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osprey_archerJoyce Kilmer, the author of Literature in the Making, by Some of Its Makers, is best known today as the author of “I think that I shall never see/a poem as lovely as a tree…” Kilmer is also a boy Joyce, as I discovered when Kilmer alluded to his years at Columbia, about which he reminisces briefly while waiting in the hall to interview the man who (I strongly suspect) was Kilmer’s favorite literature professor in his own undergrad years.
This book grew out of a series of articles for the New York Times, which in turn grew out of a series of interviews with well-known authors in 1917. I believe Amy Lowell or Edwin Arlington Robinson would be the best known of these authors today, although I must confess that I have no understanding of what the general public knows about American literature between, say, 1870 and 1930. “What do you MEAN William Dean Howells no longer towers like a colossus?”
He certainly towers like a colossus in this book: his chapter comes first, and many of the questions around which the book is organized arise either directly from Howells’ literary pronouncements (for instance, American literature is “a phase of English literature,” which Kilmer coyly attributes to “a critic” before at last letting it out of the bag that Howells said it) or his general literary influence. Many of the writers muse about their position in the realism vs. romanticism wars, a war in which Howells carried the standard of Realism.
It should be noted that Howells was a realist in the sense that Jane Austen was a realist: he observed his own society closely and patterned his novels off the behavior of the more-or-less normal people that he met. He was not a realist in the sense that many people were using it by 1917, as a synonym for “gritty, vulgar sex novel.”
(The book includes a wide variety of different literary perspectives, including Charles Rann Kennedy who describes himself as one of “the manikoi, the prophetic madmen, who are swayed by what is about to happen rather than by what has happened.” But sadly it does not include a profile of an author of gritty, vulgar sex novels, and although Kilmer makes allusions to Certain Authors he doesn’t name names. KILMER.)
As the book was published in 1917, it frequently returns to the question “What will be the effect of the war on literature?” Howells is characteristically blunt: “War stops literature.” Kilmer relays this comment to certain other writers, including Robert W. Chambers, “who has written more ‘best sellers’ than any other living writer,” who is politely incredulous: Howells, Chambers says, “must have forgotten that the Civil War caused one man to make contributions to our literature as valuable as anything we possess. He must have forgotten Abraham Lincoln.”
This seems more or less unanswerable, although one must note that in Kilmer’s case, Howells comment was prophetic: the war did stop literature for him, as Kilmer died on the Marne in 1918.
And of course in another sense, the Great War did mark the end of a certain literary tradition in America. Many authors note their hope that the war will purify literature, and it certainly did not in the sense that these authors wanted - although Hemingway might argue that it wiped away a lot of accumulated dross of adjectives and multi-clausal sentences.
Of course part of the reason so many of these authors are forgotten is the pure attrition of time, but I think it’s also in part because they are, for the most part, the end of a tradition: they had no successors to keep their names alive. (Lowell is of course the exception.)
I went into this a bit afraid that it would balloon my reading list, but in fact I escaped mostly unscathed, although I ended up haring off in the middle of Charles Rann Kennedy’s chapter to read his one-act play The Terrible Meek (available on Gutenberg.org ETA: actually on google books, not Gutenberg at all), and I am devastated to inform you that he is perhaps correct in describing himself as one of the manikoi: it was written in 1912 and it does feel terribly prophetic about the Great War. It’s written for three actors (to be performed on a dark stage!) and features a captain with perfect English public school diction beginning to have Doubts about the justice of empire, a soldier straight out of Kipling, and the mother of the man that the soldiers just executed…
Kennedy says that he “wrote The Terrible Meek by direct inspiration from Heaven in Holy Week, 1912,” (and adds “I put that in… not only because I know it is the absolute truth, but because of the highly entertaining way in which it is bound to be misinterpreted”), which will perhaps tell you which story he is retelling in modern dress. It’s nonetheless devastating. I can see why people rejected the play as too harsh before the war and then wanted to perform it in droves once the conflict began.
On a lighter note, the book also left me with a yen to read Montague Glass’s Potash and Perlmutter, partly on account of his literary theory that “Fun for fun’s sake is a much more important maxim than art for art’s sake.” He muses for a while on the differing techniques of romanticists and realists, and then concludes, “Literary snap judgments are foolish things. Nothing that I have said to you has any value at all.”
This book grew out of a series of articles for the New York Times, which in turn grew out of a series of interviews with well-known authors in 1917. I believe Amy Lowell or Edwin Arlington Robinson would be the best known of these authors today, although I must confess that I have no understanding of what the general public knows about American literature between, say, 1870 and 1930. “What do you MEAN William Dean Howells no longer towers like a colossus?”
He certainly towers like a colossus in this book: his chapter comes first, and many of the questions around which the book is organized arise either directly from Howells’ literary pronouncements (for instance, American literature is “a phase of English literature,” which Kilmer coyly attributes to “a critic” before at last letting it out of the bag that Howells said it) or his general literary influence. Many of the writers muse about their position in the realism vs. romanticism wars, a war in which Howells carried the standard of Realism.
It should be noted that Howells was a realist in the sense that Jane Austen was a realist: he observed his own society closely and patterned his novels off the behavior of the more-or-less normal people that he met. He was not a realist in the sense that many people were using it by 1917, as a synonym for “gritty, vulgar sex novel.”
(The book includes a wide variety of different literary perspectives, including Charles Rann Kennedy who describes himself as one of “the manikoi, the prophetic madmen, who are swayed by what is about to happen rather than by what has happened.” But sadly it does not include a profile of an author of gritty, vulgar sex novels, and although Kilmer makes allusions to Certain Authors he doesn’t name names. KILMER.)
As the book was published in 1917, it frequently returns to the question “What will be the effect of the war on literature?” Howells is characteristically blunt: “War stops literature.” Kilmer relays this comment to certain other writers, including Robert W. Chambers, “who has written more ‘best sellers’ than any other living writer,” who is politely incredulous: Howells, Chambers says, “must have forgotten that the Civil War caused one man to make contributions to our literature as valuable as anything we possess. He must have forgotten Abraham Lincoln.”
This seems more or less unanswerable, although one must note that in Kilmer’s case, Howells comment was prophetic: the war did stop literature for him, as Kilmer died on the Marne in 1918.
And of course in another sense, the Great War did mark the end of a certain literary tradition in America. Many authors note their hope that the war will purify literature, and it certainly did not in the sense that these authors wanted - although Hemingway might argue that it wiped away a lot of accumulated dross of adjectives and multi-clausal sentences.
Of course part of the reason so many of these authors are forgotten is the pure attrition of time, but I think it’s also in part because they are, for the most part, the end of a tradition: they had no successors to keep their names alive. (Lowell is of course the exception.)
I went into this a bit afraid that it would balloon my reading list, but in fact I escaped mostly unscathed, although I ended up haring off in the middle of Charles Rann Kennedy’s chapter to read his one-act play The Terrible Meek (available on Gutenberg.org ETA: actually on google books, not Gutenberg at all), and I am devastated to inform you that he is perhaps correct in describing himself as one of the manikoi: it was written in 1912 and it does feel terribly prophetic about the Great War. It’s written for three actors (to be performed on a dark stage!) and features a captain with perfect English public school diction beginning to have Doubts about the justice of empire, a soldier straight out of Kipling, and the mother of the man that the soldiers just executed…
Kennedy says that he “wrote The Terrible Meek by direct inspiration from Heaven in Holy Week, 1912,” (and adds “I put that in… not only because I know it is the absolute truth, but because of the highly entertaining way in which it is bound to be misinterpreted”), which will perhaps tell you which story he is retelling in modern dress. It’s nonetheless devastating. I can see why people rejected the play as too harsh before the war and then wanted to perform it in droves once the conflict began.
On a lighter note, the book also left me with a yen to read Montague Glass’s Potash and Perlmutter, partly on account of his literary theory that “Fun for fun’s sake is a much more important maxim than art for art’s sake.” He muses for a while on the differing techniques of romanticists and realists, and then concludes, “Literary snap judgments are foolish things. Nothing that I have said to you has any value at all.”
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Date: 2022-04-10 05:49 pm (UTC)(Jumping the pond, even the moderns are engaged in the Struggle for Life as Darwin put it, Beehrbom had the terrible misfortune to publish Seven Men right after Strachey's Eminent Victorians....)
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Date: 2022-04-10 09:01 pm (UTC)Kilmer mentions an "American novelist whose books are very long, very dull, and distinguished only by their author's obsession with sex," and I wonder if he meant Theodore Dreiser.
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Date: 2022-04-10 07:29 pm (UTC)Now I'd like to read that because it looks, at least in summary, like an influence on Christopher Fry, and I have no idea if it remotely was. (I assume it has been revived as a radio play since?)
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Date: 2022-04-10 08:49 pm (UTC)(I'm not sure how a radio play would reproduce the effect of the final moments when the lights come on and - dun dun DUN! - our English public school captain is a centurion and Christ is hanging on a cross, but I daresay a clever radio producer could come up with something.)
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Date: 2022-04-10 09:00 pm (UTC)That's great. I should just go read this thing.
(I'm not sure how a radio play would reproduce the effect of the final moments when the lights come on and - dun dun DUN! - our English public school captain is a centurion and Christ is hanging on a cross, but I daresay a clever radio producer could come up with something.)
I had not assumed from the setup that it needed an OH SNAP moment! Perhaps one could hit the audience with an unmistakable Easter hymn or something from a Bach Passion or even a suitable piece of Sydney Carter? (I've had Donald Swann singing "Friday Morning" from their 1964 EP Songs of Faith and Doubt stuck in my head since reading this post, although it would make better exit music than a revelation.)
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Date: 2022-04-10 09:14 pm (UTC)"A soldier's ghost must be a pitiable thing to see" is one of those lines that a few years would make inextricably hauntological, yes.
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Date: 2022-04-11 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-10 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-10 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-10 10:51 pm (UTC)