Sherwood Anderson's "Babbitt"

Notes on Two Novels and a Book of Essays

EDMUND WILSON, JR.

IN Mr. Sherwood Anderson's Many Marriages (Huebsch), we have a sort counterpart of Mr. Lewis's Babbitt— the awakening of a middle western business man to the emptiness of his life, But the treatment is so completely different that the theme is scarcely recognizable as the same. For, whereas in Babbill you have the hero presented almost entirely in his contacts with material things—his motor-car, his razorblades and his oflice—in Many Marriages you have the American business man shorn almost completely of his business and with his malaise brought home at once to a sexual maladjustment.

Yet I feel that in this case, for once, Mr. Anderson has been a little too careless about environment: a Ford car or a safety razor here and there might have brought his story into truer perspective, As Mr. Anderson tends to submerge himself more and more in the consciousness of his chief characters, not only the inanimate world which surrounds them but also the other personalities which impinge upon them tend to become more and more phantasmal and have now nearly evaporated altogether. This seems to be one of the chief difficulties of the subjective method—to keep your chief character in a credible world. The real values of life must be allowed for; the other characters must be felt as something more than ideas in a central consciousness; they must be felt as centers of consciousness in themselves.

And it is partly in failing to keep his grasp on reality that Mr. Anderson allows his story to go to pieces. After an attractive beginning, the novel becomes more and more like a sentimental day-dream of the hero and less and less like a narrative of actual happenings. John Webster, a small-town manufacturer, has fallen in love with his secretary; he must break the news to his wife and at the same time justify himself to his daughter. So he sets a rather naively romantic stage with some candles and a statue of the Virgin, and, appearing before his family, nude, speaks out the smothered secrets of his heart. The wife collapses and commits suicide; the daughter is immediately won to his side. At the door, he is stopped by the old servant who tells him that she, too, is on his side, that she has always disliked the wife, that she has only stayed on his account. Having knocked them all cold, he departs, with his strong silent woman—a woman so excessively silent that she almost literally never speaks a word. But then no more does the wife or the daughter. They are the wraiths of John Webster's brain. He never really knows or touches any of them; they are like the obedient fancies of childhood.

Perhaps it is writing in the novel form which has undone Mr. Anderson. His success in the short story has been brilliant. Let anyone compare the poignancy of The Other Woman, in which a similar theme is attempted, with the flaccidity and cliffuseness of Many Marriages.

Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf (Harcourt), is another promising novel spoiled by sentimentality. It has some excellent writing—especially at the beginning— and presents technical novelties of some interest; but I feel that these latter are seen to much greater advantage in Mrs. Woolf's short stories; her machinery for rendering complicated impressions proves rather clumsy as a vehicle for a long narrative.

In any case, what I chiefly object to is her uncompromising sentimentalization of her hero. Women seem unfortunately almost always to do this when they undertake to write about young men. Chesterton has said that Jane Austen was the only woman novelist who has ever been able to write calmly about men and I believe on the whole he was right. Even when they give you the facts, as Mrs. Woolf, no doubt, in this case does, they invest them with a perfumed atmosphere of humidity which immediately arouses suspicion. This is what I felt about Miss Cather's One of Ours, and Mrs. Woolf's seems just such another case. Like Claude Wheeler, Jacob Flanders is a virile but wistfully appealing young man. Like Claude Wheeler, he is killed in the war and is evidently intended to have wide national implications. Jacob Flanders is, I suppose, meant to represent England, as Claude Wheeler was the United States. But, like Claude Wheeler, he is so petted and bewept by the rather amorous tenderness of his creator that the intrinsic value and interest of the character is obscured as by a haze of tears.

I suppose men are just as bad about women. I have heard women say that none of the heroines of male fiction are right. But men's pictures of women are likely to be flattering; they swell their stature with romanticized masculine qualities. Whereas women's portraits of men I denounce as libelous—mere watercolors of a noble sex.

MR. HILAIRE BELLOC'S new volume of essays, On (Doran), is, of course, full of good things: terse wit, diverting conceits, magic names from the Middle Ages, a nice appreciation of nonsense and a moving appreciation of poetry. Yet in the end Mr. Belloc disgusts me a little. I get tired of hearing him urge his claims. I get tired of hearing him tell me that he is a Catholic, that he is a humanist, a Gentile, a gentleman, that he has inside information about history, that he is an honest and honorable man. He never seems to reach a point where he enjoys a disinterested play of the intelligence apart from the satisfaction of insisting upon his own advantages and gifts; the desire to enjoy this satisfaction seems to obtrude itself even between the lines of his historical and economic works, which he has made a special effort to keep impersonal,

In the course of the years Mr. Belloc has convinced me of the facts which preoccupy him—that he is not a swindler, that he is not a Protestant, that he is not a teetotaller, an ignoramus or a Jew; but I can't help wondering, what then? The ideas which he so querulously advances seem to be inspired by a desire to justify these prejudices. I can never quite take them seriously as thought. What survives as an irreducible minimum is a handful of rather remarkable poems, There arc even in this last book of essays line passages and lines of poetry which, though he does not acknowledge them as his own, I suspect him of having written, They do much to redeem his snappish complaints and his bumptious and incessant snobbery.