VARIETY
221
-the popular-musical equivalent,
in fact, to much of our poetry and
prose, which is no longer capable
of embodiment and of statement,
but only of ):he evocation, the
third-remove sensuous hint, the ex–
quisite sub-detail, the romantic
actor's catch-in-the-throat, the dy–
ing fall which the worst of such
writers emphasize with dotdotdot.
I think this sort of deceit and
decay is most disastrous and most
conspicuous among Negroes, and I
am interested again to observe
that that is so in rough proportion
as they are our richest contempo–
rary source of folkart, and our best
people en bloc. But it does not by
any means stop with Negroes. The
mock-primitive, demagogic style of
the great bulk of WPA and leftist
painting is a white disease, mainly,
and seems to me almost entirely
distinct in source and cause from
the primitivism of Parisians or even
the puniest of their imitators.
A white disease too is such a
show as
Oklahoma,
the best of
whose tunes have a certain pseudo–
folksy charm, but whose accents,
premise~
and success seem to me as
questionable as those of Carl Sand–
burg, once he came to be "recog–
nized," and in many respects be–
fore. Indeed we have a tradition
for this sort of badness. The humor
of men like Ward and Billings has
always been spoiled for me not
only by its low comic content but
by its innocent-crafty, lucrative in–
verted snobbery; all but the best of
Mark Twain is terribly tainted by
his professional-Americanism; a
man like Will Rogers is wholly ex–
plained by our national weakness
for congratulating ourselves upon
our special forms of disgraceful–
ness; and there are not many of us
who realize that Irving Cobb, C.
B.
Kelland, Edgar Guest and John
Steinbeck have a great deal of
shame in common; that the "talk–
American" writer, the Common
Man as normally represented in
left-wing, liberal and tory fiction
alike, and the pseudo-Biblical dic–
tion which chokes so much of our
writing once we try to "dignify"
the vernacular, are all at least as
dangerously "literary," snobbish,
affected and anti-human as the
mock-Mandarin prose ' and the
mock-Oxford speech of the self–
caricatured Seaboard Anglophile.
On page 134 of
The Pocket
Book of Quotations
you may read:
"I'm learnin' one thing, learn–
in' it all a time, ever' day.
If
you're
in trouble, or hurt or need-go to
the poor people. They're the only
ones that'll help--the only ones."
On page 136:
"It takes a heap o' livin' in a house
t' make it home
A heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye
sometimes have t' roam
Afore ye really 'preciate the things
ye lef' behind,
,
An' hunger fer 'em somehow, with
'm altus on yer mind."
The latter passage is by Edgar
Guest and is quoted from his poem,
Home.
The former is by John
Steinbeck and is quoted from his
novel,
The Grapes of Wrath.
The
very small body of writing you
might find which would not in–
criminate itself by comparison,
which attempts to use the verna–
cular, and which at the same time
shows good judgment both in using
and in depriving itself of the Man–
darin manner, is the prospect we
have for the development of a
popular literary art which I join
Miss Bogan in looking towards.
(Postscript: I should explain
that I have not seen
Othello, Car–
men Jones
or
Oklahoma,
because
I felt sure they would be bad. Peo–
ple who spoke well of the shows
have reinforced me in this feeling
