American Literature

Essays and Opinions

Cesare Pavese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138518773
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351532532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was the leading Italian scholar of American literature of the generation that came to maturity under Mussolini. He was not only an acute and wide-ranging literary critic, but also a sensitive poet and novelist. In addition, he was a prodigious translator. In collaboration with Elio Vittorini, he translated and brought to the attention of the Italian public the works of many important American writers. American literature helped to give direction to Pavese's creative work and was a resource for his personal literary campaign against Fascism.

Pavese was a non-academic critic, though far less anti - academic than D. H. Lawrence. His first purpose was to use American literature to subvert Italian literature, but beyond that there were a number of issues on which he disagreed with standard American criticism. When he does, his wild, original energy of discovery can trigger a welcome change of focus for our views of American writing.

Pavese never visited or lived in America; it was for him a foreign country, although a shifting and sliding special case. He had no stake in its sectional chauvinisms. He had a vital stake in its whole literature because, as his communications to Vittorini make clear, he had a stake in the literature of the whole world. For a while, America seemed to him the probable center of that whole. This was the center where things were happening in the world of the mind, and where the future was being born and licked into shape. Paveses's writings about American literature still offer original and unsparing insights.

Part One 1930–1934

AN AMERICAN NOVELIST, SINCLAIR LEWIS

The Americans have invented a new way of drinking. I speak, of course, of a literary way. A character, at a certain point in a novel, throws over everything: good manners, job, family (when he has one), and alone, or accompanied by a bosom friend, he disappears for some time on the usual expedition. “He has gone on the grand sneak.” Sometimes the absence lasts for days. In the meantime, the rebel’s course is quite simple: from an uproar of songs and bright remarks to an anguished and thoughtful countenance. At the end, the character returns to his place in life. He is a little hung over and wilted, but he has a new awareness of himself; the machinery of civilization does not entirely possess him, life is still worth living. Thus it happens in the novels. (I am not at the moment concerned with how it happens in real life.) And certainly it is a novelty. After the classical banquets, after the Satanic debauches of the moderns, our industrial civilization had to create a third way.

America has always been a land of exceptional drinkers. But it is not important here to cite, as usual, Poe, who in any event drank like a European. Not even O. Henry fits the case, the picturesque O. Henry with his happy-go-lucky swindlers and eccentrics, vagabonds through all the states of the Union and beyond, dionysiac and comical drunkards, all of them people who even when in prison (which often happens) seek no release in wine because their spirits are already too gay and free to need it. These people drink, in short, as they breathe. The origins of the new meaning of the paradise of alcohol in contemporary American literature must be sought rather in certain works of the early years of the century, of socialist and revolutionary tendency, in certain novels, for example, by Jack London. Those atrocious benders that Martin Eden indulges with his friend from the laundry in Oakland have for their precise and admitted intention to drug the muscles and intoxicate the spirit, stupefied by brute labor. It is already a protest against a social system which suffocates and denies life. Born as polemic, with the exaggeration and artistic rigidity of all polemic creations, this myth will perpetuate itself in subsequent literature, less bound by ideological preoccupations and more rich in poets. Let two suffice, Sherwood Anderson and Lewis.

They are not exceptional types, these drinkers, but clerks, laborers, journalists, common people, everyday people. They have no furious genius to placate, they are not damned. They are poor men, slaves of the “job,” who sometimes resort to this last pretense of individual rebellion. And they never do so in order to commit an outrage; with the same motive, the more refined among them go to hear a concert. Among us nothing like this has ever been written. If in some social novel of the last century a European drinks more than usual, we are in the presence of the usual polemic implication: the drunkard is a worker, a brute, the human beast. The novelty and value of the American myth is that instead the drinker is not at all unusual, but is an average man among men, whose life oppresses him, and he protests in this way. And this submissive rebellion is more tragic than any amount of exemplary satanism or brutalization. Sinclair Lewis—we will see how—describes this world.¹

Meanwhile, his early novels preserve traces of the preponderantly pamphleteering kind of writing of Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris. A certain passion for throwing light on social problems reappears, refined and made art, in the pages of these novels—The Job, Main Street²—and the situation of Martin Eden, a manual worker and intellectual in love with a daughter of the upper middle class, who teaches him to teach himself, is found again, at several points, in at least two of these novels, The Trail of the Hawk and Free Air.³ But with this comparison I do not mean to imply that all Lewis’ characters spend their time getting drunk. Anyhow, not even Jack London’s characters do. Drinking is virtually a symbol. More precisely, all Lewis’ protagonists are melancholy rebels who in a thousand ways—falling in love, living in the open air, changing jobs, studying, going in for art, speaking a many-colored dialect, or even, sometimes, getting plastered—try to escape the humiliating daily grayness, the wearisome vacuity of factories, offices, and homes. They drink, in fact, with an effort, these good Americans, even in the late novels, after 1919, when the obstacle of the Eighteenth Amendment should have made its infraction irresistible and fascinatingly seditious. To Lewis, drunkenness is disgusting, no doubt about it, although in Our Mr. Wrenn, in Babbitt, and in Elmer Gantry, he describes it with a certain flair and an easygoing tolerance.

Ultimately, the thirst of these characters is for one thing only: freedom, freedom for the individual confronted by the irrational restraints of society. It is the national malady of America, a country, if ever there was one, of impertinent moralists; but not, let it be understood, of supermen—poor creatures, rather, even when they possess genius. Here is the whole novelty of Lewis. From the affability of Wrenn {Our Mr. Wrenn), himself a would-be comic playwright as well as a romantic traveler, to the tragedy of Gottlieb (Arrowsmith), an exacting and lonely scientist, the Lewis character is always a man among men, stifled by petty miseries and gladdened by modest joys, dreamer of an ideal not always very well defined. And the author views him in an infinite variety of ways which constitute the whole range of his poetry: from grotesque caricature to resigned and thoughtful seriousness.

The richness and the variety of Lewis’ world reside in the innumerable attitudes with which he contemplates the spectacle of the daily human revolt against environment and self. And the spectacle makes him smile. In their insatiable timidity, men are comical. And the environment that oppresses them is both comical and grotesque. But sometimes, by virtue of a rebel who acts more seriously than the others or who reflects the common aspirations in a more universal way, the scene becomes tragic. Still, these outbursts of anguish are not the knowing contrivances of a contrapuntal novelist: sometimes, even (in Elmer Gantry), they destroy the harmony of the work. The author of Babbitt always begins with an amused and mocking tone. Usually he wants to make of all the characters a series of whimsical little men and women, slightly ridiculous, slightly sad. He does not want to have the naive air of taking such types seriously; but every so often it happens, and, in Main Street, in The Job, everywhere, he comes out with more heartfelt sentences, he contradicts himself, he believes, and he admires. For plainly he himself is the rebel described and all his character types are only the innumerable faces of his ego. Thus it happens that he smiles and laughs, but always in the end caresses the victim with his sorrowful glance. For this reason, as we shall see, Babbitt turned out to be the masterpiece: in him, better than in any other character, Lewis fused the preposterous puppet with the human brother whom we must feel sorry for.

Sinclair Lewis is himself the rebel portrayed in the novels. The little man who suffocates and pants for air and doesn’t even know what he wants or where he is going, or rather, continually discovers new avenues but argues and struggles with himself, perpetually in flight, is of course the figure of himself which we are permitted to glimpse between the lines. A curious phenomenon of his books illustrates this instability of his spirit: all the human types and backgrounds which in one place he ridicules he elsewhere delights in, he approves of them, he is moved by them. For example, the situation of the customary city dweller who is going to make an excursion to get close to nature—roughing it, as they say, living and laboring in the open air—occurs twice, at least, in two novels, Babbitt and Mantrap. In the first, the attempt is viewed gaily, humorously, with typical Paul Riesling, half absorbed and half hysterical. In the second, the trip to Canada is a spiritual victory wherein Ralph Prescott has nothing comical about him, and he even manages, without becoming ridiculous, to wear the moccasins which would yield such comedy on the flabby feet of Babbitt. Gopher Prairie, the town that in Main Street Lewis excommunicated and described as not only grotesque but unbearable in its vulgarity, becomes in Free Air an interesting Western stopover where even the traveling salesmen are sympathetically treated. And the drinking that in Arrow smith is practically acceptable in the emigrants of St. Hubert, who think they are now going home, is revolting in Eddie Schwirtz in The Job.

All these uncertainities of judgment which, in any case, ought to be gratefully accepted, since with them our author has multiplied the variety of his situations, are reflected in the last and most comprehensive uncertainty of all, that uncertainty through which Sinclair Lewis, the most knowing expert of slang and the American vernacular⁴ now writing in the United States, and the first and most determined to derive from it artistic results, condemns, in effect, his own glory, making slang the characteristic of his most vulgar personages and calling attention to the fact: “slangy” and “backslapping” are the attributes of Schwirtz (The Job) and Schmaltz (The Man Who Knew Coolidge). But gradually this conventional judgment fades before the down-to-earth quality of the man’s nature and origins, before his irresistible passion for the genuine and the powerful, and he ends in the creation of two superb figures, sturdy and full-blooded, sympathetic though theatrical, who are also, to return to our starting point, great drinkers: G. Sondelius (Arrowsmith) and Elmer Gantry, of whom I shall speak again.

Sinclair Lewis achieved fame with Main Street (1920). This interminable novel—where the ennui that suffocates the soul of the heroine, buried in the vulgarity and gossip of a small Minnesota town, ends, through the static quality of the characters and the monotony of Carol’s reactions, in suffocating the soul of the reader as well—is the work that brought fame to the author of Babbitt. Even Babbitt (1922): I swear that all that uproar is caused more by its social quality, its satire of a class (the average American businessman), and by the great and noisy gaiety of the characters’ conversations, than by the more essential values of art. Main Street is not, however, an example of something taking hold with the customarily stupid public (everybody knows how stupid the public is, and neither you nor I are part of it), but this time—what a coincidence!—it made a great hit with the author. Sinclair Lewis was convinced that in Main Street he had written a great work, his great work, which he had cherished—if one may believe his critic and biographer, Charles C. Baldwin—for at least fifteen years. It was a tale minutely realistic, a background new or almost new, under that aspect, to the national literature; and, at the same time, it was a courageous attack on a frame of mind still dominant. All must applaud. Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, was a photographic likeness—too much of a likeness—and, according to the author’s intention, it stood for hundreds of Gopher Prairies, it stood for all America. From the novel a film was even made by Warner Brothers. And the habit of describing a man and a setting representative of a class, of an intellectual phase, of a profession, would persist in Lewis in such a way that it would on other occasions lead him into sin. Sinclair Lewis, as Baldwin also says, wrote Free Air (1919), the novel immediately preceding the story of Carol, in order to get the money that would allow him to attend to Main Street. It is the usual mischance that happens to writers: Free Air, this nuga, is a jewel of poetry in comparison with the gross machine that followed it a year later.

Sinclair Lewis had already written several books in the years between the outbreak of the European war and 1920. This group of novels describes a whole intellectual epoch, and I want to speak of them a little, since almost nothing is known of them in Italy, or, at least, nothing about them appears those few times when the classic Babbitt is discussed. With respect to Babbitt, the neglect would be no great evil if, in order to treat critically and understandingly a work by a certain writer, this work only sufficed the reader.

Several novels, then, quite different from those which will follow Main Street: Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), The Trail of the Hawk (1915), The Job (1917), The Innocents (1917), and Free Air (1919). One characteristic that distinguishes them from their successors is that they all have happy endings. By a happy ending I mean a resigned acceptance, a peaceable return to the track which, for the entire novel, the rebel has been trying to jump, or, more often, to a marriage Ibsen-style, rejuvenated and Americanized; the choice of a companion (The Trail of the Hawk, Free Air, The Job) with whom to look forward to a future of freedom and struggle. A conclusion, then, this last one, somewhat cinematographic and banal, if it were not for the continuous commentary, malicious and tolerant, with which these pages are adorned, and, more than anything, for the sympathetic and genuine nature of the protagonists, toward whose provincial naivete the author offers spiritual indulgences, and whose gay and youthful seriousness he brings to birth through intimate sympathy from an indigenous root; all of them are people of the Middle West, as he himself was.

This poetry of young life, enjoyed as a beautiful adventure, bold and simple, extending from its commonplace origins to the conquest of the whole world, is perfect in Free Air, the story of the vicissitudes of a restless young man from Schoenstrom, a prairie village in Minnesota, the enterprising and frustrated proprietor of a public garage. He sees an aristocratic couple from Brooklyn going by in an automobile, a young lady who drives and her father who, without too much conviction, seeks in the wide open spaces the health he lost in overwork. The two intend to cross the continent from Minneapolis to Seattle. Milt Daggett, the young man, abandons his business, climbs into his flivver, and follows the girl. Adventures, in which wide-awake, practical Milt Daggett clears away obstacles for the gentlefolk. Boy, does he like the girl! She, in the meantime, is discovering the great body of America, the unsuspected reality of people and of actual life, the fascinating seriousness and freshness of the Midland. In her enthusiasm, she catechizes the young man, who at bottom thinks Shoenstrom will always be an unbearable hole, but who is glad to listen and even to read Vachel Lindsay. He discovers that he is much like the poets (“ ‘Thought poetry was all . . . rhymed bellyachin’ about hard luck’ ”), and begins to wonder what kind of life the girl leads in Brooklyn. They arrive at Seattle. Milt, a new Martin Eden, begins to study, in order to make himself worthy. Complications with the young lady’s background. And here is how the novel ends (the two are stuck in the mud in a shallow river crossing):

“If you kiss me again like that, we’ll both topple overboard. By the way, can we get the car out?”

“I think so, if we put on the chains. We’ll have to take off our shoes and stockings.”

Shyly, turning from him a little, she stripped off her stockings and pumps, while he changed from a flivver-driver into a young viking, with bare white neck, pale hair ruffled about his head, trousers rolled up above his straight knees—a young seaman of the crew of Eric the Red.

They swung out on the running-board, now awash.

“Watch out for that turn! Heavens, how I have to look after you! Is there a class in cooking at your university? No—do—not—kiss—me—on—a—turn!”

This is the beginning of the story of Milt and Claire Daggett.

The prelude over and the curtain risen on the actual play, they face the anxieties and glories of a changing world. Not without quarrels and barren hours, not free from ignorance and the discomfort of finding that between the mountain peaks they must for long gray periods dwell i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• PART ONE: 1930-1934
• PART TWO: 1938-1950
• APPENDIX: ENGLISH WRITERS
• INDEX OF NAMES