Second Mencken Chrestomathy (39 page)

After “La Terre,” and especially after “La Débâcle,” Zola began to weaken and wobble. Success enfeebled him, as it enfeebles all artists, not to say all scientists. He became a rich man, with a country house, servants, public engagements, investments, a conscience. He took a drastic cure to reduce his weight, and had his beard neatly clipped. Yearning for offspring and finding himself with a sterile wife who refused to be put away, he achieved a son and a daughter in collaboration with an amiable female neighbor. There was talk of putting him into the French Academy, an honor, like all French honors, comparable to being elected to the Elks. He was headed for the puerile melodrama of the Dreyfus affair, in which the rôle he played, observed calmly in retrospect, seems to have been little distinguishable from that of a movie star
recommending Lucky Strikes. “Le Docteur Pascal” showed a new and “good” Zola—an optimist, a right-thinker. There followed the cities series, “Lourdes,” “Rome” and “Paris.” “Fécondité” found him at the bottom of the slide. Its last four or five chapters contain some of the most maudlin drivel ever penned by mortal man.

Zola had many defects as a man. He was vain, arrogant and intolerant. An Italian by ancestry, he naturally loved money, and there were times when his passion for it made a fool of him. He was an eager seeker for public notice, and maneuvered for it in a shameless manner. Afraid of his virago of a wife on the one hand, he grossly deceived and humiliated her on the other. His courage in the Dreyfus business has been greatly exaggerated in the telling, chiefly by English reporters eager to make propaganda against the French. He ran away at a critical moment, and frequently forgot Dreyfus in thinking of Zola. But he had many compensating virtues. He had a fine intelligence: he was eager for knowledge and able to grasp elusive facts. He was immensely diligent and took his trade seriously. The old-time novelist needed only pen, paper and a quiet room; Zola studied life at first hand, laboriously, conscientiously, thoroughly. Nothing that was human was uninteresting to him, and nothing that was human surprised or shocked him. His eye was made for the microscope; his hands were not cut out for the lute. For metaphysics he had a healthy contempt: what interested him was physiology. He had, in his best days, the vast impassivity of a Darwin, the true detachment of a born scientist. What men thought engaged only his passing attention; he devoted himself to observing what they did. He was, in a very real sense, the first behaviorist.

The good novels of his prime are now neglected, I suspect, mainly because he wrote so many bad ones in the days of his decline. He passed out of life somewhat ridiculous: a scientist turned uplifter. The messianic delusion has ruined many men, but few better ones. By his own single effort he reoriented the novel, and made every successor his debtor. There are romancers left who show no trace of his influence, but surely not many novelists. His marks are all over such men as Wells, Bennett, Mann, Sudermann and Proust. He has been vastly more influential than either Flaubert or Turgeniev. The novel that Dickens wrote survives today
only as a conscious archaism; it seems idiotic after “Germinal” and “La Terre.” Some day, I believe, these astounding works will be read again. Perhaps the tide is turning toward them already. For years they were obtainable in English only in mutilated versions, poorly printed. The Comstocks hunted them down relentlessly; in England their publisher, the elder Vizetelly, was thrown into jail, and died there. But now they begin to appear in better editions, with prefaces by various learned hands. Their day may be coming.

From the
American Mercury
, June, 1931, pp. 251–52.
A review of T
HE
P
OLISH
H
ERITAGE OF
J
OSEPH
C
ONRAD
, By Gustaf Morf (Richard R. Smith); New York, 1931

Years ago, in the course of a review of one of the late Joseph Conrad’s books, I permitted myself the observation that all of his characters, in the last analysis, were Poles. Sometimes he called them Germans, Frenchmen, Latin-Americans, Chinamen or Malays, and very often he called them Englishmen, but always they remained Poles like himself. This observation somewhat exercised Conrad, but his argument, when it reached me, convinced me only that a great artist is often a bad observer of his own psychological processes. This conviction is now heavily reënforced by Dr. Morf, for his book is devoted to proving, not only that practically all of the characters in the Conrad gallery are Poles, but also that the transactions in which they engage are largely echoes from Conrad’s own life, or the lives of his relatives. The whole canon of his works, in fact, is moved over from English literature to Polish literature, and the circumstance that they are written in English becomes a trivial accident, like the circumstance that Frederick the Great’s highly Prussian memoranda were written in French.

Whether or not Dr. Morf is a Pole himself I don’t know, but he is quite at home in the Polish language, and so brings forward a great deal of material hitherto unknown to English critics. Part of
it is to be found in the autobiography of Conrad’s uncle and guardian, Tadeusz Bobrowski, part comes from the writings of Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, and part is in other family papers. Dr. Morf says that, both as boy and as man, Conrad was almost the archetypical Pole—full of grand projects, an incurable romantic, an ardent patriot, and, with it all, the victim of chronic repinings and despairs. He went to sea as a young man simply because he craved heroic adventure, and the Russians had the lid down so tightly in his part of Poland that there was no chance for it at home. Had the times been happier he would have taken to the field against the oppressor, as his forebears had done before him. But in the Poland of the early ’70s a Polish patriot was as hopelessly hobbled as a biologist in Mississippi, and so young Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski herbu Nalecz (thus Dr. Morf gives his name) had to content himself with dreams of the Congo and Cathay.

In his career as a sailor there was something touchingly ludicrous, though he himself seems to have been unaware of it. He was as ill-fitted for the sordid routine of a British merchant skipper as he would have been for the life of a ballet dancer. He was apparently resented as a foreigner and distrusted as a romantic. He took his ship too near to dangerous coasts, and proposed voyages that were far more glamorous than profitable. Finally, as every one knows, he abandoned deep water for the infernal Congo river trade, and there came near losing his life. Dr. Morf hints that he went to Africa less as a steamboat commander than as a sort of explorer—that he always liked to identify himself, not with the dull, respectable and often pious brethren of his mundane vocation, but with the glittering, and sometimes wicked adventurers of the past—Torres, Tasman, Cook, and so on. In this identification he sought an escape from his bafflement as a Polish patriot. If he could not slit the gullets of damned Muscovites he would at least prove that he was still a devil of a fellow, and not to be daunted by cannibals and mosquitoes.

Unfortunately, this escape mechanism, in the long run, failed to work. Conrad could never quite rid himself of his Polish conscience; he harbored to the end a disquieting feeling that he had deserted and betrayed Mother Polonia. Dr. Morf says that this feeling
was responsible for “Lord Jim.” He sees the whole story of Jim as a sardonic and shuddering projection, thrown up as by some ghastly magic lantern, of Conrad’s own story. “It is,” he says, “more than a novel; it is a confession. As a confession of a man tortured by doubts and nightmarish fears it must be understood, if it is to be understood at all.” The central episode of the tale is almost too familiar to need recalling: Jim, a ship’s mate, violates all the canons of his craft by deserting his ship in the face of disaster, and thereafter wanders forlorn and disconsolate in an Eastern jungle, a pariah beyond rehabilitation. The sinking ship, says Morf, is Poland, and Conrad is Jim. And the earnest of his desertion is his naturalization as a British subject. So long as he hesitated at that—and he hesitated a long while—there was some chance that fate would take him back to Poland, and restore him to the glorious enterprises of his ancestors. But once he had sworn to revere and cherish Queen Victoria he was lost forever.

I leave this theory to your prayerful consideration, but must add, in justice to Dr. Morf, that he supports it with a great deal of curious evidence. The parallel between Jim’s career and Conrad’s, indeed, is astonishingly close, and extends to many small details. They go to sea, for example, under the same circumstances, they suffer almost the same misadventures, and they are consoled by the same diversions. Both become known in their circles, not by their surnames, but by their given names. Both have noble titles. The name of Jim’s ship is
Patna
, and Polska is the Polish name of Poland. Finally, the ship, after Jim deserts it, is towed to port by a French gunboat—an echo, says Morf, of the ancient Polish hope that the French would one day rescue them. “Lord Jim” was first published in 1900, the year that also saw the appearance of Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams.” Conrad, says Morf, knew the Freud book, but disliked it intensely, and Freud with it. In that dislike there was something akin to his aversion to Dostoievski. Both were “too crude, too explicit.” Like all of us, he “did not want to know the objective truth about his own work.”

From T
HE
L
ATE
M
R.
W
ELLS
, P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 22–35. Into this essay entered parts of reviews of Wells books that had appeared in the
Smart Set
between 1908 and 1919. In 1919 Wells still had The Outline of History (1920), The World of William Clissold (1926), The Science of Life (1929), The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932), The Shape of Things to Come (1933), and Experiment in Autobiography (1934) ahead of him, but his best work was done. The view of him that is set forth here was adopted by most of the more competent critics who attempted estimates of him after his death.

The high day of Wells lasted, say, from 1908 to 1912. It began with “Tono-Bungay” and ended amid the final scenes of “Marriage,” as the well-made play of Scribe gave up the ghost in the last act of “A Doll’s House.” In “Marriage” were the first faint signs of something wrong. Invention succumbed to theories that somehow failed to hang together, and the story, after vast heavings, incontinently went to pieces. One had begun with an acute and highly diverting study of monogamy in modern London; one found one’s self, toward the close, gaping over an unconvincing fable of marriage in the Stone Age. Coming directly after so vivid a personage as Remington in “The New Machiavelli,” Dr. Richard Godwin Trafford simply refused to go down. And his Marjorie, following his example, stuck in the gullet of the imagination. One ceased to believe in them when they set out for Labrador, and after that it was impossible to revive interest in them. The more they were explained and vivisected and drenched with theories, the more unreal they became.

Into “The Passionate Friends” (1913) there crept the first downright dullness. By this time Wells’s readers had become familiar with his machinery and his materials—his elbowing suffragettes, his tea-swilling London uplifters, his smattering of quasi-science, his intellectualized adulteries, his Thackerayan asides, his text-book paragraphs, his journalistic raciness—and all these things had thus begun to lose the blush of their first charm. To help them out
he now heaved in larger and larger doses of theory—often diverting enough, but in the long run a poor substitute for the proper ingredients of character, situation and human passion. Next came “The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman” (1914), an attempt to rewrite “A Doll’s House” (with a fourth act) in terms of ante-bellum 1914. The result was 500-odd pages of bosh, a flabby and tedious piece of work, Wells for the first time in the rôle of unmistakable bore. And then “Bealby” (1915), with its Palais Royal jocosity, its running in and out of doors, its humor of physical collision, its reminiscences of “A Trip to Chinatown” and “Peck’s Bad Boy.” And then “Boon” (1915), a heavy-witted satire, often incomprehensible, always incommoded by its disguise as a novel. And then “The Research Magnificent” (1915): a poor soup from the dry bones of Nietzsche. And then “Mr. Britling Sees It Through” (1916).…

Here, for a happy moment, there seemed to be something better—almost, in fact, a recrudescence of the Wells of 1910. But that seeming was only seeming. What confused the judgment was the enormous popular success of the book. Because it presented a fifth-rate Englishman in an heroic aspect, because it sentimentalized the whole reaction of the English proletariat to the war, it offers a subtle sort of flattery to other fifth-rate Englishmen, and,
per corollary
, to Americans of corresponding degree, to wit, the second. Thus it made a great pother, and was hymned as a masterpiece in such gazettes as the New York
Times.
But there was in the book, in point of fact, a great hollowness, and that hollowness presently begat an implosion that disposed of the shell. I daresay many a novel-reader returns, now and then, to “Tono-Bungay” (1909), and even to “Ann Veronica” (1909), but surely only a reader with absolutely nothing else to read would return to “Mr. Britling Sees It Through.” There followed—what? “The Soul of a Bishop” (1917), perhaps the worst novel ever written by a serious novelist since novel-writing began. And then—or perhaps a bit before, or simultaneously—an idiotic religious tract—a tract so utterly feeble and preposterous that even the Scotsman, William Archer, could not stomach it. And then, to make an end, came “Joan and Peter” (1918)—and the collapse of Wells was revealed at last in its true proportions.

This “Joan and Peter,” I confess, lingers in my memory as unpleasantly
as a Summer cold, and so, in retrospect, I may perhaps exaggerate its intrinsic badness. I would not look into it again for gold and frankincense. I was at the job of reading it for days and days, endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent fatuity, its almost fabulous inconsequentiality. It was, and is, nearly impossible to believe that the Wells of “Tono-Bungay” and “The History of Mr. Polly” wrote it, or that he was in the full possession of his faculties when he allowed it to be printed under his name. For in it there was the fault that the Wells of early days, almost beyond any other fictioneer of the time, was incapable of—the fault of dismalness, of tediousness—the witless and contagious coma of the evangelist. Here, for nearly six hundred pages of fine type, he rolled on in an intellectual cloud, boring one abominably with uninteresting people, pointless situations, revelations that revealed nothing, arguments that had no appositeness, expositions that exposed naught save an insatiable and torturing garrulity. Where was the old fine address of the man? Where was his sharp eye for the salient and significant in character? Where was his instinct for form, his skill at putting a story together, his hand for making it unwind itself? These things were so far gone that it became hard to believe that they ever existed. There was not the slightest sign of them in “Joan and Peter.” The book was a botch from end to end, and in that botch there was not even the palliation of an arduous enterprise gallantly attempted. No inherent difficulty was visible. The story was anything but complex, and surely anything but subtle. Its badness lay wholly in the fact that the author made a mess of the writing, that his quondam cunning, once so exhilarating, was gone when he began it.