British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

(1914) and The Stoic (1947). In the first book of the sequel Dreiser expresses the idea of almost all his novels: “We suffer for our temperaments, which we did not make, and for our weaknesses and lacks, which are no part of our willing or doing.” That is, all of us crave for power and affection, though some men are extremely powerful, like Frank Cowperwood, while others, the exceptions, give up.

An example of those who succumb is Clyde Griffiths, the central character of An American Tragedy (1925), who wants to enter the magic circle of the powerful, but fails because he tries to get rid of the girl who is standing in is way. The girl’s death is partly accidental, but Clyde Griffiths is executed. Everybody and nobody is to blame. Dreiser is sure of one thing: the moral and the social codes of America misrepresent the truths of human nature, and so does conventional fiction.

There are opponents to Dreiser’s works in America who accuse him of being too pretentious, and say he was a poor philosopher. But everybody agrees that he was the first novelist to catch the full native flavour of Americans of modern times. His works are realistic (though American critics say, naturalistic) sagas with a sympathy and pity not to be found in any other writer of the time.

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) started as a proletarian writer. In 1906 he published his first novel The Jungle – an expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry. The book had a political effect and after its publication the US Government instituted an investigation of the meat yards. It established the author as a socialist. The proceeds from the novel were used to found Helicon Hall, a utopian community for socialist living and education. Sinclair’s socialist views predetermined the themes of his next novels. King Coal (1917) is based on Colorado coal strike and deals with a college boy’s experience of mining work and his subsequent agitation for improved working conditions. The novel Oil! appeared in 1927 and raised the theme of the corruption within oil industry, politics, and public life. Ross, the protagonist of the novel, realizes that only socialism can cure society’s ills. Ten novels about Lanny Budd starting with World’s End and then a sequel The Return of Lanny Budd reflect the state of politics from 1913 to the 1950-s.

Among the new writers of that period one can name Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941). An Ohio businessman, he suffered a nervous breakdown and quitted the job. He learned much from Gertrude Stein, and her influence manifests itself in his first book Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which

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made him a leading naturalistic writer. It is a collection of short stories, unified by their setting – a small town where most people know something of one another. All the characters are puzzled people. They have been misunderstood; they seek to understand; they seek for love and recognition. Wrapped in their obsessive fancies, they speak out ideas though no one will listen to them.

The evocation of small town life and distrust of mechanization were to set the tone for his other novels. In the introduction to the novel Poor White Anderson writes that the actual hero of the novel is a small Ohio town, Bidwell, and that the people of it are additional. The protagonist, Hugh McVey, the “poor white” inventor becomes rich after several of his inventions have been exploited and turned Bidwell into a flourishing industrial town. The prosperity of the town is followed by the struggle between workers and bosses. McVey cannot communicate with people. Finally he understands the corrupting effect that his inventions have had on the town and its people. So the narrative is principally concerned with the devastating effects of the modernization of a rural town, and the collapse of democracy, as it is swamped by class values based on material wealth.

Sherwood Anderson made the novel something of a substitute for poetry and religion, whereas Sinclair Lewis (1885–1957) made it a branch of superior journalism. Where Anderson stressed the mystery and bafflement of life, Lewis recorded its details with the cynical expertise of a star reporter. In 1920, with the publication of his Main Street, it seemed that he had struck a mortal blow at a small-town life, exposing the utterly intolerable drabness, narrowness and complacency of it. Sinclair Lewis strengthened his reputation with Babbit (1922), in which he attacked the morals and stupidity of an American city. When one re-examines Main Street and Babbitt at this distance from their first appearance, it becomes clear that Lewis belonged in many ways to the people he castigated, he did not know himself whether he loved or hated his heroes. Having shown the cruelty with which the citizens treat the outsider, Lewis still lingers over his material, taking back half of what he has said. Thus in Main Street Carol Kennicott leaves her tiresome husband. So might Sherwood Anderson have ended a novel. But Lewis brings her back to Dr Kennicott – a solution he can make plausible only by suggesting that, after all, her husband is a sturdy, honest person, while Carol has been weak and self-centered.

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In Arrowsmith (1925) Lewis portrays the wanderings of an honest man through the idiocities and corruptions of America. Arrowsmith is an innovative novel. Sinclair Lewis was the first to show the academic world from inside, with all its conflicts, intrigues and careermongering. One of the characters of the novel formulates the ethic credo of a scientist: to work hard and not to give others to use you. But it is very difficult to combine these two in reality. A cabinet scientist looks naturally in the works of Jules Verne, but in the XX century he cannot live outside society. He is indebted to science but the very thought about possible consequences of the experiment makes the protagonist to sacrifice. Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1930).

Thomas Eliot (1888–1965) is an American who identified himself with English culture. In 1925 he was even received into the Church of England and took British citizenship. His poetry is very original, characterized by the combination of free verse with virtuosity in the use of rhythm and rhyme. Like French symbolists, he considered that the only reality in life is the inner reality, and that poetry should work by indirect image and suggestion. It is very difficult to read Eliot’s poetry. Once he declared that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. The main idea of his poems is that civilization is doomed. The outlook of the poet is expressed in the poem Waste Land (1922), which consists of 5 parts and expresses the bitter disillusionment and widespread sense of cultural failure that followed the First World War. It combines impressionistic juxtaposition, evocative imagery and powerful effects of language to present cultural collapse and spiritual sterility. Like Joyce in Ulysses he places myths alongside views of modern society in an ironic contrast. He mingles the classic texts like Shakespeare’s with commonplace language of the present, creating the impression that modern civilization is inferior against the achievements of the past. In the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot’s hero is a man with a divided self, who wants to be active, to love, but is incapable of these emotions. His indecision and selfanalysis have much in common with Hamlet.

But Prufrock is much inferior and he recognizes it:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

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Advise the prince; no doubt an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –

Almost, at times, the Fool.

Ezra Pound is still another American who spent much time in Europe, worked as a secretary for Yeats in 1913–1914, and worked out the principles of a new Modernist movement, that of Imagism – a British and American poetic movement founded in England in 1912, it reacted against the “Romanticism” of poets like Swinburne, whose words, the Imagists felt, obscured emotion rather than clarified it. Pound, Flint, Amy Lowell and others agreed upon the following principles:

–To use common speech with exactness.

–To try new musical rhythms and create new moods.

–To have freedom of subject.

–To avoid vagueness in imagery: to be 'hard', clear and direct.

–To be economical in their use of language.

Pound wrote of the image as an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” and the best-known example of the mode’s characteristic brevity and incisiveness is his In a Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Another example is Amy Lowell’s Autumn Haze:

Is it a dragonfly or a maple leaf

That settles softly down upon the water?

Tasks

1.The theme of Nature in the works of Jack London. Compare his treatment of the theme with that of Bret Harte’s.

2.Read an extract from Jack London’s story To Build a Fire. Compare his description of a man and a dog. What devices does the author use to recreate the atmosphere of wilderness?

At the man's heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it а truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder

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than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man's brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man's heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or eke to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.

3.Speak on the political views of Theodore Dreizer and their reflection in his works.

4.Point out the main features of naturalism. Analyze one of the works of this literary trend.

5.Compare the works of Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson. What do they have in common?

6.William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) is another Imagist, who later turned to Objectivism, started writing simple scenes of American life in warm, everyday language. He sought to create a poetry of American English.

The following poem, 'This is Just to Say' (1934), is one of Williams's best-known:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox

and which

you were probably saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious so sweet

and so cold

a)Can you guess who might be speaking to whom?

b)In what way is the poem 'Objectivist'?

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Chapter IV

THE LOST GENERATION

The Lost Generation is a term given to a group of British and American writers who lived chiefly in Paris in the 1920s. They were deeply disillusioned by socio-economic and political climate of their countries after World War I. A leading member of this group was Earnest Miller Hemingway (1899–1961), a great American short-story writer and novelist. He made his name with Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises) in 1926, a novel that best catches the post-war period of disillusion. The novel treats the war as a recent disaster and is directed against militarism. Hemingway knew the subject very well, he started World War I as a war correspondent. Fiesta deals with the life of young Americans living in Paris just after the war. The idea of the lost generation is expressed by the hero of the novel: “You are an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working.”

Hemingway was the inventor of the so-called “theory of an iceberg”: he wrote that"... if a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things, as strongly as though the writer has stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water." In his stories and novels, rigorously confining himself to the matter at hand, refusing the aid of literary artifices, Hemingway extracts an amazing richness from his rare excursions below the surface of the narrative.

Hemingway's aim to write absolute truth induced him to create a new style. He avoided conventional narration, but tried to make his readers understand his ideas about nature, labour, and war by sketching in vivid scenes his own experience in war or in travels. Leaving out many unnecessary details Hemingway mastered a new short-story form. Some of these short stories he used for his novels.

He was of the opinion that art and literature play an important role in the world: “A work of art endures forever.” Hemingway stressed the role of the writer: “Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.”

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It has often been said against Hemingway that he gravely handicapped himself by dealing with violent action rather than the act of intelligence. It is true that he seems most at home with characters who say little. The language of Hemingway's works is of bare simplicity; it is in keeping with the characters he wants to portray. It is surprising how he reveals the inner world of his personages in short dialogues and colloquial phrases. Plain words in simple declarative sentences bring out the sensations of the central characters and at the same time make the reader participate in the events of the story. For instance, when he reproduces the speech of people who are not English, notably in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), where he is among the Spanish peasantry, he renders their words in an ingenious “translated” English which reminds the reader that they are actually speaking in Spanish.

The Civil War in Spain was a turning point in the writer’s life. He took part in it, wrote a plenty of articles, raised money for Spain. The experience he got there, helped Hemingway to write the play The Fifth Column (1938), the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls and to complete the novel To Have and Have Not. He was one of the first to warn against the fatal danger of fascism. By the way his first articles on fascism were written at the beginning of the 1920s. In his article Genoa Conference he noted that the fascists “were under the tacit protection of the government, if not its active support”, that “they had a taste of unpenalized lawlessness, unpunished murder, and the right to riot when and where they pleased”. He said that Mussolini was the biggest bluff in Europe. He was also fully aware of the danger that fascism meant for literature: “ There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism.” During World War II he continued his work as a war correspondent and his articles are among the best publicist works.

Hemingway’s ideas about literature are well expressed in his story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The main idea of the story is that literature should be sincere. Truth and not popularity or wealth is the main aim of a real writer. Hemingway dealt with this idea in an earlier book The Green Hills of Africa (1935). He said about writers in America: “We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually. Then our writers, when they have made some money, increase their standard of living, and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishment, their wives, and so on, and they write slop.”

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The main character of the story is an American writer Harry, whose approaching death brings back to mind the past. His reminiscences are interpreted in the form of commentaries, inserted into the story. Hemingway shows himself as a good psychologist. He widely uses symbols. The snows of Kilimanjaro are a symbol of the creative and moral strength, which Harry could never achieve, the hyena is a symbol of death.

Across the River and Into the Trees is one of the most lyrical works of the writer. One can see Shakesperian motives in it: Venice, an old warrior Richard Cantwell and a young patrician Renata. Elegical image of Venice is connected with the motives of love, beauty and death. Richard’s love for Renata is the personification of his sorrow for the younger days and passing life.

In The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Hemingway managed to tell a story of a man on his own that is a parable of all humanity. The writer tells of a Cuban fisherman who is a simple man but not a simpleton. The Cuban’s fight with a great fish can be interpreted as the struggle with fate; it is in a way an illustration of Hemingway’s code: a man can be killed but not destroyed. Describing the lions in the dream of the old man in the last lines of the story Hemingway asserts optimism and new strength. The book is also about the link between two generations. It is a masterpiece for its imaginative language and the descriptions of nature.

The posthumous volume A Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir of Paris in the early 1920s is a real achievement: alive, precise, firmly shaped. The character sketches are tight with the sense of affection or antipathy, alliance or combat. He is nice about Ezra Pound and a few others, and amusing yet rather malicious on Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first of all meant to be a writer. He regarded himself a professional and competed with Hemingway in public recognition. His short stories were first published in fashionable periodicals and then collected as Flippers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). His writing parallels his own experience to a poignant degree; both are the record of youth searching wildly for a perfection that does not exist.

Fitzgerald longed for some central certainty, from which “he could look out upon the world, safe from hurt”. So, he attended a university for the sons of well-to-do Easterners, and strove to be a success among his classmates. In the army he envied those who had been in action, and had thus entered the inner sanctum of danger. He wrote in a short story An Off-Shore Pirate of men coming out of the trenches, watched by the hero,

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that “the sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him”.

Since Fitzgerald had been unable to adopt these symbols, he concentrated upon others: in particular, upon the aristocracy of wealth. The very rich, as he told Hemingway and as he said in The Rich Boy “are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them.” What it did to them was not necessarily good and Fitzgerald knew this. He was merely fascinated by the magic properties of wealth, and by the immunity it could purchase – immunity from everybody else, who was an outsider. Fitzgerald had no idea of contrasting one group against another. With wealth – and also youth, looks, and success, which were part of aristocracy all doors opened. Poverty was mean. Fitzgerald himself was married to a glamorous lady, and they led high life. So, his characters from the first two collections are too evidently projections of himself, dreaming extravagantly and extravagantly disappointed.

In The Great Galsby (1935), Fitzgerald shows wealth and youth at variance. Jay Gatsby, despite his huge house, his lavish parties, and his mysteriously dishonourable sources of income, is primarily a spokesman for youth. One can see the dualism of the protagonist’s personality; his best desires come into conflict with his practicism of a bootlegger. The roots of Gatsby’s tragedy are in American dream to become rich and independent. The main idea of the novel is that real happiness cannot be gained by immoral means. To an extent the novel is a satire of the “rags to riches” story.

Monroe Stahr, the main character of the novel The Last Tycoon, is another victim of an American dream: a businessman coexists with an artist in him; he has everything except the gift to give himself to other people.

After The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald produced more short stories and the novel Tender is the Night (1934). The reviewers, in the socially conscious 1930s, dismissed it as a hangover from a vanished era. Most of the expatriates were home again. But Fitzgerald wrote of an American expatriate, Dick Diver, disintegrating from too much money and domestic problems, coming back to America at last not in repentance, but to hide from abject failure. The reviewers were too hard on Tender is the Night, though recent critics appreciate the novel. In some respects it is a better book than Gatsby; it is more ambitious and reveals an even more sensuously alert intelligence. But the intelligence is of a professional order. Fitzgerald has learned more fully how to construct a novel; he incorporates a wider range of characters; his prose is a constant pleasure.

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If Fitzgerald is associated with “the Jazz Age” of the 1920s, the name of John Roderigo Dos Passos (1896–1970) is linked with the next decade, when he became one of America's most prominent novelists. Yet he had already made his name. Born in the same year as Fitzgerald, he displayed an equal craftsmanship: his first novel, One Man's Initiation (1917), was published in 1920, the same year as This Side of Paradise. And with his second book, Three Soldiers (1921), Dos Passos took his place among the young writers, who were defining the character of their time. His hero in Three Soldiers, John Andrews, is a composer who enlists because he is tired of freedom and hopes “to start rebuilding the fabric of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship and scorn”. But instead, military life (in America and then in France) arouses a wild repugnance in him. At the end, he is arrested as a deserter by the military police and marched off. Dos Passos seems to imply, must all sensitive men suffer at the hands of the machine: the final chapter is called “Under the Wheels”. The author’s answer is that the Artist is right, the world is wrong. John Andrews among the uniformed ranks is, in the words of the old joke, the only one in step.

In Manhattan Transfer (1925) Dos Passos uses the collectivist principle trying to crowd all of New York into one book, by methods that were later used in the novel U.S.A. There is a multitude of characters, whose lives interweave, on various social levels; they are traced through twenty years or so, growing up, growing old, rising and falling in the success scale. The general narrative is prosaic, the dialogue accurate though there are passages of impressionist description. And there is still a central character, Jimmy Herf, who is clearly a descendant of John Andrews. In some respects Herf is worse off. He is no longer the Artist, merely the WouldBe Artist, intelligent but ineffectual.

The anger of the Artist at the materialism of American life is expressed in the trilogy composed of The 42 Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). Nevertheless Dos Passos did not become a “proletarian” novelist; there had always been an element of radicalism in his work. From the beginning, he tried to represent both the lonely individual and the sensations of the crowd. In Three Soldiers he introduces three very dissimilar men, as if to embrace the whole of American society. The narrative is accompanied by three famous devices, of which two – The Newsreels and The Biographies – emphasize the documentary nature of the trilogy. The Newsreels are a medley of newspaper headlines, fragments of popular songs, etc. The Biographies are brief, vivid sketches of important men and women who typify the periods covered by the work. The other

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