Shadowland (Mar-Aug 1923)

<^<<iM-r An English writer endeavoring to infuse American "pep" into his stories American Writers and European Readers English readers and critics will not substitute the American "pep" standard for that of genuine artistry B;y R. le Clerc Phillips OF late one has heard much concerning the European and more particularly the English neglect of American literature. It cannot be denied that English books sell better here than do American books in England, but the reasons for this are not always fully appreciated by Americans. In the first place, one often wonders if Americans realize how very difficult it is for English readers to visualize the American social picture. It is one that is difficult, indeed, for any European to understand, owing to an almost complete lack of those vivid tones and sharp outlines which are features of the European social picture, and compared with which the relative colorlessness and flatness of the American, judged from the standpoint of both novelist and reader, are at a distinct disadvantage. Consider for a moment the social picture of France. It contains within its frame a whole system of different worlds. There is, for example, that of the remnants of the ancien regime, its members, ghosts of what they once were, but still essentially aristocrats, still proud and aloof ; that of modern politics, with its struggles and scandals and heartbreaking problems ; that of the Quartier Latin and of those artists and intellectuals who have "arrived" and whose names are known the world over ; that of the financiers, merchants and newspaper proprietors ; that of the demi-monde; that of the solid bourgeoisie; and that of the French peasant, frugal, devout, industrious, whose forbears have tilled and farmed the fertile soil of France for a thousand years. And all the worlds are different; all their denizens are different. The French demi-mondaine is one woman, the aristocrat of the Faubourg St. Germain, ultra-Catholic, bound and controlled by centuries of tradition, is another ; the French peasant is a world apart from the French bourgeois; the intellectual and artist utterly unlike the parvenu financier. They one and all differ in bearing, in manners, in deportment, in speech and in thought, and the only similarity that links the one to the other is that all are French. And in England these differences, these worlds, are even more pronounced, more clearly defined and more dissimilar. Now the trend of American life does not encourage such dissimilarities. Compared with European countries, it may even be said that they almost do not exist, the largest and broadest difference being that created by the absence or presence of wealth — a very grave difference, to be* sure, but capable of adjustment by the acquisition of money or by the loss of it. It certainly is not to be denied that the American social system carries with it some great advantages over that of Europe, but, most assu.edly, it does not lend to novelists such a rich, varied and romantic background to write against. And it is precisely this background of the American social picture that European readers find dull, colorless and uninteresting. It is possible for a European to be resident for years in America and yet fail to overcome a feeling of boredom produced by the intense sameness of the American social picture as contrasted with the romance, variety and richness of the European. It would seem as if that uniformity and equality which are the pride and aim of the American social system are not altogether to be considered and delighted in as unmixed blessings from the fiction writer's point of view. I have American friends who find much food for mirth in what they consider to be the childish pomps and vanities of English life. Possibly they are childish — and again, possibly not. But they certainly form a better background, a happier environment for the development of the creative arts than the flatness of universal equality. For a poet is more likely to burst into song (and by song I mean song and not a strident shriek or raucous bawl) in the garden of an old English manor house than amidst the roaring machinery of even the biggest factory in the world ; a painter is more likely to encompass beauty amongst the architectural glories of a dead and gone age — yes, ruins, tho they be — than in the engine-room of the very newest and finest ship in the world ; and a great dramatist is more likely to come to life amongst those peoples whose lives offer the violent contrasts, the heart-rending struggles and -bitter conflicts that are the very marrow of great drama, than amongst those races where money is comparatively easy and no one is so very different from anyone else. 1 n the matter of his background, the American writer is, thru no fault of his own, at a certain very grave disadvantage as compared with the European writer ; and when to this handicap, imposed by the very conditions of Page Eighteen