real poet, so far as I have heard, was ever a real Socialist. He is not merely a poet! He has been hitherto almost exclusively a poet of the coast of Bohemia—simple, sensuous and passionate. He knows nothing except what he has intimately experienced. His imagination does not penetrate into the reality of the economic, social, and political structure of a state. He is a play-boy like John Synge's hero, so deeply enveloped in his personal dream of felicity that he scarcely notices his collisions with a sordid reality.
He was born in the land of suppressed desires, the romantic dreamland of west-central Illinois, in the little town of Barry, in 1887. Illinois suppressed his desires by forcing him to attend high school and study algebra for a while in a Mississippi River town; but he escaped out of that into the Agnostic Society and into the library, where he made his own education by reading Ingersoll and Shelley, Spencer and Omar, anthropology and Ernest Dowson, Ecclesiastes and Swinburne, Verlaine and "The Shropshire Lad," and dreaming of the Venus of Melos and the Discus-Thrower. Economic need suppressed his desires by forcing him to work in factories, then as a newspaper reporter in Davenport, Iowa, and subsequently as a literary editor for some years in Chicago, and finally in New York, on "The Liberator" and "The Masses."
But in his high-school days he had entered an avenue of escape from bourgeois realities by thinking freely and writing verse. In 1913, he expressed his dream of a new feminine ideal in "Women as World Builders." In 1918, he published his dream of educational reconstruction entitled "Were You Ever a Child?" which sets forth the "new" educational notion of utilizing instead of killing off by the educational processes the child's personal and creative impulses. As in Chicago, so in New York, he escaped from journalism to the coast of Bohemia; he haunted artistic settlements; he was a pioneer of the modern migration to Greenwich Village; he frequented little theaters; he wrote much verse and several one-act plays; he published in 1924 a very readable collection of critical essays called "Looking at Life," which interprets current books and ideas from the point of view of a poet and an intellectual radical.
Mr. Dell's novels are four: "Moon-Calf," 1920; "The Briary Bush," 1921; "Janet March," 1923, and "This Mad Ideal," 1925. By a comparison of these books with the essays and the available biographical record, I have convinced myself that the first two of them, at least, are hardly to be regarded as fiction, are rather to be considered as confessions, like those of Jean Jacques. They constitute one continuous narrative of the adventures of Felix Fay from childhood through his first marital difficulties and adjustments, and they resemble the "Confessions" of Rousseau in many important respects.
They are poetic, in the sense that poetry is "impassioned recollection." They have the form and movement of autobiographical revery in a sensitive mind which feels a rhythm in its experience, sees pictures in its own life history and savors and idealizes its past. There is nothing here of the sociologist's notebook, nor of the overworked optic nerve of the photographer-realist. Memory has discarded everything that is not memorable, quick, delicious, pungent, or enchanting to the revisiting mind. There are reminiscences of childhood raptures here as exquisite as that passage in Rousseau in which he remembers how he and his father read romances together till they were reminded that it was morning by the swallows twittering under the eaves. Take, for example, this recovery of the child's delight in learning to read—not forgetting that Mr. Dell's impulse to revise educational method derives from this source:
He had been looking at his favorite picture in the Yellow Fairy Book. He had said to his mother so often: "Mamma, read me that part," that he knew the passage beside it almost by heart. He put his finger on the printed words, one after another, and spoke them aloud: "The—Prince—took—her—hand" He stopped, with the realization that he had been reading. It was so wonderful that the thought of it made him feel faint. He went back again with his finger, saying them hesitatingly. With a kind of fearful awe he proceeded down the page.
Yes, it was true—he could read. And suddenly he began to cry out in piercing tones, "Mamma! Mamma!"
She came running, her arms white with flour from breadmaking.
"I can read! I can read!" he cried.
After young Felix has learned to wander on short excursions into "the realms of gold" he has a curious fantasy one day in school while dreaming over how many yards of calico you can buy for $1.38 at 11½ cents a yard. He dreams that he is a fairy prince carrying a magic book containing answers to all secrets into "a little house in the woods that nobody knew anything about."
That is good child psychology: to build a "secret house" seems to be an instinctive act with children as with birds. For days and weeks together, when the fit comes upon them, they will live in a fever of mystery and excitement about their hidden retreat. And a conservative may interpret this fever as a token of the profound naturalness of the passion for 'property.'
At the age of twelve Felix, who has passed through his doll period, enters his secret-house period, and finds in the garret, with a trapdoor, a secure hiding-place where he may read and dream. Presently Rose, the gardener's daughter, joins him there. He reads to her from Rousseau's "Confessions." They talk, they dance, they dream there. Sometimes they walk in the woods and recite poetry to each other. One night they slip out to the woods with bread and meat and build a fire and eat their supper, and lie watching the friendly stars for hours. They are too happy to sleep. "Nevertheless, at last they slept, and awakened chill and stiff, a little before dawn. They laughed cheerfully, each rather secretly frightened at their daring." Then they went home. It was all quite innocent—and childlike!
Was it really? Childlike, yes, very likely. But what is "innocence" at the ages of twelve and fifteen?—when the girl gives queer little kisses on the mouth, which begin fiercely and end abruptly with a laugh, and when the boy has already read Jean Jacques and relishes the "frank sensuality" of "Venus and Adonis." Let us for the present leave the question unanswered. As Mr. Dell presents the incident, it is what is known as an idyllic incident.
I have recited it in some detail because it is a kind of prototypical symbol for Mr. Dell's entire vision of the happy life. It recurs, in one form or another, in each of his four novels. The end of every man's desire, as he sees it, is to be one of two children playing in a secret garret. In "The Briary Bush" the fairy prince and princess find some equivalent for the garret in the artist studios of Chicago, and then there is the actual cottage in the woods where Rose-Ann on her bridal morn bathes in a bank of snow. In "Janet March" the substitute for the shepherd's cottage is again a studio in Greenwich Village. In "This Mad Ideal" there is a little "shack" on the hillside that "nobody knows anything about," where passionate friends talk, read poetry and exchange kisses—innocent and childlike.
Is a lonely dwelling, built by whom or how
None of the rustic island-people know.
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This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed
Thee to be lady of the solitude.
Everything that Mr. Delt has to tell us about the summum bonum is in Shelley's "Epipsychidion." So far as I can make out, none of his heroes or heroines conceives of any object higher or more complex or extensive than a solitude à deux with most simple cooking and sleeping apparatus—"all the romantic inconveniences"—in which two delicately attuned comrades of opposite sexes shall sit them down and, first having told the stories of their lives, i. e., their previous love affairs, shall recite poetry to one another; talk a little about art; perhaps write a poem or two and a one-act play about what happened to the children after the Pied Piper led them into the hill, and then, certainly, exchange many, many kisses of happy and irresponsible comradeship.
Money-making is not a serious consideration to any of these Babes in the Wood; though they are all pretty consistent atheists, they still cling to the thought that "the Lord will provide" something from the delicatessen shop in the next block. Artistic "creation" is not a consuming passion to them, but rather a recreation after many, many kisses begin to pall. Marriage is an incident, avoidable or unavoidable—to be considered as, at the best, an expedient and a convenience. Children are incidents, not ultimate objects, and they are to be accepted only when desired. For them the consummation and the fragrant flower of life is just the simple personal relationship of two people who, in the consciousness that they are, for the moment, sufficient one for the other, have run a finger of fire around themselves and their "secret garden" and shut the universe out.
Let us have a description of the quality of this ideal relationship from an "anonymous author" quoted in "Janet March":
I seek happy companionship in which what is vulgarly called passion shall have a dancing quality, long since banished from the definition of that word; let me say, rather, I seek playful and joyous friendships in which no intimacy is withheld; relationships based upon a mood which is best set forth in the old mythologies—the serene indifference of gods and goddesses and the careless ecstasy of fauns and nymphs; generous comradeships of the moment; inconsiderate of the dull responsibilities of workaday life, existing for their own sake, without foolish, elaborate pretenses and without tremendous consequences, free equally of the burden of hope and fear.
Through "Moon-Calf" and "The Briary Bush," Felix Fay seeks the nymph, the dream-girl. Through "Janet March" and "This Mad Ideal" Janet and then Judith seek the faun, the dream-boy. Thus both the masculine and the feminine sides of the relationship should receive equal illumination. I gravely doubt whether they do.
"Janet March" strikes me as a very able attempt to make a girl out of Felix Fay. She is as like Felix Fay as two peas, except that her adventures begin in a modern and comfortable and liberal home, and except that she appears to have very little artistic talent. She has no clear purpose other than to be "free," and to be herself. Mr. Dell, however, does confer upon her some physiological experiences which are sexually distinctive. And he places her in the various situations which a contemporary young woman may enter if she sets out in search of a career and self-realization with Mr. Dell's ideals in her head. Some aspects of her rather formless yearnings and some important phases of her predicaments he discusses with a kind of intimate sympathy and understanding which are still excessively rare. "Janet March" seems to me, on the whole, an informative and valuable history of feminine adventures on the coast of Bohemia.
In "This Mad Ideal," however, I find no advance in the development of the theme, and a marked falling off in the artistic resources. Judith is merely an excessively attenuated sketch of Felix Fay. Her rebellion and the first steps in her adventure are presented with a sophomoric thinness, and with only an occasional glimpse of the "tendrils of imagination" reaching into empty space.
If Mr. Dell is to hold our attention as historian of experiments on the Bohemian coast, it is clear that he should not waste another book in proving to us merely that girls and boys have a pathetic hunger for happiness; that they rebel against a conventional society which objects to their entering where they conceive happiness to be, and that, consequently, they go seeking in Bohemia for "companionships at once light and gracious, irresponsible and sincere, generous and self-respecting."
We know all that well enough. He has communi-, cated to us the shape of his ideal, and we acknowledge that it has a certain attraction on paper. But in order to develop his theme he must proceed to a far more realistic account than he has yet given us of the collision of his dream with reality. In his first three novels there were a good many interesting conclusions presented or implied: for example, the Moon-Calf discovered to his own complete satisfaction that he was merely a silly ass to go looking for his kind of intoxication in alcohol, or for his species of dream-girls among factory hands and shopgirls and casual neurotic schoolgirls hunting boys by the pheasant cage in the park, and drunken girls in roadhouses, and prostitutes, and hectic maudlin girls in the piggery of drunken Bohemian parties. One by one, the dreaming idealist in "Moon-Calf" eliminated all these impossible partners of a "delicate comradeship," light and gracious, generous and self-respecting. The Moon-Calf began to discover that he had put one or two things into his ideal which could not exist together—that, for example, an ideal comradeship could not in this world be at the same time "irresponsible" and "generous." He was on the brink of discovering marriage as Mr. G. K. Chesterton discovered Christianity, as a thing designed to meet his special need.
Mr. Dell's weakness as a writer of fiction and also as a feminist seems at the present moment due to a kind of indolence or apathy or lack of courage in the use of the realistic imagination. I regretfully recognize that he has encountered some dissuasive lions in the way of becoming a thoroughly honest historian of Bohemia. Perhaps being constrained to withdraw the hard truth of "Janet March" has influenced his decline into the soft mush of "This Mad Ideal."
As his readers and his censors gradually accustom themselves to the hard edges of fact, it is to be hoped that they will allow him to broaden the moral basis of his fiction by an adequate disclosure of the relation of his dream world to its environment. I am not sure that Mr. Dell really desired to tell us any more than he did about, for example, the physiology and psychology of the two adolescents sleeping together in the woods; about the psychology of the girls who resort to "criminal operations"; about the future of the two adventurous girls who get drunk in a roadhouse—one of them on the eve of her marriage—or about the psychology of the girl who drowns herself. Perhaps a more realistic development at a number of points where one feels that Mr. Dell simply "isn't there" would mar the "light and gracious" air which should surround these delicate, irresponsible comradeships. But so far as the interests of actual Babes in the Wood are concerned—those Babes in whose interest censorship is supposed to be instituted—clearly the danger to be apprehended is not from reality but from the illusion of intoxicating dreams.
- ↑ This Mad Ideal, New York, 1925.