The War and American Letters

Two Good Reasons Why Our Writers Have Apparently Lacked Inspiration

HENRY BRINSLEY

A FEW nights ago one of my scribbling friends dined with me. I say "scribbling," but as a matter of fact he's better than that, being really one of the dozen most popular writers of short stories in America. Other details are out of point, as I don't wish to identify him further, for professional reasons. In my study after dinner I picked up from my desk a letter from another friend who happens to be a Magazine Editor. "What's your answer to this?" I asked my guest, and read to him the following paragraph: " 'The war doesn't seem to have touched us artistically at all; certainly it hasn't affected our art as expressed in literature any more than it has any other form of American art. Look at our Liberty Loan and other war posters, for example— lifeless things compared with the excellent British and French ones. And the French and the English, and even the Spanish have really turned out literature as a result of war inspiration, whereas we in America have turned out nothing. Why? Probably because we didn't get any inspiration, probably because we didn't feel the war. What do you think?' So I pass it on to you—you're a writer; what do you think?" My friend grinned. "I think he's pulling your leg; it's only a rhetorical question —and he's given half the answer already." Then he put down his cigar and went at it.

"The chief reason for our failure to measure up artistically with our allies is our lateness in getting into the war—-or its brevity after we did get in. Although we declared war in 1917 we didn't get into the actual fight until it was nearly four years along, and then we had but little more than six months of battlefield experience. During the first four years (and after), everything visually, dramatically, plastically, emotionally thrilling in any ultimate sense was some thousands of miles away. Of course we couldn't feel the war from here; we could feel slowly but surely all sorts of steadily growing economic discomforts, all sorts of apprehensions, all sorts of sympathetic thrills, and, finally, all sorts of patriotic impulses, but we could feel them all, except the last, only as one feels the outermost ripples when a stone is thrown in the water far away from one.

Literature's Long Apprenticeship

"NOW let's analyze problem. Take authors, to begin with, and confine the field to creative fiction, in its largest sense and not as a mere stupid antithesis to 'truth.' I'm not a novelist. I haven't tackled that bigger form yet, but I've written shorter fictions for a dozen years or more. Writers may be born, not made, but few if any writers (poets excepted) spring fully equipped into the field in their first youth: we all have to go through an apprenticeship of hard work, and I doubt if you'll find very much first-class stuff turned out much before a writer is thirty-one. I'm speaking of Literature with a big L—your editorial correspondent's word—not of pleasantly ephemeral cures for ennui. Take the great corpus of fictional English Literature: the best novels and tales have been written by artists over thirty. There are striking exceptions,—Jane Austen, the young Dickens, the early Kipling, but however striking, they are none the less exceptions. One of the reasons for this is, of course, that during the first ten years of maturity, from twenty to thirty, one is accumulating the most of one's materials for art in the form of valuable experience and during this process hasn't quite time to digest it into an effectively working philosophy or technique. All this has been said before, and by more eminent critics, so let's take it for granted, at least as a working hypothesis. And, for another, let's take it as axiomatic that an artist can deal most effectively only with things he has himself seen, felt, and experienced: these are his best material, however he may translate them into 'ideal' forms.

Few American Writers Got to the Front

"WELL, the first draft took in men from wenty-one to thirty-one. Comparatively few of the older men of the second draft got to the front. Thus, theoretically, the greater part of our trained creative artists were non-combatants, and were not 'on the scene.' Whereas practically every able-bodied French artist, and nearly every English, either got to the front or was decidedly within the zone of operations when he could very much 'feel' and observe the thing. Sympathy may be a strong incentive to art, as it is to action—and my God, how often during the four years has one gone round with a lump in one's throat and blind rage in one's heart—but it isn't the actual material of art. And imagination is all well enough, but what, in such a whirling hell as this war was, is imagination to the real thing. Here, listen to this," and he drew a scrap out of his pocketbook. "This is from a youngster whom I know, who was one of the Americans under Gouraud,—it was written July twenty-fifth, from the hospital at Dijon.

"'While I was trying rather crossly to get to sleep again the fracas all at once magnified itself astonishingly, and we forgot about going to bed, for we couldn't help realizing that here was something really extraordinary. We stepped out of the tent and the full sweep and grandeur of it broke on us. The thing was being done on an immense scale. We stood amazed as fury after fury was released, telling each other how wonderful it was. It had the glory of a storm, and more sustained and terrible. Cannon shots followed one another like the beat of the knives on a planer— It doesn't seem possible to you; but it's true, without exaggeration. Think of the shells being sent over that fast for hours, smashing the trenches into nothing, and raking the back area for miles and miles,—think of making a hurricane like that and putting to shame God's best thunder. Lights of all kinds were in the sky, which was strangely streaked with low hanging clouds—lights made by the bright flashes of the guns near us replying to the Germans, and great illuminations, like a curiously dislocated dawn, where enemy shells fell. It was magical and creepy,—unearthly darkness, unearthly lights, and that unearthly roar engulfing it all —the sound of unimagined power, which we felt in the grinding and trembling of it, just as one standing by a great engine feels its power, and there was the sound as of unimaginably great iron things thundering their way across

the brazen roof of the sky—oh, a huge and marvelous roar that put awe into our hearts. . .

. . Our turn came again soon, and this time it was the battery itself that the Germans were shooting at; they had sent over a flying machine, which had set fire to a kite-balloon near us, and had discovered us as well. While we were looking for the proper pile of shells to carry over, a 77 lit a few feet from the gun we were serving. We ducked naturally enough, then started back to work, but hardly had we grouped ourselves about our little pile ready to begin, when there was a comical hot little explosion back of us, and six of us had been hit. It was a 77 filled with a high explosive, but it sounded, not like a giant fire-cracker, but like one of those foolish little ones much magnified. We hadn't heard it sing, as one does those which light at a little distance—but all at once the air seemed very full of something and then came the explosion. It was fatal to one man, who died in my arms while I was trying to staunch the big wound in his chest. My leg felt hot and prickly, but I made the dug-out unaided. There I lay quiet for a while; before long I was carried off to the dressing station a few rods down the road. I was content to lie there. I felt peaceful, and I was not in pain.'

"Good Lord!" gasped my friend, "take that from a mere kid, who had no idea he was writing literature — but a Johnny-on-theSpot. You've got to believe every word of it, —he makes you see and feel the whole thing in a way that no one merely sitting at a desk could make you. Read it fast and get its breathless, unconscious rhythm. 'Cannon shots followed one another like the beat of the knives of a planer.' No human artist who hadn't seen it could dare make up that phrase. And now look at this." And he picked up from my table a copy of "The Best Short Stories of 1918."

Last Year's Best Stories

"TAKE the book only for what it's worth—a selection of American 1918 fiction by a perfectly average intelligence; but it's the average reader who in the long run 'establishes' the bulk of English Literature. 1918 was our war year, and here if anywhere we should see its immediate effect. There are twenty stories, and about half of them seem to have something to do with the war. But if you study them closely you will see that, probably with one exception, none of them grips anything vital that drags you into the war's wonderful actualities. Harrison Rhodes, for example, writes a perfectly good story—'Extra Men'—but it's so obviously merely a desk-stunt that it doesn't get you in the way his model, 'The Bowman of Mons', does. The exception is Mary Freedly's 'Blind Vision': the crux of this, to be sure, is only a mental state—it doesn't bring you physically into things at all—but the mental state is so vividly of the war that you wonder how she got it so convincingly right, and so admirably 'across.' Among the twenty authors there are only two officers. Neither treats of the war here. One of them, Captain Achmed Abdullah, who writes, in 'A Simple Act of Piety', a rattlingly good Limehouse Night, is scarcely an American author. The other, Captain Arthur Johnson, gives, in 'The Visit of the Master', a bit of highbred literary comedy. Curiously enough, the story which Mr. O'Brien, the editor of the volume, considers the best of the year, also by Captain Johnson (he doesn't reprint it), called 'The Little Family,' does seem to touch on the war. It's an exquisite story, and for one I agree with young Mr. O'Brien that it's by far the best of the year; but the author only plays an 'off-stage' trick on you with the war detail: the rare charm and deep poignancy of the tale don't in the least hinge on the war.

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"In short, few if any of our trained artists were in the thick of things, and they've had to resort to faking— or, if you like it better, sheer imagination; and the long-range emotional sympathy was through too brief a period of co-operation and too unpoignant for it to transmute imagination into fine gold, except in a few rare cases. The artistic victory will be with the Johnny-on-the-Spot, the youngsters now coming back and readjusting themselves. We'll hear from them soon, and, judging from superb bits like that kid's letter, it's going to be good—if the Editors don't force the 'heart-interest' or ruin it in other blameless ways."

"But how could they?" I broke in, "if really first rate stuff should begin to come in?"

"Sh-h," he whispered quizzically, "they have a wild passion for 'editing' everything, even the best stuff,—and none of them got to the actual front."