Claude C. Washburn

“ He is the puppet-master who will not be obeyed, looking on at the antics of his rebellious marionettes with a fastidious distaste, a contemptuous pity. He appears to have a sick, but not weak, disgust for life. Well, one certainly does not ask for optimism. Any one who can look upon the world as it has been revealed to us of late years, and yet flaunt a blithe and hopeful spirit, deserves only an audience of children. But the attitude one divines in the bravest seems to be: ‘So that is what humanity is—humanity of which we are a part! ”

“ If the Mussolini legend and the Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy, of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets, above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his best, a President of the United States may and should be. ”

“ TRUTH AND FICTION IN ITALY There is in most contemporary Italian fiction a limpness, flaccidity—I hardly know what to call it—which at its least offensive expresses a feeble despair, and at its worst becomes a whine. It is not the expression of a rugged pessimism; there is nothing rugged about it. Rather, it reveals a lack of vitality, a thin-bloodedness, the spirit one is accustomed to think of as ‘womanish,’ though, as a matter of fact, the women writers of Italy appear less guilty in this respect than the men. ”

“ But no nation in the world is so wistfully desirous of a unity that, despite appearances, it has not got. All sorts of judgments, mostly idiotic, have been passed on Americans by Europeans, but there is at least one which is profoundly true: that Americans want pathetically to be liked. This is at once a sign of weakness in us and a proof of frustration; it reveals the fact that we have not the unity we crave. We huddle together for comfort, but, because we are doing childish insignificant things, we get no closer for that. It is true that individuals can never get very close to one another. ”

“ So that, in a sense, the arts do form an important part of virtually every Italian’s life—but a shut-off separate part. From this derives a tyranny over the arts, that could not possibly exist in America or England, where people do not feel strongly enough about them to desire to tyrannize over them. An American or an Englishman will listen timidly to music that he does not understand, or timidly read (or claim to have read) a book that he finds incomprehensible, or timidly and gravely walk through the halls of a picture show which, so far as he can see, reveals only insanity. ”

“ So there is all the more reason why pornography, playing delicately above them, but bound to them none the less, should adopt every possible artifice to display its iridescent lightness. Almost alone among the arts, it runs no danger in this—as does poetry or painting; it can never become thin or empty, since its feet are anchored in those eternal facts. The Siegfried theme beneath the leaping flickering fire-music. Given this foundation (to say nothing of the stupid opposition to the art) , it is amazing what delicacy pornography has, at its best, achieved. ”

“ And, to save me, I cannot make out what his thesis really is. It might be: that there is no such thing as freedom, no escape from life; or that liberty is more unbearable than slavery; or that everything is illusion. It does not seem to me to be clearly any one of these things or any other—least of all what Pirandello himself indicates in a short essay written for the new edition of the novel: that people are the marionettes of their own idea of themselves until that idea becomes intolerable and they tear off the mask and reveal their naked faces. ”

“ It was this minority that was disillusioned by the war, and, frankly, I think we deserved to be—though perhaps somewhat less rudely. Not because we had ideas about life, but because we had such ideas—so smooth, so smug, so unrelated to the facts, so inconsistent with what, if we had only looked honestly, we might have seen in ourselves. For example, individually none of us was more than spasmodically happy, none contented; cowardice alone or, at best, habit and lack of initiative restrained each of us from committing the most dastardly acts; selfishness lay at the bottom of our behaviour ”

“ Let him but guard his gift of freedom jealously and he can have evening after evening of solitude. In America he must have fought rudely to obtain even half-hours of solitude, since nobody could understand that he wanted it. He builds up about him now a peace that is not empty but the richest of all mediums. Any flight, any surrender, any subterfuge, was justifiable to obtain it—provided he does something with it; and if he does not, the punishment will be swift and he alone the sufferer, for the full sense of space will become an aching emptiness and his precious leisure a burden. ”

“ Thus belittling the emotion they conjure up, they make us smile sheepishly at it—and then, in a half-hope, buy the chocolates or the perfume. They deliberately confuse our sense of values. They depict beauty as a genial strumpet for sale to any one at a reasonable price.
The word ‘beauty’ is at a discount to-day. One is wary of employing it. The trouble is that in the ’nineties of the last century a very loquacious group of aesthetes made a silly cult of the conception and thereby so cheapened the word itself that even after thirty years it has not quite recovered. ”

“ Thus with ‘pornography.’ ‘Literature treating of subjects inciting to lust’ is no explanation of the shuddering sense of evil, arousing a desire to cross oneself, that the word evokes. Good gracious! we have all listened to dirty stories—in the smoking-room of Pullman cars if we are men, at our finishing schools if we are women—and, whether interested or bored, we certainly felt no shuddering sense of evil. The truth is that the connotation, the emotional significance, of a word may be so different from its original prosaic meaning as almost to kill the thing the word purports to define. ”

“ Telephones, motor cars, radios, phonographs, movies, magazines, and newspapers save us from the leisure that we dread because, not being able to think, we should not know what to do with it. However that may be, ignorance of self is certainly at the bottom of our conception of the world as black-and-white and miracle-spotted. One deep unafraid look into our own hearts, and we should never again see life as so simple, sharp-edged an affair, because we could never again dissociate ourselves from any manifestation of it. ”

“ But the heart-breaking thing is that Pirandello has genuine creative genius, and that genius and a thesis cannot live together any better than youth and crabbed age; sooner or later the former becomes too strong for the latter. He sets out to create characters that shall prove his point, and, lo! the puppets spring into real life, become actual men and women, while he, the burattinaio, continues to flog them onward along the path of the Idea. The result is, in almost every case, an exasperated sense of frustration in the observer, the conviction that an abstract idea has killed something true. ”

“ That was the secret of the wretchedness, the disillusionment, that the reason for feeling ‘fed up.’ We blamed it on civilization or governments or God; at heart we knew it was ourselves who were to blame. Beginning with the hurt recognition that the world was not as we had pictured it, we went on logically to the gloomier recognition that we were not what we had fancied ourselves. This was inevitable. A man who distrusts the honesty of others is a man who secretly does not believe in his own honesty ”

“ Only now, in a spasm of disgust for these people coming before him in costume, for the woman he loved so purely bringing her hateful lover into his presence, for all the lies, lies, lies, with which, far more than his ‘mad’ life, their ‘sane’ lives are filled, does he reveal the truth. At the end, the willed fiction in which he lives is so strong that under its influence he kills Belcredi. ”

“ Yet it is more admirable than harmful; for in a world only too full of greed and selfishness it supplies a bed-rock of self-sacrifice, an anchor in something solid and permanent for the individual, and it creates a strong national life, which we Americans, for all our standardization of existence, are without. You have, in short, in Italy and France, the exact opposite to life in America. In the latter country there is unanimity, all but identity, of behaviour in superficial things, with, beneath, no convictions, no obligations, a chaotic emptiness ”

“ Similarly, I am at times annoyed by Etheredge’s indifference to the social movements that swirl madly around us all. It is, for instance, impossible for me to watch the progress of Fascismo coolly. I feel grudging admiration for the machine, resentment at the suppression of free speech, bitterness at the cynical pretence of constitutionalism. I cannot, in other words, keep Fascismo out of my life, any more than I can keep out the problems of international relations, German indemnities and the war debts. Etheredge can. ”

“ This black-and-white, miracle-spotted world in which we children of faith believe, is in reality a poor and barren world, as is revealed by our novels that exhibit it. I have no interest in the question of whether our contemporary novelists are better than, for example, the English, or theirs better than ours; but I do assert that the novel in England is vastly richer than the novel in America—not glaringly black-and-white, but full of half-tones, shadows and subtleties. ”

“ There is an appearance of national life because so many thousands are doing the same thing at the same time—reading the same advertisements, wearing the same kind of clothes, going to the same movies; but they are not consciously performing the same duties. In existence we are a gregarious nation, but existence is nothing; in real life we are intensely lonely, isolated individuals—as much so as if we lived in Europe. Perhaps this would be as it should be, a foundation for individual achievement, if we would recognize it and rejoice in it. ”

“ In Italian life the individual is strong, the organized group weak; which is a splendid and sane condition of affairs. In Italian literature, as in the other arts, the group flourishes disastrously and frequently submerges the individual. Let a man write a few books that reveal talent, and immediately a group forms about him, with a cult of its hero and a critical estimate of his work to which he will thereafter find himself attempting to conform, thus, hedged about by a wall of literary ideas, growing less and less capable of an individual interpretation of life itself. ”

“ Men are hopeless babies. Not only do they delight in primitive things, but their whole attitude toward life is immature and absurd. They expect a great deal from life, and are hurt when they do not get it. You see them looking out at life with wide pained eyes, in precisely the same way a child looks out of the window at the rain that is spoiling his holiday.
Women expect a great deal less from life—once they have passed their spoiled girlhood, when they expect to receive everything and give nothing. ”

“ And their love of truth, burning more clearly now that the lamp was less encrusted with illusions, showed them some very heartening facts: that the thirty centuries of recorded human life were not as barren a waste as all that; that always, as far back as eye could see, even in the midst of war, pestilence and external chaos, some men had laboured patiently, and for no other reward than the satisfaction of their love of truth, to guard and, bee-like, add a few drops to the small store of knowledge transmitted to them ”

“ Radios, motor cars, telephones, vacuum cleaners—they are all infinitely dull because they are all surface things{13} that do not trouble the heart or the brain. Existence is dull, but life, underneath it, is a wild and thrilling adventure. What one does is nothing; what one believes and feels is everything. ‘After all,’ said William James, ‘the most important thing about a man is what he thinks about the universe.’ But if he does not think about it ...? For all its feverish activity, America does not seem to me to have the fever of living. ”

“ Take, too, that simplification of the facts, which I have mentioned as one of the essentials to modern success. Up to a certain point, and if the aim sought is worth while, it is admirable. The world is altogether too ‘full of a number of things’ not to demand their simplification for the attainment of a single purpose. Some of them must be lopped off. But the larger your majority, the more primitive the simplicity it demands, and the more drastic the pruning. It cuts off living branches along with the dead. ”

“ Here it seems to me that the French sacrifice a possible rare greatness to a moderate average of success. One admires French achievement for being so French, and yet, even while admiring, is faintly dissatisfied that it is not something other than that, and greater. One wearies of so much perfection. It does not seem an adequate interpretation of a chaotic world. French art is noble; yet it has never produced a Tolstoy, a Wagner, a Shakespeare, or a Michelangelo. It is not universal enough ”

“ It is more wearisome. Because when the expected thing is done for any reason more emotional than mere habit it is significant of something other than individual dullness; it has roots that penetrate down into the dark earthy past of a whole race. Whereas to do invariably the unexpected thing, in order to show oneself superior and startle an audience, is significant of nothing at all; beneath such behaviour is emptiness.
Emptiness, indeed, yawns beneath the literature of sophistication. There is no probing of truth below the glitter. ”