Writing & Other Bloodsports, page 25
Your father is worried, too. . . . He thinks you have lost your ambition, that you haven’t got a definite aim in life. Charley Simmons, who is just your age, has a good job and is going to be married. The boys are all settling down; they are all determined to get somewhere; you can see that boys like Charley Simmons are on their way to being really a credit to the community, (p. 99)
To merely “get on” in the world seemed like an oversimplification to Krebs. He wanted to sleep late in the mornings, walk to the library to get a book, and to eat lunch quietly at home. He would read on the front porch until he became bored, and then would spend the hottest hours of the day “in the cool dark of the pool room.” He loved pool, he liked to practice his clarinet in the evening, walk downtown, read for a while, and then go to bed.
His family was willing to go along with Krebs’ inactivity for a while, but they could not allow him to go on in this aimless way indefinitely. After a month, his mother had a talk with him. Krebs’ father did not care what kind of work his son did—“All work is honorable he says”—but he had to make a start at something. Krebs does not believe in God (many professional soldiers who have fought in major campaigns lose their faith; it is an inevitable corollary to combat experience), and when Krebs’ mother says, “God has work for everyone to do. There can be no idle hands in His Kingdom,” he replies, “I’m not in His Kingdom.” (p. 98) To please his mother, however, Krebs kneels with her when she says a prayer for him, but this is the final humiliation that sends him on his way. He can no longer accept the simple values of his parents, and his home town is too small to hold him.
He had tried so to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it. . . He wanted his life to go smoothly. It had just gotten going that way. Well, that was all over now, anyway, (p. 101)
It is important to note that Krebs does not consider the idea if going to another small town: the city, he seems to know instinctively, like other immobilized heroes, will offer him the anonymity he desires, the opportunity to do as he pleases without interference from family or friends.
In 1919 small town values were remarkably alike in America, whether the small town was in Oklahoma or Ohio, as Sherwood Anderson discovered when he published Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson’s purpose was to “tell the story of the defeated figures of an old American individualistic small town life.” (Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, p. 290)
Winesburg of course was no particular town. It was a mythical town. It was people. I had got the characters of the book everywhere about me, in towns in which I had lived, in the army, in factories and offices. When I gave the book its title I had no idea there really was an Ohio town by that name. . . . And the people of the actual Winesburg protested. They declared the book immoral and that the actual inhabitants of the real Winesburg were a highly moral people, (pp. 295-296)
George Willard, a central character, is not the hero in the stories collected under the tide, but he gradually became aware of the narrow-mindedness of the little town. And when he did become aware of the values accepted by the majority, and discovered further that they were not the values he wanted to share with them, he, too, like Krebs, escaped to the city. If he had remained, he might not have become immobilized in the small town, because, in a small American town, it is impossible to avoid interpersonal relationships.
Awareness of existent values, not a desire to change them, is what gives the hero his push into immobility. Without awareness there is neither comedy nor tragedy, or for that matter, a story worth the telling. The immobilized hero may be supersensitive and an intellectual, e.g., Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly; or he may be insensitive and of substandard intelligence; but either way, the awareness of values becomes a matter of degree.
Isolation alone, which is a theme running through American fiction in books as diverse in style as Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled, Roads and Erskine Caldwell’s Trouble in July, to use two extremes, does not add up to the characteristics of the immobilized man as defined in these pages. The man who is merely isolated may be quite happy and contented in his environment. Garland, for example, thanks to a seminary education and a two-year teaching post in Boston, did not become aware of the ugliness of his former life on the prairies until he returned for a visit after an extended absence.
The farther I got from Chicago the more depressing the landscape became. It was bad enough in our former home in Mitchell County, but my pity grew more intense as I passed from northwest Iowa into southern Dakota. The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost hopeless and sterile poverty. My dark mood was deepened into bitterness by my father’s farm, where I found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the enormous sunburned, treeless plain, with no expectations of ever living anywhere else. Deserted by her sons and failing in health, she endured the discomforts of her life uncomplainingly—but my resentment of “things as they are” deepened during my talks with her neighbors, who were all housed in the same unshaded cabins in equal poverty and loneliness. (Preface, Main-Travelled Roads.)
Three of the stories in Main-Travelled Roads are concerned with the return of a man to the rural scenes of his youth. The return is never altogether successful, although the young hero comes back with high expectations. In “A Branch Road” a successful young man returns to the “middle border” after seven years. His former sweetheart is married to a cruel farmer; she lives in dreary drudgery in a house full of flies; her beauty has disappeared and she has aged prematurely. She is virtually a slave to the demands of her husband and her mother- and father-in-law. Nevertheless, the girl’s husband, his father and mother, and even the girl herself, are not discontented. This is the only life they have ever known, and they have learned acceptance without complaint. The returned hero persuades the girl to desert her husband and run away with him; but the reader knows, if she does not, that he takes her away out of pity, not for love.
Platt, the insensitive hero, whose standard of intelligence is usually called “native,” of John Sanford’s Make My Bed in Hell, was denied an education by one of the cruelest fathers in modern fiction, who watched his mother die of overwork, who was happy to see his father die, who had never known anything other than hard work and bitter poverty on his upstate New York farm, is contented enough until a former acquaintance who has escaped this rural environment returns and tells him about the wonders of the world outside upper New York State. When Platt realizes what he has missed in life, he allows the man to freeze to death in his barn without helping him. Platt is acquitted, of course; there are no laws in New York requiring a person to assist another in distress— other than the common laws of humanity. Without awareness of “things as they are,” which alone forces revaluation, the merely isolated man is not an immobilized hero.
The hero who has been immobilized by calamity or war is analogous to Platt, however. An outside influence of some magnitude forces a reexamination of values. World War I, and later, World War II, served as a springboard for a hard, second look at values commonly accepted. Ezra Pound’s poet Mauberly, who is remarkably like Pound himself at the time, is shaken out of his apathetic complacency by the first World War. A poet no longer young, who has accepted the critical standards of prewar England, comes to the conclusion by the end of the war that they (the combatants) had fought,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization. (11.31-32)
Once Mauberly reaches this morbid conclusion, he is forced to reject the accepted standards of the poetry of the prewar era as well. If there is no place for a poet in this “botched civilization,” he will create one—elsewhere. He is intelligent enough to realize that the new age calls for prose, but he cannot accept the things a man must do to become a successful writer of prose; he therefore ignores the advice of Mr. Nixon, a writer who has met with commercial success: “And give up verse, my boy,/ There’s nothing in it.” Having first fled the farm and then America, the poet will flee England, too—to work on his “Medallion” elsewhere:
Then on an oar
Read this:
“I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist.” (11.20-25)
The immobilized hero, who is either an artist or fancies himself to be an artist, can only create the intellectual climate he desires in the heterogeneous manswarm of the city. His bitterness and loneliness can be cherished in the city; his penchant for pessimism is reinforced and reconfirmed daily by the city horrors that surround him and by the sensational headlines in the daily press. Thomas Wolfe’s Eugene Gant, a Southern boy from a small city who came to New York to create a new climate in which to write a novel, looks only for the evil and ugly aspects of the metropolis. These new forms of ugly are in contrast to the different types of ugliness he fled from in Old Catawba. He filters these new experiences through an artist’s eyes, and, although he often exaggerates the worst aspects of the city and its people, he derives a bitter self-satisfaction that is close to delight from reporting what he sees. If nothing else, the crude, crass, meretricious brutality of New York gives Eugene Gant something to write about. The same comments hold true for Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” a Southern black man new to the city and its ways. He seeks out a hidden basement room in a rotting nineteenth century house, and makes a nest in the coal. In this “warm hole,” lighted by “1,369 light bulbs,” the “light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.” (p. 5) In this dirty but well-lighted place, the invisible man can embitteredly search for the self, secure in the knowledge that he is reasonably safe at last from outside interference.
Because the immobilized hero is primarily an urban product, the novels to be discussed at some length in this chapter will be those that are most representative of the American immobilized hero.
Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, like Eugene Gant, once he becomes aware of the brutality and suffering that goes on in the city, is soon unable to see anything else.
Crowds of people moved through the street with a dreamlike violence. As he looked at their broken hands and torn mouths he was overwhelmed by the desire to help them, and because this desire was sincere, he was happy despite the feeling of guilt which accompanied it. He saw a man who appeared to be on the verge of death stagger into a movie theater that was showing a picture called Blonde Beauty. He saw a ragged woman with an enormous goiter pick a love story magazine out of a garbage can and seem very excited by her find. (pp. 93-94.)
Any person who truly desires to see what Miss Lonelyhearts saw (or incidents quite similar) may do so easily enough by walking one block on 42nd Street, East or West, from Broadway—seven days a week.
The supersensitive character who cannot ignore these depressing cityscapes, like Miss Lonelyhearts, will soon become immobilized. Miss Lonelyhearts cannot help such people because there are too many of them; he can offer them his pity but he knows that pity is not enough; he therefore loses the objectivity and the ability to compartmentalize his mind that a man must have to live happily (or functionally) in the city.
In the beginning of the short novel, Miss Lonelyhearts (no other name is given to the hero) takes the job as advice columnist on his paper because he hopes it will eventually lead to a better position with more money. His editor, Shrike, and his fellow newspapermen, take the column as a joke and, at first, so does the hero. But the letter writers are sincere in their pleas for help; their insoluble problems are real and vital to them, and reality is rarely funny. Before long their agonizing cries for assistance penetrate the carapace of this professional reporter.
Advice columns are for the sole purpose of selling newspapers, and they are under the control of the features editor on most papers. The advice column is a comic feature; it is not meant to be taken seriously by readers at large; letters are answered by a flippant quip or a jocular comment at the expense of the letter writer. Most of the readers of advice columns are non-letter writers, and they enjoy the letters and flippant replies from a vantage position of superiority to the letter writers; the readers of these columns laugh hardest at the simple-minded letter writer who actually believes that he will get any intelligent or practical advice from a columnist. In two popular American syndicated advice columns, “Dear Abby” and “Ann Landers” (the columnists are sisters), which are quoted widely, I have never seen a letter printed with a problem that could not have been solved by the letter writer with one full minute of serious thought. If postage is sent, however, both columnists state that they will answer serious letters privately. The serious letters, which are too disturbing to be published, are the letters that affected Miss Lonelyhearts. Without the toughmindedness of his co-workers, he saw nothing amusing in letters like this one:
I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terrible when she looks at me. What did I ever do to deserve such a terrible bad fate? Even if I did do some bad things I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born this way. I asked Papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I dont believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?
Sincerely yours,
Desperate (p. 4.)
Under the daily pressure of such letters Miss Lonelyhearts becomes depressed. His feeble-minded sweetheart, Betty, attempts to restore his spirits by taking him to the country for a weekend. She is seduced and impregnated for her pains; but their jobs are in the city, and to the city they must return. Miss Lonelyhearts sinks from mild depression to deep apathy to deeper depression. He finally takes to his bed, mentally and physically unable to go to the office and read the flood of daily letters. He becomes mentally confused, trying to find an answer for all of this misery in his mind. He assumes, in his feverish state, Jesus Christ’s burden of all the world’s sins. He stares, as if in a trance, at a statuette of Jesus, which he has pinned to his bedroom wall with huge spikes. He believes, at last, that God has sent him into this world to work miracles; and in this sick state of mind he becomes one with God. When Doyle, a crippled meter reader, calls to remonstrate with the columnist for seducing his wife, “he rushed down the stairs to meet Doyle with his arms spread for a miracle.” (p. 141) But Doyle was calling on him with a revolver. Doyle does not, of course, mean to shoot Miss Lonelyhearts; he merely became confused when the hero, with his arms symbolically spread, came rushing down the stairs. The pistol is discharged accidentally, although Miss Lonelyhearts is killed as certainly as though it were fired on purpose. Like God’s sacrifice of His son, Jesus, Miss Lonelyhearts’ death goes for nothing, solves nothing, and is equally meaningless. The cry for help “from Desperate, Harold S., Catholic-mother, Brokenhearted, Broad-shoulders, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband” is still sounding throughout the city. But now there is not even a Miss Lonelyhearts to hear it. Sensitive readers find the ironic futility of this ending almost unbearably cruel.
West’s contribution to the immobilized hero novel, however, is doubly important because he dealt with the nonintellectual as well as with the educated, or supersensitive immobilized hero. In an important sense, all of the simple characters in The Day of the Locust are immobilized. The original title was to have been The Cheated, but the author changed it for “literary” connotations before the book was published. These characters are unable to function because they do not see themselves as they are; they all see themselves in another role of some kind. Tod, a young scenery designer for a movie studio, sees himself as a great painter. In the secret studio of his mind he composes a great mural, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” This imaginary painting has been inspired by all of the hopeless people who have come to Los Angeles to die. When they revolt, he feels, they will surely burn to the ground the city that deceived them. These are the men and women of America who have achieved Dostoevsky’s Underground Man’s inadequate goal: the small pension after a lifetime of useless, unrewarding work, and a place in the California sun to await death. They have been cheated by life and at last they realize it, now that it is too late to start over. They have been lured to Hollywood by the glamor and the sunshine:
Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked, and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires. . . . Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack bodies and slack minds. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have worked and slaved for nothing, (p. 157.)
West is not critical of society; he is reporting fictionally the actual conditions of Southern California as he observed them during the Depression years, before television. Nor does he offer any solution to the problem; in fact, the problems have worsened in Southern California since The Day of the Locust was published in 1939.
