British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

device – that of die Camera Eye - is a survival from the aesthetic Dos Passos. Keeping pace chronologically (more or less) with the other parts, the Camera Eye sections, written in a prose-poetry look out on the crass scene from the viewpoint of a person one assumes to be the author.

Tasks

1.What united the writers of “The Lost Generation” trend?

2.Here is an extract from The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald.

There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went as moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide of the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach, while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On weekends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden shears, reparing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York – every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed by a butler’s thumb.

–What impression have you got of Gatsby’s world?

–Does the author oppose two worlds: those of leisure and hard work?

–What does each of the following phrases suggest: “like moths”, “blue gardens”?

3. In the beginning of the story The Rich Boy Fitzgerald gives his opinion of rich people.

Do you think it is ironic, respectful or obsequious?

THE RICH BOY

Begin with an individual and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know our-

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selves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an "average, honest, open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal – and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.

There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and not his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves – such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

4.Here is an extract from Hemingway’s Preface to Farewell to Arms. What is his attitude to wars. Enlarge on the war theme in the novels of Ernest Hemingway.

The title of the book is A Farewell to Arms and except for three years there has been war of some kind almost ever since it has been written. Some people used to say: why is the man so preoccupied and obsessed with war, and now, since 1933 perhaps it is clear why a writer should be interested in the constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war. Having been to too many of them, I am sure that I am prejudiced, and I hope that I am very prejudiced. But it is the considered belief of the writer of this book that wars are fought by the finest people that there are, or just say people, although, the closer you are to where they are fighting, the finer people you meet; but they are made, provoked and initiated by straight economic rivalries and by swine that stand to profit from them. I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it.

5.A Farewell to Arms is one of the best books written by Ernest Hemingway. His “iceberg” theory is expressed very vividly in it. In the ex-

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tract given below the protagonist, Frederick Henry, has just known that his new-born baby is dead. Catherine, his wife, sends him away to have something to eat as he is very exhausted. Read the extract and say why the dinner is described in such detail. What does the author want to say to the readers?

I ate the ham and eggs and drank the beer. The ham and eggs were in a round dish – the ham underneath and the eggs ontop. It was very hot and at the first mouthful I had to take a drink of beer to cool my mouth. I was hungry and I asked the waiter for another order. I drank several glasses of beer. I was not thinking at all but read the paper of the man opposite me. It was about the break through on the British front. When he realized I was reading the back of his paper he folded it over. I thought of asking the waiter for a paper, but I could not concentrate. It was hot in the cafe and the air was bad. Many of the people at the tables knew one another. There were several card games going on. The waiters were busy bringing drinks from the bar to the tables. Two men came in and could find no place to sit. They stood opposite the table where I was. I ordered another beer. I was not ready to leave yet. It was too soon to go back to the hospital. I tried not to think and to be perfectly calm. The men stood around but no one was leaving, so they went out. I drank another beer. There was quite a pile of saucers now on the table in front of me. The man opposite me had taken off his spectacles, put them away in a case, folded his paper and put it in his pocket and now sat holding his liqueur glass and looking out at the room. Suddenly I knew I had to get back. I called the waiter, paid the reckoning, got into my coat, put on my hat and started out the door. I walked through the rain up to the hospital.

6. What are the main themes of Dos Passos’ novels? Compare the works of the three writers/

Chapter V

LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH (1930–1940)

The Southern tradition in American literature means the transfer of the past into the present time. Writers of the South devoted their books mainly to their region, but treated the theme of Southern life in a different way. Faulkner used the South as a basis for his literature and dug deep into the social problems of his region, that of Mississippi, which is united by special historical ties and follows its own traditions. Thomas Wolfe combined a kind of Southern romanticism with the documentary reflection of the

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1930. All these writers are sometimes called regionalists, as they were preoccupied with the problems of those particular regions.

Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945) was the first major Southern novelist. In fact she recreated the history of her region. She was a very prolific author and divided all her novels into several groups: “Novels of the Commonwealth”, dealing with the history of her native Virginia; “Novels of the Country” about the rural life and “Novels of the City”. The main themes of many of her novels are the decay of the “Southern legend” and the condition of women. One of her most known novels, Barren Ground, is about a strong-willed farmer’s daughter Dorinda Oakley, who is struggling to bring her family farm back to life. The author shows, how the heroine’s character is tempered in spite of all difficulties and obstacles: Dorinda, having been abandoned by the man she loves, decides not to be as soft as the other women of her family, and make her fate by herself. The author portrays a new Southern woman. Non-productive indigenous plants of the area become symbolic in the novel and give the titles to each section of the book: broomsedge symbolizes sexual impulse; pine – sickness and death and life-everlasting is like a nameless force which enables people to survive.

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) describes her beloved South nostalgically. The novel Gone with the Wind (1936) deals with the patriarchal life of Southern aristrocracy, the glorious courage of the Southern soldiers during the Civil War and the decline of “the legend” after it. It was her sole novel, and it was such a success that for the rest of her life Mitchell had to answer the letters of the book admirers.

Caroline Gordon (1895–1981) is also preoccupied with the decline of her native region.

The novel None Shall Look Back renders the very atmosphere of the peaceful life of the Southern polite society in general, the Allard family in particular and then opposes to it the cruelty of the Civil War. The destiny of the Allards is followed by her in the novel The Garden of Adonis devoted to the years of Great Depression.

William Faulkner (1897–1962), the most prominent writer of the South, described the decline of his native old South into racism and psychological sickness. In the novels Sound and Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom (1936) he gives a whole gallery of vivid characters, though one can observe a curious combination of violence and passivity in them. In all his novels Faulkner describes the darkest sides of human nature.

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In The Sound and Fury, we are first introduced to the Compson family through the mind of the idiot Benji, who is also deaf and numb. A reader is confronted by the tragedy of human loneliness. The second part of the novel relates the last day of Quentin Compson, a Harvard graduate, who understands that his father is worth for nothing, that the family is doomed. He commits suicide. His brother Jason Compson is the main character of the third part. He is a vulgar realist. In the three parts Faulkner uses interior monologue – an attempt to convey in words the process of consciousness. The fourth part is related by the black cook Dilsey, who acts as Greek Chorus, commenting on the events in a realistic manner. She represents moral integrity, dignity and compassion. The writer’s artistic method is to plunge the reader into the scene and to leave him to find out what everybody is talking about. The story is rooted in the past. Even when the main lines of the story are established, the significant detail is embedded in a mass of information and illusion. It is sometimes difficult for a reader to detect it. In this novel Faulkner opposes the idea of doom to that of endurance; the latter with the double connotation of suffering and survival. It is the proud, the Compsons, who are doomed, and the humble or the poor , who survive.

Absalom, Absalom! was written in 1936. It is like a Greek tragedy, though many critics call it the most melodramatic work of the writer. The story starts in 1833, when the protagonist, Thomas Sutpen, settles in Jefferson. His first wife gives birth to their son Charles, but suddenly Sutpen discovers that his wife has black ancestry and he rejects his son. Later Sutpen remarries, has another son and a daughter. Charles falls in love with his half-sister and wants to marry her, but is killed by his half-brother Henry who wants to prevent incest. Sutpen longs for a heir and seduces Milly, the squatter’s granddaughter. She gives birth to a daughter, and not a son, so Sutpen turns them out. Wash Jones, the squatter, murders him. The irony is that the estate is now in the possession of Clytemnestra, Sutpen’s daughter by a mulatto slave. Wishing to revenge, Clytemnestra sets fire to the mansion, killing herself and Sutpen’s son Henry. There is only one survivor of Sutpen’s dynasty, the idiot Jim Bond. The novel is interesting from the stylistic point of view, it is constructed through the accounts of three narrators; there is no reliable narrator, so the readers have to piece the facts together.

The Snopes’ trilogy – The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion – centers upon the theme of moral degradation. The protagonist Snopes gets rid of all his relatives to become rich.

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As it has been mentioned, the problem of racism is one of the leading problems of Faulkner’s works. In Sartoris Faulkner treats it nostalgically, recollecting the time when the whites were kind and treated their black slaves as if they were their naughty children. The writer belonged to the Southern aristocracy and could not ignore the legends about the glorious past. On the other hand he shows the rise of self-respect in the former slaves.

In all his novels Faulkner develops several subject lines, makes wide use of interludes and anecdotes. He usually uses third-person narration – the events and characters are shown through the eyes of another person.

Katherine Ann Porter (1890–1980) wrote under a strong influence of James Joyce and Faulkner. In the collection The Old Order: Stories of the South she raised the problem of new social forces winning over the old patriarchal life. The main conflict of all her works is that between commitment and detachment. Her most famous work, The Ship of Fools, was written in 1962 and is a moral allegory, as the passengers of the ship from Mexico to Germany provide a microcosm of the types which make up the human race.

Erskine Preston Caldwell (1903–1987) wrote mainly in the vein of naturalism. He made his first success with Tobacco Road (1932). The book is about poor white farmers struggling to seek out existence in the Deep South. The book sometimes repels readers with morbid details. It was followed by God’s Little Acre (1933), the action of which takes place in Georgia. This novel is about the friendship of two agricultural workers, George and Lanny. Both novels are a mixture of social outrage and bawdy humour. They depict regional life, racial and social relations in the South. The author displays his sound knowledge of folk culture. During World War II he was a war correspondent, visited Russia and in 1942 published the reminiscences about his war experience – All out on the Road to Smolensk.

The next two writers, John Steinbeck and William Saroyan do not represent the Southern trend. They are included into this chapter for “geographic reasons” – they are both from California, and because there is relatively much of Caldwell’s naturalism in Steinbeck’s works.

John Earnst Steinbeck (1902–1968) was born in California, which formed the background for his early short stories Tortilla Flat (1935).

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Then followed two novels about landless rural workers, In Dubious Battle (1936) and Of Mice and Men (1937). In these books, as well as in his The Grapes of Wrath, an epic account of an emigrant family to reach “the promised land”, California, the writer records the Depression years with amazing fidelity. He attempts to combine realism and romance and portray, through the lives of individuals, the national spirit. In all Steinbeck’s novels people are much happier when they are close to nature. "A writer must declare and praise man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit–for bravery in defeat, for courage, forgiveness, and love. I believe that a writer who does not passionately believe in man's ability to improve himself has no devotion for, nor any membership in, literature." Such were the words of John Steinbeck when he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962.

Much of John Steinbeck's writing is concerned with the land and the people of America. He defends the poor, the oppressed, and those who were simply different. His stories present a majestic history of the life and times of warm, human, and utterly believable characters. His scenes include all America, but most often they are those of the fertile Salinas Valley of his native California. His first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929. It is a historical story about a 17th century Caribbean pirate. The book was not successful. Shortly afterwards, he wrote two more novels. They were even less successful than the first. One of them, however, The Pastures of Heaven, by a strange stroke of fortune, established his career as a writer. One day, a New York publisher, Pascal Covici, happened to buy The Pastures of Heaven to read on a long train ride. He was so impressed with it that he immediately got in touch with the young author. He learned that Steinbeck had completed another book but that seven publishers had already turned it down. Covici asked to read it. That was Tortilla Flat, and Covici published it in 1935. It became Steinbeck's first great success and led to his literary partnership with Covici for the next 30 years.

Tortilla Flat is an amusing tale of three warm-hearted and kind Mexi- can-Americans living in Monterey, California, who find it difficult to be law-abiding. The book became a best-seller. In 1936, he published In Dubious Battle, a bitterly realistic novel about a labor strike of California fruit pickers. It was not a popular book, but Steinbeck was not discouraged. He was already at work on a new novel, which proved to be one of his best.

This was Of Mice and Men, published in 1937. It is a tender and tense story of two homeless and wandering farm workers. Steinbeck had begun

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it as a stage play but later changed his mind and completed it as a novel. After its success, he then adapted it for the stage. Of Mice and Men won for Steinbeck the 1937 New York Drama Critics Award which honored him for “handling a theme genuinely rooted in American life”.

Two years later, his next book, The Grapes of Wrath, established Steinbeck's fame all over the world. It was his masterpiece, a big, angry novel telling the tragic story of the travels of poor farmers from the dusty plains of Oklahoma to the fertile valleys of California. It caught the mood and tragedy of the great economic Depression of the 1930's and became a universal story of the flight of dispossessed people everywhere.

When America entered World War II, Steinbeck went to England, North Africa, and Italy as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.

Steinbeck's first postwar novel, Cannery Row, returned to the scenes of his native California. This was followed in 1947 by The Wayward Bus. Neither of these novels, however, was very successful. Then in 1951, he published East of Eden, his most ambitious work since The Grapes of Wrath. He confessed that he considered it the best book of his career. “I'm 50 years old,” he said. “"If East of Eden isn't any good, then I've been wasting my time”. He had little to fear.

Though probably not as good as The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden was still a very good novel. It tells the history of two families during the period from the American Civil War to World War I who find a new life in California.

Then in 1961, Steinbeck made a comeback with the publication of The Winter of Our Discontent. In it, he told the story of a man from a distinguished New England family who betrayed his idealism through fear of insecurity. The book was praised by many critics, and it particularly impressed the judges of the Swedish Academy who, in 1962, presented Steinbeck with the world famous Nobel Prize for literature.

In the same year, Steinbeck published Travels with Charley, an account of his trip across the United States with his dog. It is one of the best word-pictures of America that has ever been written. About the trip, he said: “I began to feel that Americans exist, that they really do have characteristics regardless of their states, their social and financial position, their education, their religious and political beliefs”. But then, like all observers who have tried to define America and Americans, he confessed that “the more I inspected this American image, the less sure I became of what it is”.

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Early in 1966, Steinbeck journeyed to South Vietnam as a war correspondent for the New York newspaper, Newsday.

William Saroyan (1908–1981) lived in California and won early fame with his short stories and was formed as a writer in 1930s. He is a born narrator. He speaks about everyday life with good knowledge and kind humour. He has always been far from politics, but he could feel the general mood and render it in his novelettes. In Some Day I’ll be a Millionaire Myself he builds up the plot on a paradox: the heroes find a work at last and can live a normal life. But again and again they recollect the past days, when they had nothing but lived a real life. Material things mean nothing, spirituality is everything. In Love, Here Is My Hat Saroyan shows himself as a deep psychologist. The story is also based on a paradox: “Love is absurd, always has been, always will be.” The lyrical story warmly renders the mood of a couple, who are going to split. He constructs dialogues in Hemingway’s manner and to an extent follows his “iceberg theory”.

Paradox is the writer’s main device. It is vividly seen in his later stories, when Saroyan turns to political events of his time. “Is it possible that comedians are the biggest killers? – he writes in one of his stories addressed to Hitler and Mussolini. The War in Spain is a very short story but in it the writer could enclose his deep hatred for it. A young man is going to Spain, leaving his “treasures” to his little brother and twin sister: “That was all. Drake went to the war. We never saw him again, and nobody in the house except Paula could keep from crying. Paula kept saying, “They can’t kill Drake,” even though he was dead.” What more can be said about the tragedy of war?

Tasks

1. Here is an extract from Faulkner’s story The Old People. Characterize Sam, an ex-slave.

White man's work, when Sam did work. Because he did nothing else: farmed no allotted acres of his own, as the other ex-slaves of old Carothers McCaslin did, performed no field-work for daily wages as the younger and newer negroes did – and the boy never knew just how that had been settled between Sam and old Carothers, or perhaps with old Carothers' twin sons after him. For, although Sam lived among the negroes, in a cabin among the other cabins in the quarters, and consorted with negroes (what of con-sorting with anyone Sam did after the boy got big enough to

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walk alone from the house to the blacksmith-shop and then to carry a gun) and dressed like them and talked like them and even went with them to the negro church now and then, he was still the son of that Chickasaw chief and the negroes knew it And, it seemed to the boy, not only negroes. Boon Hogganbeck's grandmother had been a Chickasaw woman too, and although the blood had run white since and Boon was a white man, it was not chief's blood. To the boy at least, the difference was apparent immediately you saw Boon and Sam together, and even Boon seemed to know it was there – even Boon, to whom in his tradition it had never occurred that anyone might be better born than himself. A man might be smarter, he admitted that, or richer (luckier, he called it) but not better born. Boon was a mastiff, absolutely faithful, dividing his fidelity equally between Major de Spain and the boy's cousin McCaslin, absolutely dependent for his very bread and dividing that impartially too between Major de Spain and McCaslin, hardy, generous, courageous enough, a slave to all the appetities and almost unratiocinative. In the boy's eyes at least it was Sam Fathers, the negro, who bore himself not only toward his cousin McCaslin and Major de Spain but toward all white men, with gravity and dignity and without servility or recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth which negroes sustain between themselves and white men, bearing himself toward his cousin McCaslin not only as one man to another but as an older man to a younger.

2. What are the distinctive features of Naturalism? How does it differ from Realism? Analyze one of the novels of John Steinbeck or Erskine Caldwell.

Chapter VI

AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE 1950–70s

Though America came out of World War II richer and more powerful than ever before, the prosperity was accompanied by acute tensions. Senator McCarthy became a spokesman for a certain group of Americans who sought a simple explanation for their problems. With him, they believed that they were the victims of the conspiracy of world Communism. Witchhunt and spy-manias swept the country. It was difficult for the writers and other intellectuals, while the mood lasted, to maintain their dignity. The Vietnam War deepened the crisis. Literature was taking new forms, though realistic tendencies still remained.

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