The Word on the Streets

The American Language of Vernacular Modernism

Brooks E. Hefner

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780813940403
• eBook ISBN: 9780813940427
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity.

The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongside more recognized strands of literary modernism, the vernacular modernism these writers exhibited lays bare the aesthetic experiments inherent in American working-class and ethnic language, forging an alternative pathway for American modernist practice.

Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres—from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska—employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.

1 /“The Steady Reaching Out for New and Vivid Forms”

H. L. Mencken and the American Revolution of the Word

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination.

—H. L. MENCKEN, THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE (1919)

The fallout from Eugene Jolas’s “Revolution of the Word” manifesto was both swift and palpable. Shortly after the publication of this famous issue, which included Irwin’s “Slanguage: 1929” among its experimental pieces, the leftist journal the Modern Quarterly took issue with the manifesto’s bold proclamation in a fall 1929 symposium devoted to transition’s “Revolution of the Word.” If anything, Jolas’s 1930 response to his Modern Quarterly critics produces a stronger bond between transition’s avant-garde literary polemics and the innovations of the American vernacular. Titled “The King’s English Is Dying—Long Live the Great American Language,” Jolas’s point-by-point response to V. F. Calverton concludes with a memorable invocation. He writes,

The mysticism surrounding the “purity of the English language” has, I believe, lost its force. In the crucible of the immense racial fusion of indigenous and immigrant America there is occuring [sic] today an astounding creation that ultimately will make the American language, because of its greater richness and pliancy and nearness to life, the successor of British English. This is already happening in speech, and as soon as the age-old delusion that there must be a difference between written and spoken words has had its day we will probably see the American language colonize England and all English-speaking countries.¹

In making these claims, Jolas provides a telling footnote: “See H. L. Mencken’s The American Language.” Jolas’s argument here is not far off of Mencken’s in his masterwork; Mencken too would celebrate the American language for what Jolas called its “immense racial fusion of indigenous and immigrant America” and for its ability to colonize, to become globally dominant. What is striking in this, however, is Jolas’s insistence that the American language, with “its great richness and pliancy and nearness to life” is, in effect, the lingua franca of modernism itself. He concludes the essay by claiming that the intersection of racial and immigrant groups in the United States “will bring to fruition the language of the century to come.”²

Jolas’s invocation brings Mencken and his American Language squarely into the discussion of avant-garde aesthetics. While this might seem surprising, particularly to modernist scholars who have largely ignored the importance of Mencken to the period, it is not unique. Mencken was a veritable obsession among writers and intellectuals of the modernist era, and Jolas was not the only avant-garde figure to cite Mencken’s popular linguistics as a useful analogy for experimental writers. A 1923 article by Matthew Josephson, editor of the little magazine Broom, claims that “the temper of the age, which is one of prodigious social transformation, must be contributing far more in the way of new names, technical and colloquial, new compounds, neologisms, word-structures. Another period of language expansion, such as occurred in the sixteenth century, has set in. (The reader is here referred to H. L. Mencken’s The American Language).”³ If anything, Mencken’s linguistic work provided modernists like Jolas and Josephson a popular and well-respected analogue for the innovations they championed in little magazines like Broom and transition. At the same time, it reinforces the strong connection between manifestos like the “Revolution of the Word” and slang and vernacular dictionaries like Irwin’s “Slanguage: 1929.”

This chapter considers the popular linguistics of H. L. Mencken, whose landmark study The American Language offers a theoretical voice to the concept of vernacular modernism. Additionally, the chapter serves as an extension of the theoretical issues raised in the introduction and a practico-theoretical bridge between the introduction and the case studies that follow. Mencken’s work, however, would not likely have been possible without the influence of writers like Mark Twain. Twain’s literary praxis operates as a precursor to vernacular modernism, critiquing the linguistic assumptions of realism from within a largely realist framework. In what follows, I consider Twain’s linguistic experimentation in texts like Roughing It (1872) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) as a background to the linguistic and philological work of Mencken, whose American Language (1919), researched and published at the birth of high modernism, operates as a vernacular modernist manifesto. In analogous modes, Twain and Mencken sought an American “Revolution of the Word,” one that punctured the pretentions and elitism of dialect realism, offering in its place an experimental American vernacular that would provide the raw material for a peculiarly American modernist innovation.

“The Vigorous New Vernacular”: Mencken Reads Twain

A nation’s language is a very large matter. It is not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful; the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be considered also.

—MARK TWAIN, “CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE” (1882)

For the purposes of this argument, it is a rather convenient coincidence that the year 1910 witnessed two crucial moments in the history of the American vernacular: the death of Mark Twain in April and the first of H. L. Mencken’s Baltimore Evening Sun articles on the American language in October. Mencken was soon to become the editor of the Smart Set and later the American Mercury and well on his way to becoming one of the most prominent cultural figures of the 1920s, and these publications would be the first in a lifelong engagement with questions of language and culture in America. Though Mencken’s bombastic and polemic writing style shared little with Twain’s work, it was clear in Mencken’s multiple appreciations of him that Mencken saw Twain as the greatest American writer to date. Twain was, according to Mencken, “the largest figure that ever reared itself out of the flat, damp prairie of American literature.”⁴

For Mencken, Twain’s literary genius rested, unsurprisingly, on the latter’s distinct prowess in the use of vernacular language. Twain is one of Mencken’s major sources in his popular linguistics, and he singled Twain out in the early editions of The American Language, noting that “in all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably American as the point of view underlying it.”⁵ Here Mencken highlights Twain’s early travelogue Roughing It, where he notes that Twain was “celebrating ‘the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains’” (AL 1:16–17, AL 2:20, AL 3:21). These celebrations of Twain tie Mencken’s popular linguistic project to Twain’s work, collecting and reproducing the vernacular speech of the West and old Southwest; they also point to Twain’s thematic concerns, which, in Mencken’s reading, overlap with his own intellectual project.

Like most American literary critics of the early twentieth century, Mencken’s literary assessment of Twain found its primary source in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1913 he called the novel “one of the great masterpieces of the world . . . the full equal of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe,” and in 1919 he wrote that it was “a truly stupendous piece of work—perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English.”⁶ Mencken’s estimations of the novel anticipate later celebrations of it by modernists like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, who claimed in Green Hills of Africa that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck Finn.”⁷ While the study of Twain has long moved beyond the exclusive consideration of his masterpiece, it is important to reconsider and reconstruct Mencken’s reading of Twain—and of works related to Huckleberry Finn—as central to his own popular linguistics, and, by extension, a vital precursor to what I have termed vernacular modernism.

Additionally, Mencken’s understanding of Twain shares an affinity both with his own intellectual project of the 1910s and 1920s and with influential critical readings of Twain that coalesce around concepts like “genteel” and “vernacular.” For Mencken, Twain is the model of the debunker:

What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue! What contempt he emptied upon shams of all sorts—and what pity! He regarded all men as humbugs, but as humbugs to be dealt with gently, as humbugs too often taken in and swindled by their own humbuggery. He saw how false reasoning, false assumptions, false gods had entered into the very warp and woof of their thinking, how impossible it was for them to attack honestly the problems of being; how helpless they were in the face of life’s emergencies.⁸

Mencken cannily anticipates mid-century readings of Twain, such as Henry Nash Smith’s influential thesis that Twain’s work is structured around the conflict between genteel and vernacular values, generally siding—in his most celebrated work, at least—with vernacular characters and language. Channeling Van Wyck Brooks’s argument that bifurcated the nature of American life along the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” Smith emphasizes that Twain’s work charts the “two levels of experience”: “the realm of the ideal, the locus of values, and the realm of everyday reality, the locus of facts.”⁹ Twain scholars—including James M. Cox, Michael Egan, David R. Sewell, and many others—have long been indebted to this particular characterization of Twain, even if they have complicated and revised Smith’s initial argument.¹⁰ Sewell, for example, situates Twain’s work in the complex nineteenth-century relationship between speech and writing and complicates Smith’s hard-and-fast distinction between these vernacular and genteel registers.

Smith’s argument has been adapted since its publication in 1962, but it continues to structure readings of Twain, whether those oppositions are seen in terms of vernacular /genteel or oral/written.¹¹ What remains suggestive about Mencken’s reading of Twain is the way in which this celebration of Twain’s ability to debunk pretention and hypocrisy is connected to his strategic and virtuosic use of vernacular language. Mencken’s description of Twain’s virtues uncannily resembles Mencken himself; this is in fact a version of Twain crafted in Mencken’s own image. Compare his description of Twain’s value, for example, to Mencken’s own assessment of “the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly” of life in the United States: “the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, or aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances.”¹² For Mencken—and for Mencken’s reading of Twain—the exposure of what he called the “boobus Americanus” is somehow subtly linked to the celebration of a “vigorous new vernacular” that would become Mencken’s American Language.¹³

Because Mencken tied Twain’s genius to Roughing It and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a reading of such texts—along the lines Mencken might have read them—will serve as a useful means of conceptualizing the development of vernacular modernism (and of Mencken’s linguistic studies) from Twain’s experimental model. Given the underlying assumptions of this project, it might be better to describe Twain’s work as representing the limits of dialect fiction, rather than exemplifying that of the vernacular. Of course, Twain’s rampant experimental use of dialect blurs these boundaries and gives rise to further experiments in vernacular fiction of the twentieth century. It remains important, however, to see Twain operating in a tradition that encompasses both dialect fiction and the literary realism of figures like his friend William Dean Howells. As Jonathan Arac has written, “Only during Howells’s own career, beginning after the Civil War, did an ethnographically serious dialect literature arise, what we call local color.”¹⁴ For, while popular humor movements of the first half of the century turned on dialect to mark racial and regional difference (and the political and social hierarchies such difference suggested), the rise of a realist aesthetic in the 1870s and 1880s meant that literary work—determined to represent the real world in mimetic forms—would also begin to include the “commonplace” language that had previously been excluded from serious literary endeavors. In efforts to democratize literary representation, realism often went beyond the simple inclusion of a dialect-speaking servant figure or backwoodsman; serious novelists began emphasizing dialect in protagonists, and talented dialect writers like Mark Twain became literary sensations. As Gavin Jones has argued, “Late nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect literature.”¹⁵

The link between dialect writing and realism is unmistakable: both depend on photographic (or phonographic) representation, both assume the ability of language to accurately represent this world, and both orient themselves around hierarchy within linguistic groups. So, even in the most genteel of realist texts, the introduction of commonplace language, whether marking country naïveté or ethnic difference, marks social differentiation, education, and value of characters. As Elsa Nettles has written,

Howells’s faith in the power of realism to promote brotherhood seems based on an unswerving allegiance to principles of unity and equality which he championed throughout his life. Yet his theory of realism, when put into practice, reveals an inherent conflict. . . . As his own fiction shows, nothing more immediately establishes differences among characters than different habits of speech. Unless all the characters speak in the same way, dialect at once divides the speakers of the standard language from the nonstandard speakers.¹⁶

Even in realist texts where the protagonists are marked with dialect (like Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham [1885]), these characters are routinely judged—and in Lapham’s case, ultimately banished—by the genteel narrative voice. The major realist writers of this era generally held to this particular sense o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a Theory of American Vernacular Modernism
• 1. “The Steady Reaching Out for New and Vivid Forms”:H. L. Mencken and the American Revolution of the Word
• 2. “Never Mind the Comical Stuff. . . . They Ain’t No Joke about This!”: Ring Lardner, Anita Loos, and the Comic Origins of Vernacular Modernism
• 3. “I Didn’t Understand the Words, but My Voice Was Like Dynamite”: Anzia Yezierska, Mike Gold, and the Jewish American Break with Realism
• 4. “Say It with Lead”: Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Modernism’s Underworld Vernacular
• 5. “The Necromancy of Language”: Realist Uplift and the Urban Vernacular in Rudolph Fisher and Claude McKay
• Conclusion: Modernism’s Familial Relations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index